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Posted on Wednesday, 02 April 2014 11:03 By Christian Freymeyer While the origin of illicit financial flows ranges from government embezzlement to human trafficking, and from corporate tax evasion to grand corruption, the destination seems less ambiguous. A $35 million mansion in California, artwork totaling €18 million, and a $38 million dollar private jet. These sound like items purchased by the world's wealthiest oligarchs, right? Well, they were actually acquired by Teodorin Obiang, son of President Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea. as long as financial institutions in the EU remain complicit in the transfer of illicit capital, African countries will continue to bleed billions When his father convenes with other leaders for this week's EU-Africa summit, a wide range of topics will be covered. But there's one issue in particular that should be given a loudspeaker during the talks in Brussels: illicit financial flows. Africa and Europe have a unique financial relationship. It's one that is marked by illicit capital flowing out of African countries into bank accounts in financial centers across the EU. While the younger Obiang's official salary is less than $7,000 per month, he managed to spend more than $315 million between 2004 and 2011 on sports cars, beachfront mansions, lavish apartments, and even some Michael Jackson memorabilia. And this is only one example. In 2011 alone, it's estimated that €43.7 billion left Africa by way of illicit financial flows; this money should rather have been invested in infrastructure, education and healthcare, all of which are areas highlighted by the EU-Africa Summit. Just to put that number into perspective, African countries received a combined €34.3 billion in developmental aid the same year, according to statistics from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). While the origin of illicit financial flows ranges from government embezzlement to human trafficking, and from corporate tax evasion to grand corruption, the destination seems less ambiguous. The end game for most is to move funds to a place where they can be used freely, and preferably, anonymously. At the moment, that task is far too easy. Loopholes in the current system have fostered a strange breed of companies. They don't do any real work, don't have any employees, and, more often than not, don't even disclose who owns them. These anonymous companies are one of the primary vehicles used to funnel illicit money from Africa into places like the EU. To set one of these companies up, you often don't even need to list the name of the beneficial owner, the person who ultimately controls and benefits from the company. Thanks to the secrecy granted to anonymous companies, they become a predictable means for corruption and money laundering. A study from the World Bank estimates that 70 percent of big corruption cases over the last 30 years involved the use of anonymous corporations to help hide the identity of the perpetrators. The report also found that it is easier to set up an anonymous company in Europe and America than it is in traditional tax havens like the Jersey or the Cayman Islands. When authorities try to investigate these entities, it's almost impossible to unravel the web. Money often floats through a labyrinth of different companies, in different jurisdictions, leaving, at best, a confusing and incomplete paper trail. However, with new legislation moving through the EU, part of the solution appears to be within reach. The European Parliament recently voted to require EU-based companies and trusts to list their beneficial owners in central registers that would be publicly accessible. This would allow authorities, civil society, journalists and citizens from around the world to verify who owns companies or similar legal entities. José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, has already endorsed the idea of registers for beneficial ownership. Although the European Parliament vote was a monumental step in the right direction, the legislation still needs to be agreed to by European national governments. This week's summit is an opportunity for leaders like President Barroso and President Obiang to face the subject of illicit financial flows head on. One of the self-ascribed goals of the meetings is to explore ways to promote sustainable and inclusive growth and socio-economic development. But, as long as financial institutions in the EU remain complicit in the transfer of illicit capital, African countries will continue to bleed billions of dollars every year. These porous financial walls undermine the very goals the summit's leaders hope to address. True beneficial ownership transparency, including public registers, is vital to help realize more sustainable economies in Africa and Europe alike. Christian Freymeyer is the New Media & Press Coordinator for the Financial Transparency Coalition, a group of NGOs, civil society organizations, and governments that advocate for increased transparency in the international financial system.

Lest we forget that the left considers the American founding our original sin, a recent string of articles, lawsuits, and so-called “activism” is taking aim at America’s founding fathers. They were too white, too male, not woke enough, some owned slaves. And anyway, the Constitution is silent on gender fluidity. On June 1, James Madison Memorial High School senior Mya Berry launched a petition to shorten the name of their school -- erasing Madison’s name from it entirely. Apparently, the school’s name made Berry feel “more than unsafe.” The proposed name-change would, according to Berry, comprise a remedy for several racial affronts she had experienced at Memorial. The school’s name sake, like several founding fathers, owned slaves yet argued for gradual emancipation efforts and “wished to see [slavery] diminished and abolished by peaceable & just means.” Of course, Madison Memorial High is in Madison, Wisconsin. Not sure if Berry’s sense of insecurity extends to her municipality, but Madison is an extremely liberal college town. She should think big. Former Councilman Mario Salas of the San Antonio Coalition of Human and Civil Rights really, really doesn’t like those racist founders. In The San Antonio Observer he dubbed them “ancestors of a white supremacist movement.” Salas penned these accusations as a response to his failed efforts to remove the historic monument in San Antonio’s Travis Park that commemorated Confederate war dead. Salas claimed all monuments honoring the deaths of “soldiers that defended slavery” were a mere guise for institutionalized racism: “These statues represent a long history of oppression.” Fair enough, but Salas seems to think that because he wants to erase history, he’s entitled to make up its replacement. Salas asserted that the Revolutionary War was “as much about anything else. And that “Millions of dollars invested in slavery would be lost if the British won the war.” Then there’s this: “England eventually opposed slavery before the U.S. did, and this set off a wave of anger that fueled the 1776 Revolution.” So a wave of anger over something 40 years in the future (Britain would not pass its Slavery Abolition Act until 1833) sent the colonists to the barricades? And this breathtaking idiocy: The third verse of the star spangled banner reads: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave. From the terror of flight or gloom of the grave. And the star-spangled banner—O! Long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Keep in mind that the part about the “hireling and slave” refers to black people and is an attack against the British who freed slaves and had more blacks fighting for them than George Washington did. Um. No. “Hireling and slave” referred to British soldiers. They were professionals, often the dregs of society, fighting for a monarch. (They called it “taking the King’s shilling.”) The line derides them in comparison with the citizen soldiers the U.S. fielded in the War of 1812. (Salas doesn’t seem to know that the anthem was written during that conflict.) And the British did free slaves in exchange for their service. It was a tactic to bolster the numbers of Tory partisans. Salas’ action group isn’t the only organization disproportionately obsessed with the fact that several of the Founders owned slaves. The South Carolina Humanities Council partnered with The Slave Dwelling Project and Living Through the Eyes of the Enslaved on a project to bring tourists to Presidential dwellings run by slaves. “Tracing the footprint of slavery exposes former Presidents as slave-owners,” reads the Project’s website. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Poplar Forest, as well as James Madison’s Montpelier are, naturally, first on the list of tour sites. At lefty site CounterPunch.org, Mike Ferner writes that “A historically critical article about the American Revolution would typically discuss how the democratic promises of the Declaration were left hanging at war’s end, followed by a decidedly undemocratic constitution six years later.” He then states all the ways in which the founders and the system they created, were insufficiently woke, before quoting extensively from a speech by the patron saint of left-wing revisionism, Howard Zinn. Blah blah, who did the Revolution really benefit? Yadda yadda yadda, what about the Indians? Blah Blah Blah, “the Revolutionary War, like all wars, was a class war.” It’s all the usual America-hating drivel. Being a liberal is to always be miserable. Doubly so on Independence day.

Melania Trump’s official White House portrait has been released. Here it is. And… she looks like a model. Probably because she used to be one. So? The Boston Globe immediately picked the whole thing apart top to bottom. From the 25-carat diamond ring President Trump bought Melania for their 10-year wedding anniversary “worth more than most Americans would make in 10 lifetimes” to the fact that she’s “not really smiling” like other first ladies or that her “cool, distant gaze seems to evoke her runway-model past more than her current role as the country’s first lady,” the Globe found all kinds of reasons why Melania’s White House portrait sucks. That, and she… wait for it… crossed her arms: Boston portrait photographer Ryuji Suzuki, of Beaupix Studio , immediately noticed the first lady’s crossed arms and distant gaze in the new portrait. “There are different opinions about people crossing their arms in portraits,” he said. “If you do it right, you might add a powerful impression, but it often gives you distance. If you want to be friendly and approachable you probably wouldn’t pose like this.” Like an excited little kid that gets his mom to display his latest finger painting up on the fridge, the Globe then shared the article of the controversy of Melania’s White House portrait on Twitter, zeroing in on her pose of all things and asking, “So what’s with the crossed arms?” The White House released an official portrait of Melania Trump. So what’s with the crossed arms? https://t.co/H7UszrNJjL pic.twitter.com/R2SxcdZimS — The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) April 4, 2017 …and that’s when they got owned. Because… no one ever crosses his or her arms in pictures, right? Thanks Boston Globe. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos (Click for details). Contributed by Piper McGowin of The Daily Sheeple. Piper writes for The Daily Sheeple. There’s a lot of B.S. out there. Someone has to write about it.

The Giants spent $200 million on payroll this year, which not only sounds like a lot — it is a lot. On the other hand, the Dodgers, San Francisco’s archrival in the National League West, spent $300 million. With San Francisco voters passing Proposition D Tuesday by an almost 3-1 count, the Giants might well have the leverage to erase that $100 million difference in the near future. The proposal allowed for a waiver of height restrictions in the area around AT&T Park, enabling the team to go ahead with their so-called Mission Rock proposal. The club wants to build a high-rise district on a parking lot across from McCovey Cove behind the right field wall. The plans call for three towers that now can reach 240 feet in addition to homes, shops, offices, art studios, parks and a brewery, an area that Giants’ president Larry Baer told the Los Angeles Times will “have a Fenway feel, a Wrigleyville feel.” And catching the Dodgers may not be the end. With sellouts in 408 consecutive games, the Giants already generate revenue in excess of every club in baseball other than the Yankees and the Dodgers. That will spike when the debt on AT&T Park is paid off down the line. And while the Giants have won three of the last six World Series titles, Baer sees the Mission Rock project as a hedge against an inevitable downturn in on-field performance. “The biggest single thing for us going forward is that we have a real estate project,” Baer said. “That is going to help us create a very important neighborhood around the ballpark and allow us to keep up with teams that are in larger markets. “We can convert to 18 million homes for television like New York has, or 12 million homes like L.A. has. We’re at 7 million homes. To make up for the disparity, that is going to be one difference-maker for us.” One more thing. The Giants may have sold every ticket at its disposal this year, but the Giants’ attendance was 400,000 behind the Dodgers, who don’t always sell out, but who always play in the park with the most seats in baseball.

Here are some recent developments on bitcoin and the blockchain from around the world. Russia’s Love-Hate Relationship Russia’s stance towards bitcoin and blockchain is a study of a great contrast. While Russia has been unfriendly towards bitcoins, it is showing enthusiasm towards its underlying technology, the blockchain. However, this could be changing. As Russia’s Central Bank moved to embrace the blockchain technology, comments by Andrei Lugovoi, Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee for Security and Anti-Corruption generated hope for the future of cryptocurrencies as well. A press release by Russia’s Central Bank revealed that the central bank is setting up a working group to engage in the “analysis and evaluation” of application possibilities of new financial technology. An extract from the release read, “The Central Bank established the Working Group on the analysis of advanced technologies and innovations in the financial market. Among the priority issues - the study of distributed technologies (e.g. blockchain), as well as new developments in the mobile, payment, and other areas.” Russia’s has been hard on its attitude towards bitcoin but the same has seen a gradual shift from a time when the Finance Ministry prepared a draft on banning all forms of money substitutes in Russia which includes bitcoins. According to Andrei Lugovoi, “In the beginning of 2016 after a series of meetings with the fiscal authorities and businesses, it was stated that in the future the Central Bank could begin to legalize and regulate certain transactions with Bitcoin, particularly peer-to-peer transactions and settlements with individuals.” Russia currently ranks fifth in the world with 200,000 users of cryptocurrency users, and thus if the above proposal is enforced, it will provide a big boost to virtual currencies. Bitcoin Could Be ‘Real Money’ in Japan In an interesting development, Japan’s financial regulators are reportedly considering treating virtual currencies such as bitcoin equivalent to real money, a move that would strengthen the mechanism of consumer protection and pave a way for growth in the virtual economy. Currently, virtual currencies in Japan are “recognized as objects but are not treated on a par with their more established counterparts.” As per the Nikkei report, FSA is considering amendments to legislation to include virtual currencies such as bitcoin as “fulfilling the functions of currency.” The proposal will be submitted during the ongoing Ordinary Diet Session. This move would bring entities like exchanges for virtual currency under a regulatory preview with tighter oversight, thereby enabling virtual currency to expand in a safer mode. Australia, Bitcoin & Blockchain In a recent speech Greg Medcraft, Chairman, Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) spoke about the blockchain. He said, “This technology has the potential to fundamentally change our markets and our financial system .... Blockchain will have profound implications for how we regulate.” ASX has already collaborated with Digital Asset Holdings, LLC to develop solutions for the Australian equity market using the blockchain technology. Meanwhile in February, Melbourne based Bitcoin Group, a company that mines bitcoins, completed its initial public offering raising $4.2 million to be listed on Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). It was the first IPO by a company engaged in bitcoin mining. Other than finance, blockchain is being applied to politics. Flux, “a revolutionary political party and politico-economic structure” is looking to revamp the way the orthodox system of politics by bringing in the blockchain technology. Flux provides a modern voting system using the blockchain technology which allows transparency, immutable records and ease of online voting. It filed its papers with the Australian Election Commission in January, and aims to elect six senators. Flux describes itself as “a layer for the redistribution of political power. And when a Flux candidate is elected they become a gateway for voters to directly influence parliament.” Flux now has 1238 registered members according to the website. Blockchain Coming to Korea The Korea Stock Exchange (KRX) as reported by The Korea Times has begun “preliminary steps” to develop a trading platform for off-board dealers based on the blockchain technology. The new platform will bring together buyers and sellers OTC which would facilitate trading by reducing efforts in finding trade partners and reducing costs involved. Dubai’s Global Blockchain Council To promote innovation and adopt next generation technologies at a global level, Dubai Museum of the Future Foundation recently announced the launch of Global Blockchain Council. Al Aleeli, CEO, Dubai Museum of the Future Foundation said that “the significant growth in the volume of transactions using Blockchain platform during 2015, which reached 56%, refers to the great opportunities that can be utilized through the optimal application of this technology in the relevant sectors." According to him, the global investments in blockchain could reach $300 billion over the next four years. The Global Blockchain Council will explore and promote blockchain and digital currencies as well as study its advantages and disadvantages while working on ways to utilize the technology in the best possible way. European Parliament A new draft report by the European Parliament on virtual currencies stresses that virtual currencies and blockchain technology can contribute greatly towards consumer welfare and economic development by dramatically lowering transaction costs for payments and transfer of funds while enhancing the speed and resilience of payment systems, and allowing transactions to be tracked in case of malfeasance. The report calls for the creation of a horizontal Task Force DLT (distributed ledger technology) under the leadership of the Commission to facilitate the necessary technical and regulatory expertise to support the relevant actors (at both EU and Member State level) in efforts to ensure a timely and well-informed response to the new opportunities and challenges. Meanwhile the European Central Bank (ECB) showed “openness to new technologies” and said that it intends to assess the relevance of blockchain and distributed ledger technology for various banking services like payments, securities settlement as well as collateral. Final Word The developments around bitcoin and the blockchain technology are fast evolving. While banks, and technology companies are already involved in many such projects, governments are becoming increasing open the changes which have entered the financial ecosystem (and extending beyond finance), while making sure that they do not compromise on issues such as money laundering and other illicit activities.

8 years ago A new poll shows only 1 in 4 Americans believe Sarah Palin is qualified to be president. (CNN) - Two days after Sarah Palin fired up a large crowd at Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally in Washington, a newly released survey suggests a clear majority of Americans don't think the former vice presidential nominee has the right credentials to be president. According to the new survey from Vanity Fair and CBS News' 60 Minutes, only 1 in 4 of all adults thinks Palin is qualified to be commander-in-chief while 60 percent say she is not. By a narrow 47-40 percent margin however, Republicans do feel Palin has the right stuff to be president. But self identified conservatives – constituting the segment of the GOP largely thought to most favor the former Alaska governor – are essentially split 41-40 percent on her abilities to govern the country. What may also be troubling for the former Alaska governor if she finds herself in a general election matchup, 3 in 5 independent voters don't think Palin is qualified while only 21 percent do. Among moderates, the numbers are even worse with 70 percent reporting they lack confidence in Palin. Predictably, the numbers are most dire for the former vice presidential nominee among self-identified Democrats: 3 in 4 say Palin isn't up to the responsibilities of the Oval Office. The survey, conducted by CBS News between August 3-5, surveyed 847 U.S. adults by telephone.

This Minecraft PE triple village seed was submitted by an Epic Minecraft player a few days ago. The seed has been floating around for awhile (it works in both 0.9x and 0.10x infinite), so we’re not sure if the submitter, Budderlord, was the first to find it, or if he was turned onto it by someone else. Regardless, the important details: there’s a massive triple village straight in front of you when you start the game. The triple village is in a savanna biome directly across the river in front of you when the game renders. There are two blacksmiths in the village and one of them has emeralds amongst other loot (apples, ink sacs and iron ingots). We checked under all the wells and unfortunately didn’t find anything worth mentioning. When you spawn, your best bet is to get to the village fast before the careless blacksmith’s lava catches the chests on fire. The surrounding landscape beyond the savanna is river, desert and mountains (extreme hills). Thanks again to Budderlord for submitting the seed. Minecraft PE 0.10.0+ Infinite Seed: 1388582293 Minecraft PE In-Game Screenshots

One of the best things about beer gardens is getting your brew in one of those giant mugs that seem tailored specifically for Vikings or professional wrestlers. These enormous old-fashioned steins hold enough beer to fuel an entire afternoon of relaxation and camaraderie—and if you use them often enough, your drinking arm will get noticeably bigger than your other arm. In recent years, beer gardens inspired by their nineteenth-century predecessors have been returning to American cities. These places are often named with some variation of the classic German "biergarten," and are characterized by open spaces, big tables, and large crowds during Sunday afternoons. Alongside classic cocktail bars, the new beer gardens draw inspiration from the past to create a modern drinkscape drenched in nostalgia, and create a lens for understanding America's drinking past. America's first beer gardens appeared in the nineteenth century, courtesy of a wave of German immigrants. America's gardens closely resembled their counterparts in the Old World, which were sprawling establishments conducive to lazy Sunday afternoons spent with family or striking up conversations with friendly strangers. Germany's beer gardens were originally created after brewing was banned during the summer months due to repeated brewery fires. Breweries responded to the ban by digging cellars near riverbanks to keep their beer cool until they needed it in summer and to give their lager-style beers the proper conditions to ferment properly. Breweries cooled these cellars further by scattering gravel on the ground and planting leafy shade trees. It wasn't long before tables and chairs showed up in these pleasant environs, and the beer gardens grew to host thousands of people who congregated to listen to music, discuss politics, play chess, or just lounge about in the sun. American beer gardens followed suit, offering a stark contrast to saloons and taverns that were often dark and dingy places designed for grouchy old men to take quick slugs of whiskey. American beer gardens helped German immigrants preserve part of their identity and heritage, but also introduced other Americans to a more relaxed form of drinking while offering a space to hold athletic events, as well as civic and religious functions. The rise of beer gardens in America coincided with the opulent industrial and economic advances of the Gilded Age, and their style reflected that. The gardens built by brewing giants such as Frederick Pabst and Frederick Miller to promote their brands were the exact opposite of the dive bars where their brews are popular today. Schlitz Garden, built in 1879 by the Schlitz brewery in Milwaukee, featured a concert hall, dance pavilion, bowling alley, and a three-story pagoda that provided stunning views of the city, according to historian Maureen Ogle. The largest beer garden in New York was Atlantic Gardens, which was built indoors to guard against unpredictable weather, and featured giant frescoes, skylights, indoor gardens, and an orchestra. Regardless of how civilized and pleasant these beer gardens sound to us today, they collided with the Temperance movement and an attitude among many Americans that alcohol was the Devil's potion and a social blight that needed to be eradicated from the nation. Temperance advocates believed that the gardens exposed young people to alcohol, and that the presence of young women proved an irresistible temptation to young men who all should have been spending their Sundays at church. Other Temperance advocates were more ambivalent towards beer, focusing their efforts against hard liquor and treating beer and wine as something in its own category. Near the end of the nineteenth century, a group of sociologists called the Committee of Fifty investigated drinking places around Chicago in order to better understand America's "liquor problem," according to Andrew Barr's Drink: A Social History of America. Their report characterized beer gardens as pleasant and enchanting havens offering an escape from life's hectic rush, providing a stark contrast to a saloon culture that bred violence, domestic and otherwise. One woman on the committee described a beer garden by writing, "Isn't it beautiful? Can it be, is it possible, that after all our ideas are wrong and these people are right?" Regardless, the forces of Temperance eventually hardened into a drive for outright Prohibition. Beer, which had grown in popularity throughout the nineteenth century, partly as a result of German immigrants and their beer gardens, was a target. As the nation sped toward the Volstead Act, which outlawed liquor in 1919, Prohibitionists took advantage of xenophobia surrounding beer-drinking German immigrants in the buildup to World War I to score points against alcohol. The lieutenant governor from Wisconsin, one of the states where beer gardens first took hold, attacked his fellow Americans of German descent personally, claiming that, "No Germans in the war are conspiring against the peace and happiness of the United States more than Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, Miller and others of their kind." That claim, of course, was absurd. The threat those men posed was little more than offering Americans places to casually lounge around during their days off, playing checkers, catching up with friends, and napping. Regardless, the fear mongering worked, and it has taken nearly a century to begin reclaiming what was lost. About the Author: Reid Mitenbuler is a Washington, DC-based writer. He is currently writing a book about bourbon for Viking/Penguin. Find him online at The Bourbon Empire and on Twitter @ReidMitenbuler. This post may contain links to Amazon or other partners; your purchases via these links can benefit Serious Eats. Read more about our affiliate linking policy.

Amsterdam Releases Pair of Adventure Brews at Retail Stores TORONTO, ON – Amsterdam Brewery has announced the retail release of two Adventure Brews, the brewery’s on-going series of one-off, collaborative and small batch beers. Available now in 473 ml cans is Starke Pilsner, a beer that has been a favourite at the Amsterdam BrewHouse since it was first made available there on draught last year. The 5.8% abv Czech-style lager is described as “a refreshing golden Pilsner with a rich body and some spicy, grassy notes from the hops as well as a slight resiny finish.” Out in 650 ml bottles is Shape Shifter, a 10% abv strong ale brewed in collaboration with Indie Ale House. Aged in Cognac and Madeira barrels for 5 months, it’s described as having “flavours of dark fruit and vanilla with a sturdy oak, treacle and caramel.” Both beers are available now in the retail stores at the Amsterdam Brewery (45 Esandar Drive) and BrewHouse (245 Queens Quay West) in Toronto.

For Charlie Manuel, for Don Mattingly, for Jim Leyland, the end may not necessarily be near. But the end of their contracts? Now that is definitely near. Those three household names find themselves part of an odd phenomenon that is rocking baseball this season, pretty much out of nowhere: Managers in the last year of their contracts. Amazingly, 10 of the 30 managers in the big leagues don't have a deal that extends beyond this season. And no one we've surveyed can recall anything like it. Ready for the roll call? Here we go: Charlie Manuel (Phillies) Don Mattingly (Dodgers) Jim Leyland (Tigers) Joe Girardi (Yankees) Terry Collins (Mets) Davey Johnson (Nationals) Ned Yost (Royals) Eric Wedge (Mariners) Walt Weiss (Rockies) Ron Gardenhire (Twins). In 2013? They're all totally in charge. In 2014? Uh, we'll get back to you. “ Every contract I've had, I've worked all the way to the end, until the contract expired. I was never uncomfortable with that. So if I'm hiring people who are uncomfortable with that, I'm hiring the wrong people. ” -- Yankees GM Brian Cashman Judging by all the front-office folks whose response to this was "I didn't even realize that," it's safe to say this is more of a coincidence than some gigantic management conspiracy. But it does reflect a change in what once passed for conventional thinking: We can't hang our manager out there on the last year of his deal. The players will walk all over him. That may have been the theory once upon a time. But nowadays, says Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, "I think it's something from out of the past that doesn't exist in the present anymore. It's one of those old things that was widely accepted -- and then a lot of smart people said, 'Why?'" The Yankees have been asking, "Why?" for years, actually. For a decade, it's been their policy, for the most part, not to extend anyone's contract -- manager or player -- until it expired and they had to make a decision. Somehow or other, they've managed to function just fine. Imagine that. "Derek Jeter played to the end of his contract and went to free agency," Cashman said. "Mariano Rivera played to the end of his contract and went to free agency. The general manager worked to the end of his contract. Every contract I've had, I've worked all the way to the end, until the contract expired. I was never uncomfortable with that. So if I'm hiring people who are uncomfortable with that, I'm hiring the wrong people." In fact, Cashman's manager, Girardi, doesn't appear to be in any significant jeopardy of losing his job -- even though the manager of the New York Yankees clearly would not top the list of America's most secure gigs. But all of these situations are different. So let's run through them, saving the most volatile for last. Joe Girardi, New York Yankees: He's been through this last dance before -- in 2010 -- and got a new three-year deal out of it, even after a season in which the Yankees got bludgeoned by the Rangers in the ALCS. So there has been very little buzzing about Girardi's job status -- and Cashman says there shouldn't be. "We have a guy in that office who knows he'd have no problem getting a job [if he got let go]," the GM said. "And we should all have that confidence in ourselves if we're in that situation. If you're really good at what you do, things take care of themselves. That's the way we should all look at it." Three-time manager of the year Jim Leyland, 68, is in his 22nd season and eighth with Detroit. AP Photo/Danny Moloshok Davey Johnson, Washington Nationals: No big job crisis here. Johnson and GM Mike Rizzo agreed back in November 2012 this would be Johnson's last season as manager. Then he'll resume his role as a special advisor to Rizzo next year. Nothing more to see here. Move along. Jim Leyland, Detroit Tigers: The Tigers let Leyland manage out his previous contract last season, squirming right to the finish line before giving him a new deal the day after the World Series. But had they not charged from behind to win the division in the final week and a half, there's an excellent chance someone else would be managing this team right now. At this point, Leyland and his boss, Dave Dombrowski, seem to have an understanding that Leyland has reached the stage of his career where it makes more sense for both of them to operate on a year-to-year basis. One of these years, Leyland will move on and say it was his decision -- or have it spun as a mutual decision. But the best description of his status at this point is "open-ended." Terry Collins, New York Mets: Collins is in the final year of his original two-year contract, which included an option for 2013. His GM, Sandy Alderson, has consistently said lots of good things about him. So there's no indication that Collins is in any imminent danger of losing his job. But Alderson has made it clear he believes in maintaining the flexibility to re-evaluate the manager and his coaching staff in a year. So a lot depends both on how this season plays out and how ready to contend the Mets believe they'll be heading into next season. One baseball exec who speaks frequently with Alderson told Rumblings that Collins' situation is so wide-open, "I don't think you can read into it, one way or the other." Ned Yost, Kansas City Royals: This one is a puzzler. Yost and GM Dayton Moore have a great relationship, and baseball people who know them both say they'd be shocked if Yost isn't back next year. Nevertheless, if you have a good memory, you'll remember that when the Royals picked up Yost's option for this season about 14 months ago, Moore said he wanted to avoid speculation that Yost was some sort of lame duck. There has been no attempt to dodge that speculation this year -- not yet, at least. But one longtime friend of Moore says he's "practically 100 percent certain" Yost isn't going anywhere. So is that convincing enough? Walt Weiss, who coached a high school team last year, is off to a 14-7 start as manager of the first-place Rockies. Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post Walt Weiss, Colorado Rockies: It's hard to remember any first-year manager who agreed to take the job on a one-year deal. But Weiss stepped into this position with remarkable confidence in himself -- and with the assurance, from people he'd known for years, that they wanted him to do this for as long as he wanted to do it. "If we gave him a two-, three- or four-year deal," said Rockies GM Dan O'Dowd, "then, at some point, he would be entering the last year of his contract, and that, unfortunately, would be the focal point of the media. So perhaps, if this can turn into how we chose to define this particular topic -- a relationship built on something bigger -- then that question will never be the focal point of his position, and he can do what he does best and enjoys most -- managing his players and not answering questions about his job status!" Hmmm. We think he just summed up why this tide is shifting about as well as it can be summed up. Eric Wedge, Seattle Mariners: The Mariners have said very little about Wedge's status as he heads into the final season of a three-year deal. And GM Jack Zduriencik declined the opportunity to discuss it for this opus, saying it was club policy not to comment on anyone's contract issues. But this feels like a moment in time where everyone involved in the running of this team is on notice. If this turns into One Of Those Years, Wedge, Zduriencik and the folks around them could all start wondering about their job security. But it's way too soon to start sounding those alarms. In truth, the manager's seat isn't any hotter, or cooler, than anyone else's seat on this team -- not at the moment, anyway. TRIVIALITY Don Mattingly, Los Angeles Dodgers: Another fascinating situation. It would be a stretch to say Mattingly is "in trouble." He and GM Ned Colletti have an excellent relationship. So unless something goes haywire, Mattingly is more likely to get an extension than a layoff notice. On the other hand, the manager told the Los Angeles Times last winter that he asked the team to pick up his 2014 option, just so he could avoid being a topic in pieces like this -- and "they said that wasn't the plan for me or my coaches." So this is a situation to watch carefully: We're talking about a team with a $217 million payroll. A team with an ownership icon (Magic Johnson) who already has said that anything less than a trip to the World Series would make this season a failure. And a team that hasn't played well early. So anything is possible. Mattingly's players clearly like him, and "they know he's on the last year of his deal," said one executive who has been following this saga. "So if they like the guy so much -- if they don't want anything to happen to him -- they can make that a non-issue by playing better. Can't they?" Ron Gardenhire, Minnesota Twins: Nobody on this list has managed his team for more seasons than Gardenhire has managed the Twins (12). He and GM Terry Ryan have a long history and a great understanding of each other and their franchise. But that doesn't mean the manager can count on being around for another 12 years -- or even another 12 months. And the manager gets that. When Ryan informed him last winter it wasn't the right time to drop an extension on him after two straight last-place seasons, Gardenhire told him, "I haven't earned anything." This has been one of baseball's most stable franchises. But Ryan did push for big changes in Gardenhire's coaching staff this season -- a development that tells you anything could happen. But as one exec who once had ties to the Twins told Rumblings, "It's hard to picture Gardy not being the manager and Terry not being the general manager. They've been embedded together for so long." So could Gardenhire be gone if this season spins the wrong way? "He could," the exec said. "But I wouldn't bet on it." Charlie Manuel has never had a losing season as Phillies manager. Steve Nesius/Reuters Charlie Manuel, Philadelphia Phillies: We've saved the most interesting name on this list for last. Manuel is the winningest manager in Phillies history. He has never had a losing season in any of his eight seasons in Philadelphia. He's one of two managers in team history to have won a World Series. And he told Rumblings again this week that "I plan to keep managing -- unless I decide all of a sudden I don't want to do it." So why does his job status feel so uncomfortable? Because there's a vibe around his team that the men upstairs think it might be time for a new voice, even though GM Ruben Amaro Jr. insists it's only the media that is making an issue of this. "Honestly," Amaro told Rumblings, "I don't think about his situation at all." Asked if he was concerned about how his players would respond to having a manager with an uncertain future, Amaro said: "I don't think the players give two craps about it. I don't think it's even a factor, not with our guys I don't know if a contract for the manager should be a motivating factor for any player. They should be motivated by winning. That's it." Meanwhile, Manuel says this only affects him when people like us ask about it. "I'm still the same guy," he said. "If I had a 10-year contract, I'd think the same way and manage the same way." But he clearly wants to keep chugging along, and management clearly hasn't climbed on board. So at some point, this situation has a chance to fire up. For the moment, though, "I find that talking about it is not good," Manuel said. "It's not good for me or anyone else." The fascinating part about this whole subject is that if you were to compile a list of managers who could be "in trouble," it wouldn't be confined to the 10 men in this group. The oddsmakers at Bovada LV just published their "First Manager to Get Fired" odds. And while Manuel topped the charts at 4-1, five of the other 10 names were guys not on the last year of their deals: Bud Black (9-2), Ron Roenicke (7-1), Clint Hurdle (10-1), Mike Scioscia (12-1) and John Gibbons (20-1). What all of that reminds us, said one National League executive, is that "an extension doesn't guarantee anything." Those extensions, he said, serve more as lovely parting gifts than indicators of job security. So if they don't provide any more security, why do we all get so worked up about them? The truth is, Tony La Russa won a World Series in the final year of a contract. Joe Torre took the Yankees to two World Series in years his contract was up (and technically managed one of them, in 2001, after his contract was up). And way back when, in another era, Walter Alston managed the Dodgers for 23 years -- on 23 one-year contracts. So it's not as if this has never happened before. It just never happened all at once before. But now that it has, why do we have a feeling it won't be the last time? Ready to Rumble Greinke Shields • Got into an interesting debate recently with an American League executive who was extolling the impact James Shields has made on the Royals. He took a position I didn't see coming: If he had a choice of which starter he'd give a nine-figure contract to -- Shields or Zack Greinke -- he'd take (wait for it) Shields. "Greinke's stuff is a little better," he said. "And on a given day, he can rise to the occasion and just dominate. But there are other days where he almost seems a little disinterested. You never have to worry about that with Shields. He's out there for one reason -- to beat you. And then there's the impact he has on a club on a daily basis. That's one thing about Greinke. He has great stuff. But he gives you none of that." • Shields has said he's open to sticking around in Kansas City long term. But if he's a $100 million deal waiting to happen, it's hard to find anyone who thinks the Royals could afford that contract. #50 SP St. Louis Cardinals 2013 STATS GM 5 W4 L1 BB1 K37 ERA 1.93 • While we're on the subject of aces with hefty contracts: After the flurry of big-buck extensions settled down around Opening Day, an official of one large-market club said the one monster contract he questioned was Adam Wainwright's five-year, $97.5 million extension with the Cardinals. Well, here we are, three weeks into the season: Wainwight has a 1.93 ERA and a 37-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio, and you don't hear any more questions, do you? "The word for that contract in this clubhouse is 'needed,'" said David Freese. "He needed it. We needed it. We all needed Adam Wainwright to be a Cardinal for the rest of his career. Especially with [Chris Carpenter] going down, this clubhouse, this organization, this city needed to have Adam Wainwright around." Harper • We all gush over Bryce Harper's power. One scout we talked to gushed about something else: his hustle. "I saw him hit a routine ground ball to shortstop, and I got him running to first in under four seconds," the scout said. "I'll tell you what: If you wanted to find a poster child for how to play major league baseball correctly, you'd choose Bryce Harper." • You know those rumors that the Mets are "monitoring" Giancarlo Stanton -- the ones that also mention the Marlins would undoubtedly ask for Zack Wheeler and Travis d'Arnaud in return? "I wouldn't give one of those guys for Stanton," said one NL exec. "The catcher has a chance to be a 10-year All-Star. The other guy is one of the best pitching prospects in the game." So there you have it. #63 SP Cleveland Indians 2013 STATS GM 5 W4 L1 BB13 K30 ERA 1.85 • Here's a Trade That Didn't Happen to ponder: Justin Masterson is 4-1, 1.85 for the Indians after five starts. Out in balmy Colorado, Dexter Fowler has out-homered the Marlins (7-6). When the Indians dangled Masterson in the offseason, they asked for Fowler to head the package. That deal was talked about extensively early in the offseason. Never did happen. Think either side would do it today? • We've made Jean Segura famous for his baserunning. After all, while lots of men can go first to third on you, nobody can go third to first like he does. But Brewers GM Doug Melvin posed a different question about his shortstop: When people talk about the best young shortstops in baseball, how come they never talk about Segura, the centerpiece of last year's Zack Greinke deal? Good question. Segura hit .313, with a .367 on-base percentage, in his minor league career. He won a batting title in the Dominican last winter. And he's hitting .356/.397/.493 in the big leagues this month. That sure gets our attention. "He's really been under the radar," Melvin said. "I don't think he's ever listed in the top 25 prospects. But he's 22, going on 23, and he's really opened our eyes. I see people talk about the [Jurickson] Profars and even the Dee Gordons. But they never talk about him. He's an exciting player." • A scout who was in attendance for the big Stephen Strasburg-Matt Harvey duel in New York last weekend reported: "If you didn't know who was who, you'd have thought Harvey was Strasburg and Strasburg was Harvey. You know, I've always loved Strasburg, and I've given him the highest grade you could give a player. But if you were to ask me which guy was the better bet to be great for the next five years, I'd say Harvey. His stuff's just as good. And he has a better delivery." Wow. Matt Harvey Fever. He's got it. TRIVIA ANSWER • Finally, people gush about Harvey's fastball and changeup, and you can understand why. But the pitch that has truly changed his career is his slider, which we've even heard opposing hitters describe as "unhittable." Right. As in literally unhittable. He has thrown it 97 times this season -- and given up one hit. Incredibly, that's a pitch he virtually never threw in the minor leagues. But Harvey told Rumblings that when he got to the big leagues, he showed pitching coach Dan Warthen the grip he used to throw it. Warthen tweaked it slightly. And next thing Harvey knew, even he couldn't believe how hard he could throw it and how much it moved. So what's the secret? "Basically," he said, "I just offset the grip on my fastball -- and throw the crap out of it." Modern biomechanics at work, ladies and gentlemen. Or something like that. Tweets of the Week • If we're reading this right, our favorite legendary 19th-century fireballer wasn't real impressed that the Rockies and Braves teed it up Tuesday in 23-degree temperatures: I once pitched in 23 degree weather. I shot a buffalo, wore its hide, and tossed a complete game without complaint. — Old Hoss Radbourn (@OldHossRadbourn) April 23, 2013 • If you're not following Mets public relations witticist Jay Horwitz, why are you on Twitter in the first place? Novel approach to Dog Day today.Five of 9 Mets starters will be accompanied to their positions by their pet dogs. Hopefully, no accidents. — Jay Horwitz (@Jay_HorwitzPR) April 20, 2013 • And we couldn't resist this quip from Gar Ryness, the fabled Batting Stance Guy, because after we finished laughing, we actually looked this up: Cleveland up on Houston 14-0. 1st time Cleveland up 14 since Bernie Kosar was released. — Batting Stance Guy (@BattingStanceG) April 21, 2013 Astounding Fact of the Week OK, the Bernie Kosar thing was a joke. But This is a 100 percent true fact: The Indians really did take a 14-0 lead in the second inning Saturday. Meanwhile, the Browns have also held a 14-0 lead once In their last 80 games! We kid you not. Here at World Rumblings and Grumblings Headquarters, it's the facts and just the facts. You know that.

A 12-hour rooftop riot at a prison in Gippsland overnight is believed to have been sparked in part by a change in toothbrushes as a security measure. Inmates at the Fulham Correctional Centre near Sale were forced to use flexible toothbrushes after fears that hard toothbrushes could be filed down to make weapons, Corrections Commissioner Bob Hastings said. Hard to reach ... Rioting inmates on the roof of Fulham Prison, where a change to flexible toothbrushes is believed to have sparked fury. Credit:Geoff Parrington ‘‘This is really a safety issue because unfortunately some of the prisoners with the conventional toothbrushes used those to become weapons,’’ Mr Hastings told the ABC radio today. ‘‘There was also some other discussion up around Fulham around a pay TV deal that was about to finish and move to a more digital free-to-air process. There were also some issues around dress standards that people objected to.’’

As Vogue celebrates its 125th year, we look back at the history of fashion, and the magazine, in a series of “five points” videos by decade, narrated by the stylish Sarah Jessica Parker. 1930–1939The flapper was a casualty of the stock market crash of 1929. Out of her ashes rose the femme fatale. At night she was a modern Diana in figure-molding bias-cut satins that oozed to the floor. By day, she might play with a Surrealist as served up by Elsa Schiaparelli. Then war came, and removed frivolity from fashion. THE LONG RUNHemlines were lengthening before the Great Crash of 1929; they fell to the floor after that debacle and stayed there for quite a while. There was nothing prim about these sweeping hems, however. The abbreviated silhouette was traded for a long, sculptural one built along classic lines that emphasized the figure within the frock. Madeleine Vionnet’s diagonal bias-cutting technique resulted in dresses that were sensuously molded to the body. Such perfection as not easily come by; “simplicity,” noted Vogue, “is a complex art.” LOVE SCHIAPEven more complicated was the kismet that brought Prince Edward into the orbit of an American divorcée named Wallis Simpson, for whom he’d abandon his throne and be exiled from his sceptered isle. Theirs was a romance that was well chronicled in Vogue by John McMullin, the magazine’s “As Seen by Him” columnist, and Cecil Beaton, who were part of the royal entourage. Before she married her prince in a Wallis blue Mainbocher design, Beaton famously captured her posing in some splendors by Elsa Schiaparelli, including the “lobster” dress hand-painted by Salvador Dalí. ALTERNATIVE FACTSDalí and the influence of the Surrealists was pervasive in the ’30s. Like the “phony war” that preceded major action on the Western Front, the movement, which aimed to yoke dreams and reality, captured the tension and strangeness of the time. Elsa Schiaparelli, the Paris-based Italian couturier and Chanel’s nemesis, was most closely associated with this movement and she aligned herself with artists like Jean Cocteau and Marcel Vertès. Surrealism made its way into Vogue, too. Not only did Dalí become a frequent contributor, but Giorgio de Chirico created artwork for the magazine and Cecil Beaton incorporated elements of the movement’s style into some of his photographs. THE FEMALE GAZEThere were few women working among the stellar stable of artists working at Vogue during the 1930s, which included photographers Horst P. Horst, Cecil Beaton, and the illustrators Eric and Christian Bérard, all of whom had a keen appreciation for the haute side of fashion. Startlingly different was the work of Toni Frissell, a young, well-connected American, who joined the staff as a caption writer but ended up as a photographer, one who brought a distinctive American wholesomeness, youth, and even fresh air to the pages of the magazine: Frissell was one of the few photographers at the magazine then shooting out of doors. PAJAMA GAMESThough Vogue first voiced its approval of pajamas in the 1920s, they continued to be endorsed in the ’30s as a headline like “Personality + 1931 = Pyjamas” shows. It was during this decade that pants started making their way out of the boudoir, becoming acceptable for casual resortwear, as well.

Chris Fehn of SLIPKNOT has recorded some drums for MOTÖRHEAD guitarist Phil Campbell's forthcoming solo album. Also scheduled to appear are JUDAS PRIEST frontman Rob Halford and UGLY KID JOE vocalist Whitfield Crane. Asked by Headbangers Lifestyle's Lilo at the end of last year if there are any plans for him to write and an autobiography or have a film made about his life, Campbell responded: "I don't want a film about my life; no way. I'm working on a book of the funny stuff. I don't want a life story; I just want the funny stuff. [It's] gotta be documented, 'cause some of it's pretty bizarre and unbelievable. It's totally funny, though. [It's a book about] my experiences. It's what would normally not happen if you weren't in this band." Regarding when fans can expect to see his book released, Campbell said: "I'm seriously working on it now in January. It'll be a year or two [before it comes out], but it'll be worth it." Asked in a 2012 interview if he has ever considered making a solo album, Phil responded: "Yes, I have thought about it a lot. But I shelved it a couple years ago, because I've decided that I want to write a book about all the insane things that happen on tour. So, I'm trying to compile all of those stories and funny situations. So, at this point, I'm working on that. But, I'm a bit lazy, so it's taken a while. But as far as a solo record, I do have a studio at home, it's just hard finding the time. With MOTÖRHEAD, we've been working so hard, for so long." MOTÖRHEAD was forced to cancel three shows last November after Campbell became ill and required hospitalization. MOTÖRHEAD frontman Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, who celebrated his 70th birthday on Christmas Eve (December 24), learned two days later that he was afflicted with an aggressive form of cancer. He died two days later, on December 28, at his home in Los Angeles.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel had a warm meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday that stood in sharp contrast to her growing split with President Trump. (Filip Singer/European Pressphoto Agency) President Trump escalated his feud with Berlin on Tuesday, even as Germany’s leader and Trump’s own spokesman tried to defuse the conflict, which has sent tremors through Washington’s core postwar alliances. Before the presidential tweets began flying early Tuesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel reaffirmed the importance of Germany’s ties to the United States. But she pointedly did not back down from earlier comments about Europe’s need to rely on itself rather than its friends. The dispute started as Trump sped through meetings in Europe last week and appeared to leave a trail of bruises in his wake. It heated up after Merkel did little over the weekend to hide her disappointment with Trump’s refusal to commit Washington to the climate change treaty. And it was further inflamed Tuesday at 6:40 a.m. Washington time when Trump fired a white-hot shot straight at Berlin’s glass-and-concrete chancellery. “We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change,” Trump wrote in his early-morning tweet. The fight has had few obvious practical consequences so far. But Merkel’s meetings this week — first a chummy meeting with India’s leader on Tuesday and then a sit-down with the Chinese prime minister on Wednesday — were bracing reminders of the trade ties being forged outside the United States as Washington moves toward a sharply more nationalist and protectionist agenda. (Reuters) Merkel refused to give ground Tuesday, even as she sought to ease the dispute with a rhetorical hug. “Transatlantic relations are of paramount importance,” Merkel said alongside Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Berlin. “What I did was merely to point out that in light of the present situation, there are yet more reasons that we have to take our destiny in Europe into our own hands.” [As Merkel seeks allies elsewhere, Modi visits Berlin bursting with friendliness] The Modi meeting was planned long before the dust-up with Trump. But the cheerful body language between the two leaders was difficult to miss. “We are meant for each other,” Modi said to Merkel, smiling widely, as both leaders made positive comments about a European Union-India trade deal in the works. German officials — who say that the United States remains Germany’s most important international ally and an important partner whose friendship they want to maintain — feel that Trump has prioritized relations with authoritarian nations such as Saudi Arabia instead of democratic allies. Many were shocked when Trump declared in Riyadh that “we are not here to lecture” the mostly unelected assembled leaders — and then blasted European allies in Brussels for not spending enough on defense. That led Merkel to conclude that she needs to advocate a sharply more pro-European agenda at home ahead of September elections, one ally said. She said Sunday at a beer-hall political rally that Europe can no longer fully rely on others, a message clearly about Washington, even if it was aimed largely at her own voters. 1 of 60 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Trump’s first trip overseas as president View Photos The U.S. president traveled to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Rome, Belgium and Sicily, Italy. Caption The U.S. president traveled to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Rome, Belgium and Sicily, Italy. May 27, 2017 German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, speaks to President Donald Trump as Tunisia's President Beji Caid Essebsi listens during an expanded session at the Group of Seven Summit in Taormina, Italy. Philippe Wojazer/Reuters Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. “It was mostly to say we have to strengthen Europe. It was not anti-Trump,” said Norbert Röttgen, a close Merkel ally who is the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the lower house of Germany’s Parliament. “You have to explain to your voters what we make of the experience of the last days,” Röttgen said. “Trump, he is an unprecedented president. He calls into question by the way of his behavior, by what he is saying, by what he is not saying, the foundation of this alliance, and you have to give an answer to that. And the answer of the chancellor is that we have to bring into this alliance, not against this alliance, but into this alliance, a stronger German hand.” With Germany’s elections drawing closer, Merkel has been forced to turn her attention to her own voters — most of whom loathe Trump and staunchly oppose increasing defense spending, one of his key demands. She is seeking a fourth term in office and has rejected most of Trump’s criticisms as baseless. [Even Angela Merkel’s political rivals are on her side against Trump] Even before Trump’s victory last year, Merkel was increasing defense spending, pushing up the budget by $27 billion over the next three years. That would almost double current levels — but it would still be dwarfed by the $664 billion the United States spends every year. Now Merkel needs to convince German voters that defense increases are in their own interest, rather than a response to Trump. In a preview of election-season arguments, leading Social Democrats said Monday that Merkel should have openly opposed Trump from the start rather than trying to work with him at first. “Merkel needs to put some distance between herself and Trump, who is exceptionally unpopular in Germany,” said Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel in northern Germany. But there are practical limits to any German split from Washington, Dirsus said. Germany is not militarily independent and is far from becoming so. And the United States remains an important trade partner. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that there was no dispute between Trump and Merkel. “I think the relationship that the president has had with Merkel he would describe as fairly unbelievable,” Spicer said. But Europeans are growing weary of the message gap between Trump and the rest of his circle. They are still searching for which side to give greater weight — and last week’s trip tipped the balance toward the president. “Europeans think they are now being treated worse by Trump than countries like Russia or Saudi Arabia,” said Stephan Bierling, an expert on transatlantic relations at the University of Regensburg in Germany. The bilateral strains mean that the United States has, to some extent, lost the trust of one of Europe's most pro-American leaders. The German chancellor, the most powerful politician in Europe, grew up in East Germany, and her upbringing there has long been credited for her staunch support for closer European-U.S. ties. “Given her experience with the Cold War, Merkel has long upheld and defended American ideals. But the belief in shared values has been shattered by the Trump administration,” Bierling said. Noack reported from Berlin. Read more: Alternately charming and boorish, Trump plays the role of a lifetime overseas Trump scolds world leaders at NATO ceremony Following Trump’s trip, Merkel says Europe can’t rely on ‘others.’ She means the U.S.

8:58 AM - 1st floor - I arrive to work. Hayley picked me up because I knew I'd be getting drunk today, and I would never get behind the wheel of a car while intoxicated. A boat, maybe. A plane, damn right. But a car? Please. I'm not a daredevil. 9:09 AM - 1st floor - I get a sausage biscuit from Starbucks. I'm not trying to start puking at 11 AM just because I drank on an empty stomach. Oh, and thanks for the $12 sausage biscuit, Starbucks. You Starfucks. 9:33 AM - 1st floor - I put 3 shots worth of Jameson into my coffee, because any coffee with two shots or less is regular coffee. I also don't want to get too drunk too quickly (this notion goes to shit). So far Elie is none the wiser, and my deliciously evil plan is budding beautifully. Drinks so far: 3 shots of whiskey 9:54 AM - 1st floor - I'm halfway done with my Irish coffee. I'm already feeling a bit frisky. O'blivious McUnobservant over here still has no idea what's going on, and he isn't even a tiny bit drunk. That's called a "lose-lose" scenario. 10:00 AM - 1st floor - I snap a selfie of Elie's butt (or lack thereof) and myself. Whether these photos end up for work or for pleasure...well, frankly, that's none of your business. But between you and me? Pleasure. 10:27 AM - 1st floor - My Irish coffee is really kickin' in now. I'm definitely not drunk, but I'm teetering on buzzed. I see a Pringles can, and my huge brain and I come up with an idea. It still has chips in it, but the flavor is Serrano Ham aka warm ocean poop. I empty the chips and slip my PBR into the canister, right before Elie shows up. Close call. 11:07 AM - 1st floor - Elie is one of those weirdos with a standing desk, conveniently set up right behind me. It worries me, and my reasoning is twofold: 1) I don't like him lurking behind me, it makes me feel uncomfortable, and we all know that he's probably staring at my ass. Perv. Well, I guess we're even; 2) he can turn around at any time and watch what I'm doing and I would never know. Thankfully I had Pete, the wise Sancho Panza to my moronic Don Quixote, keeping a vigilant eye out for me. 11:19 AM - 1st floor - My Irish coffee is officially finished. Now I'm working on the "PBR in the Pringles can" operation. I am feeling aaaaa-loosey goosey! The can is too short for the Pringles canister, so any beer that exits the can and doesn't make it into my mouth gets lost in the abyss at the bottom of the canister, collecting that finely ground chip dust, then goes back towards my mouth during the next sip. I am now drinking an Xtra Kickin' Jalapeño Pabst Blue Ribbon. It makes me ponder on the time my Aunt gently (aggressively) informed me that I'll likely never be married. Things are beginning to click. Drinks so far: 3 shots of whiskey , 2 beers 11:22 AM - 2nd floor - I proceed to exhale into my coworker Marc's breathalyzer in order to figure out how far along I've come. I feel like store-bought breathalyzers always tell you you're more sober than you are, whereas the breathalyzers from the po-po will be a little more generous. That being said, I am surprised and slightly depressed to see I only blew a .053. Tucker Max would be disappointed. 11:29 AM - 1st floor - The way Hayley is wearing her headphones makes me laugh. Does she have an ear where her sideburns are or something? What is she listening to, brain waves? Who does she think she is, DJ Paris Hilton? Friggin' nerd. She's cool though. If she and someone that I hated were hanging off of a cliff, I'd save her. Maybs. 11:41 AM - 2nd floor - Somebody in the office is playing the theme to Happy Days. One of the younger interns asks where the song is from. I hold back an unyielding urge to bitch slap that bomboclat. Some old timey dancing is about to go down if this music keeps up. Either the twist or the jitterbug, I'm pretty open to new old things. 12:11 PM - 2nd floor - As I continue drinking, I am forced to keep coming up with cunning ways to consume my alcohol. I finish my Starbucks drink and my Pringles beer, now I'm drinking an entire beer out of a styrofoam to-go box. I only do this so that I can walk by Elie and mock him further when I reveal the truth. The mission is a success. Elie is none the wiser, and I am all the drunker. 12:27 PM - 2nd floor - Marc's girlfriend, Annie, arrives for lunch. I found some shot glasses to (quietly) take shots with the upstairs people, but I couldn't pull the cups apart. Annie used her Beowulf-like strength and staunch sense of justice to help me out. Somewhere Batman wipes a tear of proud approval from his righteous cheek. Annie and I joke about fighting, but it's all in good fun, because she'd wreck myself before I could even check myself. 12:37 PM - 3rd floor - I just took a shot with Rudy, Ethan, Marc and Molly, all while Elie roosts on the 1st floor. They're fuggin' troopers and they totally understand the struggle. I mean, who doesn't actively try to get drunk at work? Losers, squares and Elie, that's who. 12:51 PM - 1st floor - Hayley said she's meeting her roommate at 1pm for lunch. I belligerently inquire from across the room, "What, are you gonna BANG your roommate? TOOOIGHT, TOOOIGHT." Hayley is not amused, my other coworkers are slightly amused but also disturbed, and Elie is still none the wiser. Sean is winning all over the place. 12:53 - 1st floor - Pee pee time! I bravely waddle as quickly as possible to the bathroom, like a man. 1:03 PM - 1st floor - (2 Months Ago): Jamba Juice just dropped off smoothies for the whole office. I take the last two smoothies and put them in the freezer. I have no idea when they'll come in handy, but I feel as though one day Future Sean will be able to use them for something, and will pay homage to my genius resourcefulness. 1:13 PM - 1st floor - I suddenly remember that Past Sean put two smoothies in the freezer. I rub my hands together in a deliciously evil way, because I'm about to rock the civilized world's dick off and put vodka in my Jamba Juice. Clever, I know. I look up and nod my head approvingly to Past Sean in order to pay him homage for his genius resourcefulness. Why I looked up as if he were dead and in heaven, no one knows. Unfortunately, the only vodka we have is Jalapeno Vodka. Why is this in existence? I presume Jalapeno Vodka is the source of the world's troubles: every major war, disease and disaster. It is the devil's urine. Drinks so far: 5 shots of whiskey , 2 beers , 2 shots of jalapeno vodka (in the Jamba Juice) 1:36 PM - 2nd floor - I just took another shot of whiskey. I also find a small flask of Fireball Whiskey. I was going to down it, but Marc begged me not to finish it. Legitimately begged. And Marc is cute as fuck, only a barbarian would say no to him. 1:37 PM - 2nd floor - I said no to him. 1:53 PM - 1st floor - I ask Elie if I can write an article about drinking at work. Little does he know that I am already drinking at work. He gives me genuine advice on how to approach the topic. I give him genuine looks of boredom. I don't have time for his managerial ways. I am thinking about Ferrero Rocher chocolates the whole time and how they shaped my childhood (and my ass). Good luck breaking that train of thought, Mr. Look-At-Me-I'm-Sober-And-Responsible-And-Shit. 2:17 PM - 3rd floor - I take another shot of Jameson upstairs. I express to Ethan (our Finance Manager) my gameplan, then blow in his face to see how much I smell like booze. He approves, and regrets smelling my breath on a cosmic level. Everything is going swimmingly. Rudy demands that I get my drunk ass back to work, so I respond by yelling at everyone else to, "Get back to work!" 2:35 PM - out of office - I'm at C4 Deli with Pete and Evan for lunch. I order a French dip sandwich and a glass of Merlot. I finish the glass of Merlot like I've never seen wine before. I quickly order another, and the waitress looks at me like I'm her shitty ex-boyfriend that didn't treat her how feminist memes depict a woman should be treated. She's probably right, who knows...either way, I forgive her. She's hot, and hot people are easy to forgive. Drink status: 7 shots of whiskey , 2 beers , 2 shots of jalapeno vodka , 1 glass of wine 2:46 PM - out of office - I am drinking my second glass of wine. I have been elected as the new mayor of Struggle City, and I do lots of civil work in the bordering cities of Tipsyborough and Drunkshire. I am clearly running unopposed in the forthcoming election. I also demolish my French Dip sandwich like a rapper "eating booty groceries" or whatever they say, and now Pete is looking at me like I just greatly offended his ancestors. *3:02 PM - out of office - A hot homeless woman with a zebra backpack asks for a cigarette. I tell her to pick three categories, then I will ask her a trivia question using one of those three categories. I choose her category "entertainment". I ask her who Jay-Z is married to. She can't answer. I wonder what sort of fuckery this is, because it's literally the easiest question of all time. I give her the ultimate clue, which is, "She wants you to SAY HER NAME, because she's a SURVIVOR, and she sticks up for herself and ALL THE SINGLE LADIES." I even flawlessly perform the choreography to All The Single Ladies and she still doesn't know. Eventually she says Beyoncé, so I give her a smoke and walk the fuck away in sheer disgust, but also with a feeling akin to reserved paternal pride. I'm proud of you, vagabond. 3:35 PM - 1st floor - I try to walk past Elie, who is studiously working on the couch in the lobby, like the Pink Panther. I believe I succeeded, however the look on his face says, "What is wrong with that guy?" 3:37 PM - 3rd floor - I go upstairs to take another shot. I decide to take a shot at Elie's desk, because I live life on the edge, and danger turns me on. I laugh at my boss's remarkable lack of environmental awareness. I also called him a "dummy." I thought that shit was hysterical. He's not a dummy, but he sure is making my job easy today. *4:01 PM - 1st, 2nd and 3rd floor - I spend the next 10 minutes walking around the office discreetly flipping everybody off. I find a never-ending source of happiness from this. I once did this with famous buildings and works of art in Europe. I love being obnoxious, and I'm really good at it. Final drink status: 10 shots of whiskey , 2 beers , 2 shots of jalapeno vodka , 2 glasses of wine *4:14 PM - 2nd floor - Hayley comes upstairs solely to laugh at me. I make fun of her for being an unpaid intern, then immediately apologize because she is my ride home. Elie is also a good sport about being the butt of everybody's jokes ALL. DAY. LONG. He gives Hayley and me a Jack In The Box gift card so that she can feed me on the way home. 6:26 PM - home - I finally arrive home. I am too drunk to continue doing things. Goodbye reading peoples! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *3:02 PM - Pete later informs me that despite my assuredness, the homeless woman was not hot. He's obviously trying to keep her for himself, so I express gratitude for his guidance, then curse his filthy, whorish name under my breath. *4:01 PM - I found the pictures of me flipping off European things. You're welcome, world. Except you, Europe. You kind of asked for it. *4:14 PM - I can't remember if she actually fed me or not. Hayley, if you didn't feed me, you owe me one egg roll and a Double Jack. Friggin' interns, man.

0 Shares 0 0 0 0 In statements at a panel in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday Iran Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said US president-elect, Donald Trump, "will be surprised" if he tries to renegotiate the hard-won nuclear deal. The top diplomat noted that he's taking a "wait and see" attitude about the Trump administration and "the jury is out." Pressed by the Associated Press afterward on Wednesday, Zarif said it "won't be the end of the world if he [Trump] tries to walk away from the deal [officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action]". "He wants to surprise people, so he will be surprised," if he does, Zarif said with a smile, without elaborating. Zarif also criticized the outgoing administration of Barack Obama, saying it "did not implement their side of the bargain in a full and complete way" notably about difficulties faced by Iranian banks. In addition, he told the panel that Iran and Saudi Arabia should be able to work together to help end conflicts in Syria and Yemen, after successfully cooperating over Lebanon last year, Reuters reported. "I do not see any reason why Iran and Saudi Arabia should have hostile policies toward each other. We can in fact work together to put an end to miserable conditions of the people in Syria and Yemen and Bahrain and elsewhere in the region," Zarif said. "Iran and Saudi Arabia were able to actually stop impeding the process of the presidential election in Lebanon. We have a success story."

A Taunton woman arrested Monday afternoon on drunk driving charges was carrying a lizard in her bra, police said. Amy Rebello-McCarthy, 39, veered off the road and struck half a dozen mailboxes before crashing onto a lawn, police said. When police arrived around 1:30 p.m., Rebello-McCarthy slurred her words as she asked officers to call a tow truck. All four tires were flat, the airbags had been deployed, and the bumpers were missing, police said. When police searched her car, they found an open bottle of brandy in the front seat along with empty bottles of root beer-flavored nips, police said. Advertisement Rebello-McCarthy’s blood alcohol content was measured at nearly twice the legal limit, police said. Get Metro Headlines in your inbox: The 10 top local news stories from metro Boston and around New England delivered daily. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here A 22-year-old Waltham man, Martin Kyewalyanga, was in the passenger seat when the car crashed, witnesses told police. While police were talking to Rebello-McCarthy, Kyewalyanga was smoking a cigarette near the back of the car, where gasoline was dripping. Police asked him to step away from the vehicle, fearing that he might start a fire. Kyewalyanga was placed under arrest for his own safety because he was so inebriated, police said. As she was arrested, Rebello-McCarthy told police officers that she was carrying a bearded dragon in her bra. The lizard was placed “in a red bandana for safe keeping,” police wrote in their report. “It faces no charges at this time,” police wrote in a Facebook post that had some fun at Rebello-McCarthy’s expense. Advertisement She has been arraigned 109 times in her adult life, police said. “You can’t make this stuff up,” police wrote in the post. Maddie Kilgannon can be reached at maddie.kilgannon@globe.com . Follow her on Twitter @MaddieKilgannon

Jeb! waiting for people to show up to his Republican party. Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images Entertainment, D. Anschutz/Thinkstock. Mike Murphy finds it all very funny that people think Jeb Bush is in trouble. The head of Bush’s $100 million super PAC, Right to Rise, considers most political punditry this cycle to be stupid. Conceded. But both the stupid and occasional non-stupid pundits all agree on one thing: Things aren’t going well for Bush, and one cannot assume that the old rules governing Republican presidential nominating contests will inevitably save him. Murphy outlined his thinking in a rare extended interview with Bloomberg Politics. Why? Most practically, to signal Right to Rise’s thinking to the official Bush campaign and leery donors. Or, in Murphy’s words: “[W]e thought it would be good to kind of go through our theory of the race in a more distributed way.” His theory is lacking. Nowhere, between all his mockery, does he get to the heart of the matter: why people don’t like Jeb Bush right now, and how Right to Rise intends to change that. “What I find is we’re in this funny casino of the pre-season now,” he says, “where the complete sum of pundit knowledge in this race, with a few rare exceptions, is based on national polling that in my view is completely meaningless.” Zuh? There will always be a fair share of bad national poll coverage. If there’s more of it this time, Murphy can blame the Republican National Committee and its media partners for pegging debate participation to national polling status. But it’s not like Bush is only doing badly in national polls that don’t matter, anyway. He’s doing poorly in polls of early states, too. Bush is doing lousy in Iowa. That’s fine: Bush is one thing and Iowa Republicans are a whole other thing. But he’s also performing lousy in New Hampshire, a state he has spent an extraordinary amount of time in and has been advertising in. He is not leading in Florida, his natural firewall, or South Carolina, the GOP establishment’s traditional firewall for their chosen representative. How important are early state polls? They can and do fluctuate along with everything else. Murphy, whether he means to or not, implies that early state polls are important, because he dramatically lowers Bush’s expectations in those early states based on how poorly things have been going. That, as the Washington Post’s David Weigel points out, is really the most eye-popping exchange in the interview: Murphy argues that Bush doesn’t need to win any states for the first 45 days of contests in order to win the nomination—people will know that he has the money to compete for the long haul, the “little guys” will flame out, and then the real race will begin later on in big-state, winner-take-all races. It’s an arguable theory. Murphy is not the first to suggest that super PACs like his extend the primary map and downplay the traditional importance of the early states. But Murphy is supposed to be the one arguing that, writ-large, the old rules of nominating—in which party voters eventually ditch flings and flock to the more electable, “establishment” pick—still apply. Arguing that the eventual nominee need not win (or even place!) in Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina this time around punctures his underlying premise—that this time isn’t all that different. This is second-order stuff, anyway. Whether the rules are different or not, the central problem for Bush is the same: Voters simply do not care for him. Being relatively liked by human beings who vote in elections is an important first step toward winning elections. We need not pay much attention to Bush’s top-line number in national polls, but we can look to his favorability ratings to see what sort of space he has to work with. Monmouth University’s latest national poll, released this morning, finds Bush at 5 percent nationally. Whatever. Skip to the favorability ratings, though, and the picture somehow looks even more grim. Of the six candidates’ whose favorables were polled among Republicans, Bush is the only one underwater—at 37 to 44 percent. This is indicative of the trend, and it corresponds with what any person paying vague attention to the news has seen. Murphy is just spinning, same as anyone else who works for Bush. Of course there are going to be some gaps in what he says versus what is really happening. But if he’s going to prattle on about how the media has invented a sorry state of affairs for Bush’s candidacy that isn’t backed by evidence, well, we hate to break it to him. If anything, the media has given Bush too much credit due to his last name and his family’s reputation for winning presidential nominations. Who in their right mind would believe that this visibly poor campaigner, who’s fifth-placing it every which way, whose fundamentals show little room for growth, who’s out-of-step with the temperament of his party’s voters, whose cash advantage isn’t really in another league anymore, and whose general election viability isn’t looking so hot is going to be restored by the natural laws of presidential nominating? Only the stupid, stupid media would believe that this guy has a shot.

With an impressive group of future television and movie stars, That '70s Show graced the Fox airwaves for eight seasons (almost a full decade!) beginning in 1998. Here are some facts about how the Point Place, Wisconsin cheese was made. 1. TOPHER GRACE WAS DISCOVERED PERFORMING IN A HIGH SCHOOL PLAY. Co-creators Bonnie and Terry Turner were the parents of a cast member of a high school production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Their attention gradually turned to the lead, Topher Grace. The Turners asked him to audition the following year for their new show. 2. ASHTON KUTCHER WAS A MODEL BEFORE AUDITIONING. He got the part of Kelso after playing him “naive” at his audition, while everybody else played him as dumb. But Kutcher had never acted: "The first five episodes of That '70s Show, I was convinced I was going to be fired, because I was terrible," Kutcher told Rolling Stone. 3. MILA KUNIS LIED ABOUT HER AGE AT HER AUDITION. The then-14-year-old reasoned that the producers wouldn't want to cast someone too young because of work hour restrictions for minors, so "I told them I was going to be 18," Kunis told People. "But I didn't tell them when I was going to be 18!" 4. KUNIS’ FIRST KISS WAS ON THE SHOW, WITH KUTCHER. She enjoyed some other firsts on the show, not all of them with cast members she ended up marrying: Wilmer Valderrama taught her how to drive. Danny Masterson took her to her first club and bought her her first drink. He was also her prom date. 5. MASTERSON’S ROLE IN THE FACULTY WAS CUT SHORT SO HE COULD SHOOT THE PILOT. All the actor was told about his character, Hyde, was that he is a “deep theorist stoner type.” Masterson figured out how to play his character “by episode four or five.” 6. KURTWOOD SMITH BASED RED FORMAN ON HIS STEPFATHER. Smith's stepdad passed away shortly before the pilot was filmed. Smith also has the distinction of being the only regular cast member who was actually born in Wisconsin. 7. THE ORIGINAL TITLE FOR THE SHOW WAS TEENAGE WASTELAND. The Who songwriter Pete Townshend refused to allow his lyric from “Baba O’Riley” to be appropriated for the show; the same went for the proposed title of The Kids Are Alright. After Feelin’ All Right was presented as the name of the program to advertisers, Bonnie Turner realized that no matter what they called it, everybody would just to refer to it as “that '70s show.” 8. THE CO-WRITER OF THE THEME SONG WAS PAID $70 EVERY TIME THE SHOW WAS ON TV. Big Star singer Alex Chilton co-wrote “In the Street,” which was covered in season one by Todd Griffin before Cheap Trick’s version kicked things off starting in season two. With the name of the show in mind, Chilton found the dollar amount ironic. 9. LEO WAS WRITTEN WITH TOMMY CHONG IN MIND. Chong claimed in 2003 that his stoner character Leo was starting to get written out more because of 9/11. After disappearing for a few seasons while serving a jail sentence for selling “drug paraphernalia,” Mickey “Leo” Chingkwake returned, and was credited as a series regular in the show’s eighth and final season. 10. WILL FORTE TURNED DOWN PERFORMING ON SNL TO CONTINUE WRITING ON THE SHOW. Forte enjoyed the job security of his writing/producing gig on That '70s Show and feared failure on Saturday Night Live. One year later he changed his mind. 11. THE SMOKE IN THE "POT CIRCLE" SCENES WAS STRAWBERRY-SCENTED. Laura Prepon, Kutcher, and Masterson hid their lit cigarettes below the table before those scenes so that they could partake in their habit in between takes. 12. LATER SEASONS HAD BAND-THEMED EPISODE TITLES. Season five episodes all shared titles with Led Zeppelin tunes. For season six, The Who was honored. The Rolling Stones were represented in season seven. For season eight, it was Queen. 13. KEVIN MCDONALD GOT THE ROLE OF PASTOR DAVE BECAUSE OF HIS DOG AND TOPHER GRACE . Grace drove by one day while The Kids in the Hall cast member was walking his dog and said he was a huge fan. It led to him playing Pastor Dave for six episodes before the character unceremoniously disappeared. McDonald believes the show forgot about him because co-creator Mark Brazill left to work on the failed spinoff That ‘80s Show. 14. THERE WAS A U.K. REMAKE CALLED DAYS LIKE THESE IN 1999. It was the first time an American company (Carsey-Werner) produced both the American and British versions of the same show. Days Like These used the same scripts as That '70s Show, switching out American references with British ones, like David Bowie replacing a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders poster, and Prince Charles visiting instead of President Gerald Ford. Only 10 episodes were aired. 15. LAURIE FORMAN SUFFERED A TRAGIC END. Lisa Robin Kelly was taken off the show halfway through season three, returning in the fifth season only to be replaced by actress Christina Moore. "I was guilty of a drinking problem,” Kelly said in 2012. “And I ran.” Kelly passed away on August 13, 2013, after entering a rehabilitation facility; the coroner ruled the cause as being from multiple drug intoxication.

glitch on Mar 15 Indeed. It's an undefined behavior. C and C++ do not specify when the post-increment occurs within the statement, only that it is guaranteed to occur by the end token (i.e., ;) -- whether immediately before (or after) use, at the beginning (or end) of the statement, or at some point in between is not specified. For this reason, referencing a variable more than once in a statement where the post-increment operator is used results in undefined behavior. The same code may produce different results on different compilers, different architectures, or even the same compiler with different optimization settings. So, 0, 0 0, 0 could also have been a result. Although, for the original poster, to elaborate on the specific behavior of the initial post 1, 0 0, 1 some more, suppose we have m = 0; printf("(m++, m, m++): %d, %d, %d ", m++, m, m++); (m++, m, m++) gave me 1, 2, 0 (with gcc version 4.0.1 Apple Inc. build 5488), which illustrates going on with that initial post. The post-increment operators are evaluated first and from right to left, so the "m++" in the third parameter is done first (returning 0 and incremeting m to 1). The "m++" in the first parameter is done next, since it's the next post-increment operator to do (evaluating from right to left). The first parameter returns 1 and increments m to 2. This concludes the evaluation of the post-increment operators in the statement. Now, proceeding from right to left, the rest is done. So, finally, the "m" in the second parameter is evaluated as 2 (0 incremented to 1, which was then incremented to 2).

When I initially started my Magic Mirror project, it was just to see if it was possible. It was never meant to be an open source project, let alone a commercial project. When the project eventually got more famous, it wouldn’t take long for the first commercial opportunities … After the blog posts of my Magic Mirror went viral (mainly because the Raspberry Pi foundation blogged about it), the first inquiries started to appear in my inbox. An though I wasn’t really interested in building Magic Mirrors as paid projects, one inquiry really stood out. It turned out a successful entrepreneur was building a new house and was looking for a nice eye-catcher as the center piece of the living room. Since the living room would contain a mirror anyway, the Magic Mirror project was the perfect fit. The mirror ended up being a 2 x 3 meter mirror with a 60" LED TV behind it. As far as I know this is the largest Magic Mirror so far. The client’s work consists of a lot of traveling, and thus he wanted a way to show the places on earth he visited most. Using Google’s WebGL Globe I created a module that showed the visited spots using spikes on a rotating globe. If a spot is visited more than once, the spike becomes longer. Above video was made during the development process. The rotating globe really gives a nice futuristic touch to the project. Because of the WebGL usage, this Mirror isn’t running on a Raspberry Pi. It uses a Mac Mini as its host allowing me to built more processor intensive modules. Since the mirror is larger than the screen itself, a black frame is placed around the monitor. This prevents you from seeing the guts of the Magic Mirror. On the photo you can see the frame around the monitor. But honestly, in real life it doesn’t affect the end result in a negative way. Better yet: it gives some depth to the project. Having such a large Magic Mirror in the center of your living room gives you a lot of opportunities for cool home automation projects. So as you can guess, this is an ongoing project. The best part of this project? It allowed me to work on the Magic Mirror on a paid basis, resulting in the MagicMirror² platform. Of course, the client specific modules (like the globe) are kept private. But any modification in the core will be added to the open source platform. That leaves me with the most important part of this blog: thanking my client for the trust in the work he has shown by letting me built this awesome Magic Mirror and allowing me to continue my work on the MagicMirror² project.

Mona T. Brooks / KCPB While the world's first coders helped build the tech industry, its designers will define the industry's future, said graphic designer and computer scientist John Maeda. Maeda spoke Sunday at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, where he issued the findings of his #DesignInTech report. Before 2010, Maeda said, design played a secondary role in the technology industry. How a product or service looked or worked, and the ways users interacted with it, were typically an after-thought that focused mostly on cosmetics. Design only ever grabbed attention when companies like Apple pushed outside the norm. But that's changing fast. Startups and large tech firms all recognize that their products need to be both visually appealing and deliver great user experiences -- and that means thinking about design from the beginning. It also means the industry needs people who can communicate those ideas and create more satisfying experiences. In other words, it needs designers who contribute from the start of a project -- not the end. "Twenty-seven startups co-founded by designers and 10 creative agencies were acquired by tech in the last four years," Maeda said. The former president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Maeda joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers last year as Silicon Valley's first ever design partner. Since he joined KPCB, he said, six other venture capital firms have brought on designers to help scout new talent and incorporate design into their portfolio companies 'products. Take Airbnb, Maeda said. Founded in 2008, the company makes it easy for people to rent out their homes or a single room to those looking for a place a stay. It was dreamed up by designers Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, both RISD graduates, after the two attended an industrial design conference. "[Silicon Valley] didn't think a designer could build and run a company. They were straight up about it. We weren't MBAs, we weren't two Ph.D. students from Stanford. Being designers they thought we were people that worked for people that ran companies," Chesky told Dezeen magazine in January 2014. Maeda also pointed to Dropbox's 2013 acquisition of Orchestra, the makers of sleek email app Mailbox, for $100 million. That deal brought former IDEO designer Gentry Underwood to the cloud storage company as head of design. Microsoft, too, has acquired design talent in the mobile app space with its purchases of email app Acompli and calendar app Sunrise. Both products had been hailed for their design and experience. In his report, Maeda also points out the growing need for designers who double as programmers. Dropbox's Underwood, for instance, holds both a Stanford degree in human-computer interaction as well as degrees in psychology and anthropology. Maeda found that more than a third of 110 surveyed designers in the tech industry had formal engineering training and over half had formal art or design training. In a survey of 370 designers, 93.5 percent described the ability to code as useful and at some times essential. Intriguingly, not all of those designers work in the tech industry.

Jon Stewart’s last Daily Show was much more than just a cameo-packed, Springsteen-soundtracked, emotion-infused blow-out. The legendary host’s final episode was also a financial lightning rod for an excellent cause. Stewart partnered with charity fundraising platform Omaze to raise money for New York Collaborates for Autism. Donors who gave $10 or more were entered in a drawing to attend The Daily Show’s final taping, meet Stewart and hang out on the set. More than 47,000 people from 78 countries donated, generating a whopping $2.23 million for NYCA. Here’s the complete donation breakdown: —Total Raised: $2,235,520 —Winning Donation: $100 —Number of Donors: 47,048 —Number of Countries: 78 —Average Donation Amount: $45.50 —Average Amount Raised Per Day: $14,707 —Highest Donation: $35,000 Here’s Stewart with the drawing’s big winner, Sameer: “Over the last 16 years, no one has done more than Jon to engage people around the issues that truly impact our lives,” said Matt Pohlson, Omaze’s co-founder, “and it’s fitting that he leveraged his final show to raise more than $2 million for this incredible cause.” Pohlson took to Instagram to voice his admiration for Stewart, posting a photo of the two working together. Watch Stewart’s final episode of The Daily Showhere, but be warned: you’re going to feel all the feelings. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah premieres on Monday, Sept. 28.

A quick history of Motorola devices will tell you they have yet to release a smartphone with a full HD 1080p display. Tell us why then — when talking about their new Android 4.4.3 feature that allows users to disable the carrier name from being displayed in the status bar — Motorola VP of Product Management Punit Soni posted a screenshot of a phone with a 1080×1920 resolution display? Weird? Not really. We’ve heard rumors that the upcoming Motorola Moto X +1 would arrive with a more up-to-date full HD display. While nothing is confirmed, it’s highly unlikely Soni would be using some other Android device to show off a new Motorola feature, so this could be our confirmation that the Moto X+1 will, in fact, feature a 1080p display. Anyone surprised? Relieved? After checking out current flagships, this Android blogger has his money on the Moto X+1 as his next smartphone purchase. Let’s hope Motorola doesn’t hold back much this time around. [Google+]

Last Thursday night, a gay couple was brutally beaten by a group of two men and six women who were “visibly intoxicated.” NBC Philadelphia reports, “Witnesses say someone in the group asked, 'Is this your f****** boyfriend?' When one of the victims told them yes, the group allegedly attacked them, punching and kicking them in the face, head and chest.” One of the attackers grabbed a victim's bag and fled. At least one of the victims was taken to the hospital for fractures to his face and had to have his jaw wired shut. Generally after an attack of this kind, the investigation can draw out indefinitely. The Philadelphia Police Department said it was looking for as many as 12 people in relation to the attack. But today Philadelphia's ABC News syndicate reported that some of the suspects are expected to surrender to police in the near future. Why the sudden change of heart? A number of good actors on various social media used Twitter, Facebook, and some CCTV footage to track down the attackers and alert police of their possible identities. When the Philadelphia police released grainy CCTV footage of the group of attackers on YouTube on Tuesday, Greg Bennett, a former Real Housewives of New Jersey star, tweeted the video with the message, “Video of the 10-12 pieces of garbage suspected of a gay bashing in Philly. Spread it round.” Bennett, who has hundreds of thousands of followers, received a photo from one of his followers of a group of people at a restaurant in the area who looked similar to the people in the CCTV video. At that point, a Twitter user called @FanSince09 retweeted the image from the restaurant and discovered that the restaurant was called La Viola. The Twitter user then went to Facebook to find out who had checked into La Viola on Twitter on Thursday night and found at least three people who checked into the restaurant and whose faces seemed to match those in the CCTV video. @FanSince09 reportedly took that information to the police, and Philadelphia Detective Joseph Murray tweeted this morning, “S/O to @FanSince09 This is what makes my job easy. Sure, it's up to me to make the arrest but we are all in this together.” Since then, sources have told various news outlets that the people in the photo were former students of a local Catholic high school who were in town for a dinner. NBC Philadelphia said that some of the suspects have lawyered up and told the police department they would surrender today, but they have kept the department waiting, and officers were considering going to the suspects' homes to make the arrests. Use of CCTV footage has often been highly controversial. In the UK, privacy groups balked at widespread CCTV use, which was later shown to not have much of an impact on crime prevention. But occasionally good can come of the ever-watching eye. Earlier this year, a Wisconsin woman was cleared of responsibility in a car crash with a Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office Deputy when CCTV footage was discovered that showed that the Deputy was responsible for the crash. Still, using the hive mind to solve crimes and mysteries doesn't always have a happy ending. In the wake of the Boston bombings last year, amateur investigators on reddit accused several innocent people of being the perpetrators, and the site manager, Erik Martin, issued a public apology for "online witch hunts and dangerous speculation." It's still unclear whether suspects will be arrested and charged—as Detective Murray tweeted today, “Let's be clear here. No arrests made. Central Detectives have done a ton of work and have a lot more to do. (Not a Law & Order episode)”. But it is clear that social media contributed to speeding up the process of justice.

The only scientists who kept the Business-as-Usual sign hanging out during the war were the mathematicians and astronomers. The other men of learning were engaged in war work. Physicists were making better range-finders, chemists were making better poison gases, and theologians were proving that their gods were in the trenches qualifying for meritorious-conduct medals and kisses on both cheeks. But the astronomers and mathematicians were not doing their bits. While the war was in progress, Albert Einstein was completing his theory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and British astronomers were working on plans to test it. It was fraternizing with the enemy. Scientists of this type have always been dangerous internationalists. They did incalculable harm to Church and State at an earlier time by casting suspicion on the Bible truth that the earth was flat and had four corners, and even today a man who meddles with the universe is regarded as unsafe. One of the organizers of the American Legion started an agitation to bar Einstein from the United States as a Red; the Woman Patriot Corporation lodged a complaint against him with the State Department; an American consular official nearly heckled the scientist into abandoning an American trip; Cardinal O’Connell denounced the Einstein theory as false, atheistic, and immoral; a religious writer charged that Einstein had cribbed the theory from the writings of a thirteenth-century saint. Nevertheless, Einstein slipped past the immigration authorities in 1930, and he did it again last October. Today, he is openly carrying on mathematical work at Princeton. The anti-nationalistic taint in astronomy manifested itself when British astronomers, even before the Treaty of Versailles had been signed, confirmed the new theory that had been made in Germany. On May 29, 1919, two expeditions under the Union Jack—one at Sobral in Brazil, and the other at Principe off the coast of West Africa—photographed an eclipse in order to discover whether starlight, as Einstein’s calculations had indicated, was twisted when it passed a massive body like the sun. They reported that Einstein was right. Since then, his theory has been retouched in detail, but its essentials have been repeatedly verified. No important scientist is to be found among the skeptics, although there is every incentive to debunk Einstein, if it can be done. Immortality awaits the man who can overthrow Einstein. The popular uproar over the theory surprised no one more than the author of the theory. He had been almost a recluse. His contacts had been with quiet, scholarly men of his own type, and his sudden glory appalled him. Interviewers, photographers, lion-hunters, cause-promoters, testimonial-seekers, and reflected-glory chasers of every kind came swarming into his life. A man of soft, plastic nature, Einstein was helpless in their hands. He was forced into the rôle of publicist, propagandist, and oracle. After fourteen years of experience with international nuisances and go-getters, Einstein has developed some resistance, but he has not yet learned how to say “No” successfully, and he is still the prey of determined busybodies. The Einstein of 1933 has become fairly reconciled to the occupation of popular idol. He has developed into a mixer, a wit, an authority on things in general, and the probable successor of George Bernard Shaw as the world’s miscellaneous consulting expert, but his countenance still reflects the bewilderment of his early years as a demigod in spite of himself. Permanent astonishment shines from his great eyes under their apprehensive brows. When he first became famous, Einstein was a strange compound of cosmic wisdom and worldly inexperience. Presented by Lord Haldane to the Royal Society in England as a man of unparalleled intellectual boldness, Einstein found himself intimidated by the livery of the Haldane retainers. “He is too formidable,” said the Professor later at the Haldane place, when Mrs. Einstein wanted to summon the butler to fix a window. When he visited the Queen of the Belgians, Einstein failed to notice the welcoming party at the railway station and surprised the royal household by arriving on foot, baggage in hand. The Professor and his wife were both bewildered by the barbaric hospitality which overwhelmed them on their earlier visits to this country. They agreed that they must blindly accept whatever occurred to them in this bizarre republic; at a dinner in Cleveland, Mrs. Einstein, shrugging her shoulders at what appeared to be an elegant American eccentricity, ate a bouquet of orchids which she found on what seemed to be a salad plate. Einstein knew things that everybody else was ignorant of, and was ignorant of things that everybody else knew. The name of the richest man in the world meant nothing to him. He used a $1,500 check from the Rockefeller Foundation as a bookmark, lost the book, and could not remember who had sent the check. It took Mrs. Einstein some weeks to clear up the affair and to obtain a duplicate check, which was needed to pay the salary of an assistant. “My God, do you even have to sleep in those things?” Einstein is a mental Hercules, according to those who know his work. He has performed prodigious labors. By all the theories of physiognomy, he should be a granite-visaged Norse god of the Hindenburg type, instead of looking like a poet or musician. On theoretical grounds, he should have an iron will, instead of being pliant, docile, compromising. The explanation seems to be that Einstein, unlike most men of achievement, has never had to coerce or harden himself. His work was an exalted revel and his whole scientific life was a perpetual carnival, to judge from a speech of his at a dinner in Berlin in honor of the physicist, Max Planck. A preceding speaker had talked of the “agonizing toil” and “superhuman will” required of a great scientist. Einstein demurred. “This daily striving,” he said, “is dictated by no principle or program, but arises from immediate personal need. The emotional condition which renders possible such achievements is like that of the religious devotee or the lover.” On another occasion, Einstein described the impulse to grapple with his problems as “a demoniac possession,” needing no stimulation from conscious effort of the will. Einstein’s own theory about himself must be correct; nothing else could account for his irresistible energy in his own regions of thought and his lamblike helplessness in ordinary contacts. To catalogue a few of his lost wars of everyday life: For a time he refused to play the violin for charity because of his modest estimate of his own ability, and because he thought it unfair to professionals; under pressure, however, he gave many recitals. He declined a de-luxe cabin on a trip to America because of his scruples against luxury, but accepted when informed that he was hurting the feelings of the steamship line. On his trip to India, he refused to travel in a rickshaw because he thought it degrading to use a human being as a draught animal; he reconsidered, however, on the ground that rickshaw boys must live, and patronized them extensively. Hating fuss and feathers, he has been induced to make triumphal progresses on four continents. He has compared mass newspaper interviews to being bitten by wolves and to being hanged, but nevertheless he is frequently gang-interviewed. This easy yielding to pressure would lead another man to cheapen himself, but Einstein is saved by his aesthetic sense and his unworldliness. He could not do anything sordid. He doesn’t want anything; there is nothing about the man for temptation to work on. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1921, he gave it to charity. When a magazine offered him an amazing sum for an article, he rejected it contemptuously. “What?” he exclaimed. “Do they think I am a prizefighter?” But he finally wrote the article after arguing the magazine into cutting the price in half. It is said that he declined his present post at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton on the ground that the salary was preposterously munificent, and was persuaded to accept only by the promise of an enormous pay cut. He objected to gifts, but his 1930 trip to this country netted him five violins and other valuable booty. His backbone stiffened, however, when an admirer sought to press on him a Guarnerius valued at $33,000; this he firmly refused, saying that he was not enough of a musician to do justice to the instrument. Probably no man has been more plagued than Einstein by offers of money for testimonials for toothpaste, pimple-eradicators, corn plasters, and cigarettes. He brushed all this aside as “corruption” and would have no compromise. Einstein regards money as something to give away; in 1927, he was aiding one hundred and fifty poor families in Berlin. Einstein’s amiable infirmity of purpose was illustrated on his trip to America on the Belgenland, in 1930. The liner stopped five days in New York Harbor on the way to the Pacific Coast. Before leaving Germany, the scientist had announced that he would give no interviews, pose for no pictures, make no speeches, and pay no visits, but would remain aboard the ship. He was chivied into doing just the opposite of what he had planned. His five days were spent in interviews, broadcasts, luncheons, teas, dinners, and sightseeing expeditions. He even toured Chinatown. He went to the opera, visited Jeritza, and gave his written approval to the late Bill Guard’s brief definition of the Einstein theory: “There is no hitching-post in the universe.” The interviewing on the ship went on so long that the Professor finally uttered a resolute “No more” and went into hiding. A reporter found him. “Go away,” said Einstein, in his slow, reproachful manner, “immediately.” Seeing the disappointment on the reporter’s face, the scientist called after him, “Come back, young man, and I will try to answer your questions.” Pen-and-ink artists were also barred at this time. But when one of them surreptitiously made a sketch, Einstein autographed it and added a rhyme in German to the effect that “This fat, overfed pig seems to be Prof. Einstein.” It is the habit of this good, easy man to reward those who violate his rules and penalize those who respect them; courteous reporters, photographers, and artists are continually scooped by their unmannerly brethren, who by harrying and badgering the scientist put him into an affable, complying humor. While Einstein may have suffered to some extent under press cross-examinations, he has a miscellaneous journalistic inquisitiveness of his own and is an expert in baiting others with who and which. During an illness in 1928, he was attended in Germany by a world-famous New York physician. The physician memorized one hundred and fifty funny stories and told them to his celebrated patient. It was supposed that he did this to keep Einstein cheerful. “Not at all,” said the physician. “I told him funny stories in self-protection. He asked me so many questions that I was constantly embarrassed by my ignorance. When I found that he liked jokes, I memorized them to stop his questions.” “Gosh, Jack, I was born in a room like this.”

It's been another turbulent year for developer Evolution Studios, but the Runcorn-based firm has done right by its fans. DriveClub may have suffered some serious server issues at launch, but the studio both rectified those and delivered arguably the best Season Pass on the PlayStation 4 to date. Sadly, it's starting to run out of road. At least, that's what we thought. It was believed that the title's last add-on packs were due out later this month, but game director Paul Rustchynsky has revealed that "more exciting content" is in the works. While this won't be a part of the existing Season Pass, we're excited to see what the studio has in store – some new tracks, perhaps? Earlier in the year, Sony sadly laid off a number of staff at the British outfit, but maintained that the developer would remain open in order to support its PlayStation 4 exclusive racer as a service. With that in mind, it seems feasible that the organisation may announce some kind of second Season Pass, assuming that the playerbase is still there. Whatever the case, a new patch will deploy next week, adding Elite Driver levels, improvements to the title's Photo Mode, and much more. Where would you like to see the game go next? Take a sharp hairpin turn in the comments section below.

The last week brought about some cooler temperatures to South Florida and believe me that is quite a relief! This delightfully cool weather inspired me to make one of my favorite Cuban potajes (stew) ... Potaje de Garbanzo. I think of a potaje (poe-tah-hey) as not quite a soup, not quite a stew and not quite a porridge. It's a hearty chickpeas (garbanzo), simmered with Spanish chorizo, ham, smoked pork shank, Cuban calabaza and potatoes. The taste takes me back to the days of sitting in my mom's kitchen, talking and watching her prepare this divine "potaje". It's funny how so many of the memories of my mom, that mean so much to me and that I hold dear, took place in her kitchen. A little choked up and a big sigh inserted here! Anyway, back to the "potaje". To me, the perfect spoonful has a piece of chorizo, calabaza, and chickpea swimming in the smokey, paprika infused tomato-y broth. Add your favorite bread to dunk in the savory broth or white rice and your meal has just graduated to a traditional Cuban meal. This is nothing short of absolutely, positively delicious! I am pretty certain that my favorite Potaje de Garbanzo may become one your favorites too!1 tablespoon olive oil1 large vidalia onion, chopped3-4 garlic cloves, chopped1 large bell pepper chopped4 small dried and cured Spanish chorizo* links, sliced on the diagonal1 tablespoon sweet, smoked Spanish paprika1 tablespoon granulated garlic powder1 laurel bay leaf1 8 oz can tomato sauce4 cups chicken stock1 1/2 dry white wine1 pounds of garbanzo beans1 1/2 pounds of smoked pork shank8 oz ham steak cubed1/2 Cuban calabaza squash (or butternut squash), peeled and diced into large pieces1 - 2 large red potatoes, peeled, diced1/2 teaspoon salt Soak the beans 24 hours ahead of cooking time, change water whenever possible. Place the rinse beans and place in a pot with enough water to go about 2 inches above beans. Bring to a rolling boil and cook for 5 minutes on high. Cover and turn off heat. Leave in water for 1 hour. Remove and rinse beans set aside. Throw out water.Heat a deep, heavy bottomed dutch oven over medium heat. Add olive oil, onions, pepper and garlic. Saute for 5-7 minutes or until vegetables are tender, add sliced chorizo, paprika, bay leaf and garlic powder stir well to incorporate. Cook, stirring often, for 5 minutes, making sure the chorizo has expelled it's oils. Add tomato sauce, lower heat to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes, covered. Add all of the remaining ingredients,, and stir to combine. Cook for 1 hour or until beans are almost tender. Add salt and cook for another 1/2 hour.Serve in deep bowls along with crusty Cuban or French bread and/or, as served traditionally, with white rice. Enoy!substitute Spanish chorizo with Mexican chorizo, the flavor profiles are completely different.I like to to dice my calabaza (squash) in large pieces so that I actually have pieces of it remaining in the stew once it is done cooking. It tends to break down considerably during the cooking process.. After sauteing and simmering vegetables and chorizo in the tomato sauce, transfer all ingredients,, to the slow cooker and cook on high for 4-5 hourson low for 8-9 hours. Half hour before cook time is up add in the salt.I never add salt to beans until they are almost done. It is my experience that salt added to the beginning of the bean's cooking process will keep the beans from softening. See my post Salt Will Keep Your Beans from Softening for more information on bean cookery!

Crispy Rice Crispy Rice is unaware they can edit their status GTR.co.uk seasoned Member Join Date: Apr 2009 Posts: 93 Accident: Don't do what I did.... I had a low speed crash into the back of a white van, it was a badly surfaced road, we were stopped, pulled away.... and the person infront of the van stopped for no reason, causing the van to tap the tow bar of the car infront and me in sympathy to do the same to the van. Ok enough of the excuses, I am posting here to make sure noone makes the same mistake I did. I thought long and hard about posting this, but i think it is important that other GTR owners see this so they aren't stung by a careless accident and the GTR Tax! I bumped into tho the white vans tow bar causing this small crack in my bumper... Unfortunately it also set off the Pedestrain Saftey system, where the bonnet pops up.... Which is a one use system.... You need to replace the bumper, rams, bonnet hinges.... and of course the ECU When the accident happened i called my dealer and asked them to collect the car and told them i would just pay for it without putting it through my insurance. Then i found out the total cost of the repairs. Eleven Thousand Pounds. I'm pleased to report the car has been repaired perfectly, even if it took 5 weeks! But I fear GTR insurance won't be so cheap next year for any of us. Sorry about that! But don't do what I did. And if you hit a pedestrain, make sure you are reveresing Updated for new readers - 24th November 2009 This issue has been raised with Nissan UK and following their investigations they have asked me to post the following statement: Issue of a high repair bill for a low speed front impact on a GT-R "As a company we cannot comment in any detail on an individual customer case. This is a private matter and we are currently in contact with the customer, his insurance company and the dealer to help resolve this particular situation. What we can confirm is that Nissan has a policy of continuous improvement, and as such is constantly reviewing parts prices, suppliers, and customers’ feedback. In this instance, thanks to the comments received, we have discovered a computing error regarding the price of the actuators and this has now been rectified. Nissan apologises for any inconvenience this may have caused and if there should be any customers who have purchased such components at the incorrect price they will be fully reimbursed with the difference. However, based on the level of product demand we believe this was the first time such an instance has occurred. The GT-R has been designed to meet the latest legal and safety standards for all new cars. This innovative pop up bonnet system is required as there is insufficient clearance between the bonnet and the top of the engine to comply with the European directive 70/156/ EEC as amended by 2003/ 102/ EC for pedestrian safety. For your information the bonnet system only operates if the bumper is hit in a certain way and under a series of strict parameters. Not every time you bump the bumper, or if the vehicle is stationary." This information will also be posted into the first post of this thread, so anyone reading it will see it. I think we should recognise and appreciate how Nissan have fully investigated this now, stated the position and reasons for both errors in pricing and also the existence for these pieces. They have also (as has been posted by the owner), spoken to the owner personally about this and provided a nice gesture in the form of a jacket. As far as Nissan and I are concerned this is the end of the issue. Guy I consider myself a fairly competent driver, I can drive reasonably quickly on a circuit, and read the road ahead enough to make good progress on the public highway. But I had an accident, and it was all my own doing.I had a low speed crash into the back of a white van, it was a badly surfaced road, we were stopped, pulled away.... and the person infront of the van stopped for no reason, causing the van to tap the tow bar of the car infront and me in sympathy to do the same to the van.Ok enough of the excuses, I am posting here to make sure noone makes the same mistake I did. I thought long and hard about posting this, but i think it is important that other GTR owners see this so they aren't stung by a careless accident and the GTR Tax!I bumped into tho the white vans tow bar causing this small crack in my bumper...Unfortunately it also set off the Pedestrain Saftey system, where the bonnet pops up....Which is a one use system....You need to replace the bumper, rams, bonnet hinges....and of course the ECUWhen the accident happened i called my dealer and asked them to collect the car and told them i would just pay for it without putting it through my insurance.Then i found out the total cost of the repairs.Eleven Thousand Pounds.I'm pleased to report the car has been repaired perfectly, even if it took 5 weeks!But I fear GTR insurance won't be so cheap next year for any of us. Sorry about that! But don't do what I did. And if you hit a pedestrain, make sure you are reveresing __________________ Last edited by Guy; 24th November 2009 at 04:59 PM .. Reason: Added Nissan UK Response

Matti Breschel (Saxo-Tinkoff) won stage 3 at the Tour of Denmark from a five-rider breakaway and also moved into the general classification lead of his national Tour. Francesco Bongiorno (Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox) and Wilco Kelderman (Belkin) finished second and third respectively behind the 28-year-old Dane, followed by Lars Bak (Lotto Belisol) in fourth and Edoardo Zardini (Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox) in fifth. Related Articles Tour of Denmark hints at Swedish sojourn for 2015 Breschel not only won his second straight stage, but now holds the leader's yellow jersey with a six-second advantage over Bak while Bongiorno moves up to third at 14 seconds. The peloton was shattered on the 200km queen stage from Sønderborg to Vejle through a combination of crosswinds, record heat, hills, plus a taxing finishing circuit. Overnight race leader Magnus Cort Nielsen (Team Cult Energy) finished in a 16-rider group at 48 seconds and dropped to ninth on general classification. The day's early break formed just 10km into the stage as six riders went out on the attack: Alex Rasmussen (Garmin-Sharp), Mikhail Ignatyev (Katusha), Mark Sehested Pedersen (Blue Water Cycling), Michael Reihs (Team Cult Energy), Søren Kragh Andersen (Team Tre-For) and Mikkel Mortensen (Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal). After 25km of racing their lead reached three minutes and for the next couple of hours their advantage fluctuated slightly between 2:40 and three minutes on the peloton. Crosswinds split the peloton at the 84km mark, but the field eventually re-grouped. The Belkin team had been setting tempo at the head of the peloton and after covering 113km the break's lead had dropped to 1:30. In addition to the hilly terrain during the Tour of Denmark's longest stage, the peloton was having to grapple with the hottest temperatures in race history, with the mercury reaching 31.5 Celsius. Belkin kept the break's advantage pegged at 1:30 for the next 30km but then the escape group started to falter as both Rasmussen and Sehested were dropped at 146km. Saxo-Tinkoff and Lotto Belisol both provided assistance to Belkin in the peloton and the four riders in front saw their lead drop below one minute. With approximately 35km remaining, the break was caught and a group of 10 went out on the attack. Just prior to reaching the 5.6km finishing circuit in Vejle, to be completed three times, the lead group had increased in size to approximately 20 riders. The finishing circuit featured a stiff, 21 percent ascent which provided a perfect platform for riders to go on the attack. Lars Bak, Matti Breschel and Wilco Kelderman were particularly aggressive and eventually a lead group formed inside the final 10km comprised of Bak, Breschel, Kelderman, Björn Leukemans (Vacansoleil-DCM), Troels Vinther (Team Cult Energy) plus a pair of Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox riders, Francesco Bongiorno and Edoardo Zardini. Bak was the highest-place rider on GC in the front group, starting the day just seven seconds out of yellow, but Breschel, too, was a threat to take over the race lead as he was only one place behind Bak on GC at 11 seconds. Not wanting to go head-to-head with Breschel in a sprint finish, Bak tried to solo away to victory on the final lap as he pushed the pace on the Kiddesvej climb. The Lotto Belisol rider, however, would again be chased down by his breakaway companions, with Breschel, Kelderman, Bongiorno and Zardini making contact and setting up a sprint finale. Breschel once again proved the fastest as he won for the second straight day, plus earned the leader's yellow jersey to cap off another strong performance. Full Results 1 Matti Breschel (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 4:44:41 2 Francesco Manuel Bongiorno (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 3 Wilco Kelderman (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 4 Lars Bak (Den) Lotto Belisol 5 Edoardo Zardini (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 6 Jelle Wallays (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:00:09 7 Björn Leukemans (Bel) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:00:13 8 Viacheslav Kuznetsov (Rus) Katusha 0:00:21 9 Juan Antonio Flecha (Spa) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 10 Troels Vinther (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:00:31 11 Michel Kreder (Ned) Garmin-Sharp 0:00:40 12 Marco Canola (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 13 Laurens De Vreese (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:00:44 14 Marc Goos (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:00:48 15 Damien Gaudin (Fra) Team Europcar 16 Tim Declercq (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 17 Arthur Vanoverberghe (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 18 Sacha Modolo (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 19 Jesper Hansen (Den) Team Cult Energi 20 Gijs Van Hoecke (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 21 Enrico Battaglin (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 22 Mark Cavendish (GBr) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 23 Wouter Mol (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 24 Björn Thurau (Ger) Team Europcar 25 Kevyn Ista (Bel) IAM Cycling 26 Michael Mørkøv (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 27 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 28 Rasmus Mygind (Den) Team Tre-For 29 Thomas Löfkvist (Swe) IAM Cycling 30 Marc Garby (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:00:53 31 Emil Vinjebo (Den) Team Tre-For 0:01:12 32 Enrico Barbin (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 33 Martin Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:01:19 34 Sonny Colbrelli (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:01:28 35 Martin Elmiger (Swi) IAM Cycling 0:01:39 36 Maarten Tjallingii (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 37 Rob Ruijgh (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 38 Martijn Keizer (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 39 Jimmi Sørensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:01:50 40 Alexander Porsev (Rus) Katusha 0:01:59 41 Gustav Larsson (Swe) IAM Cycling 0:02:14 42 Matthias Brândle (Aut) IAM Cycling 0:02:28 43 Frantisek Rabon (Cze) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:02:43 44 Jos Van Emden (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:03:55 45 Yves Lampaert (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 46 Koldo Fernandez (Spa) Garmin-Sharp 47 Rasmus Guldhammer (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:04:53 48 Daniel Foder (Den) Blue Water Cycling 49 Vladimir Isaychev (Rus) Katusha 50 Rudiger Selig (Ger) Katusha 51 Nikola Aistrup (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 52 Stijn Vandenbergh (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 53 Fabio Calabria (Aus) Team Novo Nordisk 54 Tyler Farrar (USA) Garmin-Sharp 55 Olivier Kaisen (Bel) Lotto Belisol 56 Martin Velits (Svk) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 57 Marko Kump (Slo) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 58 Andrew Fenn (GBr) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:05:27 59 Nicolai Brøchner (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:07:34 60 Timofey Kritskiy (Rus) Katusha 0:07:40 61 Manuele Boaro (Ita) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 62 Pieter Vanspeybrouck (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 63 Andre Steensen (Den) Team Cult Energi 64 Asbjørn Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:09:33 65 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:10:03 66 Christopher Juul Jensen (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 67 Julien Vermote (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:10:15 68 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 0:10:23 69 Marco Haller (Aut) Katusha 0:10:46 70 Robbie Hunter (RSA) Garmin-Sharp 0:10:57 71 Kenny Van Hummel (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 72 Jens Debusschere (Bel) Lotto Belisol 73 Marco Coledan (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:11:23 74 Moreno Hofland (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 75 Kristian Haugaard Jensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 76 Michael Valgren Andersen (Den) Team Cult Energi 77 Anders Lund (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 78 Maarten Neyens (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:11:26 79 Tony Hurel (Fra) Team Europcar 80 Sander Cordeel (Bel) Lotto Belisol 81 Bryan Coquard (Fra) Team Europcar 82 Christophe Kern (Fra) Team Europcar 83 Pim Ligthart (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:11:51 84 Andrea Peron (Ita) Team Novo Nordisk 85 Marco Bandiera (Ita) IAM Cycling 0:11:54 86 Matteo Pelucchi (Ita) IAM Cycling 87 Michael Berling (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:13:47 88 Jay McCarthy (Aus) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 89 Martijn Verschoor (Ned) Team Novo Nordisk 90 Alexey Tsatevitch (Rus) Katusha 91 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 92 Christopher Williams (Aus) Team Novo Nordisk 93 Alex Rasmussen (Den) Garmin-Sharp 94 Kevin De Mesmaeker (Bel) Team Novo Nordisk 95 Rasmus Sterobo (Den) Team Cult Energi 96 Barry Markus (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 97 Kristof Goddaert (Bel) IAM Cycling 98 Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 99 Rolf Broge (Den) Team Post Danmark 100 Stephen Clancy (Irl) Team Novo Nordisk 101 Morten Øllegaard (Den) Blue Water Cycling 102 Dennis Hereford Jensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 103 Christopher Stevenson (Swe) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 104 Frederik Plesner (Den) Team Tre-For 105 Jacob Nielsen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 106 Kasper Klostergaard (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 107 Morgan Lamoisson (Fra) Team Europcar 108 Sébastian Turgot (Fra) Team Europcar 109 Giovanni Bernaudeau (Fra) Team Europcar 110 Martin Grøn (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 111 Christian Moberg Jørgensen (Den) Team Cult Energi 112 Markus Kilsgaard (Den) Team Post Danmark 113 Rick Flens (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:14:03 114 Martijn Maaskant (Ned) Garmin-Sharp 115 Iljo Keisse (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 116 Kenny Dehaes (Bel) Lotto Belisol 117 Frederique Robert (Bel) Lotto Belisol 118 Justine Morris (Aus) Team Novo Nordisk 119 Aske Vorre (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:14:43 120 Graeme Brown (Aus) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:15:54 121 Theo Bos (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 122 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 123 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:15:56 124 Mathias Gade Jacobsen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:18:43 125 Jonas Aaen Jørgensen (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:19:01 126 Lasse Norman Hansen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:19:40 127 Rasmus Christian Quaade (Den) Team Tre-For 128 Mathias Møller Nielsen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 129 Kaspar Schønnemann Larsen (Den) Team Tre-For 130 Casper Von Folsach (Den) Team Tre-For DNF Sébastien Rosseler (Bel) Garmin-Sharp DNF Brian Bulgac (Ned) Lotto Belisol DNF Michael Van Staeyen (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise DNF Sebastian Lander (Den) Team Post Danmark Sprint 1 1 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 5 pts 2 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 3 3 Alex Rasmussen (Den) Garmin-Sharp 1 Sprint 2 1 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 5 pts 2 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 3 3 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 1 Mountain 1 1 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 10 pts 2 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 6 3 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 4 4 Alex Rasmussen (Den) Garmin-Sharp 2 Mountain 2 1 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 10 pts 2 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 6 3 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 4 4 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 2 Mountain 3 1 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 10 pts 2 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 6 3 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 4 4 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 2 Mountain 4 1 Michael Mørkøv (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 10 pts 2 Arthur Vanoverberghe (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 6 3 Marc Goos (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 4 4 Vladimir Isaychev (Rus) Katusha 2 Most aggressive rider 1 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 10 pts 2 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 6 3 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 4 Young riders 1 Wilco Kelderman (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 4:44:41 2 Gijs Van Hoecke (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:00:48 3 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 4 Marc Garby (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:00:53 5 Emil Vinjebo (Den) Team Tre-For 0:01:12 6 Yves Lampaert (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:03:55 7 Nicolai Brøchner (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:07:34 8 Asbjørn Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:09:33 9 Marco Haller (Aut) Katusha 0:10:46 10 Moreno Hofland (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:11:23 11 Kristian Haugaard Jensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 12 Michael Valgren Andersen (Den) Team Cult Energi 13 Bryan Coquard (Fra) Team Europcar 0:11:26 14 Jay McCarthy (Aus) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:13:47 15 Kevin De Mesmaeker (Bel) Team Novo Nordisk 16 Rasmus Sterobo (Den) Team Cult Energi 17 Barry Markus (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 18 Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 19 Stephen Clancy (Irl) Team Novo Nordisk 20 Frederik Plesner (Den) Team Tre-For 21 Martin Grøn (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 22 Markus Kilsgaard (Den) Team Post Danmark 23 Aske Vorre (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:14:43 24 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:15:54 25 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:15:56 26 Lasse Norman Hansen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:19:40 27 Mathias Møller Nielsen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 28 Casper Von Folsach (Den) Team Tre-For Teams 1 Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 14:14:43 2 Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:00:42 3 Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:01:01 4 Team Cult Energy 0:01:27 5 Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:01:47 6 IAM Cycling 0:02:35 7 Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:05:01 8 Katusha 0:06:33 9 Omega Pharma-Quick Step 0:07:44 10 Garmin-Sharp 0:08:48 11 Team Post Danmark 0:09:37 12 Team Trefor 0:10:53 13 Team Europcar 0:12:22 14 Lotto Belisol 0:15:10 15 Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:15:35 16 Blue Water Cycling 0:22:53 17 Team Novo Nordisk 0:29:51 General classification after stage 3 1 Matti Breschel (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 13:34:33 2 Lars Bak (Den) Lotto Belisol 0:00:06 3 Francesco Manuel Bongiorno (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:00:14 4 Wilco Kelderman (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:00:16 5 Edoardo Zardini (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:00:19 6 Jelle Wallays (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:00:29 7 Björn Leukemans (Bel) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:00:33 8 Juan Antonio Flecha (Spa) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:00:41 9 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:00:47 10 Troels Vinther (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:00:51 11 Michel Kreder (Ned) Garmin-Sharp 0:01:00 12 Marco Canola (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 13 Laurens De Vreese (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:01:04 14 Rasmus Mygind (Den) Team Tre-For 0:01:06 15 Kevyn Ista (Bel) IAM Cycling 0:01:08 16 Björn Thurau (Ger) Team Europcar 17 Thomas Löfkvist (Swe) IAM Cycling 18 Tim Declercq (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 19 Wouter Mol (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 20 Michael Mørkøv (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 21 Mark Cavendish (GBr) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 22 Jesper Hansen (Den) Team Cult Energi 23 Enrico Battaglin (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 24 Damien Gaudin (Fra) Team Europcar 25 Arthur Vanoverberghe (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 26 Gijs Van Hoecke (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 27 Sacha Modolo (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:01:24 28 Emil Vinjebo (Den) Team Tre-For 0:01:32 29 Martin Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:01:39 30 Martijn Keizer (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:01:59 31 Rob Ruijgh (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 32 Martin Elmiger (Swi) IAM Cycling 33 Maarten Tjallingii (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 34 Viacheslav Kuznetsov (Rus) Katusha 0:02:03 35 Alexander Porsev (Rus) Katusha 0:02:19 36 Sonny Colbrelli (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:02:20 37 Gustav Larsson (Swe) IAM Cycling 0:02:34 38 Matthias Brândle (Aut) IAM Cycling 0:02:45 39 Frantisek Rabon (Cze) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:03:03 40 Yves Lampaert (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:04:15 41 Koldo Fernandez (Spa) Garmin-Sharp 42 Nikola Aistrup (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:04:53 43 Marko Kump (Slo) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:05:07 44 Tyler Farrar (USA) Garmin-Sharp 0:05:13 45 Rudiger Selig (Ger) Katusha 46 Rasmus Guldhammer (Den) Blue Water Cycling 47 Vladimir Isaychev (Rus) Katusha 48 Daniel Foder (Den) Blue Water Cycling 49 Fabio Calabria (Aus) Team Novo Nordisk 50 Martin Velits (Svk) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 51 Marc Garby (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:05:28 52 Olivier Kaisen (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:05:34 53 Jos Van Emden (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:05:37 54 Andrew Fenn (GBr) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:05:47 55 Stijn Vandenbergh (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:06:11 56 Manuele Boaro (Ita) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:08:00 57 Pieter Vanspeybrouck (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 58 Nicolai Brøchner (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:08:51 59 Timofey Kritskiy (Rus) Katusha 0:09:22 60 Marc Goos (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:10:06 61 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 0:10:40 62 Asbjørn Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:11:11 63 Jens Debusschere (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:11:17 64 Christopher Juul Jensen (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:11:22 65 Moreno Hofland (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:11:39 66 Robbie Hunter (RSA) Garmin-Sharp 0:11:42 67 Kristian Haugaard Jensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:11:43 68 Michael Valgren Andersen (Den) Team Cult Energi 69 Bryan Coquard (Fra) Team Europcar 0:11:46 70 Maarten Neyens (Bel) Lotto Belisol 71 Tony Hurel (Fra) Team Europcar 72 Julien Vermote (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:11:55 73 Pim Ligthart (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:12:05 74 Sander Cordeel (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:12:09 75 Andrea Peron (Ita) Team Novo Nordisk 0:12:11 76 Marco Coledan (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:12:15 77 Enrico Barbin (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 0:12:21 78 Marco Haller (Aut) Katusha 0:12:24 79 Kenny Van Hummel (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:12:32 80 Anders Lund (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:12:42 81 Matteo Pelucchi (Ita) IAM Cycling 0:12:46 82 Jimmi Sørensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:12:59 83 Martin Grøn (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:14:04 84 Morten Øllegaard (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:14:07 85 Alexey Tsatevitch (Rus) Katusha 86 Kasper Klostergaard (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 87 Sébastian Turgot (Fra) Team Europcar 88 Kristof Goddaert (Bel) IAM Cycling 89 Kenny Dehaes (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:14:23 90 Barry Markus (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:14:32 91 Dennis Hereford Jensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:14:39 92 Markus Kilsgaard (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:14:43 93 Martijn Maaskant (Ned) Garmin-Sharp 0:14:48 94 Jay McCarthy (Aus) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:14:59 95 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:15:20 96 Giovanni Bernaudeau (Fra) Team Europcar 0:15:22 97 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:15:26 98 Alex Rasmussen (Den) Garmin-Sharp 0:15:28 99 Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:15:29 100 Jacob Nielsen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 101 Martijn Verschoor (Ned) Team Novo Nordisk 0:16:04 102 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:16:10 103 Marco Bandiera (Ita) IAM Cycling 0:16:12 104 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:16:16 105 Christophe Kern (Fra) Team Europcar 106 Theo Bos (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:18:01 107 Graeme Brown (Aus) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 108 Frederique Robert (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:18:05 109 Stephen Clancy (Irl) Team Novo Nordisk 0:18:28 110 Rick Flens (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:19:07 111 Rolf Broge (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:19:11 112 Jonas Aaen Jørgensen (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:20:13 113 Lasse Norman Hansen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:20:25 114 Andre Steensen (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:20:29 115 Christopher Williams (Aus) Team Novo Nordisk 0:22:15 116 Frederik Plesner (Den) Team Tre-For 0:22:34 117 Christian Moberg Jørgensen (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:22:50 118 Kevin De Mesmaeker (Bel) Team Novo Nordisk 0:22:51 119 Iljo Keisse (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:22:56 120 Morgan Lamoisson (Fra) Team Europcar 0:23:34 121 Aske Vorre (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:27:20 122 Michael Berling (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:28:39 123 Christopher Stevenson (Swe) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 124 Kaspar Schønnemann Larsen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:30:27 125 Justine Morris (Aus) Team Novo Nordisk 0:31:02 126 Rasmus Sterobo (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:31:57 127 Rasmus Christian Quaade (Den) Team Tre-For 0:32:29 128 Mathias Møller Nielsen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:32:35 129 Mathias Gade Jacobsen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:38:59 130 Casper Von Folsach (Den) Team Tre-For 0:39:23 Points classification 1 Matti Breschel (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 30 pts 2 Lars Bak (Den) Lotto Belisol 22 3 Nikola Aistrup (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 18 4 Wilco Kelderman (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 18 5 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 16 6 Tyler Farrar (USA) Garmin-Sharp 15 7 Kenny Dehaes (Bel) Lotto Belisol 13 8 Francesco Manuel Bongiorno (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 12 9 Marko Kump (Slo) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 12 10 Björn Leukemans (Bel) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 11 11 Moreno Hofland (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 10 12 Pim Ligthart (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 10 13 Bryan Coquard (Fra) Team Europcar 9 14 Edoardo Zardini (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 9 15 Sacha Modolo (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 8 16 Mark Cavendish (GBr) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 7 17 Jelle Wallays (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 7 18 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 6 19 Viacheslav Kuznetsov (Rus) Katusha 5 20 Barry Markus (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 5 21 Matthias Brândle (Aut) IAM Cycling 5 22 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 5 23 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 5 24 Martin Grøn (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 5 25 Kevyn Ista (Bel) IAM Cycling 4 26 Andrea Peron (Ita) Team Novo Nordisk 4 27 Juan Antonio Flecha (Spa) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 4 28 Troels Vinther (Den) Team Cult Energi 3 29 Robbie Hunter (RSA) Garmin-Sharp 3 30 Rasmus Mygind (Den) Team Tre-For 3 31 Martijn Verschoor (Ned) Team Novo Nordisk 3 32 Michel Kreder (Ned) Garmin-Sharp 2 33 Björn Thurau (Ger) Team Europcar 2 34 Jens Debusschere (Bel) Lotto Belisol 2 35 Alexander Porsev (Rus) Katusha 1 36 Yves Lampaert (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 1 37 Marco Canola (Ita) Bardiani Valvole-CSF Inox 1 38 Alex Rasmussen (Den) Garmin-Sharp 1 39 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 1 40 Markus Kilsgaard (Den) Team Post Danmark 1 41 Rolf Broge (Den) Team Post Danmark 1 Mountains classification 1 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 30 pts 2 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 18 3 Mikkel Mortensen (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 14 4 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 10 5 Michael Mørkøv (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 10 6 Rolf Broge (Den) Team Post Danmark 10 7 Arthur Vanoverberghe (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 6 8 Matthias Brândle (Aut) IAM Cycling 6 9 Frederik Plesner (Den) Team Tre-For 6 10 Nikola Aistrup (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 4 11 Marc Goos (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 4 12 Martijn Verschoor (Ned) Team Novo Nordisk 4 13 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 4 14 Vladimir Isaychev (Rus) Katusha 2 15 Jimmi Sørensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 2 16 Alex Rasmussen (Den) Garmin-Sharp 2 Most aggressive rider classification 1 Matthias Brândle (Aut) IAM Cycling 10 pts 2 Jimmi Sørensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 10 3 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 10 4 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 6 5 Michael Reihs (Den) Team Cult Energi 6 6 Rolf Broge (Den) Team Post Danmark 6 7 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 4 8 Pim Ligthart (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 4 9 Martijn Verschoor (Ned) Team Novo Nordisk 4 Young riders classification 1 Wilco Kelderman (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 13:34:49 2 Magnus Cort Nielsen (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:00:31 3 Gijs Van Hoecke (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:00:52 4 Emil Vinjebo (Den) Team Tre-For 0:01:16 5 Yves Lampaert (Bel) Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 0:03:59 6 Marc Garby (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:05:12 7 Nicolai Brøchner (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:08:35 8 Asbjørn Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:10:55 9 Moreno Hofland (Ned) Belkin Pro Cycling Team 0:11:23 10 Kristian Haugaard Jensen (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:11:27 11 Michael Valgren Andersen (Den) Team Cult Energi 12 Bryan Coquard (Fra) Team Europcar 0:11:30 13 Marco Haller (Aut) Katusha 0:12:08 14 Martin Grøn (Den) Team Concordia Forsikring-Riwal 0:13:48 15 Barry Markus (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:14:16 16 Markus Kilsgaard (Den) Team Post Danmark 0:14:27 17 Jay McCarthy (Aus) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:14:43 18 Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick-Step Cycling Team 0:15:13 19 Mark Sehested Pedersen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:15:54 20 Søren Kragh Andersen (Den) Team Tre-For 0:16:00 21 Stephen Clancy (Irl) Team Novo Nordisk 0:18:12 22 Lasse Norman Hansen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:20:09 23 Frederik Plesner (Den) Team Tre-For 0:22:18 24 Kevin De Mesmaeker (Bel) Team Novo Nordisk 0:22:35 25 Aske Vorre (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:27:04 26 Rasmus Sterobo (Den) Team Cult Energi 0:31:41 27 Mathias Møller Nielsen (Den) Blue Water Cycling 0:32:19 28 Casper Von Folsach (Den) Team Tre-For 0:39:07

Special Status Whatsapp groups and Facebook pages are abuzz with activity, ahead of the event, planned on January 26. With the resounding success of the jallikattu saga in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, it is now the turn of Andhra Pradesh to follow suit. Only this time, the purpose is to ensure that the Centre accords ‘special status’ to the state. Several Whatsapp groups and social media pages are abuzz, as Andhraites plan a day-long protest at the RK Beach in Visakhapatnam on Republic Day this year. Thousands are expected to gather at the beach in support of their long-standing demand that 'special status' be accorded to Andhra Pradesh. The hashtag #APDemandsSpecialStatus is currently one of the trending topics on social media in the state, with enthusiasts urging people from all over AP to gather at the beach in a massive show of solidarity for the cause. "We have been coordinating with several hundred people through Whatsapp groups and Facebook pages for the protest. We are trying to mobilize as many people as we can for the protest,” says Satish -a student from Visakhapatnam- who plans to be a part of the protest along with his friends. Speaking to The News Minute, organisers say that arrangements are being made to provide free transportation to the venue. “We have already spoken to three autorickshaw unions. They support our cause and have promised to make available at least 40 autos in the RK Beach area to provide free transport to protesters," says Sai Keshav, one of the organisers who is coordinating with youngsters from Guntur to ensure maximum participation. Like many others, Keshav and his friends plan to reach Visakhapatnam on the previous day itself. "People are seething with anger at the gross neglect of the state by the Centre for so long. There is so much of potential in here, but what do we get…absolutely no support from the Centre," he fumes. Speaking about what exactly sowed the idea of such a protest, Keshav replies: "When we saw the jallikattu protest in Marina, we were inspired to start our own protest for our very own cause. Just the way the youth of Tamil Nadu got an ordinance passed in favour of jallikattu, we too shall seek to put pressure on the Centre to pass a ‘special status’ ordinance for AP." He also claims that there are many active Whatsapp groups that function solely to try and get as many people to participate in the protest. Many people have even reportedly volunteered to provide food, snacks and water to the protesters. The lack of a central organiser is evident, as there is a sense of disarray among volunteers over certain aspects of the protest. "We had trouble getting police permission too, as a two-day CII Partnership Summit is to be held on 27-28 January at the same venue. They have however agreed to let us hold it, as long as we are peaceful. We initially decided to start the protest at 9 am in the morning, but we may have to start as early as 7.30 am, or as late at 11 30am. The protest may go on till late in the night, as the YSRC party plans to hold a candle march in the evening,” remarks Keshav. According to Harish -an organiser- more than 50,000 people will join the protest, with 7000-odd people expected to join from Vijayawada alone. Several Telugu actors too have backed the demand for special status, with ‘Power Star’ Pawan Kalyan even releasing a special song Desh Bachao -a protest musical- to extend his full support to the movement. Actor Varun Tej tweeted: "Will be supporting anything that is for the welfare of the people of our states. I support the special status of AP." (sic) Sai Dharam Tej wrote: "It's time for us to be united and fight for what we were promised and deserve. AP demands special status." (sic) Actor Sundeep Kishan confirmed his participation in the silent protest. "Will be taking part in the silent protest in Vizag on the 26th to do my bit as a responsible citizen. Please join us,” (sic) Sundeep tweeted. The state government however persists in its claim that the planned protest is the handiwork of the ‘Opposition parties’. Hitting out at the Opposition on Monday, state Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu accused them of simply wanting to create a ruckus. Naidu also took strong exception to the comparison of Special Category Status (SCS) promised to Andhra Pradesh with TN’s jallikattu campaign. "Some parties are trying to provoke people and create disturbances. But we will not allow this. We will be very firm," he told reporters. Massive protests broke out all over the state last September, after Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced a 'special economic package' for Andhra Pradesh, instead of ‘special status’ that the state had demanded.

CLOSE President Trump reprised his attacks on former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, telling supporters in Ky. that 'they like when people stand for the American flag.' Wochit Colin Kaepernick was selected as one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2017. (Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP file) Colin Kaepernick, whose national anthem protest sparked equal amounts of applaud and outrage, was named one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2017. The former Wolf Pack quarterback, who is an NFL free agent, began his protest of the anthem by first sitting and then kneeling as it was played before NFL games. Other NFL players, including Nevada alum Brandon Marshall, followed his lead. During a game against Purdue, a dozen Wolf Pack players held a single fist in the air during the anthem. Kaepernick said his protest was over the oppression of minorities, including police brutality. "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," Kaepernick told NFL Media about his protest. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder." Kaepernick, who donned the cover of Time magazine last September, went on to say he loved America and his protest was being misunderstood and wasn't a statement against the military. He pledged to donate $1 million (he's donated $400,000 so far) and sent food, water and aid via plane to Somalia, which is experiencing a historic famine. He also started free "Know Your Rights" camps for youth. President Donald Trump, who has taken credit for Kaepernick being unemployed, was critical of the quarterback during the president race. “I think it’s personally not a good thing," Trump said of the protest. "I think it’s a terrible thing. And, you know, maybe he should find a country that works better for him. Let him try. It won’t happen.” Time listed Kaepernick among the "icons" in its 100 most influential list. His former 49ers' quarterback, Jim Harbaugh, penned the Time write-up applauding Kaepernick. Harbaugh initially said he was against the act – "I acknowledge his right to do it, but I don't respect the motivation or the action," he said – before changing his stance. "I thank Colin for all he has contributed to the game of football as an outstanding player and trusted teammate," Harbaugh wrote in Time. "I also applaud Colin for the courage he has demonstrated in exercising his guaranteed right of free speech. His willingness to take a position at personal cost is now part of our American story. How lucky for us all and for our country to have among our citizens someone as remarkable as Colin Kaepernick."

Microsoft’s policy, which it calls its Services Agreement, allows it to analyze customer content from one its free products and use it to improve another service — for example, taking information from messages a consumer sends on Windows Live Messenger and using it to improve messaging services on Xbox. Previously, that kind of sharing of information between products would not have been allowed under Microsoft policies, which limited the use of data collected under one of its products to that product alone. Microsoft has promised, however, that it will not use the personal information and content it collects to sell targeted advertising. It will not, for example, scan a consumer’s e-mails to generate ads that might interest the user. Google does that, and expanding its ability to draw on that content was part of the reason Google changed its privacy policy this year. But the new Microsoft policy does allow for such targeted advertising. Microsoft promised not to do so in blog posts and e-mails informing its customers about the change, but not in the formal policy. That has some privacy advocates nervous. “What Microsoft is doing is no different from what Google did,” said John M. Simpson, who monitors privacy policy for Consumer Watchdog, a California nonprofit group. “It allows the combination of data across services in ways a user wouldn’t reasonably expect. Microsoft wants to be able to compile massive digital dossiers about users of its services and monetize them.” Jack Evans, a Microsoft spokesman, says the company’s plans are benign. He differentiates between the Services Agreement, also known as the terms of use, that was changed on Friday and the company’s Privacy Policy, which was last updated in April. “Over the years, we have consistently informed users that we may use their content to improve the services they receive,” Mr. Evans said in a written statement. “For instance, we analyze content to improve our spam and malware filters in order to keep customers safe. We also do it to develop new product features such as e-mail categorization to organize similar items like shipping receipts in a common folder, or to automatically add calendar invitations. “However,” he added, “one thing we don’t do is use the content of our customers’ private communications and documents to create targeted advertising. If that ever changes, we’ll be the first to let our customers know.” Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. Microsoft’s new services agreement affects only its free, Web-based products, not the software programs that individuals and companies buy off the shelf for home or business use. It covers Hotmail, and its related e-mail service, Outlook.com, but not the Outlook e-mail and calendar program that is individually loaded onto computer hard drives and widely used by corporations. Bing, its search engine, is covered, but Internet Explorer, its browser, is not. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Microsoft’s pledge not to use the data from its Web services to target advertising has some credibility, given the company’s broader privacy initiatives. The company has said it will include a “do not track” feature in its new Internet Explorer 10 Web browser that prevents online advertising companies from monitoring the browsing habits of users so they can target promotions. Microsoft has made “do not track” the default setting on the new version of Explorer, a move that has caused a firestorm among online advertising companies. Microsoft’s push to provide better privacy protections for consumers comes at a time when its efforts in Internet advertising have sputtered. Online advertising remains a small fraction of Microsoft’s overall business, accounting for $2.6 billion, or about 3.5 percent, of the company’s revenue during its last fiscal year, which ended June 30, according to Microsoft’s filings with securities regulators. But it is easy to see how Microsoft customers might be confused, because the different divisions of Microsoft that draft and oversee its user agreements and privacy policies did not anticipate that the changes in the services agreement would raise privacy questions. The drafters of the service agreement, a more technical bunch, thought the changes were so small that they were mentioned in August in a specialty “Volume Licensing” blog dedicated to commercial customers, but seemingly nowhere else on Microsoft’s vast array of corporate Web sites. Microsoft also sent an e-mail about the change in late August to all of its 325 million Hotmail users. But those notices became the subject of nervous online chatter when some users learned that a similar message, using the same template, was being used by hackers to distribute harmful malware. Online message boards warned against even opening the messages. Inside Microsoft, officials were focused not on whether the policy changes affected privacy but rather on a different change, one that limits the ability of Microsoft customers to sue the company, including in a class action, over its products. The new agreement requires the use of binding arbitration. Mr. Evans said the change put in place on Friday in the Services Agreement “did not alter our existing privacy policies.” Those policies include a 4,000-word main policy and at least 16 related product-specific privacy policies. That itself is an example of how users cannot possibly know what Internet companies are doing with their personal information, said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a consumer protection group based in Washington. “No one understands how all this data is being put together and being used,” he said. “All of these companies are in a digital arms race to tie together all the information they have about individuals. For companies like Google and Microsoft, the real goal is to expand market share.”

TIM Cahill has declared that Melbourne City’s clash with the ‘defensive’ Sydney FC is an FFA Cup final replay. The star attacker revealed that he had struggled since the team’s chaotic trip to Coffs Harbour a month ago after playing on a “cricket pitch”. The guest marquee was back in starting contention for Friday night’s AAMI Park clash along with right-back Ivan Franjic who set up his Cup final winner almost three months ago. City's Tim Cahill is penalised for this tackle on Sydney's Berni Ibini during the round 10 match. Source: AAP Round 21 Visit Match Centre Visit Match Centre Visit Match Centre Visit Match Centre Visit Match Centre Cahill vowed to attack the Sky Blues, expecting the visitors to pick their moments. “This is like another FFA Cup final, they’re coming to our place,’’ Cahill said. “There’s a lot on it, we’re excited by it. There’s a fresh buzz about our team and we’re starting to click. “When you play Sydney FC you know they’re going to come here and defend, it’d be very unlikely for them to come out and attack,’’ he said. “They know we’ve got a lot going forward. They’ve based themselves on a manager (Graham Arnold) that makes sure they’re well drilled. “The way they play, all the midfield fuses back in. They wait and pray and there’s 11 behind the ball, 24/7. “You have to really respect that, that’s the reason that they’re at the top but questions will be asked when it’s about winning games at the right times. “We need to finish as high as possible and come finals, we need to be firing. It’s about whoever’s up for the fight at the end of the season.’’ Tim Cahill. Source: AAP Cahill’s last start was in the January 27 loss to Newcastle and featured for just a few minutes off the bench last week, with a suspension sandwiched in between. “Coffs Harbour was a big one for me playing on a cricket pitch, it was a difficult trip, travelling almost 48 hours and the morning of the game and I had a bit of a knock,’’ he said. “It’s working out OK; it’s about management. There’s eight games until finals.” City are third on goal difference, trailing leaders Sydney FC by 17 points.

Dyngus Day Date When Celebrated : Always the Monday after Easter Dyngus Day, also spelled Dingus Day, is a fun Polish Holiday. It is very popular in Poland, as well as in Polish communities across America. After the long Lenten holiday, Dyngus Day is a day of fun. And, perhaps a little romantic fun. It is always celebrated on the Monday after Easter. The Irish traditions and celebration on Saint Patrick's Day is well known. For those of Polish decent, Dyngus Day is a similar day of fun, parades, drinking and festivities. You do not have to be Polish to enjoy Dyngus Day. Rather, consider yourself Polish for the day, and join in on the fun. You'll be glad you did. Dyngus Day Tradition: There are all sort of ways for boys to meet girls. But, this one takes the cake. Guys, on this day you get to wet the ladies down. Sprinkling or drenching with water is your goal. Chase after the ladies with squirt guns, buckets, or other containers of water. The more bold and gallant boys, may choose to use cologne. Hitting (gently, please) the ladies on the legs with switches or pussy willows is also common. Yes ladies, you can strike back. Ladies , you get your revenge on Tuesday, when tradition has it that you throw dishes or crockery back at the boys. It has become increasingly popular for the ladies to get their revenge on Monday, tossing water back at the boys. Note: Dyngus Day is also called Wet Easter Monday. Hmmmmm, I wonder why!? More about Pussy Willows What happened on this Day? This Day in History Famous Birthdays Origin of Dyngus Day: When exploring the roots of Dyngus Day, Historians point to the baptism of Polish Prince Mieszko I in 966 A.D. Baptism with water signifies cleansing, fertility, and purification. Somewhere along the way, the tradition of tossing water on the girls and hitting them with pussy willows evolved. Ecards We've got you covered with free Ecards for just about any other holiday, occasion, event, or no event at all!

Robert Cumming / Shutterstock.com I recently sent a letter of complaint by email to Air New Zealand about their policy of treating all male passengers as potential child molesters, and seating them away from unescorted minors. True to the promise of their auto responder, I have received a more personal response. Rather I should say that they have responded with a non response. Following is their email to me and then my response back to them. —– Dear Mr Elam Thank you for your email regarding your recent flights with us. It was a pleasure to read your comments regarding the excellent standard of service which you received on your flights with us, and that you had an enjoyable stay in New Zealand. It is certainly always encouraging to receive feedback such as yours as it is proof to us that the high standards which we aim to provide are being maintained. However, I am sorry to read of your disappointment in an aspect of our Unaccompanied Minor policy, namely in regards to not seating minors next to male passengers. By way of explanation, Air New Zealand ’s internal procedures relating to the seating of unaccompanied minors and young persons travelling alone are as follows: For Crew surveillance reasons, unaccompanied minors and young persons travelling alone are normally seated together in the rear of the aircraft and next to the crew galley. Where possible, a spare seat is kept empty next to unaccompanied minors and young persons travelling alone to be used by the crew where special attention is required. Where a flight is full, we will endeavour to seat a female passenger next to unaccompanied minors and young persons travelling alone. These procedures reflect the approach adopted by leading airlines around the world and have been in place for some time. Mr Elam, thank you once again for taking the time to write in to us. I trust that I have been able to address some of your concerns, and that we may have the opportunity of welcoming you and your wife onboard our flights again in the future. Kind regards, Claire McLister Customer Support Specialist ——- Dear Ms McLister, Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions, and in such a prompt manner. However, your response would have been much more satisfying had you actually answered my questions rather than just tell me what I already knew, namely that it is Air New Zealand’s official policy to practice gender profiling against male passengers, regarding them all as threats from which the children on your planes need to be protected. I sought in my query to find out why that was happening, Ms. McLister, not to get a non responsive reiteration of what I was obviously complaining about in the first place. So I am here, asking you again. What determinants did your airline use to arrive at such a policy? How do you respond to my concerns that the policy is discriminatory and fostering inaccurate and negative stereotypes of fully half of your clients? I am quite sorry, Ms. McLister, but your statement of “These procedures reflect the approach adopted by leading airlines around the world and have been in place for some time,” has the ring of a child excusing their poor judgment by saying “ Well, everyone else was doing it.” First of all, not everyone else is doing it. As I indicated in my original communication, Qantas, who appears to be your primary competitor among the USA to NZ air service providers, does not do it. And, as I also reminded you, British Airways was recently sued over the policy, and was compelled to change it because there was no demonstrable reason to have it in the first place. Your response to me, as courteous and professionally worded as it was, was simply avoidant of these points and the quite reasonable questions raised about your practices. Would you kindly answer those questions, or am I to understand that you are going to defend a sexist policy by avoiding any meaningful discussion with a customer? Lastly, Ms.McLister, I am not married, and so was not traveling with my wife. It appears you just made that assumption when seeing I was traveling with a female. Given the other assumptions you made about me, and all men boarding your flights, I should not, I suppose, be surprised. It seems to be policy on all levels at Air New Zealand. But I would nonetheless really appreciate either a straight answer from you regarding my inquiry, or the courtesy of forwarding these questions to someone who will provide as much. Kind Regards, Paul Elam Claire McLister’s email address: flightcomment@airnz.co.nz

In Local News, Public Transport / By Anthony Lim / 7 December 2016 10:22 am / 46 comments It looks like taxi drivers may have lost the champion of their cause. According to a Malay Mail Online report, Big Blue Taxi Services’ owner Datuk Shamsubahrin Ismail has had a change of heart and is now backing the legalisation of ride-sharing services. He announced the turnaround after his company was supposedly robbed of RM8,000 by a driver three days ago. The driver, a man in his 50s and who had driven for Big Blue Taxi for six years, has since disappeared. “I have helped him out so many times and this is how he repays me,” Shamsubahrin said. He had lodged a police report and will be taking the taxi company, which the missing driver had obtained his permit from, to court. The case will be filed under Section 43 of the Land Public Transport Act Section, which states that a company can be held responsible if a taxi driver is found guilty of any wrongdoing. Shamsubahrin claims this is the first time any taxi company is being brought to court under the section. “The existing law we have is already strong but Land Public Transport Commission must be more effective and proactive in ensuring that we don’t allow unethical and immoral people to work as taxi drivers,” he explained. With regards to ride-sharing services, Shamsubahrin said that because taxi drivers were unfazed by the competition from Uber and Grab by refusing to change, he was urging the government to speed up the process of regulating them. “I support the approval of Uber and GrabCar services,” he stated. This is a stark contrast to the stand taken previously. In October, he had said that the government’s idea of encouraging aspiring ride-sharing drivers with a RM4,000 rebate to purchase a Proton Iriz was a clear indicator of the government’s intention to wipe out the taxi industry in favour of ride-sharing companies. “You said you want to transform the taxi industry, but we saw nothing from the budget that was helpful to the taxi industry. Instead you promote the people to drive Uber,” he had then said. He also took a swipe at the government’s initiative in handing out 12,000 individual permits to qualified taxi drivers, saying the policies appeared to be half-baked. “There is nothing concrete. If they want to really help and allow us to compete at a level playing field they should regulate Uber’s fares as well,” he said.

2012 might have been too early for a price cut on Sony's flagging PlayStation Vita portable, but early 2013 is obviously a different matter. Sony Japan announced today that both the Wi-Fi and 3G enabled versions of the system will be lowered to a price of ¥19,980 (around $215) starting on Feb. 28; a price drop of 20 to 34 percent (depending on the model). The reduction comes none too soon to try to revive the powerful portable's standing in the country. After a relatively healthy launch weekend, Japanese sales of the system plummeted in its second week on store shelves. Those sales continued to sag week by week, except for brief spikes surrounding new software launches that weren't sustainable. The system reached a new sales low in November when it managed to sell only 4,021 units across Japan in a week, placing behind even the ancient PlayStation Portable and selling less than 1/46th as much as the 3DS in the same period. Are the US and Europe set to see similar price cuts in the near future? In the US, Sony's descriptions of Vita sales have gone from "exceptional" to "acceptable" to estimates of only 35,000 sales in January 2013, which can only be described as "unacceptable." Europe's Vita sales have looked more like Japan's, falling behind even the PSP and well behind the newer 3DS in the region last year. Sony also scaled back its worldwide sales expectations for the Vita two times last year after the market gave a collective shrug to show less than predicted levels of interest in the system, and Sony President Kaz Hirai said in January that system sales were on the "low end of what we expected." That all points to a system that needs to quickly come down in price worldwide if it's going to have any hope of stopping its downward spiral. Perhaps Wednesday's PlayStation Meeting will include some portable pricing news in addition to word of Sony's future home console plans.

Kaju katli recipe with step by step photos. Kaju katli (vegan cashew fudge) recipe or kaju barfi recipe is one of the most sought after Indian sweet recipes. Here is an easy kaju katli recipe for beginners to try without sugar syrup. These thin, melt in mouth and smooth kaju katlis are just like what you get in sweet stalls. This is one of the most tried and tested recipes from the blog too. Do try out this fool proof kaju katli recipe as a treat to the family or edible gift during festivals like Diwali, navratri, Ganesh chaturthi etc. Kaju katli recipe or kaju barfi recipe or Indian vegan cashew fudge recipe is a royal Indian sweet that takes a pride position in most Indian festival treats. It is one of the most loved sweets and often gifted to friends and relatives during festivals like diwali. I have tried making kaju katli recipe 2-3 years before and did not get it right. I always have a problem with sugar syrups . I try to stay away from sweets calling for even one string syrup and the most popular recipe of kaju katli is the one with powdered cashews and one string syrup,obviously not my cup of tea. I so badly wanted to try kaju katli recipe as it one of our favorite sweets and I was desperately searching for kaju katli without sugar syrup recipe. I found this easiest recipe for kaju katli in Mrs Mallika Badrinath’s 100 sweet varieties and there was no need for sugar syrup.You just have to grind sugar and cashew,mix and cook,can it get easier than this . Usually varak (edible silver foil) is placed on kaju katli but i never use it. Though this is an easy kaju katli recipe we need to be extremely focused and careful as when to stop cooking,kneading etc. Please be sure to check the notes section for more pointers. This kaju katli recipe is so rich that you wont believe it is vegan.I have used just a drop of ghee just to grease the plate and that can be avoided too if you wish. There is absolutely no need for ghee in this recipe, this is a vegan Indian cashew fudge recipe 🙂 I can confidently say this is the best recipe for kaju katli that even beginners can try without any fear. I really urge you all to try this quick and simple kaju kalti recipe or kaju burfi recipe as it is called in few places and surprise your loved ones with this royal Indian sweet 🙂 To make kaju katli recipe you have to make sure your cashews are at room temperature. Do not use cashews that were stored in fridge. Make sure to bring the cashew nuts to room temperature. You can even dry roast the cashews briefly to remove the moisture in them. You can flavor kaju katli recipe with rose water or saffron. I like to add saffron in kaju burfi. This royal Indian sweet kaju katli keeps well for up to a week at room temperature. There are few kaju katli recipes with milk but the should be consumed on the same day as prepared. Store kaju katli in airtight container and serve kaju katli as required. Another delicious variation of kaju katli recipe is kesar kaju katli. You can even try badam katli, kaju pista rolls,kaju strawberry recipes. Here is how to make kaju katli recipe with step by step photos. Few more Indian sweet recipes you might like are coconut pista ladoo, quick chocolate burfi, easy dhoodh peda, badam katli How to make kaju katli recipe with step by step photos. 1.Soak cashews in water for 30 minutes. I soaked the cashews in hot water, you can soak in milk too but kaju katlis made that way have less shelf life. 2. Powder the sugar using a dry grinder or mixer. 2. Grind cashews to a very fine paste. You can use the milk or water used for soaking to ease the grinding. You have to grind the cashews to a very smooth and fine paste with minimum water. For the 1 cup of cashews I used 3 tablespoons water for grinding. 3.Measure one cup of ground cashew paste and powdered sugar and take in a non stick pan. Mix well. Make sure to mix very well before you start cooking as the mixture gets cooked very easily. 4.Now heat the mixture over low-medium flame and start to stir. Mix well and keep stirring in low flame. keep scarping the sediments while stirring. Add saffron and mix well. 5. Keep stirring for 7-10 minutes, The kaju sugar mixture will start bubbling and it will begin to thicken. Make sure to scrape the edges while stirring. Add saffron at this stage if you want to add. 6. Once the kaju sugar mixture forms a lump and gathers in the center,pinch a very small amount and make a ball with your fingers. if you are able to form a ball,then it is the correct consistency. Switch off the flame and let the mixture cool for a while. 7.Once the mixture is warm to touch,knead into a very soft dough. This is the very important step for getting perfect,soft melt in mouth kaju katli. You should not let the mixture cool down completely. Knead the kaju mixture in to a very smooth dough while it is still warm. If you are unable to knead you may add few drops of warm milk but again that will reduce the shelf life. 8.Roll the dough into a 1/4 inch thick circle and make diamond shaped pieces. The thickness of kaju katlis is your choice. The kaju katlis you get in shops will be very thin,so roll the dough as thin or thick as you prefer. 9. Allow the pieces to set for 10 minutes. Store kaju katlis airtight in room temperature. If you refrigerate the kaju katlis may turn a bit hard. Kaju katli recipe card below: 5 from 6 votes Print Kaju katli recipe, cashew fudge recipe | how to make kaju katli Prep Time 30 mins Cook Time 10 mins Total Time 40 mins Kaju katli recipe is a royal Indian sweet,vegan cashew fudge,rich melt in mouth with just 4 ingredients! Course: Sweet/dessert Cuisine: Indian Servings : 20 kaju katlis Calories : 83 kcal Author : Harini Ingredients (1 cup=250 ml) 1 cup cashews 1 cup powdered sugar 1/8 teaspoon saffron optional 1/2 teaspoon cardamom powder Instructions Soak cashews in water for 30 minutes. Powder the sugar. Grind cashews to a very fine paste,just y sprinkling water. Measure one cup of ground cashew paste and powdered sugar and take in a non stick pan. Mix well. Now heat the mixture over low-medium flame and start to stir. Add saffron and mix well Keep stirring for 7-10 minutes,till the mixture thickens and leaves the sides.Scrape the edges while stirring. Once the mixture forms a lump and gathers in the center,pinch a very small amount and make a ball with your fingers. if you are able to form a ball,then it is the correct consistency.Switch off the flame and let the mixture cool for a while. Once the mixture is warm to touch,knead into a very soft dough. Roll the dough into a 1/4 inch thick circle and make diamond shaped pieces. Allow the pieces to set for 10 minutes. Store kaju katlis airtight. Recipe Notes 1. Do not add more water while grinding. Just sprinkle to ease the grinding,the cashew paste should be very smooth. 2.Do not cook the mixture more than 10 minutes. Once the lump reaches soft ball stage,remove from flame.The mixture will further thicken when it cools. 3.Knead the mixture very well but gently,the more you knead the more soft your kaju katlis will be. 4. If the dough seems to be dry you can a tablespoon of milk or water while kneading. Sharing is caring!

God is in the details. So they say. Words I tend to live by. My next two posts will be a reflection on exactly that. I have talked before about my biggest struggle in doing a show like this, where the Costume team has an opportunity to create such elaborate, detailed pieces, is hearing viewers say, “when do we see that costume?”. WE SAW IT!!!! Three episodes ago! But you actually didn’t. The actor never got up from the table, we never saw them from the back, there was never a head to toe shot (almost never), it is too dark to see it if they did, etc. I often threaten to abandon the details. “What is the point? ” I ask. “Why should my team bleed over these costumes for months, if we are never going to see them?!?! Don’t we want the audience to SEE this alien world??” But I do get it. The show cannot add hours to loving close ups on buttons or pocket details. There is an awful lot of story to get into a 13 hours of television and every minute is precious. I also believe that even if we don’t see the details, we feel them. They are their subliminally (is that a word?), they help the audience to believe that the world is real, and they absolutely help the actor to feel the character. God IS in the details. But I am a mere human, and I struggle. So I created my own art gallery, to celebrate the details. My work, the work of my team. I am an atheist, after all. Let’s start with one of my favourite costumes this season. Annalise at Versailles. I love this costume. It is as close a reproduction as I could make of this costume. I try to pepper the show with reproductions. Not only does it add authenticity, but it validates various choices. this particular costume is about detail, but very importantly about color. This supports our choice to use a different palette in S2 than everyone expects. These are not the pastel, bon bon colours that come later in the 18th century. The colors of the mid 18th are much deeper and richer. Our story is just one King before the ears of Marie Antoinette that everyone associates with the 18th century. This is a Casaquain from the Palais Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris. Ours- The differences are clear. Our colors are deeper. There comes a point when you have looked at every possible shade of whatever colour you are trying to match, the dye room is already behind schedule, and you have to LET IT GO, TERRY! It is close enough! We also just did not have the time to create that marvellous tulip hem and to piece the silver lace the way they did. I had to use a Dupioni silk in order to get the closest color. Very often these things are an exercise in compromise. But you accept it and move one. Cameras need to roll. Enjoy!

In the latest episode of To Be Continuous, Edith and Paul discuss the challenges and benefits of refactoring monolithic applications into microservices. They examine various approaches for creating microservice boundaries and dispel the myth that they should be defined as small as possible. Transcript 00:00:00 00:00:00 Paul Biggar: The idea of having something that you have a slow delivery cycle for some particular reason, or you have a normal delivery cycle but that still takes a day or whatever because there's code review and that sort of thing. And you want to have something really, really fast. You want to have multiple stages, multiple speeds of delivery based on different needs of different parts of the company, and that sort of thing. Edith Harbaugh: I'm just so excited about this today, started talking about it. I mean this is really the promise of microservice. Like the old way was you had this monolith. The best thing I ever heard was a friend call it disgusting monolith, where everything was all tied together, and if you wanted to change one thing, you had to test everything all together. Paul: Right, and we've all been there I'd say. Edith: Yeah and it's very painful. It's very painful because then you get into this fix/release cycle. But decoupling things into different components that means that you can start iterating on some of them faster than others. Paul: Right, One of the questions that you get around microservices is, "How do you define microservices boundaries?" And a lot of people just go, "Oh you make them as small as possible" which I think is ridiculous. But the ones that have always made sense to me is that you have service boundaries where there's different teams, or service boundaries when there's needs to deploy the service at different pace from the services around it. Edith: Yeah, I mean I don't think you should decompose for the point of decomposing. Because that's when you end up with like 8,000 microservices, and you're like, "I don't know," this happens. I think you should decompose when, as you said, there's a functional reason why something has to move at a different speed. Paul: Right, so the obvious one apart from those two is that it makes logical sense as a dependency for the API. This is a good API boundary for all the things that rely on it. Edith: Yeah, because that releases you basically from release hell. Because you want to have a logical way that you can say, "Okay, this microservices interacts with this one at a certain time in a certain boundary." A really good example I heard is There's this myth that you iterate very frequently on your UI, and I think this is true if you're in more consumer business where you can get a million people looking at your app and rapidly iterate. If you're at a company, if you're a B2B company, and you're rolling out your own customers, they don't actually want to have two people in the same customer have different user experiences. It's very confusing so you have to get a lot of support calls. Paul: So I agree with you in the general case. But having used AB testing, it is an extremely useful tool to roll features out slowly and that's what I think even in B2B case. Edith: I think it really depends on your B2B. Because I have heard some horror stories about people who try to do it at a B2B, and they get a lot of support calls. You know, "What's happening? The button I expected there to be is not there." Or "we just did a whole lot of training on this last week." Paul: Yeah, and something has changed? Edith: Yeah. Paul: So I think one of the things that's really valuable about the modern dev tools go to market is that you have both on-prem and on-cloud customers. Edith: Are we just doing buzzword bingo now? Paul: Sure, sure, sure. So when you have customers who use both your cloud service and your downloadable software, the customers who use your downloadable software are the people who are naturally much more conservative. That's why they're using your downloadable software in the first place. So you can do your AB testing in the cloud on the cloud customers who are much more early adopters and much more willing to put up with that sort of thing and happier to get the good UX that comes out of it. Edith: Even then most people don't have sufficient volume to do effective AB testing. Paul: I don't think that's true at all. Edith: I think that's very true. Paul: You don't have sufficient volume to do minor AB testing like to tell the difference between two different versions of blue, right? That's something you need Google Scale for. But if you're trying at a new positioning, you have AB testing. I think the major value when people complain about AB testing, the major value that they overlook is that it tells you that you didn't fuck something up. Edith: Yeah, I think AB testing is a misnomer. I think it's really risk tolerance. Paul: Right, so if you're launching a new messaging or a new onboarding page or something like that that you think is going to deal with your position much better, or it mentions a new product which hadn't been mentioned before, you want a B version that was just the old version that tells you you didn't tank your conversions. Edith: Yeah, and the dirty secret is that most changes have no effect at all. Paul: Right, right. But you want to be sure of that. We launched a new, beautiful home screen once or homepage, and it dropped our conversions 20%. Edith: Yeah, I remember. Paul always teases me cause I talk about TripIt. Like we tried a different footer, and it destroyed our conversion. Paul: Oh! A footer. Edith: A footer Paul: Did it have a different call to action or move to call to action or something or provided more calls to action? Edith: The footer had a lot of calls to action. Paul: Yeah, that was exactly the thing with ours. We had, "You can sign up right now you can read the docs or you can do something else." And it ended up that a lot of people go read the docs, and then just forget about us. Edith: Yeah, and this is the kind of classic product debate then. Do you want them to sign up if all they're going to do is read the docs? And you can argue about this for hours about qualifying leads, when to get people into the funnel. Paul: I think if you have a drip marketing campaign, you generally want them to cross the line which gets them into drip marketing campaign. Edith: Paul, you're a marketer! Paul: I was the CEO of a company. I've done fucking everything, for three months each. Edith: What was the rotation? If you fucked everything three months each? Paul: Yeah, everything that got done by me was done badly, but it was better than not being done at all. Edith: So what was your rotation? Paul: I did sales. I did marketing. I did PR. I did UX. I did support. I did everything. Edith: What was it like when you were sales? Paul: So fortunately Circle had so much interest and such strong product market fit that sales was literally having a call with the CFO saying the price is this. And he's like, "Can you lower the price?" "Uh, no. All right, well thanks." I had a couple of calls that were literally that. They brought some financy person or the manager and they were like, "We demand a discount." And it's like, "Yeah, this is a good price we feel." Edith: So do they end up buying? Paul: Yeah, yeah. I mean, some of them don't. I hated giving discounts. I felt like we had a really good price, and it was actually kind of cheap for the value that customers got out of it. And so when people came for discounts, I was just like, "No." Edith: That's funny. You know there's the opposite which is you should price a little high expecting that you'll discount. Paul: Yeah, I think for bottom-up tills, you can't really do that. Because people won't ask for it, they'll just leave. Edith: Ah! Paul: The old oracle way doesn't apply to our modern bottom-up. I guess, do you have a top-down? Edith: We have both. I mean as soon as you get into procurement department, like their job is to get a discount. Paul: Right, right Edith: So if you don't give them a discount, they feel like they didn't do their job, and their like, "What happened here?" Paul: Yeah, and that's why you end up, I guess in the microservice version of the sales process is you apply a different sales process to different people. And the bottom-up people get the price on the website, and the people who go through their procurement department get another thing. And the fact that you have to talk to their procurement department means that they're getting charged an outrageous price in the first place to deal with that. Edith: I think the words continuous delivery terrifies a lot of people. Paul: Mmhmm Edith: It's funny because we do a podcast called.. Paul: To Be Continuous, yeah, I think that's what it's called. Edith: I mean let me check the label. Yeah I think people think of continuous delivery is that you have to push out multiple times a day an hour. When really it just means that you need to be able to push out what you want. Paul: Right, right I've rarely seen a continuous delivery company that does continuous delivery and uses that to mean we're only doing it when we can. I think they all push at every version. I find it extremely rare for people to push out, especially in small companies. Maybe there's a small company bias. Edith: No, I'm talking more at larger orgs. They find continuous delivery terrifying. Because they're like, "Our processes are not set up to have a new version of the UI every day." Like, "We need to go train our support people. We need to go do this. We need to update this." So to go back to what you said, I think there's different functions within their systems that they would like to be updated at different speeds. Paul: Yep, I agree with that. You can kind of think of the UI as one microservice. You can think of all the other things as different microservices. But the one that I've always found, people need to update quickly, but they don't necessarily want to update it repeatedly, is the marketing pages. So the entire front-end of your thing. You'll get to a point when you have marketers and the marketers ask for the front-end, which was beautifully built by developers. Edith: With Han Loverdly and Jekyll Paul: I think actually Jekyll is pretty good for them, but like will typically be built-in react, you know whatever the same as your website is it'll be nicely unified and has an excellent release process. And the marketers will be like, "Yeah, we don't want to talk to you to make a change here. We need you to put in the optimizely pixel and could you switch this over to WordPress." Edith: Yeah, cause they want to be able to do it themselves, they don't want to have to go bug their developers. Paul: Yep, Then they end up with a terrible release process from a developers perspective in that there's no staging environment. There's no ability to preview your stuff. There's no code review. There's no nice automated releases that have pull request in them. There's just like someone playing around in Word Press. Edith: I could feel the horror in your voice. Paul: Well, I think it's easy to fuck things up that way. But it's better to only have to rely on your team to get something out. When you have to start to rely on other teams, that's when your deliver really gets slow. Edith: Yeah, I thought of a classic thing where you want to have very quick releases and it's anything security related. This is actually one of my big things is that you want to be able to constantly patch security vulnerabilities. And the security vulnerabilities that exist today will be different tomorrow, the day after and the day after and the day after. Paul: You generally want to have a way of dealing with security vulnerabilities immediately even though that is extremely scary and very, very dangerous. Edith: But whatever you know today will be different later. Paul: Yep, we had multiple approaches of dealing with different container images. Because a container image would take like 36 hours to roll and to deploy. So we needed to be able to run something on that image. It was partially for security. It was partially for user experience. It was partially because sometimes things broke in the ecosystem. But we had the ability to go change, we called it the pseudo hack. So a command that would run a pseudo. And there was 30, 40 times where we need to make some change to the pseudo hack to support something weird that was going on. Edith: Yeah I think a lesson is if you have to do a fix, how long does it take you to do it? Paul: Right, there's the actual fix itself, and then there's the process of getting the fix into production. Edith: Yeah, and if that process is more than a day, you're in serious trouble. Paul: Yep. Well, I mean if it takes you a day, but you're able to get it patched really quick, I mean that's kind of the source of the word patch, right? If you patch it immediately and then you go fix it, and it takes a day, that's no big deal. Edith: Oh, yeah, but as long as you can patch. Paul: Exactly yeah. So we ended up at various points with a very quick process to update our engine X, so that we could filter particular data or filter particular user types and that kind of thing, and a bunch of different levels to deal with particular security vulnerabilities that might theoretically come up. Not just security vulnerabilities, but also like DDOS. Edith: Yeah, just everything that comes up. Paul: Incidents of whatever kind. Edith: Yeah incidents that are not your core functionality, but are crucial to be quickly addressed. Paul: Right exactly. Edith: So I think I could break down different speeds of which you want stuff to update. Stuff that leaves you vulnerable to the outside world, that's kind of like your protective cocoon, if there's a hole breech there, you need to repair it immediately. Or else you'll end up hacked. Paul: The problem with those is that you also need to maintain those. So you need to have testing around those. You need to have people remember how to do them. If you go to use one of those things, and no ones touched it in six months and it went stale or it rotted in some way, then you're even more fucked now especially if you've provided yourself an accidental back door, or provided your attackers an accidental back door. Edith: Yeah, and then there's stuff that you want to go at different speeds. Like if you're doing any sort of billing update, you actually want to be kind of cautious. Paul: Yeah, I mean this is for feature flags I find particularly useful. You enable a billing chains like that for one person and then you watch what happens. You make sure that they're able to do the thing, and you go very, very cautiously. Edith: Thanks for wearing LaunchDarkly shirt, Paul. Paul: No worries! Feature flags are awesome. Edith: It looks really good on you by the way. It matches your haircut. Paul: Thanks. Edith: I get really excited the more I talk to our LaunchDarkly customers right now because I've seen the way just the world has changed even in the couple years that we've been around. Paul: What are people using LaunchDarkly for that blew your mind? Or how perhaps are they using it that blew your mind? Edith: I'm pretty jaded so not much blows my mind. But it's more like they visited a big customer and they said how much less stress they were in and how much less risky their releases were now. Paul: Right, we've been saying this for years that Continuous delivery is less risky than monolithic delivery or stage delivery. What did we use to call it when it wasn't continuous? Edith: Waterfall? Paul: Sure waterfall. I think people didn't really believe us. Edith: I think there's still a lot of doubt. I think if you draw like a crossing the chasm type thing, I think we're still like squarely in the early adopters. Paul: Yep, that's true. Edith: But I think it's starting to move. Paul: Yep.

Image copyright Reuters Image caption The couple smiled at each other through the announcement Japan's Princess Mako has formally announced her engagement to a non-royal after receiving the emperor's approval. This announcement kicks off a lengthy marriage process, and it also means the princess will lose her royal status. Under a controversial Japanese law, female imperial family members forfeit their status upon marriage to a "commoner" whereas male members do not. At a press conference, she said she was first attracted to Kei Komuro's "smile like the sun". "I've been aware since my childhood that I would lose royal status once I married," Princess Mako said. "While I've worked to help the emperor and fulfil duties as a royal family member as much as I can, I've been cherishing my own life." The formal announcement came from Japan's Imperial Household Agency on Sunday, after local media reported news of the planned engagement in May. The princess was not in line to the throne, as a 1947 succession law states that only men from her family's lineage can become emperor. Image copyright AFP/Getty Images Her fiancé, Kei Komuro, is a 25-year-old law firm employee. The couple met five years ago while studying at the same university. In the televised conference, he described the princess as someone who quietly watched over him "like the moon". Princess Mako, 25, is the eldest child of Prince Fumihito, whose official title is Prince Akishino. She is pursuing a doctorate and works as a museum researcher. The announcement was originally expected in July, but was postponed after a rain disaster hit western Japan. The wedding is expected to take place next year, according to the public broadcaster NHK.

news A senior IT professional specialising in regional telecommunications in Victoria yesterday afternoon delivered an extraordinarily erudite and pointed education to a 3AW radio host who had gone on an extended and inaccurate rant live on air, rebutting claims that the National Broadband Network project would cost $233 billion but deliver speeds no different to ADSL broadband. Yesterday afternoon, the host of 3AW’s Drive program, Tom Elliott, broadcast a segment which contained a large number of factual errors regarding the National Broadband Network project initiated by Labor, which has been continued as the Coalition’s Broadband Network project. Elliott highlighted an article in The Australian newspaper which had reported that Labor’s NBN project had passed just three percent of Australian premises, but had cost $7 billion to date. “If I got out my trusty calculator, if it cost the same amount of money to cover 100 percent of homes, which the NBN is supposed to do, and businesses, it would cost $233 billion,” Elliott claimed. In fact, NBN Co’s recent Strategic Review (PDF) showed Labor’s version of the NBN would cost as little as $63 billion if funded by the Government completely, or $54 billion if the rollout was reworked. The Coalition’s version will cost even less. In addition, under all scenarios, the NBN project is slated to make a long-term modest return on its capital; effectively rendering its initial expenses meaningless. In addition, with major capital projects such as the NBN, it is common for a substantial amount of the overall capital cost to be lodged up-front; these costs do not reflect the remaining cost of such projects. The host went on to interview a series of listeners live on air, who sequentially claimed that the NBN was delivering only equivalent or even worse service than prior ADSL broadband connections possible on Telstra’s copper network. “Broadband via the old copper network and ADSL is getting pretty quick. Unless it’s a huge leap forward, I just don’t know whether we should be spending anywhere between $70 billion and $233 billion on it,” said Elliott, who appeared to grow increasingly hostile towards the NBN project as the segment went on and anti-NBN caller after anti-NBN caller lined up to agree with him. However, one of the later callers in the segment was able to substantially educate Elliott on the specific advantages of the NBN rollout. Elliott introduced the caller as George Fong, the executive director of Victorian regional telecommunications consultancy Lateral Plains. However, Fong is actually a much more senior figure than he appeared on the call (see his biography here). Fong (pictured, right) started his career practising law in Singapore, before moving to Australia in 1987 to lecture at the University of Ballarat. He then founded one of the nation’s first regional ISPs, NetConnect Communications, as early as 1994, and has subsequently spent over 20 years teaching, managing and consulting on IT matters. He is also vice president of the Internet society of Australia and sits on a number of other organisation’s management committees. Fong spoke with absolute authority on the NBN project, answering all of Elliott’s comments with aplomb and leaving the host appearing to be speechless at some points. You can listen to the entire interview online; the MP3 file is available here and Fong’s segment starts around 1 hour and 19 minutes and 20 seconds. For example, asked about the final cost of the project, Fong firstly pointed out that virtually every other major nation-building capital infrastructure project had gone at least slightly over their budget, before stating that the cost of the NBN project could only be examined in terms of the length of time the infrastructure would last. “Instead of saying, this is what the immediate cost is, we need to look at the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years and amortise it across that in terms of the returns that we get from the advantages that we’ve got,” Fong told Elliott. “Remember dial-up. You would never go back to dial-up, would you? In ten years’ time we’re probably never going to go back to ADSL, and that sort of future-proofing that we need, that’s what fibre will do for us in the regional areas.” Fong also commented with strong authority on issues such the disconnection of Telstra’s copper network, the inherent advantages of fibre over copper, the fact that the copper will need to be replaced eventually, the higher availability and ease of switching between competing ISPs on the NBN’s fibre, and even the expected boom in online media as a consequence of the project. Elliott had no comeback to Fong’s comments, abandoned his criticism during the encounter and merely thanked him for appearing on the show. It is very common for radio commentators to heavily criticise the NBN project. Shockjocks such as Alan Jones and Ray Hadley have become notorious for their ongoing, often vitriolic criticism of the project. However, it is very rare that an informed, erudite commentator such as Fong is allowed on the programs to refute the claims being made by the host. opinion/analysis This morning I was all set to write another in a very long line of articles about ignorant and ill-informed radio shockjocks criticising the NBN and Labor’s preferred Fibre to the Premises technology when I started listening to Elliott’s incredible segment on 3AW yesterday. And then George Fong came along. I have never, in all my time reporting on the NBN project, heard such an erudite, educated and convincing counter-argument made on air or anywhere else. In the face of Elliott’s raving technical and commercial illiteracy, Fong’s calm and self-assured words were balm to my soul, and I’m sure many listeners felt precisely the same way. I’ve interacted with Fong before on Twitter, but never realised quite how convincing he could be on air. George Fong, you are a bloody legend, mate, and have done a service to your country, educating thousands of listeners and one very ill-informed radio commentator about what the NBN project really is (or at least should be) all about. I hope you consider getting involved in further commentary on the issue, perhaps on other radio stations or on television. I now class you as a bona fide hero of the Australian IT industry. Fong is on Twitter: I recommend you message him and tell him what a good job he’s done. It’s not often you see this kind of thing happen in Australia’s mainstream media. Image credit: Lateral Plains

Raheem Sterling was allegedly attacked and racially abused as he arrived at Manchester City’s training ground on Saturday morning in preparation for their game against Tottenham Hotspur. The England forward was believed to have been kicked and branded a “n-----” by a man who appeared to be waiting for the 23-year-old at the players’ entrance at City’s football academy training base, according to sources. Sterling had pulled into the entrance in his car as he arrived for City’s pre-match preparations, at which point he is believed to have been confronted by the man hurling a barrage of abuse at him. Telegraph Sport understands that Sterling got out of his car to ask what the problem was only for the man to react by reputedly kicking the City player in the leg. It is unclear at this stage whether City have opted to report the incident to Greater Manchester Police but it is thought the sickening scenes were caught on CCTV. It is not believed the man was known to Sterling. City have yet to comment on the matter. Sterling did not suffer any injuries in the alleged attack and he went on to start and score twice – his 14th and 15th goals of an extraordinary season – in City’s 4-1 victory over Tottenham as Pep Guardiola’s side moved 14 points clear at the top of the Premier League.

OAKLAND, Calif. — On a sun-drenched Saturday, Eddie Metairie wandered around the Cat Town Cafe & Adoption Center, past the miniature-golf-size buildings, cat perches and a bed shaped like a tuna can as he followed Lucia, an independent-minded brown tabby. Going to a shelter to find a cat in a cage “is heartbreaking,” said Mr. Metairie, a project manager at a hotel supply company, but the Cat Town Cafe “feels organic.” He was having fun. By the time his $10-an-hour playtime was up, Mr. Metairie had made plans to take the cat home and rename her Amélie. The Cat Town Cafe & Adoption Center, which opened in late October and has arranged 52 cat adoptions so far, claims to be the first permanent cat cafe in the United States. Customers line up for locally brewed strong coffee, handmade bagels and “vegan fig nut pop tarts” (the proprietors clearly know their audience). When it is time to visit the cat zone, visitors push through glass doors to another world of lounging cats, all of them candidates for adoption. There are no cages.

New questions over A-G's link to embattled priest Updated New questions are being asked about the link between the New South Wales Attorney-General and a retired Catholic priest who allegedly abused a number of female children during his time in the church. Father Finian Egan's more than 50 years as a priest took him to at least half a dozen churches in and around Sydney. But the priest's service in the Catholic church came to an end when a number of women came forward to accuse him of abusing them when they were children. Within weeks of 7.30 airing a series of stories on Father Egan, at least five people had gone to police and a widespread investigation was underway. But nearly two years later, the priest has not been arrested or charged. One of his alleged victims, Nikki Wells, says there is no reason the case should be taking so long. "The wait has been absolutely horrendous. It's been really traumatic. The statements with the police have been finalised in 2010," she said. "We've been told the case is on the DPP's desk, but it's been on the DPP's desk for seven months. Now they keep telling us they're just waiting for a signature, so it's beyond me how it's been so long. "The case has been investigated. It's very clear the evidence is there from all the witnesses, so I don't understand why he hasn't been charged." Father Egan has always denied the allegations, and as the case dragged on questions were raised elsewhere in the media about the alleged sex offender's long-time association with Attorney-General Greg Smith. Mr Smith and Father Egan go back some years, and when Mr Smith was elected to Parliament five years ago he cited Father Egan's influence in his maiden speech to Parliament. "At St Gerard's, Father Finian Egan charmed us with his Irish wit and his pastoral devotion to his flock," he said in the speech. Damien Tudehope, now the Attorney-General's chief of staff, also knows Father Egan well, attending the priest's church and, as a solicitor, defending him against sexual abuse allegations. The ABC does not suggest that either Mr Smith or Mr Tudehope have interfered with the potential prosecution involving Father Egan, but critics argue there is an appearance of a potential conflict which the A-G should address. 'Completely horrified' But 7:30 can reveal discussions it is alleged the Attorney-General has had regarding the Egan matter which cast doubt over his impartiality. Last year Ms Wells spoke to another Catholic priest about her frustration at the delay. That priest, who the ABC has agreed not to name, says he then met Mr Smith last July. After that meeting the priest detailed his version of what was said in an email to Ms Wells which the ABC has obtained. In the email the priest says Mr Smith told him he thought Ms Wells was trying to take money from the church. "I was with Greg Smith the other day and I raised your case with him. He commented that 'you were just trying to get $1m from the church'," the priest said in the email. Ms Wells says the conversation was completely inappropriate. "I was completely horrified that the chief lawmaker in the state could comment on an open criminal case for a start," she said. "Secondly, that he'd pass judgment on someone he doesn't even know and just disbelief that the whole matter that our Attorney-General could speak so publicly about me and my case and a criminal matter. "Clearly he thinks I'm a liar and that other witnesses are liars too because I'm not the only victim in this matter - a clear lack of empathy and devastating unprofessionalism." The ABC asked Mr Smith if the priest's email description of the meeting and what was said was correct, and in response the Attorney-General issued a statement saying he "recalls no such conversation". "The Attorney-General recalls no such conversation and notes that 7.30 has failed to provide any detail which would help his recall," the statement said. "He says he would never suggest any victim of sexual abuse was simply motivated by a desire to claim a financial payout." Questions Beyond the alleged comment that Ms Wells was just after money, the email raises other questions. In fact Ms Wells said she had discussed a $1 million figure with the church, not for herself, but as a loan for a charity she was running to care for survivors of childhood abuse. She was shocked the Attorney-General would know anything about the $1 million figure, something she had raised only with senior churchmen, and she said so in her email reply to the priest. "I am horrified that Greg Smith knows about us seeking assistance for the Sunrise Centre - I am also further disgusted that he said that I just wanted to get $1 million out of the church," she wrote in the email to the priest. The priest replied, saying he had similar concerns about the fact Mr Smith knew about the $1 million figure. "This is what he had heard and that concerns me where this had come from," he said. "He is well connected within the church - he seems to know all the hierarchy - much more in the know than I am." Those connections troubled Greens MP David Shoebridge, who put a series of questions about the matter to Mr Smith on notice in Parliament. "In my dealings with him, it's an attorney that's more likely to defend the church than to get out and defend the victims," he said. Among the questions, he asked Mr Smith whether he had had any communication with anyone beyond the DPP regarding the Egan case. But Mr Shoebridge says in his answers Mr Smith did not address that issue, only stating that his office had not been in contact with the DPP about it. "That's a remarkable lack of candour... it was a very specific question capable of a very precise answer and we simply didn't get that," Mr Shoebridge said. "If the half of the answer you don't give is the core of the information, you've got to ask whether or not that is misleading." Topics: government-and-politics, states-and-territories, crime, sexual-offences, catholic, nsw First posted

The province of New Brunswick is toying with the idea of adding a second moose hunt in 2017. Dwayne Sabine, a biologist with the Department with Natural Resources, says the minister has been looking into the idea. Sabine says there are benefits to having a split season. "We see some crowding right now in some wildlife management zones where we have a lot of tags out with healthy moose populations," said Sabine. "A split season would split the hunters up, a little less crowded in the woods." The Department of Natural Resources registered a record number of moose this season, 3,728 animals were killed in total. The Department of Natural Resources is considering a move to split moose hunting season in 2017. (CBC) That's up from the previous year, which had a record 3,683 moose tagged. The success rate of hunters is around 80 per cent. Sabine says a split season wouldn't necessarily mean more hunters in the woods. "Sustainability would still be our first responsibility," said Sabine. "It would also be helpful for the butcher situations," said Sabine. "A lot of butchers are booked up solid right now, and I've heard a lot of hunters complaining they have no place to take their moose." Larry Henderson, a meat cutter just outside of Fredericton, says he's booked solid after every hunting season. "I've got 35 moose right now," said Henderson. "It's the busiest time of the year." Henderson, a meat cutter since the 1970s, says he works non-stop for days after moose season begins each year. "Well you work away at it. I've always had a full cooler, doesn't matter if it's a three-day season, five-day season, or a six-day one," said Henderson. The Department of Natural Resources 3,728 animals were killed in total. (CBC) "If I didn't have to hang them as long, that would help, but breaking it up like that would probably help." Any changes to the season in the future would require a vote in cabinet. The province is returning to a three-day moose season in 2016, down from the previous two years which saw five-day hunts.

Japan's exports have also declined amid economic contraction [File: EPA] Japan's economy has slipped into recession after a worse than expected performance for the first quarter of the year. The economy contracted sharply in the first quarter, as factory production and consumer spending declined in the aftermath of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami. Real gross domestic product - a measure of the value of all goods and services produced domestically - shrank at an annualised rate of 3.7 per cent in the January-March period, the country's cabinet office said on Thursday. The result marks the second straight quarter that the world's third largest economy has lost steam and undershoots an annualised 2.3 per cent fall forecast in a Kyodo News agency survey. While there is no universally accepted definition of a recession, many economists define it as two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction. Others consider the depth of economic decline as well as other measures like unemployment. Japan's magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami left more than 24,000 people dead or missing, and wiped out entire towns in the hardest-hit areas. Damage is estimated at $300bn, making it the most expensive natural disaster in history. It damaged factories in the region, causing severe shortages of parts and components for manufacturers across Japan, especially automakers. A crippled nuclear power plant caused widespread power shortages that added to the difficulties faced by businesses and households. Seijiro Takeshita, director of Mizuho International, told Al Jazeera that recovery may take a long time because clean-up efforts were taking so long. Consumer spending falls Japan's factory production and consumer spending both fell the most on record in March. Exports in March went south for the first time in 16 months. Companies are reporting lower earnings and diminished outlooks for the rest of the fiscal year. Toyota, Japan's biggest automaker, said last week that its quarterly profit tumbled more than 75 per cent because of parts shortages after the tsunami. As of May, the crisis cost the company production of 550,000 vehicles in Japan and another 350,000 overseas. Toyota is expected to lose its spot as the world's top-selling automaker to General Motors this year. Even before the disaster, Japan's economy was shaky. In a historic shift, China overtook the country as the world's second largest economy last year. Japan struggled to address a slew of problems including years of deflation, a rapidly ageing and shrinking population, and ballooning public debt. 'Instant evaporation' Japanese companies increasingly relied on exports to drive growth and offset the persistently lackluster demand at home. After four solid quarters of growth, Japan's GDP turned negative in the last three months of 2010 due to weaker exports and consumer demand. The downturn was expected to be temporary. Instead, Japan has now recorded consecutive quarters of contraction for the first time since the global financial crisis. GDP fell for four straight quarters starting April 2008. The country's economy and fiscal policy minister Kaoru Yosano described the current slump as milder than the previous slide, when global demand "evaporated instantly". "The Japanese economy's ability to rebound is sufficiently strong,'' Yosano said, according to the Kyodo News agency.

The Last Jedi doesn’t feel like a Star Wars movie. This isn’t a bad thing, exactly. There are moments of brilliance where director Rian Johnson is clearly trying to elevate this franchise, imbue it with a greater complexity. There are other moments that feel like the worst of Marvel films. And then there are the porgs, which are a bit like the Minions of the franchise. I’m going to go ahead and discuss spoilers from here on out, because I feel this film is difficult to dissect without going into detail, and let’s be honest, nobody needs a recommendation to go and see a Star Wars film. So if you haven’t seen it, read no further. Major Spoilers ahead The very first scene, with Hux’s threat to Poe turning into a prank call, was tonally off. Guardians of the Galaxy was heavily influenced by Star Wars, and now it seems that inspiration has turned full circle. In fact, although some of the humor was welcome, there was far too much wisecracking throughout the film. At the end, I half expected Rey’s ship to crash land on Earth and encounter the Avengers, only to turn to the camera and wink as the credits rolled. On the other hand, there are some surprisingly mature themes here, as the franchise moves beyond the very clearly defined good and evil of the past installments. The importance of failure, the refusal to define Kylo by his Force allegiance, and the admission that heroes can come from humble backgrounds are all interesting attempts to diversify the narrative. I confess, I never liked Luke Skywalker as a character before (please don’t hate me), but I really enjoyed his presence in this film. Luke has grown beyond the starry-eyed boy and into a jaded, isolated old master, paralleling Yoda’s journey from the original trilogy. But the moment where he intended to murder the young, sleeping Kylo felt utterly wrong, going against the grain of everything the character is. It may have been only an instant, but Skywalker always seemed genuinely innocent, the kind of guy who doesn’t learn to masturbate until his late teens. The man is a boy scout, and he has no business murdering sleeping students. That being said, Mark Hamill has only improved with age, and I was deeply sorry to see him go. I loved his dramatic force-projection scene with Kylo, and him peacefully fading off into the Force after a long, accomplished life seemed the most fitting end to the space Messiah. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The new face of the franchise is Rey, and she has grown less and less interesting the more we see of her. Daisy Ridley is likable and charismatic, but she doesn’t have much to go on here; she’s wildly overpowered, and an early hint that she may embrace the dark side never really goes anywhere. She seems fascinated by the potential of evil, and then not. I don’t understand her motivation, other than to have an exciting adventure. The much-anticipated reveal of her parentage can best be described as an enjoyable disappointment. I like the fact that genius can emerge from nothing, as Star Wars has always been fixated on heritage and fatalism. But I also feel like I need some sort of explanation for the seemingly most powerful individual in the franchise. Then again, Kylo Ren may have been lying. But I’m starting to feel like I don’t much care what Rey does from now on. Kylo Ren has turned into the most fascinating and complex Star Wars character ever, as far as I’m concerned. For a series that’s always been so black and white, Kylo is very grey indeed, and is set up to be the major villain, or perhaps even hero, of the new trilogy. Adam Driver puts in a strong, understated performance, as Kylo has matured beyond tantrums. Well, almost. He does shatter his Vader-wannabe mask in a fit of rage, physically and metaphorically destroying his old identity and embracing himself for who he truly is. I always liked the idea of Darth Vader being a legend in this fictional universe, so much so that he has a fanboy trying to emulate him. But Kylo’s utter humiliation at the hands of Rey, and manipulation by Snoke has taught him that there was only one Darth Vader, and his story ended long ago. Kylo’s story, on the other hand, looks to be completely unpredictable. The Force-connection scenes between him and Rey were among the highlights of the film, and provided some much-needed characterization for both of them, allowing both to speak, debate, even flirt, without any need for a lightsaber battle. But I must say, I felt cheated when it comes to lightsaber battles. The Last Jedi has way too many lasers and speeding spacecraft. Starfighters are cool, I guess, but they’re just not as fun as two people desperately fighting to the death with laser swords, and the countless scenes of Poe shooting through space, effortlessly avoiding being hit, really made me notice the runtime. There’s a lot of time spent at a space casino, with little payoff. Poe appears to be the new Han Solo, and a surrogate son for Leia, which is cute. Finn shows an understandable desire to run away, only to be stopped by the cheery, vaguely annoying Rose. The two spark it off, but prove to be a dull couple indeed, and we’re given very little reason to care for them. Dearly departed Carrie Fisher gives a strong final(?) performance for Princess Leia, and there are several instances where it looks as though she’s about to die onscreen, only for her to survive to the end credits intact. I’m hoping her character will peacefully die offscreen before the next installment, which is surely the most tasteful thing to do, given the circumstances. I was kind of worried Disney was going to use that creepy face-capturing technology to continue her story, but they have stated that they won’t, even if they’d really like to. The scene where Kylo chooses not kill his mother is powerful – the man is more than willing to stab his father in the gut, but we all know that only a true monster kills their mom; that’s Norman Bates level of villainy. But his comrades go ahead and do the job for him, only for Leia to float through the vacuum of space, proving her command of the Force. It’s another scene I’m conflicted by – Leia always seemed like she chose a more “normal” life compared to her brother, and this feels like another scene that dilates the power of the Force. The Last Jedi, much like The Force Awakens, gives the impression that mastering the Force is kind of easy. Thankfully, there’s no mention of midichlorians. One of the greatest scenes in the film is between Rey and Kylo (most of the great scenes involve the two, really) in Snoke’s fabulously red throne room – he’s not an attractive man, but he certainly has a flair for interior design. When Kylo betrays Snoke, he establishes himself as the big bad, which is great, but also renders Snoke utterly pointless. What on earth was the point of him, other than to be a diet Palpatine? Not everybody needs a padded backstory, but characters that significantly drive the plot need more than this. Where did this guy come from, and what was his ultimate plan, other than “being evil?” It feels as though the new trilogy is finding the story as it goes along, which isn’t exactly a bad thing, but has led us down a few dead ends in the process. I wanted to at least hear Snoke say, “you wanna know how I got these scars?” Then there are the porgs, which are deeply unsettling. I know Star Wars has a history of inserting Beanie Babies into scenes where they don’t belong, but hell, these creatures aren’t even cute. They’re right on the edge of the uncanny valley, more akin to deformed fetuses rather than adorable little critters. And they’re everywhere, breaking the tension, interrupting the narrative flow like a blaring toy commercial, which is what they are, really. Seeing past the various flaws, this film is a joy to look at. The salt planet (let’s all thank that guy who licked the ground for clarifying that for us), the beautiful isolation of Luke’s island, the ragtag, chipped-away aesthetic of the Rebellion, were all wonderfully depicted. But there was a certain emptiness here that’s difficult to pin down. The Last Jedi is tough to define; I really loved some moments in this film, and despised others. Luke had his finest appearance on screen, as far as I’m concerned, and a great send-off. Princess Leia is supremely dignified throughout, even when she’s floating through the depths of space, frosted in ice. Rey’s emptiness was balanced by Kylo’s complexity, and Finn, Poe, Rose and whoever Benicio Del Toro was, were all … there. Oh, and I forgot to mention Captain Phasma. But that’s ok, because she never did anything. I left the theatre in a strange mood, unsure if I was even looking forward to the next installment. I had very high hopes for Rian Johnson, seeing as Looper is one of my favorite sci-fi films. But The Last Jedi lacked Looper’s slickness. It was bloated, burpy, tonally wobbly. Forty minutes could have been sliced out of this film, and would have left it leaner, healthier. I still trust Rian Johnson with the new trilogy, I think. But I’m even more wary about Disney’s alarming takeover of the entertainment world. Are all their films going to feel like they’re part of the Marvel cinematic universe now? We’ll see what’s next for Star Wars. I had a lot of issues with The Force Awakens recycling old story, but it still felt very much like a Star Wars film. The Last Jedi manages to be both a bold step forward, and a significant step back. Follow me on Facebook or Twitter

In California, where there are nine festivals devoted to lavender alone, you’re never far from something that needs celebrating. But sometimes an event or theme or setting is so attractive, you might want to make a weekend or even a week of it. Here are 10 in 2018 worth a look. Mendocino Crab, Wine and Beer Festival: This scenic hamlet on the north coast draws visitors with a variety of festivals throughout the year, but its crab fest is one of the best of its kind, thanks to its all-you-can-eat cioppino and crab feeds, a crab-cake cook-off and the area’s excellent local wines and beer. www.mendocino.com (Jan. 19-28) ScotsFestival on the Queen Mary: When you remember that Mary was Queen of Scots, it’s obvious why the famed ship, built on the bonny banks of the River Clyde and now permanently moored in Long Beach, is home to the state’s most unusual gathering of the clans. Expect all the usual competitions, music, games, haggis-eating and whisky-tasting opportunities, plus a Robert Burns Supper. www.queenmary.com (Tentative dates: Feb. 17-18) Palm Springs Modernism Week: What began as a single showcase now draws lovers of midcentury-modern architecture, design and culture from around the world for 10 days of activities that include film screenings, lectures, symposiums, art events, home tours, martini parties and even an ode to the beloved Airstream travel trailer. Sign up early enough and you can rent a gem of a private midcentury home. www.modernismweek.com (Feb. 15-25) Like our Facebook page for more conversation and news coverage from San Jose, the Bay Area and beyond. Pebble Beach Food and Wine: This is the younger sister of Aspen’s famous signature culinary festival, but with even better wine. Set on one of the most prestigious stretches of coastline in the country, the event draws thousands to sample offerings by more than 100 celebrity chefs and 250 wineries. Enjoy culinary demos, grand tastings, special events — such as last year’s Southern Breakfast with Hugh Acheson — while taking in sumptuous views. www.pbfw.com (April 5-8) Paso Robles Wine Festival: Anchored in the Downtown City Park, with additional events hosted by wineries in the nearby rolling hills, this four-day eating and sipping extravaganza includes winemaker dinners, live music and barrel tastings. Buy tickets to the Grand Tasting early. www.pasowine.com. (May 17-20). Valhalla Renaissance Faire: Renaissance fairs can be found closer to home, but why not hang out with the jousters and wenches on the shores of Lake Tahoe? Held at the Camp Richardson Historic Resort, this one offers four stages of entertainment, 900 costumed actors and more chances to buy food, drink and cool stuff than you can shake a turkey leg at. www.valhallafaire.com (June 2-3 and 9-10) Festival Napa Valley: As a fundraiser for youth music programs, this 10-day festival offers everything from decadent winemaker dinners to free concerts in the park as it hops from high-end restaurants and prestigious wineries to concert halls. The price tag to some of its five-star events can be steep, but they offer a rare opportunity to see and even rub shoulders with international music superstars and other celebrities. www.festivalnapavalley.org (July 20-29) Pageant of the Masters: You’ve got two months to enjoy Laguna Beach’s Festival of the Arts, one of the best juried fine-arts shows in the country. But make plans now to buy tickets to the “Pageant of the Masters” in which theatrical magic and creative humans re-create a series of “living pictures” every night. In 2018, the tradition will celebrate 85 years with “Under the Sun,” evoking masterpieces by impressionists and plein air artists. www.foapom.com (July 7-Sept. 1) Russian River Jazz and Blues: Over its 40-plus-year history this summer swan song has hosted legions of musical legends, including Etta James and Buddy Guy. The music is top-notch and the atmosphere is even better, with a stage set right on the beach. Pitch a tent under the redwoods and kayak, paddle boat or swim in the river while the bands play. www.russianriverfestivals.com (Mid-September) Reading this on your phone? Stay up to date with our free mobile app. Get it from the Apple app store or the Google Play store. Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival: This is the mother of all pumpkin festivals. In a state with this much agriculture, that’s no small feat. Cars line Highway 92 throughout the two-day celebration of all things October, a time of year when this Pacific coast-side town simply sparkles. This time why not avoid the traffic and make a weekend of it? www.pumpkinfest.miramarevents.com (Mid-October)

Wednesday Writing Hook Sure Hump-Day can suck, but we’ve decided to turn it into a *Hooray-Day* by releasing a new writing hook every week! Each edition will feature an image of an artefact, a complementary writing hook, and a little about its historical provenance, with a further reading option. We’d love to hear about the stories and adventures you wrote with them – be sure to detail them in the comments below! You can subscribe for more writing hooks, or find them on Facebook or Twitter. The Writing Hook A pregnant woman has disappeared. The villagers mutter nervously and exchange dark looks – such disappearances have been going on regularly for the last 20 years, not to mention livestock rippings and other attacks. No one has ever been implicated. A blood-trail leads back to the house of wealthy, pleasant local farmer, Peter Stummp, but there is no obvious evidence in the property. When questioned, neither Stummp nor his daughter seem to know anything, although you do notice that the kitchen is filled with the tantalising aroma of meat stock… The Historical Facts Peter Stummp, during 1589, had one of the most famous werewolf trials in history. As he was brutally tortured, he confessed to having practiced black magic since the age of 12, and that the Devil had given him a magical belt, which turned him into a great wolf until he removed it. He also confessed to killing and eating fourteen children, one of whom was his son, and two pregnant women. He later described the fetus hearts as “dainty morsels”, which he plucked out and ate whilst they were still beating. He was accused of incest with his daughter, and also confessed that he had intercourse with a succubus sent to him by the Devil. How would you use this writing hook for your writing or role-playing campaigns? How would you make this writing hook better? Let us know in the comments below! Looking for more inspiration? Why not try last week’s writing hook, Writing Hook #1: The Mysterious Box.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and Singapore founder Lee Kuan Yew. File photo / Composite Despite both ruling with an iron fist, the late Singapore founder Lee Kuan Yew is extremely different from Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Singapore's biggest newspaper said Friday. In a strongly-worded opinion piece, the Straits Times scoffed at commentaries that Lee and Duterte had similar administrative styles and nation-building approaches. Lee, under an authoritarian rule, transformed Singapore from a third world to a first world country. He passed away in March 2015. "The analogy would have been interesting except that it is laughably inappropriate," wrote Global Affairs associate editor Ravi Velloor. The first big difference between them, said the piece, was that Lee "was not a man to have a person's life taken away without absolute attention to due process." "People with no links to the drug trade, either as consumers or suppliers, have been assassinated in the process, perhaps to settle private vendettas. Criticism is met with abuse. An army of online warriors, some of whom are perhaps employed in the booming outsourcing industry, seem to be readily on hand to troll presidential critics, putting a fright into even seasoned commentators," it said. In Duterte's ongoing war against illegal drugs, at least 1,840 deaths have been recorded. Of this number, 1,088 were killed during police operations. Aside from this, the piece said Lee would never back away from a territorial claim "for the elusive promise of a few bags of silver in development aid." The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled last July that China's economic claim on the South China Sea was without basis. The Duterte administration, however, has been careful not to bring up the matter in international fora or with China, saying it wants to work with the rising superpower in resolving the issue. "The Duterte-ordered extrajudicial killings, and his gyrations on the maritime dispute with China, have raised a stench for the Philippines that is far more perverse than the haze that used to spread out from Indonesia. If it goes on for too long, it could potentially be a bone in ASEAN's throat," said the Straits Times. It also warned against signs that Duterte may be endangering the Philippines' once promising economic future. "Global investors have turned skittish in recent weeks as his coarse tongue and take-no-prisoner methods get attention," it said, citing the Peso dropping to a seven-year low. "Mr Duterte has many good reasons to be in a hurry to accomplish his mission. Presidents in his nation are allowed only a single six-year term, after all. Sometimes, though, it is wise to make haste a tad slowly," it added.

When Kalimah Priforce was eight years old and in foster care, he got more books the only way he could. He went on a hunger strike. – RSVP for #StopRacism Weekly Calls – Every great story has its miracles. A few weeks before reaching nine years of age, impossible became a daily part of my life as a foster care resident of a Bedford Stuyvesant group home–deep in the heart of Brooklyn. It belonged to the very powerful Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council (CBCC) of New York City. There weren’t many leisure activities other than a single television that most of the kids fought regularly over. Residents weren’t allowed to leave the premises except to attend school, group trips escorted by staff members, or chauffeured around in vans to fulfill medical appointments. Rather than engaging in squabbles with other kids about which shows to watch (Yo MTV Raps was very popular then), I monopolized a small library of donated books to satisfy my insatiable curiosity about the world. Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free I read every book, many of them twice. As a result, I approached one of the group home staffers and kindly requested that they order more books to expand the library in a, “Please sir, can I read some more?” Dickensian way. ♦◊♦ I was the first to make such an odd request, so they ignored me at first, but I was persistent. Several hours later, I got my answer that it was “impossible” and that there simply “wasn’t enough funding for more books.” I wasn’t convinced, and it didn’t help them that I had just finished reading the stories of Peter Pan, Encyclopedia Brown, Huckleberry Finn, The Little Prince, Pippi Longstocking, and other precocious youth. I wanted more books, and even tried negotiating with them. I was already a vegetarian by the time I arrived to the group home, and my dinner selections consisted mostly of salads and breads. I calculated that for every meatloaf or chicken sandwich I didn’t eat, that the agency was saving a dollar or two per day. My suggestion to them was that they use the money they were saving to purchase of books. They angrily declined and forcefully stated that it couldn’t be done. Since all my neogotiaitons failed. it was then that I decided, at eight, that if they couldn’t feed my brain, there was no use to them feeding my stomach. I wrote a letter to them declaring that I would fully withdraw from eating any food until they ordered more books. I was on a hunger strike, though I didn’t know what to call it. They called my bluff, but by the third day of my hunger strike, they were getting worried and threatened to have me psychologically evaluated and be force-fed. Their campaign to stop my civil disobedience included bribing my fellow dorm mate to bring food to my bed. I wrote a letter to them declaring that I would fully withdraw from eating any food until they ordered more books. I was on a hunger strike, though I didn’t know what to call it. I slept most of the day because of my volunteered malnourishment. Once. I woke up and discovered a plate of macaroni and cheese (my favorite) beside my bed. I brought the plate to the kitchen, politely placed it on the counter, and returned to the male dorm. Day four was when my life would be changed forever, as the offsite director of the group home visited the offices and photocopied paperwork. I was mopping the floors near him (it infuriated the staff that though I wasn’t being fed, I continued to complete my assigned chores) when out of courtesy he asked me how I was doing, as he was directly involved in my social work case as the physically tortured and neglected Haitian kid who was brave enough to testify against his mother in family court. I replied, “I haven’t eaten in three days.” After an immediate shock and awe, he quickly arranged for a meeting between me and the staff. Through its duration, I sat right beside him. I always distrusted adults, so it didn’t help that they accused me of being obstinate, and that my eating disorders were due to mental instability on my end. Still, their words did upset me. However, their labels wouldn’t stick as accurate depictions of my character, because prior to and throughout my hunger strike I remained well-behaved. I completed all my chores in addition to assuming the cleaning duties of other kids who were too ill or traumatized to complete them during their first few days there. Chronic or intermittent homelessness will do that to anyone–especially kids and young teens. It’s completely demoralizing. He asked them for solid reasons why they didn’t inform him of the issue. They explained that they didn’t feel it bore enough importance to be referred upwards to him. This made him even more upset, and I was getting my front-seat first lesson on the spectacle of adult incompetence and mediocrity. They only cared about their jobs and would only exercise intelligence when they felt their jobs would be threatened, and so they “quieted” my request for books. If fear over the loss of their jobs wouldn’t have clouded their foresight, they would have seen this incident from the perspective of the director. If word had gotten out to major media outlets that a Black (Haitian) kid in what was once considered “The largest ghetto in the United States—Bed Stuy”, went on a hunger strike after his request for “more books” was denied by a taxpayer funded group home, it would have rocked the entire social services community. A city and state investigation of the CBCC organization would have been made, and absolutely everyone would have lost their jobs. Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free The staff members weren’t thinking, and even at eight years old, I knew better than to take that level of stupidity too seriously. The director turned towards me, leaned forward, and promised me that if I ate immediately after the meeting, he’d personally see to it that more books be added to the library. Though I didn’t trust many adults, I respected him enough to agree to the deal. After the meeting was over, I went into the small cafeteria and ate lunch with everyone else. To this day, I’ll never forget that I had mixed vegetables and a cheese sandwich with plenty of mayonnaise. Grilled cheese never tasted so scrumptious. Surprisingly, the next day men in jumpsuits arrived to set up bookshelves for the boxes of new books that had just been delivered. How he pulled it off so quickly, I will never know, but I marveled as I saw the covers of The Hobbit, D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Oliver Twist, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for the first time. At that moment, I knew I would be destined to be the smartest boy in the world! One of the female staffers approached me with an envelope, rather than lazily calling me into her office as she usually did. It was a typewritten letter from the director I had brokered the deal with. Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free I don’t recall the exact words, but it was a permission slip that allowed me the special privilege to leave the group home during visitation hours—to the local library and museum. As long as I had the letter, and showed it to the museum receptionist, my admission would be free. I imagine this was a preventive measure on his part in expectation that I would finish reading all the books in the group home library–and I did. I was the only group home resident given this access. ♦◊♦ Standing up for the right to read books drastically changed my world. Eventually, I would be discovered by a Buddhist nun (impressed by my juvenile hunger strike story) and along with her monastic community, provided me with a free five-year-long formal education and tutorship. In 1999, New York City finally ended a multi-million dollar contract with CBCC after a crackdown uncovered the foster care agency’s widescale mismanagment and corruption. Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free Also, it wouldn’t be the last time I held a hunger strike against seemingly powerful change-resistant forces. During my sophomore year at Central State University, when faced against a school administration that wouldn’t budge on its policies toward the dietary needs of students, I held another hunger strike that brought the heads of a major food corporation together along with college administrators. I presented my proposal that by tailoring menus to address the dietary diversity of the student body, it would save them money and benefit both parties. After negotiations were made, I broke my second and last hunger strike with a veggie burger that they prepared for me. Every good story has its miracles, but every miracle needs pushing. The problem with “in the box” education solutions is that they run counter to recent studies revealing that when we place students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds into the same classroom with higher income students, they still perform below expectations. That’s because the key to knowledge is exposure, and exposure is what we don’t talk enough about in education circles. The difference between kids that make it and ones that don’t isn’t decided by test scores or even their natural talents, but more to do with whom and what they are exposed to. Thanks to Twain, Barrie, Dickens, Caroll, and so many more…books gave my earliest dreams the push they needed to make the incredible journey from the confines of a Brooklyn group home to the learning labs of sillicon valley—where I currently run an edtech startup. My life’s work is about giving every learning miracle its push. So every morning when I smile into the mirror, a precocious eight-year old boy smiles back at me, because his miraculous journey is far from over. Please sir, can I read some more? — RSVP to join weekly calls on Conscious Intersectionality We are proud of our SOCIAL INTEREST GROUPS—WEEKLY PHONE CALLS to discuss and help solve some of the most difficult challenges the world has today. Calls are for Members Only (although you can join the first call for free). Not yet a member of The Good Men Project? Join now! Join The Good Men Project Community. The $50 Platinum Level is an ALL-ACCESS PASS—join as many groups and classes as you want for the entire year. 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A group of outraged Florida voters has launched the Web site MyCongressmanIsNuts.com in a drive to oust Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, the outspoken lawmaker who grabbed national headlines after it was revealed that, among other comments, he called an adviser to the Federal Reserve chairman a “K Street whore” in a radio interview in September. The site is raising money to defeat the Orlando-area congressman and the site’s organizers describe it as a “more appropriate alternative” to Mr. Grayson’s CongressmanWithGuts.com, which the Grayson campaign said helped to raise more than $250,000 in the first three weeks of October. The “Nuts” site took in about $3,335 overnight after its Thursday evening launch, according to a donation ticker on the Web page. “Alan Grayson’s recent self-indulgent behavior has paralyzed his ability to serve as an advocate for the citizens of central Florida,” the Web site says in a plea for contributions. The site features YouTube videos of TV and cable news reports critical of Mr. Grayson’s exploits. “Every penny that we raise is going to go to exposing his policies and who he really is,” said Angie Langley, 34, chairwoman of the recently formed political action committee behind the Web site. “We are going to flood the district with bumper stickers, yard signs, and we are prepared to launch radio and television ads - whatever it takes to make sure this guy is not re-elected.” Ms. Langley, a business development consultant in the Lake County portion of Mr. Grayson’s district, said the PAC is not affiliated with a political party and is not backing any candidates. She is not new to politics, however, having previously served as chairman of the Lake County Republican Party. The PAC’s two other board members are a registered Republican and a registered libertarian. Mr. Grayson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Several Republicans have lined up to challenge Mr. Grayson, including a trio of “tea party” activists hoping to capitalize on the anti-tax, anti-big government movement that flourished over the summer. But national Republicans reportedly are looking for a stronger candidate in what has historically been a GOP-leaning district. The Bronx, N.Y.-born Mr. Grayson, a wealthy businessman and lawyer, was a freshman House member virtually unknown on the national stage before his stinging rhetoric and take-no-prisoners style began to draw attention in September. That’s when he stood on the House floor and said the Republican health care plan is “to die quickly if you get sick.” He responded to calls for an apology by apologizing instead to “the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.” He also set up his own Web site - NamesOfTheDead.com - that claims to list people who have died without health insurance. He has described criticism of his frank comments as “Republican hissy fits.” Some House Republicans talked of an official censure for Mr. Grayson over his health care remarks on the floor, but the effort died. But on Tuesday Mr. Grayson did offer what he called “my sincere apology” to Linda Robertson, the adviser to Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke whom he called a “K Street whore” last month on the nationally syndicated “Alex Jones Show.” Such derogatory references to K Street, a base of many Washington lobbyists, are not unheard of in the nation’s capital, but are usually reserved for private conversations and not nationally syndicated radio. On the “Alex Jones Show,” Mr. Grayson said: “This lobbyist, this K Street whore, is trying to teach me about economics.” The remark was widely criticized by Republicans and Democrats alike. “This characterization of Ms. Robertson, made during a radio interview last month in the context of the debate over whether the Federal Reserve should be independently audited, was inappropriate, and I apologize,” he said. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

The filmmaker announced via Twitter that he hopes to debut his hockey movie at Sundance 2013. Kevin Smith is sharing details about his next -- and final -- film via Twitter, telling fans that he hopes to unveil Hit Somebody during Sundance 2013. PHOTOS: Kevin Smith in Action The auteur had initially planned to create the movie in two parts, but wrote on Jan. 5 that he is currently “Writing script two, but now gonna make one big movie instead… Makes more sense anyway: the movie’s about taking one, good shot.” Smith revealed that he hopes to begin shooting in June. FILM REVIEW: Red State In response to another follower, Smith noted that the film’s total running time could reach 150 minutes with credits. Last January, Smith told reporters that Hit Somebody would be his last film. “I feel good about that,” he said while promoting his most recent film, Red State. “I feel like my critics are probably saying ‘Oh, good, he’s leaving.” STORY: Kevin Smith Slams Indie Spirits on Twitter After His 'Red State' Is Snubbed Smith clarified that while he is closing the curtain on theatrical films, he is “willing to try other directing projects.”

ASUS Google Nexus 7 16GB Android Tablet (2013 version) with a 1080p Full HD Display and a Quad-Core Processor This award-winning tablet races through pre-loaded Google apps with its 1.5GHz quad-core processor, and 5.1 surround sound lends clarity to business calls and video game sound effects. CNET Editor’s Choice Tablet CNET called the ASUS Google Nexus 7 “the best tablet value on the market” because of its HD screen, battery life, and speedy performance. The latter is thanks to the quad-core processor, which the review notes helps seamlessly power racing games and create “the best-performing small tablet for gaming.” Create Kid-Friendly Profiles with Android 4.3 You can restrict kids’ access to websites and other questionable content by creating kid-friendly profiles on the Jelly Bean operating system. You can also download your choice of over one million apps available on Google Play. Easy-to-Hold Design The tablet’s thin bezel makes it easier to hold it with one hand, freeing up the other to tap through apps or high-five strangers. Specifications ASUS Google Nexus 7 Tablet Model number: ASUS-2B16 7” 1080p full HD display 2.3 million pixels create 323ppi 1.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor 2GB RAM 16GB hard drive Android 4.3 Jelly Bean operating system Pre-loaded with Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, and Hangout apps Buy apps from Google Play 1.2MP front and 5MP rear HD cameras 5.1 virtual surround sound Narrow bezel Condition: new 1-year warranty from ASUS Dimensions: 4.5”x7.9”x0.35”, 0.6lb. In the Box: Tablet, charger, manual, USB cable ASUS was named for Pegasus, a symbol of wisdom and knowledge in Greek mythology. In addition to these two tenets, the company mirrors the winged horse in another significant respect: both entities have taken part in a series of epic journeys. ASUS notebooks have lived on the MIR Space Station. They were the first to work in the thin, icy air atop Mount Everest. As fireworks exploded over the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, ASUS servers directed the show. ASUS motherboards have probably even found their way directly into your home or office, as they’re present in one of every three computers and one in every two pizza delivery men. That’s a lot of ground for the Taiwanese company to cover in less than three decades. Tablet FAQ Answers to common questions for first-time tablet buyers. Answers to common questions for first-time tablet buyers. Tablet Buying Guide A simplified look at the complex world of tablets. Find out which features are right for you. A simplified look at the complex world of tablets. Find out which features are right for you. For questions pertaining to this deal, click the Ask a Question button below. For post-purchase inquiries, please contact Groupon customer support. Goods sold by Groupon Goods. View the Groupon Goods FAQ to learn more.

Prosecutors often understand what’s going on but threaten the women with long sentences (sometimes based on conspiracy laws) to get them to testify against their men. That’s how the criminal justice system works, but when the women refuse to cave, they go to prison for many years — and the guys then drop them. When men are in prison, they seem to get visits frequently from girlfriends, who also add money into their commissary accounts so they can buy small items and make phone calls. But the prisoners and social workers I spoke to said that when women are imprisoned, they get fewer visitors and their accounts are often empty. Mass incarceration also has an abysmal record. Recidivism is high, and imprisonment breaks up and impoverishes families. A newly published study from the Russell Sage Foundation found that incarceration of a family member is associated with a 64 percent decline in household assets, magnifying poverty and the race gap in America. And the 2.6 million American children who have a parent in prison or jail pay an enormous price — which, as Rabbit’s story shows, isn’t always necessary. Rabbit was diverted from prison to a model program in Tulsa called Women in Recovery. (Hunter also is in the program.) It reduces the numbers of women in prison, saves money and has had remarkable success helping troubled women shake drugs and restart their lives. It has a two-generation approach that works with both the women and their children. The program offers counseling, intensive support, coaching on budgeting and conflict resolution, and help getting high school equivalency diplomas, housing and jobs. The upshot is that Rabbit has now been clean of drugs for nine months — the longest since she was a young child — and has a job in a warehouse with some prospects for promotion. She has custody on weekends of her son, 12, and daughter, 11, and is trying to rebuild relationships with them. Women in Recovery programs last 17 months and cost $19,700 on average; after that, the woman is in a job, and recidivism over the next three years is just 4.9 percent. Without the program, the state might imprison the women for years at a much greater cost — and end up with a much higher recidivism rate.

Everything seems in order when you scroll down the list of young Peruvian players called up to represent their country at Under-15 level. That is, until you reach the name Osama Vinladen Jiménez López. Vinladen called up by Peru The Unión Comercio player has a startingly similar name to Osama Bin Laden, who was the founder of terrorist group al-Qaeda, the organisation responsible for the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Given that the Spanish pronunciation of the letter 'V' is very similar to the letter 'B' in this case, the name bears an even closer resemblance to that of the Saudi Arabian when spoken. Peruvian naming tradition offers explanation It is common in Peru for parents to name their child after a famous individual, regardless of how that individual entered the public consciousness. Peruvian culture places importance on names, and parents may think that giving their child a famous name will help them achieve notoriety. As such, it is not uncommon to come across Peruvians with names ranging from 'Hitler' to 'Ringo Starr'.

The fermentor that started it all, reinvented again! We've taken the revolutionary Big Mouth Bubbler® glass and re-engineered it with the help of world-class Polish master glassmakers to ensure sturdy, solid, superior craftsmanship. Extra-thick glass eliminates oxygen permeation and keeps your brew safe. Banish bugs and bacteria with perfectly air-tight seals from a carefully ground, completely smooth and obsessively flat neck top. In the evolution of Big Mouth Bubbler®, we've added some perks! Instantly measure volume with gallon graduation marks. Easier transfer of clear beer with a taller, narrower body while ensuring less liquid is left behind. Bid your funnel and siphon sayonara! Pour cooled wort directly from your kettle into the Big Mouth Bubbler® for instant transfers. Pitch yeast without it running down the sides of your fermentor. Easily add flavorings to secondary, and then just as easily remove them! Gallon graduation markings help ensure precise measurement of fermenter volume. Last but not least, you asked and we listened: more space for the adhesive FermagraF° LCD thermometer than any other glass fermentor! The most obsessively engineered glass fermentor ever created, we are proud and excited to introduce the new and improved Big Mouth Bubbler® EVO 2. Note: We still strongly recommend the Big Mouth Bubbler® carrying harness. Each Big Mouth Bubbler® Includes: Big Mouth Bubbler® Glass Fermentor, Universal Lid* Big Mouth Bubbler® Microfiber Cleaning Cloth *The new Big Mouth Universal Lid (included) fits all Big Mouth Bubbler® Fermentors. The Big Mouth Bubbler® Universal Lid is just like a traditional carboy bung, only bigger! Just as easy to sanitize and set in place too. Ribbed silicone rings ensure a positive seal to keep out pests, while the non-threaded design allows the lid to move, preventing an out-of-control fermentation from dangerously pressurizing your fermentor. You will also need a Small Universal Carboy Bung - drilled or solid.

NEW DELHI: Real estate major DLF was on Wednesday directed by the Supreme Court to deposit Rs 630 crore fine slapped on it by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for allegedly resorting to unfair business practices.The apex court said the total ammount will be deposited within three months with its registry pending the outcome of the appeal filed by DLF against May 19 order of Competition Appellate Tribunal's upholding the penalty of Rs 630 crore imposed by the CCI."We direct the appellant (DLF) to deposit the amount of Rs 630 crore in this court," a bench comprising justices Ranjana Prakash Desai and N V Ramana said in its interim order.The bench said so far as the interest on the amount was concerned it has to be determined as per the November 9, 2011 order of the CCI that was fixed at 9 per cent.It also directed DLF to file a fresh undertaking that in the event of dismissal of the appeal it will pay such amount as directed by the court.DLF pleaded that it should be granted at least six months time to deposit the amount. However, the bench said it was inclined to grant three months time only.Further, the bench directed that out of Rs 630 crore, the real estate major has to deposit Rs 50 crore in three weeks and the Registry will be at liberty to invest it in any of the nationalised banks.The apex court adjourned the hearing by admitting DLF's appeal in which Haryana government, Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) are parties along with the residents' association on whose plea the competition watchdog had imposed the penalty on the company.The CCI in 2011 had found DLF violating fair trade norms and imposed a fine of Rs 630 crore on it following a complaint by Belaire Owners' Association in Gurgaon.It was in May 2010 that the buyer's association had complained against DLF.

What’s on the horizon for 2016 and beyond? Find out in this annual ebook sampler of excerpts from some of Del Rey’s most exciting science fiction and fantasy titles! Inside are a slew of iconic authors and brands. Michael J. Sullivan, the author of the Riyria series, kicks off an original five-book saga. Elizabeth Moon revisits her classic military sci-fi epic Vatta’s War with a new standalone novel. Science Fiction Hall of Famer Connie Willis returns with a satire of love and (mis)communication. China Miéville, one of the most consistently original voices in any genre, presents a brilliant work of alternate history. And a bold era of World of Warcraft storytelling begins with a tale of justice and vengeance. Here, too, are emerging voices and incredible new visions. At the edge of the Russian wilderness, a young girl tries to protect her family from terrifying fairy tales come to life. In Kolkata, India, a college professor learns of a race of people at once more than human yet kin to beasts. An ordinary family in England undertakes a ten-year period of servitude to a ruling class endowed with powerful magic. A contestant on a reality TV show, cut off from all outside contact, learns that the real world may have changed in terrifying ways. A young man with inexplicable powers is recruited by a secret training program at West Point. And in South Dakota, a child falls through the earth—only to wake up in the palm of a giant metal hand. This marvelous ebook sampler contains excerpts from eleven recent and upcoming works: AGE OF MYTH by Michael J. Sullivan THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE by Katherine Arden COLD WELCOME by Elizabeth Moon CROSSTALK by Connie Willis THE DEVOURERS by Indra Das GILDED CAGE by Vic James THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS by China Miéville THE LAST ONE by Alexandra Oliva THE POINT by John Dixon SLEEPING GIANTS by Sylvain Neuvel WORLD OF WARCRAFT: ILLIDAN by William King Keep Reading

The graphic disparity between Watch Dogs' reveal trailer and yesterday's story trailer have been an extremely hot topic. Online communities are filled with discussions about the game's graphics being “downgraded” and we're seeing reports of Ubisoft's PR working to handle the immense backlash. One such Ubisoft PR person is Tessa Vilyn, Ubisoft Benelux PR and events manager. Due to her comments supporting the game's visuals, she has become a target for questions from the distraught community looking for answers. Her initial tweet about the matter is as follows, “Bit bummed about some people not liking the graphics of the #Watchdogs trailer! I saw the game guys and it looks INCREDIBLE! #promise” When faced with a tweet asking her if the graphics have been toned down since the E3 reveal, she responded by saying that such a thing is “impossible”. “it is impossible, of couse [sic] it is not downgraded at all. :),” she wrote. “i love graphics, its because i know they look good i'm bummed they think differently about it.[...] its a true next gen game for sure... for sure.. “ Tessa states that she's played the latest demo of the game and that reactions are too harsh and lack the hands-on experience that she had had with the game. “Believe me the game is not downgraded, that would just be a bit ridiculous. :) … Again this is my opinion based on what i saw when playing the latest demo.” One such comparison that's making the rounds is the one that I have embedded below. It shows footage of a car chase from Watch Dogs footage in 2012 and footage from the latest trailer. The lighting effects shown are not very comparable. In a Eurogamer interview with Watch Dogs' creative director, Jonathan Morin, posted yesterday, Morin stated that despite the game's delay to improve functionality of gameplay mechanics, the game will not look like the game's reveal trailer. "Are we delivering the 'movie [style vision] of every single person on Earth who saw that [The Games Reveal Trailer]? Probably not, that's not possible. But are we delivering on this fantasy of being a hacker, controlling everything and approaching things in different ways – yes,” said Morin. Last year, Morin told VideoGamer that there would be no visual downgrade from the game's reveal to retail state. "There's no scale down in quality, especially the next-gen versions," Morin told VideoGmer in September. "It's pretty much the opposite. What we showed at E3 2012 in a lot of respects was less good. I think it's in the details. So no, there's no scale down." Watch Dogs Delay: Game Delayed to Tend to "Important Details", Will Not Look As Good As E3 2012 Reveal Honestly, the backlash toward the game's graphics seems a bit excessive - especially when it's driving people to toss vitriol towards Vilyn, someone that had no hand in the game's development or the latest trailer. Watch Dog's still looks like a good game, even if the graphics have been downgraded, but there are many prospective buyers out there that want answers, and the only material that they have are comparisons comprised of media coverage footage and trailers. Ubisoft is going to have to release some official comparison shots and or footage, or a statement if they want to nip this backlash in the bud.

Ahead of her meeting with Trump tomorrow, British Prime Minister Theresa May joked that "opposites attract" and called on the US President to renew the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States and lead in a new, changed world. In the United States for what will be Trump's first meeting with a foreign leader since he took office last week, May signaled a shift in foreign policy, bringing her position more in line with that of Trump. Following a disparaging statement from the French Finance Minister earlier in the day, in which Michel Sapin said that “Madame May can go see whoever she wants. I understand she goes to see the new U.S. president given the history between the U.S. and the U.K" and added that "she is not going there to negotiate," because allegedly "neither she nor Mister Trump are in a position to negotiate", May decided to prove him wrong, and urged the US and UK and their leaders to stand united and confront new challenges, including the rise of economies in Asia that people fear could "eclipse the West," the threat of Islamic extremism and a resurgent Russia. "So we - our two countries together - have a responsibility to lead. Because when others step up as we step back, it is bad for America, for Britain and the world," May told members of Republican Party at their retreat in a speech often punctuated by applause from an enthusiastic crowd. "This cannot mean a return to the failed policies of the past. The days of Britain and America intervening in sovereign countries in an attempt to remake the world in our own image are over. But nor can we afford to stand idly by." Following her speech, UKIP's Nigel Farage tweeted that "I can hardly believe Mrs May's words about our place in the world and with America. I've wanted all of these things for years" and added that the PM said "things that I could only ever have dreamt that a British Prime Minister would say." I can hardly believe Mrs May's words about our place in the world and with America. I've wanted all of these things for years. — Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) January 26, 2017 Some of the key points touched upon by May in her speech as summarized by Axios: The U.S. and U.K. are at the start of crafting a great trade agreement, but that the new deal must serve both national interests. (This can't happen until after Britain official leaves the EU.) U.S. and U.K. should stop intervening in other countries to try to "remake the world in our image." On working with Trump, she said, "Haven't you ever noticed, sometimes opposites attract?" She added she would challenge Trump on issues like torture. When it comes to Putin, May's advice was "to engage, but beware." She said "there is nothing inevitable about conflict between Russia and the west," and that the countries should work to make "cooperation more likely than conflict." She is pushing for major reform of multinational organizations to better serve the nations that formed them. She added, "The most important institution is and should always be the nationstate." NATO should be "as equipped to fight cyber warfare" as it is to fight conventional warfare. U.S. and U.K. should work together to fight the "evil ideology" of "extremist Islamism Of note, as Reuters points out, is her break with the interventionism that launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan underscores a change in global politics. It also fits with Trump's move to put "America first" and scores well with voters in Britain whose feeling of being left behind by globalization helped fuel Britain's vote to leave the EU last year that propelled May to power. Aware that Brexit will shape her legacy, May welcomed her early visit to the United States, a boost to her attempts to show that Britain can prosper outside the European Union despite criticism at home for cozying up to Trump. On her U.S.-bound flight, May concentrated on similarities with the U.S. leader, who some reporters suggested had a style in stark contrast to her more cautious, restrained approach. "Haven't you ever noticed ... sometimes opposites attract?" she answered with a laugh The biggest open issue, however, is trade, and the desire of both nations to eventually sign mutually beneficial bilateral contracts. Eager to win favor - and a trade deal - with the new U.S. president to bolster her hand in the divorce talks with the European Union, May said both countries shared many values and that, contrary to his statements that NATO was "obsolete," Trump had told her he was committed to the U.S.-led military alliance. May said she supported Trump's "reform agenda" to make NATO and the United Nations "more relevant and purposeful than they are today," and "many of the priorities your government has laid out for America's engagement with the world." But there may be sticking points in Friday's talks - May said she condemned the use of torture and would stick to UK policy, suggesting Britain may not accept intelligence that could have come from such methods that Trump could reintroduce. "We condemn torture and my view on that won't change – whether I'm talking to you or talking to the president," she said when asked what impact it would have if Trump brought back a CIA program for holding terrorism suspects in secret prisons. May will have navigate the middle ground carefully, wary of being criticized as too pro-Trump or alternatively as too negative toward a future trading partner. But the take home message is that any gain for the UK and US, is a loss for Europe, which would prefer to see the UK in a position of weakness, and May knows this well. She has threatened to walk away from the EU if she fails to get a good deal, and some critics say that could give other countries, like the United States, the upper hand in any talks. And the EU might not take kindly to any overly friendly overtures to a president some of the bloc's main leaders have voiced concern about. Some kind of trade agreement, though, is high on her list of priorities, despite Britain and the United States being at odds over genetically modified organisms, meat production and public procurement and May unable to sign deals until after Brexit. May says she will launch the divorce talks by the end of March by triggering Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty, which gives up to two years to negotiate an exit deal. Only then can she agree with third countries. Both leaders should use the time to find areas where they could remove trade barriers, May said. What tomorrow will boil down to? "We're both very clear that we want a trade deal." For those who missed it, May's full Philly speech is below

President Barack Obama bases his surrender to Iran’s nuclear ambitions on the notion that his olive branch is reversible. In effect, he believes, it can’t hurt to talk. That’s a notion inculcated into diplomatic culture, and put forward by at various times by accomplished diplomats like Nicholas Burns and Ryan Crocker. It’s also a notion which is demonstrably wrong. A nuclear deal isn’t like mail ordering a child’s toy with 100-percent guarantee on returns. Once Obama went down the path toward even a framework agreement—never mind that the framework seems increasingly illusionary by the day—he effectively ceded any and all momentum to the Iranians. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif once studied in the States. He speaks English. But spending time in America and speaking English does not make a foreign ideologue sympathetic to America; rather, it simply enables that ideologue to be able to communicate more easily with Americans. Just as after a visit to Damascus as senator, John Kerry became convinced of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s reformist nature, now as secretary of state, Kerry has allowed Zarif to substitute charm for sincerity. Hence, Zarif’s triumphalist gloating upon his return to Tehran: Bahman Kalbasi, a correspondent for BBC TV Persian Service, tweeted, “State TV host: ‘But the US says the architecture of sanctions stays?’ Zarif laughs: It has already collapsed.” Rouhani, likewise, has been triumphalist as he once again lives up to his reputation as the regime’s “Mr. Fix-It,” getting the financial relief the Iranian leadership so craved at little or no cost to the Islamic Republic itself. The sanctions, Obama promised, would “snap back into place” if Iran didn’t meet its obligations. But since the death fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, through the early days of Critical Dialogue (when, against Europe’s outstretched hand, Iranian hitmen assassinated dissidents in downtown Berlin), and after the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center, the Iranian government understands that the European Union cares more about mercantile issues than human rights or international security. Nor does Russian President Vladimir Putin even bother about the pretense of caring about human rights. Zarif is right; international sanctions crafted and carefully pushed through the Security Council by men like John Bolton (something Obama and partisans forget) have effectively been squandered upon the altar of Obama’s ego and Kerry’s ambition. There is no going back. Deal or no deal on June 30, Iran’s goal in negotiations has always been sanctions relief, not nuclear normalization. Tehran has won; international momentum against it has evaporated. From Iran’s perspective, Zarif has reason to gloat.

Sometimes I fall into a rut with Italian sausages and go with the usual sausage with onion and peppers. Not that there's anything wrong with that but I needed a change! And that is what led me to developing this recipe. I braised the sausages in red wine until the wine completely evaporated and started to crisp up the skin. The sausages take on the deep color of the wine and are then simmered in a spicy tomato, olive and caper sauce. Was it good? Nope ... it was mouth-watering! The Hub, had seconds and he's my "this stuff is good" barometer ... if he's having seconds I know it's a home run.Serves 41 pound Italian sausage1 cup red wine2 tablespoons olive oil1 medium onion, chopped6 garlic cloves, minced or pressed through a press1/4 cup of drained non-pareil capers, roughly chopped1/2 cup of drained kalamata olives, pitted and roughly chopped1 tablespoon tomato paste2 pounds of roma tomatoes, diced or 1- 28 ounce can of diced tomatoes, including juice1 teaspoon fresh or 1/2 dried thymeI bay leaf2 pinches of sugar1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes or to taste (If you don't like heat just leave it out)1 teaspoon salt (or to taste)1/4 teaspoon black pepper1 pound linguine or pasta of choiceIn a deep skillet add the wine and bring to a boil over medium heat. Add the sausage links, cook until the wine evaporates (about 7 - 9 minutes) and sausage casing begins to crisp up and brown. Set aside.Heat skillet over medium heat, add olive oil and onions and cook for 5-7 minutes. Add garlic, capers and olives, cook for an additional 3-6 minutes or until fragrant. Add the remaining ingredients including the sausage. Bring up to a low boil and reduce heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes.Prepare pasta according to package instructions.Serve over pasta of choice, I prefer linguine, french bread and a glass of red wine or beer. ENJOY!

T-Mobile is capping off the first calendar year of its Uncarrier strategy with a quarter of more customer additions than it's seen in years. The carrier says in its Q4 2013 results that it now serves 46.7 million customers, an increase of over 13 million year-over-year. This quarter alone it saw the addition of 869,000 postpaid customers — a major shift from losing 515,000 postpaid customers this quarter last year. T-Mobile says it hasn't done this well on postpaid since 2005. More customers, more losses But despite the gain in customers, T-Mobile continues to take a hit on overall earnings, posting a loss of $20 million, compared to a loss of $8 million from the prior year's quarter. In part, that's because T-Mobile has begun spending more money in order to get new customers — a cost up 40 percent year-over-year — and it's ultimately seeing less revenue from some of the most valuable ones. Average revenue per user for postpaid dropped around 9.4 percent from this quarter last year, lending to the increased losses. Revenue for the quarter was up, though how much depends on whether you factor in MetroPCS, which has been folded into the company since this time last year. Including MetroPCS, T-Mobile saw revenues leap to $6.83 billion for Q4 from $4.9 billion the prior year; without MetroPCS, it still sees a 10 percent improvement on the back of strong equipment sales. Smartphones in particular soared this quarter, with T-Mobile selling 6.2 million units during Q4 2013, up from just 2.8 million in the prior year's quarter. In a statement, T-Mobile CEO John Legere says that its fourth quarter numbers prove the company's new strategy is working. "Customers are fed up with the old ways and are voting in favor of choice, innovation and doing business with a company that cares about them and is willing to earn their business," Legere said. Earning their business is continuing to come at a cost, but for T-Mobile, that appears to be a cost worth bearing as it begins to improve its services and gain attention in the market. Update: In a conference call discussing its quarterly earnings, members of T-Mobile's executive team expressed a positive outlook on the company's ability to turn its newfound growth into profitability as it moves forward, though they acknowledged that costs involved with its Uncarrier initiatives may not turn around immediately. Some of its more recent Uncarrier plans have apparently been off to a strong start though, including its offer to pay ETF fees for customers transferring from other carriers. T-Mobile also said that its free data offer for tablets has been successful in getting new customers to try its network, and it suspects that many will eventually convert into paying tablet or smartphone customers. Legere declined to comment on the possibility of further industry consolidation.

It's nowhere near Valentine's day but Google is feeling the love. Maybe it wants to help you find that special person before New Year's Eve so you have someone to kiss at midnight, or maybe it's just setting you up for a healthy relationship in preparation for February 14th, but regardless of the reason, Google Search now responds to the command, "Give me a love quote." Try it and out pops a card with a random famous quote about love. Got one you don't like? You can try again. It might not be as fun as flipping a coin or rolling a dice through a search, but it could potentially be life-altering. Who knows, you might start by wooing your date with some romantic words provided by Google, then end up committing to the ultimate quote of, "till death do us part." Sure, chances are you'll wind up searching for heartbreak or divorce quotes, but I'm an optimistic person. Go get'em tiger! Source: @Google

The Retirement Commissioner says the superannuation age needs to rise from 65 to 67. Diane Maxwell says the country can’t afford not to make the change, calling it a "no-brainer." "The number of 65-plus will double in the next 25 years, the cost of super will triple in the next 20 years," she says. "Our dependency ratio — the number of people of working age to retirees — will go from 4.4 to 2.4 [per working person]. We can't pretend this isn't happening." But Commerce Minister Paul Goldsmith disagrees, saying economic growth will cover the cost of keeping super eligibility at 65. Mr Goldsmith says the government currently spends around 5% of GDP on super. "The projections are in 2045, 30 years from now, that will increase to 7% of GDP. The world's not going to come to an end. We can afford that," he says. Prime Minister John Key says he would resign before he lifted the retirement age, in part because he says it would be tough on many blue collar workers. A recent survey by the Retirement Commission found two-thirds of Kiwis want it kept at 65. "I'm hoping to change the voters' minds," says Ms Maxwell. "If I can change the voters' minds, I can change [Mr Key's] mind." The Retirement Commissioner also says immigrants should not be eligible for super until they have lived in New Zealand for 25 years, in line with the average of 26 years. Currently, the wait is 10 years. But Mr Goldsmith says we’ve always been a generous country. She says now the government has such a large surplus it should resume payments into the Super Fund. RAW DATA: Lisa Owen interviews Retirement Commissioner Diane Maxwell and Commerce Minister Paul Goldsmith Lisa Owen: Well, this is a political hot potato that no party wants to handle – superannuation. But now the Retirement Commissioner, Diane Maxwell, is wading in. Her report on New Zealand’s retirement policy is due shortly, and she joins me now in the studio. Diane Maxwell: Good morning. Good morning. What are your key recommendations going to be? So super as it stands is a fantastic thing. We’re very proud of it, but it’s not sustainable in the long term unless we make some changes. So the changes that we’re looking at, you’ve either got to say how do you work on the eligibility criteria or the absolute amount that people get? So the eligibility criteria would time spent in country, age that you become eligible for super and the absolute amount is about the indexation that occurs every year and what it’s indexed to. So we’re looking at looking at raising the age of eligibility over time and talk more about that. So to what age? From 65 to what, do you think is the best? So I want to be really clear that this is a slow change. We’re looking at three scenarios. One of them would impact people who are 55 today. You’d raise it three months a year over a period of 10 years, so it’s a slower change than the last time it went up. To…? To 67. To 67. To 67. Okay. You mentioned foreigners coming into the country, their eligibility. At the moment you get super — full super — if you’ve been here for 10 years. Yeah. What would you do about that? So you get New Zealand super after 10 years, and the OECD average is 26 years, so we are an outlier. We would look at extending that out, and we’re costing out if we extended it to 25 years — being in New Zealand for 25 years before you get New Zealand super. If you look at the migration figures for the ones that have just come out, in fact, net migration is 70,000 into New Zealand. That’s a net figure. So the actual figure’s 125,000, and actually a quarter of them are New Zealanders coming back, but we do have people coming to New Zealand and we do have parents coming to New Zealand, people who are resident in New Zealand, and we need to think about in the longer term, as is a cost blowout, how we manage that. Okay, I just want to unpack some of them, because there’s a lot in there. So let’s look at the age first. You say you’ll bring it in incrementally. Well, two-thirds of the people you surveyed most recently don’t want a bar of raising the age. Yeah. So why would any political party take a policy… They won’t. …that is potentially suicidal? Look, the problem is — I do want to put these numbers out there very quickly — the number of 65-plus will double in the next 20 years. The cost of super will triple in the next 20 years. As importantly, our dependency ratios, which is the number of people of working age to retirees will go from 4.4 to 2.8— 2.4, sorry. 2.4 people of working age to every one retiree. Yeah. So we can’t pretend that this isn’t happening. Now, I have days where I think, actually, it’s going to be fine; I believe in growth and driving productivity. But then we look at how an ageing population is actually going to impact productivity. Our costs are growing faster than our GDP ever could, so part of this is where I’m getting to is people need to understand all that before they can decide what they think, otherwise it’s a very emotional reaction. But it comes back to the thing you say — the number of 65-year-olds is going to double. That’s double the voting. The voters, I know. I know. They’re doubling the voter population. We need a bipartisan— How are you going to get parties to do this? I’ve very pragmatic about this. We need a cross-government agreement. That would be fantastic. By the time it comes in as a change, it will be a no-brainer. I notice in your clip you had retirees as old people on Zimmer frames. Actually, 65- to 70-year-olds are quite a sprightly, fit bunch, you know? They’re not spending a whole lot of time on Zimmer frames, and yet we pull out pictures of really old people, but what we find is that people in their 60s and their late 60s now are really quite an active, healthy bunch. So we’re living for longer, but also we’re healthier for longer; we’re working for much longer. I want to talk about that a bit more a bit later, but what’s really important is that our current prime minister has vowed that he will resign before he increases the entitlement age for super. Can you change his mind? Look, it comes down to what the voter thinks. I’m hoping to change the voter’s mind. And get them to send him the message? If I can change the voter’s mind, I can change his mind, because that’s the point. You said we’re doing a report; I’m not doing a report. I have said to the government they’re not getting a report, and I know you have my minister on after me. Yeah. What they’re going to get, actually, are seven videos within which all our work will be embedded as digital content. The problem with doing a report, and this is what happened last time, is a group of people like me sit in a room and people who know about the stuff talk about the stuff with other people who know about the stuff, and then we peer-review each other’s stuff, and then we go home. So you want people to watch these videos and know where you’re at? It’s a circular internal conversation. This has to go out to New Zealand. This has to be understood by New Zealand, by voters, by taxpayers, and to do that we’re got to take the jargon out of it. We’ve got to make it sensible. We’ve got to make it interesting and compelling, and we’ve got to put it out there in ways that make sense. So there’ll be quick videos, interesting, quite funny, I’m hoping, that people can watch, and then within that will be embedded the research, the recommendations which are going to be in the freezer and a few others things. So it’s a very different type of work, and there’s not going to be a report. Okay. I want to then talk about some of the fairness issues, because you’ve touched on that. Yeah. So between generations and between workers, so how is raising the age of super, even if it’s incremental, fair to, say, Maori, who have a lower life expectancy. Yeah, absolutely. Or people who are physically clapped out because they’ve had such jobs in their life? So this is really really important, because actually if you talk to people about this, then their feelings change about raising the age— towards raising the age. So what I’ve learnt this year with all the work that we’ve done, and I’ve been travelling around New Zealand with my listening ears on, is that what we’ve— You know, we talk 65 to 67. That’s a really old conversation. We’ve got to stop talking 65 to 67. We need to talk 50 to 70. That’s where the conversation needs to be, because we engage with people who actually in their early 50s, cannot go too much further in terms of work. Are they going to have exemptions? So what we need to do is step back. And so we’ve got two groups here — one who, frankly, could work to 70 without a problem, but for others, 65 isn’t the issue. If they’ve got an issue at 65, they will have had an issue at 55. So if we raise the age today — and I’m not saying we’re going to — we would save 1.6 billion, so you take that 1.6 billion, and you look at where it needs to be invested for people in their early 50s. So is it a career change? Is it retraining? Is it—? What do they need? Do they need a hearing aid? What do people need throughout their 50s to take them into their 60s and their 70s? So you’re talking about stretching their work life no matter what they do now? I think for some of them, yes, and for some people, no. Will there be exceptions? And I think, you know, it is changing. We’re seeing people much healthier much longer. The other thing to remember is that jobs are changing. Many of those manual jobs that broke people aren’t— are dying out. But we need to say really clearly, take the 1.6 billion, look at the people who simply cannot work and make sure they are looked after. Look at the people who could work but just need retraining and retrain them, and then the people, frankly, who are 65 going strong, fit as a fiddle and working full-time, they don’t need Super. The thing is, though, you’re going to have more people in the workforce, so what kind of jobs are they going to be competing for, and who are they going to be competing against? Yeah. I mean, there’s a silly theory, which we should have all moved on from, that a 65-year-old working is taking a job away from an 18-year-old. They’re not. There’s lots of evidence that that simply isn’t the case. We want to grow a productive economy. So you’re saying nobody’s going to be squeezed out by making a growing percentage of the population—? I don’t believe so, but what I do believe is that the workforce — and we know this from the month we did Ageing Workforce — the workforce is not ready to employ older New Zealanders. There is huge discrimination and bias against older New Zealanders, so this is critical, because if we say we want people to work for longer, we have to have the workplace ready to accommodate them — not just accommodate them but get the best out of them. There are lots of people in their 60s who are very competent and capable and able-bodied who cannot get a job because of our attitudes towards aging, and we need to address that. All right. I want to move on to KiwiSaver. Let’s take a look at some of the figures there — 131% jump in money taken out for first homes in the past year; hardship withdrawals up 52%; a number of people signed up but not paying in grew to 1.1 million — that’s heading towards the halfway mark —and growth in membership halved since the Government nixed its start-up contribution. So if this is about numbers, give us your number for KiwiSaver. How’s it doing, 1 to 10, 10 being the best? I’d put it at an 8, actually. Look there are people who aren’t putting enough money in. As you said, half of KiwiSaver members didn’t get the full-member tax credit, and then half of that group, about 580,000, didn’t put anything in at all, so those are big numbers for not contributing. However, what I see when I travel up and down the country, and this is where you’ve got to step away from the spreadsheets, get out of Wellington and talk to people, I see people with savings they would never have otherwise had. You know, they’re people who have never had savings in the family. They have a history of never having had savings, and they have savings. But there is room for improvement, so the Government said— There’s huge room for improvement. The Government said when it was fiscally prudent, it would auto-enrol people into KiwiSaver. Is the time right now? Should we be going for it? Oh, look, I don’t know what— I’m not sure what that would achieve, cos people could still opt out, and about 75% of the workforce— sorry, the people eligible in that workforce are in. So you’re on the fence on that one? What I said the other day I stand by, which is what I’d love to see support for is that group who are joining the workforce for the first time. So their first job is their first time they’ve got an income, and basically it’s a conversation with them that says, ‘You know what? This is what an income looks like. You’re on a salary. This is your first opportunity to save and to start a savings habit.’ So that’s where I would say give them the $1000 kick-start as a first-jobber if they didn’t get it already. Make sure they’re on KiwiSaver, but give them that moment, that flush moment, where they go, ‘$1000. This is a savings vehicle. I’m working now, the beginning of my working career. I’m going to take this seriously.’ There’s a couple of things I want to run through before we get out of time. So the Super Fund, the Government stopped paying into that in 2009. Again, it said when the books were in the black, they would start paying again. We are – 1.8-billion surplus. Is it time to start repayments into that? I would say yes, it is. Yes, quite definitely. Right now spend the surplus on that? Depends. You know, previously, I think it was 1% to 2% GDP that went in before it stopped, so question is — is that the right amount? But, you know, the pre-funding, which is what’s going to kick in in 20 years’ time to try and alleviate some of the pressure point, is critical. There’s no way around it. So Super Fund also gets taxed on its earnings. Should—? I mean, that was, what, $250 million last year. I know. They were one of our biggest taxpayers one year. So should those returns be taxed? So last time I did this report, I said, ‘If you can’t start contributing to the fund, for goodness sake, stop taxing the thing,’ as a midpoint. See, to me, if you contribute, then tax; if you don’t contribute, don’t tax. We’ve got to go, but I just want to ask you quickly — is the Government going to listen to you? Are New Zealanders going to listen to me is a bigger question, because if New Zealanders listen to me, the Government will listen to me. Okay. Thanks for joining us this morning. Much appreciated. Lisa Owen: Welcome back. Well, before the break we heard from the Retirement Commissioner, Diane Maxwell, about changes she says we need to make to superannuation. But even she admits the changes are a vote loser, so will the government listen? Well, joining me now in the studio is the commerce minister, Paul Goldsmith. Good morning to you. Paul Goldsmith: Good morning. How are ya? You would have heard the Commissioner say there that she thinks retirement age should go up to 67, change it over 10 to 15 years. Sound like a good idea? Are you going to do it? No. I mean, I think... Look, I agree with a lot of what the Retirement Commissioner says around— Her focus is around trying to encourage New Zealanders to save for their retirement and think about their retirement over the long term. I don't agree with her assessment that the current regime is unsustainable. I don't think the facts back that up. If you look at what the Treasury says, we basically spend about 5% of GDP at the moment looking after our older citizens, and that's absolutely right. They should have a decent standard of living and comfort when they're old. The projections are that by 2045, so 30 years from now, that will have increased to 7% of GDP. Now, the world's not going to come to an end. We can afford that and it's important that we do. Well, she says you can't. In 2057 that's $104 billion a year with a rising, ageing population. And even you have said that we can afford it, and I'm quoting you here, as long as we keep control of other government spending. That's right. So, what are you going to cut to afford it? Well, you don't have to cut anything. I mean, what you've seen— Look, we've talked about going from 5% to 7% over the next 30 years in terms of spending on superannuation. Let's just remember that in the last six years, this government has taken total government spending from nearly 35% of GDP down to just under 30% now. So we've managed to drop government spending by 5% of GDP in six years without closing things down. We've actually continued to invest heavily in social programmes. We've increased benefits. We've done all sorts of things so... We'll have an item on later this morning which is about health where the budget is, arguably— a tight rein is kept on the health budget, and if you look at some of the figures, they say, decreasing against population — health funding, so you are keeping a tight rein. You're going to be spending money on building new prison beds. So does this mean tax cuts will be off to afford superannuation? No. I just think you need to continue on in a stable, sort of sensible, pragmatic government like we've had. And if you keep good sound control of the finances, then there's no reason to think that New Zealanders can't afford to look after their older people in their retirement. The point that I focus on as commerce minister, is around encouraging people to save through KiwiSaver. And I think one of the things— You know, the challenge that we've got is that there is a tendency for people to sign up when they start a new job and then not think about it for the next 10 years. And so the thing that worries me is that we wouldn't want a generation of New Zealanders to get to retirement, having been in KiwiSaver for 30 or 40 years— So why not auto-enrol them, then? Well, they are auto-enrolled. You can opt out if you need to, but at the moment when you start a new job, you're auto-enrolled. Yes. When you start a new job. Yeah. Sure. Super is for our vulnerable to make sure that when people retire, there is something to sustain them. And you talk about people paying into KiwiSaver. I suppose the issue is, we've seen this year that there's plenty of working poor who can't afford a roof over their head or a hot meal. How do you suggest they save for their retirement? Well, that comes back to the government doing everything it can to create an environment where the economy grows. And, boy, we've got a pretty good story on that front. I mean, the economy's grown 3½%, we're creating new jobs — 300,000 new jobs in New Zealand since the bottom of the global recession, and average wages are rising faster than inflation, so that's all good stuff and I think we've got every reason to be optimistic about New Zealand's future. Sure, we've got challenges but the best way to deal with people who are struggling is to have a good, strong economy where people can get jobs. But the thing about KiwiSaver is that it's not there to replace super, and so the problem I have with the narrative is that when people say, 'The current system is unsustainable and you're not going to have super when you retire,' I don't think that's the right message to send to people at all. The Commissioner is not saying that. She's saying you'll just get super later. You should get super later cos we can't afford to give it to you at 65. Like I'm saying, I think what we have got is sustainable. But the KiwiSaver regime is to supplement that, not to replace it. And that's why I think it is important that we encourage— I mean, there's every incentive for New Zealanders to save— But not everyone can afford KiwiSaver. Well, you know, we've got 2½ million New Zealanders who are in KiwiSaver at the moment. 1.1 million are not paying a single cent in. Yeah. Yeah. They've signed up but they're not paying... they're not saving. Yeah. Quite a number of them will be kids who have been signed up under the age of 18. 52% increase in the number of people withdrawing money from KiwiSaver due to hardship. That is evidence people cannot afford it. And that's about 100,000 out of the 2.5 million, so it's a pretty small group. And we have a bit of flexibility in KiwiSaver so that if you do have real issues, you can take the money out, and also so people can take it out and buy their first home. So you've got to have a bit of flexibility in the system. But the point remains, and where I focus as a minister, is to make sure people have got the opportunity to engage with KiwiSaver. And I pay a lot of attention to things such as ensuring people think about what kind of fund they're in, whether they're in a growth fund or a defensive one, and also paying attention to the fees they pay. And that's something that I've been working on as well, because what you don't want is people to wake up after 30 years and realise that they were in the wrong fund. They were paying high fees and the result is not as good as it could be. The other point that the Commissioner raised there was new New Zealanders who are collecting super after 10 years in the country, and she's saying that the OECD average is 26 years you have to be in the country before you can collect super. Should you change that, do you think? Well, look, I think we're a generous country and we have been always. I think— Like I say, the overall system is sustainable, but, ultimately, that's a matter for the Minister of Finance or Immigration to deal with. It's not my area directly, but I think the broader point is that you do have a robust, sustainable system. All right. Thanks for joining me this morning. Much appreciated.

In the early evening on Friday, a woman arrived at hospital, bloody stumps instead of fingers on her right hand, her left hand all but severed. "Chop wounds" is the medical term used by the doctors and nurses in remote Papua New Guinea - and for this woman the injury was the horrible consequence of her father attacking her with a machete. Irish nurse Aoife Ni Mhurchu treats a patient last year at Tari Hospital in the highlands region of Papua New Guinea. The woman sought treatment for lacerations after her husband cut her with a knife on the back of her head and both hands. Credit:Jodi Bieber/MSF "We still don't know if we've succeeded in saving her hand," said Aoife Ni Mhurchu, an Irish nurse who was called in to help for the two hour emergency surgery after the woman arrived at the Tari hospital in the southern highlands region. Violence is a cruel fact of life for many women in PNG, with a recent report estimating almost two-thirds of local women suffer physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.

John Tyndall FRS (; 2 August 1820 – 4 December 1893) was a prominent 19th-century Irish physicist. His initial scientific fame arose in the 1850s from his study of diamagnetism. Later he made discoveries in the realms of infrared radiation and the physical properties of air. Tyndall also published more than a dozen science books which brought state-of-the-art 19th century experimental physics to a wide audience. From 1853 to 1887 he was professor of physics at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. Early years and education [ edit ] Tyndall was born in Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, Ireland. His father was a local police constable, descended from Gloucestershire emigrants who settled in southeast Ireland around 1670. Tyndall attended the local schools (Ballinabranna Primary School) in County Carlow until his late teens, and was probably an assistant teacher near the end of his time there. Subjects learned at school notably included technical drawing and mathematics with some applications of those subjects to land surveying. He was hired as a draftsman by the Ordnance Survey of Ireland in his late teens in 1839, and moved to work for the Ordnance Survey for Great Britain in 1842. In the decade of the 1840s, a railroad-building boom was in progress, and Tyndall's land surveying experience was valuable and in demand by the railway companies. Between 1844 and 1847, he was lucratively employed in railway construction planning.[1][2] John Tyndall circa 1850 In 1847 Tyndall opted to become a mathematics and surveying teacher at (Queenwood College), a boarding school in Hampshire. Recalling this decision later, he wrote: "the desire to grow intellectually did not forsake me; and, when railway work slackened, I accepted in 1847 a post as master in Queenwood College."[3] Another recently arrived young teacher at Queenwood was Edward Frankland, who had previously worked as a chemical laboratory assistant for the British Geological Survey. Frankland and Tyndall became good friends. On the strength of Frankland's prior knowledge, they decided to go to Germany to further their education in science. Among other things, Frankland knew that certain German universities were ahead of any in Britain in experimental chemistry and physics. (British universities were still focused on classics and mathematics and not laboratory science.) The pair moved to Germany in summer 1848 and enrolled at the University of Marburg, attracted by the reputation of Robert Bunsen as a teacher. Tyndall studied under Bunsen for two years.[4] Perhaps more influential for Tyndall at Marburg was Professor Hermann Knoblauch, with whom Tyndall maintained communications by letter for many years afterwards. Tyndall's Marburg dissertation was a mathematical analysis of screw surfaces in 1850 (under Friedrich Ludwig Stegmann). Tyndall stayed in Germany for a further year doing research on magnetism with Knoblauch, including some months' visit at the Berlin laboratory of Knoblauch's main teacher, Heinrich Gustav Magnus. It is clear today that Bunsen and Magnus were among the very best experimental science instructors of the era. Thus, when Tyndall returned to live in England in summer 1851, he probably had as good an education in experimental science as anyone in England. Early scientific work [ edit ] Tyndall's early original work in physics was his experiments on magnetism and diamagnetic polarity, on which he worked from 1850 to 1856. His two most influential reports were the first two, co-authored with Knoblauch. One of them was entitled "The magneto-optic properties of crystals, and the relation of magnetism and diamagnetism to molecular arrangement", dated May 1850. The two described an inspired experiment, with an inspired interpretation. These and other magnetic investigations very soon made Tyndall known among the leading scientists of the day.[5] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1852. In his search for a suitable research appointment, he was able to ask the longtime editor of the leading German physics journal (Poggendorff) and other prominent men to write testimonials on his behalf. In 1853, he attained the prestigious appointment of Professor of Natural Philosophy (Physics) at the Royal Institution in London, due in no small part to the esteem his work had garnered from Michael Faraday, the leader of magnetic investigations at the Royal Institution.[6] About a decade later Tyndall was appointed the successor to the positions held by Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution on Faraday's retirement. Main scientific work [ edit ] Beginning in the late 1850s, Tyndall studied the action of radiant energy on the constituents of air, and it led him onto several lines of inquiry, and his original research results included the following: Tyndall's setup for measuring the radiant heat absorption of gases. (Click on image for a description). Tyndall explained the heat in the Earth's atmosphere in terms of the capacities of the various gases in the air to absorb radiant heat, also known as infrared radiation. His measuring device, which used thermopile technology, is an early landmark in the history of absorption spectroscopy of gases. [7] He was among the first to correctly measure the relative infrared absorptive powers of the gases nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, etc. (year 1859), after Eunice Foote in 1856. He concluded that water vapour is the strongest absorber of radiant heat in the atmosphere and is the principal gas controlling air temperature. Absorption by the other gases is not negligible but relatively small. Prior to Tyndall it was widely surmised that the Earth's atmosphere has a Greenhouse Effect, but he was the first to prove it. The proof was that water vapour strongly absorbed infrared radiation. [8] [9] Relatedly, Tyndall in 1860 was first to demonstrate and quantify that visually transparent gases are infrared emitters. [10] He was among the first to correctly measure the relative infrared absorptive powers of the gases nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, etc. (year 1859), after Eunice Foote in 1856. He concluded that water vapour is the strongest absorber of radiant heat in the atmosphere and is the principal gas controlling air temperature. Absorption by the other gases is not negligible but relatively small. Prior to Tyndall it was widely surmised that the Earth's atmosphere has a Greenhouse Effect, but he was the first to prove it. The proof was that water vapour strongly absorbed infrared radiation. Relatedly, Tyndall in 1860 was first to demonstrate and quantify that visually transparent gases are infrared emitters. He devised demonstrations that advanced the question of how radiant heat is absorbed and emitted at the molecular level. He appears to be the first person to have demonstrated experimentally that emission of heat in chemical reactions has its physical origination within the newly created molecules (1864). [11] He produced instructive demonstrations involving the incandescent conversion of infrared into visible light at the molecular level, which he called calorescence (1865), in which he used materials that are transparent to infrared and opaque to visible light or vice versa. [12] He usually referred to infrared as "radiant heat", and sometimes as "ultra-red undulations", as the word "infrared" did not start coming into use until the 1880s. His main reports of the 1860s were republished as a 450-page collection in 1872 under the title Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat . He produced instructive demonstrations involving the incandescent conversion of infrared into visible light at the molecular level, which he called calorescence (1865), in which he used materials that are transparent to infrared and opaque to visible light or vice versa. He usually referred to infrared as "radiant heat", and sometimes as "ultra-red undulations", as the word "infrared" did not start coming into use until the 1880s. His main reports of the 1860s were republished as a 450-page collection in 1872 under the title . In the investigations on radiant heat in air it had been necessary to use air from which all traces of floating dust and other particulates had been removed. [13] A very sensitive way to detect particulates is to bathe the air with intense light. The scattering of light by particulate impurities in air and other gases, and in liquids, is known today as the Tyndall Effect or Tyndall Scattering. [14] In studying this scattering during the late 1860s Tyndall was a beneficiary of recent improvements in electric-powered lights. He also had the use of good light concentrators. He developed the nephelometer and similar instruments that show properties of aerosols and colloids through concentrated light beams against a dark background and are based on exploiting the Tyndall Effect. (When combined with microscopes, the result is the ultramicroscope, which was developed later by others). A very sensitive way to detect particulates is to bathe the air with intense light. The scattering of light by particulate impurities in air and other gases, and in liquids, is known today as the Tyndall Effect or Tyndall Scattering. In studying this scattering during the late 1860s Tyndall was a beneficiary of recent improvements in electric-powered lights. He also had the use of good light concentrators. He developed the nephelometer and similar instruments that show properties of aerosols and colloids through concentrated light beams against a dark background and are based on exploiting the Tyndall Effect. (When combined with microscopes, the result is the ultramicroscope, which was developed later by others). He was the first to observe and report the phenomenon of thermophoresis in aerosols. He spotted it surrounding hot objects while investigating the Tyndall Effect with focused lightbeams in a dark room. He devised a better way to demonstrate it, and then simply reported it (1870), without investigating the physics of it in depth. [15] In radiant-heat experiments that called for much laboratory expertise in the early 1860s, he showed for a variety of readily vaporisable liquids that, molecule for molecule, the vapour form and the liquid form have essentially the same power to absorb radiant heat. [16] (In modern experiments using narrow-band spectra, some small differences are found that Tyndall's equipment was unable to get at; see e.g. absorption spectrum of H 2 O). (In modern experiments using narrow-band spectra, some small differences are found that Tyndall's equipment was unable to get at; see e.g. absorption spectrum of H O). He consolidated and enhanced the results of Desains, Forbes, Knoblauch and others demonstrating that the principal properties of visible light can be reproduced for radiant heat – namely reflection, refraction, diffraction, polarisation, depolarisation, double refraction, and rotation in a magnetic field. [17] Using his expertise about radiant heat absorption by gases, he invented a system for measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in a sample of exhaled human breath (1862, 1864). The basics of Tyndall's system is in daily use in hospitals today for monitoring patients under anaesthesia. [18] (See capnometry.) (See capnometry.) When studying the absorption of radiant heat by ozone, he came up with a demonstration that helped confirm or reaffirm that ozone is an oxygen cluster (1862).[19] Tyndall's setup for preserving broths in optically pure air. In the lab he came up with the following simple way to obtain "optically pure" air, i.e. air that has no visible signs of particulate matter. He built a square wooden box with a couple of glass windows on it. Before closing the box, he coated the inside walls and floor of the box with glycerin, which is a sticky syrup. He found that after a few days' wait the air inside the box was entirely particulate-free when examined with strong light beams through the glass windows. The various floating-matter particulates had all ended up getting stuck to the walls or settling on the sticky floor.[20] Now, in the optically pure air there were no signs of any "germs", i.e. no signs of floating micro-organisms. Tyndall sterilised some meat-broths by simply boiling them, and then compared what happened when he let these meat-broths sit in the optically pure air, and in ordinary air. The broths sitting in the optically pure air remained "sweet" (as he said) to smell and taste after many months of sitting, while the ones in ordinary air started to become putrid after a few days. This demonstration extended Louis Pasteur's earlier demonstrations that the presence of micro-organisms is a precondition for biomass decomposition. However, the next year (1876) Tyndall failed to consistently reproduce the result. Some of his supposedly heat-sterilized broths rotted in the optically pure air. From this Tyndall was led to find viable bacterial spores (endospores) in supposedly heat-sterilized broths. He discovered the broths had been contaminated with dry bacterial spores from hay in the lab. All bacteria are killed by simple boiling, except that bacteria have a spore form that can survive boiling, he correctly contended, citing research by Ferdinand Cohn. Tyndall found a way to eradicate the bacterial spores that came to be known as "Tyndallization". Tyndallization historically was the earliest known effective way to destroy bacterial spores. At the time, it affirmed the "germ theory" against a number of critics whose experimental results had been defective from the same cause. During the mid-1870s Pasteur and Tyndall were in frequent communication.[21][22] One of Tyndall's setups for showing that sound is reflected in air at the interface between air bodies of different densities. Invented a better fireman's respirator, a hood that filtered smoke and noxious gas from air (1871, 1874). [23] In the late 1860s and early 1870s he wrote an introductory book about sound propagation in air, and was a participant in a large-scale British project to develop a better foghorn. In laboratory demonstrations motivated by foghorn issues, Tyndall established that sound is partially reflected (i.e. partially bounced back like an echo) at the location where an air mass of one temperature meets another air mass of a different temperature; and more generally when a body of air contains two or more air masses of different densities or temperatures, the sound travels poorly because of reflections occurring at the interfaces between the air masses, and very poorly when many such interfaces are present. (He then argued, though inconclusively, that this is the usual main reason why the same distant sound, e.g. foghorn, can be heard stronger or fainter on different days or at different times of day.)[24] An index of 19th century scientific research journals has John Tyndall as the author of more than 147 papers in science research journals, with practically all of them dated between 1850 and 1884, which is an average of more than four papers a year over that 35-year period.[25] In his lectures at the Royal Institution Tyndall put a great value on, and was talented at producing, lively, visible demonstrations of physics concepts.[26] In one lecture, Tyndall demonstrated the propagation of light down through a stream of falling water via total internal reflection of the light. It was referred to as the "light fountain". It is historically significant today because it demonstrates the scientific foundation for modern fibre optic technology. During second half of the 20th century Tyndall was usually credited with being the first to make this demonstration. However, Jean-Daniel Colladon published a report of it in Comptes Rendus in 1842, and there's some suggestive evidence that Tyndall's knowledge of it came ultimately from Colladon and no evidence that Tyndall claimed to have originated it himself.[27] Molecular physics of radiant heat [ edit ] With this setup Tyndall observed new chemical reactions produced by high frequency light waves acting on certain vapours. The main scientific interest here from his point of view was the additional hard data it lent to the grand question of the mechanism by which molecules absorb radiant energy Tyndall was an experimenter and laboratory apparatus builder, not an abstract model builder. But in his experiments on radiation and the heat-absorptive power of gases, he had an underlying agenda to understand the physics of molecules. Tyndall said in 1879: "During nine years of labour on the subject of radiation [in the 1860s], heat and light were handled throughout by me, not as ends, but as instruments by the aid of which the mind might perchance lay hold upon the ultimate particles of matter."[28] This agenda is explicit in the title he picked for his 1872 book Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat. It is present less explicitly in the spirit of his widely read 1863 book Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion. Besides heat he also saw magnetism and sound propagation as reducible to molecular behaviours. Invisible molecular behaviours were the ultimate basis of all physical activity. With this mindset, and his experiments, he outlined an account whereby differing types of molecules have differing absorptions of infrared radiation because their molecular structures give them differing oscillating resonances. He'd gotten into the oscillating resonances idea because he'd seen that any one type of molecule has differing absorptions at differing radiant frequencies, and he was entirely persuaded that the only difference between one frequency and another is the frequency.[29] He'd also seen that the absorption behaviour of molecules is quite different from that of the atoms composing the molecules. For example, the gas nitric oxide (NO) absorbed more than a thousand times more infrared radiation than either nitrogen (N 2 ) or oxygen (O 2 ).[30] He'd also seen in several kinds of experiments that – no matter whether a gas is a weak absorber of broad-spectrum radiant heat – any gas will strongly absorb the radiant heat coming from a separate body of the same type of gas.[11] That demonstrated a kinship between the molecular mechanisms of absorption and emission. Such a kinship was also in evidence in experiments by Balfour Stewart and others, cited and extended by Tyndall, that showed with respect to broad-spectrum radiant heat that molecules that are weak absorbers are weak emitters and strong absorbers are strong emitters.[10] (For example, rock-salt is an exceptionally poor absorber of heat via radiation, and a good absorber of heat via conduction. When a plate of rock-salt is heated via conduction and let stand on an insulator, it takes an exceptionally long time to cool down; i.e., it's a poor emitter of infrared.) The kinship between absorption and emission was also consistent with some generic or abstract features of resonators.[31] The chemical decomposition of molecules by lightwaves (photochemical effect) convinced Tyndall that the resonator could not be the molecule as a whole unit; it had to be some substructure, because otherwise the photochemical effect would be impossible.[32] But he was without testable ideas as to the form of this substructure, and did not partake in speculation in print. His promotion of the molecular mindset, and his efforts to experimentally expose what molecules are, has been discussed by one historian under the title "John Tyndall, The Rhetorician of Molecularity".[33] Alpine mountaineering and glaciology [ edit ] Tyndall visited the Alps mountains in 1856 for scientific reasons and ended up becoming a pioneering mountain climber. He visited the Alps almost every summer from 1856 onward, was a member of the very first mountain-climbing team to reach the top of the Weisshorn (1861), and lead of one of the early teams to reach the top of the Matterhorn (1868). He is one the names associated with the "Golden age of alpinism" — the mid-Victorian years when the more difficult of the Alpine peaks were summited for the first time.[34] John Tyndall explored the glacial tributaries feeding Mer de Glace in 1857. General topology (left); dirt-bands in glacier (right). In the Alps, Tyndall studied glaciers, and especially glacier motion. His explanation of glacial flow brought him into dispute with others, particularly James David Forbes. Much of the early scientific work on glacier motion had been done by Forbes, but Forbes at that time didn't know of the phenomenon of regelation which was discovered a little later by Michael Faraday. Regelation played a key role in Tyndall's explanation. Forbes didn't see regelation in the same way at all. Complicating their debate, a disagreement arose publicly over who deserved to get investigator credit for what. Articulate friends of Forbes, as well as Forbes himself, thought that Forbes should get the credit for most of the good science, whereas Tyndall thought the credit should be distributed more widely. Tyndall commented: "The idea of semi-fluid motion belongs entirely to Louis Rendu; the proof of the quicker central flow belongs in part to Rendu, but almost wholly to Louis Agassiz and Forbes; the proof of the retardation of the bed belongs to Forbes alone; while the discovery of the locus of the point of maximum motion belongs, I suppose, to me."[35] When Forbes and Tyndall were in the grave, their disagreement was continued by their respective official biographers. Everyone tried to be reasonable, but agreement wasn't attained. More disappointingly, aspects of glacier motion remained not understood or not proved. Tyndall Glacier located in Chile and Tyndall Glacier in Colorado were named after John Tyndall, as is Mount Tyndall in California[36] and Mount Tyndall in Tasmania.[37] Educator [ edit ] Heat Considered as Mode of Motion, is his setup for demonstrating that air cools during the act of expanding in volume; and that air heats up during the act of compressing in volume. (Click on image for more explanation). John Tyndall's tutorial books about physics contained many illustrations. This one, from, is his setup for demonstrating that air cools during the act of expanding in volume; and that air heats up during the act of compressing in volume. (Click on image for more explanation). Besides being a scientist, John Tyndall was a science teacher and evangelist for the cause of science. He spent a significant amount of his time disseminating science to the general public. He gave hundreds of public lectures to non-specialist audiences at the Royal Institution in London.[38] When he went on a public lecture tour in the USA in 1872, large crowds of non-scientists paid fees to hear him lecture about the nature of light.[39] A typical statement of Tyndall's reputation at the time is this from a London publication in 1878: "Following the precedent set by Faraday, Professor Tyndall has succeeded not only in original investigation and in teaching science soundly and accurately, but in making it attractive.... When he lectures at the Royal Institution the theatre is crowded."[40] Tyndall said of the occupation of teacher "I do not know a higher, nobler, and more blessed calling."[41] His greatest audience was gained ultimately through his books, most of which were not written for experts or specialists. He published more than a dozen science books.[42] From the mid-1860s on, he was one of the world's most famous living physicists, due firstly to his skill and industry as a tutorialist. Most of his books were translated into German[43] and French[44] with his main tutorials staying in print in those languages for decades. As an indicator of his teaching attitude, here are his concluding remarks to the reader at the end of a 200-page tutorial book for a "youthful audience", The Forms of Water (1872): "Here, my friend, our labours close. It has been a true pleasure to me to have you at my side so long. In the sweat of our brows we have often reached the heights where our work lay, but you have been steadfast and industrious throughout, using in all possible cases your own muscles instead of relying upon mine. Here and there I have stretched an arm and helped you to a ledge, but the work of climbing has been almost exclusively your own. It is thus that I should like to teach you all things; showing you the way to profitable exertion, but leaving the exertion to you.... Our task seems plain enough, but you and I know how often we have had to wrangle resolutely with the facts to bring out their meaning. The work, however, is now done, and you are master of a fragment of that sure and certain knowledge which is founded on the faithful study of nature.... Here then we part. And should we not meet again, the memory of these days will still unite us. Give me your hand. Good bye."[45] As another indicator, here is the opening paragraph of his 350-page tutorial entitled Sound (1867): "In the following pages I have tried to render the science of acoustics interesting to all intelligent persons, including those who do not possess any special scientific culture. The subject is treated experimentally throughout, and I have endeavoured so to place each experiment before the reader that he should realise it as an actual operation." In the preface to the 3rd edition of this book, he reports that earlier editions were translated into Chinese at the expense of the Chinese government and translated into German under the supervision of Hermann von Helmholtz (a big name in the science of acoustics).[46] His first published tutorial, which was about glaciers (1860), similarly states: "The work is written with a desire to interest intelligent persons who may not possess any special scientific culture." His most widely praised tutorial, and probably his biggest seller, was the 550-page "Heat: a Mode of Motion" (1863; updated editions until 1880). It was in print for at least 50 years,[47] and is in print today. Its primary feature is, as James Clerk Maxwell said in 1871, "the doctrines of the science [of heat] are forcibly impressed on the mind by well-chosen illustrative experiments."[48] Tyndall's three longest tutorials, namely Heat (1863), Sound (1867), and Light (1873), represented state-of-the-art experimental physics at the time they were written. Much of their contents were recent major innovations in the understanding of their respective subjects, which Tyndall was the first writer to present to a wider audience. One caveat is called for about the meaning of "state of the art". The books were devoted to laboratory science and they avoided mathematics. In particular, they contain absolutely no infinitesimal calculus. Mathematical modelling using infinitesimal calculus, especially differential equations, was a component of the state-of-the-art understanding of heat, light and sound at the time. Demarcation of science from religion [ edit ] Vanity Fair, 1872 Tyndall caricatured as a preacher in the magazine, 1872 The majority of the progressive and innovative British physicists of Tyndall's generation were conservative and orthodox on matters of religion. That includes for example James Joule, Balfour Stewart, James Clerk Maxwell, George Gabriel Stokes and William Thomson – all names investigating heat or light contemporaneously with Tyndall. These conservatives believed, and sought to strengthen the basis for believing, that religion and science were consistent and harmonious with each other. Tyndall, however, was a member of a club that vocally supported Darwin's theory of evolution and sought to strengthen the barrier, or separation, between religion and science. The most prominent member of this club was the anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley. Tyndall first met Huxley in 1851 and the two had a lifelong friendship. Chemist Edward Frankland and mathematician Thomas Archer Hirst, both of whom Tyndall had known since before going to university in Germany, were members too. Others included the social philosopher Herbert Spencer. Though not nearly so prominent as Huxley in controversy over philosophical problems, Tyndall played his part in communicating to the educated public what he thought were the virtues of having a clear separation between science (knowledge & rationality) and religion (faith & spirituality).[49] As the elected president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874, he gave a long keynote speech at the Association's annual meeting held that year in Belfast. The speech gave a favourable account of the history of evolutionary theories, mentioning Darwin's name favourably more than 20 times, and concluded by asserting that religious sentiment should not be permitted to "intrude on the region of knowledge, over which it holds no command". This was a hot topic. The newspapers carried the report of it on their front pages – in the British Isles, North America, even the European Continent – and many critiques of it appeared soon after. The attention and scrutiny increased the friends of the evolutionists' philosophical position, and brought it closer to mainstream ascendancy.[50] In Rome the Pope in 1864 decreed that it was an error that "reason is the ultimate standard by which man can and ought to arrive at knowledge" and an error that "divine revelation is imperfect" in the Bible – and anyone maintaining those errors was to be "anathematized" – and in 1888 decreed as follows: "The fundamental doctrine of rationalism is the supremacy of the human reason, which, refusing due submission to the divine and eternal reason, proclaims its own independence.... A doctrine of such character is most hurtful both to individuals and to the State.... It follows that it is quite unlawful to demand, to defend, or to grant, unconditional [or promiscuous] freedom of thought, speech, writing, or religion."[51] Those principles and Tyndall's principles were profound enemies. Luckily for Tyndall he didn't need to get into a contest with them in Britain, nor in most other parts of the world. Even in Italy, Huxley and Darwin were awarded honorary medals and most of the Italian governing class was hostile to the papacy.[52] But in Ireland during Tyndall's lifetime the majority of the population grew increasingly doctrinaire and vigorous in its Roman Catholicism and also grew stronger politically. It would have been a waste of time for Tyndall to debate the Irish Catholics, but between 1886 and 1893 Tyndall was active in the debate in England about whether to give the Catholics of Ireland more freedom to go their own way. Like the great majority of Irish-born scientists of the 19th century he opposed the Irish Home Rule Movement. He had ardent views about it, which were published in newspapers and pamphlets.[53] For example, in an opinion piece in The Times on 27 December 1890 he saw priests and Catholicism as "the heart and soul of this movement" and wrote that placing the non-Catholic minority under the dominion of "the priestly horde" would be "an unspeakable crime".[54] He tried unsuccessfully to get the UK's premier scientific society to denounce the Irish Home Rule proposal as contrary to the interests of science.[55] In several essays included in his book Fragments of Science for Unscientific People, Tyndall attempted to dissuade people from believing in the potential effectiveness of prayers. At the same time, though, he was not broadly anti-religious.[56][57] Many of his readers interpret Tyndall to be a confirmed agnostic,[58][59][60][61][62][63][64] though he never explicitly declared himself to be so.[56][57] The following statement from Tyndall is an example of Tyndall's agnostic mindset, made in 1867, and reiterated in 1878: "The phenomena of matter and force come within our intellectual range... but behind, and above, and around us the real mystery of the universe lies unsolved, and, as far as we are concerned, is incapable of solution.... Let us lower our heads, and acknowledge our ignorance, priest and philosopher, one and all."[56] Private life [ edit ] A memorial to John Tyndall above Belalp in the Swiss Alps. Tyndall did not marry until age 55. His bride, Louisa Hamilton, was the 30-year-old daughter of a member of parliament (Lord Claud Hamilton, M.P.). The following year, 1877, they built a summer chalet in the Swiss Alps. Before getting married Tyndall had been living for many years in an upstairs apartment at the Royal Institution and continued living there after marriage until 1885 when a move was made to a house near Haslemere 45 miles southwest of London. The marriage was a happy one and without children. He retired from the Royal Institution at age 66 having complaints of ill health. Tyndall became financially well-off from sales of his popular books and fees from his lectures (but there is no evidence that he owned commercial patents). For many years he got non-trivial payments for being a part-time scientific advisor to a couple of quasi-governmental agencies and partly donated the payments to charity. His successful lecture tour of the United States in 1872 netted him a substantial amount of dollars, all of which he promptly donated to a trustee for fostering science in America.[65] Late in life his money donations went most visibly to the Irish Unionist political cause.[66] When he died, his wealth was £22,122.[67] For comparison's sake, the income of a police constable in London was about £80 per year at the time.[68] Death [ edit ] In his last years Tyndall often took chloral hydrate to treat his insomnia. When bedridden and ailing, he died from an accidental overdose[69] of this drug in 1893 at the age of 73, and was buried at Haslemere.[70] The overdose was administered by his wife Louisa. “My darling,” said Tyndall when he realized what had happened, “you have killed your John.” [71] Afterwards, Tyndall's wife took possession of his papers and assigned herself supervisor of an official biography of him. She dragged her feet on the project, however, and it was still unfinished when she died in 1940 aged 95.[72] The book eventually appeared in 1945, written by A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, whom Louisa Tyndall had authorised shortly before her death. John Tyndall's books [ edit ] See also [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] Sources [ edit ]

He's a "nice guy," she's "a wild child"; will they ever make it work?! That's the question at the core of Love, a new comedy-adjacent series from Judd Apatow and writers-slash-real married couple Paul Rust and Lesley Arfin. Aspiring writer Gus (Rust) and adrift radio producer Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) repeatedly and hesitantly weave into and out of each other's lives, as if trying to determine whether they're looking at a life raft or an anchor that'll drag them into the depths of their worst selves. Rating 2.5 It's not an uninteresting premise. The problem is that Love just takes way too long to get to a place that makes you realize why Gus and Mickey's relationship merits its own television series. Early on, it meanders just as aimlessly as Gus and Mickey. It moves so slowly that it almost feels like watching their emotional horrorshow in real time, which sounds audacious until you consider that its first four episodes span a combined 142 minutes of screen time. If I weren't committed to watching all 10 episodes of Love for this review, I would have tapped out after the second episode — and that's a shame, because the back half of the series is so much stronger than the early episodes that it's actually shocking. So to make sense of the confusing bundle of insecurities that is Netflix's latest original series, let's get into the good, the bad, and the "wait, what?" of Love. The good: Addiction is incredibly difficult to portray. As Mickey, Gillian Jacobs digs in deep. In Love's shapeless first few episodes, Jacobs's Mickey is by far the more interesting character to watch, even if her constant cursing left me — a New Jersey native whose own mouth tends to run NC-17 — feeling exhausted by the end of the series premiere. The character is a clear proxy for Arfin, who turned her frank "Dear Diary" column for Vice into an equally frank book that discussed her heroin addiction; she's now been sober for a decade. Playing Mickey affords Jacobs the opportunity to stretch in all sorts of unflattering directions, and she rises to the occasion with obvious relish. And once Love peels back Mickey's protective layer of disdain to get to the addict underneath, she's a lot easier to understand. Addiction is tricky to portray accurately; it's even trickier to portray both accurately and comedically. Working through self-destructive valleys to achieve lasting sobriety is an excruciating, maddening, constant process. Thus, it's a huge challenge to depict addiction on television shows, which depend on the audience connecting to characters in some way or another. But that's not to say it can't be done: CBS's Mom, for example, has found a way to tackle this tricky balance — and on a weekly multi-camera sitcom — to both devastating and hilarious effect. Very often, Mickey is a tough character to swallow. But it makes perfect sense that she's unstable, erratic, selfish, and hungry for validation in the context of her addictions. So while it takes some time for Love to fulfill its potential, the moments when Jacobs gets to rip into what drives Mickey — and what keeps her stumbling backward — are truly great. The bad: Love takes its sweet time to get anywhere particularly interesting Television shows that assume their audience will binge-watch several episodes at once walk a very shaky line. On the one hand, they can lean into a slower, maybe more satisfying burn like few other mediums can. On the other hand, they risk devoting too much time to various characters and stories, just because they can. So I get it, Love. You had 10 episodes to fill, and Netflix didn't restrict their running time, so you took that freedom and ran with it. But assuming that just because people have the opportunity to binge-watch, they'll stick with your show for a while — no matter what — is a dangerous trap. Airing on Netflix gives you more breathing room and flexibility, but it should in no way stop you from producing compelling, tightly edited work. TV episode runtimes are fluctuating now more than ever, thanks to streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon, but the standard episode length for any show that's not a drama is still around 30 minutes at most. (On a show that airs with commercials — basically anything that's not on premium cable — episodes usually top out around 22 minutes.) All but two episodes of Love run at least that long, and a handful run longer. Assuming that just because people have the opportunity to binge-watch, they'll stick with your show for a while — no matter what — is a dangerous trap It's one thing if you can justify a longer runtime with crucial character work, or a particularly funny bit. But on Love, those extra minutes hang like extra weight the characters have to drag around. Without any purpose, their banter is just kind of ... there. Maybe Love should have looked to its Netflix peer Master of None for an example of how to balance extra room with smart editing. In its first season, the Aziz Ansari comedy could have easily pushed the boundaries of the 30-minute episode, but kept every episode under that mark. At the recent Television Critics Association winter press tour, Ansari's co-creator Alan Yang even said that their "Mornings" episode — a highly ambitious collection of moments spread over a couple's first year living together — was originally 52 minutes long, or about twice as long as the final cut. As much as I loved "Mornings," a loose 52 minutes of that material very likely would have been a slog. That Love slacks off on editing isn't particularly surprising, given that Apatow has a co-creator credit. His direction often yields projects that are two-thirds great and one-third superfluous, from 2009's Funny People to last summer's Trainwreck with Amy Schumer. At the same TCA winter press tour, Apatow got defensive when questioned about Love's 40-minute pilot, saying it's really the show's only longer episode — but with three other installments surpassing 36 minutes, that's just not true. And so Love doesn't really click into gear until its fifth episode, after laying over two and a half hours of groundwork. In "The Date," Mickey resets her sober clock to "zero," and Gus goes on a disastrous date with her roommate, Bertie (a completely delightful Claudia O'Doherty). From that point on, every episode is noticeably more focused, and therefore, way more effective as a chapter in a love story. The "wait, what?": Outside of Mickey, Love isn't sure where to direct your sympathy Naturally, Love would like you to feel at least a little sympathetic toward both Mickey and Gus, since they're the main characters and all. But you can feel the show struggling to define both characters before that fifth and crucial episode, and in the meantime, it's just about impossible to know how the series itself views them. Gus is very simply presented as a standard, somewhat dorky nice guy. He's less of an overt jerk than the egomaniacs Mickey usually goes for, but he's certainly got his own emotionally manipulative tendencies, and it's not clear until somewhere around the seventh episode whether the show realizes that or not. Episode six serves as another weird interlude, sympathy-wise, as it sees Mickey going on a bender with actor and comedian Andy Dick, playing himself. In "Andy," he and Mickey get trashed together, and as they come down, he confesses that he believes drinking has destroyed his life from the ground up. Dick has had very messy, publicly documented addiction issues, and his heart-to-heart with Mickey certainly feels like an honest, significant moment. But it's muddled by a vague story about going out with Vince Vaughn that "probably" ended in Dick "getting gropey" — an eyebrow-raising detail in the context of Dick's real-life, alcohol-influenced encounters, some of which resulted in sexual assault lawsuits as recently as 2012. It's difficult to know exactly what the show thinks of Dick in this moment, but if you're aware of the real-world accusations that've been against him, this tossed-off allusion to his "gropey" tendencies is even harder to understand. The verdict: Love — both the show and the concept — is a promising mess I've rarely been as frustrated by a TV show as I was while watching Love. I could tell it was trying to appeal to me — a 20-something writer who lives in Los Angeles — but all it did was remind me that this portrayal of Los Angeles can get insular and self-indulgent, fast. Most annoyingly, as the later episodes of the season eventually revealed, there was an incisive and witty show hidden all along beneath the sludge of its opening few chapters. In fact, Love's first four episodes are so overstuffed with bland filler that episodes two, three, and four could've been cut altogether, and the show could've skipped right from the pilot with "The Date" without the plot losing much importance. The show's saving grace is that the far more interesting end of season one is a promising sign for season two, which Netflix ordered months before the show even premiered. If there's one piece of writing advice that's stuck with me, it's the one delivered by a college professor who chopped three introductory paragraphs off a paper and told me I should do that with everything I write: "It's just clearing your throat before you get to the good stuff." I couldn't get that idea out of my head while watching Love; it just kept clearing its throat, over and over again, until it finally realized what it wanted to say.

Four hours after three suicide bombers killed at least 41 people and wounded hundreds more at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport, CIA Director John Brennan said the attacks bore the grim hallmarks of ISIS and warned that the fanatically violent Islamic terrorist group wants to conduct similar large-scale attacks in the United States. “I am worried from the standpoint of an intelligence professional who looks at the capabilities of Daesh … and their determination to kill as many as people as possible and to carry out attacks abroad,” Brennan said in an exclusive interview at CIA headquarters with Yahoo News. Brennan credited effective homeland security measures and intelligence for the fact that ISIS has been unable to attack America directly — the Orlando and San Bernardino shootings were carried out by radicals inspired by ISIS but not under its control — but he believes the group will keep trying to penetrate American defenses. “You look at what happened in the Turkish airport, these were suicide vests. It’s not that difficult to actually construct and fabricate a suicide vest … so if you have a determined enemy and individuals who are not concerned about escape, that they are going into it with a sense that they are going to die, that really does complicate your strategy in terms of preventing attacks.” He added: “I’d be surprised if Daesh is not trying to carry out that kind of attack in the United States.” Daesh is an acronym for the Arabic name of the Islamic State, better known as ISIS or ISIL. Without confirming that the airport bombings were carried out by ISIS, which as of Wednesday morning had not claimed responsibility, Brennan indicated that the method of attack — suicide bombers wearing explosives-laden vests — pointed to the Islamic extremist group rather than to Kurdish nationalists, who have been waging a campaign of violence against the Turkish state. “It was a suicide bombing [which] is usually more a Daesh technique,” Brennan said. Moreover, Brennan said that ISIS has a motive to spread its terror to Turkey, which has been targeting ISIS terrorists across the border in Syria. Until recently, Ankara’s failure to police its border with Syria was a sore point with Washington. “Turkey has been cracking down on some of the transit of foreign fighters who are flowing into, as well as out of, Turkey, and they are part of part of the coalition providing support, allowing their territory to be used by coalition aircraft, so there are a lot of reasons why Daesh would want to strike back.” Brennan said ISIS is using terror tactics to “offset” tactical battlefield setbacks and losses of territory in Syria and Iraq. But he was quick to add that the wider offensive in the region and Europe and beyond is “not solely” a reaction to losses in Iraq and Syria. “Over the past year and a half they have made a more determined effort to carry out attacks abroad, and we see in terms of their plans, their preparations, the movement of people as well as propagandizing outside, exhorting, inciting a much more determined effort to carry out these external operations,” Brennan said. Slideshow: Deadly attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk >>> In the interview, Brennan was blunt about the slow nature of progress both in the fight against ISIS and efforts to push Syrian President Bashar Assad out of power. He echoed somewhat pessimistic comments he made earlier this month before the Senate Intelligence Committee about the enduring strength of ISIS as a terrorist organization with global reach. “We’ve yet to really thwart Daesh’s ability to reach beyond the Syria-Iraqi borders and put in place some of the plans and preparations to carry out attacks,” Brennan said. He added, “I am very concerned we have not had the success against Daesh in that environment as we’ve had in the core areas of Syria and Iraq.” A key prong of U.S. strategy to defeat ISIS is the removal of Assad, whom Brennan described as a “magnet” for a wide spectrum of extremist groups in Syria. But the CIA chief acknowledged that Assad is getting stronger rather than weaker. “Relative to where he was on the battlefield last year, [Assad] is in a better and stronger position [today],” he said. For that he blames Russia, which intervened last September to prop up its flagging client with thousands of troops and sophisticated weaponry. Frustrated with Moscow, Brennan said, “The Russians sometimes want their cake and eat it too as far as having the cooperation with us against terrorists but not wanting to do anything that’s going to lead to a political settlement that will have a more durable future as a far as a political agreement.” Continue reading

Your marriage has come to an end, and now that you have decided to divorce, you are in the situation of hiring a lawyer. You may even wonder if your services are necessary. Here we will explain why they are. Surely you know cases of cordial divorces and on good terms, and other catastrophic. In addition to the personality of those involved, this also has to do with the expertise of the lawyers in charge. In general, the less you need to go to court, the less painful and faster the divorce is. But anyway, even when you and your spouse have agreed to divorce, it is advisable that both have legal advice. And this is because, beyond the emotional consequences that lead to the dissolution of the marriage bond, there are also legal aspects that cannot be ignored. A lawyer specialized in divorces will know how to guide you through this process, solving the pitfalls that arise along the way. Start by asking for references to family and friends. And when you meet with the lawyers, ask about their experience and credentials. Serious lawyers will always be able to provide you with references from other clients. If you and your spouse have been able to agree on important points such as home, child custody, and joint property, it is even possible for a single lawyer to resolve minor legal issues, such as paperwork. However, if a disagreement arises between the clients, the lawyer has an ethical obligation to transfer at least one of them to another lawyer. In the most complicated divorces, as if there had been physical or verbal abuse, infidelity or addictions, it is essential to have the services of a lawyer, especially to protect children Division of property The more property you and your spouse jointly own the more complicated this process will be. Washington is a community property state. By these statutes, all goods acquired during the marriage, including those made in the name of an individual, are seen as belonging to both parties. In the case of divorce, this means that everything can be divided between you and your spouse equitably. The assets will be distributed so that each party leaves in relatively equal conditions. Custody of the child One factor that often causes problems in a divorce is custody of the child. You and your spouse will have to solve these problems. When children come into play, things often heat up and mess up. The use of an experienced divorce lawyer in these cases can be a great benefit. Not only can it help calm tense situations, but a professional can fight to secure their rights as a parent, protect their guardianship, claim custody, visitation, and much more. Child support If there are children involved in your divorce, child support may also come into play. These payments are designed to provide ongoing care for minor children and to cover food, clothing, housing, education and other needs. In general, the party with the most nights will receive payments from the other party. How do you choose a good family lawyer? The first thing to look for is the lawyer’s experience in this field. Experience is always a degree. An experienced lawyer knows the repercussions that a certain decision or action can have, knows the family judges, which foot they hobble and which should be the most appropriate strategy to apply in the case in question, knows the casuistry, the details, and their solutions The second thing to keep in mind is to have “chemistry” with the lawyer. “That you understand and that you understand. This is fundamental. Without trust, the thing does not work.

Most of the technology inside the headset is common across all of the manufacturers, but ASUS has worked hard to make its offering unique where it can. For instance, the company used a polygonal-art covering for the visor, ensuring that it looks much nicer than, say, Acer's View Master-esque offering. Similarly, ASUS's headset feels much lighter than its rivals' models, and the company included an antimicrobial cushion inside. The headset, like its brothers, has inside-out tracking, which uses the two front-mounted cameras to track the controllers. That makes it significantly cheaper than Vive or Rift handsets, which require additional peripherals for tracking. Before testing, my concern was that the cheaper technology would compromise the accuracy and reliability of the controllers. That concern was misplaced, and the system actually works really rather well. The controllers themselves are designed by Microsoft and clearly sail close to the style laid down by Oculus for its Touch paddles. The biggest difference is a less gaming-focused button layout, with a touchpad, Windows key and thumb stick on the main platform. Your other fingers fall naturally around the other triggers that are situated on the slender hand sticks. They scream that they can be used for business just as naturally as play, as Microsoft is wont to do with its hardware design. On the outside ring, you'll find a halo of 32 small LEDs that the headset uses to pinpoint the position of the controllers in the air. But even when pulling my hands well beyond the visor's field of view, the tracking remained pretty reliable. One of the demo titles required me to pull weapons out from over my shoulder, and the tracking remained impeccable. The funny thing is that, personally, I was concerned that these headsets would attempt to please two masters and fail for both of them. After all, the inside-out tracking wouldn't be as accurate or reliable as more expensive alternatives, and its price was too high for a casual purchase. I'm happy to admit that I was wrong and that I'm actually pretty excited for this technology, especially now that it's compatible with Steam VR games. ASUS doesn't know when its hardware will make its debut beyond the end of this year or the start of the next. Although it would be lunacy if it missed the holiday season, given that this may be many people's first attempt at buying VR gear for their homes. Either way, when it does arrive, it'll set you back €449, and you could expect it to set you back around $500-ish when US pricing is announced. Follow all the latest news from IFA 2017 here!

Increasing competition in the wireless market highlights the need for consolidation among operators, UBS Analyst John Hodulik said this morning. And an attempt at a deal between T-Mobile and Sprint may be the first domino to fall as M&A activity heats up. The U.S. wireless industry has seen an unexpected war over unlimited data plans and an accelerated race to 5G in recent months. Meanwhile, the FCC’s ongoing incentive auction of 600 MHz spectrum has straightjacketed any significant mergers and acquisitions due to its anti-collusion rules, which prevent the discussion of deals by wireless companies and broadcasters that could influence bidding in the event. Analysts said we may see a flurry of activity in the coming weeks, though, after the auction ends and as Donald Trump’s administration settles in. And an attempted merger between the nation’s third- and fourth-largest carriers may be in the offing, Hodulik said. Mobile World Congress 2019 Attend the 2-Day Executive 5G Panel Series FierceWireless is returning to Barcelona, Spain, during Mobile World Congress 2019 with a two-day Executive 5G Panel Series at the Fira Congress Hotel, conveniently located across the street from the MWC Convention Center. The panel events will take place on Feb. 25-26 and will cover 5G and The Fixed Wireless Access Opportunity, Taking 5G Indoors, and Making 5G Ubiquitous. Attendees will have the opportunity to network and hear from 5G leaders including Verizon, Vodafone, Orange, Sprint, NTT Docomo, Boingo Wireless, Qualcomm, and more over the course of two days. Secure your spot at the event today! Now is your chance to join fellow industry professionals for networking and education. Registration information and the schedule can be found on the website here. Register today “We continue to believe a Sprint/T-Mo announcement is likely given the benefits of moving from four wireless players to three and the significant synergies it would create,” Hodulik wrote in a research note. “In addition, we believe the timing is appropriate: (Sprint’s parent) SoftBank has already recovered its cost basis, turned the asset around operationally and financially, and moreover a deal would allow SoftBank to deconsolidate $30B+ in debt. SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son has already laid the political groundwork, promising to invest and create jobs in the U.S. We also note that the company has focused on strategic value rather than valuation in past acquisitions; we believe a premium here would make sense given asset scarcity and also valuation support and synergies.” A tie-up between T-Mobile and Sprint makes sense on multiple levels: It would enable the two smaller carriers to better compete with Verizon and AT&T, which claim much larger customer bases, and it would enable T-Mobile—which is thriving financially—to tap Sprint’s significant high-band spectrum assets. Such a deal would still face major hurdles, however. T-Mobile has become much more valuable in the last few years as its business has thrived, and Sprint’s precarious financial position may forestall any deal. Meanwhile, much of Sprint’s value lies in its spectrum holdings rather than its actual wireless business, further complicating any potential marriage. That possible merger isn’t the only possible tie-up that could alter the wireless landscape in coming months, of course. Comcast and Charter have made no secret of their plans to move into wireless and may be looking to partner with an existing carrier to do so. And Dish Network and Ligado Networks are aiming to put their spectrum to use by building IoT-focused networks that could be complementary to current cellular networks. T-Mobile is particularly well-positioned to take advantage of any M&A activity on the horizon, Hodulik said. “With the incentive auction wrapping up, carriers will be free to start talks for the first time in a year,” he wrote. “Over this time period, a new deregulatory administration has entered the White House and wireless competition has become extremely aggressive, setting the stage for potential M&A. While many scenarios are possible, we believe T-Mobile stands to benefit given its strong fundamentals and strategic value.”

by Lucy Peltz From America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, Britain’s economic, social and political stability was in turmoil. Against this backdrop of revolution abroad, the relations between the sexes – and their proper roles — were increasingly challenged. While the figure of the respectable female writer of sentimental novels, poetry or didactic literature had become a cultural commonplace, there was a new backlash against the literary woman asserting her views in the more ‘masculine’ genres of history and politics. The tightening of gendered boundaries can be particularly identified in the reception and troubled reputation of a new generation of political voices, including the radical Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1787, Mary Wollstonecraft was a relatively unknown writer who was running a school when she published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. This was a ‘conduct book’, one of the few genres deemed acceptable for women writers. A year later Wollstonecraft wrote Mary, A Fiction, a semi-autobiographical novel in which she created an independent female protagonist whose ‘grandeur is derived from the operations of [her] own faculties, not subjugated to opinion’. It was also in 1788 that Wollstonecraft began to write for the Analytical Review. It was in this radical newspaper, that she first declared her admiration for the controversial republican thinker, Catherine Macaulay. This happened when Wollstonecraft was reviewing the older woman’s Letters on Education, where there was a clear overlap between Macaulay’s ideas and those Wollstonecraft had published in Letters on Education, especially around the importance of parental nurture and the coeducation of girls and boys. Wollstonecraft also empathised with Macaulay’s attack on the way girls were expected to ‘counterfeit . . . weakness in order to attract the notice of the male’. And while Wollstonecraft had formerly imagined herself the ‘first of a new genus’, in 1790 she was pleased to identify Macaulay as a female role model. Her enthusiastic sense of affinity with the ageing radical is evinced in the unsolicited and bold letter that Wollstonecraft wrote to Macaulay. Madam, Now I venture to send you < blank >, with a name utterly unknown to you in the title page, it is necessary to apologise for thus intruding on you – but instead of an apology shall I tell you the truth ? You are the only female writer who I consider in opinion with respecting the rank our sex ought to attain in the world. I respect Mrs Macaulay Graham because she contends for laurels whilst most of her sex only seek for flowers. Whereas the final sentence of this letter captures the spirit of the two writers’ shared interest in promoting a new model of assertive womanhood, it is the first (now expurgated) sentence that indicates Wollstonecraft’s main excuse for writing to Macaulay without prior introduction. With this letter, we can deduce that Wollstonecraft had sent a copy of her recent publication the Vindication of the Rights of Men. This was her impassioned reply to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) which had appeared a few months before — Observations on the Reflections of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France (1790). Her letter to Macaulay thus attempted to reach out to a kindred political and intellectual woman whose own published attack on Burke’s Reflections had also just appeared. Both pamphlets reflect the feeling among radicals who had welcomed the French Revolution, in its first years. Wollstonecraft later summed up the mood when she stated that a ‘new spirit has gone forth, to organise the body-politic . . . Reason has, at last, shown her captivating face.’The Vindication was Wollstonecraft’s first major success and it moved her into the masculine terrain of political discourse. It argued in favour of a more meritocratic society and scorned the privilege and property of the aristocratic hierarchy which Burke had defended. The first edition of the pamphlet made no mention of Wolstonecraft’s name and many critics assumed it was the work of a man. The Analytical Review knew better and their critic could not resist mocking Burke on this point: ‘How deeply must it wound the feelings of a chivalrous knight . . to perceive that two of the boldest of his adversaries are women!’ For conservatives in Britain desperate to maintain the status quo the deferential relationship expected between men and women took on an increasingly politicized charge at this time at this time. In this context, the image of the empowered woman – as identified particularly in the French mob — became deeply emotive. An example of this can be seen in the satire Don Dismallo running the Literary Gauntlet.This etching was published by William Holland, a radical printseller, just one month after the publication of Burke’s Reflections. It portrays Burke in the character of Don Dismallo, the deluded knight from Don Quixote who champions chivalrous but pointless causes. The inference here is that Burke’s support for the French monarchy was just such a pointless cause. To reinforce this point, Burke is presented in a fool’s costume running the gauntlet past a line of opponents who are each armed with a cat-o’-nine-tails to punish him. On Burke’s left we can see: Helena Maria Williams, the poet, Richard Price, the Dissenting minister and polemicist, Anna Letitia Barbauld, the poet and educationalist. To Burke’s right, are: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, an MP who opposed Burke in the House of Commons, and the figures of Justice, holding out her sword, and Liberty, who turns her back on Burke to support a frail figure with a banner bearing scenes from the storming of the Bastille. To their right, are John Horne Tooke another radical MP and Catharine Macaulay. She, like the other women, wears French tricolours.The people in this print are all linked by their support for the Revolution. The women were distinguished for refuting Burke in print, or so it seemed. Williams who was noted for her sympathetic, eyewitness Letters Written in France had just published a poem in praise of the storming of the Bastille. Catharine Macaulay’s forthcoming attack on Burke’s Reflections had been announced and Barbauld, who had first opposed Burke in March1790, was assumed to be writing another refutation of his Reflections.While only a handful of the responses to Burke were by women, Don Dismallo indicates how the female political voice raised special anxieties. Horace Walpole, who shared Burke’s anti-revolutionary conservatism, dismissed them as cheap hacks who ‘spit their rage at eighteenth pence a head’. He vilified further, describing them as ‘Amazonian allies, headed by Kate Macaulay and the virago Barbaud, whom Mr Burke calls our poissardes’. By referring to Burke’s description of working-class women in the French mob — as fishwives, or the ‘furies of hell’ – Walpole’s comments reflect the conservative fear of female activism.Wollstonecraft’sappeared just a few days before Don Dismallo which explains why she is not figured in the print. According to her biographer, the Vindication received ‘extraordinary notice’, especially once it was identified as the work of a woman.At the same time, her name became associated with other leading revolutionaries who, like Tom Paine, had attacked Burke’s Reflections. She met Paine and many others through Joseph Johnson, the bookseller who was like a father figure to her. He gave weekly dinners which were a meeting place for London’s religious dissenters and political radicals. Among them were Henry Fuseli an extrovert but married artist for whom Wollstonecraft developed a desperate infatuation and eventually proposed a ménage à trois — and William Godwin – a shy and awkward philosopher who was initially irritated by the way she monopolized the conversation but would later become her husband. It was also through Johnson that Wollstonecraft met John Opie, the fashionable artist who became her life-long friend. This was his first portrait of Wollstonecraft painted in the period immediately following the Vindication. It is a sensitive and confident image of a female author, showing her distracted momentarily from her studies.With Opie’s typically dark palette we have the sense that Wollstonecraft is working late into the night. Although Fuseli had criticized her as a ‘philosophical sloven’, Wollstonecraft is shown here with the powdered hair and silk gown of a polite woman. There is no record of Wollstonecraft’s views on this portrait. But her comments on sitting for the portrait below, at about the same time are, however, revealing.She wrote to her supporter William Roscoe, stating that ‘I do not imagine that it will be a very striking likeness; but, if you do not find me in it, I will send you a more faithful sketch – a book that I am now writing, in which I myself . . . shall certainly appear, hand and heart’. This comment contains both prosaic and psychological insight. Apparently Wollstonecraft doubted Williamson’s work but, more importantly, she was did not like giving up control over her own self-representation. The book that she refers to in this letter was her The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).It would be an overstatement to call the Rights of Woman an autobiography. The work does however tackle issues of female education, identity and autonomy that had preoccupied and effected Wollstonecraft for most of her adult life. English women she argued had been forced into narrow roles within society, were denied access to education and were thereby trivialized as frivolous creatures whose purpose was only to please men. Moreover, women were complicit in their own cultural subordination through their love of sentimental novels, gossip and fashion. Advocating serious study to lift a woman from sensation to intellect, Wollstonecraft’s rallying cry was aimed at the radical reform of Britain as a whole. “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore them their lost dignity – and make them, as part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.Having renounced Christianity in 1790, Wollstonecraft’s proposals were rooted in her belief in ‘perfectibility’ – the doctrine that people can achieve perfection in their lifetime. The work was also based on a levelling principle which took its inspiration from the French Revolution. Both were contentious positions to adopt and yet the Rights of Woman was greeted with approval in 1792. That is because most reviews treated it as ‘an elaborate treatise on female education’. The Analytical Review, for one, managed to overlook the radical elements and conclude that ‘If the bulk of the great truths which this publication contains were reduced to practice the nation would be better, wiser and happier’. The only periodical to attack the Rights of Woman was the Critical Review. This Tory paper correctly identified the revolutionary ambitions and implications of Wollstonecraft’s proposals. It envisaged a world in which Wollstonecraft’s proposals were put into action and decried the social impact if women, once educated to the level of men, refused to continue their allotted duties of child care and nursing the sick. Ironically the French Revolutionary government concurred. Although Wollstonecraft had dedicated the book to the French diplomat Talleyrand, his report on education to the National Assembly in France expressed the view that women were indeed the weaker sex and should follow the ‘will of nature’ in pursuing gentler, domestic occupations.Despite its initial success, the Rights of Woman and its author would become synonymous with libertarian immorality and would soon be shunned. The reasons for this fall from grace were manifold including the reception of Wollstonecraft’s subsequent writings, the details of her private life and the increasingly repressive social and political situation. The personal details were revealed by her widower William Godwin whose Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was rushed into press four months after Wollstonecraft’s gruesome death in childbirth in 1797.Godwin, a leading radical philosopher, was grief-stricken and stayed away from Mary’s funeral writing ‘I have not the least expectation that I can ever know happiness again’. During a deep and prolonged melancholy, his one consolation was reading Wollstonecraft’s manuscripts including her unfinished novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. Within two weeks, he had begun to write her Memoirs which were published with four volumes of her posthumous works. If this was a cathartic exercise for Godwin, his inability to dissemble ruined the Wollstonecraft’s reputation for generations to come.True to his philosophical ideal that perfection could be achieved by reason alone, Godwin made no attempt to hide the scandals of her life. He shocked readers with details of how Wollstonecraft had lived out of wedlock and had a child with another man, had twice attempted suicide, had become pregnant before her marriage to Godwin and, finally, had refused religious rites on her deathbed. In focussing on her personal life and distress, Godwin aimed to present his dead wife as a ‘female Werther’ – the doomed character in Goethe’s influential novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). But in the end, Godwin’s writing is in fact more an exploration of his own feelings and the culture of sensibility than the Wollstonecraft’s political philosophy.Before her death in 1797, Wollstonecraft was the most widely read political woman in Europe. While her death had been recorded by respectful obituaries, Godwin’s Memoirs made a spectacle of her unconventional life. Describing her as having ‘sentiments as pure, as refined, and as delicate, as ever inhabited a human heart’ his principle mistake was to ask for sympathy for her plight and pose her as ‘the fairest source of animation and encouragement to all who would follow’. Godwin was of course deluded by grief but he also misjudged the moral climate in presenting Wollstonecraft as a role model. Those periodicals that had applauded the Rights of Woman were almost unanimous in wishing Godwin had never written such a ‘tribute’. Her posthumous reputation was also poorly served by his publication of her unfinished novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman which excuses adultery, argues for women to have control over their own property and is frank about female sexual appetites.In the end, there was no literary model which Godwin could use to represent Wollstonecraft as a subjective, intellectually assertive woman with desires in a way that did not render her contemptible. Moreover, his catalogue of her sexual exploits and political beliefs provided a rod with which to beat all radical women writers. The grand inquisitor was Reverend Richard Polwhele whose long verse-diatribe The Unsex’d Females, of 1798, was one of the most concerted critiques of late eighteenth-century feminist writers. Using the inflammatory category ‘unsex’d’, Polwhele named and attacked a band of women who, he declared, had abandoned ‘natural’ modesty, supported the introduction of democratic politics and who even went as far as to demand equality with men. Unsurprisingly, he considered Wollstonecraft the archetypal ‘unsex’d female’: See Wollstonecraft, whom no decorum checks, Arise, the intrepid champion of her sex; O’er humbled man assert the sovereign claim, And Slight the timid blush of virgin fame.

Advertisement Advertisement Over the last two months, GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has been forced to deal with various allegations against him and his campaign. With less than three months until the Republican National Convention, a new conspiracy has been released, this time against his father. Conspiracy Cruz Last month, the National Enquirer broke a story claiming that Cruz allegedly had affairs with at least five separate women, including former campaign staffers. Cruz quickly denied the allegations, which quickly faded away over the next week. Now a new claim has been released, this time targeting Cruz's father, Rafael Cruz, allegedly linking him to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, as reported by The American Intelligence Report on April 17. Advertisement WAS CRUZ’S FATHER LINKED TO THE JFK ASSASSINATION? https://t.co/acN2jQQm14 pic.twitter.com/FFwwZLuTzy — Kristan T. Harris (@KristanTHarris) April 17, 2016 The site notes that Rafael Cruz Sr. was in New Orleans and Dallas shortly before Kennedy was assassination on November 22, 1963. The elder Cruz married his first wife, Julia Ann Gara, following his graduation from the University of Texas in 1959. The couple moved from Dallas to New Orleans three years later in 1962. The claims of a conspiracy are based on a photo of alleged Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald standing with a man that the site claims is Cruz. The American Intelligence Report, via the Wayne Madsen Report, claims that Oswald hired Cubans to help distribute "Hands off Cuba" propaganda in New Orleans during the summer of 1963. In a photo released by the site, Oswald can be seen standing next to a man who looks similar to Cruz. Advertisement Top Videos of the Day Going even further, the report states that a "source" confirmed that it was Rafael Cruz in the photograph, and that "there is a strong reason to believe that Cruz was associated with Central Intelligence Agency’s anti-Castro operations." Conspiracy debunked There have been hundreds of conspiracy theories about the murder of President Kennedy, with some having legitimate claims to contradict the findings of the Warren Commission. However, while some theories deserve investigation, others have been proven false, or to be downright silly. Snopes: Was Ted Cruz's Father Linked to the JFK Assassination?: Disreputable web site posits a link between Te... https://t.co/qEIuNjPEl2 — Skeptic Network (@SkepNet) April 17, 2016 Just hours after the report of Cruz being linked to Oswald and the JFK assassination, Snopes released their findings. Advertisement Describing the Wayne Madsen Report as "disreputable" and a "notoriously unreliable conspiratorial," Snopes found nothing that could backup the claims made in their report. Snopes also pointed out that Cruz left the city of Dallas a year before Kennedy even made his trip to Dealey Plaza, sarcastically noting, "the conspiracy in which Cruz and Oswald were involved was so vast, they were able to predict the movements of President Kennedy several months before Kennedy himself planned them." Conclusion The idea that Sen. Cruz's father had anything to do with the plot to kill Kennedy is, at least as of press time, a conspiracy that belongs with the Umbrella man. In 1978, United States House Select Committee on Assassinations released their findings in the Kennedy assassination and concluded that "Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy," though it's highly unlikely that Cruz had anything to do with it.

Wednesday’s domestic cup match presents a unique challenge for Ottawa Fury FC, one that the club has not yet faced in 2015: speed, all over the pitch. That is the x-factor that FC Edmonton will bring to the midweek cup fixture tomorrow at TD Place Stadium. While Ottawa has certainly had a positive start to its spring campaign, with four points of a possible nine to start its season, it hasn’t faced teams with the kind of game-breaking speed and athleticism that the Eddies possess. With the likes of Sainey Nyassi and Lance Laing on either flank, Eddies boss Colin Miller is sticking to his tried-and-true method of fielding athletes. Eddie Edward and Kareem Moses offer similar displays of athleticism on the flanks of FCE’s back four, and can pose offensive threats occasionally. When Fury FC and FCE met in the first round of last season’s Amway Canadian Championship, everybody highlighted a strong second leg at home as the key to the Eddies’ victory. Of equal importance, however, was their ability to draw the first leg in Ottawa. Miller was visibly ecstatic after the 0-0 result in last year’s first leg, and will likely be looking to do the same thing tactics-wise on Wednesday. Expect FCE to play defensively, but use the flanks heavily on counters. Young Hanson Boakai may slot into an Eddies lineup he has yet to truly crack in 2015. The 18 year-old’s slicing runs and quick feet gave Ottawa nightmares in last year’s Canadian Championship fixtures. Things are certainly trending in the right direction in Edmonton; Sainey Nyassi picked up NASL Player-of-the-Week honours this past weekend, and the Eddies rallied to defeat the visiting Ft. Lauderdale Strikers 3-2. English midfielder Ritchie Jones has two goals in three games, and appears to have settled into the game on this side of the pond. From a Fury FC perspective, this year’s edition of the Amway Canadian Championship represents a shot at not only redemption from last season’s first round exit, but a chance to earn the respect of potential MLS opponents. FC Edmonton managed to put a scare into the Montreal Impact in last year’s second round, and Marc Dos Santos’ side will be hoping to do the same if they can advance past the Eddies. Romuald Peiser will likely carry the captain’s armband again on Wednesday, as skipper Richie Ryan was ruled out for at least the next three weeks by Dos Santos with a leg injury. Julian De Guzman will likely run the ship from the midfield as he did superbly on Saturday in the club’s 1-0 win over Minnesota. All things considered, the odds are surely in Ottawa’s favour for Wednesday’s fixture; the club has grown substantially more than FCE in the year since the two last played, Fury FC are at home, and crucially, are on an extra day of rest. However, I would be foolish to bet against a Colin Miller side on the road, on what is shaping up to be a rainy, sloppy affair in front of a small crowd due to the Ottawa Senators NHL playoff game. In England there is a saying which asks, “But can they do it on a rainy night at Stoke?” In NASL circles, however, it should say, “But can they break down a Colin Miller team defending for its life on the road?” Everything about this fixture is telling me that Fury FC will pound the Eddies and all but solidify a place in the second round. Then I remember Colin Miller’s 4-1-4-1, or deep-lying 4-4-2, and realize what a monumental task breaking down FCE’s defence may prove to be. Prediction: 0-0 draw Photo courtesy of Ottawa Fury FC. Liked it? Take a second to support NSXI on Patreon! Carlos Verde Carlos is a first-year journalism student at Carleton University in Ottawa. A former communications intern with Fury FC, he supports Newcastle United and Sevilla. In terms of his writing, he is a Yaya Touré – big, physical, yet oh so dainty. Like this: Like Loading...

When members of the opposition are trying to outflank Netanyahu on the right, even the IDF seems like a saner alternative to Israeli politicians. By Yoni Mendel “A nation in uniform,” “an army that has a state,” “a democracy of army bases.” In academic research of the critical kind, Israel is understood as a militaristic state. This, among other things, is what the sociologist Baruch Kimmerling meant when he said, “whether we want it or not — we are a clearly militaristic society, and this militarism is also a central principle around which Israeli society is organized.” Uri Ben Eliezer wrote about Israel as a “nation in uniform,” researching the military characteristics of Israeli society. Oren Barak analyzed the development of “Israeli security networks” and their social and political role in the country. In other words, much academic research has been dedicated to the topic. It is not difficult to find quotes from Israeli policymakers, most of them (unsurprisingly) Jewish men who served in high-ranking positions in the IDF — men who straddle the line between military and civil society in Israel. This begins with IDF Chief of Staff Yigal Yadin’s declaration in the 1940s that “the Israeli civilian is a soldier with 11 months leave” and continues with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks that Israel must “forever live by the sword.” Lapid vs. Abbas and the security establishment On the backdrop of Israel’s militarism, it is important to say a few things about the security establishment. This past month has seen a great number of examples that show how this establishment, and specifically the IDF, has begun to be viewed by the Israeli leadership — both by the government as well as by both the coalition and what, for some reason, is deemed the “opposition” in the Knesset — as outdated, irrelevant, ignorant, and deceitful. This began with the violence and stabbings in October 2015. The propagandists of the Israeli government announced openly that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ incitement was behind the uprising. The demagoguery quickly became the prominent message, with the media quickly adopting the words “incitement” and “Abbas” as inseparable. Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Hotovely went as far as to organize a training for senior members of the ministry focusing on “incitement,” which included talks by researchers who support her worldview. The same happened with Culture Minister Miri Regev, Energy and Water Resources Yuval Steinitz, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, and others. What did the “opposition” do in the meanwhile? It isn’t hard to guess. MK Yair Lapid fell into line, stating that “Abbas is continuing with his crusade of incitement,” adding his own bit of militarism and claiming that “anyone who harms us will bear responsible for the outcome.” On the other hand, we have an organization called the IDF’s Intelligence Corps. As opposed to the incitement of the right and the left, the corps released the following two professional assessments: “Abbas is not inciting in order to harm Israelis,” and “Abbas is considered a very moderating force in Judea and Samaria.” How did Education Minister Naftali Bennett respond? “The security establishment is wrong.” This continued with the banning of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement; a movement that has the support of one-third of Muslims in Israel, that has a network of schools and restaurants, and which has its own newspaper. This movement, we must remember, has existed in a reality in which “Israel’s Arab citizens have been discriminated against since 1948 because they are Arab,” according to the government-appointed Or Commission. The cabinet, however, decided to outlaw the group, as opposed to outlawing discrimination and those who support it. After all, some of them hold high-ranking positions among the Israeli leadership. There is no reason to provide a stage for the remarks coming from government ministers, who all sang the same tune against the Islamic Movement. Not a single one of them actually knows the movement, aside from a few choice quotes provided by a “research organization” whose ideas match up with theirs. But let’s see what those in the “opposition” thought about the decision. There, the leader of the “opposition,” Isaac Herzog, described the ban as the “first step in protecting democracy.” His co-leader, Tzipi Livni, added that she supports the ban. When asked why she didn’t take the same step when she was justice minister, she responded that the Shin Bet didn’t support it. Had Livni maintained the same security-oriented stance she held back then, she would discover that the Shin Bet actually did publish a response to the ban. It turns out that the Shin Bet expressed doubts about banning the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement. In fact, the Shin Bet believed that doing so will only lead to more unrest among Israel’s Arab citizens. This is not a new position. It was presented to the government in 2014, when the Shin Bet wrote that “there is no intelligence that connects the Islamic Movement to real violent activity,” and that it opposes banning the group. Netanyahu, Livni, Herzog and others didn’t seem to care. Yair Lapid did not disappoint and praised the move. Jewish Home vs. the IDF The same phenomenon continued and reached the Israeli street. Over the last few days, as the violence in the West Bank has continued to flare up, and protests have begun to take place primarily in refugee camps, the same voices could be heard from the benches of the government. But there is no real need to give a stage to the extreme remarks by government ministers about what is happening in the West Bank. We must give the right to respond to the representatives of the “oppositional right” of Herzog-Livni-Lapid, and only after that give the IDF a chance to respond. The representatives of the Zionist Union have already proposed it all. Herzog has already proposed that Netanyahu’s coalition put the West Bank on lockdown, place all the Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem under closure, and consider calling up a large number of reserve soldiers. Chairman of the Council of Judea and Samaria (Yesha Council) Avi Ro’e, saw eye to eye with Herzog, stating that the opposition head would “do a much better job at dealing with Palestinian terror.” As opposed to the hawkish views of Herzog, Netanyahu, Livni, Shaked, Lapid, Regev, Bennett and others, the IDF Central Command provided a different perspective. The commander of the Central Command stated that the terror attacks are not the result of institutionalized incitement or work of a terrorist organization, but rather part of a “limited uprising… and the attacks are inspired by other attacks, not by a centralized leadership… the terrorists are young, desperate, and frustrated, some of them are unemployed.” According to Central Command, the violence can be stopped through easing restrictions: “economic relief, including providing more permits to work inside Israel, providing building permits in Area C, releasing prisoners, and approving the supply of weapons to the Palestinian Authority.” The government’s disdain for the IDF recommendations was difficult to hide. MK Moti Yogev (Jewish Home) toed the line of his friends from the right, stating that the army’s assessments were, put simply, “irresponsible.” The swan song? It is difficult to belittle the phenomenon we see before our eyes. It is also difficult to write these things, when considering the military’s involvement in our daily lives — an organization that deals with security, that has a clear preference for men, that excludes Arab citizens and is seen by many of them as the enemy for fighting their brothers — is a process that Israeli civil society must limit, not to mention refrain from celebrating. The latest phenomenon reveals that both the army and the security establishment know that while the gut thinking of people like Netanyahu and Herzog might win elections, it is not good for the citizens of Israel. Palestinians live under occupation, and there is nobody who knows this better than the power hat occupies them: the commanders of the Central Command, which has been in control of the West Bank since 1967. They know that Palestinians in Al-Fawar refugee camp are desperate and frustrated. We are also coming to terms with the political shallowness in which we are living: an extreme right-wing government that wins the support of the “opposition” for every violent step it takes, even if the price is rejecting assessments by state security experts. These are members of Knesset who think only of the next primaries, of how to give the public what it wants, as long as it is viewed as “relevant.” In reality, this translates to thinking of solutions that promote Netanyahu’s theory of living by the sword. Perhaps this is the swan song. No one can promise that this kind of thinking will not eventually permeate the IDF. Perhaps soon the army will not abide solely by security-based thinking — which in itself is limited and limiting — but will start taking cues from the legislative and executive branches of the government. Forget for a moment about stopping the attacks, forget about granting freedom to a nation we have been controlling for nearly 50 years. What’s really important is whether the candidate will be viewed as more nationalist than the nationalists. The recipe is simple, and the dish is being cooked up daily in the Israeli political kitchen: for everything Netanyahu says, say something even more extreme. And whenever the army says something, just oppose it and say that the security establishment is wrong and misleading the public. Woe to us that we are resigned to put our trust in human rights, clearheaded thinking, and restraint in the hands of an army. An organization that is, first and foremost, dedicated to security. But as the Jewish sages said, “in a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.” And today, more than ever, it seems that both the opposition and coalition are bereft of decent people. Yoni Mendel is the projects manager of the Mediterranean Unit at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and co-editor of the book review section of the Journal of Levantine Studies (JLS). This article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call, where he is a blogger. Read it here.

The 48 Laws of Power (1998) is the first book by American author Robert Greene.[1] The book is a bestseller,[2][3] selling over 1.2 million copies in the United States,[4] and is popular with prison inmates and celebrities.[4][5][6][7][8][9] Background [ edit ] Greene initially formulated some of the ideas in The 48 Laws of Power while working as a writer in Hollywood and concluding that today's power elite shared similar traits with powerful figures throughout history.[5] In 1995, Greene worked as a writer at Fabrica, an art and media school, and met a book packager named Joost Elffers.[4][8] Greene pitched a book about power to Elffers and six months later, Elffers requested that Greene write a treatment.[4] Although Greene was unhappy in his current job, he was comfortable and saw the time needed to write a proper book proposal as too risky.[10] However, at the time Greene was rereading his favorite biography about Julius Caesar and took inspiration from Caesar's decision to cross the Rubicon River and fight Pompey, thus inciting the Great Roman Civil War.[10] Greene wrote the treatment, which later became The 48 Laws of Power.[10] He would note this as the turning point of his life.[10] Reception [ edit ] The 48 Laws of Power has sold over 1.2 million copies in the United States and has been translated into 24 languages.[4] Fast Company called the book a "mega cult classic", and The Los Angeles Times noted that The 48 Laws of Power turned Greene into a "cult hero with the hip-hop set, Hollywood elite and prison inmates alike".[4][11] The 48 Laws of Power has been reported to be much requested in American prison libraries,[5][12] and has been studied as a first year text in some US colleges.[13][14] Rapper 50 Cent stated that he related to the book "immediately", and approached Greene with the prospect of a potential collaboration, which would later become The 50th Law, another New York Times bestseller.[15] Busta Rhymes used The 48 Laws of Power to deal with problematic movie producers.[8] DJ Premier has a tattoo inspired from Law #5, "Reputation is the cornerstone of power", on his arm[6] and DJ Calvin Harris has an "Enter with boldness" arm tattoo based on Law #28.[16] The 48 Laws of Power has also been mentioned in songs by UGK, Jay Z, Kanye West, and Drake.[6][17][18] [19] Dov Charney, founder and former CEO of American Apparel, frequently quoted the laws during board meetings, has given friends and employees copies of the book, and appointed Greene to the board of American Apparel.[4] Former Cuban President Fidel Castro is also claimed by the book's author to have read the book.[4] The book has been banned by several US prisons.[20] Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer said that Greene's so-called laws are based on isolated examples, and not on solid research.[5] Kirkus Reviews said Greene offers no evidence to support his world view, Greene's laws contradict each other, and the book is "simply nonsense".[21] Newsweek also points out ways the laws contradict each other and says "Intending the opposite, Greene has actually produced one of the best arguments since the New Testament for humility and obscurity."[22] Director magazine notes "some of Greene's 'laws' seem contradictory" and the work is "plodding and didactic".[23]

We’ve all seen them before. Walk three blocks in Boston and you’re bound to encounter megaphone-wielding “Men of God” telling us we’re all going to Hell. But one little girl in Salem took exceptional offense to a proselytizing loudmouth attempting to ruin the sacred institution of Salem Halloween, so she told him what we’ve all secretly dreamed of saying. I know I wrote yesterday about two Boston kids telling their Mom to shut up and how wrong it was, But I’m willing to make an exception to the “respect your elders” rule when said elder is telling everyone within earshot they’re going to Hell unless they subscribe to his very specific brand of Christianity. And in Salem on Halloween, no less! Let the Pagans have their day of fun in the unholiest of lands, and leave the sermons on every other sidewalk in Boston like you normally do. [h/t Reddit]

Lounès Matoub (Kabyle: Lwennas Meɛṭub; Berber languages: ⵍⵡⴻⵏⵏⴰⵙ ⵎⴻⵄⵜⵓⴱ or ⵎⵄⵟⵓⴱ ⵍⵓⵏⵉⵙ; Arabic: معطوب لونّاس‎ (January 24, 1956 – June 25, 1998)) was a famous Algerian Berber singer, poet, thinker and mandole player who was a prominent advocate of the Berber cause, human rights and secularism in Algeria throughout his life. Matoub was reviled by most of the Muslim population in Algeria for his Laïc political and atheist views and the alleged blasphemy of some songs (like Allahu Akbar) along with his militant advocacy of Berber rights,[1] so he was unpopular among both warring parties during the Algerian Civil War. His assassination, in circumstances which remain unclear, provoked violent riots in Kabylie. Berber Algerians still accuse the Algerian government of killing Matoub Lounès, but some of the Algerian government's figures accused the Islamist terrorists of this crime. Early life [ edit ] Lounes Matoub was born on 24 January 1956 in the village of Taourirt Moussa in Algerian Kabylie. When he turned 9, he built his first guitar from an empty car oil can and composed his first songs as a teenager. His political and cultural identity was awakened by armed confrontations between Kabyles and government forces in 1963–1964. In 1968, the Algerian government introduced a policy of Arabization in the education system. Matoub reacted by skipping school; his memoirs recall: "We had to give up Berber and reject French. I said no! I played hooky in all my Arabic classes. Every class that I missed was an act of resistance, a slice of liberty conquered. My rejection was voluntary and purposeful."[2] By 1975, he had abandoned formal education. He left for France in search of work. Musical career [ edit ] Lounès Matoub with his Algerian mandole in 1975. He was an Algerian singer of Kabyle music. Matoub began his singing career under the patronage of the established singer Idir. He recorded his first album Ay Izem (The Lion) in 1978; it was a phenomenal success. He went on to record 36 albums, as well as writing songs for other artists. He gave his first major concert in April 1980, at the time of the "Berber Spring" protest movement in Kabylie. His music mixes Algerian Andalucian Chaabi orchestration with politicized Berber (Tamazight) lyrics, and covers a broad variety of topics including the Berber cause, democracy, freedom, religion, Islamism, love, exile, memory, history, peace and human rights. Unlike the Amazigh poet/musicians who preceded him, Matoub's style was direct and confrontational. Fellow musician Mohamed Alileche recalls: He went straight. He criticized a president. He mentioned the president of Algeria right in the beginning of his career. He goes black and white. He was very, very clear in his songs, and he is the only singer – not only Algeria, but in all of North Africa – who criticized the government and criticized clearly. He would never get afraid.[3] Despite being banned from Algerian radio and television during his life, Matoub became, and remains, an extremely popular Kabyle singer. Political events [ edit ] During the riots in October 1988, Matoub was shot five times by a policeman[citation needed] and left for dead. He was hospitalised for two years, requiring 17 surgeries, including the insertion of an artificial sacrum and the contraction of his leg by 5 cm. His 1989 album L'Ironie du sort describes his long convalescence. During the civil war, which began in 1992, the Islamist Armed Islamic Group (GIA) added his name to a hitlist of artists and intellectuals. Matoub remained in Algeria. On 25 September 1994, he was abducted. He was held for two weeks in a GIA mountain stronghold and condemned to death. He was released following a large public demonstration in which his supporters threatened "total war" on the Islamists. In 1994, he published his autobiography entitled Rebelle (Paris: Stock, 1995). Prizes [ edit ] Matoub Lounès (in the middle with the white shirt) with his friends, notably Mourad Nechab, known to be his favorite, and family in Kabylie On December 6, 1994, Matoub received Le Prix de la Mémoire ("The Memorial Prize") from Mrs. Danielle Mitterrand, President of La Fondation France Libertés ("The French Liberties Foundation") in Paris; the prize recognises those who devote themselves to recording and preserving the impact of political events on ordinary lives. ("The Memorial Prize") from Mrs. Danielle Mitterrand, President of ("The French Liberties Foundation") in Paris; the prize recognises those who devote themselves to recording and preserving the impact of political events on ordinary lives. On March 22, 1995, the Canadian journalists' organisation SCIJ awarded him Le Prix de la Liberté d'Expression ("The Prize for Freedom of Expression"). ("The Prize for Freedom of Expression"). On December 19, 1995, he received Le Prix Tahar Djaout ("The Tahar Djaout Prize") from La Fondation Nourredine Abba ("The Nourredine Abba Foundation") at UNESCO headquarters in Paris; the prize is named for an Algerian writer who was assassinated by Islamists in 1993. Assassination and aftermath [ edit ] On 25 June 1998, at approximately 12:30 pm local time, Matoub's car was stopped at a roadblock while he was driving along a mountainous road in eastern Algeria. The car was fired upon by masked gunmen, killing Matoub and wounding his wife, Nadia Matoub, and two sisters-in-law. Within hours, news of Matoub's murder had spread throughout Kabylie and thousands of angry mourners gathered around the hospital where his body was taken. The crowd shouted "Pouvoir, Assassin" ("Government, Assassins"). A week of violent riots followed his death. Young demonstrators clashed with riot police and attacked government property. On 28 June 1998 tens of thousands people attended his funeral in front of his house in his native village. He was buried between a fig tree and a cherry tree, opposite the house he was born in. Matoub's family played a scathing parody of the Algerian national anthem, which came from Matoub's final album Lettre ouverte aux... ("Open letter to..."), released after his death (Gold-Disc). Matoub's assassination occurred a week before a law excluding languages other than Arabic from public life was due to come into effect. Matoub had been an outspoken critic of this law. On 30 June 1998 the GIA claimed responsibility for the assassination of Lounes Matoub. On the first anniversary of his death, a general strike was observed in Kabyle's capital Tizi-Ouzou and thousands protested on the streets. Protesters broke into the town's court room and tore down its scales of justice. The BBC reported that many Berber activists blamed the government for Matoub's death and rejected its claim that Islamists were responsible. Around 20,000 people marched in Tizi-Ouzou to mark the third anniversary of Matoub's assassination. His family have created a foundation in his name to promote his memory, throw light on the circumstances of his assassination and promote the values he defended. Two streets in France have been named after Matoub, one in Grenoble and one in Lyon. On 18 July 2011, two men, Malik Madjnoun and Abdelhakim Chenoui, were convicted of killing Matoub, and sentenced to 12 years in jail. The one-day trial was suspended twice when Matoub's family interrupted to insist the suspects were innocent.[4] As Madjnoun and Chenoui had been in prison awaiting trial since 1999, they were released in 2012, having served their time.[5] Political views of Matoub [ edit ] Matoub Lounès spoke out in favour of federalism, secularism, democracy, freedom of speech, the recognition of Berber as a national and official language, and the decentralization of public schools in Algeria. For a period of time, he was a member of the Rally for Culture and Democracy, an opposition party in Algeria, although he had left the party by the time of his death.

Patent Troll That Accused Company Of 'Hate Crime' For Fighting Back Now Asking Court To Silence Company from the you-fail-at-law dept For the foregoing reasons, Lumen View respectfully requests that the Court grant its Motion for a Protective Order ... to protect Lumen View’s confidential information and (1) prohibiting FTB and its attorney from further communicating with representatives of the media regarding confidential settlement information, or posting such information on social media, (2) require FTB and counsel to take necessary steps to remove from the internet its prior media disclosures, blog posts or press releases that disseminate this protected information, and (3) to grant any other such relief as this Court deems just and proper. Wasserbauer's request has a couple of problems. First, his idea of what constitutes "confidential information" is pretty broad—it includes not just the $50,000 demand but Wasserbauer's own simple admission about who is behind Lumen View. Second, FindTheBest never signed any kind of non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement.... [....] The rule that Wasserbauer cites, Rule 408 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, is not actually the legal gag order he apparently imagines it to be. The rule doesn't say anything about talking to the media. It simply states that offers of compromise or settlement are often not admissible as evidence in court. We recently wrote about how patent troll Lumen View's lawyer Damian Wasserbauer had gone off the deep end, claiming that an entrepreneur who was fighting back against the trolling was guilty of a hate crime . Kevin O'Connor, the CEO of FindTheBest (FTB) didn't want to give in to a patent troll shakedown, turning down a $50,000 settlement offer and pledging to spend $1 million fighting Lumen View just on principle. That's resulted in a countersuit, arguing that Lumen View is engaged in extortion and racketeering. Wasserbauer (who, frankly, appears to be a bit out of his league here) doesn't seem to be handling the publicity very well. He's asking the court for an astoundingly broad gag order against O'Connor, including saying he needs to try toprior disclosures.Yeah, good luck with that...Of course, as Joe Mullin notes over at Ars Technica, the entire basis of Wasserbauer's argument appears to be a significant misreading of the law:And we won't even get into the laughable claims by Wasserbauer that there's no First Amendment worries in such a gag order, because that's clearly false. It seems clear that Wasserbauer isn't happy with the media attention -- most trolls aren't -- especially since it's been fairly effective in highlighting the way Lumen View's trolling works. Trolls often get away with what they do because it's too much effort to even figure out how to fight back. If someone else is doing it publicly, it lowers the barrier tremendously. Filed Under: damian wasserbauer, gag order, kevin o'connor, patent trolls, patents Companies: findthebest, lumen view

No timetable on pulling jets, says Defence Minister Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan Canada will not pull its CF-18 fighter jets from the combat mission in Iraq and Syria if it degrades the overall capability of the coalition forces, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan told SiriusXM in an interview on “Everything in Political with Evan Solomon.” “The decision for that will be based on my conversations with my counterparts, making sure that the coalition’s capability is not reduced,” the defence minister said. He said he is working on various options and will announce a decision soon. This stands in contrast to what the Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion said on Monday, when he announced that the combat mission would end imminently. “It will be a matter of weeks not months,” Dion told reporters. Dion also said pulling out Canada’s jets would be done in conjunction with Canada’s allies and rolled out alongside a new plan, but he never hinted that the defining issue would be “capability.” Sajjan also said he is considering leaving Canada’s air refueling and reconnaissance aircraft as part of the mission. The Conservative defence critic James Bezan responded to Sajjan, demanding to see the details of the Liberal plan for the military mission. He believes there have been contradictory messages sent about the nature of the mission and whether the Liberal government will eventually put more boots on the ground. “I’m looking forward to seeing exactly what the plan is because that wasn’t apparent,” says Bezan. “The defence minister is using language that’s quite different from what we’re hearing from the Prime Minister,” he said. Bezan said the Prime Minister has said in the House that Canada needs to fight ISIS in its own territory. “Does that mean boots on the ground?” he asked. The defence minister joined Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Pearson airport on Thursday night to greet the incoming Syrian refugees, but Sajjan says the government is trying to avoid using military bases to house more refugees. “We are trying to, hopefully, not even be able to use military bases, but if it’s needed, we are available for that purpose,” the minister said. Today the threat level from ISIS was raised in Geneva after suspects related to the Paris attacks are being tracked by police, but the defence minister maintains his previous statement that Canada has nothing to fear from ISIS. “Canada should not fear ISIS, and I am firm believer in that,” he said. “Canadians should feel safe but that does not mean that we are going to eliminate all threats, but we have security forces that 24/7 are looking out for these types of threats,” he said. Sajjan also said his most important job is protecting the mental health of the men and women in the Canadian military. The comments came in a wide ranging interview ton “Everything is Political” that covered new money in the budget for the military, sexual misconduct in the forces, and Canada’s support for the Afghan police force. The entire interview can be heard by clicking on the link below or by subscribing to the “Everything is Political podcast here..

Panhandler Lawsuit Kim Pindak stands outside Chicago's federal courthouse after the first day of testimony in a civil lawsuit involving him and and other panhandlers Monday, Jan. 25, 2016, in Chicago. He and another panhandler brought a suit that alleges they lost up to $10 a day because authorities bar them from begging in Daley Plaza, a popular public square in the city. The trial that started today is a rare instance of jurors being asked to decide the issue of panhandlers' rights. (AP Photo/Michael Tarm) CHICAGO -- A federal civil trial pitting two panhandlers against one of the nation's largest sheriff's departments got underway Monday, in a case stemming from a lawsuit that alleges the men were improperly stopped from begging at a popular Chicago square. Kim Pindak and Sam Phillips claim they lost up to $10 a day over four years because Cook County sheriff's deputies told them repeatedly they couldn't ask for money at Daley Plaza, best known for its iconic Chicago sculpture by Pablo Picasso. Pindak, 63, said during a break in the trial that he was forced to supplement his income by begging because all but $30 of his $750-a-month federal disability assistance went toward paying living expenses at an assisted-living facility. "A lot of people see us as scam artists," he said. "I don't live in the Waldorf Astoria. I'm just trying to survive." Wearing a sports jacket his attorneys bought him for the trial, Pindak said over lunch that he never imagined he would one day be a subject in a rare panhandler case to go before a federal jury. He quickly added, "I never thought I would be a panhandler, either." He said he once aspired to become a physician before suffering debilitating mental illness. The extra income from panhandling allows him to buy an occasional coffee, a pair of shoes or sometimes books about his favorite hobby -- chess. Back in the courtroom, he often looked uneasy as he sat at a table for the plaintiffs. The judge, Rebecca Pallmeyer, has presided over some of the most notable cases in recent Illinois history, including the corruption trial of former Illinois Gov. George Ryan. In recent years, courts nationwide have increasingly agreed that asking passers-by for money is constitutionally protected free speech under the First Amendment, said Rebecca Glenberg, a civil liberties lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. A man panhandles on the street Monday, Jan. 25, 2016, in Chicago. A lawsuit brought by panhandlers who say they lose up to $10 a day because authorities bar them from a popular public square in Chicago is set to go to trial. The trial that starts Monday in Chicago federal court is a rare instance of jurors being asked to decide the issue of panhandlers' rights. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) The case in Chicago will examine whether lax or nonexistent training for sheriff's deputies regarding panhandlers' rights contributed to violations of Pindak's and Phillips' rights. Pallmeyer already ruled that the men's rights were violated, at least in some instances. Jurors will be asked to come up with a dollar amount for any damages determined. Pindak calculates he may have lost up to $10 a day for four days a week over a four-year period because of the sheriff's department; that could add up to more than $8,000. Adele Nicholas, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told jurors during her opening statement Monday that the case is about the responsibility law enforcement agencies have to adequately train their staffs about citizens' rights. She said money wasn't the point. "This case is about something bigger," she said. "It's about responsible police practices." But an attorney defending the sheriff's office, Patrick Russell, told jurors there was never a concerted effort to bar panhandlers from Daley Plaza. At worst, he said, panhandlers like Pindak might have been asked to "move along" from time to time. He said they were not arrested, detained or prosecuted. "So I ask you: What are the damages?" he said. Another attorney for the plaintiffs, Mark Weinberg, has filed other panhandler lawsuits. One, a 2001 class-action suit, argued it was illegal for Chicago to define panhandling as disorderly conduct. That suit was settled, entitling 5,000 panhandlers to payouts of $400 each. City ordinance prohibits aggressive panhandling tactics. But no one accuses Pindak or Phillips of that. Phillips said he simply holds a sign while panhandling that reads, "I'm Just Hungry."

Look in your bathroom. Got a loofah in there? Ever used one? You know, like a sea sponge? Now think about it being used for building houses. Huh!? This is exactly what’s happening right now in Paraguay. Elsa Aldivar, a social activist teamed up with Pedro Padros, an industrial engineer to make this happen. It didn’t happen right away. Aldivar was searching for a way to give women an earth friendly way to generate income, and encouraged them to cultivate loofah, that grows easily there, to be dried out and made into cosmetic products. But they found that a certain portion weren’t up to export standards, and 30% of the quality material was being shaved off while making mats, slippers, insoles and the cosmetic tools. [social_buttons]So she wondered what use/value could be created from these. Material for house walls and roofs, she decided. After extensive trial and error, she and Padros devised the perfect combination of loofah, recycled plastic, and things like cotton netting and corn husks, all of which would otherwise be disposed of. At less than $3 a square meter, competitive with wood. But beyond being merely equivalent in price, it exceeds wood’s capabilities, with the ability to take dye during manufacture, making painting unnecessary. They are flexible, able to better withstand disaster situations. If they do fall, there’s less chance of injury, as they’re lighter weight. And they can be recycled, repeatedly. And with care in initial selection of plastics, when they can no longer be remade into housing material, they can be used as biofuel. While totally viable as a building material in many environments far outside rural Paraguay, their ease of use, and ability to work with local, familiar materials like adobe makes them ideal for use locally, providing both shelter and income. They are the winners of the Rolex Award for Enterprise, and with this, they’ll be building three demonstration homes and have a promotion center, where both urban and rural people will be able to learn about this innovative material. Readers: What else are you seeing out there to make super efficient use of resources, for building and otherwise? What other, lesser known options are being developed that we should know about? Article & image source: Rolex Awards for Enterprise

Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF Asura is a hack and slash that puts you in the role of a dangerous demon fighting an evil maharaja. Inspired by Indian myths and full of intense combat, it’s this week’s Indie Pick. I’m a big fan of rougue-lites and classic dungeon crawling. I picked up Brutal last year and still take time for the occasional bit of questing. Asura scratches the same itch. Our editor in chief, Stephen Totilo, looked at it at E3 2016, enjoying the game while literally sitting on the show floor. It has snappy combat, fun magical spells, and constantly reshuffles level design to offer new configurations to explore each time you load it up. One of the things I like the most about Asura is how it takes mythology and uses it to inspire these gameplay systems. It’s not just lore. And the designers at Ogre Head Studios took their story and integrated it nicely into the mechanics. “When a demon dies he does not stay dead,” designer Zainuddin Fahad told Kotaku. “Instead he reincarnates. With a new skill tree in this case.” Advertisement Fahad and his co-workers come from an initial background in mobile game design, which quickly took off in India. They found themselves working on project they lacked passion for. Inspired by games like Diablo and Age of Empires, they set off to create their own games. The result was Asura. “Our [goal] was to bring a much needed change in the Indian games industry,” Fahad said. “We have rich culture and heritage which are personal to us. We wanted to fuse this with game design and mechanics.” Asura might not revolutionize the hack and slash genre but it’s definitely held my attention. There’s always allure to finding a new treasure chest or slaying a difficult boss. It’s crafted with care. In this day and age, with bloated storefronts and rushed games, that makes all the difference in the world. Advertisement You can play Asura on PC, Mac, and Linux. Each week, I show off a new, affordable indie game using the tag “Heather’s Indie Pick.” Advertisement

What does "open source" mean? With open source software being so prevalent in our lives (Android, WordPress, Mozilla Firefox are almost fixtures), you would think that it would be simple enough to find somebody who can explain the term around here. A quick survey around the office turned out dismal results, however. A fellow intern told me "open source software" simply meant that the source code is open for view; another insisted that it means the software is free to use. I personally had the impression that it meant the code was crowd sourced and created by volunteer developers--the idea was immediately shot down by the other two. So what, really, does "open source" mean? In an attempt to understand and clarify some of the misconceptions surrounding the term, I contacted the Open Source Initiative (OSI), a foundation that oversees the use of the term and approves open source licenses. I talked to Karl Fogel, the author of the book "Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project" and a board member of OSI. I put to the test a few common beliefs about open source software: Open source only means that the source is open to view. False Under the OSI's Open Source Definition, software that is open source must also allow unrestricted redistribution and modifications. Certain licenses are also copyleft, which means that any derived work must also be distributed under the same license--So check your licenses carefully before proceeding. This misconception is due to a direct interpretation of the word "open source", says Fogel. Its actual meaning is supposed to invoke the idea of 'freedom'--the liberty to change and recreate--but finding the correct lexicon was difficult. "It is a problem inherent in the English Language. In Spanish and French you have the word 'Libre', but there is no such equivalent in English, " Fogel says. Open source software is free. True This point is tricky, because it depends on what your definition of "free" is, and who you talk to. As mentioned above, the OSI's definition of open source software is “free” in the sense of giving freedom to those who use it. So in the most common way of thinking, where "free" means no upfront cost to use, modify, or distribute, the answer is yes: the software is free. That said, if you lean towards economics and like to think about the long-term costs of open source software, you may have brought to mind the old adage "There's no such thing as a free lunch". (Or, as it is commonly used to compare with open source, a Free Beer.) Open source software rarely comes with the technical support and warranty services that proprietary software provides. So while you may not pay upfront now, the expenses for the software maintenance and upkeep may accumulate and charge you in the future. On a smaller note, if you follow the Free Software Foundation (FSF)'s official four-point definition for free software, you may also have a problem with equating open source with free. FSF's definition, though similar, is not technically the same as OSI's definition for open source software. Indeed, on FSF's front page there is a link to an article by Richard Stallman, FSF's founder, with the title "Why Open Source Software misses the point of Free Software". The rift in the definitions causes a few select cases where the licenses are open source but not technically free software licenses. One such example is the NASA Open Source Agreement. In response to questions about this technicality, Fogel stresses that they are, in actuality, small differences. "Although the wording of two definitions is different, their meaning is basically the same," he says. He points out that the two organizations often informally synchronize the types of licenses accepted so that the vast majority of open source licenses are also free licenses. It is "extremely rare" to find main stream software that falls under a license approved by one organization and not the other. In the end, it all depends on what you think is "free" and there are many arguments for each. But for all general purposes and definitions, open source software is free. Open source software cannot be commercial. False "All open source software is commercial software by definition," Fogel explains, " There's also the point that 'commercial' does not mean 'proprietary'. " Companies may not be able to sell open source software, but they can sell services and products related to it. For instance, they can offer a premium version of the software that has additional features. An example of this is RedHat Linux Enterprise, a premium version of the widely available CentOS and Fedora. It offers binaries and support services on top of the original software, and is purchased through a subscription plan. Open source software is crowd sourced and vice versa. False Crowd sourcing refers to the process of using a large group of public contributors to complete a task. While there are hundreds of crowd sourced projects that are open source as well (such as Wikipedia), the two terms are not interchangeable. In crowd sourcing, the original group that initiated the project is allowed to keep intellectual property and distribution rights--restrictions which should not be present in an open source project. Yelp.com is one such example: Members of the public contribute by posting reviews on the site, but they are not allowed to, say, redistribute Yelp's content. Nonetheless, Fogel believes that crowd sourcing is most sustainable when it operates on open source materials. "Then everyone in the crowd has equal claim to the results of the collective labor -- no one has a monopoly," he says.

Westminster Presbyterian Church on Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis plans to demolish an eight-story glassy office building adjacent to its historic site and expand the church’s footprint in its place. The building project, contingent upon church board approval next week, is part of a larger campaign focused on positioning the church for its next 100 years in downtown Minneapolis. The campaign also will raise up to $7 million for charity and community services, including about $4 million for new affordable housing in the city, said senior pastor Tim Hart-Andersen. Westminster is seeking city approval for a two-story, 41,000-square-foot modern expansion with large plazas and gardens lining the highly trafficked street. Early cost estimates put the project at $27 million to $28 million. The church in 2012 purchased the property at 1221 Nicollet Mall for $8.7 million. At that time, the 3,100-member Westminster announced that it planned to eventually raze the blue-hued office building to make way for a church expansion. The original portion of Westminster was built in 1897 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Westminster plans to use the addition for worship and gathering space, a multipurpose room, classrooms, youth spaces, church offices and community partnership space, according to documents filed with the city. Westminster Presbyterian Church on Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis plans to demolish the 9-story office tower it owns next door and replace it with a two-story, 41,000 square foot church expansion. “We want to be a part of this city’s growth for years to come,” Hart-Andersen said. “One of our principles is to be ecologically responsible as it is our understanding of caring for creation. There will be a green roof that will water the plaza and provide water for the bathrooms. “We really want it to be an example of how you can have a green and sustainable building in the heart of the city.” Community partners About 25 percent of the new space is designed to host community partners, including one of two possible nonprofits, Hart-Anderson said. Declining to name the organizations they are having conversations with, Hart-Andersen did say it will probably either be a nonprofit that provides services for early intervention for babies and toddlers who have suffered trauma or an urban school. In addition to the expansion, Westminster plans to renovate 30,000 square feet of its existing interior to provide new libraries and co-working space. The modern-style expansion will use more natural materials like limestone, zinc-coated copper and a stucco-like plaster. Westminster plans to start demolition on the 1980s-era office building April 15. Plans also include a two-story underground parking garage for more than 230 vehicles. The church would get rid of its existing surface parking lot. Instead, there will be large outdoor plazas and gardens on both the Nicollet Mall and Marquette Avenue sides. “We want this to be a beautiful and inspiring space,” Hart-Andersen said. “It’s part of a larger effort to position the church for the next 100 years.” Coincides with mall project The construction coincides with a high-profile makeover of Nicollet Mall, the city’s signature street. Westminster has been in communication with the Nicollet Mall redevelopment team to make sure construction timing and designs don’t conflict with one another. “A lot of thought went into how the Nicollet Mall redesign would fit in with its space,” said Steve Cramer, president and chief executive of the Minneapolis Downtown Council. “Apart from the aesthetic value of their project, which I see as high, their investment in the community is hugely important. So an A-plus from the Downtown Council’s perspective.” The plans are on the agenda of the city’s Planning Commission Committee of the Whole for March 17 — the same day the church board will vote on the project. Westminster has committed to building 150 affordable housing units in or near downtown Minneapolis over five years. It contributed to The Rose, a recent affordable housing complex at the corner of Portland and Franklin avenues. The church is working with Aeon to construct another 90 units near Hennepin County Medical Center in Downtown East. $4M Affordable housing will be built in the program 41,000 Square footage of the modern expansion $28M Estimated total cost of the whole project If approved, Westminster will launch its fundraising campaign on April 10. The construction is expected to take two years, with a targeted completion date of Easter 2018. “We’ve had a generous response from our congregation already,” Hart-Andersen said. “People are really energized and excited by this.”

​"We wear white to unite against any attempts by the Trump administration to roll back the incredible progress women have made in the last century, and we will continue to support the advancement of all women," Frankel said via a statement released to Vox. "We will not go back." Frankel is the Beyonce of the party. She's the chair of the House Democratic Women's Working Group. A group of 66 Democratic women members, many of whom she has mobilised for the movement and are expected to take part in this fashion statement. When they are not syncing up their wardrobes, the group advocates for pay equality, reproductive health services and paid sick and family leave. Since the inauguration they have been particularly vocal about some of Trump's "achievements" that have wound back women's progress. Just three days after taking office he reinstated the "global gag rule", also known as the Mexican City policy. A Reagan-era piece of legislation that prevents financial aid from the US funding non-government organisations that provide or advise on abortions and access to contraception for about 27 million women in developing countries. That executive order came just hours after the 44th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court ruling that recognises abortion as a constitutional right. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was, for a politician, refreshingly enthusiastic about the latest campaign by her party's working group. "​Tonight, our Democratic #WomenWearWhite in support of women's rights - in spite of a POTUS who doesn't!," she tweeted.

Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill has submitted draft legislation to her state legislature’s General Administration and Elections Committee that would establish a system of automatic voter registration through its Department of Motor Vehicles offices. The legislation is modeled after similar laws that recently went on the books in Oregon and California. Including Connecticut, automatic voter registration bills have been proposed in fifteen states in 2016 alone. In 2015, 20 states, plus Washington, DC and the federal government, considered automatic voter registration legislation. In New Jersey, Chris Christie vetoed an AVR bill that passed both houses of the state legislature, although activists in the state have vowed to put the proposal on the statewide ballot and pass it via referendum. Oregon began implementing its automatic voter registration system last month, and has already reported that its rate of voter registration has skyrocketed. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “Oregon officials reported that based on preliminary data, Oregon Motor Voter added 4,300 people to the rolls in the first six days – more than double the previous average number of registered voters per month.” According to Secretary Merrill’s office, “The data provided to the DMV would populate a voter registration form. An ‘e-signature’ program would permit an electronic signature to be collected so the client could certify citizenship; accept or refuse to register to vote or affiliate with a party. The registration applications would be electronically transmitted to the Registrars of Voters.” The inclusion of an e-signature in their process underscores the fact that, in response to one of the most commonly-raised objections to the policy, automatic voter registration really won’t lead to a large number of undocumented immigrants being added to the voter rolls. As I’ve written before, there aren’t any good arguments against automatic voter registration, although there are a few bad ones. The United States remains one of the world’s only modern democracies that places the burden of registering to vote on the citizen, as opposed to the state. This hurdle keeps millions of Americans who would otherwise vote from casting ballots every year. To that point, a recent report from Demos projected that automatic voter registration via the DMV would add 312,000 people to the state’s voter rolls. The margin of victory in the state’s 2014 gubernatorial race was just over 27,000 votes.

The 11-time winner is calling time on his F1 career after Sunday's Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, and was centre stage at a special team farewell party hosted in the Yas Marina paddock on Saturday night. After deputy team principal Claire Williams paid tribute to the contribution he had made since joining the outfit in 2014, she announced that as well as presents of a photo album and specially-commissioned cartoon illustrating his career, he will be given his Brazilian GP chassis. The car featured a unique rebranding from title sponsor Martini, which replaced its name with 'Massa' on the car. Right time As Massa struggled to hold back the tears after being told of the gift, he told team members, rival drivers, media, friends and family that he had huge gratitude for everything Williams had done for him but was even more convinced he was quitting F1 at the right time. "I am so proud of my career, everything I passed through, difficult moments, and great moments," he said. "I think it is a good time, so I am really happy with my decision. "It is very difficult to decide or stop, because we are young and you need to decide something in the moment that you are still fit. To keep doing and keep working for very long, I am really sure I chose the right moment to do that." Final emotions Massa secured a slot in Q3 in his final qualifying – and he was clearly delighted about the opportunity to show well after ending up 10th on the grid. "Definitely it is a good thing, so definitely it is always good to be quick," he explained. "It is my last qualifying so it is good to finish with a good performance. "I had quite a good qualifying. I am happy. So my last real qualifying of my career in F1, and it is always good to be quick. "I am not stopping because of the speed. I am stopping because of other things – it is a nice gift. I am concentrated and ready for the race tomorrow and hopefully things will be even better tomorrow." Massa insisted he was heading into Sunday's race with no feelings of sadness at all, having been overwhelmed by the support he has received in recent weeks. "I am not sad. I am happy for my decision anyway," he said. "It is a really good feeling to finish your last qualifying but with a good performance, a good performance gives you happiness and I am happy for my job today and I hope we can have a good race tomorrow. "We know the car we have. The race will not be easy, so many cars around that are more competitive than ours. But I will try everything I can for the best of my car." Don’t miss our Abu Dhabi GP video preview…

Review Article 1Department of Molecular Physiology, Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster, Schlossplatz 8, 48143 Münster, Germany 2Unit for Drug Discovery, Department of Parasitology, Institute of Biomedical Science, University of São Paulo, 1374 Prof. Lineu Prestes Avenue, 05508-000 São Paulo, SP, Brazil 3Bernhard-Nocht-Institute, Bernhard-Nocht-Straße 74, 20259 Hamburg, Germany Received 14 February 2014; Revised 28 May 2014; Accepted 29 May 2014; Published 15 July 2014 Academic Editor: Nongyao Sawangjaroen Copyright © 2014 Dana Ditgen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Helminths are the largest and most complex pathogens to invade and live within the human body. Since they are not able to outpace the immune system by rapid antigen variation or faster cell division or retreat into protective niches not accessible to immune effector mechanisms, their long-term survival depends on influencing and regulating the immune responses away from the mode of action most damaging to them. Immunologists have focused on the excretory and secretory products that are released by the helminths, since they can change the host environment by modulating the immune system. Here we give a brief overview of the helminth-associated immune response and the currently available helminth secretome data. We introduce some major secretome-derived immunomodulatory molecules and describe their potential mode of action. Finally, the applicability of helminth-derived therapeutic proteins in the treatment of allergic and autoimmune inflammatory disease is discussed. 1. Introduction During the last centuries living conditions in western countries changed extremely and social and economical structures shifted dramatically. As a suggested consequence of the resulting improvements in hygiene, antiparasite treatments, and the reduced exposure to pathogens and childhood infections, the occurrence of chronical inflammatory diseases and allergies increased rapidly [1, 2]. In 1989, David Strachan was the first one to link these two developments and enunciated the “Hygiene Hypothesis.” According to this thesis, the observed increases in certain inflammatory disorders were due to the decreased early-life exposure to microorganisms and other eukaryotic infectious agents including helminths [3]. Worm-like parasites that belong to unrelated phyla, namely, the plathelminthes (trematodes and cestodes) and the nematodes, were already present in early Hominidae. This long coexistence between humans and helminths must have had a fundamental impact on the constitution and regulation of the immune system [4–6]. As an advancement of the “Hygiene Hypothesis,” the “Old Friend Hypothesis” was put forward by Graham Rook. He hypothesized that numerous harmless pseudocommensals, including the helminths, were tolerated by the immune system due to their abundant presence [6]. In this way, the tolerance of helminths reduces the negative impact on the host’s fitness, since it decreases the tissue damage or other fitness costs [8]. Recently, William Parker extended this hypothesis to the “Lost Friends Theory” or the “Biome Depletion Theory.” This theory describes the consequences of separating us from our partners in coevolution. Accordingly, the reduced pattern of exposure to microorganisms and helminths and their depletion from the human ecosystem lead to an unstable and unbalanced immune state [9]. Since the loss of components of our biome is partly responsible for epidemics of immune-related diseases such as autoimmune and allergic diseases, the most reasonable solution would be the restoration of the biome [10]. Hence exposure to helminth parasites could again establish and maintain the normal immunological balance in humans. However, colonization with intestinal helminths as immune therapy is problematic due to various physiological side effects. Furthermore, the induced immune hyporesponsiveness could affect immune reactions to concomitant infections and vaccination efficacies [4, 11]. An alternative approach therefore is to identify the immune modulatory molecules produced by helminths that can alter immune functions. 2. Helminths Infections with helminth parasites have great impact on global health and it has been estimated that at least one-third of the human population is infected with these parasites, prompting helminth infections to be termed the “Great Neglected Tropical Diseases” [4, 12]. Although highly parasitized individuals can suffer from severe pathology, helminths usually cause asymptomatic or subclinical chronic infections, with little evidence of an inflammatory response or overt tissue destruction. As such, many helminths can survive within their host for decades. About one-third of mankind in the tropics and subtropics are chronically infected with one or more helminths [4, 12]. According to the WHO, more than 1.5 billion people or 24% of the world’s population are infected with soil-transmitted infections (WHO, report 2014). The most common helminthiases of humans are caused by soil-transmitted nematodes, namely, Ascaris lumbricoides, Trichuris trichiura, and the hookworms Necator americanus and Ancylostoma duodenale, followed by schistosomiasis (blood flukes of the genus Schistosoma) and lymphatic filariasis (Wuchereria bancrofti, Brugia malayi, and Brugia timori) [13] (Table 1). According to the CDC, approximately 807–1,121 million people are infected with A. lumbricoides, 604–795 millions with whipworms, and 576–740 millions with hookworms (CDC, report 2013). Table 1: Overview of the most common human pathogenic helminths. While these helminths show a remarkable variety in their mode of life, their hosts, and life history stages, they induce a canonical host immune response pattern. 3. Helminth-Associated Immune Response The human immune system responds to the invasion of helminths into the organism differently than to bacterial or viral infections. While microbial pathogens are usually eliminated from the host with a rapid and inflammatory immune response, the immune response to helminths is less severe and has a strong regulatory character [14]. Worm infections elicit T H 2 cell responses associated with a significant production of IL-4, IL-5, IL-9, IL-13, IL-31, IL-25, and IL-10 [13, 15]. Furthermore, the worm infections are often associated with high levels of IgE, IgG1, and IgG4 and stable eosinophil and mast cell responses [16]. Eosinophils become activated in helminth-infected sites and secrete proinflammatory cationic proteins, oxygen radicals, lipids, and other mediators like cytokines. Eosinophils and mast cells release their cytotoxic products during degranulations at infected sites [17]. The release of mediators leads to blood vessel enlargement, increased mucus production, and cell contraction of smooth muscle cells [18]. It is assumed that the primary role of eosinophils lies in the defence against large organisms which cannot be phagocytosed. Eosinophils can bind to carbohydrate ligands and fixed antibodies on the parasites surface, degranulate and release their cytotoxic agents to harm the parasite [19], and then get phagocytosed by macrophages after their response [17, 18]. Within 24 h after penetration into the host organism most helminths trigger an immediate production of T H 2 cytokines [14]. The protective effect of helminths against allergy and autoimmunity strongly depends on worm species (age, state of infection, and parasite burden) [20, 21]. Individuals infected with filarial nematodes like W. bancrofti and Onchocerca volvulus or with trematodes like Schistosoma mansoni and Schistosoma japonicum develop a strong T H 2 immune response [22]. Nevertheless, three helminth stages are known, which do not induce a T H 2 response immediately after infection: the cercariae of schistosomes, the microfilarial stage of B. malayi, and the nematode Trichuris muris [14]. In case of helminth and Mycobacterium tuberculosis coinfection, a dramatic reduction of protective immune responses can be observed [22]. However, some infections with parasitic worms like Nippostrongylus brasiliensis and Toxocara canis with Mycobacterium bovis or M. tuberculosis do not lead to an impaired protective immune response [22–24]. Although allergy-associated T H 2 responses and antihelminthic T H 2 responses are very similar, they also differ as follows: (1) larger amounts of polyclonal, non-parasite-specific IgE antibodies are produced that do not cause allergic reactions and (2) during helminth infection an induction of strong inflammatory regulatory immune responses occurs [25, 26]. In worm infections the Fcε receptors on mast cells can be saturated with non-worm-specific IgE; thereby, a binding of worm-specific IgE is averted. This occupation of receptor-binding sites suppresses the immediate hypersensitivity responses and the degranulation of mast cells (IgE blocking hypothesis) [18]. The IgE blocking hypothesis is still a matter of discussion. Larson and colleagues have shown that in mice the suppression of basophil responsiveness by chronic helminth infections was found to be dependent on host IL-10 [27]. IL-10 downregulates key-IgE signaling molecules [27] causing the level of serum IgE to decrease. This in turn influences the production of IgE receptors on basophils and mast cells [28–30]. Additionally, Mitre and coworkers demonstrated that the blocking of FcER1 on mast cells and basophils by parasite-induced polyclonal IgE does not mediate the protection against atopy, since the ratio of polyclonal IgE to allergen-specific IgE is too low to saturate the receptors and to suppress degranulation of mast cells and basophils [28]. Furthermore, Larson and colleagues compared the release of histamine from basophils in helminth-infected children before and after anthelminthic drug treatment and observed the suppression of basophil responsiveness during the intestinal helminth infection. They proposed that this inhibition of basophils, which are involved in the development of T H 2 responses and function as effector cells for allergy, leads to protection against allergic diseases [31]. Helminth parasites have developed a lot of strategies to evade or modulate the host immune responses with advantages on both sides [32]. Thus, there is a shift in the T H 2 response towards immunosuppression, immunological tolerance, or modified T H 2 response [16]. In case of immunosuppression an upregulation of regulatory T cells takes place which suppresses protective T H 2 as well as inflammatory T H 1 responses. During immunological tolerance development, effector T H 2 cells enter a state of anergy and fail to develop specific T effector cells which mediate resistance. Finally, in the modified T H 2 response, downstream effects of the normal T H 2 responses are muted and result in an increase of noncomplement fixing IgG4 and IL-10 [16, 33, 34]. In case of asymptomatic parasitic infections, the concentration of the T H 2-dependent isotype IgG4 is increased. A differential stimulation of IgG4 is promoted by IL-10 which is formed at high concentrations during chronic helminth infections [18]. Furthermore, many studies have shown that these helminth-mediated T H 2 responses can also prevent the often harmful inflammatory T H 1 responses by inducing suppressive regulatory T cells which contribute to the formation of IL-10 and TGF- . Thus, helminths are able to regulate the immune responses and ensure homeostasis under various disease conditions such as autoimmune diseases, inflammations, cancer, and microbial infections [13, 15, 35]. Affected by IL-4, IL-13, and IL-21, the differentiation of alternative activated macrophages (AAMs) occurs that can inhibit the proliferation of other cells and support an increased intracellular growth of bacteria [13]. In addition to their recruitment to sites of infection and various effector functions, they also have strong anti-inflammatory properties. These are manifested by the secretion of IL-10 and TGF- and the expression of certain genes that are involved in the repair of the extracellular matrix, fibrosis, and wound healing [13, 15]. Thus, AAMs serve tissue homeostasis, act as effector cells against parasites, and downregulate the adaptive immune system [16]. In summary, chronic helminth infections result in a downregulation of proinflammatory responses, an enhanced T H 2 response, and repair mechanisms [13, 32]. Figure 1 describes the interactions in the immune response to helminths. Figure 1: Cellular interactions in the immune response against helminths. Helminth-secreted excretory/secretory (ES) products are capable of inhibiting in vitro generated dendritic cells (DCs). They can inhibit the maturation of DCs and induce the expansion of functional T regs [35, H 2 response starts with the recognition of parasitic pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) by certain pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) that are expressed on the DCs of the host [ H 2 cells. This response includes IL-4, IL-5, IL-13, and IL-10 secretion and production of IgG4 and IgE by B cells, as well as the activation of effector cells such as mast cells, eosinophils, and basophils [ H 1, T H 2, and T H 17 cells. Thus, these cells have strong anti-inflammatory properties, which are manifested by the secretion of IL-10 and TGF-β as well as the expression of additional genes [16, RI) on mast cells and basophils; this leads to an activation of these cells and a secretion of inflammatory mediators like histamine, heparin, leukotrienes, and prostaglandin D2 [38– H : T helper cells; TGF- : transforming growth factor- ; ADCC: antibody dependent cellular cytotoxicity; EDN: eosinophil derived neurotoxin; DC: dendritic cell; APC: antigen-presenting cell; T reg : regulatory T cell. Cellular interactions in the immune response against helminths. Helminth-secreted excretory/secretory (ES) products are capable of inhibitinggenerated dendritic cells (DCs). They can inhibit the maturation of DCs and induce the expansion of functional T 36 ]. The helminth-induced T2 response starts with the recognition of parasitic pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) by certain pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) that are expressed on the DCs of the host [ 13 37 ]. Through contact with the antigen, the DCs become activated, allowing them to act as antigen-presenting cells (APC) after the migration to the adjacent lymph nodes, with the ability of processing and presenting the antigen to T cells to initiate an immune response [ 16 ]. The helminth-induced host immune response is focused on the protection of the host organism and is mediated by T2 cells. This response includes IL-4, IL-5, IL-13, and IL-10 secretion and production of IgG4 and IgE by B cells, as well as the activation of effector cells such as mast cells, eosinophils, and basophils [ 35 ]. Affected by IL-4 and IL-13 occurs the differentiation of alternatively activated macrophages (AAMs) which can inhibit the proliferation of other cells like T1, T2, and T17 cells. Thus, these cells have strong anti-inflammatory properties, which are manifested by the secretion of IL-10 and TGF-as well as the expression of additional genes [ 13 32 ]. Furthermore, IL-4 and IL-13 lead to an increased contractility of smooth muscle cells and a hypersecretion of mucus for expulsion of intestinal helminths [ 38 ]. Immune complexes of IgE bind to high affinity IgE receptors (FcRI) on mast cells and basophils; this leads to an activation of these cells and a secretion of inflammatory mediators like histamine, heparin, leukotrienes, and prostaglandin D2 [ 16 40 ]. PAMPs: pathogen-associated molecular patterns; PRRs: pattern recognition receptors; ES: excretory/secretory; IL: interleukin; Ig: immunoglobulin; AAM alternatively activated macrophages; T: T helper cells; TGF-: transforming growth factor-; ADCC: antibody dependent cellular cytotoxicity; EDN: eosinophil derived neurotoxin; DC: dendritic cell; APC: antigen-presenting cell; T: regulatory T cell. 4. Therapeutical Use of Helminths Since there was such mounting evidence that helminth infections can modulate the mammalian immune response, treatment of immune dysregulatory diseases with live worms was considered to possess therapeutic capability, even though the suppression of an ongoing dysregulated immune response is probably more difficult to achieve than the prevention of its development. Because of the predicted lack of pathogenicity of certain helminth species, these were used in a series of clinical trials. For ethical reasons only individuals were treated who already suffered from immune dysregulatory diseases and in most studies the helminth dose was much lower than in natural infection [41, 42]. In the beginning, in a small trial three patients suffering from ulcerative colitis were treated with ova from the pig whipworm Trichuris suis [43]. In a clinical trial carried out by Summers et al., T. suis ova (TSO) were administered to 29 patients suffering from Crohn’s disease. 79.3% improved significantly and 72.4% experienced remission [44, 45]. Similar results were obtained in a larger trial where patients with ulcerative colitis were treated. A decrease of pathological symptoms was observed among 43.3% of the 54 patients treated with TSO [46]. Further double-blinded placebo-controlled clinical trials using TSO are currently conducted by Coronado Biosciences and Falk Pharmaceutical company [47] (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov). A different approach, using 50 live N. americanus larvae, was executed by Croese and colleagues with 9 patients suffering from Crohn’s disease. Following the treatment, a decrease in pathology was recorded for two patients [48]. Correale and Farez conducted studies with multiple sclerosis patients that had also been affected by parasites. They were able to show that in these patients the disease pattern was weaker than in the control group [49, 50]. Nacher et al. observed that malaria patients with an additional gastrointestinal helminth infection, notably Ascaris, rarely showed acute renal failure or cerebral malaria in comparison to other malaria patients [51]. In mice infected with Helicobacter pylori, helminth infections were shown to reduce the tissue-damaging inflammation [52]. Recent epidemiological studies have clearly demonstrated that helminth, for example, Schistosoma spp., infected children had a reduced prevalence of allergic disorders. Other studies have shown that chronic infections with helminths protect people against allergic sensitization. The same results were achieved by infecting mice with Strongyloides stercoralis [25, 26]. Here, anthelmintic treatment led to loss of immune suppression and to an increase in atopic reactivity to allergens. Furthermore, the relationship between suppression of allergies and Schistosoma infection has been shown in both infected humans and mouse models [53]. A suppression of lung inflammation was shown in S. stercoralis-infected mice [54]. Also, extracts of the porcine parasite Ascaris suum inhibit IgE antibody production against unrelated antigens or antigens without reference and the generation of ovalbumin-specific T H 2 responses in a murine model of asthma [25, 55]. Infection with the rodent intestinal nematode N. brasiliensis is another example of suppression of T H 2 type allergic reactions, which inhibits the development of allergen-induced airway eosinophilia [56]. ES products of N. brasiliensis (NES) elicit a T H 2 response by affecting DCs. But besides the regulation of T H 2 response, NES also affect the proinflammatory T H 1 responses by suppressing mitogen-dependent IFN-γ release as well as DCs produced and LPS induced IL-12p70 [57–59]. The trematode Fasciola hepatica causes liver fluke disease in sheep and cattle. F. hepatica infected mice, which were experimentally coinfected with Bordetella pertussis, showed a reduced bacterial-specific T H 1 response. Furthermore, the mice were unabled to eliminate the microbe [60, 61]. This might be triggered by F. hepatica tegumental antigens that inhibit mast cells [62]. Contrariwise, F. hepatica did not suppress the IFN- -driven T H 1 response triggered by Toxoplasma gondii infection [63]. As described before, helminths can downregulate harmful T H 1 responses which are upregulated during autoimmune diseases. A therapeutic use of helminths could lead to a modified T H 2 response and to an induction of T regs . This could result in a simultaneous reduction of T H 1/T H 17 responses and thereby reduce the pathology of autoimmune diseases [64–66]. In summary, all these studies support the concept of bystander immunoregulation by chronic helminthic infections being able to control allergen-specific or other inflammatory responses [67]. Since the dampening of the systemic immune response of the host is beneficial in transplantation, recent publications even suggest the use of helminthic therapy or helminth product therapy to enhance the allograft tolerance [68]. Despite these promising trials, the use of helminths within the therapeutical range is currently not possible due to various reasons: the breeding of helminths in the required amounts is not feasible and there are safety factors that need to be considered. Since there is evidence that only chronic but not acute infections are protective, parasite loss over time needs to be monitored [37]. The parasitic modes of action within the host are hardly explored and in some cases even completely unknown, so that possible side effects like diarrhea and intestinal pain are unpredictable [41, 69]. Unfortunately, most of the current experiments were performed with animal models and the assignability on humans cannot be guaranteed [70]. Furthermore, the psychological burden of the patients needs to be considered here as well [11, 25, 26]. The most potent anti-inflammatory response observed in humans is caused by chronic helminth infections, such as with Schistosoma spp. or O. volvulus and not by a transient infection. Therefore, it is obvious that only chronic infections with long-living helminths offer great therapeutic and preventive antiallergic effects [25, 26]. But not only live parasites can modulate or suppress the immune response. Glycans of the cuticula as well as helminth eggs or soluble extracts of worms can have the same effect. For example, S. mansoni egg soluble antigen (SEA) has the ability to prevent autoimmune type 1 diabetes by inducing a stronger T H 2 and T reg cell response as well as functional changes in APCs [65, 71–73]. However, the repeated use of helminth antigens might also induce neutralizing antibodies, thereby preventing long-term protection. In order to avoid the possibly critical therpeutic infection with a parasite, one major research aim is to identify and characterize helminth-derived molecules that are capable of modulating the immune system and to implement therapeutic approaches based on such molecules and thus replicate the protective effect already observed in helminth therapy. These immunomodulators could lead to the generation of novel strategies for anti-inflammatory drug development [41, 58, 70, 74, 75]. 5. Excretory/Secretory (ES) Products The immunomodulatory potency of helminths appears to be largely achieved by their surface or ES products [25]. Secretory products are substances with certain biological functions that are secreted from cells or glands. Contrariwise, excretory products are unnecessary metabolic products that are released from the body. Both, however, are sometimes difficult to distinguish from one another. The composition of these products varies significantly from parasite to parasite, but in general all of them contain different glycoproteins, proteins, and smaller peptides; nonprotein components include glycans, glycolipids, and bioactive lipids, like the eicosanoid inflammatory mediators, prostaglandins, and leukotrienes [76, 77]. The term ES products describes both substances that are actively secreted by helminths and products that are released within the course of physiological processes, for example, digestion or egg-laying [58, 78]. Furthermore, varying compositions of ES products at different life cycle stages can be expected [78, 79]. Given below are a few examples of ES products that exert the antiallergic and anti-inflammatory effects of helminth infections. In a chemically induced colitis mouse model the ES products of the canine hookworm Ancylostoma caninum reduced the inflammatory response and expression of proinflammatory cytokines while inducing the production of IL-4 and IL-10 [32, 75]. Furthermore, the ES products of the hookworm Ancylostoma ceylanicum can protect against chemically induced colitis by downregulating T H 1 and T H 17 cytokines [80]. Similar protection against inflammation was also obtained by using recombinant ES protein rTsP53 from T. spiralis in a colitis model [81]. Hsieh and associates also describe a secretory protein from N. americanus which binds to natural killer cells and stimulates the production of interferon-gamma [82]. The secreted protease inhibitor cystatin from Acanthocheilonema viteae, Av17, modulates macrophage-mediated inflammation in a murine model of colitis and significantly reduces inflammatory infiltrations and epithelial damage. As immunomodulatory strategy, the enhancement of IL-10 production by macrophages is proposed [83]. The immunomodulatory effect of ES products has also been shown for the cestode Taenia crassiceps. T. crassiceps ES products regulate DC activity by binding multiple receptors (e.g., MGL, MR, and TLR2), thereby downregulating TLR-mediated DC maturation and secretion of IL-12 and TNF- . This results in T H 2 polarization [84]. There are a growing number of helminth mediators identified in the secretome that have the potential to be used in new therapeutic strategies against inflammatory diseases. Furthermore, the identification of the mechanisms and pathways these mediators utilize to redirect the immune system might reveal further key mechanisms that have evolved in host-parasite coevolution. Below we provide some examples of immunomodulatory proteins found in the secretome of parasitic nematodes. 6. Proteins Found in the Secretome of Parasitic Helminths The secretome contains functionally diverse classes of molecules that are involved in different vital processes. While some proteins are secreted by exocytosis via the classical pathway using a hydrophobic signal peptide, other alternative pathways include exosomes, lysosomes, and microvesicles. Exosome-like vesicles have been described in the trematodes Echinostoma caproni and F. hepatica. These extracellular vesicles are internalized by an unspecific endocytic pathway or by specific ligand-receptor recognition mechanisms [85]. Transmembrane flipping and translocation can also result in the release of proteins. Finally, proteins can shed their extracellular domains, while other parts remain inside [86]. Parasitic nematodes secrete a wide range array of proteins and obviously not all of them interact locally and systemically with host immune cells; for example, there are proteolytic enzymes that are secreted to help parasites penetrate the host skin, enable tissue migration, or are involved in feeding. Furthermore, detoxifying enzymes or stress-related proteins are released to assist parasite survival in inflamed tissues. Acetylcholinesterases (AChe) are utilized that potentially interfere with secretion processes of the intestinal mucosa involved in the expulsion of pathogens [87]. Recently, it has been shown that acetylcholine is capable of modulating the activity of macrophages and attenuating local and systemic inflammation [88], making the secretion of AChe by parasites even more intruiging. Parasitic nematodes include pathogens from plants and animals. Ectoparasitic plant parasites feed on the roots, while endoparasites penetrate the root. The obligate root-knot Meloidogyne species have evolved a highly sophisticated relationship with their hosts. Here, secretory proteins play an important role during migration through the roots and the formation and maintenance of proliferating cells [89]. Besides this, just like in animal-infecting parasites, molecules are secreted that are involved in the suppression or evasion of the innate immune system of the host plant. Here, antioxidant proteins coat the surface of the nematode or jasmonic acid-dependent responses are blocked. Furthermore, plant cells are reprogrammed to form multinucleate giant cells as a permanent feeding structure by the induction of nuclear division without cytokinesis [90]. Most secretory proteins of parasitic plant nematodes are produced in the oesophageal, amphidial, and rectal glands, as well as in the hypodermis and intestine [90, 91]. Common secretome components include cell-wall-degrading enzymes and expansins, venom allergen homologues (VAL), SXP/RAL-2 protein, MAP-1, SEC-2, and cuticle collagens [90]. Unlike the previously mentioned nematodes, the pine wood nematode Bursaphelenchus xylophilus does not establish permanent feeding sites but kills quickly by feeding on parenchymal cells after migrating through the resin canals of the tree. Following the death of the plant cells, the nematode feeds on fungal growth [79]. Due to this special feeding habit, ES products of the parasite include cell-wall-degrading enzymes like cellulases, pectate lyase, expansin-like, and venom allergen-like proteins. Furthermore, cysteine and aspartic peptidases are two of the most abundantly secreted peptidase groups found in the B. xylophilus secretome [79]. These could be beneficial for the parasite in several ways: it either allows the degradation of host molecules for their own nutritional purposes or serves as a defense against host responses [79]. Besides peptidases, 47 peptidase inhibitors were found that could battle against host plant peptidases. Interestingly, expression of host peptidases was significantly increased during B. xylophilus infection [79]. In general, animal parasitizing helminths secrete two sets of protease inhibitors that have immunomodulatory properties, cystatins, and serpins. The varying properties of cystatins from parasitic nematodes with respect to their free-living relatives point to the acquisition of anti-inflammatory properties during the coevolution of the parasites and their hosts. Cystatins have been shown to interfere with the host immune cell signaling pathways. They inhibit cysteine proteases such as cathepsins and aspartyl endopeptidase which are important for the processing and presentation of antigens by APCs. Thereby, they inhibit T cell activation. Furthermore, cystatins also prevent T cell proliferation and trigger the decrease in costimulatory molecule expression by APCs [58]. Serpins on the other hand are inhibitors of serine proteases and are able to inhibit neutrophil proteinases and elastase and cathepsin G [92]. The serpin SPN-2 is the most abundant member of secreted proteins from B. malayi microfilariae; however, its function is still not clear [93]. To survive within their host, nematodes secrete a battery of diverse antioxidant systems that detoxify oxygen radicals produced by infection-stimulated host phagocytes. These proteins include peroxiredoxin, catalase, glutathione peroxidase, superoxide dismutase, thioredoxin, thiroredoxin peroxidase, and many more [7, 94]. Secretory glutathione S-transferases (GSTs) are thought to participate in the protection of parasite membranes from peroxidation [95]. Interestingly, the secretory GST-1 from O. volvulus has prostaglandin D2 activity, thereby contributing to the production of parasite-derived prostanoids [96]. The nematode Haemonchus contortus belongs to the order of the Strongylida and can infect both cattle and humans worldwide. This blood feeding nematode elicits haemorrhagic gastritis, anemia, oedema, and associated symptoms by nurturing on capillaries of gastric mucosa [97, 98]. H. contortus has a large set of secreted peptidases and peptidase inhibitors that function in host penetration, blood feeding, and blood-digestion [97–100]. Similar to the ES products of other parasitic nematodes, H. contortus releases substances influencing the host-parasite interaction as well as the host immune response, resulting mostly in a T H 2 response. ES products also include sugar-binding proteins that act as receptors for glycoprotein ligands. These C-type lectins and galectins mimic host molecules and might facilitate evasion by competing with host lectins for the binding to ligands that are involved in inflammation [58, 98, 101]. Interestingly, galectin-9 from the canine gastrointestinal nematode Toxascaris leonina was shown to suppress dextran sulfate sodium-induced intestinal inflammation in mice and elevated levels of IL-10 and TGF-β were observed [102]. Other types of molecules that mimic host molecules are IFN- , TGF- , and the macrophage migration inhibition factors (MIFs) [103]. The cytokine MIF is an early mediator of innate and aquired immune responses and is rapidly upregulated in various inflammatory conditions [104]. Besides having cytokine activity, MIFs also have oxidoreductase and tautomerase activity. The filarial MIF homologue from B. malayi promotes alternative activation of macrophages in a T H 2 environment. This activation can be directly linked to its oxidoreductase activity [105, 106]. ES products from the murine gastrointestinal parasite Heligmosomoides polygyrus were shown to have a wide range of immunomodulatory activities including the suppression of airway allergic inflammation [41]. Also, the calcium-binding chaperone calreticulin was shown to induce a T H 2 response and at the same time interact with the mammalian scavenger receptor type A on DCs [107]. The proteins VAL-1 and AChe-1 are prevalent in L4 and adult ES products. They are considered as antigenic targets, since they induce protective immunity in mice; however, their mode of action is still unknown. While ES products from L4 and adults also seem to have TGF-β activity, released molecules from the egg stage appear to be less important in immunomodulation [108]. The Sushi domain protein family and the ShK/SXC domain toxin family are highly prevalent in the L4 secretome [108]. Sushi-like proteins are prevalent in mammals and regulate complement activation. The conserved ShK/SXC domain that shows similarity to cnidarians toxins is also extensively expressed by other nematodes including T. canis [108, 109]. Proteins of this family are able to inhibit calcium-dependent lymphocyte activation [110]. The A. suum secretome comprises about 750 molecules and contains many peptidases used for penetration and degradation of host tissue and molecules which serve to escape or modulate the host immune response. Secreted peptidases such as astacin, serine-, cysteine-, and metalloproteases ensure migration and feeding of the worm [111]. Besides this, these proteases are involved in the modulation of the host immune response [111–113]. In a murine air pouch model, the A. suum-derived protein PAS-1 inhibits the inflammatory leukocyte migration and reduces the synthesis of proinflammatory cytokines. Furthermore, the suppressive effect of PAS-1 in OVA-induced lung allergic inflammation was shown to be attributed to the induction of CD4+CD25+ T cells and CD8+ T cells [114]. The secretome from the canine filarial parasite Dirofilaria immitis contains a 15 kDa antigen (DiAg) that can induce antigen-nonspecific IgE production in rats through increased generation of T H 2-related cytokines. Interestingly, DiAg suppresses the immediate dermal response to allergen-IgE interactions. This supports the IgE blocking hypothesis mentioned above [115]. In Teladorsagia circumcincta, an astacin-like metalloprotease and cathepsin F were identified as the most abundant ES products. These proteins are known to digest host proteins; however, the astacin-like metalloprotease additionally stimulates the immune responses during the early phase of the infection [116, 117]. Carbohydrates that are linked to proteins and lipids of nematodes have been shown to have immunogenic and immunomodulatory properties [118]. ES proteins of A. suum that are homologous to helminth-secreted peptides with important immunogenic or immunomodulatory roles in host animals are mostly O-linked glycosylated proteins. These glycans are unusual and structurally distinct from host glycans and induce a glycan-dependent cytokine response biased toward Th2 cells [111]. The major antigenic determinant phosphorylcholine (PC) is a small hapten that is often linked to carbohydrate epitopes in gastrointestinal and filarial nematodes [119]. PC-bearing antigens are able to interfere with key proliferative pathways in B and T cells, DC maturation, and mast cell degranulation [120]. The rodent filarial parasite Acanthocheilonema viteae secretes the aminopeptidase ES-62, which is the most intensely studied PC-substituted protein. ES-62 exerts its effect on various immune cells, where its anti-inflammatory action depends on the PC-moiety. It has the ability to inhibit B cell, T cell, and mast cell proliferation, promotes the alternative activation of macrophages, and is responsible for the T H 2 response through inhibition of IL-12p70 production by DCs [121]. In a mouse model for rheumatoid arthritis, ES-62 was able to significantly reduce the severity of developing collagen-induced arthritis and suppress further progression of an already established disease [122] Furthermore, its anti-inflammatory action was also observed in human rheumatoid arthritis-derived synovial tissue cultures [123]. Here we have given a few examples of proteins found in the secretome of parasitic nematodes, some with known functions in immune modulation and some with as-yet hypothetical functions. Helminth secretomes are a rich source of novel drug and vaccine targets, diagnostic markers, and immunomodulatory proteins. While the analysis of secreted proteins from different life stages of helminths is still quite challenging, numerous secretome analyses of helminths exist by now (Table 2). The combination of the existing data towards a more integrated view of ES products from helminths will be the next logical step. Existing difficulties, such as the lack of genomic sequence information, can be dealt with by using RNA-sequence assembly as reference for the identification of ES products. More challenging, however, are low protein concentrations due to high dilutions of cultivation media, is contamination of normally nonsecreted proteins due to cell lysis and death, or is that most developmental stages cannot be cultivated in vitro [117]. Here enrichment methods could be applied that are based on posttranslational modifications of secreted proteins, for example, glycosylation [124]. Table 2: Overview of the proteomic analyses of helminths secretome. 7. Conclusion Helminthic infections have a large impact on global health and can cause severe forms of helminthiasis. Nevertheless, they have proven to have immunomodulatory and immunoregulatory effects on the host’s immune system which can be exploited in the treatment of immune dysregulatory diseases. While helminths have independently evolved various strategies to gain entrance to host tissues and to actively evade or even manipulate the signaling network of the immune system, the host developed strategies to limit pathology by shifting the T H 2 response towards immunosuppression instead of triggering an inflammatory tissue-damaging response. A number of promising clinical trials were performed using live worms to treat immune dysregulatory diseases. However, the major research aim is to identify and characterize helminth-derived modulators which can foster anti-inflammatory drug development. Abbreviations AAM: Alternative activated macrophages ACE: Acetylcholinesterase AcES: Ancyostoma canium ES products APC: Antigen-presenting cell DCs: Dendritic cells DiAg: Dirofilaria immitis antigen ECM: Extracellular matrix ES: Excretory/secretory Fc RI: High affinity IgE receptors GST: Glutathione S-transferase IBD: Inflammatory bowel disease IFN- : Interferon-gamma Ig: Immunoglobulin IL: Interleukin LF: Lymphatic filariasis LPS: Lipopolysaccharide MGL: Macrophage galactose C-type lectin MHC: Major histocompatibility complex MIF: Macrophage migration inhibitory factor MR: Mannose receptor NES: N. brasiliensis ES products NK: Natural killer cells OVA: Ovalbumin PAMPs: Pathogen-associated molecular patterns PAS-1: Protein from A. suum PC: Phosphorylcholine PRRs: Pattern recognition receptors RELM- : Resistin-like molecule-alpha SEA: S. mansoni egg soluble antigen TGF- : Transforming growth factor-beta T H : T helper TLR: Toll-like receptor TNF- : Tumor necrosis factor-alpha T regs : Regulatory T cells TSLP: Thymic stromal lymphopoietin TSO: Trichuris suis ova VAL: Venom allergen/Ancylostoma secreted protein-like. Conflict of Interests The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper. Authors’ Contribution Dana Ditgen and Emmanuela M. Anandarajah contributed equally to this work. Acknowledgment The authors acknowledge the CAPES/DAAD support within the UNIBRAL Programme entitled “INFECTBIO-USP-WWU” (348/2013).

Hey everybody! Welcome to Clix O’Clock, a new weekly feature here on We the Nerdy! Assistant Editor Henry has been playing Heroclix for a very long time and wants to spread his love of the game with everybody who’ll listen! This week he talks about the constant obsession people have over the War of Light Entities, and why he is perfectly okay if he never has one in his clutches again (Other than to trade it away for some sweet Clix swag!) So this weekend my school ran a small convention where we hosted a Heroclix event. We were very fortunate that we were able to play with some War of Light boosters and play a miniature Month 4 event. A friend of mine, newer to Heroclix, was able to buy his first War of Light boosters and pulled Proselyte. I was really happy for him and tried to hold back my secret envy, since Proselyte has a great value on the secondary market. But I got over this quickly and realized something. I really don’t care about the Entities anymore. I’ll admit that there is a part of me that does want the entities, but for a much simpler purpose than most. I just like the idea of adding people to certain theme teams. How fun would it be to make Superman a Blue Lantern with Adara, or for the Joker to be inducted via the Butcher into the Red Lantern Corps? But apparently, most people seem excited by them because they have the potential to be so deadly via the possession trait. For a mere 25 points, you can make any piece objectively more awesome, something that anybody can get behind. People quickly gravitated towards this incredible mechanic, and the prices of the already rare pieces (1 per case) skyrocketed. Here’s the thing. Paying upwards of $100.00 for a Heroclix is kind of insane for me. I’ll admit that I’ve bought expensive pieces in the $70.00 range, but those are few and far between. Entities have been heralded as game-breaking pieces that can ruin the spirit of Heroclix. They’re not.I was lucky during my Month 3 Event and I pulled Ion, the Green Lantern Entity. I used him, equipping him to my Black Lantern John Stewart (Which I later realized wasn’t necessary), and went to town on opponents. But when the event was over, and I had won my prizes, I quickly traded him off. His initial value of $280.00 was too much to pass up, and it got me a slew of Marvel Zombies and convention exclusives. I was very happy to do that, because it allowed me to get a bunch of pieces I had wanted for quite some time. The very moment where I stopped caring about Entities came last week, when I played against a team that had three of them in a 300 point game. It was a pretty nasty team, with an overall worth of over $400.00, but it didn’t demolish me. It beat me, yes, but even with all of the crazy nonsense that it gained from the Entities, it didn’t break the game. I felt like I held my own and had my opponent shaking in his boots a few times. Ultimately, a good player can go toe-to-toe with an Entity based team. They are good, but they cost a lot and the cost becomes more apparent with the more they use. When you think about how little you are really facing, you don’t have nearly as much to worry about as you’d expect. Despite this, people are obsessed with collecting them all. And there is nothing wrong with wanting them all, but I really hope people can keep things in perspective. They aren’t going to automatically give you victories, and even for all they can do, there is so much else you can do for 25 points in today’s age of Heroclix. You can add some tokens, an ATA, or change a resource entirely. I think that though the Entities are good and have their value, the obsession that people have with equipping them to other characters and using the “Possession” ability is a bit absurd. At the end of the day, they are nothing more than the current new hotness, and in a few months there will be something else that completely negates them. The band-wagoners will move on and fawn over something new and exciting. And the cycle will continue. Thanks for checking us out! Be back here next week at the same time, Clix O’Clock! Related

Here is more Prizes: Potential winners will be chosen by Car From Japan and contacted personally via email on December, 2015. Winners of 1st & 2nd prizes will be given 1 car each, delivered at their selected port. Winners of 3rd and 4th prizes will receive coupons (valid for 6 months); that can be used to buy any car from the available stocks. If the vehicle chosen has less value than the prize, winner can use the balance winning amount in his/ her next purchase (balance valid for 6 months). If the total invoiced price of the vehicle chosen is higher than the prize received, the winner needs to make the balance payment. Please note that we have all sorts of cars. We have cars, priced lower than USD 500 & also New Land Cruisers in our stock. So, most certainly you will be able to find the car you want. Details: Potential winners will be chosen and contacted via email by Car From Japan with instructions on how to choose & receive their prize. If the winner disagrees to receive the prize or does not co-operate or respond within 3 days after he/ she is contacted, such winner might be disqualified. In such case, another eligible entrant maybe selected by Car From Japan. Car From Japan will send emails calls to contact the winners. Car From Japan will not be responsible if the winner do not respond timely & gets disqualified as a result of failed contact attempts. Further details for receiving the prize will be provided to winners directly by Car From Japan. Winner will select the delivery port & Car From Japan will arrange the delivery of the prize at Car From Japan's sole discretion. The winner is solely responsible for all expenses after the car reaches the selected port (for example: applicable tax, clearing services, car insurance, licensing, registration, title and other fees associated with receiving the prize). Further details for receiving the prize will be provided to winners directly by Car From Japan. Submission Rules: One entry per person. False entries are not accepted. False names, addresses, and other falsified information will result in disqualifications. We request you to provide true information only, due to strict documentation requirements for the importing/exporting of vehicles. Please note that this contest is void where prohibited by law. This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed, administered by, or associated with Facebook or Twitter or Google+. You are providing your information to Sponsor, Car From Japan and its' partners, and not to Facebook or Twitter or Google+. The information you provide will be used mainly for contacting you and sponsor's marketing purposes.

Even as the freshly minted Obama administration was pledging a "new era of open government" in 2009, officials were quietly adding new rules that had the potential to slow down public requests for documents. Those rules, detailed in memos reviewed by FoxNews.com, could even trip up present-day efforts to dig into the IRS' practice of targeting conservative groups. The rules detailed in the memos largely emanated from the Treasury Department and, specifically, the IRS. "It would seem to repudiate this notion that this is going to be the most transparent government in history," said Dan Epstein, executive director of Cause of Action, the group that first obtained the memos. [pullquote] The memos follow reports about the administration's use of private email accounts, and coincide with ongoing debate about government transparency -- particularly with recent disclosures about widespread surveillance programs. More On This... Epstein said the document request procedures are "troubling" since the media are "really concerned about the limits of government power." According to the documents, the Treasury Department in 2009 set up an additional review for requests involving "sensitive information," which covered a broad range of items. The White House sometimes got involved, slowing down the process. The IRS also acknowledged having another review process for requests from "major media," but not for requests from private individuals. Members of the media often try to obtain documents not readily available by citing a law known as the Freedom of Information Act. The Treasury Department, though, in late 2009 erected speed bumps for some so-called FOIA requests. The rules were detailed in a November 2010 memo and report sent from the Treasury inspector general to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. The documents showed the Treasury Department set up an additional "formal level of review" for requests for "sensitive information." This category would cover everything from emails to memos to calendars to travel logs for top department officials, legal advisers, senior advisers and others. Once a request was deemed "sensitive," it would then go before a "review committee," made up of officials from several Treasury offices. Further, the document said a special report would be prepared for IRS requests from "major media." This covers requests from traditional news media as well as bloggers, and according to the report covered information that "was likely to attract news media or congressional interest, involved large dollar amounts, or involved unique or novel issues." This report would then be sent to a higher-up in the division who decided whether the material should be disclosed. The report repeatedly said that, in most cases, political appointees were not involved in these decisions, and that the agencies have no procedures to allow that. But Epstein said these rules could cause problems as Congress and the media dig deeper into the origin of the IRS practice of singling out conservative groups for additional scrutiny. He pointed to another memo, dated April 15, 2009, from then-White House Counsel Greg Craig that urged "executive agencies" to consult with his office "on all document requests that may involve documents with White House equities." Craig said this pertains to everything from FOIA requests to congressional requests to subpoenas. This practice apparently dates back to 1993. The Treasury IG memo cited this, and described the White House involvement as "minimal and limited." However, the report also said the White House involvement "was responsible in several cases for adding a significant processing delay," which in Treasury's case slowed them down. "It actually is heavily ironic in the realm of transparency," Epstein said. He pointed to edicts and memos early on in the first term of the administration stressing transparency. Obama issued a January 2009 directive calling for an "unprecedented level of openness." Attorney General Eric Holder in March 2009 directed all Executive Branch departments to use a "presumption of openness" when dealing with FOIA requests. To that end, the administration has instituted several other transparency initiatives. It has followed through on requiring Cabinet secretaries to hold Internet town hall discussions, set up a comprehensive website to track stimulus spending, and set up a national declassification center.

At one point, he called out in Mandarin in an attempt to confuse the enemy. He was wounded, but the tactic worked, allowing his unit to reposition and drive back the Chinese. Awarded the Navy Cross, the second-highest honor a Marine can receive, he was cited for “extraordinary heroism.” “Despite serious wounds sustained as he pushed forward,” the citation read, “First Lieutenant Lee charged directly into the face of the enemy fire and, by his dauntless fighting spirit and resourcefulness, served to inspire other members of his platoon to heroic efforts in pressing a determined counterattack and driving the hostile forces from the sector.” Less than a month later, while Lieutenant Lee was recovering in a field hospital from a gunshot wound to an arm, tens of thousands of Chinese forces surged into the region, overwhelming 8,000 American troops fighting as United Nations forces. His arm was still in a sling when he and a sergeant left the hospital against orders, commandeered an Army jeep and returned to the front. Over the next two weeks, Lieutenant Lee helped lead his unit of several hundred Marines across snowy mountain passes at night, using only a compass, to find and reinforce a smaller group that had been surrounded. His unit then repeatedly drove back Chinese soldiers, ensuring that the vastly outnumbered Americans were able to retreat to the sea. A final wound during the fighting ended his combat duty in Korea. For this action he was awarded the Silver Star. “First Lieutenant Lee’s platoon was pinned down by intense hostile fire while attacking south on the main service road from Koto-Ri,” the citation said. “Observing that the heavy fire was inflicting numerous casualties, he exposed himself to the deadly fire to move among his troops, shouting words of encouragement and directing a withdrawal to covered positions. Assured that the last of his wounded was under cover, he was seeking shelter for himself when he was struck down and severely wounded by a burst of enemy machine-gun fire.” Some who either served with Major Lee or knew of him said they believed he was deserving of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award.

It's a valid question: why is it that the United States has long refused to launch air strikes or other military action against the Islamic State (ISIS), the extremist group responsible for untold suffering and destruction in Syria, but is happy to bomb ISIS now that it has pushed into Iraq? Why is it okay to attack ISIS on one side of the largely-hypothetical Syria-Iraq border, but not okay to do on the other side, particularly given that ISIS is doing way more harm in Syria than it is in Iraq, and is only able to attack Iraq at all because of its huge haven in Syria? It turns out, though, that there are legitimate reasons for bombing Iraq and not Syria. And while there are arguable cases for attacking ISIS in Syria, it is also true that the distinction matters a great deal, and that the Obama administration's approach isn't as hypocritical as it might look at first glance. Here are six reasons why. 1) Bombing Iraq is about preserving the status quo; bombing Syria would be about changing the status quo, which is much harder and more open-ended Obama ordered air strikes against ISIS in Iraq focused on the narrow goal of defending Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Kurdistan had been mostly secure until ISIS began pushing into the territory about a week ago; it's got a stable, pro-American, oil-producing government. Obama's strikes are meant to help Kurdistan defend itself, and to preserve the status quo of a secure Kurdistan. The strikes are very clearly not about trying to change the larger ISIS war in Iraq, or to help Iraq retake the vast ISIS-held swathes of territory. In Syria, there is no "good" status quo to defend. Any strikes against ISIS there would be about pushing the group back from Syrian territory it already controls, so that more moderate Syrian rebels could seize it. In other words, the air strikes would be about changing the facts on the ground in Syria, rather than preserving them. Obama seems willing to use force when he can protect something good — a stable, secure Iraqi Kurdistan — but not to try to fix something bad. He doesn't want to "own" the outcome, get dragged into a potentially long engagement that could easily escalate, or risk sending the conflict spinning in an unpredictable new direction. So the US approach to Syria and Iraq is consistent in this respect. 2) The US has a local partner that can take the lead in Iraq, but not in Syria President Obama does not want to be responsible for either of these wars. He's willing to intervene in Iraqi Kurdistan, but not in Syria (or in non-Kurdistan Iraq, for that matter), because in Iraqi Kurdistan there is a trustworthy, stable, pro-American partner that can take the lead in fighting ISIS: the Kurds. So the US doesn't have to run an entire side of the war; it can just help out the Kurdish forces and leave the conflict to them. The thinking here is both that the US doesn't want to get sucked into putting boots on the ground for an open-ended occupation and that the US doesn't want to create a power vacuum. Bombing ISIS in Iraqi Kurdistan won't create a power vacuum because the Kurdish government is already on the ground to take territory back. In Syria, however, it's not clear that the moderate rebels are capable of pushing back ISIS; even if they were, the disorganized network of rebels isn't exactly a stable and self-perpetuating government that we know will act predictable and responsibly. And there are plenty of other extremist groups in Syria that could take over any territory ISIS is booted out of. 3) Bombing ISIS in Syria would mean helping Bashar al-Assad In Syria, ISIS's two main enemies are Syrian moderate rebels and the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. The US bombing ISIS, then, would indirectly help out Assad. No one in the American government likes Assad, whose government has played the leading role in slaughtering civilians during the three-year civil war. But the tricky thing here is that US policy is still to avoid toppling Assad outright, since this could open a dangerous power vacuum that ISIS might fill. If there were a way to bomb ISIS without helping Assad, then the US might be more open to it. But there's not. Obama has said he doesn't want the US military to start acting as Iraq's unofficial air force — that's just not a job for Americans to take on, he thinks — so he certainly wouldn't want to act as Assad's air force. 4) Meanwhile, bombing Assad would help ISIS Another argument you hear is that, if Obama isn't going to bomb ISIS in Syria, he should at least bomb Syrian regime targets. But, again, there is no way to do this without helping ISIS, even if the aim would be to help Syrian moderate rebels. As long as the Syrian civil war is a three-way fight between two American enemies (Assad and ISIS) plus one maybe-sorta-potential American ally that is nowhere near winning, the US is just very unlikely to intervene. Meanwhile, in northern Iraq the fighting is between an American enemy (ISIS) and a close American ally (Iraqi Kurdistan), so the calculus is much clearer. 5) The US has legal authority to intervene in Iraq, but not in Syria The Iraqi government has authorized the US to conduct air strikes against ISIS in Iraq, which means that the US does not need authorization from the United Nations Security Council in order for the operation to be legal under international law. In Syria, by contrast, there was no Security Council authorization for the use of force, because Russia made it clear that it would veto any attempt to pass one. And there was, obviously, no invitation from the Assad regime for the US to conduct air strikes against it. That means that any military operation to protect Syrian civilians would have had far shakier legal authority. That's not necessarily entirely dispositive — under some legal theories, humanitarian intervention is permissible even in the absence of Security Council authorization if it is responding to an urgent civilian protection need. But those doctrines are less established, and thus less legally certain, than the legal authority for intervention in Libya, and now Iraq. Legally, the US strikes in Iraq are more akin to the NATO-led operations conducted in Libya in 2011. UN Security Council resolution 1973, which authorized the Libya campaign, used very similar language to the August 7 resolution on Iraq: it referred to "widespread and systematic attacks" against the civilian population, which "may amount to crimes against humanity." For Syria, meanwhile, there was no such legal authority and no clear way to get it. That's something that clearly matters to Obama. 6) Iraq strikes have broad international support, Syria strikes do not Immediately before the Iraq operation was announced, the Security Council, after an emergency meeting, passed a unanimous resolution expressing "deep outrage" at ISIS's attacks on vulnerable minority groups, and noting that such actions "may constitute crimes against humanity." The resolution also "call[ed] on the international community" to support the Iraqi government's efforts to help communities targeted by ISIS. This strongly suggests that the Security Council supports the air strikes. There's a reason that the UN Security Council is used as a benchmark for international support for military operations. The five permanent members are the five largest stakeholders in the international system — the US, UK, France, Russia, and China — and it can take a lot for them all to agree on something. Syria's Bashar al-Assad has a high-placed friend on the Security Council — Russia — and by virtue of being a state has other allies that don't want to see Syria bombed by the US. ISIS, meanwhile, is universally loathed, so countries are generally happy to have the US push it back. In case this weren't clear enough, US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power tweeted a photo of the resolution minutes before Obama announced that he had authorized air strikes, suggesting that the administration wanted to establish that there was international support for the operation before they announced it.

By Speaking at the “A Trans-Atlantic Agenda for Shared Prosperity” conference sponsored by the AFL-CIO, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the IMK Macroeconomic Policy Institute in Washington on Monday, Federal Reserve Vice-Chair Janet Yellen admitted in her speech that the official unemployment rate of 7.9 percent is actually incorrect because of a variety of factors. According to Yellen, who is considered a potential successor to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, stated that the unemployment rate is actually 14.4 percent. This number includes about 800,000 discouraged workers who have given up seeking employment and roughly eight million workers who are in part-time jobs but would prefer to work a full-time job. “The unemployment rate now stands at 7.9 percent. To put this number in perspective, while that’s a big improvement from the 10 percent reached in late 2009, it is now higher than unemployment ever got in the 24 years before the Great Recession,” said Yellen in her prepared remarks. “Moreover, the government’s current estimate of 12 million unemployed doesn’t include 800,000 discouraged workers who say they have given up looking for work. And, as exhibit 6 shows, 8 million people, or 5.6 percent of the workforce, say they are working part time even though they would prefer a full-time job. A broader measure of underemployment that includes these and other potential workers stands at 14.4 percent.” The former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco also conceded that the poverty rate is a lot higher than it had been for the past decade and presently stands at 15 percent of the general population in the United States. The results of the recession, says Yellen, have been consequential for these individuals. “Even those today who are fortunate enough to hold jobs have seen their hourly compensation barely keep pace with the cost of living over the past three years, while labor’s share of income – as measured by the percent of production by nonfinancial corporations accruing to workers as compensation – remains near the postwar low reached in 2011,” stated Yellen. “It will be a long road back to a healthy job market. It will be years before many workers feel like they have regained the ground lost since 2007.” Despite Yellen’s admission that the federal government’s unemployment numbers are suppressed, her figures, according to other economists, are several percent lower than other projections. The unofficial unemployment rate is seen at 22.5 percent. Indeed, the unemployment statistics have been revised since the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Officials either insert or delete specific equations, workers and numbers to match their public policies and provide the nation’s citizens false data to generate support from voters. Economic Collapse News reported in October that John Williams of ShadowStats.com noted that if the federal government measured unemployment the way the U.S. did during the time of the Great Depression then the numbers would be dramatically higher. Nevertheless, Yellen also admitted that even though the Federal Reserve has taken numerous actions, like implementing low interest rates, which she pointed out hasn’t done much to increase spending, the recovery has been slow. “After a lengthy recession that imposed great hardships on American workers, the weak recovery has made the past five years the toughest that many of today’s workers have ever experienced,” added the former Chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisors in the President Bill Clinton administration. In December, the Fed confirmed that it will keep key short-term interest rate at or near zero percent as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6.5 percent. However, it all depends on how the U.S. economy gets to that unemployment level. If the jobless number, for instance, dips below 6.5 percent because workers are exiting the labor force then Bernanke would still not raise rates. Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, stated in a video at the time that Bernanke is throwing the U.S. dollar over the currency cliff with his policies. “The only variable is: how long can Ben Bernanke get away with lying and pretending there is no inflation? How much inflation can he create?” asked Schiff in his video. “By expanding your balance sheet by over $1 trillion a year, that’s massive inflation that is the definition of inflation. He is inflating the money supply. Prices are going to rise in response to that. The question is: how long can he convince the world that prices aren’t rising, despite all the inflation he is creating?” This content has been created by Economic Collapse News and is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can supply a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact sgo@economiccollapsenews.com.

On March 4th, 2017 – 2 PM, at the Peace Wall in Berkeley, CA fascists are coming back. The feeling across organized circles is that this is, on some level, a trap. So come and enjoy a strategy of vigilance. Please don’t run alone after the first fascist you see, but collect yourself and take note of your surroundings. Find allies and accomplices. There will be no platform for fascism in the Bay Area nor will revolutionaries be pawns in some neo-reactionary game. Our strength is exercised not just in our ability to respond and react but in our proactive autonomy that creates a cool, determined, collected atmosphere of safety and solidarity. May we humbly suggest not taking any bait but make collective decisions. Stay with your affinity group and resist the frogmen that come out from behind the keyboards. This is not a statement on any particular tactic – it’s a call for strategic engagement. Some wisdom garnered from fascist demonstrations over the least few years in California suggests that some participants on their side are easily shaken and violently react with weapons. This is to say Anti-Fascists should be aware of this in scenarios in which small numbers of boneheads/frogmen walk to and from the demonstration. What began as a direct response to Feb. 1st – a march for “free speech,” with the frat-brownshirt Proud Boys as special guests – has been completely rebranded since Milo’s fall from grace. Now the organizers of these “Marches 4 Trump” are trying to pull together a coalition of libertarians, ancaps, armed militias, brownshirt alt-right enforcers, the “patriotic” Tea Party crowd, and alt-lite Deplorables without alienating any of them. People getting organized against fascist 'Proud Boys' holding 'March 4 Trump' in #Berkeley pic.twitter.com/sF29nUxLVS — FireWorks (@FireWorksBAY) February 22, 2017 Rich Black is the public face of the March on Berkeley. His Twitter header is a pastel ancap flag. He neglected to make the March on Berkeley Facebook event page (or its guest list) private. In an attempt to funnel every angry conservative in California into downtown Berkeley, he (or other organizers) canceled the Sacramento and Los Angeles marches and combined them with Berkeley’s. He seems very eager to simultaneously a) reassure everyone that this is not an alt-right event and b) tag Gavin McInnes begging for promotion, retweet the Proud Boys, and tag both them and the Oath Keepers in his tweets. For someone who isn’t organizing a fascist march, he sure wants all the fascists to know about it. Black wants his fascist cake and eat it too. The Berkeley College Republicans, everyone’s favorite concentration of truly banal evil, will be in attendance as well. In meetings they’ve been enthusiastically hyping March 4th and are trying to get the California State Militia to show up. BCR’s alt-right and white nationalist ties are well documented and getting stronger. Jack Palkovic was spotted on BART with Identity Evropa founder Nathan Damigo. They hugged each other goodbye. The feeling on the ground is that this is, on some level, a trap. They’re massing outside the police station. The cops are ready to protect these fascists, and they aren’t going to be hands-off this time. Camera-hungry Milo counter-protesters like Eddie Brock show up in Rich Black’s Twitter conversations. They call themselves a march, but there’s no parade route even being discussed. Their organizers claim to be working with police, militias, and the FBI. And they’re expecting antifascist resistance. They’ve been circulating our calls to action, warning each other that the spectre of antifa will be back to haunt them. So show up and haunt these motherfuckers. Bring your friends. Give ’em hell, but be careful. Berkeley is the hill that the alt-right and their growing coalition have chosen to flounder on, and they’re only getting cockier. We shut these fascists down before, and we’ll do it again.