ever since this peculiarly American word first entered the dictionary at the end of the nineteenth century.

Like all fairy tales, it began when a small group of intrepid explorers went down into the woods, into the darkest corner of the forest. Rhys Chatham explains, "Artists like Yoko Ono, Walter De Maria, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Morris, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Henry Flynt, went down to this area that you weren't even allowed to live in, called SoHo…"

William Basinski at Arcadia

South of Houston and north of Canal Street in the lowest tip of Manhattan Island, SoHo was once the most populous ward in the city. But as Broadway became what a 1973 New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission report called "a boulevard of marble, cast-iron and brownstonecommercial palazzos … the entertainment center of the city," the area was transformed - and fast. The cobbled streets behind Broadway became notorious for their 'houses of assignation', the middle classes left in their droves, and manufacturing took their place. The 1860s saw a 25% drop in the population as factories and warehouses moved into the ward.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the city centre had moved north and the more upscale businesses with it, leaving just paper waste and textile firms behind. The district slumped and for several decades saw little change. "It was not until the 1960s that a new movement began to stir," continues the Landmarks Preservation Commission report. "This, surprisingly enough, was caused by the trend among artists to paint on larger and


in classical music advised me not to do it downtown," she told Kyle Gann in an interview for the Village Voice; they told her, "you're wasting your money, nobody's going to go there. Anybody who's interested in 'serious' music goes to midtown."

Ono's first series of loft concerts was curated by a composer named La Monte Young, a former academic dodecaphonist who had encountered the ideas of John Cage at the famous Darmstadt summer school in 1959. Young put together a series with Richard Maxfield, a former student of Cage's at the New School for Social Research who was interested in experimenting with magnetic tape.

Ono performed a piece called Wall Piece for Orchestra which required the instrumentalists to bang their heads against the wall, while Henry Flynt improvised onhomemade instruments made of toothpicks and elastic bands. La Monte Young released a butterfly into the audience and called it Composition 1960 #5, wrote a piece which invited the performer to feed a bale of hay to the piano "or leave it to eat by itself", and drew two notes on a stave, seven semitones apart, with the indication "to be held for a long time". Marcel Duchamp was in the audience, smiling appreciatively.

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Rhys Chatham at 8BC, 1987. Photo by Corey Pearson

The floodgates were open. George Maciunas, ringmaster to the international Fluxus circus, helped many artists to purchase former industrial buildings, many of them ex-sweatshops, and convert them into combination living and working spaces. They called them 'fluxhouses' and though they lacked trivial things like


heat and plumbing, their vast open spaces made ideal performance spaces. La Monte Young and his wife Marian Zazeela moved to a loft on Church Street in August of 1963 and began to dream of a concert space where the music would never end. It would be a complete light and sound environment, and it would be called the Dream House.

Meanwhile, Steve Reich and Philip Glass's ensembles were playing regularly in lofts owned (and lived in) by the likes of Meredith Monk and Yvonne Rainer. Ornette Coleman opened up his Artists House on Prince Street in the West Village in 1968. And Phill Niblock renamed his own loft Experimental Intermedia as a venue for his films and microtonal compositions, and increasingly those of many other artists and film-makerstoo. It was at Niblock's place that Rhys Chatham saw his first loft concert. "The difference when you heard a concert at Phill's," he says, "is that it was his living room, so we'd all be lounging around on couches and beds, sitting on the floor or whatever, and it was a very, very comfortable, very relaxed environment. It was something informal. I suppose we could call it the modern day chamber music."

At that time, in 1970, Chatham was nineteen years old and had been studying electronic music with Morton Subotnick at New York University, where he had access to one of the first generation Buchla 100 Series electronic synthesisers. At Subotnick's studio at NYU, Chatham had created some music for a number of art works by an


older couple named Woody and Steina Vasulka. "I gave them lessons on the Buchla 100 series and they were so touched, and I guess they thought I was so cute," he says.

On June 15th 1971, the Vasulkas opened up a space in the Mercer Arts Center, a huge former hotel in SoHo that had been divvied up into a series of studios. The Mercer Arts Center was home to a rehearsal space for theatrical directors like Richard Foreman, but it also contained the Oscar Wilde Room, which was occupied by the New York Dolls for much of 1973. The Vasulkas' space was originally intended to be a venue for the newly emerging genre of video art, but they decided to have a contemporary music night every monday andand we did publicity. So it was another place to play where everything was in place, so it would cost the artists less to put their own concerts on."

One of the first people Chatham invited to play was La Monte Young. "I had studied his Selected Writings the way only a teenager can. So I called up La Monte, completely innocently. Even back then, he was really a superstar on the downtown scene, but I called him anyway." Young invited Chatham over to his place on Church Street and played piano for him on an upright tuned in just intonation. Mindful of the site-specific nature of much of his music, however, and the long periods of tuning and preparation he required in situ before a concert, Young was


exclusion from the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. Woodwind player Sam Rivers had Studio Rivbea on Bond Street, commemorated on the legendary Wildflowers compilations released by Douglas Records in 1977. Down the street, singer Joe Lee Wilson had The Ladies Fort, while in the East 20s, there was the Jazzmania Society.

At the same time, even in the same neighbourhood, DJ David Mancuso started to use his own loft as a venue for a weekly series of all-night acid-fried dance parties. Dancers brought whistles and rattles, making the whole space into one big percussion section, and Mancuso would mix and stretch the funkiest bits from a wide range of music, from Philly soul to African percussion records. Ever mindful of cues from the crowd, he would shape his selection oftunes into a sonic journey, a narrative of multiple climaxes. "What had emerged," writes Tim Lawrence in his book Love Saves The Day, named after a note on Mancuso's flyers, "was a social and egalitarian model of making music in which the DJ played in relation to the crowd, leading and following in roughly equal measure."

"Clubs are set up for the purpose of making money," Mancuso told Lawrence in a 2007 interview. "This is not what the Loft is about. The Loft is about putting on a party and making friends … For me the Loft is all about social progress." A similar sentiment would be put forward by Rhys Chatham in relation to his time at The Kitchen. "None of us were getting paid. For the artists


we charged at the door and none of this bollocks of 50% of the door," he tells me, "we gave [the artists] 100% of the door."

But despite their similar ethos and physical proximity (by the mid-70s the Kitchen was on Wooster Street and Mancuso's Loft was just around the corner on Prince Street), the Loft and Kitchen remained two different worlds. And might have remained so, if it wasn't for a series of changes in the world of contemporary music at the end of the 1970s.

In the mid-1970s, the post of music director of The Kitchen was taken over, first by Arthur Russell and then the trombonist Garrett List. Between them, Russell and List started breaking down some of the venue's unspoken taboos.

A classically trained cellist from Oskaloosa,Iowa, Russell had moved to New York in 1973 to study music. After an argument with Charles Wuorinen, he promptly dropped out of college and became music director at The Kitchen. Initially, he hewed close to the established traditions of the venue but there was this little local band he liked, in whom he detected some of the spirit of musical minimalism enthused with the energy of punk and new wave. So he took a chance and booked them. The name of that band was The Talking Heads. "It caused quite a lot of comment at the time," Chatham remembers. "Nobody had any idea what CBGB's was. We thought of this as an anomaly."

Russell's tenure as music director was short-lived, and he was succeeded by the trombonist Garrett


List, who had played alongside Rhys Chatham in La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music. Towards the end of the decade, List had started playing with Frederic Rzewski, who at that time was busy hipping New York's contemporary music scene to the virtues of free improvisation and the exciting things going on in the loft jazz scene. So List started inviting the likes of Art Ensemble Of Chicago and Don Cherry to come down. Meanwhile, Arthur Russell had been taken by a boyfriend to a place called the Gallery, where the DJ Nicky Siano was building on the new sound developed by Mancuso at the Loft. Pretty soon, he was there every week.

"Back in the 1970s," Chatham explains, "there was this pyramidal hierarchy where you had music ofa classical tradition on top, jazz somewhere below, and rock was barely considered music. What we were trying to do back then was to break down these barriers … This music was intermingling and merging together and finding common points of reference." Increasingly, the programme at The Kitchen began to reflect this.

Michael Gira at Sin Club, 1984

Into this increasingly liberal music environment stepped Michael Gira. Born in Los Angeles, Gira had studied at Otis College of Art where he had met and befriended fellow student Kim Gordon. In 1979, he moved to New York, attracted by the "apocalyptic environment" suggested by the film Taxi Driver and the no wave scene them emerging from downtown art galleries. "It seemed very appealing to me, somehow, that New York," he tells


me over the phone.

"However, when I got to New York, no wave was already dying. There was this void for a short period of time musically around New York, I think. It was just this kind of fake jazz music that was going on. British dance music was kind of infiltrating the clubs." Gira's band Swans and Gordon's band Sonic Youth started playing around town together, hoping, as he tells me, to fill "that void with something else. We created our own space and we were closely aligned for a short period of time."

Gira recalls Swans being booked by Chatham to play at The Kitchen during the latter's second tenure as music director, taking over from Garrett List again at the end of the decade. "I recall thatstruggle." Chatham left permanently for France around the same time. "The rents got more and more expensive," he recalls, "so those of us living in SoHo moved to TriBeCa. Then that got more expensive, so we moved to the East Village. Then I moved to France…"

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Michael Gira, by Wim van de Hulst

William Basinski moved to New York only a year after Michael Gira. "We were a few years too late for the dirt cheap huge lofts in Soho and Tribeca," he explains. "There were still some shit holes available but we'd talk to tenants and they would tell us, 'our landlord is crazy. He's trying to kick us all out. He chopped the power lines with an axe and threatens us.' Well, we were determined,


damn it. Somehow we got to Brooklyn, I can't remember how."

With the visual artist James Elaine, Basinski moved into a "5000 sq. ft. former sweat shop on the 6th floor of a beautiful old seven storey brick building with 26 rotten windows." Bewitched by the murals on every subway train and horrifed by the stench of urine and the "huge rats having the time of their lives, they imagined their new home as the "edge of the earth", like something out of Antonioni's Il deserto rosso. They went to The Kitchen and to Experimental Intermedia and visited La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House.

Basinski spent a few years playing in different bands, while Elaine struggled to get collectors to cross the river to see his work. Finally,just as they had finally come to some sort of permanent settlement with their landlord, they got a letter in the mail saying the city was condemning the entire neighbourhood and they had to move out.

With a buy-out from the council - thanks to a law firm who took their case on pro bono - they went on the hunt for somewhere new. The first one was a commercial property in Williamsburg. "We got there not knowing where the hell we were," Basinski recalls. "The door was open and we walked up into this amazing gothic ruin full of pigeons, vaulted ceilings in repeating octagons, peeling paint, pigeon shit, filth, decay, floor to ceiling windows with views of Manhattan and the East River - it was gorgeous!" They


took it. Basinski's friend Chauncey suggested they call it Arcadia, after the mythical home of the god Pan. "I knew we had to have a stage at the end, and a performance space. We had to share this. It was too beautiful not to."

Arcadia

"We got the place in spring, worked our asses off and had it shining by late June with the help of all of our artist and musician friends, still no gas for the kitchen and heat until November, but the first concert was 4th of July 1989." Pretty soon they had a regular concert series and an inhouse recording studio. "We nurtured people we liked, and everyone from various bands helped each other, so there was a kind of core group for a while. Iwas developing an agenda and a curatorial focus. Arcadia was a testing ground for bands I wanted to produce."

Though there were still a great deal of artist-run spaces and loft gigs at that time – particularly in their neighbourhood in Williamsburg – Basinski insists "there wasn't really anything comparable to Arcadia as far as baroque beauty and glamor [went]. It was unique. We thought it would last forever, but no." Eventually the lease ran out and it was going to be ten grand a month to renew. "That was the end."

Basinski and his "repertory company" lasted nearly twenty years in their "Venetian palazzo" on the East River. "No-one ever forgot a visit to Arcadia," he tells me, not without a melancholy tinge for times gone by. But he


seems genuinely stoked about the concert series he has coming up in "sparkling London".

In the meantime, the tectonic plates of New York's effervescent cultural scene continue to shift and stir. "There's a place in Bushwick a bit further out called the Secret Robot Room," Rhys Chatham tells me at the end of our conversation, "these artists leased a building so you've got visual artists there, they do concerts there, Oneida rehearses there.

"SoHo lives on in Bushwick," he says. "The scene is vibrant there."

William Basinski's Arcadia Series takes place at venues around London over the coming year, in association with Art Assembly.

Tomorrow, Wednesday 12th March, Michael Gira plays solo at St. John's Church in Hackney, alongside Basinski. On Thursday 20th March, Rhys Chatham and Charlemagne Palestine play a collaborativedefining portion having an end located in the medium facing surface, and a wide portion connected to the other end of the track width defining portion. The track width defining portion has a top surface having a width smaller than that of the top surface of the wide portion. The width of the top surface of the track width defining portion in the medium facing surface defines the track width. To achieve higher recording densities, the track width should be as small as possible. Here, the length of the track width defining portion in the direction perpendicular to the medium facing surface will be referred to as the neck height. To improve the write characteristics of the write head unit, such as the overwrite property which indicates the


the trailing end relative to the reference position will be defined as the trailing side. The leading side is the rear side in the direction of travel of the recording medium relative to the slider. The trailing side is the front side in the direction of travel of the recording medium relative to the slider.
The magnetic head is typically disposed near the trailing end of the medium facing surface of the slider. In a magnetic disk drive, positioning of the magnetic head is performed by a rotary actuator, for example. In this case, the magnetic head moves over the recording medium along a circular orbit about the center of rotation of the rotary actuator. In such a magnetic disk drive, a tilt of the magnetic head with respectto the tangent of the circular track, which is called a skew, occurs depending on the position of the magnetic head across the tracks.
In particular, in a magnetic disk drive of the perpendicular magnetic recording system which is higher in capability of writing on a recording medium than the longitudinal magnetic recording system, the skew can cause the phenomenon that signals already written on one or more tracks in the neighborhood of a track targeted for writing are erased or attenuated during writing of a signal on the track targeted for writing. In the present application, this phenomenon will be called unwanted erasure. Unwanted erasure includes adjacent track erasure (ATE) and wide-area track erasure (WATE). To achieve higher recording densities, it is necessary to prevent unwanted erasure.
A known


technique for preventing unwanted erasure induced by the skew is to provide a write shield having an end face that is arranged to surround the end face of the main pole in the medium facing surface, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 8,427,781 B1, for example. Such a write shield will hereinafter be referred to as a wrap-around shield. The wrap-around shield includes a bottom shield located on the leading side relative to the main pole, a top shield located on the trailing side relative to the main pole, and two side shields located on opposite sides of the main pole in the track width direction. A magnetic head including the wrap-around shield is capable of preventing unwanted erasure because a magnetic flux produced from the end facePages from a certificate issued by the rabbinical seminary to 20-year-old Khaim Aronov”evich Efron from Antokol, Vilna, 1869. Among the secular subjects studied were algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, astronomy, world history, Russian history, Russian language, geography, and handwriting and drawing. Efron received the grades of “satisfactory” for arithmetic and Russian and “poor” for geography and handwriting and drafting. (YIVO)

Seminary

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were attempts to reform the training of rabbis and teachers in Europe. Such programs were conducted at seminaries that were modeled on elite state schools under Enlightened absolutism and on ecclesiastical seminaries, and combined traditional learning with the modern sciences; what was novel was the instruction in secular subjects as well as homiletics. The idea of rabbinical and teachers’ seminaries was developed


by maskilim, under both the pressure and the protection of the state. At times there were also open-minded traditional rabbis and teachers among the founders of the seminaries, who intended to anticipate and moderate changes dictated by the state or by radical Jewish reformers.

For a brief period beginning in 1823, Peter Beer and Herz Homberg, two maskilim and government advisers, oversaw the federation of three yeshivas in Prague to form the Privilegierte Öffentliche Rabbinerschule (lit., Privileged [i.e., Chartered] Public Rabbinical School). The first true seminary in Eastern Europe, however, was the Szkoła Rabinów, founded in 1826 in Warsaw primarily on the initiative of the maskilim Abraham Stern, Jakob Tugendhold, and Antoni Eisenbaum. Although it did not ordain any rabbis and graduated few teachers, it did help facilitate itsstudents’ integration into advanced institutions of learning and vocational training. The seminary in Warsaw was closed after the Polish uprising in 1863; yet, along with the Collegio Rabbinico Italiano in Padua (1829), the École Rabbinique de France in Metz (1830), and the Nederlandsch Israëlitisch Seminarium of the Ashkenazim in Amsterdam (1836), it served as a model for seminaries in the Pale of Settlement, the Ravvinskiia Uchilishcha in Vilna and Zhitomir (1847). In 1854 the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Prussian-ruled Breslau was founded, stimulating the opening of the Országos Rabbiképző Intézet (1877) in Budapest.

The seminaries in Warsaw, Vilna, Zhitomir, and Budapest depended on cooperation between the Enlightened absolutist, imperial state and the maskilim. The Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, by contrast, owed its existence to a private Jewish foundation and the


personal initiative of a conservative Jewish reformer. The seminaries in Warsaw, Vilna, and Zhitomir were connected via personal networks. There was cooperation between the seminaries of Breslau and Budapest, and an attempt at cooperation among Vilna, Zhitomir, and Breslau.

In their attempts to modernize rabbinical training, the seminaries invoked medieval Jewish philosophy as a forerunner of, and an inspiration for, modern Jewish academia. All of the seminaries developed new, comprehensive curricula and introduced the study of religious philosophy and homiletics; they merged academic scholarship with traditional learning (Bible and Talmud), though they struck a balance in different ways. Most offered a twofold course of study that combined university preparatory courses with rabbinical or teacher training; in Breslau and Budapest, however, rabbinical training had a clear priority and took morethan two or three times as long to complete than the programs in Vilna and Zhitomir, where the main focus was on general higher education.

In Budapest, studies at the university were and continue to be obligatory; in Breslau they were looked on favorably. In Warsaw, university studies were possible only for a brief period, until the closing down of the university in 1831. In Vilna and Zhitomir, such studies were not an option.

All of the seminaries stimulated scholarship in Jewish studies. Breslau had the best reputation, but the highest enrollments were found at the seminaries of the Russian-ruled Pale of Settlement. The longest-lived, however, proved to be the seminary in Budapest.

Vilna and Zhitomir

State-sponsored seminaries were founded in the Pale of Settlement in 1847 in Vilna and Zhitomir, centers


Gottlober, and Eli‘ezer Zweifel in Zhitomir) taught Jewish subjects. Russian was the official language of instruction, but ignorance of that language meant that German was used until the forced integration policy after the Polish uprising of 1863. Yiddish was the spoken language.

Following the standard model for state educational institutions, both seminaries were boarding schools under Christian leadership. Each of them had dormitories with up to 65 students. Local Christian headmasters (although Akim Zimmerman in Zhitomir was a convert) ensured state control. Organized along paramilitary lines, the institutions demanded dual loyalty—to the state and to the Jewish religion and Jewish traditions. The seminaries admitted boys from the age of 10, both paying and scholarship students, with preference given to orphans, the poor, and teachers’ children. Students received a seven-yeargeneral and Jewish secondary school curriculum according to the tenets of the Haskalah, including traditional Jewish educational elements: Bible studies, Talmud, ethics, Jewish law, Jewish history, and Hebrew and Aramaic language and literature. This curriculum was followed by either one year of teacher training or two years of training for the rabbinate. Scholarship students were obligated to teach for a mandatory period of 6–10 years.

The seminaries were poorly defined, controversial institutions. For maskilim, they were a means of reform (and a source of employment); for Russian reformers they were a tool of integration of Jews into Russian society; and for the state bureaucracy, they represented a means of control, as they were essentially state-run institutions. These varying goals created conflict over the methods for training rabbis and teachers


and highlighted the impotence of the maskilim and the limits of governmental reform policies. Amid the tension created by these differing forces, the seminaries had to manage conflicts aggravated by crises and political upheavals. They nevertheless developed their own dynamic and managed to grow to impressive size and to wield considerable influence.

In 1847, there were 63 pupils in Vilna and 23 in Zhitomir; by the end of the 1850s, these numbers had grown to 300 and 207, respectively, and during the 1860s enrollment in Vilna reached 400. The two seminaries were at that point producing 4 rabbis and 10–11 teachers each year. Altogether, they produced 550 graduates, including about 150 rabbis and about 400 teacher candidates (more than 234 in Vilna and 160 in Zhitomir). During the 1870s,seminary graduates held 55 rabbinical posts, many in the larger cities: Zelik Minor in Moscow; Avram Drabkin in Saint Petersburg; Aharon Pompianski and Shelomoh Pucher in Riga. The most prominent graduates—Adolph Landau, Lev Katzenellenbogen, Avraham Harkavy, Nikolai and Osip Bakst, Mikhail Morgulis, and Mikhail Kulisher—became scientists, journalists, and lawyers who served as key figures in founding centers of Russian Jewish culture in Saint Petersburg and Odessa.

Three brothers of the Shokhor family who studied in the Vilna rabbinical seminary and went on to become crown rabbis in various cities of the Russian Empire, 1898. (Forward Association / YIVO)

In their earliest years, the seminaries met opposition from traditional communal leaders, who sometimes even compelled students to fill quotas for recruits into the Russian army; not until 1850 were seminary students


freedom of location, and admission to the civil service for Jewish academicians (1861). Enrollment rose with these features, and the changes fostered integration into the state educational system but distanced the seminaries from their intended function. Under the patronage of businessman Aharon Lebenson, the seminary in Vilna incorporated a cultural center with a library, a Sabbath school, a relief fund, and an orphanage. From 1860 to 1879, it published the weekly periodical Ha-Karmel with a supplement in Russian, receiving support for the venture from the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia (OPE) in Saint Petersburg.

As a new generation of Jewish staff took over in Vilna, conflicts arose. The differences between the two generations of maskilim were manifest in their clothing, language, and understandingof the goals of education. While the older, self-taught generation spoke Yiddish and wore traditional garb, young teachers wore the uniform of the Ministry of Education (beginning in 1857) and spoke Russian (even during the Polish uprising of 1863, the seminaries remained loyal to the Russian state). Jewish studies, however, became unpopular. The Great Reforms radicalized the young maskilim, and they began to demand civil rights in addition to an education.

By the mid-1860s, almost all the self-taught teachers had retired, although influential teaching posts remained “in the family”: Tsevi Hirsh Katzenellenbogen and Yehudah Idel Shereshevskii were replaced by their sons (Ḥayim Leib Katzenellenbogen, Il’ia Shereshevskii), Lebensohn passed the post to his son-in-law (Yehoshu‘a Steinberg). Young maskilim, including Minor, Pompianski, and Pucher, became teachers in the new Russian Jewish


elementary schools and were the first to preach in the language of the land. The seminary in Vilna became extremely active as a center for translation: for the first time, the prayer book (by Assir Vol’; 1866) and the Torah (by Yonah Gerstein, Lev Gordon, and Lev Levanda; 1875) were translated into Russian, and Russian Jewish textbooks were published. The seminaries produced the first generation of Russian Jewish intellectuals, a new elite.

The balancing act during a period of imposed acculturation threatened to degenerate into forced integration, and some seminarians indeed converted to Christianity. The publication of Kniga kagala (The Kahal Book; 1869) by the censor for Jewish books in Vilna, Iacov Brafman, launched a scandal; his text denounced the Jewish communal organization and supplied ammunition for antisemitic journalists.The seminary was involved in the publication and was therefore drawn into the controversy, placing it under increasing pressure to justify itself.

The seminary in Zhitomir followed the Vilna model but had some particular distinctions. Located in the provinces, far from the centers of power, it could more easily avoid close supervision, although this also meant that it was a less prestigious institution. Internecine feuds unfolded undisturbed by outside forces, and in contrast to Vilna, there was no handover from older to young among the Jewish staff. During the Crimean War, the Zhitomir seminary was larger than the one in Vilna, although it subsequently reassumed its subordinate position.

While the emphasis at the Vilna seminary was on philology, Zhitomir focused on mathematics. During the Great Reforms, it made a name


for itself thanks to the head of the Kiev school district, Nikolai Pirogov, who abolished corporal punishment, admitted seminarians to universities, and allowed them to serve as headmasters. A struggle for pension entitlements, which lasted almost 10 years and was ultimately unsuccessful, was led largely by Jewish teachers in Zhitomir.

At the start of the 1870s, the revolutionary movement began to attract followers from the seminaries, including Aharon Lieberman, Aharon Zundelevich, Vladimir Iokhel’son, and Lev Kantor. The seminaries had fulfilled their function as engines of integration and the Russian government found them politically risky in this early revolutionary period. In 1873, after the change of state policy toward Poland and with the halt to educational reform under the minister of education, Count Dmitrii Tolstoi, the seminaries were converted toJewish teacher-training institutes.

Breslau

Seven years after the founding of the seminaries in the Pale of Settlement, the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar (JTS) in Prussian-ruled Breslau opened its doors. Privately funded, JTS was founded by Zacharias Frankel, who also became its director, and was under the supervision of the state. Frankel developed the seminary based on the school of Positive-Historical Judaism that he had instigated.

JTS existed from 1854 until it was violently dissolved by the Nazis. Not a boarding school, it was an institution of a manageable size, with 2–5 teachers and an average of 39 students per year (a peak of 69 in 1929–1930), some of whom earned it a great reputation. Especially prominent were the faculty of the early period—Heinrich Graetz, Jacob Bernays, and Manuel Joël—followed by Jacob Freudenthal and


a multitude of seminary graduates (Ismar Elbogen, Hermann Cohen, Moritz Güdemann, Michael Guttmann, Bernard Weinryb, Leo Baeck, Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski), who became eminent figures in academia, literature, and public life. In all, the seminary graduated a total of 250 rabbis.

The curriculum consisted of classical languages, German and Hebrew literature, natural sciences, Jewish philosophy and history, Bible, Talmud, and homiletic literature and preaching. German was initially the language of instruction, but in later years Hebrew was incorporated as well. From 1856 it operated its own synagogue. University studies were mandatory for seminarians, and obtaining a doctoral degree was looked upon favorably. After 1869, JTS and the university were connected informally when Graetz and Freudenthal taught at both institutions. In the early 1930s, two seminary teachers were accredited as universityprofessors, and JTS was entitled to call itself the Hochschule für Jüdische Theologie. The renowned Monatschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (Monthly for the History and Science of Judaism) was the seminary’s institutional journal, edited from 1869 to 1887 by Graetz, from 1893 to 1920 by Markus Brann, and from 1920 to 1938 by Isaak Heinemann. JTS contributed prominently to the scientific study of Judaism; Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden (History of the Jews) is but one example.

Budapest

The Rabbinical Seminary of Hungary in Budapest (Országos Rabbiképző Intézet), which still exists, was founded in 1877, a decade after the emancipation of Jews in Hungary. From its inception, the seminary was located in a building specifically built for it in the city’s center. Originally it was under the control


of the Ministry of Religion, which nominated the faculty and supported the school financially. Since 1945, it has been an institution of the Union of Jewish Communities in Hungary. Until World War II, the seminary’s rectors and many of its teachers were internationally renowned Jewish scholars, among them Moses Bloch (who served as rector from 1877 to 1907), Vilmos (Wilhelm) Bacher (1907–1913), Lajos (Ludwig) Blau (1914–1932), Michael Guttmann (1933–1942), David Kaufmann (1877–1899), and Ignác Goldziher (1900–1921).

Ideologically akin to the Positive-Historical Judaism of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, with which it maintained close relations, the Budapest seminary bore the specific imprint of Hungarian Jewish Neology. Training courses generally lasted 10 years and were divided into two equal phases. Accordingly, there were two departments: the university preparatory program andthe rabbinical school. Following the 1946–1947 academic year, the seminary was reduced to offering rabbinical training alone; after 1991 it was restructured and now has training programs for religious teachers, cantors, and social workers. In 1999, it was renamed the Jewish Theological Seminary–University of Jewish Studies (Országos Rabbiképző–Zsidó Egyetem).

The curriculum initially combined general education courses and classical rabbinical studies (Bible, Talmud, halakhah, Hebrew, Aramaic, Jewish history, and philosophy). The original languages of instruction were Hungarian and German; Hebrew was added after 1933, and Hebrew and Hungarian have been utilized since 1945. Since 1891, upper-level students had to be enrolled simultaneously at the University of Budapest; a doctorate became mandatory to receive the state-approved rabbinical degree.

Until the Holocaust there were two types of seminarians: secondary school graduates and former


yeshiva students. The school attracted students from Hungary as well as Slovakia, Transylvania, and the Banat region. The plan to establish a boarding school was realized only for a brief period in 1931–1932 under the direction of Blau. After World War II, students came from the Communist states of Eastern Europe.

In the first century of its existence, the seminary ordained 300 rabbis, some of whom later became renowned seminary directors, including Adolf Buechler (Jews’ College in London), Samuel Krauss (Israelitische-Theologische Lehranstalt in Vienna), and Michael Guttmann (JTS in Breslau). A number of its graduates, including Raphael Patai and Martin Schreiner, acquired international reputations as scholars. The lecturers Vilmos Bacher, József Bánóczi, and Samuel Krauss published the first complete translation of the Hebrew Bible into Hungarian between 1898 and1907 and were among the founders of the Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat (Israelite Hungarian Literary Society). In the 1920s, the seminary took a leading role in the Magyarization of Hungary’s Jews. After World War II and despite the cold war, Alexander Schreiber emerged as an internationally renowned scholar of Judaic Studies and ensured the survival of the institution within the Communist state.

In 1985, the seminary was presided over by Lászlo Salgó; József Schweitzer headed it from 1985 to 1998, and was succeeded by Alfréd Schöner. The enrollment numbers varied, though there were always a greater number of students in the university preparatory department than in the rabbinical school. Peaks of 106 students at the university preparatory level and 48 students at the rabbinical level were attained in 1887–1888


and 1892–1893, respectively, but enrollment fell to an all-time low of 18 and 9 students, respectively, during the critical years of 1920–1921 after the founding of the Hungarian republic. In the years immediately preceding the Holocaust, enrollment in rabbinical courses rose drastically with the systematic exclusion of Jews from Hungarian society, reaching a peak of 125 in 1943–1944. After the war, combined enrollment in the seminary and the university numbered only in the tens but it rose again after 1989, reaching 264 in 2003.Peter McCann's HR troubles started in 2001, when a former employee filed a complaint alleging that Ideal Images, McCann's Omaha-based screen printing and embroidery company, fired her because of her race. McCann and his entire staff were questioned by investigators from the state's Equal Opportunity Commission, and the investigation dragged on for several stressful weeks. The complaint was eventually dismissed, partly because the worker's replacement was also a minority, but the thought of another discrimination charge frightened McCann, who began to obsess over everything from background checks to performance evaluations.

By 2004, McCann's staff had tripled, to 27 employees, and the HR chores had become nearly all-consuming. Meanwhile, workers were grumbling about Ideal's lack of flexible spending accounts and a retirement plan. McCann was eager to offer the benefits,


those brought up near Boston, may think differently. Clarke makes Kennedy seem a bit listless — not the way most people remember him, but then Chappaquiddick took place only thirteen months after Kennedy’s brother Robert was killed, and Kennedy probably was a bit listless.

In an early scene after the opening credits, Kennedy is talking to 28-year-old blond Mary Jo Kopechne on the beach (not by accident, probably, the director does not have them sitting close to each other) raising an obvious question: how did Kennedy get to the beach? Two methods leap immediately to mind: 1) He drove (the movie has him being driven down Dike Road and over the bridge — he’s in the back seat reading the paper, presumably in English) and then walked to thebeach; or 2) He rappelled down a seriously long rope from Apollo 11, then on its way to the moon.

The people of Massachusetts selected number 2 as the obviously correct answer because Kennedy said, later that week, that he was unfamiliar with that part of the Chappaquiddick Island, i.e., the road to Dike Bridge, the bridge itself, and the beach, and they believed him sufficiently to return him to the United States Senate.

Later the same evening, Kennedy and Kopechne go to the party at a rented house to be with others from Robert Kennedy’s staff: nothing wrong with that. The group was described in some press accounts as six men and six women, imparting an almost certainly undeserved whiff of scandal — people expect one downwind from the


because the Kennedy clan and its media mafia sought to sanitize the event in order to protect the sole remaining heir to the Kennedy throne — and bedrooms, where young staffers might be, uh, bedded.

Probably the two most damning facts in the movie, and in real life, are that when Kennedy walked from the bridge back to the house where the party was going on, he didn’t stop at any of the four houses along the way to ask for help. Nor did he follow the advice of his two pals (Joe Gargan and Paul Markham) that he call the police as soon as he got back to his hotel in Edgartown. Why didn’t he, or why didn’t he stop at one of the four houses? Perhaps becausegirl in the car.

Kennedy is whisked back to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and then the Kennedy spin doctors arrive to control the narrative: Theodore (Ask Not) Sorensen, Robert (even he himself conceded he was a failure) McNamara, Burke Marshall (head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Kennedy) and family members, the Stephen Smiths and Sargent Shrivers. They plot and scheme how to lie, how to dissemble. Kennedy continues to screw up, wearing an obviously unneeded neck brace to Kopechne’s funeral.

The story they concoct is that Kennedy left the party house around 11:30 p.m., in time to get the last ferry back to Edgartown (it stopped running at midnight). He said he was unfamiliar with the road, and instead of staying on the


nightmare lives on.) Fade to credits. End of movie.

But not end of scandal.

The rest of the scandal was detailed in pieces in the Vineyard Gazette and the Washington Post in 1989. The foreman of the grand jury that investigated the Chappaquiddick events told reporters that his jury was misled and blocked in its investigation. The judge at the inquest (which the Kennedy people had managed to have held behind closed doors) in his final report made it clear that the evidence was that Kennedy knew where he was headed.

The judge bullied the grand jurors and warned them repeatedly that they were bound to secrecy, and he even had a Roman Catholic priest in clerical garb sit beside him.

The grand jury foreman said that the judge so intimidated himFor all you car aficionados out there, how's this for an operating system analogy from PC World? Installing Linux onto a laptop sold by the computer retail behemoth is like putting a Ford engine into a BMW, apparently.

Earlier this week a mysterious PC World customer, known only by the name of Tikka, posted a story to Slashdot about the store's refusal to repair a hardware fault on a five-month-old Acer laptop.

The store's IT support "Tech Guys" told Tikka that, because Linux had been installed, the machine's warranty had been voided.

But, here's the rub: the fault in question hinged on a dodgy, er, hinge on the laptop's display. In other words, a pure hardware failure that was completely unrelated to the choice of operating system installed.

Despite that, PC World


work. Training is required for new Volunteer Land Stewards. In addition to the monitoring skills and knowledge gained from the training, volunteers will have the unique opportunity of participating in the preservation of some of the most beautiful lands on the Eastern Shore.

Saturday, May 14 on the Upper Sassafras River Portion of the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail

Join Sultana Projects' staff naturalists Chris Cerino and John Mann for an incredible paddle on the National Park Service's new Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail. On Saturday, May 14, Chris, John, and a handful of lucky kayakers will venture to the headwaters of the Sassafras River and the site of one of the most active Great Blue Heron rookeries on Maryland's Upper Eastern Shore. In addition toGeneral Secretariat for Research and Technology, Greece; the National Scientific Research Foundation, and National Office for Research and Technology, Hungary; the Department of Atomic Energy and the Department of Science and Technology, India; the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, Iran; the Science Foundation, Ireland; the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Italy; the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and the World Class University program of NRF, Republic of Korea; the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences; the Mexican Funding Agencies (CINVESTAV, CONACYT, SEP, and UASLP-FAI); the Ministry of Science and Innovation, New Zealand; the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission; the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the National Science Centre, Poland; the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal; JINR (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan);


the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, the Federal Agency of Atomic Energy of the Russian Federation, Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research; the Ministry of Science and Technological Development of Serbia; the Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación and Programa Consolider-Ingenio 2010, Spain; the Swiss Funding Agencies (ETH Board, ETH Zurich, PSI, SNF, UniZH, Canton Zurich, and SER); the National Science Council, Taipei; the Thailand Center of Excellence in Physics, the Institute for the Promotion of Teaching Science and Technology of Thailand and the National Science and Technology Development Agency of Thailand; the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey, and Turkish Atomic Energy Authority; the Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK; the US Department of Energy,personally purchased over 7.6 million PPC clicks over the last year, across almost every mainstream advertising exchange, he deeply understands the ins and outs of the industry.

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Blockchain Developer

Alexey Suhih

Alexey is a top-level developer and part of the original DopeCoin development team. He is also the co-founder of BurningButtons.com. As a full-stack developer who specializes in Node.js, PHP, Postgre/MySQL/MongoDB and many other related technologies, he regularly works on massive projects. He has been the team lead on several large scale development projects and has built customized payment gateways, back-end billing systems and everything in between.

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Web Developer

Daniel Lagman

Daniel is an experienced senior web developer who has worked on multiple projects in the Philippines, France, Germany and the US. With his innate Project management skills and natural eloquence he facilitated meetings


across different media directors of million dollar companies in and around the Philippines. Specializing in PHP, Yii Development, WordPress themes / plugins and other similar technologies, he forged a strong understanding of the ins and outs of many systems.

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Lawyer

Crofton Sacco

Based in Colorado, Crofton is an associate attorney and also runs Northern Colorado Marijuana Attorney. He specializes in business and commercial law, E-business and information technology, transactions, intellectual property, and copyright/trademark law. He has been representing medical marijuana patients/dispensaries/rights for the majority of his career and is extremely passionate about the new and emerging industry. He is also a marijuana advocate and has been a member of NORML and the Colorado NORML chapter since 2012.

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Sales & Marketing

Keith Shingleton

Keith has deep ties with dispensary owners, cultivators, product producers, and marijuanalicense providers all across Canada. As the president and co-founder of Integrative Alternative Health Services, he has a large Rolodex of patients, doctors, and medicinal marijuana providers all across the country. Being involved so deeply in the Canadian marijuana space he has deep knowledge of the rules and regulations and has always been the go-to guy whenever a connection needs to be made or a partnership established.

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Community Manager

David Edwards

Based In the South West Of England, David 'Goldie' Edwards has been marketing online since before the birth of Google. He has aided numerous companies around the world to the top of search engine rankings. In early 2014, David made the decision to switch from helping others reach their online goals to building out his own substantial network of websites


and web 2.0 properties. He has been and still is very involved with the Cannabis industry and cryptocurrencies.

OUR ADVISORS

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Zach Collins

Zach is a partner in a digital marketing agency specializing in performance marketing. His firm helps clients utilize emerging adtech to scale their businesses online by quantifying the value of every impression purchased. Previously he was the head of US equity trading for Apex Capital Management, a hedge fund managing over $2 billion in assets. Zach graduated from Vanderbilt University summa cum laude and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in Economics. He is also a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).

Business Advisor

Mike Jed

Michael is a co-founder of Elevated Strategies, which focuses on patient retention management for cannabis dispensaries. He entered the industry when he tookhis skill set, developed at Deloitte Consulting, to one of the largest dispensary chains in the southwest. He was promoted to Chief Marketing Officer and deeply understands the advertising needs of dispensaries and their partners. Michael graduated Magna Cum Laude from UCLA with a major in business economics and a minor in accounting.

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Investment Advisor

Richard Tran

Richard runs a large community of cryptocurrency enthusiasts in Vietnam and is a representative of bgctradecoin.com. He has a large social media presence over several platforms including over 26,000 members on Facebook and 4000+ on Telegram. The purpose of his communities is to analyze new and upcoming projects and to organize investment and spread awareness to worthy projects. He works with a small specialized group of Vietnamese and Chinese investors who have been responsible


by Staff WritersKirkuk, Iraq (AFP) March 3, 2010
The election hopes of Kurdish voters in Kirkuk rest on an American neurologist of Iraqi descent whose mission is to win control of the disputed, ethnically-mixed oil-rich province.

Nejm Eddine Karim, a Kurd, returned to his native land from Washington two months ago to contest the election and is staying in the house that Iraq's President Jalal Talabani, himself also a Kurd, has made his campaign HQ.

"I propose that an Arab becomes vice president of Kurdistan and a Turkmen is made prime minister, if we succeed in making Kirkuk (240 kilometres, 150 miles, north of Baghdad) part of Kurdistan," said Karim, whose wife and three children have stayed in the US.

The 61-year-old physician emigrated to the United States in 1975, having firstobtained his medical degree at the University of Mosul, in northern Iraq.

He is the number one candidate in Kirkuk for an alliance between Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) of Massud Barzani, president of the autonomous Kurdistan northern region, which is in dispute with Baghdad over oil rights and the sovereignty of Kirkuk.

Talabani, who has suffered heart trouble and circulation problems, has travelled to the United States on several occasions to be treated by Karim, who has become his personal physician.

According to Karim, "the Arabs and Turkmen will experience a situation a thousand times better than today because their voice will be directly heard among the leaders of Kurdistan," if the province is brought under the northern region's banner, rather than the


central government in Baghdad.

The decision to select a candidate who left Iraq 35 years ago, however, has raised the eyebrows of some members of the Kurdish community in Kirkuk, which has a mixed population of Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and Christians.

Karim is "a faithful ally of Talabani, who has a book of addresses in the US and there is a consensus among the two big parties to give him an important political position," said Khabab Abdallah, a Kurdish political analyst in the Kurdish region's second city of Sulaimaniyah.

For Rafaa al-Marsumi, a fellow analyst based in Kirkuk, Karim is "close to the Americans and a politician of weight for the PUK, which has passed through a period of crisis but retains a popular base of support.

Karim's message may be receivedwell by Kurds in Kirkuk, but less favourably by other communities.

Since the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein in the 2003 US-led invasion, the province's population has risen from 850,000 to 1.4 million, according to figures collated in September last year by provincial authorities.

Around 92,000 families, said to have been displaced under now executed Saddam's Arabisation policy in the 1980s that saw Sunni Arabs arrive as Kurds were driven out, have returned from the Kurdistan region.

Turkmen, who believe they are the original inhabitants of Kirkuk, view the influx of Kurds as an invasion, and Assyrian Christians and Arabs want the province to remain a sovereign part of Iraq, rather than Kurdistan.

Thirteen parliamentary seats are up for grabs in Kirkuk, and Kurds expect to obtain the majority, although Karim's detractors


say the physician's years abroad have left him uneducated about Iraq's chaotic situation.

"He could have made his medical skills available to his compatriots instead of arriving with a divisive project," said Omar Khalaf al-Juburi, a candidate for the secular Iraqiya list of former prime minister Iyad Allawi.

Ammar Kahia, of the conservative Shiite list of the Iraqi National Alliance (INA), which includes candidates loyal to the radical anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, accused Karim of adopting "a partisan manner."

For the State of Law Coalition of current Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, the bottom line is that Kirkuk must remain under Baghdad's control. "Kirkuk should not be annexed," said Sheikh Khairi Nazem al-Assi, a candidate on the list.

Pakistan won't extradite Taliban leaderLahore, Pakistan (UPI) Mar 2, 2009 Pakistan will not be sendingPRN Promotes Doug Rice to President and GM

Tuesday, May 3, 2005

Veteran broadcasting executive Doug Rice has been promoted to president and general manager of Performance Racing Network and Gerry Horn, a 20-year veteran of corporate sales, was elevated to vice president of PRN sales.

The announcement was made by H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler, president of Speedway Motorsports, Inc., Performance Racing Network's parent company.

Rice joined PRN in 1988 as director of affiliates and, after serving in other managerial positions, was named vice president and general manager in 1999. In addition to overseeing the network's operations, Rice has also served as co-anchor alongside Mark Garrow on all PRN race broadcasts since 1994.

Under Rice's direction, PRN has grown to one of the largest radio networks in professional sports. The network broadcasts 10 NASCAR


NEXTEL Cup races and eight NASCAR Busch series events at Speedway Motorsports, Inc.
facilities. It also produces numerous other motorsports-related programs including "Fast Talk with Benny Parsons," "PRN's Garage Pass" and "The ALLTEL Pit Reporters."

"Doug has done a tremendous job building and refining PRN," said Wheeler. "Under his direction, the quality of the broadcast production, programming and growth has been phenomenal."

Prior to joining PRN, Rice worked as the morning show host on WSTP in Salisbury, N.C. He is a graduate of Appalachian State University.

Horn joined PRN in 2002 after serving as vice president of business development for Market Velocity, and spending nine years as director of sponsorship sales for the Charlotte Hornets NBA franchise. Horn earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Rhode Island and a master's degreefrom the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Performance Racing Network is a subsidiary of Speedway Motorsports, Inc. (NYSE:TRK), a leading marketer and promoter of motorsports entertainment in the United States. Its programming airs on more than 700 radio stations, XM Satellite Radio and NASCAR.com.


use of cloud in their business, advantages of cloud, challenges if any, costs in setup and running and more. Gautam has been a startup entrepreneur himself, who is up to date with the best technologies and platforms that can be utilized to boost new businesses.

4:50pm – 5pm : Q and A

5pm : Thriveni to talk about Cloud Security Systems. She is a Professor of Computer Science with teaching experience in various esteemed engineering colleges. She has participated in national and international conferences and won the best technical research paper award for her paper titled, “Cloud computing as the next best business strategy”

5:20pm : Q and A

5:30pm : Networking Timeout

5:50pm : Anshum Gupta to speak on Amazon CloudSearch and his experience with various startups who weren’t pro-cloud, why henow understands the advantages of cloud technology. He is a software engineer-cum-architect specializing in search engines and intelligent systems. Currently, a part of the AWS CloudSearch team. He has had extensive experience being a primary contributor in the Search teams at various startups like Naukri and Cleartrip

6:10pm : Q and A

6:20pm : Bhavesh Goswami Co-Founder and CEO of Cloudthat to speak on “Host your application in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in Minutes”. We will learn about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon CloudFormation, and how to host your application in the cloud. Bhavesh was one of the first developers in Simple Storage Service (S3) team of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Seattle. He honed his Cloud computing skills at Amazon where he helped ship the first


Associated Press

President Donald Trump fired off a flurry of tweets defending his trade war with China on Friday morning as tariff increases took effect.

He floated plans for another large-scale farmer-bailout plan that would buy American agricultural products and ship them "to poor & starving countries in the form of humanitarian assistance."

He also argued that protectionism was helping Americans and said there's "no need to rush" a deal with China.

President Donald Trump fired off a flurry of tweets defending his trade war with China on Friday morning as tariff increases took effect, arguing that protectionism was helping Americans and floating plans for another large-scale plan to bail out farmers.

"Tariffs will bring in FAR MORE wealth to our Country than even a phenomenal deal of the traditional kind," he wrotevowing to take countermeasures. About $250 billion worth of shipments from China faces a 25% import tax following the adjustment.

Trump has in recent days swung between expressing optimism toward a deal and defending the possibility of a prolonged dispute. He said Thursday that Chinese President Xi Jinping had written him a "very beautiful" letter and that the two leaders would "probably" speak by phone.

Yet Trump asserted that Americans were better off during a trade war early Friday and doubled down on plans to place new tariffs on the $325 billion worth of US imports from China that hadn't been hit. He also appeared to delete a tweet saying there was "no need to rush" trade talks with China that were set to resume Friday in Washington, only to


When most people speak of racism against the Irish they automatically think of Britain and more specifically England. The history of anti-Irishness in our Anglo-Celtic neighbour is a long one, with Medieval roots. It was the Norman-French invasion and conquest of Britain in the 11th and 12th centuries that gave it real impetus. Up to that time Ireland and England generally enjoyed close relations. From the 6th century onwards northern English aristocrats regularly married off their children into the Irish (and Scottish) royal houses in the hope of cementing alliances with the dominant Gaelic powers of the Irish Sea region. Ironically when the Norman-French lord William the Bastard took (stole?) the throne of England it was to the Irish that the indigenous English turned for help. Harold Godwinsonwas the last native English king of England until his death in the Battle of Hastings in 1066 fighting the Norman-French invaders. But in his youth he had lived for a time as a political exile in Ireland, while his sister Edith of Wessex, the wife of Edward the Confessor king of England, was noted as a fluent Irish-speaker. Returning to England Harold maintained his family’s strong links to Ireland, securing from his allies a mixed Irish and Scandinavian-Irish force which fought alongside the English at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, three weeks before the catastrophe at Hastings.

Following the death of Harold at the hands of the Norman-French his sons and their supporters fled to Ireland seeking refuge with the powerful magnate Diarmaid mac Maoil na mBó, the


king of Laighin. From there the English exiles launched several attacks on “Occupied” England using Irish and Scandinavian-Irish fleets and armies, striking across the southern counties (one target was the affluent sea-port of Bristol whose mercantile classes later became closely associated with the Norman-English campaigns in Ireland). Eventually the exiled English princes disappeared from the pages of history, possibly blending into the milieu of Irish aristocratic families after a brief sojourn in Scandinavia. Another irony is to be found in the outside chance that the descendants of the last native English king of England may be living in Ireland.

Anti-Irishness on the island of Britain took a firm hold with the paranoia of the Norman-French ascendancy which displaced the English nobility. For them Ireland was a political, military andeconomic rival, and they looked on at the Gaelic-Scandinavian trading networks that dominated the region with envy – and avarice. The country was also increasingly a place of refuge for anti-Norman interests, English, Scottish and Welsh. The latter in particular filled the Irish royal courts as petitioners for military and financial aid including such notables as the Irish-born Gruffydd ap Cynan, later king of Gwynedd, and the exiled Rhys ap Tewdwr, king of Deheubarth. Even some Norman-French lords looked to forge bonds with their Irish counterparts, the seditious activities of the powerful de Montgomery brothers, Arnulf de Montgomery (Earl of Pembroke) and Robert de Montgomery (Earl of Shrewsbury), leading indirectly to the Norman-British incursions into Ireland of the late 12th century, culminating with the invasions of 1169 and


undercurrent throughout much of British society in the same way that anti-Semitism is felt if not always expressed in Europe (at its most banal the otherwise inexplicable dislike in England for people with red hair or “gingers” stems from the stereotypical image of Irish people in 18th and 19th Britain, a sort of lingering folk-memory).

Unfortunately wherever the British went their prejudices went with them. The United States, despite its origins and later development, retained a strong British influence in its founding language, culture and religion that made animosity to the Irish inevitable. The presence of so many English colonists along with their Protestant religious beliefs meant that Irish settlers and their Roman Catholic faith were at best distasteful, at worse positively provocative. These attitudes were given a militantinfusion with the later migration of Scots-Irish (or Ulster-Scots) settlers from Ireland. Shaped by the conflict-ridden Anglo-Scottish colonial plantations in Ireland the Scots-Irish brought with them a ready resort to bloodshed wrapped up in a puritanical Protestant fundamentalism that created a seismic shift in the emerging American society. For a significant number of these new Americans to find the old Irish (and Catholic) foe in their new home was unacceptable and they developed an intolerant culture of Irish people that persists in some parts of the United States to the present day.

These two factors, more than anything else, blossomed into the anti-Irish racism that became so dominant in American society in the decades surrounding An Gorta Mór or the Great Famine in Ireland of the mid-1800s. During the


American Civil War the Confederacy was notable for the high levels of Scots-Irish descendants participating in the Confederate forces and government, whereas the newer Irish filled the ranks of the Federal armies (and thereby assured entry to wider acceptability in American society). Radical anti-Irish and anti-Catholic groups like the Native American Party or the Know-Nothings and the later the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) traced their origins to these times.

It has often been said that when John F. Kennedy was elected to the White House in 1961 the moment had been reached when Irish-Americans were finally accepted as American. Looking back at those rose-tinted times through the myth of the new Camelot, however tarnished around the edges it has subsequently become, the whirlwind of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice Kennedy’ssuccessful candidacy whipped up in the United States has long since been forgotten. If you think the indignation and outright hysteria that greeted the election and presidency of Barack Obama is something new think again. It finds eerie parallels in the administration of JFK.

Over the last five decades anti-Irish (or Catholic) bigotry in the US was largely relegated to the fringe. It rarely manifested itself, except through a sort of vague mockery or satire. Even when offensive stereotypes of Irish people were presented it was not always with prejudicial intent. Simple ignorance, more often than malice, was to blame when offence was given. If the makers of the American televisions series, Sons of Anarchy, were told that their Irish characters and storylines are racist (which they explicitly are)


Ford Mustang design inspired by World War II squadron of African American P-51 Mustang fighter pilots. The sale of this […]

After announcing its SEMA Mustang Build Powered by Women contest earlier in the week, Ford Motor Company has now opened up voting to aide in the selection of the final concept. The collaboration between Ford and SEMA is a first, and is lead by SEMA Businesswomen’s Network. At the end of the contest, a 2013 […]

Later this year at the 2012 SEMA Show, Ford will debut a special Ford Mustang project car that will be design and built by a group of women from Ford and the SEMA Businesswomen’s Network (SBN). Ford donated a 2013 Mustang GT along with some leading female designers from inside the company toSnapshot: Above, tigers at a reserve in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Officials said on Monday that there were nearly 3,000 Bengal tigers in the wild in India, a 33 percent increase since 2014.

Billboard record: “Old Town Road,” the country-rap song by Lil Nas X, has become the longest-running No. 1 single in the 61-year history of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.

A royal editor: Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, will be the first guest editor of British Vogue’s September issue, considered the most influential edition of the year for fashion magazines.

Gamer wins $3 million: Kyle Giersdorf, 16, said he planned to buy a new desk with the money he won at the Fortnite World Cup.

Late-night comedy: The hosts noted President Trump’s disparaging comments about Baltimore. “The man who tells us


Council Member Sherri Downing

Council Member Sherri Barbarin Downing

Council Member Downing is a District of Columbia native but her family hails from New Orleans, Louisiana. After beginning her career in Information Technology as a Cisco Network Engineer, she was able to purchase a home in Fairmount Heights. A resident for over 25 years, she found a love for her city and as a lay person has worked tirelessly to ensure that the residents of Fairmount Height enjoy the benefits that surrounding cities enjoy. While working full- time with Citibank, she often sent out her signature e-mail blasts to her neighbors, letting them know about BGE Credits, Tax Credits, and Historical Register information. Mrs. Downing was elected to the Town Council in May, 2015. Council Member Downing is the Chairof the Public Relations Committee and the Co-Chair of the Community Services Committee. Her community activism is how she met her husband, Kevin Downing. They often work side by side on various community projects and since their nuptials, have decided to stay and continue to invest in Fairmount Heights. Mrs. Downing is the mother of one son, Shohn Barbarin and a grandmother to Zahyden.


Asia Division.

Fighting between the military and the KIA has been ongoing since a 17-year ceasefire disintegrated in June 2011. The military’s offensive against the KIA has displaced more than 75,000 people, while Naypyidaw has largely prevented international organisations from delivering aid to conflict areas.3 Hospitalised As Soldiers Brutalize Youth Corpers In Rivers State!

At least three members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) serving in Rivers State are reeling in pains after being brutally wounded by soldiers believed to be attached to the Joint Task Force (JTF) in Rivers State.
Street Journal’s findings revealed that as part of the activities marking the end of the service year for concerned youth corps members in the Omoku axis, the Local Inspector of the NYSC in the area, Mr Adams had organised a send forth party for the Batch B corpers and Street Journal gathered that the event was well attended. Not quite an hour after the party however, not less than three of the youth corpers that had gone to celebrate were patients in


hospital wards following severe beatings and stab wounds allegedly inflicted on them by armed soldiers.
Narrating his ordeal, Mobolaji Abawa, who Doctors say is lucky to be alive disclosed that “after the party, youth corpers from the same area with me gathered in a group because it was late and about six of us from the same place of primary assignment stayed together in order to ensure that we would all move in the same vehicle. Just as I was trying to negotiate with a bus driver, I noticed that there was what sounded like an argument behind me.
The argument was between a man who alighted from his car and a youth corper. I could hear the man asking do you know who I am? When the corper repliedthat he didn’t know who the man was, he introduced himself as the JTF (Joint Task Force) Commander. And before we knew what was happening the man went back to his car and brought out a knife with which he was going to stab the corper that was arguing with him. We all started begging him not to stab the guy. To prevent the man from stabbing the guy, some corpers had to hold him while others begged and apologised for whatever wrong the guy might have done. All the plea and apology however seemed to fall on deaf ears. He kept saying that he would deal with the corper. After a while, one of the corpers said they should leave him. He said he should be left


to do whatever he wanted to do. Again the man was enraged and he promised to deal with the corper that spoke. He left the person he originally wanted to stab and went for the other corper because of his utterances.
I noticed there was a lady in the vehicle and I approached the car and appealed to the lady to come and help us beg the man and probably calm his down. The lady however did not give a positive response so I left her and moved to where my colleagues were.
The man went back to his car and came back with something that looked like an iron rod.
When we saw that he had another weapon, everyone moved back and as we tried to run to avoid beingParents' experiences and perceptions of group-based antenatal care in four clinics in Sweden.
group-based antenatal care consists of six to nine two-hour sessions in which information is shared and discussed during the first hour and individual examinations are conducted during the second hour. Groups generally consist of six to eight pregnant women. Parent education is built into the programme, which originated in the United States and was introduced in Sweden at the beginning of the year of 2000. to investigate parents' experiences of group antenatal care in four different clinics in Sweden. a qualitative study was conducted using content analysis five group interviews and eleven individual interviews with parents who experienced group-based antenatal care. An interview guide was used. the study was set in four antenatal clinics that had


baseball coach Scott Madsen to play for the Eagles. Four of the players graduated from Pro Baseball Academy, an all-male high school on the island.

The students were born in Puerto Rico and have large-extended families living throughout the island. Because Hurricane Maria was one of the biggest catastrophes in modern history for Puerto Rico, the five-baseball players spent days waiting for someone from their families to contact them. By Sept. 25, they were all contacted that their families are safe.

Officials said 1,360 of the islands cell towers collapsed and 85 percent of above-ground and underground phone and internet cables were knocked out. Roads are blocked, phones dead and hospitals at capacity, making the situation even more dire. Over 155-mile-an-hour winds pounded the island four hours.

Adams explained when aslides. When the flood waters in the homes recede, people throw away the furniture and anything that gets wet. Most of the floors are tile and will eventually dry. Adams estimates 80 percent of the homes in Puerto Rico have cement walls, floors and roofs.

The homes made from wood are not usually salvageable. Between the water and wind, there is usually nothing to save after a hurricane, Adams said. Because the north and south areas of Puerto Rico are mountainous (4,390 feet above sea level), people living along the mountain ranges usually do not get as much flooding as those in the coastal areas.

Adams and Torres arrived on Eastern’s campus in fall 2016. During the first month of college they found themselves, along with their baseball teammates, shoveling


two of the students plan to major in electrical engineering, one in biology, one in business and one has not decided his major.

Three of the students speak fluent English and two are enrolled in English as a Second Language class. Most Puerto Ricans speak Spanish and take conversational English classes in elementary school.

The language barrier is not a problem in sports. According to these student athletes, it’s the same baseball rules in Puerto Rico, only everyone who plays there tries to make it look easy. Hopefully, as in playing the game of baseball, life will become easier for these five athletes knowing their families survived last week’s “apolcalyptic” catastrophe.me know.

Thanks!

The Pope can act unilaterally, that is without the agreement or even permission of other bishops. And in the same breath, he can impose on other bishops. He can depose other bishops but himself cannot be deposed even by a council. And since 1983, no other bishop can be ordained without his permission.

The Pope IN the Oriental Orthodox Church is not the Pope OF the Oriental Orthodox Church, but of the Coptic Church specifically. Our Church is a conciliar church, with the Pope of Alexandria having a "primacy among equal bishops", but nevertheless a diocesan bishop like other diocesan bishops, with Alexandria (and Cairo) as his main diocese.

Not sure about the Pope of Rome. It seems like an elevation of a status above episcopacy, whereas for the


Coptic Church, it is a level in episcopacy.

« Last Edit: October 05, 2012, 06:15:31 PM by minasoliman »

Logged

Vain existence can never exist, for "unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain." (Psalm 127)

If the faith is unchanged and rock solid, then the gates of Hades never prevailed in the end.

What is the difference between the Roman pope and the Orthodox bishops in terms of:

their roles,their power,and their authority.

To Roman Catholics, the Pope of Rome has universal authority and jurisdiction. That is to say that he has authority over any and every other bishop, regardless of jurisdiction. He is above in power, stature, and authority over the entire visible church. Councils are effectively below the Pope in authority. Roman Catholics also believe in "papal infallibility," which(If I recall correctly, he excommunicated the whole bunch.) You might as well ask both the Orthodox Church and the Roman Church to apologize for all the souls they endangered and possibly lead to damnation through Arianism.

"Soon" in Orthodox time could mean, well....just about anything, really, but probably nothing less than 25-1,000 years .

How long did your church take to apologize for the Fourth Crusade? It was 800 years

The Roman Catholic Church was under no obligation to apologize for the Fourth Crusade. The sack of Constantinople was not authorized by the Church and was in fact reacted to rather harshly by the Pope when he learned of it (If I recall correctly, he excommunicated the whole bunch.) You might as well ask both the Orthodox Church and the


Roman Church to apologize for all the souls they endangered and possibly lead to damnation through Arianism.

Please don't start this argument again. There are threads here in the past that deal with this distorted version of history.

Logged

"Religion is a neurobiological illness and Orthodoxy is its cure." - Fr. John S. Romanides

"Soon" in Orthodox time could mean, well....just about anything, really, but probably nothing less than 25-1,000 years .

How long did your church take to apologize for the Fourth Crusade? It was 800 years

The Roman Catholic Church was under no obligation to apologize for the Fourth Crusade. The sack of Constantinople was not authorized by the Church and was in fact reacted to rather harshly by the Pope when he learned of it (If I recall correctly, he excommunicatedFilm opened on July 23, has since sold 3,582,115 tickets

As of Sunday, the One Piece Film Gold movie has earned 4,778,856,000 yen (about US$46.02 million) and sold 3,582,115 tickets in the 37 days since its opening on July 23. Toei is projecting that One Piece Film Gold will earn more than 6 billion yen (about US$56 million).

Starting on September 3, participating theaters will begin handing out an A5 illustration card (seen below) with original illustration by Eiichiro Oda, and signed by 15 cast members.

Japanese entertainment company T-Joy held screenings of the film with English and Chinese subtitles in five Japanese cities from July 23 to August 5. The film also has 3D, 4DX, and MX4D screenings.

Kazuhiro Yamaji ( Kamen Rider Blade's Kei Karasuma, Psycho-Pass' Jouji Saiga, One Piece's


Senor Pink) guest stars in the film as the main antagonist Gild Tesoro (pictured far left in image at right). Gild Tesoro a casino king who controls the huge golden ship Gran Tesoro . He is a devil fruit user who ate the "Gol Gol fruit." He is an extremely rich man who is said to possess 20% of the monetary "Beli" that exist in the world.

The cast members include:

Hikari Mitsushima as Carina, a popular and mysterious songstress in Gild Tesoro's crew, with ties to Nami's past.

Gaku Hamada as Mr. Tanaka, a devil fruit user who ate the "nuke nuke" fruit. With his secretive devil fruit powers he is in charge of Gran Tesoro's internal security.

Nanao as Baccarat, a devil fruit user who ate the "lucky lucky" fruit.When she touches someone, their luck changes. She is a mysterious and elegant woman who acts as an escort for the Straw Hat pirates. She is Gran Tesoro's concierge who attends to VIPs visiting the area.

Kinya Kitaōji as Reizu Max, a famous gambler who is actually a key figure in the Revolutionary Army.

Comedian Kendo Kobayashi as Dice, a gigantic card dealer and part of Gild Tesoro's crew

Actor Arata Furuta as Kent Beef Jr. and Pork, two partners who compete in the turtle car race with Luffy

Comedian Korokke as Jimmy Myers, another turtle car racer, and the Red Eyed Owls that cry out when intruders are detected

Comedian Nadaru as Morkin, a member of the Long Long Pirates who attack the Straw Hat Pirates

Original manga creator Eiichiro Oda served as


the film's executive producer as well as being credited with the original work. Oda also served as the executive producer for the previous film in the franchise, One Piece Film Z. Additionally, Oda designed the various new costumes for the Straw Hat crew for the film, drew the rough drafts for the new characters, and also drew the film's first visual (pictured at left).

Hiroaki Miyamoto (One Piece episodes 352-679, assistant director for One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island) directed the film, and Tsutomu Kuroiwa (live-action Black Butler film, live-action Liar Game: The Final Stage film, live-action The Perfect Insider TV series) wrote the script. Masayuki Sato designed the characters for animation, and also served as chief animation director. Kazuo Ogura is the art director, while Nobuhitohelp California, including moves to expedite
permits for new power plants and authorizing rebates to power consumers.
"We're deeply concerned about the state of California, as we are with the
rest of the nation, but we haven't had an energy policy," he said.
"Interestingly enough, this is the first comprehensive energy policy probably
ever -- certainly in a long time."
Bush's robust defense of his reaction to the country's potential energy
crisis reflects how much the issue has heightened the political stakes for
him. Escalating gasoline prices, the California blackouts and a sagging
economy have transformed his effort to forge a national energy plan into an
early test of his leadership.
Rhetorically, Bush and his Democratic adversaries agree the United States
needs a balanced energy policy that combines


increased production of oil,
natural gas and other fossil fuels with conservation, development of
alternative energy sources and creation of more efficient automobiles and
appliances.
But Democrats believe that Bush and Cheney are relying too much on energy
production at the expense of environmental protection, while the president
and vice president oppose mainly Democratic calls to tap the Strategic
Petroleum Reserve and impose temporary price controls on energy wholesalers.
Davis on Wednesday again called for price caps.
"What's going on here, pure and simple, is unconscionable price gouging and
market manipulation by the big energy producers and marketers -- most of
them, incidentally, located in Texas," Davis said.
But Bush was unrelenting. "Price controls do not increase supply, nor do they
affect demand," he said.
The eventual verdictto release a list of participants.
As described in broad outline by Bush and Cheney in the days before its
release, the energy plan will emphasize long-term expansion of the country's
power supply over short-term fixes for current shortages.
The plan will recommend that Congress, various government agencies and Bush
use legislation, regulatory reforms and executive orders to spur the
construction of more oil refineries and power plants, and increase production
of nuclear and coal-fired energy.
The Cheney task force, according to briefings for interest groups and
congressional offices, suggests paying for its initiatives through a
combination of tax incentives, direct government funding and market-driven
investments by oil companies and other energy producers.
Democratic lawmakers and allied environmental activists have seized upon the
plan's focus on production --


the president selecting them, and Bush and his
administration so far haven't budged in their opposition to price controls.

Powerful new law for state: The public authority could seize private plants
and market bonds for projects.
By Jim Sanders
Bee Capitol Bureau
(Published May 17, 2001)
Arming itself for battle, California took steps Wednesday that could lead to
construction of public power plants, seizure of private ones and creation of
a buyers cartel that would opt for additional blackouts rather than pay
exorbitant prices.
Faced with no control over wholesale prices and no ability to simply stop
buying electricity, supporters said drastic measures may be needed to avoid
the possibility of economic disaster to the state's budget until the market
can stabilize in 18 months to two years.
The Public Power Authority
longtime shareholder Clyde Vaughn told Glynn during the question-and-answer
period. He said PG&E's executives became "infatuated with the fairy tale of
deregulation" and "joyfully sold all of us down the river."
Glynn, facing several hundred shareholders during a two-hour meeting in San
Francisco's cavernous Masonic Auditorium, defended the company's decision to
put the utility into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and laid most of the
blame for the company's problems on Davis and the Public Utilities
Commission.
"No one wanted this thing to happen," Glynn said after Vaughn spoke from the
audience. He pledged to "rebuild the value of this company."
Glynn appeared to have the support of most shareholders. They applauded when
he explained PG&E's decision to back away from negotiations to sell its
transmission grid to the


state as part of a rescue package, saying: "We're
not interested in selling any of our utility assets."
But he also had to contend with shouts from the audience and barbed questions
about even such mundane matters as the appointment of Deloitte & Touche as
the company's accounting firm.
A few booed a fellow shareholder, Bob Orser of Oakland, for defending top
management's decision to forgo their traditional end-of-year bonuses as a
cost-cutting measure.
And three protesters from Global Exchange, the San Francisco community
activist group, were dragged out of the meeting before it ended and before
their leader, Medea Benjamin, had a chance to ask a question.
Afterward, Benjamin said she had been prevented from entering the hall
because, even though she had shareholder credentials, she didn'tbonds to build, purchase, lease or
operate power plants.
Plants financed by the authority will provide cost-based electricity to
California consumers, Davis said, which will help stabilize the state's
volatile energy market.
The power authority is modeled after one in New York, which has 10 power
plants, 1,400 miles of transmission lines and produces about 25 percent of
the state's power. Nebraska also has a power authority, which created a
market in which residents pay 22 percent less than the national average,
Burton said.
An increase in the number of power plant down for repairs this year "is
strong evidence that people are manipulating the market by withholding power
to drive up prices," Davis said.
"The only way we can fight back against this type of price gouging


has proven to be a disaster."
He repeatedly blamed the crisis on out-of-state power generators.
"There is a tremendous drain on California because of generators' prices," he
said. "And that drain is heading straight to the heart of Texas."
Other key lawmakers urged Davis Wednesday to join with the governors of
Washington and Oregon to set a limit on the price the states would pay for
power this summer, creating a "buyers' cartel."
The states should set their own price ceiling on electricity in light of
federal regulators' refusal to set region-wide caps, said Fred Keeley,
D-Boulder Creek, the Assembly's point man on energy.
The states would refuse to pay, under any circumstances, more than a
predetermined price that would give electricity generators a "reasonable"
profit, under aresolution sponsored by the nine Democrats.
If generators refused to lower their prices, that would mean almost certain
blackouts in California this summer, said Assemblyman Paul Koretz, D-West
Hollywood, the measure's author.
But those will happen anyway, by all accounts, and the price cap would let
the state better predict and manage the outages, he said.
The resolution proposes that caps be installed for two years, until enough
power plants can be built to allow the market to function naturally.
The state has been buying power for the customers of three major utilities
since mid-January. The utilities' credit was cut off after they amassed debts
of more than $14 billion dollars due to high wholesale electricity prices
that they were unable to pass on to customers.

California lawmakers


would hinder the development of a free
energy market. In that light, Keeley said California must find another way to
cap skyrocketing electricity prices itself, or bankrupt its budget and
economy.
The strategy won't work without Washington and Oregon, however, Keeley said,
but the three acting together can effectively set energy prices throughout
the 11 Western states.
The Pacific Northwest states are vulnerable this summer as well, due to dry
conditions there, said Lenny Goldberg of San Diego-based Utility Consumers'
Action Network. The group first suggested the strategy a month ago.
"At some point it's going to take some drastic action to deal with this
crisis and get us through the summer," Goldberg said.
Keeley and Koretz said they believe it would be easier for Gov. Gray Davisto
negotiate caps with other states if he has the backing of the Legislature.
Similar efforts have been discussed within the Davis administration, said
spokesman Steve Maviglio, but Davis had no immediate reaction.
The lawmakers dismissed generators' objections that capping power prices
would prompt them to sell their electricity for higher prices to other
states, or dissuade generators from building more power plants in California.
California is too large a market for the power producers to ignore, they
said.
If generators refused to sell electricity because of the caps, the state
could respond by seizing the plants themselves, said Koretz and Goldberg,
though Keeley had reservations.
The resolution proposes that caps be installed for two years, until enough
power plants can be built to allow the market to


hit with huge jumps in
other operating costs, including workers compensation, health insurance and
wages. Meanwhile, he said he is being undercut by cheap foreign imports,
hindering his ability to raise prices enough to cover the increase in costs.
?????Officials representing the state's agriculture industry, which received
the smallest rate increases, called the decision by the California Public
Utilities Commission fair. They said the industry's circumstances and
precarious economic condition, as its costs have risen and its products'
prices have fallen, justified further concessions.
?????"Agriculture is experiencing its third tough year in a row," said Hank
Giclas, vice president of Western Growers, a produce industry trade group.
"[The caps] are a positive recognition of the fact that agriculture is unique
and experiencing difficult times, but it doesn't go as farInc.--all based outside California.
?????In the past, Davis has used an assortment of inflammatory terms to
broad-brush the generators. He recently called them "the biggest snakes on
the planet Earth."
?????But Reliant in particular has drawn the governor's wrath for allegedly
being more recalcitrant than the others in working with the administration.
?????"They just want to bleed us dry," Davis said in his interview with The
Times. "I'm not saying they're unique in that capacity. But they are uniquely
obstructionist."
?????Davis said that, among other things, Reliant has opposed court and
federal orders that it sell power to the state and recently refused to
forgive a portion of the hundreds of millions of dollars it is owed by
California's utilities.
?????Reliant also informed Davis that it is asking higher prices in part
because


the
purchase.
?????"It was a split-second decision made on the real-time market to fill
some voids we were having in our power supply at the time," Hidalgo said.
"The intent was very clear: to keep the lights on."

Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times

FERC Issues Power Ruling
Energy: Agency says order will help some firms bring electricity to market.
Davis says it will hurt state.

By MEGAN GARVEY, Times Staff Writer

?????WASHINGTON--An order issued Wednesday by federal regulators may make it
easier for California's alternative energy generators--considered a crucial
component of the battle against blackouts--to bring their electricity to the
market this summer.
?????The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission order, which came a day after
Gov. Gray Davis asked the commission to "stay its hand" on matters relating
to electricity producers knownpenalties.
San Francisco City Attorney Louise Renne said after the hearing, "The ruling
recognizes that counties are PG&E's highest priority creditors and should not
have to give up any part of their legitimate claims." San Francisco is owed
about $3 million, she said.
The Board of Regents of the University of California has voted unanimously to
alter its stance on race-based admissions, rescinding a 1995 ban on the
practice.
Many regents described yesterday's vote as bringing back the "welcome mat"
for minority students.
"This is a great day for the students of California ... and for the people of
California in general," said Regent Odessa Johnson. "I wore black today
because I hoped I was coming to a funeral."
The funeral was for two resolutions adopted by the


People of the world need to minimize their negative
potential and understand that communication between people and nations is
easier with an open heart. Anger is an unreliable source of energy, he said,
causes suspicion in marriages and creates between friends.
Even though religion appears to be losing its influence in modern times, he
said it still has the power to help humanity. People need to sh a set of
values that include caring, compassion for others and a sense of community if
they want to make the world a better place. ern society, he told an audience
that included actress Sharon Stone, continues to widen the gap between the
rich and the poor of the It is up to wealthy people with their greater
influence, he said,to initiate change.
"We need to address this issue," he said.
St. Mary's College students angry about what they said was lenient treatment
of an alleged student rapist have called an end to their hunger strike,
according to a spokesman for the Moraga school.
"At two o'clock this morning all issues were resolved, and the last tent was
removed at 6:30 a.m.," St. Mary's spokesman Clifford Williams said on
Wednesday.
Between 12 and 20 students pitched tents on the lawn in front of the quiet
campus's central chapel building on Monday.
They charged that administrators had failed to enforce a proclaimed policy of
"zero tolerance" for campus sexual assaults when they reversed a disciplinary
board's determination that a male student was responsible for the rape of a
female


student and should be expelled. Administrators decided instead to
suspend the student from campus activities.
An economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco says the nation's
longest running economic expansion is not headed for recession, but Tuesday's
interest rate cut was made to avoid one. which measures the value of a
nation's output of goods and services, increased by 2 percent from the first
of January through the end of March. A recession is declared when the GDP
decreases for six consecutive months, he said, but that hasn't happened since
1990.
"This is still a record expansion," Zimmerman said. "The economy is not in a
recession."
But voting members of the Federal Reserve felt other economic indicators,
such as high layoffs and low orders for newthe Davis
administration knows how much the state is paying for power, and if the
prices go too high, California could run out of money before the bond
revenues can replenish the treasury, analysts said.
Despite the dire predictions, finance department officials say California is
in better shape than it was during the recession of the early 1990s, when
then-Gov. Pete Wilson was scraping to make up for a $14 billion budget
shortfall.
"We've simply seen the end of a boom that was created by a soaring stock
market," said Sandy Harrison, spokesman for the state Department of Finance.
The Assembly and Senate must still approve a final budget for the next fiscal
year, which begins July 1.
Until then, Davis will face an aggressive cadre of Republican


airport officials said they will work with the city-owned Hetch
Hetchy Water and Power agency to fast-track development of its own gas-fired
peaker plant, said airport spokesman Ron Wilson. The goal will be to build a
permanent 571-megawatt plant that could power 571,000 homes.
An irate Wilson said the airport broke off negotiations with El Paso Merchant
Energy Co. after the Houston firm allegedly jacked up the cost of the deal.
An original agreement to supply power to the airport was approved by the
airport commission March 20. The day before it was to be voted on, El Paso
indicated that it was going to need more money -- and the airport said the
numbers being discussed were untenable.
"They wanted to get into our pockets so deepprices during power shortages.
"With two local companies controlling almost 90 percent of supply, they have
the ability to corner the market and dictate excessive prices that we and our
customers believe are unjust and unreasonable," said Paul Vaitkus, Nstar's
vice president of energy supply.
Peter Meier, associate general counsel for PG&E Corp.'s National Energy
Group, denied yesterday that his company's plants have overcharged Boston
consumers.
"We're not exercising market power," he said. "We charge rates that bring us
a fair and reasonable return."
PG&E Corp. owns 21 power plants in the New England area, mostly hydroelectric
facilities. Sithe Energies, based in New York, holds stakes in 27 North
American plants, primarily in New York and Massachusetts.
Nstar's Vaitkus said power prices routinely soar whenever regional
transmission lines


"to make sure they are fair and reasonable."
Bush also said he has worked with California officials to expedite power
plant permitting and is "deeply concerned" about the state.
"The quicker supply gets on, the easier it's going to be for the consumers in
the state of California," Bush said.
White House officials said Bush will issue two executive orders next week
that would direct federal agencies to speed permitting of energy facilities
and require studies of the energy impact of regulatory actions.
As the administration has said in interviews and statements the past month,
the report focuses on increasing supplies of traditional fossil fuels and
nuclear power, with a heavy stress on updating the nation's electricity grid
and other energy infrastructure.
A senior administration described the gridas a relic of the 1950s that
balkanizes the country into isolated power islands, preventing transmission
from areas of ample supply to areas of shortages.
In an attempt to mitigate rising gasoline prices, the report also orders an
Environmental Protection Agency review of "boutique" gasoline formulas that
various states require to control air pollution. The aim is to standardize
fuel blends so that regions are less dependent on single refineries.
In a pre-emptive strike, Democrats attacked the plan as ineffective hours
before the highlights were released.
"The president seems almost totally indifferent" to California's blackouts,
said House minority leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo.
The report calls for easing regulations that inhibit new electricity
transmission lines and gas pipelines, including calling for federal
condemnation of private property to build power