24 hours."

June 15: Updated condition of Rep. Scalise: https://t.co/1mt8o5wp8u — MedStar Washington (@MedStarWHC) June 16, 2017

A gunman opened fire on the Republican baseball team's practice before Thursday's annual charity baseball game, critically wounding Scalise, R-La., and injuring three other people as horrified legislators and staffers scrambled for cover amid a barrage of bullets. Scalise, the third most powerful Republican in the House, was shot through the hip.

Just before the game Thursday night, members of the Democratic and Republican teams knelt together in prayer near second place, where Scalise would have been playing. The crowd chanted "USA! USA!"

Later, the crowd burst into applause as Capitol Police Officer David Bailey — who was injured as he pursued the shooter — hobbled to the mound on crutches and tossed the ceremonialin February of 2012, members of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department

were conducting undercover drug buy-bust operations in one of the city’s parks. Ofﬁcer

DeSheila Howlett was assigned as the undercover buyer. She wore regular street clothes and

drove in an unmarked vehicle. She wore a recording device that allowed the other ofﬁcers to
hear her.

Ofﬁcer Howlett, driving around the park, called out to defendant, who was walking in the
park. She asked defendant if he had “a dub,” the street name for $20 worth of drugs. Defendant
replied that “he was good” and showed Howlett that he had marijuana.

Ofﬁcer Howlett invited defendant into her car. After sitting in the front passenger seat,
defendant took out a bag of marijuana. Defendant did not have anything to put the drugs on, so
Officer Howlett


opened the car door
and each grabbed one of defendant’s arms and pulled defendant out of the car onto the ground.

In taking defendant to the ground, defendant landed with his arms underneath him. Due
to safety concerns, and so they could place the defendant in handcuffs, the ofﬁcers tried to
remove his hands from under him, to no avail. Defendant clenched his hands near his body by
his waistline area. Ofﬁcer Cotton ordered defendant to put his hands where the ofﬁcers could
see them. Defendant did not comply. The ofﬁcers continued to pull on defendant's arms,

ordering defendant to let them see his hands, but defendant stiffened up and refused to remove

his hands and arms from underneath his body. A detective who had responded to the scene
ultimately used his Taser on the defendant toTuesday, May 09, 2006

Senate 41 Notes

Long-time State Senate Pro Tem Bob Garten was defeated in the Republican primary by challenger Greg Walker, instantly making the race for Senate 41 one of the most interesting. Mainly, Walker has some interesting baggage.

But first, a plug for Kenn Gividen. He ran for Governor in 2004 as the Libertarian candidate, opposite Republican Mitch Daniels and Democrat Joe Kernan. Here is a link to Kenn's new campaign website.

Kenn is in favor of smaller government, lower taxes, and eliminating property taxes. Very common sense stuff. He stands as an excellent choice for those voters who can't vote Democrat because of their commitment to bigger government and higher taxes, but are unwilling to vote for a candidate with the baggage Mr. Walker brings.

The man is


drained the water and started to get out of the tub. "I went to raise myself-to get out of the tub. I put my right elbow on the right side of the tub and I grabbed this handhold with my left hand and attempted to assist myself in getting up and the handhold broke away from the wall and it was a massive handhold ... and it broke away from the wall and hit me across... *583 the bridge of my nose." He fell back and hit his head, back and neck. He blacked out. "The next thing that I remembered was I opened my eyes and there was blood streaming down my face and my chest and that is the next thing that I recollect." He calledfor help and was taken to the hospital. The cut on the bridge of his nose was sutured. He suffered injuries to his back and neck. The "handhold" was a ceramic fixture set in the wall above the tub. It was known in the ceramic tile trade as a "soap and grab" and was intended to be used by bathers to help themselves in and out of the bathtub. It was installed with the expectation that bathers would so use it. Apper was alone in the room at all times, made no prior examination of the fixture, and noticed nothing unusual about it. It appeared to be securely fastened and was not loose to the touch. There were no warning signs or notices in regard to the fixture


or its use. He used it as he had previously used similar fixtures on many other occasions in many other motels.[2]
On 13 January 1972 Apper and his wife instituted an action in tort in the Circuit Court for Washington County against Eastgate. He sought damages for the injuries he suffered which he alleged were caused by Eastgate's negligence. He and his wife sought damages for loss of consortium. On 17 February 1972 Eastgate filed a third party claim against Harold L. Jones, trading as Jones' Wallpaper, Linoleum and Tile Service (Jones), who installed the soap dish and handhold.[3]
The action was tried before a jury on 26 November 1974. *584 At the close of evidence offered by the Appers, the court directed a verdict against them and discharged thefavor of Defendants, Eastgate Associates, et al and against the Plaintiffs, Leonard Apper and Beverly Apper;"
The next entry on the docket is under date of 23 December 1974: "Order for Appeal by Plaintiffs Leonard Apper and Beverly Apper, His wife, filed;" The "ORDER FOR APPEAL BY PLAINTIFFS, LEONARD APPER AND BEVERLY APPER, HIS WIFE", is included in the record, stamped as filed 23 December 1974, at 10:49 A.M. It reads, over the signature of one of the appellants' attorneys:
DEAR MR. CLERK:
Enter an Appeal to the Court of Special Appeals from the Judgment entered in this action on November 26, 1974."
No judgment had been entered. The verdict directed by the court was no more a judgment than would be a verdict of the jury.[5] There being no final judgment,


her and her boyfriend. Although the evidence was disputed as to the extent of the confrontation, all testified that Carroll pulled his ex-wife's hair and struck her, with Carroll himself conceding on the stand that he struck her with his fist and that he may have pulled her hair when he pulled her toward him to land the blow.
Carroll was indicted for burglary, aggravated assault on the boyfriend with a gun, simple battery by pulling the ex-wife's hair, kidnapping, aggravated assault on the ex-wife with a gun, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime. A jury acquitted him on all counts except the simple battery misdemeanor count. He appeals, alleging that the trial court erred in (1) sustaining various relevance objections raised by theCampaign Against Climate Change says Britons now have to ‘pay to protest’ after police refuse to close roads along route

The right to stage demonstrations in Britain could be threatened following a demand that climate change protesters planning a march next month hire a private firm to oversee it – a role previously carried out by the police.

The Campaign Against Climate Change (CACC) says it is effectively being made to “pay to protest”, after learning that its demonstration in London, which could attract up to 20,000 people, will carry a bill of thousands of pounds.

Following negotiations with the Metropolitan police, the Greater London Authority and Westminster city council, the organisers of the Time to Act march – which is supported by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, the Stop the


N15.8 billion has been expended on fighting Boko Haram insurgency for three years in the state-Governor Ibrahim Gaidam

Governor, Ibrahim GaidamMilitary fails to disclose amount used
Yobe State Governor, Ibrahim Gaidam, yesterday said N15.8 billion has
been expended on fighting Boko Haram insurgency for three years in the
state.He disclosed this when the House Committee Chairmen on Internally
Displaced Persons (IDPs) and Emergency Disaster Preparedness (EDP) paid
him an official visit at the Government House, Damaturu.

He lamented that the colossal sum could have been expended on
execution of several development projects that could improve the living
condition of the people across the state.

On how funds were expended, Gaidam said: “The immediate past federal
administration failed to finance the fight effectively and fully. The
state government had to deploy the meagre resources at its disposal to
support the campaign inareas of payment of allowances to security
operatives, procurement of vehicles, logistics, medical assistance to
security operatives and vigilante groups, maintenance of vehicles, all
totaling N13.7 billion.

“Government also incurred expenditures in the provision of relief
materials and medical assistance to victims of insurgency, thereby

bringing the amount to N15.8 billion as at the first quarter of 2017.”
Chairman of House Committee on Internally Displaced Persons (IDP),
Sani Zoro, said the National Assembly would ensure that monies spent on
fighting insurgency, are refunded.
Meanwhile, the Military yesterday failed to disclose how much the
Federal Government had spent in fighting insurgency in the last two
years in the Northeast region.

When The Guardian visited the Defence headquarters in Abuja yesterday, the Director of Defence Information (DDI), Maj. Gen John Enenche, was said to be in a meeting. But in a text message,


not usually called "skull-crashing" – the practice you’re referring to is typically known as head-butting. And yes, sometimes people really do engage in it.

The most widely witnessed real-life head-butt in history was almost certainly the one given by French soccer star Zinedine Zidane to Italy’s Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup finals. Materazzi later admitted he had provoked Zidane, and both players were disciplined. In a 1992 New York Times article, Morgan Gendel reported that soccer players in the northern British Isles called the maneuver "sticking the nut," and that it was a "street-fighting move popular mostly in working-class sections of Britain and Ireland."

Of course, head-butting is unwelcome in most sports, even those directly involving combat. A head-butt motion shows up sometimes in the traditional sequences ofperson doing the butting is uninjured while his victim is knocked cold. Here at the Straight Dope Message Board we were unable to identify a mainstream film depicting a head-butt before 1980, when the move turned up in both The Road Warrior, starring Mel Gibson, and Roadie, starring Meat Loaf. In the Times article mentioned above, Gendel pointed to Gibson’s use of the head-butt in 1987’s Lethal Weapon as the beginning of the fad in U.S. cinema. After that, it soon showed up in Black Rain (1989), Internal Affairs, Kindergarten Cop, Dances With Wolves (all 1990), One Good Cop, The Hard Way, Hook, Star Trek VI, The Commitments (all 1991), and Batman Returns (1992).

Mike Figgis, who directed Internal Affairs, has said the key to a good movie head-butt


establish a media career.[1] A celebrity can fight the release in court to maintain deniability while still feeling the career benefits. In contrast, a celebrity may take the route of openly releasing the tape and benefit directly from royalties as well as indirectly from the publicity. In 2004 professional wrestler Chyna and her husband entered into a distribution deal with Red Light District Video for their home video. Chyna later was cast on the VH1 reality show The Surreal Life.
The current public acceptance of celebrities with sex tapes is speculated by Joe Levy, executive editor of Rolling Stone, to be due to the easy availability of pornography, as well as couples more commonly making their own tapes due to the prevalence of video cameras
Mmm she is so hot!feel happier on home turf where many teams have been eclipsed by the Gunners’ fluent passing game in the four years since they moved into the stadium.

Arsenal have not, though, enjoyed the best of weeks. Central defender Laurent Koscielny, who avoided serious injury from the rash challenge that saw Joe Cole sent off at Anfield, was himself dismissed in the closing minutes when he was somewhat harshy adjudged to have handled the ball deliberately. But while his absence will be temporary, those of two midfielders will be longer. Samir Nasri, who looked sharp in pre-season and also impressed against Liverpool, had to undergo surgery on a knee surgery and is likely to be out for a month, while promising youngster Emmanuel Frimpong injured cruciate knee ligaments in training


2008 Aflac All-American Game

The 2008 Aflac All-American Game is coming up at Dodger Stadium on August 9th. The College Baseball Blog assistant editor Mark Rafferty will be in attendance providing insights into the top players for the 2009 MLB Draft and the top incoming freshmen for the 2010 college baseball season. The full press release of the Aflac All-American Game is available below.

COLUMBUS, Ga., July 11, 2008 – Aflac today announced the full 38-player roster for the sixth Aflac All-American High School Baseball Game, which features the best high school baseball players in the country. The game will be played on Aug. 9 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, the first time in the game’s six-year history that it will be played at a major league baseball stadium,and will be broadcast live on FOX Sports Net at noon Pacific Time.

The annual Aflac All-American High School Baseball Game showcases the nation’s top high school players in an East versus West matchup played following their junior year. Aflac All-Americans are chosen by the experts at the official selection partner, Perfect Game USA, and in consultation with the staff at baseball’s most influential magazine, Baseball America.

As part of Aflac’s ongoing commitment to the fight against childhood cancer, all game proceeds from the 2008 Aflac All-American High School Baseball Game will benefit ThinkCure, the official charity of the Dodgers, which supports critical cancer research at City of Hope and Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Since 2005, the game has generated nearly $525,000 for charity.

“Now going into our sixth year,


as it’s such a tremendous opportunity for these young men to show their skills in front of a nationwide audience and MLB scouts,” said Smith. “Aflac does a tremendous job promoting this game and working hard to support pediatric cancer research, and I’m proud to be a part of it once again.”

The Aflac All-American Game boasts alumni who have had a huge impact in the past five Major League Baseball first-year player drafts. Overall, 52 alumni have been selected in the first round, including three No. 1 overall selections: Matt Bush (2004, San Diego) and Justin Upton (2005, Arizona), and this year’s top pick, Tim Beckham (2008, Tampa). The 2008 draft saw 10 Aflac All-Americans drafted in the first round.

The players will be led by a stellar coachingstaff as well. All-USA Coach of the Year Todd Fitz-Gerald, head coach at perennial American Heritage in Plantation, Fla., will manage the East team. He will be assisted by the assistant coach of last year’s East squad, Kevin Maris, of Oak Hall School in Gainesville, Fla. (and son of former Yankees slugger Roger Maris), and legendary San Diego coach Manny Hermosillo of Montgomery High School, who also served as manager for last year’s West squad.

Managing the West team will be Andy Hall, head coach of Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif. Rounding out the West coaching staff are Omar Washington, and former major leaguer Cecil Espy, both of whom have coached in the game since its inception.

The Aflac All-American High School Baseball Game is considered the country’s


Hoosick Falls

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a statement Thursday warning residents in Hoosick Falls not to drink or cook with village water because of elevated levels of a toxic chemical found in the public water system last year.

In response, the village's mayor has reversed his position, and adopted the EPA's recommendation.

The man-made chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid, or "PFOA," was used since the 1940s to manufacture industrial and household products such as non-stick coatings and heat-resistant wiring, including at a factory near the village water treatment plant. The chemical was discovered in the village water system last year by a private citizen, Michael Hickey, whose father, John, died of kidney cancer in 2013. PFOA has been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, as well as thyroid diseases and otherserious health problems.

The EPA's public statement was issued four days after a Times Union story reported that the state Health Department and village leaders, including Mayor David B. Borge, downplayed the health risks of PFOA in the water supply, and declined to warn people not to drink it. The story reported that many village residents, including a longtime family physician in Hoosick Falls, Dr. Marcus E. Martinez, suspected that high cancer rates and other extraordinary health problems in the village's population may be the result of the contaminated water.

"While the EPA continues to gather information and assess the Hoosick Falls water contamination, it recommends that people not drink the water from the Hoosick Falls public water supply or use it for cooking," the EPA's statement said. The agency's


plant. Saint-Gobain and prior owners of the plant used PFOA to manufacture products there, including heat-resistant wiring, dating back decades. Saint-Gobain purchased the plant in 1999, becoming the fifth owner of the facility since it opened in 1956. The France-based company also owns another manufacturing plant in the village. The two plants employ about 200 people.

For several weeks, Saint-Gobain has been paying for village residents to get free bottled water from a Tops supermarket in Hoosick Falls. The company also has provided alternate water to some facilities, including St. Mary's Academy, an elementary school in the village that shut off its only water fountain recently.

Borge said the company has also agreed to pay more than $2 million to install a carbon-filter system at the village treatment plant thatwould remove PFOA from the water. The project is expected to take about a year to complete.

Residents in a grassroots group, Healthy Hoosick Water, that formed to draw attention to the issue, are pushing for government agencies to conduct a health survey to determine whether cancer and other illnesses in the village can be attributed to the PFOA pollution. The group also called on the state or EPA to determine the source of the pollution and how far it may have spread. Saint-Gobain tested groundwater at its McCaffrey Street plant last year and found levels of PFOA at 18,000 parts per trillion, well above the 400 ppt advisory level for short-term exposure set by the EPA. But scientific studies funded by DuPont in the Ohio valley, where PFOA


for having a good end to our financial year.

“We had stronger-than-normal sales in the US market and we had exceptional sales in China, so a combination of the Perth Mint brand and the design of the rooster coin made it a very popular coin.”

The mint sold higher amounts of coins and bullion bars in December and January as the price of gold fell on the inauguration of US President Donald Trump and the US Federal Reserve’s decision to increase interest rates at the end of last year. Meanwhile, the recent US travel ban on seven mainly Muslim countries has also seen a greater rallying to gold as a safe haven and helped push prices up last week.

The Perth Mint sold 72,745 troy ounces of bullion bars and coinsweeks, and if you lived reasonably frugally it was possible to pay the month's rent with one decent short-story sale.

Since I wasn't haven't consistent success at first, I decided to sponge up all the advice I could find from the established Old School pros. It took me years to realize that their advice was in turn rooted in a time when there were two mail deliveries daily, no paperback originals market, a lot of pulp magazines on the newsstands -- for that matter, a lot of newsstands -- and far fewer writers competing for the available publication space. Back in their day, if you lived in New York, it was possible to mail a story to Astounding in the morning, get it back with comments from John Campbell


that afternoon, rewrite it overnight and remail it the next morning, and have Campbell's check in-hand the following evening -- and that was at a time when 5-cents per word was serious money.

Now? There are, what, three major pro magazines left? A vast plethora of minor pro and semi-pro markets ranging from brilliant to awful, a paperback originals market that's coughing blood, an entry on the Endangered Species List for "neighborhood bookstores" tagged Believed Extinct in the Wild, and a good short-story sale might... Pay your cell phone bill for a month, and leave enough left over for lunch at Taco John's?

So how much of the advice that I sponged up from the Old School pros -- or even that I developed myself, from my own experiences inA celebration of life for a beloved graduate Shirley Naomi Kanani Garcia

On Friday, July 24, friends and family came together to share memories of Shirley Naomi Kanani Garcia a University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa William S. Richardson School of Law graduate who passed away May 30. Garcia lived a meaningful life and is remembered lovingly by the people with whom she worked, lived and shared passionate ideals of social justice with.

Friends and family shared fond memories in remembrance of Garcia and the life she led. When her friend, Jade Wong, wanted to attempt a triathlon, Garcia spent hours training her to swim in the smooth, strong freestyle at which she excelled. When her sister, Margaret Garcia Dalzell, took up zumba, Garcia listened attentively to why she was so


Transcript for Key takeaways from Trump's State of the Union address

Vietnam. Okay, Cecilia, thanks very mu let's bring in our political team. Jon Karl, it was two speeches in one. Had you that call to unity but also a call to arms for the president's base. Reporter: In the beginning and at the end, president trump seemed to come out against trumpism. I mean, the language is incredible. He talks about rejecting the politics of revenge, resistance and retribution, bridging old divisions. This is the time to row kindle the bonds of love. That is not the Donald Trump that we have seen O the past two or three years. And yet where he seemed most passionate and energetic was when he went for his wall, he vowedhe would build it, took the hard line on abortion, so we saw the hard line Donald Trump but we saw that's not new, what was new here was this plea for unity and even in the hard line, George, he did not call for a national emergency to build the wall a he did not say that he would shut the government down. Mary Bruce, you saw the president congratulate the new women members and skipped it for Nancy Pelosi and could not mistake the fact she's sitting over his shoulder and did have that warning on investigations. She did have a polite but sometimes amused look but made clear where she disagrees with him on immigration and that eye roll when he warned Democrats no the


Ponerorchis bidupensis

Ponerorchis bidupensis is a species of flowering plant in the family Orchidaceae, native to southern Vietnam.

Taxonomy
The species was first described in 1999 by Leonid Averyanov, as Hemipilia bidupensis. In 2010, he transferred it to Amitostigma. A molecular phylogenetic study in 2014 found that species of Neottianthe, Amitostigma and Ponerorchis were mixed together in a single clade, making none of the three genera monophyletic as then circumscribed. Neottianthe and Amitostigma were subsumed into Ponerorchis, with this species becoming Ponerorchis bidupensis.

References

bidupensis
Category:Orchids of Vietnam
Category:Plants described in 1999David de Gea: It would be great if Cesc Fabregas came to Manchester United

David de Gea: Believes it is possible to become the world's best goalkeeper

Fabregas has been linked with a move to Old Trafford after the Red Devils reportedly tabled a bid and De Gea admits he would relish the chance to link up with his fellow Spaniard at club level.

"It would be great if Cesc Fabregas came here," said De Gea, quoted in the Daily Mail.

"He is a great player, very skilful, knows how to win things and you always want those type of players in your team."

De Gea has been receiving praise of his own of late, with Spain skipper Iker Casillas claiming that the 22-year-old keeper could establish himself as the best in the


Issey Nakajima-Farran was just happy to feel at home. Having spent his entire soccer career playing abroad, the 31-year-old always felt like a foreigner. He had seen local players in Japan, England, Singapore, Denmark, Australia and Cyprus all be treated like heroes, and he was ready to finally get his welcome.

That was the dream that Nakajima-Farran was imagining when he signed for Toronto FC in 2014. His return to Canada, however, would very quickly turn into a nightmare. On his birthday, and just five games into his Toronto FC career, Nakajima-Farran was abruptly traded to the Montreal Impact.

"I saw how a Canadian team is virtually an American team," Nakajima-Farran said of Toronto who play in US-owned Major League Soccer. "The club is Canadian, the fans are Canadian, butthere was no pride in the organization to be a Canadian team."

With the Impact, Nakajima-Farran was also not given much of a chance, and didn't feel welcomed by his coach. Fed up, he left Canada to play in Malaysia.

"I'm glad I'm out of it and back playing as a foreigner," he says of his experience. "Hopefully someday Canada can have their own league and be able to truly say it's a Canadian league."

It's a feeling echoed by Canadian soccer players around the world, forced to leave home to make a living. Even those who play for Canadian teams do so in an American league, and get muscled out by roster rules that favour US players.

With that in mind, and as part of a bid for the 2026 FIFA


World Cup, Canada is trying overcome past failures and create a national professional league. It's a project that the CSA have slowly been working on for years.

Story continues below interactive.

As the coach of Canada's men's Under-20 national team, Rob Gale has seen first hand how a lack of professional opportunities hurts Canadian players when they come up against countries with established professional leagues.

"That's the big difference why I think we are competitive at the younger ages and then it's hard once players turn 20," he says.

What he has also seen, however, is the national landscape changing at the club level, indicating that a Canadian league might not be that farfetched.

"Calgary has a team, Winnipeg has a team, obviously you've got Ottawa, and Edmonton and Kitchener in Ontario hasa team as well," he said of the existing pro teams in Canada.

It's a small start he admits, but it could form the base of what would be an eight team Canadian league. The interest is there.

Not only could it benefit existing Canadian teams, however, it would benefit the existing league structure in Canada as well. League 1 Ontario, for one is hopeful that this league will be created soon.

"We believe that it is imperative for the long term success for our league that there is a domestic league that has demand for the Canadian players," said commissioner Dino Rossi. "We want to be a key source of those players."

The difficulty for Canadian leagues has always been getting past initial interest. This is something Richard Whitall, who helped


put together a report for the CSA, on the feasibility of a Canadian league, consistently found in his research.

"They all collapsed for pretty much the same reasons, nobody considered what it's like to keep a league afloat five years down the road from the initial launch," he explains. "Things can change very, very quickly."

It's a cautionary-tale, especially with what another collapse would mean not only for the game in Canada, but for the players who would ultimately be playing the league. In the past the results of league's disbanding have been disastrous.

"What you don't want to do is offer those opportunities and then it doesn't become viable and the players are kind of left without a place to play," explains Gale.

Another concern is whether or not the CSAfor a Canadian league to succeed, Rollins sees two things as incredibly important beyond just investors and teams: a strong media partner and marketing. He looks at the Canadian Football League (CFL), the highest profile league that is exclusively Canadian, as the perfect example.

"[A Canadian Soccer League] needs to really embrace their Canadianness," he says. "That's the one thing I really do appreciate about the CFL, they've tried to stress their differences from the American versions of the game rather than run from them."

The new league is enough to get Nakajima-Farran interested again. While his last experience is still in the back of his mind, he is cautiously optimistic about what a new league could bring.

"If there was a Canadian focused club playing in a Canadian league it


Students currently in Minneapolis high schools can remain the same school even after the district changes attendance boundaries, officials said Monday.

Students in grades 10 through 12 will graduate from their current high school. The high school transition will start in 2021 with incoming ninth-graders, and school choice options remain in play, said Superintendent Ed Graff.

But parents hoping to learn more details about the new attendance boundaries will have to wait another month.

During the first of two informational meetings scheduled this week, officials flashed a vague boundary map with few details during a presentation at Roosevelt High School. Graff said some aspects of the boundary changes will be presented to the school board March 5, with final recommendation to the full board for approval March 24.

Officials also announced thatthe district's high school career and technical education programs will become centrally located at North, Roosevelt and Edison high schools. These courses teach skills such as computer science, engineering, robotics and agriculture.

It will take several years before the three high schools offering the programs will be remodeled and ready for students, but the current programs will continue.

"The new district design is more than any single element — it's not just about changing boundaries," said Graff. "It's about the delivery of expectations for how students are valued in their schools."

More than 200 people attended Monday night's meeting. Graff and other officials said resources aren't accessible to students at each of the seven high schools and that Henry and North are "racially isolated," with North at just 17.5% capacity. Three


Domestic water supply systems are usually connected to the water company's main by a service pipe, in two parts, the water company's pipe making an end to end junction with the customer's pipe at the highway boundary. A major public health problem remains the large number of premises which are still equipped with lead pipes, as the slightly soluble lead is a well known cumulative poison. One approach to this problem has been to replace lead piping with polyethylene plastics tubing. Alternative ductile metals such as copper have their own cumulative hazards.
As an alternative to replacement of lead pipes, it has been proposed to line the pipes with a polyethylene film which is everted by fluid pressure into the pipe (see WO97/04269) or a polyethyleneterephtalate (PET) film whichMail Australia article titled, 'How MAFS transformed Channel Nine: Married At First Sight credited for company's $4 billion Fairfax merger after the reality series took over TV and became a cultural phenomenon.'

'Maybe they're worried I'll spill the beans': Sarah Roza (pictured) also chimed in, revealing that Channel Nine's social media department has been trying to 'silence' her by deleting her comments and then blocking her

Fuming! Dean Wells (pictured) went even further by sharing a screenshot of a Daily Mail Australia article titled, 'How MAFS transformed Channel Nine: Married At First Sight credited for company's $4 billion Fairfax merger after the reality series took over TV and became a cultural phenomenon'

Captioning the image with a lengthy rant, Dean wrote: 'So we make a billion dollars or so for Channel


Control communications

In telecommunication, control communications is the branch of technology devoted to the design, development, and application of communications facilities used specifically for control purposes, such as for controlling (a) industrial processes, (b) movement of resources, (c) electric power generation, distribution, and utilization, (d) communications networks, and (e) transportation systems.

References

Category:Telecommunications engineering
Category:Control engineeringCasey Jones (2011) Free Watch

Casey Jones is the story of a quirky young man with an irresistible propensity for violence. A lifelong outcast, Casey learned at a young age to channel his brutal urges into sports, but ...
See full summary »


Memphis college seeks more diversity

MEMPHIS — A small, historically black college in Memphis is trying to diversify its student population.

MEMPHIS — A small, historically black college in Memphis is trying to diversify its student population.

The Commercial Appeal reports LeMoyne-Owen College is trying to recruit more nonblack students to its campus.

Part of that effort includes featuring 18-year-old David Aguilar, who is originally from Mexico, on an upcoming recruiting booklet.

The college, which sprang from a makeshift school for freed slaves 150 years ago, still has a student body that is mostly African-American. About 2 percent of the 1,100 students are from other races and ethnic groups.

Officials say the college has enrolled a few white students or those born in foreign countries for several years, but they are looking to expandwith severe mental health problems having been sectioned and then in immigration detention and then released onto the streets of Portsmouth. They had a medical report in which we found the name of the mental health solicitor who had seen them whilst they were sectioned. A phone call established that under certain provisos of the Mental Health Act, an argument could be made for housing. We are delighted that after some months of wrangling temporary accommodation has been provided.


punting from the 50 up by 7 points, the Packers got a fresh set of downs at the 22 yard line and took a 14 point lead two plays later.

Check out the blocking up front, as well. Rodgers got this out of his hand pretty quickly, but it was still a 7 step drop. He needed a bit of time for the play to develop.

Kudos. Kudos all the way around. Especially for you, Jordy. This was a grown man catch in a huge moment.

It’s worth noting that, with Cobb dragging the linebacker from the middle of the field, Richard Rodgers was open on his route. A quick pump to Nelson and a throw across the middle to Rodgers likely would have picked up the first down, as well.France fuel protests: Macron holds urgent security meeting Published duration 2 December 2018 Related Topics France yellow vest protests

image copyright EPA image caption A statue of Marianne, a symbol in France, was vandalised inside the Arc de Triomphe

French President Emmanuel Macron has held an urgent security meeting following a day of riots by thousands of anti-government protesters.

Ministers said that while no options had been ruled out, imposing a state of emergency had not been discussed during the talks - despite earlier reports.

Protests over fuel tax have grown into general anger at higher living costs.

Three people have been killed in the protests since demonstrations started more than two weeks ago, police said.

Justice Minister Nicole Belloubet has promised to bring the full force of the law to bear on people


who are found to have resorted to violence.

Before the security meeting on Sunday, Mr Macron inspected some of the damage caused in the disturbances, which had centred on Paris.

More than 100 people were injured in the city, including 23 members of the security forces, and nearly 400 people were arrested, police said.

image copyright AFP / Getty Images image caption Vehicles in the streets of Paris were torched and some 400 arrests were made

image copyright EPA image caption Mr Macron assesses damage caused during the "gilets jaunes" protests near the Champs-Elysées

Mr Macron visited the Champs-Elysées and the Arc de Triomphe, which was scaled by demonstrators on Saturday.

He later chaired an urgent meeting at the presidential palace, involving the interior minister and top security service officials.

France's interior ministry says aboutrely on their cars.

media caption France fuel protests: Who are the people in the yellow vests?

The protest movement has no identifiable leadership and has gained momentum via social media, encompassing a whole range of participants from the anarchist far left to the nationalist far right, and plenty of moderates in between.

Nearly 300,000 people took part in the first country-wide demonstration, on 17 November.

Can Macron heal the rift?

By Hugh Schofield, Paris correspondent

Coming straight from the airport, the president was greeted with cheers but also boos as he looked at the wreckage of burnt-out cars and smashed windows on the Avenue Kléber.

At the Arc de Triomphe, he saw the graffiti targeting him and his government sprayed on the outside, and inside the devastation in the ticketing and reception areas, which


of Inquiry in June 2004 (2) may be regarded as the nearest thing to an “official account.”

According to this report, 19 Arab hijackers, whose names and photographs have been posted shortly after the attacks on the FBI website (3)(4), perpetrated the atrocities on September 11 through a collective suicide operation.

Two AA and two UA passenger jets were, according to this account, flown as living missiles into the named targets.

The first AA aircraft (flight AA11, tail no. N334AA) is said to have left Logan airport in Boston at 7:59 with 92 people on board (crew, passengers and hijackers) and crashed at 8:46 on the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.

The second AA aircraft (flight AA77, tail no. N644AA) is said to have left Dullesairport in Washington, D.C. at 8:20 with 64 people on board and crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37.

The above departure times, incidentally, are still disputed and in the case of AA11. As of November 13, 2003, the statistical database of the Department of Transportation (BTS) did not even mention AA11 as a flight scheduled for September 11, 2001.

At a later date the Department added a record for this flight with the departure time set as zero.

Checking again the BTS database for this article on November 18, 2004, I discovered that the DoT again amended its database by setting the scheduled departure of AA11 to the “official time” of 7:45 (6).

It appears that the DoT had received orders to align its database with the “official account” on the crime


WTC 1 causing millions in damage to the parking garage? How come no one mentions that? 6 people were killed and 1,000 injured. (I saw it live on TV and real people were evacuated. It was in February and it looked cold outside. I couldn't figure out why people had black soot just on their mouths and noses which they were covering with a handkerchief or kleenex.)

The first World Trade Center bombing was provocateured by the government. In 1993 the FBI planted their informant, Emad A. Salem, within a radical Arab group in New York led by Ramzi Yousef. Salem was ordered to encourage the group to carry out a bombing targeting the World Trade Center's twin towers. Under the illusion that the project was a sting operation,Salem asked the FBI for harmless dummy explosives which he would use to assemble the bomb and then pass on to the group. At this point the FBI cut Salem out of the loop and provided the group with real explosives, leading to the attack on February 26 that killed six and injured over a thousand. The FBI's failure to prevent the bombing was reported on by the New York Times in October 1993.

Very good analyses there compass. Sadly it's all rubish. All you need to know is that the buildings were demoed under smoke and the media played a movie while it was happening. Center of operation was the WTC7, which was done with at the end.

Great info in the show about hollow towers and the 3,000


longer important in light of Jesus and the New Testament.

Baloney, he says. The same Jesus that created the universe out of nothing could make fish out of fish. LOL

That is Catholic belief. No hypocrisy there.

Would that were true. Unfortunately, while Fr. Corapi may believe in creatio ex nihilo as an abstract concept, he doesn't believe in the facticity of the events of the first eleven chapters of Genesis--and that is what this argument is about.

The Church does not attack the veracity of Genesis. Genesis provides an outline or framework for Creation, but it was never intended to be a science book. Genesis is a theological work that affirms that God created the world and explains the "evolution" of human nature through original sin. It explains out existence inJuliam Joachim, Marc Edworthy and Laurent Delorge are included in City's reserve team tonight and are hopeful they can make their mark in the first team's battle for a play-off place.

Joachim is expected to play 45 minutes against Fulham at Highfield Road in the first stage of his comeback from a long-term shin injury, while Edworthy and Delorge are expected to play the full 90 minutes.

Joachim's season has been a virtual write-off since his transfer from Aston Villa last summer as he has made only six starts because of a succession of injuries.

He damaged his ankle during pre-season and his latest injury was to his shin. His last start was at the end of January.

Edworthy's last match was against Wolves at Molineux in mid-January, when he collected an


ankle injury.

Delorge has been under intensive treatment for a back problem that struck in mid-February.

City's manager Roland Nilsson will be keen to welcome them back on board for the last three matches of the season.

He also received good news today from his centreback Mo Konjic, who underwent an X-ray on his instep following a challenge by West Bromwich Albion's striker Trevor Benjamin on Monday.

No fracture has been revealed and Konjic is expecting to be back in training in time to push for selection against Preston North End at Deepdale on Saturday.in a decrease in female employees' monthly benefit payments. The statutory scheme in issue was in most respects identical to the PERS provisions in issue here.[9] The court held that the new tables could be validly applied to all female employees who had not yet retired as of the effective date of the new tables; it reasoned that the employees had "acquired a contractual right to an annuity when they commenced employment under the provisions of the statute," but that
one must look to the statute to determine what that annuity is... . The member, under the plain wording of the statute, does not acquire a vested contractual right to an annuity based on the mortality table in use when the employee became a member of the retirement system;


and for determining the amount of annuities to be allowed on the basis of the contributions of members.
At such times as the retirement board may deem it necessary and at least once each quinquennial period, the retirement board shall have prepared by a competent actuary familiar with retirement systems, a report showing a complete valuation of the present and prospective assets and liabilities of the various funds created by this article with the exception of the expense fund. The actuary shall make an investigation of the mortality and service experience of the members of the retirement system and shall report fully upon its conditions with such recommendations as he shall deem advisable for the information of the retirement board in the proper operation of the retirement system.
See Birnbaum,Read More

The Glasgow School of Art has been devastated by fire for the second time in four years (Image: REUTERS)

Firefighters tackled the fire at The Glasgow School of Art (Image: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

"Along with Glasgow City Council we had hoped that access in mid-September might have been possible, but inspections of the building following the final removal of existing scaffolding on the south west corner confirmed that additional work would need to be undertaken here.

"We will work flat out to get this work done as soon as possible and in the meantime will continue to identify how controlled access can be arranged."

All but two of the main fire exits from the CCA are opposite the south-west corner of the Mackintosh Building and the ABC O2.

It means entry


is insufficient evidence to support a finding of a conspiracy and that in any event they were entrapped by undercover agents of the United States Treasury Department.

5
The evidence presented at trial by the Government and uncontroverted by defendants shows that the defendants, as well as several other persons, engaged in a series of meetings and conversations, the subject of which was the sale of counterfeit Federal Reserve Notes.  In attendance at all of these meetings was at least one undercover assistant of the Treasury Department.

1.  Sufficiency of the Evidence

6
Appellants on appeal argue that the evidence was insufficient as a matter of law to sustain the conviction.  We find that the evidence is sufficient.

7
It is clear that a series of meetings and telephone conversations was heldin which appellants were active participants.  The acknowledged purpose of these discussions was the sale of counterfeit currency.  There is testimony that appellant Jones was the contact with the person controlling the counterfeit currency and that appellant Lefner was the contact with the buyer.

8
There is further testimony that Jones received two counterfeit notes from a coconspirator which he transferred by way of an intermediary to two police informants.  An undercover agent testified that he had a private meeting with Lefner at which time they discussed the details of the manufacture and quality of the counterfeit currency, and Lefner counted out some of the counterfeit bills.

9
At a meeting on July 16, 1967, at which Lefner was in attendance, it was agreed that the delivery of the


Category Archives: French Guyana

The heavy Caucasian-non-Caucasian mixing zone is from North Africa across Arabia, and then in a belt from the Urals in the north down through the Stans to Afghanistan, Pakistan and North India in the south and all the way to Siberia and even East Turkestan in China to the east.

One can say that there is a White/non-White mixing zone of recent origin in the Americas mostly from Mexico south in Mesoamerica down to Latin America all the way down to Chile, Uruguay and Argentina in the south, with more admixture to the north and much less at the south. Mesoamerica is quite thoroughly admixed or mestized as is Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Paraguay. In Colombia, the Whites are also quite admixed with Black.

There is athe ruling classes of Mexico and Costa Rica in a different category.

Mexico’s ruling class is actually part of a revolutionary party that is a member of the Socialist International. The reason Mexico did not have a Leftist revolution in the 1980’s was because, as my mother put it when I asked her why not, “They already had their revolution.” Mexico has long had great relations with Cuba and for the entirety of the war, the Marxist FMLN guerrillas of El Salvador had their head offices in Mexico City itself. They have national health care, free education to the university level and most of the rural land is owned by the state as “ejidos,” which are rented out for use by any peasants who wish to farm them.

However the


to the left and right.

Guido, a handsome bachelor, has been abandoned by all his friends since he lost his money, and Minette, his cat – for which the governor’s cook has offered three florins – is all that remains of Guido’s household. Marianne is sitting by the table knitting; she takes the white cat from her lap to the divan.

Guido returns and Marianne asks why he has not appealed to his rich uncle for financial assistance. Guido forbids her to speak his name: it was he who ruined Guido’s father, furthermore they would have to ask Schalgg, his intendant. Guido rejects this suggestion too; but Marianne suggests that his charming young cousin might help him out. Alone, Guido expresses his love for his ‘pauvre petite Minon’.

Just then, a

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his settler-led Government miscalculated badly when they thought the eyes of the World were on Syria and the Iran deal and that they had a free hand in Palestine.

They forgot that they were dealing with a most resilient and fearless people, the indigenous Palestinians. The first and second intifada a seemingly a distant memory for the Zionists but historical inspiration for Palestinians.

Israeli ministers have claimed in recent months that the ‘conflict’ was no longer an issue. President Obama did not even mention it in his UN address.

Netanyahu spent most of his speech on Iran. His only reference to ‘the conflict’ was his disingenuous claim that he was ready for peace talks ‘without conditions’. He then went on to lay conditions.

The last few months


visits of Jews conducted under the supervision of the Islamic Waqf?

The attacks on Alaqsa, the siege on the old city, the theft of homes and planting of settlers in East Jerusalem, coupled with the continuing oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank were raising hatred. The violence by settlers which has recently taken the firm for burning Palestinians was on the increase in Jerusalem and the West Bank. The siege on Gaza and the Lack of hope of a better tomorrow finally lit the spark for what feels like a third intifada.

Palestinians do not have weapons. They threw stones but Netanyahu ordered snipers to shoot them. This finally led to a number of young men taking to stabbings. Israel’s heavy handed response, including home demolitions ignited wider clashes.with groups of atoms in the molecules rather than the entire molecule. They postulated the correlation of different bands to specific groupings, for instance the nitro group in nitrobenzene. In 1885, Abney and Festing developed a colour photometer and undertook a range of colour measurements.

E. R. Festing joined the South Kensington Museum in 1864. He became one of two assistant directors at the South Kensington Museum. On the retirement of the Director of the museum, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen, in 1893, the museum was split into an Art Museum (which subsequently became known as the Victoria and Albert Museum) and a Science Museum. Festing became the first Director of the newly formed Science Museum.

Festing was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) on 4 June 1886. He was


for his consistency with selection in the 2015 Prime Minister's XIII side.

9. Sam McKendry

Another Panthers prop who is the cornerstone of Penrith's engine room, McKendry has completed his eighth season in the top grade, and much like Latimore, played in 24 games in both the last two seasons. With Brent Kite now retired, McKendry will be called upon to lead the Panthers' promising group of front-rowers in 2016 and beyond.

8. Mitchell Aubusson

Arguably the most adaptable player in the NRL, Aubusson is perhaps a victim of his own versatility. We've seen the Roosters utility cover the back-row, centre, wing, and hooker (and probably more if asked), and is generally deployed from the bench by Trent Robinson. He's seldom missed a game since 2011, and the Roosters wouldn't able to– and is an unsung hero of a star-studded Cowboys roster.

5. Ryan Hinchcliffe

Whether it's starting at lock, coming off the bench or deputising for Cameron Smith at hooker, Hinchcliffe will rarely let his teammates down. A hard-working middle forward, Hinchcliffe has hardly missed a game for the Storm with 174 appearances for the club since joining from Canberra in 2009. In his final year in the NRL he was drafted into the NSW camp for Origin III as cover for Robbie Farah.

4. Bryson Goodwin

Souths weren't able to replicate the feats of 2014, but things could've been worse had it not been for Goodwin, who adds much-needed experience to a young backline. Played in all 25 of the Rabbitohs' NRL games, switching between wing and centre and scoring six


tries in the process, but it was his efforts without the ball which helped shore up South Sydney's edge defence.

3. Bodene Thompson

An off-season recruit from Wests Tigers, Thompson flourished in his first season at Mt Smart Stadium averaging just under 39 tackles and 90 metres per game from 21 starts in 2015. Playing the full 80 minutes for the bulk of those games, he also scored six tries and established himself on the Warriors' right edge.

2. Leeson Ah Mau

Part of a much-maligned Dragons pack in 2014, Ah Mau and the rest of the Red V engine room went to another level in 2015, racking up some solid numbers in the process. Starting at prop in all of the Dragons' 25 games this season, Ah Mau averaged 112 metresand 26 tackles per game and struck up a great combination with fellow front-rower Mike Cooper. Will need to continue in the same vein in 2016 following the departure of Trent Merrin to the Panthers.

1. Blake Green

Melbourne struggled to find a permanent replacement for premiership-winning five-eighth Gareth Widdop once he departed at the end of the 2013 season, but look to have found their man in Blake Green. With eight tries and 10 try assists in 25 appearances this season, Green has slotted in perfectly into the Storm system, and could help Craig Bellamy's side to yet another grand final appearance.


jugglers who began performing in 1912. The members were Gladys Tucker, Nellie Green, Denise Wathon, Bonnie Wathon, and Carrie Cliff. They performed an act of club passing, tennis racket juggling, hoop passing, and a solo tap dance done while juggling. They were perhaps best known for their finale of juggling lighted clubs in the dark. They were given these clubs by the famous Gentleman Juggler Salerno. They were originally known as the Four Clovelly Girls, then the Five Carlton Sisters, and finally as the Juggling Jewels. In 1943, they became the Four Juggling Jewels and were the Three Juggling Jewels by 1949. They continued performing until at least 1950. Here are some photos of the Juggling Jewels.

Lois Jackson informed us that at some point in her youth, oneis that video, courtesy of 2015 IJA Historical Achievement Award Winner Bobby Jule. Thanks, Bobby!!

We have been fortunate to be able to rescue many props and be trusted with many more that we are now able to use to honor the jugglers of the past. We plan to continue to expand the museum collection with amazing props, photos, books, and videos, preserving the history of our art for future generations of jugglers.

David Cain is a professional juggler, juggling historian, and the owner of the world's only juggling museum, the Museum of Juggling History. He is a Guinness world record holder and 15 time IJA gold medalist. In addition to his juggling pursuits, David is a successful composer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and singer as well as the author of sixteen


Watch Full Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur Movie Online David Attenborough tells the story of the discovery and reconstruction in Argentina of the world's largest-known dinosaur, a brand new species of titanosaur. Measuring 37m long and weighing 70 metric tons, it now holds the record as the biggest animal ever to walk the Earth. In 2014, a shepherd spotted the tip of a gigantic fossil bone sticking out of a rock in La Flecha Farm in the Chubut Province in the Argentinian desert. Palaeontologists soon uncovered a massive 2.4m long thigh bone, the largest ever found. By the end of the dig they had uncovered more than 220 bones. As the programme reveals, these all belong to a new species of the giant plant-eating titanosaur. Filmed over thefirst breather passage providing a communication between the breather chamber and an inside of the electric motor housing; and a second breather passage providing a communication between the breather chamber and a lubricating oil separation chamber formed in the gearbox casing.
Herein, the term xe2x80x9cgearboxxe2x80x9d includes a power transmission device such as a single stage reduction gear device, a multistage transmission, and a continuously variable transmission.
In this construction of the breather device, one breather chamber communicates with the inside of the electric motor housing and the inside of the gearbox casing through the first and second breather passages respectively so that air within the housing and the casing can escape from the breather chamber. Further, since the second breather passage is in communication with the breather chamber and the


lubricating oil separation chamber, even if lubricating oil is splashed by the gears within the gearbox, the splashed lubricating oil is separated in the lubricating oil separation chamber so as to prevent the lubricating oil from entering into the breather chamber through the second breather passage. Further, temperature of the breather chamber drops abruptly after a long hour drive under a lower outer temperature. However, since the gears within the gearbox and the lubricating oil have large heat quantities, these heat quantities are absorbed by air within the breather chamber through the second breather passage and therefore temperature in the breather chamber decreases gradually.
According to a second aspect of the invention, the aforementioned breather device may be made such that a terminal box is provided above the connectingportion in communication with the electric motor housing, that an outer wall forming the terminal box and an outer wall forming the gearbox casing are used to form part of the breather chamber, and that part of a cover member which covers the terminal box is used as an upper wall of the breather chamber.
In this construction of the breather device, in addition to the above advantages, the breather chamber can be rendered compact in size. The outer wall of the terminal box and the outer wall of the gearbox casing are utilized to form part of the breather chamber, which is further covered by part of the cover member to form the breather chamber. In other words, by utilizing the outer wall of the terminal box and


the outer wall of the casing the breather chamber is formed, leading to provision of a compact breather chamber without increasing the weight. Further, by disengaging the cover member of the terminal box the breather chamber is open and seen during the maintenance of the terminal box.
According to a third aspect of the invention, the aforementioned breather device according to the second aspect of the invention, the outer wall forming the terminal box extends such that an upper end thereof tilts toward the gearbox.
In this construction of the breather device, in addition to the above advantages, workability and assembly of the terminal box can be facilitated because the outer wall of the terminal box tilts and the open end of the terminal box obliquely faces upward. The deadincluding equipment it has largely been unable to acquire for decades,” the report adds.

The embargo in question – which dates back to the 1979 Iranian revolution – will expire next year, as stipulated in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear deal.

While President Trump Donald John TrumpFederal prosecutor speaks out, says Barr 'has brought shame' on Justice Dept. Former Pence aide: White House staffers discussed Trump refusing to leave office Progressive group buys domain name of Trump's No. 1 Supreme Court pick MORE pulled the United States from the nuclear deal last year, administration officials have pressed the UN to keep the embargo from expiring and keep advanced weapons out of Iran.

The new DIA report, titled "Iran Military Power," found that the


including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and air-to-ground strikes, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force as the primary operator of the growing fleet.

Tehran has been blamed for several drone-involved attacks in recent months, including a Sept. 14 attack on two Saudi oil refineries - which were hit by drones and cruise missiles - and the downing of a U.S. surveillance drone in June.

The United States has pushed back against such actions with sanctions on Iran, as well as shows of force in the Gulf region.

The most recent such show came on Tuesday, when the U.S. aircraft carrier strike group Abraham Lincoln sailed through the Strait of Hormuz, according to a Navy statement.

The official said Tuesday that Iran’s top goal is to deter attacks on its homeland andBIO
Born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1960. Dashper graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland in 1982. He has exhibited widely in New Zealand, Australia, and Europe since 1980. His major New Zealand exhibitions include, Julian Dashper’s Greatest Hits, Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1992; The Big Bang Theory, Artspace, 1994; and The Twist, Waikato Museum of Art and History, 1998. Much of Dashper’s work concerns the connections between abstract art and popular culture. One of his themes is the reading of international modernism in New Zealand art, and how in New Zealand we know the great modernist works largely through reproduction. Another is the canon – the list of artists regarded by the culture as great. The Big Bang Theory for


instance puts the names of major New Zealand regional artists on drumkits, as though they were rock bands. In 2001 Dashper was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and was the artist-in-residence at the Donald Judd Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Julian Dashper died in Auckland 30 July 2009. (Credit: Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand)

TEXT
Julian Dashper makes concept-based art, which focuses heavily on the conceptual elements of a work of art. While employing a variety of mediums (painting, sculpture, photography, video, readymade objects, and sound) his work reflects a modest, pared-down aesthetic that encourages a more mindful or cognitive art experience. His conceptual practice pursues a global exchange of ideas about so-called international styles (such as pure Abstraction), the reception and dissemination of visual culture, and the re-positioning ofThe 3.3-kilometre Metro Line was originally expected to be ready for passengers in April 2014. In December, the city announced the opening date would be pushed back to June 2014. Now, the city expects the Metro Line to open at the end of the year.


AGAIN. For that matter so is his network CNN]

"This time, Gaza fighting is 'proxy war' for entire Mideast

By Josh Levs, CNN

updated 1:48 PM EDT, Fri August 1, 2014

The Gaza conflict is a proxy war for the Middle East, analysts sayEgypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are seen as supporting Israel's crackdown on HamasTurkey and Qatar support HamasHamas is an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood, which threatens some governments

(CNN) -- The conflict raging in Gaza is different this time.

While Hamas' rocket attacks and Israel's military actions may look familiar, they're taking place against a whole new backdrop.

"This is unprecedented in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict," says CNN's Ali Younes, an analyst who has covered the region for decades. "Most Arab states are actively supporting Israel against the Palestinians --and not even shy about it or doing it discreetly."

It's a "joint Arab-Israeli war consisting of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia against other Arabs -- the Palestinians as represented by Hamas."

As the New York Times put it, "Arab leaders, viewing Hamas as worse than Israel, stay silent."

One of the outcomes of the fighting will likely be "the end of the old Arab alliance system that has, even nominally, supported the Palestinians and their goal of establishing a Palestinian state," Younes says.

"The Israel-Hamas conflict has laid bare the new divides of the Middle East," says Danielle Pletka, vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. "It's no longer the Muslims against the Jews. Now it's the extremists -- the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and their


backers Iran, Qatar and Turkey -- against Israel and the more moderate Muslims including Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia."

"It's a proxy war for control or dominance in the Middle East," says CNN's Fareed Zakaria.

To understand why and what all this means, we need to begin with understanding of Hamas.

Zakaria: Gaza is 'proxy war' for Mideast Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood

Hamas, which has controlled the Palestinian government in Gaza for years, is an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood. To many Americans, the brotherhood is familiar for its central role in the power struggle for Egypt. But it's much larger than that.

"The Muslim Brotherhood is international, with affiliated groups in more than 70 countries, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE," says Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near EastPolicy.

The Arab Spring showed the region that uprisings can lead to the Brotherhood gaining power. So it's a threat to the governments it opposes.

"Israel's ongoing battle against Hamas is part of a wider regional war on the Muslim Brotherhood," says the Soufan Group, which tracks global security. "Most Arab states share Israel's determination to finish the movement off once and for all, but they are unlikely to be successful."

"From the perspective of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE and some other Arab states, what the Israeli Prime Minister is doing is fighting this war against Hamas on their behalf so they can finish the last stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood," Younes says.

"Arab governments and official Arab media have all but adopted the Israeli view of who is a


terrorist and who is not. Egyptian and Saudi-owned media are liberal in labeling the Muslim Brotherhood as 'terrorists' and describing Hamas as a 'terrorist organization.' It's a complete turnabout from the past, when Arab states fought Israel and the U.S. in the international organizations on the definition of terrorism, and who is a terrorist or a 'freedom fighter.'"

Egypt's new President vowed during his campaign that he would finish off the Muslim Brotherhood. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former military chief, deposed Egypt's first freely elected leader, President Mohamed Morsy of the Muslim Brotherhood, last year following mass protests against Morsy's rule.

El-Sisi was elected officially in June.

"In Egypt you have a regime that came to power by toppling a Muslim Brotherhood government," says Trager. "It's therefore in an existential conflictwith the Brotherhood. So it doesn't want to see Hamas, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, emerge stronger in a neighboring territory."

Egypt also has another reason to stand against Hamas: rising violence and instability in Sinai, the northern part of Egypt that borders Israel and Gaza. Hamas' network of tunnels includes some in and out of Egypt used to smuggle goods include weapons for attackson Israeli civilians.

It's part of a regional war on the Muslim Brotherhood.The Soufan Group, which tracks global security

The new Egyptian government has been "cracking down aggressively since it removed the brotherhood from power," Trager says.

El-Sisi closed the border crossings between Egypt and Gaza, which has helped block Hamas militants from escaping or smuggling in more weapons during Israel's onslaught. But it also has contributed to the


succession," says Trager.

The Saudis and Egyptians are more scared of Islamic fundamentalism than they are of Israel.CNN's Fareed Zakaria

"So these countries have been directly supportive of the coup in Egypt because it removed elected Islamists and therefore discredited that model."

Saudi Arabia is "leading the charge," partly through backing the coup and financing state media reports that attacked the brotherhood, says Younes.

"Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE all see the destruction of Hamas as of benefit to their internal security as well as to regional stability."

"The Saudis and the Egyptians are now more scared of Islamic fundamentalism than they are of Israel," says Zakaria.

"The Saudi monarchy is more worried about the prospects of Hamas winning, which would embolden Islamists in other parts of the Middle East, and thereforepotentially an Islamist opposition in Saudi Arabia."

Qatar also funds many Muslim Brotherhood figures in exile, including Hamas political leader Khaled Mashaal, who is believed to have orchestrated numerous Hamas terrorist attacks.

"I think this is a case of a country with a lot of money to burn making a certain calculation in 2011 that made a lot of sense at the time: that the Brotherhood was the next big thing that was going to dominate many of the countries of the region," says Trager. "Realistically, it made sense to bet on it."

Turkey has "more of an ideological sympathy with the Brotherhood," he says.

Erdogan has tried to use the cause of the Brotherhood to bolster his own Islamist credentials. Eric Trager, Washington Institute

"Erdogan has tried to use the cause of


the Brotherhood to bolster his own Islamist credentials at home," says Trager. Last year, Erdogan cracked down on mass demonstrations in his country.

Iran has long supported Hamas, supplying it with weapons. And Meshaal used to be based in Syria.

But that changed. In 2012, Meshaal left Syria as the country's civil war deepened -- a decision believed to have caused a breakdown in his relationship with Iran as well, says Firas Abi Ali, head of Middle East and North Africa Country Risk and Forecasting at the global information company IHS. Tehran is aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Now, Syria -- Israel's neighbor to the north -- is locked in a brutal, multiparty civil war, with Islamist extremists hoisting severed heads onto poles. The war, believed to have killedmore than 115,000 people, is just one of the many developments emphasizing how many "fault lines" there are in the region, Richard Haass, president of Council on Foreign Relations, told "CNN Tonight."

"There's fault lines within the Palestinians between Hamas and the other part of the Palestinian Authority. You have Sunnis vs. Shia. You have Iran vs. Saudi Arabia and the Arabs. You have secularists vs. people who embrace religion in the political space."

The Palestinian Authority

Paying a price for all this is another key player: Fatah, the Palestinian faction that controls the West Bank. Fatah and Hamas have long fought each other, but earlier this year made another effort at a unity government.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is in charge of the government in the West Bank, "seems politically


an ally (and a base) in the region, if invited and the terms were right. Maybe there are other considerations. I wish we had a Commander in Chief looking our for our interests.

President Obama is considering airstrikes or airdrops of food and medicine to address a humanitarian crisis among some 40,000 religious minorities in Iraq who have been dying of heat and thirst on a mountaintop after death threats from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, administration officials said on Thursday.

The president, in meetings with his national security team at the White House on Thursday morning, has been weighing a series of options ranging from dropping humanitarian supplies on Mount Sinjar to military strikes on the fighters from ISIS now at the base of the mountain, aKurdish independence and militancy in neighboring Turkey and Iran, will limit the degree to which Washington and regional capitals are willing to arm Iraq's Kurds to engage Islamic State militants beyond limited airstrikes.

Analysis

Iraq's Kurdish region faces serious geographic challenges when it comes to defense. The territory is roughly crescent-shaped. The interior of the crescent, which faces Iraq's disputed territories, starts as flat, open desert and steadily elevates into hills, ultimately transitioning to mountains that anchor the borders with Turkey and Iran. Much of the region's critical energy infrastructure, both within the Kurdistan Regional Government proper and in the disputed regions surrounding Kirkuk, lies near areas of Iraqi territory now claimed by Islamic State militants and in open desert. Critical cities such as Dohuk, Arbil and Kirkuk are also


nestled either within or close to the disputed territories on the crescent's interior border.

Any advance by the Islamic State into peshmerga-controlled territory immediately puts the militants dangerously close to these strategic areas because of the lack of geographic depth in this highly contested borderland. Major urban centers, including the regional capital, Arbil, and Sulaimaniyah, and the region's energy infrastructure already have a more robust Kurdish peshmerga defensive presence. But Islamic State militants will continue to launch opportunistic strikes along the Kurdistan Regional Government's long southern border, leveraging their mobility to launch surprise attacks where possible against Kurdish forces along the border.

Iraq's Population Density By Ethnic and Sectarian Divisions

Click to Enlarge

This puts the defending peshmerga at a disadvantage. They have to protect an arcing border that stretches for morethe Mosul area and areas farther west.

Turkey, Iran and the United States each have a fundamental interest in preventing a large-scale assault by Islamic State militants on Iraq's federal Kurdish region. International support for the Kurds, somewhat in conjunction with Baghdad, is likely to continue focusing on preventing a wholesale collapse of the Kurdish region or the loss of large swaths of Kurdish territory to Islamic State militants. Short of this threat, which Stratfor still considers to be unlikely at this time, additional outside assistance to Kurdish forces is likely to be limited to airdrops of humanitarian aid and targeted airstrikes against Islamic State targets.

The Americans and Turks are also likely to consider hitting Islamic State artillery positions. It will be far harder for the Islamic State to


Islamic State recently released the second edition of its English-language Dabiq magazine to coincide with the Eid al-Fitr holiday, which marks the end of Ramadan's month of fasting. The first edition of Dabiq, released near the beginning of Ramadan, was titled "The Return of Khilafah" to celebrate the Islamic State's declaration of a caliphate by its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The second edition of the magazine was titled "The Flood" and had a twofold purpose. The first was to document the successes that the Islamic State had enjoyed on the battlefield during the month of Ramadan in both Iraq and Syria. The second was to use those successes to bolster the group's claim to be the true leader not only of the jihadist world but of all Muslims. Usingthe example of the prophet Noah to support its strictly dualistic ideology, the group argues that Muslims have the choice of either supporting the Islamic State or perishing as the group overwhelms the earth like Noah's flood.

A significant portion of the magazine is devoted to tying these two concepts together through a process known as mubahalah, a traditional Islamic process for resolving an intractable religious dispute in which the two parties ask Allah to bless the side telling the truth and curse the errant party. In a seven-part article titled "The Flood of the Mubahalah," the magazine outlines how the Islamic State's spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, invoked mubahalah in the dispute between his organization and its detractors, which include Jabhat al-Nusra and al Qaeda's current leadership under Ayman


al-Zawahiri. The article claims mubahalah was invoked on two occasions: on Islamic dates corresponding to dates in March and April 2014. The article further claimed that Osama bin Laden and the rest of the former al Qaeda leadership had praised the Islamic state it established before the new leadership criticized it.

The editors of Dabiq argue that the Islamic State's gains on the battlefield since mubahalah was declared -- and specifically the "flood" it had unleashed on parts of Iraq and Syria during the month of Ramadan -- serve as proof that Allah blessed the Islamic State. The successes therefore prove that the Islamic State was on the right side of its conflict with al Qaeda and the other groups. Because of this, all Muslims are supposed to supportand Syria, the Islamic State demonstrated another difference from al Qaeda. For several years now, the al Qaeda core and its most effective regional franchise, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, have been telling jihadists in the West to stay home and conduct attacks where they live rather than risk traveling to places such as Pakistan or Yemen to receive training at militant camps. These calls for grassroots operatives to conduct attacks in the West reflect not only the pressure these groups have been under in Pakistan and Yemen but also al Qaeda's fixation on attempting to strike Western countries that support the rulers of Muslim countries.

While the Islamic State conducted a multitude of terrorist and insurgent attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, it has not attempted to


strike outside of its home region. Even its terrorist attacks outside of Iraq and Syria have been in places such as Jordan, al-Zarqawi's home country, or Lebanon. When U.S. forces pulled out of Iraq, the Islamic State continued attacking the Iraqi government and eventually became involved in the civil war in Syria. It has remained focused on fighting its enemies inside the region -- including the Syrian and Iraqi regimes and other rebel groups -- but has not attempted attacks in the United States or Europe.Terrorism, Insurgency and Beyond

In the Gauging the Jihadist Movement series published in December 2013, Stratfor noted that jihadists are militants and that they use various types of military operations, including terrorism and insurgent tactics. The al Qaeda core was always heavily focused onterrorism, but as a small vanguard organization, it was never large enough to become a meaningful insurgent force or to establish an Islamic polity itself.

Many of the regional jihadist groups that joined al Qaeda's global constellation, such as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, have progressed beyond terrorism into insurgency. But most of these attempts have not fared well and have been put down by the host country with outside assistance. Even al Qaeda in Iraq, a predecessor of the Islamic State that was aligned with al Qaeda until February, was heavily damaged and nearly destroyed after it moved from terrorism to insurgency in Iraq and declared an Islamic state in Iraq in 2006. It was only after the U.S. drawdown


and withdrawal from Iraq and the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011 that the group managed to regain its strength and again assert its claim to rule an Islamic state. It has become a formidable military force, capable not only of conducting terrorist operations and hit-and-run insurgent attacks but also of taking and holding territory, something the al Qaeda core group has never been able to do.

So far, the Islamic State has been able to claim its battlefield successes as proof of Allah's blessing. However, it has not yet received the global recognition and acceptance it hoped its declaration of a caliphate would produce. The number of jihadist groups swearing allegiance to the Islamic State has remained quite limited to date, and the publishing ofhard-core militants they had been looking for. They also picked up an apparent hanger-on, an Iraqi man in his early 30s whom they knew nothing about.

The Americans duly registered his name as they processed him and the others at the Camp Bucca detention center: Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badry.

That once-peripheral figure has become known to the world now as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-appointed caliph of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and the architect of its violent campaign to redraw the map of the Middle East.

“He was a street thug when we picked him up in 2004,” said a Pentagon official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. “It’s hard to imagine we could have had a crystal ball then that would tell


us he’d become head of ISIS.”

At every turn, Mr. Baghdadi’s rise has been shaped by the United States’ involvement in Iraq — most of the political changes that fueled his fight, or led to his promotion, were born directly from some American action. And now he has forced a new chapter of that intervention, after ISIS’ military successes and brutal massacres of minorities in its advance prompted President Obama to order airstrikes in Iraq.

Mr. Baghdadi has seemed to revel in the fight, promising that ISIS would soon be in “direct confrontation” with the United States.

Still, when he first latched on to Al Qaeda, in the early years of the American occupation, it was not as a fighter, but rather as a religious figure. He has since declared himselfcaliph of the Islamic world, and pressed a violent campaign to root out religious minorities, like Shiites and Yazidis, that has brought condemnation even from Qaeda leaders.

Despite his reach for global stature, Mr. Baghdadi, in his early 40s, in many ways has remained more mysterious than any of the major jihadi figures who preceded him.

American and Iraqi officials have teams of intelligence analysts and operatives dedicated to stalking him, but have had little success in piecing together the arc of his life. And his recent appearance at a mosque in Mosul to deliver a sermon, a video of which was distributed online, was the first time many of his followers had ever seen him.

Mr. Baghdadi is said to have a doctorate in Islamic studies from a university in


Baghdad, and was a mosque preacher in his hometown, Samarra. He also has an attractive pedigree, claiming to trace his ancestry to the Quraysh Tribe of the Prophet Muhammad.

Beyond that, almost every biographical point about Mr. Baghdadi is occluded by some confusion or another.

The Pentagon says that Mr. Baghdadi, after being arrested in Falluja in early 2004, was released that December with a large group of other prisoners deemed low level. But Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi scholar who has researched Mr. Baghdadi’s life, sometimes on behalf of Iraqi intelligence, said that Mr. Baghdadi had spent five years in an American detention facility where, like many ISIS fighters now on the battlefield, he became more radicalized.

Mr. Hashimi said that Mr. Baghdadi had grown up in a poor family ina farming village near Samarra, and that his family was Sufi — a strain of Islam known for its tolerance. He said Mr. Baghdadi had come to Baghdad in the early 1990s, and over time became more radical.

Early in the insurgency, he gravitated toward a new jihadi group led by the flamboyant Jordanian militant operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Though Mr. Zarqawi’s group, Al Qaeda in Iraq, began as a mostly Iraqi insurgent organization, it claimed allegiance to the global Qaeda leadership, and over the years brought in more and more foreign leadership figures.

It is unclear how much prominence Mr. Baghdadi enjoyed under Mr. Zarqawi. Bruce Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer now at the Brookings Institution, recently wrote that Mr. Baghdadi had spent several years in Afghanistan,


working alongside Mr. Zarqawi. But some officials say the American intelligence community does not believe Mr. Baghdadi has ever set foot outside the conflict zones of Iraq and Syria, and that he was never particularly close to Mr. Zarqawi.

The American operation that killed Mr. Zarqawi in 2006 was a huge blow to the organization’s leadership. But it was years later that Mr. Baghdadi got his chance to take the reins.

As the Americans were winding down their war in Iraq, they focused on trying to wipe out Al Qaeda in Iraq’s remaining leadership. In April 2010, a joint operation by Iraqi and American forces made the biggest strike against the group in years, killing its top two figures near Tikrit.

A month later, the group issued a statement announcing newnot diminished.”

The Sunni tribes of eastern Syria and Iraq’s Anbar and Nineveh Provinces have long had ties that run deeper than national boundaries, and ISIS was built on those relationships. Accordingly, as the group’s fortunes waned in Iraq, it found a new opportunity in the fight against Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria.

As more moderate Syrian rebel groups were beaten down by the Syrian security forces and their allies, ISIS increasingly took control of the fight, in part on the strength of weapons and funding from its operations in Iraq and from jihadist supporters in the Arab world. That fact has led American lawmakers and political figures, including former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to accuse President Obama of aiding ISIS’ rise in two ways: first by completely


Hussein, whose brutal dictatorship had kept a lid on extremist Islamist movements, gave Mr. Baghdadi the freedom for his radical views to flourish.

In contrast to Mr. Zarqawi, who increasingly looked outside Iraq for leadership help, Mr. Baghdadi has surrounded himself by a tight clique of former Baath Party military and intelligence officers from the Hussein regime who know how to fight.

Analysts and Iraqi intelligence officers believe that after Mr. Baghdadi took over the organization he appointed a Hussein-era officer, a man known as Hajji Bakr, as his military commander, overseeing operations and a military council that included three other officers of the former regime’s security forces.

Hajji Bakr was believed to have been killed last year in Syria. Analysts believe that he and at least two of the threeother men on the military council were held at various times by the Americans at Camp Bucca.

Mr. Baghdadi has been criticized by some in the wider jihadi community for his reliance on former Baathists. But for many others, Mr. Baghdadi’s successes have trumped these critiques.

The victories gained by the militant group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were built on months of maneuvering along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which define a region known as the cradle of civilization.

“He has credibility because he runs half of Iraq and half of Syria,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New American Foundation.

Syria may have been a temporary refuge and proving ground, but Iraq has always been his stronghold and his most important source of financing.


Now, it has become the main venue for Mr. Baghdadi’s state-building exercise, as well.

Although the group’s capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, appeared to catch the American intelligence community and the Iraqi government by surprise, Mr. Baghdadi’s mafia-like operations in the city had long been crucial to his strategy of establishing the Islamic caliphate.

His group earned an estimated $12 million a month, according to American officials, from extortion schemes in Mosul, which it used to finance operations in Syria. Before June, ISIS controlled neighborhoods of the city by night, collecting money and slipping in to the countryside by day.

The United Nations Security Council is considering new measures aimed at crippling the group’s finances, according to Reuters, by threatening sanctions on supporters. Such action is likely to have littleUkraine and Gaza, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) captured a third of Syria in addition to the quarter of Iraq it had seized in June. The frontiers of the new Caliphate declared by Isis on 29 June are expanding by the day and now cover an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people, a population larger than that of Denmark, Finland or Ireland. In a few weeks of fighting in Syria Isis has established itself as the dominant force in the Syrian opposition, routing the official al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, in the oil-rich province of Deir Ezzor and executing its local commander as he tried to flee. In northern Syria some five thousand Isis fighters are using tanks and


artillery captured from the Iraqi army in Mosul to besiege half a million Kurds in their enclave at Kobani on the Turkish border. In central Syria, near Palmyra, Isis fought the Syrian army as it overran the al-Shaer gasfield, one of the largest in the country, in a surprise assault that left an estimated three hundred soldiers and civilians dead. Repeated government counter-attacks finally retook the gasfield but Isis still controls most of Syria’s oil and gas production. The Caliphate may be poor and isolated but its oil wells and control of crucial roads provide a steady income in addition to the plunder of war.

The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement wasimplemented in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet this explosive transformation has created surprisingly little alarm internationally or even among those in Iraq and Syria not yet under the rule of Isis. Politicians and diplomats tend to treat Isis as if it is a Bedouin raiding party that appears dramatically from the desert, wins spectacular victories and then retreats to its strongholds leaving the status quo little changed. Such a scenario is conceivable but is getting less and less likely as Isis consolidates its hold on its new conquests in an area that may soon stretch from Iran to the Mediterranean.

The very speed and unexpectedness of its rise make it easy for Western and regional leaders to hope that the fall of Isis and the implosion


were taking territory, they have money, they can train us.’ This is bad news for the government, which barely held off an assault in 2012 and 2013 by rebels less well trained, organised and armed than Isis; it will have real difficulties stopping the forces of the Caliphate advancing west.

In Baghdad there was shock and terror on 10 June at the fall of Mosul and as people realised that trucks packed with Isis gunmen were only an hour’s drive away. But instead of assaulting Baghdad, Isis took most of Anbar, the vast Sunni province that sprawls across western Iraq on either side of the Euphrates. In Baghdad, with its mostly Shia population of seven million, people know what to expect if the murderously anti-Shia Isis forces capture thewere half-starved and forced to use their own weapons and buy their own ammunition. The only large-scale counter-attack launched by the regular army and the newly raised Shia militia was a disastrous foray into Tikrit on 15 July that was ambushed and defeated with heavy losses. There is no sign that the dysfunctional nature of the Iraqi army has changed. ‘They were using just one helicopter in support of the troops in Tikrit,’ the former minister said, ‘so I wonder what on earth happened to the 140 helicopters the Iraqi state has bought in recent years?’

Probably the money for the missing 139 helicopters was simply stolen. There are other wholly corrupt states in the world but few of them have oil revenues of $100 billion a year to


Islam, pay a special tax or be killed. Members of other sects and ethnic groups denounced as Shia or polytheists are being persecuted, imprisoned and murdered. The moment is passing when the non-Isis opposition could successfully mount a challenge.

The Iraqi Shia offer another explanation for the way their army disintegrated: it was stabbed in the back by the Kurds. Seeking to shift the blame from himself, Maliki claims that Erbil, the Kurdish capital, ‘is a headquarters for Isis, Baathists, al-Qaida and terrorists’. Many Shia believe this: it makes them feel that their security forces (nominally 350,000 soldiers and 650,000 police) failed because they were betrayed and not because they wouldn’t fight. One Iraqi told me he was at an iftar meal during Ramadan ‘with a hundred Shia professionalpeople, mostly doctors and engineers and they all took the stab-in-the-back theory for granted as an explanation for what went wrong’. The confrontation with the Kurds is important because it makes it impossible to create a united front against Isis. The Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, took advantage of the Iraqi army’s flight to seize all the territories, including the city of Kirkuk, which have been in dispute between Kurds and Arabs since 2003. He now has a 600-mile common frontier with the Caliphate and is an obvious ally for Baghdad, where Kurds make up part of the government. By trying to scapegoat the Kurds, Maliki is ensuring that the Shia will have no allies in their confrontation with Isis if it resumes its attack in the direction of


their own incompetence and corruption and because the Sunni uprising in Syria in 2011 destabilised the sectarian balance of power in Iraq. Three years on, the Isis-led Sunni victory in Iraq threatens to break the military stalemate in Syria. Assad has been slowly pushing back against a weakening opposition: in Damascus and its outskirts, the Qalamoun mountains along the Lebanese border and Homs, government forces have been advancing slowly and are close to encircling the large rebel enclave in Aleppo. But Assad’s combat troops are noticeably thin on the ground, need to avoid heavy casualties and only have the strength to fight on one front at a time. The government’s tactic is to devastate a rebel-held district with artillery fire and barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, force mostof the population to flee, seal off what may now be a sea of ruins and ultimately force the rebels to surrender. But the arrival of large numbers of well-armed Isis fighters fresh from recent successes will be a new and dangerous challenge for Assad. They overran two important Syrian army garrisons in the east in late July. A conspiracy theory, much favoured by the rest of the Syrian opposition and by Western diplomats, that Isis and Assad are in league, has been shown to be false.

Isis may well advance on Aleppo in preference to Baghdad: it’s a softer target and one less likely to provoke international intervention. This will leave the West and its regional allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – with a quandary: their


provinces in northern Iraq: ‘Such things do not happen spontaneously.’ In a speech in London in July, he said the Saudi policy towards jihadis has two contradictory motives: fear of jihadis operating within Saudi Arabia, and a desire to use them against Shia powers abroad. He said the Saudis are ‘deeply attracted towards any militancy which can effectively challenge Shiadom’. It’s unlikely the Sunni community as a whole in Iraq would have lined up behind Isis without the support Saudi Arabia gave directly or indirectly to many Sunni movements. The same is true of Syria, where Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington and head of Saudi intelligence from 2012 to February 2014, was doing everything he could to back the jihadi opposition until hisdismissal. Fearful of what they’ve helped create, the Saudis are now veering in the other direction, arresting jihadi volunteers rather than turning a blind eye as they go to Syria and Iraq, but it may be too late. Saudi jihadis have little love for the House of Saud. On 23 July, Isis launched an attack on one of the last Syrian army strongholds in the northern province of Raqqa. It began with a suicide car-bomb attack; the vehicle was driven by a Saudi called Khatab al-Najdi who had put pictures on the car windows of three women held in Saudi prisons, one of whom was Hila al-Kasir, his niece.

Turkey’s role has been different but no less significant than Saudi Arabia’s in aiding Isis and other jihadi groups. Its


most important action has been to keep open its 510-mile border with Syria. This gave Isis, al-Nusra and other opposition groups a safe rear base from which to bring in men and weapons. The border crossing points have been the most contested places during the rebels’ ‘civil war within the civil war’. Most foreign jihadis have crossed Turkey on their way to Syria and Iraq. Precise figures are difficult to come by, but Morocco’s Interior Ministry said recently that 1122 Moroccan jihadists have entered Syria, including nine hundred who went in 2013, two hundred of whom were killed. Iraqi security suspects that Turkish military intelligence may have been heavily involved in aiding Isis when it was reconstituting itself in 2011. Reports from the Turkish border say Isis isno longer welcome, but with weapons taken from the Iraqi army and the seizure of Syrian oil and gasfields, it no longer needs so much outside help.

For America, Britain and the Western powers, the rise of Isis and the Caliphate is the ultimate disaster. Whatever they intended by their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their efforts to get rid of Assad in Syria since 2011, it was not to see the creation of a jihadi state spanning northern Iraq and Syria run by a movement a hundred times bigger and much better organised than the al-Qaida of Osama bin Laden. The war on terror for which civil liberties have been curtailed and hundreds of billions of dollars spent has failed miserably. The belief that Isis is interested