text
stringlengths 316
100k
|
|---|
Following my post on my top 5 Zelda games, I thought it would be apt to post an equivalent for another of my favourite franchises – Super Mario.
Mario has been a huge part of my gaming experience growing up, and whilst I’ve thoroughly enjoyed many of his extra-curricular exploits (Tennis and Golf in particular), I’m sticking with the conventional ‘mainline’ Super Mario platformers for this Top 5.
Here they are:
5. Super Mario Bros
The game that started it all and one I’ve shamefully yet to complete. I first experienced it with the generous Mario All Stars for the SNES, and it was the one I kept coming back to. It’s Mario platforming at it’s purest and rawest, getting very tricky and unforgiving at times, but the quality of the jumping mechanics will always keep me returning.
Original cartridges are available on Amazon here.
4. Super Mario Sunshine
What Mario Sunshine does really well is add an extra layer of depth to the 3D Mario formula via the FLUDD pack. As well as retaining the majority of Mario’s moves from ’64, the water-propelled system adds a multitude of new moves, twists and tweaks to the moveset, giving the player the most control over Mario there’s ever been. Even subsequent Mario games lack the depth of control featured here.
The only reason Sunshine isn’t higher up the list is the lack of variety in the levels, a real shame compounded by the fact that those that are in the game are superb. Yoshi’s inclusion also feels like a wasted opportunity.
As it’s never been released on Virtual Console, original copies go for a premium. They can be picked up used from Amazon here.
3. Super Mario Galaxy
The only game on the Wii that I truly loved, Galaxy felt like a much more truer sequel to ’64 than Sunshine. The best looking game on the Wii by some distance and the best looking Mario game to date, it’s a joy to play. Every level is a treat.
The excellent Galaxy 2 felt more like an expansion than a true sequel for me – the Lost Levels to Galaxy’s Mario Bros – and so it didn’t quite have the impact the first Galaxy had on me.
Galaxy can be picked up on Amazon.
2. Super Mario World
Super Mario World is one of those rare games that feels perfectly complete – like no addition could make it any better than it already is. The way the seven areas have their own flavour, with every enemy oozing charm and feeling unique make finding all 96 exits a pleasure that never diminishes with subsequent playthroughs. One of the most replayable and enjoyable games ever made. And the music is exceptional.
Super Mario World can be picked up for the 3DS from Amazon here.
1. Super Mario 64
Even if you take away the incredible influence this game had on the videogame landscape when it released, SM64 remains the benchmark against which all other 3D platformers are judged. Running around with Mario in the courtyard still feels fun, racing a penguin down an ice slide still feels fun, and swinging Bowser around and around into a huge mine still feels fun.
I’m not sure I’ll ever have the same feeling I had when first playing this game – perhaps the imminent dawn of VR or augmented reality in our living rooms will provide that spark again – but even if I don’t I can just keep collecting 120 stars and know it will still be fun.
Original copies of Mario 64 can be picked up from Amazon, but your best bet is the Virtual Console.
|
Story Highlights Blacks rate their current life satisfaction lowest among major groups
But they rate their anticipated life satisfaction in five years the highest
Gap in life satisfaction compared with anticipated life is highest for blacks
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Blacks in the U.S. have consistently rated their current satisfaction with their lives lower than have whites, Asians and Hispanics in recent years. At the same time, blacks have been far more optimistic than the other three groups when assessing what their satisfaction with their lives will be like five years in the future.
Current and Anticipated Life Satisfaction Mean Score, by Race and Ethnicity, Averaged From 2008-2016 Imagine a ladder with 10 steps, where the top step is the best possible life for you and the bottom step is the worst possible life. On which step do you stand at this time? On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now? White Black Asian Hispanic Current life satisfaction (mean) 7.0 6.8 7.0 7.0 Anticipated life satisfaction in five years (mean) 7.6 8.4 8.0 8.0 Difference between anticipated life satisfaction in five years and current life satisfaction +0.6 +1.6 +1.0 +1.0 Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index
Gallup and Healthways measure Americans' current and anticipated life satisfaction ratings using the following questions based on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale:
Current life satisfaction: "Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?" Anticipated life satisfaction: "On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now?"
In 2008, the first year Gallup and Healthways measured life satisfaction using this scale, blacks' current life satisfaction scores averaged 6.6. By 2009 it rose to 6.9 and by 2010 to 7.0. While similar to the rise among Asians, that 0.4-point increase was greater than the increases seen for whites and Hispanics over the same period spanning the inauguration of President Barack Obama and his first two years in office.
After 2012, however, blacks' satisfaction ratings dropped back to the lowest level since 2008 and remained there throughout Obama's second term. Meanwhile, life satisfaction for the remaining three groups either slightly improved or held steady. Whites' life satisfaction ratings reached a nine-year high during Obama's last year in office, in 2016.
The year-over-year trends for anticipated life satisfaction ratings were similar over this period.
Life Satisfaction Trended, 2008-2016, by Race and Ethnicity Imagine a ladder with 10 steps, where the top step is the best possible life for you and the bottom step is the worst possible life. On what step do you stand at this time? White Black Asian Hispanic 2008 6.8 6.6 6.8 6.9 2009 6.9 6.9 6.9 6.9 2010 7.0 7.0 7.1 6.9 2011 7.0 6.9 7.0 6.9 2012 6.9 7.0 7.0 7.1 2013 7.0 6.8 7.1 7.0 2014 7.0 6.8 7.1 7.1 2015 7.0 6.8 7.1 7.1 2016 7.1 6.8 7.1 7.0 Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index
Blacks' Life Satisfaction Predictions Most Likely to Fall Short
Overall, U.S. adults are optimistic about their future lives, estimating their satisfaction will be nearly a step higher on the ladder than how they rate their life today. But this varies considerably across racial and ethnic groups.
Whites are the least optimistic in terms of improving their life satisfaction in the future, but as such have also proven to be the most accurate when comparing their anticipated life satisfaction score from five years earlier with their current score reported five years later -- at only about a half step lower than what they had previously projected. Asians and Hispanics are both close to the overall national average with their anticipated score on the future life ladder close to one point higher that the average score reported five years later.
Among blacks, however, the current life satisfaction reported each year from 2013 through 2016 consistently fell far short of their anticipated future life satisfaction reported five years earlier from 2008 to 2011, a deficit that is much greater than for any other group. For example, blacks' actual rating of their current lives in 2016 was 1.6 steps lower on the ladder scale than what the average anticipated life satisfaction rating was measured for this group in 2011.
Bottom Line
Overall, blacks' life satisfaction in the U.S. was somewhat higher in 2016 than in 2008, but lower than the peak years measured from 2009 through 2012. These middle years represented the peak of the presumed "Obama life satisfaction effect," which appeared to contribute an additive boost in current and anticipated life satisfaction for those who were both black and identified as a Democrat.
Regardless of the year-over-year trends, blacks have consistently reported the highest levels of life optimism for the future of any of the four major race and ethnic groups during Obama's presidency. These higher expectations have been unmet each year, due to many potential contributing factors.
Perceptions of racism are one possible explanation. The percentage of blacks who report that racism against blacks in the U.S. is widespread grew from 72% in 2009 to 82% in 2016, perhaps contrary to the trend that was anticipated when Obama first took office. And the percentage of blacks who viewed Obama's election and presidency as one of the most important advances for blacks in the U.S. has dwindled from 71% in 2009 to just 51% in 2016. Further, fewer Americans in 2016 believe that blacks have as good of a chance as whites to get jobs for which they are qualified than did so in 2009.
Now that the Obama era has ended, it remains to be seen whether the same patterns in current and anticipated life satisfaction ratings for racial and ethnic groups will persist during Donald Trump's administration. Still, the patterns seen during the Obama years suggest a resiliency in blacks' optimism for a future that is characterized not simply by equal opportunity, but also perhaps by equal gains in employment, wages, the justice system, social stature, community safety and love, among other metrics that might ultimately influence their collective well-being, and their pursuit of a life well-lived.
These data are available in Gallup Analytics.
|
Lazyninja wrote: You should probably apologize to the bartender for destroying his table with your mind.
Unless he was wearing a binder or something in all your previous encounters, you are relatively certain this is not the bartender.
You think.
Rather than open your mouth about it you’re just going to assume this is a different Khajiit.
milaek wrote: Say hello to the nice completely non threatening Khajit! Might know a bit about how to improve your sneaking skills.
Soooo… hey, you point out. You can’t help but notice she has some slaughterfish there.
The Khajiit nods. Speaking with a heavy accent, she tells you they were in the well. The guard captain saw them and offered a reward to anyone who took care of them.
Oh, you say. That’s… actually, you were trying to get them out yourself just yesterday!
She neutrally comments that you did not succeed.
You admit to her that you could have maybe done better. It looks like a harpoon works well! You tell her that you actually tried harpooning them yourself, though your harpoon wasn’t nearly as good as hers.
It was way better than that one, though.
Obscuras wrote: Ask if you can have the scales. And some food.
DamienGranz wrote: Be all like “You gonna eat that?”
The Khajiit doesn’t say anything, so you continue.
I, ah, didn’t actually know about any sort of reward when I was fishing for those yesterday, you say. I figured I could just sell their scales, cook their meat, that sort of thing. Also, there was this woman there who wanted to poison the well or something if no one else could kill the fish.
The Khajiit confirms that slaughterfish scales do sell decently, and their meat is… acceptable. She’ll have it later tonight, herself, after she sells their scales and collects the reward. She saw no such woman at the well, though.
Oh, she left a long time ago. I kinda hope she’s in jail now. For putting people in danger, I mean. Like, no offense to you if you’ve been in jail before. For… Khajiit things.
SallowFace wrote: If you start losing your grip on the conversation, comment on the weather.
FilthyCasual wrote: Ask that Kajiit why she’s out in the snow with no shoes on.
So! How come you’re, ah, out in the snow with no shoes on?
She points out that it is the middle of summer. And in the far south of Cyrodiil. Snow was not expected.
Yeah, you say. You guess that… would be unusual. You ask if she’s alright, being barefoot in the snow.
She responds that every second she sits here is pure agony.
You’re not sure if she’s joking.
The Khajiit continues her dark glare for a while. Eventually, she says she recognizes you: you’re that Suthay-Raht with human-tongue. Scampered around yesterday morning, talking to everyone.
Oh! Yeah, you nervously laugh, that was me. I think I remember you, too. We spoke in Ta’agra, and you compared my speech to… I’m not sure, my parents never taught me the word.
She commends your parents on giving you a respectable upbringing.
puncherub wrote: What is up with this lady exactly? … Even if she’s just trying to get a bucket of water, why at 1 AM? Why is she even up?
Lazyninja wrote: Wait a second! How did she spear two slaughterfish without the rope tied to that spear?! Inquire as to whether this woman is an acrobat or a wizard.
So, ah, you’re some kind of… fisher?
Acrobat, she corrects. She helps townshumans and good-wizard Sigrid with odd jobs that need deep-climbs, long-jumps, or sight-in-dark-places or scaring-eye. Fixing weather vanes, finding lost keys, scare away wildlife on jobs too small for fighter’s guild, and the like.
Oh, I guess that kinda stuff makes sense for someone like you.
Like me, she asks.
Yeah, you say. You know. Like… us.
Hellequin wrote: Grab the rope. You’ll likely need it for your heist.
MORTALphoenix wrote: Take the rope from the well it could be useful later, maybe you could even use it to restrain Sigrid later.
You ask the Khajiit if she wants to, ah, take this rope. You saw it here earlier so you’re guessing it’s not hers.
She tells you that, seeing as how it doesn’t belong to her, she’s going to do the responsible thing as a contributing-member of society and not steal it in plain view like some sort of racial stereotype.
You know what she’s trying to say to you, but right now you’re on a quest. Besides, the rope’s been here for a good ten hours by now. If someone needed it more than you do, they would have taken it already. And it’s not like you’re stealing it; you’ll bring it back later. It’s lying on the ground now and you’ll probably drop it back on the ground whenever you’re done with it.
The Khajiit makes a low, growling sound, but is otherwise silent as you gather up the rope. When you’re done, she mentions that it’s wet and late at night, and that she wants to go back home now.
Unless there is something else Khajiit wishes to waste this one’s time with?
Additional resource credits:
Cider – surly acrocats
|
Getty Images / Lior Zaltzman
The case Netanyahu laid out against an Iran deal in his address to Congress revolves around 11 core arguments. Think they sound convincing? Look at those arguments one by one, and you’ll see why each of them is bogus.
Argument #1. More pressure can secure a better deal with Iran than current negotiations. If Iran walks away from talks now, this pressure will eventually bring it back to the table, ready to make more compromises.
Pressure in the form of sanctions — especially multilateral, international sanctions — helped convince Iran to come to the negotiating table. But Iran’s red lines in negotiations, including retaining some level of enrichment, are clear. Additional U.S. pressure now, aimed at forcing the Iranian regime “to its knees,” is far more likely to scuttle talks than to force greater Iranian flexibility, and the failure of diplomacy would be blamed on the U.S., not Iran. One result: no deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear program. Another result: strengthening those in Iran who support weaponization of the nuclear program as a deterrent against attack. And a third result: the almost certain collapse of the international sanctions regime, which has been critical to restraining Iran’s nuclear program so far.
Argument #2. The only good deal with Iran is one that completely or nearly completely dismantles Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, preventing Iran from enriching or limiting Iran to close to zero enrichment.
Zero enrichment or complete dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is both unachievable and unnecessary. It’s unachievable because just as U.S. negotiators must get a deal they can “sell” to their constituencies, Iranian negotiators must be able to sell a deal to their own constituencies as meeting their own red lines. And it’s unnecessary because assuming “zero enrichment” and “complete dismantlement” are genuinely shorthand for “the best possible guarantee that Iran’s nuclear program will remain peaceful,” this goal can be achieved through a nuclear agreement that includes strict limits on Iran’s enrichment capacity and stringent safeguards and transparency with respect to Iran’s nuclear facilities and materials. Insisting on “zero enrichment” or “total dismantlement” guarantees no deal — which means it guarantees that such limits and safeguards are absent.
This story "11 Lies Netanyahu Told Congress on Iran" was written by Lara Friedman.
Argument #3. Any deal with Iran is a bad deal, because the mullahs can’t be trusted.
Any nuclear deal with Iran would be grounded in ongoing rigorous inspections and verification mechanisms — not trust — to ensure that Iran lived up to its end of a deal. Should Iran interfere with those inspections and verification mechanisms, or should those inspections and verification mechanisms reveal Iranian malfeasance, the international community would know immediately and have ample opportunity to prepare its response. Without an agreement, those rigorous inspections and verification mechanisms would be absent.
Argument #4. It would be wrong to make any nuclear deal with Iran unless that deal also held Iran accountable for its support for terrorism and extremism, in the region and beyond.
An Iran nuclear deal would not change U.S. policy or impact U.S. sanctions with respect to Iran’s support for terrorism. U.S. anti-terrorism legislation is for the most part separate from Iran nuclear legislation; anti-terrorist provisions that apply to countries around the world would continue to apply equally to Iran, even with a nuclear deal in place. A nuclear deal with Iran could, potentially, open the door for improved U.S.-Iran relations, which could increase U.S. leverage and potentially lead to improvements in other areas of concern to the U.S., including concerns linked to Iran’s support for terrorist organizations.
Argument #5. It would be wrong to make any nuclear deal with Iran unless that deal also held Iran accountable for its terrible record with respect to human rights and civil liberties inside Iran.
An Iran nuclear deal would not change U.S. policy or impact U.S. sanctions with respect to Iran’s record on human rights abuses, democracy, or other non-nuclear-related matters. By improving the conditions of Iranians overall, an Iran nuclear deal could strengthen domestic groups engaged in promoting human rights and civil liberties. It could also strengthen Iranian political forces that are more open to change. For these reasons, a nuclear deal is widely supported by human rights and democracy advocates within Iran. The failure of Iran diplomacy — and what this failure would mean in terms of discrediting some of Iran’s more moderate political voices — could open the door to greater repression domestically.
Argument #6. A deal with Iran over its nuclear program will only strengthen an odious, extremist regime, and in doing so increase the threat of extremists everywhere.
The U.S. and its P5+1 partners are pursuing a nuclear agreement with Iran not as a gift to Iran, but because curtailing the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran is in the vital interests of the U.S. and the international community, including Israel. A deal with Iran over its nuclear program would in no way imply U.S. approval for Iranian policies or bad behavior in any sphere. And a deal would in no way limit the ability of the U.S. and the international community to sanction or pressure Iran for bad behavior — just like any other country.
Argument #7. One-year “breakout” time for Iran to become a nuclear state is way too short. If Iran decides to dash to get a bomb, it will already be too late.
“Breakout” time doesn’t refer to the time required for Iran to become a nuclear-armed state. It refers to the time needed for Iran to produce enough weapons-grade uranium to fuel a single nuclear bomb. To become a nuclear-armed state, Iran would have to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for at least two bombs, one to test (to prove its nuclear capabilities) and the other to hold as a deterrent against retaliation. It would also have to build both bombs, build a working delivery system, and carry out a test. An agreement would impede Iran’s ability to do all of these things. It would extend “breakout” time from the current 2-3 months to at least one year.
Argument #8. It doesn’t matter how many limits or safeguards you put into place — Iran will “sneak out,” and we will wake up one day to find Iran armed with nuclear bombs.
Guess what? “Sneak-out” is a danger with or without an agreement. An agreement will put into place inspection, oversight and verification mechanisms — with respect to facilities, equipment and supplies — that ensure that a “sneak-out” would be far more difficult for Iran to achieve and far more likely to be detected. Without an agreement, this oversight will not be implemented, ensuring that any “sneak-out” effort would be far more likely to go undetected.
Argument #9. Current negotiations leave in place too many Iranian centrifuges. The more centrifuges left spinning, the greater the threat Iran poses.
Under the interim deal that gave birth to the current negotiations Iran has already eliminated its stockpile of 20% enriched uranium gas, the feedstock required to produce weapons-grade uranium — in effect emptying the cartoon bomb that Netanyahu displayed at the U.N. So the immediate threat of Iranian “breakout” has been dramatically reduced. A nuclear deal can be expected to build on this, significantly reducing and capping the number of centrifuges spinning in Iran, limiting the type of centrifuges, and limiting enrichment, such that Netanyahu’s cartoon bomb will not be refilled and weapons-grade uranium remains out-of-reach. Without an agreement, the number of Iran’s centrifuges can only be expected to grow.
Argument #10. A nuclear deal with Iran will leave Iran as a threat to the world and an existential threat to Israel, will sell out our allies in the Gulf, and will fuel a nuclear arms race in the region.
A negotiated deal with Iran would not imply that the U.S. was abandoning traditional allies in favor of warmer ties with Iran. Neither diplomacy nor military action can guarantee that Iran will not someday decide to pursue nuclear weapons. International pressure and sanctions have impeded Iran’s nuclear program for years, but more importantly, leaders in Iran today have decided not to pursue an active nuclear weapons program. A negotiated deal can bolster this decision, while further rolling back Iran’s nuclear capacity such that if Iran’s leaders someday have a change of heart, the U.S. and international community — including our allies in the region — will have ample time to take action.
Argument #11. A deal that “sunsets” after 10 or 15 years is no good — it just means that Iran will wait and ready itself and then go nuclear the minute a deal ends.
An Iran nuclear agreement would dramatically mitigate the short- and medium-term threats of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. When that agreement ends, Iran would remain a member of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, subject to the terms of that treaty (and it was violations of the NPT that got Iran in trouble in the first place). Iran would also remain bound by an Additional Protocol to the treaty, granting U.N. inspectors greater authority in monitoring Iran’s nuclear program. At that time, following a decade or more of intrusive inspections and other oversight mechanisms, the U.S. and international community would be in a far stronger position to judge Iran’s actions and intentions vis-à-vis its nuclear program than they would have been without a deal. If Iran then appears to be shifting course and pursuing weaponization, the U.S. and international community would take action — and their decisions at that time would benefit from more than a decade of insights into Iran’s nuclear program.
Still not convinced? Check out a more detailed breakdown of Netanyahu’s bogus arguments here.
Lara Friedman is the Director of Policy and Government Relations for Americans for Peace Now.
|
There are no reliable statistics about slave labor in Brazil, so it's difficult to know the extent of the problem, but estimates range between 25,000 and 40,000 people. An estimated 1.8 million people work for little or no pay across Latin America.
The labor ministry in Brazil defines slave labor as work done in degrading conditions for less than minimum wage. For years, activists and NGOs have decried slave labor in Brazil's rural sector, including the charcoal production and cattle-farming industries.
"Drones don't substitute the inspector's physical presence, but they will be useful out in the country, in the case of farms that are hard to reach by road, for example," Bruno Barcia Lopes, coordinator of Rural Supervision for Rio de Janeiro's Labor Secretariat, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Starting next month in the state of Rio de Janeiro, six drones mounted with video cameras will be sent to fly around and record businesses in rural areas suspected of forcing workers to toil away in slave-like conditions. Exactly what will be done with the footage is still unclear.
The Brazilian government will start deploying a small army of drones as part of its latest effort to eradicate human trafficking in remote parts of the country.
Read more
The Brazilian government will start deploying a small army of drones as part of its latest effort to eradicate human trafficking in remote parts of the country.
Starting next month in the state of Rio de Janeiro, six drones mounted with video cameras will be sent to fly around and record businesses in rural areas suspected of forcing workers to toil away in slave-like conditions. Exactly what will be done with the footage is still unclear.
"Drones don't substitute the inspector's physical presence, but they will be useful out in the country, in the case of farms that are hard to reach by road, for example," Bruno Barcia Lopes, coordinator of Rural Supervision for Rio de Janeiro's Labor Secretariat, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The labor ministry in Brazil defines slave labor as work done in degrading conditions for less than minimum wage. For years, activists and NGOs have decried slave labor in Brazil's rural sector, including the charcoal production and cattle-farming industries.
There are no reliable statistics about slave labor in Brazil, so it's difficult to know the extent of the problem, but estimates range between 25,000 and 40,000 people. An estimated 1.8 million people work for little or no pay across Latin America.
But the government has stepped up in recent years to address the problem and the country's labor ministry, in particular, has made it a main priority. In the mid-1990s, the labor minister launched its Special Mobile Enforcement Group that teamed up with law enforcement and prosecutors to hunt down and raid farms and other companies suspected of abusing workers.
And according to the Guardian, more than 400 Brazilian companies comprising 30 percent of Brazil's GDP signed a national pact to eradicate slavery in 2005.
Related: A Drone Is Flying Abortion Pills From Germany to Poland This Weekend
The drone plan couldn't come at a better time, since one of Brazil's most effective and influential tools against slavery in the country was recently compromised.
In 2003, the government got even more aggressive and began publishing a list of companies found to be using slave labor, known as the "dirty list." Companies that made it on the list, which numbered as many as 600, were subjected to sanctions often boycotted around the world and also barred from getting government and private loans. The company could get off the list if, after two years, they proved they had changed their ways.
Last year, the company that built the World Cup stadium in Brazil was added to the dirty list after government officials accused it of subjecting more than 100 workers to squalid conditions and long hours. The list was upheld by the International Labor Organization and other human rights groups as an inspiring approach.
However, the Supreme Court in Brazil ruled to suspend the restrictions imposed by the list last December after a group of real estate companies filed an injunction against it, claiming its restrictions were too much.
Anti-human trafficking groups were furious at the ruling, which they say creates "a normative vacuum that allows nearly 600 companies and persons exploiting slave labor to benefit from publish funding and tax advantages."
According to Brazil's ministry of labor, 41,451 workers across Brazil were "rescued" from slave-like conditions from 1995 to 2011, most of whom were working under debt bondage. The Special Mobile Groups Inspection reportedly rescued more than 2,000 workers in 2013. It's unclear if any those workers are better off now.
"We can't say things are better, or that slave labor has migrated to the cities, and it's almost impossible to calculate numbers," Leonardo Sakamoto, head of anti-slavery group Repórter Brail told Reuters. "Slave labor is like Silly Putty. Every time you squeeze it, it assumes a different form."
In what's believed to be the first proposal of its kind, Kevin Bales, a well-known American abolitionist and co-founder of NGO Free the Slave, said in 2013 he would use drones with cameras to film slave labor in the fishing camps in India and a tiger sanctuary in Bangladesh.
His plan was to partner with a British filmmaker and turn the footage into a documentary and, ultimately, use the information to help free those trapped in forced labor.
But it wasn't well-received by local activists who called it a well-intentioned publicity stunt that didn't address the underlying causes of exploitative labor.
According to the International Labor Organization, there are around 21 million people worldwide trapped in some form of forced labor. The United Nations estimates that trafficking in human is the third largest criminal industry, behind drugs and guns.
Brazil was the last country in the Americas to officially abolish slave labor in 1888.
Follow Rachel Browne on Twitter: @rp_browne
|
Every day, billions of pieces of content are shared on Facebook . To keep up with the data, Facebook has been using a variety of tools to classify text. Traditional methods of classification, like deep neural networks are accurate, but have serious training requirements.
In an effort to classify both accurately and easily, Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab developed fastText. Today, fastText is going open source so developers can implement its libraries anywhere.
FastText supports both text classification and learning word vector representations through techniques like bag of words and subword information. Based on the skip-gram model, words are represented as bag of character n-grams with vectors representing each character n-gram.
“In order to be efficient on datasets with a very large number of categories, fastText uses a hierarchical classifier, in which the different categories are organized in a tree, instead of a flat structure (think binary tree instead of list),” said Facebook authors Armand Joulin, Edouard Grave, Piotr Bojanowski, and Tomas Mikolov in a post.
For those less artificially intelligent, the bag of words process is fast because it essentially ignores word order and instead focuses on the occurrences of a word. “Words” are represented in a multidimensional space and linear algebra is used to calculate the relationship between a query and a categorized set of words. Remember that when we feed a computer text, we are starting from scratch. To adults, grammar is intuitive — we know what words are, where they end and where they begin. Computers can handle the most complex computational challenges, but can struggle to differentiate “I love TechCrunch” from “CrunchLove iTech.” Methods like this essentially take a qualitative analysis problem and force it to be quantitative through the addition of statistics.
These techniques enable fastText to be faster than traditional deep learning methods. Facebook created this nifty comparison chart to show us side-by-side accuracy.
FastText is not restricted to English and can work with other languages including German, Spanish, French, and Czech.
Earlier this month, Facebook implemented an anti-clickbait algorithm into its Newsfeed. While the algo is quite complicated and focuses on both behavioral identifiers and language, fastText enables developers to create similar tools themselves.
Not to brag, but Facebook says that the new open source technology can be “trained on more than 1 billion words in less than 10 minutes using a standard multicore CPU. fastText can also classify a half-million sentences among more than 300,000 categories in less than five minutes.” #HumbleBrag
Starting today, Facebook’s fastText will be available from their GitHub.
|
6 years ago
Washington (CNN) - MoveOn.org is moving into the TV fight over curbing gun violence.
The progressive group will announce Friday that it's going up with a television commercial that goes after members of Congress who accept donations from the National Rifle Association.
Follow @politicalticker
The MoveOn spot, which the group says it will spend six figures to run for a week on national cable television (including CNN), is part of their campaign titled, "The NRA doesn't speak for me.”
In the ad, a man named Jerry Thompson, who describes himself as a gun owner and proud defender of the Second Amendment, says "for years I've watched Congress take money from the NRA and then oppose any kind of reform that helps keep us safe."
Thompson goes on to say that he was disgusted by the NRA's response to the December massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, where a well-armed gunman killed 20 young students and six adults.
The commercial ends with Thompson saying "I've had enough. So here's my message to Congress. You take money from the NRA and then continue to do their bidding, we're going to remember that come election time. The NRA doesn't speak for me, and they don't speak for the vast majority of Americans so stop taking their money"
MoveOn's announcement of their new ad comes one day after NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre charged that President Barack Obama's gun control proposals in the State of the Union address were "not about keeping kids safe at school" but rather part of a broad campaign to "dismantle the Second Amendment."
"When nothing else matters to every parent in America, President Obama had nothing to say about school security and nothing he proposed has anything to do with protecting one child in any school in this country," LaPierre said in remarks billed as a response to Tuesday's speech.
Near the end of the State of the Union address the president made an emotional plea for Congress to hold votes on controversial proposals for tougher gun laws. Listing gun violence victims, some of whom were in the audience at the U.S. Capitol, Obama said "they deserve a vote" as many in the audience cheered loudly.
Thursday's NRA speech came one day after LaPierre issued a rally-cry for gun owners, writing in an op-ed that "good Americans are prudently getting ready to protect themselves" against what he described as an onslaught of doom.
"Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face-not just maybe. It's not paranoia to buy a gun. It's survival," the NRA's executive vice president wrote in the op-ed published Wednesday by the conservative news website, The Daily Caller.
The NRA also went up at the beginning of the week with a web video that asserted that the president's attempts to enact new gun control laws would result in the "confiscation" of people’s firearms.
MoveOn says that besides the TV ad, they'll greet members of Congress as they head home for recess with organized rallies and congressional office drop-bys. The group also says it will distribute "The NRA Doesn't Speak for Me" bumper stickers.
- CNN's Ashley Killough contributed to this report.
|
Introduction
Our vision is to have a constant, healthy growth together with our partners worldwide. Our goal is to be widely recognized for our designed products and to have them available in all major market regions within EU and US. We should be a good alternative to the already established retail brands of today. It's of great importance for us that our partners understand the values of Fractal Design, therefore we are putting great effort into choosing the right partners from the start. We will work actively to maintain sales territories and profitable business for our partners.
Specifications
2x 140mm fans (one 140mm included, one optional) with removable and washable filters, in the front. Recommended for intake of air.
1x 120mm fan optional with removable and washable filter, in the front. Recommended for intake of air.
1x 180mm fan included in the top of the case. Recommended for exhaust of air.
1x 140mm fan included in the rear of the case. Recommended for exhaust of air.
1x 120/140mm fan optional in the side of the case. Recommended for intake of air.
4x 5,25” bays, 1x 5,25” to 3,5” converter included
Mini-itx, micro ATX, ATX and E-ATX motherboards
10x HDD trays. 4x HDD trays in the HDD cage in the main chamber. This HDD cage is removable and rotatable. (Space ~330mm with HDD Cage and without ~480mm) 6x HDD trays in the lower HDD chamber. These HDD cages are fixed.
A total of two 140mm fans and one 180mm fan included. Front 140mm fans are mounted with removable, washable filter. A fan controller is included, for mounting in one of the rear expansion slots.
Pre-fitted with dense noise absorbing material in both side panels.
ModuVent™ feature, allowing the user to choose between an optimal low noise level, having the cover mounted or optimal airflow by removing the cover and mounting a fan for intake.
On top of front panel: 4x USB 2.0, 1x eSATA and Audio I/O
Case size (WxHxD): 232 x 560 x 561.3 mm
Net weight: 17.95kg
I would like to thank Fractal Design for providing the review sample.Most of you may not know Fractal Design, but the company has been making a splash with their unique enclosures at a competitive price. The company also sells power supplies, case fans, and a few accessories on top of that.Not much else to say really, but this is their official vision:We are taking a look at the Define XL today, which is available in two different colors. Fractal Design sent us the all black variant for review. They were also kind enough to send us the Define R1 and Define R2 - check out the reviews! Fractal does not go out and release a new case under a new name, but actually improves on the existing designs and calls it R1, R2, R3 and so on. They are also planning a Core series of budget cases along with an Arc series for those looking for a traditional, ventilated case with the usual Fractal Design touches.
|
Click here to preview and download the MP3s!
I put a ton of fun and hard work into this release and hope you find it fun and interesting to listen to. Huge thanks to my friends who give me input on the little stuff when I needed it, and millions of thanks to you for listening to the end results! I hope you like it!
The physical CD is now shipping (order here). It features more original artwork by Kori Michele Handwerker and Peter Selmayr on a high-quality digipack. I can't wait to see what they look like in person. It's a fun thing to anticipate seeing after all the effort put into the art alone. Update: They're here and they look awesome! Very happy w/ them!!
Other items of interest:
- Stores: iTunes, Bandcamp, Google Play, my MP3 store (MP3 download directly from me), Amazon (soon)
- Physical CD Signing: I will still be signing the CD's if you buy 2 or more, including if you buy an old+new CD. To keep it simple on me for shipping and to stay consistent/fair with the way I started doing it when I only had 1 CD, I only put the autographed CD's in packages of 2+ orders.
|
SAN FRANCISCO — Forget about the possibility that a single "atmospheric river" storm could end California's worst drought in at least 1,200 years, NASA researchers said Tuesday.
Instead, it will take 11 trillion gallons of water, which is one and a half times the capacity of Lake Mead, Nevada, the country's largest reservoir, to climb out of the water deficit the Golden State is in, new data shows.
The NASA analysis comes from satellite and aircraft-based measurements of groundwater and mountain snowpack in California, and was released at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on Tuesday morning. The data also comes a week after a severe storm hit California, dumping more than nine inches of rain in some places, and just before another storm hits central and northern California.
See also: 7 Underwater Surprises Exposed in Dried Out California Lakes
"It takes years to get into a drought of this severity, and it will likely take many more big storms, and years, to crawl out of it," said NASA's Jay Famiglietti in a NASA press release.
Trend in water storage from 2011 to 2014, with red showing water losses. Image: NASA/JPL
NASA claims the calculation of the volume of water required to end a drought is unprecedented, and was made possible by a set of satellites collectively known as the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE. Other data came from airborne measurements of mountain snowpack using NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO).
Previously, the same research team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, showed that water storage in the state's Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins was 11 trillion gallons below typical seasonal levels, a figure that has steadily grown larger since GRACE satellites launched in 2002. These river basins lost a volume of about four trillion gallons of water each year since 2011, the data shows, with the vast majority of this lost in California's Central Valley.
To put this annual amount into perspective, it is more water than California's 38 million residents use for domestic and municipal uses, NASA said.
Speaking at a press conference, Famiglietti said the Central Valley of California — one of the most agriculturally productive areas in the U.S. — has lost a Lake Mead's worth of water since 2011. (Lake Mead itself has reached record lows in recent years.) The Sacramento River and San Joaquin River basins, Famiglietti says, have lost one and a half times Lake Mead's capacity of 36 million acre-feet, or about 12 trillion gallons, in just the past three years.
He says the recent rainstorms improve conditions on the surface, where soil moisture is improving, but groundwater in aquifers beneath the Central Valley will take far longer to refill. "The groundwater takes much longer to respond," Famiglietti said. He compared the long-term decline in the Central Valley's groundwater to a tennis ball bouncing down a flight of stairs — there are temporary bounces when rain is plentiful, but high water demand is ensuring that the overall direction is downward.
The results show that the 2014 snowpack in the state's Sierra Nevada mountain range was the lowest on record, beating out the previous record-holder of 1977, when the state had half the population than it does now. The ASO data show that previous data based solely on ground observations had miscalculated the snowpack and the water running off of the snow pack when it melts, and the new numbers are half of the previous estimates.
According to NASA's Tom Painter, the low snow extent contributed to the unusual warmth in California during 2014, as the year is likely to be the state's warmest since records began in 1880.
Snow water equivalent map for a portion of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range, as detected by NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory in May. Image: NASA/JPL
Painter said scientists used two main instruments mounted to a De Havilland Twin Otter aircraft to measure how much water is in the snowpack and how much light the snow absorbs, both of which influence how much water will flow out of a basin when the snow melts and into area reservoirs and rivers. One of the instruments is known as a LIDAR, which is mounted on the belly of an aircraft. This acts as a "high-frequency laser pointer," Painter said. The other instrument is an imaging spectrometer, which detects reflected light from the snow.
The GRACE satellites help measure Earth's changing shape, surface height and gravity field, and allow scientists to measure groundwater based on very subtle shifts in the planet's gravitational field.
New drought data shows the groundwater levels in the Southwest U.S. are in the bottom 10% since such records began in 1949, reflecting increased drawdowns of these resources by farmers and other water users, as well as the influence of droughts.
The GRACE satellite mission is already operating beyond its designed lifespan, with a new satellite system planned for launch in 2017. Famiglietti and his colleagues at NASA are hoping the current satellites manage to eek out another few years without disrupting the data.
|
Play Facebook
Twitter
Embed Clinton: Putin-Praising Trump Isn't Running a Serious Campaign 1:53 autoplay autoplay Copy this code to your website or blog
Hillary Clinton said the 2016 presidential campaign is turning into reality TV and accused Donald Trump of not taking his White House bid seriously.
“Every day that goes by, this just becomes more and more of a reality television show. It's not, it's not a serious presidential campaign,” Clinton said during a press conference Friday.
The response came after being asked her reaction to Trump’s appearance on the state-funded Russian Television. Trump on Thursday appeared in an interview with Larry King on Russia Today, though his campaign said they believed the interview was only for King’s podcast.
The GOP presidential nominee has heaped praise on Russian leader Vladimir Putin and this week said he was a stronger leader than Obama.
“Can I say I was surprised? I'm not sure anything surprises us anymore,” Clinton said. “But I was certainly disappointed that someone running for president of the United States would continue this unseemly identification with and praise of the Russian president, including on Russian television.”
|
On Sunday morning, Bernie Sanders addressed the National Press Club in a press conference in which he gave a brief speech and answered media questions. In prepared remarks, he presented the ever-looming delegate math. And contrary to what many Hillary Clinton supporters believe, neither candidate has an easy road to the Democratic nomination at the convention in July.
Sanders laid out the numbers, which are favorable for him in terms of a contested convention.
“There are a total of 4,766 Democratic delegates — 4,047 pledged, 719 super delegates. A candidate needs 2,383 votes to win. Let’s be clear. It is virtually impossible for Secretary Clinton to reach the majority of convention delegates by June 14 — the end of primary season — with pledged delegates alone. She will need super delegates to take her over the top at the convention in Philadelphia. In other words, it will be a contested convention.”
He then discussed the percentage of delegates each candidate has — 55 percent for Hillary, 45 percent for Bernie. Ten states, D.C., and three territories have not yet voted. Current polling also indicates that Sanders has a strong possibility of winning California on June 7. The state offers 475 pledged delegates (not counting super delegates). If he wins the majority of each state, this could inch his percentage totals up.
[Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images] Real Clear Politics has published data that takes several polls and averages them out. All data shows Sanders steadily rising in California, with just a 6.7 point deficit behind Clinton.
One of the most recent polls, released by Fox News on April 22, shows Sanders trailing Clinton by just 2 percent in California, with 46 percent of likely voters polled preferring Sanders over his rival. That’s a big jump from just one year ago, when only 5 percent of Californians polled said they would vote for Sanders.
Sanders also addressed the possibility of a contested convention by criticizing super delegates who have publicly declared that they will cast their votes for Hillary despite Sanders winning landslide victories in their state.
“In the state of Washington, we won that caucus with almost 73 percent of the vote but at this point Secretary Clinton has 10 super delegates. We have zero.”
He also noted that in other states where he performed well — Minnesota, Colorado, and New Hampshire — Clinton either has the support of all the state’s super delegates or a vast majority. In fact, Minnesota is the only state of the four mentioned above where he has any: a grand total of three.
Sanders emphasized that he is not looking to steal delegates from Clinton in states where she performed well. Those, he said, should continue to support her. But in states where the majority of the people either caucused or voted for Sanders, he said those super delegates should listen to the people who voted for him.
Bernie Sanders also noted that in poll after poll, he is the stronger of the two candidates. He noted the recent George Washington University survey, in which he beats Trump by 10 points with 50 percent of the vote. Hillary defeats him by less than half. The Investor’s Business Daily poll shows Sanders beating Trump by 12 points while Clinton only defeats him by seven points. This would give him leverage at the convention in July should it, indeed, be contested.
After giving his prepared speech, Sanders fielded reporters’ questions who asked him about his “tone,” what he hopes his legacy would be — he said he hoped his legacy would be that he was a very good president — and what would happen should he not win the nomination at the convention. Sanders indicated strongly that he will do whatever he needs to ensure Trump or another GOP candidate does not win the White House.
Jane and Bernie Sanders [Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images] He was also asked if there were lessons to be learned from the discrepancy between his large record-breaking rallies and disappointing results in states like New York.
“Good question … Three million independent voters in New York State disenfranchised. They could not vote because of the crime of writing down that they were independent voters. I think that’s absurd. By the way, in most polls, in most contests, we do far, far better than Clinton in the Independent vote.”
Independents now make up one of the biggest voting blocs in the United States, and many tend to lean Democratic or progressive. This could also benefit Sanders in a contested convention.
Blogger and writer John Laurits already wrote about the possibility of a contested convention in an April 28 blog post that’s now gone viral on social media. His math reflected what Sanders spoke of in his prepared speech, and went into even more depth. Laurits emphasized the unlikelihood of Clinton taking the needed number of delegates unless she wins at least 71 percent of the vote in remaining states and territories. With the power of math, Laurits showed how that will probably not happen, even with Clinton’s deep-pocketed backers.
Bernie Sanders normally performs well in open and semi-open primaries and caucuses. California is one such state, with registered Democrats and registered, unaffiliated voters allowed to vote in the Democratic primaries there. With 475 delegates at stake (not including the super delegates), Sanders has a good chance of foiling Hillary’s plan to sail into the convention in July with the needed number of delegates.
In other words, get the popcorn ready. It’s going to be one heck of a show in Philly.
[Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images]
|
The Aurora Arktika creaks as it sways in the tide and presses against the dock. Snow pillows cap the deck and icicles hang from the sides. In the darkness, we hand boards, sleeping bags, and backpacks over the railing to the crew.
Broken boards are inevitable in Iceland, although they’re also extremely hard to replace. Heiðar Logi Elíasson, suddenly in the market for a new surfcraft.
Siggi Jonsson stands on the deck wearing a wool sweater and red cap, exuding authority like only a bearded Icelandic boat captain can. Using the Arktika as a mobile base camp, Captain Jonsson’s expeditions have taken him as far as the Norwegian island of Jan Mayen and Ittoqqortoormiit in Greenland. But today he’ll be steering us to Iceland’s most isolated coast, where a tangle of mountains sink into the ocean and violent storms suddenly sweep in from the North Pole.
“It’s a careful balance out there,” Captain Jonsson tells us. “We normally try to avoid the conditions that surfers look for. A storm can form at any moment and put us in a dangerous spot.”
Swell rocks the boat as we leave the safety of the harbor. Below deck, the crew sits in a circle around a table, swapping sea stories. There’s something about tales of charging polar bears, vigilante orca hunters, and lonely Arctic outposts that seem uniquely Icelandic. As they talk, the lanterns sway from the rafters, causing shadows to dance around the cabin. It isn’t long before I start to feel sick, and I swallow some Dramamine and climb through the hatch to get some air.
It’s calm and silent on the main deck except for an occasional rumble of laughter from below and the hollow sound of crashing waves echoing between mountain peaks. The night sky is so clear that the cosmos looks close enough to touch, and the placid water mirrors the stars. It’s as if our sailboat is drifting through space.
In the morning, the crew gathers on deck. The radio squeals as Captain Jonsson searches for a weather report. His brow furrows as he holds the receiver to his ear, and he explains that another storm is rapidly approaching.
“It’s a big system,” he says. “There isn’t time to surf; it’s too dangerous. We have to head back.”
All aboard the Aurora Arktika. Having sailed through some of the region’s most volatile waters, no vessel could be better equipped for an Icelandic surf expedition.
This is the obvious drawback to chasing waves through Iceland. The conditions are difficult for most of the year, but surfing there in the dead of winter is borderline masochistic. The entire island freezes into a maze of snow and ice, blizzards barrel through without warning, avalanches consume highways, and darkness devours the country.
The local surfers, however, are accustomed to these challenges. To them, it’s simply the price you pay if you want to surf year-round. The Icelandic surf community is a small, tight-knit group that have arranged their lives and jobs to accommodate the whims of Iceland’s temperamental character, exploring jagged fjords and vast black-sand beaches hoping to find the next icy barrel.
It sounds romantic, but the reality involves endless hours of travel, crossing from one side of the island to the other, chasing the ever-shifting wind and trying to stay one step ahead of storms that could strand you for days. The occasional score is all they can hope for, and returning from a long excursion empty-handed is the bitter pill they frequently swallow.
With only a few hours of light each day, Icelandic surfers have to methodically plan sessions around every swell. Clearly they picked the right spot on this particular day.
Our boat is close enough to the pointbreak that we can see the faint lines of whitewater from the deck, but black storm clouds loom over the horizon like a tidal wave. Olsen checks the point with binoculars. The fact that we can’t catch even one wave is agonizing for our crew, but the Icelanders are pragmatic. They know how bad an ill-timed session could turn here. Sails billow and we cut across the sea, racing the weather back to the harbor.
The temperature plummets and the bay freezes over in front of the harbor. A tugboat has to meet us at the entrance and break a path through the ice that we take to the docks.
We stop for food at a small restaurant on the way to our cabin, and Magnussen opens his laptop to load the forecast for the next two days. When the Icelanders see it, their eyes grow.
Fighting off the cold is a constant challenge, both in and out of the water. Timmy Reyes, grateful for every layer.
“These are new colors,” Magnussen says as an animation of the storm system loops on the screen. “They’ve added to the scale to accommodate how big the storm is.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” Olsen replies. “The size will make all kinds of spots turn on.”
Magnussen tells us that there’s a stretch of coast that will light up with swell from the storm, but it would take 11 hours to get there. The route crosses a mountain pass and traverses high sea cliffs, with old sections of road that lean into deep, rocky chasms. The steep slopes are known for avalanches, he explains. It would be white-knuckle driving at a snail’s pace.
In the corner of the restaurant, a TV broadcast warns that houses and boats across the country are in danger. Avalanche warnings on roads have been raised to the highest level, and the news anchor says this is the biggest storm to hit Iceland in 25 years. Traveling now is a big risk to take, but no one is willing to miss out on this rare swell event. After an hour of deliberation, we decide to head into the storm.
For locals, preparing for a storm of this magnitude is like preparing for a siege, and they do it in a regimented fashion. They stockpile supplies, seal their windows, and deadbolt their doors. Then, life shuts down. Roads fill with snow, transportation ceases, and, occasionally, the power goes out. Once the storm passes, normal life resumes at the speed of the snowplow.
We stop at a market before our cross-country journey, and the whole town seems to be pushing through the aisles, filling shopping carts with frozen and canned goods. Outside, the shoppers rush back to their homes in the dark, but we race in the opposite direction. Our cars are the only ones taking the narrow road out of town.
Sam Hammer, enjoying the most pristine conditions you could ever hope for along the temperamental coast.
The winding road leads up the side of a tall mountain with a black abyss on one side and a wall of ice on the other. Suddenly a thick white blanket slides down the mountain and onto the road in front of us. Our decision to cross the island in a storm now seems terrifyingly naïve.
The car creeps near the edge of the precipice where the snow bank is most shallow and we try to press through the blockage. A few feet in, our wheels lose traction and start spinning helplessly.
For a minute we just sit in silence, listening to the rumble of the elements outside.
“We need to do this,” Burkard says.
I crack my door and the wind blasts it back at me. In that half second, the car’s interior is already peppered with snowflakes. Outside the car, the only way to move is by shielding your face with your hands, leaving a small gap between your fingers to see.
The crew digs at the wheels and rocks the car back and forth to no avail. Logi Elíasson sprints to his car and returns with a shovel. He attacks the snow, slinging it through the air and carving a wide-open space around the car. Seven of us crowd around the back bumper and lean into it. A voice counts down from three, screaming over the roar of the wind. On our fourth try, the car breaks free.
We arrive at a cabin by the sea after 14 hours on the road, and the fury of the storm is only intensifying. The house creaks and warps as we settle in, and then the power goes out.
|
Astronauts enjoy light duty, repair urine processor
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: February 10, 2010
The Endeavour astronauts worked through a light day in orbit Wednesday, preparing for a spacewalk overnight Thursday, the first of three to attach and outfit a new habitation module, and looking forward to a bit of off-duty time. Space station commander-turned-plumber Jeffrey Williams, meanwhile, spent his "morning" repairing the lab's urine recycling equipment, installing a new distillation assembly centrifuge and pump module brought up aboard Endeavour, along with a new filter that engineers hope will restore the critical system to normal, or near-normal operation. If all goes well, Williams will complete the repairs this evening and the equipment will begin processing stored urine to make sure the system works as expected. "The top priority really will be replacing the distillation assembly, which is a centrifuge that's a central component in the urine processor," said lead Flight Director Kwatsi Alibaruho. "That assembly will be replaced and if everything goes well, we'll do the initial activation of that assembly and start a brief shakedown period." Engineers on the ground "will be looking at the performance of that system, making sure all the currents and the rotation rates and other parameters are as they expect," he said. "And then we'll try to process some of the urine that's been stored. We'll probably start that process early on flight day five (overnight Thursday) or a little bit later." The primary goal of Endeavour's mission is to attach a new habitation module to the station that will house the U.S. toilet, oxygen generation system, carbon dioxide scrubber and water processing system, all of which are currently housed elsewhere in the lab. But the equipment racks will not be moved until the urine processing system has had a chance to operate, generating pure water that will be returned to Earth aboard Endeavour for analysis. Shuttle engineers at the Johnson Space Center are continuing their assessment of Endeavour's heat shield to make sure the orbiter can safely descend to Earth a the end of the mission. LeRoy Cain, chairman of NASA's Mission Management Team, said engineers now have enough imagery to rule out any need for an additional, focused inspection. Time set aside for such an inspection now will be put to use transferring equipment and supplies and doing other tasks. Overall, Cain said, the shuttle's thermal protection system appears to be "very clean" with only two "areas of interest" under discussion. A photo survey carried out by the station crew during the shuttle's approach Tuesday showed a ceramic insert around a fastener securing a carrier plate around one of the shuttle's cockpit windows had loosened, protruding a bit above the surface of the window frame.
A protruding ceramic insert seen before Endeavour's flight (left) and during photo surveys before docking (right). Credit: NASA
The fastener acts as a spacer of sorts and engineers are assessing what might happen if it worked loose during re-entry, whether it could strike the shuttle's tail fin, speed brake or an aft orbital maneuvering system rocket pod. "The vertical stabilizer, where we have the rudder and the speedbrake, is the area that would be of concern, possibly the OMS pod," Cain said. "The ceramic insert is a fairly dense material. We'll see what the debris transport shows us." It's not yet known what sort of energy the insert could impart if it did work itself loose, or even whether that's a possibility given that it didn't come all the way out during the vibrations of launch. "There are a whole lot of questions that have to be answered before we would ever consider whether or not we need to do anything to mitigate it," Cain said. "We have more questions than answers at this point, so we'll let the team go off and do the work." Another area of interest is a repaired tile on the upper surface of the crew module. The repair appears to have failed and one corner of the tile has separated slightly from the rest. Neither issue appears to be a serious threat and as of this writing, it appears unlikely any repairs would be attempted. But Cain said nothing has been ruled out. "Those are two areas we'll take a closer look at from an analysis standpoint, we'll do some debris transport assessment and we'll talk some more about those two areas as we go through the mission," he said. "Initially, it doesn't look like we're going to be very concerned about them, but we want to be very vigilant and take a closer look." Overall, he said, "the vehicle is very, very clean from a thermal protection standpoint. Endeavour looks really good." Here is an updated timeline of today's activity (in EST and mission elapsed time; includes revision C of the NASA television schedule): EST........DD...HH...MM...EVENT 02/10 04:14 PM...02...12...00...Crew wakeup 04:30 PM...02...12...16...Post MMT briefing on NTV 05:49 PM...02...13...35...ISS daily planning conference 06:04 PM...02...13...50...ISS: Distillation assembly install 07:04 PM...02...14...50...ISS: Water pump assembly replacement 07:19 PM...02...15...05...EVA tools configured 07:44 PM...02...15...30...Transfer operations 08:24 PM...02...16...10...ISS: Waste water tank offload 09:19 PM...02...17...05...EVA tool audit 09:30 PM...02...17...16...Mission status briefing on NTV 09:39 PM...02...17...25...ISS: Filter install 10:49 PM...02...18...35...Joint crew meal 11:49 PM...02...19...35...PAO event on NTV 02/11 12:09 AM...02...19...55...Crew off duty time 04:14 AM...03...00...00...EVA-1: Procedures review 05:29 AM...03...01...15...ISS evening planning conference 06:39 AM...03...02...25...EVA-1: Mask/pre-breathe 07:24 AM...03...03...10...EVA-1 Airlock depress to 10.2 psi 07:44 AM...03...03...30...ISS crew sleep begins 08:14 AM...03...04...00...STS crew sleep begins 09:00 AM...03...04...46...Daily highlights reel on NTV 01:30 PM...03...09...16...Flight director update on NTV 04:14 PM...03...12...00...Crew wakeup Fixing the urine processor is critical to long-term station operation. With a crew of up to six full-time astronauts, generating fresh water is an on-going issue that will take on added significance when the shuttle is retired later this year. Here is a bit more background from the CBS News STS-130 mission preview: The station's urine processor has been shut down in recent weeks because of problems with the distillation assembly. More recently, blockage in a line knocked out the part of the system that converts condensate into clean water. "We brought home the other failed distillation assembly on the last shuttle flight," station Program Manager Mike Suffredini said before launch. "Through a failure investigation, we found calcium deposits inside the distillation assembly and we're doing quite a bit of investigation to determine how to prevent that in the future. "One way is to not process to as high a concentration of brine inside the system, meaning we empty the tank that carries the ultimate waste from the urine processor, we empty it a little more often. So we want to run the processor with the new distillation assembly inside long enough to fill the tank up to the new level we plan to operate at, remove that tank and bring it home. "That will take us almost the entire mission, from the time we're able to install the spare until the time the crew has to depart," Suffredini said. "That's what's driving us not to do the rest of the rack moves until the urine processor can move." As for the presumed line blockage problem with the water processing system that is preventing conversion of condensate, engineers believe a filter carried up aboard Endeavour should resolve the issue. "When the shuttle arrives we'll install the filter and then we'll activate the water processor along with the urine processor and recover our regenerative (environmental control and life support) system by the end of the mission," Suffredini said. The station has plenty of stockpiled water for extended operations while work to fix the current problems is carried out. Station Flight Director Bob Dempsey described the repairs as "an extensive amount of work." "Once they complete that work, we'll activate from the ground and begin processing the urine and we'll watch that very closely," he said. "We'll process as much as we can through the mission so the filter/tank assembly gets to be used as much as we can and verify that the system is working in its new configuration and then we'll bring it back on the last day." As it now stands, the oxygen generation system, the U.S. toilet and the water processing system racks bound for Tranquility will not be moved into the new module during the normal shuttle timeline. If the flight is extended one day as managers hope, the Endeavour astronauts should be able to get some, if not all, of the equipment transferred.
Additional coverage for subscribers:
VIDEO: WEDNESDAY MORNING'S MISSION STATUS BRIEFING PLAY
VIDEO: SHUTTLE CREW WELCOMED ABOARD STATION PLAY
VIDEO: HATCHWAY OPENED BETWEEN TWO SPACECRAFT PLAY
VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR DOCKS TO THE SPACE STATION PLAY
VIDEO: SHUTTLE FLIES OUT IN FRONT OF STATION PLAY
VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR PERFORMS 360-DEGREE BACKFLIP PLAY
VIDEO: STUNNING SHOT OF SHUTTLE AGAINST HORIZON PLAY
VIDEO: STATION'S VIEW OF SHUTTLE ENGINE FIRING PLAY
VIDEO: PREVIEW OF FLIGHT DAY 3 ACTIVITIES PLAY
VIDEO: TUESDAY AFTERNOON'S MANAGEMENT TEAM UPDATE PLAY
VIDEO: AMAZING LAUNCH FOOTAGE FROM COCKPIT CAMERA PLAY
VIDEO: FLIGHT DAY 2 HIGHLIGHTS MOVIE PLAY
VIDEO: TUESDAY'S MISSION STATUS BRIEFING PLAY
VIDEO: TIME-LAPSE OF WING INSPECTIONS PLAY
VIDEO: INSPECTION BOOM READIED FOR USE PLAY
VIDEO: PREVIEW OF FLIGHT DAY 2 ACTIVITIES PLAY
VIDEO: NARRATED TOUR OF ENDEAVOUR'S PAYLOAD BAY PLAY
VIDEO: FLIGHT DAY 1 HIGHLIGHTS MOVIE PLAY
VIDEO: THE FULL STS-130 LAUNCH EXPERIENCE PLAY
VIDEO: SHUTTLE ENDEAVOUR BLASTS OFF! PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: GO BEHIND THE SCENES IN MISSION CONTROL PLAY
VIDEO: JETTISONED EXTERNAL FUEL TANK TUMBLES AWAY PLAY
VIDEO: PAYLOAD BAY DOORS OPENED FOLLOWING LAUNCH PLAY
VIDEO: CREW FINISHES GETTING SUITED UP PLAY
VIDEO: ASTRONAUTS LEAVE CREW QUARTERS PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: CREW ARRIVES AT LAUNCH PAD 39A PLAY
VIDEO: ASTRONAUTS BOARD THEIR SPACECRAFT PLAY
VIDEO: LAUNCH REPLAY: VAB ROOF PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: LAUNCH REPLAY: PRESS SITE PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: LAUNCH REPLAY: PAD PERIMETER PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: LAUNCH REPLAY: BEACH TRACKER PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: LAUNCH REPLAY: PAD CAMERA 070 PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: LAUNCH REPLAY: PAD CAMERA 071 PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: LAUNCH REPLAY: UCS-23 TRACKER PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: LAUNCH REPLAY: PLAYALINDA BEACH PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: LAUNCH REPLAY: PAD FRONT CAMERA PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: LAUNCH REPLAY: BANANA CREEK SITE PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: NARRATED REVIEW OF SHUTTLE'S PREPARATIONS PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: NARRATED REVIEW OF PAYLOADS' PREPARATIONS PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: EXPLANATION OF WEATHER PROBLEMS PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: LOW CLOUDS SCRUB FIRST COUNTDOWN PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ASTRONAUTS DEPART QUARTERS FOR PAD 39A PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: CREW GETS SUITED UP FOR LAUNCH ATTEMPT PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: PAD SERVICE GANTRY RETRACTED PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: TIME-LAPSE OF MOBILE TOWER ROLLBACK PLAY
VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH COMMANDER GEORGE ZAMKA PLAY
VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH PILOT TERRY VIRTS PLAY
VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH MISSION SPECIALIST 1 KAY HIRE PLAY
VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH MISSION SPECIALIST 2 STEVE ROBINSON PLAY
VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH MISSION SPECIALIST 3 NICK PATRICK PLAY
VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH MISSION SPECIALIST 4 BOB BEHNKEN PLAY
VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR'S PRE-LAUNCH NEWS CONFERENCE PLAY
VIDEO: THURSDAY STATUS AND WEATHER UPDATE PLAY
VIDEO: COUNTDOWN PREVIEW BRIEFING PLAY
VIDEO: ASTRONAUTS ARRIVE FOR LAUNCH PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: LAUNCH DATE SET AT FLIGHT READINESS REVIEW PLAY
VIDEO: PAYLOAD BAY DOORS CLOSED FOR LAUNCH PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: CREW SEES TRANQUILITY LOADED INTO SHUTTLE PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: SHUTTLE EVACUATION PRACTICE PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ASTRONAUTS BOARD ENDEAVOUR PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: THE LAUNCH DAY SIMULATION BEGINS PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: PAD BUNKER TRAINING FOR THE CREW PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: CREW BRIEFED ON EMERGENCY PROCEDURES PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: TEST-DRIVING AN EMERGENCY ARMORED TANK PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: NIGHTTIME APPROACHES IN TRAINING AIRCRAFT PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ASTRONAUTS CHAT WITH REPORTERS AT PAD 39A PLAY
VIDEO: SPACEWALKER UPDATES COOLING HOSE FIX PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ROBINSON'S THOUGHTS ON SHUTTLE RETIREMENT PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ASTRONAUTS ARRIVE FOR PRACTICE COUNTDOWN PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: TRANQUILITY DELIVERED TO PAD 39A PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: PAYLOAD TRANSPORTER GOES UPRIGHT PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: PACKING UP PAYLOAD FOR LAUNCH PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: SHUTTLE ENDEAVOUR'S FRIGID ROLLOUT TO PAD PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR HOISTED FOR ATTACHMENT TO TANK PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: CRANE ROTATES THE ORBITER VERTICALLY PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR MOVES TO ASSEMBLY BUILDING PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: TIME-LAPSE SHOWS ENDEAVOUR ASCENDING IN VAB PLAY
VIDEO: TIME-LAPSE SHOWS THE MOVE TO ASSEMBLY BUILDING PLAY
VIDEO: ORBITER READY TO LEAVE HANGAR PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: EXTERNAL TANK ATTACHED TO BOOSTERS PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR'S MAIN ENGINE INSTALLATION PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ASTRONAUTS VISIT THEIR SPACECRAFT PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: CREW INSPECTS MISSION PAYLOADS PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: FUEL TANK UNLOADED FROM THE BARGE PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: EXTERNAL TANK ARRIVES AT SPACEPORT PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: FORWARD THRUSTER POD CHECKED OUT PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: ENDEAVOUR TOWED OFF RUNWAY FROM STS-127 PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: TRANQUILITY HATCH SEALED FOR LAUNCH PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: CUPOLA ATTACHED TO TRANQUILITY PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: THE SPACE STATION'S NEW CUPOLA PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: TRANQUILITY UNPACKED IN FLORIDA PLAY | HI-DEF
VIDEO: NEW MODULE ARRIVES FROM EUROPE PLAY | HI-DEF
SUBSCRIBE NOW
|
PORTLAND, Maine — Sweden is digging in on a proposal to ban imports of live lobsters into the European Union after a rebuke from American scientists, and the issue could go all the way to the World Trade Organization.
Sweden asked the European Union to bar imports of live American lobsters into the bloc earlier this year after 32 American lobsters were found in Swedish waters. The U.S. government then told the European Commission that the proposal isn’t supported by science, and American and Canadian scientists issued reports calling the Swedish claim into question.
Now, Sweden’s Agency for Marine and Water Management is issuing a response to criticism, and says the country is right to be cautious about the appearance of a foreign species in its waters. The response came out at the end of July and defends the prevention of the spread of American lobsters as “environmentally desirable and cost-effective.”
WATCH: Four-clawed lobster found, likely caught off Canadian coast
The Congressional delegation of Maine, the country’s largest lobster producing state, issued a statement that said it will appeal to the WTO if the European Union ultimately sides with the Swedes.
Lobstermen in America and Canada, which together export $200 million worth of lobster to European markets each year, are hopeful that Sweden’s call for a ban eventually amounts to nothing.
“I haven’t taken my Swedish engine out of my boat yet,” said Gerry Cushman, a Port Clyde lobsterman. “I’d like to see lobsters stay open throughout the world everywhere.”
European Union’s Scientific Forum on Invasive Alien Species is expected to express an opinion about Sweden’s call for a ban on Aug. 31. The country has said American lobsters, which are fished off the coasts of the U.S. and Canada, could spread disease and overtake the smaller European variety of lobster.
Robert S. Steneck, a University of Maine scientist, wrote a paper that said the American lobsters that turned up in Europe were most likely released illegally, as opposed to migrating across the ocean. He also wrote that American lobsters don’t pose a threat to European lobsters, in part because winter ocean temperatures along the coasts of European countries are too warm for the American lobsters to reproduce.
But Sweden’s marine agency said it is “vital” to take a precautionary approach to the issue, because American lobsters’ failure to gain a foothold in Europe thus far is “no guarantee that the same species will not be successfully invasive in another place or time.” The agency also says more research is needed into the impact of cross-breeding of American and European lobsters.
READ MORE: N.B. lobster fishermen say catches are down in Northumberland Strait
Maine’s congressional delegation said the European import market is critical to the lobster industry, and the state’s leaders remain committed to supporting it. Maine’s lobster industry was worth about a half billion dollars last year and catches have soared to record highs in recent years.
State leaders hope the EU “will strongly consider the evidence offered by North American experts and decide not to pursue a ban on imports of live American lobster to Europe,” the delegation said in a statement.
|
This article is over 1 year old
Australia’s drug regulator is investigating the promotion of an ebook that advocates homeopathic treatment for babies and toddlers, against all scientific evidence.
Brauer, one of Australia’s largest homeopathy companies, promotes the Little Book of Natural Medicines for Children on its website. The book is available for download, and the website promotes the efficacy of homeopathic products. Brauer’s homeopathic products are sold in several pharmacies around Australia.
The book recommends “15 gentle, natural, safe and effective medicines that use homeopathic ingredients to quickly restore your child’s health”.
“Symptoms such as cough and cold, pain and fever, stomach aches and more can naturally be relieved and soothed with our products,” the book states.
Homeopathy not effective for treating any condition, Australian report finds Read more
“Clinical trials have shown that homeopathic medicines are effective in dealing with many different health problems.”
In 2015 the National Health and Medical Research Council reviewed 225 research papers on homeopathy and found it was not effective for treating any health condition. Homeopaths believe that when illness-causing substances are diluted in water or alcohol, the resulting mixture retains a “memory” of the original substance that triggers a healing response in the body. This theory has been scientifically debunked.
Earlier this month an independent panel reviewing pharmacy regulation for the health department recommended in its interim report that homeopathic products should be kept out of pharmacies on the grounds that they did not work and were placebos at best.
When alerted to the book by Guardian Australia, a Therapeutic Goods Administration spokeswoman said the administration’s advertising compliance unit would investigate Brauer “and take appropriate regulatory action should an issue be identified”.
“The promotional material published on the Brauer website and in the Little Book of Natural Medicines for Children appears to be directed at consumers and is therefore required to comply with the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 and the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code,” she said.
A professor of public health and drugs policy expert, Ken Harvey, said it was clear to him the book breached advertising regulations.
“Statements [in the book] are deceptive, misleading and in breach of a number of sections of areas of consumer law,” he said.
Homeopathic products should not be sold in pharmacies – review Read more
Brauer declined to comment, instead referring questions to the chief executive of Complementary Medicines Australia, Carl Gibson. Gibson said he took issue with the NHMRC’s finding that homeopathy was ineffective.
He said the highly respected medical research institution, Cochrane Australia, agreed with his view of the NHMRC’s finding.
But a Cochrane spokeswoman told Guardian Australia that Complementary Medicines Australia and Gibson had not accurately reflected Cochrane’s position. Cochrane had found the conclusion that homeopathy was clinically ineffective was “justified based on the evidence presented”, she said.
Gibson did not respond to requests from Guardian Australia for further information.
In a statement the NHMRC said its homeopathy review “has received international recognition, with many evidence-based medicine practitioners lauding it for its thorough and comprehensive assessment of available evidence”.
Loretta Marron is the chief executive of Friends of Science in Medicine, a group of scientists, consumer advocates and health professionals that promotes evidence-based treatments. She said the Brauer booklet was problematic and should be removed from websites.
“The words ‘homeopathy’ and ‘effective’ should never be used in the same text,” Marron said.
“To imply that a homeopathic remedy can boost or support a sick child’s immune system is pure nonsense. The principles of homeopathy contradict what we know about chemistry, physics, physiology and biology. Hundreds of clinical trials have failed to find good-quality evidence that homeopathy is effective for any illness.”
She said children might be harmed if they were given homeopathic remedies instead of proven treatments. The Brauer book does suggest parents take their baby to a doctor for “infection, high fever, vomiting, diarrhoea, refusing to eat or severe pain”, or if they felt unsure.
Only one pharmacy contacted by Guardian Australia said it would remove homeopathic products from stores in light of the findings from the government’s pharmacy review.
TerryWhite Chemmart said it had removed homeopathic products being advertised on its website after being contacted by Guardian Australia.
“A very limited range of homeopathic products, which were previously available online, have been removed from our website,” a spokeswoman said. “All pharmacies within the TerryWhite Chemmart network are owned by individual pharmacists, and they may choose to stock items outside the core range, including if requested to do so by customers.”
Most pharmacies did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokeswoman for Priceline pharmacies said the company would continue to sell homeopathic products and would wait until the pharmacy regulation review panel handed down its final report in September, “at which time further decisions can be made”.
|
Despite the era’s prudish, repressed reputation, the Victorians loved a good craze — the weirder, the better. Well-to-do men and women alike found themselves gripped by fashionable momentary obsessions with novelties, from blue-and-white porcelain to orchids to roller skates to spiritual seances. When the late 1870s brought the so-called “Ordinary” or penny farthing bicycle (the epitome of an old-timey bike, with a front wheel many times larger than the rear) into the public eye, the comical-looking contraption was a sensation.Bicycle mania swept the nation, and the advent of the more manageable “Safety” bicycle — named for its relative safety compared to the high-wheeled penny farthing — meant that even women could get in on the fun. While today it seems completely natural to hop a bike and hit the road, the advent of the bicycle had a hugely liberating (and controversial) impact on women’s lives; for the first time, there was a way for them to leave their houses and embrace their own autonomy without facing social suicide.A woman born during the Victorian era had precious few options. Middle- and upper-class ladies were expected to marry, give birth to babies (preferably boys), entertain guests, and keep a respectable household — that’s it. A proper lady’s place was in the home, where she whiled away her days strapped into a suffocating corset and cumbersome hoop skirt, minding the servants, popping out children, and serving as an ornamental object for her (hopefully rich) husband to either cossett or ignore as it suited him. Women weren’t meant to exercise their bodies or their minds, which led to generations of frail creatures whose lives were governed by fainting spells and striving for an arsenic-white complexion, no matter how much they secretly yearned to write or debate or explore.Those who ran afoul of these social conventions ran considerable risk of ostracization and/or "spinsterhood" — a fate which, back then, meant a life of poverty and loneliness. However, once the bicycle entered the picture, all of these bored, idle housewives and daughters were suddenly given a safe, respectable route out of their velvet prisons. They grabbed those handlebars like drowning people straining towards life preservers. As an 1896 issue of Munsey’s Magazine explained, "To men, the bicycle...was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world."The notion of women freely riding around town on wheels dismayed plenty of staunch traditionalists, especially when those women discovered bloomers. Bloomers (also referred to as “Turkish dress”) were loose pantaloons worn beneath a shortened skirt that soon replaced the customary heavy layers of petticoats and whalebone corsets initially worn by lady cyclists. The “rational dress” movement that had blossomed during the first wave of feminism found renewed traction thanks to the bicycle; its advocates campaigned for less-restrictive garments, moving to abolish the hated tight-laced corset and normalize simpler attire for athletic use. The long skirts and constricting undergarments Victorian ladies were required to wear were impractical, uncomfortable, and dangerous even when sitting, let alone cycling; comfortable, bifurcated bloomers were the obvious answer, and they became immensely popular.
|
With portable navigation systems hanging from millions of windshields and the price point of the popular devices diving down to the $99 mark, automakers' expensive in-dash nav systems are going the way of the car phone. But with mobile-phone based navigation gaining ground – and the new 3-G iPhone expected to debut on Monday with full GPS capability – portable navs could soon face a similar fate.
Phone-based GPS navigation has been steadily gaining ground on portables. Earlier this week, Networks in Motion, the leading provider of navigation services to the top four U.S. cellular carriers, announced that the day before Mother’s Day, May 10, saw the largest spike ever in the use of navigation on mobile phones, with nearly 5 million requests.
That's a lot of drivers finding their way to mom's house. And looking at a small screen while driving.
Portable navigation has experienced phenomenal growth over the past several years, while automakers' expensive in-dash systems have been shown to increase the depreciation of a vehicle. But the use of GPS-enabled mobile phones isexpected to quadruple by 2011, and if GPS is introduced on the new iPhone, as expected, it could accelerate the shift away from portable nav systems. And as Popular Mechanics reported, leave GPS suppliers "scared %#*@-less."
Portable nav heavyweight Garmin already introduced an iPhone-like GPS phone earlier this year, and last week minor player Mio unveiled two similar GPS phones. Now, all eyes will be on Steve Jobs on Monday when the Apple Godhead is expected to unveil the iPhone 2.0 with built-in GPS at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
The market is ripe for it. Networks in Motion, which claims to have a 57 percent share of U.S.
revenue from navigation services offered on mobile phones, says that in early in 2007 it had less than a million paid users. Now it has more than 3 million, and in May it reached the milestone of more than 100 million monthly navigation requests.
But the biggest challenge will be how to deal with driver distraction issues in moving from the small screen of portable navs to the even smaller screen of mobile phones.
Let's see if Apple will show the way.
Photo by Flikr user Juanpg
|
Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
¿Te has quejado de que tu conexión a internet es muy lenta y no puedes ver Netflix en 4K al instante? En realidad no sabes lo que es una conexión lenta a menos que hayas estado en Venezuela, como lo revela una clasificación de los países y sus velocidades de conexión en donde quedó de último lugar.
Advertisement
Speedtest, un servicio mundial para medir la conexión a internet de tu red WiFi o red móvil, se ha dedicado a listar un total de 133 países en todo el planeta dependiendo de su velocidad de conexión a internet (122 cuando se consideran solo las redes móviles). En promedio la mayoría de países cuentan con una velocidad de descarga de unos 20 Megabits por segundo (Mbps), aunque las mejores velocidades se encuentran alrededor de los 150 Mbps.
Venezuela, en cambio, está en el puesto número 133 con apenas 3,20 Mbps de velocidad promedio.
Advertisement
La velocidad promedio de un país la obtienen con los datos de un mes y dependiendo de los resultados de miles de personas que consultan su velocidad en la app. Aunque es cierto que en países de Europa, Asia y Norteamérica cuentan con velocidades de hasta 300 Mbps, en Speedtest estiman un promedio general entre las mejores y peores velocidades de sus usuarios.
En el caso de Venezuela eso se traduce en apenas 3,20 Mbps de descarga, lo que quiere decir que descargar un archivo de 1 GB toma alrededor de unos 45 minutos, mientras que un videojuego de última generación toma uno o más días. Sí, lo has leído bien. En cuanto a la velocidad móvil de Venezuela el país no está en el último lugar, pero casi, encontrándose en el lugar número 110 de un total de 122, gracias a sus 8,39 Mbps de descarga. En el país es más rápido navegar por móvil que con conexión de banda ancha.
Tomando en cuenta todos los problemas de infraestructura, importación de componentes y mantenimiento de sistemas que sufren las compañías de telecomunicaciones en el país, esto no es ninguna sorpresa.
Advertisement
Por otro lado, México se encuentra en el puesto número 69 con una velocidad promedio de banda ancha de 18,42 Mbps, España en el número 20 con 56,79 Mbps y Estados Unidos en el número 9 con 70,75 Mbps. Singapur es el país con la mayor velocidad promedio en el mundo, gracias a sus 154,38 Mbps.
Puedes consultar la lista de los países con mejor conexión a internet en el mundo a través de este enlace.
Síguenos también en Twitter, Facebook y Flipboard.
|
Clarence Eckerson Jr. and Earl Blumenauer at the Bike Summit. Photo courtesy of Clarence E.
The National Bike Summit in Washington DC is a golden opportunity for bike activists to meet with lawmakers. Usually the pitch is for more funding, but in these times of growing austerity, this has been downgraded to simply asking for no cuts in funding for bike infrastructure. There was also a ride in honor of Gabrielle Giffords (see video below).Check out this video about the 2011 congressional bike ride. This year's edition was in honor of Gabrielle Giffords:
According to SB, the League of American Bicyclists and America Bikes focused on three aspects in their defense of bike funding:
The business aspect . America Bikes put together fact sheets for each individual district showing how much money that district has received for "transportation enhancements" (TE) like biking and walking, how much they've invested in Safe Routes to Schools, how many bike retailers are in the district, and how much money those retailers bring in. In most cases, the numbers show that retailers earn in one year about one-half to one-third of the amount spent on TE in the past 17 years - a pretty good return on investment, they'd argue. (Those district data sheets, which also include local legislation and advocacy groups, will be online soon at www.americabikes.org.)
. America Bikes put together fact sheets for each individual district showing how much money that district has received for "transportation enhancements" (TE) like biking and walking, how much they've invested in Safe Routes to Schools, how many bike retailers are in the district, and how much money those retailers bring in. In most cases, the numbers show that retailers earn in one year about one-half to one-third of the amount spent on TE in the past 17 years - a pretty good return on investment, they'd argue. (Those district data sheets, which also include local legislation and advocacy groups, will be online soon at www.americabikes.org.) The local aspect . In their 400 meetings with Congress members' offices, advocates made the case that bicycling is important to constituents by talking in detail about the popular trails and busy commuter routes in each district, as well as the bike stores and local business. They invited lawmakers to join them for a bike ride, an event, or a ribbon-cutting for a trail as a way to get the member to have a personal connection with biking in the district. Their motto was "don't cut what you haven't seen."
. In their 400 meetings with Congress members' offices, advocates made the case that bicycling is important to constituents by talking in detail about the popular trails and busy commuter routes in each district, as well as the bike stores and local business. They invited lawmakers to join them for a bike ride, an event, or a ribbon-cutting for a trail as a way to get the member to have a personal connection with biking in the district. Their motto was "don't cut what you haven't seen." The ask. Lots of members of Congress will tell you how much they love biking. They'll go on at length about how many miles they put in each week, how they ride to their district office in spandex, how they've taught their kids to ride bikes. But do they support continued dedicated funding for bicycling and walking programs like transportation enhancements, Safe Routes to School, and the Recreational Trails Program? That's what advocates were trying to pin the offices down on. "If they say they support biking but they don't support funding for these programs, they don't support biking," said one movement leader.
Indeed, investments into biking are very cost-effective and they can actually gain in value once a certain threshold is met; the more miles of interconnected safe bike lanes you have, the more useful that network is to cyclists (so they use it more) and the more attractive it is to potential riders. It all snowballs from there.
If the government wants to save money, nothing's more frugal than the bicycle. It certainly beats spending money on fossil fuels that then disappear in smoke...
Via Streetsblog, Streetfilms
More on Bikes
Craziest Bike Rides... EVER! (Videos)
You Are Not Stuck in Traffic... You Are Traffic
The 2011 National Bike Summit in Washington D.C.
The MacGyver Approach to Winter Biking (Zip Ties!)
|
The signs are unmistakable. Once again, the west is preparing to escalate military intervention in the Arab and Muslim world. This time the target is Syria. Since the US presidential election, the warnings have multiplied. First, in a breathtaking reprise of the falsehood that paved the way for the invasion of Iraq, US and British leaders claimed the Syrian regime might be about to use chemical weapons against rebel forces, and threatened dire consequences.
Then the US authorised the stationing of Patriot missile batteries along the Turkish-Syrian border. Ostensibly intended to protect Turkey from stray Syrian artillery fire, they could rather more plausibly be used to help enforce a Libya-style no-fly zone. There has since been a flurry of media briefings about increased covert US arms supplies and rebel training, along with plans for intensified intelligence and special forces deployment, or even all-out air and naval power support. Direct intervention, US and British officials are reported to insist, is "now inevitable".
Next Britain followed France in recognising the new opposition Syrian National Coalition, stitched together under Nato and Gulf tutelage, as the "sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people". Since the coalition clearly isn't the sole representative of Syrians, the declaration (which goes beyond even what was said during the Libyan war) sets a precedent that is likely to come back to haunt them. But it was followed by only a slightly less sweeping statement from the US and around 100 allies.
What such support can mean on the ground is demonstrated in the latest real-life horror video circulating among Syrians. It shows two captured officers from President Assad's Alawite sect being beheaded with a machete in the street, apparently by western-backed Free Syrian Army rebels, one of them a child.
Of the tens of thousands who have died since last year's uprising morphed into armed revolt, the majority have certainly been killed by regime forces. But there's also no doubt that atrocities have been committed on a large scale by both sides. And they have mushroomed as jihadist groups have grown in importance and Iraq-style ethnic cleansing, kidnapping, revenge killings and sectarian attacks spread.
Rampant torture and summary executions by opposition as well as regime forces have been condemned by human rights organisations, along with widespread rebel conscription of child soldiers. Last week Channel 4 News uncovered evidence that more than 100 Alawite civilians killed in the town of Aqrab may have been massacred by rebel forces rather than, as initially reported, by government troops.
You might imagine the multiplication of such incidents and the advance of fundamentalist groups in Syria would give western governments reason to pause before bolstering their support for the rebels. But in fact that's exactly why they insist they need to step up their involvement.
David Cameron told parliament this week that there was now a "strategic imperative" to act because the Syrian war (which the west and its Gulf allies have been fuelling) is "empowering al-Qaida-linked extremists". There is an "opportunity", he says, for Britain, the US and autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan to "shape" the Syrian opposition.
Of course, both the US and Britain have been funding, training and attempting to funnel Gulf arms through Turkey and Jordan to their favoured factions for some time. Now the Obama administration has branded a leading Syrian jihadist group a terrorist organisation, to Syrian opposition fury. The aim is intervention for influence, both before and after the expected fall of the Assad regime – dressed up, as in Libya, in the language of "protecting civilians".
It's all of a piece with the rebranded war on terror. In the wake of the disaster of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, there were to be no more boots on the ground. Intervention would again take the form of "humanitarian" air campaigns, targeted drone attacks and a return to the proxy and covert wars of the past.
But as demonstrated by Nato's campaign in Libya – which helped boost the death toll by a factor of at least 10 and gave air cover to ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate killing – wars to "protect civilians" do nothing of the kind. Deeper western intervention in Syria will certainly escalate, not end, the killing, as well as taking Syria's future out of the hands of its own people.
What began in Syria nearly two years ago as a popular uprising, brutally repressed by the Assad regime, has since increasingly taken on the character of a sectarian conflict and regional proxy war, as Saudi Arabia and its western backers have seen the chance to bury Iran and Russia's main long-term Middle Eastern ally.
But the expectation that the government is about to fall is almost certainly premature. With neither side strong enough to prevail, the likelihood instead is that the country will go on bleeding, as external intervention deepens the conflict. Even if the regime were to implode or retreat to its strongholds, the civil war would very likely continue.
Which is why the only way out of an increasingly grim conflict is a negotiated settlement, with regional and international backing. This week, Syria's semi-detached vice-president, Farouk al-Sharaa (mooted as a possible transitional president), acknowledged that the Syrian army could not win the war, and called for a "historic settlement" and national unity government.
The western powers and Gulf regimes have so far underwritten the opposition resistance to negotiation. An attempt to sponsor a regional settlement by Egypt's president, Mohamed Morsi, in conjunction with Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia was scuppered by the Saudis. But in one form or another, negotiation will eventually have to take place.
Meanwhile, not only will more intervention by the western powers increase the death toll. It may not give them the control they crave either. Already the mainly Islamist rebel fighters are becoming more mistrustful of their foreign backers. Just as likely is that it will lay the ground for the kind of blowback that created al-Qaida in Afghanistan in the first place – and risk engulfing the region in a still more devastating conflict.
Seumas Milne's book, The Revenge of History: The Battle for the 21st Century, is available from guardianbookshop
|
Federal and local law enforcement agencies are increasingly using civil forfeiture to seize properties of Americans, from criminals to innocent individuals. In doing so, police have turned the forfeitures into a billion-dollar revenue generator.
Civil forfeitures were first set up to deny convicted drug dealers, embezzlers, racketeers and other offenders from keeping property obtained with tainted money. While this is still the case in many instances, other people not accused of committing a crime are also having their homes and other possessions taken away by law enforcement.
Isaiah Thompson reported for ProPublica: “Over the last two decades, forfeitures have evolved into a booming business for police agencies across the country, from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to small-town sheriff’s offices.”
In 2000, officials seized $500 million in forfeitures. By 2012, that amount rose to $4.2 billion, an eightfold increase.
Along the way, innocent homeowners have struggled to keep their properties in the face of questionable forfeitures.
In Philadelphia, police tried to seize the home of Rochelle Bing, 42, a home health assistant for the elderly and disabled, whose 24-year-old son was caught selling crack cocaine. Even though Bing was not involved in the crime or accused of breaking the law, she had to fight a civil forfeiture with limited means.
“For me to lose my home,” she told ProPublica, “for them to take that from me, knowing I had grandchildren—that would have hurt me more than anything.”
In Philadelphia alone, between 2008 and 2012, nearly 2,000 forfeiture actions were filed against houses whose owner’s children or grandchild were alleged to have committed drug offenses. In only 30 of those cases did a judge reject the seizure of the home, according to ProPublica’s investigation.
The Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C., is reported to be “seiz[ing] cars by the hundreds” based on suspicion of illegal activity. The vehicle owners must post a $2,500 bond merely to challenge the seizure.
And in Tenaha, Texas, police are said to undertake rampant seizures of cash from people driving along the highway in spite of there being no evidence of criminal activity. One couple, who had planned to use their cash to purchase equipment for the man’s restaurant, also had their infant son seized while they were locked up in jail for the night.
-Noel Brinkerhoff, Danny Biederman
To Learn More:
Law to Clean Up ‘Nuisances’ Costs Innocent People Their Homes (by Isaiah Thompson, ProPublica)
Five Egregious Ways Police Are Seizing Property From Those Never Accused Of A Crime (by Nicole Flatow, ThinkProgress)
Police Seizing Property Equals Guilty Until Proven Innocent: Paul Jacob (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
|
Amir Tibon is a diplomatic correspondent with Walla News.
Ehud Barak hadn’t given a speech in months, and speculation was rife about what he was going to say when he took the stage at a prestigious policy conference in Herzliya, an affluent suburb of Tel Aviv, two weeks ago. Barak was one of Israel’s leading political figures for two decades, having served as the country's prime minister in the late 1990s and later as defense minister under Benjamin Netanyahu from 2009 to 2013. Was he about to announce a political comeback?
It turned out that Barak, a former special ops commando officer, had one last mission in mind: To take out his former boss and partner.
Story Continued Below
In his speech, Barak accused Netanyahu of cowardice, opportunism and fear-mongering. He warned that Israel's current government, arguably the most right wing in its history, was showing “signs of fascism,” and that if Netanyahu wasn’t stopped, Israel was on course to become an apartheid state. “The entire Zionist project is in grave danger,” he proclaimed. And the main source of that danger wasn't Israel’s external enemies, but rather its own democratically elected leader.
Barak hasn’t let up since. “Netanyahu,” he said in a televised interview broadcast a day after his angry speech, “has gone off the rails. He needs to go.”
But Netanyahu doesn’t seem to be going anywhere; instead it is Israel’s former generals, like Barak, who are being marginalized while the longest-running prime minister in the Jewish state’s history consolidates his power. Barak wasn't speaking only for himself when he attacked Netanyahu in such strong language. Over the past few months, the top news story in Israel has been the right-wing prime minister's tectonic power struggle with Israel's security establishment. One after the other, Israel's top security chiefs and military leaders have criticized Netanyahu's flagship policies and warned about the direction in which he is leading the country, typically over his refusal to engage in talks with the Palestinians and his push for military action against Iran.
Last month, in a move characterized by some Israeli pundits as an act of retaliation against the rebellious security establishment, Netanyahu announced he was appointing Avigdor Lieberman to be the country’s next defense minister. A hawkish civilian politician who was once Netanyahu's personal chief of staff, Lieberman would be the most inexperienced defense minister in Israel’s history. Lieberman supported an attack on Iran in the years 2009-2012, when the country's top generals were against it, and has also threatened in the past that Israel could bomb Egypt, despite the fact that the countries have had a successful peace treaty for decades. He is also famous for his blistering criticism of the Israeli military's conduct, always demanding harsher methods—some bordering on illegal, and some crossing that border—against the Palestinians. His appointment is likely to weaken Israel’s security establishment and make it harder for the country’s top generals and spymasters to challenge the government’s policies.
As difficult as Netanyahu has been for Obama, he’s sure to be even tougher with the next U.S. president.
Netanyahu has recently entered his 10th cumulative year in power, and he’s likely to be around when the next president of the United States begins his or her term in office. The changes he’s brought are going to pose growing challenges for the U.S. as it navigates the treacherous waters of Middle East politics. As difficult a customer as Netanyahu has been for Barack Obama, he’s sure to be an even tougher one for the next U.S. president—in large part because of his successful purging of the Israeli national-security establishment that was keeping him in check.
President Obama listens to Prime Minister Netanyahu during a March 2014 visit at the White House. | Getty Images
What this means is that disagreements between Israel and the U.S. on the Iranian issue could resurface very quickly, despite the fact that a nuclear deal with Iran was signed less than a year ago, and also that on the Palestinian front, a new escalation is much more likely than any progress toward peace. Only last October, Netanyahu declared that Israel will “forever live by the sword.”
The Jewish state's top generals, spymasters and intelligence chiefs have been the fiercest and most outspoken critics of Netanyahu’s policies over the years; unlike in most Western democracies, where the military is usually considered more hawkish than the civilian leadership, in Netanyahu's Israel, it's usually been the other way around. Out of the 17 most senior security and intelligence chiefs who have worked directly with Netanyahu during his time in office, no fewer than 13 have strongly criticized his flagship policies or the direction in which he is leading the country (of the four that haven't, two are currently still in office).
Of the 17 most-senior security & intel chiefs who have worked with Netanyahu, at least 13 have strongly criticized his policies.
Some of the renegades once counted themselves close friends and partners of Netanyahu, and their breaks with their boss have been especially striking. One of these is Tamir Pardo, the former head of Mossad, Israel’s CIA. Pardo had participated in the famous Entebbe hostage rescue operation in which Netanyahu's revered older brother, Yoni, was killed in 1976; and Pardo was one of the last people to speak to the mortally wounded Yoni—who in death became a national hero and icon, helping to give rise to Bibi’s political career. Pardo was also a regular participant in the annual memorial service organized by the Netanyahu family. So the prime minister had reason to think, when he picked Pardo to replace the balky and difficult Meir Dagan as head of Mossad in 2010, that he’d at last found someone who was a loyalist and as much of a hawk on Iran as he.
But it was not to be. Time after time, when Netanyahu raised the option of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities within Israel’s most secretive security forums, Pardo, like the other generals, vehemently opposed it. At one of his rare public appearances in 2011, when the Iranian program was in full flower, Pardo enraged Netanyahu by declaring that "Iran is not an existential threat to Israel. People are using the phrase 'existential threat' with too much liberty." Pardo didn't specify the “people” he was referring to, but with Netanyahu regularly invoking the Holocaust into his warnings about Iran, it wasn't difficult to understand.
Pardo retired earlier this year. In his last briefing as head of Mossad to members of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), he talked about the importance of strengthening the Palestinian Authority and trying to solve the conflict with the Palestinians. “He couldn’t be more clear about it,” says one Knesset member who attended the top-secret briefing.
Yaakov Peri, a former head of the Shin Bet—Israel’s internal intelligence agency—who has also served as a cabinet member in one of Netanyahu’s governments, told me recently that "some people like to say the security establishment is in fact leading the opposition in this country. I think that's an exaggeration, but there's no doubt that on two issues—Iran and Palestine—the security establishment's professional analysis has consistently contradicted Netanyahu’s policies and statements.”
***
The roots of the disagreements between Netanyahu and the security establishment can be found in the prime minister’s dismal and pessimistic view of the world. Netanyahu sees military might as the only possible tool to keep his country safe. Most of Israel's security chiefs, on the other hand, envision Israel as a country that derives its strength from arms, but also seeks benefits from diplomacy and peacemaking, when possible. As Ehud Barak explained in his speech, “If you put in one room all the living former heads of the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and the Israel Defense Forces, more than 90 percent of them would say that it's simpler to protect Israel from a border that assures our security interests next to a Palestinian state, than to protect a ‘greater Israel’ with millions of Palestinians living under its control.”
The roots of the disagreements between Netanyahu and the security establishment can be found in his pessimistic view of the world.
Lt. General (ret.) Benny Gantz, who led the Israeli military from 2011-2015, recently made a similar point in a public speech: “We might have to continue living on our sword, but we have an obligation to check out other options as well, so we can tell our children that at least we tried.” The overwhelming majority of Israel's current and former security chiefs would sign on to this statement without hesitation. However, when I asked Netanyahu about it a few weeks ago, he replied that any discussion of peace initiatives at the moment is detached from reality.
By placing the hawkish Lieberman in the Defense Ministry, Netanyahu has seriously undercut the security establishment, the most important moderating force within Israel's power structure. Lieberman's predecessor, Lt. General (ret.) Moshe Ya'alon, was also affiliated with the right wing in Israel (he is still a registered member of the Likud party), but as a former general himself, he encouraged those serving under him to speak their minds freely and openly, even if their analysis contradicted that of the elected government. In the months leading to his removal from the Defense Ministry, Ya'alon gave backing to the IDF senior command on a number of occasions in which the generals clashed with other cabinet members from the right wing, mainly over the question of how much force Israel should use in retaliation to Palestinian terror attacks. Lieberman, who was still in opposition in parliament during that period, took the side of the most extremist ministers in the government, advocating policies that, if implemented, would highly increase the likelihood of war.
Now the next U.S. administration will find itself facing a new balance of power in Israel, between the most right-wing government in decades and the traditionally more moderate security establishment—one in which the extremists, at least for the moment, have triumphed.
Today, my colleagues and I are fighting the most important war of our lives—the battle for Israel's future.”
Over the past few months, as the recent tensions between Netanyahu and the security establishment were simmering, I spoke to dozens of current and former senior Israeli officials who have participated in this power struggle between Israel's most successful politician and its most popular national institutions. I asked them to help me tell the history of this battle, which spans over two decades, and also to draw out the consequences it could have for the Jewish state in the future. Almost everyone I talked to, whether it was people close to Netanyahu or people who vehemently oppose him, agreed that the prime minister's skirmishes with his top generals have had a profound effect on Israel—and that Netanyahu has succeeded in weakening his opponents.
“I fought in five different wars as a soldier and an officer,” Major General (ret.) Amnon Reshef, one of Netanyahu's strongest critics, told me recently. “Today, my colleagues and I are fighting the most important war of our lives—the battle for Israel's future.”
***
To understand what’s happened, it’s best to go back to the beginning of this internal war inside Israel, which began on the night of May 29, 1996, when Benjamin Netanyahu won an election in Israel for the first time.
Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a Likud rally in Tel Aviv; May 19, 1996. | AP Photos
On that night, watching the first exit polls with his wife, Sara, Netanyahu was convinced he was going to lose. The election was held only six months after the murder of the previous prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, by a right-wing extremist. Netanyahu, who was leader of the opposition at the time, participated in demonstrations against Rabin's attempts to make peace with the Palestinians, which featured pictures of Rabin dressed up as a Nazi officer. Most pundits assumed that Israeli voters would punish Netanyahu for "turning a blind eye to the wild incitement," of an assassin, a line used by his opponents, and the last opinion polls conducted before Election Day seemed to reinforce that assessment.
But in the last 24 hours of the campaign, something changed. Netanyahu’s “coalition of the ascendant”—consisting of Israel's ultra-orthodox, national-religious, settlers and immigrant populations—took him across the finish line, to the narrowest election victory in the history of the Jewish state.
It was a huge upset that sent shock waves through the entire country—and nowhere were they felt more strongly than inside the Israeli security establishment. Many of the country's top generals and spymasters at the time were considered personally close to Rabin—himself a decorated former general, who led the Israeli military to its greatest victory ever in the 1967 war. His murder was deeply traumatic for these men, and the fact that Netanyahu, who was accused of pumping up the public case against him, was now going to sit in Rabin's chair was even more difficult to stomach.
The hard feelings were mutual. “Bibi thought the generals were all ‘Rabin’s men,’” says a former senior adviser to the prime minister. “He didn't trust them.”
Netanyahu had grown up in a hard-line, nationalist home—his father was a history professor who preached against any form of compromise between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The top ranks of the military, by contrast, were consisted mostly of men who grew up in the strongholds of the left-leaning Israeli Labor Party. “For Netanyahu, they represented the founding Israeli elite, that his father—and many of his voters—simply despised," says the former senior adviser.
This was especially true of Lt. General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, then the military's chief of staff, and one of the most popular men in Israel at the time. Tall and handsome, with green eyes and a résumé full of battlefield heroics, Lipkin-Shahak was considered by many as Rabin's natural heir. Both were born to famous Zionist families in Jerusalem, both were affiliated with the IDF's Paratroopers Brigade, and both believed that Israel was strong enough militarily to pursue peace with its neighbors. "They had a father-and-son-like relationship for years," says Colonel (res.) Benny Lavie, who was Lipkin-Shahak's closest aide at the time.
When Rabin wanted to convince the Israeli public that concessions for peace didn't mean Israel would endanger its security, he sent Lipkin-Shahak to conduct talks with the Palestinians on his behalf. Pictures of the popular general walking on a sandy beach with a top Palestinian negotiator made their way into the press, and became a symbol of hope for better days. Martin Indyk, the U.S. ambassador to Israel at the time, recalled years later that “there was no one the Palestinians trusted more than Amnon, ‘the peace general.’”
Netanyahu, unlike his top general, thought that Rabin's diplomatic moves were a big mistake. He was elected on a promise to stall and if possible even reverse his predecessor's concessions.
The security establishment was almost uniformly against this approach, although there was a small faction within the IDF senior command closer in its analysis to Netanyahu. Most of the relevant generals and intelligence chiefs believed that even though the agreements Rabin had signed with the Palestinians were far from perfect (to say the least), the former prime minister's broad push to end the conflict was the right direction for Israel.
The generals' position soon became public through leaks and background briefings to the press. In reply, a hawkish Likud politician, considered close to Netanyahu, accused the military's senior command of undemocratic conduct, and bashed the generals as "suckers for the previous government and the Labor Party." Netanyahu publicly distanced himself from the harsh attack, but privately, he thought there was a lot of truth to it.
The tensions between Netanyahu and the top security chiefs reached a boiling point in late September of that year, when the prime minister decided to allow Israeli tourists into a previously restricted part of an ancient tunnel running underneath Jerusalem's Old City, one of the most religiously contested areas in the world. Netanyahu wanted to prove a point to his political "base" of religious right-wing voters: that no part of Jerusalem, even the city’s most disputed areas, would be off limits for Jews. The security chiefs feared that such a move was a needless provocation that would ignite fire on the Palestinian street. But Netanyahu had no interest in hearing their opinion. In fact, his final decision to go forward with the plan was made without even consulting them. “We heard about it from the news,” recalls Lavie, Lipkin-Shahak's close aide.
Hours after the tunnel was declared open, riots erupted in multiple Palestinian cities, and 17 Israelis and more than 80 Palestinians were killed over the next three days. In an attempt to calm down the Israeli public, Netanyahu summoned a hastily arranged press conference, and asked a number of security chiefs—including Lipkin-Shahak and the head of the Shin Bet, Admiral (ret.) Ami Ayalon—to stand beside him as he spoke to the nation. After keeping them out of the loop, he was now trying to use their familiar faces and well-regarded experience, to prove to the public that things were under control.
Then, planted news stories began to surface questioning the security chiefs’ role in the skirmish. Perhaps the entire mess was their fault? Perhaps they didn't do enough to warn the prime minister? A former senior security chief, who was an IDF general at the time, recalls that “people couldn't believe it. Bibi was trying to shift the blame to us. In the culture of the military, taking responsibility for your decisions is a core value. A commander can't make a mistake and then try to pin it on his soldiers. But that's essentially what Bibi was trying to do.” In a heated security cabinet discussion shortly afterward, Ayalon—usually known for his cool manner and civility—exploded at the prime minister, accusing him of not allowing the security chiefs to express their professional assessments before the government.
The “tunnel riots,” as they came to be known, damaged the security chiefs’ relationship with Netanyahu in ways that were beyond repair.
The Israeli public was exposed to the security establishment's frustration in early November 1996, when the country commemorated the first anniversary of Rabin's murder. The military held its main memorial event at a large concert hall in Tel Aviv, and Lipkin-Shahak was the prime speaker. Standing before thousands of officers and soldiers, he stated that he will “speak directly to Yitzhak today,” and then unloaded. “Yitzhak, it’s been a very hard year since you left us,” he said. “Polarization, hedonism, sectarianism and opportunism have reached the heart of our national consensus, while the IDF has been turned into a punching bag.” Lipkin-Shahak didn't mention Netanyahu by name—there was no need to. Everyone understood exactly what he was talking about. As one senior Mossad operative who was in the crowd recalls, "the air had the smell of a military coup.”
The next morning, Lipkin-Shahak's speech was on the front page of every newspaper. Israel's most popular talk-show host wrote a column stating that "this is the kind of leader we need." Netanyahu asked his pollsters to start testing the effects of a possible entry by Lipkin-Shahak into politics. The results were very worrying. Later on, when right-wing activists complained to Netanyahu that he wasn't doing enough to erase previous agreements with the Palestinians, he angrily told them that if they stopped supporting him, "you'll get Lipkin-Shahak as prime minister." The implications were clear: a return to Rabin's peace policies, and the possible emergence of a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu's prophecy eventually came true, but not exactly as he imagined it. In late 1998, his government collapsed and Israel went to new elections. Lipkin-Shahak, who by then was already out of the military, quickly announced he was running to replace Netanyahu. At the same time, the Labor Party chose Lt. General (ret.) Ehud Barak, Lipkin-Shahak's predecessor as the military's chief of staff, to be its candidate. To make things even worse for Netanyahu, his own defense minister, Major General (ret.) Yitzhak Mordechai, announced that he was leaving Likud for an independent run, describing Netanyahu as opportunistic, irresponsible and arrogant.
Eventually, in their united desire to see Netanyahu leave office, two of the generals, Lipkin-Shahak and Mordechai, stepped aside to clear the way for the third, leaving Barak as Netanyahu's only challenger. On election night, the former general won 56 percent of the popular vote. In front of tens of thousands of celebrators at Rabin Square—the site of the traumatic assassination in 1995—Barak declared it was "the dawn of a new day" for Israel. He promised to immediately renew peace talks with the Palestinians.
Early on May 18, 1999, celebrating Israelis crowd into Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square after Benjamin Netanyahu concedes to Ehud Barak in Israel’s general elections. Some carry portraits of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. | AP Photos
For Netanyahu, it was the birth of a defining trauma. His rule was abruptly cut short by a development that seemed to come out of his most terrifying nightmares: a joint conspiracy by three decorated generals, who all turned their fire on him and managed to throw him out of office.
Over the next 10 years, as he was trying to salvage his political career, Netanyahu worked to execute what was perhaps the most important lesson of his 1999 loss: a mechanism to keep the generals out of politics.
The effort finally succeeded in 2007, when Netanyahu—by then once again the leader of the opposition—managed to wrestle through the Knesset a bill that made it illegal for retired security chiefs and generals to run for public office in the first three years after their retirement. Israel already had a law in place that forced retired generals to take a “cool-off period” of one year before entering politics, but the new bill multiplied that period.
After his 1999 loss, Netanyahu worked to pass a law blocking retired generals from running from office for four years after their retirement.
The bill certainly worked. After losing to Ehud Barak in 1999, and then enduring a crushing defeat by Ariel Sharon, arguably Israel's greatest general ever, Netanyahu finally won another election in 2009, when his main opponent, then-Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, lost to him in public opinion polls on the question of who will deliver better security for Israel.
But the bill had another important consequence, which Netanyahu perhaps didn't expect: It freed the security chiefs serving under him to speak up in unprecedented ways. After all, no one could accuse them of attacking the prime minister because of their own political aspirations, as they were technically barred from entering politics. Netanyahu would soon discover that this was quite a heavy price to pay.
***
Three months ago, on a rainy Sunday morning in late March, Netanyahu's convoy arrived at Rosh Pina, a picturesque town of stone mansions and red roof tiles overlooking the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. The dark-windowed line of cars made its way through the narrow streets of the town, stopping at the entrance to its historic cemetery, one of the oldest in the country.
Netanyahu was there to attend the funeral of the man who was his greatest rival within the security establishment in recent years: Meir Dagan, the former head of Israel's fabled Mossad agency who in life had described Netanyahu as “a danger to Israel,” “a coward who loses his balls in critical moments” and “the worst manager I’ve ever worked with.” Now, the prime minister was about to read a eulogy over his open grave.
The prime minister, of course, chose to focus on the more positive aspects of his relationship with Dagan. “I remember sitting with him to discuss secret operations, and just bursting in laughter because of how daring and even rude his ideas were,” Netanyahu recalled with a smile.
Meir Dagan, shown in this undated photo wearing his rank and his two citations for bravery, was appointed as the Director of the Mossad by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on September 10, 2002. | Getty
In the crowd were a number of people who had followed Netanyahu’s tensions with Dagan from a close distance. Former Israeli President Shimon Peres talked about Dagan’s lifelong commitment to the Jewish state's security. The current Chief of Staff of the IDF, Lt. General Gadi Eizenkot, watched silently as a group of generals carried Dagan’s casket into the cemetery. Not far from him stood his friend and predecessor, Lt. General (res.) Gabi Ashkenazi, who led the military in the same years that Dagan headed Mossad. Also in attendance was Yuval Diskin, the former head of the Shin Bet and an expert in the field of targeted assassinations, who declared that Dagan's death left him “feeling like an orphan.” Many of those gathered at the cemetery agreed.
What all of these men had in common—besides their friendship with Dagan—was their own history of clashes with Netanyahu. Eizenkot and Ashkenazi over the issue of a possible Israeli strike against Iran; Diskin over the same issue, and also over Netanyahu's policy toward the Palestinians. These disputes weren't mentioned by any of the speakers, but they hung over the cemetery like a heavy cloud.
Dagan was famous in Israel for one thing: his expertise in killing the country's enemies. Under his watch, while serving under Prime Minister Sharon, Iranian nuclear scientists died mysteriously on the streets of Tehran. Top Hezbollah and Hamas operatives were blown up near the apartments of their mistresses. A senior Syrian general died while attending a party at his home. The assassinations created a legendary aura around Dagan. One prominent Egyptian newspaper declared that the stubby spymaster was in fact Superman.
But Dagan wasn't just a ruthless killer. Behind closed doors, he was also a powerful advocate for diplomacy with the Arab world and the Palestinians. Dagan believed that Israel shared two fundamental interests with many Arab regimes—preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and stopping the spread of radical Islamic terrorism—and that this situation created promising opportunities for the Jewish state. Sharon and his successor, Ehud Olmert, both used Dagan for top-secret diplomatic missions.
Netanyahu, however, was elected in 2009 on the same hard-line platform from his earlier term, promising to prevent the foundation of a Palestinian state and to never evacuate even a single settlement in the West Bank. While Olmert spent his last year in office fervently trying to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians, Netanyahu brought with him the promise of a diplomatic stalemate.
In the background was a more consequential debate: How should Israel deal with the nuclear threat from Iran? Dagan and Netanyahu both believed Iran should never be allowed to produce a nuclear weapon, but that was about the only thing they agreed on.
Bibi has a tendency to exaggerate security threats,” says a former senior security chief. “As long as it’s just a political tactic, we can live with it. But when it starts affecting fateful security discussions—it becomes a problem.”
As late as 2011, Dagan was convinced that Iran was still relatively far from the bomb. Most of Israel's intelligence community supported his assessment. Netanyahu, on the other hand, was speaking—both in public and in private—as if Iran was on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon within months. "Bibi has a tendency to exaggerate security threats," says a former senior security chief, who was involved in the Iranian dispute. "He uses it to invoke fear in the Israeli public. As long as it's just a political tactic, we can live with it. But when it starts affecting fateful security discussions—it becomes a problem."
In addition to the timeline disagreement, Netanyahu and Dagan also had very different opinions on what was the right way to stop the Iranians. Netanyahu and Ehud Barak—who was now his defense minister—talked as if a military strike was the only solution. Dagan thought it would be a complete disaster. Since Iran's nuclear facilities were spread out around the country, it was almost impossible to annihilate the program completely. An Israeli strike, he believed, would only increase the Iranians' pursuit of the bomb, which would be described as a defensive necessity against Israel. The smarter way to deal with the problem, he insisted, was through a combination of secret sabotage efforts and strong international pressure led by the United States. Netanyahu grew afraid of using the former, and was always highly skeptical about the latter, especially with Obama sitting in the White House. Netanyahu didn't trust the American administration to eliminate the threat from Iran, and feared that Obama was intent on reaching a compromise with the Iranians that would hurt Israel's security.
Israel's other top security chiefs mostly agreed with Dagan. The military's chief of staff, Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi, was responsible for building the capability to strike Iran, but believed that such a step should be the ultimate last resort—“only when the knife gets close to the skin of our throat." A strike would almost certainly lead to a full-scale war with Iran, in which thousands of missiles would land on Tel Aviv. Ashkenazi had no doubt that Israel would emerge victorious from such a war—but he also thought it was unwise to start it as long as there were other options.
Yuval Diskin, head of Shin Bet—the internal intelligence agency—strongly agreed. Although his agency was technically not involved in the debate over Iran, his prominence and experience got him a place in the security cabinet discussions—where he offered his support to Dagan and Ashkenazi’s positions.
In the summer of 2010, at the end of yet another long security cabinet discussion, Netanyahu and Barak asked Dagan and Ashkenazi to stay with them alone for a few minutes, and then revealed something that stunned the two security chiefs: They wanted the military to speed up its preparations for a strike on Iran, making it possible within a matter of weeks.
This is an illegal order,” Dagan told Netanyahu. “This means we are de-facto starting a war with Iran.”
Ashkenazi tried to explain that if the military sped up the preparations to fit this new schedule, there was a very high chance that Iran, sensing unusual movements on the Israeli side, would launch a pre-emptive strike. Dagan’s reaction was harsher. “This is an illegal order,” he told Netanyahu. According to Israeli law, the prime minister isn't authorized to declare war on another country—only the entire security cabinet can do that. “This means we are defacto starting a war with Iran. Get it first of all through the cabinet,” Dagan said.
Netanyahu and Barak were furious, but in consultations they held later that day, they both realized there was no choice but to back down: if such a vote actually took place, the security chiefs were very likely to persuade more than half of the cabinet members to oppose it, especially since the most experienced cabinet member on security affairs, Ya'alon (then holding the title of Minister for Strategic Affairs), was also not a big fan of the idea.
“Could Netanyahu and Barak have actually ordered a strike? I'm not sure,” says a former senior cabinet member. “Some of us thought at the time that all their talk about it was just brinksmanship, as part of an attempt to force Obama to take military action. But could they have gotten Israel into a very dangerous situation just by speeding up the preparations? I believe the answer is yes. Dagan, Ashkenazi and a number of ministers at the security cabinet saved us from war.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and Defence Minister Ehud Barak prepare to give a press conference at the Israeli Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, November 5, 2009. | Getty Images
The Israeli public had no idea that this fateful drama was unfolding until a few months later, when Dagan, on his last day before retiring from the Mossad, invited a group of senior Israeli journalists to the Mossad's headquarters for a very rare briefing on the Iranian issue. A strike on Iran, he told them, wouldn't solve the problem, but only make it worse. It was much smarter, he argued, to work closely with the United States on increasing the economic pressure.
Dagan was worried that as he and Ashkenazi, who also finished his term in 2011, exited the scene, Netanyahu and Barak would make another attempt at a strike. His unusual news briefing was soon followed by a string of public appearances, in which he carried the same message, even more sharply. “A strike on Iran? It's the stupidest idea I've ever heard of,” he said in a speech at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “I hear the assessment from the government that we have less than a year to act,” he added in a TV interview, “I totally reject that assessment.”
Dagan's attacks were met with blistering criticism from Netanyahu's supporters. One right-wing minister even suggested that Dagan should be put on trial for exposing state secrets. “I’ll be glad to,” Dagan replied with a smile. “Israel is a democracy, last time I checked. People like myself still have a right to say what's on their mind.”
***
Netanyahu was furious at Dagan, but he refrained from personally hitting back. The prime minister, unlike the wider Israeli public, was aware of the fact that Dagan had just been diagnosed with advanced stages of cancer. He wasn't going to turn into a political threat. There was no reason to lose sleep over him.
The same couldn't be said of Dagan's two main partners in shooting down the Iran strike—Ashkenazi and Diskin. The prospect of one of them joining politics in the future and re-enacting the events of 1999 seemed more than likely to Netanyahu and his top advisers.
Ashkenazi was the one they feared most. The charismatic general, appointed chief of staff in 2007, enjoyed overwhelming popularity among the Israeli public, which credited him with restoring the military's sense of confidence after Israel's problematic 2006 war in Lebanon. Israel's top-rated satire program, which routinely mocked Netanyahu, gave Ashkenazi the exact opposite treatment, portraying him as a humble and gruff soldier who ate pita bread with scorpions for lunch at the training ground.
Like Dagan, Ashkenazi was a lifelong warrior who nevertheless believed that Israel's security could be strengthened by diplomacy. A former senior aide of his says that in late 2007, after the IDF successfully destroyed a nuclear reactor in Syria, Ashkenazi sent a personal letter to then-Prime Minister Olmert, expressing his view that this impressive demonstration of force had created good conditions for Israel to engage in new diplomatic initiatives. Under his tenure as chief of staff, the IDF also increased its cooperation with the security forces of the Palestinian Authority, despite the stalemate on the diplomatic front.
Israeli army chief Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi holds his head in his hand before a briefing, June 17, 2007. | Getty Images
By the time he was nearing the end of his term, Ashkenazi was enjoying the status of a political messiah among the Israeli center-left bloc. In the Knesset, there was chatter about an attempt to cancel the 2007 "cool-off period bill" so that Ashkenazi could join politics a year after taking off his uniform. Netanyahu's advisers accused the chief of staff of "laying the foundations for his future political career while he was still in the military," an accusation fiercely denied by those close to Ashkenazi.
When he did eventually become a civilian in 2011, Ashkenazi's political potential immediately plummeted, as a result of a wide-ranging police investigation that broke out against him and his closest aides. At the heart of the probe was Ashkenazi's very troubled relationship with Defense Minister Barak—their top aides, it was discovered, had run spying operations on each other. The main beneficiary from the mess was Netanyahu: The investigation dragged on until 2016, with no indictment against Ashkenazi or any of his people. Netanyahu, meanwhile, was spared the need to run against a popular figure like Ashkenazi in the two election cycles that took place in between.
Ashkenazi's sidelining cleared the way for the third security chief who clashed with Netanyahu during those years, Yuval Diskin, to become the new great moderate hope. Like Meir Dagan, Diskin was an expert in targeted assassinations. Like Dagan, he was appointed to lead his agency, the Shin Bet, by Ariel Sharon. And like Dagan, he had developed a strong contempt toward Netanyahu.
Diskin wasn't as well known to the general public as Dagan and Ashkenazi. The Shin Bet's work, unlike that of the Israeli military and the Mossad, doesn't appear a lot in the media. The agency is basically responsible for spying on the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control. As one former head of the agency told me, "we swim inside the sewage tunnels, so Israelis can get drinking water in their taps. It's not something people want to talk about over dinner.”
Fluent in Arabic and intimately familiar with hundreds of Palestinian villages, towns and neighborhoods, Diskin had no illusions about the people with whom Israel had been in conflict for decades. But like the overwhelming majority of Israel's security and intelligence chiefs, he strongly believed that it was possible to make progress towards peace—and that the alternative policy, of entrenching Israel's settlements in the West Bank, would have disastrous consequences.
They had no idea what his policy really is. One day he's for a Palestinian state, the next day he's against it. He says something in English to the Americans, and contradicts himself a week later in Hebrew.”
In late 2009, when Netanyahu—under strong pressure from the Obama administration—agreed to accept the two-state solution and open peace negotiations, Diskin thought that perhaps he was going to witness a strategic shift in the prime minister's policies. But just like the American administration, Diskin soon became convinced that Netanyahu wasn't negotiating in good faith.
"As a security chief, you shouldn't have any problem working for a prime minister you don't agree with," says a person close to Diskin. "But I think Yuval and the other security chiefs found it impossible to work with Bibi, because they had no idea what his policy really is. One day he's for a Palestinian state, the next day he's against it. He says something in English to the Americans, and contradicts himself a week later in Hebrew at the Likud faction.”
When Diskin left the Shin Bet in 2011, his low profile held on for almost a year. But when he finally opened his mouth, it was like a volcanic eruption.
It started with a rare public appearance in which Diskin called Netanyahu "messianic" and claimed the prime minister was lying to the Israeli public regarding the timeline of Iran's nuclear progress. “I don't trust him,” Diskin said. “He and Ehud Barak are not the kind of people I want to see leading the country in the event of a war.” The Israeli press rejoiced, turning the former Shin Bet chief's combative speech into the top news story in the country.
Next came a lengthy interview Diskin provided to a documentary film called “The Gatekeepers.” The film's director, Dror Moreh, set out to interview all the living former heads of the Shin Bet, in order to ask them what they thought were the implications of Israel's decadeslong occupation of the Palestinians. All of them said, each in his own words, that Israel had to make a serious effort to end the conflict. The strongest moment in the interview with Diskin was when Moreh read aloud a quote by Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a famous Israeli intellectual, who warned back in 1968 that if Israel kept the occupied territories, "it will be inflicted with the corruption typical to colonial regimes. The government will constantly have to deal with oppressing an Arab rebellion, and with acquiring Arab Quislings. The IDF will suffer from atrophy and become an occupation army.” Moreh then asked Diskin: "What do you think about this statement, when you look at the state of Israel today?" Diskin looked straight into the camera and said: "I agree with every word of it.”
“The Gatekeepers" was a huge success, winning a number of prestigious prizes and an Academy Award nomination in the documentary category. Netanyahu, however, announced publicly that he had no intention to watch the film, and Israel's minister of Culture, a member of Likud, expressed satisfaction when it fell short of winning the Oscar.
Behind these angry reactions was fear of the film's impact, both in Israel and abroad. The six men who were interviewed by Moreh were not the usual left-wing, liberal critics of the Israeli occupation. They were, in many ways, the occupation itself. The fact that all of them spoke out in favor of a two-state solution, at the same time Netanyahu was busy explaining why such a solution was impossible to reach, became a source of great embarrassment for the prime minister. Diskin’s interview became the ultimate public example of the rift between Netanyahu and his own security establishment.
Diskin's tormenting of Netanyahu was far from over. In January 2013, Israel was scheduled to hold new elections. Netanyahu was basically running unopposed, but the main question of the elections was how many Knesset seats Likud would receive. Netanyahu was hoping to get 45, a number that would all but guarantee great stability for his next government. The polls indicated this target was within reach.
Two weeks before Election Day, the country's most popular newspaper published a front-page interview with Diskin, containing what was possibly the most scathing attack Netanyahu had faced during his entire career. Diskin described Netanyahu, Barak and then-Foreign Minister Lieberman sitting around smoking cigars casually during a discussion about a war with Iran that could potentially lead to widespread destruction in Tel Aviv: “The defense minister gets up, walks to the bar in the same room, and pours himself a drink. Just like that, in the middle of such a consequential discussion, he's standing there, with his alcoholic beverage in hand. I can't even begin to describe, to tell you the image we're seeing in front of our eyes …
“One of the ministers sitting there has trouble breathing. I ask him—aren't you bothered by the cigars? And he says, yes, very much. So I tell him, why don't you say something to them? And he answers, ‘I’ve told them, but what can I do? They don't listen.’”
With Netanyahu and Barak … the personal, opportunistic and immediate interest always comes first,” said Diskin.
And there was more:
“Ever since 1994, I've worked in close proximity to Israel's most senior leadership,” Diskin said. “I've seen all kinds of leaders—Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, Olmert and once again Netanyahu. With most of them, I felt that at the moment of truth, when there could be a clash between their personal interests and those of the state of Israel, they will always put the national interests of Israel above anything else. And unfortunately, many of my colleagues in the senior ranks of the security establishment feel that with Netanyahu and Barak, it's not like that. For them, the personal, opportunistic and immediate interest always comes first.”
***
Netanyahu managed to survive Diskin's attack—two weeks later, he was still the country's prime minister. But the election results were a great disappointment for Likud: Instead of getting close to 45 Knesset seats, the party just barely passed 30. And while there were many reasons for this last-minute collapse, Netanyahu's postmortem analysis showed that the attacks on him by the veterans of the security establishment had an important effect: they caused many Israelis to second-guess his insistence that no one else could deliver better than him on security.
The prime minister, however, was already working on fixing that problem, even before the elections. In 2011, when the three combative security chiefs left their posts, Netanyahu was determined to replace them with people he would find easier to work with: less independent, less charismatic, and if possible, closer to his worldview.
In the Shin Bet, Netanyahu ignored Diskin's recommendation to promote his own deputy, and instead appointed Yoram Cohen, the first chief in the history of the agency to come from Israel’s national-religious sector, which is mostly right wing and supportive of Netanyahu’s policies. Cohen, who recently completed his term, was indeed much better for Netanyahu than his predecessor, but even under his leadership, disagreements between the prime minister and the agency surfaced from time to time. On a number of occasions, Cohen publicly contradicted Netanyahu's statements against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, saying that contrary to the prime minister's portrayal of Abbas as a terror supporter, the Palestinian president was in fact opposed to violence and committed to security cooperation with Israel.
In the Mossad, Netanyahu appointed Tamir Pardo, a man who was, on paper, the complete antithesis of Dagan and as a Netanyahu family friend someone the prime minister thought he could depend on as an ally. But during the years 2011 and 2012, Pardo made clear in Israel's most secretive security forums that he thought an Israeli strike on Iran would be a mistake. "He basically inherited Dagan's position," says one former Israeli official who participated in dozens of discussions on Iran together with Pardo. Pardo advocated for a tough line of action against Iran, involving covert operations and economic pressures. But when it came to Netanyahu's desire to send Israeli warplanes to Iran, he was very skeptical—and so was the new IDF chief of staff, Lt. General Benny Gantz, who told Netanyahu that if he gets an order to attack Iran, he will fulfill it, but not before officially telling the government that it was a dangerous mistake.
Thanks to their opposition, the year 2012 went by without a strike on Iran. In June 2013, the prospects of a strike all but vanished after Hassan Rouhani won the presidential elections in the Islamic Republic. The White House greeted the results by expressing hope that under Rouhani's supposedly moderate leadership, a nuclear deal could be reached. Netanyahu's reaction offered a clear contrast: "Nothing changed in Iran last night," the prime minister announced. He insisted that Iran was still intent on building a nuclear bomb and then wiping Israel off the map.
The Israeli security establishment didn't accept Netanyahu’s “all is dark” analysis of the election of Hassan Rouhani in Iran.
The Israeli security establishment didn't share the American administration's full-throated optimism, but it also didn't accept Netanyahu's “all is dark” analysis. The commander of the military's Intelligence Corps, Major General Aviv Kochavi, sent the prime minister a special assessment (approved by Gantz) claiming that Rouhani's rise to power signaled “a major strategic shift” in Iranian politics. The Mossad also considered the election results a major turning point for Iran, which was still a dangerous enemy to Israel, but not necessarily one headed for the possession of nuclear weapons in the near future.
Perhaps it was this reading of events that led Pardo, in the summer of 2014, to spurn Netanyahu once again, by saying that “the greatest risk to Israel's national security isn't Iran—it’s the conflict with the Palestinians.” This one sentence, uttered at a briefing Pardo gave to senior Israeli business executives and leaked to Ha'aretz newspaper, contradicted everything Netanyahu had been saying for almost two decades: that Iran is Israel's greatest challenge, and that the Palestinian issue was being over-hyped because of the media's “childish obsession,” as Netanyahu's confidant Ron Dermer once said.
Pardo's comment was bad for the prime minister not only because of its content, but also because it so closely echoed a statement made a few months earlier by Diskin. Speaking at a pro-peace rally in Tel Aviv, the former Shin Bet chief declared that "the implications of not finding a solution to our conflict with the Palestinians are much more dangerous than Iran." When his words hit the headlines, Netanyahu's office quickly shot back, stating that "anyone who believes the Palestinian issue is more dangerous than Iran is clearly delusional.”
Netanyahu personally approved the nasty reaction; now, when Pardo repeated Diskin's position, it came back to haunt him. “Does the prime minister think Pardo is also delusional?” journalists were quick to ask. Trying to save face, Netanyahu's office forced Pardo to issue a clarification.
It wasn't the last time such a dictation would be necessary: Half a year later, in January 2015, Pardo met with a group of American senators visiting Israel, and surprised them by warning about the dangers of approving new sanctions legislation against Iran. The very same legislation was enjoying the active support of Dermer—Israel's ambassador to Washington—yet here was the head of Mossad, telling lawmakers it was akin to “throwing a hand grenade” into the nuclear negotiations, all but ensuring a new war in the Middle East.
Unlike some commentators in Israel who assumed Pardo's words came out as a result of unintended sloppiness, Netanyahu suspected that the Mossad chief knew exactly what he was doing (Time magazine reported that he had tried to block Pardo from meeting the group). And the timing couldn't have been worse: Pardo's words were leaked less than 24 hours after it was announced that Netanyahu had been invited by the Republican leadership to speak before Congress against the impending nuclear deal.
At a Likud party office in the city of Netanya, Israelis watch a TV broadcast of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the U.S. Congress. | Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images | Getty Images
The security establishment almost unanimously believed Netanyahu’s speech before Congress was a mistake. But while the current security chiefs could only express their opposition to it behind closed doors, their retired predecessors were free to speak about it publicly, and quite harshly. "Bibi, I taught you how to navigate," said Major General (ret.) Amiram Levin, who was Netanyahu's commander during his mandatory military service in an elite commando unit in the 1970s. "It seems like you've lost your compass. Our enemy is Iran, not the United States.”
A few months later, as the prime minister was desperately fighting to stop Obama from reaching a veto-proof majority for the Iran deal in Congress, dozens of former Israeli generals and spymasters spoke out against his decision to go head-to-head against the U.S. president. A smaller group of former security chiefs, including one former head of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, even made their way to Washington to brief members of Congress in support of the deal.
Israel’s security establishment almost unanimously believed Netanyahu’s speech before the U.S. Congress was a mistake. “Our enemy is Iran, not the United States,” said Major General (res.) Amiram Levin.
The Obama administration used the former generals’ statements to sell the deal to skeptical lawmakers. Major General (ret.) Ya'akov Amidror, Netanyahu's former national security adviser and one of the few former generals who have consistently backed the prime minister, says this had an important effect on the final outcome in Congress: "The average congressman, especially a Democrat, wants to side with Israel, but siding with Israel is very different than siding with Likud", he explains. "The fact that these former security officials contradicted the prime minister helped present this as a controversial issue not just in America, but also in Israel.”
Watching from the sidelines, Pardo and the new military chief of staff, Lt. General Gadi Eizenkot (who replaced Gantz in early 2015), carefully stayed out of harm’s way. They didn't join the former security chiefs in supporting the deal, but also didn't join Netanyahu's public fight against it.
***
Netanyahu's loss on the Iran deal marked a low point in his career. And yet, his future biographers will most likely describe the year 2015 as one of great success for the prime minister, mainly for his impressive victory in the elections that were held in Israel on March 17 of that year.
Beating his main competitor in those elections, Isaac Herzog, a lawyer-turned-politician with zero security credentials, wasn’t hard for Netanyahu to do. Still, in many ways, his real fight wasn't against Herzog—but instead, against his old rivals, the veterans of the security establishment.
The first shot was fired by Meir Dagan, who despite his deteriorating health, appeared at an event commemorating his old friend, Sharon, two months before Election Day, and lashed out at Netanyahu. “His policies are leading Israel towards becoming a bi-national state. It's a disaster,” Dagan warned. Next came Diskin, who threw his support behind Herzog. In a post he published on his Facebook page, the former Shin Bet chief—who had refused requests by hundreds of citizens, and also by Dagan, to enter politics himself—explained that “no one can be worse than Netanyahu. He represents six years of constant failures."
The former Shin Bet chief was unsparing: “No one can be worse than Netanyahu. He represents six years of constant failures.”
Four days before Election Day, Netanyahu received the hardest blow, when dozens of former generals, Mossad and Shin Bet officers, and even senior veterans of the police, published a joint appeal to the public to throw him out of office. The unprecedented onslaught was led by Major General (ret.) Amnon Reshef, famous in Israel for his crucial role in pushing back the Egyptian Army in the 1973 war. “Israel deserves a better leadership,” he announced at a news conference in Tel Aviv, warning that Netanyahu's behavior toward President Obama was a threat to Israel's strategic alliance with the United States.
And yet, facing the strongest resistance any Israeli prime minister had ever encountered from the country's powerful security establishment, Netanyahu managed to prevail. Likud beat Labor by six Knesset seats, Netanyahu won another term, and for the first time in his career, he had clearly overcome his former uniform-wearing rivals.
Copies of ballots papers and campaign posters for Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party lie on the ground in the aftermath of the party’s victory in parliamentary elections, March 18, 2015. | Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images | Getty Images
His decision to appoint Lieberman as defense minister in May, a year and two months after the elections, was a second straight victory. And the long-term demographic trends in Israel as a whole, and in the military in particular, are also working in his benefit, as the national-religious sector in Israel, known for its overwhelming support of Netanyahu's right-wing policies, is slowly becoming more prominent inside the midlevel ranks of the IDF.
Isaac Herzog’s disappointing loss in the last elections has convinced many Israelis in the center-left bloc that only a glorified war hero—someone like Barak in 1999, or Sharon in 2002—can beat Netanyahu. There isn't a lack of candidates for the job. Perhaps it will be Ya'alon, the disgruntled former defense minister, who for the past decade was one of the very few former generals to publicly support Netanyahu, but now has joined the ranks of the prime minister's enemies. Or maybe it will be Ashkenazi, who has finally put the legal ordeals behind him, and still enjoys great popularity. Gantz, who will have to wait until 2018 before entering politics, and Diskin, who has gone quiet for the past few months, are also considered strong potential candidates.
In the past eight years, as Netanyahu endlessly fought with President Obama, the U.S. administration managed to maintain excellent ties with Israel's security system, despite the political tensions. Israel's top-rated investigative television program, "Uvda," even revealed recently that Meir Dagan for years had a direct communication channel with Obama's first-term CIA director, Leon Panetta, over the head of Netanyahu. Such a scenario seems very unlikely to repeat itself in the future. The inconvenient truth is that unless one of these former generals beats Netanyahu in the next elections, the next U.S. administration will have to get used to a new reality in the Jewish state: one in which the most right-wing elements in the political system are gaining more and more power and influence at the expense of the "old guard" of Israel's security establishment.
What will be the policy implications of these developments?
On the Iranian front, Netanyahu's options are very limited at the moment. The security chiefs currently in office, such as IDF chief of staff Eizenkot, have made it clear that they believe the nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic has decreased the level of threat to Israel in the near future. Netanyahu probably won't be able to carry out a strike against the professional advice of his own military leaders, especially after their objections have become public. If, however, the nuclear deal looks shaky a year from today, an Israeli strike could definitely be once again put on the table—and it's not clear at all if this time there will be someone strong enough in Israel to block it.
When it comes to the Palestinians, things are even more complicated. Despite his hawkish opinions, Moshe Ya'alon routinely accepted the advice of the IDF senior command to do as much as possible to distinguish between Palestinian terrorists and the general Palestinian population—or, in the words of one senior general still in service, "to convince the average Palestinian that he doesn’t have to become a terrorist."
Lieberman, however, has advocated in the past for collective punishments, and started his term in the defense ministry by vowing to take down Hamas' rule in Gaza the next time a conflict erupts on Israel's southern border. Peace negotiations don't seem like an even remote option at the moment. This new reality creates a daunting challenge for Israel's security chiefs. A few months from now, it will probably create a similar headache for the next U.S. administration.
|
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak threw cold water on the right-wing media narrative that President Obama is anti-Israel, praising Obama for doing "more" for Israeli security than any other U.S. president.
In an interview with Wolf Blitzer that aired yesterday on CNN's The Situation Room, Barak responded to a question about the state of the current U.S.-Israeli relationship by saying, "I should tell you honestly that this administration under President Obama is doing, in regard to our security, more than anything that I can remember in the past."
BLITZER: You've studied U.S.-Israeli relations over many years. How would you describe the relationship today? BARAK: I think that from my point of view as defense minister they are extremely good, extremely deep and profound. I can see long years, administrations of both sides of the political aisle deeply supporting the state of Israel, and I believe that reflects the profound feelings among the American people. But I should tell you honestly that this administration under President Obama is doing, in regard to our security, more than anything that I can remember in the past. BLITZER: More than any other president? LBJ, Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush? BARAK: Yeah, in terms of the support for our security, the cooperation of our intelligence, the sharing of thoughts in a very open way even when there are differences, which are not simple sometimes, I found their support for our defense very stable.
Barak's praise for Obama on Israeli security flies in the face of the right-wing media's false narrative that Obama is hostile to Israel, a narrative that goes as far back as 2008. These bogus attacks include claims that Obama and members of his administration are anti-Semitic and that Obama may use military force against Israel.
Just yesterday, conservative media figures added to this narrative by remarking that Obama, as president, hasn't visited Israel.
During an appearance on Fox News' Special Report, Fox contributor and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol praised Romney's recent visit to Israel while noting that "President Obama has not been in Israel as president of the United States." Fox's Sean Hannity similarly said that it is an "alarming fact that after nearly four years in office, President Obama has yet to visit our closest ally in the Middle East in what is now a very troubling time."
In fact, Obama visited Israel as a candidate, just like Mitt Romney, and it is not unusual for a president to not make a trip to Israel during a first term. Furthermore, none of the previous three Republican presidents made trips to Israel at this point in their presidencies, and neither Ronald Reagan nor George H.W. Bush traveled to Israel as president at all.
|
Court Rules Gran Turismo Protected By 1st Amendment In Including Company Logos For Realism
from the track-speech dept
Ever since video games got to a point of enough realism, how those games depict real-life locations and real life "props" has become an interesting question due to, of course, trademark law. Electronic Arts recently stepped into this question, for entirely unrelated reasons, when it announced it was no longer going to ask for permission to depict realistic and branded weapons in its shooting games. The question has always been more prevalent in the world of sports games, however, with stadiums named for advertising partners and advertising depicted all over the stadiums and equipment within the sport.
Well, we've got another case of a video game producer attempting to rely on First Amendment protections to be able to depict a third party brand within its game, as Gran Turismo made use of Italian flooring company Virag's logo for realistic effect. And, according to the outcome between Virag and Sony in California, the First Amendment wins.
Virag is an Italian flooring manufacturer -- and it also sponsors car races. Its name and logo have appeared on tracks in Sony's realism-obsessed Gran Turismo games, as seen in the image above, and the company sued Sony in California -- but a judge just tossed out most of Virag's claims.
With this order, the First Amendment status of video games as an expressive medium continues to be upheld. "Gran Turismo 5 and Gran Turismo 6 are expressive works that qualify for First Amendment protection," judge Laurel Beeler wrote.
This is good news on several levels. To start, having a judge slap down an obnoxious attempt by a company to sue over the depiction of that company's brand, essentially free advertising, is always welcome. Add to that the further cementing of video games as a medium of expressive art, something that really ought to have been settled in the minds of the masses by now. And, finally, anything that gives game developers a greater sense of freedom to pursue realism with less regard for the insane permission culture that has invaded the arts works for me as well.As a few commentators have pointed out, Sony likely prevailed because the case was heard in the US, where we have fair use provisions with some actual teeth, compared with the EU where, if anything, the culture of permission is even greater. I would argue that if a region's intellectual property law is such that companies feel emboldened to try to end what is essentially free advertising within art, some revisions to those laws are needed.
Filed Under: first amendment, gran turismo, logos, realism, video games
Companies: sony, virag
|
Do you remember the “Bush boom”? Probably not. Anyway, the administration of George W. Bush began its tenure with a recession, followed by an extended “jobless recovery.” By the summer of 2003, however, the economy began adding jobs again. The pace of job creation wasn’t anything special by historical standards, but conservatives insisted that the job gains after that trough represented a huge triumph, a vindication of the Bush tax cuts.
So what should we say about the Obama job record? Private-sector employment — the relevant number, as I’ll explain in a minute — hit its low point in February 2010. Since then we’ve gained 14 million jobs, a figure that startled even me, roughly double the number of jobs added during the supposed Bush boom before it turned into the Great Recession. If that was a boom, this expansion, capped by last month’s really good report, outbooms it by a wide margin.
Does President Obama deserve credit for these gains? No. In general, presidents and their policies matter much less for the economy’s performance than most people imagine. Times of crisis are an exception, and the Obama stimulus plan enacted in 2009 made a big positive difference. But that stimulus faded out fast after 2010, and has very little to do with the economy’s current situation.
The point, however, is that politicians and pundits, especially on the right, constantly insist that presidential policies matter a lot. And Mr. Obama, in particular, has been attacked at every stage of his presidency for policies that his critics allege are “job-killing” — the former House speaker, John Boehner, once used the phrase seven times in less than 14 minutes. So the fact that the Obama job record is as good as it is tells you something about the validity of those attacks.
|
For Chinese immigrants in New York City and elsewhere, recent events have provided an opportunity for a rare public reckoning with one of their adopted country’s most volatile fault lines. Though Officer Liang and one of the two New York officers killed in an anti-police ambush in December shared a Chinese heritage, Chinese-Americans have so far figured little in the debates over police misconduct and racial injustice that have roiled the country.
Now Chinese-Americans, too, find themselves divided.
Some have hesitated, reluctant to find politics or racial discrimination in the indictment of Officer Liang. Others have hailed the charges against him as a means of improving relations between the police and all minorities. But for some, the indictment is nothing less than the scapegoating of a young officer whose parents may have to live without their only son — and a call to arms for a minority group that has never been as politically active as blacks or Hispanics.
“We don’t want to be pushed around anymore, or picked on anymore,” Mr. Gim said. “We’re going to fight back.”
Image Phil Gim of Whitestone, Queens, said he and other Chinese-Americans viewed the indictment of Officer Liang as an act of scapegoating. Credit Ángel Franco/The New York Times
Mr. Gim and his lunchmates first met on WeChat after the death of Officer Wenjian Liu, who was shot in December. Now they are reaching out to the Chinese-language press, contacting lawyers to advise Officer Liang and planning a protest march in New York, a city with the largest Chinese population outside of Asia. An online petition opposing the indictment that was started in California by a member of the Chinese-American community has garnered more than 100,000 signatures.
The indictment has galvanized other Chinese-American leaders, but in a different way.
To say that Officer Liang has been singled out misses the bigger picture, those leaders argue. Asians have also suffered at the hands of police officers, they say, and it is time for them to join the chorus of black and Latino voices calling for reform.
|
Because there’s no point of putting an end to a franchise when more money can be made, here comes a new rumor that Warner Bros. is plotting a trilogy of movies based on the Harry Potter play, Harry Potter And The Cursed Child. Jack Thorne’s play follows Harry and the gang in middle age, but mainly focuses on the hero’s son Albus and his friendship with Scorpius Malfoy, the offspring of antagonist Draco. It opened in London last year, the script was published, and it’s on its way to Broadway.
Now Screenrant has picked up on a recent episode of the Unofficial Universal Orlando Podcast in which guest Jim Hill—a “theme park historian,” who Screenrant reports has some good contacts— shares his purported knowledge about the studio’s plans. According to Hill, Cursed Child is being envisioned as a sort of “Harry Potter: The Force Awakens” with the likes of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint reprising their roles starting in 2026. “They want this trilogy of movies to have the actors that we know and love from the original films, that we watched grow up, as adults,” he said. “And, of course, they’re hiring a bunch of new, younger actors to play their children with the hope that, if we can lean on J.K., maybe there’ll be The Cursed Adolescent.” The Cursed Child’s proposed cinematic future came up when Hill was discussing NBC Universal’s recent acquisition of the Potter television and digital rights. Hill said: “They not only have Potter, they have Fantastic Beasts and, supposedly, if you drill down into the language of the deal, they also have—when they’re finally made—the trilogy of movies that will be based on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”
Advertisement
Now it’s worth noting that not only has J.K. Rowling indicated that Cursed Child will remain stage and page-bound, but Warner Bros. denied an earlier whisper about potential movie plans. However, it also could be the case that everyone will keep batting these rumors away until they decide to announce something concrete.
|
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of areas in the brain known to be involved in making memories does not improve memory performance, according to a new study.
Deep brain stimulation is an invasive technique that involves the implantation of electrodes deep into the brain and then running current through them to electrically stimulate nearby neurons.
In the recent study, no participants showed memory improvement. There was instead a range of memory impairment of 5 percent to 20 percent with stimulation.
The study negates earlier findings from 2012 that suggested a benefit but the silver lining is that if this specific form of stimulation diminishes memory performance, another approach may still improve it. The 2012 study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1107212) found a 64% improvement in memory performance for memories formed while subjects were experiencing brain stimulation. The findings were encouraging, but they ran counter to scientific evidence suggesting that the kind of stimulation used in the study would inhibit neurons and potentially impair memory.
Both studies presented subjects with similar memory tasks. A spatial task involved remembering the location of an object in a 3D virtual space. Participants would navigate through the space to find an object. During control sessions, they received no stimulation. In stimulation sessions, they would experience 50 pulses of electrical current per second for 5 seconds. A verbal task involved recalling words on a list. Electrical pulses were delivered for 4.6 seconds while participants studied the list.
The new study differed, says lead investigator Joshua Jacobs, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University, in that they observed observed subjects as they performed 48 memory retrievals per session, 8 times as many as in the previous study. He also enrolled 49 subjects. The previous study included 7. "It's quite a bit bigger and more statistically powered, so it's more likely to produce accurate results," says Jacobs.
None of the participants showed statistically significant improvement. On average across both tasks, stimulation of the entorhinal cortex resulted in a reduced accuracy in memories of 9% compared to non-stimulated memories. Stimulation of the hippocampus resulted in 8% impairment on average. Impairment ranged from 5% to 20% across all regions stimulated for both tasks.
The study's measurement of spatial memory also differed from the earlier study. To measure spatial memory, participants revisited the 3D virtual space--this time, without the object being present in the space and without stimulation--and navigated to the place they recalled to be the object's location. Jacobs' team then calculated how far off the remembered locations were from actual locations.
In the previous study, the objects remained visible in the virtual space during the recall test, potentially skewing results in the positive direction for participants lucky enough to spot the object while navigating the space.
Such confounders often occur in early studies of new techniques, say Jacobs. Follow-on studies are important because they improve methods. "Theirs was a first study of its kind," says Jacobs. "It's important to improve the protocol in a way that quantifies spatial memory more precisely."
|
A Certain Magical Index
Heavy Object
Light novel author Kazuma Kamachi appears to be going for some kind of award. The pen behindandhas so far published a new light novel every month for the last two years. Kamachi is heading into his third year with no immediate signs of slowing down.
His streak began in September 2014 with the launch of the light novel series Mitō Shōkan://Blood Sign . He has continued to publish novels in his Intellectual Village no Zashiki Warashi , Heavy Object, Saikyō o Kojiraseta Level Counter Stop Kenseijo Beatrice no Jakuten Sono Na wa "Buu Buu" , Shinyaku Toaru Majutsu no Index , and inter-series crossover novels every month since. His latest release is Heavy Object: Ichiban Chiisana Sensō (Heavy Ojbect: The Smallest War) and the third volume of Saikyō o Kojiraseta Level Counter Stop Kenseijo Beatrice no Jakuten Sono Na wa "Buu Buu" is slated for next month.
His achievements hardly stop there. Despite having no physical volumes, Kamachi is also writing the Kyūketsuki no Ane to Zombie no Imōto ga wa ni Hairita-sōna me de Kotchi Mite Irukedo Dōshimashō...Riaru Dedakedo zombie/vampire story on his website.
[Via Yara-on!]
|
Swedish prosecutors say that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will be interviewed on Nov. 14 at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been holed up for four years.
The Prosecution Authority says that Ecuador has granted Sweden's request for legal assistance in questioning Assange over a rape allegation stemming from a visit to the Scandinavian country in 2010.
The agency said Monday that a Swedish assistant prosecutor and police investigator will be allowed to be present at the interview, conducted by an Ecuadorian prosecutor and that a DNA sample will be taken from Assange if he consents.
The 45-year-old Australian computer hacker has denied the accusation, and refused to meet prosecutors in Sweden fearing extradition to the United States to face espionage charges if he leaves the embassy.
Associated Press
|
Gov. George Pataki has decided to shelve his seven-month-old presidential campaign, which began at the back of the pack and remained there.
Pataki broke the news in a two-minute “fireside chat” broadcast Tuesday evening in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina during NBC’s “Chicago Med” — a drama about people facing desperate odds.
“While tonight is the end of my journey for the White House as I suspend my campaign for president, I’m confident we can elect the right person — someone who will bring us together and who understands that politicians, including the president, must be the people’s servant and not their master,” Pataki said.
Here it is:
Hours earlier, reports in the Boston Globe and elsewhere said that Pataki had been making calls to his backers to thank them for their support.
While the front ranks of the Republican race have experienced volatility over the past months — as Donald Trump’s campaign has seen bursts of polling strength from Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — Pataki remained at or near the bottom of the baker’s-dozen pack of candidates even as he campaigned assiduously in New Hampshire.
Since his launch in late May, Pataki’s relentlessly mild-mannered affect and moderate stances on social issues made him something of an odd man out in a field dominated by conservative red-meat purveyors like Cruz and Trump. His difficulties were similar to those still being faced by moderate governors John Kasich and Jeb Bush, only Pataki never made it from the “undercard” televised debates to the highly rated prime time combat.
He built his appeal to GOP voters on his record as New York’s governor during 9/11 and his ability to win three gubernatorial terms in a deep-blue state. The first pitch was buried under worries about more recent terror threats, while the second probably ended up hurting Pataki in a primary race where electability does not yet appear to be a primary concern.
The holiday season has seen some culling of the Republican pack: South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham dropped out last week, in the wake of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s November exit. It’s expected that the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire first-in-the-nation primary — both the first week of February — will see the field drop by as much as half.
Here’s the full release from Pataki’s suspended campaign:
|
Dangerous crossroads: Is Obama intent upon waging a military operation on Russia’s border prior to the end of his presidential mandate?
This military onslaught could potentially create a fait accompli.
Are these US deployments part of Obama’s “act of retribution” against Russia in response to Moscow’s alleged hacking of the US elections, which according to the director of National Intelligence James Clapper constitute an “Existential Threat” to the Security of the US.
As we recall Obama on December 29th “ordered a series of retaliatory steps against Russia”.
Is this a “fast-track” procedure on the part of the outgoing president, with the support of US intelligence to create chaos prior to the inception of the Trump administration on January 20th?
According to Donbass International News Agency Service, “A Massive US military deployment should be ready by January 20.”
Political Insanity prevails.
And insanity could potentially unleash World War III.
Meanwhile none of this is front page news. The mainstream media is not covering it.
Below is the report of the Donbass International News Agency report.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 5, 2017
* * *
Correction. A previous version of this text by the Donbass News Agency (translated from Russian) misquoted the original RT source: the figures refer to pieces of military hardware rather than tanks.
***
The NATO war preparation against Russia, ‘Operation Atlantic Resolve’, is in full swing. 2,000 pieces of military hardware will be sent in coming days from Germany to Eastern Europe, and 1,600 US military hardware are deployed to storage facilities in the Netherlands.
At the same time, NATO countries are sending thousands of soldiers in to Russian borders.
According to US Army Europe, 4,000 troops and 2,000 military hardware will arrive in three US transport ships to Germany next weekend. From Bremerhaven, US troops and huge amount of military material, will be transported to Poland and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
USA is sending to Russian borders 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division. Overall, more than 2,500 pieces of cargo are shipped to Germany, where those will be unloaded in the period January 6-8. US military material and troops will continue to Poland by rail and military convoy’s. Massive US military deployment should be ready by January 20.
“Some 900 cars with military materiel will be transported by train from Bremerhaven to Poland. There are also about 600 pieces of freight that will be transported by train to Poland from the military training ground at Bergen-Hohne. Nearly 40 vehicles will travel directly by road from Bremerhaven to Poland,” told Bundeswehr press office.
“Three years after the last American tanks left the continent, we need to get them back,” said Lieutenant General Frederick “Ben” Hodges, commander of US forces in Europe.
He made the statement during a visit to the Logistics School of the Bundeswehr in Garlstedt, Lower Saxony. He told journalists that the measures were a “response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the illegal annexation of Crimea.”
While NATO is preparing for war against Russia, Hodges turned everything upside down and accused Russia of preparing for war. “This does not mean that there necessarily has to be a war, none of this is inevitable, but Moscow is preparing for the possibility,” Hodges said.
In the dangerous escalation against nuclear-armed Russia, which poses the danger of a third world war, the German Bundeswehr is playing a central role. “Without the support of the [German] Army, we can go nowhere,” Hodges said during an appearance at the Joint Support Service of the Bundeswehr.
Germany, which rolled over Eastern Europe in its war of extermination 75 years ago, is preparing to send combat troops to the Baltics. In January, 26 tanks, 100 other vehicles and 120 containers will be transported by train to Lithuania. Germany will send the 122nd Infantry Battalion.
At the same time total of 1,600 US fighting vehicles are due to be stored at a six-warehouse complex in the southeastern village of Eygelshoven, near the Belgian and German borders. The Eygelshoven facility was originally opened in 1985 during the Cold War, when it was used by US troops to practice drills in case of a possible Soviet attack, wrote RT News.
Abrams Tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Paladin artillery have already started arriving in what is part of a $3.4 billion Congress-approved scheme to increase NATO military capability in Europe. Storage sites are also planned to be reopened in Poland, Belgium and Germany.
|
CHANDAULI (UP): A truck driver was on Monday killed allegedly by Road Transport Office (RTO) staffers after he refused to pay bribe during a vehicle checking drive in Naubatpur locality in Sayyadraza area here, police said. Anant Lal Gupta (50), a native of Kaushambi district, was allegedly beaten to death at around 5 AM by some members of the RTO staff, Superintendent of Police Shalabh Mathur, said.According to the victim's son Ashwini (23), who worked as a cleaner with his father, "One of the constables of the RTO Department took the vehicle for weighing at the weighing centre and found that the truck was not overloaded, but demanded Rs 1,000."His father was willing to pay only Rs 500 after which the RTO constables and one Shiv Kumar of the weighing centre beat him brutally, causing his death, he said.After the incident, angry locals jammed the National Highway-2 in protest and turned violent, pelting stones at the police when they tried to disperse the crowd, Mathur said.A police constable was injured in the incident and the police fired in the air and lathicharged to control the situation, he said.An FIR has been registered in connection with the incident, Mathur added.
|
A note before we begin: because it would take up the entire article to explain how blockchain works, I assume you have a basic understanding of the core concepts. If you don’t, I recommend watching this quick 3 minute video before you continue with this or any of my other blockchain articles. Have more time/interest? I recommend this slightly more in depth course.
As we continue to see the need for decentralization permeate all aspects of our lives, of course, this will have to include some of the staples of our digital life that we have come to love and use daily: the app store. A place where you can browse, purchase, and engage with millions of others to accomplish particular tasks, such as browsing the web, making and splitting payments, browsing for jobs, signing contracts, and endlessly more. As the saying goes, 'there's an app for that.'
That saying is evolving, and it will become, 'there's a decentralized app for that.'
Reinventing Apps
Because trust and security are paramount to our most sensitive communications, many people are moving to encrypted solutions to communicate, such as the app Signal, or Whats App with encryption. They are using other apps like Dwolla, or Venmo, to make peer-to-peer payments, but as we have seen, these apps still fall short of offering real trust and security because they lack genuine decentralization and are bound to the fact that they are a third party facilitator. No matter how hard they try, they are at best, a perfect middleman. I am not saying any of these services are not worth using, but, due to the centralized nature they all share, they will never offer the trust and transparency that a non-owned, fully transparent system governed by its users can.
Decentralization is the only way to be genuinely free of controlling interests and censorship, and as we make our way through the app stores of life, taking part in things like chat, job hunting, contracts, and digital payments, this becomes more and more important. In this day and age of NSA security breaches, we just cannot afford to put all our trust into centralized and vulnerable entities, including apps we use to store and transmit essential and private information. We will begin to see our app store require the same transparency and decentralization to ensure privacy, and true security. This can be true even for games, where in app purchases are required, or top scores coveted, and in need ft true protection from manipulation.
This will also Reinvent your physical wallet.
Furthermore, just as you may use payment apps, such as PayPal to make peer to peer payments online, many of you may have gotten a PayPal debit card to use at terminals while you are out and about during the day. The same will be required of decentralized cryptocurrencies as they become mainstream. The same shape and size as a credit card, new hardware wallets will allow users to store, send, and receive cryptocurrencies. They are immune to computer viruses that steal from software wallets, and ultimately, are eventually should be a requirement for cryptocurrency holders.
We are on track to replace all elements of our communication and trust-based transactions with blockchain based ones, and I aim to point out who I feel will be some of the key players in that new world here in this article series.
Enter, Status.
Based out of Switzerland, and fresh off an ICO raising more than $100M in less than three hours (!), Status is a decentralized browser and app platform with built-in chat and wallet functionality giving anyone access to the decentralized web. This platform's goals are preserving the right to privacy, mitigating the risk of censorship, and promoting economic trade in a transparent, open manner; Status is building a community where anyone is welcome to join and contribute.
“Focused on making decentralization a reality.”
“We are aware that there are challenges and there is a lot of work to be done, but our goal remains to create an Ethereum-powered world for all. We will continue to invest ourselves in the future of blockchain and push to build a strong open source community.” ~ Carl Bennetts, Status Co-Founder.
Not just a browser, Status is offering revolutionary solutions for the decentralized web, such as their Hardwallet. Users can sign up for the beta of the crypto-wallet to store, send, and receive cryptocurrencies with built-in NFC for wireless wallet transactions.
They also just welcomed New COO from Google. After successfully leading Google Maps and Google Flights products, long-time “Googler” Nabil Naghdy is joining the team as Chief Operating Officer. They also are promoting an open bounty with $1M bounty fund: Status Open Bounty launches as a bounty-based, open source collaboration tool for users to find, contribute, and receive rewards for code contributions. Status has pledged $1M for open source projects that will be released over the coming months.
Another example of how blockchain is reinventing business and changing the world.
This article is part of a new series of articles I am writing profiling businesses reinventing existing industries using the Blockchain.
It’s not just a solution for Chat, Apps and Payments, it has the potential to become the new backbone of the internet. Watch, and you will see more and more companies emerging with solutions to existing markets with solutions based on the Blockchain. It’s early days, and the best is yet to come. Follow me here as I will continue to write about great examples of the “Blockchain reinventing business.” If you have or know of a company I can review and potentially profile, please submit your idea to me at reinvent.biz.
Disclaimer: I make the best effort to select companies I feel are the best fit for the markets I profile, and in some cases I work directly with PR firms to promote their clients, who are the leaders emerging in the space. While I am not directly affiliated or invested in the companies I profile here, I do own Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. I hold investment positions in the coins, but do not engage in short-term or day-trading. When mentioning an ICO or TGE, it is not intended to be investment advice. You should seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice. (I recommend Abacus Wealth Partners, for their philosophy of sustainable investing.)
|
NEW DELHI: LeEco plans to invest about $200 million (Rs 1330 crore) into developing content for India , including its own produced content, over the next two to three years, while beginning to make smartphones locally by next month in a deeper push into what is a crucial market for the Chinese internet player.The Beijing headquartered company aims to fill half of its content library for India with original content made locally and for the local market, within the next three years, while the remaining will be acquired from production houses and content providers.“We won’t shy away from investing into content… you could see about $200 million over two to three years,” said Debashish Ghosh, chief operating officer of Indian Content Business at LeEco India. The company has tied up with Eros, YuppTV , and Hungama “We plan to launch our own content platform by October, which will host original and acquired premium content. Maybe in three to four years, half of our content would be original,” Ghosh added.Content – primarily movies, videos and music – will be the key differentiator for LeEco that has sold over 700,000 smartphones in India since its entry in January and plans to sell upto a million units by the month end.The company also launched three smart televisions ranging between Rs 59,790 and Rs 1.49 lakh on Thursday, which will be available for pre-booking from August 10-12 and sales thereafter.The content will be integrated with televisions and smartphones, which will set the brand apart in the intensely competitive Indian market in both categories. The company is also mulling launching VR headsets in India, which will also tie in the content strategy.LeEco said it will begin making phones in India by next month, and was talking to a few contract manufacturers."We're close to starting manufacturing, within this quarter. We've been evaluating different locations including Andhra Pradesh, UP, Haryana and Uttarakhand. Now, we're in the final stages," Atul Jain, chief operating officer of Smart Electronics Business said separately.The company is yet to ascertain the number of units it will get made locally and the assembly lines that will be required to make phones to meet demand.In the TV segment, LeEco aims to become the No 1 brand in the online space within this year, while the models will be available in the offline retail within the next two to three months.Having launched smartphones offline, the company will expand its reach from 2,000 outlets in eight cities to 8,000 outlets in 65 cities by the year end.
|
Hello all,I hope everyone is doing well. As many of you know by now, SkeleVader has opened up the management of this year's challenge coin. RILMS and I will be working together on this project together and I wanted to take some time to introduce myself and talk about this project a little bit.Last year I had a blast at PAX Prime 2015. This was my first year of attending a PAX convention. I had a wonderful time playing many unreleased games, trying out VR games for the first time, and meeting new friends! To top things off, I purchased a souvenir before I went. This was the PAX Challenge coin.The PAX Challenge coin has been a very important project to me and to many others on this forum. The coin represents the city in which the PAX convention is held on one side, while the other represents some aspect of gaming. In the past, the coin has had dice, handhelds, consoles, computers, a coin slot, and many other things on them throughout the years. The Seattle side for last year had a Monorail.I am hoping that this project is as successful as it has been in previous years. I am now accepting ideas on what you want on each side of the coin. I'm thinking possibly a controller for the gaming side, but it is up to the many wondrous forum members to ultimately decide. As for the Seattle side, I'm thinking the Pike Place Market sign, but again this is just a preliminary idea. All ideas are welcome, and I shall be accepting ideas until July 15th. This may be a tad early, but I want to make sure that I have enough time to make a poll for containing all ideas. This way, the most popular opinion will be put on the coin. There are other ideas for the coin as well which include size, finishes, and edge design. In the past a size of 1.75 inches has been used, along with an antique bronze finish. A smooth or reeded edge has also been popular in the past. Discuss away! goo.gl/forms/bGoZBZCIhWsaSkpu2 Is the link to the new idea form! Suggest away! All stated ideas posted in this thread will be inputted, so don't worry about inputting your idea again. All ideas will be on the final voting form as long as they aren't silly.So, how was everyone E3? Thank you everyone for your responses to the coin suggestion form. Things have been slowing down and I've also contacted Kiddercorp. Their response follows:Since they say it takes about 4 weeks to get made, I'm thinking of ending the survey next week, being the 25th of June. Make sure your responses get in. The voting process will start up soon after that with one ballot allowed. The voting process will end on July 9th or so. The voting will also ask for how many coins are wanted(which is not a necessary question, but does help me allot a ballpark estimate to kiddercorp). Any further question can be shot over via pm or posted below. Thanks and looking forward to getting everything set up.Well hello everyone! I hope all of you are having a great June! We're quickly getting close to PAX Prime/West! I want to thank everyone for submitting ideas to the first poll. With that out of the way, I want to say that I'm sorry it wasn't posted yesterday, but it is finally ready. The first poll to decide what thechoices are! I decided to do it this way, since we have WAY TOO MANY fantastic ideas. This will sort out the ideas so that the second poll is easier to complete. You may vote for your own ideas, but voting for your own ideas may not necessarily make it win. Good luck to everyone!First Voting poll located at: http://goo.gl/forms/jD90vBj4uLeVyRHG3 This poll closes on July 9th! Now voting begins! I'm so excited!All right, we've come into the final weeks before Pax Prime! The last poll has ended and I'm excited to announce that the coin will be reeded and only come in the regular colour palette. This has been decided because of the way the last poll went. Not even half of you wanted the colour version of the coin. Reeded beat out smooth by a land slide. The choices of finish for the coin has been reduced to three options. Another aspect of the coin which has been nailed down is that we are going with 1.75". The gaming side in this final poll has 4 options since the 3rd place was tied between Unity and The QBert Pyramid. As for the Seattle side, we only have 3 options. Make sure to get your vote in as voting for this will be closing on the 20th of July.Final Voting poll located at http://goo.gl/forms/cK8t9o1zLjkydegI3 With the saving of the poll opens up the poll. I've also changed the way in how voting once works. You must use your forum handle to submit this time, NOT a Google account. I shall update after the 20th.Wow, what a fantastic turnout for all of this. Before I get to what everyone wants, the final results, I want to take a quick moment to thank some very important people who have supported me throughout this whole ordeal. First off, Skelevader deserves thanks for giving me a shot to run this year's PAX Prime/West Coin. I also want to thank RILMS for being my #2. If you don't already know, RILMS has taken it upon himself to work the August month for the coin to make sure everything comes together in time for PAX Prime/West 2016 as I will not be online much due to the fact that I'm travelling to England! And finally, I want to thank all of you who have given a little time to read every post, to suggest some great ideas, to vote for some amazing ideas, and finally hope that the choice you picked won this year's coin. Anyways, let's hop right into the results!For the finish colour of the coin, (choices were Antique Gold, Antique Brass, and Antique Bronze)Coming in 3rd with 25% of the votes: Antique Gold(my pick)Coming in 2nd with 27.5% of the votes: Antique BrassThat means in 1st place with 47.5% of the votes:....That's right everyone, this year's challenge coin is going to be penny coloured.For the Seattle side of the coin, (choices were Pink Elephant Car Wash, Fremont Troll, and Dick's)Coming in 3rd with 22.5% of the votes: Long Dick's Sausage EmporiumComing in 2nd with 35% of the votes: The Pink Elephant Car Wash(my personal favourite....oh well, maybe next year)That means in 1st place with 42.5% of the votes:.....so let's hear it for the troll! WOO!All right, now for the side that everyone cares a LOT about(I was even pestered by my good friend Garet_Jax to reveal what was in the lead). We had four choices, which were The QBert Pyramid, Virtual Reality, Unity. A collage of props, icons, orelements that represent different gaming genres, and Khoo's Pic! So without further ado, let's hop right into the results.Coming in 4th with 12.5% of the votes: The QBert PyramidComing in 3rd with 25% of the votes: Virtual RealityComing in 2nd with 30% of the votes: Unity. A collage of props, icons, or elements that represent different gaming genres(my pick)Which means in 1st place with 32.5% of the votes:What a close race. Thank you to everyone who voted. We ended up with 40 people that voted for this final ballot! Not a bad turnout if I do say so myself. Anyways, this has been the Prime Challenge Coin 2016 awards show. Thank you for coming out! *clap clap clap*So this next part won't be in a poll, however I need help deciding what form of Khoo you guys want a picture of. We could have a collage of different Khoo pictures, or we could do his Penny Arcade avatar, or we could do his real life face....It'll be interesting to see what everyone wants. In the meantime, I'll ask Khoo if it is alright to put his face/avatar on the coin. Maybe he would even be able to suggest some poses of himself for the coin. Anyways, I'll post this now with a short version on page 2.Okay, so RILMS has created an interest form, so that we can better see the interest for the coin. It includes sections to gather information on how many coins you wish to get. This includes the coloured version and regular version of the coin. The link to it is here! We also have a proof for the coin which isWe are getting extremely close to opening up orders as well, but I'll post details for that VERY soon.Order Form https://goo.gl/forms/lKwPMdCBA3HSzJIs1
|
also jack-pot, "big prize," 1944, from slot machine sense (1932), from now-obsolete poker sense (1881) in reference to antes that begin when no player has a pair of jacks or better; from jack (n.) in the card-playing sense + pot (n.1). Earlier, in criminal slang, it meant "trouble," especially "an arrest" (1902).
The regular Draw-Poker game is usually varied by occasional Jack-Pots , which are played once in so many deals, or when all have refused to play, or when the player deals who holds the buck , a marker placed in the pool with every jack-pot. In a jack-pot each player puts up an equal stake and receives a hand. The pot must then be opened by a player holding a hand of the value of a pair of knaves (jacks) or better. If no player holds so valuable a hand the deal passes and each player adds a small sum to the pot or pool. When the pot is opened the opener does so by putting up any sum he chooses, within the limit, and his companions must pay in the same amount or "drop." They also possess the right to raise the opener. The new cards called for are then dealt and the opener starts the betting, the play proceeding as in the regular game. [" Encyclopaedia Britannica ," 11th ed., 1911, "Poker." The article notes "Jack-Pots were introduced about 1870."]
To hit the jackpot "be very successful" is from 1938.
|
76 Popular Apps Confirmed Vulnerable to Silent Interception of TLS-Protected Data
Will Strafach Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 6, 2017
During the development of our web-based mobile app analysis service verify.ly, it was essential to have a clear understanding of the most common security issues which plague mobile applications today. Automatically scanning the binary code of applications within the Apple App Store en-masse allowed us to get a vast amount of information about these security issues.
I will present some findings within this post which I believe to be in the public interest, related specifically to iOS applications which are vulnerable to silent interception of (normally) TLS-protected data while in use. Our system flagged hundreds of applications as having a high likelihood of vulnerability to data interception, but at this time I will be posting details of the connections and data which I was able to fully confirm as vulnerable using a live iPhone running iOS 10 and a “malicious” proxy to insert an invalid TLS certificate into the connection for testing.
UPDATE: A follow up has been posted here.
Highlights
During the testing process, I was able to confirm 76 popular iOS applications allow a silent man-in-the-middle attack to be performed on connections which should be protected by TLS (HTTPS), allowing interception and/or manipulation of data in motion.
popular iOS applications allow a silent man-in-the-middle attack to be performed on connections which should be protected by TLS (HTTPS), allowing interception and/or manipulation of data in motion. According to Apptopia estimates, there has been a combined total of more than 18,000,000 (Eighteen Million) downloads of app versions which are confirmed to be affected by this vulnerability.
of app versions which are confirmed to be affected by this vulnerability. For 33 of the iOS applications, this vulnerability was deemed to be low risk (All data confirmed vulnerable to intercept is only partially sensitive analytics data about the device, partially sensitive personal data such as e-mail address, and/or login credentials which would only be entered on a non-hostile network).
of the iOS applications, this vulnerability was deemed to be low risk (All data confirmed vulnerable to intercept is only partially sensitive analytics data about the device, partially sensitive personal data such as e-mail address, and/or login credentials which would only be entered on a non-hostile network). For 24 of the iOS applications, this vulnerability was deemed to be medium risk (Confirmed ability to intercept service login credentials and/or session authentication tokens for logged in users).
of the iOS applications, this vulnerability was deemed to be medium risk (Confirmed ability to intercept service login credentials and/or session authentication tokens for logged in users). For 19 of the iOS applications, this vulnerability was deemed to be high risk (Confirmed ability to intercept financial or medical service login credentials and/or session authentication tokens for logged in users).
of the iOS applications, this vulnerability was deemed to be high risk (Confirmed ability to intercept financial or medical service login credentials and/or session authentication tokens for logged in users). The App Transport Security feature of iOS does not and cannot help block this vulnerability from working.
and help block this vulnerability from working. Within the “Solving the Problem” section, I present a simple short-term mitigation to this vulnerability class which any end user will be able to make use of.
Explaining the Risk
There are many potential avenues along the network path for this vulnerability class to be exploited in order to intercept and/or manipulate data. While it is certainly possible for an ISP or a rogue Wi-Fi provider to be the attacker, that is unlikely in most Western regions, and is not considered to be a serious risk. With regards to this sort of man-in-the-middle attack, a common analogy makes a reference to using the Wi-Fi connection within a coffee shop, or an airport, but lately I am starting to dislike the analogy as it is easy to misunderstand and minimize the perceived potential for attack. The truth of the matter is, this sort of attack can be conducted by any party within Wi-Fi range of your device while it is in use. This can be anywhere in public, or even within your home if an attacker can get within close range. Such an attack can be conducted using either custom hardware, or a slighly modified mobile phone, depending on the required range and capabilities. The best similar and well-understood form of attack to this would be the ability to read data from credit cards at a close range.
Vulnerable Applications (Low Risk)
This is a listing of iOS applications which are vulnerable to this attack, but pose a low risk to end users if data is intercepted. Additionally included are iOS applications which have already been publicly disclosed as vulnerable.
Vulnerable Applications (Medium and High Risk)
Please see this follow up post.
Past Occurances
This class of vulnerability has been an issue in the past for various noteworthy iOS applications. Gathering information via open source, I was able to find 26 total instances over the past few years. To my knowledge, the mentioned apps are likely to be fixed, unless otherwise noted (This is an assumption based on timeframe, but they were not part of this assessment so I have not 100% confirmed).
Solving the Problem
This class of vulnerability poses a complex problem, as application developers are the only ones who can fully mitigate it. It is derived from networking-related code within iOS applications being misconfigured in a highly unfortunate manner. Due to this, Apple’s “App Transport Security” mechanism will see the connection as a valid TLS connection, as it must allow the application to judge the certificate validity if it chooses to do so. There is no possible fix to be made on Apple’s side, because if they were to override this functionality in attempt to block this security issue, it would actually make some iOS applications less secure as they would not be able to utilize certificate pinning for their connections, and they could not trust otherwise untrusted certificates which may be required for intranet connections within an enterprise using an in-house PKI. Therefore, the onus rests solely on app developers themselves to ensure their apps are not vulnerable.
End Users : There is a short term trick which can be used to mitigate this type of vulnerability. The vulnerability is very likely to only be exploited if your connection is flowing over Wi-Fi (whether you’ve joined a public Wi-Fi network, or a determined attacker has force-joined your mobile device onto a rogue network without your knowledge). Therefore, if you are in a public location and need to perform a sensitive action on your mobile device (such as opening your bank app and checking your account balance), you can work around the issue by opening “Settings” and turning the “Wi-Fi” switch off prior to the sensitive action. While on a cellular connection the vulnerability does still exist, cellular interception is more difficult, requires expensive hardware, is far more noticeable, and it is quite illegal (within the United States). Therefore, it is much less plausable for an attacker to risk attempting to intercept a cellular data connection.
: There is a short term trick which can be used to mitigate this type of vulnerability. The vulnerability is very likely to only be exploited if your connection is flowing over Wi-Fi (whether you’ve joined a public Wi-Fi network, or a determined attacker has force-joined your mobile device onto a rogue network without your knowledge). Therefore, if you are in a public location and need to perform a sensitive action on your mobile device (such as opening your bank app and checking your account balance), you can work around the issue by opening “Settings” and turning the “Wi-Fi” switch off prior to the sensitive action. While on a cellular connection the vulnerability does still exist, cellular interception is more difficult, requires expensive hardware, is far more noticeable, and it is quite illegal (within the United States). Therefore, it is much less plausable for an attacker to risk attempting to intercept a cellular data connection. Companies : If you offer an application in the iOS App Store, consider analyzing builds prior to App Store submission using our verify.ly service. This class of vulnerability and all other possible “low hanging fruits” (vulnerabilities discoverable to a determined attacker who commits 24 hours total analysis time) can be fully detected by performing an automated scan of the binary code and giving you an easy to read report outlining any and all flagged issues, ensuring your customer data is safe.
: If you offer an application in the iOS App Store, consider analyzing builds prior to App Store submission using our verify.ly service. This class of vulnerability and all other possible “low hanging fruits” (vulnerabilities discoverable to a determined attacker who commits 24 hours total analysis time) can be fully detected by performing an automated scan of the binary code and giving you an easy to read report outlining any and all flagged issues, ensuring your customer data is safe. Developers: Be extremely careful when inserting network-related code and changing application behaviors. Many issues like this arise from an application developer not fully understanding the code they’ve borrowed from the web.
Further Investigation
As mentioned earlier, this will be revisited in 60 to 90 days to document responses from affected companies and application fix timelines. Investigation of more applications may also occur, due to hundreds of applications being flagged as being vulnerable (with high confidence), but this would depend on public interest.
Contact
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me via Twitter (@chronic).
If you need any sort of mobile application research conducted which requires mass analysis of many applications to retrieve data and/or answer a question, e-mail would be the best way to get in touch ([email protected]).
|
Greg Biffle won’t race just anything that he is offered.
The 19-time Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series winner knows what he wants, and that is a shot to win in NASCAR’s premier division.
However, while Biffle is not strapped inside of a racecar, he is partaking in NASCAR’s traveling circus, attending the Daytona 500 and this past weekend’s Kobalt 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Though he recently signed with NBC to be a frequent guest on NASCAR America, the urge to still race exists for the former Roush Fenway Racing driver.
“I’ve got opportunities in trucks, XFINITY and Cup,” Biffle said. “I love the XFINITY and Truck Series, but I don’t want to go do that full-time. The only thing I would consider is a top ride in the Cup Series. It’s really all that I want to do. If that’s not available, I’m happy with being semi-retired.”
Biffle and Roush parted ways at the completion of the 2016 NASCAR season. The veteran had competed in 499 consecutive races while piloting the No. 16 Ford for the organization before splitting ways with the only team he called home in NASCAR’s premier division.
With performance dropping over the past three seasons, Biffle and the team said it was time for a change. Roush downsized to two full-time cars in 2017, eliminating the No. 16 team from its lineup, opting to focus on Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Trevor Bayne.
“It’s been a little bit difficult,” Biffle said, describing what it is like to be at the track and not racing. “I love to drive and race. I had tons of great opportunities, but I elected to wait for the right opportunity. If the right opportunity comes along, I’ll take advantage of that. Right now, I’m really enjoying watching and stepping back to have a little time off to look at it.”
Biffle remains optimistic that an opportunity will come to compete in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series once again. Whether or not that opportunity comes, though, remains to be seen.
With limited options over the off-season, he said he “elected to stay out of the car for right now.” If the opportunity does not present itself, as he said, there will be no XFINITY Series races or Camping World Truck Series events for the former champion in both divisions.
The 19-time Cup Series winner is focused on his next task at hand, which is entering the NASCAR America studio to help fans have a better understanding of the sport he dedicated the majority of his life to.
“I’ve done some of it in the past, so I’m looking forward to it,” he said. “I like being a guest analyst, breaking down the races and talking diligently about it. I’m going to have fun with it. It keeps me involved and something to do, which I enjoy.”
|
Embedded liberalism is a term for the global economic system and the associated international political orientation as they existed from the end of World War II to the 1970s. The system was set up to support a combination of free trade with the freedom for states to enhance their provision of welfare and to regulate their economies to reduce unemployment. The term was first used by the American political scientist John Ruggie in 1982.[1]
Mainstream scholars generally describe embedded liberalism as involving a compromise between two desirable but partially conflicting objectives. The first objective was to revive free trade. Before World War I, international trade formed a large portion of global GDP, but the classical liberal order which supported it had been damaged by war and by the Great Depression of the 1930s. The second objective was to allow national governments the freedom to provide generous welfare programmes and to intervene in their economies to maintain full employment.[2] This second objective was considered to be incompatible with a full return to the free market system as it had existed in the late 19th century—mainly because with a free market in international capital, investors could easily withdraw money from nations that tried to implement interventionist and redistributive policies.[3]
The resulting compromise was embodied in the Bretton Woods system, which was launched at the end of World War II. The system was liberal[4] in that it aimed to set up an open system of international trade in goods and services, facilitated by semi-fixed exchange rates. Yet it also aimed to "embed" market forces into a framework where they could be regulated by national governments, with states able to control international capital flows by means of capital controls. New global multilateral institutions were created to support the new framework, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
When Ruggie coined the phrase embedded liberalism, he was building on earlier work by Karl Polanyi, who had introduced the concept of markets becoming "dis-embedded" from society during the 19th century. Polanyi went on to propose that the "re-embedding" of markets would be a central task for the architects of the post war world order, and this was largely enacted as a result of the Bretton Woods Conference.[5] In the 1950s and 1960s, the global economy prospered under embedded liberalism, with growth more rapid than before or since. Yet the system was to break down in the 1970s.
Previous systems [ edit ]
Embedded markets: all periods up to 1834 [ edit ]
Polanyi argues that until the rise of 19th-century liberalism, markets, where they had existed at all, were always and everywhere "embedded" in society; subject to various social, religious and political controls. The forms of these controls varied widely, for example in India occupations were for centuries determined by caste, rather than market forces. During the middle ages, physical markets in Europe were generally heavily regulated, with many towns only permitting larger markets (then known as fayres) to open once or twice a year.[6]
Polanyi explicitly refutes Adam Smith's statement that natural man has a "propensity to barter, truck and exchange",[7] arguing that anthropology and economic history shows that until the 19th century, markets had only a marginal role in the economy, with by far the most important methods governing the distribution of resources being reciprocal gift giving, centralised redistribution and autarky (self-sufficient households). While Polanyi concedes that European society was beginning to develop towards modern capitalism from as early as the 14th century, especially after the Glorious Revolution and the commencement of the Industrial Revolution, he contends that it was not until 1834 that the establishment of truly "free" markets became possible. Polyani calls this dis-embedding of markets from society a "singular departure"[8] from anything that had happened before in human history.[9] Prior to the 19th century, international trade was very low in proportion to global GDP.[10]
Classical liberalism: Dis-embedded markets, 1834–1930s [ edit ]
According to Polanyi, a key event of 1834 which allowed the formation of free markets to take place in Great Britain (the worlds foremost economy at the time), was the abolition of outdoor relief which followed the seizure of political power by the middle classes in 1832.[11] With the unemployed poor unable to get any form of financial help except by entering workhouses,[12] and with workhouses made much more oppressive than they had been before, the unemployed would tend to go to any lengths to obtain work, which established a free market in Labour. Polanyi concedes that during the 19th century, the free market helped deliver unprecedented material progress. He also contends it caused enormous hardship to wide sections of the population; seemingly paradoxically, a rapid general increase in prosperity was accompanied by a rapid increase in the number of paupers. (To some extent this phenomenon had been under way in both Europe and Great Britain from the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution, accelerating with the Industrial Revolution in mid-18th century, but it became more acute after 1834.)[13]
In both Britain and Europe, labour movements and other forms of resistance arose almost immediately, though they had little sustained effect on mainstream politics until the 1880s. In Britain, although tens of thousands starved to death or were forced into workhouses and prostitution, social unrest was relatively low, as on the whole even the working class were quick to benefit from the increasing prosperity - in part this was due to Britain's early adoption of the free market and her lead in the industrial revolution. On continental Europe, unrest erupted in the Protests of 1848, after which Marx and Engels launched their Communist Manifesto, although this did not have any great immediate effect. For the most part, from 1834 until the 1870s, free market ideology enjoyed almost unchallenged ascendancy in Great Britain, and was expanding its influence abroad. In 1848, Lord Macaulay published his The History of England. Though Macaulay was mainly looking back at the 17th century, he also anticipated the enduring triumph of free market liberalism. He was wrong.[14]
By the 1880s, various labour market protections had been enacted, causing Herbert Spencer, at the time perhaps the world's most prominent advocate of economic liberalism, to raise the alarm at the rising power of socialism.[15][16] During the late 19th and early 20th century, in the field of politics, labour relations and trade, free market supporters suffered further set backs with intellectual and the moral attacks from an informal networks of progressive reformers: this included groups like the Fabians; individuals such as Keir Hardie and Pope Leo XIII with his social encyclical Rerum novarum; and national leaders like Otto von Bismarck and David Lloyd George, who both introduced early precursors of the welfare state. In the United States, this period has been labelled the Progressive Era.[17] Other developments not necessarily associated with the progressive movement but still opposed to the free market, included various countries such as the United States significantly increasing their trade tariffs. In contrast, within mainstream academia and the practice of international finance, free market thinking remained largely ascendant until the 1930s. Although the gold standard had been suspended by World War I, in the 1920s international financiers were largely successful in re-establishing it. It was not until the crisis of 1931 that Britain decided to leave the gold standard, with the United States following in 1933 – by the mid-1930s the global liberal economic order had collapsed, with the old, highly integrated trading system replaced by a number of closed economic blocks. Similarly, in mainstream economics, free market thinking was undermined in the 1930s by the success of the New Deal and by the Keynesian Revolution. After a transition period and World War II, embedded liberalism emerged as the dominant economic system.[10][18][19]
Embedded liberalism: 1945–1970s [ edit ]
Mainstream scholars such as Ruggie tend to see embedded liberalism as a compromise between the desire to retain as many as possible of the advantages from the previous era's free market system, while also allowing states to have the autonomy to pursue interventionist and welfare based domestic policies.[20][21][22] Anticipating the trilemma that would later be formulated as the impossible trinity, Lord Keynes and White argued that freedom of movement for capital conflicted both with nation state's freedom to pursue economic policies based on their domestic circumstances, and also with the semi fixed exchange rate system that was widely agreed to be important to maximise international trade in goods and services. As such, it was widely agreed that states would be free to enact capital controls, which would help them simultaneously maintain both fixed exchange rates and, if desired, expansionary domestic policies.[23] During the 1950s and 1960s, embedded liberalism and Keynesian economics were so popular that conservative politicians found they had to largely adopt them if they were to have a chance of getting elected. This was especially the case in Britain and was called the post-war consensus, with a similar though somewhat less Keynesian consensus existing elsewhere, including in the United States.[24]
Marxist scholars tend to broadly agree with the mainstream view, though they emphasise embedded liberalism as a compromise between class interests, rather than between different desirable but partially incompatible objectives. David Harvey[25] argues that at the end of World War II, the primary objective was to develop an economic plan that would not lead to a repeat of the Great Depression during the 1930s. Harvey states:
“ To ensure domestic peace and tranquility, some sort of class compromise between capital and labor had to be constructed. The thinking at the time is perhaps best represented by an influential text by two eminent social scientists, Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom, published in 1953. Both capitalism and communism in their raw forms had failed, they argued. The only way ahead was to construct the right blend of state, market, and democratic institutions to guarantee peace, inclusion, well-being, and stability.[26] ”
Harvey notes that under this new system free trade was regulated "under a system of fixed exchange rates anchored by the US dollar's convertibility into gold at a fixed price. Fixed exchange rates were incompatible with free flows of capital".[26] (See also: Bretton Woods system) In addition, there was a worldwide acceptance that "the state should focus on full employment, economic growth, and the welfare of its citizens and that state power should be freely deployed, alongside of or, if necessary, intervening in or even substituting for market processes to achieve these ends".[26] He also states that this new system came to be referred to as "embedded liberalism" in order to "signal how market processes and entrepreneurial and corporate activities were surrounded by a web of social and political constraints and a regulatory environment that sometimes restrained but in other instances led the way in economic and industrial strategy".[27]
In 1960 Daniel Bell published a book, The End of Ideology, where he celebrated what he anticipated to be an enduring change, with extreme free market thinking permanently relegated to the fringe. He was wrong.[14] Harvey argues that while embedded liberalism led to the surge of economic prosperity which came to define the 1950s and 1960s, the system began to crack beginning in the late 1960s.[28] The 1970s were defined by an increased accumulation of capital, unemployment, inflation (or stagflation as it was dubbed), and a variety of fiscal crises.[28] He notes that "the embedded liberalism that had delivered high rates of growth to at least the advanced capitalist countries after 1945 was clearly exhausted and no longer working".[28] A number of theories concerning new systems began to develop, which led to extensive debate between those who advocated "social democracy and central planning on the one hand" and those "concerned with liberating corporate and business power and re-establishing market freedoms on the other".[29] Harvey notes that by 1980, the latter group had emerged as the leader, advocating and creating a global economic system that would become known as neoliberalism.[29]
Subsequent systems [ edit ]
After the transition period of the 1970s, the neoliberal era is commonly said to have begun at about 1980. Also referred to by economic historians as the Washington Consensus era, its emergence was marked by the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, and Ronald Reagan in the United States. While there was no attempt to revive the previous system of fixed exchange rates on a global scale, Neoliberalism upheld a similar commitment to free trade as had the previous era. Similar to the era of classical economic liberalism, neoliberalism involved the "dis-embedding" of markets - at a policy level some of the main changes involved pressure for governments to abolish their capital controls, and to refrain from economic interventions. Many of the institutions established in the previous era remained in place however, and free market ideology never became as influential as it had been during the peak years of classical liberalism. In a 1997 paper, Ruggie himself discussed how some of the protection gained for workers with the embedded liberal compromise still lived on, though he warned it was being eroded by the advance of market forces.[30]
In Britain and the United States, domestic free market reforms were pursued most aggressively from about 1980–85. Yet from a global perspective, the peak years of neoliberal influence were the 1990s.[31] After the 1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union, there was an acceleration of the pace at which countries throughout the world chose or were coerced into implementing free market reforms. In 1992, political scientist Francis Fukuyama suggested that free market capitalism coupled with liberal democracy may be a stable end point in human social evolution in the End of History and the Last Man.[14] Yet by 1999, various adverse economic events, most especially the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the harsh response by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), had already caused free-market policies to be at least partially discredited in the eyes of developing world policy makers, especially in Asia and South America.[32][33][10]
Post Washington consensus: mixed liberalisms, 2009 and later [ edit ]
In 2009, in the wake of the 2008 worldwide financial crisis, a number of journalists, politicians and senior officials from global institutions such as the World Bank began saying that the Washington Consensus was over.[34][35][36][37] As part of the 2008–2009 Keynesian resurgence, it briefly appeared that there might be a prospect of a return to embedded liberalism—there had been an upsurge in global collaboration by the world's policy makers, with several heads of state calling for a "New Bretton Woods". Yet by 2010 the short lived consensus for a return to Keynesian policy had fractured.[38] Economic historian Robert Skidelsky suggested it was too soon to identify the characteristics of the new global economic order. It may be that no single order will emerge; with the rise of the BRICs and other emerging economies, there is less scope for a single power to effectively set the rules for the rest of the world.[39]
As of late 2011, there had been some trends consistent with a move away from economic liberalism, including a growing acceptance for a return to the use of Capital controls, Macroprudential regulation and State capitalism.[40] On the other hand, China has been progressively liberating its capital account well into 2012, while in the United States the Tea party emerged as a powerful political force, with members who appear to be committed to a purer vision of the free market than has existed since the peak of classical liberalism in the 1840s.[41] George Monbiot said in 2013 that neoliberalism remained an influential ideology.[42] In 2011, professor Kevin Gallagher suggested that rather than being largely governed by a single ideology as had been the case for the previous eras, the newly emerging global order is influenced by "varieties of liberalism".[43]
See also [ edit ]
Notes and citations [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Cockett,, Richard (1995). Thinking the unthinkable: think-tanks and the economic counter-revolution, 1931-1983. Fontana Press. ISBN 0-00-637586-3.
Helleiner,, Eric (1995). States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8333-6.
Kathleen R McNamara (1999). The Currency of Ideas: Monetary Politics in the European Union (Cornell Studies in Political Economy). Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801486025.
Mark Blyth (2002). Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521010527.
Harvey, David (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Eirc Helleiner; Louis W Pauly; et al. (2005). John Ravenhill, ed. Global Political Economy. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-926584-4.
|
Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Outnumbered,” Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) declared that while he recognizes the plight African-Americans, he isn’t a fan of the so-called Black Lives Matter movement.
Paul said, “College should be the absolute place, people are not yet decided. This is a great place to have a discussion. And if you ban discussion on college campuses because its politically incorrect that is a problem.”
He continued, “I will also say I am very much— Well I am not a big fan of sort of Black Lives Matter because it sounds like only black lives matter, it should be every. But I am very much coming from a different place, I was middle-class, upper middle class, my dad is a physician. But I have learned lot about the anger in our cities and there is no justification for violence, but there is anger and we need to understand it.”
He added, “I story I tell is the story of Kalief Browder, who is a 16-year-old black kid from the Bronx who was arrested but never convicted of a crime and spend three years in Rikers. When I think of people angry in our cities I think of his family. He ended up committing suicide. He was in solitary confinement for two years, never convicted of a crime. When I think of his classmates or his family I think gosh if I was his friend I would be unhappy and anger at the system, at the man. I am starting to understand where the anger comes from a and we need to fix things as far as the law and criminal justice in our system because it isn’t being meted out fairly.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
|
So Fedora Workstation 21 is done and out and I am extremely pleased to see the positive reception and great reviews. But we are not resting on our laurels here and are already busy planning for the Fedora Workstation 22 release. As many of you might know Fedora Workstation 22 is going to come up relatively fast, so we only have about 6 more weeks of development on it feature the freezes starts to kick inn. Luckily we have a relatively long list of items that we started working on during the Fedora Workstation 21 cycle that is nearing completing and thus should make the next release. We are of course also working on bigger long term developments that you should maybe see the first outline of in Fedora 22, but not the final version. I thought it would be nice to summarize some of the bigger items we expect to land and link to the relevant blogs and announcements for each one.
Wayland
So first out is to give an update on our work on Wayland as I know that is something a lot of people are curios about. We are continuing to make great strides forward and recently hired Jonas Ådahl to the team who many might recognize as an active Wayland and libinput developer. He will be spearheading our overall Wayland effort as we are approaching the finish line. All in all things are looking good, we got a lot of the basic plumbing in place for Fedora Workstation 21, so most works these days is mostly focused on polish and cleanups. One of the bigger items is the migration to use libinput. libinput is a library we decided to create to be able to share input device handling between X and Wayland and thus make the transition smoother and lower our workload during the transition period. Libinput itself is getting very close to feature complete and they are even working on some new features for it now taking it beyond what was in X. Peter Hutterer recently released version 0.8 and we expect to have 1.0 out and in use for both X.org and Wayland in time for Fedora Workstation 22.
In parallel we are also working on porting the needed bits in GNOME over to use libinput and remove any lingering X dependencies, like the GNOME Control Center which should also be ready for Fedora Workstation 22.
Another major change related to Wayland in Fedora Workstation 22 is that we will switch the default backends in GTK+ and SDL over to using Wayland. Currently in Fedora Workstation 21 applications are actually running on top of XWayland, but in Fedora Workstation 22 at least GTK+ and SDL applications will be default to Wayland when run under the Wayland session.
The Wayland SDL backend has been around for quite a bit, but Jonas Ådahl plans on spending some time smoothing out the last rough edges, in fact for SDL applications we hope we can actually provide noticeable performance improvement over X in some cases (not because OpenGL will be faster of course, but because we might be able to be smarter about handling different resolutions between desktop and game), but we have to wait and see if that pans out or if we have to settle for performance parity with X. We are also looking at getting the login session to use Wayland by default. All in all this should take us a huge step forward towards making using Wayland feel real.
As it looks now Wayland should be quite close to what you would define as feature complete for Fedora Workstation 22, but one thing that is going to take longer to reach maturity is the support for binary drivers, especially the NVidia ones. This of course is a task that mostly falls on NVidia for natural reasons, but we are trying to help out by Adam Jackson working to making sure Mesa works with their proposed EGLStreams and OpenGL Dispatcher proposals. So during the course of the coming year we will likely have a situation that you will be able to have a production ready Wayland session if you are running any of the open source drivers, but if you want to run Wayland on top of the NVidia binary driver that is most likely to only really be possible towards the end of the year. That said this is a guesstimate from our side as how quick the heavy lifting will happen, and how quickly it will be released by NVidia for public consumption is of course all relying on internal plans and resources at NVidia and not something we control.
Battery life
One thing we know being developers ourselves and from speaking with developers about their operating system of choice, battery life is among the top 5 reasons for what choice people make about their hardware and software. Due to this Owen Taylor has been investigating for some time now both what solutions exist today, what other operating systems are doing and what approaches we can take to improve battery life. Because a common complaint we hear from a lot of people is that they don’t feel they get great battery life when running linux on their laptops currently. Some people are able to solve this using powertop, but we feel there are a lot of room for automatically give our users better battery life beyond manual tweaking user powertop.
Improving battery life is a complex issue in many ways, including figuring out how to measure battery life. I guess everyone has seen laptops advertised with X number of hours of battery life, but it is our impression that those numbers tend to be quite bogus even when running the bundled operating system. In some testing we done we concluded that the worst offenders numbers could only true if you left your laptop idle in the corner with the screen blacked out. So gnome-battery-bench will help us achieve a couple of things, it should generate comparable battery lifetime numbers which both should help our users choose the hardware that gives the best battery life under linux and it also lets us as developers keep tracking how changes affect battery life so that we can catch regressions for instance. It also lets us verify the effect various kernel tuneables or ambient light detection schemes have on battery life in a better way than we can with existing tools. We also hope to use this to work with vendors to improve the battery life of their hardware when running Fedora or RHEL. Anyway, I suggest reading Owens Taylors blog for some more details of his work on improving battery life..
One important effort we want to undertake here, which might not all make it for Fedora Workstation 22, is taking advantage of the ambient light detectors in many modern laptops. One of the biggest battery drains in your system is the screen brightness setting and by using the ambient light detection hardware we hope to be able to put in place some intelligent behavior for different situations. This is a hard problem though and it was attempted solved in GNOME before, but the end result back then was that people felt they where “fighting” GNOME over their laptop brightness settings, so in the end it was dropped completely, so we need to careful to not repeat that outcome.
Application bundles
Another major effort that is not going to ready for Fedora Workstation 22, but which we might have some preview of is Application bundles. Matthias Clasen recently sent out an email to the Fedora Desktop mailing list outlining the state of the application bundles work. This is a continuation of the Sandboxed Applications in GNOME proposal from Lennart Poettering. The effort is being spearheaded by Alexander Larsson and the goal is to build the infrastructure needed to do sandboxed desktop applications efficiently. There is a wiki page up already detailing Sandboxed Apps and there are some test applications already available. For instance you can grab an application bundle of Builder, the cool new IDE project from Christian Hergert. (Hint, make sure to support his Builder crowdfunding effort if you have not already.). Once this effort matures it will revolutionize how desktop applications are built and distributed. It should make life easier for application developers as these bundled applications are designed to be distribution agnostic and the sandboxing aspect should help improve security. Also the transition should put the application developers directly in charge of the update cycle of their applications enabling them to better support their users.
3rd Party Application handling
So the ever resourceful Richard Hughes has been working on adding support for handling 3rd party applications in GNOME Software. He outlined this effort in a recent blog post about GNOME Software.
While the end goal here it to offer 3rd party application bundles as described in the section above, the feature has also a lot of near term advantages. We have seen that over the course of the last years we moved from a model where you use your browser to search for software online to users expecting to find all software available for a system through its app store. With this 3rd party application support available in GNOME Software we can start working to make that expectation a reality also in Fedora. We took great strides forward in Fedora Workstation 21 with having metadata available for most of the standard applications packaged in Fedora, but there is also a lot of popular applications and other things out there that people tend to install and use which we for various reasons are not interested or able to ship in Fedora. The reason for this can range from licensing issues, to packaging issues to simply resource issues. With Richards work we will be able to make such software discoverable in Fedora, yet make a clear distinction between the software we have vetted and checked and the software you get from 3rd parties.
How to deal with 3rd party software has been a long and ongoing discussion in the Fedora community, and there are a lot of practical and principal details to deal with, but hopefully with this infrastructure in place it will be a lot easier to navigate those issues as people have something concrete to relate to instead of just abstract ideas and concepts.
One challenge for instance we have to figure out is that on one side we don’t want 3rd party software offered in Fedora to be some for of endorsement or sign of being somehow vetted by the Fedora Project on an ongoing basis, yet on the other side the list will most likely need to be based on some form of editorial process to for instance protect both Red Hat and Fedora from potential legal threats. I plan on sending an initial proposal to the Workstation Working Group soon for how this can work and once we hashed out the details there we will need to bring the Working groups proposal into the wider Fedora community as this also affects our Cloud and Server offering.
File Manager
A lot of people these days use Google Drive, be that personally or because their company has a corporate Google apps account. So to make life easier for our users we are making sure that Nautilus are able to treat your Google drive as just another drive on the system, letting you drag and drop files off or on it. We also dedicated some effort to clean up and modernize the file manager in general, with Carlos Soriano blogging about his efforts there just before Christmas. All in all I think these are improvements that should improve the life of our developer and sysadmin target audience, but of course they are also very useful improvements to the general linux using public.
Qt Theming
One of the things we had to postpone for Fedora Workstation 21 was the Adwaita theme for Qt applications. We are expecting it to hit Fedora Workstation 22 though and you can get the theme to install and test from Martin Briza copr repository. The end goal here is wether you run a pure Qt application like Skype or Scribus, or a KDE application like Krita or Amarok, you should get an Adwaita look and feel to the application. Of course desktop integration isn’t just about a theme, there is a reason the GNOME HIG exists, but this should be an improvement over the current situation. The theme currently targets Qt4, but of course Qt5 is also on the roadmap for a later release.
Further terminal improvements
As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry about Fedora Workstation we realize that the terminal is the most important application for many developers and sysadmins. So we are also hoping to land some more of the terminal improvements we been working on in Fedora Workstation 21. The notifications for long running jobs being maybe the thing I know a lot of developers are excited about getting their hands on. It will let you for instance start a long compile in a terminal and know that you will be notified once it is completed instead of having to manually check in from time to time.
More development tools
In my opinion the best IDE for Python development currently is PyCharm. And not only is it the best from a functionality standpoint they also decided to release an open source version last year. That said we have been struggling a bit with the packaging of PyCharm, and interestingly enough it is one of those applications I think will benefit greatly from the application bundle work we are doing, but in the meantime we at least do have a Copr of PyCharm available. It is still an open question, but we might make this CoPR one of our testcases for the 3rd party application support in GNOME Software as mentioned earlier. Anyway if you are a Python developer I strongly recommend taking a lot at it. Personally I looked at various Python IDEs over the years, but always ended up just going back to Gedit, but when trying PyCharm it was the first time I felt that the application actually offered me useful functionality beyond what a text editor like Gedit does. Also in recent versions they also deal well with the introspection based Python bindings for GTK3 which was a great boon for me.
We are also looking at improving the development story around Vagrant and doing Fedora and RHEL development, more details on that at a later point.
ABRT improvements
The ABRT tool has become a crucial development tool for us over the last couple of years. The Fedora Retrace server is one of our main tools
for prioritizing which bugs to look at first and a crucial part of our goal of making Fedora a solid
distribution. That said, especially its early days, ABRT has had its share of detractors and people
being a bit frustrated with it, so Bastien Nocera and Allan Day has been working with the ABRT team to both integrate
it further with the desktop, for instance ensuring that it follows your desktop wide privacy settings
and to make sure that the user experience of submitting a retrace report is as smooth and intuitive as possible
and not to mention as unobtrusive as possible, for instance you don’t want ABRT to choke your system while trying to generate
a stack trace for us. The Fedora Workstation Tasklist contains links to bugzilla and github so you can track their progress.
Still a lot to do!
So making our vision for the Fedora Workstation come through takes of course a lot of effort from a lot of people. And we are really lucky to be part of such a great community where so much cool stuff is happening all the time. I mean the Builder effort from Christian Hergert as I talked about earlier is one of them, but there are so many other things happening too. So if you want to get involved take a look at our tasklist and see if there is anything that interests you or for that matter if there is something that you think should be worked on, but isn’t on the list yet. Then come join us either on #fedora-workstation on the freenode IRC network or join the fedora-desktop mailing list.
|
General Electric has joined its energy-efficiency and distributed-power technologies with its industrial internet platform to create a new grid edge company, Current.
Current combines GE’s commercial and industrial LED lighting, solar, energy storage and electric-vehicle businesses with the predictive analytics of its industrial internet platform, Predix, to provide one-stop shopping for customers looking to solve increasingly complex energy problems.
“Customers are asking for more help,” said Maryrose Sylvester, CEO of Current and former president and CEO of GE Lighting. “They’re looking for someone who can look horizontally across their business and can do the hard work for them.”
GE is pitching Current as a startup, but it brings together existing businesses that have more than $1 billion in revenue and is supported by one of the largest corporations in the world.
Yet Current is meant to have a startup mentality, and be more flexible and nimble than its parent company. At the same time, it is backed by deep pockets that can offer customers various financing options.
“It's a sign of the times that GE has created a specific focus on an integrated offering, one that has the ability to marry technology with digital analytics to engage end-use customers in actually becoming active grid participants at the grid edge," said Steve Propper, director of grid edge at GTM Research.
A large piece of the $90 billion left in GE Capital after it was dismantled earlier this year has migrated to Current. GE had been separately tweaking and incubating various technologies, such as its LED business, which was run separately within GE Lighting, and Predix, which was officially launched earlier this year. Now, these pieces will be merged to support customers looking to innovate at the grid edge, whether C&I customers, municipalities or utilities.
First focus on C&I
Early customers, including Walgreens, Simon Property Group, Hilton, JPMorgan Chase, Hospital Corporation of American and Intel, are mostly in the commercial sector.
"There's an increasing recognition in the market that large customers and other heavy consumers of energy can actually be leveraged as a grid asset, rather than a challenge, and create new revenue streams for themselves, utilities and grid operators," said Propper.
Walgreens had already worked with GE Lighting for years and was looking for more ways to incorporate clean energy and leverage lighting networks for advanced applications using lighting-as-a-service. Current and Walgreens will be testing applications such as pushing offers to customers in stores and keeping track of stock.
“It is important that we continue to find innovative, sustainable technology and explore ways to leverage software platforms like GE’s Predix to assess our energy needs and increase efficiency,” Matt Harris, divisional VP of facilities asset management for Walgreens, said in a statement.
The applications might be different for each customer, but the ultimate goal is to have something that looks like a Predix app store that can serve various sectors from healthcare to municipalities to retail.
The pilots have also produced varied flavors of financing, said Sylvester, adding that Current can “do it all.” For cash-strapped municipalities, that might be entire projects done turnkey with service models, or loans for companies that want to own energy assets and pay-as-you-go software licenses.
The challenge of cities
As Current looks to realize revenue from Predix, it will need customers that have “champions at every level” for this type of investment. Municipalities, for example, are a huge opportunity, but the company will have "to really help them be their dot-connectors,” said Sylvester.
At Lightfair earlier this year, GE was just one company pushing the city of the future with endless apps on top of LED networks. The problem is many cities have siloed budgets, and many municipal agencies are just trying to keep up with daily requirements and are not thinking about the potential cross-agency benefits of a networked city. GE hopes its pilot in San Diego, with thousands of LED streetlights and 50 intelligent nodes, will help to change that.
Many vendors are offering more layered services for cities, universities and large corporations. Silver Spring and Acuity have a partnership to bring networked streetlights to cities and utilities. There is overlap, as well: both Acuity and GE Ventures are investors in Sensity Systems, a smart-lighting platform that also works with Cisco.
GE is confident that Current can help cities navigate their energy future, and additional applications, in a way that other companies with less robust offerings cannot. “This is a new kind of energy company,” said Sylvester. “We can touch [our customers] at the highest level down to operations.”
Eventually, Current also expects to serve utilities, especially those that are trying to offer more robust energy services to their customers. "I think we have this real opportunity to partner with utilities in this period of great change and disruption to help them," said Sylvester. At the time of launch, however, Current was not working directly with any utilities.
|
Attend a Christian church service anywhere in the world this Sunday and take a look around at who’s sitting in the seats.
What will you see?
Almost certainly, more women than men. Women with husbands and families, but also married women attending without their husbands, widowed women, and single women, both young and old. You likely won’t see any husbands who are attending without their wives, or very many single guys.
Among the men who are in attendance, you’ll probably notice a couple of characteristics: First, many of the men who are there will be present in body only; you won’t see them singing and they’ll be paying more attention to their phones than the pastor. Second, you’ll observe that the majority of the males adhere to a certain type: white collar, sensitive-seeming, and unfit (either very thin or overweight) — fellows you’d categorize as “nice guys.” You’ll see only a few men who seem to work with their hands, or who you’d describe as athletic, virile, earthy, tough, or rugged.
Pew Research has found that, on average, Christian congregants across the world skew about 53% female, 46% male. In the U.S., surveys show a split that’s even wider: 61% women to 39% men (the gap occurs in every age category, and is thus not due to the fact that women live longer than men). In sheer numbers, what this means is that on any given Sunday in America, there are 13 million more women than men attending church.
In a few Christian churches, the ratio of women to men is close to equal; in others it’s a yawning 10 to 1. The gender disparity is greater in smaller, older, rural, and more liberal mainline churches, and lesser in larger, urban, more conservative, and non-denominational churches, but it shows up in every country, amongst Protestants and Catholics alike, and bypasses no denomination (with the possible exception of Eastern and Greek Orthodox); only 2% of Christian congregations in the U.S. do not have a gender gap.
Men are not only less likely to attend church, they are also less likely to participate in their faith in other ways. According to Pew Research, Christian women are 7% more likely than men to say religion is important to them. And as David Murrow records in his book, Why Men Hate Going to Church, research conducted by George Barna found that women are far more likely to be involved with their church and faith on nearly every level, to the tune of:
57 percent more likely to participate in adult Sunday school
56 percent more likely to hold a leadership position at a church (not including the role of pastor)
54 percent more likely to participate in a small group
46 percent more likely to disciple others
39 percent more likely to have a devotional time or quiet time
33 percent more likely to volunteer for a church
29 percent more likely to read the Bible
29 percent more likely to share faith with others
23 percent more likely to donate to a church
16 percent more likely to pray
Barna summed up his findings thusly: “Women are the backbone of the Christian congregations in America.”
So what accounts for this disparity between men’s and women’s commitment to the Christian faith?
You may be tempted to chalk it up to the fact that women are just generally more religious than men. Which is true. Across all religions and around the world, women are 13% more likely than men to say that religion is “very important” in their lives. Several theories, from the biological to the cultural, have been forwarded by researchers to explain this gap, and among the masses, plenty of armchair analysts posit that women are simply more inherently moral or “spiritual” than men.
Yet women’s greater religiosity across all faiths doesn’t at all explain the gender gap within Christianity itself. For as it turns out, it’s the only major world religion with a significant gender disparity among its adherents. Women are only more religiously inclined when surveys of Christians are averaged with those of Hinduism, Buddhism, Orthodox Judaism, and Islam — faiths in which the religious commitment of their male and female members is close to equal.
For example, according to the Pew Research Center, while Christian men participate to a lesser extent in every area of their faith, the commitment of Muslim men and women to their religion is nearly identical, except in one facet — Muslim men are a third more likely to attend services than women. Muslim men and women pray at almost exactly the same rate, and are just as likely to say their religion is important to them.
So it isn’t true that men are less interested than women in all religions — they’re just especially indifferent to the Christian faith.
Again, we return to the question: Why?
Why does a religion started by a carpenter and his twelve male comrades attract more women than men? Christian churches are led predominately by men (95% of Protestant senior pastors and 100% of Catholic clergy are male) and are criticized by feminists as bastions of male patriarchy, power, and privilege; so why is the laity paradoxically composed largely of women?
Was there ever a time when the gender ratio of Christianity was equal? And if so, why did a disparity between male and female adherents develop?
Among men who are committed Christians, why do they seem to be more effeminate, on average, than the male population as a whole? As Murrow puts it, what is it about “Christianity, especially Western Christianity, that drives a wedge between the church and men who want to be masculine”?
These are fascinating questions, certainly for Christians who have noticed this phenomenon themselves and for pastors of churches who are concerned about the health of their congregations (as we’ll see, there’s a strong connection between the number of men in a church’s pews and its vitality).
But it’s also a fascinating subject for anyone interested in the influence of economics and sociology on religion, and who understand the enormous influence religion has had and continues to have on Western culture in general, and conceptions of manhood in particular.
So over the next several weeks, we’ll be offering two articles that explore possible answers to the above questions. First, we’ll outline various theories as to how, when, and why Christianity became feminized and unattractive to many men. We’ll then delve into the history of a time in which there emerged a dedicated response and effort to revive the masculinity of the faith — a movement that went by the name of “Muscular Christianity.”
Stay tuned.
Read the Series
Christianity’s Manhood Problem: An Introduction
Is Christianity an Inherently Feminine Religion?
The Feminization of Christianity
When Christianity Was Muscular
_____________
Sources:
Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow
The Church Impotent by Leon J. Podles
Tags: christianity
|
A leader of the ruling party in Pakistan has reportedly denied that the United States has provided about $30 billion in American taxpayer funds for security and economic aid to Pakistan since the war started in neighboring Afghanistan 16 years ago.
“It’s not billions of dollars, it is peanuts,” claimed Chaudhry Nisar, a Pakistani lawmaker who until recently served as the country’s interior minister, reports Dawn.
He urged Islamabad to carry out an audit of U.S. aid it has received in the last decade.
Since the war in neighboring Afghanistan broke out in October 2001, the United States has provided “nearly $30 billion” in American taxpayer money for security and economic aid to Pakistan, revealed the U.S. National Defense and Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2015.
Nisar argued that the United States has provided funds to its Coalition Support Fund (CSF) for “services rendered by Pakistan” in the fight against Islamic terrorism.
“If our bill [for military services] is $500 million, they [US] sit on it for months … and end up giving us $200 million,” complained the Pakistani politician.
CSF refers to U.S. aid that is eligible to be used to reimburse coalition partners for logistical and military support to American military operations.
In recent years, the United States has withheld millions of dollars in reimbursement payments to Pakistan, with plans to cut more, over its refusal to take action against the Afghan Taliban and its ally the Haqqani Network.
Most recently, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration decided to cut about $50 million in 2016 CFS payments to Pakistan.
The Trump administration has also decided to withhold $400 million in 2017 CFS funds to Pakistan, according to the NDAA for that year.
In total, the U.S. has provided $14 billion in CFS funds alone to Pakistan, reported the Washington Post, citing the Pentagon.
While announcing his Afghan war strategy last week, U.S. President Donald Trump acknowledged recently that the United States has been “paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars” while the Muslim country has been “housing the very terrorists we are fighting” in neighboring Afghanistan.
The leader of the ruling PML (N) party in Pakistan, Nisar, denounced Trump’s accusation that Islamabad is providing shelter to Islamic terrorists, echoing other officials from his country.
Last week, President Trump accused Pakistan of providing “safe havens to agents of chaos and terror,” to the ire of Islamabad.
|
photo via SWNS
Back in June 2012, an Irish man named Andrew Shannon walked into the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and punched a hole in an $11 million painting by Claude Monet. The painting, entitled Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat, was badly torn in the incident. After the attack, museum conservators undertook an extraordinarily complex 18-month restoration of the painting. In addition to stabilizing the damage and ultimately glueing the work back together, the conservators had to research and replicate Monet’s painting technique, and reattach tiny flecks of paint that were recovered at the scene of the attack. The museum has documented the endeavor in an online feature.
In July 2014, the restored painting was put back on display at the National Gallery of Ireland. At the end of 2014, Shannon was sentenced to six years in prison for the attack. Incredibly, he is now on trial for a second attack, in which he is accused of destroying two paintings at a hotel in Ireland.
The painting was removed from public display and taken into the conservation studio for treatment. It was laid flat and stabilised from the front and back. Conservators removed the painting from its frame and documented any changes to the condition of the object. Photo via National Gallery of Ireland
Repair work to the damaged NGI canvas was carried out on the back of the painting. Before turning the painted side down onto the cushioned working surface, a temporary cover was applied to protect the vulnerable paint surface. Photo via National Gallery of Ireland
The process of tear repair involved flattening, aligning and rejoining the edges of the torn canvas. Initially the canvas was relaxed using localised application of moisture and gentle weighting for short intervals – training it to remain flat again. With the aid of a high-powered microscope and appropriately small tools, the tear edges were carefully aligned thread-by-thread. Re-joining of the realigned, broken canvas fibres involved applying a specially formulated adhesive to achieve a strong but reversible bond between the thread ends. Photo via National Gallery of Ireland
Tiny areas of paint loss (where fragments could not be reinserted) were filled with a reversible material made from chalk and a low percentage solution of animal gelatine glue. This material termed gesso, was pigmented to match the colour of the original priming layer. Photo via National Gallery of Ireland
via Hyperallergic, Gizmodo
|
A
askaradfem:
The definition of rape seems to be subjective these days. I personally do not believe it is possible for a woman to rape a man, since I define rape as sexual male violence done to females, involving penile penetration orally,vaginally,or anally. Since women don’t have penises, by this definition they cannot rape…unless you’d go out of your way to use a foreign object. But even then I am conflicted, because the term rape also carries a historical context, in which rape has been, as is still largely used a tool by men to keep women subordinate, take away their autonomy, dehumanize them, impregnate, spread disease etc. Rape is used as a weapon during times of war, in which historically more women are killed during the organized mass rapes then the men who die in combat. I cannot apply a vise versa analysis to a highly gendered issue. Sexual assault would be a more appropriate term in my opinion. That would still be considered wrong and unacceptable. -Ana
Considering statutory rape is a thing, and erections being involuntary it’s entirely possible for women to rape men under the influence too. It doesn’t happen nearly as much but to effectively erase male survivors of female abuse assumes there are no women out there with bad intentions or that women are incapable of doing bad things. Although it is heavily gendered we still have to respect male victims of female violence and abuse on an individual level and treat perps the same, or else what we have been saying about our desire to eradicate rape by making it some lesser offense just seems shady to me. My two cents.
|
Story highlights Canada pledged to increase defense spending from $18.9 billion in 2016-2017 to $32.7 billion in 2026
President Trump has repeatedly slammed NATO allies for not spending enough on defense
(CNN) Canada has pledged to increase defense spending by over 70% in a move praised by senior US and NATO officials.
Canada's defense minister Harjit Sajjan said the increase followed "years of underinvestment," and would boost annual defense spending from $18.9 billion in Canadian dollars in 2016-2017 to $32.7 billion in 2026.
(That's the equivalent of an increase from $13.99 billion in the US to $24.2 billion.)
In a statement, Canada's chief of the defense staff, Gen. Jonathan Vance, said the funding boost "represents a significant investment in our future," and said it would allow the Canadian military to "remain a flexible, responsive, combat-capable force that is prepared to deploy anywhere in the world."
"We must be ready to operate in multiple theaters at any given time," Vance added.
Read More
|
Cam Cameron had called the offensive shots for the Ravens since 2008. (Photo11: Patrick Semansky, AP) Story Highlights Caldwell, a former head coach, to get first crack at playcalling gig
The Baltimore Ravens have fired offensive coordinator Cam Cameron and will replace him with quarterbacks coach Jim Caldwell.
The Ravens are ranked 18th in total yardage and ninth in scoring, but it obviously isn't good enough for head coach John Harbaugh.
WORKING OVERTIME TO LOSE: Ravens crumble vs. Redskins
"My charge — our responsibility as a coaching staff — is to maximize the opportunities for our team to win, and we can still reach all of our goals for this season," Harbaugh said, per the team's website.
"With our coaches and players, the solution is in the building. We are going to make the most of our opportunities going forward, and this change gives us a better possibility to achieve our goals."
Quarterback Joe Flacco has thrown for fewer than 200 yards in three of the last four games and six times this season. And there's been plenty of consternation about the perceived lack of touches Cameron has gotten running back Ray Rice, who is on pace for 268 carries and 64 receptions, off from his totals of 291 rushing attempts and 76 catches last season.
The reeling Ravens have lost two straight and will face the Denver Broncos at home Sunday in Caldwell's first game as coordinator. It'll be Caldwell's first stint as an NFL coordinator. He's been either a head coach, quarterbacks coach or wide receivers coach in his 35-year career.
|
Image caption Mr Saber had already served several jail terms since 2000
Jailed Iranian journalist and veteran activist Hoda Saber has died of a heart attack after going on hunger strike.
Mr Saber, who was in his 50s, began his strike on 2 June to protest about the death of fellow opposition figure Haleh Sahabi, during an incident at the funeral of her activist father.
Mr Saber was jailed after the disputed 2009 elections that saw President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad re-elected.
He had also served several prison terms since 2000.
The opposition website Kaleme.com said: "Security forces on Friday transferred him from Evin prison to Modarres hospital due to cardiac complication induced by his hunger strike.
"But the damage of the cardiac complication... was too severe."
Haleh Sahabi, 55, died on 1 June during a confrontation with security forces at the funeral of her father, Ezatollah Sahabi.
She had been allowed out of prison to attend the ceremony. There are reports that she was hit by security forces and died of a heart attack.
Iranian officials denied any clashes with security had taken place at his funeral.
Ezatollah Sahabi, a leading dissident, died of stroke on 30 May at the age of 81.
|
Friday’s jobs report was a reasonably strong one, economically speaking. The economy added 171,000 jobs in October, according to the government’s survey of business establishments. In addition, estimates of jobs growth were revised upward for August and September.
The unemployment rate, which is calculated through a separate survey of households, ticked up to 7.9 percent. But this was because it was estimated that more workers, 578,000, entered the labor force in October, outweighing what it said were 410,000 people who found jobs.
Is the report good enough to have an impact on the waning days of the campaign? There is a dispute in the political science literature about whether voters react to underlying economic conditions, or rather, to the news media’s coverage of the economy.
If it’s the real-world conditions that count, the actual act of the government publishing the jobs figures is unimportant. People will already have observed local economic conditions and incorporated them into their decision of who they might vote for.
Indeed, measures of subjective economic attitudes, like consumer confidence, have shown more strength in the last two months, suggesting that the public has already “priced in” the idea that the economy is slowly returning back to normal.
If the news coverage matters instead, and perceptions are more important than the reality on the ground, then a report with good headline numbers (for example, the one last month, which had unemployment dropping to 7.8 percent) will have more impact than one where the strength is in the fine print (as it was in this latest report). Furthermore, it could matter which other stories the economic news is competing against. Right now, we’re already in a very busy news cycle, between Hurricane Sandy and the end of the presidential campaign.
These ideas are not mutually exclusive, of course. It’s very likely that both the reporting on the economy, and actual conditions on the ground, matter to some degree.
In this case, however, neither would be suggestive of much last-minute political impact. Subjective perceptions of the economy, and the statistical data we have about it, already seemed to have been roughly in line with one another. And the headline numbers in this jobs report were not quite strong enough to break through and dominate the news coverage over the final weekend.
This may be a case of two wrongs making a right. This report is a little stronger than it appears, but reporters also tend to over-interpret the meaning of the monthly swings in the jobs numbers, which are subject to a fair amount of statistical error.
Still, this month’s numbers are part of a longer-term story. With the relatively strong October numbers, and the upward revisions to August and September, the economy has now created an average of 157,000 jobs per month so far this year. This may be a slight underestimate, in fact. The government has announced, but not yet officially incorporated into the numbers, its estimates of annual benchmark revisions, which would add to the jobs numbers in January through March.
Those revisions would bring average jobs growth throughout the year to about 165,000 jobs per month.
In February, just before the jobs figures for January were announced, we published a simple statistical projection that forecast how the election would turn out based on President Obama’s approval ratings at that time, and the jobs numbers over the rest of the year.
Our conclusion was 150,000 represented the over-under line. If more than 150,000 jobs were created per month, then Mr. Obama would be a favorite for re-election, other factors being equal. Below that threshold, then he would be an underdog.
The actual numbers have come in just slightly ahead of the 150,000-job benchmark, it turns out, suggesting that Mr. Obama might be favored to win re-election, but is not a lock to do so.
And that’s pretty much what we’re seeing in the polls. There is not much time for the polls to change, and if they are right, Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. But Mr. Obama’s advantage is marginal enough that Mitt Romney could win if the polls miss a couple of points high on Mr. Obama in the swing states.
What this jobs report perhaps does do is remove Mr. Romney’s best opportunity to shift the polls in his direction before the election. We’re very likely to wake up on Tuesday knowing that the polls have Mr. Obama as the Electoral College favorite. We’ll have to wait until Tuesday night (or longer) to know whether the polls have it right.
But if they do, and Mr. Obama wins narrowly, the outcome will be broadly in line with what the jobs numbers predict.
|
Alberta’s ethics commissioner is urging a change to provincial laws to ban politicians from accepting any hospitality gifts from lobbyists that exceed $100.
Marguerite Trussler says a cap tied to events or food is easy to understand and to enforce.
“That leaves nothing to interpretation,” Trussler said Tuesday to an all-party legislature committee tasked with recommending changes to election, campaign and conflict-of-interest rules.
“You know the exact amount. And it does allow lobbyists to still offer modest hospitality to members.”
Currently, politicians can accept gifts worth up to $200 each, along with event invitations up to a maximum of $400 a year. The ethics commissioner can also approve event invites over the $400.
In her written submission to the committee, Trussler said three out of every four calls she gets from MLAs on gifts relate to lobbyists.
“Directly excluding giving of more expensive gifts by lobbyists would go a long way toward reducing perceptions that members are being, or are able to be, influenced by lobbyists,” she wrote.
The current gift rules raised questions under the former Progressive Conservative government, before Trussler’s tenure, when government members were given the green light for everything from fishing trips to rounds of golf to helicopter rides and hotel rooms, paid for by companies.
Trussler noted the $100 limit would still allow for “meet-and-greet” events followed by lunch or light dinner.
“For the most part, lobbyists seeking the attention of individual members should be meeting with them in their offices.”
The cap is one of many suggestions made by Trussler to the Select Special Ethics and Accountability Committee, which will have its recommendations eventually submitted for debate in the legislature.
Trussler also recommended that a one-year cooling-off period for former cabinet ministers be doubled to two years before they can take jobs as lobbyists.
“A one-year cooling-off period is too short as former ministers still have considerable contacts and influence within their former departments,” Trussler wrote.
She also said that, to avoid conflicts of interest, former cabinet ministers should be required to get approval from the ethics commissioner before accepting any job during the cooling-off period.
Trussler also said her office needs more freedom to inform the public when and why it is working on an investigation.
And she said it needs access to documents otherwise protected under legal privilege.
There is a way to balance the confidentiality of such documents while also making them available to investigators, she said, citing the recent case of former premier Alison Redford.
In 2010, Redford was in charge of the Justice Department when it awarded a contract to sue Big Tobacco to a firm that included her ex-husband.
Then-ethics commissioner Neil Wilkinson cleared Redford of conflict of interest, but the case was reopened after it was discovered that Wilkinson did not have access to documents protected under solicitor-client privilege.
British Columbia’s conflict-of-interest commissioner is now reviewing the Redford file.
|
Hoboken Originals explores the survivors of a neighborhood in transition. Through the eyes of the old establishment family business owners and workers, I aim to better understand what defines a neighborhoods identity or uniqueness.
With these portraits I aim to reflect and celebrate a community’s distinct character. Hoboken, New Jersey charmed me when I first moved here in the winter of 2007. Sitting in the shadow of Manhattan, Hoboken is only a mile square and has a long and proud history. I grew particularly fond of the old Mom & Pop shops that I encountered. Many of these establishments have existed for generations and within their walls I found a quiet contemplation of a cherished history.
Hoboken’s older family businesses are succumbing to the changing economy and are closing their doors. They are inevitably being replaced by the ever ubiquitous national chain store.
A recurring theme of my photography is the effort to record what is vanishing from our collective memory – a way of living, a tradition, or trade. I try to capture the fleeting present so that we can honor that which is deeply rooted in our past. —John Delaney
|
Someone at Activision thought it would be a good idea to hand out $200 editions of the next Call of Duty game to the first 500 people who could get to the game's booth at the Milan Games Week. No other rules. Just get there first. Surprise: it was not a good idea.
Not sure what the organisers were thinking, but accounts from the showroom floor say that after a civil enough start, as the crowd got bigger hundreds of people went crazy, rushing the booth. In the process, they trashed the thing, so badly that it had to be closed down.
A reporter from Italy's Il Messaggero newspaper was there, and says that while caught in the crowd they were kicked, shoved and slapped.
You can see some of the resulting damage in the clip below.
GamesWeek 2013, la febbre di Call of Duty: Ghosts Prestige Edition danneggia lo stand [Il Messaggero, via Go Nintendo]
|
The Democratic state representative in Maine who threatened President Trump's life in a Facebook post earlier this week has since apologized in a follow-up post.
State Rep. Scott Hamann said his Tuesday night comment that Trump would not make it through his first term in office if he ever encountered the president was "aggressively sarcastic" and "inappropriate."
"This is not language I typically use, it does not reflect my personal values and, while misguided, it was intended to make a visceral point about the devolving political discourse in America," Hamann said in the private post, according to a local news outlet.
In the original post, Hamann called a "childhood friend" who disagreed with him about Trump a "fucking pussy."
"See, it's not only Trump supporters who can talk like complete assholes," Hamann wrote in a lengthy comment on someone's post. "As long as that's what's coming out of that side, then I'll match you dumb fucks word for word. Trump is a half term president, at most, especially if I ever get within 10 feet of that pussy."
The Maine GOP provided the Washington Examiner with a screenshot of a private conversation between Hamann and a man named Keith. Hamann alleged he would take legal action against the other man for possibly reporting the abusive content.
"If your feelings were hurt by a conversation between two friends, then don't read. And if anything negative comes from your attack on my employment, my attorney will be in touch. Cease and desist," Hamann wrote.
Bangor Daily News said Secret Service has not launched an investigation into Hamann.
|
BUCKS COUNTY, Pa. (CBS)—A scathing report released on Wednesday by authorities in Bucks County details more than 50 years of sexual abuse within a Pennsylvania school.
According to the Bucks County District Attorney, the incidents happened from the 1950s through 2005 at the Solebury School—a college preparatory school for 7th- through 12th-grade boarding and day students.
For decades, it’s alleged that students as young as 14 were lured into sexual relationships on and off the school’s 90-acre campus.
In the grand jury report made public today, one witness recounts a time when she alerted school administrators about having sex with a teacher, but administrators did nothing beyond telling the teacher and student to stop having contact with each other.
District Attorney Matthew Weintraub says the relaxed environment of the school allowed students and teachers to mingle inappropriately while the administrators turned a blind eye.
DA on campus culture: one case at Solsbury School a nude art class model did not show up so the teacher stripped down and served as model — Alexandria Hoff (@AlexandriaHoff) February 1, 2017
“It was culturally accepted at this school that if you were employed there it was OK if you wanted to have sexual relations with your students. There were no lines of authority,” Weintraub told CBS 3’s Alexandria Hoff.
Weintraub also said in a statement, “Solebury School violated this social compact for over 50 years. Its prior administrations practiced willful blindness while its teachers took advantage of the parents’ trust and violated the children in their care. Preying on these children was like shooting fish in a barrel. This was child predation under the guise of progressive education. It’s unconscionable.”
Authorities say in 1996, teacher David Chadwick was arrested by Solebury Township police on charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a child under 16.
The victim, who was a former student, alleges she and Chadwick had sex throughout her sophomore year from 1993-1994.
Chadwick later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one to three years in prison.
Other incidents released in the report detail testimony from some of the victims who have come forward.
A retired social worker claims she was lured into a sexual relationship by her teacher from her junior year until she was 22. Now, 77, she says the sexual abuse required her to be in therapy most of her life.
In another incident, a male teacher allegedly took a male student off campus to a house of a school volunteer where he was drugged and raped. Now, 62, the victim says he needed surgery from injuries due rectal damage.
Authorities say in each of the abuse cases, the former students said that school administrators knew about the illegal relationships but refused to discipline their staff.
The grand jury has found each of the victim witnesses to be credible and has identified nine teachers who could have been prosecuted, but due to statute of limitations, the time frame in which the accused could be prosecuted has expired.
“Since they are serving a life sentence, we should be able to prosecute the perpetrators for the rest of their lives as well,” Weintraub said.
Weintraub details a most recent case involving a 17-year-old’s sexual relationship with a teacher. But the victim has declined to prosecute the teacher because she doesn’t want to “relive the abuse and testify in open court.”
While not in leadership at the time of the crimes, the school’s current headmaster, Tom Wilschultz, admits the school is guilty and has instituted new policies to prevent this type of activity.
In order to further protect students, Wilschultz has implemented a strong policy for reporting allegations of sexual misconduct and holds annual instruction and training in setting boundaries with students.
In 2014, Wilschultz issued a mass mailing telling the community of the allegations against the school and acknowledged fault.
The grand jury says more must be done, adding that teachers need to be tested for drugs and alcohol, security needs to be increased and administrators should be immediately fired when there is a founded allegation.
|
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday announced his intention to “surround the entire State of Israel with a fence,” including sealing off openings in the West Bank security barrier.
Speaking during a tour of the Jordan border area in the south, Netanyahu said the extensive project would also address the potential threat of cross-border tunnels into Israeli territory.
“If you’re thinking of erecting a fence there you have to take into account that they could tunnel underneath it,” Netanyahu said. “The people who said that there is no significance to [retaining] territory in the modern age should go to Gaza.”
Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up
In its 2014 conflict with Israel, the Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas, as well as firing thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israel, used a network of subterranean passages to infiltrate Israeli territory, launch attacks and in one case, during fighting inside Gaza, kidnap the body of an IDF soldier.
“In our neighborhood, we need to protect ourselves from the predatory animals,” Netanyahu said in an apparent reference to extremist Islamist movements.
Unlike the borders with Egypt and Jordan, where both sides of the fence are in relatively open areas, Netanyahu hinted at potential problems implementing a reinforced barrier in West Bank “where you have built up areas, buildings along the separation line.”
But, the prime minister added, Israel is “formulating a plan to seal off the openings in the security fence in the West Bank.”
“At the end of the day, in the State of Israel as I see it, there will be a fence like this one [the border fence with Jordan currently under construction] surrounding its entirety…We will surround the entire State of Israel with a fence, a barrier.”
Netanyahu called the border project a part of a “multi-year plan to surround the entire State of Israel with security fences to protect ourselves in the current and projected Middle East.”
The project, which is also set to include a new fence along the border with the Gaza Strip, will cost “many billions,” he said.
Last month, construction began on a long security fence along the Jordanian border, Israel’s only internationally recognized frontier currently without a full barrier.
In accordance with a 2015 government decision, approximately 30 kilometers (18 miles) of fence is initially being built, from the southernmost resort town of Eilat to beyond a new international airport currently under construction in the Timna Valley. This portion of the project is expected to be completed by the end of the year, and will cost approximately NIS 300 million ($77 million), which will be drawn from the Defense Ministry budget.
In 2013, Israel completed a five-meter-high barbed wire fence along its border with Sinai, seeking to prevent terror groups, drug smugglers and African migrants from infiltrating Israeli territory from the Egyptian peninsula.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
|
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Ayalon meets with South African DFA D-G Matjila, 2009
Israel–South Africa relations refer to the current and historic relationship between the Republic of South Africa and the State of Israel.
Early Israeli relations with apartheid South Africa [ edit ]
South Africa was among the 33 states that voted in favour of the 1947 UN Partition Plan,[1] recommending the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, and was one of only four Commonwealth nations to do so. On 24 May 1948,[2] nine days after Israel's declaration of independence, the South African government of Jan Smuts, a long-time supporter of Zionism, granted de facto recognition to the State of Israel, just two days before his United Party was voted out of office and replaced by the pro-apartheid National Party. South Africa was the seventh nation to recognise the new Jewish state. On 14 May 1949, South Africa granted de jure recognition to the State of Israel.[3]:109–111[4] The Israeli interest in South Africa sprang in part from the presence of about 110,000 Jews in South Africa, a figure which included more than 15,000 Israeli citizens.[5]
Blossoming of relations [ edit ]
"For years, Israel's policy toward South Africa was one of deliberate ambiguity - publicly condemning apartheid, while privately maintaining a pragmatic and mutually beneficial array of commercial and military ties." — The New York Times 1987[6]
Diplomatic relations between Israel and South Africa began in 1949, when Israel established a consulate-general in Pretoria,[3]:110 which was raised to the status of a legation in November 1950.[7] However, South Africa had no direct diplomatic representation in Israel (it being represented by the United Kingdom) until South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1961, whereupon it sent a consul-general to Tel Aviv.[8] South African Prime Minister D.F. Malan first visited Israel in 1953.[9]
In the 1950s and 1960s, Israel had prioritized building relations with the newly independent states of sub-Saharan Africa; this, in turn, led it to take a critical stance on the question of apartheid. Israel joined in condemning apartheid at the United Nations and voted to enforce sanctions against South Africa.[10] On October 11, 1961, Israel voted for the General Assembly censure of Eric Louw's speech defending apartheid.[11][12] Israel became one of a few nations to have strong relations with apartheid South Africa.[13] However, in 1963, Israel informed the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid that it had taken steps to comply with the military boycott of apartheid South Africa and had recalled its ambassador to South Africa.[12][14] Israeli leaders publicly condemned apartheid throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, although it maintained contact with South Africa through a low-level diplomatic mission in Pretoria and through France, a mutual ally.[15] The South African Jewish Board of Deputies feared an anti-Semitic backlash if Israel did not maintain good terms with the present government.[16] However, Israel continued to criticize apartheid and seek closer relations with black African nations, but an anti-Semitic backlash never occurred.[17] Israel regularly voted against South Africa's apartheid policies at the United Nations.[18] After Israel voted in favor of economic and diplomatic sanctions against South Africa, Israeli lawmakers overwhelming approved the vote at the Knesset by a vote of 63-11, with 13 abstentions.[19]
Israel continued a policy of active friendship with black Africa throughout the 1960s and offered technical and economic aid.[10] After 1967, Israel's attempted alliances with newly independent African states had, in most assessments, failed. As a final expression of this strategy, in 1971, Israel offered $2,850 in aid to the Organization of African Unity's fund for liberation movements,[10] which was rejected, but not before reportedly irking the South African government.[20]
Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War and subsequent occupation of the Sinai and West Bank alienated it diplomatically from much of the Third World and African states. Black nationalist movements then began to see it as a colonial state.[21] At the same time, in South Africa, Israel became the object of widespread admiration, particularly among the country's political and military leadership. The editorial of Die Burger, then the mouthpiece of the South African Nationalist Party, declared: "Israel and South Africa are engaged in a struggle for existence... The anti-Western powers have driven Israel and South Africa into a community of interests which had better be utilized than denied."[15] In 1973, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) instituted an oil embargo against Western nations as way of punishing them for supporting Israel; in doing so, OPEC sought support from other international groups to strengthen its impact. Arab states and black African nations formed a working alliance at the United Nations that sought both to criticize the two countries with UN resolutions and establish that the two develop close relations. Due to this alliance with the Arab world, many African countries broke off relations with Israel and did not consider restoring them for decades.[10]
Israel continued to denounce apartheid, but it privately began to cultivate relations with South Africa in secret. This approach was similar to many Western nations at the time.[6][22] Israel's condemnation of apartheid was based on opposition to the racist nature of the practice, and its maintenance of mutually beneficial commercial and military ties was rooted in a concern for South African Jews and a realpolitik attitude that Israel was too isolated to be selective about partners in trade and arms deals.[6][23] Within less than a decade, South Africa would be one of Israel's closest military and economic allies, whilst Israel would occupy the position of South Africa's closest military ally, and Israel had become the most important foreign arms supplier to the South African Defence Force[3]:117–19 In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, to put additional diplomatic and military pressure on Israel, Arab oil-producing countries threatened to impose an oil embargo on countries with international relations with Israel. As a result, many African countries broke ties with Israel as well.[24]
Most African states had fully broken ties after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and Israel increased its cultivation of ties with the similarly isolated government in Pretoria.[25] Israeli ties and trade with South Africa became more extensive. According to Ethan A. Nadelmann, the relationship developed because many African countries broke diplomatic ties with Israel during the 1970s following Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza during the Arab–Israeli wars, causing Israel to deepen relations with other isolated countries. In the 1970s Israel aided the FNLA (Angolan National Liberation Front) proxy forces organized and trained by South Africa and the CIA to forestall the formation of a government led by the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola-now the ruling party of Angola). Israel sent a plane full of 120 mm shells sent via Zaire to the FNLA and Unita and a shipment of 50 SA-7 missiles.[26] Israel remained officially opposed to the apartheid system, but it also opposed international embargoes. Israeli officials sought to coordinate ties with South Africa within a tripartite framework between Israel, the United States, and South Africa.[5] There was anti-apartheid sentiment among the Jewish communities of both South Africa and Israel. However, on the Israeli side, many saw it necessary to cooperate with any country willing to be friendly with Israel and support its existence. For the South African government, there was a desire to expand its network of friendships.[10]
South African Airways began operating flights between Johannesburg and Tel Aviv, but as it was banned from using the airspace of most African countries, it had to take a detour around West Africa, doubling the distance and flying time involved.[27] However, El Al, the Israeli national carrier, was able to operate flights between the two cities via Nairobi.[28]
Israel also developed ties with the nominally independent "homelands",[3]:143–44 especially with Bophuthatswana. Its president, Lucas Mangope, visited Israel in 1985;[29] it established a mission in Tel Aviv called "Bophuthatswana House", the only place outside South Africa to fly the homeland's flag, despite the objections of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.[30]
Strategic relations [ edit ]
By 1973, an economic and military alliance between Israel and South Africa was in the ascendancy. The military leadership of both countries was convinced that both nations faced a fundamentally similar predicament, fighting for their survival against the common terrorist enemy of the PLO and the ANC.[31]
In 1975, the Israel–South Africa Agreement was signed, and increasing economic co-operation between Israel and South Africa was reported, including the construction of a major new railway in Israel, and the building of a desalination plant in South Africa.[32] In April 1976 South African Prime Minister John Vorster was invited to make a state visit, meeting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.[25][33] Later in 1976, the 5th Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Colombo, Sri Lanka, adopted a resolution calling for an oil embargo against France and Israel because of their arms sales to South Africa.[32] In 1977, South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha visited Israel to discuss South African issues with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan.
Israeli and South African intelligence chiefs held regular conferences with each other to share information on enemy weapons and training.[34] The co-ordination between the Israel Defense Forces and the South African Defense Force was unprecedented, with Israeli and South African generals giving each other unfettered access to each other's battlefields and military tactics, and Israel sharing with South Africa highly classified information about its missions, such as Operation Opera, which had previously only been reserved for the United States.[35]
The South African government's yearbook of 1978 wrote: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."[36]
In 1978, Israel's ambassador to South Africa, Yitzak Unna, announced he was boycotting Golda, a play about Golda Meir's life, because the producers (an American production company) had chosen to show the play at Breytenbach Theater, which barred blacks and coloreds. Following his announcement, least 10 other Western ambassadors said they too would not attend, and Golda Meir herself said she fully supported Unna's decision.[37][38]
From the mid-1970s, the two countries were allegedly involved in joint nuclear-weapons development and testing. According to Seymour Hersh, for example, the 1979 Vela Incident was the third joint Israeli–South African nuclear test in the Indian Ocean.[39] Richard Rhodes concludes the incident was an Israeli nuclear test, conducted in cooperation with South Africa, and that the United States administration deliberately obscured this fact in order to avoid complicating relations with Israel.[40]
Israel was one of the most important allies in South Africa’s weapons procurement during the years of PW Botha’s regime.[41]
By 1980, a sizeable contingent of South African military and government officials were living permanently in Israel, to oversee the numerous joint projects between the countries, while their children attended local Israeli schools.[42] Scientific collaboration also continued to increase, with many scientists working in each other's countries. Perhaps most sensitive was the large group of Israeli scientists working at South Africa's Pelindaba nuclear facility.[42]
During Operation Protea in 1981, the South African Defence Force made military history, as arguably the first user of modern drone technology, when it operated the Israeli IAI Scout drones in combat in Angola. They would only be used in combat by the Israel Defense Forces a year later during the 1982 Lebanon War and Operation Mole Cricket 19.[43]
In 1981, Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon visited South African forces in Namibia for 10 days,[44] later saying that South Africa needed more weapons to fight Soviet infiltration in the region.
In 1984, Pik Botha again visited Israel but this time only for an unofficial meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir.[45]
Ballistic missile collaboration [ edit ]
The commanders of the South African Defense Force were present at the test-firings of Israel's Jericho ballistic missile system, where they stood alongside the IDF generals.[46] Israel's ballistic missile system, the Jericho II missile, was subsequently licensed for production in South Africa as the RSA series of space launch vehicles and ballistic missiles. The RSA-3 was produced by the Houwteq (a discontinued division of Denel) company at Grabouw, 30 km east of Cape Town. Test launches were made from Overberg Test Range near Bredasdorp, 200 km east of Cape Town. Rooi Els was where the engine test facilities were located. Development continued even after South African renunciation[47] of its nuclear weapons for use as a commercial satellite launcher.
The RSA-2 was a local copy of the Jericho II ballistic missile and the RSA-1 was a local copy of the Jericho II second stage for use as a mobile missile.[48][49][50][51]
End of apartheid and severing of ties [ edit ]
By 1987, a minority of Israeli officials and a number of liberal intellectuals, led by Yossi Beilin, then political director general of the Foreign Ministry, wanted not only to reduce cultural, commercial, and military ties, but also for Israel to take part in the international condemnation of apartheid. However, the majority of government officials, led by Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, wanted to maintain the status quo with South Africa (or make a few token reductions) and make their relationship even more secretive. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres took a middle-ground view, saying "Israel is not going to lead a policy" against South Africa, but would follow the approach taken by the United States and Western Europe.[6]
In 1987, Israel found itself the only developed nation in the world that still maintained strong, even strategic relations with South Africa, as the apartheid regime was entering its final throes. (Among African nations, only Malawi maintained diplomatic relations with South Africa throughout the Apartheid era.)[52] Based on intelligence assessments that the present South African government was no longer sustainable, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, in a speech before parliament the same year, announced that Israel would sign no more new military contracts with the South African government and would "gradually" allow those already in effect to expire. Peres accompanied his announcement with the statement: "There is no room for discrimination, whether it's called apartheid or any other name", Peres said. "We repeat that we express our denunciation of the system of apartheid. The Jewish outlook is that every man was born in the image of God and created equal."[53] Israel reduced cultural and tourism ties including establishing educational programs in Israel to help black South Africans. However, several secret military treaties with South Africa remained in force, continuing joint research in missile development and nuclear technology.[5]
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi wrote in 1988 that the alliance between South Africa and Israel was one of the most underreported news stories of the past four decades and that Israel played a crucial role in the survival of the apartheid regime.[3]:108–109 Israel's collaboration with Apartheid South Africa was mentioned and condemned by various international organisations such as the UN General assembly (several times since 1974).[3]:114
On July 14, 1991, four days after the United States acted to end its economic and cultural sanctions against South Africa, Israel lifted its sanctions as well. The four years in which they were in effect saw Israel's trade deficit with South Africa swell to some $750 million. The sanctions did not apply to agreements signed before they were imposed in 1987. Although Israel had always condemned apartheid,[54] it was long apprehensive about the punitive measures, stemming from Israel's own vulnerability to international embargoes by the United Nations and Third World–dominated bodies.[55] The resuming of open relations no longer included military cooperation.[56] When then-President F. W. de Klerk visited Israel in November 1991, he was involved in negotiations to end apartheid. The Israelis responded warmly to his declaration that "there will be a new constitution" in South Africa, "which we believe should be one which will prevent domination, in any form, by a minority, but also domination by a majority in the sense that no majority should be in a position to abuse its power." During de Klerk's state visit, he and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir agreed to normalise relations.[54]
Alleged nuclear collaboration [ edit ]
South Africa provided much of the yellowcake uranium that Israel required to develop its nuclear weapons. South Africa built its own nuclear bombs, possibly with Israeli assistance.[57] Some Resolutions of the UN General Assembly in the early 1980s which condemned the cooperation between Israel and Apartheid South Africa, also mentioned nuclear collaboration.[58] U.S. Intelligence believed that Israel participated in South African nuclear research projects and supplied advanced non-nuclear weapons technology to South Africa during the 1970s, while South Africa was developing its own atomic bombs.[59][60] According to David Albright, "Faced with sanctions, South Africa began to organize clandestine procurement networks in Europe and the United States, and it began a long, secret collaboration with Israel." He goes on to say "A common question is whether Israel provided South Africa with weapons design assistance, although available evidence argues against significant cooperation."[61]
Chris McGreal has written that "Israel provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa's development of its nuclear bombs".[25] In 2000, Dieter Gerhardt, Soviet spy and former commander in the South African Navy, stated that Israel agreed in 1974 to arm eight Jericho II missiles with "special warheads" for South Africa.[62]
According to journalist Seymour Hersh, the 1979 Vela incident, was the third joint Israeli-South African nuclear weapons test in the Indian Ocean, and the Israelis had sent two IDF ships and "a contingent of Israeli military men and nuclear experts" for the test. Author Richard Rhodes also concludes the incident was an Israeli nuclear test, conducted in cooperation with South Africa, and that the United States administration deliberately obscured this fact in order to avoid complicating relations.
In 2010, The Guardian reported that newly declassified South African documents uncovered by academic Sasha Polakow-Suransky showed details of a meeting on 31 March 1975 between the two countries' defence ministers, at the time South African P. W. Botha and Israeli Shimon Peres, in which Peres purportedly offered South Africa "three sizes." The report suggested that the "three sizes" referred to nuclear warheads, but the deal never materialised.[57][65][66] Backed by former minister Yossi Beilin, Peres said the allegations were untrue and based on a selective interpretation of the minutes. Former apartheid foreign minister Pik Botha, as well as various Israeli insiders and experts, also said the allegations were highly improbable.[67][68] Avner Cohen, author of Israel and the Bomb and The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel's Bargain with the Bomb, said, "Nothing in the documents suggests there was an actual offer by Israel to sell nuclear weapons to the regime in Pretoria."[69]
Relations between Israel and post-apartheid South Africa [ edit ]
Nelson Mandela first visited Israel as well as the Palestinian territories in 1999, after he had handed over the presidency of South Africa to Thabo Mbeki. He had not previously received an invitation from Israel.[70] He met with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, like Ehud Barak and Yassir Arafat. He said: "To the many people who have questioned why I came, I say: Israel worked very closely with the apartheid regime. I say: I've made peace with many men who slaughtered our people like animals. Israel cooperated with the apartheid regime, but it did not participate in any atrocities." Mandela reiterated his unwavering opposition to Israeli control of Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon. And he noted that, upon his release from prison in 1990, he received invitations to visit "almost every country in the world, except Israel."[71][72]
Then Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visited South Africa in 2004,[73] meeting with South African President Thabo Mbeki, the first visit by an Israeli leader since the end of apartheid.
Some prominent South African figures, such as Desmond Tutu and Ronnie Kasrils,[74][75] have criticized Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, drawing parallels between apartheid South Africa and modern-day Israel.[76]
The Congress of South African Trade Unions, which represents 1.2 million South African workers, has also accused Israel of practicing apartheid and supported the boycott by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, as well as all Israeli products.[77]
However, South African ambassador to Israel Major General Fumanekile Gqiba generally did not agree with the analogy, saying about his time in Israel:
before I came here. I regarded Jews as whites. Purely whites. But when I came here I discovered that, no, these guys are not purely whites. ...You've got Indian Jews, you've got African Jews, and you've got even Chinese Jews, right? I began to say to our comrades, No, Israel is not a white country... Perhaps we would say there are those who came from Poland, who happened to be white—i.e. Ashkenazi their culture still dominates. It's difficult to say Israel is racist, in a classic sense.[78]
South Africa is an advocate of the two-state solution. In 2004 South African Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad criticized Israel's building of the Israeli West Bank barrier.[79]
Annual trade between Israel and South Africa totaled $500 million as of 2003.[73]
According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2007, 86% of South Africans both in a rural and urban spread had an opinion on the Israel–Palestine conflict. One of the few relevant questions with data from South Africa asked "Now thinking about the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, which side do you sympathize with more, Israel or the Palestinians?" Of those asked; 28% said they sympathized more with Israel, 19% more with Palestine, 19% sympathized with both parties equally and 20% sympathized with neither. 14% didn't know or didn't answer.[80]
Following the Gaza flotilla raid, South Africa recalled its ambassador from Israel and summoned the Israeli ambassador for a reprimand.
The movement for an Academic boycott of Israel, within the broader Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, was established in South Africa following the 2001 Durban Conference on Racism. Following an academic petition supported by more than 250 academics, including Breyten Breytenbach, John Dugard, Antjie Krog, Mahmood Mamdani and Achille Mbembe. The Senate of the University of Johannesburg decided to end its ties with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in March 2011.[81] The University denied that the decision amounted to an academic boycott of Israel.[82] Others have claimed it as "a landmark moment in the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel campaign".[83] Jewish and Israeli groups have criticised the decision.[84] In April 2015, Israel refused permission for Pretoria Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande, and three aides to visit their Palestinian counterparts in Ramallah via Jordan. The South African Jewish Board of Deputies and the South African Zionist Federation said “This is most regrettable.” Their statement noted: “We believe both countries should encourage greater interaction at all levels and lift restrictions in this regard, in the interests of relations between Israel and South Africa and the broader interests of peace and stability”, while also making the point that the process of shutting out individuals from the other country had been done by South Africa to Israelis in the past.[85] In July 2017, news report said that the ANC had recommended that South Africa's embassy in Israel be downgraded to an "interests section" to show solidarity with Palestinians and distance Pretoria from Jerusalem, though this recommendation has yet to be ratified.[86]
On 14 May 2018, South Africa withdrew its Ambassador to Israel indefinitely following the 2018 Gaza border protests. The South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation said in an official statement "As we have stated on previous occasions, South Africa reiterates its view that the Israeli Defence Force must withdraw from the Gaza Strip and bring to an end the violent and destructive incursions into Palestinian territories."[87]
See also [ edit ]
|
South African woman found with 6kg of cocaine in books after arriving at Perth Airport
Updated
Customs officers have discovered about six kilograms of cocaine hidden in books among a woman's luggage at Perth Airport after she arrived on a flight from Johannesburg.
The 32-year-old South African woman was charged with attempting to import the cocaine.
The drugs were found when the woman's baggage was examined by Australian Border Force (ABF) officers after her flight landed in Perth on Friday night.
"During the examination, ABF officers detected six packages concealed in six books," the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said.
"Initial testing returned a positive result for the border controlled drug cocaine.
"The exact weight and purity of the cocaine will be subject to further forensic testing.
"The AFP attended and arrested the woman. She was later charged with importing a commercial quantity of a border controlled drug."
The woman is facing a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
She is due to appear in Perth Magistrate Court.
Topics: drug-offences, police, perth-6000, wa, south-africa
First posted
|
If Hillary Clinton wins the presidential election next Tuesday, she could have a former San Antonian on her radar for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Wallace Jefferson, a 53-year-old John Jay alum, former president of the San Antonio Bar Association and former chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, was the topic of discussion during an email exchange between Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and Christopher Stone, president of the Open Society Foundations, an organization funded by Democratic sugar daddy George Soros.
The emails, contained in a recent WikiLeaks document dump, were exchanged on the evening of February 13, only hours after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at a luxury resort in West Texas.
Backed by a subject line that read “Scalia replacement,” Stone emailed Podesta the following question: “Remember our discussion of Wallace Jefferson, (former) Chief Justice in Texas?”
Podesta replied, “Yup.”
There’s much that this brief exchange doesn’t tell us, and Stone did not respond to an interview request for this column. But a few points are obvious.
We know that Stone and Podesta didn’t wait long after Scalia’s passing to start contemplating how his seat should be filled. We also know that the two men had talked about Jefferson as a potential Supreme Court appointee even before Scalia’s sudden, surprising death.
It’s not hard to understand why two Democrats such as Stone and Podesta would find this Texas Republican intriguing.
Almost immediately after Scalia’s death, Senate Republicans made it clear that they would block any appointee offered by President Barack Obama, on the grounds that a lame duck with less than a year in office should let their successor fill the vacancy. When Obama offered up Merrick Garland, a milquetoast moderate with nearly 20 years of experience on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Senate took no action.
In recent weeks, two veteran Republican senators — John McCain and Richard Burr — have upped the partisan ante, pledging that if Clinton wins the presidency, they will automatically reject her Supreme Court appointments.
Given this hostile, hyper-partisan climate, Jefferson could offer a bipartisan solution.
He is an African American Republican who was appointed to this state’s highest bench by former Gov. Rick Perry; a compassionate conservative with an independent streak; an appellate attorney who has represented deep-pocketed interests; and a thoughtful jurist who has spoken with eloquence about the need to make the court system work for people on the low end of the economic ladder.
Jefferson also has a compelling story. The descendant of a slave who went on to become a Waco City Council member during Reconstruction, and the son of an Air Force major, he became the first African American justice on the Texas Supreme Court.
For progressive Democrats, who carry visions of Elizabeth Warren filling Scalia’s old seat on the bench, Jefferson would be a letdown, but a letdown they would accept.
For Republicans, he would be a hard candidate to reject, regardless of their hatred for Clinton.
Jefferson, whose law practice is currently based in Austin, declined to comment on the possibility of a Supreme Court appointment. But he knows the conjecture is out there.
Back in March 2015, “Texas Week” host Rick Casey wrote an op-ed for the San Antonio Express-News, suggesting that if a Supreme Court vacancy occurred before Obama left office, the president should give Jefferson a serious look.
That same argument would apply to Clinton next year.
Jefferson’s most appealing quality — aside from his incisive mind and fundamental decency — is his refusal to let partisan thinking contaminate his commitment to the rule of law.
“I’m feeling like I’m independent,” he told the Longview News-Journal in 2002.
Although Jefferson was the beneficiary of straight-ticket Republican voting in Texas, he has consistently argued that this state must reform its partisan system for electing judges.
In 2013, he told The Atlantic: “I don’t like the concept of a Republican or Democratic judge. I think fundraising undermines the confidence in a fair and impartial judicial system.”
Jefferson would be for Clinton what Anthony Kennedy turned out to be for Ronald Reagan: a compromise choice who can’t be pigeonholed. And that might be just what the court needs right now.
[email protected]
Twitter: @gilgamesh470
|
Turkey has declared a day of national mourning after twin bombings targeting police struck the heart of Istanbul near the home stadium of football giants Besiktas, killing 38 people.
A car bomb detonated outside the Vodafone Arena football stadium on the shores of the Bosphorus after the Super Lig match between Besiktas and Bursaspor, while less than a minute later a suicide attacker struck a nearby park.
Authorities did not say who was behind the blasts, the latest in a year that has seen Istanbul and other cities rocked by a string of attacks blamed on ISIS jihadists and Kurdish militants.
Former 9NEWS cameraman Cameron Stewart was close by when the bombs detonated and said it took him some time to figure out what was happening.
"It rattled the hotel in a way I haven’t really ever felt before," he said.
"The windows were shaking but then I kind of couldn’t piece together what was going on… then the second one happened and it kind of clicked."
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim ordered flags to fly at half mast while President Recep Tayyip Erdogan postponed a planned trip to Kazakhstan, the state news agency Anadolu reported.
Twenty-seven of those killed were police and two were civilians, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said, adding that 10 suspects had been detained.
Mr Soylu said the first blast was caused by a car bomb that struck outside Besiktas's football stadium.
It was followed 45 seconds later by another attack at the nearby Macka Park, carried out by a suicide bomber who blew himself up in the midst of police officers.
The Istanbul governor's office said 155 people were wounded, 19 of them were in intensive care unit, the private NTV broadcaster reported.
The explosion site in central Istanbul. (Reuters / Murad Sezer) ()
A forensic team has inspected the stadium and the park to collect evidence, an AFP journalist said. Municipality trucks meanwhile cleaned up the area.
"An act of terror targeted our security forces and citizens at Besiktas tonight," Mr Erdogan said in a statement after the attacks.
Mr Erdogan said the blasts were timed to cause maximum loss of life.
"We have witnessed once more here in Istanbul the ugly face of terror which tramples down any form of value and morals," he said.
The explosion site in central Istanbul. (Reuters / Murad Sezer) ()
State broadcaster TRT showed images of the wreckage of a car, engulfed in flames with emergency services swarming around the scene outside the sports venue.
Other footage showed severely damaged police vehicles, while witnesses said the force of the blast had shattered the windows of nearby homes.
"I heard two explosions in less than one minute, followed by the sound of gunshots," one witness told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Besiktas is one of Istanbul's most popular football clubs, and its fans are known for their anti-establishment views and famously played a big role in the 2013 protests against Mr Erdogan, who was then prime minister.
The club said that among those killed was Vefa Karakurdu, a senior police officer in charge of security at games who was a member of its congress, and Tunc Uncu who worked at its official merchandise shop.
Besiktas in a statement vowed to "stand firm against the vile attackers who will never achieve their goal."
Police cordoned off the area around the stadium immediately after the blasts, which occurred near the Ottoman-era Dolmabahce palace that houses Prime Minister Binali Yildirim's offices.
The scene is also about a kilometre from the busy Taksim Square, a magnet for tourists.
The government slapped a broadcast ban on footage of the attack, as is becoming typical in the aftermath of major incidents in the country.
Scenes outside the Besitkas Stadium. (Reuters / Murad Sezer) ()
Police officers at the explosion site. (Reuters / Murad Sezer) ()
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
In his statement, Mr Erdogan said that "the name or the method of the terrorist organisation which perpetrated the vile attack" did not matter.
"Nobody should doubt that we will defeat terror, terror groups, terrorists and of course the forces behind them, with God's help," he said.
In June, 47 people were killed in a triple suicide bombing and gun attack at Istanbul's Ataturk airport, with authorities blaming IS.
Another 57 people, 34 of them children, were killed in August in a suicide attack by an IS-linked bomber at a Kurdish wedding in the southeastern city of Gaziantep.
Scenes outside the Besitkas Stadium. (Reuters / Murad Sezer) ()
But there have also been deadly bombings claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), seen as a splinter group of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg condemned the "horrific acts of terror" in Istanbul, adding: "We stand united in solidarity with our ally Turkey. We remain determined to fight terrorism in all its forms."
The US embassy in Turkey wrote on Twitter: "Our hearts and prayers are with the people of #Istanbul tonight."
Turkey is still reeling from a failed July 15 coup blamed by the government on the US-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen that has been followed by a relentless purge of his alleged supporters from state institutions.
With AFP and AAP.
Get breaking news alerts when a major story happens near you by downloading the 9NEWS Alerts app, available on iPhone and Android.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019
|
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Nick Higham reports on the life and career of Peter O'Toole
Actor Peter O'Toole, who starred in Sir David Lean's 1962 film classic Lawrence of Arabia, died on Saturday aged 81, his agent has said.
He was being treated at London's Wellington hospital after a long illness, his agent added.
O'Toole's daughter Kate said the family was overwhelmed "by the outpouring of real love and affection being expressed towards him, and to us".
He received an honorary Oscar in 2003, having initially turned it down.
In a letter the actor asked the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to delay it until he was 80, saying he was "still in the game and might win the bugger outright".
But when he finally clasped his statuette, he said: "Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, my foot."
O'Toole's agent said he was "one of a kind in the very best sense and a giant in his field".
Image caption O'Toole was 30 when he played Lawrence of Arabia
Film critic Barry Norman described him as a "true movie star", who had "tremendous charisma".
Prime Minister David Cameron said: "My thoughts are with Peter O'Toole's family and friends. His performance in my favourite film, Lawrence of Arabia, was stunning."
Irish President Michael D Higgins added: "Ireland, and the world, has lost one of the giants of film and theatre.
"I was privileged to know him as a friend since 1969. I spent part of 1979 in Clifden where we met almost daily and all of us who knew him in the West will miss his warm humour and generous friendship."
Broadcaster Michael Parkinson told Sky News it was hard to be too sad about the news of his passing, and smiled as he said: "Peter didn't leave much of life unlived, did he?"
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Barry Norman: "He was acting right until the end... acting was his life"
Actor, director and broadcaster Stephen Fry tweeted: "Oh what terrible news. Farewell Peter O'Toole. I had the honour of directing him in a scene. Monster, scholar, lover of life, genius …"
Writer and actor David Walliams recalled his memories of the actor, saying: "Matt & I had drinks with Peter O'Toole in LA a few years ago. He was hugely entertaining. The greatest company. A legend on screen and off."
Actress Sheridan Smith also tweeted her tribute, saying: "So sad about the death of the incredible Peter O'Toole :( He saw a play I did last year & sent me & all the cast presents after. A true gent!"
Comic Eddie Izzard added his voice by saying: "Your work will be remembered", while actor and writer Simon Pegg said the actor was "a true great".
Actor Eddie Marsan hailed O'Toole's determination, tweeting: "'Waiting for the right part - you could wait forever. So I turn up and do the best I can.' That's an actor for you. R.I.P. Peter O Toole."
The Shield star Michael Chiklis added that O'Toole was the "original, hard drinking, classic, actor's actor", saying: "The piercing blue eyes of Lawrence of Arabia will never fade", while fellow US actor Neil Patrick Harris added: "Lucky to have worked with him for a month in Prague. Wonderful man, remarkable talent."
Journalist Piers Morgan also paid tribute, tweeting: "RIP Peter O'Toole. Spent one of the funniest days of my life with him at Lord's a few years ago. A brilliant actor & crazy, hilarious man."
O'Toole began his acting career as an exciting young talent on the British stage and his Hamlet in 1955 at the Bristol Old Vic, was critically acclaimed.
Image caption O'Toole is seen backstage at the opening night of Hamlet at the Old Vic theatre in London in 1963
He hit international stardom when Sir David cast him as British adventurer T E Lawrence, the World War One soldier and scholar who led an Arab rebellion against the Turks.
Playwright Noel Coward once said that if O'Toole had been any prettier, they would have had to call the film "Florence of Arabia".
Lawrence of Arabia earned him the first of eight Oscar nominations, with his second coming for 1964's Becket, in which he played King Henry II to Richard Burton's Thomas Becket.
Burton and O'Toole's shared love of drinking garnered many headlines along with their performances.
O'Toole played Henry again in 1968 in The Lion in Winter, for which he received his third Oscar nod, opposite Katharine Hepburn.
His five other nominations were for Goodbye, Mr Chips in 1968, The Ruling Class in 1971, 1980's The Stunt Man, My Favorite Year [1982] and finally for Venus in 2006.
Image caption Peter O'Toole starred with Audrey Hepburn in 1965's comedy How to Steal a Million
Other performances included leading Shakespearean parts, comic roles in adaptations of PG Wodehouse and his famed starring role in 1989 in Keith Waterhouse's stage play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell.
It was a comedy about his old drinking pal Jeffrey Bernard, who wrote The Spectator magazine's weekly Low Life column.
O'Toole also had a reputation for riotous behaviour following bouts of drinking, but in the mid-70s he was diagnosed with pancreatitis and was warned by medics that more alcohol would prove fatal.
He had yards of his intestinal tubing - "most of my plumbing" - removed and he gave up drinking.
"If you can't do something willingly and joyfully, then don't do it,'' he once said. "If you give up drinking, don't go moaning about it; go back on the bottle. Do. As. Thou. Wilt."
'Waiting for the right part'
It was sometimes tough finding good roles, but he told the Independent on Sunday in 1990: "I take whatever good part comes along.
"And if there isn't a good part, then I do anything, just to pay the rent. Money is always a pressure. And waiting for the right part - you could wait forever. So I turn up and do the best I can."
In 1980 he starred in a critically panned production of Macbeth, but it was a sell-out after a drubbing from critics brought in audiences of curiosity seekers.
"The thought of it makes my nose bleed," he said years later.
Last July, after a career spanning 50 years and at the age of 79, O'Toole said he was retiring from the stage and screen.
However, last month it was announced he was being lined up for a role as a Roman orator in Katherine of Alexandria, a film scheduled for release next year.
|
Mitt Romney was at a Univision Candidate Forum where he found himself facing many questions on his stances on immigration issues. He squirmed and tried his best to dodge answering in detail and played the crowd with the usual airy and nonspecific conservative talking points as though they were not able to understand that he was dodging their questions.
He mostly stuck to his talking points, saying that President Obama put a temporary stop-gap solution to help what he termed the ‘Illegal Aliens’ with the dream act, promising that when he is President he will preside over the congress in finding a ‘permanent’ solution.
TPMwrites…
The audience at the Univision forum was reportedly pre-packed with Romney supporters, so many of Romney’s responses received enthusiastic applause. The Obama campaign was less impressed. “On critical issues, he continued to refuse to answer any of the tough questions or provide any specifics on what he’d do as president,” Obama campaign spokesperson Lis Smith said. “We are just two weeks away from the first presidential debate, where the American people will demand more than vague answers and empty platitudes. It’s time for Mitt Romney to come clean and get specific about his policies.” Smith accused Romney of “doubling down on asking immigrants to self-deport.”
When pressed to answer if he will be deporting any immigrants, Mitt all but choked when he said ‘we are not going to round-up 12 million people, the kids, the parents and deport them”…but when pressed for any details and given a simple yes or no choice, sadly he could not bring himself to say no.
He keeps saying that he will find a permanent solution, which I think could be anything from a draft for immigrants to his famous ‘self deportation‘ … probably in lieu of being thrown in jail. I would not put anything past Romney or the conservatives and no one is saying anything definitive to put my mind at ease.
Romney has repeatedly vowed to repeal any dream act legislation. I cannot trust him as President. I cannot trust him as President for ALL Americans. In his secret tapes he condescendingly refers to the 47% as ‘those people’…and they are Americans, think of what he says about undocumented immigrants! I just can’t trust this guy.
|
PENSACOLA (CBSMiami/AP) — In what could be described as an episode of “Auction Hunters” turned reality horror show, authorities in Pensacola are investigating after finding human brains, hearts and lungs in a storage unit they say belonged to a former medical examiner.
Someone bought the storage unit at an auction last week and noticed a foul smell as they were sifting through furniture and boxes.
Officials at the medical examiner’s office in Pensacola say the remains of more than 100 people were found crudely stored in Tupperware containers, garbage bags and drink cups. Many of the remains were not identified.
Investigators found formaldehyde, a chemical used to embalm and preserve bodies, leaking from a 32-ounce drink cup with a cracked lid that was holding a heart, said Jeff Martin, director of the District 1 Medical Examiner’s Office in Pensacola. The unit had been rented previously by Dr. Michael Berkland.
“How horrible it is for the families of these deceased to think that someone’s loved one’s organs are basically rotting away in a storage unit somewhere, it’s horrible,” Martin told The Associated Press.
Berkland worked at the medical examiner’s office from 1997 until 2003, when he was fired for not completing autopsy reports. Officials said he was also performing private autopsies in the area, but it’s unclear if any of the organs were from autopsies he conducted while working at the medical examiner’s office. The medical examiner’s office is now cross-referencing names in their database during that time period, Martin said.
Officials are also trying to locate family members for some of the victims, but many of the organs are not labeled, making it nearly impossible to identify them.
No charges have been filed against Berkland. His attorney Eric Stevenson declined comment Tuesday. Phone calls and emails to Pensacola Police were not immediately returned.
Officials are trying to determine whether Berkland broke any laws regarding biomedical waste and the storing and disposing of human remains.
It was not immediately known why the organs were being stored there. Martin said it’s unlikely they could have been sold anywhere because they were not well-preserved.
Many of the remains were stuck in household Tupperware and other containers that “aren’t made to hold up to outdoor weather conditions. The chemical inside of those containers is very caustic … a lot of those containers were emptied because they had cracked through so all of those caustic chemicals were leaking out somewhere,” Martin said.
Berkland told employees of the Florida storage facility that he planned to keep household goods and office furniture there, the company said.
“We never had any indication that anything was out of the ordinary, nor did anyone on our management team ever notice anything amiss during daily property checks,” said Diane Piegza, vice president of corporate communications of Uncle Bob’s Self Storage.
Before coming to Florida, Berkland had been fired as a contract medical examiner in 1996 in Jackson County, Mo., in a dispute over his caseload and autopsy reports. His doctor’s license was ultimately revoked there.
Berkland had incorrectly stated on the reports that he had taken sections of several brains to be preserved as specimens for medical conferences and teaching purposes. He called them “proofreading errors” and the Missouri attorney general’s office found they did not jeopardize any criminal cases.
At the time, Berkland contended the actions against him in Missouri were politically motivated and unfair because he was unable to present evidence in his defense.
(TM and © Copyright 2012 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2012 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
|
For the last two weeks we've followed the government's misuse of evidence on NHS reforms, remembering that it is perfectly permitted to reform things with no evidence at all, like everyone else does – it just shouldn't pretend to have evidence. On Thursday, the health minister, Simon Burns, appeared before a BMA meeting in London.
He tried to persuade a room full of nerds that the pathfinder initiative was a pilot scheme, to test the reforms before national introduction, even though it covers more than half of all the patients in England. Then he explained that doctors obviously don't understand what the word "pilot" means. Then he explained that the evidence of what doctors say to him when he meets them is more reliable than good quality survey data.
Things get tricky when evidence collides with what people would simply like to crack on and do anyway. At midnight, the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority (MRHA) closed its consultation on how it should label homeopathy sugar pills. You may not think this is a difficult task, but politics makes it so.
To recap: homeopathy pills don't work better than placebo dummy pills in trials. They are made by taking one drop of the original substance and diluting it in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 drops of water, then taking one drop of that solution, which is now just water, and shaking it near some pills, which you then buy to treat an illness.
Current MHRA wording says "a homeopathic medicinal product used within the homeopathic tradition for the treatment of [whatever condition]". Homeopaths like this because it's ambiguous. Their internal lobbying document (which I have posted on the internet for everyone) explains that this wording "avoids the need to prove the science" and so "allows us to practise as normal".
Can the MHRA walk the line between evidence, politics, and clarity? It's my view that quacks are welcome to be quacks, but since regulators invite us to take them seriously, we are allowed higher expectations. Lacking optimisim, I have conducted my own consultation online. Here are the suggestions.
On instructions, we have "take as many as you like", since there are no ingredients. The proposed belladonna homeopathy pill ingredients label simply reads "no belladonna", which is a convention the MHRA could adapt for all its different homeopathy labels. Other suggestions include "none", "belief", "false hopes", "shattered dreams", and "the tears of unicorns".
For warnings, we have: "not to be taken seriously", "in case of overdose, consult a lifeguard", and "contains chemicals, including dihydrogen monoxide". This, of course, is a scary name for water, which became an internet meme after Nathan Zohner's school science project: he successfully gathered a petition to ban this chemical on the grounds that it is fatal when inhaled, contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape, may cause electrical failures, and has been found in the excised tumours of terminal cancer patients.
These label suggestions are clear, unambiguous, and they do not mislead anyone. If you think they are funny, I invite you to notice that besuited people in your medicines regulator have just run a lengthy official consultation on how to label sugar pills so as not to mislead the public. People who claim to be serious should be serious.
|
Another day, another classic Goodreads author meltdown. Someone gave self-pubbed author Dylan Saccoccio a one-star review, and Saccoccio (rather predictably, as Goodreads veterans well know) went apoplectic. Saccoccio’s contributions to that thread have since been deleted because his account has been banned, though you can read some of his comments here and check out the archived thread here, because everything he wrote was ridiculous and abusive. Goodreads reviews are nothing if not dangerous stuff, folks.
Props, by the way, to reviewer Cait’s composure through the whole thing.
I’ve talked before about how this kind of behaviour led me to quit Goodreads, and the gendered stuff I was talking about in that post echoes a similar dynamic here, with a male author attempting to shout down a female reviewer. But there’s another dynamic at play that we need to talk about: authors, regardless of their intentions, should not be responding to reviews on Goodreads.
Not everyone is going to like your book. If they post an honest review — even if it’s blatantly wrong, or you don’t agree with it, or it hurts your feelings, or you think they’re a big stupid butt-face with a butt for a face — you have to just breathe and move on. Breathe. And move on.
You know who looks terrible in an author-versus-reviewer shouting match on Goodreads? The author. Always the author. Because an amateur reviewer on Goodreads, even if they post an awful screed, has nothing to lose in the situation. Even when the author isn’t behaving in a completely unhinged fashion as in this latest example, the author is the one with the professional identity to uphold. When it does go off the rails as badly as we all know it can, it’s the author who will lose sales and face.
I had never heard of Saccoccio before this weekend’s confrontation, but you can bet I would not feel comfortable picking up his book because he has made it unsafe to speak publicly about his work. And he’s made himself look, frankly, dangerous.
But it’s not just the one-or-two-star reviews. I also don’t think authors should respond to positive reviews, even to say thanks — the dynamic is too weird. Perhaps not all reviewers feel as I do, but I think the reviewing space needs to be its own thing, unadulterated by the feeling of the author’s hot breath on the reviewer’s neck as they try to make an honest assessment of the work in front of them.
Authors, I implore you: shake it off and back away from Goodreads. Here are ten things you can do that are better and more productive than responding to a review that is eating at you.
Take a long walk. Find a tree. The tree is now the reviewer. Yell mean things at the tree. Explain to the tree how hard you worked on the book. Kick the tree. Let your dog pee on the tree. Get it all out before you go near your computer again. Look at animated GIFs of kittens doing crazy things. See? Don’t you feel better? Write out a response to the reviewer in longhand. When you finish, put it in your sink and light it on fire. NO ONE NEEDS TO READ THAT. EVER. Call your mom and tell her all about how the internet is stupid and full of mean assholes and let your mom remind you that you are the best little author she knows. Bonus marks if you also have explain what the internet is to your mom. Close your eyes. Imagine a penguin. The penguin thinks you’re a great author. Put your head in a pillow and scream. Curse. Cuss. Blaspheme. Have your own little tribute to The Aristocrats. (Wash the pillow after, because that’s not good mojo for sleeping later.) Use all your pent-up anger to write a blindingly good fight scene. Or a blindingly good sex scene. However your cookie crumbles. Add it to your next book and know that you triumphed over that review. Remind yourself of the Stephan J. Harper affair. You don’t want to be that guy. And you don’t want that to be your Google legacy, either. Have you considered eating your feelings? My feelings, in times of stress, often taste like lightly salted Ruffles and glass bottle Coke. YMMV, and experimentation is strongly recommended. Take the useful feedback to heart and write another, better book. Win many awards and become famous without being famous for having a meltdown. Remember: living well is a far better revenge than becoming a wide-spread Twitter joke.
So what do you think, Rioters? Should authors respond? And what other awesome advice would you give an author to help them shake off a bad review without going bananas? Meet me in the comments and we’ll hug it out.
____________________
Want more bookish goodness, news, posts about special book deals, and the occasional puppy reading pic? Follow us on Facebook:
|
What if, when Petunia Dursley found a little boy on her front doorstep, she took him in? Not into the cupboard under the stairs, not into a twisted childhood of tarnished worth and neglect–what if she took him in?
Petunia was jealous, selfish and vicious. We will not pretend she wasn’t. She looked at that boy on her doorstep and thought about her Dudders, barely a month older than this boy. She looked at his eyes and her stomach turned over and over. (Severus Snape saved Harry’s life for his eyes. Let’s have Petunia save it despite them).
Let’s tell a story where Petunia Dursley found a baby boy on her doorstep and hated his eyes–she hated them. She took him in and fed him and changed him and got him his shots, and she hated his eyes up until the day she looked at the boy and saw her nephew, not her sister’s shadow. When Harry was two and Vernon Dursley bought Dudley a toy car and Harry a fast food meal with a toy with parts he could choke on Petunia packed her things and got a divorce.
Harry grew up small and skinny, with knobbly knees and the unruly hair he got from his father. He got cornered behind the dumpsters and in the restrooms, got blood on the jumpers Petunia had found, half-price, at the hand-me-down store. He was still chosen last for sports. But Dudley got blood on his sweaters, too, the ones Petunia had found at the hand-me-down store, half price, because that was all a single mother working two secretary jobs could afford for her two boys, even with Vernon’s grudging child support.
They beat Harry for being small and they laughed at Dudley for being big, and slow, and dumb. Students jeered at him and teachers called Dudley out in class, smirked over his backwards letters.
Harry helped him with his homework, snapped out razored wit in classrooms when bullies decided to make Dudley the butt of anything; Harry cornered Dudley in their tiny cramped kitchen and called him smart, and clever, and ‘better ‘n all those jerks anyway’ on the days Dudley believed it least.
Dudley walked Harry to school and back, to his advanced classes and past the dumpsters, and grinned, big and slow and not dumb at all, at anyone who tried to mess with them.
But was that how Petunia got the news? Her husband complained about owls and staring cats all day long and in the morning Petunia found a little tyke on her doorsep. This was how the wizarding world chose to give the awful news to Lily Potter’s big sister: a letter, tucked in beside a baby boy with her sister’s eyes.
There were no Potters left. Petunia was the one who had to arrange the funeral. She had them both buried in Godric’s Hollow. Lily had chosen her world and Petunia wouldn’t steal her from it, not even in death. The wizarding world had gotten her sister killed; they could stand in that cold little wizard town and mourn by the old stone.
(Petunia would curl up with a big mug of hot tea and a little bit of vodka, when her boys were safely asleep, and toast her sister’s vanished ghost. Her nephew called her ‘Tune’ not 'Tuney,’ and it only broke her heart some days.
Before Harry was even three, she would look at his green eyes tracking a flight of geese or blinking mischieviously back at her and she would not think 'you have your mother’s eyes.’
A wise old man had left a little boy on her doorstep with her sister’s eyes. Petunia raised a young man who had eyes of his very own).
Petunia snapped and burnt the eggs at breakfast. She worked too hard and knew all the neighbors’ worst secrets. Her bedtime stories didn’t quite teach the morals growing boys ought to learn: be suspicious, be wary; someone is probably out to get you. You owe no one your kindness. Knowledge is power and let no one know you have it. If you get can get away with it, then the rule is probably meant for breaking.
Harry grew up loved. Petunia still ran when the letters came. This was her nephew, and this world, this letter, these eyes, had killed her sister. When Hagrid came and knocked down the door of some poor roadside motel, Petunia stood in front of both her boys, shaking. When Hagrid offered Harry a squashed birthday cake with big, kind, clumsy hands, he reminded Harry more than anything of his cousin.
His aunt was still shaking but Harry, eleven years and eight minutes old, decided that any world that had people like his big cousin in it couldn’t be all bad. “I want to go,” Harry told his aunt and he promised to come home.
Dumbledore’s letter to Petunia, tucked in Harry’s blankets, changed the face of the war–it kept the Boy Who Lived safe until he could go like a pig to slaughter.
But long before Dumbledore ever wrote to this bitter woman for the sake of her blood and her sister’s undying love, Petunia Evans wrote to him. As a child, she took the address off Lily’s Hogwarts letter and wrote to ask if she might go to school there, too.
The Christmas before Lily and James died, Petunia had sent them a vase, into their little hidden house with their crawling son and their loyal, frightened, not-so-loyal friends. Petunia still hated her sister, flighty, fierce, beautiful Lily, who loved too hard and forgave to easy. Petunia hated the way she had always felt faded in her sister’s light and she hated the way it had killed her.
This was hatred. This was love; it was something else entirely. This was a girl who was told she was not pretty, not brilliant, not magic; a girl who listened and decided that, alright then, that would have to be enough. That would have to be more than enough. That would have to be better, to be normal, to be plain and horse-toothed and to have too much neck. Her sister had left her for brighter shores and, fine then, Petunia didn’t want to follow anyway. That lived like a canker under her tongue all her life.
When the little Evans family got back to their apartment with Harry’s crumpled letter in his tiny hand and Dudley’s bigger ones empty, Petunia sat them both down, in their kitchen with its weird stain on one wall and the weird musty smell, and told them they were not allowed to hate each other.
Harry looked up from the summer school essay he was editing for Dudley and Dudley peeked under the ice pack he was holding to the swelling black eye he’d got convincining some local tough kids from behind the candy shop to give Harry his pocket money back. “OK, mum,” they chorused.
When Harry met Ron on the Hogwarts Express, Ron told him he had five older brothers and Harry said, “I have one.”
The letter in Harry’s battered trunk read 'Mr. H. Potter’ and Harry signed his Hogwarts homework with that name every year he was there. When he introduced himself during the war, he said 'Potter;’ when he joined the Auror’s office the name on his door was 'Potter,’ because that meant something here.
But when he wrote home to the little two bedroom apartment where Petunia hung her hat and Dudley scowled over his exams, he signed his name 'Harry Evans,’ because that name meant something to him.
Harry still wished for parents, for none of his bad dreams to flash green and cold. When Harry stood in front of the Mirror of Erised, his whole family still spread out in front of him, his mother was smiling at him, her eyes his own. Ron saw his own successes. Dumbledore did not see socks. Ginny Weasley would have seen a ten year old girl smiling like nothing in the world could scare her and she would have pretended furiously that she hadn’t seen anything but empty, beautiful skies.
Harry saw the family he wished he could have: his mother, father, grandparents; but his cousin and his aunt, standing there too, Petunia holding Lily’s hand and so many less lines around his aunt’s old eyes.
When Harry came home with pockets full of frog spawn, Petunia squealed and made him empty them out and do his laundry himself.
When he came in with new scars, new nightmares, Petunia got him a wizarding therapist she could barely afford (but that Harry’s vaults handily could), made sure the kitchen was stocked with warm milk and chocolate for shaking midnights, and had Harry teach her how to send Howlers so that she could fill Dumbledore’s office with her rage.
When Harry brought home the moving photo album Hagrid had given him, he showed it to his aunt. Petunia didn’t cry, not even when she ran her fingers over the image of James whirling Lily high in the air, his bowtie askew, her wedding dress arcing, getting caught in the bushes, dragging in the wet spring mud. Petunia and Vernon had not deigned to attend the wedding, but Petunia recognized the silver pin in her sister’s brilliant hair. Something old.
Her nephew curled into her side, eleven and mourning love he had had for one short year, love that would scar him all his life. “Can you tell me about them?”
“I didn’t know him,” Petunia said. “Lily–Lily was everything I wasn’t. I don’t know if I knew her either.”
Harry nodded, solemn. He didn’t push; the boy never pushed, except for other peoples’ sakes.
“She was beautiful,” said Petunia. “She got mad if you stepped on flowers, because what if they had feelings.” Harry giggled. “She went after the boys on the play yard, when we were little, if they tugged on other little girls’ pigtails…”
Harry brought home other things too–a bushy-haired, buck-toothed girl and a freckled boy who shouted over the telephone–very improper. Mrs. Weasley though Petunia was quaint, stiff, a little sharp. Mr. Weasley thought she was fascinating, and Ginny thought she was hilarious, the way those lips would twist, spit out something polite and damning. The twins tried to prank her once. They didn’t do it twice.
Harry wrote home and whenever he mentioned that people called Hermione ugly or shrill something in Petunia seized up with fury; whenever he wrote that people called Ron stupid, not kind, not loyal, not practical, Petunia would cast her eyes over to Dudley, frowning over his homework, and want to set things aflame.
Mrs. Weasley sent Dudley a warm, soft sweater, every Christmas, that fit him perfectly. Petunia sent Hermione sweets and beautiful quills. She sent Ron packs of clean underwear and a football poster the first year (she meant well) (Harry had to explain it, once he stopped laughing). After that, she sent Ron sweets, too, and little trinkets: a good knife, a portable chess set, a silver lighter Ron would carry in his pocket beside Dumbledore’s Put-Outer, all through the days of that last war.
Every year, dropping Harry off at King’s Cross Station felt a little less like sending him off to die. He came back with new terrible stories for her to pry out of him, about two-faced professors and giant snakes, lost girls and blood on the walls, but he came back. He wrote letters and sent them by the owl she made him keep out on the little balcony. Dudley stopped needing to defend him from bullies, even at a weedy twelve, but he escorted Harry to the little candy store anyway.
When Harry was at school, Dudley wrote him letters, slowly, painstakingly, and told him about his new tutor and about the kids he was mentoring in his after school program. Harry wrote back about his awful DADA teacher (Petunia sent Howlers) and theories about what was trying to kill him in Hogwarts that year (Dudley didn’t tell Petunia about these, just wrote back, had tea at Mrs. Figg, with Hestia and Mundungus and all the others who had watched over Harry’s childhood, and asked them the questions the professors wouldn’t answer to Harry).
Every time Petunia dropped Harry off at 9 ¾, people stared. “It’s just 'cause I’m the Boy Who Lived, auntie,” said Harry, but Petunia knew they were looking at her wrist watch, her pantsuit, her craning neck, all the ways she did not belong.
Remus Lupin was suspicious; Lupin had heard stories about Lily’s older sister and all the sharp things that had dropped off her tongue. When he met Harry on the Express, Harry had his mother’s eyes, his father’s hair, hand-me-down clothes and he dropped under the dementors’ sway faster than anyone Lupin had ever seen. But the boy’s clothes were precisely mended and when Harry woke up he dug through his own bag, pulled out a bar of chocolate, and said, “My aunt sent me with some, in case of nightmares.”
After Lupin’s forced resignation, Harry invited him home for tea. Petunia was stiff and Lupin was shabby, but he shook her hand very properly and called her “Ms. Evans” until she told him to call her Petunia. When he finally got her to laugh, she didn’t sound like Lily but she was, for an instant, just as pretty.
Up to and after his death, Petunia considered Sirius with a kind of fierce, shrill suspicion, the way she did with lurkers on street corners or children who didn’t pull up their pants all the way up over their boxers. But she quite liked Lupin. They went to the unemployment agency together, whenever their latest temp jobs had fallen through.
The Weasleys invited her to the Quidditch World Cup, in Harry’s fourth year, but Petunia twisted her nose and declined. She let them take Dudley though. It took her that whole year to decide whether or not she regreted that–letting her boys go alone into a place that hated half of Harry’s blood and all of Dudley.
She decided two things: one, they had not been alone; and two, she didn’t regret letting them go (Dudley still lit up when he talked of Ireland’s Beaters), but she did regret not gritting her teeth and going with them. She wanted nothing to do with wizardry, with freaks and frog spawn and people who said her sister’s name in hushed reverent tones. But this was not about them. It was about her family. For that, she could deal with even newt eyeballs in her breakfast cereal.
When Voldemort returned, they tried to keep Harry in the dark all summer– Petunia sent Howlers beside Harry’s politer, anxious letters. They tried to take him away for the second part of the summer, and Petunia refused to let Harry go alone.
“You’ll be safe here,” Nymphadora Tonks reassured her, eyeing the clean-scrubbed bareness of their apartment with wariness and nostalgia.
“This ain’t a war for Muggles,” said Moody and told her eight ways they might die bloody.
“If he is my son, then he is my son,” said Petunia, and she and Dudley packed their things. When they reached Grimmauld Place, Tonks knocked over a coatrack under Petunia’s disapproving gaze, and Molly Weasley came out and hugged Petunia tight. She had known Lily Potter– remember. Petunia had lost a sister in the war and people like Molly, Arthur, Minerva, Lupin; they had lost a beautiful young friend.
They holed up in there with Sirius, who never grew on Petunia. When Petunia was frustrated with Lupin’s moping or Molly’s frenetic energy, or the way Dudley tagged along behind the twins, Petunia would go tug the covering down off the portrait of Sirius’s mother and they would scream at each other until Petunia felt her stomach settle.
When the war came, when the Order of the Phoenix rekindled itself, Dudley joined up. He worked as a messenger thoughout the war, ran missions that didn’t require spells, but did require a pocket of joke shop tricks and a tendency to be underestimated and overlooked.
Wizards looked at him and thought Muggle, thought the worst of Muggles. They made assumptions about Dudley the way they did about Ron’s smudged nose, Hagrid’s big frame and kindnesses, the way Dumbledore played the senile old fool until you got too close.
Dudley had big fists but clever fingers. His mother and her craning neck had taught him how to look. Being the kind of boy who people thought was stupid had taught him the importance of listening to everyone in a room. He was one of Lee Jordan’s radio’s best informants.
Petunia was harsh, shrill, a long way from kind, and she always had at least one wizard in her spare bedroom that year, at least one hidden message on the tip of her tongue and a Portkey under her sink.
When Harry went to his parents’ graves in Godric’s Hollow, it was the first time in either story, but this time he knew who had buried them. Harry was almost twenty and Lily had been barely more than that when she died. Harry thought about dying and he thought he could stomach it.
Hermione was warm at his elbow, brilliant and loyal and good; Hogwarts was full of hurting, stubborn, fierce children; in a back alley somewhere Dudley was pretending to be a lost Muggle, dropping intel in with the coins he paid Mundungus Fletcher for a stolen trinket. For that– Harry could see standing up in front of the cradle and telling the Dark Lord to take him first.
But he also thought about his aunt, barely more than twenty, who would have stood here and watched her sister, bright and better and insufferable and lovely, drop into the earth. There had been no one else left to bury them. Petunia had missed Lily’s wedding, but not her funeral.
Harry thought about what it would be like if Dudley didn’t come back from a mission, his big hands and bravery left discarded somewhere in the dirt. Petunia had buried her sister in wizarding soil. Where would she bury her sons?
Harry could imagine dying, but he couldn’t imagine burying Ron, or Hermione. He couldn’t imagine burying Dudley. They were in the midst of war, magic and mayhem and monsters, but Harry had one big brother and Dudley would always be bigger than him. He would always be the thing that scared the bullies away. Petunia had had one little sister, and Harry wondered if she had once thought Lily would always be unbreakable.
Petunia was not at the last battle, when her second son died in the woods, when he came back. She was not a witch. She could not use the Floo, call the Knight Bus, or Apparate. The Portkey under her kitchen sink would take her to a safe place, but she was not looking to be safe. Harry had left her and Dudley one of the DA’s little coins, which glowed bright, a call to battle. When no one answered their telephone calls or Dudley’s radio or showed up to Apparate them in the right direction, Petunia got her hat and her coat and they started driving north.
They pulled up in the smoking aftermath. Dudley had driven the last stretch while Petunia did crossword puzzles fitfully in the passenger seat. Tom Riddle’s body was a lifeless husk. The elder wand was snapped. Molly Weasley was weeping in the Great Hall.
Petunia crunched up the walk in her sensible running shoes, a hand on the pepper spray in her purse just in case. She didn’t use it on any stray Death Eaters, but she almost used it on the exultant crowd she found gathering around Harry, trespassing into his personal space as though something good might rub off on them.
Harry didn’t push, because the boy only pushed for other people. Petunia could be other people; she waded through the crowd and dragged Harry off to someplace where he could sit and shake and nibble on the chocolate she’d dragged out of her purse.
When wizards got in their faces to demand an audience with the Boy Who Lived and Died and Lived, Dudley shouldered them out of the way. Harry felt like a ten year old behind the dumpsters again, scared, bruised, loved, and he clung to his big brother’s hand.
Petunia grew old with laps full of grandchildren with pockets full of frog spawn. Petunia never stopped shrieking when they smeared it on her couch, and they never stopped tumbling into her life with sticky palms, making her purse her lips to hide her spreading smile.
This world did not want her, her shrill voice, her craning neck, her magicless hands that had held Harry’s and Dudley’s for years, looking both ways before they crossed busy streets. This had never been about the world.
Harry’s first son was named James Sirius, and his daughter Lily Luna, but his second son was named Evans.
|
Shares of biotechnology company TrovaGene Inc (NASDAQ:TROV) are collapsing – down nearly 40% as of this writing. The reason? TrovaGene announced this morning that it will be selling at least 15 million shares of its own stock to raise cash for “research and development activities and for working capital and general corporate purposes.”
Each share of common stock is being sold together with a common warrant to purchase one share of common stock at a combined effective price to the public of $0.30 per share and accompanying common warrant. The common warrants will be exercisable immediately at an exercise price of $0.30 per share and will expire five years from the date of issuance.
Added to its current 38.11 million shares outstanding, this offering promises to dilute existing shareholders by at least 40% — coincidentally, about the same amount that the stock is down today.
Another reason investors may be selling off TrovaGene stock is the price at which these new shares are being offered. At $0.30 a share, TrovaGene is offering new stock for a price 30% below what its shares cost prior to the offering announcement.
On the other hand, these new shares won’t just raise the share count but they’ll also raise cash. TrovaGene expects the sale of these new shares to help shore up its balance sheet by generating as much as $4.1 million in new capital, excluding the proceeds, if any, from the exercise of the warrants
On the ratings front, Maxim Group analyst Jason Kolbert downgraded TROV to Hold, in a report issued on November 10. According to TipRanks.com, Kolbert has a yearly average loss of 7.8%, a 34% success rate, and is ranked #4635 out of 4717 analysts.
Trovagene is a clinical-stage, precision medicine oncology therapeutics company. Its focuses on developing PCM-075, is a Polo-like Kinase 1 (PLK1) selective adenosine triphosphate (ATP) competitive inhibitor. The company was founded by Gabriel M. Cerrone, L. David Tomei, Samuil Umansky and Hovsep Melkonyan on August 4, 1999 and is headquartered in San Diego, CA.
|
Steven Spielberg hit Cannes again and it was a return worth celebrating. It has been a very long time coming — 1993 to be exact, when Roald Dahl’s children’s book The BFG was first optioned — but this master director, working again in the fantasy genre, pulls off a movie worth the wait. Saturday night at the Grand Lumiere Theatre in the Palais he soaked up the applause (at least a two-minute standing ovation just for his entrance and another 4 1/2 minutes after the end credits rolled) for his latest, The BFG, which reunited him with the late E.T. The Extra Terrestrial screenwriter Melissa Mathison to bring this tale of a friendly giant and the young girl he teaches about life in Giant Country. On a deeper level it is a story about never doubting someone out there is looking out for you. Spielberg has been spending most of his directorial energy of late on more fact-driven dramas like superb Bridge Of Spies (my favorite movie of 2015) and Lincoln, but at the Nikki Beach after-party he told me he had a different calling on this one.
“You know for the past few years I have been following my passion for history-based stories to turn into movies, but I felt the time was right to return to the fantasy films and this particular book,” he enthused about the Dahl novel. The three-time Oscar winning directing icon was clearly on a high from the audience reaction when I caught up with him at the party. And at the press conference earlier he noted, “it wasn’t going back to the past for me, but revisiting stories I love to do which are imagination stories. There were no barriers. I felt liberated on this. I could tell a story that was (unrestricted)”. And he did with the help of new muse Mark Rylance as the Big Friendly Giant.
In February Rylance became only the second actor to win an Oscar under Spielberg’s watch ( Daniel Day Lewis in Lincoln was the other). Rylance basically performs this like an Andy Serkis -type role and succeeds brilliantly. Spielberg said he already has Rylance lined up for his next two movies: Ready Player One and The Kidnapping Of Edgardo Mortara. Rylance laughed when I asked him about this new alliance. “I guess I have my next few jobs lined up,” he said. Playing opposite him is newcomer Ruby Barnhill, who reminded me so much of Mary Badham as Scout in her curiosity about Bo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird. She’s excellent. Producer Frank Marshall, who with wife Kathleen Kennedy has tried to make this film a reality for years, said that when Mathison finally came aboard to write the script it got Spielberg interested in really making it happen, but the technology had to be there and WETA’s special effects wizard Joe Letteri made the difference. Let me state it flat out, The BFG is pure movie magic , a giant of an entertainment from a giant of film. It’s a real gem and that rare live action family film that isn’t animated. And it is great to see a director, so flushed with past success, be so excited about a new film.
I also made a beeline at the party for Penelope Wilton, who is just perfection as the Queen Of England. I asked what she did to prepare and she just said she checked out footage of the Queen on the internet. She ought to be Queen herself. There’s a real warmth there. I fell in love with the way this character is portrayed. It’s that rare feel-good movie, and it will be interesting to see if today’s jaded kids can cozy up to a movie that celebrates an increasingly lost art of storytelling. Marshall, totally ebullient about the crowd reaction (if not some curmudgeonly critics) told me he has more in store. “You are going to be seeing a lot of me this summer” he said, noting he has hit a home run with July 29th release, Jason Bourne, as well as the September 9th Clint Eastwood-directed biopic of Sully Sullenberger, simply called Sully.
At age 84 he says Eastwood has done a remarkable job with a story that, according to Marshall, you may think you know, but you don’t. Both Marshall and Kennedy are also involved in the next Indiana Jones film starring Harrison Ford. Kennedy, who now runs the entire LucasFilm empire for Disney, said when she took on the mammoth Star Wars projects that there was one project she felt passionately about keeping and that was, you guessed it, The BFG. Kennedy said it was a very tough nut to crack over the past two decades. She also recalled what she said was a moment that could never be repeated, the 1982 closing night Cannes premiere of E.T., which was one of many films she produced for Spielberg. “It was really almost like a rock concert. People had flashlights swinging and lit candles . It was just incredible and it was also the last movie seen in the old Palais,” she said. As you can imagine, last night was a special one full of nostalgia for both Kennedy and Spielberg. Of course now 34 years later the magic returns, even if it is not on that impossible-to-match level. Spielberg was last in Cannes in 2013 as President of the Jury that selected Lesbian love story Blue Is The Warmest Color for the Palme d’Or. Ironically the film that followed The BFG on to the huge Lumiere screen, a competition entry (BFG is out of competition) for Park Chan-Wook’s Mademoiselle, which contains scenes of lesbian lovemaking that makes Blue Is The Warmest Color look as tame as a Minions movie.
|
More than 20 Afghans killed and 150 wounded in weekend of violent incidents
The Rack: "The Limits of Counterinsurgency Doctrine in Afghanistan: The Other Side of COIN," Karl W. Eikenberry (Foreign Affairs).
Civilian casualties
At least 16 Afghans were killed in the Watapur district of Kunar province on Saturday by a coalition airstrike targeting militants in the mountainous region, but conflicting reports have emerged about the nature of the strike, as well as the casualties (NYT, RFE/RL, VOA). Abdul Habib Sayed Khaili, the provincial police chief, told reporters that the strike hit a pickup truck carrying six militants and nine civilians, and said that some local residents claimed it was a drone strike (AP). But statements from Shujaul Mulk Jalala, Kunar’s provincial governor, and Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, put the civilian death toll at 12 (Pajhwok). A statement released by Afghan President Hamid Karzai but the death toll at 16 and only that women and children were among the victims (Reuters). NATO spokeswomen 1st Lt. AnnMarie Annicelli confirmed that coalition forces had carried out a "precision strike" that killed 10 "enemy combatants," but did not comment on whether the strike came from a drone or other air platform. Annicelli added that they had received no reports of civilian deaths in the strike but were still investigating the matter.
Hundreds of Afghans gathered outside the Iranian Consulate in Herat province on Saturday to protest against visa delays, and at least one person was killed and three were wounded when the police guarding the diplomatic mission opened fire on the crowd (RFE/RL). A police spokesman said the protestors had tried to storm the consulate and then threw stones at the police when they tried to stop them. Abdul Rahim, one of those protesting outside the facility, told reporters from Pajhwok Afghan News that it was their fourth consecutive day of visiting the consulate in an attempt to obtain the travel documents they had reportedly paid 20,000 Afghanis for (Pajhwok).
In Wardak province, at least four agents with Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security were killed and more than 150 civilians were injured when a car bomb exploded outside the intelligence agency’s headquarters in Maidan Shahr, and between three and six insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles tried to breach the building (BBC, NYT, RFE/RL). Provincial spokesman Attaullah Khogyani said that the insurgents were killed before they could access the facility. The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack (Pajhwok).
Prisoner exchanges
Afghanistan and Pakistan released at least 18 Taliban prisoners over the weekend, but received no guarantees that they wouldn’t rejoin the ongoing insurgencies in each country (NYT). On Saturday, Afghan officials confirmed that they had exchanged 11 Taliban prisoners — five fighters and six family members — for the release of Fariba Ahmadi Kakar, a female parliamentarian who had been kidnapped by militants last month (AJE, AP, BBC, RFE/RL). Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, confirmed that Kakar had been released (Pajhwok). Pakistan’s foreign ministry issued a statement on Saturday saying that they had released seven Taliban prisoners to facilitate the peace process, but they did not release Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a former top Taliban commander (AFP, BBC, Pajhwok, Post, Reuters, VOA). Afghan officials have long sought Baradar’s release as they see him as crucial to restarting stalled reconciliation efforts.
Pakistani officials told the local Express Tribune on Sunday that Islamabad, Kabul, and Washington have been in talks for months about moving Baradar to either Saudi Arabia or Turkey (ET). Karzai has recently called for the Afghan Taliban’s political office in Doha, Qatar – an office many believe Baradar persuaded the group to setup – to be moved to either of these countries.
Peaceful handover
Asif Ali Zardari stepped down from his position as Pakistan’s president on Sunday, becoming the first democratically elected president in the country’s history to complete his full five-year term (AP, BBC, Dawn, ET, NYT). As many reports noted, Zardari departed from the office with a guard of honor from Pakistan’s armed forces, a "stark contrast to the exits of previous leaders, who were ousted, forced into exile, arrested, or even hanged" (RFE/RL). Mamnoon Hussain, a textile businessman associated with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, will be sworn in as Zardari’s successor on Monday (BBC, Dawn, RFE/RL).
In its September/October "Vice" issue, Foreign Policy magazine features a report on Karachi’s role in the global trade of methamphetamine and deems it "the most dangerous megacity in the world" (ET, FP). The piece, written by Taimur Khan, a correspondent for Abu Dhabi’s National newspaper, comes after weeks of fighting within the city and recent security operations by the Sindh Rangers, a provincial paramilitary organization, to restore law and order. Khan notes that "Gangs tied to political parties have long operated in the poorer parts of the city, running extortion rings and land-grab schemes" and that "Pitched firefights that go on for days between gangs, or between gangs and the police, are not uncommon."
Pakistani clerics gathered across the country on Saturday to celebrate the 39th anniversary of the passing of the Second Amendment, which declared Ahmadis to be non-Muslims, and called for further persecution of the Islamic group (ET). The speakers of the conferences said that Ahmadis were enemies of Pakistan, demanded that they be barred from government or military positions, and even encouraged a social and economic boycott of Ahmadi shops. Ahmadis are considered non-Muslims by the more mainstream Muslim sects for believing that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadiyya faith, was a prophet.
One million mark
Noor Mohammad Noor, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission, announced on Saturday that nearly one million people have obtained voter registration cards for next year’s presidential and provincial elections (Pajhwok). The total represents a fourth of the eligible voters who will be given the identification cards in advance of April’s vote, and includes more than 700,000 male voters and 260,000 female voters. Noor added that, with the exception of seven districts where there are security concerns, the registration campaign was going well.
Update: The Justice Project Pakistan, whose Bagram Prisoner Campaign was featured in our brief on Friday, will be holding a related event at Washington, D.C.’s Fridge Gallery (516 8th Street SE) on Thursday, September 12, from 6:00-9:00 pm. The event will feature photographs from the campaign’s collection, a wine reception, and a brief discussion of the JPP’s new report, Closing Bagram – The Other Guantanamo: Repatriating Pakistani citizens from U.S. detention in Afghanistan.
— Bailey Cahall
|
The best part of last night’s game, by far, was the 15 second peek into the Celtics locker room just before the second half started. We were treated to Kendrick Perkins in street clothes, eating half an orange grove while Doc spoke.
I mean… look at that pile of orange wedges!! I’m not exaggerating when I say there must have pile of what used to be 4 or 5 oranges there. I wish I was in the locker room for that half time.
Perk: “Mmm… oranges”
Training Assistant: “um… Mr. Perk… that’s our only bowl.”
Perk: “so?”
Scalabrine: “so weak… need… orange wedge…. for…. energy”
Perk: ” ain’t none left… just this bowl here for me.
KG: “ooh… orange wedges… can I have some?”
Perk: “sure… here you go”
Scal (crawling): “But I’m so weak. I don’t… usually… play this many minutes”
Perk: “ain’t none left”
Advertisements
|
You can’t judge a book by its cover, especially the No. 1 bestseller on Amazon — 266 blank pages about why Democrats deserve votes.
“Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide,” by Daily Wire managing editor Michael J. Knowles, published Feb. 8, features the image of a donkey covered by the Stars and Stripes.
“You can go cover-to-cover in about 15, 20 seconds,” the conservative journalist told “Fox & Friends” on Thursday about the ultimate in light reading.
“It took a very long time to research this book,” he said. “When I observed their record and reasons to vote for them — on reasons of economics or foreign policy or homeland security or civil rights and so on — I realized it was probably best to just leave all the pages blank.
“When I started researching the book and going through this exhaustive study process, at first I turned to the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and it turned out they were deciding whether or not to include God in their party platform,” he said.
“And the Democrats booed God. That’s not good. So I decided probably if I’m going to make a good case to vote for Democrats, probably just leave that chapter blank.”
The self-published trolling tome — available in paperback for $8.03 — is not all devoid of words, as it contains headers and an actual bibliography.
The book’s Amazon page describes it as “the most exhaustively researched and coherently argued Democrat Party apologia to date … a political treatise sure to stand the test of time.”
The book has been flying off the shelves on Amazon, where it garnered more than 1,300 reviews — mostly sarcastic — by Friday afternoon.
“If Democrats copied and pasted the contents of this book into their national platform they could become unstoppable,” one review said.
“Riveting from cover to cover,” another said.
Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro’s one-word review — “Thorough” — appears at the top of the book.
A similar blank work on the opposite side of the political spectrum — David King’s “Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect & Admiration” — hit the shelves in November. It is available for $7.19 on Amazon, where it also is rated 4.5 out of 5 stars. But it’s ranked No. 536 on the bestseller list.
|
Bruce Flegg resigns as housing minister
Updated
Sorry, this video has expired Video: Qld Housing Minister resigns amid former staffer claims (7pm TV News QLD)
Queensland Housing Minister Bruce Flegg has resigned days after a former staffer raised questions about the accuracy of his lobbyist register.
Dr Flegg was accused of not properly documenting interactions with this son, who works for lobbying firm Rowland.
The sacked staffer also alleged Dr Flegg's diary was altered to show he was working in his electorate when he was practising medicine.
Dr Flegg told Parliament the problems with the register were due to "sloppy administration" but no-one was to blame.
"It doesn't have to be something you have done yourself or even something about yourself," he said.
"If you hold the office of a minister, you have a responsibility over those matters - not one of these matters involved any personal gain for any person."
He became emotional as he told Parliament he wanted to prevent any further damage to the State Government.
"Madam Speaker, you might guess from my demeanour today that I am tendering my resignation to the Premier," he said.
"I want everyone in this place to understand fully I am taking that action.
"The Premier has not asked me or approached me in any way about that."
Regret
Premier Campbell Newman says he accepted Dr Flegg's resignation with regret.
"I think Dr Bruce Flegg has this afternoon demonstrated incredible dignity and a great sense of honour in the way he has taken personal responsibility for administrative failings in his own office," he said.
"He has shown all of us what the ministerial tradition under the Westminster system is all about.
"I'm proud of him for coming in here and having the courage and the dignity to deliver that address that he just did."
Queensland Opposition Leader Annastacia Palaszczuk says Mr Newman should have intervened in the matter before this week.
"The Premier could have stepped in much earlier, at any time, and got to the bottom of it," she said.
"As we heard from the former senior media adviser, the former senior media adviser had approached Lee Anderson, the head of the government media unit.
"It is unbelievable to think that the head of the government media unit would not be in regular contact with the Premier updating him not these issues."
Dr Flegg is the second minister to go from the Newman Cabinet.
David Gibson quit as police minister in April - no more than two weeks after being sworn in - after revealing he allegedly drove a car while his licence was suspended.
Topics: states-and-territories, government-and-politics, qld, brisbane-4000, australia
First posted
|
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and some of his generals. Photo via Flickr user Michael Donovan
As soon as Kim Jong-un re-emerged from wherever he was this month—plump, smiling, with added cane—the question was raised whether it was all real. Certainly, images of Kim limping around the Wisong Scientists Residential District like a freshly neutered puppy were plentiful, and he apparently looked 22 pounds lighter than he did in May.
There were suggestions, even, that the Jong-un on screen was a political decoy, a doppelganger rolled out during times of crisis like when the Dear Leader is so heavy he fractures his ankles. That sort of delicious conspiracy that seems to go hand-in-hand with North Korea, like aliens in Area 51 or groups of wealthy, hooded lizard men at the Bilderberg Conference.
Adam Cathcart’s North Korea Misinformation Bingo sums up the great clusterfuck of assumptions regarding North Korea in a series of over 20 bulletpoints, as well as parodying the nature of the West’s obsession with the country. Without any facts—or any way to legitimately fact check—someone writing about North Korea can spin whatever shit they want.
Cathcart gets at a very crucial argument concerning how the Western media machine profligates (and encourages) hilarious memes and misdirection about North Korea without ever engaging with the country itself. This is why Jong-un’s recent disappearance has served only to increase the rate of stories about him, because without our great star, how can the show go on?
Quirky narratives aside, the country's reality is grim. The UN has pulled the plug on food aid and China. practically the North’s sole trade partner, is extorting them for its own goods while underpaying for the DPRK’s. Even the nation's greatest (or only) ally is fucking them over.
But such is the slippery nature of North Korea (an idea fostered both by the country and the international press) that fiction can be quite easily passed off as fact. Back in 2008, Waseda University professor Toshimitsu Shigemura published The True Character of Kim Jong-il, arguing that the Beloved Father died in 2003 and, to ensure political stability, was replaced by a doppelganger. Satellite imagery, he argues, reveals this new Kim was at least 2.5 centimeters taller than the Supreme Leader.
This is where the doppelganger theory really began: Eager to profligate the idea of North Korea being the loony bin of nations, media outlets like the Telegraph gave Shigemura a nice platform from which to preach his theories.
He later argued at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China, that computer analysis of Kim Jong-il’s voice revealed it was a different man (not, of course, the same man simply hungover or suffering from a cold). The logical culmination of all this was that Bill Clinton met a double while trying to negotiate the release of three American prisoners.
A wall painting of Kim II-sung and Kim Jong-iI. Photo via Flickr user yeowatzup
We're told that Kim Jong-il maybe had a stroke in 2008 but then completed 122 separate visits to field sites the following year. We are to assume that either the stroke was a lie or the visits were; or, perhaps more salaciously, that Kim had body doubles doing his resplendent inspections for him. It's all strangely close to some speculative celebrity gossip column.
Shigemura’s argument is not where it gets messy, it’s his sources. It's certainly feasible that Kim Jong-il felt the necessity to have doubles for safety—there have been a few reports of assassination attempts, after all. It's the fact that Shigemura was told by a North Korean agent (who obviously could not be named or traced) that Kim Jong-il had "at least four" doubles—and that, whenever they're rolled out, a high-ranking Pyongyang official is seen behind him, metaphorically pulling the strings—that's an issue.
There's a high degree of gullibility where North Korea is concerned. The same stories are circulated as new again and again. Eight years ago, for instance, "an official" told the Yonhap News Agency that Kim Jong-il had at least two identical decoys who stood in for him during public events. They apparently underwent plastic surgery, were trained how to speak like him and, crucially, were sent out when his health was bad. "They are the spitting image of Kim—the same age, same height and with the same bouffant hairstyle and pot belly," the official said.
But where were these doubles Kim Jong-il disappeared in 2003? Where were they when he disappeared again in 2008? When Kim Jong-un disappeared for a month this year?
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that this is almost certainly bullshit, designed to undermine the country's leadership rather than tackle the realities of its political system. It’s not obstinate to suggest that—if the rumors were true—times of ill health are exactly when a body double should be rolled out. Instead, we got absolutely none because they probably don’t exist. But we still believe.
Rumors about body doubles have abounded throughout history. Hitler had Gustav Weler. Winston Churchill employed Norman Shelley to read his speeches on the radio. Except neither did, really—it’s all unconfirmed conjecture. Joe R. Reeder reckoned Osama bin Laden had a cave's worth of fake Osamas ready to go.
Back in 2008, when Kim Jong-il had suffered a stroke and disappeared from view, Barbara Demick—author of Nothing to Envy—wrote about the state of Pyongyang on the ground. Nobody, she reported, had heard of the Dear Leader’s health issues. The preservation of a healthy ruler is fundamental to smooth operations in Pyongyang, after all.
I spoke to Demick about the possibility of political decoys in North Korea, and she said that she "wasn’t sure" if they were used.
"At least not widely used," she continued. "I believe if there were, Kim Jong-un may not have disappeared for 40 days. The North Korean government most likely didn't like the optics of a limping leader, especially such a young one. There were, by the way, a number of Kim Jong-il impersonators in South Korea. It was a popular party trick."
Photo via Flickr user petersnoopy
With the nature of North Korea being what it is, it’s no surprise that one of the best pieces of writing on the country is Adam Johnson’s novel The Orphan Master’s Son. The book focuses entirely on the shifting nature of North Korea’s government, with characters changing identities and names simply because of the clothes they wear. It’s the perfect facsimile of our perception of the country, but not the country itself.
When I spoke to Johnson about the possibility of his novel being close to truth, he agreed with Demick. "I’m not aware of any leadership lookalikes for leadership figures, as they were for Saddam [Hussein]," he said.
It all comes from a misunderstanding of what a political decoy is used for—to take bullets, mostly, and to foster the idea of omnipresence. In 2009, Barack Obama was reported to be considering the use of a body double due to the sheer number of threats he received on his life. Weirdly, Ilham Anas, the preeminent lookalike, didn’t want the job because of the whole potentially getting shot thing.
Say what you will about North Korea’s policy towards food, nuclear weapons, or waterslides, but its citizens don’t often shoot their leader. The same wasn't true in Iraq, where Hussein certainly had legitimate reason to be worried. In September of 2002, Dr. Dieter Buhmann of Homberg University announced on German television that he'd studied hundreds of photographs of Saddam Hussein and concluded that the former-president employed at least three political decoys.
This neatly cohered with the pervading opinion that Saddam was a nutcase tyrant who was destabilizing the region. Saddam, eager to profligate the idea of his omnipresence in Iraq, was reported to have bragged about how many doubles he had. Later, his ex-physician claimed that the reports were untrue. But Saddam's use of political decoys is widely believed to be true, and it is certainly the most likely modern scenario.
For a country not unfamiliar with using “fake villages”—like Kijong-dong in the DMZ, reportedly placed there to attract South Korean defectors with visions of economic success—the idea of North Korea’s leaders having casts of doppelgangers to keep up appearances is exciting. But North Korea isn’t exciting. It’s dreadful.
The Leader (be he Dear, Supreme or even Almighty) is broadcast everywhere, all the time; the state doesn’t need physical dummies when the idea of its leadership is more permanent than any physical presence. The government is relatively stable, with few insurgent groups of any real strength.
There is a reason, at least, that the only certified, 100-percent-confirmed political decoys in history were British soldiers M.E. Clifton James and Tex Banwell, who both pretended to be General Montgomery during World War II for Operation Copperhead. That was over 60 years ago, before facial recognition software and satellite imagery could tell whether a man's eyes look slightly further apart than usual from over 20,000 miles away.
The aim of Operation Copperhead was to convince German troops that an invasion of Southern France was incoming, but even then it was fundamentally flawed, as Banwell was far taller than Montgomery and James was a drunk. Banwell was captured and sent to Auschwitz, while James was packaged off to a hotel for the remainder of the war with nothing but the drink for company.
Charlie Chaplin in 1916. Photo via Wikimedia Commons
There’s a great story involving Charlie Chaplin that's reminiscent of how we treat North Korea now. It began in August of 1920, when Lord Desborough, drunk and filled with good humor, decided to tell an anecdote about Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin, Desborough maintained, had entered into a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition and come in 20th, "a most frightful failure."
This story—like practically every tale involving doubles and doppelgangers—is complete hearsay, but it didn't stop the British, Singaporean, American, and Australian press reporting it as true. Nowadays, it’s essential to the Chaplin mythos, just as creepy theme parks, murdered pop stars, and landing a man on the sun are crucial to the DPRK’s.
Attempting to tackle the source of misinformation around North Korea brings you up against South Korea’s media, whose information and intent about their neighbor is not necessarily always that truthful. There's a decent body of evidence to suggest their press is ruled by authoritarian policies, with the latest fall-out involving Japanese journalist Tatsuya Kato being banned from leaving South Korea for defaming Park Guen-hye. The rules are simple: Do not offend the leader of South Korea, and anything that makes North Korea look bad makes South Korea look good.
The media has a track record of falling for sexy stories about North Korea originating from the region. Two years ago, everyone thought Kim Jong-un was killed in Beijing thanks to a rumor on Chinese social media site Weibo. The ridiculous story of the 120 dogs that were fed the remains of Kim Jong-un’s uncle originated from Hong Kong paper Wen Wei Po and is about as true as the bit about Kim Jong-il once hitting 11 holes in one on the golf course. The rumors that an old guard of political figures founded by Kim Jong-il and led by Pyong So had stopped taking orders from Kim Jong-un is contradicted by the evidence of Kim Jong-il’s personal bodyguard now protecting his son. And so on and so forth.
James Hoare, who served as British Chargé d’Affairs in Pyongyang while Kim Jong-il was in power, describes the possibility of political decoys existing in North Korea as "conspiracy stuff."
"The only lookalike I heard of was an actor who played Kim Il-sung back in the guerrilla days," he said. "I'd imagine, actually, that’s still around for film and TV purposes. I’ve never heard of a Kim Jong-il lookalike. Since he made relatively few public appearances compared to his father and appeared in no films, I would imagine there was no need. But he would have been pretty easy to do—his hairstyle could be seen on many men in the country. Add dark glasses and an anorak and you'd be there."
Reading reports on Kim Jong-il’s last high-profile disappearance is an uncanny adventure into the familiar, like Groundhog Day, will Bill Murray playing whichever Kim is in power at whatever time. According to the South Korean press, Kim Jong-un and Kim Jong-il suffered from precisely the same issues before their disappearances in 2014 and 2003, respectively: diabetes, gout, and obesity. They also disappeared from view in September for almost exactly the same amount of time (40 days for the Dear Leader, 42 for the Supreme).
It’s time to move on from the regime and assess the systems in place, and time to approach the realities of life in North Korea rather than the fiction. It's time, in other words, to get some new material.
Follow David Whelan on Twitter.
|
When customers can’t find a product on a shelf it’s an inconvenience. But by some estimates, it adds up to billions of dollars of lost revenue each year for retailers around the world.
A robot called Tally roams the aisles of a supermarket.
A new shelf-scanning robot called Tally could help ensure that customers never leave a store empty-handed. It roams the aisles and automatically records which shelves need to be restocked.
The robot, developed by a startup called Simbe Robotics, is the latest effort to automate some of the more routine work done in millions of warehouses and retail stores. It is also an example of the way robots and AI will increasingly take over parts of people’s jobs rather than replacing them.
Restocking shelves is simple but hugely important for retailers. Billions of dollars may be lost each year because products are missing, misplaced, or poorly arranged, according to a report from the analyst firm IHL Services. In a large store it can take hundreds of hours to inspect shelves manually each week.
Brad Bogolea, CEO and cofounder of Simbe Robotics, says his company’s robot can scan the shelves of a small store, like a modest CVS or Walgreens, in about an hour. A very large retailer might need several robots to patrol its premises. He says the robot will be offered on a subscription basis but did not provide the pricing. Bogolea adds that one large retailer is already testing the machine.
Tally automatically roams a store, checking whether a shelf needs restocking; whether a product has been misplaced or poorly arranged; and whether the prices shown on shelves are correct. The robot consists of a wheeled platform with four cameras that scan the shelves on either side from the floor up to a height of eight feet.
Tally takes advantage of the fact that big stores already put together data showing the layout of shelves and the arrangement of products on those shelves.
It uses a map of the store to navigate, while the shelf layout, known as a retail planogram, is used to compare the actual shelves to the ideal. The data collected by the robot is transmitted to a server, where it is analyzed and turned into alerts for the retailer.
Two of three founders of Simbe Robotics were involved with Willow Garage, a research lab and incubator created by Scott Hassan, an entrepreneur who worked with the founders of Google on a precursor to their search engine, to develop advanced robotic hardware and software. Willow Garage spawned a number of robotics startups as well as the widely used Robot Operating System software.
Tally is just the latest example of robots creeping into new areas of work (see “Are You Ready for a Robot Colleague?”). A study published recently by the consulting firm McKinsey concludes that 46 percent of most work could be automated using emerging technologies.
Simbe Robotics plans to develop other robots for the retail space in the future. “Our primary vision is automating retail,” Bogolea says. “We think there’s a huge opportunity to automate mundane tasks, to free people up to focus on customer service.”
Manuela Veloso, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who works with mobile robots, says Tally is a clever idea for a robot. “From a technical point of view, it’s challenging,” she says, although the problem is simplified in this case because all the products are arranged on shelves.
Joe Jones, a robotics researcher and entrepreneur who was involved with iRobot and Harvest Automation, is also impressed. But he says the biggest challenge for Simbe Robotics will be getting the system to work reliably in the real world. “In a real-world environment the robot may not behave as effectively as it does in the lab or even in a supportive beta test site,” he says.
|
In a move to clear cap space to sign center Boban Marjanovic, the Pistons intend to waive Joel Anthony and Cameron Bairstow, David Mayo of MLive reports. Neither player is owed any guaranteed money, so the team won’t be on the hook for any salary as a result of the moves. Detroit is reportedly set to ink Marjanovic to an offer sheet worth $21MM over three years.
Bairstow, 25, appeared in 18 games with Chicago last season, averaging 1.9 points, 1.6 rebounds in 5.7 minutes per outing. The two-year veteran was drafted out of the New Mexico with the No. 49 overall pick in the 2014 NBA Draft. As a senior for the Lobos, he averaged a Mountain West Conference-high 20.4 points, 7.4 rebounds and 32.9 minutes in 34 games. Bairstow holds career averages of 1.2 points, 1.0 rebounds and 4.6 minutes in 36 NBA games with the Bulls. He was acquired from the Bulls in June in exchange for guard Spencer Dinwiddie, who was reportedly waived by the Bulls today as well.
Anthony, 33, appeared in 19 games for the Pistons in 2015/16, averaging o.9 points and 1.1 rebounds in 5.1 minutes per outing. He shot .600/.000/.750 from the field on the year. Anthony was set to earn $2.5MM next season.
|
He’s already filed a lawsuit (PDF) that says he was denied a promotion because of his atheism.
Since then, Specialist Jeremy Hall hasn’t won many fans in the military.
He’s still facing threats.
Spc. Jeremy Hall filed a formal statement Wednesday with the Army. He says he overheard a conversation between two sergeants in his platoon and one wanted to “bust Hall in the mouth.” Hall says he faces the animosity because he is an atheist and is suing the Department of Defense. He alleges it permits a culture that pushes fundamentalist Christianity. He says he does not feel safe his unit.
It’s bad enough we have our soldiers overseas right now; that many are not treated with respect because they are not Christian is despicable. The Department of Defense has to take action against high-ranking army officials who allow this harassment to continue.
(via Deep Thoughts)
[tags]atheist, atheism[/tags]
|
GM Alex Anthopoulos, under whose six-year tenure the Blue Jays emerged as one of the best teams in the AL, will not return to Toronto, reportedly over philosophical disagreements over how he built a winner, and concerns that his power over baseball operations would be severely curtailed under a new team president.
Sportsnet had the news first, and every subsequent report repeats that Anthopoulos was offered a long-term contract extension, but turned it down. The disagreement reportedly wasn’t over money, and there are no other GM jobs open, so it’s not as if Anthopoulos is leaving for something better. Instead, it’s not hard to connect the dots between Anthopoulos’s departure and the hiring of new president and CEO Mark Shapiro in August.
Shapiro had more or less run baseball operations in Cleveland since 2001, so when he came to Toronto, you knew it wouldn’t be just to handle the financial side of things. Anthopoulos, who said it was his decision not to negotiate an extension during the playoffs (negotiations that ended up lasting three business days at most) appears to have balked at having to cede decision-making power, especially to someone who reportedly came right in and criticized the way he had been doing things.
Anthopoulos’s Blue Jays, with their recent acquisitions culminating in deadline deals for David Price and Troy Tulowitzki, are in Win-Now Mode. They did not win this year, but are in a much closer place than they were a year ago, or even three months ago. This necessarily comes at a cost, both to payroll and to farm-system depth. Both of those things are anathema to Mark Shapiro’s way of doing business.
Advertisement
You can blame this on Shapiro (and a lot of people will), but he’s doing what he was hired to do. This is on Rogers, which wants a slimmer payroll and a stronger pipeline of cheap, controllable talent. That’s no less valid a way to run a team, and other than Noah Syndergaard, there aren’t any ex-Jays prospects that you can point to as obviously bad deals.
The good news for Jays fans is that a change in the front office doesn’t mean things have to change on the field, not for a while. Nearly every significant everyday player is under team control for next year (the rotation is a different story), and I can think of numerous recent examples of teams switching GMs near the peak of a run of success, and winning championships with the old guy’s roster.
The optics are terrible here—right now, it looks like the Blue Jays giving the boot to the man who oversaw their rise from mediocrity to contender, and repudiating his strategies that got them there—but the cult of the executive is a trap. There are lots of people out there capable of building championship teams, and multiple ways to do it. Anthopoulos had success in Toronto; that doesn’t mean it was sustainable, or that ownership was willing to spend to realize his vision, or that Shapiro can’t also have success with his methods. The Blue Jays should be good for the immediate future, and Anthopoulos’s moves (good and bad, and he’s had both) will be felt for a long time after he’s gone. The only thing that seems clear for now is that the big-acquisition window is closed—taking the next step will have to be done without a payroll bump to match.
Advertisement
[Sportsnet]
|
Half a million Raspberry Pi’s have now rolled off the element14 production line
London, 8 January 2013. Almost one year since the launch of the Raspberry Pi, the global computing phenomenon, element14 has announced it has signed a new distribution contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to sell the credit-card sized computer around the world.
element14, the leading high-service distributor of electronic components and home to the award-winning element14 Community, has also announced that it has now manufactured more than 500,000 Raspberry Pi’s since the launch in February last year. Trying to get your head around the huge success of Raspberry Pi is not easy, but if you were to stand all the element14 Raspberry Pi’s end to end they would reach 25.6 miles, higher than the 24 miles Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner skydived last year.
In a year that saw the world fall in love with the microcomputer, element14 brought production of the Raspberry Pi to the UK from China in September 2012.
There is no sign of a slowdown in demand for the revolutionary computer with the award-winning element14 community, the worlds largest online community for design engineers and electronics enthusiasts, helping to bring together Raspberry Pi fans to share ideas and further innovation through the Code Exchange.
Mike Buffham, Global Head of EDE at element14, said: “It seems every time we talk about the Raspberry Pi we say it has been a true phenomenon, but it genuinely has. Back in February last year we could never have thought it would be this successful. Now less than a year on and we have manufactured over 500,000 at element14 alone, and we are delighted to have signed a new global contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to continue to play a pivotal role in putting computer programming back at the heart of engineers, both young and old.”
Eben Upton, Co-Founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, said: “Since the Raspberry Pi was launched globally in February 2012 it has been a tremendous success story. The younger generation has demonstrated significant intrigue in learning how to build and program their own computer device. And what has been great to see is the enormous growth in the hobbyist market. I have seen projects from Twittering chickens to home beer brewing kits being created using the Raspberry Pi and its accessories.”
Since the launch of the Raspberry Pi Board B element14 has released a series of exclusive accessories that enable owners to build their collection with the addition of extra functionality and capabilities. These include:
PiFace digital : Targeted at 11-16 year olds this
Gertboard The Gertboard is an add-on GPIO expansion board which allows Raspberry Pi users to connect to and control more advanced physical devices.
WiPi - Wirelessly connects the Raspberry Pi to a network
- Wirelessly connects the Raspberry Pi to a network PiView - enables the direct connection of the Raspberry Pi to VGA monitors from the HDMI output
Computing enthusiasts can expect to see a lot more from Raspberry Pi in 2013 and you can find out more about the minicomputer at our businesses around the world – Newark element14 in North America, Farnell element14 in Europe and element14 in Asia Pacific. The Raspberry Pi is also available through CPC in the UK and MCM in the United States.
To join the discussion about Raspberry Pi go to the element14 Community and sign up to the Raspberry Pi Group.
|
David Cameron has claimed that his favourite TV detective dramas demonstrate the need for a so-called "snooper's charter".
In an appearance before a committee of peers and MPs, Mr Cameron said he wanted to resurrect the communications bill with cross-party support after 2015.
The bill, which was scrapped last year after opposition from the Liberal Democrats, would lead to the creation of a huge database of people's online activity including emails, voice calls and social media.
Mr Cameron highlighted how crimes in television dramas are solved by tracking the use of mobile phones. He warned that investigators will lose this ability as criminals and terrorists resort to using the internet instead.
Earlier this week Mr Cameron told BBC Radio 2 that he likes to relax by watching Elementary, a modern-day version of Sherlock Homes set in the US, and Homeland, a thriller about a CIA agent on the trail of a soldier she believes is an Al-Qaida operative.
Mr Cameron told the Joint National Security Strategy committee: "I love watching, as I should probably stop telling people, crime dramas on the television. There is hardly crime drama where a crime is solved without using the data of a mobile communications device.
"As you move from a world of people having fixed telephones and mobile phones to Skype and phones on the internet, if we don't modernise the practise and modernise the law over time we will have the communications data to solve these horrible crimes on a shrinking proportion of devices. That is a real problem for keeping people safe."
Mr Cameron acknowledged concerns about civil liberties, but said that politicians need to reassure the public that the bill would only allow the security service and police to monitor online activity, rather than the content of emails and messages.
He said: "I don't think that we have actually got across to people yet the actual basis of this. In most of the serious crimes, comms data - who called who and when, and where was the telephone at the time, not the content of the call - is absolutely vital."
He also said he was "very worried" that the Edward Snowden revelations have made Britain less safe and suggested newspapers should stop "endlessly dallying in this to think before they act".
Mr Cameron also denied that his cuts to the armed forces budget has reduced Britain's influence in the world.
His comments come after Robert Gates, the former US defence secretary, warned that reducing the size of the armed forces will prevent Britain from becoming a "full partner" with America.
Mr Cameron said that in hindsight he wished he had transformed the army sooner from "battle tanks in Europe" to "drones and cyber". He said: "I wish we had done more and faster."
He also said Britain is "right" to retain its climate change targets and cannot afford to "trhow them out the window".
During an appearance before a committee of MPs and peers, Mr Cameron rejected claims that climate change targets are a "huge mistake" which could "severely damage" Britain.
He said that he is committed to reducing the level of carbon emissions although he has concerns that European red tape could hinder the development of the shale gas industry.
Asked if the Climate Change Act, which commits Britain to an 80 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, Mr Cameron said: "I support the climate change act. I don't think that the climate change act is something we should have concern about."
|
Hubbub What Milwaukee is talking about SHARE
By of the
There are a lot of open questions about how consumers will be affected by the possible sale of most of Wisconsin's Time Warner Cable subscribers to Charter Communications.
Here are responses to some questions that came up among JSOnline commenters about Internet service under Charter.
Would Charter cap the amount of data I can use?
Internet service providers would like to cap the amount of data you use, just as most cap the data used in cellphone plans. The companies claim streaming video and other data-heavy services can strain their networks, and that those using a lot of data can slow the speed of services to other customers.
Cynics argue data caps give the companies another service for which they can charge. Most Time Warner Cable customers don't have data caps, according to a November survey by tech website Gigacom.
There are reports that Time Warner Cable has tested data caps in some cities and received a negative reaction. Some Internet providers like AT&T UVerse will charge customers additional fees if they exceed the cap several times. Comcast is trying this model in some markets. But Charter's policy is the harshest in Gigacom's survey. If you keep going over Charter's cap, the company shuts off your access. "You're cut off," the Gigacom survey says.
How fast is Charter's Internet service?
Charter's Internet service can be zippy for watching videos. Internet video service Netflix posts monthly reports of the speed of American Internet providers (likely in an effort to pressure those companies to speed up service for streaming video). In March's survey results, Charter ranked fourth among major service providers at an average of 2.61 Mbps, just ahead of Comcast and Time Warner Cable. AT&T's UVerse ranked 12th at 1.73 Mbps.
Will Charter's Internet service be more or less expensive?
As for which company provides the best prices, comparisons are nearly impossible. You can get different prices if you bundle services such as TV, phone and Internet, or if you have discount codes through your employer or if you live in an area with more competition.
Charter doesn't offer Internet service in Milwaukee, but the company's website has pricing for stand-alone service. By punching in a random residential address in downtown Madison, we were shown an offer of $39.99 a month for the first 12 months of service at a speed of 30 Mbps. There was an additional $5 a month charge for renting a wireless router from the company.
An address in Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood yielded a $54.99 monthly charge from Time Warner Cable's website, plus $5.99 a month for that wireless router. AT&T U-Verse had an additional hurdle in comparing because its website yielded price offers for different speeds. A plan at 24 Mbps was $54.95 per month. It appeared the router would cost extra with AT&T as well.
Would Charter charge more in Milwaukee because the local competitors charge more? We don't know yet.
Will customers have to give up their old rr.com email addresses?
If the deal goes through, some hassles are likely for Time Warner Cable subscribers. For example, Barry Orton, a University of Wisconsin-Madison telecommunications professor, said it is likely that those who use "rr.com" email addresses provided by Time Warner eventually would have to switch to "@charter.net" addresses.
"It's a real pain to switch," Orton said. "So they're going to be aware of that. They're probably going to have to keep the 'rr' for some period of time, but I suspect sooner or later they are going to have to transition that."
Time Warner Cable has shifted customers from rr.com addressees to twc.com email addresses even though both brands are owned by the same company. Comcast has required customers of some of the cable companies it has purchased over the years to switch email addresses, though the company created tools to help customers make the transition.
|
WASHINGTON -- A federal judge on Wednesday threw out Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's complaint against her state's voter-approved medical marijuana law.
The complaint filed in May sought a judgment on whether state officials administering Arizona's medical-marijuana programs could be at risk for federal prosecution.
Brewer filed the complaint along with state Attorney General Tom Horne, claiming a letter from the former Arizona U.S. attorney suggested state officials could face prosecution.
U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton dismissed the complaint without prejudice, ruling enforcement actions by federal officials posed no genuine threat to state officials seeking to implement the law.
"Plaintiffs," wrote Bolton "have not shown that any action against state employees in this state is imminent or even threatened." Further, the complaint did not show any state officials had been prosecuted in other states for "participation in state medical marijuana licensing schemes."
The actions of federal officials concerning other states "do not substantiate a credible, specific warning or threat to initiate criminal proceedings against state employees in Arizona" if they were to enforce the marijuana act, Bolton wrote. Even if the letters from the U.S. attorneys in Arizona or other states were interpreted as threats or warnings, a "generalized threat" is not sufficient to merit a ruling about this state law, she added.
"It's unfortunate in this incident that the federal court has basically said we have to wait for a state employee to be prosecuted or face imminent prosecution before the state's lawsuit will be heard," Brewer spokesman Matt Benson told the Phoenix New Times.
Upon filing her lawsuit, Brewer ordered all applications for medical marijuana dispensaries in the state be rejected by Arizona's Department of Health Services. Her office maintains Brewer's stance on dispensaries hasn't changed in light of Wednesday's decision.
"It is unconscionable for Governor Brewer to continue to force very sick people to needlessly suffer by stripping them of the legal avenue through which to obtain their vital medicine," said Ezekiel Edwards, director of the ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project, in a statement. "Today’s ruling underscores the need for state officials to stop playing politics and implement the law as approved by a majority of Arizona voters so that thousands of patients can access the medicine their doctors believe is most effective for them."
Proposition 203, which Arizona voters passed in 2010, allows seriously ill patients to obtain marijuana with a doctor's request. Both Brewer and Horne opposed it.
|
Oh my, 3 fandoms?In Season 1, Episode 15, Twilight turns into "Rapidash" when she doesn't get Pinkie. Well, honestly, who does? We saw in Too Many Pinkie's that she doesn't even get herself ;DYes, the art is 3DWith thanks to Lauren Faust ( -------------------FAQHow big is the art?- 300 x 168 x 8How long did it take you?- About 3.5 hoursTexture Pack?- "Love and Tolerance" by Hazzat (~ Zoot101 Who is best pony?- See my page for my fav's list.Can I request a creation?- If you send me a link to either- Something that's in the public domain, or- Something you ownthen I'll take a look. No promises, but I might take it up! Preferably pony-related, but doesn't have to beAre there more of these Minecraft creations?- Why yes, yes there are. I've made a nice gallery for you:- I'm also slowly adding to it
|
All political candidates are accused of lying at some point, and Hillary Clinton is no exception. But some people believe that Hillary Clinton is especially dishonest. The accusations are flying even stronger after news broke that she had, indeed, handled classified information carelessly by using a private email server and the DNC was planting anti-Sanders stories during the campaign. Is the idea that she’s more dishonest than most candidates a fair evaluation?
In a Washington Post/ABC poll from March, an astonishing 59% of those asked “Do you think Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy?” answered “No.” That sounds like a high number, and it is. But Donald Trump, in that same poll, received a 69% rate of “No.”
Despite this fact, the Trump campaign has launched LyingCrookedHillary.com – a website dedicated to exposing Hillary Clinton as a liar.
So what gives? Why is Hillary known for being a liar?
Ask the common person, and you’ll get a handful of responses. And a lot of that depends on when you ask. At this point in time, you’ll hear more about Benghazi or her email server. In ages past, you might hear about the Iraq war, gay marriage, TPP, or a dozen other topics.
That is why we took a hard look at six of the most widely touted “lies” of Hillary Clinton and asked: Is there anything to this?
As it turns out, there is. And here is what you need to know.
1. Clinton Falsely Claimed a ‘Strong Record’ on Gay Marriage
Clinton’s stance on gay marriage has evolved over time and, according to Politifact, has tracked very closely with public opinion polls. She has always been in favor of civil unions with equal rights as married couples, but didn’t publicly voice support for same sex marriage until 2013.
In 2000, at a news conference in New York, Clinton said:
Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time, and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman. But I also believe that people in committed gay marriages, as they believe them to be, should be given rights under the law that recognize and respect their relationship.”
In 2002, Clinton participated in an interview with Chris Matthews at the University of Albany in New York. Matthews asked her if New York state should recognize gay marriage and she simply answered: “No.”
In 2004, Clinton took to the Senate floor to speak against a constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage. This gives the appearance of support for gay marriage, but her rationale primarily focused on her opinion that such a decision should be left up to the states. She believed that the Defense Against Marriage Act (DOMA) was sufficient to protect the state’s rights in this matter. In that same speech on the Senate floor, she said:
I believe marriage is not just a bond but a sacred bond between a man and a woman. I have had occasion in my life to defend marriage, to stand up for marriage… So I take umbrage at anyone who might suggest that those of us who worry about amending the Constitution are less committed to the sanctity of marriage, or to the fundamental bedrock principle that exists between a man and a woman, going back into the midst of history as one of the foundational institutions of history and humanity and civilization, and that its primary, principal role during those millennia has been the raising and socializing of children for the society into which they become adults.”
In November of 2010, while speaking at the University of Melbourne in Australia, Clinton was asked about her stance on same-sex marriage. She replied that she felt the matter of same-sex marriage should be decided on a state-by-state basis. She added:
I have not supported same-sex marriage. I have supported civil partnerships and contractual relationships. Yet I am supportive of our states’ taking actions that they believe reflects the evolution of attitudes about this… for many people it is sort of a symbolic issue, that if you don’t support that you don’t support equality between people, and particularly for the LGBT community. But I am very comfortable saying that we, in the Obama Administration, fully support every kind of equality … and we will continue to support states’ making their own decisions about this.”
In fact, Clinton didn’t publicly endorse same-sex marriage until 2013 when she released this video.
So it appears that Clinton changed her mind about same-sex marriage over time. The problem is that she has been mostly unwilling to acknowledge that record or to apologize for her previous opposition to gay marriage. She tends to simply state that she has evolved, and move on.
In a 2014 NPR interview with Terry Gross, starting around 27:30, Gross gave Clinton the chance to state that she has personally changed her opinion on the issue. At that point, Clinton became defensive and aggressively denied the allegation. Somewhat taken aback, Gross gave Clinton the chance to say that she only changed politically, but was always in support of same-sex marriage personally. Clinton proceeded to deny this as well, leaving listeners to wonder: what other option is there? Instead, Clinton became indignant and said:
“I have a strong record. I have a great commitment to this issue. And I’m proud of what I’ve done and the progress we are making.”
Her claim of a strong record is, of course, false. As shown above, Hillary has been outspoken in her opposition, working against gay marriage until very recently.
Her past record on gay marriage cannot be labeled as “strong,” since at one point in time she was opposed to it altogether. Clinton appeared to be unrepentant and has, in fact, avoided opportunities to apologize for her past opposition.
Recently, Clinton came under fire for trying to defend her husband’s support for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In an MSNBC interview with Rachel Maddow, she said:
“On Defense of Marriage, I think what my husband believed — and there was certainly evidence to support it — is that there was enough political momentum to amend the Constitution of the United States of America, and that there had to be some way to stop that.”
But many activists have disputed this claim, stating that, at the time Clinton signed DOMA, there was no discussion of a constitutional amendment. Though conservatives did eventually start a movement to amend the constitution, that did not occur until four years later.
@BernieSanders is right. Note to my friends Bill and #Hillary: Pls stop saying DOMA was to prevent something worse. It wasnt, I was there. — Hilary Rosen (@hilaryr) October 25, 2015
Elizabeth Birch, who was executive director of the Human Rights Campaign from 1995 to 2004, told the Huffington Post,
“It’s ridiculous. There was no threat in the immediate vicinity of 1996 of a constitutional amendment. It came four years later. It may be that she needs to revisit the facts of what happened.”
When Bill Clinton had tried to use that same excuse years before, Birch had written an op-ed refuting the claim:
“In 1996, I was President of the Human Rights Campaign, and there was no real threat of a Federal Marriage Amendment. That battle would explode about eight years later, in 2004, when President Bush announced it was a central policy goal of his administration to pass such an amendment.”
Evan Wolfson, founder and president of Freedom to Marry, also backed up Elizabeth’s take on the subject,
“It is not accurate to explain DOMA as motivated by an attempt to forestall a constitutional amendment. There was no such serious effort in 1996.”
In this light, it seems odd that Clinton would drudge up that same debunked theory, and it makes sense why this particular lie incensed so many front-lines activists.
2. Clinton Falsely Claimed That She Landed Under Sniper Fire in Bosnia
During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Clinton claimed that she landed under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996 when she was First Lady. That story, it turns out, was simply not true.
“I remember landing under sniper fire,” Clinton said during a March 17, 2008 speech at George Washington University. “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
Emmy award winning journalist Sharyl Attkisson, a CBS news reporter who accompanied Clinton on that trip, unequivocally refuted the story.
Actor and comedian Sinbad, another attendee, contradicted Hillary Clinton’s account of the events as well.
When challenged on her assertion, Clinton altered course. According to an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on March 25, 2008, Clinton said she had been sleep deprived and simply “misspoke” when she talked about landing under sniper fire in Bosnia.
But calling this an isolated occasion was a lie as well. A lie to cover up the first lie. Reporters found that she had used the same story at least two different times in the preceding months. Once in Iowa in December of 2007 and again in Texas in February of 2008.
Confronted with these facts, her position changed significantly. Speaking to a group of reporters, she said:
You know, I made a mistake in describing it. I have said many times … we were … told by the Secret Service and the military that we were going into a war zone and that we had to be conscious of that. I was the first first lady taken into a war zone since Eleanor Roosevelt. And, you know, I think that the military and the Secret Service did a terrific job. But we certainly did take precautions. There is no doubt about that, and I remember that very clearly. report this ad But I did make a mistake in talking about it the last time and recently.”
But the exaggeration didn’t stop there. When confronted with footage that showed her stopping on the tarmac to speak with a little girl, Clinton told reporters:
“I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this eight-year-old girl and I said, ‘Well, I, I can’t, I can’t rush by her, I’ve got to at least greet her. So I greeted her, I took her stuff and I left. Now that’s my memory of it.”
That statement gives the impression that she rushed off the tarmac after greeting the little girl. But extended footage told a completely different tale. As CBS News reported:
“She and her daughter Chelsea lingered on the tarmac to greet U.S. military officials, took photos, and then walked to the armored vehicle where she did, eventually, duck and enter.”
According to eye witness Sharyl Attkinson, the footage also shows her taking pictures with a group of seventh graders.
3. Clinton Is Probably Sincere About Her Position on the Iraq War
This is one example when the claims that she lied were most likely not true. On February 7, 2007, Hillary Clinton said this on the Senate floor:
“If I had been President in October 2002 I would have never asked for authority to divert our attention from Afghanistan to Iraq and I certainly would have never started this war.”
While we don’t know for certain what Clinton would have done as President, we do know what she did and said as a senator.
For starters, in 2002 Sen. Clinton voted in favor of authorizing the use of force in Iraq in a bill formally known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.
Before the vote, on October 10, 2002 in her speech to the Senate, Clinton strongly encouraged the use of diplomacy. In no uncertain terms, she condemned unilateral action, stating that:
“If we were to attack Iraq now, alone or with few allies, it would set a precedent that could come back to haunt us.”
But she also said:
“In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001.”
You can watch part 1 of her speech here and part 2 of her speech here.
The vote took place the day after Clinton made this speech, and the resolution passed by a vote of 77 to 23.
On February 3, 2016, Clinton attended a CNN Town Hall event in New Hampshire. During a Q&A with the audience, she claimed that she only voted for the bill because President Bush said that he needed to use it as leverage in order to finish the inspections.
This has become a point of contention. Some analysts believe that if that were truly Clinton’s motivation, then she would have supported the Levin amendment. Clinton voted against that resolution, which failed in the Senate shortly before passage of the Iraq resolution that same day. Clinton’s opponent Lincoln Chafee wrote this opinion article on the topic.
The Levin amendment purported to limit the use of force until other diplomatic options had been exhausted, specifically urging cooperation with the United Nations. But here’s where things get tricky. Opponents of the amendment, Clinton included, say it could have compromised the leverage of the United States regarding the weapons inspections. Proponents of the amendment explicitly deny this and even allege that opponents are being disingenuous in that characterization.
Full text of the amendment, formally titled “Multilateral Use of Force Authorization Act of 2002” can be found here.
The most relevant provisions are as follows:
From Section 2
“Congress–
(1) supports the President’s call for the United Nations to address the threat to international peace and security posed by Saddam Hussein’s continued refusal to meet Iraq’s obligations…
(2) urges the United Nations Security Council to adopt promptly a resolution that would–
(A) demand that Iraq provide immediate, unconditional, and unrestricted access of the United Nations weapons inspectors…
(B) authorize the use of necessary and appropriate military force by member states of the United Nations to enforce such resolution in the event that the Government of Iraq refuses to comply; and
(3) affirms that, under international law and the United Nations Charter, the United States has at all times the inherent right to use military force in self-defense.”
And from Section 3
“(a) Authorization.–Pursuant to a resolution of the United Nations Security Council described in section 2(2) that is
adopted after the enactment of this joint resolution, and subject to subsection (b), the President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States to destroy, remove, or render harmless Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons-usable material, ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers, and related facilities, if Iraq fails to comply with the terms of the Security Council resolution.
(b) Requirements.–Before the authority granted in subsection (a) is exercised, the President shall make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that the United States has used appropriate diplomatic and other peaceful means to obtain compliance by Iraq with a resolution of the United Nations Security Council described in section 2(2) and that those efforts have not been and are not likely to be successful in obtaining such compliance.”
For her part, it seems that Clinton probably held a bonafide belief that the Levin amendment could undermine the leverage of the United States. That is, if her aforementioned speech on the Senate floor is to be taken at face value. She said, for example:
Others argue that we should work through the United Nations and should only resort to force if and when the United Nations Security Council approves it. This too has great appeal for different reasons. The UN deserves our support. Whenever possible we should work through it and strengthen it, for it enables the world to share the risks and burdens of global security and when it acts, it confers a legitimacy that increases the likelihood of long-term success. The UN can help lead the world into a new era of global cooperation and the United States should support that goal. But there are problems with this approach as well … In the case of Iraq, recent comments indicate that one or two Security Council members might never approve force against Saddam Hussein until he has actually used chemical, biological, or God forbid, nuclear weapons.”
All of this indicates that Clinton probably isn’t lying about her stance on the Iraq war.
That conclusion is undermined, however, by her somewhat hawkish statements about military action both before and after the vote.
For instance, a month before the vote on Meet The Press, she said: “I can support the President, I can support an action against Saddam Hussein because I think it’s in the long-term interests of our national security …”
And her statement to the Council on Foreign Relations on December 2003, shortly after the capture of Saddam Hussein:
I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam Hussein. I believe that that was the right vote. I have had many disputes and disagreements with the administration over how that authority has been used, but I stand by the vote to provide the authority because I think it was a necessary step in order to maximize the outcome that did occur in the Security Council with the unanimous vote to send in inspectors. And I also knew that our military forces would be successful.”
So, while this does give the impression of playing both sides, Clinton has remained fairly consistent on the topic of why she had authorized force in Iraq and how she’d expected things to be done differently.
Lastly, during the 2008 Presidential campaign, Clinton claimed that she, as a U.S. Senator, was opposed to the Iraq war before then-U.S. Senator Obama. At a campaign stop in Eugene Oregon on April 5 2008, she said:
“I actually started criticizing the war in Iraq before he did.”
Clinton qualified this assertion with the admission that Obama has been critical of the Iraq war as an Illinois Senator in 2002, but that, during their concurrent terms as Senator, which began in 2005, she had been first to criticize the conflict. In support of this, Clinton cited a news release from her office dated January 26, 2005.
Despite her convoluted reasoning, Clinton was wrong even by her own standards. As it turns out, Obama had renewed his criticism of the war on January 18, 2005, a full week earlier than Hillary, during Condoleezza Rice’s confirmation hearings.
While this can technically be called a lie, it was likely merely accidental: a small inaccuracy about an already weak point.
So, on the whole, Clinton has been fairly consistent on her stance on the Iraq war and her vote to authorize it. While experts might call her position that Hussein was aiding terrorists to be misguided, or her position on the Levin amendment to be unfounded, Clinton hasn’t shown blatant dishonesty in either of these cases. And while her assertion that, as a Senator, she criticized the Iraq war before then Senator Obama has been proven to be false, this appears to be a case of factual inaccuracy rather than a premeditated lie.
4. In the New York Primary Debate, Clinton Misrepresented Her Support for a $15 Federal Minimum Wage
Hillary Clinton has been difficult to understand regarding her stance on the minimum wage. But one thing she has been consistent on is that is should be higher than it currently is.
As far as research shows, Clinton supports a national $12 minimum wage, but not a national $15 minimum wage. At the same time, she does support certain state and local governments’ going to a $15 minimum wage.
During the November 2015 debate in Iowa, Kathie Obradovich first asked Sanders: “You called for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour everywhere in the country. But the President’s former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Alan Krueger, has said a national increase of $15 could lead to undesirable and unintended consequences of job loss. What level of job loss would you consider unacceptable?”
When Clinton addressed the same question, she said:
…I do take what Alan Krueger said seriously. … However, what Alan Krueger said in the piece you’re referring to is that if we went to $15, there are no international comparisons. That is why I support a $12 national federal minimum wage. That is what the Democrats in the Senate have put forward as a proposal. But I do believe that is a minimum. And places like Seattle, like Los Angeles, like New York City, they can go higher. It’s what happened in Governor O’Malley’s state. There was a minimum wage at the state level, and some places went higher.”
But in the 2016 New York primary debate, when asked directly, Clinton said that, as president, she would sign a bill to raise the national minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Watch it here at around the 33 minute mark.
Wolf Blitzer asked: “As President, if a Democratic Congress put a $15 minimum wage bill on your desk, would you sign it?”
And Clinton responded:
Well of course I would. And I have supported, I have supported the fight for 15…”
This appears to indicate a change of heart. And Bernie Sanders called her on it. He said, “To suddenly announce now that you’re for $15, I don’t think is quite accurate.”
Clinton answered:
I have said from the very beginning that I supported the fight for $15. … I supported the $15 effort in L.A. I supported in Seattle. I supported it for the fast food workers in New York. The minimum wage at the national level right now is $7.25, right? We want to raise it higher than it ever has been, but we also have to recognize some states and some cities will go higher… I have taken my cue from the Democrats in the Senate… (who said) we will set a national level of $12 and then urge any place that can go above it to go above it. … I think setting the goal to get to $12 is the way to go, encouraging others to get to $15. But, of course, if we have a Democratic Congress, we will go to $15.”
Sanders responded: “Well, I think the secretary has confused a lot of people. I don’t know how you’re there for the fight for $15 when you say you want a $12-an-hour national minimum wage.”
That exchange seemed to indicate that while Clinton would prefer a $15 minimum wage, she is willing to compromise with legislatures to get to $12. But is that accurate? Does Clinton personally support a national $15 minimum wage?
No. She explained in the November debate that she does not support it nationally because it may result in job loss. And subsequent interviews after the New York debate indicate that she hasn’t actually changed from that position.
When asked by George Stephanopoulos about this inconsistency, Clinton explained she would be in favor of such a bill if it made allowances for rural areas to have a lower standard than $15. This equivocation was absent in the Brooklyn, New York primary debate.
So, in conclusion, Clinton does not support an across-the-board national $15 minimum wage, even though the words she used in the New York debate made it appear to voters that she did. Both before and after the debate, Clinton has consistently opposed a national $15 minimum wage, although her nuanced position has mostly supported a $12 minimum wage with some exceptions for the wage being higher than that in some regions.
5. Hillary Falsely Claimed That She Was Always Opposed to NAFTA
Was Hillary a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning? She certainly says she was. In 2008, Clinton told a group of reporters, “I have spoken consistently against NAFTA and the way it’s been implemented.”
She has also said, “I was one of the voices in the administration warning about NAFTA.”
And again, according to NPR: “You know, I have been a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning.”
But, according to MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, White House documents indicated that Hillary, as First Lady, was actually a NAFTA supporter. David Shuster said during the episode:
The documents reveal she held at least five meetings to strategize about how to win congressional approval (of NAFTA). She helped the White House block opposition from labor and environmental groups, and she was the featured speaker at a crucial meeting on November 10, 1993, where 120 women opinion leaders were asked to help lobby the Senate for passage of the deal.”
According to ABC News, participants in that event said, “Her remarks were totally pro-NAFTA and what a good thing it would be for the economy. There was no equivocation for her support for NAFTA at the time. ”
In 1996, during a visit with unionized garment workers, she said, “I think everybody is in favor of free and fair trade. I think NAFTA is proving its worth,” according to an Associated Press report.
And this statement made in 2007 indicates that she definitely had positive expectation for NAFTA: “NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would.”
So either she was lying in 2007, when she said she had positive expectations for NAFTA, and again in 1993 when she lobbied for it, or she was lying in 2008 when she says she was “a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning.”
For more information, see David Shuster’s excellent coverage of the deception for Hardball.
6. Clinton Lied When She Said She Never Sent Classified Information on Her Private Email Server
The video above shows Clinton saying that she never sent any classified material in the past. Specifically, she said:
I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material, so I am certainly well aware of the classification requirements, and did not send classified material.”
On July 5, FBI Director James Comey said that she had, indeed, sent and received 110 emails about classified matters on her private server. These emails were easily hackable and she and her aides were “extremely careless” in their handling of classified information. But the FBI does not recommend charges against Clinton.
Comey said:
For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters.
AP wrote an extensive story that fact checked many of Clinton’s statements compared with Comey’s, showing many times that she was dishonest. You can read the list at this link.
On YouTube, this video compares Clinton’s statements with Comey’s statements:
|
In the past couple years, companies like Google and Facebook have struggled to find the right balance between useful and creepy with the development of facial recognition technology. Some law enforcement agencies, however, are not holding back their enthusiasm—and nobody's going for it quite like the cops in San Diego.
The Center for Investigative Reporting just published an in-depth look into San Diego's recent, rather unnervingly enthusiastic foray into the tactical use of facial recognition in the field. Armed with 133 Samsung Galaxy tablets and smartphones, law enforcement agencies in San Diego and Imperial Counties have started scanning suspects' faces and cross-checking them all with the state of California's mugshot database, that also happens to be linked to the state's 32 million driver's license photos.
Advertisement
If the so-called Tactical Identification System (TACIDS) find a match, it gives the officer instant access to information about previous arrests, including the suspect's home address, criminal history, and so forth. Handy!
Obviously, of course, there are some serious privacy concerns here. A TACIDS draft policy explores different scenarios that would lead to officers using facial recognition, and, believe it or not, one doesn't require the officer to stop the person at all. In this scenario, they could simply use facial recognition tech on security camera footage or even social media (read: selfies). Especially in a scenario where an officer stops and confronts someone, Fourth Amendment concerns come into play. Think about it: if a cop knows he can simply use his tablet to perform an instantaneous background check, this newfound power would presumably affect how he decides who's a suspect and who's an innocent bystander.
But is this okay? Well, the courts have yet to rule on a case involving police use of facial recognition. Plenty of people don't think so. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published a lengthy blog post in response to the Center for Investigative Reporting's feature. In it, the EFF's Jennifer Lynch points to a quote from an Arizona Supreme Court justice who said "[t]he thought that an American can be compelled to 'show his papers' before exercising his right to walk the streets, drive the highways or board the trains is repugnant to American institutions and ideals."
Advertisement
For now, the use of facial recognition in day-to-day police work will continue. So far, the various law enforcement agencies in San Diego have made 5,629 queries since TACIDS launched. However, that does not count all the other agencies around the country that are catching onto the trend. Homeland Security, border control, the FBI—they're all thinking about face scanning, too. And this is just a small part of the broader shift towards the militarization of police forces, a situation serious enough that people are writing entire books about it.
So what do you think? Are you cool with facial recognition coming to a police department near you? Let's talk it out in the comments.
|
Thousands to be affected as Qantas engineers walk
Updated
More than 11,000 Qantas passengers will have their travel plans affected by industrial action at three major airports today.
Qantas says 80 domestic and international flights will be cancelled, delayed or brought forward when engineers walk off the job for four hours this afternoon in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.
The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association says it wants a 15 per cent pay rise and better job security.
But Qantas says its maintenance engineers are the highest paid in the world, and current demands are unreasonable.
The carrier says it wants to return to the negotiating table as soon as possible.
The strike begins at 3:00pm AEDT (4:00pm AEST).
Qantas estimates the latest industrial action would take the total number of passengers affected by recent strike action to 46,500.
More delays at Australia's international airports are likely on Thursday when Customs inspectors stop work over a pay negotiation.
The Community and Public Sector Union has rejected the Federal Government's offer of a 9 per cent pay rise over three years.
ABC/AAP
Topics: air-transport, unions, sydney-airport-2020, sydney-2000, brisbane-4000, brisbane-airport-4007, melbourne-3000, melbourne-airport-3045
First posted
|
“Cannabis use for medicinal purposes dates back at least 3,000 years.[1-5] It was introduced into Western medicine in the 1840s by W.B. O’Shaughnessy, a surgeon who learned of its medicinal properties while working in India for the British East Indies Company. Its use was promoted for reported analgesic, sedative, anti-inflammatory, antispasmodic, and anticonvulsant effects.
In 1937, the U.S. Treasury Department introduced the Marihuana Tax Act. This Act imposed a levy of $1 per ounce for medicinal use of Cannabis and $100 per ounce for recreational use. Physicians in the United States were the principal opponents of the Act. The American Medical Association (AMA) opposed the Act because physicians were required to pay a special tax for prescribing Cannabis, use special order forms to procure it, and keep special records concerning its professional use. In addition, the AMA believed that objective evidence that Cannabis was harmful was lacking and that passage of the Act would impede further research into its medicinal worth.[6] In 1942, Cannabis was removed from the U.S. Pharmacopoeia because of persistent concerns about its potential to cause harm.[2,3]
In 1951, Congress passed the Boggs Act, which for the first time, included Cannabis with narcoticdrugs. In 1970, with the passage of the Controlled Substances Act, marijuana was classified as a Schedule I drug. Drugs in this category are distinguished as having no accepted medicinal use. Other Schedule I substances include heroin, LSD, mescaline, methaqualone, and gamma-hydroxybutyrate.
Despite its designation as having no medicinal use, Cannabis was distributed to patients by the U.S. government on a case-by-case basis under the Compassionate Use Investigational New Drug program established in 1978. Distribution of Cannabis through this program was discontinued in 1992.[1-4] Although federal law prohibits the use of Cannabis, the table below lists the localities that permit its use for certain medical conditions.
The main psychoactive constituent of Cannabis was identified as delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). In 1986, synthetic delta-9-THC in sesame oil was licensed and approved for the treatment of chemotherapy-associated nausea and vomiting under the generic name dronabinol. Clinical trials determined that dronabinol was as effective as or better than other antiemetic agents available at the time.[7] Dronabinol was also studied for its ability to stimulate weight gain in patients with AIDS in the late 1980s. Thus, the indications were expanded to include treatment of anorexia associated with human immunodeficiency virus infection in 1992. Clinical trial results showed no statistically significant weight gain, although patients reported an improvement in appetite.[8,9]
Within the past 20 years, the neurobiology of cannabinoids has been analyzed.[10-13] The first cannabinoid receptor, CB1, was identified in the brain in 1988. A second cannabinoid receptor, CB2, was identified in 1993. The highest concentration of CB2 receptors is located on B lymphocytes and natural killer cells, suggesting a possible role in immunity. Endogenous cannabinoids (endocannabinoids) have been identified and appear to have a role in pain modulation, control of movement, feeding behavior, and memory.[11]
“Cannabinoids are a group of 21-carbon–containing terpenophenolic compounds produced uniquely by Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica species.[1,2] These plant-derived compounds may be referred to as phytocannabinoids. Although delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the primary psychoactive ingredient, other known compounds with biologic activity are cannabinol, cannabidiol (CBD), cannabichromene, cannabigerol, tetrahydrocannabivarin, and delta-8-THC. CBD, in particular, is thought to have significant analgesic and anti-inflammatory activity without the psychoactive effect (high) of delta-9-THC.”
“One study in mice and rats suggested that cannabinoids may have a protective effect against the development of certain types of tumors.” They continue; “Cannabinoids may cause antitumor effects by various mechanisms, including induction of cell death, inhibition of cell growth, and inhibition of tumor angiogenesis invasion and metastasis. One review summarizes the molecular mechanisms of action of cannabinoids as antitumor agents. Cannabinoids appear to kill tumor cells but do not affect their nontransformed counterparts and may even protect them from cell death.”
“An in vitro study of the effect of CBD on programmed cell death in breast cancer cell lines found that CBD induced programmed cell death, independent of the CB1, CB2, or vanilloid receptors. CBD inhibited the survival of both estrogen receptor–positive and estrogen receptor–negative breast cancer cell lines, inducing apoptosis in a concentration-dependent manner while having little effect on nontumorigenic, mammary cells.”
“In addition, both plant-derived and endogenous cannabinoids have been studied for anti-inflammatory effects. A mouse study demonstrated that endogenous cannabinoid system signaling is likely to provide intrinsic protection against colonic inflammation.[23] As a result, a hypothesis that phytocannabinoids and endocannabinoids may be useful in the risk reduction and treatment of colorectal cancer has been developed.[24-27]“
“CBD may also enhance uptake of cytotoxic drugs into malignant cells. Activation of the transient receptor potential vanilloid type 2 (TRPV2) has been shown to inhibit proliferation of human glioblastoma multiforme cells and overcome resistance to the chemotherapy agent carmustine.[28] In an in vitro model, CBD increased TRPV2 activation and increased uptake of cytotoxic drugs, leading to apoptosis of glioma cells without affecting normal human astrocytes. This suggests that coadministration of CBD with cytotoxic agents may increase drug uptake and potentiate cell death in human glioma cells.”
“Many animal studies have previously demonstrated that delta-9-THC and other cannabinoids have a stimulatory effect on appetite and increase food intake. It is believed that the endogenous cannabinoid system may serve as a regulator of feeding behavior. The endogenous cannabinoid anandamide potently enhances appetite in mice.[29] Moreover, CB1 receptors in the hypothalamus may be involved in the motivational or reward aspects of eating.[30]“
“Cannabinoids may also contribute to pain modulation through an anti-inflammatory mechanism; a CB2 effect with cannabinoids acting on mast cell receptors to attenuate the release of inflammatory agents, such as histamine and serotonin, and on keratinocytes to enhance the release of analgesic opioids has been described.[34-36] One study reported that the efficacy of synthetic CB1- and CB2-receptor agonists were comparable with the efficacy of morphine in a murine model of tumor pain.[37]“
FREE subscription to Receive Quality Stories Straight in your Inbox!
RELATED POSTS
As the world’s most beloved herb, Cannabis, continues to be liberated from the persecution of the government and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, research continues to validate the many health benefits of Cannabis. This time, The National Cancer Institute, a government-funded organization has released a report indicating that cannabis and cannabinoids are indeed powerful agents of good health and wonderful supplements in the fight against cancer.The report then goes on to outline several key potential benefits of cannabis that should be noted in the race for a cure for cancer, and also in the debate to further legalize cannabis in the United States After presenting this important information the report then goes on to discuss the pharmacology of cannabis , a summary of clinical research on cannabis, and even the negative effects of it’s consumption, which do include a risk of cancer, although this is rather inconclusive.As the report states, “cannabis has been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years,” and only recently has it been targeted for prohibition. At a time when cancer is now the leading cause of death of children and cancer rates are climbing for everyone, those without safe access to medical cannabis absolutely deserve the right to add this to their medicine cabinet if they so choose.Alex Pietrowski is an artist and writer concerned with preserving good health and the basic freedom to enjoy a healthy lifestyle. He is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and an avid student of Yoga and life.Article sources:
|
Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) doesn’t want voters in Michigan to think former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney prefers another candidate—despite the fact that Romney, a Michigan native, recorded robocalls for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), too.
“Gov. Romney’s kinda recording robocalls for everyone. And I didn’t want people to think he favors one person over me because he doesn’t,” Kasich told reporters Tuesday after a rally in Lansing, Michigan. “So you know, it’s his words, I don’t write his scripts.”
It was widely reported that Romney recorded robocalls for Rubio’s campaign in four states, but the fact that Romney also recorded a robocall for Kasich in Michigan went largely unnoticed until Tuesday afternoon. (Kasich’s campaign didn’t respond to an inquiry from the New York Times on Monday.)
The scripts Romney reads in the robocalls for the two candidates are nearly identical. Kasich’s robocall begins, “Hello, this is Mitt Romney calling and I’m calling on behalf of Kasich for America.”
Because Romney is recording robocalls for multiple candidates, Kasich said the show of support didn’t come under ideal circumstances.
“We want to make sure people don’t think that Romney is for someone else and not for me, particularly in the state of Michigan,” he told reporters. “So is this the scenario I would like to have had it work out like this? Not really, but it is what it is.”
Listen to Romney robocall for Kasich below, via ABC News:
|
“All officers, all officers. There is an officer shot. There is an officer shot.”
Those were the chilling words heard on police radio Saturday night broadcast by a woman who stopped to help mortally wounded San Diego police Officer Jeremy Henwood.
Shooting scanner traffic - Part 1
Shooting scanner traffic - Part 2 Officer-involved shooting scanner traffic - Part 2
San Diego police Officer Jeremy Henwood
View the photo gallery: Officer slain by suicidal man
Donations Donations to the family can be made to the Officer Jeremy Henwood Family Trust. Checks can be made out to the San Diego Police Officers Association, with “Jeremy Henwood” written in the memo line. Donations can be sent to: Jeremy Henwood Family Trust, care of San Diego Police Officers Association, 8388 Vickers St., San Diego, CA, 92111. Donations can also be made online at sdpoa.org.
If you knew San Diego police Officer Jeremy Henwood and would like to share memories of him, please e-mail breaking@uniontri... or call the breaking news line at (619) 293-1010. We are also seeking information about Martin Hanna, who was shot and is hospitalized.
“It was the first indication in the San Diego Police Department that we had an officer who was shot,” said Police Chief William Lansdowne at Sunday afternoon news conference.
The woman and her husband were in their vehicle behind Henwood’s patrol car about 5:30 p.m. at University Avenue and 45th Street.
They were watching when Dejon White, 23, pulled up along side the patrol car in a black Audi, pointed a shotgun at the unsuspecting officer and opened fire.
The couple rushed to Henwood’s aid. “He is still breathing,” the woman is heard saying on the tape that is posted on the web site SanDiegoPublicSafety.com.
The dispatcher immediately broadcast 1199 - code for an officer needs help.
As police rushed to the scene one officer can be heard asking “It is one of ours?”
The response came in the affirmative.
One of the first officers to arrive then can be heard radioing “I’ve got an officer down with a gunshot wound to the head near the left ear.”
Henwood, a captain in the Marine reserves who had just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, was rushed to a hospital where he died hours later.
As the events of the night quickly unfolded and police scrambled to locate the shooter a department helicopter hovered overhead.
White was located less that an half hour later parked in the driveway of his home on 48th Street just south of Polk Avenue.
The air crew can be heard warning officers on the ground that White had a shotgun.
White pulled out of this driveway and started to head south on 48th. Officers rushing north from University Avenue blocked his path.
He stopped the car and reached for the shotgun, police said. When he opened the door of the car seven officers opened fire. On the tape one of the responders is heard saying "shots fired."
The car rolled backwards into a fence. White, who police said had earlier shot a man at an In-N-Out restaurant, was declared dead at the scene. Investigators later discovered a two-page suicide note in his apartment.
The names of the couple who stopped to help Henwood have not be made public. Lansdowne called their actions an “heroic effort.“
|
A bomb exploded near the BJP's office in Bangalore this morning, injuring 16 people including eight policemen. ( See Pics) Karnataka's state elections are scheduled for May 5, so a police van was posted outside the BJP branch in Malleshwaram, a crowded residential neighbourhood which also hosts several temples.Intelligence officials told NDTV that an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) was used this morning, but were not clear on how the bomb was triggered. A large fire followed the explosion. Several vehicles including the police van were gutted.Bangalore Commissioner Raghavendra Auradkar said the explosives appear to have been placed on a motorcycle, but so far, he said, there are no details of the sort of material that was used.Karnataka's Home Minister R Ashok described the blast as "terrorist activity" and said BJP workers were the target. (Watch) The policemen who were injured today were on duty on a day when a lot of activity was expected at the BJP office because it is the last day for candidates to file their nomination papers for the state elections."The injuries are not very serious and nobody is critically injured, said L Pachau, the Director General of Karnataka.RPN Singh, the country's junior Home Minister, urged, "Don't pay heed to rumours".He said, "The Home Ministry will provide any assistance that the Karnataka Police needs."Union Home minister Sushil Shinde has said the centre would begin an inquiry into the incident. When asked if this could be described as a terror attack, he said that would be known only "after the probe was completed." A team from the National Investigation Agency, which has expertise in handling terror attacks, has inspected the site.
|
The Affordable Care Act’s so-called contraception mandate, met with immediate outrage from the Religious Right and the Catholic bishops. These groups, unsatisfied with generous religious exemptions to the law, are demanding broader loopholes that are tantamount to a radical redefinition of religious liberty.Houses of worship are wholly exempt from the mandate, and accommodations have been made for many religious non-profits. But for-profit corporations want the courts to extend those exemptions to them, too. Represented by outfits like the Becket Fund and the Alliance Defending Freedom, owners of secular companies have filed dozens of challenges to the law.Now, the Supreme Court is set to hear two such challenges to the contraception mandate. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties, both secular, for-profit companies owned by conservative Christian families, are asking the highest court in the land to allow them to seriously impede their employees’ fair access to contraception coverage.At AU, we disagree. We’ve consistently told the courts that secular corporations don’t exercise religion. The owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Woods are asking the Supreme Court to elevate their beliefs over the medical needs of their employees. True religious liberty should never come at the cost of someone else’s rights.AU’s executive director, the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, said, “The Supreme Court needs to make it clear that religious freedom is not a battering ram to use against individual rights.”He added, “The question before the court is simple: Does the owner of a secular corporation have the right to impose his religious views onto his employees? And the answer is equally simple: No.”Our legal team has filed dozens of briefs in support of the contraception mandate because we believe it’s important to safeguard workers’ access to birth control. We have actively opposed challenges brought by Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Woods, Eden Foods and others. But now, we’d like to hear from those most directly affected by these lawsuits.If you work for Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Woods, Eden Foods or any other company that is challenging the contraceptive mandate and you’re worried about your ability to obtain contraception coverage, we want to hear from you. Your information will be kept strictly confidential: it won’t go to your employer or to the media. Your story stays with us.Our confidential submission form is now available online. A member of AU staff will be in touch with you shortly after we receive your submission in order to decide how we can best protect your interests.We hope you’ll give us the opportunity to continue safeguarding your rights.
|
Mr. McCain said he was “frankly puzzled” that investigators were taking so long, since the relevant articles and books cited “a relatively small number of senior officials.”
The F.B.I. appears to be focused on recent media disclosures on American cyberattacks on Iran , a terrorist plot in Yemen that was foiled by a double agent and the so-called “kill list” of terrorist suspects approved for drone strikes, some of those interviewed have told colleagues. The reports, which set off a furor in Congress, were published by The New York Times , The Associated Press, Newsweek and other outlets, as well as in recent books by reporters for Newsweek and The Times.
In June, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. , rejecting Republican calls for a special prosecutor, directed the United States attorneys for Maryland and the District of Columbia to investigate the leaks. While some officials have indicated that their primary focus has been on the cyberattacks and the Yemen plot, some of those interviewed have been questioned about the targeted killing of terrorists.
Employees of several agencies have been directed to preserve records related to the cases under review. Early interviews have appeared to be informational in tone, rather than accusatory, some employees have said, as agents try to master the facts on complex secret programs and trace press reports about them.
Already the deterrent effect of the investigation on officials’ willingness to discuss security and foreign policy issues, presumably one purpose of the leak crackdown, has been striking. Some government officials and press advocates say Americans are learning less about their government’s actions.
“People are being cautious,” said one intelligence official who, considering the circumstances, spoke on condition of anonymity. “We’re not doing some of the routine things we usually do,” he added, referring to briefings on American security efforts and subjects in the news.
Gregg Leslie, the interim executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, an advocacy group, said the effect of the current investigation comes on top of a growing awareness by journalists in the last two years that the government often tracks employees’ e-mail and telephone contacts.
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
“Reporters are beginning to resort to the old practice of meeting on a park bench to avoid leaving an electronic trail,” he said.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
The Senate antileak proposals got strong bipartisan support in the intelligence committee, with only Senator Ron Wyden , Democrat of Oregon , voting against them. But in recent days the proposed bill has been pilloried by former officials and civil liberties groups and has gotten no public support from current intelligence officials, the White House or the House Intelligence Committee.
Critics have pointed out that the new rules would be highly selective, applying only to the intelligence agencies and not to the White House, the State Department — or to Congress itself. In addition, they say, by prohibiting official background briefings by subject-matter experts who do not want to be named publicly, the bill could actually prompt reporters to seek out unofficial sources, leading to more uncontrolled disclosures.
“Everybody in the intelligence world agrees that we have never seen so many high-level leaks,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former assistant director of the C.I.A. “But this is the wrong solution.”
W. George Jameson, a lawyer who spent most of his 30-year C.I.A. career in the general counsel’s office, said the Senate bill also could be unconstitutional on separation-of-powers grounds. “It’s the legislative branch telling the executive branch how to deal with executive-branch classified information,” he said.
Rigid rules can backfire, Mr. Jameson said. Often, a reporter who obtains classified information calls an agency to check facts or alert officials to a pending story. Remaining mum, he said, often makes no sense.
“Sometimes you have to reveal classified information to protect classified information,” Mr. Jameson said. “Things move fast, and there are no bright lines.”
Brian Weiss, a spokesman for Senator Dianne Feinstein , the Democratic chairwoman of the intelligence committee, said she was aware of the potential problems. “The bill is a work in progress,” he said. “Senator Feinstein is looking at the comments and is open to changes as it moves forward.”
A closer look at the recent disclosures reveals some of the complexity. The Stuxnet computer worm that destroyed some Iranian nuclear centrifuges, for example, first came to light not from press leaks but from computer security companies that saw its consequences in several countries. The New York Times had reported in January 2009 that President George W. Bush had authorized attacks on Iranian computer networks; more recent articles provided more detail on the American role in the attacks, and Mr. Obama’s oversight of them.
Some experts say the underlying cause of damaging disclosures is the overclassification of routine information. “People who regularly deal with classified information lose all respect for the system because so much of what they see is improperly classified,” said Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University law school.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
She noted that more than 4.8 million government employees and contractors now held security clearances. “That’s not a recipe for keeping secrets,” she said.
|
The morning is a good time to experience Revere Beach. No honky-tonks out, just older women with their tiny dogs, the muscle-bound runner who seems curiously distracted by squawking seagulls, and a man so tiny and fragile doing tai chi next to the lap, lap, lapping of the water that I fear a stiff breeze would send him to Nova Scotia.
It’s the oldest public beach in the United States and folks in Revere (Reverians? Revereites?) wear this fact with a badge of honor. There are many more luxe beaches along the Massachusetts shoreline (pick one on Cape Cod, won’t you?) but this one is For the Public By Special Decree of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Impossible to believe in our own time, but the state government bustled in and took this section of private shore for the common good back in 1895. Today most governmental bodies are all too willing to give away the farm to any number of “innova4tors” who seek a lucrative public-private partnerships that is Oh So Private But Hey, The Public Might Get Something Later, Let’s Just Sign on the Dotted Line (sorry, my mind just turned to Chicago’s parting gift from Mayor Richard Daley and the parking meter “deal”)
Today, everyone remains welcome at Revere Beach, which is an impressive feat when you think about it. Especially when you consider that development continues to run its course in swift fashion in the area. This long expanse of sand is close to two (arguably three) MBTA Blue Line stations, and the views are quite lovely as one can look out at the tiny towns of Winthrop and Nahant in the distance, along with taking part in the ongoing sidewalk ballet on Revere Beach Boulevard that has a certain charm, regardless of whether Kelly’s Roast Beef is open or not.
Come see it for yourself. Morning is good, but whenever you have time works.
|
CNN's Jaime Gangel: "We Double Checked With Our Source," Rubio Campaign Is Hiding Internal Dissent
A battle is being waged within Florida Sen. Marco Rubio's campaign about whether he should even remain in the GOP presidential race ahead of his home state primary, sources say. Jamie Gangel responds to the Rubio campaign, which called her story "100% fiction."
VIDEO: CNN Reporter Confirms "Breaking News" Fiction Report Based On Just A Single Source https://t.co/wWgP7FHxDj — Joe Pounder (@PounderFile) March 8, 2016
JAIME GANGEL: Now, for the record, Alex Conant, the communications director for the Rubio campagin came on our air last hour and said he was very upset about this report. He said it is not, true, that there is no dissent inside the campaign. And once again repeated that Rubio was staying in.
BUT, we double checked with our source who confirmed that our story was 100% correct.
So the Rubio campaign may not be happy that this story is out there when they are fighting for their life, they don't want people to know there is dissent in the campaign, but the reality is we were told there has been a serious debate about whether he should drop out before the Florida primary.
|
This 6 piece set will be made to the buyer's measurements
This listing includes:
Front and Back Tie over-bust corset
Long A-line skirt w/trim
Full circle mini skirt with trim
Mid length Add-A-Bustle with trim - drawstring waist
Hoodie Bolero Shrug
Sleeveless black top w/lace
MEASUREMENTS NEEDED:
BACK OF SHOULDERS: (upper shoulder width for back of shrug)
(actual measurements & deducted measurements)
BUST:
UNDER-BUST:
WAIST: (where you naturally bend)
HIGH HIP:
LENGTH FROM UNDER-BUST TO WAIST:
For the corset, take your actual measurements and deduct 1-2" for a proper fit or just take your measurements as tight as you want to wear it.
LENGTH: Waist to hem - for long skirt
100% cotton - hand wash cold water, line dry, warm or steam iron.
If you have questions about sizing, please email me.
The full circle mini skirt has an elastic waist
The mid length add-a-bustle has a drawstring waist.
The Back tie over bust corset has steel boning at the front and back lacings and on the three side seams.
This is not a heavy duty corset and is not meant for waist reduction.
THANKS SO MUCH FOR LOOKING!
I have no returns or refunds.
All sales are final.
|
SINGAPORE — (UPDATE – 1:48 p.m.) A bank in Singapore where President Rodrigo Duterte claimed Senator Antonio Trillanes IV maintained an account said on Tuesday that it did not exist but was unable to give him a certification since he is not a client.
Trillanes, accompanied by some reporters, first asked a teller at the DBS Bank branch at the Alexandra Retail Center to verify if there was an account number 178000296012 in his name, which Duerte had earlier claimed contained “193,000” in an unknown currency.
After checking their records, the teller said the account did not exist.
The supposed DBS account was among those posted on social media that Trillanes supposedly owned in several foreign banks and one of those mentioned by Duterte.
Trillanes then asked the manager of the bank for a certification. After a 10-minute private meeting with the bank official during which he explained the circumstances behind his request, Trillanes said the manager, who declined to be interviewed, had called their main office and was told they could not issue a certification to a non-client.
Trillanes also went to Raffles Tower, where he supposedly has a Hongkong Shanghai Bank joint account — number 0016729915127 — with a Robert Fong containing 278,300 Singapore dollars.
However, there is no Hongkong Shanghai Bank at Raffles Tower. And while a Google search indicates that there is a Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. Ltd. there, it does not appear on the building’s business listings.
Trillanes also went to a mall on Raffles Boulevard to check if it had a branch of the bank but found only an ATM.
He said this proved that his supposed overseas accounts were a figment of the imagination.
|
When the Giants 2014 championship season ended, everything seemed to be perfect within the organization. Players were locked up long term, Joe Panik had solidified the team's need at second base, and it looked like Pablo Sandoval was going to re-sign. However, he apparently felt disrespected by the team that signed him as a teenager and bolted for Boston. San Francisco was suddenly forced to fill a position in a market that had very few attractive solutions. Rather than signing a free agent, the Giants turned to the trade market and acquired Casey McGehee, who'd become expendable after the Marlins got Martin Prado from the Yankees.
While he wasn't expected to put up MVP type numbers, or even replace the production of the panda that once occupied the hot corner, the Giants thought he could at the very least be an average major league player for them. That couldn't have been farther from the truth. McGehee has struggled mightily, and the #HitsMcGehee stopped coming.
Stats before being sent down to AAA
Casey McGehee PA HR BB% K% ISO BABIP wOBA wRC+ 2015 118 2 6.8% 20.3% .082 .238 .242 55
He was below league average in every offensive category, and as of Saturday has an fWAR of -0.6. Even his defense was worse than it had been in 2014. It wasn't exactly sparkling last year but was at least a positive value according to Fangraphs' Def rating. Put simply, the Giants had to address their third base situation quickly at the beginning of this year. A trade was unlikely given how early it was in the season, so Bruce Bochy turned to a relatively unknown player, Matt Duffy. He was called up during the 2014 season to play the role of utility man and pinch hitter and quickly earned the trust of his manager.
In limited action for the first month of the season, Duffy showed that he could handle major league pitching and improved his defense dramatically with each game at third base. Since taking over full-time duties after McGehee was demoted to AAA, he's proved that it wasn't a mistake to give him the reins. He turned an ugly situation around completely and may wind up being the long-term solution at third base going forward.
Matt Duffy PA HR BB% K% ISO BABIP wOBA wRC+ fWAR 2015 233 7 5.2% 18.5% .164 .339 .349 128 2.2
With the exception of Duffy's walk rate, every one of his offensive metrics is better than what McGehee produced. Not only was he a clear upgrade, but Duffy began to show that he was a true offensive threat. His ISO, wOBA, and wRC+ are all above the major league average, and if we use 550 plate appearances as a projection point, Duffy is on pace to finish with an fWAR of 5.1. Of course, on pace analysis isn't the best way to go about it, but it is meant to give context to how good Duffy has been so far.
His ascension to becoming a legitimate everyday third baseman mirrors that of another player, one with whom he shares a first name: Matt Carpenter. Both were drafted long after the pomp and circumstance of the first couple of rounds, and when they were called up, neither elicited much fanfare. Their minor league numbers were good but not gaudy. In their first seasons at the major league level, they became mainstays in their teams' respective lineups. While Duffy's statistics were shown already, his line is listed below along with Carpenter's 2012 season for the sake of ease.
PA HR BB% K% ISO BABIP wOBA wRC+ fWAR Matt Duffy, 2015 233 7 5.2% 18.5% .164 .339 .349 128 2.2 Matt Carpenter, 2012 340 6 10.0% 18.5% .169 .346 .355 124 1.5
Barring an injury, Duffy will eclipse Carpenter's playing time from 2012, but if we ignore plate appearances for the moment and focus on the rate statistics, the similarities are clear. Their ISO values are separated by just .005 points; their wOBA by .007; and their wRC+ by just 4, however this time in favor of Duffy. It would seem that Carpenter had the better rookie season, if only slightly so, but according to fWAR, that's not the case. The difference in overall value stems from Duffy's superior defense, which ranks among the game's elite third baseman in 2015.
Innings DRS RZR OOZ RngR ErrR UZR UZR/150 Def Nolan Arenado 622.0 15 .806 38 8.9 0.6 9.1 19.8 10.1 Josh Donaldson 617.0 6 .788 32 7.2 -0.4 6.1 12.8 7.2 Adrian Beltre 475.2 6 .733 21 4.8 0.5 5.7 17.6 6.5 Manny Machado 637.0 7 .816 36 5.5 -0.2 5.3 11.8 6.4 Evan Longoria 597.2 2 .737 31 2.3 1.6 4.4 15.9 5.4 Justin Turner 303.1 8 .769 17 3.6 1.2 4.8 22.1 5.4 Matt Duffy 393.2 5 .770 23 3.8 0.7 4.7 15.4 5.3 Todd Frazier 639.0 2 .743 19 4.6 -0.8 4.1 8.9 5.2 Aramis Ramirez 455.0 -3 .750 15 3.7 1.0 4.4 14.1 5.1 Mike Moustakas 580.0 7 .726 30 2.3 1.3 4.0 9.9 4.9
Duffy has logged just 393.2 innings at third base (the second lowest on this list) but ranks among the top ten in almost every defensive metric. He's made 23 plays that qualify as out of the zone (OOZ), which is good for the second highest total in the National League, behind the reigning Gold Glove winner Nolan Arenado. His DRS (Defensive Runs Saved) of five may not seem that high, but it places him eighth in major league baseball for those with 200 innings or more at the position.
Going into the season, the Giants planned on letting McGehee play out 2015 as their starting third baseman and would then figure out what to do moving forward once the year was over. With his poor play, he forced the Giants to turn to someone that almost no one outside of the organization had ever heard of. While no one will be thanking Sandoval for leaving, or McGehee for being a disappointment, Duffy's emergence was a direct result of their actions. San Francisco could have wound up paying their former third baseman close to $20 million for a negative fWAR (although it's impossible to know how exactly how his season would have played out with the Giants), but they are instead paying Duffy a measly $509,000. If Sandoval were to improve to an fWAR of just 0.1, we could say that Duffy was worth 22 times more than the Giants former third baseman; but because of his negative value, it's not possible to calculate.
Duffy has been an incredible addition to what has become one of baseball's most potent offenses, and if the early returns aren't a mirage, but an actual representation of the baseball player he is, the Giants have found their solution at third base. He gives them an entirely homegrown infield once again and enormous financial flexibility moving forward.
. . .
Matt Goldman is a Featured Writer for Beyond the Box Score and a Contributing Editor for MLB Daily Dish. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheOriginalBull.
|
Disbarred lawyer who stole $9 million sentenced to 40 years
Anthony Chiofalo, a Houston lawyer who has been on the run since June when he was accused of stealing more than $9 million from his employer, leaves the 339th state District Court with his attorney, Paul Doyle, Monday, January 7, 2013, in Houston, after he turned himself in weeks ago at a Rhode Island police station. Chiofalo, 51, was a New York attorney with a suspended law license who moved to Houston in 2009. He took a job with Tadano America, a wholly owned subsidiary of a Japanese company that manufactures large cranes, court records show. He is accused of stealing from them using dummy law firms. less Anthony Chiofalo, a Houston lawyer who has been on the run since June when he was accused of stealing more than $9 million from his employer, leaves the 339th state District Court with his attorney, Paul ... more Photo: Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle Photo: Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Disbarred lawyer who stole $9 million sentenced to 40 years 1 / 7 Back to Gallery
The embezzler at the center of an investigation that brought down two Harris County DA investigators and saw one indicted for stealing thousands of dollars worth of rare comic books was sentenced Monday to 40 years in prison after admitting his crime.
Anthony Chiofalo, a disbarred attorney who was charged with stealing $9 million from his employer from 2010 to 2012, pleaded guilty to theft of more than $200,000, a first-degree felony. He was sentenced by visiting judge James Anderson.
"If he had gone to trial, a jury would have given him life," said special prosecutor Kent Schaffer. He said jurors would have heard about other allegations, including forging his law school records to get a job. "Throughout his life, he's engaged in criminal conduct that he's never been held accountable for and today he was," Schaffer said.
He said Chiofalo would probably serve 10 to 20 percent of the 40 years.
Prosecutors believe Chiofalo, 52, bought valuable comic books, collectibles and sports memorabilia with money he embezzled from Tadano America Corp., which makes large cranes.
Hundreds of items, including a first-edition Batman comic book worth about $900,000 and a baseball helmet signed by Pete Rose, were seized when Chiofalo was arrested.
Schaffer was appointed as special prosecutor after the district attorney's office recused itself because of a possible conflict of interest.
DA investigator Lonnie Blevins was arrested in February 2013, accused of taking some of the comic books that were evidence and selling them to collectors in Chicago and San Antonio.
He was charged with the transfer of stolen goods. His case is pending in federal court. He is accused of committing the crime while at the district attorney's office, but left about two months before being arrested.
His partner at the office, Dustin Deutsch, was suspended from the district attorney's office after Blevins was arrested. Deutsch then resigned. He has not been charged with any crime.
|
Introduction. 1 Injuries. 2 Acute Injuries. 2 Chronic Injuries. 2 Economy. 4 Adapting to Barefoot Running. 4 Conclusions. 4 Acknowledgements. 5 References. 5 Introduction Well-known international athletes have successfully competed barefoot, most notably Zola Budd-Pieterse from South Africa and the late Abebe Bikila from Ethiopia. Running in bare feet in long distance events is evidently not a barrier to performance at the highest levels. Indeed, in this review I will show that wearing running shoes probably reduces performance and increases the risk of injury. I became interested in research on barefoot running when I noticed that a reasonably high proportion of runners compete in bare feet during cross-country races in Queensland, Australia. I have based the review on articles I found containing the words barefoot and running in Medline, SportDiscus, and in Web publications. I found several original research reports on the occurrence and mechanisms of acute and chronic injuries in unshod and shod populations, and a few reports on the energy cost of running with and without shoes (including an unpublished thesis). Two authors provided recommendations for adapting to barefoot running. I also found informal websites devoted to barefoot running and barefoot living. There are apparently no published controlled trials of the effects of running in bare feet on simulated or real competitive performance, nor any surveys on the reasons why people do not compete barefoot. Injuries Where barefoot and shod populations co-exist, as in Haiti, injury rates of the lower extremity are substantially higher in the shod population (Robbins and Hanna, 1987). Furthermore, running-related chronic injuries to bone and connective tissue in the legs are rare in developing countries, where most people are habitually barefooted (Robbins and Hanna, 1987). This association between injury and wearing shoes is consistent with the possibility that wearing shoes increases the risk of injury, but other explanations for the association are possible; for example, in developing countries barefoot runners may be too poor to seek medical attention, shod runners may wear shoes because they have problems running barefoot, and shod runners may wear bad shoes, wear shoes incorrectly, and cover more miles. Prospective studies and randomized controlled trials of barefoot and shod running would resolve this uncertainty. Studies of rates of injury in barefoot and shod runners in developed countries are non-existent, presumably because barefoot runners are a rarity. However, there have been several studies implicating footwear in the etiology of injuries in runners. I have grouped these as studies of acute injuries (resulting from an accident during running) and chronic injuries (resulting from continual exposure to running). Acute Injuries Ankle sprains are the most frequently reported acute sports injury, and 90-95% of these are inversion injuries causing partial or complete rupture of the anterior talofibular ligament and occasionally of the calcaneofibular ligament (Robbins et al., 1995; Stacoff et al., 1996). It is claimed that footwear increases the risk of such sprains, either by decreasing awareness of foot position provided by feedback from plantar cutaneous mechanoreceptors in direct contact with the ground (Robbins et al., 1995), or by increasing the leverage arm and consequently the twisting torque around the sub-talar joint during a stumble (Stacoff et al., 1996). Siff and Verkhoshansky (1999, p.452) reported that running shoes always reduce proprioceptive and tactile sensitivity, and that using bare feet on the high-density chip-foam mats in gyms preserves proprioceptive sensitivity. Robbins et al. (1989) considered that behaviors induced by plantar tactile sensations offer improved balance during movement, which may explain the preference of many gymnasts and dancers for performing barefoot. The skin on the plantar surface (sole) of the foot is more resistant to the inflammatory effects of abrasion than skin on other parts of the body (Robbins et al., 1993), but stones, glass, nails or needles can still cause bruising or puncture wounds even when the plantar skin is thickened by adaptation to barefoot running. Extremes in temperature can also cause discomfort, blistering or chill blains. Running shoes therefore will play an important role in protection on some courses and in some weather conditions. Chronic Injuries One of the most common chronic injuries in runners is planter fasciitis, or an inflammation of the ligament running along the sole of the foot. There is some evidence that the normally unyielding plantar fascia acts as the support for the medial longitudinal arch, and that strain on the proximal fascial attachment during foot strike leads to plantar fasciitis (Robbins and Hanna, 1987). Barefoot running may induce an adaptation that transfers the impact to the yielding musculature, thus sparing the fascia and accounting for the low incidence of plantar fasciitis in barefoot populations (Robbins and Hanna, 1987). Chronic ailments such as shin splints, ilio-tibial band syndrome and peri-patellar pain are attributed variously to excessive pronation, supination, and shock loading of the limbs (Siff and Verkhoshansky, 1999, p.451). When running barefoot on hard surfaces, the runner compensates for the lack of cushioning underfoot by plantar-flexing the foot at contact, thus giving a softer landing (Frederick, 1986). Barefoot runners also land mid-foot, increasing the work of the foot's soft tissue support structures, thereby increasing their strength and possibly reducing the risk of injury (Yessis 2000, p.124). Wearers of expensive running shoes that were promoted as correcting pronation or providing more cushioning experienced a greater prevalence of these running-related injuries than wearers of less expensive shoes (Robbins and Gouw, 1991). In another study, expensive athletic shoes accounted for more than twice as many injuries as cheaper shoes, a fact that prompted Robbins and Waked (1997) to suggest that deceptive advertising of athletic footwear (e.g., "cushioning impact") may represent a public health hazard. Anthony (1987) reported that running shoes should be considered protective devices (from dangerous or painful objects) rather than corrective devices, as their capacity for shock absorption and control of over-pronation is limited. The modern running shoe and footwear generally reduce sensory feedback, apparently without diminishing injury-inducing impact–a process Robbins and Gouw (1991) described as the "perceptual illusion" of athletic footwear. A resulting false sense of security may contribute to the risk of injury (Robbins and Gouw, 1991). Yessis (2000, p.122) reasoned that once the natural foot structures are weakened by long-term footwear use, people have to rely on the external support of the footwear, but the support does not match that provided by a well functioning foot. Runners with diminished or absent sensation in the soles of the feet are particularly vulnerable to damage or infection when barefoot. Peripheral neuropathy is a common complication of diabetes mellitus and may result in the loss of protective sensations in the feet. Barefoot locomotion is therefore not recommended in this population (Hafner and Burg, 1999). Indeed, proper footwear is essential and should be emphasized for individuals with peripheral neuropathy (ACSM/ADA, 1999; ACSM, 2000). Economy Wearing shoes increases the energy cost of running. Burkett et al. (1985) found that oxygen consumption during running increased as the amount of mass they added to the foot increased; shoes and orthotics representing 1% of body mass increased oxygen consumption by 3.1%. Flaherty (1994) found that oxygen consumption during running at 12 km/h was 4.7% higher in shoes of mass ~700 g per pair than in bare feet. An increase in oxygen consumption of ~4% is of little importance to the recreational runner, but the competitive athlete would notice a major effect on running speed. The increase in oxygen consumption with running shoes could have several causes. An obvious possibility is the energy cost of continually accelerating and decelerating the mass of the shoe with each stride. Another possibility is the external work done in compressing and flexing the sole and in rotating the sole against the ground--up to 13% of the work done in walking, according to Webb et al. (1988). Frederick (1986) reported that oxygen consumption increased substantially with thicker shoe inserts during treadmill running. Not surprisingly, materials used for cushioning in shoes absorb energy, and stiff midsoles should produce a 2% saving of energy compared with standard midsoles (Stefanyshyn and Nigg, 2000). Finally, shoes probably compromise the ability of the lower limb to act like a spring. With bare feet, the limb returns ~70% of the energy stored in it, but with running shoes the return is considerably less (Yessis, 2000, p.123). Adapting to Barefoot Running Thirty minutes of daily barefoot locomotion is a recommended starting point to allow thickening of the sole of the foot and adaptation of muscles and ligaments (Robbins et al., 1993). Begin by walking barefoot at every reasonable opportunity then progress to jogging, gradually increasing the intensity and duration (Yessis 2000, p.124). After 3-4 weeks, the plantar skin eventually becomes robust and allows longer periods of barefoot running at higher average velocities (Robbins et al., 1993). To facilitate adaptation, perform progressive strengthening exercises for the foot and ankle, including foot inversion, toe flexion, and walking on the balls of the feet. Barefoot locomotion on uneven surfaces will also help stimulate the plantar surface and provide increased sensory feedback (Yessis 2000, p.125). Conclusions • Running in shoes appears to increase the risk of ankle sprains, either by decreasing awareness of foot position or by increasing the twisting torque on the ankle during a stumble. • Running in shoes appears to increase the risk of plantar fasciitis and other chronic injuries of the lower limb by modifying the transfer of shock to muscles and supporting structures. • Running in bare feet reduces oxygen consumption by a few percent. Competitive running performance should therefore improve by a similar amount, but there has been no published research comparing the effect of barefoot and shod running on simulated or real competitive running performance. • Research is needed to establish why runners choose not to run barefoot. Concern about puncture wounds, bruising, thermal injury, and overuse injury during the adaptation period are possibilities. • Running shoes play an important protective role on some courses, in extreme weather conditions, and with certain pathologies of the lower limb. Reviewer's Comment Acknowledgements I would like to thank Christian Finn and Will Hopkins for their kind assistance in the editing of this article. References American College of Sports Medicine and American Diabetes Association (1997). Diabetes mellitus and exercise: joint position statement. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 29(12), i-vi American College of Sports Medicine (2000). ACSM position stand on exercise and Type 2 diabetes. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 32, 1345-1360 Anthony RJ (1987). The functional anatomy of the running training shoe. Chiropodist, December, 451-459 Bergmann G, Kniggendorf H, Graichen F, Rohlmann A (1995). Influence of shoes and heel strike on the loading of the hip joint. Journal of Biomechanics 28, 817-827 Burkett LN, Kohrt M, Buchbinder R (1985). Effects of shoes and foot orthotics on VO2 and selected frontal plane kinematics. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 17, 158-163 Clarke TE, Frederick EC, Cooper LB (1983). Effects of shoe cushioning upon ground reaction forces in running. International Journal of Sports Medicine 4, 247-251. Flaherty RF (1994). Running economy and kinematic differences among running with the foot shod, with the foot bare, and with the bare foot equated for weight. Microform Publications, International Institute for Sport and Human Performance, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon Frederick EC (1986). Kinematically mediated effects of sports shoe design: a review. Journal of Sports Sciences 4, 169-184 Hafner J, Burg G (1999). Dermatological aspects in prevention and treatment of the diabetic foot syndrome. Schweizerische Rundschau fur Medizin Praxis 88, 1170-1177 Robbins SE, Gouw GJ (1990). Athletic footwear and chronic overloading: a brief review. Sports Medicine 9, 76-85 Robbins SE, Gouw GJ (1991). Athletic footwear: unsafe due to perceptual illusions. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 23, 217-224 Robbins S, Gouw G, McClaran J, Waked E (1993). Protective sensation of the plantar aspect of the foot. Foot and Ankle 14, 347-352 Robbins SE, Gouw GJ, Hanna AM (1989). Running-related injury prevention through innate impact-moderating behavior. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 21, 130-139 Robbins SE, Hanna AM (1987). Running-related injury prevention through barefoot adaptations. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 19, 148-156 Robbins SE, Waked E, Rappel R (1995). Ankle taping improves proprioception before and after exercise in young men. British Journal of Sports Medicine 29, 242-247 Robbins S, Waked E (1997). Hazards of deceptive advertising of athletic footwear. British Journal of Sports Medicine 31, 299-303 Siff MC, Verkhoshansky YV (1999). Supertraining (4th ed.). Denver, Colorado. Supertraining International Stacoff A, Steger J, Stussi E, Reinschmidt C (1996). Lateral stability in sideward cutting movements. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 28, 350-358 Stefanyshyn DJ, Nigg BM (2000). Influence of midsole bending stiffness on joint energy and jump height performance. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 32, 471-476 Webb P, Saris WH, Schoffelen PF, Van Ingen Schenau GJ, Ten Hoor F (1988). The work of walking: A calorimetric study. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 20, 331-337 Yessis M (2000). Explosive running. Illinois, USA. Contemporary Books Edited by Will Hopkins
Published Dec 2001
editor
©2001
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.