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Most people would agree that having a sense of purpose in a job makes them feel more productive and happier because then a job seem less like work. In addition, helping others seems to be more important than the money earned in a job. That produces motivation and a willingness to put in extra effort. Taking a look at what jobs have the highest and lowest satisfaction rates according to surveys is an interesting way to assess what job may be right for you. Physicians Physicians in the health care field showed the highest satisfaction rate in their jobs with a score of 95.5 percent. Neurosurgeons, along with cardiothoracic surgeons, OB/GYNs and anesthesiologists were at the top of the job satisfaction list. Not only do these health care jobs offer high pay, they also offer the bonus of a contribution to society by treating the sick and saving lives. Self-Employed Business Owners This group encompasses entrepreneurs, business owners and contractors. With a job satisfaction rating of 93.3 percent, the people in this group had the highest rating for work environment, including a feeling of openness and a sense of trust. The accomplishment attained in these types of jobs is an important aspect of achieving satisfaction. Teachers Teachers, including teaching assistants and teachers of special education, came next at 91.1 percent. Almost 70 percent said they were thriving, and the teachers reported that they had been happy within the past 24 hours, by laughing, smiling or having experienced joy in their lives. Jobs Requiring Professional Training Computer programmers, architects and other professions that require professional training reported a 90.4 percent satisfaction with their jobs. Because of their training, they were placed in jobs with responsibility and the ability to see the outcome of their efforts. Managerial Jobs Those in managerial jobs scored their work environments high and reported their satisfaction level as 90.3. Well over half of those surveyed said their superior in the company treated them like an equal, which was a higher rating than all the other professions that were surveyed. Jobs With the Lowest Satisfaction Those who work in jobs where morale tends to be lowest are also the most dissatisfied with their jobs. Workers in fast food restaurants show the least amount of satisfaction in a job, according to PayScale, with 25 percent saying that their jobs make the world more unpleasant. Coming in second were pickers at 21 percent. These workers spend their days working in warehouses to ensure that purchasers receive their packages. The monotony of the job, combined with staying in a warehouse all day may contribute to their dissatisfaction. Floor supervisors for table games at casinos also said their jobs made the world more unpleasant. Although this type of job is fairly high paying, watching people lose money at the game tables every day must be difficult for some. Finding a Satisfying Job Satisfaction in your job and feeling that you are making a contribution makes it more likely that you will be happy with a position, no matter what it is. Some people are motivated by pursuing a career with an eye toward advancement, while others believe that passion for what they are doing make a difference. Having a good attitude, challenges in your work that encourage you to improve, variety in the tasks you are expected to do and a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day contributes to your sense of satisfaction in a job. TheJobNetwork helps you job hunt by noting your skills and interests to send you job alerts when positions of this type become available. After you sign up for job match alert, all you have to do is fill out your qualifications and what types of jobs you are seeking. If you prefer, you can use the job site to search yourself, saving yourself the time from looking at multiple sites to find that great job.

Square Enix's free online manga magazine Gangan Online is counting down to a pair of announcements with a mysterious splash page that loads when the website is accessed, and fans think they've decoded what the enigmatic image may mean. At the time of this writing, the splash page displays what appears to be an image of straw, as well as two timers, one in pink and one in blue. Gangan Online otaku are already speculating that the announcements may mean some form of animated adaptation for the manga series Mahōjin Guru Guru 2 and / or Buyuuden Kita Kita. Both series are written and illustrated by Hiroyuki Etō, and both feature an unusual character named Kita Kita Oyaji, who is known for his grass skirt and strange dance moves. The original Mahōjin Guru Guru manga has been adapted into a TV anime twice (once in 1994 - 1995, and again in 2000) as well as a 30 minute animated theatrical film in 1996. Could more anime be on the way? We'll just have to wait and see what the countdown entails... Source: Otakomu Paul Chapman is the host of The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast and GME! Anime Fun Time.

Your voice matters, SHARE THIS Your voice matters, SHARE THIS [S10 E08] Direct Download This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff responds to a criticism aimed at how d@w focuses too much on the transition from capitalist firms to worker co-op firms with too little attention paid to the larger social changes needed to move towards a worker-owned economy and thusly, beyond capitalism. Professor Wolf answers this criticism by discussing the broader social changes necessary to sustain a worker co-op based economy including the economic tools our government could use to sustain an economy-wide sharing of profits and resources as deemed necessary by the people participating in, working and creating in, the industries they as employees could and would control. **We make it a point to provide the show free of ads. Please consider supporting our work. Become an EU patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/economicupdate A special thank you to our devoted Patreon community whose contributions helped pay for the new EU backdrop. We hope you like it! Prof. Wolff's latest book "Understanding Socialism" is now available. Click here to get your copy! "Understanding Marxism" is also still available: Paperback: http://bit.ly/2BH0lkL Ebook: https://bit.ly/2K6iI8v Want to help us translate and transcribe our videos? Learn about joining our translation team: http://bit.ly/2J2uIHH Jump right in: http://bit.ly/2J3bEZR Transcript has been edited for clarity. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update. I’m glad to be here. I’m your host, Richard Wolff. I want to respond today to a criticism sent in to us, which I think is well taken. The critic said, “Look. You make a good case,” and thank you for that, by the way, “you make a good case for the transition from hierarchical undemocratic capitalist enterprises, where a tiny group of people make all the decisions and the rest of us have to live with the results without being able to control those decision makers. You make a good case that we need to transition to democratic worker co-ops. But in your focus on that, you tend to shortchange a discussion of what the larger social changes have to be that go with a transition to worker co-ops. So that sometimes it sounds from the way you talk,” says this critic, “as though the transition in the enterprise will solve all the problems, will take care of itself, will produce the context it needs to survive.” I think there’s a good point to that criticism. So I want to use today to talk about what some of the larger social changes have to be if a transition from capitalist enterprises to a worker co-op based economy is going to have the results we want and to be able to survive over time to become the dominant economic system. The way capitalism became dominant through the passing away of slavery, feudalism, and other precapitalist systems. So let’s discuss what the larger context beyond the capitalism would need to be, it might look like, if we want to have it be democratic in the way we won’t want to democratize enterprises. The first thing to begin with is to notice that there has to be an inclusion, if you mean to be democratic, as we do, there has to be an inclusion in the decision-making operation of people other than the workers in an enterprise. Because they’re not the only ones affected by what an enterprise does or doesn’t do. Here are two other groups that are affected and that have to be brought in. One is the community, where this workplace exists—the factory, the office, the store—is located somewhere. It is surrounded by people who live and work elsewhere in this society or who maybe live, but don’t work—not everybody is a working person. All kinds of people are doing other things. They’re children, they’re elderly, they’re incapacitated, one way or another, or they’re devoted to things we don’t normally call work although, if you look closely at them, they are, perhaps not paid, but just as important in society. So there has to be a way for the community, for the environment, for the people affected by what an enterprise does to have some input. Otherwise, it isn’t democratic. And it’s not just the people who live in the communities where workplaces are located. There’s another group—the customers—the people for whom the work is done. The goods, the services produced are consumed either by another enterprise or by the general public, And they too, are affected by the price, by the quality, by everything about that. And they, too, have to be in on it. So one of the things that has to happen for worker co-ops to be successful, to be welcomed as a new form of social life, the way capitalism was two or three centuries ago, as we emerged from feudalism, at least in Europe. So I would argue that the new society has to have a context in which there are instruments, ways, organizations that allow the citizens in the surrounding community and customers also to participate with the workers in making the decisions. That would be a democratic reorganization of society to facilitate and to make it acceptable for the workers to democratically run their enterprise. Because they bring in as co-determinators the others affected by the decisions of an enterprise, which is not only the workers, but also the residents of the community and the customers. Then we have another problem that the larger society has to solve. And we’ve talked about that in other contexts on this program in the past. Let’s imagine worker co-ops. Well, one worker co-op does real well and grows and does able to pay its workers better and all of the good things that can happen. But next door or down the street or across town, there’s another worker co-op, which, for all kinds of reasons, isn’t doing so well. Maybe people there got sick, maybe the environment was not successful, maybe people stopped wanting to get the output that that other work co-opted. All kinds of reasons explain why one enterprise is successful and another one isn’t. That’s true in slavery. That’s true in feudalism. It’s true in capitalism. And it will be true in a worker co-op economy. The question is not whether some do better and some do worse. The question is how do you handle that? In capitalism, those who are successful outcompete those who aren’t and, eventually, destroy them in competition and then eventually absorb them, hiring the workers, who lost their job in the capitalist enterprise that went down, who move over to the one that went up, thereby, continuing the uneven development that capitalism is always noted for. So what would a context be that would help this not happen in a worker co-op? How would it handle it? Well, the answer is you’ve got to deal with it directly. You’ve got to make a commitment socially not to allow one co-op’s success to be connected to and, in an effect, worsen another co-op’s lack of success. You’ve got to deal with that. Not imagine that it doesn’t matter. Not imagine that it doesn’t have terrible social effects. It always has. Capitalism pretends you don’t have to worry about that. We know better. We want to worry about it, because we know that the success of a society, sooner or later, will depend on its internal cohesion, its sense of community. And if you destroy that by having extreme different experiences in the workplace, you will come to regret it. So we need a context that handles that situation. Well, how would you do that? This is an old idea of people who have been critical of capitalism, because capitalism not only makes some people rich and large numbers of people poor, as we well know, but it allows the rich to use their wealth to get richer still and, thereby, forces the poor to suffer the consequences of the rising inequality, which we certainly know much about here in the United States since the last half-century has been a historical horror show of rising inequality. So what are we going to do? I think we need, first of all, to understand that this is a real problem. That it has affected society for a long time. It isn’t unique to a worker co-op society. The difference is in a worker co-op society the very logic of democratizing the enterprise, creating equality where all the people, who work in an enterprise, together—one person, one vote—make the decision. That, hopefully, will inspire, will inform, will give an idea about how to do that in the larger society, because it’s good for us that way and doing it in the larger society reinforces the support for doing it inside the workplace that they can help each other. So what would it mean? It would mean to learn a lesson. And the lesson is that you’re better off if you solve a problem collectively, if you share the suffering and the difficulties we all have in life, and if you share the victories and the successes we have. We will become a stronger family, a stronger neighborhood, a stronger town, a stronger country if we learn how to do that to help one another. You might even call it a kind of loving one another if you use the term broadly enough. And so there ought to be a context for worker co-ops. And then I shouldn’t change there “ought to be” I don’t think worker co-ops can survive without what I’m about to say. There has to be a larger social context that reinforces the whole logic of democratic egalitarian workplaces and enterprises. And the first step in that is to understand a role for—let’s call it “the government” or “the state” or whatever you want to call it—something we agree to establish in our community to help our community deal with the reality that we have to figure out how to cope with unequal growth rates, unequal experiences in the workplace. One way to do that very very important and, perhaps, in the largest scheme of things, the most important at least at our phase of history. We have to finally understand that there has to be a separation between a job and an income, on the one hand, and the decisions at a workplace, on the other. We now have a situation in which human beings are in terror all the time of losing their job, of losing their income. And they are asked to make decisions about what happens at the workplace, not in terms of what’s good for the community as a whole, not in terms of the society as a whole—of which they are a part, of which they are a product—but instead, out of terror, to hold on to the job, to hold on to the income, or maybe to get a better job or maybe they get a better income. Suppose we handle that as follows. We want everyone to decide what’s best in their workplace in terms of the society’s well-being. And the way we’re going to do that is we’re going to say, “A job is a human right. By virtue of having been born, you’re going to have a job and an income.” And if the particular job you have right now is not useful society-wise, we don’t want it anymore—for whatever reason—we don’t need that product or we want to preserve nature, or whatever is our reasoning, if we decide a particular kind of work isn’t needed to be done, that has no impact on your job and your income. We will find you another job. And we will maintain you with your income in the transition. And we’ll work out ways of doing that. But you don’t have to worry when you make a decision about a workplace based on your membership in the larger community that it’s going to risk your job and your income. That is not necessary anymore. We have more than enough wealth and income to do that for everybody. And it would take our society an enormous step forward. And I’m talking not only about what’s good for our society, but what’s good for the mental health of every single person who spends so much of their mental energy, their anxiety, their worry on the job, “Can I keep it?” The income, “Can I count on it?” And all that flows from that. Well, we’ve come to the end of the first half of this discussion of the larger context we need for worker co-ops to survive and grow. And so I want to make a couple of announcements before we make the break. We recently published our second book called “Understanding Socialism”. And you can get a copy of it by going to our websites. You can get a copy by going to lulu.com and we urge you to do it. It’s the second book. We earlier published “Understanding Marxism”. If you haven’t checked out our gift shop, please go to our website, look at the items under store and see whether some of those might be of interest. We want to thank, as always, our Patreon community for the enormously important support they provide. Consider becoming a member. And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, it’s a big help as well. Stay with us. We’ll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today’s Economic Update. We were talking about a response I want to make to a criticism that, by focusing on the transition from capitalist enterprises to worker co-ops, too much attention, an excessive amount of attention is focused on that micro-level without talking about the larger social context that has to go with it if these transitions are to survive and if they are to have the social impact, which is why we support them in large part. I want to make the point now that we need a government, we need a government to help us—locally, regionally, nationally—create that context. I ended the first half by talking about one function for that government is to manage the guarantee of a job and income, so that people are freer to make decisions about what’s good for the environment, for our community, for their families and so on at the workplace without that anxiety and fear of losing my job and losing my income, which, of course, has to be primary, if it’s not guaranteed. It’s like having to worry about where your next drink of water comes from, because you could die from poison rather than living in a community, which makes sure that all the water coming out of all the faucets is safe to drink. We want that, because we don’t want to have to worry about our next drink of water, do we? Well, we don’t want to worry about our income and our jobs either. And they’re just as available as is clean water. Problems? Sure. Costs? For sure. But we can manage it. It’s only the capitalist system that blocks us from solving this kind of problem. Well, what would the government do? Some of you think and, particularly, if you’re sensitive to the old socialist tradition, that the government should come in and redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich or the other way around, right? If you’re a socialist it would be more from the rich to the poor. But you think of the government as a redistribution agency. I want to argue very strongly that that’s not what I’m talking about. Let me explain. It’s not that I don’t object to the imbalances—poverty and wealth existing side-by-side, of course, I do—but I don’t think redistribution is the solution. And the best way I can teach that—I’ll get it across—is by using a simple example, which I have done before. But since a number of you wrote to me about it, I’m going to do it again. Imagine, you and your child going to the park on a lovely Sunday afternoon and your child informs you—none too subtly—that they would like an ice-cream cone. And now, imagine, that you have two children and you take them to the park, and both of them, at the same moment, happened to say, “Wow. I would like an ice-cream cone.” So you go to the little vendor down the road and he or she is selling ice cream cones. And you ordered two and you give the two of them to one of your two children. And then you see the face on that one and you see the face on the other one. And you realize, “This is going to cause major trouble. Not only in the immediate moment, but, who knows, for how long.” You already got problems, we call “sibling rivalry”. They’re going to get a lot worse, if you behave like this, and you figure that out. So you say, “Okay. I am now going to redistribute the wealth. I’m going to take one of the two ice cream cones away from the child I gave the two two, and give it to the child who had none. I’m going to redistribute.” And then you’re going to see a level of rage on the part of the child who’s deprived of one. And you’re going to wonder, “Wow. Did I make the situation better by my redistribution or did I make it worse?” If you’re honest, you will ask that question, because it has to be asked. Redistribution produces bitter anger division conflict. The logical inference from the story I’ve told is—and you already know it—it would have been much smarter never to have given one child two cones than it is to give one and then we distribute. The same is true everywhere else in economics. It’s much better to distribute from the get-go equally than to do so unequally and then impose a redistribution. Much of modern society is torn apart over these redistribution efforts. Those who got it, in the first place, feel embittered that they are being deprived. Suppose, you had not done it that way. Suppose you had said, “There’s a reason why we distribute much more equally. It’s precisely to avoid the difficulties and the tensions and the bitterness that come from not doing it.” Learn the lesson. Like the parent of those two kids sorted it out. We can learn that lesson socially. What would that mean? Here’s what it would mean very practically. If there’s a worker co-op that is doing really well—generating profits, growing—and then the other part of town or the other part of the country, there are worker co-ops that are having problems. Let’s leave a small portion of the profits of the worker co-op that is doing well in their hands to distribute to their communities, to their workers, but the lion’s share of their profit that goes into the general fund. And that is made available in part to those that are not doing so well, but even more generally is used for everybody’s benefit. For example, everybody gets a benefit, because a part of the profits produced by the successful co-ops is used to start new co-ops, to provide a higher social welfare in the form of better parks for people to enjoy, more beaches, more free time. Let everybody learn that we’re in whatever worker co-op you work you’re being benefited by the good performance of other worker co-ops. Just as they will be benefited when it’s your turn in your co-op, which gets help to become successful. You will always be helping yourself a little and helping the larger community. And you won’t mind having the bulk of your profits taxed away, because you’re getting benefits all the time from the profits tucked away from the other co-op you’re participating. And, you know, people know that already, because that’s the principle of taxation. We all pay taxes and then things are done that we all benefit from—the public highway, the public park, the networks of support that we get, the social benefits that flow to us, the state parks we enjoy in the summer—you name it. We kind of understand the collective resources so that we understand, hopefully, that the taxes we pay are not just a drag on us, because they perform good services for other people just like the taxes on other people produce the social services we all use and rely on. That can be done in and for enterprises. It makes us all cohere as members of a community and a government apparatus—the same kind of apparatus that will allow for the end of terrorization of people, because you can take away their income and jobs. The end of that administered by a state should be accompanied by a state that uses its powers of taxation—of the profits of worker co-ops—to balance them out, to help those that are having a hard time, to carry out the adjustment if some co-op is doing stuff that we just don’t need anymore. And the help has to be moving those people to things that we do need to have and so on. This kind of management of the relationship among worker co-ops will allow them to be more of a community and less of a cutthroat set of competitors than we are used to in capitalism. And then again, a rough equality among co-ops so that the strong helped those that are less strong knowing that what’s strong this decade will not be so strong next decade. We once were an economy in which the car industry was number one. It isn’t anymore. We were once an economy in which coal was the name of the game in mining. It isn’t anymore. These things go up and down with technology, with tastes. The co-op that’s in a good place one day will not be in a good place the next. We will help each other, and the state will do that. Performing that kind of collective democratic mutual support in the larger society will reinforce doing the same inside a workplace with the workers, the customers, and the community members around the workplace. In other words, “Yes, we need larger social institutions alongside the workplace institution.” And the democratization of one facilitates the democratization of the other. It’s the transition from a capitalist economy to a worker co-op economy that will help bring the social changes we need. They don’t guarantee it. That’s why we’re talking about it. Those big social changes have to become themselves targets, objects, goals for what we’re trying to achieve. Let me explain to the critic who wrote and who suggested this program, let me explain one more reason why I have focused so much of my life work and my work on these programs to the transition to worker co-op enterprises. It’s because we have a long tradition of thinking about what the state should or shouldn’t do and having debates over it. We’ve had a tradition of socialism that focused on what the state could and should do to make capitalism less harsh and more humane. But what we haven’t done, what we have neglected is to look inside the corporation, inside the workplace for the changes that have to happen there. That’s why I focus on it. Not because it’s more important than anything, but because it has been neglected. That’s the focus. But it was never intended to suggest that we don’t have the big changes, the big social changes in front of us that have to be dealt with. And I hope that the conversation today is, at least, a beginning of showing the kinds and directions of larger social changes that need to go along with the transition to a democratic workplace both as a condition for that transition that happened and as an objective for the people, involved in that democratic workplace, to participate in a productive way in the largest society and in ways that will reinforce the very worker co-ops that they have established. And my final point. What I’m saying is what capitalism did to the transition from the feudal manor—lord and serf—to the capitalist enterprise—employer–employee—also needed to adjust the larger society. And boy, they were bold. They got rid of kings and queens. That’s what you had in feudalism. They set up parliaments and they had rules about what the parliaments could do and not do, things that were done to facilitate what capitalists wanted. To this day, capitalists spent a lot of time and a lot of money shaping the politics to make the society work in such a way that they can become richer and more successful. All that I’m suggesting is some of the ways in which a worker co-op-based economy will change the larger society to reinforce its ability to serve the people that the democratization of workplaces is intended to rescue from the condition they suffer in capitalism. I hope you have found this extended discussion useful particularly those of you who wanted to hear some more about the larger context. The focus on worker co-ops is a response to the fact that the old criticisms of capitalism, the older socialisms talked about all kinds of important interesting things. But they tended to neglect the transformations inside the workplace that were needed to make a transition from capitalism to something better happen. That’s why we focus on it, but it’s an addition to the issues of the larger society, not a substitute. Thank you very much for your attention. We’ve come to the end. Appreciate your being interested and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Transcript by Aleh Haiko The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracyatwork.info. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us. Want to join the volunteer transcription team? Go to the following link to learn more: https://www.democracyatwork.info/getinvolved

Outraged that employees in his organization had begun placing recycling bins throughout The Blaze’s headquarters and studio and replaced individual water bottles with a water cooler, Glenn Beck brought the Vice President of Studio Operations onto his radio program today to explain why these changes were taking place. When she claimed that doing so was saving the company money, Beck not only didn’t buy it but also didn’t really care and instead issued a new company-wide policy that any employee who buys a compact fluorescent light bulb when non-CFL options are available will be fired. “Global warming is a pile of crap,” Beck declared, adding that he would be issuing a memo informing everyone that “if anyone does anything in this company because of global warming, they’re fired”:

My dad bought a Mercedes for me! Turns out it was for him! Now I have to drive the jaguar! 1,580 shares

Lots of first-time cryptocurrency investors are downloading Coinbase, an easy-to-use app for buying and selling bitcoin. According to one estimate, the app notched 700,000 downloads over a single week in December. That was twice as many downloads as Snapchat or Instagram over the same time period, according to the analysis. The price of bitcoin spiked over the past month, drawing hordes of first-time investors eager to speculate on the cryptocurrency. Lots of them are flocking to Coinbase, an easy-to-use service that lets people exchange dollars for bitcoin. The app quickly shot up to the top free spot on Apple's App Store charts in the United States, though it settled down to the No. 8 spot on Friday. New analysis from the app-analytics firm Sensor Tower shows just how many people downloaded Coinbase on their iPhones and iPads. Over the week that ended Tuesday, as bitcoin mania was spiking, Coinbase saw 700,000 first-time installs. That was twice as many first-time installs as juggernaut apps like Snapchat and Facebook's Instagram achieved over the same time period, according to Sensor Tower's data. On Friday, a review of the charts showed that Coinbase had slid below Snapchat and Instagram once again. But it's still a meteoric rise for an app that was ranked in the 300s in the US on the App Store only a month ago. And if bitcoin's price continues to rise, you can expect people to continue downloading Coinbase and other so-called wallet apps in large numbers.

When Orla Met Lizzie Deignan is a chat with one of the top cyclists in the world about the challenge and excitement of impending motherhood. Lizzie shares her joy at starting a family, and her plans to juggle her new role, with that of being a professional cyclist. She also talks openly about her “horrendous” experience before the Rio Olympics when it was reported that she had missed three anti-doping tests in a year, despite having her name cleared in court, and her disappointment in the UK Anti Doping Agency for their role in the matter.

An attacker killed at least 84 people by driving a truck at high speed into crowds watching Bastille Day fireworks in the French Riviera city of Nice late on Thursday. French President Francoise Hollande said the attack was undeniably of a terrorist nature, according to a Reuters translation of the president's televised national address at 4 a.m. local time. The act was a "monstrous" one, he said, and the victims included "many children." Police shot and killed the driver, who drove a 25-ton, unmarked truck at high speed for more than 100 meters along the famed Promenade des Anglais seafront in the southern resort town before hitting a mass of spectators, regional sub-prefect Sebastien Humbert had earlier told France Info radio. The driver then continued to plow on through the crowd for hundreds of meters as "people went down like nine-pins," according to an onlooker. The incident occurred around 10.40 p.m. local time. Photographs of the truck show its windshield scored by bullet holes and its front grille destroyed. NBC News cited a source as saying that the driver, who has not yet been named, was a French national of Tunisian descent. French media made similar reports, while Reuters reported that the man was 31 and born in Tunisia, adding that he was known to police for common law crimes but not to intelligence services. Reuters was citing an unnamed police source. The death toll from the attack had mounted throughout the evening and early morning in France, with the latest count coming at about 8 a.m. CEST, when a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said 84 people had died and 18 were in critical condition. CNBC was unable to independently confirm the numbers. Among the casualties were a father, 51, and son, 11, from Lakeway, near Austin in Texas, NBC News said. A truck ploughed into a crowd in the French resort of Nice on July 14, leaving at least 60 dead and scores injured in an 'attack' after a Bastille Day fireworks display, prosecutors said on July 15, 2016. Valery Hache | AFP | Getty Images In his TV address, Hollande said a state of emergency that had been due to expire on July 26 would be extended by three months. The president also said that the country would maintain the 10,000-strong homeland security force that had been protecting France during an eight-month state of emergency, and that he would call up military and police reservists to help relieve the existing forces. Hollande will travel to Nice on Friday to support the region. According to Reuters, regional president Christian Estrosi told BFM TV that the driver had also opened fire on the crowd and that weapons and grenades were found inside the truck after the attacker was killed by police. Humbert described it as a clear criminal attack. Residents of the Mediterranean city close to the Italian border were advised to stay indoors. There was no sign of any other attack, nor any immediate claim of responsibility. @Gendarmerie: #Nice06 Emergency operation in progress. Keep calm and avoid downtown area. Follow the official accounts to be informed. Almost exactly eight months ago Islamic State militants killed 130 people in Paris on Nov. 13, the bloodiest in a number of attacks in France and Belgium in the past two years. Four months ago, Belgian militants linked to the Paris attackers killed 32 people with a series of bombs in Brussels, while just a month ago a man who said he was affiliated with Islamic State killed a police captain and his female partner at their house in a Paris suburb. On Sunday, France had breathed a sigh of relief as the month-long Euro 2016 soccer tournament ended without a feared attack. Hollande called the latest carnage an attack on liberty by fanatics who despised human rights, but said that France would continue its military operations in Syria and Iraq. "We thought he lost control. We all shouted: 'Stop! Stop!'" said Nader Shafa'ai, an Egyptian tourist, who captured the mayhem on his video camera as the truck came careening through the crowd. "Then it was clear it wasn't an accident." The footage Shafa'ai shot shows French police as they surrounded the white truck and fired rounds at the driver. The footage also shows scores of bodies under and behind the truck. "I filmed it because I was in shock," he said. One woman told France Info she and others had fled in terror: "The lorry came zig-zagging along the street. We ran into a hotel and hid in the toilets with lots of people." Police officers and rescue workers arrive to assist the crowd that a truck drove through during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, France. Valery Hache | AFP | Getty Images Regional newspaper Nice Matin quoted its own reporter at the scene saying there were many injured people and blood on the street. Damien Allemand, the paper's correspondent, was quoted as saying: "People are running. It's panic. He rode up onto the Prom and piled into the crowd ... There are people covered in blood. There must be many injured." Social media carried images of people lying apparently lifeless in pools of blood, prompting some people to suggest that users do not post photographs and videos of the dead and injured. Awful news about #Nice and shocking to see so many graphic videos when police haven't had time to contact relatives yet. Come on Twitter! A truck drove through a crowd during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, France. CNBC Hollande had just hours earlier told reporters that a state of emergency put in place after the Paris attacks in November would not be extended when it expired on July 26. "We can't extend the state of emergency indefinitely, it would make no sense. That would mean we're no longer a republic with the rule of law applied in all circumstances," Hollande told journalists in a traditional Bastille Day interview. U.S. President Barack Obama condemned what he said "appears to be a horrific terrorist attack." "I have directed my team to be in touch with French officials, and we have offered any assistance that they may need to investigate this attack and bring those responsible to justice," Obama said in a statement. "We stand in solidarity and partnership with France, our oldest ally, as they respond to and recover from this attack." European Council President Donald Tusk said the attack was in contrast to the history of Bastille Day, France's national day, that celebrates the storming of the Bastille, a key event in the French Revolution. Tragic paradox that the subject of #NiceAttack was the people celebrating liberty, equality and fraternity. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that Canada has offered "all possible assistance" to the French government. "Senseless acts like this one are not isolated events, and we will continue to work with our allies and partners to fight terrorism in all of its forms. We will bring those who are responsible to justice, whether they be the perpetrators, or those involved in funding or organizing such attacks," Trudeau said in a statement.

GTA is well known for its jokes and spoofs, but this week it would appear someone has beaten Rockstar at its own game by falsely advertising the next installment in the GTA series. Over the past few days, GTA Online players have seen messages supposedly advertising GTA6 appear on the side of their screens. On the surface, the announcements appeared to be fairly legitimate: they used a font similar to the official Rockstar branding, and even included a link to Rockstar's website. Unsurprisingly, this was enough to hoodwink many players, who were ecstatic at the news of a new GTA game and rushed to Twitter to express their excitement. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings Yet not everyone was convinced by the fancy fonts. On Reddit, theories emerged to try to explain the mysterious messages. Some users (correctly) speculated the hoax stemmed from mods, as the notifications only appeared on moddable platforms such as PC and last generation consoles. Other users highlighted a GTA6 release date in 2019 was unlikely due to an overlap with Rockstar's other major upcoming release, Red Dead Redemption 2. I hate to break it to you but the #GTA6 #leak was clearly a #hoax. @RockstarGames wouldn't bring out a gta so close to #RedDeadRedemption2. They work on long running games like #GTA5 that's 5 years old and they wouldn't limit red dead's lifespan to a year https://t.co/Zmrf8QZNJp — 0V3RCL0CK3D (@0V3RCL0CK3D_) July 3, 2018 This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings To the sadness of many, the cynics were revealed to be on the correct side of history. Taking to Twitter, Rockstar confirmed the notifications were indeed a hoax. The likely culprits appear to be modders, who seem to have successfully targeted the game's announcement system to distribute the bogus messages. This is a hoax made with the use of mods, and not an official message or statement from Rockstar Games. *OV — Rockstar Support (@RockstarSupport) July 2, 2018 This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings Although GTA fans must return to waiting for (real) GTA6 news, one thing is certain: Rockstar now have a solid blueprint for their GTA advertising campaign, whenever the true release date may be.

Added: Aug-26-2015 By: fobfob77 (27086.12) Tags: Shooter Bryce Williams Films His Own Murder Rampage This Morning Location: United States

Text Size: A- A+ Everything has changed for Pakistan’s ‘Selected’ Prime Minister Imran Khan after the recent visit to the United States. Since Imran Khan was sworn in to power in August 2018, he has been mocked as a ‘Selected’ prime minister and not an elected one. The word selected has irked Khan and his ministers so much that the deputy chairman even banned its usage in the national assembly. But during his recent visit to the US, ‘Senator Tony Booker’ came out in support of Khan, saying, “If he is selected then it might be the best selection ever, and if he is elected then Pakistanis are the most wise nation in the world.” Khan wins Booker If India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was taking a lap with US President Donald Trump in Houston, Pakistan had Tony Booker, who just settled the year-long debate on “selected” once and for all. #manofpeace #manofjustice #manofwisdom . ⁦@ImranKhanPTI⁩ . I say sir You are selected by the ALMIGHTY to lead Pakistan in the future .May the blessings of ALMIGHTY shine upon this nation . And may ALLAH guide us all .Pakistan hamesha Zindabad.🇵🇰♥️ pic.twitter.com/Db1iM0d1U6 — Shaan Shahid (@mshaanshahid) September 29, 2019 But, wait. There’s just a small glitch. Tony Booker, the US Senator, doesn’t really exist. He exists in the tweets of Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) fans, not in the real world. There is one Cory Booker, US senator from New Jersey, but he hasn’t had the opportunity to weigh in on Pakistan prime minister’s status of being selected yet. Very cleverly, when people pointed out that Tony Booker wasn’t real, some of the PTI trolls started spinning the statement in Cory Booker’s name. When Khan advises the entire world to “just Google”, it might be a good start if he could teach that to his supporters at home first. For now, Tony Booker, a fictitious senator, lives only in memes. But the marketing of Imran Khan’s US visit is endless. When he returned, hundreds of supporters and his top cabinet colleagues landed at the Islamabad International Airport with flags and flowers, in the backdrop of welcome chants. On Twitter, hashtag #WelomeHomePMIK trended the whole day. It was a welcome fit for a king who has returned after victory on the battlefield – or in his case, after winning another World Cup. But scratch the surface, and the welcome party is also another product of the fake news factory that is today’s PTI. Of course, when former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s supporters used to welcome him at the airport, Imran Khan used to lampoon them as “darbaaris”. Also read: Imran Khan is done being the PM of Pakistan. He now wants to worry about India all the time Trump, Erdogan listen to world leader Khan Imran Khan is a world leader and if you don’t know that, then you have been living under a rock. Indians can use Burnol, for President Trump and President Erdogan were “seeking advice” from our captain on the sidelines of UN General Assembly’s 74th session last week. Look at him sitting so calmly, displaying such poise. They claim that this shows how the world values the leader of Pakistan. Unprecedented, his followers say. There is a photograph that really exists. Trump and Erdogan are leaning over and talking to each other. Except that in the real picture, there was an empty seat between Trump and Erdogan. And PTI trolls have superimposed Imran Khan’s picture in the middle. 12 Indian Muslims The world has gone gaga over Khan’s speech, his party claims: his act, speed, timing, delivery and whatnot. He is not only the best ambassador of Kashmirs, but he is also now the voice of every Muslim in India. After all, he worries about them day and night. Indian Muslims, from wherever, are glued to their TVs, watching Khan’s UNGA speech. https://twitter.com/saira_muslim/status/1177659337935933440 They showcase a tweet with an image of an Indian Muslim family saying: “We have heard Imran Khan’s speech with our entire family in India. It is heartening to hear the words of Islam.” But no, this Muslim family from Kolkata was watching then-US President Barack Obama’s famous Cairo speech 10 years ago. Nevertheless, if you have to show that the speech was a hit with 12 Indian Muslims, then this is the way to do it. Also read: Imran Khan lectures Modi on minorities. He must ban forced conversions in Pakistan first Time magazine cover Imran Khan had just ended his UNGA speech, and it was just a matter of seconds before he made it to the cover of Time magazine. A cover showing Khan hit the social media stands, titled, “He Came, He Fought, He Conquered. How Khan won the world!” From what it looks like, the Time hasn’t done just a cover on Khan but an entire Issue, with no other stories but “How Prime Minister Imran Khan changed the Muslim world”. And by just superimposing Khan on the cover of a 2018 magazine. Now, don’t ask about the contents of this issue because the deadline was short and the editors of Time didn’t have the time. So, you will have to live with only the cover for now. Thanks to Insafians, it is the second time in 2019 that Khan made it to Time magazine’s cover: in April, he was adjudged as one among the ‘100 most influential’ people in the world. Rani Mukerji, a voice of reason Ever since the advent of Twitter in Pakistan, ‘Rani Mukerji’ has been a voice of reason for PTI users. Whatever the political situation between Pakistan and India be, Rani Mukerji will give her opinion anyhow. If there is a day when you don’t understand the difference between real or fake, wait for Rani to endorse it to know it is fake for real. https://twitter.com/RANIMUKERJl/status/1177627759704719360 “What a brilliant & tremendous speech by the Pakistani PM @ImranKhanPTI at the #UNGA. He spoke his heart out for the Oppressed Kashmiris & rightly exposed the RSS controlled regime. Wish we Indians had leadership like him,” the tweet by @RANIMUKERJI read. It doesn’t matter if her bio says ‘Parody account’ – what she posts is gospel truth for Khan supporters. The only tweet posted by the account has more than 4,000 likes and close to 2,000 retweets. Also read: A meeting with Imran Khan is all it took to make Pakistanis fall in love with Donald Trump Putin-Khan dostana in US Russian president Vladimir Putin had a rather good dinner interaction with PM Khan, as they sat together in New York, or so we are told. What all they would have talked about, we wondered. It meant good news diplomatically, right? But just as we were about to begin our celebration over this, we found that Putin wasn’t even in New York. He was in Russia with the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Paid ad in NYT Get a paid advertisement published, put the ad sheet on top of the front page of The New York Times, and tweet from the official party handle: “The world has started paying attention to the #KashmirIssue and that itself is a diplomatic win for Pakistan. Our only aim is to make the Kashmiri voices heard despite Modi’s attempts to silence them through media blackout in Kashmir. Today in @nytimes! #ImranKhanVoiceOfKashmir”. Once the lie is called out, simply delete the tweet. A sponsored ad, not on the front page of The New York Times. The author is a freelance journalist from Pakistan. Her Twitter handle is @nailainayat. Views are personal. Subscribe to our channels on YouTube & Telegram Why news media is in crisis & How you can fix it You are reading this because you value good, intelligent and objective journalism. We thank you for your time and your trust. You also know that the news media is facing an unprecedented crisis. It is likely that you are also hearing of the brutal layoffs and pay-cuts hitting the industry. There are many reasons why the media’s economics is broken. But a big one is that good people are not yet paying enough for good journalism. We have a newsroom filled with talented young reporters. We also have the country’s most robust editing and fact-checking team, finest news photographers and video professionals. We are building India’s most ambitious and energetic news platform. And have just turned three. At ThePrint, we invest in quality journalists. We pay them fairly. As you may have noticed, we do not flinch from spending whatever it takes to make sure our reporters reach where the story is. 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Out with the old, and in with the new, the 2017-18 New York Knicks are once again the “new look Knicks.” At the end of the 2016-17 New York Knicks season, there was undeniable evidence that there would be dramatic changes throughout the entire Knicks organization. Coming off a disappointing 31-51 record last season, it was evident that change was necessary in order to achieve relevancy in the near future, and the Knicks didn’t fail to shake things up. Headlined by the firing of Phil Jackson and the trading of Carmelo Anthony, the Knickerbockers look to start the organization off on a clean slate in the 2017-18 season. There are reasons to be excited and optimistic about a potential future for some of the young Knicks, and if the preseason is any indication, there is proper evidence not even to pay attention to the Knicks at all. This upcoming season will serve as an indicator as to who can be expected to have a significant role on this team for years to come. There are a few things to watch for this season, and the position battles will be paid close attention to all season, especially at the point guard position. Battle For Point Guard Position The Knicks first-round draft pick Frank Ntilikina enters this season as an unknown commodity. Ntilikina missed all of the Orlando Summer League and four out of five preseason games due to injury. There was a slight possibility that Ntilikina could begin the season as a starter, but all of that was practically erased due to his lack of availability. Veteran point guard Ramon Sessions appears to be the favorite to man the starting point guard for the time being. The question is, can the 19-year-old Ntilkina play his way into manning the point guard position for the New York Knicks? That position battle will be something worth keeping an eye on. Can Kristaps Porzingis Take The Next Step? With Carmelo Anthony being traded, Kristaps Porzingis now officially steps in as the face of the franchise. Porzingis will soon be the focal point of the offense and carry a heavy workload night in and night out. It remains to be seen how KP will handle that role. The skill set is there and the potential is unquestioned — the only thing left to check off the list is the execution factor, and Porzingis has to be the centerpiece of this team for years to come. The Knicks reunion with Tim Hardaway Jr. will aid KP in his claim to become an NBA superstar. Hardaway’s scoring abilities will take some weight off the back of KP and hopefully take some pressure off of him as well. Is Jeff Hornacek The Man For The Job? Jeff Hornacek [Image by Elsa/Getty Images] Last season was a bit of a disaster to say the very least. Jeff Hornacek was in many ways a puppet for Phil Jackson. Hornacek was unable to coach his team the way he wanted in any given scenario without Jackson breathing down his neck. With the triangle offense out, there are no more excuses for Hornacek. While it would not be fair to assess Hornacek off of the number of wins the Knicks end up with, due to the lack of talent on his roster. It is up to the head coach to push this team in the right direction and develop his players correctly. If there is clear progression by players such as Frank Ntilikina and Kristaps Porzingis, then Hornacek deserves real consideration to coach this team over the next couple of years. The 2017-18 Knicks season will be filled with flashes of brilliance, and more often than not, bursts of brutality. However, in the end, this season is all about building for the future and closer towards the ultimate goal: to win an NBA Championship. [Featured Image by Mike Stobe/Getty Images]

The new SimCity is bustling like never before. You’ll notice the difference right away—unlike previous versions of the hit computer game, this one is actually full of tiny citizens. They leave their tiny homes every morning and walk (or drive or take a bus) to power plants or factories, where tiny crates are made and picked up by trucks driven by other tiny people, then finally dropped off at stores where the Lilliputian populace shops. Given this manic attention to municipal minutiae, it may come as a surprise that the series isn’t universally beloved in the urban-planning community. After all, this is where many of today’s youngest planners first experienced the thrills of zoning and city budgets. (New Yorker writer John Seabrook has written that the game is “arguably the single most influential work of urban-design theory ever created.”) But other professional planners think that SimCity’s influence hasn’t been wholly positive. Its reliance on single-use zoning, for instance, can make it seem like urban sprawl is the only way for cities to grow. To test out the theories, I played the newest game with Stone Librande, its lead designer, and Jeff Speck, a city planner and the author of Walkable City, a remarkably fun guide to making downtowns more pedestrian-friendly. The city we created together wasn’t exactly a paradise—we had a bit of an arson problem—but Speck walked away impressed. The citizens are the most obvious manifestation of the fundamental differences between this game and previous ones. When Librande and Electronic Arts started working on it three and a half years ago, their first decision was to make the simulation work from the bottom up rather than from the top down. “Everyone has to go to work, get money, and shop,” he says, and what happens in your city is the product of the actions of the thousands of tiny people who live in it.Admittedly, says Librande, these people are pretty dumb. They live entirely in the present, making decisions intersection by intersection. They aren’t picky about where they work and they don’t exactly have long-term goals, but it’s enough for phenomena like rush hour and gridlock to emerge. And it’s far more complex than previous Sims games, which simply drew cars in front of large buildings to create the appearance of traffic—and then had them vanish at the next intersection. Speck, the city planner, noted that this type of model is actually more advanced than what most traffic engineers use in real life. In fact, if the calculations the Sims citizens are making were even more complex, the game could have real-world applicability. “They need to consider that if they drive it’ll take them this long, and that they’ll have to pay this much for parking, and that they can’t work in their car but that the train has Wi-Fi, and so on,” Speck says. The game’s designers would love to do all that, Librande says, if they were making a model for urban planners. To which Speck replies, “Have you ever considered it?” City planning obviously isn’t EA’s goal, but neither is mindlessly addictive play—the series has always had a strong sense of social mission. “Our goal is to make a game that’s a hit worldwide as an entertainment product that as a side effect wakes people up,” says Librande. “I want people to play this game and at the end of it say, I understand something about my city that I didn't before.” The Sims, another EA creation and one of the bestselling games of all time, was a subtle critique of consumerism, insofar as anyone playing in the style of “whoever dies with the most toys wins” ends up spending the whole game working to pay for her toys. (The pronoun is deliberate: the Sims was one of the first games to be played by women in significant numbers.) Spore, another spinoff, taught players about the randomly branching paths evolution can take. Likewise, the newest SimCity is full of buried commentary and critique. Your city has three wealth classes, but once basic needs have been taking care of, no group is necessarily happier than the others. Low-wealth people get paid one low-wealth token, which they can use at a low-wealth shop to buy one unit of happiness; if you’re high-wealth, you get one high-wealth token which will also buy you one unit of happiness. “You’re like Socrates!” exclaims Speck when Librande explains the model. “You’re a philosopher trying to understand human nature at the deepest level. Wealthy people spend more to achieve the same happiness.” (Studies, by the way, show happiness plateaus after about $75,000 a year.) Education in SimCity is a sort of wonder drug: if you build a university, people get sick less, commit less crime, build solar panels on their roofs, get wealthier, and are generally better off. They also start to complain more about bad city services and pollution, so depending on what sort of Sim mayor you are it could have drawbacks. The game’s most salient message, though, is that cities are extremely complex. You have to deal with power, water, housing, transportation, pollution, even sewage. Sewage was controversial, says Librande. “When we first started talking about it people said, wait, that’s not fun, nobody wants to deal with sewage.” But after watching a documentary about Chicago’s sewer system, they decided that sewers are an amazing piece of infrastructure that people hardly ever think about—and the game could force them to. Every civic decision has consequences. Put your sewage treatment center too near the water table and everyone gets sick. Put the garbage incinerator too far from town and the dump trucks will take so long to pick up trash that it’ll accumulate in people’s yards and they’ll move away. Put the incinerator upwind and it’ll stink up your town. As in real cities, a lot of these problems start small but get bigger the longer you ignore them. Some things got left out in the interest of playability. You don’t have as many street options as Speck would like to see. You can’t add bike lanes, and you can’t limit parking. In fact, parked cars sometimes disappear to save space. In an interesting statement on car culture, Librande decided that if they made parking realistic, so much of the screen would be dedicated to asphalt that it’d be too boring to play. Still, Speck says, it’s a tremendously impressive project, and Librande probably knows more about city planning than even he does. “I think about design, but I'm not operating on a scale where I'm thinking about power production,” says Speck. A central thesis of Walkable City is that planners should be generalists because design by people interested in just one issue—say, water runoff—yields inhospitable cities. “I think you'd make a great city planner just based on what you've learned from designing this game,” Speck tells Librande. Meanwhile, our time is running out, so we decide to make a city. We accidentally put a highway to nowhere cutting diagonally across our island. There’s no undo button in SimCity; Librande says it makes your decisions feel more real. Eventually, though, we have a nice diamond of residential and commercial blocks, a central park, windmills, and a sewage treatment plant off to the side. We decide to specialize in culture, but our fledgling town can’t afford an opera house, so we go with a casino. The casino, unfortunately, attracts a criminal element that our city lacks the police force to control, and soon there’s an arsonist on the loose. We forgot the fire department. Now a whole row of prime waterfront real estate is burning. “There’s a strong entropic force,” says Librande. It’s easier to build things than to keep them running. That’s true of real cities, too.

by “Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was paying a former student to keep quiet about allegations of sexual abuse from the time when Hastert was a teacher and wrestling coach in Illinois, two sources with knowledge of the federal government investigation told CNN on Friday afternoon.” There are serious reasons why this doesn’t make Hastert much different from other Members of Congress, or for that matter the President. Childhood poverty has risen for every major racial group since 2008, according to a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report released on 28 May. This, over the time Barack Obama has been president, but he’s immensely assisted by the Congress in this work to transfer more wealth to the plutocrats who run the system. As the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn so succinctly puts it, “Wealth creates poverty, and poverty creates wealth.” When massive wealth is flooded to the billionaires, massive poverty swirls in its wake. Why, in the wealthiest nation on earth do we have any children living in poverty, let alone rising numbers of millions? The National Center for Children in Poverty estimates that 45% of American children live in low-income families with 16 million of them, 22% of American children, living in poverty. There is no Land of Opportunity, as the establishment myth has it, for these children. Congress has the ability to raise taxes and fix this. They certainly know how to spend prodigious wealth on those who finance their political campaigns, piling on trillions to add to the national debt. And they certainly know about child poverty increasing– the NCES report was sent to the Congress, after all. If past performance is an indicator, we may be assured Congress will do nothing about this report. Poor children do not contribute to political campaigns, nor do they vote, the two things which raise a scintilla of interest from Congress. But knowing this hellish existence, replete with hunger, lack of medical care and sometimes homelessness is being inflicted on children in the wealthiest nation on earth, and doing nothing about it, is child abuse, as sure as any other child abuse, and these sociopaths who can ignore such suffering while on their knees kissing the butts of transnational investors who don’t give a damn about this nation or its people should be standing before a hanging judge, had we a system of justice based on justice, and sentenced to whatever child abusers get. Jack Balkwill is an activist in Virginia.

Engadgeteers spend a lot of their day staring at a screen, so it's no surprise that nearly all of us are blind without glasses or contact lenses. But wouldn't it be great if we could give our eyes a break and just stare at the screen without the aid of corrective lenses? That's the idea behind an experimental display that automatically adjusts itself to compensate for your lack of ocular prowess, enabling you to sit back and relax without eyewear. It works by placing a light-filtering screen in front of a regular LCD display that breaks down the picture in such a way that, when it reaches your eye, the light rays are reconstructed as a sharp image. The prototype and lots more details about the method will be shown off at SIGGRAPH next month, after which, its creators, a team from Berkeley, MIT and Microsoft, plan to develop a version that'll work in the home and, further down the line, with more than one person at a time.

Who speaks for the Republicans? By Ezra Klein When the inevitable showdown between the revived Republican Party and the Obama White House occurs, who will speak for the Republicans? In 1994, they had Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich, both of whom were nationally credible leaders, at least at the time. But looking through Gallup's "most admired" poll, Republicans haven't coalesced around any similarly serious names -- or really anyone at all. The most admired man in America, by a wide margin, is Barack Obama. Three of the four most-admired women in America are associated with either the Obama campaign or the Obama presidency (Hillary Clinton clocks in at No. 1, and Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama take the third and fourth slots). The closest thing the GOP has to a Dole or a Gingrich is Sarah Palin, whose interests and messages frequently diverge from those of the Republican Party and who polls very poorly among the broader populace. Perhaps the idea that you need a leader to deliver your message is outdated in an age when Fox News and other outlets that are willing to create and push the message on their own. But I rather doubt it, particularly as Obama's brand remains surprisingly strong and the Republican brand surprisingly weak despite the results of the 2010 election. One reason for that strength, I think, is the absence of a viable alternative. It's sort of a shame for the GOP that Mitt Romney turned out to be such an unlikable and untrustworthy candidate. His business experience and executive accomplishments would've made him a good standard-bearer in this political climate. And you could certainly imagine a world in which John McCain had run a different campaign in 2008 and, though he'd lost, remained broadly admired among the public. Add in some savvy positioning during the last two years, and people might have begun wondering whether they'd made the right choice. But in the world we're in, he doesn't even register on the Republican side of the poll.

WASHINGTON — Eric Dean made a career of calling military veterans to urge them to enroll at Ashford University, a for-profit school based in San Diego that offers online degrees. Dean, who was instructed in sales techniques at Ashford, said he tried to befriend hundreds of current and former sailors and soldiers — many from the nation’s poorest communities — to convince them to attend. “I’ve seen the inside,” Dean told NBC News in an interview, saying he had been “pressured into essentially selling my soul to throw fellow veterans under the bus” by misleading them about the educational outcomes about the school's graduation and job-placement rates. Dean, who’d served in the Navy, quit Ashford in December 2017 because he said he objected to the school's practices and now says veterans with PTSD were among his recruits. Military veterans dine on campus at Georgetown University in Washington on July 30, 2015. Bill O'Leary / The Washington Post via Getty Images file Under President Barack Obama, the Department of Education cracked down on for-profits like Ashford. With its high sticker price, questionable job placement success and 16 percent graduation rate — considerably lower than the national average of about 60 percent. Ashford was described in a Chronicle of Higher Education investigation as “a poster child for the ills of the for-profit college sector,” and the school was sued by the state of California, which said it was misleading students about tuition cost and burying them in loan debt. While the Obama Administration didn’t solve all the problems associated with the for-profit college industry, it successfully created new rules intended to help rein in the worst-performing schools and to protect taxpayer dollars. Veterans and low-income Americans can qualify for large sums of federal aid, making them top recruitment priorities for for-profits. Now, the Trump Administration is trying to overturn those rules — and veterans and low-income Americans are the most at risk. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has begun a months long process to unwind the Obama-era rules, easing oversight of for-profits’ use of tax dollars and protections for defrauded students. DeVos has argued the for-profit industry offers an important alternative to traditional four-year colleges and universities for many Americans seeking training in specific trades. “Instead of targeting schools simply by their tax status, this administration is working to ensure students have transparent, meaningful information about all colleges and all programs,” DeVos said last year, announcing plans to overturn the rules. DeVos did not respond to an NBC interview request. In response, House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters, D-Calif., told NBC News she plans to introduce two bills ending the incentives given to for-profit schools to recruit military members and veterans. “I am absolutely concerned. We may be going back to the worst of times with this industry” when minorities, poor people and veterans were the targets, Waters said. Waters said she hopes there will be bipartisan support to intervene. “Democrats and Republicans alike wax eloquently about their support for veterans,” she said. "Anytime there is some effort for veterans people want to get on board.” Veterans targeted Trump frequently proclaims his devotion to the military and veterans. “Nobody’s done more for the military than me,” he has often said. But veterans are among the students most at risk from the aggressive recruitment tactics used by for-profit colleges. For-profit schools cost on average twice as much as public colleges, and most of their revenues come directly from taxpayers through federal financial aid. The schools also spend heavily on marketing and recruiting students who qualify for federal aid, especially veterans. Here’s why: For every dollar of GI Bill funding for-profit schools secure, they qualify for an additional $9 in federal student aid. For-profit schools have been eight of the top 10 recipients of GI Bill tuition and fee payments since 2009, according to an analysis of VA data by Veterans Education Success, an advocacy group for veterans that has worked against the tactics used by for-profit schools. Waters’ legislation would end that incentive and require for-profits to get more of their money from students who can pay privately before qualifying for any federal aid, she said. The legislation followed years of effort by the Obama administration to slow the volume of federal dollars going to for-profit schools that have a history of poor outcomes, including low graduation rates. Like much of the Democratic agenda, the effort is likely to be resisted in the GOP-led Senate. A 2017 lawsuit by California’s attorney general alleges Ashford misled prospective students and engaged in other illegal practices. Dean says recruitment techniques included avoiding direct answers about low graduation rates in order to maximize enrollment. “It was all unethical, the way we were misleading students,” said Dean. The Department of Education under Obama created a “borrower defense” rule, making it easier for students to be relieved of their federal student loans if a school is found to have used illegal or deceptive tactics in recruiting them. A “gainful employment” rule required schools to demonstrate their graduates are making a living wage. The Obama-era rules had an impact, according to former Obama Education Department senior policy adviser Ben Miller. Miller told NBC News his analysis shows that from 2010 to 2018, federal funding for for-profit schools facing lawsuits and investigations dropped by 75 percent, or $14.4 billion and that many of those schools closed. An improving economy was a factor in the drop, as fewer people pursue higher education when the economy is strong. Still, schools that weren’t under investigation saw their federal revenues drop by just 14 percent during the same period, the analysis found. John King, a former Education Secretary under Obama who helped write the original rules, said DeVos’s efforts would have an insidious effect. “It seems these measures are intended to resuscitate the industry and allow new bad actors to emerge or to allow bad actors that have lost a lot of enrollment to be able to grow again,” he said. “A Waste of Time” After four tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which he earned a Bronze Star, U.S. Army drill sergeant Andres Figueroa wanted to start a new career at a TV sports channel. He enrolled at Full Sail University, a for-profit in Orlando, Florida, to learn how to operate camera equipment. Recruiters for the school had portrayed Full Sail as one of the top film schools in the country, Figueroa told NBC News, and had assured him that graduates were virtually guaranteed employment with various “industry partners.” None of that, Figueroa said, turned out to be true. “It was a waste of time, waste of money and I don’t even tell anybody that I went there. I feel duped,” Figueroa said, claiming he had received only limited hands-on training and job placement assistance. Figueroa estimated it would take him 10 years to repay loans for the part of his Full Sail bill that 20 months of his GI funds didn’t cover. Annual tuition at the school is $29,398, double that of the nearby University of Central Florida, which boasts a significantly higher graduation rate and higher post-graduation salaries, Education Department statistics show. Casey Tanous, Full Sail’s public relations director, said the school’s curriculum is, in fact, rooted in “hands-on” education. For any student to suggest he’d been duped is “hard to believe,” Tanous said. “Film students spend hundreds of hours using gear and software that is specific to the learning objectives of the course and the program,” she said, noting that any student with concerns is encouraged to “reach out to us.” While Full Sail has not drawn as many high-profile legal challenges as has Ashford, it ranks near the top of a Department of Veterans Affairs list of 1,600 schools with official complaints filed against them. NBC also found 13 complaints about Full Sail filed with the Florida attorney general’s office. Only three other schools, all for-profits — the University of Phoenix, Colorado Technical University and DeVry University (online) — had more complaints. Colorado Technical University, part of Career Education Corporation, aggressively courts veterans. One former CTU recruiter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of career retaliation, said the school often targeted the poorest veterans — many of whom struggle with PTSD — who would qualify for the most federal aid. Because the enrollment process was often rushed, the recruiter said, some agreed to take out additional loans without realizing it. In a statement, CTU said it “strongly disagrees” with the characterization of its recruitment. “We have a thorough process to inform and counsel incoming students. We have a strong record of supporting veterans,” the statement said. Last month, Career Education Corporation reached a settlement with 48 states and the District of Columbia that accused it of misleading students about the costs of its programs, their job prospects and using “emotionally charged language emphasizing the pain in prospective students’ lives to pressure them into enrolling.” The company denied allegations of wrongdoing or liability. DeVos Doubles Down DeVos’s efforts to rescue for-profits from the Obama era rules conflict with other actions the Trump administration has taken against the risks associated with the for-profit education industry. In August 2017, Trump signed the “Forever GI Bill,” which restored GI benefits to some veterans whose schools had gone out of business. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated 5,000 veterans would be eligible through that legislation to receive $170 million in restored benefits over ten years. U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at the White House in Washington on Aug. 16, 2018. Leah Millis / Reuters In 2018, a Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general report warned that some $2.3 billion in taxpayer-financed GI Bill money could go to “improper payments to ineligible colleges” over the next five years. Education Department spokeswoman Liz Hill told NBC News that transparency around for-profits would help weed out underperforming schools. She cited an interagency working group that strives to inform veterans about “scams.” “Of course bad actors need to be shut down and taken off the field,” Hill said, adding that the administration will overhaul an online “College Scorecard” which allows students to compare data on schools, including costs and graduation rates. “We’re trying to give students and veterans actionable and meaningful information about all schools,” said Hill. The online courses offered by for-profit schools “appeal to student veterans’ need for flexibility,” Hill said, as they tend to be older, married and supporting kids and family or have a disability. Still, critics say DeVos’s decision to ease rules — and, separately, to reinstate an accreditor — organizations responsible for accrediting colleges — behind two major for-profits that are now defunct — will make it easier for problematic schools to prey on veterans. DeVos says the rules placed unfair burdens on for-profits that public and nonprofit institutions don’t face. DeVos reinstated the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), one of the nation’s most controversial for-profit accreditors, after the Obama Administration withdrew the agency’s recognition, citing a “profound lack of compliance” with the “most basic” responsibilities of an accreditor. A federal judge had ordered DeVos to reconsider the decision, finding the Obama administration didn’t review thousands of pages of evidence. DeVos’s decision is now under review by the department’s inspector general. “DeVos has taken a number of steps to literally steer taxpayer money toward the very worst quality schools,” said Carrie Wofford, president of Veterans Education Success, which provides free legal services and career counseling to veterans. “With the other hand, she’s stripping out all of the protections students had. It’s almost as if she’s bent on trying to prop up a handful of bad actor companies.” Administration Connections The efforts of for-profits to target veterans can be aggressive. Some pay for recruiting leads from websites masquerading as official Pentagon or government sites. One of these, GIBill.com, was effectively shut down in a settlement with a group of state attorneys general over defrauding veterans. While the company that operated the site, QuinStreet, denied wrongdoing, it was forced to transfer the site to the VA. Other sites designed to generate leads for marketers, like Military-colleges.com, continue today. It is owned by a company called Education Dynamics, which makes a profit by selling leads. Trump, who once ran the for-profit Trump University, agreed in 2017 to pay $25 million to settle a class-action lawsuit by students who said they were defrauded. Trump repeatedly denied the fraud claims and said he could have won at trial. And Devos’s team at the Education Department includes advisers who have lobbied for the for-profit school industry. One is senior adviser Robert Eitel, a former vice president at Bridgepoint Education, Ashford’s parent company. Another, Principle Deputy Undersecretary Diane Auer Jones, recommended DeVos reinstate the controversial accreditor ACICS, giving it a year to fix its compliance problems. ACICS accredited two large for-profit schools, ITT Tech and Corinthian Colleges, which were subsequently shut down amid lawsuits, investigations and Obama administration sanctions. Bridgepoint has received significant regulatory attention, including a $31 million fine in 2016 by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for engaging in allegedly “deceptive acts and practices” regarding students' monthly loan payments. Bridgepoint denied the company intentionally deceived students and said it reached the agreement to resolve the dispute. The two for-profit schools that have received the most GI Bill-funded tuition payments since 2009, the University of Phoenix and Education Management Corporation, have both paid hefty settlements to the federal and many state governments to resolve claims that they pressured students to sign up. EDMC in 2015 agreed to pay $95.5 million to resolve allegations it violated federal law by paying employees based on student enrollment, even as it said the claims were without merit. In 2009, the University of Phoenix similarly agreed to a $78.5 million settlement, even as it denied the allegations of improper incentive compensation. In total, despite the Obama administration administration’s efforts to rein in the for-profit industry, eight schools have collected some $34.7 billion in GI Bill tuition and fees since 2009, according to Wofford’s group. Ashford With veterans so financially desirable at for-profits like Ashford, Dean said he faced pressure from his superiors to meet monthly quotas and “enroll them no matter what.” The goal, Dean said, was to keep students signed up for at least three weeks until they became “financially liable,” or ineligible for a refund. Dean’s claims were echoed in a 2017 lawsuit brought by the state of California against Ashford, alleging the school’s sales people made “false and misleading statements to prospective students to meet their enrollment targets.” The lawsuit has not been resolved. In a statement responding to the suit, Bridgepoint, which owns Ashford, said the school’s online education program is a “model” for bettering the lives of “people who did not, or who were unable to, pursue more traditional avenues to degrees” and that thousands of graduates attest to its quality. In addition to Dean, NBC News interviewed a second longtime former Ashford military recruiter who spoke on the condition of anonymity out concern for retribution but corroborated Dean’s claims. Dean said he left because he didn’t like the company’s recruitment tactics. Ashford did not comment on why he left. In response to the recruiters’ claims, Ashford spokeswoman Dori Abel said the school never targeted its “marketing materials or advertising campaigns specially to veterans, low-income or otherwise.” The school has a “strong compliance program,” Abel said, including a whistleblower hotline. There is no record of any calls to the hotline that reflected Dean’s concerns during the time he worked there, she added. Such allegations, Abel said, represented “an orchestrated effort among certain activist groups to paint our entire sector as irresponsible.” For his part, Dean said he had, in fact, complained to a manager about “unethical” practices at the school some four months before he quit but never got a response. Dean said his recruits included Vietnam and Iraq veterans who openly confided about their struggles with PTSD. “It was exploiting their emotions,” Dean said. “I’d say, ‘Do it for your kids. Your family never went to college. You’ll be so proud of yourself.’”

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Travellers can make some money by becoming informal couriers The next time you take an international flight, how about transporting something in your suitcase for a complete stranger? If your answer to that question is a resounding "no way", and the very thought conjures up terrifying images of unwitting drug mules and long prison sentences, you might need to think again. "I always take things back from my travels for family and friends," says 45-year-old French airline worker Olivier Kaba. "Now not only am I able to bring things for others, but I get rewarded financially for doing it. "In the past two years I have made about 1,000 euros ($1,100; £860)." Olivier is a regular user of Worldcraze, one of three similar firms that have launched in recent years to help connect people who would like to buy something from a different country, with travellers who have spare space in their suitcase and want to make a bit of money by being informal couriers. Image copyright Ouibring Image caption There are some products that ex-pats just cannot live without The idea is that the buyer can quickly get his or her hands on a product that may not be available to buy or import where he or she lives (country A), or that the item may simply be a lot cheaper abroad (country B). So with transactions made via the three companies' websites and apps, travellers who are due to fly from country B to country A can purchase and transport the products for the buyers. They can then arrange to meet to hand them over. Over the past 24 months Olivier says he has transported everything from three months' supply of French salami to the US, bags of Japanese sweets called "Tokyo banana", and 20kg of fabric samples for a woman starting her own business. "I discover new products I have never heard of," he says. Worldcraze was launched in 2012 by French entrepreneurs Frederic Simons and Guillaume Cayard. Image copyright Olivier Kaba Image caption Olivier Kaba makes about 500 euros a year transporting goods via Worldcraze On a trip to New York Frederic noticed a large price difference between Levi's jeans in France and the US, and the idea was born. Today Worldcraze says it has 10,000 users, with Apple products being the most frequently delivered items. From each transaction Worldcraze takes €2.50 from the buyer, and 10% of the traveller's payment, which is up to 10% of the cost of the product being transported. Singapore-based Ouibring has a similar business model. Founded in 2016 by developers Joel Gordon and Andrew Crosio, they say that one Ouibring delivery is now made every day on average. Goods delivered so far include artisan coffee from Japan to Hungary, a baby carrier from Thailand to the US, a candle carried from India, and a room spray from Singapore to the Czech Republic. Image copyright Ouibring Image caption Joel Gordon says Ouibring flags any inappropriate requests "For shoppers this is a way of getting previously unavailable products, full stop," says Joel. "For bringers [the travellers who deliver the items] it's about making some money, and meeting interesting people who appreciate the effort, and can share tips for exploring the place you're visiting, or the next step on your journey." To remove the risk of illegal or counterfeit products being transported both Ouibring and Worldcraze only allow users to buy and collect new products from legitimate shops. Worldcraze's chief marketing officer Constance Claviez Homberg says: "Our users can't buy illegal products because they are buying products directly in shops. "That way it is just impossible to carry illegal stuff, or counterfeit products. [And] travellers have to upload the product's bill on our platform to prove that the product is congruent." Image copyright Worldcraze Image caption Worldcraze helped one man buy a hockey stick from overseas The company also advises users to check on whether the item in question is legal in the destination country, and has staff that check out requests made on its website and app every day. Ouibring's Joel Gordon says that it also has a "moderation system" which "flags requests that may be inappropriate, and we remove requests if required". He says that the company also advises users that if they are unsure about anything they should get in touch via its secure contact form "and we'll get back to you asap". "We are happy to provide advice for travellers for specific questions," says Joel. "At the end of the day, it is the individual traveller's responsibility to ensure they comply with the relevant laws of the country they are travelling to." Mumbai-based Beck Friends, another firm that enables travellers to transport goods for other people, doesn't limit people to purchasing new items. Instead a traveller recently transported a much-loved teddy bear from Chicago to Mumbai after its owner, a four-year-old girl called Heer, left it behind. Image copyright Beck Friends Image caption Beck Friends helped reunite Heer and her bear Teddy To remove any security concerns, the buyer and carrier have to be first connected on social media, such as on Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+. Users must also upload two valid forms of identification, such as a passport and driving licence. Beck co-founder Deep Malhotra says: "Security is the prime concern, and we are building a robust platform to address this." Where things get more complicated is the issue of export and import tariffs, which vary greatly from country to country. All three companies say they advise users on this, and it is the buyer who ultimately has to pay any charges. If any traveller is unsure of something, or gets into any difficulties, all three companies say they have support staff available around the clock to help, be it via telephone, live web chat or email. Ouibring's Joel Gordon says that he doesn't think security or customs worries will hold back the growth of his company. "Our vision is to become another part of daily international life, like Airbnb, with people all around the world helping to make transport, logistics and travel work together better."

Saban really did dominate the 90s with so many Tokusatsu shows under his brand competing against each other with no real outside competition exception for CW's take on Kamen Rider when Power Rangers was declining in popularity and Disney wanting nothing to do with it. I wonder if we'll see a new Toku show, original, based on Kamen Rider again or at least a non-Saban production, for the west?

1) You’re a killer because you say “Goodbye, Tiffany,”to the college girl passing your butter and white bread across the scanner at the grocery store, even though her name tag is scarred and beaten and only visible in flashes under the windbreaker she’s got on because the register is right by the front door, and the front door is always hissing open, sometimes even when nobody’s there. 2) You’re a killer because you let the mouse go that shows up on your glue trap under the sink, and you stand there and watch it to see what it’s going to do now, in the alley, where it’s going to go, and how, since its four feet are now four tufts of grey on the glue trap you’ve stuck to the side of the scarred and beaten dumpster. Mouse bones are like wet toothpicks. Just scissors. 3) You’re a killer because you think about your brother at odd moments, about the way his name tasted in the air when your mother would call it, like it stood for both of you, like you would of course follow wherever he went, like you liked eating mashed potatoes and casserole as much as he did, but you didn’t, you couldn’t. In those scarred and beaten dishes you only ever saw all the hundred other casseroles that had lived there, and died there. 4) You’re a killer because you know to never look away when an off-duty police officer locks eyes with you at a stop sign, his instincts ringing all his bells, and nobody even had to tell you not to look away, you just know this from your own instincts, you know that his scarred and beaten soul, that it’s calling across to yours, that it’s the same kind of lonely and afraid. Just pull forward when it’s your turn. Keep moving. 5) You know you’re a killer because you never can remember the plots of the movies you sit through at the second-farthest theater from your apartment, but you can list the color and pattern of every shirt the two leads wore, because that’s where the real story was, it was in those selections, it was like standing before a closet for you, standing there and parting the shirts, looking behind them, to the wardrobe designer, the one you waited until the end of the credits to find. A name you say later in your bedroom, in secret, like a promise. 6) You’re a killer because you know the truth about Batman, about why he works at night, and why the mask, the gear, all the complicated exit strategies, and why he never uses guns—they attract too much attention—and, most of all, why he’s always watching, and why his mouth when he’s watching is so important. And why he needs a cave like that. And why this scarred and battered city, it’s his and his alone. 7) Another way you know you’re killer through and through is that you can’t stop with the lists, they’re everywhere, and they’re all so necessary, they’re all so perfect, so elegant, so right, they each take so many drafts to get them that right, but the main way you know you’re a killer is that you’re not on a single one of these lists. 8) The eighth way you know you are what you are is that when your brother dared you to eat that Christmas light bulb in fifth grade you did, not little by little like he meant, but all at once, like a glass chili pepper from the cafeteria, and then he had to pay you like he said, only, that night, you crept across to his bed, your mouth still bloody, and you slid that scarred and battered five dollar bill under his pillow, and never asked him if he found it. 9) You know you’re a killer because of the way you can feel the whole city watching you push your shopping cart past the scarred and battered meat cooler at the grocery store, your eyes and mind and privates not not not catching on the slash of white rib bone coming up through the red meat, you’re not looking at all, you’re just walking past, your legs working just like everybody else’s, just like normal. 10) You know all this, can feel your true self writhing around in your chest, but a list doesn’t prove anything, does it? No, what proves it finally is that you’ve sat in the back seat of a scarred and battered car for three hours now, a name on your lips to say when her shift’s over, and she’s behind the wheel: “Melissa.” Not “Tiffany.” It’s so she’ll think this is all a mistake. So she’ll think this doesn’t have to be happening. But it does. It already is. The look in her eyes in the rearview, it’s going to be perfect.

Bengaluru: At a time when scientists all over the world are struggling to develop artificial liver tissue, three Bengaluru scientists have actually developed such tissues that perform functions of the human liver. This breakthrough has not just brightened hopes for patients seeking liver tissues from live donors, but has also brought a potential alternative to artificial extracorporeal liver support (or liver dialysis) used in detoxification treatment for liver failure - a process similar to hemodialysis.The trio that achieved the breakthrough comprises Arun Chandru, Dr Abdullah Chand and Dr Sivarajan T - all senior scientists at Pandorum Technologies Pvt Ltd, the Bengaluru-based biotechnology start-up working on tissue engineering.The ideation process for the same started way back in 2009. In 2012, they received a grant for the research project from the Union department of biotechnology (DBT), under the ministry of science and technology. It has not yet reached the stage where it can be transplanted. But the made-in-India mini liver will presently serve as test platforms for discovery and development of drugs with better efficacy, less side-effects and lower costs.And it could eventually replace the human liver, thus enabling transplants without waiting for living donors. The process of making this made-in-India liver tissue involved taking cells from a live human liver and encapsulating them in hydrogel.These were then bio-printed as mini-livers using an indigenously developed 3D bio-printer. The cells in the hydrogel were then grown in an environment that almost replicated the conditions in which liver thrives in a live human body.The scientists found that the cells grown in such a way were viable and stable for up to four weeks outside the human body. The scientists say the artificially grown liver tissue resemble the original human liver tissues structurally and functionally - which means they can produce albumin, fibrinogen, transferrin, ferritin, urea and cholesterol, besides being able to store fat and secrete enzymes responsible for metabolism and detoxification.The scientists feel the artificial tissues could help cut down costs of medical research by 20-30 per cent, besides transplant costs too when that can be achieved subsequently. The current cost of liver transplant is around Rs 20 lakh. "The 3D printed living tissues enable affordable medical research and could reduce animal and human trials. It will eventually lead to full scale transplantable organs," Chandru, who is also the co-founder of the company, said.This is not only a significant milestone but will also meet the acute shortage of human organs available surgical transplantation. They can produce personalised tissue patches and organs that can be used by surgeons in a clinical setting."They perform functions like any other liver tissue and their response drugs and toxins are more realistic than current industry standards of 2D cell culture and animal models which are not human alike. Generally testing on animals may not get accurate results all the time. The tissue that we have developed has 10 million cells and can be primarily be used in medical research which is mainly to do with disease modelling and studying the radiation effects," says Chandru.As of now, the biggest challenge in clinical trials is a lack of human-like models, which is why this 3D bio-printing technology, that enables producing artificial tissues, can improve drug and vaccine delivery, mechanistic toxicology and medical research.In 2013, a Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) engineer Sangeeta Bhatia told one of the science writers of their news magazine that although the liver is a regenerative organ, global efforts of researchers working in the hope of producing an artificial liver tissue for transplantation have repeatedly been stymied.The question that is bugging the scientists globally is this: "Why do mature liver cells quickly lose their normal function when removed from the human body?" Well, Chandru, Abdullah Chand and Sivarajan seem to have found the answer to that question. As of now, work on artificial organs have been going on Japan, USA, and Europe with China recently joining the league.The Bengaluru scientists are now in talks with the pharmaceutical industry specialised in liver-specific drugs, a multi-billion-dollar market.

Satellite images reportedly show Iran has established a base outside of Damascus to house missiles capable of hitting Israel, crossing a “red line” for the Israeli government as it struggles to stop Iranian entrenchment in Syria. Images from the Israeli satellite firm ImageSat International appear to show a pair of newly built missile hangars on the base, which strongly resemble hangars at another Iranian compound that Israel bombed last year. The new base, located around eight miles north-west of Damascus, is being run by the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which has spearheaded Iran’s involvement in Syria, according to Fox News. If the base is confirmed to hold Iranian missiles, its presence will likely increase the tensions between arch rivals Israel and Iran over Syria, which have been growing sharply in recent months. Those tensions erupted in early February when Israel shot down an Iranian drone that entered its airspace from Syria and in turn lost one of its F-16 fighter jets to a Syrian regime anti-aircraft missiles. Iran denies owning the drone.

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain’s attempts to get an explanation from Russia over the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Salisbury have always been met with obfuscation and lies and that hasn’t changed, Prime Minister Theresa May’s spokesman said on Wednesday. Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia knew the real identity of two men accused by British prosecutors of trying to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia and that they were civilians with nothing criminal about them. “These men are officers of the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU ... The government has exposed the role of the GRU, its operatives and its methods, this position is supported by our international allies,” the spokesman told reporters. “We have repeatedly asked Russia to account for what happened in Salisbury in March and they have replied with obfuscation and lies. I can see nothing to suggest that has changed.”

next Image 1 of 2 prev Image 2 of 2 French far-right leader Marine Le Pen was charged Friday with allegedly misusing European Parliament funds to pay two parliamentary aides who also work at her National Front headquarters. Her lawyer said she denies the charges and will fight to get the investigation suspended. Investigators suspect some National Front lawmakers used legislative aides for the party's political activities while they were on the European Parliament payroll. Le Pen is president of the far-right National Front party. The prosecutor's office said Le Pen was summoned and handed preliminary charges of breach of trust and complicity in breach of trust concerning two parliamentary aides when she served at the European Parliament. Le Pen is suspected of using parliamentary funds to pay Catherine Griset from 2009 to 2016 and bodyguard Thierry Legier from 2014 to 2016 for allegedly working as aides in Strasbourg, seat of the European Parliament, even though they also have roles in her far-right National Front party. Griset was charged in February for allegedly receiving money through a breach of trust. Le Pen is also charged with complicity in breach of trust in connection with her role as president of the National Front from 2014-2016. That charge could not immediately be clarified. Le Pen denies the charges. "It makes no sense," National Front vice president Florian Philippot, Le Pen's top lieutenant, said on the BFM-TV station. "She is obviously 24 hours out of 24 both the president of the National Front and a European deputy." Le Pen plans to file an urgent demand Monday at the Appeals Court asking that the preliminary charges be annulled due to "the violation of the principle of separation of powers," her lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, said in a statement. She will also seek a suspension of the investigation. His reference to "separation of powers" may relate to a contention that the French justice system should not interfere in the affairs of political parties. Bosselut could not immediately be reached for comment. The preliminary charges are thrown out if investigators fail to come up with convincing evidence. The case goes to trial if they do. A conviction for breach of trust charge carries a potential penalty of up to three years in prison and a fine of 375,000 euros ($428,000). Le Pen had twice refused summonses from authorities while campaigning, first for the French presidential election which she lost May 7 to Emmanuel Macron, then for a lawmaker's seat in the French National Assembly which she won on June 18. Due to that win, Le Pen gave up her seat in the European Parliament. Other European parliamentarians, including Le Pen's father Jean-Marie Le Pen and her companion Louis Aliot, have also been investigated for allegedly misusing parliamentary aides' wages. Aliot last week refused to respond to a summons by investigators, French media reported. Some leading politicians are now living under a cloud of suspicion as to whether they misused funds meant to pay aides' salaries. The one-time front-runner in France's presidential race this year, conservative Francois Fillon, was charged over allegations that he paid his wife, who served as his parliamentary aide, and two children for work they did not perform. Fillon suffered a big loss in the first round of the presidential vote. Macron himself is determined to avoid any possible connection to the lax or corrupt political practices of the past. Three of his ministers bowed out of their jobs shortly after being appointed — the justice, defense and European affairs ministers — over concerns they could be caught in the investigations into the political use of salaries to parliamentary aides.

The Tory council which last year unveiled plans for an ‘easy council’ model in which residents would be charged extra for services has voted through massive pay increases – doubling the allowances received by cabinet members and increasing the allowances of the council leader by more than 50 per cent. Leader of Barnet council Lynne Hillan will now be able to claim up to £54,000 a year for the role, a rise of nearly £20,000 – on top of a £10,000 basic allowance. Only one Tory councillor voted against the measures at Hendon town hall last night, Kate Salinger, who has been removed from all her committee posts by the Tory group, and stripped of all her duties. Under the new measures, cabinet allowances are up £17,000 to £34,000, while at the same time, opposition councillors will lose out, gaining minor allowance increases but losing their £500 travel expenses. One of those to benefit from the doubling in cabinet allowances is Brian Coleman (pictured right), in charge of transport and the environment, who was already in receipt of more than £100,000 of taxpayers’ money. Coleman is a member of the London Assembly, for which he was last year paid £52,910, and is chairman of the London Fire Board – which recently voted itself a 25 per cent pay rise – and for which Coleman is paid £26,833, all in addition to his wages from the council. A Standard investigation last year put his total cost to the public purse at £104,503.50. Coleman claimed £2,275 travel expenses for eight months in his role as chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority and also ran up a taxi bill of £8,231 in his position as Assembly Member for Barnet and Camden, including a £656 bill on one day. The pay increases come at a time of “austerity” and massive cuts in public services; indeed, only on Monday, local government minister Grant Shapps said: “It is not justifiable for hikes in councillor allowances when public sector workers are facing a two-year pay freeze. We’re all in this together, and those who hold public office need to lead by example.” Coleman, however, says: “I think residents will be delighted at a sensible scheme within Barnet. The London Councils scheme recognises the work councillors of all parties do. We have to look at allowances every four years and have done what 20 other councils have done… “The cabinet is getting nothing like its entitled to according to Sir Rodney Brook (report author). I will take the money I’m entitled to. No more, no less.” As you’re here, we have something to ask you. What we do here to deliver real news is more important than ever. But there’s a problem: we need readers like you to chip in to help us survive. We deliver progressive, independent media, that challenges the right’s hateful rhetoric. Together we can find the stories that get lost. We’re not bankrolled by billionaire donors, but rely on readers chipping in whatever they can afford to protect our independence. What we do isn’t free, and we run on a shoestring. Can you help by chipping in as little as £1 a week to help us survive? Whatever you can donate, we’re so grateful - and we will ensure your money goes as far as possible to deliver hard-hitting news.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has appointed former Liberal cabinet minister and deputy prime minister Anne McLellan to examine the dual role of justice minister and attorney general in the federal cabinet — and whether the two roles ought to change. "Significant issues have been raised recently about relations between the former attorney general and justice minister and government. And I am announcing today that Anne McLellan will be appointed to investigate independently," Trudeau told the House of Commons Monday. "As former justice minister and attorney general and deputy PM, she has a unique understanding of the role." Trudeau said that McLellan will act as a special adviser, examining whether the cabinet roles of justice minister and attorney general — which are occupied by the same person in Canada — should be reformed in the wake of allegations of political interference in the SNC-Lavalin affair. McLellan will report her findings to the prime minister and provide recommendations by June 30. "She will also analyze the operating policies and practices across the cabinet, and the role of public servants and political staff in their interactions with the minister of justice and attorney general of Canada," Trudeau said in a statement. The prime minister first said he intended to appoint someone to look into the dual role on March 7. "I believe that it is timely and appropriate to examine these questions. I look forward to providing my advice to the prime minister," McLellan said in a statement. Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former justice minister and attorney general of Canada, told a Commons committee last month that she felt she was improperly pressured by 11 officials in the Prime Minister's Office to allow Quebec-based engineering company SNC-Lavalin avoid bribery and corruption charges providing it met a number of conditions in a potential remediation agreement. Wilson-Raybould did not allow the firm to enter into such an agreement, but the ensuing political controversy has raised questions about whether it's time to consider dividing her former role into two separate positions — to keep the attorney general free of political pressure. 'It's not that hard' McLellan, who held the post of justice minister and attorney general from 1997 to 2002 under then-prime minister Jean Chrétien, told CBC earlier this month that she backs the idea of looking at splitting the current role. She also argued that when she served in the post, its dual nature made for better policy. She said she was often pushed hard to lean toward certain decisions, but that she enjoyed those debates. She said it made for better legislation — but only because everyone knew where the "red lines" were. "It sounds complex, but actually day in, day out, it's not that hard, as long as everybody knows what their roles are. PMO, clerk, colleagues, everybody knows what their role is." While McLellan said she supports a study of the dual role, she added that it should wait until after the political tensions surrounding the SNC-Lavalin affair have died down. The Conservatives were quick to criticize the appointment, noting that McLellan, despite her political experience in the role, is an active member of the Liberal Party who has engaged in party fundraising efforts. According to the Liberal Party, McLellan, will now no longer host a planned March 31 fundraising event to help female Liberal candidates run federally. "Well, there you have it, Mr. Speaker. Liberals will investigate Liberals to get to the bottom of this. Former Liberal cabinet minister Anne Mclellan. Maybe Sheila Copps wasn't available," Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer said in the Commons today. Remaining connected Last month she said that, even if the roles are split, future attorneys general would have to somehow remain plugged in to the political context of decision-making. "I don't believe that the attorney general should be isolated from the concerns, the anxieties, the fears, the aspirations of their colleagues," she said. "And when I say colleagues, I mean ministerial, caucus colleagues and opposition colleagues. "The attorney general cannot be divorced in making decisions around invoking sections of the anti-terrorism or other legislation, cannot be divorced by what is happening in various communities in our country, their fears, their aspirations, how they feel if a prosecution is commenced and a certain sentence is sought."

Conheça o canário nativo do Brasil que é 'pistola' na vida real – e mais bravo que o canário belga Ave nativa do Brasil é territorialista e menos dócil que canário belga. Penugem amarela é característica dos machos.

"Our first priority should be to ensure our democracy is available to everyone, which is why this is my first bill of the new Congress," Rep. Blumenauer said. "I am proud that the success of the Oregon model is now being recognized federally by paving the way for all Americans to vote by mail."

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But, again, it wasn’t just that he was uninterested in the traditional systems by which laws were passed in Washington. It was that he embraced that disinterest as a solution. He was an Outsider, coming to D.C. without the encumbrances of having done this before. This was framed by his supporters as though he was the new sheriff in town, prepared to think outside the box. Others framed it less generously, as though a tourist had wandered onto an aircraft carrier and decided he was going to shoot down some MiGs. Trump’s central pitch, redistilled and redistributed on a near-daily basis over the course of 2016, was a simple one: I am a dealmaker, and I will make deals. It was a simple premise and his core campaign argument, simpler and more important than “make America great again.” Once you bought into the idea that Trump’s business acumen would translate into handshake agreements solidifying the future of our country, you were bought into the idea that he could do anything. Which is what he promised. He made sweeping assertions of what he could do, powered — not inhibited — by the objections of realists. AD AD “Health care that covers everyone for less cost and with better options!” Trump would promise. But that’s impossible!, the realists would respond. “That’s because you don’t know how to make deals,” Trump would reply. If you bought into the idea that Trump could close the deal, you bought into the idea that the naysayers simply didn’t get it. Trump can’t close the deals. What deals has he made? He got a conservative appointment confirmed for the Supreme Court — after having Neil M. Gorsuch recommended to him by outside groups and after the Senate changed its rules to assure the confirmation. He’s signed a lot of executive orders, but those aren’t deals and some of those were blocked by the courts. He discussed a cease-fire in Syria during his sit-down with Vladimir Putin, which seems to be holding. AD AD But legislation? No. On Monday night, the most recent example: Two more Republican senators came out in opposition to the Obamacare overhaul that was awaiting their votes. The senators’ announcement was especially brutal because it came shortly after Trump hosted a dinner during which he hoped to persuade other senators to back the bill. Trump was late to the effort and was wooing the wrong people when the rug was pulled out from under him. The president is anxious to assure the public that he remains the competent deal-maker-in-chief, tweeting brash, overconfident and contradictory assertions about the future of health-care legislation after the bill’s collapse. (On Monday night, it was “REPEAL failing ObamaCare now.” On Tuesday morning, “[a]s I have always said, let ObamaCare fail.”) And yet, as we noted on Monday, Trump didn’t really do very much to ensure its passage. That the bill was in trouble wasn’t a secret. For some time now, it’s been clear that Senate Republicans had a remarkably thin margin of error on their effort to get the necessary 50 votes for passage. But Trump didn’t do much to try to solidify his party’s position. He traveled to France last week for a Bastille Day celebration, a trip that had been planned for some time but does not appear to have been unmissable. When he returned to the country over the weekend, he literally spent hours over two days watching a golf tournament at his private club in New Jersey. Where was the dealmaking? AD AD Two things likely happened. The first is that Trump quickly learned that the 535 members of Congress operate from a different position of concern than the people with whom he used to make business deals. The bottom line, here, is the concern of voters, something that varies from person to person. There’s never a one-on-one agreement. That Trump also revealed himself to be an untrustworthy ally — saying, for example, that the House bill he took credit for helping to pass was “mean” — no doubt made his job harder. Why take a tough vote on a bill if you’re going to get burned for it by a president seeking to cover his own tail? That’s the other thing that happened. One reason Trump likely never embraced the Senate bill was that he certainly knew it wasn’t very popular. And among the motivations that power the president, few are as important as the desire to be viewed positively. Theoretically, the buck stops at the president’s desk. But Trump seems more than happy to let the blame fall elsewhere: On his Republican allies, on the Democrats, on Hillary Clinton. AD AD There’s an anecdote that didn’t get much attention last week that’s relevant here. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) was addressing a small crowd in D.C. when he told a story about a conversation between Trump and his secretary of defense, Jim Mattis. From Washingtonian’s report: “We’re asking permission to send 50 of our soldiers into a village outside Raqqa,” Mattis told Trump, according to Graham. “Why are you calling me?” Trump replied. “I don’t know where this village is at.” Mattis told him, “Well, that’s what we’ve done for the last 8 years.” Trump, Graham said, then asked, “Who’s asking to go into that village?” Mattis told him, “A major, first in his class at West Point.” “’Why do you think I know more about that than he does?’” Graham said Trump asked. “And then he hung up.” In one sense, that’s understandable: The guy on the ground has more intimate familiarity with what’s happening than does Trump. But in two senses, it’s amazing. First, Trump is the ultimate decision-maker on military matters, a role he embraces in the abstract but that, here, seemed to take him aback. But, second, we can easily see a way in which this is handled if the incursion into that village goes south: Well, Trump might say, it’s not my fault. During the 2016 Republican convention, one year ago this week, Trump promised that only he could fix what was wrong in Washington. That it was he who could go to Washington, crack skulls and make change. A year later, that’s not how it has played out. As some might have predicted, Trump’s lack of familiarity with the process of legislating and his over-the-top promises on what he could deliver didn’t pan out. He came to Washington pledging to be the ultimate dealmaker, who would make all of your dreams come true.

Today’s guests, author and speaker Kay Warren and UFC fighter Cody Garbrandt, know firsthand what it’s like to help people they care about face circumstances that are too tough for them to face alone. Kay Warren is the co-founder of Saddleback Church with her husband, Rick. For more than ten years, Kay has been a tireless advocate for those living with mental illness. She shares how she and her husband Rick met, the beginnings of Saddleback Church, and her fight for her son’s life as he dealt with mental illness. When UFC World Champion fighter Cody Garbrandt was a young boy, he dreamed of becoming a champion. His family was filled with generations of fighters, and while growing up in a blue-collar town in central Ohio, his dream to become a champion seemed nearly impossible. After years of struggle, when Cody was 20, his brother introduced him to someone who would change Cody’s life forever. You Don’t Have to Face This Alone: Kay Warren & Cody Garbrandt – Jesus Calling Episode #111 Narrator: Welcome to the Jesus Calling Podcast. Today we visit with two guests who know firsthand what it’s like to help people they care about face circumstances that are too tough for them to face alone: author and speaker Kay Warren and UFC fighter Cody Garbrandt. First up, Kay Warren is the co-founder of Saddleback Church with her husband, Rick. She is an international speaker, bestselling author, and Bible teacher who has a passion for inspiring and motivating others to make a difference with their lives. She is best known for more than 10 years as a tireless advocate for those living with mental illness. She shares about growing up in the church, how she and her husband Rick met, and the beginnings of Saddleback Church, plus her fight for her son’s life as he dealt with mental illness, which first started when he was very young. Kay Warren: I’m Kay Warren. And my husband Rick and I founded Saddleback Church in our living room in 1980. We’ve been serving at Saddleback for about 38 years. Currently I’m an advocate for people living with mental illness and for those affected by suicide. I was born in San Diego, California. My dad was a pastor of small Southern Baptist churches, very conservative little churches. One thing I remember about growing up was not being able to play cards, not going to movies, not going to dances and not being able to wear a two-piece swimsuit. I mean, really super conservative childhood, but it was good. I loved what my dad did. My mom and dad were people of integrity, and they lived the same life at home that they did at church. I was a very typical church pastor’s daughter at the time: playing the piano, singing in the choir. I knew how to sew and knew how to cook some things that were very much expected of women and girls when I was growing up. I loved nature, loved being outside, but I was more of a passive enjoyer of nature. I wasn’t the kind of person that had to conquer the ski slopes and plumb the depths of the ocean. I was content to sit on a blanket and look up at the stars. That was my enjoyment, or watch a tree or fire. I’m much more an enjoyer of nature than a participator in nature, but beauty restores me. “I’m an enjoyer of nature–beauty restores me.” – Kay Warren Growing up in a ministry family was not problematic for me. I didn’t sense that that we were different at church than we were at home. We had our secrets. And those were things that came to play out of my life later on, but I didn’t recognize it as a little kid as being things that were different. Kay Warren – Meeting a Young Rick Warren Rick and I met at college, this little liberal arts college where we were both students. And there were only about 600 students at the time, so you knew everybody. I knew of Rick, and I knew that every weekend he was out preaching at some youth revival, and I thought he was wonderful. He was funny and outgoing and very extroverted. But I was not interested in him because he was too loud, he was too extroverted, and I was not seriously interested in him. I just liked him as a friend. I was dating one of his friends at the time, and I asked him why Rick didn’t date. He was popular, and clearly everybody liked him, but he just he didn’t date. I asked his friend, “Why doesn’t Rick date?” And he said, “Well, he figures why waste the money on a girl you’re not going to marry, that when the right girl comes along, God will let him know that and that’ll be that.” And I just thought that was the strangest thing I’d ever heard of. A few months later, this guy that I’ve been dating who was Rick’s friend, we broke up. And within felt like a few days, all of a sudden Rick was sitting down next to me in a cafeteria. We didn’t really know each other. He took me out on a date, and eight days later he asked me to marry him. And I remember it as being one of those moments in which there’s only been a couple of times in my life where it really felt like God spoke to me, and this was one of those moments. “I remember it as being one of those moments in which there’s only been a couple of times in my life where it really felt like God spoke to me, and this was one of those moments.” – Kay Warren Rick said eight days after our first date, “Would you marry me?” And I said, “What did you say?” He said, “I love you. Would you marry me?” And I prayed and I said, God, what am I supposed to do? I don’t love him. I’m not in love with him. What am I supposed to say? This is where I felt God spoke to me. I felt like He said, Say yes and I’ll bring the feelings. So with my 19 year old understanding of God and His will and love and marriage and all those things, I said yes, even though I didn’t love him, because I felt God had told me to do that. Soon after that, he went to Japan on a short-term mission trip. I went to Alabama as a short-term mission trip. We came back together. I ended up moving back home where my parents lived. So we were separated the entire year before we got married. What led us to the terrible marriage problems that we encountered right off the bat was, first of all, we didn’t know each other. We just genuinely didn’t know each other. We didn’t go through the typical courtship of where you see each other day in and day out. It was we were strangers. So that created a few problems. There was a problem because I had been sexually molested when I was a little girl, but I hadn’t told anybody. And I had never even really thought that much, it was something that kind of got buried in my own mind. So when we got married, I mentioned it to Rick. He didn’t know what to do with that. I didn’t know what to do with that. But it created a lot of problems. Then I think looking back, we were just very immature, very immature. We didn’t have a lot of experience. It wasn’t in a day in time in which you talk a lot about problems and how to work them through, so within days of getting married, we were both instantly thinking, This is the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life. “I felt like [God] said ‘Say yes, and I’ll bring the feelings.’” – Kay Warren For the next few years, we just struggled constantly with conflict and how to communicate, how to work through all the things that you’re supposed to work through before you get married. So today, after being married nearly 43 years, I can tell you that we are best friends, and we are crazy about each other and madly in love. But it took a long time to work through all the things that were wrong, all the things that we had to overcome, all the ways that were so different. But I’m so glad we did. I am so glad we did. Starting Saddleback Church from Scratch After we graduated from college, Rick wanted to go seminary. So we moved from California to Texas, and he went to Southwestern seminary. And while we were there, his whole vision changed. I was not happy with the fact that his whole vision changed because I married a guy who I thought who was going to be a traditional pastor. It’s just what I thought was going to happen. I knew I was going into a ministry, and that was okay. But once we got to seminary, he felt like that God was asking him to plant a church. Today that’s just not that big a deal, it feels like everybody you talk to is planning a church or they’ve done church planting. But it was not common forty three years ago. But to just start from scratch with no money, no members, no building, none of that didn’t feel exciting to me. It was actually felt pretty scary. So I was a little resistant at first. And then as God began to work in my heart, which is a longer story, but as He began to work in my heart, slowly the dream moved from just Rick’s heart to mine as well. When we actually moved to the Saddleback Valley in 1980, I was as excited as he was. I couldn’t wait. I just I was ready. I believed in what God had called him to do it. I believed in Rick and his gifts and what God was doing and I was ready. Easter 1980 was our first service, and it was so exciting. We didn’t know how many people would show up. We had this little band of people who’d been working with us for 10 weeks getting ready, but we had no idea. And that first day at Laguna Hills High School ,when 205 people came walking in, person after person, it still makes me really emotional. It was like, God, you really did call us to this. This is what we’re supposed to do, and this thing is going to work. There are 205 people here. And it just it went from there. And it blossomed and it mushroomed and it grew exponentially. And we just felt like we were on the back of a bucking bronco, just kind of holding on for dear life because this church exploded. People came to know Christ by the dozens, and then the hundreds, and then the thousands. And over these years, it has been one of the greatest joys of my life, to lead and pastor and minister to be a shepherd to the people here at Saddleback Church. It just grew through stages, and we found that we had to keep growing. We couldn’t stay the same people that we were when we started the church. That is, we leaders had to constantly be evolving, constantly be growing in our own character and our own capacity to know God and then to communicate Him to the people that we were serving. “We leaders had to constantly be evolving, constantly be growing in our own character and our own capacity to know God and then to communicate Him to the people that we were serving.” – Kay Warren And as that visibility grew, Rick being an extrovert, was just naturally more comfortable with that than me, as an introvert. And I’ve had to go through a lot of different growth periods in which I would just have to keep surrendering to God. Then as those numbers would grow, I would have to just keep coming back to God and say, I don’t know how to do this. This is beyond me. This is beyond my capability. This is far beyond what I feel like I can do. The good part about that was that it made me trust God. It made me rely on Him. It made me believe that that I was capable for whatever He had called me to do. Philippians 4:13 in the Amplified [version] says, “I am ready for and equal to anything through him who infuses inner strength into me that is. I am self-sufficient in Christ sufficiency.” That verse has really held me as the church has grown in visibility and grown in responsibility. That through what God what Jesus has infused in me—I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me—I really am able to do it. I’m equal to it. I’m up for it because of His strength in me. And it’s pushed me in ways that I don’t know that I would have been pushed, had we stayed at 50 or 100. The visibility has forced me to rely on God. It forced me to grow forced me to really lean into His capability to be capable. A Mother Chooses Joy Amidst Her Greatest Loss One of the greatest joys of my life has been being a mom. And we have three kids: Amy, Josh, and Matthew. “One of the greatest joys of my life has been being a mom.” – Kay Warren Josh and Amy are just amazing human beings. They’ve got little people themselves now, so I’m a grandma—it’s the best thing in the world. But Matthew, our youngest, we knew from a really early age that he was different than his siblings. He was 7 when we realized that all those things that had just been different, that we thought he would grow out of, were actually a problem. So at 7, Matthew was diagnosed with DU, with depression. And then from there—bless his heart—panic attacks and A.D.H.D and early-onset bipolar disorder, and suicidal ideation when he was 12, and then obsessive compulsive disorder and body dysmorphic disorder and major depressive disorder. And then in the last year and a half before he passed away, he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. His life was so difficult, with so many challenges around mental illness. And they just didn’t get better. They just got worse and worse. And even though he was so ill, he was also this amazing guy. He was funny and creative and deeply compassionate for other people who suffer. He had a huge, tender heart for other people in pain. But he just kept it just kept getting worse. Probably two or three years before he died, I realized that as his mom, it was taking such a toll on me. Mental illness, especially severe mental illness, takes such a toll on families. And our family was struggling right along with him, suffering with him. I knew that I was going down, if you will, going down spiritually, going down emotionally. “Severe mental illness, takes such a toll on families. And our family was struggling right along with him, suffering with him.” – Kay Warren So I did a really intense study of scripture and what the Bible says about joy, and came to realize that I had defined it wrong. I was defining it based on how I felt. If I felt up that day, if it seemed like it was a good day, then I could experience joy. But if Matthew had a hard day or something else went wrong on my life, then I didn’t have joy. And that up-and-down, up-and-down was really getting to me. Come to find out, as I look at scripture, it’s so much more than that. That’s why I wrote a book called Choose Joy: Because Happiness Isn’t Enough. Happiness will not carry you through those dark times. It will not be enough when the wheels fall off the bus, when the bottom falls out. Happiness will evaporate, but joy can stay. And that’s what I wanted. When I realized that joy was so much about what I knew about God, what I believed about God, the choices that I wanted to make in relation to what I knew about God, changed everything for me. And it was in that study of joy and making a decision that I could count on God’s character, that I could count on God’s goodness, that I could count on God’s control in my life, even when to me life was spiraling wildly out of control. That’s when joy began to take root in my life, and that changed me. That changed my approach. “Happiness will not carry you through those dark times. It will not be enough when the wheels fall off the bus, when the bottom falls out. Happiness will evaporate, but joy can stay.” – Kay Warren So when Matthew declined—and he did decline—and eventually took his life on April 5th, 2013, it was the worst day of my life. It was the day that I had dreaded and prayed would never happen. And yet it did. We felt very helpless to change the trajectory of the way it seemed Matthew was going. And when he died, we were faced with confronting, on the deepest level ever, What do we really believe about God? What do we really believe about what He teaches? Is He truly good? “What do we really believe about God? What do we really believe about what He teaches? Is He truly good?” – Kay Warren I had I come to that conclusion when I was learning how to choose joy. But when we lost Matthew, there was nothing that had ever challenged my faith to that. And we did lose—I, in particular—lost hope for a while after he died. My hope had been that God would heal him, and God didn’t heal him in the way that I expected, the way that I fervently prayed, begged, pleaded with God, counted on verses, counted on scripture. That isn’t what happened. But you can’t live without hope. And so I had to learn how to rebuild hope, how to rebuild that trust in God and His promises. “I had to learn how to rebuild hope, how to rebuild that trust in God and His promises.” – Kay Warren When Matthew died, we were left with shattered lives, shattered hope, shattered family. And we made the decision just really right off the bat that we were going to try to help other people. Since then, God has been, has just brought hundreds, hundreds of other people into our lives. Sometimes it’s people who themselves are living with suicidal thoughts and are struggling, they’re not sure that they’re going to be able to make it. Sometimes it’s families who have a loved one who is also feeling suicidal. And sometimes it’s families who have lost someone to suicide, and they are, just as we were, in that shattered heap on the floor of trying to figure out, How do you rebuild your life? And while it’s been difficult to share over, and over, and over, and over our journey in grief and our journey in rebuilding hope, it gives me the sense that Matthew’s death is not wasted. I remember so many times, in the first weeks and months, just saying, My life is ruined. You will never be good again, it can never be good. And what I would say to anybody who has experienced grief and loss and that sense that your life is ruined and it can never be good again, I will tell you that life will never be the same again. That part is for certain. It will never be the same. But it can be good again. And God has this way of still working in those places where we feel ruined, where we feel like our lives have been shattered, and He does rebuild. “I would say to anybody who has experienced grief and loss and that sense that your life is ruined and it can never be good again, I will tell you that life will never be the same again. That part is for certain. It will never be the same. But it can be good again.” – Kay Warren So if you’re struggling today with mental illness, or you maybe you’re not even sure that that’s what’s wrong—you just know you’re having a harder time functioning at work or in your maintaining your friendships or you can’t sometimes, you might not be able to get out of bed. You’re feeling life just feels like it’s collapsed in on you, and you’re not sure that you can keep going. I just want to know you’re not alone, and that there is hope. And please don’t isolate yourself. It’s a natural thing that we do when we’re feeling sad or feeling alone or feeling anxious, is to isolate and to withdraw and not be as close to other people. Sometimes that’s because we don’t really want them to know. We’re afraid that they won’t love us, or that they will think we’re weird if we tell them how much we’re struggling. But that just increases that sense of anxiety and that sense of loneliness and that sense of depression. So the very first thing I would do is to tell you please connect with other people in your life who love you. And if you are a family member, someone you love, maybe they don’t recognize that they have an illness or they are just so ill that they can’t seek the help, maybe you have loved somebody who has a substance use disorder—I mean there’s so many things that get complicated—reach out and do not stay isolated. Seek help at your church. There’s some great organizations: NAMI, the National Alliance of Mental Illness, is a great free resource that you can get tons of information. My website, kaywarren.com, has all kinds of things that I’ve assembled that I didn’t know how to find when I was had a family member [struggling with mental illness]. We’ve assembled them, and they’re easy and they’re easy to access. So don’t be alone, don’t give up hope, and look for the resources and the help, because there’s always hope. Narrator: Kay believes that we don’t have to always understand God in order to trust Him, and that we can trust Him because He loves us. She finds comfort in the words of Jesus Calling and encourages those who are dealing with pain and loss to remember that God’s love for us never changes—even when things get hard. Kay Warren: I don’t even remember when I first encountered Jesus Calling. It just feels like it’s so much a part of my life, and it’s been so much part of my life for so long now that I tried to think when I first heard about it, when somebody first gave me the copy. I don’t know, but I love it. It has been just sometimes the exact word I needed. I think that part of what’s been so meaningful is because it’s personalized. It comes from, it’s as though Jesus Himself is talking to me and that has felt very intimate. It’s like, Yes, this is you, Jesus, talking to me from your Word. And I’ve relied on it in some difficult situations. It’s on my phone. I carry it. You know I’ve got the app, and so I if I don’t read it at home, I’m reading my app. But there’s a passage one day’s reading in particular. I go back to over and over and over. And it says: I am leading you, step by step, through your life. Hold My hand in trusting dependence, letting Me guide you through this day. Your future looks uncertain and feels flimsy, even precarious. This is how it should be. Secret things belong to the Lord, and future things are secret things. When you try to figure out the future, you are grasping at things that are Mine. This, like all forms of worry, is an act of rebellion, doubting My promises to care for you. Whenever you find yourself worrying about the future, repent and return to Me. I will show you the next step forward, and the one after that, and the one after that. Relax and enjoy the journey in My Presence, trusting Me to open up the way before you as you go. The day I read that for the very first time was a day I was worried about Matthew. I didn’t know what was going to happen. He was in a particularly bad season, and I wanted to know what the future held. And when I read [this passage] that morning, and it says “This day your future feels uncertain and flimsy,” I’m like, Yes, yes yes it does. “Even precarious.” Yes that’s exactly. And then that line “That’s how it should be. Secret things belong to the Lord, and future things are secret things.” You know, it was it was a gentle word from Jesus, but it was also a little “Hey, get out of there. That’s my business. This is not your business, this is mine.” And then when it says “When you try to figure it out, you’re grasping at things that are Mine, and that is a form of rebellion. You’re doubting that I’m going to care for you.” Whoa. So it convicts me and comforts me all at once. God’s Love for Me Never Changes My life is anchored on the belief that God can be trusted. I don’t understand why Matthew had mental illness so severe from a little boy. I don’t understand that. I don’t understand why we couldn’t get all the help that we needed. I don’t understand why he wasn’t healed. I don’t know. What I do know is that God holds those answers, and I’m content to let God hold those answers. I know He will tell me, and I know that one day I will see Matthew again. Soon after he died, somebody came up to me, one of my dearest friends. And her greeting to me was, “The next time you see him, he’ll come running to you whole and in his right mind.” I believe that. I absolutely believe that because of what I know about God. I know how He works. I don’t get His ways. I know His love for me never changes and that one day all that He has promised, I will receive. Narrator: For more information about Kay Warren and her book Choose Joy: Because Happiness Isn’t Enough, please visit kaywarren.com. We’ll be right back after this brief message about a free offer from Jesus Calling. Download this FREE Jesus Calling Daily Prayer Calendar which works with your Jesus Calling devotional. Each day begins with a guided reflection followed by space for prayers of thanksgiving and special requests. Narrator: Our next guest is UFC World Champion fighter Cody Garbrandt. When Cody was a young boy, he dreamed of becoming a champion. His family was filled with generations of fighters, and while growing up in a blue-collar town in central Ohio, his dream to become a champion seemed nearly impossible. After years of struggle, when Cody was 20, his brother introduced him to someone who would change Cody’s life forever. Cody Garbrandt: My name is Cody Garbrandt. I’m a former and future UFC Bantamweight champion from Sacramento, California. Early back in my childhood, I remember my mom always being there for us. I had an older brother that was 11 months older than me named Zach. Always remember just wrestling around with him. My father was nonexistent. He was never really in our life, he was out of prison since we were born. We actually took my mother’s maiden name which is Garbrandt. Growing up in Uhrichsville and Dennison, Ohio, was much different from a lot of places. It’s a lot of factories are outsourced, jobs are taken away. There’s a coal mine in town, there’s a couple of factories that a lot of our family—our mothers or parents or cousins or uncles—worked at. So it is a really small town. Everybody knows everybody. We come from a poverty-stricken community. But I remember a lot of blue collar people and hard workers, and just loved growing up in a small town like that. And when things happen, big things or bad things, the community came together. And it was kind of like a Friday Night Lights kind of town—except for, reverse role, it was wrestling. We had a good wrestling population, good wrestling team. So the community really supported our wrestling at our school. Cody Garbrandt – Fighting Was Our Normal My family grew up fighting. And sometimes negative environments, but sometimes controlled violence as well. My uncle was an amateur boxer. My grandfather boxed, my father boxed, my other uncle boxed. it was just, we had a fighting family and that’s where it came from. That’s all I knew was fighting at an early age. I was around it. I went to the fights. My grandfather took us to our uncle’s fights. And he would get so drunk that he’d end up fighting in the stands. And we’d watch Grandpa fighting in the stands with some other spectator or some other person that was there. And we would watch him fight, and watch our uncle fight, and then we’d go home. So it was just normal for us. As far back I remember I wanted to be a fighter. I’ve always had fighting around my life, whether it was negative or positive. And I took the positive from it. A Faith Life Challenged, Changed, and Renewed My faith basis is from my uncle. He was tried as an adult at 15 years old – life sentence. Was incarcerated, and acquitted of charges 23 months later. And he’s the one that led us to God and led us to going to church and having a relationship with the Lord. He had an epiphany in [prison], and he told us all how he felt a pressure come off his chest and gave himself to the Lord there. And he would encourage us go to church. He would pick us up, and we’d go to church and spend Sunday morning [there]. Before we even knew who the Lord was, I’d always talk to someone as a child, you know, you’re in your head. So I always had that belief in a higher power, and I came to the realization that it was the Lord, that it was God that I was talking to. And we found a new church in Sugarcreek, Ohio, called New Point Church. It was a church that I went to in my early age early adult life from teenager to till present day. I still try to attend when I’m in Ohio. But there’s a lot of churches I bounce around in. When I was in high school I kind of just started going on my own and wanting to have a relationship with the Lord. When I was going through things, [I knew] I could always fall back on Him. I always knew that when I went to the church services, no matter where I was at my life, I always felt like the Lord was speaking to me, and I took something from that service and what the message was to be shared. And I just always felt that I was changed, challenged, and renewed after a good church service. And I kept my relationship with the Lord. Chasing the Dream to Be a World Champion My uncle was our father figure in our life, once he got out of prison. He was a former amateur boxer and continued his career once he was released from prison. He would take us to the gym, take us to restaurants, to dinner, to lunches, and would take us school shopping, fishing, whatever he could do with us to spend time with us. You know, I always remember wanting to be like my uncle. I got to be about 11 or 12 years old and I saw the UFC Ultimate Fighting Championship on TV. I wrestled at the time, and I also boxed without my mom knowing. My uncle would take us off to the gym and we’d spar and we had pads. My mom wasn’t too fond of us you know boxing and the fear of being punch drunk and other things a mother would worry about. So my uncle would take us twatchio the gym we’d spar and train secretly until it was just inevitable that we would want to do this follow his footsteps. And there was a show on Spike TV that was called The Ultimate Fighter where about 16 contestants would live in a house, and they would fight each other for a contract to the UFC to make it to the UFC. I remember watching that show and visualizing myself being on the way to getting on the show and winningou the contract and becoming a UFC star and champion. And I’ve always had that dream of being a world champion. I always believed in myself too. I always believed that I would make it to the UFC and I would be a world champion. I always had that faith in myself. And I dreamed so big that I knew I had the courage to chase it, that God placed that dream in my heart. No matter what I was going through, even in my darkest times as I grew up—I was in and out of trouble, a lot of fights or at parties making wrong decisions—I always had that little flash of light at the end of the tunnel was being a world champion. “I always believed that I would make it to the UFC and I would be a world champion.”- Cody Garbrandt And that’s what I held onto over the years, just chasing this dream and always believing in myself. Cody Garbrandt’s Physical & Mental Training So I have a pretty vigorous, tough training schedule. But I love it because you have to train as hard as you’re going to fight. If you train hard, then the fight will be easier. Training is day in and day out. It’s a grind, I call it “the grind.” It’s embracing the grind, embracing the pain. Everyday you’ve got to get up and have your work ethic judged. You get every fresh day to have a new start, a new start in this life that you’re working towards. And for me it’s a challenge. If I have upcoming fight, I have a vision board. I have goals and dreams and everything written out before the camp that I have to achieve during my camp, from the smallest tasks of getting up early and making sure everything is in order before I get to the gym. I’m there early. I’m doing the smallest things, from my stretching to my mobility. As much as physical work you put in, you also have to do the mental side of it. I also go to float therapy. It’s a deprivation tank. I lay in there for an hour and just get lost in myself and float on top of the Epsom salt. I go into this dream state and just visualize, and I usually do my prayer. I speak to the Lord, whatever thoughts and feelings come into mind, I just let it go and get detached with myself mentally, physically, spiritually in the float tanks. The Young Friend Who Changed Everything Narrator: Cody trained hard to become the world champion fighter he always wanted to be. He experienced some setbacks as a young adult, making decisions he wasn’t proud of, and grew frustrated with the long road to the UFC. However, his inspiration to keep going came from an unlikely young friend. Cody Garbrandt: When I met Maddux Maple, he was a five-year-old boy from the same hometown as I was, and he was diagnosed with leukemia. My brother reached out to me, and I was an amateur fighter trying to make my ranks up to the pro trying to make this as a career. And I had a lot of adversity and wrong decisions and bad decisions that I made that were delaying me from the road that I should have been on. [Maddux and I] met in unfortunate circumstances, with his early diagnosis with leukemia and his battle, and what I was going through. I was trying to get back on in the gym and back to my passion back to my dream that I wanted to be a world champion for so long. Like I said, I kept making a horrible decisions and just kind of living carelessly until I met Maddux Maple. And he kind of change my life. He redirected my faith, my focus, my purpose in life after meeting him and sitting down with his family. “[Maddux Maple] redirected my faith, my focus, my purpose in life after meeting him and sitting down with his family.” – Cody Garbrandt The first time meeting him, I left there and I knew that I had more to live for than how I was living life. It gave me more purpose in my fighting career. And it was a bond that we made. And I would always come see him. He would walk me out to my fights from amateur all the way up to the pro. I had so much motivation and inspiration from him through the battle that he fought every day to get up and fight for his life. This five-year-old kid found the inner strength to be able to do that. It really helped me in my career to go and push myself into practice and go in there and fight and keep fighting and be getting this experience so I could go to the pros, so I could go to the UFC and become a world champion. And I really leaned on him a lot for motivation inspiration when I needed the most. And about seven months left of him taking his chemotherapy, he wanted to give up, he wanted to die. He didn’t want to do it anymore. His parents called me. They called me and said they needed my help. They needed something to get that little boy’s heart turned around, and they knew that it could be me. He looked up to me so much. It was a phone call that really made my heart sink. You know, this was a boy that turned into my little brother. I didn’t know what endeI was going to say to him. What will I do to change his little heart? I [called him up and] said, “Maddux, if you don’t take this medicine, you’re going to die. Who’s going to walk me out to the octagon? Who’s going to walk me out to these fights? I don’t go to battle alone. You don’t go to battle alone. And you know I need you there. I love having you there. I tell you what, I’ll make you this promise. You don’t complain about taking your medicine to your parents for your seven months left, you’ve been doing so well. You promise me that you’ll take your medicine without complaint and beat cancer, I promise you I’ll make it to the UFC and I’ll take you to every fight with me and we’ll win the World Title together.” I took a big deep breath, and he said, “Okay, Cody, I promise you that.” We kept in touch, obviously, and every time I come back to Ohio, I’d see him. And seven months later he still took his chemo. On August 25th he called me. And he said, “Cody!” I said, “What’s going on, buddy?” And he had a smile ear to ear me, I mean, he was happy as can be. And he said, “I kept my end of the promise. Now it’s your turn to keep your end of the promise. I am done with my chemo treatments, I’m in remission now.” And at that time my life, it really, really lit a fire under me. I was so motivated and focused. I went out to Sacramento. I was 4-0 as a pro, I was so close to getting into the UFC. I was knocking on the door. And I just needed a little boost of inspiration, motivation from him. And that’s what it was. I finally got signed to the UFC at three months after he was in remission. It was a series of events that was huge for us in our life. We finally got there. I ended up keeping my promise to make it to the UFC. And he was there for my first UFC fight. I ended up knocking my opponent out. I said, “There’s a little boy and I’ve got to give him a shout out.” He was so happy. And the security guards let him come down in MGM in Las Vegas and give me a big hug, and he had tears in his eyes. He was so happy for me. That was a great moment. I said, “This is just a start. We’re in now. And we’re going to go to the top, and we’re going to do this, we’re going to set out to be world champions together.” “We’re in now. And we’re going to go to the top, and we’re going to do this, we’re going to set out to be world champions together.” – Cody Garbrandt It took us a little under two years to reach our goal of becoming a world champion. And on December 30th, 2016, I was able to keep and fulfill my promise with Maddux that we made to become a world champion together. “On December 30th, 2016, I was able to keep and fulfill my promise with Maddux that we made to become a world champion together.” – Cody Garbrandt Everyone Has the Power to Be a Role Model I think that everyone has the power to become a role model. I was in no position at the time to become a role model—it kind of just happened naturally. I kind of was led into a leadership role. “Everyone has the power become a role model.” – Cody Garbrandt I’m remember being chosen as team captain on my football team and wrestling team. I remember telling the coach that I was no captain, I wasn’t a team captain, I kind of did my own thing. And you know, coming to meet Maddux and everyone saying, “You’re a hero, you’re role model to this kidpeae,” I looked at it in a different light. He was an inspiration, and almost a role model to me, but that molded me to being a role model for him. “He was an inspiration, and almost a role model to me, but that molded me to being a role model for him. “ – Cody Garbrandt I think everyone has the power to be the role model, just doing the smallest things right. From the smallest things: keeping the focus, keeping the dream, keeping the faith, no matter where you’re at in your life, your highest of highs and lows of lows. Keeping that balance and just staying staying focused. And positivity. I mean staying staying positive through it all, I think, is how anyone can be a role model. If you have this positivity, you can spread that positivity to anybody and whatever they’re going through in their life. When We Trust God, He Brings Good Things Narrator: Cody believes that God gives us the dreams that are in our hearts, and when we trust Him, He can bring good from our lives. He reiterates this point by sharing the May 10th devotion from Jesus Calling. Cody Garbrandt: Do not resist or run from the difficulties in your life. These problems are not random mistakes; they are hand-tailored blessings designed for your benefit and growth. Embrace all the circumstances that I allow in your life, trusting Me to bring good out of them. View problems as opportunities to rely more fully on Me. When you start to feel stressed, let those feelings alert you to your need for Me. Thus, your needs become doorways to deep dependence on Me and increasing intimacy between us. Although self-sufficiency is acclaimed in the world, reliance on Me produces abundant living in My kingdom. Thank Me for the difficulties in your life since they provide protection from the idolatry of self-reliance. Yeah I think that that’s a great message for whatever you’re going through. I’m forever grateful for a lot of the losses or the setbacks or the delays that God gives me in my life because I learn from them, I grow from them—in all levels of my life, spiritually, physically, mentally. I just know that God’s willing to do great things in my life. I choose to keep my faith through the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. If God gives you a dream and He allows you to dream, then He gives you the courage to chase it, to do it. There’s a reason why He planted those dreams in your mind and heart. “If God gives you a dream and He allows you to dream, then He gives you the courage to chase it.” – Cody Garbrandt The words of encouragement I would give to someone that’s facing the fight of their life: never give up. It’s all worth it. I mean, the pain that you go through, that adversity, the hardships, the trials and tribulations, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Narrator: You can learn more about Cody and Maddux’s friendship in Cody’s new book, The Pact, available wherever books are sold. Next time on the Jesus Calling Podcast, we speak with Jack and Marsha Countryman. Jack has been in the Christian publishing industry for over 30 years, with Marsha by his side, and created the beloved “God’s Promises” series of books. Jack and Marsha share how working hard and seeking God together has helped to keep their marriage strong for over 50 years. Jack: I find the secret of marriage is to lift your partner up at all times. Listen to her. Respect her. Have no secrets from her. Because she is your helpmate, and God has given her to you to bless your life. And she blesses me everyday.

We’ve known that carbon dioxide concentrations have been dangerously high, and rising, for a while now. We’ve also known that the gas gets trapped in the atmosphere, causing the so-called greenhouse effect and leading to rising temperatures. But in new research published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists show for the first time the link between the rising CO2 and the rising greenhouse effect on the surface of the Earth, not just in a laboratory. And they directly attribute their findings to fossil-fuel emissions. The scientists looked at how carbon dioxide perturbs the Earth’s energy balance through a measure called “radiative forcing.” They observed radiation wavelengths in Alaska and Oklahoma over the period of 11 years, from 2000 to 2010, finding that carbon dioxide was to blame for an increase in radiative forcing in both locations. They juxtaposed their data with a system that tracks CO2 emission sources, determining that much of it was caused by burning fossil fuels. “We’ve shown the critical link that connects greenhouse gasses to what is pushing the system to a warmer place,” one of the study’s authors, Daniel Feldman of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, tells Quartz. Feldman says the state of the Earth’s climate is governed by a balance between the energy we get from the sun, the energy the planet emits on its own, and what gets absorbed and reflected out into space. “When you add CO2 to the energy system, the energy gets rearranged and leads to a state that has higher temperature,” he says, calling the findings a “definitive fingerprint of CO2 on the forcing of the climate system, on how we’re ultimately affecting the planet on which we live.” The conclusion matches up with previous predictions. “This study provides direct observational link and confirmation of what had been largely a theoretical modeling determination of the radiative forcing that drives the global warming component of current climate change,” Andrew Lacis, a NASA scientist who is unaffiliated with the report, tells Quartz.

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La trajectoire de Mohamed Daleel, le Syrien auteur d'un attentat-kamikaze à Ansbach (Bavière) le 24 juillet, interroge les enquêteurs. Mais les recherches du New York Times permettent désormais de mieux cibler son parcours. Le 24 juillet, un Syrien se fait exploser à l’entrée d’un concert en plein air dans la ville bavaroise d’Ansbach. Il s’appelle Mohamed Daleel (ou Abou Youssef pour Daesh). Au moyen d’une bombe, cachée dans son sac à dos, il fait quinze blessés mais il est le seul à perdre la vie. Depuis, son profil et son parcours interrogent les autorités allemandes. Une enquête du New York Times lève à présent une partie du mystère. De la Bulgarie à l'Allemagne en passant par l'Autriche L’homme arrive en Europe en avril 2013, en Bulgarie plus précisément. Il se présente quelques mois plus tard, en novembre, à Ilana Savova qui dirige à Sofia une organisation de défense des droits de l’Homme. Près de trois ans plus tard, elle se souvient bien de lui: "On ne voit pas gens avec des éclats d’obus dans la jambe tous les jours!" Il lui explique qu’il est blessé depuis qu’un obus est tombé sur sa maison tuant sa femme et ses enfants et qu’il a fui la Syrie pour se faire soigner et échapper à la guerre. Il obtient bientôt l’asile en Bulgarie mais il ne peut recevoir le traitement qu’il souhaite. Il quitte alors ces contrées pour l’Autriche où il fait une demande d’asile au printemps 2014. On le lui refuse car les autorités prennent acte du fait qu’il bénéficie déjà du statut de réfugié en Bulgarie. C’est à ce moment là qu’il s’établit dans le sud de l’Allemagne, dans le land de Bavière. Une fois sur place, il affirme à un thérapeute pilotant une association d’aide aux migrants et victimes de traumatismes qu’il a été maltraité en Bulgarie. Comme Mohamed Daleel est plus tard menacé d’expulsion vers la Bulgarie, Harald Weinberg, un parlementaire allemand élu de Bavière, se saisit de son cas. Il écrit le 15 novembre aux autorités d’Ansbach pour qu’on lui permette de rester arguant de difficultés psychologiques et de la tendance suicidaire du jeune Syrien depuis qu’on veut qu’il quitte l’Allemagne. C'est à Alep qu'il a reçu sa blessure Difficile d’en savoir plus pour le moment sur la personne qu’était Mohamed Daleel à l’heure de son attentat-suicide, attaque avant laquelle il a fait allégeance à l’Etat islamique dans une vidéo ensuite retrouvée dans son téléphone. En revanche, Daesh, en revendiquant son acte, a apporté quelques informations sur le passé de Mohamed Daleel. D’après l’organisation djihadiste, il rejoint les rangs de l’EI en Irak avant de se battre en Syrie, à Alep. C’est là qu’il est blessé par un shrapnel. Il cherche alors à se faire soigner en Europe pour mieux revenir sur le front. Pour d’obscures raisons, il n’aurait pu satisfaire cet objectif, décidant alors de passer à l’acte en Allemagne.

“O F COURSE NOT , I’m not an idiot,” says Liu Yongli, a chauffeur in Beijing, when asked whether he has ever paid personal income tax. Despite earning well above the tax-free threshold, Mr Liu (not his real name) breezily explains that he has never faced any consequences for tax-dodging. Cavalier views like his may help explain why personal income tax accounted for only 8% of total tax revenue in China last year, compared with an average of 24% in the OECD , a group of rich countries. The finance ministry estimates that 187m people ought to be paying income tax. Yet a former finance official reckons that in 2015 only 28m people—just 2% of the population—did so. In theory, the income-tax reform on which the authorities are embarking, which the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main mouthpiece, is calling the most significant in the country’s history, is about narrowing the tax base, not widening it. The threshold at which tax becomes payable was raised from 3,500 yuan ($503) to 5,000 yuan a month on October 1st. The finance ministry says the number of people liable for income tax should fall to 64m as a result. But it also seems determined to make those who owe tax actually pay it—a change that could have dramatic implications for politics. A revamp of the income-tax system has been in the works for several years. A tax-evasion scandal this summer involving Fan Bingbing, China’s most famous actress, who was exposed by a whistleblower for having ducked nearly 300m yuan in taxes, may have added urgency to the task. (Ms Fan was eventually fined 884m yuan.) Fanning the flames Public interest is enormous. A state-sponsored “consultation exercise” on the reform in July attracted over 130,000 comments. That is around 100 times the average for such exercises, which the national parliament is legally required to conduct before approving new laws. Salaried professionals in big cities have long complained that they bear an unreasonable share of the tax burden. That is because firms are legally required to withhold a portion of salaries in taxes. The rich, whose income usually does not come in the form of a pay cheque, and those in the informal economy, like Mr Liu, find it comparatively easy to evade the taxman. Even salary-earners can evade tax by arranging to receive most of their pay under the table, in cash, keeping their declared earnings below the level at which income tax starts being levied. Employers agree to this scam because it allows them to shirk on social-insurance contributions, which can be as high as 40% of a worker’s salary. The finance ministry reckons that a worker on a monthly salary of 15,000 yuan is enjoying savings of around 1,000 yuan a month as a result of raising the tax-free threshold. Special deductions that come into force in January for education, care for the elderly and rent, among other expenses, will further boost tax savings. A spokesman for the ministry says the reform will result in 320bn yuan in lost revenue, about a quarter of what the government currently collects in income tax. But the reforms also include rules that aim to make it harder for companies to avoid social-insurance contributions by paying workers under the table. Those who make more than 60,000 yuan a year will be required to file annual tax returns, starting next year. Preferential tax treatment for annual bonuses may end, notes Freeman Bu of Ernst & Young, an accounting firm. There will be more audits and investigations, predicts Ellen Tong of Deloitte, another accounting firm. Expatriates, who had previously found it easy to avoid being taxed on their worldwide income, will face closer scrutiny. The anti-tax-avoidance provisions in the new law are likely to convince many to “reconsider”, says Grace Lin of Cuatrecasas, a law firm. Mr Liu, the chauffeur, intends to call the government’s bluff. He believes that most people will not file taxes despite the new regulation. Everyone knows “there is an equilibrium of cheating”, he says: workers skimp on taxes because they do not trust the government will spend their money wisely. Mr Liu cites the Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure-building project, as an indefensible giveaway to poor countries. The government, he explains, has enough “self-awareness” to recognise that turning a blind eye to tax shirkers is in its political self-interest. But China has run a budget deficit in 21 of the past 22 years. Last year the deficit breached the government’s self-imposed cap of 3% of GDP . Public debt stands at around 50% of GDP . Although none of these figures is alarming, especially by the standards of the rich world, the economy’s slowing growth will eventually make the government’s debts harder to control. No wonder, then, that officials are keen to boost revenues. Authoritarian regimes typically prefer indirect levies such as consumption taxes, not least because these are less likely to arouse resentment than income tax. If the government manages to expand the ranks of taxpayers, it may feel pressure to provide more detail on how their money is spent, and perhaps even a say in its use. As Bruce Gilley of Portland State University points out in a recent paper, resentment against a tax on salt under the Nationalist government helped to propel the Communist Party to power.

SÃO PAULO – Ex-presidente do Banco Central e estrategista-chefe da gestora Rio Bravo, Gustavo Franco apontou suas percepções sobre a crise política do Brasil e porque os mercados estão reagindo com relativa tranquilidade à turbulência política após a delação dos donos da JBS. “Minha crença fundamental nessa crise é de que existe um consenso muito forte de que a economia tem que seguir esse rumo que está determinado por esse governo, com uma equipe econômica parecida ou igual a atual”, destacou Franco, durante o evento Investindo Globalmente, realizado na tarde da última quinta-feira (25) em São Paulo. De acordo com o ex-presidente do BC, a incerteza econômica reside no apoio congressual às pautas de política econômica que dependem do Congresso, mas há uma maioria parlamentar que vem apoiando muito fortemente essas mudanças. Aliás, na visão de Franco, a pauta econômica é o único ativo desse governo: “não há mais nada que se possa falar de bom dessa administração que não seja a pauta da economia”. PUBLICIDADE Dessa forma, Franco aponta que o mercado não está preocupado que Michel Temer saia desde que a equipe econômica se mantenha e, no momento, há uma grande chance disso acontecer. Isso porque a maioria que apoia a pauta de reformas é a mesma que vai escolher o próximo comandante nacional – e ainda sabendo que “o resto do mundo e do Brasil gostariam” que a economia se mantivesse com essa administração. “O que é possível fazer daqui por diante é maravilhoso e muito já foi feito, mais até do que muita gente esperava. Ainda mais em condições precárias e com um presidente que passou a apoiar as pautas econômicas como resultado de um consenso que é muito mais forte do que ele”, ressaltou. Ao falar sobre as reformas, Franco ressaltou que não será em um ano de trabalho parlamentar que o Brasil irá resolver os últimos 25 anos de atraso. “Não estamos revogando a CLT, só estamos fazendo algumas modificações. Na reforma da Previdência também, não vai ser uma reforma definitiva, teremos que fazer outras mudanças. Ela vai ajudar, mas se vier mais ‘aguada’ também não será o fim do mundo”, ressaltou.

Ship Behavior Targeting behavior has been completely reworked, and ships now prioritize targets much more intelligently than before. Stationary ships will be more appealing targets, and ships that dramatically affect the battle (such as gravwell generators) will become high priority targets when activated, causing ships in the vicinity to break off of previous targets to face the new threat. This also means a ship won’t break off from a hostile target that’s returning fire to instead fire upon a resource collector that’s wandered into the fray. Also, thanks partly to improved targeting behavior and partly to the new true ballistic weaponry, if a ship (such as strike craft) approaches a ship that would normally have difficulty targeting it (such as a destroyer) in a head-on approach, the strike craft will be ripped apart as they are very easy targets due to their approach vectors. It’s not only targeting behavior that’s changed: flight speed and maneuvers have received a complete rework. For example, the more ships are present in a formation, the slower the formation will move. It won’t be dramatically different, but it is noticeable in comparison: Dave showed me a claw formation of five lance fighters flying side-by-side with a claw formation containing ten of the same unit, and after moving approximately 50km there were several ship lengths separating the two groups. Formation size also affects the turn rate of the formation. As more ships are added the further the ships on the trailing edge must travel when a formation rotates; thus reducing the mobility. Because ships no longer move at a static speed, their behavior in combat is also altered. “These new flight maneuver abilities allow for more intuitive behavior” Stephen Cole (one of the core team members who’s working mostly on balance) said to me in a later email, “for instance it is now possible for fighters to slow down during their attack run to maximize time on target and speed up when coming back around”. While having strike craft fly slower to maximize damage sounds appealing, with the implementation of the new ballistics system that means they’re also more susceptible to enemy fire: “ships caught going slower during a strafing run are easier to hit”, said Cole. Waypoint behavior has also been modified as Cole informed me: “waypoints can now be closed, creating a patrol loop, and ships can leave their patrol to attack enemy units encountered while on patrol and return to the patrol, or ignore enemies altogether”. I think this will be really useful for setting up offset patrols of single scouts as an early warning system, or to find enemy resource ops without having to micro as much. There are a lot of synergies between the various changes which, when seen in action, are a dramatic improvement over the current version. Another change which I like very much is exploding ships now deal much more damage than they did previously – from what I saw in the patch, a capital ship exploding will easily destroy any frigate class ship or below in the vicinity. However, since ships are much ‘smarter’ now, whenever a ship starts to go down you’ll see all nearby vessels work frantically to clear the blast radius. Dave illustrated this by scuttling a Battlecruiser, and watching all of the frigates desperately alter course was like watching WWII naval footage – eerily accurate. This was a change I’ve always wished for, and it was too cool seeing it realized. This update also impacts…

My God its So Big Your Going to Hurt me

Uber and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman today settled a 14-month investigation into the ride-sharing company's privacy practices. The AG's office in November 2014 opened an investigation into Uber's tracking tools, including "God View"—an aerial map of riders' locations. Separately, Uber in February notified the AG that as early as May 2014, the company experienced a data breach, in which driver names and license numbers were accessed by an unauthorized third party. The database intrusion impacted approximately 50,000 drivers across multiple states. Today's settlement, which resolves both investigations, requires Uber to pay a $20,000 penalty for failure to provide timely notice to drivers and Schneiderman's office regarding the data breach. Moving forward, the ride-sharing service must also encrypt geo-location information and adopt multi-factor authentication, among other data security practices. "This settlement protects the personal information of Uber riders from potential abuse by company executives and staff, including the real-time locations of riders in an Uber vehicle," Schneiderman said in a statement. Uber's operations team maintains an aerial view of the real-time movements of its cars, to assist with tasks like balancing supply and demand—which does not require the names and personal details of passengers. The company opened its own investigation into New York-based General Manager Josh Mohrer in November, after BuzzFeed reporter Johana Bhuiyan accused Mohrer of using "God View" to follow her Uber car without permission. In the end, Uber took "disciplinary actions" for Mohrer's violation of company privacy policies. Schneiderman has turned this settlement into a cautionary tale. "I strongly encourage all technology companies to regularly review and amend their own policies and procedures to better protect their customers' and employees' private information," he said. Further Reading Mobile App Reviews

WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump talks about the masses of Central Americans trying to get into the U.S., he describes a horde of beefy men with ill intent, “some of the roughest people you’ve ever seen,” and mocks them for acting like frightened babies so soft-hearted Americans will take them in. Figures from his own administration tell a different story: Those coming are increasingly families and children. Among them are thousands who get a chance for a life in America because they make a compelling case that they risk persecution in their home countries. Lately, Trump has settled on the bad-dude image of a martial-arts fighter to be the face of those migrants. “How stupid can we be to put up with this?” Trump marveled in a speech to a Jewish Republican group Saturday. “The asylum program is a scam.” That apocryphal fighter has been showing up repeatedly lately in Trump’s rhetoric of disdain. From his remarks Saturday: TRUMP, on asylum seekers: “People that look like they should be fighting for the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship). They read a little page given by lawyers that are all over the place,” coaching them to say “I am very fearful for my life. I am very worried that I will be accosted if I’m sent back home.” Trump then mocks immigration judges or other officials: “Oh, give him asylum. He’s afraid. He’s afraid.” And he adds: “We don’t love the fact that he’s got tattoos on his face. That’s not a good sign.” THE FACTS: The migrants he plays for laughs don’t fit that profile. The current surge of migrants from Central America to the U.S. border is characterized by large numbers of families. In several years previously, unaccompanied children made up the majority of Central Americans seeking asylum at the border. Last month, Homeland Security’s immigration statistics office released its latest annual report on the flow of asylum seekers and refugees, covering 2017. Among those who came from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras and applied for asylum at the border, 56 percent were unaccompanied children. The percentage was the same the year before and higher in 2015. Altogether, Homeland Security granted the asylum applications of more than 26,500 people in 2017. Almost one-third were children. Nearly half were women. Close to two-thirds were married. Additionally, the Justice Department granted asylum to more than 10,500 people who were already in the country and made their case for refuge in their deportation hearings. In total, the leading countries of nationality for people granted asylum were China, El Salvador and Guatemala. ___ TRUMP: “If they put one foot on our territory, if they start climbing a fence and they’re on the Mexico side, welcome to the United States. Think of it. It’s the craziest thing.” THE FACTS: It’s not that simple. What is lost in Trump’s rhetoric is that it is legal to come to the border and ask for asylum. As for those who sneak illegally into the U.S. and get caught, they, too, are entitled to apply for asylum. As the Homeland Security report states: “Generally, any foreign national present in the United States or arriving at a POE (port of entry) may seek asylum regardless of immigration status.” Whether they ask at the border or after being caught inside the U.S., most don’t get it. People are defined as asylum seekers when they come to the border and ask to come in or when they make that request while already inside the U.S. People who are not near or in the U.S. and want to gain admission on humanitarian grounds are considered refugees. Generally, they are people who are living outside their home countries, such as in refugee camps. The U.S. admitted 53,691 refugees in 2017. That was a drop of 37%, attributed to increased security vetting. About 43% were children and women slightly outnumbered men. Among the adults, 62% were married. ___ TRUMP: “They have a visa lottery, Democrats. … You pick out a name. Do you think they’re putting their finest, do you think they’re putting their great people there? No.” THE FACTS: This is one of Trump’s favorite fictions — the notion that other countries place their troublesome citizens in a U.S. visa lottery hoping they’ll win and move to the U.S. He adds to the false story by attributing the program to Democrats only. The diversity visa lottery program was signed into law by Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1990 and had broad bipartisan support. Under the program, citizens of countries named by the U.S. can bid for visas if they have enough education or work experience in desired fields. Out of that pool of qualified applicants, the State Department randomly selects a much smaller pool of tentative winners. Not all winners will have visas approved because they still must compete for a smaller number of slots by getting their applications in quickly. Those who are ultimately offered visas still need to go through background checks, like other immigrants. Associated Press writer Colleen Long contributed to this report.

iMac Pro 2021, just like its previous version, packs all the beastly features. Made from a single sheet of aluminium, this iMac Pro is going to change how the professionals work in their Studios. Introducing — iMac Pro — Apple #iMacPro2021 #AppleiMacPro #imacpro #AppleConcepts Concept by junmyung https://www.behance.net/gallery/91951025/iMac-Pro-2020 iMAC PRO 2021 Thanks for Viewing!

I watch too much TV drama, so I can say this with a degree of certainty: It’s rare that climate change comes up. (Television news programs also contain “tepid” coverage, in general, according to watchdog group Media Matters). That’s why it was so weird/exciting for this climate reporter when global warming received its very own subplot on Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama The Newsroom over the last two episodes. First, a little context: Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill) is the show’s once daffy news producer whose role this season seems exclusively designed to reverse earlier charges of sexism against Sorkin. She’s now good at her job! During a convoluted scene on a train from Boston to New York, Maggie overhears and records a top EPA official talking shit on the phone about President Obama to another journalist, off-the-record. Even though that agreement of confidentiality doesn’t extend to the other Amtrak passengers, she eventually tells the official she won’t use his juicy Obama-dissing quotes. So impressed by her ethics, the official, Richard Westbrook (Paul Lieberstein), rewards her with a scoop: an embargoed EPA report. WHOA! WHAT A SCOOOOOP! (For the uninitiated, while a heads-up about a study is great to get a jump on your competition, reports are circulated and embargoed all the time). Anyway… Maggie also gets an exclusive interview with the official, the deputy assistant administrator of the EPA (WHAT A GET!) and in the most recent episode, she produces a segment for host Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) about the report’s dire warnings. The scene is odd for a number of reasons. The Newsroom packages its drama based on last year’s events, and at that time, the news that the world was approaching 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had been publicly anticipated for weeks. So, not a scoop in any way, or anything that anyone following the science didn’t already know. But putting that aside, let’s take a look at Sorkin’s “facts”, as presented in the episode. How do they measure up? Let’s go line-by-line through the scene above. In the weird parallel universe of The Newsroom, I’m not sure when these “latest measurements” were meant to have been taken. But he’s right. We covered this at the time: The world passed that 400 ppm threshold for the first meaningful way in May 2013, when the daily mean concentration of carbon dioxide was higher than at any time in human history, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The measurements are indeed taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii; you can follow what’s known as the “Keeling Curve”—a measurement of atmospheric concentration of CO2—on Twitter, naturally, thanks to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Depends what you’re defining as catastrophic failure, I suppose. Say you were born last year, when I assume this episode was meant to be set. If we follow along current emissions trends, the planet will be 3.96°F-8.64°F (2.2°C–4.8°C) hotter than preindustrial times by your retirement. (You can type your birth year into this cool interactive, driven by data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to check how hot it will be when you’re old). That’s above temperatures recommended to be in the supposedly “safe” zone by the IPCC, and could definitely result in a variety of “catastrophes” and “failures”. As deaths increase due to things like extreme weather, droughts and wildfires, this statement seems true enough when applied to individual episodes of calamity, which will surely increase. (The number of annual deaths in the UK due to heat, for example, is predicted to rise by 257 per cent by 2050.) The EPA official is right, in one sense. But it’s also arguable that deaths are already and will continue to be linked to climate change events. The line in the script infers the failure of the planet as a whole, which I think is artful flourish to illustrate just how glum this fellow is feeling. Yup. That’s what the science says. The last time the atmosphere clocked 400 ppm it was 3 million years ago—the “Mid-Pliocene”—when sea levels were as much as 80 feet higher than today (see this 2007 research paper authored by a group led by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University.) I’d probably add an “around” or “about” before the “80 feet higher” in the above statement; the studies leave a margin of error. But this statement checks out. His point is sound, but I’d like to see the writers’ sourcing—these numbers seem to date to around the late 1990s. According to a more recent 2011 NOAA report, 55 percent of the world’s population lives within 50 miles of the coast. The UN has a slightly different number: Over 40 percent of the world’s population, or 3.1 billion, lives within 60 miles of the “ocean or sea in about 150 coastal and island nations.” In the US, 39 percent of the nation’s population lived in counties directly on the shoreline in 2010. That seems right. There’s consensus amongst 97 percent of climate scientists that global warming is happening and that’s it’s a manmade disaster. And I’ve heard climate scientists use this analogy before. (For what it’s worth, there are other things that can influence the boiling point of water, including altitude.) He’s talking about the “carbon budget”, and again this is sound, despite Newsman Will’s growing anguish at a pretty devastating interview. The 565 gigaton number was popularized by Bill McKibben in a 2012 Rolling Stone article that Newsroom writers seem to have read. The number is “derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades” (done by financial analysis firm Carbon Tracker) and is what we can add into the atmosphere by mid-century and still have a reasonable chance of success of staying below that safe two degrees warming threshold. Our grumpy scientist is so despondent because, yes, 2,795 is the number of gigatons of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves in the hands of fossil-fuel companies and petrostates. In short, it’s the fossil fuel we’re currently planning to burn, writes McKibben. Carbon Tracker says 80 percent of these assets need to remain unburned. All of these things are predicted by the IPCC—I mean, not the permanent darkness thing, I don’t think that’s meant to be scientific. But yes, as we reported in May this year, Europe faces freshwater shortages; Asia can expect more severe flooding from extreme storms; North America will see increased heat waves and wildfires, which can cause death and damage to ecosystems and property. Especially in poor countries, diminished crop yields will likely lead to increased malnutrition, which already affects nearly 900 million people worldwide. So, in all, well done Newsroom. Informative, accurate, if a little heavy-handed on the doom and gloom.

President Donald Trump’s Lawyer Ken Starr reminded senators on Monday that the Founders were concerned by the possibility of partisan impeachment, which is why there should be a high threshold for the proceedings. Starr, the former independent counsel during the Clinton impeachment, opened up the president’s defense on Monday afternoon in a speech detailing the threshold of impeachment. He said that the Founding Fathers made a “deliberate and wise choice” to restrain the power of impeachment wielded by Congress to help prevent frivolous impeachment efforts. “Impeachments should be evaluated in terms of offenses against established law — especially with respect to the presidency,” he said. The Founders, Starr argued, developed a common law threshold for impeachment requiring criminal activity to increase the “predictability” of the proceedings. “To do what?” he asked. “To reduce the profound danger that a presidential impeachment will be dominated by partisan considerations, precisely the evil that the framers warned about.” Starr stressed that previous presidential articles of impeachment efforts actually charged the president with actual crimes, such as the ones brought against former President Bill Clinton and former President Richard Nixon. The common law of requiring criminal activity for presidential impeachment was “consistent with the constitutional text” and “consistent with the nation’s history” Starr said. He argued that the current articles of impeachment against Trump did not meet the threshold of “high crimes and misdemeanors” set by the Constitution. “Were crimes alleged in the articles in the common law of presidential impeachment?” he asked. “In Clinton, yes. In Nixon, yes. In this case, no.”

On 29 August 2019, the much awaited new Greek data protection law came into force. Τhis law (4624/2019), implements both the provisions of the EU Law Enforcement Directive (LED, 2016/680) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) into national level. However, since the first days after the law was adopted, a lot of criticism was voiced concerning the lack of conformity of its provisions with the GDPR. The Greek data protection law was adopted following the Εuropean Commission’s decision of July 2019 to refer Greece to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for not transposing the LED on time. Thus, the national authorities acted fast in order to adopt a new data protection law. Unfortunately, the process was rushed through. As a result, the new data protection law suffers from important shortcomings and includes Articles that are challenging the provisions of the LED or even the GDPR. In September 2019, Greek EDRi observer Homo Digitalis, together with a Greek consumer protection organisation EKPIZO, sent a common request to the Hellenic data protection authority (DPA) asking it to issue an Opinion on the conformity of the Greek law with the provisions of the LED and the GDPR. The DPA issued a press statement in early October 2019 announcing that it will come up with an Opinion in due time. Moreover, on 24 October 2019; Homo Digitalis filed a new complaint to the European Commission regarding the provisions of the Greek data protection law that are challenging the EU data protection regime. Moreover, in order to acquire a thorough view on the Greek law, Homo Digitalis reached out to one of the most prominent privacy and data protection law experts in Greece, Professor Lilian Mitrou, who kindly shared her thoughts on the positive and one negative aspects of the new data protection law. Professor Mitrou states that, on the positive side, the Greek legislator has introduced further limitations to the processing of sensitive data (genetic data, biometric data or data concerning health). Thus, according to the Article 23 of the new Greek law, the processing of genetic data for health and life insurances is expressly prohibited. “In this respect the Greek law, by stipulating prohibition on the use of genetic findings in the sphere of insurance, precludes the risk of results of genetic diagnosis being used to discriminate against people,” she says. However, a strong point of criticism relates to the provisions concerning the purpose alienation. The Greek law introduces very wide and vague exceptions from the purpose limitation principle that prohibits the further use of data for incompatible purposes. “For example, private entities are allowed to process personal data for preventing threats against national or public security upon request of a public entity. Serious concerns are raised also with regard to the limitations of the data subjects’ rights,” Professor Mitrou points out. She reminds that the Greek legislator “has made extensive use of the limitations permitted by Article 23 of the GDPR to restrict the right to information, the right to access and the right to rectification and erasure”. However, these restrictions have been adopted without fully complying with the safeguards provided in Article 23, para 2 GDPR. Moreover, the Greek law introduces provisions that allow the data controller not to erase data upon request of the data subject, in case the controller has reason to believe that erasure would adversely affect legitimate interests of the data subject. Thus, the data controller is allowed by the Greek legislator to substitute the will of the data subject. “The Greek law has not respected the GDPR as standard borderline and has (mis)used ‘opening clauses’ and Member State discretion not to enhance but to reduce the level of data protection,” Professor Mitrou concludes. Homo Digitalis https://www.homodigitalis.gr/ Professor Lilian Mitrou https://www.icsd.aegean.gr/group/members-data.php?group=L1&member=47&fbclid=IwAR3LWksLRO0Yp1JCNWaGp-UODEeyALxtDHYOUo7Tg7kQ_CtGXfS2l8Z-cxw The data protection law 4624/2019 (only in Greek 29.08.2019) https://www.kodiko.gr/nomologia/document_navigation/552084/nomos-4624-2019 Official Request to the Hellenic Data Protection Authority for the issuance of legal opinion on Law 4624/2019 (20.09.2019) https://www.homodigitalis.gr/en/posts/4217 Homo Digitalis on a seminar discussion regarding Law 4624/2019 (24.09.2019) https://www.homodigitalis.gr/en/posts/4232 Homo Digitalis’ complaint to the European Commission against the new data protection law 4624/2019 (24.10.2019) https://www.homodigitalis.gr/source_content/uploads/2019/11/Complaint-Form-for-breach-of-EU-law_24October2019.pdf (Contribution by Eleftherios Chelioudakis, EDRi observer Homo Digitalis, Greece)

The ACT Government's budget decision to go deeper into debt for community services has been praised by health and welfare groups, but some say opportunities to support the most vulnerable citizens have been missed. Measures announced to promote tourism operators in the Territory and proposed public asset sales have been well received by industry. The Government sold its budget as having heart, in contrast to Commonwealth funding and job cuts. While welfare groups praised the commitment to community services some say the focus was too narrow. Darlene Cox from the Health Care Consumers Association says absorbing the cuts is brave. "[It's] a really difficult decision for them and it's grown the deficit but it means we can continue to provide services to the community," she said. A spokeswoman for the ACT Council of Social Services (ACTCOSS), Rebecca Vassarotti, agrees but is concerned about homeless citizens. "We think that it could go further in terms of supporting the most vulnerable Canberrans and there are some missed opportunities there," she said. ACT Government 'fixated' on NDIS: Advocacy for Inclusion Christina Ryan from Advocacy for Inclusion says there should have been more set aside for people with disabilities. "The Government's just getting fixated on the NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) and it's forgetting about all the other facets of people with disabilities' lives," she said. ACT's hospitality and tourism sectors say they are set to benefit from many of the measures announced in yesterday's budget. The budget outlined money for attracting international flights, tourism advertising, some major sporting events and even a few new "Welcome to Canberra" signs. Hotels Association spokesman Brad Watts says it all comes at the end of a difficult 12 months for the industry. "It's great to see we've been spared the razor gang approach to our sector and good to see tourism funding has been maintained and increased right across the board," he said. The budget included $1.5 million to continue planning for a new convention centre which still requires a commitment of several hundred million dollars more to be built. Chris Faulks from the Canberra Business Council says it will be money well spent. "People that come to conferences spend about $600 a day on hotels, restaurants and retail," she said. In handing down the budget yesterday, the ACT Government announced plans to sell off a number of public assets to take advantage of the Commonwealth's asset recycling program. Treasurer Andrew Barr says they include the bookmaker ACTAB, some older public housing stock, office buildings and Canberra's street light network of 73,000 lights. The Government could already have a buyer for its street light network with Canberra's electricity provider, ActewAGL, welcoming the deal. The company floated the possibility of upgrading the lights to LED and solar technology; some could also have motion detectors.

Employees of one small Missouri town had an extreme reaction when residents elected their first Black female mayor: 80% of the police department quit, along with the city clerk and two other staffers. And, according to the New York Times , no one seems to wants to guess, or even speculate about, the real reason for the mass exodus. Tyrus Byrd, a former Parma, MO city council member, was sworn into office as mayor last week, but she will have to deal with a police force with only one person. Five of the town's six police officers submitted letters of resignation last week, citing only "safety concerns," according to news station KFVS . No one has been more specific about what "safety concerns" or " trust issues " would make a town's public safety officers quit en masse, but Byrd has said she is still determined to clean up the city. To make the mass resignations even more suspicious, KFVS also reported that when Byrd started her first day, the officers' resignation letters could not be found , and that computers had been wiped clean. According to one of the police officers who quit , he felt that Byrd's father was too involved in police investigations while he was an alderman, which made him worry about the new mayor's plans for the department. Byrd won a close election against longtime Mayor Randall Ramsey, who held the office for 37 years. The population of Parma is slightly more than 700 people, and Byrd won by less than 40 votes. The city attorney, clerk, and waste water treatment supervisor also resigned with the police officers. This post has been updated. It was originally published on April 20th.A headline on an earlier version of this post on Facebook mistakenly stated that the entire police force had resigned — it was 80%. We apologize for the error.

On April 7, the day Shaukat Ali was assaulted and forced to eat pork for selling buffalo meat at his eatery in Assam, he had hidden the saucepan with the meat stew in a sack. Earlier in the week, a few young men had come to his eatery in the biweekly market that convenes in Biswanath Chariali area of Biswanath district every Thursday and Sunday, and expressed their displeasure that he served “goru’r mangso”, the generic Assamese word for all bovine meat. Kamal Thapa, one of the mahaldars (managers) of the market, had turned them away that day. “What is your problem?” Thapa had purportedly told them, and shooed them off. On Sunday morning, four other mahaldars turned up at Ali’s eatery. They told him that the young men had returned the previous day and demanded that buffalo meat must not be sold in the market henceforth. “They said that if I had brought any buffalo meat with me, I should send it back or throw it away,” Ali recounted. Ali’s family, starting with his father, has been running this eatery for 40 years, serving among other things buffalo meat, which they made a point to always cook at home and never at the eatery. Better to be safe than sorry, Ali heeded the mahaldars and hid the buffalo meat he had brought with him that day. “That day I only served broiler [chicken] and fish,” he said. But at around 3.30 pm, when the young men returned to the market and raided his tiny eatery, they found the saucepan of meat ensconced in the sack. All hell broke loose. “Bangladeshi, m***********r, you think this is Pakistan?” Ali recalled one of the young men asking him. “Bangladeshi” is a commonly-used slur in Assam where the spectre of undocumented migration forms the centrepiece of the state’s identity politics. The men, more than a dozen according to Ali, did not stop there. They went on a rampage: destroying everything they could find in his sparse eatery. “They broke all the desks and dumped the utensils and gas cylinders into a nearby ditch,” said Ali. Ali then rushed to the mahaldars for help, but did not receive any. “They asked me to get out from there,” he claimed. “So, I decided to run as I was scared they would hit me.” But as he tried to flee, he ran into one of the mahaldars on the road, said Ali. He claimed that the mahaldar accosted him, made him ride pillion on his motorbike, and then deposited him at a nearby shop. The young men who had ransacked his eatery soon arrived and pounced upon him, he said. “They hit me with sticks, kicked me all over, then dragged me to a corner in the market and again beat me up,” said Ali. The rest of the attack is on video, shot in all likelihood by one of his assaulters: Ali kneeling down in slush, surrounded by an irate mob, bombarding him with hostile questions: “Why are you selling beef?” “Do you have a license to sell beef?” “Are you Bangladeshi?” “Is your name in the NRC [National Register of Citizens]?” Force-fed pork Assam is currently updating its National Register of Citizens. Meant to be a roster of all the “genuine” Indian citizens living in Assam, the register is being updated for the first time since 1951. Ali’s name does feature on the updated registry, said his family. “Everyone on our family is on the NRC [National Register of Citizens],” said his brother Abdul Rahman, who has an Assamese Bihu song as his caller-tune. “My great-grandfather was born here in Darrang district.” Ali’s ordeal did not end there. As seen in the video, Ali was then force-fed pork, a meat that Islam forbids the consumption of. When he hesitates, one of the assailants sternly instructs him to swallow the piece of meat. Ali is now in hospital, nursing injuries all over his body. But the humiliation far exceeded the physical pain, he said. “Fine, they beat me up,” Ali said. “But why did they force me to eat pork? We only sell buffalo meat because Hindus do not eat there.” His brother, a teacher in a lower primary school, was equally distraught, often breaking down in the middle of conversations. “If they thought my brother was doing a mistake, they could have called the police,” Rahman said. “But why force him to eat pork? All of us have some kind of reverence towards our faith. After what he had to go through he might as well be dead.” Cattle slaughter is not banned in Assam. Unlike many other Indian states, the law in Assam also does not distinguish between buffaloes and cows or bulls. The Assam Cattle Preservation Act of 1950 allows the slaughter of cattle over 14 years of age, or those incapable of work or for use in breeding. The law stipulates that such cattle will be given a “fit-for-slaughter certificate” by a doctor of the state animal husbandry and welfare department, but in practice such certificates are rarely issued. One arrested The police arrested one man on Tuesday and are on the lookout for the others seen in the video. “We will take action as per law,” said district police chief Rakesh Roushan, even as he insisted it was not a “not a matter of communal tension”. Rahman said he hoped the incident does not take a communal turn. “We have been assured by the police that the culprits will be arrested, we do not want to blame all Hindus, we just want the guilty to be punished,” he said. While Assam has always been fraught with ethnic tensions, the last couple of years has also seen Hindutva making a silent entry into the state, coinciding with the BJP’s rise. The run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and 2016 Assembly elections were marked by several beef-related incidents of violence in the state. Biswanth, part of the Tezpur Lok Sabha constituency, votes later this week on April 11. Ali said he was hurt that he was targeted for his religion in the place he grew up. “My father ran this eatery for 40 years,” he said. “Everyone knew, but no one ever objected. He died feeding people.” Will he ever go back to running the eatery? “The mahaldar has said I can, but I cannot sell goru’r mangsho,” he said. “That is okay, I will sell broiler [chicken] and fish.”

Global Statistics Representing AI in IoT Market Scenario The global AI in IoT market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24.59% during the forecast period, 2019–2026. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) are embedded in networks to instigate innovative technology solutions. The improved intelligence performance of applications and devices aids the framing of better business decisions. The confluence of AI with IoT would provide several opportunities for the growth of the AI in IoT market during the forecast period, 2019–2026. For instance, in February 2019, Singtel unveiled plans to launch an AI-powered IoT network through Microsoft Azure. The platform will access Azure’s wide set of cloud services, including IoT Hub, IoT Edge, and relative machine learning and cognitive services to introduce cloud intelligence and analytics in smart devices. Additionally, the penetration of smart devices such as smartphones, smart wearable, and others and connectivity would further foster the growth of the AI in IoT market. According to the Mobile Economy Report 2019 by GSMA, the number of IoT connections is expected to reach 25 billion by 2025. Intended Audience AI Solution Providers IoT Solution Providers System Integrators Software Developers Cloud Service & Solution Providers Technology Investors Research Institutes Integration of AI in IoT to be Driven by the Need for Automation and a More Personalized Experience AI and IoT evolve continuously. Machine learning and deep learning technologies are expected to drive the AI in IoT market on account of the demand for automation and personalized experience among organizations. For instance, in April 2017, ABB and IBM partnered in industrial AI solutions; this partnership collaborated ABB’s digital offering, and ABB AbilityTM, with IBM Watson Internet of Things cognitive capabilities, provisioning potential for customers in utilities, transport, industry, and infrastructure utilizing AI. Additionally, it aimed to assist organizations in improving the quality control, reducing downtime, increasing speed, and yield of industrial processes. Introduction of AI & IoT to Transform the Retail Industry The retail industry is witnessing considerable growth with technologies such as AI, IoT, BigData, and others connecting new customers and retaining existing ones while meeting the increasing demand for faster and highly efficient processes. Thus, retailers are focusing on embracing technologies that would provide customers the required assistance and convenience during their shopping experience. For instance, in April 2019, IBM introduced Smart Mirror technology to offer services to offline retailers over an interactive fitting room to connect retailers and customers digitally, thereby enhancing customers’ offline shopping experience. Such factors are resulted to drive the demand for AI in IoT market in the retail segment. Investments and Collaborations to Propel the Market in North America and Europe North America is slated to experience significant growth in the AI in IoT market on account of the growing investments in AI and IoT. These technologies are the prime focus areas for investments among enterprises for the sake of futuristic betterment of business operations. For instance, in March 2019, SAS announced a USD 1 billion investment in AI over the next few years, focusing on three main areas, namely R&D innovation, education initiatives, and expert services. Among the many customers using AI and machine learning from SAS, Volvo and Mack Trucks utilize AI solutions to analyze IoT data streaming from big rigs and then render predictive maintenance insights for fleets to keep on trucking. These, factors result to fuel the AI in IoT market in North American region. Europe is expected to observe significant growth in the AI in IoT market with an observed inclination toward stretching the capabilities of IoT applications. For instance, in April 2019, Siemens Digital Industries Software announced a partnership with SAS to assist companies in delivering AI-embedded IoT analytics for edge and cloud-enabled solutions by applying SAS streaming analytics to fulfill demands for IoT analytics with AI and machine learning capabilities through Siemens’ MindSphere. This partnership would assist companies in increasing productivity and reducing operational risk through predictive or prescriptive maintenance and optimize asset performance management for customers in industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, energy and utilities, smart cities, transportation and automotive. Thus, impelling the growth of AI in IoT market in the European region Since Europe is a hub for automobile manufacturers, technologies such as BigData, IoT, deep learning, and others offer ample potential for developing connected and automated driving (CAD) vehicle functions and services. Increasing Penetration of Smartphones to Augment the Market in Asia-Pacific and LAMEA Asia-Pacific is expected to witness considerable growth in the AI in IoT market during the forecast period, with companies seeking new avenues to transform lives and businesses utilizing AI and IoT in the technical landscape. For instance, in June 2019, ICICI Lombard partnered with Microsoft to develop ‘Insure’, India’s first AI-enabled car inspection feature on a mobile application. This deployment of artificial intelligence on smartphones will simplify the process of renewing and processing claims, along with increased efficiency and productivity. LAMEA is expected to witness steady growth in the AI in IoT market during the forecast period, 2019–2026. According to the Mobile Economy 2019 Report by GSMA, the smartphone adoption rate in LA and MEA is expected to reach from 65% in 2018 to 79% by 2025 and 52% in 2018 to 74% by 2025, respectively. Key Players Some of the prominent players in the global AI in IoT market are Google, Microsoft, IBM Corporation, Amazon Web Services, Inc, Oracle , SAP, GE, Salesforce, Hitachi, Uptake, SAS, Autoplant Systems Pvt Ltd., Kairos, Softweb Solutions, Arundo, C3 IoT, Anagog, Imagimob, and Thingstel. AI in IoT Market Segmentation By Component Platforms Software Solutions Services By Technology Machine Learning Deep Learning Natural Language Processing Computer Vision Others By Application Transportation & Mobility IT & Telecommunication Energy & Utilities Manufacturing Retail Healthcare Others By Region

"Escludere da nidi e materne bimbi già iscritti non vaccinati, è violenza politica inutile": lo sostiene il gruppo regionale in Piemonte del Movimento 5 Stelle."Apprendiamo con sgomento - dichiarano i pentastellati - della nuova circolare promossa dai ministeri della salute e dell'istruzione che non permetterà ai bimbi 0-6 non vaccinati di frequentare nidi e materne. A dimostrazione che il decreto Lorenzin e la successiva conversione in legge, sono un insieme di norme confuse".Secondo il M5S, è "del tutto evidente che anche qualora, col ricatto dell'espulsione da nidi e materne, tutti i bimbi 0-6 si vaccinassero otterremmo ben poco dal punto di vista epidemiologico. Stiamo parlando infatti per l'esavalente al massimo di 150.000 bambini 0-6 non vaccinati e di malattie non attualmente presenti (polio e difterite), non trasmissibili (epatite B e tetano) o non particolarmente diffuse (pertosse, haemophilus)". Altrettanto - sostiene il Movimento - per "il vaccino morbillo parotite rosolia (Mpr) parliamo al massimo di 450.000 bimbi non vaccinati (15% di 3 milioni di bimbi 0-6), tra questi al momento solo il morbillo pare dare problemi con un picco di 4000 infezioni nel 2017 (dati molto maggiori del 2016 ma pari al 2008 e 2011, con equivalente copertura vaccinale). Per il morbillo, ci sono decine di milioni di adulti non vaccinati e non immunizzati naturalmente che rappresentano il vero bacino della malattia, non i bimbi 0-6 non vaccinati"."Perché dunque - conclude la dichiarazione diffusa dal M5S - espellere violentemente dal sistema educativo centinaia di migliaia di bimbi senza ottenere risultati significativi? Le prime parole che ci vengono in mente sono: incompetenza ed incapacità".

This is the next Zeiss teaser image. Like I told you before this is what to expect: – Announcement before Photokina – This is a fixed lens Full Frame camera – It uses Sony tech (probably RX1II based). – Price around $3,000 – Priobably has a prime lens (35mm f/2.0?) – Slightly bigger lens construction than you get on the Sony RX1 series. – lens is autofocus

Thanks to this neat datapack you can now smelt all your Cobblestone Walls and turn them into Stone Bricks Walls! HOW TO INSTALL: Download the data pack. Open Minecraft . Select the world you want to install the data pack for, click on “Edit”, then “Open world folder”. Open the folder named datapacks , and put the data pack into it. Type /reload (if you have enabled cheats) or press F3+T if you are in the world during the installation. If the data pack has a correct format, it would be enabled in the world. If you have enabled cheats, you can verify by typing /datapack list enabled and find an entry named [file/your data pack file/directory name] . f you enjoy using the datapack, do not shy away from pressing the diamond button! Thank you for downloading and happy Minecrafting!

La polémica por la intención de Monsanto de cobrar compulsivamente un canon por el uso de la soja Intacta sumó un nuevo capítulo con una dura réplica del ministro de Agroindustria, Ricardo Buryaile, luego de que la empresa amenazara con frenar el desarrollo de biotecnologías en este país y se declarara “decepcionada” con el Estado. "Creen que están por encima del Estado; creen que están por encima del presidente Macri", le dijo Buryaile a La Nación. Recientemente, en una jornada organizada por el IPCVA, el funcionario ya había formulado cuestionamientos a la multinacional. Sin papeles El ministro recordó que se emitió la resolución 140 que invalidó cualquier sistema de fiscalización que no tuviera aval de Agroindustria, a la que se sumó luego la resolución 147 estableciendo los parámetros para que esos sistemas puedan ser validados. En ese marco, Buryaile ratificó que la empresa no presentó aún los papeles para el trámite. "Mandan cartas al Presidente, a la vicepresidenta, al embajador [por Martín Lousteau, representante en los Estados Unidos, país de origen de la empresa], a los diputados, a la opinión pública y no completaron los papeles", dijo. Sin haber presentado los papeles, para el funcionario "hoy no es válido el resultado de las muestras" que toma la compañía. "¿Quién lo avaló?", se preguntó. Y luego fue irónico, al sugerir que Monsanto "estaba más cómodo con el gobierno anterior" y agregar: "Vaya a saber por qué". ¿A la Justicia? En tanto, la dirigencia del campo también criticó a Monsanto y no descartó que la disputa termine "en vía judicial". "Esto nos obliga a decir que el que se va sin que lo echen vuelve sin que lo llamen", dijo Luis Miguel Etchevehere, presidente de la SRA, en relación al anuncio de la compañía de suspender el ingreso de nuevas tecnologías, como XTend, una soja que mejora el control de malezas. "No estamos acá para tolerar posturas soberbias o caprichos de nadie. Al campo no le impone nada nadie. La actitud de Monsanto desnuda que no quiere llegar a un acuerdo, porque cada vez que se está llegando a un acuerdo rompe el tablero. No es una actitud racional, en vez de sentarse a hablar de manera civilizada tiene una actitud destemplada, de soberbia, que parece más de un capricho que una actitud responsable", expresó Etchevehere. Por su parte, Dardo Chiesa, presidente de Confederaciones Rurales Argentinas (CRA), afirmó: "Ellos creen que nos están castigando, que es un castigo a la Argentina. No tiene intención de negociación. Esta misma amenaza me la hicieron a mí, delante del embajador de los Estados Unidos, en la residencia del embajador, dos días antes de que viniera Obama. Farinati [Juan Farinati, el presidente de Monsanto Argentina] me dijo que si los productores no están dispuestos a pagar la tecnología, entonces no van a traer más tecnologías. Me lo dijo como chicana y como amenaza". Para Chiesa, "están actuando fuera de la ley, haciendo el análisis de forma ilegal, porque el método no está validado". "Esto va a terminar en los abogados. Va a terminar en vía judicial", concluyó Chiesa.

September 1, 2012 SURVIVAL Imagine the world you know ends tomorrow. Imagine electrical grids failing, supermarkets closing and the safety nets of modern civilization crumbling, leaving millions of Americans without food and drinkable water. Though the idea seems extreme to most people, some are preparing for such a scenario. So called “preppers” or “survivalists” are amassing food, shelters and knowledge to withstand a world different from the one that exists today. Even small-scale disasters can prove stressful if not disastrous, as tens of thousands of Monmouth County residents learned in July when a water pipe line collapsed, disrupting drinking water from the tap. That’s a scenario Jason Borrelli, a 2005 Point Pleasant Beach High School graduate, is prepared to face. Borrelli and his fiancée have amassed a collection of water bottles so vast, the storage space under his queen-size bed is stuffed with the containers. “I’ve stockpiled water like it’s nobody’s business,” said Borrelli, 26. The space under another queen-size bed in the couple’s Florida home is completely filled with toiletries that they plan to barter for food and supplies, if needed. In addition, several closets in the couple’s home store nonperishable food. Though he fears a disease pandemic, economic collapse is most likely to cause the kind of catastrophic disaster he is preparing for, he said. Such a collapse “is going to happen sooner or later,” Borrelli believes. A prepper is an “all-encompassing term that defines someone whether they prepare for a disaster or whether they’re interested in sustainable living,” said Tom Martin, founder of the American Preppers Network. The network started as a social media website in 2009 with about 100 hits a day and has since grown about a million individual visitors a month, Martin said. Visitors there discuss concerns about recent events in the news, such as fires in the western United States, rising food prices, access to oil and economic instability, he said. And there’s a wilderness survival school. Led by master tracker and author Tom Brown Jr., 62, of Waretown, about 100 students gathered miles into the woods for lessons on curing animal hide, primitive cooking, shelter-building and hunting prey without the use of modern devices. It is here that the most serious of survivalists come to train for a world without frozen foods, factories and electricity. Modern humans are “alien to their own environment. They don’t belong. If something happens … they’re dead,” Brown said. The school “gives them insurance policy that no matter what happens, whether it’s deep in the wilderness or in a city/suburban environment, they will survive,” Brown said. With the right knowledge, Brown said “no matter how bad it gets in the world, you pull that car off the side of the road, step off that bus or train, walk into the wilderness and never need another damn thing for the rest of your life. … That’s freedom.”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has offered to mediate in renewed contract talks proposed for Thursday between negotiators for 30,000 striking teachers and the nation’s second-largest school district, union leaders said late on Wednesday. There was no immediate word from the Los Angeles Unified School District to the overture from the United Teachers Los Angeles, but union President Alex Caputo-Pearl said he expected the two sides to return to talks through the weekend. Union officials said the mayor and the California state superintendent of public instruction, Tony Thurmond, had met both parties on Wednesday, as the first Los Angeles teachers strike in three decades stretched through its third day. (This version of the story corrects days of the week in paragraphs 1, 3)

(Picture: Solent News) We’re all becoming more aware of just how much good medical marijuana can do. Hemp milk can act as a natural, soothing sleep aid. CBD-infused water can help athletes recover from heavy sessions quickly. And of course, cannabis can act as an effective painkiller. How to find the right therapist for you and your needs And now a British hemp company has launched a ‘cannabis for dogs’ product which claims to soothe stressed pets and help relieve conditions like arthritis. Love Hemp are selling ‘Canine-Abis’, a cannabinoid (CBD) extract oil for cats and dogs. CBD oil is made from hemp and doesn’t contain any of the psychoactive properties found in other cannabis compounds, like tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). So no – it won’t get your cat or dog high or stoned. It might sound a bit new age, bearing in mind that people are still getting their heads around using CBD as a mainstream anxiety reliever for humans, but Love Hemp aren’t alone in believing that CBD can benefit animals. Dr Robert Silver, vet and author of the book ‘Medical Marijuana and Your Pet’, claims that the extract can help reduce pets’ anxiety around stressful occasions like Bonfire Night, as well as treating a variety of conditions like epilepsy. ‘In my experience, for those dogs with uncomplicated epilepsy, the hemp extract will often work better than pharmaceuticals,’ he says. ‘I also have several oncologists in a study group with the extract and they have found that CBD can help to stop the seizures and twitches that can come with brain tumours.’ The product was developed, Love Hemp say, after they were inundated with requests from owners looking for cheaper, natural alternative to traditional veterinary treatments. ‘There are plenty of documented cases in the US where CBD has been more effective than the strong drugs that are typically prescribed,’ Dr Silver goes on to say. ‘Pain relief is a huge area and for those pets with arthritis, hip dysplasia or sore joints, we are finding that the use of hemp relieves their pain and gets them mobile again.’ He also says that canine anxiety is one of the main areas where CBD could have an impact. ‘A CBD supplement can curb these emotions in your dog and protect the animal against unnecessary stress.’ The Love Hemp oil can be bought either in the form of liquid drops or as atomiser sprays which can be consumed straight or mixed with food and drink. It’s recommended that four drops are used per 1kg of body weight, two to three times a day. And as you might imagine, it’s providing pretty popular with the dog-owning community. Tom Rowland, co-founder of Love Hemp says: ‘Our pet product is proving extremely popular and we are now in talks with several retailers who are interested in stocking it.’ MORE: Weed yoga is a thing and this yogi swears by it MORE: Apparently weed turns you into a sexual tyrannosaurus Advertisement Advertisement

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Baylor and Kansas just keep winning, setting up a monumental showdown Saturday between the top-ranked Bears and No. 3 Jayhawks that could help decide not only the Big 12 title but the No. 1 overall seed for the NCAA tournament. The two teams were separated once again by Gonzaga in the latest college basketball poll from The Associated Press on Monday. The Bears (23-1) had 48 first-place votes from the 63-member media panel, while the Bulldogs (26-1) had 14 first-place nods and the Jayhawks (22-3) had the only remaining first-place vote. "The best we could be right now is being the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament. We're No. 2," said Kansas coach Bill Self, whose team beat West Virginia and Oklahoma last week. "The reason we're not No. 1 is Baylor beat us on our home floor. They deserve it. I'm not looking at it like we haven't done as well as our record because we're in second place. I'm looking at it like we played pretty good that day and got beat by a better team, and now we have a chance to get them back." AP Top 25 Poll First-place votes in parentheses: Team Rec 1. Baylor (48) 23-1 2. Gonzaga (14) 26-1 3. Kansas (1) 22-3 4. San Diego State 26-0 5. Dayton 23-2 6. Duke 22-3 7. Maryland 21-4 8. Florida State 21-4 9. Penn State 20-5 10. Kentucky 20-5 11. Louisville 21-5 12. Villanova 19-6 13. Auburn 22-3 14. Oregon 20-6 15. Creighton 20-6 16. Seton Hall 18-7 17. West Virginia 18-7 18. Colorado 20-6 19. Marquette 17-7 20. Iowa 18-8 21. Butler 19-7 22. Houston 20-6 23. BYU 21-7 24. Arizona 18-7 25. Ohio State 17-8 Complete rankings The Bears and Jayhawks both have business to handle before they collide on Saturday, though. Kansas has a visit from Iowa State to Allen Fieldhouse on Monday night, and Baylor will be visiting Oklahoma on Tuesday night. If both win, it would set up one of the biggest games in the history of Baylor's Ferrell Center. "I think it's a tribute to the players, their belief," Baylor coach Scott Drew said. "We've been operating under joy ... [and] focusing one game at a time and we'll keep doing that." San Diego State (26-0) remained the nation's last unbeaten team and was No. 4 in the latest poll, while Dayton (23-2) climbed one spot to fifth after wins over Rhode Island and Massachusetts and a rough week for then-No. 5 Louisville. "I told our team, 'Let's get greedy. Let's play for perfection,'" Aztecs coach Brian Dutcher said. "If we're this close, we might as well play for a perfect regular season. ... Let's do something special." The Flyers are aiming for something special, too. "We're trying to win a national championship," Dayton guard Jalen Crutcher said. "We feel like that there's no team in the country we can't beat. We feel like we can go and win a national championship, and we talk about that a lot." The Cardinals lost to Georgia Tech and Clemson to plummet all the way to No. 11, but they weren't the only ranked team to lose to an unranked foe on Saturday. Auburn fell at Missouri, Seton Hall lost to Providence, Butler lost at Georgetown, Illinois lost at Rutgers, Houston fell at SMU, Texas Tech fell at Oklahoma State and LSU was beaten on the road by Alabama. Throw in then-No. 14 West Virginia's loss to Baylor and nine ranked teams lost. Eight fell to unranked opponents, the most in a single day this season. "This week wasn't a good week for us," Louisville coach Chris Mack said. "The teams we're playing are too together and we're not right now. It's unfortunate, but it happens sometimes and my job is to keep our team on course and get better." IN AND OUT BYU climbed into the poll at No. 23 after wins over Loyola Marymount and San Diego, and now faces Santa Clara on Thursday night before a showdown with the second-ranked Zags. The Cougars were followed by Arizona at No. 24 and Ohio State at No. 25, two teams that were in the poll earlier this season before dropping out. Illinois plummeted out of the poll after losing to Michigan State and Rutgers. Texas Tech also dropped out along with LSU after a brutal Saturday for the nation's Top 25 teams. CLIMBING AND FALLING Creighton made the biggest leap this week, rising from No. 23 to 15th after beating then-No. 10 Seton Hall and DePaul. Penn State moved up four spots to crack the top 10 at No. 9, while Oregon climbed from No. 17 to 14 and Kentucky moved up two spots to round out the top 10. Louisville's weak week culminated in a drop of six places to No. 11, while Seton Hall also absorbed a pair of losses and fell to No. 16. West Virginia lost to Baylor and Kansas but was only penalized three places and remained No. 17. MID-MAJOR WATCH There are some intriguing mid-major programs poised to enter the Top 25 if there's another week of upsets. Stephen F. Austin quietly improved to 22-3 and is one of the first teams out, while Northern Iowa (22-4), Utah State (21-7) and Rhode Island (19-6) are getting plenty of love from voters as March begins to bear down on the college basketball season.

(CNN) Robert Mueller's long-awaited testimony has been delayed a week, until July 24, to allow more time for Mueller to testify, House Democrats said in a statement late Friday. House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said in a joint statement that Mueller's public appearance had been pushed back at the former special counsel's request, and that Mueller had agreed to appear for an extended period. "The House Judiciary Committee will convene on July 24 at 8:30am with Special Counsel Mueller testifying in public for three hours. After a brief break, the House Intelligence Committee will convene for additional public testimony beginning at 12:00pm," the chairmen said in a statement. "All members -- Democrats and Republicans -- of both committees will have a meaningful opportunity to question the Special Counsel in public, and the American people will finally have an opportunity to hear directly from Mr. Mueller about what his investigation uncovered." But the committees are no longer expected to hear from two Mueller deputies -- Aaron Zebley and James Quarles -- on the same day, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Democrats had sought to question the deputies behind closed doors about the special counsel investigation. Attorney General William Barr had expressed a desire this week that the deputies not testify, and the Justice Department was resisting their appearances. Read More

Recent tensions between the United States and Iran have led many members of Congress to speculate about what legal authority the Trump administration may claim it has to go to war without congressional authorization. On June 28, the State Department gave a partial answer to these questions, at least insofar as they relate to the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs). In response to a recent congressional inquiry on the issue, the department wrote: [T]he Administration has not, to date, interpreted either AUMF as authorizing military force against Iran, except as may be necessary to defend U.S. or partner forces engaged in counterterrorism operations or operations to establish a stable, democratic Iraq. Some observers have interpreted this statement to mean that the Trump administration is abandoning any effort to rely on the AUMFs to attack Iran. The Hill, for example, described the letter as stating that “with few exceptions, the Trump administration does not believe the 2001 and 2002 war authorizations apply to Iran.” Others read it as a clear sign that the AUMFs may yet play a central role in justifying war with Iran, with House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel—whose inquiry the State Department was responding to—arguing that it presents “a loophole wide enough to drive a tanker through.” In reality, neither of these views is correct. Instead, the State Department’s letter says far less about what the Trump administration has planned regarding Iran and the AUMFs than either perspective acknowledges. The AUMFs addressed in the State Department’s response are statutes that authorize certain U.S. military operations. Congress enacted the 2001 AUMF shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks to authorize the use of force against the perpetrators of those attacks—al-Qaeda and the Taliban—and their affiliates, though it has since been used (often controversially) as a legal basis for a broad range of overseas U.S. counterterrorism operations. The 2002 AUMF, meanwhile, was adopted in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and authorizes the use of military force to enforce certain Iraq-related U.N. Security Council resolution and defend against “the continuing threat posed by Iraq … .” The executive branch interprets the latter to include military efforts aimed at “helping to establish a stable, democratic Iraq” and “addressing terrorist threats emanating from Iraq[,]” as well as certain efforts to combat terrorist threats against Iraq from nearby states, such as the Islamic State in Syria. Much of the confusion over the State Department’s June 28 letter appears to hinge on a misunderstanding of when the executive branch “interprets” a given statute. Generally speaking, executive branch lawyers do not have a complete view of how a given statute should be understood. Instead, they withhold judgment until they are asked whether and how a given law applies to a specific set of facts. They then identify various possible interpretations, articulate the legal strengths and weaknesses of each, work with relevant subject matter experts to spell out any policy ramifications, and tee up the issue so that appropriate officials can make an informed decision regarding the executive branch’s position. Executive branch lawyers often have different individual and institutional views about what interpretations are or are not legally available, among other factors, requiring that the issue be resolved by a higher level official. In addition, the resulting interpretations are usually constructed so as to maximize the executive branch’s flexibility in addressing future circumstances. Until a decision is made at the appropriate policy-making level, the executive branch does not have an official interpretation of how a statute applies to a given set of facts. And there often is no reason for the executive branch to reach such a determination—particularly on difficult or controversial questions—unless it must in order to pursue a specific policy. This is why the words “to date” are central to the State Department’s response. No doubt the department is being honest that the Trump administration has not yet made a determination that the AUMFs could be used to legally justify an attack on Iran. But the Trump administration most likely would not make such a determination unless and until it decided that the use of force against Iran was worth pursuing. It’s significant that the letter does not expressly say that the Trump administration has ruled out relying on the 2001 or 2002 AUMF for future action against Iran. Instead, the State Department is simply saying that the Trump administration has not found it necessary to do so yet in order to justify the policies against Iran that it has already pursued. Whether it will do so in the future is an open question. For this reason, the State Department’s letter says little about whether the Trump administration might be willing to rely on the 2001 or 2002 AUMF if and when it uses military force against Iran. What it does do, however, is shed light on how the Trump administration has already interpreted and applied the AUMFs in certain prior situations, some of which may have minor ramifications for a potential conflict with Iran. First, the State Department’s response implies that the Trump administration did not rely on either AUMF as a legal basis for the retaliatory airstrikes against Iran that President Trump recently authorized—and then aborted—for shooting down a U.S. drone. This is not particularly surprising, as such airstrikes fit comfortably within the scope of activities that the executive branch believes the president can pursue under his Article II constitutional authority. Nor would relying on Article II for those initial strikes have precluded the Trump administration from citing the AUMFs as legal authorization for future military action against Iran. For example, when the Obama administration first pursued airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq in August 2014, it asserted the authority to do so under Article II. Only later did it claim that airstrikes and other actions against the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria were also authorized by both the 2001 and, in certain circumstances, 2002 AUMFs. Second, the State Department says something interesting about how the Trump administration currently interprets both AUMFs. It indicates that the statutes together authorize the use of force where “necessary to defend U.S. or partner forces engaged in counterterrorism operations or operations to establish a stable, democratic Iraq[,]” in a practice that the Defense Department calls “collective self-defense” (emphasis added). But it suggests that this theory might be the subject of broader application than previously known. For the 2001 AUMF, this is nothing new. The Trump administration has previously told Congress that it views the 2001 AUMF as authorizing this type of collective self-defense. And it has repeatedly relied on this authority to defend local armed groups participating in counter-Islamic State operations in Syria from attacks by the Assad regime and its allies, including through airstrikes on Iran-affiliated forces. To my knowledge, however, this is the first time the executive branch has publicly extended this collective self-defense theory to the 2002 AUMF. Moreover, the letter implies that the executive branch has most likely relied on this theory to authorize some prior uses of military force, though it’s possible these authorizations were never acted upon. Neither revelation is necessarily surprising: The 2001 and 2002 AUMFs broadly authorize “necessary and appropriate” force—the language that the Trump administration has cited as incorporating collective self-defense to the 2001 AUMF—and Iranian affiliates are believed to have been involved in numerous attacks on U.S. personnel and their Iraqi allies over the past 16 years. Nonetheless, espousing it publicly appears to be a new step. Under this logic, collective self-defense under the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs might well provide a legal basis for some uses of military force against Iran. But relying on it to start a broader war against Iran would be a dramatic expansion of the theory that the Trump administration has advanced thus far. To date, executive branch officials have described collective self-defense as authorizing the “defen[se] of partner forces from attack or an imminent threat of attack with necessary and appropriate forces” in a manner similar to existing principles of unit self-defense in U.S. military doctrine. “Self-defense is not a deliberate, offensive use of force[,]” the Defense Department reportedly asserted in one response to a congressional inquiry, “[but] a reaction to an attack of imminent threat of attack”—a narrow framing that would be difficult to extend to a large scale, U.S.-initiated military campaign against Iran. This doesn’t mean that the Trump administration couldn’t choose to pursue such a theory. But it does mean that the tension between this new position and the Trump administration’s prior representations to Congress could trigger substantial political costs. There are many potential legal theories that the Trump administration could rely on to justify the use of force against Iran, several of which I’ve written about previously for Lawfare. Only some involve the AUMFs. Congressional inquiries and other oversight mechanisms are valuable tools for identifying and engaging with these theories—as well as for imposing political costs where the executive branch seems to be considering particularly controversial ones. But they have a limited ability to force the executive branch to develop and express a legal view on a major policy decision it has not yet had to confront. For this reason, statements like the State Department’s June 28 letter are generally best taken at face value as descriptions of prior practice, not indicators of what the executive branch will do in the future. Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to correct a non-substantive transcription error and a subsequent reference to it.

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Gorilla strikes again after peloton decimated by final kilometre crash German powerhouse André Greipel (Lotto-Belisol) picked up where he left on in Sunday’s Down Under Classic with another sprint victory in the opening stage of the Santos Tour Down Under between Prospect and Clare. The Gorilla managed to hold off the wheel of Italian veteran Alessandro Petacchi (Lampre-ISD), who had misfired on Sunday, with Belarusian Yauheni Hutarovich (FDJ-BigMat) in third, after a big crash decimated the peloton inside the final kilometre. "I'm lucky that I won today," said Greipel afterwards. "There has been a massive crash with 800 metres to go, my pedal got touched and I lost positions from about fifth to twentieth. But I could bridge the gap. “My teammates – two of them crashed I think – Jürgen Roelandts is not good,” the German added. “It was just a really hard day with the temperature.” As the sprinters began to attack the line, Petacchi moved slightly from close to the left hand barrier, towards the centre of the road, causing Greipel to check slightly and move off his own line. “For Petacchi – he’s a big star – he shouldn’t do this,” Greipel said of the incident. “He should just keep the line, and… just keep the line.” Victory in the stage, and the time bonuses with it, give Greipel the first Ochre jersey of the race. The stage, which took a virtually straight south to north route, was dominated by a four-man break that was brave enough to show itself in the almost constant headwind. Marcello Pavarin (Vacansoleil-DCM), Martin Kohler (BMC Racing), Rohan Dennis (UniSA-Australia), and Eduard Vorganov (Katusha) were the rabbits of the day, and they escaped almost immediately after the race pulled out of the Adelaide suburbs. Behind the four fugitives, the peloton began to split into echelons in the wind, with riders having to cope with the Australian summer temperatures of up to 42 degrees centigrade (~108 Fahrenheit). As the peloton struggled to reform itself behind them, the breakaway riders managed to open their advantage to almost twelve minutes by the middle of the stage. Unfortunately for their chances though, the tough conditions, along with enough teams that fancied their sprinters’ chances, meant that they never really stood a chance; they were eventually pulled in with 12km to go, and the peloton began to line itself up for the fast Clare finishing straight. Shortly after it passed under the inflatable final kilometre banner though, disaster struck the peloton as a crash near the front rippled back and brought down a number of riders. The group contesting the stage finish was reduced to no more than twenty as more than sixty of their colleagues hit the tarmac. “We were going approximately 60km an hour and a saw riders come from left to right,” explained Vacansoleil-DCM’s Kenny van Hummel, who was among those to hit the deck. “I was sitting in the wheel of Petacchi and had nowhere to go.” Among the more serious casualties was FDJ-BigMat veteran Frédéric Guesdon, who suffered a fractured hip; with Greipel’s teammate Roelandts and Matteo Montaguti (AG2R La Mondiale) also hospitalised. With many riders sliding off the road, a 70-year-old woman was hit, and suffered some minor injuries. Team Sky and Lotto-Belisol were well represented at the front of what was left of the peloton, and it was Sky’s Australian sprinter Chris Sutton that opened up his sprint first, on the right hand side of the road. It was Petacchi on the left that was moving faster though, although he swerved a little as Greipel came past, with Hutarovich jumping across to take third. The next stage, between Lobethal and Stirling, is also expected to finish in a sprint, although the uphill finishing straight should slow the peloton a little, making things safer for the riders. Result stage 1 1. André Greipel (Ger) Lotto-Belisol 2. Alessandro Petacchi (Ita) Lampre-ISD 3. Yauheni Hutarovich (Blr) FDJ-BigMat 4. Fabio Sabatini (Ita) Liquigas-Cannondale 5. Daniele Bennati (Ita) RadioShack-Nissan 6. Chris Sutton (Aus) Team Sky 7. Jonathan Cantwell (Aus) Saxo Bank 8. Xavier Florencio (Spa) Katusha 9. Mark Renshaw (Aus) Rabobank 10. Manuel Belletti (Ita) AG2R La Mondiale Overall standings after stage 1 1. Andre Greipel (Ger) Lotto-Belisol 2. Alessandro Petacchi (Ita) Lampre-ISD @ 4s 3. Martin Kohler (Swi) BMC Racing Team 4. Yauheni Hutarovich (Blr) FDJ-BigMat @ 6s 5. Rohan Dennis (Aus) UniSA-Australia @ 7s

Picking a Captain to double down on in MLS Fantasy is the most important choice ahead of each round of games for players around the world. There's a lot of self-help out there for MLS enthusiasts, with our Hype Team providing three major consideration for the armband for each and every week. We'll be detailing the popular choice for captain, a few alternative picks in case Plan A doesn't go to plan, and a Wildcard pick of our choosing to add to the chaos. All aboard. MLS Fantasy: Week 3 Deadline For the 2019 MLS Fantasy season there is a 'Rolling Lockout', which means you can make substitutions and transfers until the second a player's game kicks off, which means you can chop and change your lineup as any Week progresses. Captaincy in MLS Fantasy There are a few differences with picking a captain in MLS compared to playing other games such as FPL. The major element to note with our Captaincy article is that for the 2019 we will have one major essential pick, decided by a poll, as well as a series of alternatives in case your original pick doesn't go to plan, and a wildcard selection who might prove to be a worthwhile differential We've listed the differences below that make captaincy in MLS Fantasy unique: - With the Rolling Lockout, you can change your captain until the selected captaincy pick plays - Once the team your captaincy pick takes to the field, you can no longer change your captain - If your captaincy pick doesn't play, then you'll end up with nothing - There is no option to select a vice captain Week 3: Essential Captaincy Pick Our essential captaincy picks is voted on by members of our community on Twitter over at @HypeTrainMLS. We pit four popular choices against each other to see who wins the popular vote. Fixture: D.C. United vs. Real Salt Lake Player: Wayne Rooney (DC) Position: Forward (CF) Player Price: $10.5 million Week 3's action is just around the corner and we've given a lot of time to dwell over captaincy options as this is the first week of the season where there doesn't appear to be just one simple answer, so what we're envisioning is a lot of diversity with choices this week due to Nicolas Lodeiro's popularity this week waning. Our captaincy poll leans heavily on the inclusion of Lodeiro and a trio of Forward's with favourable home fixtures as we noticed the climate of Fantasy players right now to stack in attack (and somewhat neglecting the points in midfield). D.C. United's good start to the season has put them in a good place, with Wayne Rooney edging our captaincy poll ahead of Atlanta's Josef Martinez, with Champions League rotation has stunted faith in Bradley Wright-Phillips, and perhaps rightly so. Our only for this week was not including Luciano Acosta in our captaincy poll as it would have provided a clearer reflection of what we envision to be the major trend this weekend - a battle between the duo for captaincy. Acosta, in the 6-months of his contract at D.C. United, was the one hogging the spotlight after a goal and assist in the 2-0 home win against MLS Cup holders, Atlanta, and arguably has the facts to back up his potential this week after averaging 9 points across the first few weeks of the season. Wayne Rooney chipped in with an assist against Atlanta and looks to be crucial for set-pieces again this season. His corner led directly to DC's opening goal to Atlanta and it appears obvious that the Englishman will command every dead-ball situation. Opponents, Real Salt Lake, only won 3 of their 17 away games last season, and have only conceded 1 goals from their opening 2 fixtures, so there is a threat that RSL might put up a good fight defensively to limit the points potential of the Rooney-Acosta partnership. D.C. United are the most well-rounded Fantasy options with coverage across their team this week, meaning that the success. It appears that to stay competitive for Week 3, the armband will rest on either Rooney's set-piece potential or Acosta's finesse. Either way, you'll be on to a winner if D.C. United maintain Audi Field as a fortress. Week 3: Alternative Captaincy Picks We don't have one specific alternative captain, but a few choices for consideration. This method bodes well with the flexible approach of MLS Fantasy of being able to chop and change your decision until the minute before a game. Next in line for the throne... Immediate contention outside of D.C. United rests with Atlanta United and Seattle Sounders this week, with Josef Martinez (ATL) the only major contender from the MLS Cup champions. Martinez has a good record at home and scored in the 1-1 draw against Cincinnati last weekend. The only downside to Martinez's potential is the supporting cast of midfielders not yet up to speed with the new season (aside from Julian Gressel, he's been very good so far). Nicolas Lodeiro's (SEA) bonus points potential should never be overlooked and with Seattle's first away day this season, away to Chicago Fire to open Week 3, coming after a brace of home successes. Lodeiro is still the man at Seattle and if club form holds true, Fantasy points won't be far behind. The other major force it appears this week will be New York Red Bulls, which thrusts Bradley Wright-Phillips (RBNY) and Kaku (RBNY) into the conversation this week. Both players scored in a home win over San Jose Earthquakes last season and look essential picks if they start, but based off line-up reports, we're not so sure either are nailed to start due to rotation after the Champions League. What about options based off form? We're firm believers that if a player is good enough, they can overcome any fixture hurdles in MLS. True talent shines regardless of the occasion, which to us means in-form Darwin Quintero (MIN) shouldn't be overlooked. The top Fantasy player with 29 points has managed his haul away from home, albeit against opposition under new management (Vancouver and San Jose). 2 goals and 3 assists cannot be ignored for Quintero as he travels to an LA Galaxy side who are suffering from similar defensive problems as last season - the recipe for success for any opposing attacker. Elswhere, Mauro Manotas (HOU) has scored in back-to-back games for Houston and is good value at $9.9 million this week, whilst Gyasi Zardes (CLB) opened his account on the road, scoring a brace at New England in Week 2. Saphir Taider (MTL) has also found the net in both games for Montreal, with the Canadian side visiting a leaky Orlando side. Based off the logic above, Raul Ruidiaz (SEA) is also part of the conversation after scoring in both of Seattle's home openers this season, though may find himself overlooked due to Wayne Rooney and Josef Martinez playing at home. Lastly, a Carlos Vela (LAFC) masterclass against Portland begs the question, should we overlook the Mexican international in the club's MLS encounter against NYCFC, a side that are typically defensively drilled on a small home pitch? The definition of class rising above the occasion might just ring through in Vela's case, with many afraid to pull the trigger on a tricky fixture on paper. Are there any left-field considerations? CJ Sapong (CHI), like Manotas and Taider, has scored in successive MLS matches and might be worth inclusion at the very least as a $7.9 million mid-range option. The only other overlooked options come from Sporting KC's attack, with Kristian Nemeth (SKC) an in-form option, though if rotation holds up, Kei Kamara (COL) might fancy himself a goal against the CONCACAF semi-finalists. Week 3: Wildcard Captaincy Pick We pull focus on a left-field choice for captaincy, with these selections typically coming away from home due to the home field advantage that MLS clubs tends to enjoy throughout the season. Fixture: Toronto vs. New England Revolution Player: Jordan Hamilton (TOR) Position: Forward (CF) Player Price: $4.4 million Our last point of conversation this week isn't so much a cry for the most outlandish captaincy call of the season, as it is a big arrow pointed in Toronto's direction. To our surprise, and the many expecting the 2017 MLS Cup winners to be the whipping boys of the 2019 season, we were very much surprised to see Greg Vanney's drilled side battling to a deserved 3-1 victory at Philadelphia on opening day. Philadelphia have lost both matches so far this season, losing 2-0 away at Sporting KC, an occasion that got the most of Marco Fabian - the new DP missed a penalty, was sent off and as a result will miss the trip to Toronto this week. This means that we'll be taking Philadelphia's form as a pinch of salt, as well as a potential warning sign not to get ahead of ourselves regarding Toronto's capabilities this weekend, though the visit of New England couldn't be timed any better as the visiting side have struggled with just 1 point from their opening 2 games. In attack, if Jordan Hamilton is to retain his place at the weekend, we could be looking at a real cut-priced Fantasy option this week. The big 'if' word plays a factor this week, but Hamilton impressed us against Philly and the Forward also has a goal in the CONCACAF Champions League to boot, so we're expecting big things against New England if in a starting birth. The only detracting factors will be Jozy Altidore's potential availability, so it may be worth tracking Toronto's starting line-up this week. Hamilton is essentially a potentially great enabler this week so you can load up on a stacked midfield and forward line. You can read more of our latest news from the world of MLS and MLS Fantasy by clicking here. For more MLS, follow @RealHypeTrain and @HypeTrainMLS on Twitter for the latest social media insight from The Hype Train. Want to know more about The Hype Train? The Hype Train is an entertainment website founded in 2015, specialising in the Fantasy Premier League (#FPL), providing beautiful graphics and weekly insight for hopeful players attempting to climb ranking tables. We are also occasional media reviewers, with a keen interest to review movies, live sport, and professional wrestling. As well as providing FPL articles on our website, we are a founding Contributor to the new Fantasy Football Hub, where you can find more unique articles, including weekly Power Rankings, from The Hype Team. You can support us and read exclusive members only content for just £2 per-month by clicking here. The Hype Train were nominated and shortlisted for the 'Best Football Blog 2016' by the Football Bloggers Association at their annual Football Blogging Awards (The FBA's), with the final presentation held at Old Trafford in Manchester. You can follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, or visit our website here at www.thehypetrain.co.uk All aboard.

Elizabeth Wray never had very much as a young woman, having grown up in the east end of London between the wars, starting work at 14 to support her younger siblings when their mother died of septicaemia after an abortion. But when she married in 1938, and for the rest of her long life, she was very proud of her wedding dress. Like many of her background, Betty, as she was known, made her own gown for her wedding to the postal worker James Wray, using a relatively inexpensive artificial silk. She was a talented dressmaker, and her cousin Dorothy, who worked for the London couturier Norman Hartnell, already a favourite of the royal family, added some fine beadwork detailing to the collar and sleeves. Betty Wray in the 1940s. Photograph: Museum of London It was, in other words, “a rather upmarket dress for their class of people”, recalls her daughter Pamela Ackers. So special, in fact, that throughout the second world war and immediately afterwards, Wray would loan it to four other brides. Until her death in 2000 at the age of 86, it remained one of her most cherished possessions. This month, 80 years after it was made, the dress that was worn by five brides will be the centre of attention again, as part of a display at the Museum of London. The wedding dress has been donated to the Museum of London. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian It is far from the finest garment in the museum’s 23,000-strong dress collection, but according to the senior fashion curator Beatrice Behlen, it is the story of Wray’s dress that makes it “museum quality”. “As a museum, we need an object to tell a story, and you can tell so many things from this dress.” It speaks of how people lived during the war, she says, and the history of London dressmaking, the use of artificial fabrics, and the fashions of the pre-war period. For Hartnell’s own dresses, the stories of their royal and wealthy owners are often preserved, says Behlen, “whereas if the family hadn’t given this dress to a museum, in 50 years no one would probably know about this. But this dress will now remain in the museum, and people will know about this family and what happened to them.” The dress had its first outing on 21 August 1938, for the Wrays’ wedding in Palmers Green, north London. Only four guests were present, one of whom was Dorothy, and the entire wedding party is captured in a photograph of the day, which also shows the bride’s long, silk tulle veil and headdress of wax orange blossom flowers, both of which have also been acquired by the museum. Four years later, in 1942, Betty Wray’s younger sister Lilian married Bob Murray in Stoke Newington. She wore the same dress and veil, while he was in his RAF uniform. Betty Wray’s younger sister Lilian on her wedding day in Stoke Newington in 1942. Photograph: Museum of London A third family photograph shows another outing for the dress when Betty Wray’s younger brother Harry, beaming broadly, married Moyra Farr in 1947. He had been liberated two years earlier from a Japanese prisoner of war camp where he had spent four years. There were also two other weddings. “I always grew up knowing the story,” says Ackers. “Because materials were so short, my mum loaned the dress to two ladies who she worked with at the Mount Pleasant post office during the war.” With Betty Wray’s death, however, their details have been lost; both the family and the museum hope relatives of the other brides might recognise the dress and come forward. It will go on display on 13 December as part of an exhibition of new acquisitions, which also include the original Victorian bell of Holloway prison that sounded during the incarceration of hundreds of suffragettes, a fourth-century Roman oil lamp found by the Thames, and a 16th-century clay pipe mould. The dress was last worn by Moyra Farr in 1947. Photograph: Museum of London Though Betty and James Wray remained together until his death in 1998, “I would not call it, sadly, a good marriage over the years,” says Ackers. Because her mother was in service, she says, they had very little time to spend together while they were courting. “I just think they weren’t suited.” “But the actual day,” she says, “when I look at the photo of their wedding day, I think they were full of hope and promise. And of course, life is different now. “It’s 104 years since they were both born. Such a different world, isn’t it?”

WASHINGTON – The White House Friday issued a revised transcript of an earlier coronavirus task force news conference to clarify that Deborah Birx, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, said sunlight and heat were not treatments for the coronavirus. The original transcript released after Thursday's briefing quoted Birx as saying sunlight was an option for treating the virus. The corrected transcript made clear that she had, in fact, made the opposite point. Trump floated the idea of using ultraviolet light or disinfectants to treat COVID-19 in the Thursday news conference after touting a study from the Department of Homeland Security, and then asked Birx her opinion on the treatment. His remarks drew a firestorm of criticism Friday from doctors and public health officials and prompted several state agencies to warn Americans against applying or ingesting disinfectants. The maker of Lysol issued a statement asserting that "under no circumstance" should the product be used to treat the virus. "I can't believe I'm writing this, but just to be 100% clear: Do not inject yourself with disinfectants.These are poisons," Leana Wen, a visiting professor of health policy and management at George Washington University, posted on Twitter – mirroring the kind of reaction Trump's remarks drew throughout the day. "They will damage blood vessels and tissues," Wen added. "You could die." Asked by a reporter during the briefing Thursday whether it was "dangerous" to make people think it could be safe to go outside in heat and humidity, Trump asked Birx, "Have you ever heard of that? The heat and the light, relative to certain viruses, yes, but relative to this virus?" Birx responded, "Not as a treatment. I mean, certainly fever ... is a good thing. When you have a fever, it helps your body respond." Trump added, "I think it’s a great thing to look at. I mean, you know." A transcript the White House released Thursday evening originally referenced Birx saying, "That is a treatment." Corrected remarks sent out Friday morning changed that line to "not as a treatment." More:Trump floats sunlight as possible coronavirus treatment but experts say there's no medical basis for that idea One administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was a simple mistake and the White House sought to correct it as soon as possible. Trump earlier highlighted a Department of Homeland Security study indicating sunlight and humidity could weaken the coronavirus, though a top official, Bill Bryan, an undersecretary of science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security, cautioned against changing behavior based on the study. Bryan told reporters it would be "irresponsible for us to say that we feel that the summer is just going to totally kill the virus." Contributing: David Jackson, John Fritze

Ohio prison staff are being sued for 'knowingly and intentionally' letting a white supremacist stab four black inmates while they were handcuffed to a table, according to a report published this week. Two correctional officers allegedly laughed as Greg Reinke knifed the men multiple times in June 2017, according to a federal lawsuit viewed by the Cincinnati Enquirer. Shamieke Pugh and Maurice Lee, two of the inmates who've filed the lawsuit, say officers didn't strip search Reinke as required and didn't provide first aid to the bleeding inmates for more than 10 minutes. All four survived the attack at the maximum-security Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, which occurred as they were playing cards at a table near where the attacker had been seated. It was recorded on prison surveillance video that has since been viewed by millions. Staff at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville have been sued for 'knowingly and intentionally' letting a white supremacist to stab four black inmates. Pictured: The attack Shamieke Pugh, Maurice Lee, Dontez Hollis and Daryl Pascol were sitting together, cuffed to a table, when fellow inmate Greg Reinke slipped out of his handcuffs and began stabbing the men. Pictured: The attack Correctional officers stayed behind a closed door allegedly laughing and debating letting the men die. Pictured: The attack The lawsuit alleges that the four inmates - Pugh, Lee, Dontez Hollis and Darryl Pascol - were strip-searched by the officers before they were let out of their cells for recreational time and handcuffed to a table. Reinke - identified as a member of the white supremacist group the Aryan Brotherhood - was allegedly not strip-searched before he was handcuffed to a nearby table. Guards also allegedly 'gave Reinke a key' or 'knew or should have known that Reinke' had a key or something similar to slip out of his cuffs, reported the Enquirer. Reinke then pulled a homemade blade out of his sock before he began to attack the men. The officers, identified by the last names Faye and Dalton, then reportedly laughed behind a closed and locked door, with one allegedly saying: 'We should just let them die.' Hollis was able to slip out of his handcuffs and tackled Reinke, which is when the guards arrived on the scene. The men were all visibly bleeding by this time. Pugh and Lee are seeking $75,000 in damages and claim in the lawsuit that their civil rights were violated and that they suffered cruel and unusual punishment. Reinke has denied the officers arranged the attack, but said they condoned it. He's also 'stated that he just felt like killing someone,' according to a prison report. Reinke was sentenced to 54 years for the attack and is currently on a hunger strike, saying he is being mistreated by guards The Scioto County prosecutor said he found no evidence of a setup. Reviews of what happened found that guards followed prison policies and procedures, and no officers were disciplined, said Chris Mabe, the president of the union that represents the officers. One of the inmates' attorneys, Solomon Radner, argues that the guards' conduct violated constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. 'I don't care what the policies are. I don't care what the procedures are,' Radner said. 'I know what the Eighth Amendment is.' The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said it doesn't comment on pending litigation. Prison officials wouldn't say how Reinke smuggled homemade knives from his cell and slipped his cuffs. The officers' union previously said Lucasville has since ended the practice of shackling multiple inmates seated at a table. Pugh spent two weeks in the hospital being stabbed. The lawsuit also alleges he was punched and kicked by different officers while shackled a year later when he experienced chest pain and sought medical treatment from prison nurses, then was denied medical treatment for resulting injuries. Guards entered the area after one of the victims got out of his cuffs and tackled Reinke to the ground with all the men visibly bleeding (pictured) The lawsuit, filed by Pugh and Lee, allege that officers strip-searched the four men but not Reinke and either gave him a key to his cuffs or knew he had one. Pictured: Attorney Solomon Radner, far left, and Pugh discuss the lawsuit on April 3, 2019 Pugh and Lee are seeking $75,000 in damages and claim in the lawsuit that their civil rights were violated and that they suffered cruel and unusual punishment. Pictured: Pugh speaks during an interview in Delaware, Ohio, in December 2018 Pugh was released from prison in December after serving several years for burglary. Lee, now at Madison Correctional Institution, is serving a 10-year sentence on charges including aggravated robbery. Their lawsuit seeks unspecified damages. Having video of the attack is extremely important to the case because it provides evidence in a situation that might otherwise be just the guards' word versus the inmates' word, Radner said. He said he hopes the case prompts conversations about having corrections officers wear body cameras as police do. Reinke was sentenced to 54 years in prison for the attack and then received another 32-year sentence for attacking a corrections officer just eight months later. According to prosecutors, Reinke and a fellow inmate stabbed the officer 32 times, reported the Enquirer. Prior to both attacks, Reinke was already serving a life sentence after he was found guilty in a 2004 shooting in Cleveland. Recently, Reinke went on a hunger strike, claiming he's being harassed by guards, denied proper recreation time and lives in a bare cell so empty that he's forced to place his clothes on the floor. He also alleges inmates who have been convicted of killing guards aren't being treated as poorly.

Like a pair of hands that appear as mirror images of one another, biomolecules, such as DNA and RNA, come in left-handed and right-handed forms. Normally, enzymes that recognize one mirror image form won’t touch the other. But researchers have isolated RNA enzymes, known as ribozymes, that synthesize RNAs of the opposite handedness. As esoteric as this may sound, similar mirror image–making RNAs may have played a role in the early evolution of life. Researchers consider RNA a likely central figure in the origin of life. That’s because, like DNA, the molecule can store genetic information, and like proteins it can act as a chemical catalyst that speeds up normally slow reactions. Many researchers believe that life likely got its start in an “RNA world” where RNAs evolved to replicate other RNA molecules. In this scenario, the more specialized DNA and proteins arose later. Like DNA, RNA is made up of four nucleotide bases, in this case the nucleotides abbreviated A, U, C, and G. When ribozymes copy RNA, they start with a single strand of RNA that they use as a template to form a strand containing the complementary bases. C is complementary to G, and A is complementary to U. So if a template strand with the letters ACCGU were placed in a test tube with individual nucleotides floating around, the complementary bases U, G, G, C, and A would grab onto their partners on the template strand. Then for these complementary bases to form an intact complementary RNA strand, the ribozyme would need to chemically weld the adjacent nucleotides together, much as boxcars next to one another must be linked together to form a train. The difference between RNA nucleotides and boxcars, however, is that individual nucleotides can come in either right- or left-handed forms, known as D- and L-nucleotides, respectively. All naturally occurring RNAs today are D-RNAs, but researchers can create L-RNAs in the lab. Normally, a ribozyme containing D-nucleotides won’t touch L-nucleotides, and ribozymes containing L-nucleotides won’t touch D-nucleotides. But if an opposite-handed nucleotide in a would-be complementary strand twists just right, it can fool a ribozyme and get integrated into the growing strand—with drastic consequences. Thirty years ago, researchers including Gerald Joyce, then a graduate student at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, showed that if a nucleotide with the opposite handedness was incorporated into a growing D- or L-RNA complementary strand, it shut down all further growth. “It acted like poison,” says Joyce, who is now at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. This discovery raised a conundrum for origin-of-life researchers that they’ve struggled with ever since. Before life got its start, D- and L-nucleotides would likely have been equally abundant in the primordial soup. If so, how would RNA enzymes ever have managed to get the RNA copying process going without it being poisoned? Now, Joyce and his postdoc Jonathan Sczepanski have found a possible solution. Online this week in Nature, they show that by using a technique called test-tube evolution they were able to generate ribozymes capable of assembling RNA strands of the opposite handedness in the presence of a mixture of D- and L-RNA nucleotides. What’s more, when they started with a D-RNA ribozyme, they found that it preferred to work on an L-RNA template to synthesize an L-RNA complementary strand. Likewise, they prepared L-RNA ribozymes that synthesized D-RNA complementary strands from D-RNA templates. And both the D- and L-RNA ribozymes were able to make mirror image copies of themselves. The ribozymes work this trick in an unconventional way, Joyce explains. Instead of recognizing where complementary RNA bases (say an A and a U) reach across the template and complementary strand to recognize one another, the enzymes recognize the overall shape of the assembling RNA bases on the complementary strand and link whatever pieces wind up next to each other. “It’s a very exciting advance towards RNA-catalyzed RNA replication,” says Jack Szostak, an origin-of-life researcher at Harvard University who was not involved with the work. However, Szostak says, it still begs the question of where such D-RNA and L-RNA ribozymes would have come from in the first place. The answer may be forever lost to history, Joyce says. But the new work does suggest that if these cross-copying ribozymes arose early on, they could have copied both mirror versions of RNA to propel the evolution of more complex RNAs. If one of those later, more complex RNAs—say a D-RNA—proved more capable, it could have encouraged the copying of its own kind, and promoted the single-handedness in nucleotides that we see today.

Video has emerged showing a top United Nations scientist admitting that vaccine safety checks are missing in many countries, leading to accidental deaths. The World Health Organization’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, admitted that vaccines are the cause of deaths for some patients, and said that the United Nations needs to improve its explanations for what causes the deaths in many countries. Speaking before the World Health Organization in December of 2019, Swaminathan said, “I don’t think we can overemphasize the fact we really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems in many countries and this adds to the miscommunication and the misapprehensions.” “Because we’re not able to give very good clear-cut answers when people ask questions about the deaths that have occurred due to a particular vaccine, and this always gets blown up in the media,” Swaminathan added. Swaminathan did not explain which vaccines or vaccine related deaths she was asked about. “One should be able to give a very factual account of what exactly is happening, what the cause of deaths are, but in most cases there’s some obfuscation at that level and therefore there’s less and less trust in the system,” Swaminathan was also found in a video touting the benefits of vaccines. “Vaccines are one of the safest tools we have to prevent disease and ensure a healthy future for all children,” said Swaminathan. The video emerges as vaccines continue to grow into a major political issue in the United States. New Jersey’s government recently contemplated ending the state’s religious exemption to vaccines, in a move that opponents say would trample their religious liberty. National File reported: Protestors stood strong outside for hours as the State House members of Trenton deliberated. A crowd totaling over 500 individuals gathered outside hours before the vote demanding that the lawmakers uphold their civic duties and represent the people concerning the gross violations these bills pose on their constitutional rights as American citizens. The cries of “kill the bill,” and “we won’t stop,” could be heard throughout the entire State House as well as down West State Street in Trenton, New Jersey. Legal action was recently suggested after a dengue vaccine was linked to deaths in the Philippines.

Spoiler warning: Significant spoilers for Full Metal Alchemist It’s been a long while since I watched Full metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Names of characters, the beats of the story and most of the dramatic climaxes have faded to a distant haze. But one brief moment of the 60-odd episode saga still leaps to mind with perfect clarity and that is the death of Lust by Roy Mustang’s barrage of fire attacks. It was about a third of the way through the series, and by this point these sinful villains had put the heroes through all manners of torment and, with the regenerative power of the philosopher’s stone seemed to be utterly indestructible. This moment marked a turning point with the sheer power of Roy’s sustained attacks overcoming their supposed immortality and finally defeating one of them for good. It was important to the story, but that’s not what made it so memorable. It was one of those moments where the power of animation took a good scene and made it an unforgettable one. And the impact of this one short scene on viewers and even the industry as a whole can’t be understated – after all, it was a rare instance where it wasn’t just die hard sakugabros who got weak at the knees. Fans of all kinds were united in awe by Yoshimichi Kameda’s unique, visceral and powerful animation and it was the true launchpad for his career that now has him as one of the most well-known charisma animators of our time. I dare say the sakuga community gained a few members that day – it certainly left an impression on me too. But what’s so good about it? Kameda took a character’s death scene and cut through all the usual shounen anime niceties of neatly drawn, attractive characters to focus on sheer, untamed intensity of being burnt alive using whatever methods he could. He threw out the book and used rough, contorted but extremely detailed drawings, and depicted withering figures in the flames with pure shadow, barely recognisable as human. It’s probably fair to say that TV animation hadn’t seen something quite like this before. The first couple of cuts waste no time in making a statement with the realistic disfigurement underscoring the real violence of the sequence – while fire in anime is too often treated as some kind of orange magical essence that reduces a characters HP until they’re arbitrarily defeated, here it burns away the skin to muscle and bone and singes the hair. Already his drawings show carefully defined gritty details well beyond the level of the rest of the anime up until this point. But this is only the beginning; Lust is again and again engulfed in a furnace of flames, burning away her form until she becomes this writhing, flickering contortion. Here Kameda is no longer using lines and shading for Lust, depicting her purely with ink and brush. While it’s relatively common for this kind of cut to do away with standard linework for other techniques, Kameda’s execution with the brush is unique and exceptional. His drawings strike just the right balance between form and distortion so that this scorched horror is still strikingly human. Combined this with the jittery, flailing motion he creates with his frames and the overall effect is as unsettling as it is exciting. His animation throughout this sequence has such unrestrained intensity to it that impact frames might seem redundant, but he still breaks them out as yet another tool in his arsenal to take the power of Roy’s inferno to the next level. And they are a sight to behold, a primal clash of light and dark. Lust’s final screaming lunge – a last furious, escape from the jaws of a fiery death is the real money shot here that sells the whole scene, using Kameda’s creative gusto not just for wow factor but for vivid emotion. Here, Kameda’s raw, messy drawings are imbued with the very essence of desperate rage. Again the conventions of character design and crisp linework are left behind in the dust, but now more intimately, as every scrawl and stroke becomes a perfect etching of agony, hatred and desolation. Looking into Lust’s eyes in the caps below you can really feel the anger emanating from her. I don’t know about you, but it reaches right into my heart. I don’t think drawings like this can be taught, it’s Kameda’s pure artistic vision incarnate and a profound demonstration of his talent. The use of the flickering trail of the reflection in Lust’s eyes is a clever way to add speed and force to her charge. It’s also a fine example of his use of the calligraphy brush (sumi-e brush) to add a visceral, textural aesthetic to the genga. You can see this used for her hair in the screenshots above and also in the genga below (from a different episode altogether) While he’s very capable of nuance and telling through motion, the sheer impact of his drawings carry the lion’s share of Kameda’s power. Each of his key frames is a piece of art in its own right, especially in this sequence, which remains one of his best to this day. It almost goes without saying, but he was credited for in-betweens this episode so it’s fair to assume his sequence was completely animated by him. I think the concept of in-betweens doesn’t even really apply to Kameda’s efforts anyway – that would imply there’s some comprehensible logic separating his frames. The thing about Kameda’s animation on FMA is that it did away with the staples of action anime, the crisp linework, stringent on-model animation and elegant choreography. That stuff is all fun of course, but it feels like a mere farce when Kameda enters the stage. All the designing, planning and teams of directors in the world don’t hold a candle to the innate talent of this one man let loose. His animation is rough, wild and unconventional but it’s not trying to be. The vibe I get from his work is that he’s not throwing in techniques just because they’re different or to imitate his sakuga forbears; he just earnestly throws everything he has at a scene to make it as good as it can be. And it works. In his animation is a kind of truth that is almost impossible to grasp, and that is why he’s the real deal, a truly dynamic charisma animator in the spirit of Yoshinori Kanada.

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Newspaper Page Text THE WEATHER REPORT Forrctit: OkUbomi -Fslr Weanta MX asd probably Thurads) TULSA, Auft. 24. Th tcmpcrn tare: Muaihpiiu th, ntsksuis j7. osth Hindi, ana partly cloudy. 8 a a KIN A 8 8 8 8 El Y V r V OTS 7 WJLfcD 8 :: V I,. X , NO. 292 n l.l. L.ICA8KD Who: Smm i I ri PRF.88 RKPOR1 A MONO THE W ANT ADS Want to rvnl ft (bitty fiiritUli-M him i There U o urivpitued DD tbi clftMtfttd t'liiff (oil.-iy. Look for it. TUL8 A, OKLAHOMA, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 25, L91 PEN J' A (IKS PRICE FIVE CENTS LAST CHANCE TO GET WATER WITHOUTBONOS Broken-Hearted Widow of Leo Frank Leaving Home in Brooklyn to Attend Quiet Funeral of Georgia's Victim J. B. Marvin ami Associates Withdraw Their Entire Proposition. HEAVY TAX LEVY IS ONLY RECOURSE LEFT i Long Investigation of Ex perts ( 'mints for Noth ing With City. ANOTHER chance for Tulsa to set ;i water system without having to vote a bond lsvir ami pay tor it by u tux levy went glimmering yester day morning wehn J. it. Marvin and in associate! withdrew their proposal to install a storage reservoir a) Bhell creek uml supply the city with port able water at a fixed rate per thou sand gallons of consumption. The action of Mr. Marvin und bis asso ciates wiih no surprise to those fa mlllar with the water situation. It was precisely what happened when Layne & Bowler proposed to Install a well system on a guarantee, both us to quality and quantity. So many ob jections were raised that it was ap parent thai if they had offered to pup pis the water free they would have been blocked somewhere with some oij itlon or other. A Year Wasted. The name attitude was shown to Marvin and his associates and after nearly a year's qiilpt Investigation in cluding even the problem of acquiring title to the rescrvior site and rights-of-way they concluded that It was useless to press a further considera tion of their proposition. Not only was this opposition found among the present city administration hut It was encountered among private citi zens some of whom want the water problem settled and some who do not and who will oppose any plan to that end. The opponents to the proposition to allow any private company to Install a plant to supply the city at its Intake ami pumping station base their op position most generally upon the ground that it will add to the present cost of water to consumers and they argue that if this were applied on the cost of installing the plant hy the city that the debt could he wiped out m mm m LEO -HV ALLIES SOOi TO FORCE STRAITS, TURKEY ADMITS 3,200,000 Soldiers Now on Two Fronts for Kaiser, All He Can Equip, England Says in Resume of War 1 Vw Weeks Will Se of Entente Powers paign in tin K 1st INTEREST CENTERS WITH THE BALKANS Austro-Germans increase Offensive Againsl the Running Russians. LONDON, Aug. ii (10 p. in.) Optimistic reports concerning Operations on the QalllpoU peninsula have been in circulation for the past tew days and prophecies arc freely i few Weeks will see the allies' most difficult task easi. The Turn too, ex- made thai close of tin I in t he n. ar to lie Sofia The picture shows .Mrs. Leo Frank, wife of the lynched Atlanta, Oa., man, leaving the house of his parents. No. 151' I'nderhlll avenue, Itrooklyn, after the service to accompany the body to the cemetery for burial. .Mrs. Prank was very weak and hud to be assisted down the steps and into the waiting automobile, About five hundred people, most of them women and Children, wero gathered about the Frank home, attracted by the tour automobile coaches and the automobile hearse which drew up III front Of the bo'ise ut 8:80 a. ill. The plans for the funeral had been kepi secret and fe knew of them. The three-mile drive to the cemetery Was made at lop speed. At the cemetery were oiilv a few relatives Of the dead man. A mass of flow, is covers th- fresh larth of his ;r,it in the comer of the little plot In Ml funnel cemetery at Cypress Hills. (Continued On Pace Five.) Legal Fight For "Mystery Bov" ey Is Merrily On to w Ik home not disl daj dav. bad bov blondi these tin the I . if also anil front SEND SUPPLIES TO FLOODED NEWPORT Appeals for lit by Little Roc I ANOTHER REEL OF SCHOOL SCANDAL ncr ot Heeded bam- onunerce. I, J. K. Rooney Appointed Building Superintend ent of Schools. THOUSANDS HUNGRY SCANDAL IS GROWING Warning Issued Tells of Ex pected Rise in the White River. PORT WORTH, Texas, Aug. 24. aring of the habeas corpus pro ceedings brought by K. C. Can 11 gainst Mrs. Julia DelO Of Quebec retain possession ot Hoy ( arcll. Mrs. lelo declared IS her son. Tommy Delo, kidnaped from their in Canada lour years ago. will be concluded In the seventeenth disl net court here before Wednes- Mrs. Delo, on the stand Tucs sald that her son when kidnaped el ,v eVe :illll lll-oWll I : il Tilt! in dispute has brown eyes and hair. Mrs. Delo asserts that hanges are natural and BSMrtS boy is her son. She also claims iy Is S years old. Carell de- Glared he is 1-2 ycrs old. Judge Ten ell today Instructed dentists to examine the boys teeth to determine possible his correct age. 1 ho hoy. was put on tne stand I uesilny em lie nun iieen niKon irom we porch of his home by Carell had wandered over the country ( !ome Ret ly Film Develops Into I of Tragedy; Ray Fellows 1 Jolts. LITTLE HOCK flooded town ,000 inhabitants. Aug. 24. The of Newport with refugees and pas- Ipecl the A Dglo- French forces sillies;,! ui, ir news reaching from Constantinople is reliable. In fact it is felt lure now that so i far as the Dardanelles are concerned jit is a mater of Indifference to the aliu s whether the Balkan states lend a hand. Their assistance is wanted, I however, against Austria and also to shorten Turkish resistance if the Straits are i lu lled. For these reasons negotiations with the near eastern Capitals are tiling watched with In. I teres! and the decision of Serbia on I the proposals of the quadruple en ivutv Mil ii i i.-i i us will uspiiaiious oi Bulgaria, which will be reached at a council of ml sisters tomorrow is anxiously awaited. About iiic Balkans. It is believe, l iii London that Serbia's reply will porve satisfactory ami that Bulgaria's co-operatton will lbs assured. This would open the way also for an active policy on the part of Humania who wants assur ances Bulgaria will not attack hei before she commences to move her troops, it is confidently expected all theM questions will ,c settled satis factorily to the allies and that within the same period the future luilu v of Qreecs win be definitely announced, in the meantime Austin German armies are aiming more heavy Plows at Russia In the hope of pulling her on the defensive Indefinitely ami per mitting the removal of some of her i wn troops to other fronts, particu larly Serbia uml Italy in the hope of repeating their eastern successes The Russians are encouraged, how ever, by their naval victory in the gUlf of Riga Which has delayed Field Marshal Von llindenburg's great out flanking movement through Courland and are offering cry stiff resistance at almost every point in the Uullio provinces. l ighting in V'nsgtia While the Itussians are falling back east and south of Kovno It Is explained hy I'etrograd that tills was necessary to prevent them from being outflanked. They still hold hanks of the Nil-men river from I'reny Just south of Kovno, southward to Grod- no, ono of the lew fortresses still held by them on all sides of Brest Litovsk the Austro-Germans claim to be making progress, while well to the southeast of the fortress the Alls trains report their cavalry has inlered Kovel, an liupoitaiit railway junction on tin- lines to Kiev Hov no. There has been heavy fighting In ON DON, Aug. 21 (7:3." p in ) -a statement from a British authoritative source on Germany's strength m men and her losses was ! maed public here today. The itate raent asserts thai about July SI the Oermans bad 1,(00,000 men n the End western battls front and 1,400.000 mi the eastern front a total of '.'1111- J.jjOO.OOO men on the actual flighting line while there also wen, 1,120,000 Austrlans opposed to tin Russian There were hMldes a large number of Qerman Hoops of various classes iii garrisons, fortifications and on lines of communication In addition to Convalescents, invalids and others. "Il Is impossible to say,'' the state ment declares, "how far I he reserve roups have been armed and equipped but the fact that the total in, men of men on the two fronts is only 1,200, 000 appears to show that this Is about the largest number the tier mans are ;fble to put fully equipped Into the fighting lin". "The oermans from a date ahortly after the outbreak of tin- war sup plied the losses lu their lust line and 1 reserve troops from the second anil even the third line, so that It ll safe to regard all the Qerman troops in the fighting line as much 01 Die same quality as in the flrsi few months of , I he w ar. "ii is calculated that the first-line I troops lost about fifty per cent in casualties and Hie reserves about! twenty-five per cent, then- places ' being taken by recruits from 'be 1814 class and from other categories and re-formed units, Including the I9i3 , class of recruit "Since then they have lost again I about fifty per probably there twenty-five per first-line troops mideii tie men llIU e rel III Ue i t remain.', only about cent of th gtnal to which must he it1 ;1 ivouudod who the flKhtlng line. KODAK CONCERN LOSES AFTER 2 YEARS IN COURT 1 .117 2, 1 I I are Missing, "The German casualties in killed, wounded and missing reported to June SO lot ile. I i i' . :. 1 1 1 men. of whom 50b, las we,,. Killed, ir.,sos died "f disease ami 540, 72S either are missing or prisoners or are so s.-rl- ouslj w idod as to put them out of action for t in- r aindei of ; he w n Mine June i'11 there has been heavy fighting, prubablj bringing the total loss up to 2,000,000 I'oi i In year, "Assuming that half a million men were onlj slightly wounded and re covered, I be effective loss Is assumed lo amount to one million III addition lo w till h probabl) half a million men are wounded who are absent from 'lie front mi leave In hospitals, This makes the total net loss for the year 1,000,000 oi whom from (00,000 to 460,00 nen were killed. "The Oermans, It Is calculated, at the beginning of Hie war had K.000, 000 men available for nnlilarv serv ice and thai number might be n- creased by a million or a million and a half if every man of military age gave his services. The only reason able suggestion therefore for the fact ihat the Germans have only S, 200,000 men on the fighting line, is thai they ale unable to supply more than that number with equlj nt. Prom the total of from s, noii. ooo to 9,000,000 men must be deducted from (he 1, 00,000 net loss for the year and the same number ot men required for Oper She .id's in Violation rman Anti Trusl La Court Decides, of ABSORPTION METHODS SQUEEZE OUT DEALER ( J.i ins IT .'llltl I'l'ol '('lit nil of V i 'ill- IS Show 171 'otal Sales l!12. CFKALO, N. Y August 21 Tne Kasl man (Cods I. i omoanv of Rochester Is a monopoly m restraint of trade in Violation of the Sherman anti-trust law, according to a deci sion handed down here late today by Judge John it Hasel of the United making arms d a 1 1 1 n 1 1 n i 1 hui IN MEXICO WILSON GERMANY FORMALLY HAS NO FAVORITE! REGRETS INCIDENT lie Hi las "Any Never Considered 1'ailiciihtr Man Apt For (he Presidency. logy ami roii i Kaiser Official 'I Sympathy Allavs the Vnsioir. The decision oinpany an op- plan "for tin) iga monopoly the November CARRANZA ANSWERS MAKE EXPLANATION .Slates district court. grants tin defendant portunity to present e abrogation of the tn on the llrsl day of term Judge Hasel in his opinion stated that while n appeared that no if. remediable hardship would result from a separation of the present busi ness Into two or more separate com panies, it was not at this lime in tended to Indicate either a dissolu tion, division or reorganisation, it no doubt is possible, he said, that au adequate measure of relief might result from enjoining the unfair prac tices of i he terms of sale nureemnnt and from a separation of the business side, put the defendant snosld bvive Ian opportunity to present to the oooTt on the first day of the I9IB November term a plan for the abrogation of the .illegal monopoly, unuiiiy auu uurw I sonably restraining interstate trade Makes Name ca St rona il provisional by America to B Chief w res 1'nit to Be 'ro MM Willi States Hasty in ( lonclusions. Not TIIK "Jitney Sclioolhouse Scandal" run off another reel of the film Monday afternoon and broke off in singers in marooned trains huddled j the miusi .. a mirri: g scene wnen In the few buildings that are free i Kay Fellows bolted from in front of tun! with him. from flood waters, today sent an ap peal for help to Little Rook, The mayor of Newport, over the telephone, the only remaining means of communication, this afternoon de clared the situation Is becoming des perate. Ile said the food supplies in the storcH have been ruined by water and that the people are suffering from hunger. The Mltle Hock chamber of com merce took prompt steps to furnish relief. A northbound Iron Mountain train, due to leave at 4:30 p. m.. was held an hour while Secretary Carl Baer rounded up enough canned goods to furnish 4.000 people with two meals. This will be taken as far as possible by train and the remainder of the distance In motor boats. An- Turks Claim Snocasaes, AMSTBRDAM, Aug. 24.--vla Lon don, 5 : 3 j p. m.) An official state inent Issued bv the Turkish govern eient at Constantinople and received hi re today rends as follows: "Oil A I gUst 22 the enemy attacked tn hi new front near Anafarta (on the QalllpoU peninsula) but was re pulse. I with heavy losses. "On the Irak front our troops at taeked a Itritish detachment near Akike on the Buphratea, Inflicting heavy losses." (Continued on Pi Three.) the caincia and refused to play the roll of the "fall guy" any longer. Hut be did not break up the, setting en tirely although the scene had to bo deferred a day and put on in the pri vate law offices of J. It. League yes terday morning. At .Monday's meet ing there were present A. A. Ilumgar- ner, o, n. P. McDowell and Ray Kei lowa Kor gome reason j it League could not he present and when the business that brought them together, that Is, the appointment of a new building Inspector for the. school board, came up. Fellows did not like the trend of the conversation and, realizing that he was In the minor ity, broke up the setting and no ap pointment was made. There was under consideration, It (Continued n I'age Five.) (Continued ( in I'age Three Underwriters to Protect itu-incis. DETROIT, Muh., Aug. 2i Organ isation of federations of insurance igetits and underwriters in every state in the UnlO tncnts of BO-calli Insurance is one Joint convention i to fight encroach il state monopolistic of the aims of the of the international America Proposes to Operate Haitien Government for Ten Years; 300 Marines to Strengthen Island Forces Association of Casulty and Surety Underwriters and tne National Asso ciation of Casually and Surety agents which opened lu re today, Delegates to the convention contend that pri vate HSSUran S business is 'seriously menaced by the growth of state insurance. snaim r Mlla Sinks, LONDON, Aug. 24. ( 10:05 p. m.) I'.ritish steamer suvia nas i J lot crew was saved. The sunk AVSi bib Ut shipping records give two British steamers named Silvia, one of UteM arrived August 21 at Italtl more from Huelva, pal 1 ' other la a tank vessel of B - She was laat reported as arriving at 11 ili fas May 11. WASHINGTON. Aug. 24. Turbu- I lent Haiti's new government has been asked hy the Fnlted States to approve a convention under which lor ten yeurs the American govern ment would administer the finances , and supervise the policing of the is land republic. A draft of the proposal is before the Haltlen congress, sitting at Port j au Prince, where American marines have been maintaining order since the recent killing of Presidi nt Ouillaume by revolutionists. Officials here say' the state di partmcnt fixed no time limit upon consideration of its request, but It is admitted that Charge Davis, who presented the treaty draft, might have asked, as press dispatches stale, '.hat approval he given by noon to morrow. While the diplomatic branch of the I'nlted States government Is working out a plan for future peace in Haiti's domestic Ufa and foreign relations, the navy department Is proceeding with preparation for an extended stay of its marines on the Island. (Continued on Pate Three.) Oklahoma Cowboys Get Loot in Arkansas by Plundering Amity Bank aBHINOTON, Aug. 24. --While still awaiting a reply from len- erai Carranaa to the Pan-Amerioan appeal for a peace conference in Mex ico the state department Issued a statement today denying that the United Slates government had ever considered "any particular man for provisional president of Mexico." The statement was prompted by In quiries from Mexico regarding reports that the Psn-A clean conference had in view the suggestion of some particular Mexican leaders to head a provisional government. The name or Vasquea Tagle, who was minister of Justice In tho Mexico cabinet, had been mentioned frequently and re cently a leport had been circulated 1 1 tint General Obregon was being con sidered. ( arrana - Reply Ready, Carran.a's agents here Said tonight that their chief's reply to Hie pan American appeal had been completed and 'and soon would reach Washington, H Is ex pei led to suggest prompt recog nition of the carranaa government as the surest way of aiding Mexico and to point to the solidarity of the move ment as demonstrated by the answers of twenty Carranaa generals and gov ernors pledging loyalty to the "first chief." Encouragement Is said to have been ! given Carta ti.a's representatives hero! bv Mime of the European governments 1 whose diplomatic agents have been consulted. C. A. Iioimlas today called upon Sir Cecil Spring-Bice, the Hritish ambassador and submitted to him Carransa'S claims fur recognition. tin ii Britain has said it would follow the lead of the I'niteil States. panic f Interest Administration officials are watch ling with keen Interest for the Otttoome I of the fighting between Carranaa and Villa forces near Monterey. Upon the 1 result or tins iiutt.c itie I ul lire course w VSHlN'lTi IN, Aug. 21 Count Von Bernstorff, the German ambassador, communicated to the state department today instructions from Ills government expressing re gret and sympathy If Americans lost their lives In the sinking of the liner Arabic and asking that the United States delay taking n definite stand In I turing regard to the affair could be heard from. This was the first word from flcial l Arable, on mil commerce; or it an appeal from this interlocutory decree la taken to Iho supreme court and this decision is affirmed, such plan is to ho pre sented within stxly days from the fil ing of the mandate. 11,000 Pages Test I ny. Tho bill was filed June !l, 10 IS. against the Eastman Kodak company of New Jersey, Fastman Kodak com pany of New Vork, (leorge Kustman, Henry A Strong. Walter S. Hubbell ami (rank s. Noble, all uf Rochester. The testimon) was 'aki n before Judge Hasel both here ami in Rochester and comprised upward of :i,ooo printed pages ot testimony and three valuroea of printed exhibits, it was finally submitted May 15, I !i I .". Tho hill alleged substantially that from 1(02 to 1906 the Eastman com pany of New Vork Intentionally monopolised the business of manufac- and selling cameras, plates. until Germany Photographic i aj,'-r and mm in the i'nlted states b) acquiring control of an of-1 twenty competing concerns winch man source concerning tho were aiurwarii i unsolved, me plants whli h two Amerii ans per- dismantled ami tneir Dusliiess re- lsheil. Its receipt was followed an evident relaxation or Itie tension Which had bee,, growing here as days' passed with no Indication of a desire on Germany's part to disclaim an In tention of committing an act "delib erately unfriendly'' toward the United Stales. No attempt was made either at the slate department or the White1 House to Interpret the ambassador's Communlcalon, Officials merely said that of course the American govern ment WOUld await the German ex planation of the action of the sub marine commander in sinking tho Arable. What Germany Bays. Count von Bernstorff telegraphed the state department from New Vork the text of his Instructions from Ber lin. It follows: "So far no official Information available eoneerllltie the sinking of the Arable. The Herman government trusts that the American government will not take a definite stand at hear ing only the reports of one side which in the opinion of the imperial government nnmit correspond with hy moved to Rochestsr, I mil rrom 1 vr.i in i :hm products Were sold by di restrictions and with disc iii Bastmaa tiers under unts which (Continued on Page Two.) A World Peace College Plan to Prevent War ' tKLAND, Aug. A th rl cut I to woi id in .oi through the establish ment of a unlveraltj at. Washington, D. C, with l.aoo professors and an Income of 110,000,000 a year to sup port it ami teach students of ail na tions was suggested here today uy Philander p. Claxton, United states I commissioner of education, at the an nual luncheon ot tne hoard of man- the facts, but Ihat a eharne will bo " 1,11 -"oem-an scnooi peace eiven to llermanv to he heard AflUAllV. I league. Although the imperial government! 'Suh a university doubt -he good faith of tho "" ' " pupui noiu AMITV, Ark., Aug. 24 Two unmasked nun held up Assistant Cashier K. W. Finch, r, w ho was alone In the Hank of Amity, at 2 o'clock this afternoon, forced him to put $1,200, all the cash on hand. In a grain sack that they held open Then they locked Fineher In the hank vault mid rode out of town. From the vault Fineher aroused resldeiltl of the town by means of a burglar alarm. The townspeople ex changed several shots with the bandits, but none took effect, and the men rode away In safety to ward the Oklahoma line. The bandits had been here since yesterday morning and fre quently visited stores in the town. Tln-v ald they were cow boys from Oklahoma. (Continued op Page Three.) does not witnesses whose statements are re ported by i tie newspapers in Europe, it should tie l.oine in mind that these Statements are naturally made under (Continued on Page Two ) Governor Williams in Speech Cres That State Executives Be Given a Fnc Hand With Greater Authority Would be St ill parts of the world, young nun and women eager to be taught who would carry back to their native countries a doctrine of brotherly loVS that would do more than anything else to brill universal puce, he said. Mr ci.ixton made the suggestion after Or. David Statr Jordan, chancellor of Stanford utilver- Isirv hail termed file mIiimHm -f Japanese In American universities large factor in promoting friendly relations w th Japan." CARRANZA STOPS SALE OF LIQUOR B BTON, Aug. 24 -Resolutions of confidence and support were jsent to President Wilson today iy (governors of nearly a score of states attending the annual conference of governors In this city. These reso lutions, Introduced by QoVSrnOf j Walsh of Massachusetts, said; "The governors of the several commonwealths of the nation in run- I fere nOS assembled desire in tender to you an expression of their confi dence and support in this hour of deep international concern, and to assure you of their readiness to fol low your leadership In all matters wh.ch you may deem best to promote the honor and maintain the p. ace and welfare of the nation and the whole people" a sharp division of opinion mani fested lb if at the conclusion of ad dresses by Governors William H, Mann of Virginia. Robert L Williams of Oklahoma and Mos.s Alexander of ir- DOI'OI.AS. Aril., Aug. 24. raliza officials have put absolute pro hibition Into effect In the larger towns of Bonora now under their control, Sot ' rdlng to travelers who arrived from interior points today. NsOQSSrl saloon men wen- ordered to lock their doors last Saturday. C inanea went Idaho, who urged the exti usion of '.ho. dry Monday and aecolding to repetts poweis of the governor, when former UOVernor Alva Adams of Colorado took advantage of the opportunity for discussion afforded by the program. "You would have us drift away from democracy, from the policies of Thomas Jclfcrson to those of All x ander Hamilton," he slated. "It Is -ii (Continued on Pag Two.) Oeneral Calles, the Carranaa chief, in- I lends to destroy the stocks of liquor. 1 At Can a nea mining companies have, adopted the plan of paying employes in Mexican silver coin, thus relieving I the chaotic currency situation. Com. panics at NacOSarl announced that tlio August payroll would be In silver also Several Ihoueand workmen n Uffei d

Astronomers have long turned their telescopes, be they on satellites in space or observatories on Earth, to the wide swaths of interstellar medium to get a look at the formation and birth of stars. However, the images produced over the last 50 years look more like weather maps showing storm systems instead of glittering bursts of light that the untrained observer might expect of a “star map.” That is, until now. Led by University of Florida astronomer Peter Barnes and Erik Muller at the National Astronomy Observatory of Japan, a team of international researchers has just released the most comprehensive images anyone has ever seen of the Milky Way’s cold interstellar gas clouds where new stars and solar systems are being born. “These images tell us amazing new things about the Milky Way’s star-forming clouds,” said Peter Barnes. “For example, they show that we have probably underestimated the amount of material in these clouds by a factor of two or three. This has important consequences for how we measure the star formation activity, not only throughout the Milky Way, but also for all other galaxies beyond. Additionally, it gives us important new insights into the circumstances of the birth of our own solar system, such as the overall temperature, density and mass distribution in these clouds.” The complexity of the images was made possible because of the telescope used for the study, the Mopra radio telescope located in Australia. The mapping survey itself is called “ThrUMMS,” which stands for the Three-mm Ultimate Mopra Milky Way Survey. The interstellar clouds that this survey targeted are so cold that they are made up molecules of hydrogen, rather than much warmer clouds where the hydrogen may be atomic or ionised. “Only the molecular clouds are cold enough to allow gravity to collect material to form stars, but in fact, they are so cold that the hydrogen itself is undetectable by telescopes,” said Barnes. The Mopra telescope was critical to the project’s success, because it can map several molecules at once, such as carbon monoxide and cyanogen, which act as tracers for the otherwise hard-to-see hydrogen. Simultaneously mapping multiple tracers allows astronomers to deduce the conditions in these clouds much more reliably and efficiently than if they had to map them separately. The worldwide ThrUMMS team includes astronomers from the U.S., Japan, Australia, the U.K., Canada and several other countries. The survey was published in the 5 October 2015 issue of Astrophysical Journal. “We are working on several follow-up projects with the Mopra data,” said Barnes. “We continue to be enthused and inspired by these extraordinary images.”

Sean Rossman USA TODAY NASA is sending a spacecraft to a giant metal asteroid that may hold the secret to how our solar system was formed. The fact-finding mission led by Arizona State University researchers is focused on the ancient, giant metal asteroid 16 Psyche. NASA wants to know whether the asteroid, thought to be made of iron and nickel, could be part of what was an earlier planet perhaps as large as Mars. This is an opportunity to explore a new type of world — not one of rock or ice, but of metal," Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche's principal investigator said in a statement. "16 Psyche is the only known object of its kind in the solar system, and this is the only way humans will ever visit a core. We learn about inner space by visiting outer space." While NASA has no plans to bring the massive asteroid home and lacks the technology to mine it, Elkins-Tanton calculates that the iron in 16 Psyche would be worth $10,000 quadrillion, Global News reported. That's right, $10,000 quadrillion, as in 15 more zeros. NASA asteroid missions to discover secrets of the universe Scientists say the asteroid, named 16 Psyche, may have lost its outer core through a series of collisions. The Psyche mission, scientists believe, could shed light on how planets and other masses broke up into cores, mantles and crusts years ago. A look back at the year in space Psyche launches in October 2023 and will arrive at the asteroid in 2030. Psyche is part of the Discovery Program, formed in 1992 to explore the mysteries of our solar system.

The US is publicly blaming North Korea for the WannaCry cyberattack that crippled the NHS and other networks around the world. Tom Bossert, President Donald Trump's homeland security adviser, said the country was "directly responsible" for the ransomware attack which was "widespread and cost billions". It comes as Mr Trump unveiled a new US national security strategy to strengthen the country's cyber defence capabilities. Mr Bossert, writing in the Wall Street Journal, said: "After careful investigation, the US today publicly attributes the massive WannaCry cyberattack to North Korea." :: North Korea chases Bitcoin to bust sanctions Image: Tom Bossert said the attack was 'widespread' and 'cost billions' In October, Home Office minister Ben Wallace said the UK Government believed "quite strongly" that a foreign state was behind the cyberattack and named North Korea. Pyongyang has also been widely blamed in security circles and Microsoft president Brad Smith pointed the finger at Kim Jong Un's secretive regime. The attack began on 12 May and is thought to have infected machines at 81 health trusts across England - a third of the 236 overall. :: North Korea is 'hacking soaring Bitcoin exchanges', say researchers N Korea 'hacking soaring Bitcoin exchanges' The Foreign Office's minister for cyber, Lord Ahmad, repeated the NCSC's assessment on Tuesday and said: "We condemn these actions and commit ourselves to working with all responsible states to combat destructive criminal use of cyber space. "The indiscriminate use of the WannaCry ransomware demonstrates North Korean actors using their cyber programme to circumvent sanctions." "International law applies online as it does offline. The United Kingdom is determined to identify, pursue and respond to malicious cyber activity regardless of where it originates, imposing costs on those who wish to attack us in cyberspace." Wannacry hack Computers at almost 600 GP surgeries were also impacted, according to a National Audit Office (NAO) report in October. The report found that almost 19,500 medical appoints, including 139 potential cancer referrals, were thought to have been cancelled. Five hospitals were forced to divert ambulances away after being locked out of computers. However, the report found the attack could have been prevented if "basic IT security" measures had been taken. Infected machines were running computer operating systems - mostly Windows 7 - that had not been updated to secure them against cyberattacks. Mr Wallace suggested the attack could have been an attempt by North Korea to access foreign funds.

Statistics by the United States Air Force show that 4,300 bombes have been dropped by foreign troops in Afghanistan in 2017, targeting Taliban and other terrorist groups in parts of the country. According to the US Air Force figures, the number of airstrikes in 2017 was twice than of those carried out in the past two years – 2015 and 2016. US Air Force also has said this year they will bring in more airplanes to Afghanistan and will increase their support to the Afghan security forces on the battlefields. According to the figures, US and Afghan Air Force have conducted an average of 15 airstrikes daily in 2017 in south of Afghanistan. The Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan said following the announcement of Donald Trump’s new strategy for South-Asia and Afghanistan, the number of airstrikes against insurgents has increased significantly. “Airstrikes are up significantly in 2017 primarily due to the South Asia policy which President Trump has signed and allowing us to go after both the Taliban and ISSK (Daesh) where they are. It is going to allow us to pursue them. The rules of engagement are now different,” Resolute Support Mission (RS) Public Affairs Director Thomas Gresback said. In the meantime, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said that NATO will send in another 3,000 military trainers to Afghanistan to train Afghan forces. Stoltenberg said the international community will not let Afghanistan to turn to a safe haven for insurgents. “Allies and partners are also adding three thousand more trainers to the Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan, helping prevent Afghanistan from ever again becoming a safe haven for international terrorism. Afghanistan has taught us that prevention is better than intervention,” said Stoltenberg. Afghan Defense Ministry meanwhile said the Afghan Air Force has changed their tactics and that they are carrying out airstrikes with a new approach to eliminate terrorists. “We have increased our attacks and also we succeeded to eliminate a great number of the enemy's strongholds, equipment and personnel by operations carried out by air and ground forces,” Defense Ministry deputy spokesman Mohammad Radmanish said. “There will be significant results if these (military) operations are conducted in good coordination,” former military officer Gen. Ahmad Shah Sangdil said. The new remarks about the increase of airstrikes and sending in more advisers and trainers expressed amid currently over 20 provinces of the country are insecure and nearly 14 districts in different locations have collapsed to the Taliban. In addition to this, recently Taliban has advanced toward Farah city fighting against Afghan security forces. Despite ongoing fights in Farah city outskirts, fights also have been ongoing in parts of Kunduz province.

Group says it has spoken to the city about conditions, and hears "we have no more resources" False Creek Residents Association says discarded, used needles and feces and urine left in parks and on the street VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – People living in an area of north False Creek are fed up with what they call near-unlivable conditions that have been getting worse for years. A meeting is scheduled for tonight, as the group says it can no longer tolerate the unsafe situation. Fern Jeffries with the False Creek Residents Association says violence is relatively common in and around Andy Livingstone Park. “We’ve experienced an increase in not only the incidents of violence, but in the incidents of events which really threaten people’s health.” That includes discarded, used needles and people leaving feces and urine in parks, and on the street. “We have had a urine-soaked mattress sit in front of our park entrance for a few days. There are serious threats to health and safety,” she tells NEWS 1130. She says garbage cans in the area are overflowing on a daily basis. “I notice there are parts of Robson Street that have some new bins. I was recently in Toronto and they have an excellent bin system there. We have these rinky little garbage cans in our area that, after a couple hours of being emptied, they’re full again and overflowing onto the street. So, it’s not surprising that people treat this area as a garbage dump because that’s [how the] city leaves it. Jeffries moved into the area in 2004. “It has been downhill since then.” “In 2004, we looked around and said, ‘Things will get better after the Olympics’ or ‘Things will get better after Insite is operating.’ We keep looking for things to get better. Frankly, they are just deteriorating beyond what you would expect in a third world country.” The group has spoken with police and the city about the issue. Jeffries tells us the response they keep hearing is “we have no more resources.” “We are usually advised by city people to call 3-1-1. We’ve wasted a considerable [amount] of our lives on hold for 3-1-1. So, this current system of response just isn’t working.” She notes the police response to emergencies is “excellent.” But she thinks it’s going to take different agencies from a municipal level, in addition to Vancouver Coastal Health, working with the association to improve the conditions. “We would like to see on-the-ground results. We want to see better treatment options for people. We see many people on our streets — night and day — who are clearly suffering from severe mental illness.” “We wonder what’s happened to our mental health treatment system… Where are the community supports to help them?” she asks. Tonight’s meeting at 7 o’clock at Crosstown Elementary (55 Expo Blvd) is entitled “What’s the plan?” and is open to anyone with an idea @NEWS1130 pic.twitter.com/71PhPeWmlZ — Simon Druker (@Simon_Druker) September 11, 2018 Jeffries says the group’s call for help isn’t just for people living in the area, but also for those who are transient in the community. The association wants the city to come up with new ideas to tackle the problem. “In Vancouver, harm reduction has simply meant turning our streets into an open shooting gallery,” she argues. “We have not seen the prevention and treatment.” She wants to know what B.C.’s new minister of mental health and addictions’ plan is. Tonight’s meeting is for anyone with concerns but also ideas or suggestions. It takes place at 7 p.m. at Crosstown Elementary School.

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Monday night on NBC’s “The Late Night,” host Seth Meyers criticized former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) for saying Black Lives Matter is “anti-American and it’s racist.” Partial transcript as follows: MEYERS: So there were some incendiary and counterproductive responses to the tragedy in Dallas, but there were perhaps no worse response than that of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who complained, in perhaps the most galling and offensive way possible, that those peacefully protesting for police reform should shift their focus. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) GIULIANI: if I were a black father and I was concerned of my child, really concerned about it, and not in a politically activist sense, I would say, “be very respectful of the police. most of them are good. some can be very bad. and just be very careful.” I’d also say, ‘Bbe very careful of those kids in the neighborhood and don’t get involved with them, because son, there’s a 99% chance they’re going to kill you, not the police.’ (END VIDEO CLIP) MEYERS: Okay, first of all, don’t ever start a sentence with the phrase, “if I were a black father.” If you are black father, you don’t need to say it. and if you’re not, you should probably just shut the [ bleep ] up. And if Giuliani’s willing to say that some police can be very bad, you would think he’d see the value in the Black Lives Matter protests. but instead, he condemned them. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) GIULIANI: I believe that Black Lives Matter is a racist organization that is helping to fuel this. now, if I had an organization called White Lives Matter, you would say it was a racist organization. (END VIDEO CLIP) MEYERS: Yeah, we’d say ‘s racist, but more importantly, it’s redundant because everything in our country and our culture already screams white lives matter. No one in any other country right now is asking, ‘where does America stand on white people right now? Are they still pro?’ Even when a show has an all-black cast we call it “Black-ish.” but you’ll still like it, it’s just “Black-ish,” The difference is black people are disproportionately affected by racial disparities in our criminal justice system. That’s just a fact. and saying Black Lives Matter is a response to that. The problem for you, Rudy, is you’re imagining the world “only” in there. As in, “only black lives matter.” but no one is saying that. In fact, assuming the word “only” in any context is kinda weird, just in general. Like when you see a sign outside a store that says, ‘we sell lottery tickets,’ you don’t assume they mean, ‘we only sell lottery tickets.’ In fact, despite it not being on the sign you’re fairly certain they also have Mountain Dew and porno mags. Which is great for me because I don’t like making three stops when I’m shopping. I need to get home, do my scratchers, do the Dew, and read my magazines.

More details have been revealed for the upcoming Lunar New Year special of the “2019 Idol Star Athletics Championships – New Year Special”! Previously, Super Junior, TWICE, SEVENTEEN, iKON, Red Velvet, MONSTA X, NCT 127, Stray Kids, (G)I-DLE, MOMOLAND, ASTRO, The Boyz, gugudan, Celeb Five, and Golden Child were revealed for the first lineup, and some of the participants were announced for the penalty shootout and bowling events. The program has now shared part of the lineups for the archery and rhythmic gymnastics events. TWICE’s Tzuyu and Red Velvet’s Irene, who previously brought lots of buzz for their participation, will be returning for archery with their groups. gugudan and GFRIEND will also show off their archery skills again. For male idols, iKON, SEVENTEEN, MONSTA X, and NCT 127 will be competing in archery. APRIL’s Rachel and ELRIS’s Yukyung, who have both won gold medals previously, will be competing again for rhythmic gymnastics. Members of MOMOLAND and (G)I-DLE will also be participating. The “2019 Idol Star Athletics Championships” will air over the Korean Lunar New Year holiday, which runs from February 4 to February 6, 2019. As previously reported, filming for the special will kick off on January 7 at the Samsan World Gymnasium in Incheon. Stay tuned for more updates on the upcoming show! Watch the latest “Idol Star Athletics Championships” with English subtitles below: Watch Now Source (1)

So it was to be delivered a couple of days ago but didn't have a day off until today to pick it up from the post office. After a GRUELING 45 mins of standing in line at the post office i was able to obtain the box! In the box is an AMAZING MegaMan (my fav) 8-Bit retro style figurine! To whoever sent it, all i can say is PERFECT! Thank you so much!!

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Caesars Entertainment Corp's CZR.O main casino operating unit has begun a process to raise up to $3.8 billion of cash needed to exit a contentious two-year bankruptcy, according to a court filing on Wednesday. The marquee sign at Caesars Palace hotel is seen on the strip in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. February 16, 2011. REUTERS/Steve Marcus/File Photo After more than a year of legal wrangling, the Caesars subsidiary last month secured support from the vast majority of its creditors for a wide-ranging plan to emerge from bankruptcy early next year. Now Caesars Entertainment Operating Co Inc (CEOC) is seeking financing for its reorganization plan, which entails splitting Caesars’ main bankrupt unit into a casino operator and real estate investment trust (REIT), both controlled by creditors. If the plan wins U.S. Bankruptcy Court approval at a trial set for January, CEOC must have at least $1.8 billion in new financing for the REIT and $1.2 billion for the operating company before the reorganization can become effective. “If confirmed by the court, the plan requires that (CEOC)raise approximately $3.0 billion to $3.8 billion of cash from third-party exit financing,” the company said in a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Chicago. CEOC filed for Chapter 11 protection in January 2015 with $18 billion of debt and allegations by creditors that its parent looted the unit prior to the bankruptcy. The Caesars parent has promised to contribute some $5 billion to CEOC’s reorganization plan in exchange for creditors dropping billions of dollars of claims. To help fund the plan, Caesars will give creditors stock in a new group it will create by merging with another affiliate, Caesars Acquisition Co (CAC) CACQ.O, which in July agreed to sell its online games unit for $4.4 billion in cash. That money could help fund the new casino operator, Caesars has said. In its court filing, CEOC said the overall new financing is a condition to fund creditor recoveries under its reorganization plan, as well as other unspecified needs. The casino group asked for court approval to retain financial adviser and investment banker Millstein & Co, which has worked closely with CEOC throughout its bankruptcy, to oversee the financing process.

Biologists Discover New Species of Giant Carnivorous Plant 07/30/2015 - 10h54 Advertising CLÁUDIA COLLUCCI FROM SÃO PAULO A new species of giant carnivorous plant has been discovered in eastern Minas Gerais. It is the largest of its kind ever discovered in the Americas. The novelty also applies to the way it has been found: by means of a photo published on Facebook. Reginaldo Vasconcelos, an orchid grower and enthusiast of native flora, took a photo of the plant during his wanderings in the mountains near his hometown of Governador Valadares (MG). Specialists in carnivorous plants, Paulo Gonella and Fernando Rivadavia saw the publication on Facebook, identified it as a new species and made an expedition to study it. The article that reported the discovery was published in the renowned scientific journal "Phytotaxa" by a group of botanists from Brazil, United States and Germany. "It is the first plant to be discovered on Facebook," says Andreas Fleischmann, of the Botanical Garden of Munich (Germany), one of the authors. Known as "sundew" (sundew genus, droseraceae family), the now named Drosera magnifica is almost one five feet long. It produces long, slender leaves, covered with glands or "tentacles", which secrete droplets of a viscous and sticky mucilage. These red and glittering tentacles are visually attractive, and represent a death trap especially for small flying insects. The sundew genus is the largest group of carnivorous plants, with about 250 species distributed throughout the world, mainly in tropical areas of Australia, South Africa and Brazil. Facebook has become one of the most important tools for the discovery of new species, according to the authors of the article. One group, DetWeb, brings together over 5,000 botanists and enthusiasts Brazil. Translated by CRISTIANE COSTA LIMA Read the article in the original language

President Trump says the media is ignoring the U.N.'s sanctions against North Korea. He's wrong. In a tweet sent out at 4:15 PM EST on Monday, the president wrote that "The Fake News Media will not talk about the importance of the United Nations Security Council's 15-0 vote in favor of sanctions on N. Korea!" CNN and other news outlets have offered robust coverage of the resolution, which passed on Saturday. It was a lead story on Saturday afternoon and evening newscasts. CNN's Ana Cabrera interviewed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley about the resolution shortly after it was passed. Portions of the interview were re-played several times. Related: New North Korea sanctions are unlikely to make Kim blink Transcript searches show that the sanctions news was also a frequent topic of discussion on Sunday newscasts. Many analysts and commentators, even those who frequently deride Trump, credited his administration with the victory at the U.N. The coverage continued at the start of a new workweek. Related: North Korea vows to 'make the U.S. pay dearly' as sanctions tighten On CNN's "New Day" morning show, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, talked to CNN's Brianna Keilar about the sanctions. That appearance apparently prompted a series of tweets sent by the president attacking Blumenthal. At the moment that Trump tweeted his criticism of the "Fake News Media," CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper" was covering the impact of the sanctions. CNN's "The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer," discussed the sanctions on Monday, as well. The Fake News Media will not talk about the importance of the United Nations Security Council's 15-0 vote in favor of sanctions on N. Korea! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2017 On Monday evening, CNN.com's Top Stories section was led by a story about the sanctions. CNN is not the only news outlet reporting on the sanctions. To cite just a few notable examples: On Monday, an article on the resolution was published on the front page of the physical copy of the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post and USA Today also published front-page pieces on the resolution and its implications. ABC's "Good Morning America," discussed the resolution. WATCH: North Korea's new nuclear threat; vows "thousands-fold" revenge after sanctions: https://t.co/NLUoLTlTwi pic.twitter.com/7cifIKEBd6 — Good Morning America (@GMA) August 7, 2017 As did NBC's "Today." WATCH: North Korea says it will launch "thousands-fold" revenge against US following new UN sanctions https://t.co/Iv15p6mOgH pic.twitter.com/7kRqJbYwCj — TODAY (@TODAYshow) August 7, 2017 NPR included the topic in its Morning News Brief on Monday. Mainstream outlets have also published a number of articles on the resolution and what it could mean for the U.S. and internationally. - Brian Stelter contributed to this report

Adams County state Rep. JoAnn Windholz blames Planned Parenthood for the Nov. 27 shooting, at its Colorado Springs clinic, that left three dead and nine injured. She is one of the few Colorado Republicans to issue a statement in the wake of the attack. “Violence is never the answer, but we must start pointing out who is the real culprit. The true instigator of this violence and all violence at any Planned Parenthood facility is Planned Parenthood themselves. Violence begets violence. So Planned Parenthood: YOU STOP THE VIOLENCE INSIDE YOUR WALLS.” ADVERTISEMENT Windholz referenced the Center for Medical Progress video that alleged Planned Parenthood and the Colorado Springs clinic were trafficking in baby body parts, the same video suspected shooter Robert Lewis Dear referred to in his oft cited “No more baby parts” statement after his attack. “Planned Parenthood has no shame,” Windholz said. “These facts and overall mission of the abortion industry would easily send anyone over the hill who wasn’t rational.” Windholz attended the afternoon session of the day-long Nov. 9 Republican Study Committee of Colorado hearing on Planned Parenthood where GOP lawmakers studied the video. Her statement, which she provided to The Colorado Independent this morning, expressed no sympathy for the victims, including officer Garrett Swasey, an anti-abortion pastor, or the city of Colorado Springs. When a violent act happens at a Planned Parenthood facility, “the left goes on ‘auto-pilot’ blaming everyone in sight when they should be looking in a mirror,” she stated. ADVERTISEMENT Amy Runyon-Harms of the liberal group ProgressNow Colorado said she was stunned by Windholz’s remarks. ProgressNow held a press conference with the pro-choice group NARAL at 11 a.m. today at the State Capitol to discuss the shooting and the Republican rhetoric around it. “This is exactly the type of rhetoric I am speaking out against today,” Runyon-Harris told The Independent. “For one of our sitting elected lawmakers to utter the phrase ‘Violence is never the answer but…’ is unconscionable and inexcusable. Shame on Representative JoAnn Windholz.” ADVERTISEMENT Windholz, who proudly proclaims her staunch conservative credentials on her website, represents a swing district in Adams County which is dominated by unaffiliated voters and has more Democrats than Republicans. She’s a first-term legislator who beat incumbent Democrat Jenise May of Aurora by a thin margin of 237 votes in 2014. ADVERTISEMENT In contrast to Windholz’s conservative positions, she uses quotes on her website from two people not normally associated with Republican politics: former President John F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Kennedy’s quote: “Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer.” And King’s? “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” ADVERTISEMENT Windholz’s full statement is below: Violence – Where it starts. The freedoms we enjoy in the United States include those that were made up to fit the audience and unsubstantiated numerical support, specifically the right to an abortion. When a violent act happens at a Planned Parenthood (pph) facility (most recent in Colorado Springs) the left goes on “auto-pilot” blaming everyone insight when they should be looking in a mirror. Free Speech has brought to light the insidious selling of baby body parts (pph has no shame). These facts and overall mission of the abortion industry would easily send anyone over the hill who wasn’t rational. The “war on women” is what pph began with Margaret Sanger and it has turned into a war on the family, especially children. It has changed children from a blessing to a commodity making it very hard to consider ourselves to be a civilized respectful rational society. Violence is never the answer but we must start pointing out who is the real culprit. The true instigator of this violence and all violence at any pph facility, is pph themselves. Violence begets violence. So pph, YOU STOP THE VIOLENCE INSIDE YOUR WALLS. My question is, if abortions were free at pph, how long would they stay in business? Pro-Life organizations offer their caring services saving women and children for free every day and they clean up the mess that pph leaves behind. Pray Daily for the women who abort, their children, and the providers. JW This article originally appeared at the Colorado Independent

Welcome back, folks. Last week I discussed some of the repercussions of Standard’s premier deck (Red Aggro) leaving the format, so if you missed it, go check it out. This week we’re going to look ahead to Guilds of Ravnica to frame our discussion of rotation finance. What do we already know about that set that can help us predict what will happen to the value of Ixalan, Core 19, and Dominaria cards? A lot, it turns out! I. “It’s the Mana, Stupid.” Thus spoke James Carville. Standard is largely defined by its mana, and we have a very good grasp of what Standard mana bases will look like once Guilds of Ravnica drops. Staying are the Ixalan and Dominaria checklands, and on top of that, we’ll get rare duals of the five guilds above. We don’t know whether they’ll be fast lands like the Ravnica shocklands or slow like the Theros temples, but even just knowing the colors tells us a lot about what Standard will look like. Perhaps a visual picture will help. Better Mana: Worse Mana: Boros {WR} Simic {UG} Selesnya {WG} Gruul {GR} Golgari {GB} Azorius {UW} Izzet {UR} Rakdos {BR} Dimir {UB} Orzhov {WB} ———– ————- Naya {RGW} Temur {GUR} Sultai {UGB} Esper {WUB} Jeskai {URW} Mardu {BWR} Abzan {GBW} Jund {GRB} Grixis {UBR} Bant {UWG} 1. No, No, NO! I know many people have been itching to play with some of these Ixalan tribes in Standard, especially Merfolk. While card quality will keep Pirate Tribal and Dinosaur Tribal from being competitive in Guilds of Ravnica Standard, mana quality will preclude Vampire Tribal and Merfolk Tribal from being playable until Ravnica Alliance is released in January. Merfolk, in particular, I expect to become Standard-playable once Ravnica Alliance is released, both because we’ll get a rare Simic dual and because I think it likely we’ll get a few rare and mythic rare Merfolk. 2. Yes, Yes, YES? I know you’re a good boi, but can you do it alone? Grixis mana will be no worse in September than it is now, and that bodes well for Nicol Bolas. Less good for Nicol Bolas, however, is that most of its supporting cast is leaving. Roughly 70 percent of it, in fact. My hunch is that Grixis Midrange is going to take a backseat for the time being, likely emerging as a tier-one deck once again as more and more cards become added to the Standard card pool. Honestly, looking at the rare and mythic threats in Grixis colors that will survive rotation, all of the good ones that fit in a midrange strategy cost four mana or more. If you don’t believe me, check it out. This means I’ll avoid speculating on Nicol Bolas for the time being. Currently sitting at $17.50, I think it’s possible, if not likely, that it dips down into the $10.00 to $12.50 range, especially if the new rare duals are slow. Buy then, not now. II. What Decks are Surviving Rotation? How does Grixis Midrange’s card retention rate compare to other top-tier decks? Let’s take a look. Red Aggro: 17% Sai’s Resevoir: 27% Grixis Midrange: 30% Green Stompy: 55% UW Control: 60% Bant Turbo: 73% Keep this data in mind as you make speculatory investments over the next few weeks; Standard is going to change drastically after rotation. Every offensive deck is going to need to pick up some heavy hitters in Guilds of Ravnica, even Green Stompy. Scrapheap Scrounger, Heart of Kiran, and Rhonas, the Indomintable are major losses. The decks best positioned to sit atop Standard at rotation are UW Control and Bant Turbo Fog. Teferi ($35) will likely shoot up to $50 in the Fall, and Search for Azcanta and Glacial Fortress might see some gains too. I’m hopeful that my 100 copies of Seal Away will go somewhere, and you may want to consider picking some up if you want to add a penny stock to your portfolio. For you paper players, consider picking up your Nexus of Fates now. 1. What Cards Can Fill Old Shoes? Guilds of Ravnica can’t fully replace the entirety of Kaladesh and Amonkhet blocks on its own, so some cards from the most recent sets will have to step up and take their place in the metagame; identifying those most likely to do so are another avenue for speculation success. In particular, it might be worth taking a look at cards that saw play late last year before sinking back beneath the surface. Two, Deadeye Tracker and Dire Fleet Daredevil, I mentioned last week. But there are actually several others that have some potential as speculation targets. Hostage Taker ($0.93) has already increased by 100% this week, but these other three are still in the doldrums. Deathgorge Scavenger ($0.27) and Profane Procession ($0.11) are two I’m considering investing in over the next few weeks. III. Wizards and Saprolings ‘More fungus friends?!’ — Slimefoot, the Stowaway Izzet and Golgari will both be in Guilds of Ravnica. Izzet always gets a plethora of Wizards, and we can glean from the released concept art that Golgari will feature Elves and our favorite Fungi and Saproling friends. Wizards and Saprolings were already tier-three decks in Standard, and I think both will become more competitive after rotation. How competitive it is impossible to foretell, but it has made me more inclined to invest in this area. Golgari tokens don’t have many great speculation opportunities because most of the cards are common and uncommon. But two cards stand out: You should already have been picking up your Woodland Cemeteries, but definitely grab your playset if you haven’t already. Tendershoot Dryad ($0.19) is a powerhouse rare for a Golgari token deck, and it commanded a $1.00 price tag during the first month of Dominaria when players weren’t yet sick of getting crushed by Goblin Chainwhirler. I think it’s a coin flip to return to that price, so I’ll be picking up some copies and waiting for them to shoot up. (Hey, at least I laughed.) As with Golgari Tokens, many of the Wizard workhorses are common and uncommon, limiting our speculation options. There are some cards, however, I think are worthy of your consideration. Although Wizard’s Lightning and Naban are both good penny stocks, the Wizard I’m most excited about is Naru Meha ($0.30). I’m not saying that she’ll definitely go up in value — we have to see the Guilds of Ravnica spoilers — but I do believe that she could spike to $1.50 or more, and possibly settle at double or triple her present value. This is one of those low risk, low probability, high potential speculations that I like incorporating into my portfolio. I’m not sure we’ll see Sulfur Falls fall below $0.75 again, but I’ll be snapping up any copies that I do see there. Signing Off No matter what you think of my picks, I hope that you find value in incorporating some of the metrics I’m using into your speculation decisions. Mono Red will no longer be Standard’s Level 0 deck, aggressive decks are losing more than the Teferi decks, the balance and quality of mana will be changing, and all of this will impact the fabric of Standard. Considering these things when deciding where to put your money over the next several weeks will give you a definite leg up. As always, I look forward to reading your questions and comments. Last week I learned from the comments that there was a revolutionary rider who performed an even greater feat than Paul Revere, so who knows what we’ll learn this week! Are you a Quiet Speculation member yet? Have you joined the Quiet Speculation Discord yet? If you haven't, you're leaving value on the table! Join our community of experts, enthusiasts, entertainers, and educators and enjoy exclusive podcasts, questions asked and answered, trades, sales, and everything else Discord has to offer. Want to write for Quiet Speculation? All you need to succeed is a passion for Magic: The Gathering, an aptitude for getting value from your cards, and the ability to write coherently. Share your knowledge of MTG and how you leverage it to play the game for less – or even turn a profit. Kyle Rusciano Kyle started playing Magic with his little brother when they saw some other kids at a baseball camp playing. His grandma bought them some Portal: Second Age decks, and a hobby was born. Kyle played from Weatherlight through Invasion, then took a lengthy break until 2013. Now a PhD student in the humanities, the Greek mythology component of Theros compelled Kyle to return to the game. He enjoys playing Pauper and Limited as well as focusing on MTGO finance and card design. Follow him on Twitter at @KangaMage! More Posts Enjoy what you just read? Share it with the world! Reddit If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent suggestion of a "racial animus" fueling Obama’s critics is no more than political posturing, said Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley. Some GOP politicians and conservative media objected to Holder’s comments on ABC’s This Week on July 13, 2014. Riley, dubbed by Salon magazine as " the right’s favorite new race guru ," dismissed Holder’s claims as fear-mongering a day later on Fox News’ The Kelly File. "This is about Democrats concerned about minority turnout in November, and they have nothing to offer these constituents," Riley said. "It’s motivating them by scaring them, telling them that voter ID laws suppress the black vote, even though black voter turnout in 2012 exceeded the rate of white voter turnout, even in the states with the strictest voter ID laws." The political and racial motivations and effects behind voter ID laws have been debated for quite some time. We wondered, how did voter ID laws impact voter turnout across the board? The phantom poll booth Riley told us he got the statistic from the U.S. Census Bureau. The federal data agency indicated in a 2013 report that the black voting rate (66.2 percent) indeed surpassed the white voting rate (64.1 percent) by 2.1 percentage points in the 2012 elections. According to experts, the strictest voter ID laws are when voters are required to present a photo ID when casting a ballot, and if they don't, are required to take additional steps before their vote can be counted. If a voter can’t present an ID, he or she is issued a provisional ballot and must submit an ID within a certain amount of time (usually 2 to 6 days). The Census reports that in these states, black voter rates in the 2012 elections were just as high if not higher than white voter rates: Missouri: Black voter turnout higher by more than 6.0 percent* Tennessee: Black voter turnout higher by more than 6.0 percent Georgia: Black voter turnout higher by 0 to 5.9 percent Indiana: Black voter turnout higher by 0 to 5.9 percent Virginia: Black voter turnout higher by 0 to 5.9 percent* Arkansas: Voter turnout not statistically different* Kansas: Voter turnout not statistically different Featured Fact-check “Biden failed to condemn far-left violent groups like Antifa, instead faulting only the brave men and women of law enforcement.” Texas: Voter turnout not statistically different* (* indicates that voter ID laws were not in effect in 2012) So even with the voter ID laws, black voter turnout was higher than white voter turnout nationally and in the states with the strictest voting laws. But experts say that doesn’t necessarily mean that voter ID laws don’t suppress -- or, at the very least, attempt to suppress -- the minority vote. The jury is still out The impact of stricter voter ID laws is difficult to gauge because there are many factors determining voter turnout overall. It may be easy to tally the people who are turned away at the polls, but tracking why someone didn’t show up at the polls is another question, said Alex Keyssar, a political scientist at Harvard University. "It’s safe to say there will be consequences (because of the voter ID laws), but measuring them is extremely difficult," he said. The newness of the legislation makes the impact of the voter ID laws that much more difficult to determine. In fact, many of the laws weren’t even in place in the 2012 elections. (Virginia's law goes into effect in 2014 , Arkansas' went into effect in 2013 and Texas' went into effect in 2013.) "One election doesn’t make a pattern," said John Hansen, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. "We have a distance to go before we can measure the impact of these laws." So what accounted for the high turnout of black voters in 2012? Barack Obama, Hansen and Keyssar said. In this year’s midterm elections and in 2016’s presidential race, when Obama’s name won’t appear on the ballot and the laws are in place, the rates may tell a different story. And the increased black voter rates in 2012 could also be interpreted as an unintended consequence or a "backlash effect," according to Erin O’Brien. a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The stricter voter ID laws may have actually motivated the minorities the laws were trying to suppress. That motivation, unlike its effects, is backed by pretty strong evidence. "There’s an old quote by David Henry Thoreau. He said, ‘Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk,’ there’s some trout in this milk," Hansen said. After Obama’s 2008 victory, the wave of passing new laws on voter access -- including photo ID restrictions as well as proof of citizenship requirements, registration restrictions, and absentee and early voting restrictions -- had a couple of things in common, according to O’Brien’s widely cited 2013 report . The laws were proposed and enacted in states considered to be swing states, where Republicans controlled the government in both chambers, and where minority populations are having more impact on election results. "Historically, the group that has to fight the hardest are communities of color. This legislation has been forwarded at the exact time that we’re becoming more and more demographically diverse," O’Brien said. "These laws were passed in states where minority voter turnout was higher in 2008 and with larger proportions of African-Americans. So they can be seen as ways to clear these (demographic) hurdles." The ruling Riley said "black voter turnout in 2012 exceeded the rate of white voter turnout, even in the states with the strictest voter ID laws," despite the Democrats claiming the voter ID laws suppress the black vote. While there is debate about the reasons why -- and if the phenomenon will last -- Riley's statistic checks out. Census data shows that indeed, for the first time ever, black voter turnout was higher nationally than white voter turnout, and at least just as high in the states with strict voter ID laws. We rate this claim True.

So Democrats slowly moved their proposals to the right, relying more on private insurance rather than government programs. As they shifted, though, Republicans shifted even farther right. Bill Clinton’s plan was quite moderate but still couldn’t pass. When Barack Obama ran for president, he faced a choice. He could continue moving the party to the center or tack back to the left. The second option would have focused on government programs, like expanding Medicare to start at age 55. But Obama and his team thought a plan that mixed government and markets — farther to the right of Clinton’s — could cover millions of people and had a realistic chance of passing. They embarked on a bipartisan approach. They borrowed from Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachusetts, gave a big role to a bipartisan Senate working group, incorporated conservative ideas and won initial support from some Republicans. The bill also won over groups that had long blocked reform, like the American Medical Association. But congressional Republicans ultimately decided that opposing any bill, regardless of its substance, was in their political interest. The consultant Frank Luntz wrote an influential memo in 2009 advising Republicans to talk positively about “reform” while also opposing actual solutions. McConnell, the Senate leader, persuaded his colleagues that they could make Obama look bad by denying him bipartisan cover. At that point, Obama faced a second choice – between forging ahead with a substantively bipartisan bill and forgetting about covering the uninsured. The kumbaya plan for which pundits now wax nostalgic was not an option. The reason is simple enough: Obamacare is the bipartisan version of health reform. It accomplishes a liberal end through conservative means and is much closer to the plan conservatives favored a few decades ago than the one liberals did. “It was the ultimate troll,” as Michael Anne Kyle of Harvard Business School put it, “for Obama to pass Republican health reform.” Today’s Republican Party has moved so far to the right that it no longer supports any plan that covers the uninsured. Of course, Republican leaders are not willing to say as much, because they know how unpopular that position is. Having run out of political ground, Ryan, McConnell and Trump have had to invent the notion of a socialistic Obamacare that they will repeal and replace with … something great! This morning they were also left to pretend that the Budget Office report was something less than a disaster. Their approach to Obamacare has worked quite nicely for them, until now. Lying can be an effective political tactic. Believing your own alternative facts, however, is usually not so smart.

Israeli startup MetoMotion is getting ready to roll out the first-ever robotic tomato harvester. This will be the first application of GRoW, MetoMotion’s multipurpose robotic system for taking over labor-intensive, high-cost tasks in greenhouses. The tomato-picking robot is one step closer to market after the completion of a $1.5 million investment round led by a major industry player in The Netherlands, said MetoMotion CEO Adi Nir. “Our Netherlands-based investor’s combined resources and rich knowledge of the greenhouse industry will provide us with an outstanding opportunity to develop our system with the right fit for the market,” Nir added. “We can bring our first product to the market and offer farmers a valuable solution to one of the most urgent issues they face in vegetable production today.” MetoMotion, a portfolio company of The Trendlines Group in Misgav, uses technology to address increasing labor shortages and mounting labor costs, which can account for up to half of total greenhouse production costs. Designed for seamless integration with existing greenhouse infrastructure, GRoW incorporates advanced 3D vision system and machine vision algorithms to identify and locate the ripe fruit; multiple, custom-designed, robotic arms; an end-effector for damage-free harvesting; and an onboard boxing system. GRoW can be adapted to other labor-intensive greenhouse tasks such as pruning, pollination, de-leafing and data collection for cultivation analysis. “This development will radically change current greenhouse practices and will provide many benefits for growers to grow their businesses further,” the unnamed Dutch strategic investor commented.

by Nafeez Ahmed Part 1 of Return of the Reich: Mapping the Global Resurgence of Far Right Power — an INSURGE intelligence investigative series commissioned by Tell MAMA More than half a century after the Second World War, the West is sliding toward a resurgence of far-right political movements that could make the 1930s pale in comparison. A new report[i] funded by the German Federal Foreign Office reveals that public support for far-right political parties in Europe has risen exponentially since 1999, resulting in record wins in the European Parliament, as well as levels of influence on national governments unprecedented in the post-war era. An analysis of the report’s data suggests that far-right parties are poised to take a third of all seats in the next round of European elections in 2019. The German report coincides with a wide range of new scholarship exploring the similarities between anti-Muslim hatred today, and vitriolic anti-Semitism in the early 20th century. These new scientific studies by leading experts paint an alarming picture of the rise of xenophobia across the world’s most powerful liberal democracies, with stark parallels to the toxic climate of the 1930s. Far-right tipping point in Europe? As anti-Muslim sentiment has been mainstreamed in the United States through the xenophobic rhetoric of the leading Republican presidential candidates, far-right parties across the European Union are making dramatic electoral gains. In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) sent shockwaves throughout the country with its extraordinary success in the presidential elections, a hair’s breadth away from total victory. In March, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party made startling gains in regional elections in three states. The AfD is now Germany’s third most popular[ii] political party according to an opinion poll[iii] conducted in November 2015 by INSA. This is being mirrored elsewhere, with far-right parties building popular support in Slovakia (People’s Party), Hungary (Jobbik), Greece (Golden Dawn) and France (National Front). But the new report sponsored by the German Foreign Office shows that these gains are part of an alarming pattern of increasing popular support that is likely to escalate. The report by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, released in February 2016, warned that “far-right parties and movements are on the offensive in many countries worldwide in the wake of the global financial crisis.” The European elections two years ago, the report concludes, were “the most successful to date for the far-right parties in the EU.” Far right parties have “secured 172 seats in the European Parliament. That corresponds to just under 23 percent of the seats.” The new report, is authored by Thilo Janssen, a research fellow in the European Parliament. His review of European election data since 1999 reveals that the rate of increase of seats for far-right parties has doubled in each election. Exponential growth Looking closely at the rate of increase, it is clear that this is an exponential trend. In 1999, far-right seats took 11 per cent of the European Parliament. This rose by 1.5 per cent to 12.5 per cent of seats after the 2004 election. In the 2009 election, the number of far-right seats increased by 3 per cent — double the previous rate of increase — to 15 per cent. Then in the 2014 election, the number of far-right seats rocketed up to 22.9 per cent — an increase of 6.9 per cent, which is more than double the preceding rate of increase. Source: Janssen (2016) If this exponential rate of increase continues, far-right parties could win 37 per cent of seats in the European Parliament in the next election. This happens to be the same percentage of German votes that Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party won in July 1932, precipitating the rise of the Nazi regime. That parity should not be assumed to imply that today’s European far-right will at this point automatically acquire the access necessary to cement control of the levers of power in the European Parliament. Even at the point of his party’s entry into government, Hitler still required concessions from the left among other forms of collaboration to assure his rise to power. However, the parallel should be taken seriously as a signal that if current trends continue, the European far-right could be in a formidable position by 2019. If these far-right parties are able to organise coherently as a single voting bloc in the European Parliament from this position with dramatically greater access to EU funding, this could provide a foundation for further consolidation and expansion, both internationally and among their own domestic constituencies. “Right-wing populist parties in the EU are persistently on the rise, which in some Member States has taken them to the brink of obtaining a majority in parliamentary elections,” observes Janssen in his report, who also points out that their numerical strength in the EU Parliament is “chiefly due to successes in the economically strong Member States in the north and west of the EU” — namely, the UK, France, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Finland and Belgium. Despite major differences, these parties share a focus on populist resentments against immigrants, often grouped together as “Muslims”; and unwavering hostility toward the supranational EU, perceived as “the embodiment” of capitulation to the existential threat of Islam. In November 2015, Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn — who chairs the EU’s General Affairs Council in Brussels — warned that the nationalist policy agendas of anti-immigrant far-right parties could catalyse an EU break-up “within months.” “This false nationalism can lead to a real war,” he told the Germany press agency, DPA. Islamophobia as cover for far-right ideology Although these groups portray Muslims as ‘the enemy’, and some advocate support for Israel, new research confirms that this is a tactical shift to provide cover for their far-right origins and sympathies. A peer-reviewed study published in early April in the Routledge journal Israel Affairs finds that anti-Muslim hatred is increasingly being used by far-right extremists as a proxy for longstanding racist and anti-Semitic ideologies.[iv] The paper, authored by Professor Amikam Nachmani — chair of the Department of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University — highlights semantic parallels in the way Jews and Muslims have been targeted by historic and contemporary fascists: “Like today’s Muslim immigrants who are described as preferring ghettoization and parallel societies, Jews were said to emphasise their separate existence, exclusiveness and rejection of universalism since Biblical times… Nazi-style rhetoric employed against the Jews is now targeted against Muslims.” Whereas the Nazis cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler’s Mein Kampf to ‘prove’ that all Jews are agents of an international conspiracy to control the world, today selective cherry-picking of Islamic texts is used to claim that Islam commands “every Muslim to fight an uncompromising holy war against non-Muslims.” Muslims in the West are “perceived as the spearhead of the campaign to Islamise Europe,” explains Nachmani, while Muslim population growth is presented as a covert strategy to conquer Europe: “Since the mass migration of the presently 30–40 million unemployed or refugee Arabs will be heading to Western Europe, Armageddon will be fought out on European soil.” Professor Nachmani’s most alarming argument is that many of the most popular far-right groups are using the banner of Israel to conceal their neo-Nazi sympathies, and garner political legitimacy: “Right-wing Europeans, among them Holocaust deniers and ardent anti-Semites, frequently decry Arab and Muslim migrants… But these very circles also consider it ‘natural’ to show sympathy for Israel, perceived by them as a staunch enemy of the Arab nation and Muslims… European right-wingers, nationalists and fascists are presently engaging in a freakish turn: they aim to gain legitimacy by courting Israel. They hope to brush aside their hatred of Jews and the anti-Semitic past of their countries, thanks to the support they grant to the Israeli cause in the Arab-Israeli/Palestinian-Israeli conflict…” Yet Nachmani writes that the same far-right groups have backed “proposals to limit Jewish religious freedoms.” He highlights their “proposed bans on circumcision, ritual slaughtering and distinctive religious attire” aimed primarily at Muslims: “Jewish law, however, prescribes similar practices. The result is that anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment amounts to anti-Semitism or, more accurately, anti-Judaism.” From anti-Semitism to anti-Muslim hatred The tactical shift in xenophobic discourse is possible because there are important structural parallels between the targeting of Jews and the demonisation of Muslims. A new peer-reviewed paper published in The Anthology of Migration and Social Transformation finds that “the structure and function of anti-Muslim racism and anti-Semitism are actually similar in terms of the ways in which they operate especially in times of social-economic and political turmoil.”[v] The anthology, published by science publisher Springer, is part of IMISCOE (International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion), the largest academic network on migration in the world. Study author Professor Ayhan Kaya of the European University Institute in Florence is currently funded by the European Commission to research identity, pluralism and tolerance in the EU. Professor Kaya’s paper argues that although anti-Muslim racism and anti-Semitism cannot be lumped together due to fundamental historical differences, there are important commonalities: “Both anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim racism focus on belief in religious law to render Jews and Muslims as threats to the nation.” While anti-Semitism encompasses views that racialise Jews “as an assimilated threat to national interests emerging at moments of crisis”, this is now happening to Muslims: “Muslims are now being represented as a different kind of folk devil, a social group that is openly and aggressively trying to impose its religion on national culture… Muslims have become global ‘scapegoats’, blamed for all negative social phenomena such as illegality, crime, violence, drug abuse, radicalism, fundamentalism, conflict and financial burdens… There is a growing fear in the United States, Europe and even in Russia and the post-Soviet countries that Muslims will demographically take over sooner or later.” According to Kaya, public opinion poll data demonstrates sharp increases in negative attitudes toward Muslim minorities across the West, in some cases reaching close to 50 per cent of each national population. This has manifested in “increasing numbers of attacks and instances of discrimination against Muslims, as well as rallies and gatherings touting anti-Muslim messages.” Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hatred: two sides of the same racism Kaya’s findings are corroborated[vi] by a 2015 Pew Global Attitudes poll of European public opinion, which found that negative opinions toward Muslims was more than twice the rate of negative opinions towards Jews. The percentage of Europeans who viewed Jews unfavourably was just 13 per cent, compared to 33 per cent who viewed Muslims unfavourably — a third of the Europeans surveyed. The poll also showed that half or more of the public in six of the European countries surveyed believed that the emergence of far-right ‘Eurosceptic’ parties is a good thing. These complexities are reflected in recent hate crime data. In London[vii], a total of 483 incidents against Jewish people and properties was recorded for the year 2014 to 2015, an increase of 61 per cent from the preceding year. In the same period, 818 Islamophobic hate crimes were recorded, nearly double the number of anti-Semitic attacks, and an increase of 63.9 per cent from the previous year. In France[viii], anti-Semitic attacks continued to outnumber anti-Muslim hate crimes. Although anti-Semitic incidents dropped by 5 per cent in 2015, their total number was 806. While attacks against Muslim people and properties tripled in volume, their total number was 400 — half the number of attacks committed against Jews. In testimony earlier this month before an OSCE session on hate crimes, Susan Corke — Director of Anti-Semitism and Extremism for Human Rights First — said that the prevalence of anti-Semitism in France was occurring “within the context of broader and interrelated phenomena including the ascendancy of the far-right National Front party, mounting anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment, the spread of Islamist extremism, and the increasing alienation of many Muslims in France.” In other words, anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hatred, despite varying degrees, remain closely interrelated and are both at record levels. Europe’s perpetual Jewish-Muslim problem The waxing and waning of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hatred is no coincidence, but part of their complex interrelationship in the context of the tortured evolution of European nationalism. A paper released late last year by Professor Ethan B. Katz, a historian at the University of Cincinnati, in the Wiley journal Cross Currents, illustrates how both forms of xenophobia emerged directly from Europe’s colonial-era civilising missions.[ix] Colonialism, writes Professor Katz, “shaped, utilised, and manifested itself in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.” During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Katz says, “Islamophobia became much more pronounced in the colonial venture than anti-Semitism. Although Jews’ position was never entirely secure, in certain instances they even benefited from colonial rule.” After the First World War, however, at the height of the colonial venture, anti-Muslim hatred was rapidly overtaken by anti-Semitism across Europe: “Both Jews and Muslims were frequently depicted with highly racialised imagery and in many instances faced significant legal and social discrimination. At the same time, Muslims in particular were often the target of propaganda campaigns meant to win their loyalty for one European power or another, as well as provocations meant to turn them against Jews.” During the Second World War, Europe’s increasingly violent anti-Semitism “crystallised in the horrors of the Holocaust.” Europe’s colonial powers and other political forces “saw in Muslims a possible constituency for their wartime aims,” elevating their position considerably. In ensuing decades, Katz argues, far-right parties have made “Islamophobic anti-immigrant sentiment far more central to their politics than anti-Semitism.” For Katz, this grim history provides evidence that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are “inseparable hatreds” that have fluctuated in the context of geopolitical and nationalistic trends within Europe. “At no time were anti-Semitism or Islamophobia entirely separate from one another,” he points out. “Rather, they were often mutually reinforcing, either through policies of divide-and-rule or through the heightened fears they produced about both Jews and Muslims.” He closes with the following words of caution: “… when the rhetoric of either anti-Semitism or Islamophobia is invoked, whichever remains unmentioned is often present in the uncomfortable silence.” Minorities at risk This growing body of research raises urgent issues. Firstly, it demonstrates that the new far-right are perfectly capable of switching racialised loyalties for tactical reasons, demonstrating that Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe are very much in the same boat, regardless of public far-right overtures to Israel. Assumptions that these overtures imply a real reduction in anti-Semitic ideology are misleading. As this investigation will show in due course, this concern applies equally to far-right overtures to other minorities traditionally discriminated against by fascist parties, including black and ethnic minorities, religious groups like Sikhs and Hindus, LGBTQI+ people, and even those with disabilities. Secondly, political trends over the last 15 years suggest that a coalition of far-right parties — many with documented neo-Nazi sympathies — are poised to win shocking political victories across Europe over the next few years in national, regional and EU elections: and possibly as much as a third of seats in the European Parliament in 2019. Thirdly, this prospect calls into question the stability of the entire security architecture of the postwar international system. Whatever the flaws of this system — and they are real — it has permitted peace within Europe for 66 years. The potential fragility of intra-European cooperation and peace under a far-right resurgence should not be underestimated. References [i] Thilo Janssen, A love-hate relationship: Far-right parties and the European Union (Brussels, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016) https://www.rosalux.de/publication/42151/a-love-hate-relationship.html. Report funded by the German Federal Foreign Office. [ii] Jorg Luyken, ‘Hard-right AfD now 3rd biggest German party’, The Local.de (17 November 2015) http://www.thelocal.de/20151117/hard-right-afd-now-3rd-biggest-party-says-polling [iii] INSA survey data, http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/insa.htm [iv] Amikam Nachmani, ‘The past as a yardstick: Europeans, Muslim migrants and the onus of European-Jewish histories’, Israel Affairs (Vol. 22, No. 2, April 2016) [v] Ayhan Kaya, ‘“Islamophobism” as an Ideology in the West: Scapegoating Migrants of Muslim Origin’, in Anna Amelina, Kenneth Horvath, Bruno Meeus (eds.), An Anthology of Migration and Social Transformation, IMISCOE Research Series (Geneva: Springer, 2016) pp. 281–294 [vi] Bruce Stokes, Faith in European Project Reviving: Bust Most Say Rise of Eurosceptic Parties is a Good Thing (Pew Research Center, June 2015) http://www.pewglobal.org/files/2015/06/Pew-Research-Center-European-Union-Report-FINAL-June-2-20151.pdf [vii] Anil Dawar, ‘Jewish and Muslim communities both see race hate crimes rocket’, Daily Express (30 December 2015) http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/630446/Jewish-Muslim-hate-crimes-London [viii] ‘Anti-Semitic incidents in France down by 5 percent in 2015’, Jewish Telegraph Agency (20 January 2016) http://www.jta.org/2016/01/20/news-opinion/world/anti-semitic-incidents-for-2015-decrease-in-france-by-5-percent-over-previous-year [ix] Ethan Katz, ‘Shifting hierarchies of exclusion: colonialism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia in European history’, Cross Currents (Vol. 65, No. 3, September 2015) pp. 357–370

LONDON -- Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton watched Serena Williams compete against Angelique Kerber at Wimbledon on Saturday. Kerber defeated Williams 6-3, 6-3, to win the tournament. In a role reversal from her wedding -- at which Williams was a guest in May -- Markle watched her friend from the royal box. Markle and her sister-in-law Kate Middleton participated in a standing ovation as the players walked onto the court. Get Breaking News Delivered to Your Inbox Also supporting Williams on Centre Court are golfer Tiger Woods, Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour and writer-director Shonda Rhimes. "I was really happy to get this far," Williams said after the match. "I'm obviously disappointed but I can't be -- because I'm literally just getting started." Serena Williams returns against Germany's Angelique Kerber on July 14, 2018. Oli Scarff / AFP/Getty Williams is a seven-time Wimbledon champion and her 23 major trophies rank second all-time to Margaret Court. This final came just 10 ½ months after the 36-year-old American gave birth to a daughter and dealt with a serious health scare. She was playing in the fourth tournament of her comeback.

Well hello there miss.Seems like you got some icecream on your chest.I would volunteer to clean that for you....

Big story going viral on Facebook and in the Israeli press about a vulgar and racist exchange between some Israeli passengers and a flight attendant on an Israir Airlines flight to Varna, Bulgaria. Ami Kaufman at +972 cuts to the chase: The headlines are pretty much the same all over, and include the words: “Watch: The Ugly Israeli,” in reference to what Israelis see as the rude behavior they are notorious for worldwide. However, few (including mainstream media) paid attention to the little gem hidden in the video, a one-liner that epitomizes the casual racism so widespread in the Jewish state. The flight attendant refuses to sell chocolate to a passenger (apparently he was busy with another passenger, it’s difficult to discern the exact reason). Things heat up. Then, her sister sitting across the aisle says at 0:28 in the video below: “She just wants to buy chocolate, what is she – an Arab?” ……Of course, this is understandable. The only reason a flight attendant refuses to sell chocolate to someone is because they’re Arab. #Facepalm. Few paid attention? Maybe they tried to bury it? The Jerusalem Post, published the video with English captions (original Hebrew) but skipped mention of the racist segment of the exchange. It’s difficult to comprehend how casual racism is so embedded in Israeli society that the insertion of the woman yelling her bigoted screed is completely passed over in their coverage. We’ve documented the casualness of Israeli racism before. It’s ugly and sad, something I’ll likely never get used to or expect. This video exposes that casualness which may be the reason, thus far, it’s gotten passed over by western media. But with all the attention it’s garnering on social media that’s probably about to change. Haaretz mentioned one Facebook user wrote in response to the video, “flight attendants from foreign airlines call the flight to Tel Aviv – Hell Aviv. I wonder why?” Here’s the video and the relevant exchange, translation from Hebrew by Reem Khamis-Dakwar: Passenger 1: You will sell me Chocolate. Do you understand? You are my worker, I paid money for you. Flight attendant: I am not your worker. You would die before I can be your worker Passenger 1: I want the chocolate. Why wouldn’t you sell me the chocolate. I want the chocolate. What is that. I want the chocolate Flight attendant: If you think you’re raising your voice and being a little bit more violent so most probably you won’t achieve what you want Passenger 2: Sister of Passenger 1 from the other side of the aisle: Sell her the chocolate, what is she an Arab? F**your god (Arabic curse), sell her the chocolate! Do you hear? She paid for her plane ticket sell her the chocolate! Yalla (Another Arabic word) Lower your tone fast! Sell her the chocolate fast!Ya peace of trash! What is that he is not selling her chocolate? A peace of trash ! You will not sell my sister chocolate. At this point, the flight attendant approach the sister and told her??Remember my words, To “Varna”(Bulgaria) you will not arrive A third passenger sitting next to passenger 1 joined by a string of curses toward flight attendant. Thanks to Ofer Neiman and Jamil Dakwar

Bavaria's governing party has pushed through a law that significantly expands police powers in the southern German state, even as critics warn it puts civil liberties at risk. The center-right Christian Social Union used its majority in the state assembly to pass the bill late Tuesday. The party, which is part of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Union bloc, is trying to bolster its law-and-order image ahead of state elections in the fall. The new law allows police to take preventive measures — including targeted surveillance — if they believe there is a "threat" of a crime occurring. Police will also get expanded authority to use DNA evidence. The non-governmental group Society for Civil Rights warned the law would remove many of the checks that exist on police powers.

Does she have her own SCP cell, and how would they contain her and make sure she doesn't get out? (unless she's allowed to go out, whenever she wants to get fastfood or whatever lol)

The Gainesville City Council also unanimously passed the resolution Friday afternoon. “We’re also really imploring citizens to help and be part of the solution by choosing not to go out unless they need to (and) by choosing to social distance. This is a time when the entire community is really going to have to come together like never before, in no time that we’ve ever seen before,” councilwoman Juli Clay said Friday. Clay said local leaders have looked at resolutions and orders from roughly 50 other communities, and she said she feels the response here is in line with others. Mandating compliance by citizens is tricky, Clay said, because there are a number of reasons why someone could be out for essential services. “We’re trying to leave some of the freedoms up to people and ask them to use the very best common sense that they have to do some of these things that will obviously slow the coronavirus,” Gainesville councilman George Wangemann said. If something were to be mandated, Wangemann said it would probably work much better if it came from the state level rather than the municipal level. Regarding the legality of making a mandate with enforceable penalties, Hall County Board of Commissioners Chairman Richard Higgins said there has not been much research on what they can or cannot do in this arena. “We hope that people would follow the direction. I think people are doing that. I don’t think there is as many people out as there were a week ago,” he said. Gainesville Mayor Danny Dunagan said he also seen fewer people out in public. “The majority of the people that I’m talking to are staying at home, unless they have to go to work or the grocery store or the doctor or the drugstore,” Dunagan said. “If you ride through the city of Gainesville and the square, it’s dead. There may be a few people out there wandering around, and there may be a couple sitting at a bench by themselves, but as a whole, I think our citizens are doing a good job.” Dunagan said he was also unsure about the city’s ability to issue a mandate. “I think we could, if the Council decided to, which I’m not in favor of right now, is a shelter in place, but I think that may be as far as we can go,” he said. Councilman Sam Couvillon said officials want people to stay at home as much as possible and see the severity of the issue. “I’m the kind of guy that wants to give people their freedoms and have as little government intervention as possible, but it’s just like each time we do something it just doesn’t seem to be enough,” Couvillon said. “So, we want people to have some self-responsibility and take it upon themselves to do the right thing, and I feel like if we just implore on them to stay at home except for if it’s absolutely necessary, then hopefully they’ll get the message.” Couvillon, who works in insurance, said he has seen the economic effect of the pandemic as companies lay off employees and leave them without health insurance. “It’s not something that I can just make a decision in a linear matter and just say, ‘OK, stay at home and everything is going to be better,’ because for the person who has to stay at home who is no longer receiving a paycheck and doesn’t have health insurance to pay for his medicine, things are just as perilous for him,” Couvillon said. Nick Watson contributed.

The Reserve Bank’s quarterly economic forecast has been used as campaign fodder by both Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten after some predictions matched those of the government but some undermined it. On Friday the central bank said it was now forecasting year-average growth of 2.25% for 2018-19 and 2.5% for 2019-20. The figures for this financial year are down on those given by the RBA three months ago, but are “consistent” with the Coalition government’s federal budget forecasts, Scott Morrison said. “We have always taken a conservative approach when it comes to our forecast,” he said. However, those Coalition forecasts were not conservative enough to line up with the RBA’s predictions for 2019-20 – another drop on its last report and 0.25% below what the government had in the budget. Furthermore, on a year-end basis, the central bank has slashed its forecast in the financial year to June 2019 to just 1.75%. That is down from 2.5% previously and a full percentage point below what is seen as Australia’s potential growth rate at 2.75%. The disparity prompted the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, to quip that the RBA had “made the case indirectly for voting Labor”. “Now is the time for strong economic management in the interests of working and middle-class people. Our set of books has caught the government flat-footed,” he said. In its monetary statement on Friday, the RBA said the labour market was performing “reasonably well” and underlying inflation had been lower than expected. This was despite “subdued growth in household income and the adjustment in the housing market … affecting consumer spending and residential construction”. “Non-labour sources of income have been subdued and are likely to remain so for a while, given the effects of the drought on farm incomes and of soft housing market conditions on the earnings of many other unincorporated businesses,” it reported. “Strong growth in tax payments has also subtracted from disposable income growth over recent years.” Having kept the interest rate unchanged since August 2016, the RBA said it would be paying “close attention” to the labour market in its coming meetings. It is now considered relatively likely the central bank will cut the cash rate later in the year, having left them on hold for the 30th meeting in a row on Tuesday. “There is really only one reason the Reserve Bank cuts rates and that is to stimulate economic growth,” Guardian Australia’s economics columnist, Greg Jericho, has written. “Unlike the government cutting tax cuts to curry favour and put money in the pocket of sectors of the electorate they wish to reward, the RBA does not need to get re-elected.”

Pop! My Little Pony 16 3 3/4" tall Vinyl Imported By Funko Tempest Shadow fromis given a fun, and funky, stylized look as an adorable collectible Pop! vinyl figure from Funko!Hot Topic exclusive! PayPal/Venmo is currently not accepted on Presale and Backorder items.

Peter Siddle primed for recall to Australian Test team Updated It is the million-dollar question facing Australia's Test selectors which veteran all-rounder Dan Christian reckons is a no-brainer. With spearheads Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood locked in for Thursday's first Test against South Africa, the selection panel must decide whether to name Peter Siddle or Jackson Bird as third seamer. The pair have gone head to head in Victoria's Sheffield Shield day-night clash with Tasmania at the MCG and are both likely to feature in the 12-man Australian squad to be named on Friday. Bird took advantage of his opportunity to impress with the pink ball with figures of 3 for 75 and 3 for 59 in Victoria's two innings. With a day's play remaining at the end of Thursday, Siddle had two wickets for the match but has sent down 17 overs compared to Bird's 43. The 31-year-old seamer's workload has been managed in his return to first-class cricket after suffering a stress fracture in his back in February but Siddle's Victorian teammates were only too happy to make the case for his Test recall. "I've seen a lot of him recently when he's played for us, last year and this year, and he's just a class above, I think," Christian said. "He should probably be in the Australian team all the time. "When you've got someone like Starc at the other end bowling 150km/h and swinging it around ... Sidds has done that (holding) role for six or seven years. "He's got 200 Test wickets. He's a proven performer so hopefully he gets another opportunity." Siddle has looked sharp in his limited bowling opportunities and is likely to feature prominently in Victoria's pace attack on Friday, with Tasmania sitting on 3 for 19 and requiring 346 runs to pull off an unlikely win. "We held him back a little bit to be able to bowl him more tonight and then again tomorrow morning," Christian said on Thursday. "It worked out really well. Obviously everyone else picked up the slack and bowled really well today." AAP Topics: cricket, sport, australia, vic First posted

Held every year in New York, the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze is a 25-night-long Halloween event featuring some 5,000 hand-carved, illuminated pumpkins arranged into dinosaurs, sea monsters, zombies, and other spooky sculptural forms. Via Instagram: Although only associated with Halloween as we know it today since the late 1800s, the tradition of gourd carving dates back to the 18th and 19th centuries in rural Ireland and England. People created jack o’lanterns for the old holidays of Samhain and All Souls’ Night when spirits were thought to be the most active. Grotesque faces carved into the objects were meant to frighten away any ghouls seeking to do harm. See many more photos over on Flickr and Facebook. Several photos above courtesy Joshua Bousel and Bryan Haeffele. (via the Instagram Blog) Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member and support independent arts publishing. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, help support our interview series, gain access to partner discounts, and much more. Join now!

Virtually any American TV viewer alive in the 1970s or ’80s remembers Sorrell Booke as the greedy, corrupt, and still somehow lovable Boss Hogg on “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Virtually any American TV viewer alive in the 1970s or ’80s remembers Sorrell Booke (Jan. 4, 1930 – Feb. 11, 1994) as the greedy, corrupt and still somehow lovable Boss Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard. Booke died 20 years ago today, leaving behind a life story with more surprises than Hazzard County has car ramps. In honor of his passing, here are 10 things you probably didn’t know about Sorrell Booke. 1. Booke once conducted the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in his hometown of Buffalo, New York. 2. Booke was only mildly overweight, so he wore a fat suit to create the corpulent character of Boss Hogg. The suit brought his girth to 5 feet around. 3. Producers of The Dukes of Hazzard encouraged the comedic chemistry between Booke and co-star James Best, who played Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane, and often allowed the pair to ad-lib their scenes together. 4. During the Korean War, Booke served as a counterintelligence officer. 5. Booke could have called Sheriff Rosco a “dipstick” in multiple languages, as he was fluent in five. 6. Booke was an Ivy League man, having earned degrees from both Yale and Columbia. 7. In addition to The Dukes of Hazzard, Booke appeared in many landmark shows from the 1970s and ’80s like M*A*S*H, Soap and in a recurring role on All in the Family. 8. Booke ate raw liver, Boss Hogg’s favorite dish, in order to more fully immerse himself in the character. 9. As Booke’s health declined, he kept busy with voice acting. Careful ears can catch him in specials from Tiny Toon Adventures and Scooby-Doo in the late 1980s and early ’90s. 10. One of Booke’s last live-action roles was as Santa Claus in a 1988 Full House Christmas special. Sadly, Booke died of cancer in 1994 at 64, years before Hazzard reunion specials and a feature film brought the General Lee out of retirement. He was survived by his two children and legions of Hazzard fans. Written by Seth Joseph