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A magazine supplement with an image of Adolf Hitler and the title 'The Unreadable Book' is pictured in Berlin. No law bans “Mein Kampf” in Germany, but the government of Bavaria, holds the copyright and guards it ferociously. (Thomas Peter/REUTERS)
The city that was the center of Adolf Hitler’s empire is littered with reminders of the Nazi past, from the bullet holes that pit the fronts of many buildings to the hulking Luftwaffe headquarters that now house the Finance Ministry.
What it doesn’t have, nor has it since 1945, are copies of Hitler’s autobiography and political manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” in its bookstores. The latest attempt to publish excerpts fizzled this week after the Bavarian government challenged it in court, although an expurgated copy appeared at newspaper kiosks around the country.
But in Germany — where keeping a tight lid on Hitler’s writings has become a rich tradition in itself — attitudes toward his book are slowly changing, and fewer people are objecting to its becoming more widely available.
No law bans “Mein Kampf” in Germany, but the government of Bavaria, where Hitler officially resided at the time of his 1945 suicide, holds the copyright and guards it ferociously. German-language copies that were printed before 1945 are legal, although they command a premium price, and the book is available in translation elsewhere in the world.
But the question of whether to publish it in the country where Hitler plotted his empire has lost some of its edge in the Google era, when a complete German-language copy of the book pops up as the second result on the local version of the search engine.
“To say this is a very dangerous book, we must ban it, this is ridiculous,” said Wolfgang Wippermann, a professor of modern history at the Free University of Berlin. “Maybe it was necessary once, but now it’s over, it makes no sense. You can find it so easily.”
The publisher of the excerpts, London-based Albertus, has said it will appeal the Bavarian government’s injunction. In 2009, the publisher beat charges of copyright violation and the illegal use of Nazi symbols after the Bavarian government seized reprinted copies of the Nazi Party’s in-house newspaper.
The attempt to publish portions of “Mein Kampf” on Thursday was scuttled at the last moment, although the publisher, ready to capitalize on the publicity, had printed two versions of the pamphlet. The version propped on top of a heap of celebrity magazines at a newsstand in Berlin’s central Friedrichstrasse station was a slender, blue, 16-page leaflet that has historical commentary in one column and an image of blurred text stamped with “Unreadable” in the other, accompanied by two reproductions of Nazi-era newspapers.
“Mein Kampf” “is an awful book, and the whole thinking is absolutely not ours, but we have another view on it regarding the idea of packing it away. This idea is just naive,” said Alexander Luckow, a spokesman for the publisher. “In a free country, you need to discuss these very bad parts of German history.”
Still, he said, there are limits, and using Hitler’s words as inspiration, not as historical artifact, is where it crosses the line.
“The danger is allowing right-wing people to sell it in bookshops with their modern commentary,” he said. “This is forbidden and it’s good . . . not only in Germany, this should be equal in other countries in Europe. Anti-Semitism is not confined to Germany. You look and it’s all around Europe, dating back to the Middle Ages.”
The debate will soon be over, whether or not the latest excerpts make it to newsstands. German law extends copyright 70 years after the author’s death; after 2015, “Mein Kampf” will be fair game. Some in Bavaria’s government worry that neo-Nazis will publish their own version of the book shortly thereafter, and to counter that, they are encouraging a scholarly edition. A group of historians is preparing it.
Germany’s Jewish organizations have approached the publication with mixed emotions, sensitive that their country still has problems with neo-Nazis and anti-Semitism. The German government released a study this week that found that one in five Germans has anti-Semitic attitudes. And a neo-Nazi ring that has been linked to at least nine killings before it was shut down in November shocked Germans who thought they had done a thorough job working through their past.
“I do very well without any publishing of ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” said Dieter Graumann, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. “In a few years, it will be free, and I have every trust in the democratic maturity of the German people. . . . But for the moment, I am glad it is not.” |
For today’s post, I’d like to take a look at California’s voter initiative to legalize pot. If the measure passes, and the sky doesn’t fall, many other states will probably be looking at similar law changes in the near future. Our drug policy of the last century has simply not worked, and it’s heartening to see a state attempting to legalize marijuana.
The statistics on marijuana arrests are really shocking. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, which is in favor of legalization, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession between four and twelve times more than whites in California, even though studies have consistently shown that whites smoke more pot than blacks. In the last ten years, around 500,000 people have been arrested for possession. That’s absurd! Think about how expensive that is for the criminal justice system. California spends $216,000 for each juvenile inmate in its prison system, yet it spends only $8,000 per student in the Oakland school system. It seems to me that if you really want to limit drug use, it’d make more sense to spend more money keeping kids in school, helping them achieve.
The economic benefits of legalizing marijuana are mind blowing. If marijuana was legalized and taxed at the same rate of tobacco, the money we would save on law enforcement and gain in tax revenue equals about $17 billion. As Nicholas Kristof notes, that is enough money to send every three and four year old in a poor neighborhood to pre-school. Or we could spend that money improving public school education. Or we could use the money to shore up border defense. Whatever we do, $17 billion is not exactly a trivial amount.
For me, the biggest reason to legalize marijuana is to hurt the cartels. Immigration has emerged as a hot button issue recently, with Arizona passing a draconian immigration law and many similar propositions being considered by other states. People are worried about violence, and understandably so. No one wants to have foreign drug dealers operating in their back yard. But no matter how many laws we pass, or how much money we spend, marijuana from Mexico and other Latin American countries will always find a way across the border. Drug importers are smart, and the demand is so high that increased patrols by border agents and harsher prison sentences will not act as an effective deterrent. America will always have a demand for marijuana, and that means as long as the drug stays illegal, violent drug cartels will operate in our borders.
But what if the drug that the cartels are pushing is suddenly legal? No one in their right mind would buy pot off the street if they could instead walk into a dispensary and buy high quality marijuana legally, and probably for less money than the cartels are charging. Very few people actually want to have to hide their drug use. If given a choice, marijuana smokers would absolutely buy legal drugs. This would severely weaken the cartels, and decrease deaths related to drug trafficking.
I’m not advocating drug use here. I know people who have ruined their lives from excess drug use. But it’s not true that marijuana is the gateway drug that people have been demonizing for years. Just because someone smokes pot every once in a while doesn’t mean that person will turn around and become a heroin addict. Yes, marijuana intoxicates you, but so do legal drugs like alcohol. As long as sensible restrictions are built into the law, such as making it illegal to drive under the influence, then there is no reason that marijuana should not be legalized. |
Anarchists in solidarity with the purged immigrants of Agios Panteleimonas ventured once again to open the public playground which is kept locked by fascists in favor of segregation, leading to battle with riot police and five arrests.
On Tuesday 9/06 anarchists in solidarity to immigrants who are being daily terrorised by fascist thugs of the Golden Dawn neonazi party and their local allies in the area of Agios Panteleimonas, moved to unblock the entrance of the local children playground which the fascists want to keep locked in an effort to impose segregation between greeks and immigrants, and "to preserve the blood purity of the white race"...While unblocking the playground the anarchists were attacked by fascists who were soon routed before the arrival of riot police forces who engaged the anarchists in battle with the aim of protecting the fascists. During the clashes one policeman was injured and five protesters were arrested on criminal charges. After the end of the clashes, a local greek father, Mr Tasoulas, defying the reign of terror in the area, took his son to play in the coveted playground. Soon they were surrounded by fascists who blocked the exit of the playground and threatened to linch the father calling him a traitor. After he managed to handle the child to a sympathetic neighbor, the fascists beat the father in full presence of the chief of the local police station. The strong police forces present at the scene then arrested the father and took him to the local police station, where his solicitor, a leading figure of the legal world and human rights activist, was piled with eggs by fascists who threatened her life.
The new tension in the area comes after the euroelection ascent of LAOS, the fascist Popular Orthodox Alarm Party, to the 4th position with 7% of the vote. This in combination with the governing party's landslide defeat, has led the government to endorse the core of the extreme-right wing policies of LAOS, and pledge a mass sweeping operation against illegal immigrants and their greek supporters within the summer. As the concentration camp planned to be built in the old NATO airbase of Aspropyrgos is now deemed impractical, the government has committed several old military camps of disgraceful humanitarian standards around the capital for the purpose of "cleaning the city of foreigners". The measures and discourse comes as little surprise as it comes from a political party famous for wanting to displace homosexuals in desert islands in the late 1970s. Furthermore the "Law and Order" operation of the coming summer is said to also include a mass attack against anarchist squats, and solidarity actions to immigrants by the movement as a whole. This the government hopes to achieve via a virtual military occupation of the center of Athens for the summer months modeled on Olympics 2004, as well as the introduction of a disputed legislation that would eventually render protest marches illegal. Due to the lack of a legislative majority by one MP, the government has resorted to yet another legal trick by increasing the total number of MPs by one, non-elected member of its own liking for the summer session of the Parliament.
The dictatorial rule of the right-wing and the ruthless employment of its parastate agents is increasing the tension across the country. Last week one police station in Athens was attacked and a central tax office was bombed by a Marxist guerrilla group, while a series of luxury brothels frequented by the ruling class were destroyed. At the same time, the movement is on its guard in expectation of next Saturday's Gay Pride parade which last year was attacked by parastate fascist thugs, as well as in expectation of an evacuation of the old courts in down-town Athens which are occupied by immigrants and are a constant target by the bourgeois media who waste no time in supporting the fascists in a most unambiguous manner. |
The 45-year-old “highway shooter” who engaged in a 12-minute shootout with California Highway Patrol officers earlier this year now says Fox News host Glenn Beck has been an inspiration for his activity.
In a several thousand word expose for MediaMatters, Pacifica journalist John Hamilton interviewed the so-called highway shooter, Byron Williams, from prison.
In the interview, Williams details what he saw as an elaborate global conspiracy and tells the journalist — whom he sees as his “media advocate” — to look to specific broadcasts of Beck’s show for information on the conspiracy he describes. (MediaMatters says Beck’s show provided “information on the conspiracy theory that drove him over the edge: an intricate plot involving Barack Obama, philanthropist George Soros, a Brazilian oil company, and the BP disaster.”)
The release on Hamilton’s story explains that “Williams also points to other media figures — right-wing propagandist David Horowitz, and Internet conspiracist and repeated Fox News guest Alex Jones — as key sources of information to inspire his ‘revolution.'”
Williams is quoted as saying that “Beck would never say anything about a conspiracy, would never advocate violence. He’ll never do anything … of this nature. But he’ll give you every ounce of evidence that you could possibly need.”
“I collect information on corruption,” Williams says, “I’ve been at it for some time.”
Beck, in particular, he says, is “like a schoolteacher on TV.” Williams reportedly told Hamilton, “You need to go back to June — June of this year, 2010 — and look at all his programs from June, and you’ll see he’s been breaking open some of the most hideous corruption.”
Hamilton notes that extremism linked to anti-progressive propaganda is nothing new:
Conspiracy theory-fueled extremism has long been a reaction to progressive government in the United States. Half a century ago, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that right-wing thought had come to be dominated by the belief that Communist agents had infiltrated all levels of American government and society. The right, he explained, had identified a “sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.” In a 2009 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that the anti-government militia movement — which had risen to prominence during the Clinton administration and faded away during the Bush years — has returned. According to the SPLC, the anti-government resurgence has been buttressed by paranoid rhetoric from public officials like Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and media figures like Fox News’ Glenn Beck. Just last month, Gregory Giusti pleaded guilty to repeatedly threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — including threatening to destroy her California home — because he was “upset with her passing the health care law.” His mother told a local news station that he “frequently gets in with a group of people that have really radical ideas,” adding, “I’d say Fox News or all of those that are really radical, and he — that’s where he comes from.” After the 2008 election, Fox News personalities filled the airwaves with increasingly violent rhetoric and apocalyptic language. On his Fox News show, Beck talked about “put[ting] poison” in Pelosi’s wine.
Observers of this most recent act were mystified by one of Byron Williams’ reported targets: the Tides Foundation, a low-profile charitable organization known for funding environmentalists, community groups, and other organizations. Beck, it turned out, had attacked Tides 29 times on his Fox News show in the year-and-a-half leading up to the shooting.
In their writeup, The Huffington Post provided a video that detailed Williams’ attack, as posted on YouTube. It follows. |
New drunk-driving law cracks down on 3rd DUI LEGISLATURE
Drivers who are repeatedly caught drunk behind the wheel could lose their license for up to a decade under legislation signed by the governor Monday.
The measure by Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, allows judges to revoke a person's driver's license for up to 10 years if they have three or more convictions for driving under the influence within the prior decade. Currently, courts may only take away a repeat offender's driver's license for three years.
The law will take effect on Jan. 1, 2012.
Hill estimated that the measure could help take more than 10,000 repeat DUI offenders off the road each year. Nearly 188,000 DUI convictions were handed down around the state in 2008, he noted, with 9,164 of those drivers on their third conviction and 3,200 with four or more DUI offenses, Hill said.
"I urge judges across the state to use this new authority and take repeat DUI offenders off the road," Hill said in a statement.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there are 1.5 million DUI arrests in California each year, and one-third of those arrested are repeat offenders. In total, more than 310,000 Californians have three or more DUI convictions, according to the agency.
"This legislation is an important step toward making California's roads safer," Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a statement. "Those who have multiple DUI convictions should not be on the road threatening lives." |
While it’s good to see that number of obese and overweight children has (slightly) fallen for those starting school, one in 10 children is still entering reception obese or overweight, rising to one in five at the start of secondary school.
More startlingly, the figures from the Health & Social Care Information Centre show that 25% of children in poorer areas are obese, compared to about 11% in more affluent areas. Let’s absorb that disturbing fact – right now, Britain’s poor children are more than twice as likely to be obese or overweight.
Responses to these statistics have included calls for a ban on junk food advertising before the 9pm watershed, but is this really the most productive way forward?
What if it’s not so much about “junk food”, as we define it, but, rather, that all too often these days the junk is the food and the food is the junk – and that sometimes, for people on tight budgets, this is all that’s reasonably achievable?
Once poverty enters the equation, it’s simply not about junk food as we understand it anymore. Say junk food and an image springs to mind of people allowing their children to scarf down crisps, sweets, and the now notorious fizzy drinks, or burgers, pizzas and fried chicken from overflowing buckets. The implication is that the problem lies with the treats and extras, consumed on top of real meals and that children are being overindulged, to the detriment of their health.
However, this image of feckless, uncaring, underprivileged Britons encouraging their fat children to over-snack simply doesn’t ring true, especially considering that these are households where, by definition, money is tight.
On the contrary, it seems obvious that the actual meals are contributing hugely to the problem – and that this is where austerity is having a terrifying and sustained impact.
While healthy food is often prohibitively expensive, less healthy options are relatively as cheap as, well, chips. When parents have to find the cheapest food available for their family, it’s nearly always going to be less likely to be fresh; more likely to be highly calorific (therefore “filling”), as well as packed with additives whose addictive and metabolism-skewing properties should not be discounted.
You also have to factor in how exhausting poverty is. Often the last thing that stressed, skint parents need at the end of the day is to start a meal from scratch.
This is why, however well meant, the “why not buy some veg from the local market and make a lovely stew?” rationale so often takes on the shrill ring of Marie Antoinette’s fabled suggestion about the poor eating cake.
That’s the cruel thing about cooking. It’s not all about “lazy proles” and their lost culinary skills. Something that’s a hobby, a stress release, in an affluent household, too easily becomes an extra source of tension in an impoverished one. Moreover, “real” cooking can be expensive – from the ingredients, and the herbs and spices, to the equipment, even the gas or electricity. Hence the microwave, the ripping open of the packet, the easier solution. Who’s to judge? Plenty of people do.
Perhaps it could be acknowledged that the very concept of junk food has become absurdly dated and misleading. That shifts in fundamental food culture (the creep of junk into normal meals) appear to be a much more profound problem than merely overindulging in signposted treats. Kids eating rubbish has always been with us but it is only now that the staples, the dietary cornerstones, are also unhealthy, that their weight problems are escalating. Nor is the problem confined to junk food advertising – if only it were that simple. Like with most things that become uncontrollable in life, money lies at the core. Poverty isn’t only exhausting and limiting, it’s also highly fattening.
Coe did the right thing. But why did it take so long?
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Better late than never. Sebastian Coe has walked away from his Nike contract. Photograph: Lionel Cironneau/AP
Even though Sebastian Coe has finally resigned from his £100,000-a-year role as Nike ambassador, he still insists that there was no conflict of interest with his position as president of the IAAF. Is he on another planet or am I?
Coe’s resignation doesn’t prove that there was any wrongdoing, even with the email that surfaced relating to Eugene (birthplace of Nike) winning the right to stage the 2012 World Athletics Championships without others being allowed to bid. As things stand, Coe’s conduct appears to have been above board. Nevertheless he has to stop this ludicrous sulking as if a big fuss is being made about nothing.
This is a prime example of a big fuss being made about… something. Obviously, it is not feasible for the president of IAAF simultaneously to be signed up as an ambassador to a major international sportswear company. Likewise, Coe’s main argument concerning the longevity of his association with Nike (38 years) is resentful, entitled nonsense.
It’s time for Coe to be philosophical. This was a blatant conflict of interest and the only mystery is how it wasn’t dealt with when he became president earlier this year.
Let Katie Hopkins damn herself
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Katie Hopkins: the face of unreason. Photograph: Dan Kennedy/Discovery Communications/Dan Ken
It seems as though every week now there is a terrible darkening of the skies as a giant candlesnuffer slams down over the flickering wick of free speech.
This time, it happened at Brunel University, where Katie Hopkins was spouting her usual informed, enlightened views on welfare. (Oh sorry, I went a bit funny there.)
Hopkins wasn’t banned from speaking. Instead, just as she began to talk, a large bunch of students stood up, turned their backs on her and walked out of the hall. It was an action that was widely billed as a wonderful compromise protest, but it wasn’t really.
Of course it was better than banning – but only because anything is better than banning. It wasn’t spontaneous, and therefore looked staged and just a little pompous. Nor, crucially, did it respect one of the foremost principles of free speech.
Free speech is not just about someone being allowed to talk, it is also about them being properly heard and debated, and this holds true, even when that someone is as idiotic and offensive as Hopkins. Especially then.
For free speech to work, you have to let people speak first, and then challenge them via debate, which means no bans or, indeed, back-turnings and walk-outs.
Otherwise, all that happens is that people such as Hopkins remain wedded to the delusion that they’re fearless speakers of truth. Ideally, they should have their arguments brusquely shredded in a public forum.
The Brunel University walk-out was not a compromise protest, it was just a way of banning without actually banning. Everyone has to stop panicking and just allow people to be annoying bigots. Last time that I checked, the good people of Britain could cope. |
The Reds announced that they signed free agent outfielder Ryan Ludwick to a two-year deal with a mutual option for 2015 (Twitter link). The BHSC client obtains a $15MM guarantee following his best offensive season since he was a member of the Cardinals.
The Reds made the free agent outfielder a two-year two-year offer earlier in the week, but John Fay of the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that at least one other club was being more aggressive on Ludwick. The 34-year-old posted a .275/.346/.531 batting line with 26 home runs in 472 plate appearances for the Reds this past season, a marked improvement from 2010-11 when he didn't hit more than 17 home runs or post an OPS above .750.
Ludwick ranked 26th on MLBTR's list of top 50 free agents with MLBTR's Tim Dierkes correctly predicting that he would re-sign with the Reds.
Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com first reported the agreement and the dollar amount. Fay first reported the option year and that the Reds were making progress toward a deal. Photo courtesy of US Presswire. |
What if I want to build everything in ClojureScript
JiyinYiyong Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 31, 2017
Many things have changed since I wrote this post, check out updates on shadow-cljs. That’s might be promising.
JavaScript is becoming more and more mature. For front-end, React/Anguar/Vue are capable of building middle-size or even large apps, with help of all kinds of components and libraries. Deploying webapps is never easier, Webpack has almost all the features we need. For backend, Node.js ecosystem has been evolving since 2009, we have Express and Koa, with all kinds of middlewares. No mention how many developers are participating in “rewriting everything in JavaScript”.
JavaScript is a messy world. Mixed language paradigms, inconsistent languages features, lots of innovations toward different and sometimes opposite directions. It’s hard to get well with such an inconsistent programming language. However, it turned out people like to use it thanks to its successful ecosystem.
ClojureScript is in a different situation. We have faith in functional programming but there’s not a large community to support it. Here’s the problem in me. I want to build websites with only ClojureScript. How can I achieve that?
For front-end, ClojureScript libraries and components are relatively rare(or at least hard to find many of them on Google). Yes we can use use JavaScript libraries and components. However it’s not always true. Take an example from React and Vue, which are both in JavaScript, but it’s impractical to share components from each other. I saw people using React components in Reagent or Rum many times. I was convinced it’s possible. But I don’t think it’s easy since we may need so many components.
For backend it’s worse. People are using Clojure to build web servers. Being a JavaScript developer there are lots of barriers if I want to pick up the whole Java ecosystem. Developing and debugging Clojure is a lot different from ClojureScript. And for web servers, the JavaScript community is throwing away expressing and going toward Koa with async/await support, while in ClojureScript it’s core.async , a lot different. We can still Google and find blogs and projects on using React components in ClojureScript, but it’s fewer results for Node.js, besides, how about the framework and libraries? And I’m not sure about the database part either.
It’s not easy to believe in ClojureScript. To see JavaScript developers using create-react-app, using Koa, although slowly but most aspects of developing are covered by people who went ahead. In using ClojureScript, I have to take every step very carefully, sometimes in debugging without SourceMaps on variables, sometimes worried about where to find guides and docs, sometimes anxious about people misunderstanding my work.
I will still pick ClojureScript as the primary language for my personal projects. Also I’m fully aware that it adds limits to me so someday I still need to pick up some other languages to finish my work. It will be my big problem in the near future. I already see it and it made me feel sad that I can only write fast in ClojureScript. ClojureScript has some unique features that help me finished Stack Editor and Cumulo, but also trapped me here. I do hope that I learnt ClojureScript I can program all things I need, it’s always not true for any language.
Now I have to consider what to do next. In the past years I built many toy apps, none of them reached the complexity of real-world products. I have to learn such ability. Bet on ClojureScript or another? |
Ben White writing in the Independent:
This is Israel in 2012 according to a top UN body. Using unprecedented strong language, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) criticised Israeli policies in terms of “apartheid”, as part of their published observations following a regular review.
Affirming the kind of analysis that Israel’s advocates try to dismiss as lies or rhetorical excess, the Committee slammed Israel for violating the right to equality in numerous policy areas. CERD described “segregation between Jewish and non-Jewish communities”, a lack of “equal access to land and property”, and “the ongoing policy of home demolitions and forced displacement of the indigenous Bedouin communities” in the Negev.
The lack of a “prohibition of racial discrimination” in Israel’s Basic Law was highlighted, and more recent developments, such as the restrictions on family unification affecting Palestinian citizens were also part of CERD’s wide-ranging criticisms.
The Committee’s observations also covered Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories, showing how the same discriminatory patterns are found on both sides of the Green Line. Israeli settlements in the West Bank form part of a regime of “de facto segregation” severe enough to cause the Committee to remind Israel of the “prohibition” of policies of “apartheid”.
According to Dr David Keane, senior lecturer in law at Middlesex University and author of ‘Caste-based Discrimination in International Human Rights Law’, this is “the most cutting CERD recognition and condemnation of a legal system of segregation since apartheid South Africa”. |
RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson says the OPP's much-anticipated report into the RCMP's response to the Parliament Hill shootings will be released this week or next.
Paulson told the Senate's national security committee Monday his force are on the verge of releasing the report.
The report was commissioned by House Speaker Andrew Scheer after he asked for an independent police investigation following the Parliament Hill shootings.
The OPP led the investigation and submitted the report to the House of Commons in early April. When it was delivered, there were initial concerns whether the report would be made public or not.
Paulson told senators the report examines the RCMP's response to the Oct. 22, 2014 shooting, both outside Parliament Hill and inside Centre Block. That's where shooter Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was finally shot and killed.
Paulson also told senators the Mounties will release the remaining 18 seconds of the Zehaf-Bibeau cellphone video in the coming weeks. Zehaf-Bibeau recorded the video immediately before the fatal shooting.
The RCMP already released 55 seconds of the video at a Commons public safety committee meeting in March.
"This is in retaliation for Afghanistan and because [Prime Minister Stephen Harper] wants to send his troops to Iraq," Zehaf-Bibeau, says in the video.
"Canada's officially become one of our enemies by fighting and bombing us and creating a lot of terror in our countries and killing us and killing our innocents. So, just aiming to hit some soldiers just to show that you're not even safe in your own land, and you gotta be careful."
In March, Paulson told reporters the remaining 18 seconds was edited for "sound operational" reasons. Thirteen seconds were cut from the beginning of the video and five seconds were edited from the end. |
The way forward for autoworkers: An online interview with Jerry White
15 October 2015
This Sunday, October 18, at 3:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time (conversions here), the World Socialist Web Site will host an online interview with WSWS Autoworker Newsletter editor Jerry White to review the political lessons of the contract fight. White will be joined by WSWS reporter Eric London, who will conduct the interview and field questions from autoworkers across the country. The interview will be broadcast at wsws.org/autoworkers/interview.
The battle by autoworkers in the United States has reached a critical juncture. After Fiat Chrysler workers overwhelmingly defeated the contract pushed by the United Auto Workers earlier this month, the UAW has brought back another deal crafted to meet the strategic aims of the auto corporations and Wall Street.
No matter what the spin the UAW’s PR firm puts on it, the new deal, like the first, would accelerate the descent of autoworkers—once among the highest-paid industrial workers in the world—into the ranks of the working poor.
The challenges autoworkers face are immense, but the forces they can mobilize among workers and youth in the US and around the world are more powerful. To carry out a successful struggle, however, autoworkers who are leading this fight have to have a clear understanding of the economic and political forces that they confront.
To submit a question in advance of the interview, please register below. We urge our readers to make a donation to help the WSWS broaden the campaign amongst US autoworkers. |
Don’t raise your voice here.
Angela Kabari Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 20, 2017
My name is Angela. I am the woman in the centre of the current Ushahidi sexual harassment scandal.
The past six months have been some of the most bizarre in my life and, on the balance, I think there is benefit in sharing my experience with the world so that lessons may be learned from it. It is my hope that, my story shall prompt a change in company policies, both in the Kenyan tech space and in other fields.
I joined Ushahidi in September 2015 as a Capacity Development Officer for Making All Voices Count. My time there was mostly enjoyable: the work was challenging, the team was great, and the environment was liberal and progressive. All in all, a good place to be. Of course, everything was not perfect, but what organisation does not have issues and day-to-day frictions?
This changed on the morning of January 19th 2017, when Daudi Were, the Executive Director at Ushahidi asked me to have sex with a colleague, presumably for his own titillation. The events of that night left me troubled and confused. I knew that what had happened to me was not right, but I thought it was an isolated incident and decided to forget it and attempted to move on. (For details of this, see here my statement on the events of the night as well as a transcript of the audio. Some of the names in the transcript have been altered to protect the identities of my former colleagues. Aside from this, no other alterations have been made to it).
I managed to do this for precisely one week after which I began to lose focus on my work. Over the next two weeks, I started to experience migraines whenever I went to the office. I did not want to leave my bed, yet I was sleeping poorly. I had experienced some periodic stomach upsets prior to and during the team retreat. However, after the retreat, these became worse and more frequent. At first, I thought that this was due to the upheaval that the Making All Voices Count programme was experiencing at the time due to international politics (it was negatively impacted by Brexit and changes in US presidency).
I also thought that I might be physically ill so I sought professional advice from my doctor. I was diagnosed with a bacterial infection of the gut, but my doctor could not account for all my other symptoms. Upon his advice, I went to see a therapist who suggested some exercises to help me figure out what was wrong. I also took 3 weeks off from work from late February to mid-March as I thought I might be suffering from ordinary stress and burnout.
It was during this time off that I did the exercises prescribed by the therapist and I realised that my problem was psychosomatic. The distress from the incident in January had caught up with me, almost a month later. I had tried to pass off Daudi’s remarks as drunkenness or joking but my body wasn’t buying it. It was at this point that I decided to quietly resign; I still wasn’t convinced that it was something I could or should raise with my employers.
Once I had made this decision in early March, I separately confided in two close friends that I was looking for a new job because I was uncomfortable with continuing to work at Ushahidi. When they asked why I was leaving, I shared with them some details of what had happened with Daudi. In the course of our conversations, I was stunned to learn that Daudi’s comments were not the isolated incident I had assumed but rather that he had a years’ long, widely-known reputation for sexually inappropriate conduct, socially and at work.
After my leave was over, I began predominantly working from home, which thankfully was possible as Ushahidi allows remote working. I was going to the office only thrice a month on average and I timed my visits to the office to ensure that I would not have to run into Daudi. It was in early April, after a month of soul searching and conversations with three other women who had been on the receiving end of unwelcome attention from Daudi, that I came to the conclusion that something needed to be done. Unfortunately, I seemed to be the only person with both tangible evidence of his misconduct, as well as an employer-employee relationship. It is then that I sought legal advice and learned that, based on the provisions of Ushahidi’s HR Manual, as well as Kenyan and Florida Law, Daudi’s comments qualified as sexual harassment by creating a hostile environment. I was advised that I could file a court case but that it would be prudent to first give the company an opportunity to address the issue internally as the court should be a last resort.
With this in mind, I began to reach out to some of the women I had spoken to earlier. At this stage, I had been able to identify over five women who had also had inappropriate encounters with Daudi. Only one woman was willing to come forward if the Board could guarantee that she would remain anonymous. Some of the other women had no evidence of their allegations and thus did not expect to be believed. Others did not want to be associated with something so potentially scandalous or to rehash past traumatic events. It therefore took about three more weeks to get my ducks in a row and submit the complaint to the board; I did that on 4th May 2017.
See this timeline for what transpired since.
Since then, I have heard terrible stories from a total of eleven women who have told me about having similar unpleasant encounters with Daudi, in addition to another ten or so stories that I’ve been unable to verify. The behaviour told of in these stories varies from inappropriate and/or suggestive text messages to sending of pictures of male genitalia and pornography. In one incident Daudi allegedly exposed his genitals to a woman in the middle of a conversation about her work.
Viewed against this grim picture, I feel as if I got off lightly. And, in the larger spectrum of harassment that encompasses physical assault and even sexual assault, it is easy to dismiss what happened to me as trivial. Except that it is not. I’ve actually had people tell me “It was only words so it’s not a big deal — at least he didn’t rape you.” However, in my view, verbal harassment is not inconsequential; in addition to being traumatic, it is often the gateway to more grievous offences and thus should not be treated lightly or ignored.
The reason I did not come forward with my story earlier is because, under Kenyan law, it is not permitted to comment on matters currently before a court. In this case, I was advised that as a show of good faith I should uphold this convention and extend its application to the internal Ushahidi process, even though the convention does not apply because the internal process was not judicial. But now that the Ushahidi Board has suspended Daudi after finding him guilty of gross misconduct, and will issue him with a notice to show cause why his employment should not be terminated, I am of the view that I am finally free to speak and comment on this entire debacle.
I have two main bones of contention. The first is Daudi’s behaviour. Based on the additional allegations made via tweets and offline discussions that have occurred since the news of my complaint came to light on 9th July, it would not be a stretch to call Daudi’s alleged behaviour predatory. Such predation is enabled by a culture of silence and secrecy that encourages victims of harassment to “not make a fuss” or “persevere” or “just ignore him until he gets tired or bored and goes away.” This culture leads many, many victims to not call out predatory behaviour and report it as the violence it actually is. This culture feeds into the victims’ fears that there is no point in speaking out against the harassment they face and leads them to feel like they have no option but to suffer in silence. This must stop! We cannot expect victims of harassment to speak up if they are (rightly) afraid that public opprobrium will follow.
My second bone of contention is the Board’s response. I have been deeply let down by the actions and inaction of David Kobia, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich and Jenny Stefanotti. Ever since I lodged my complaint on 4th May, I have been subjected to all the negative repercussions that make victims of harassment afraid to speak out:
Lack of support: Over the 74 days of this ordeal, not a single board member has reached out to inquire about my well being in any way, shape or form. Not a phone call, not an email, not through a third party. I shall repeat this again: nobody from Ushahidi leadership or the board has at any point bothered to ask if I’m okay or sought to alleviate the adverse impact this has had on my work and health. The only person in management who displayed any concern is my supervisor who, even though he is my direct line manager, only found out about this when I informed him of my intention to leave Ushahidi on 19th June. The Board have claimed on several occasions that they refrained from enquiring about my well-being because they feared incurring legal liability. To the best of my knowledge, no laws prohibit a person from asking “how are you?” Anyone possessing some basic human decency should know — and do — better. Victim shaming: All through this process, I have been subtly censured by the Board for seeking and retaining legal counsel. The rationale is that I “made this legal and complicated” by involving a lawyer which forced everyone else to lawyer up and thus led to the delays in handling the matter. This has been said to me personally by Erik Hersman and is a sentiment that has been repeated several times by other Board members, and their counsel in both private and public conversations. Slander: I have been reliably informed of more than one instance where Daudi has made comments to the effect that I am the one who pursued him for the purposes of establishing a sexual relationship and that I only filed a complaint when he rejected me. These comments were made to both colleagues and at project meetings with Ushahidi partners. I have tried to bring this up at least twice: once in the 24th May letter to the Board and subsequently at the internal hearing on 5th July. In the first instance, I received no response while in the second I was not even allowed to complete my question and was told that “my question is not relevant” as these events occurred after my complaint was made and thus were not covered by the inquiry. Delays: It took 74 days to get a decision from the Board. Nothing except enthusiastic letter writing was done for the first 60 days. And even the letters from the Board’s counsel seemed to be sent by literal snail mail — there was always a delay of 1 to 4 working days, and unlike the other lawyers they did not send advance copies of their letters via e-mail. The Board only seemed to act once the matter became public — first with Making All Voices Count followed then in various Kenyan WhatsApp groups, blogs and media. More happened in days 60–74 (15 days) than in the initial 60 days combined. An opaque process: Throughout the 74 days, and until now, I have had no clarity on how the board would handle this issue, save for the letter issued by the Board’s advocates after the meeting of 20 June 2017 where the terms of engagement of the hearing were set out. At no point did the Board provide me with the timelines within which they intended to conclude this matter. They could have chosen to do this any way they wanted as the Ushahidi whistleblower policy is vague and only states “The Ushahidi’s Compliance Officer will notify the person who submitted a complaint and acknowledge receipt of the reported violation or suspected violation. All reports will be promptly investigated and appropriate corrective action will be taken if warranted by the investigation.” And even when a process was outlined, it was not as advertised. For instance, the inquiry that the board held was framed as a “conversation to try and establish what happened and seek clarification” but in my view, the “conversation” quickly degenerated to my being subjected to over 2.5 hours of brutal questioning designed not to get at the truth but to create an alternative narrative where the perpetrator became the victim. Even the 27-page Inquiry Report on this process ends with a Notice To Show Cause that once again has no timelines or clarity on when the process will end. Character attacks: During the inquiry, I had several harmless and not so harmless personality flaws used against me. Because I have a potty mouth and used the word “fuck” during the incident, it was suggested that I am the one who turned the conversation to sex and thus invited Daudi’s sexual overtures. This was despite the fact that I did not use the word in a sexual context (see this video for various uses of the word “fuck”). It was also implied that I actively welcomed Daudi’s sexual proposition because I did not vociferously voice my protest at his inappropriate remarks but instead tried to change the subject. The refusal to listen to, let alone address my concerns: Throughout this process, I have been provided with no opportunity to openly air my concerns to the board or receive a response to them. The issues I raised in my letters, such as Erik asking Ushahidi staff to report any sexual harassment to management, including Daudi, were not addressed. Even at the hearing, I was not permitted to ask any questions — I was not even allowed to explain why I resigned!
The blame for what is arguably the mismanagement of this entire issue lies squarely with the Board. David Kobia, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich and Jenny Stefanotti need to jointly and severally take responsibility for this. Their failure to properly manage my complaint is the sole reason I resigned from a job I was very fond of and was very good at. Their failure to set out crystal clear parameters for the hearing allowed Daudi’s counsel to turn it from an inquiry to a ‘courtroom’ with him as the prosecutor and the judge. Their failure to speak up or intervene as I was harangued for over 2.5 hours — even when my counsel objected — indicates that they found this acceptable.
They also lacked the independence to properly investigate and take action in this matter. This is evidenced by the following:
Previous knowledge of similar allegations: Daudi has a long history of allegations of sexually harassing women from his days in the Kenya Blogger Webring (KBW), which was active in the mid to late 2000s. What is even more horrifying is that at least three of the Board members have known about Daudi’s alleged penchant for harassing women for a significant period of time. Juliana was an administrator at Kenya Unlimited as this was going on, while David Kobia was a co-founder and forum administrator at Mashada. Erik was also active online during this period and presumably was aware of these accusations. Even if he might not have heard of these allegations in the aughts, Erik Hersman was explicitly informed about allegations of sexual harassment against Daudi in late 2015 when a prominent Kenyan tech entrepreneur told him about them in November 2015. The allegations this time included sending unsolicited “dick pics” to women via DM on Twitter and making unwanted sexual advances to women within the Bishop Magua building (where Ushahidi, BRCK, GearBox and iHub were then located) and in the wider tech ecosystem. At this time Daudi was the acting Executive Director of Ushahidi Kenya. Despite all this knowledge, the Ushahidi Board made Daudi’s Executive Director position permanent in January 2016. Furthermore, even when presented with unequivocal proof of gross misconduct, as I did when I made my complaint on May 4th 2017, the board had to be subjected to intense public pressure before they did anything meaningful. For over nine weeks after I lodged this complaint, Daudi continued to act in his capacity as Executive Director: he participated in project meetings, strategy sessions and even international travel as the face of the organisation, including attending the 2017 Advancing Good Governance seminar and the 6th Annual Luxembourg Peace Prize Awards. He was only sent on compulsory leave on the same day that Quartz Africa ran a story (12th July). All through this ‘investigation’, the Board has bent over backwards to accommodate the requests of Daudi and his lawyer. Initially, they asked for the same level of procedure as a criminal court (e.g. witness lists and sworn statements) without having the authority to do so. Later, they turned around and insisted that it was an internal investigation and thus should exclude evidence from sources outside the company. The Board acceded to Daudi’s lawyer’s demands, apparently because they were afraid of a wrongful termination suit being filed by Daudi. This is at best disingenuous and at worst malicious. A company with the ethos Ushahidi purports to have should not shy away from doing what is right for fear of a lawsuit. Besides, had Daudi sued Ushahidi, he’d have effectively turned a private matter public as he would have had to declare why he was terminated. Court documents in Kenya are public documents: having my complaint and particularly that audio recording in the public domain logically went directly against his own best interests. Daudi’s explanation for the events of the evening was that he lost an earpiece of his hearing aid and Erik, as well as the Aberdare staff, were helping him look for it. I then allegedly joined them without invitation and refused to leave him so all his statements were made in an effort to get rid of me. However, at the time of our conversation, Erik had already retired to bed for the night. This can be attested to by any of the Ushahidi Team Members who were still at the bonfire. During the hearing, Erik did not correct Daudi on this point and in so doing, indirectly corroborated that untruth. Even if Erik had been awake, the fact that he was called upon as part of Daudi’s “alibi” should have clearly demonstrated his lack of independence. Erik should not have been a part of the panel that the Board constituted to investigate and make a decision. One cannot be a witness and judge in the same case! To date, Daudi still has his job: From the board’s latest update, Daudi has only been suspended. It is entirely possible that he may be reinstated in the company. This is despite the Board possessing audio evidence of him sexually harassing his junior as well as allegations from a plurality of victims which relate to multiple occurrences. Even with this, it still took public pressure for the Board to first send him on leave then suspend him. This is unacceptable. How are victims supposed to come forward if this is how a company with the reputation of Ushahidi handles these incidences?
I’ve received several explanations for the delay: The Board claims that this was a complex matter because Ushahidi is domiciled in the US, yet the employees are Kenyan and the incident occurred in Kenya. It really wasn’t that complicated. Florida and Kenyan law are in sync when it comes to sexual harassment laws: we checked this before we submitted my complaint and even attached excerpts from both countries’ laws.
The Board has also claimed that they were not able to action my complaint as quickly as they would have liked because they were trying to avoid a wrongful termination suit. As explained above this is insincere. Based on the speed of events from the 3rd of July, this could have been handled in 2 weeks. So why did it take 74 days? It seems clear that the board was looking for reasons not to act despite their verbal and written assurances to the contrary. In such a case, the will to act is all that matters. Not assumed best intentions. And based on their findings, Daudi is guilty of misconduct on several fronts. None of that was news and was obvious even before the 5th July Inquiry was held. This should not have taken as long as it did.
As detailed extensively above, for some mysterious reason the Ushahidi board and leadership has been reluctant to take action even when presented with clear evidence about Daudi’s misconduct. This completely boggles the mind because this scandal poses an existential risk to Ushahidi as an organisation. The Nairobi grapevine was already buzzing with rumours of this complaint after it was made on 4th May. The board just seems to have gone out of its way to avoid dealing with my complaint.
The board has also been less than forthright in the following ways:
Clay Shirky left the Board of Ushahidi in October 2015. This was not announced internally nor externally. Up until 15th July, Clay was still listed on the website as a Board Member. The summary of the proceedings at the inquiry is dubiously interpreted, contains some outright misrepresentations as well as the omission of relevant sections. This can be borne out by the recording of said proceedings which the Board possesses and I invite them to share this recording in its entirety with the public. Internally, Ushahidi has an open door policy. However, it seems that this openness exists in spite of, and not because of the Board. Erik has invited the staff to report any incident of harassment assuring them that the Board will handle it swiftly. This assurance is solidly contradicted by how the Board has thus far treated the two staff members who were sexually propositioned on 19th January 2017, one of whom had evidence (myself) and one who did not. The Chronology of Events provided by the Board on 17th July is economical with the truth. Specific examples that demonstrate this are:
The failure to mention that I was travelling for work when I was unavailable on 31st May. This is information the Board had easy access to and should have taken into consideration when they proposed a date for the hearing.
The inaccurate description of the process of the giving of the evidence (5th to 15th June). See the timeline for what actually transpired, with an explanation for the delays.
The inaccurate description of the process of agreeing upon the terms of engagement to be used at the inquiry (20th and 27th June)
5th July: At the hearing, the Board stated they needed a week to make their decision. This has now been revised to “7 working days to communicate its decision”
“5th July: The Board communicates its decision to send the Respondent on leave until a decision is made.” It is not clear who they communicated that with. It certainly was not to me in the course of the hearing nor to the staff as I had access to e-mails until 10th July and this had definitely not been communicated to the team by then. Daudi was first sent on leave on 12th July after significant community and public pressure.
All in all, this complaint has been completely and utterly mismanaged from Day 1. Both the tech community and Kenyan society at large need to reject the terrible precedent that the Board of Ushahidi has set. Their process has been deeply flawed and this should not be ignored just because they have ostensibly come to the correct conclusion. In cases such as these, the means matter just as much as the end.
Having been on the wrong end of a poorly managed process, I would suggest that all organisations revisit their sexual harassment procedures and evaluate them in light of best practices. Specifically, they need to ensure that the following issues have been addressed:
A well-articulated process should be described that covers:
Timelines: The time taken for the entire process should be as short as possible. A maximum of 14 calendar days seems to be an acceptable global standard. The process to be followed: In what form and way should employees submit complaints or raise concerns? Are there alternate persons to whom employees can submit such complaints when the complaints are against the very person they are normally supposed to submit them to? Is evidence of a claim required? If yes, what kind? What each stage of the process will do, when it will be done and why. What form communication during the process will take and what each party should expect to hear / receive at each stage. Notification of other staff: Be explicit on what staff will be notified, when and in what form. Channel to raise concerns: A means should be created to allow all parties to raise any issues they have as the process is ongoing. Appeal process: if the outcome is not satisfactory to the parties, what if any avenues for recourse do they have?
Support to the parties: what, if any, psychological support are the victim and perpetrator entitled to? When and where is this support available, and for how long?
Leave of absence during the investigation: If and for how long the victim and perpetrator should be sent on compulsory (paid) leave as the investigation process is undertaken.
Communication with the rest of the company and the outside world: A policy should exist on what is revealed, when and how to other staff as well as to parties outside the organisation.
It should go without saying it seems that it must be said: Sexual harassment is not a harmless or victimless crime. Because of it, I’ve had to resign from a job I liked and was very good at. This has been detrimental to both the Programme, and the organisation as a whole. I know of people who have been forced to resign due to harassment and are subsequently unable to find new jobs and new sources of income. This is because at its core sexual harassment is about an abuse of power. The person in a position of power leaves the victim in a position where they either remain silent or lose their livelihood. We cannot be speaking of building inclusive workplaces for women (who bear the brunt of the majority of sexual harassment cases) when we are still contending with such rudimentary issues as ensuring that offices are free of harassment.
Based on how effectively my complaint was bungled, Ushahidi’s reputation has taken a massive hit. This need never have happened and is completely unfair to the majority of the staff of the organisation who have played absolutely no part in this series of unfortunate events, and to this day remain mostly in the dark about exactly what transpired. It breaks my heart that the good people who work at Ushahidi have been damaged by the actions of David Kobia, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich and Jenny Stefanotti. The good work that Ushahidi has done over the past 10 years, and continues to do should not be tarnished by the actions and lack thereof of this Board.
In order to begin the healing process within the company, and for the world to begin to regain confidence in Ushahidi, the Board should resign in its entirety. Only new management can begin to repair the damage done. There is a Swahili saying: “Mwenzako akinyolewa, na wewe tia maji”. Current employees who have witnessed first hand how poorly I have been treated have very real fears about how their issues and concerns will be handled in the future. Only a fresh and independent Board and Executive Director can provide the assurances that the staff, the Kenyan tech community and the world at large need, as we all move on from here. A good first step would be to set up a Kenya HarassMap deployment and put aside some resources to pay for any legal and counselling support services to other victims of Daudi and other sexual predators.
Ushahidi is a great company with a valuable product. I hope the Board can put their egos aside and do what’s best for the company, which is stepping aside to give Ushahidi a chance to rebuild its reputation.
Update: Timeline updated on 21 July to correct typos and add a missing link |
The decision Monday, the Roberts court’s first direct look at public campaign financing, concerned only systems that use matching funds, as opposed to lump-sum grants. About a third of the states have some form of public financing, as does the federal government for presidential elections.
“We do not today call into question the wisdom of public financing as a means of funding political candidacy,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “That is not our business.”
Supporters of the law said the decision could have been worse. “Chief Justice Roberts at least recognized that public financing is a valid constitutional option,” said Monica Youn, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, which represented one of the defendants in the case.
As a consequence of the decision, states and municipalities are now blocked from using a method of public financing that is simultaneously likely to attract candidates fearful that they will be vastly outspent and sensitive to avoiding needless government expense.
“The government can still use taxpayer funds to subsidize political campaigns, but it can only do that in a manner that provides an alternative to private financing” said William R. Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, which represented several challengers of the law. “It cannot create disincentives.”
Chief Justice Roberts said that all escalating matching funds placed an unconstitutional burden on politicians who chose not to participate. But he added that Arizona’s system also created problematic asymmetries and anomalies. Candidates with several opponents could generate multiple subsidies every time they spent money, and spending from unaffiliated supporters could do the same.
Justice Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the majority opinion.
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Three years ago, in Davis v. Federal Election Commission, another 5-to-4 decision with the same justices in the majority, the court struck down a superficially similar federal law known as the “millionaire’s amendment.” That law allowed candidates to raise amounts over the usual contribution limits when rich opponents spent more than a given amount of their own money.
Justice Alito, writing for the majority, said the law imposed “an unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises” free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Chief Justice Roberts said the logic of the Davis decision required the court to strike down the Arizona law. Indeed, he said, it is one thing for the government to allow candidates to seek additional contributions and another for the government to send a check.
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“The cash subsidy, conferred in response to political speech, penalizes speech to a greater extent and more directly than the millionaire’s amendment in Davis,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote.
The decision concerned two consolidated cases, Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett, No. 10-238, and McComish v. Bennett, No. 10-239. It was the fifth ruling from the Roberts court cutting back on the government’s ability to regulate campaign finance.
In a dissent summarized from the bench, Justice Elena Kagan said the Arizona law advanced First Amendment values.
“What the law does — all the law does — is fund more speech,” she wrote. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent.
“Arizona, remember, offers to support any person running for state office,” Justice Kagan wrote. The candidates who challenged the law declined to accept that help, she said.
“So they are making a novel argument: that Arizona violated their First Amendment rights by disbursing funds to other speakers even though they could have received (but chose to spurn) the same financial assistance,” Justice Kagan wrote. “Some people might call that chutzpah.”
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The Davis decision, Justice Kagan wrote, involved a different issue, as it concerned a law that raised contribution limits disproportionately.
The majority and dissent disagreed about whether the Arizona law was supported by a permissible government rationale.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote that its main purpose was to level the playing field for political speech, which several earlier decisions have said is an improper goal.
“It is not legitimate for the government to attempt to equalize electoral opportunities in this manner,” he wrote. “And such basic intrusion by the government into the debate over who should govern goes to the heart of First Amendment values.”
“ ‘Leveling the playing field,’ ” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “can sound like a good thing. But in a democracy, campaigning for office is not a game.”
Justice Kagan countered that the main purpose of the law was to root out corruption and the appearance of corruption by encouraging candidates to participate in public financing systems, a goal the Supreme Court has endorsed.
“Like citizens across this country, Arizonans deserve a government that represents and serves them all,” she wrote. “And no less, Arizonans deserve the chance to reform their electoral system so as to attain that most American of goals. Truly, democracy is not a game.” |
FILE- In this Friday, May 18, 2012, file photo, a child looks at a laptop displaying Facebook logos in Hyderabad, India. Facebook said Monday, June 4, 2012, it is testing out ways to allow younger kids on its site without needing to lie. (AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A., File)
Facebook has finally forgotten about that drunken night in college when you vomited on that one friend who never talked to you again. Any deleted photo from that episode, or any photo deleted by users for whatever reason, has finally been removed from the social network's servers, it appears.
(Now if only your friend could permanently forget about the incidence too.)
Since 2009, Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng has doggedly tracked how long it takes big photo-sharing sites to permanently delete photos after a user hits "Delete." Her method was simple: save a photo's URL, delete the photo and wait to see how long it takes for the link to die. For Twitter and Flickr, it took seconds. For MySpace (remember that?), it took months. But for Facebook, Cheng found it could take years.
In some cases, photos deleted in 2009 were still on Facebook servers in 2012. In February, Facebook explained to Cheng "[w]e have been working hard to move our photo storage to newer systems which do ensure photos are fully deleted." Now, Cheng is happy to report that she has "tested this with two photos while saving their direct URLs, and both photos became inaccessible within two days of deletion." Her readers got similar results.
First, let us say, Good job, Facebook. Like how we train a dog, we ought to reward good behavior as well as punish bad. The media, rolling up its newspaper, has knocked Facebook on the nose for many no-nos: swapping users' listed email addresses for Facebook addresses, accidentally showing people's private chats to the public, to name a few snafus. We're glad to finally give Facebook a treat.
But why did this take so long to implement?
"The systems we used for photo storage a few years ago did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," Facebook told Ars Technica on Thursday. During its period of massive growth, Facebook apparently found it difficult to expand its servers and delete photos in a timely fashion. But now that new photo storage, installed in February, apparently deletes photos within 30 days, according to Facebook.
Perhaps what this tells us several months later is that Facebook wanted to get serious about privacy -- including making sure that unwanted photos weren't being stored after users tried to delete them -- as it hurtled toward its initial public offering in May. As a publicly traded company, it's reasonable to expect Facebook to be more sensitive to privacy concerns. |
Several states voted to legalize marijuana this past Election Day but the pot business still has a gripe—regulations.
Though decriminalized on some level in 19 states and the District of Columbia (it remains illegal under federal law), marijuana is still subject to regulations that strike some in the industry as micromanagement.
One company that tracks regulations is Cannabiz Media, which publishes the “Marijuana Licensing Reference Guide.” It recently posted a list of what it describes as the “10 weirdest marijuana laws.” For example, in Nevada and Oregon, signage for businesses that sell pot is regulated down to the font size and even font style. Connecticut bans the uses of illuminated signs while Washington, DC, makes it a point to outlaw the sale of pot at gasoline stations or auto repair shops.
Ed Keating, the person who compiled the list, sees such regulations as more than just a nuisance, particularly for medical marijuana dispensaries.
“It’s really hard to comply with these regulations because they are so particular and, in some cases, they just don’t seem to make a lot of sense,” he said. “If you’re a business trying to get medicine to your patients… some of these regulations are very expensive to comply with.”
However, Keating isn’t entirely against regulations and argues that some control would be in the industry’s best interests.
“In a lot of states now, they’re starting to put what an appropriate dosage or amount is to consume,” he said, noting that Maureen Dowd’s 2014 New York Times piece on her overdose of marijuana-infused chocolates showed the dangers of no labeling. “That makes a lot of sense for safety.”
“The other area that has seen a lot of regulatory scrutiny is testing because they want to make sure that if people are consuming this as medicine—or even recreationally—they’re given a safe product,” he continued. “Where it gets dangerous is when people concentrate that product into a liquid, an oil. You’re raising the concentration of everything. So if there are bad chemicals in there, they get much more concentrated and it could be a danger to people. So I think we’ll be seeing even more regulations there.” |
The movement is not going away — most Republicans in the House have more to fear from primary challengers on their right than from Democratic challengers. An unpopular budget deal could reignite the Tea Party, as the antitax crusader Grover Norquist predicts.
But surveys of voters leaving the polls last month showed that support for the Tea Party had dropped precipitously from 2010, when a wave of recession-fueled anger over bailouts, federal spending and the health care overhaul won the Republicans a majority in the House.
The House members elected with Tea Party backing in 2010 forced onto the national agenda their goals of deep cuts to spending and changes to entitlement programs, embodied by the budget blueprints of Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who became Mitt Romney’s running mate. And some of those lawmakers led the revolt last week that prompted Speaker John A. Boehner to cancel a House vote on a plan to avert a year-end fiscal crisis by raising tax rates on household income above $1 million.
“The Tea Party put a lot of steel in the spine of the Republican Party,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma.
But the Tea Party activists have not been front and center in the fiscal fight. And Mr. Cole added that Tea Party leaders now excoriating Mr. Boehner for offering higher taxes in a budget deal did not recognize political reality.
“These guys want instant success,” said Mr. Cole, a member of the House Republican leadership. “If they want to see a better result, they’ve got to help us win the United States Senate. We’ve thrown away some seats out of political immaturity.”
But a number of Republican leaders said the Tea Party seemed headed toward becoming just another political faction, not a broad movement. It may rally purists, but it will continue to alienate realists and centrists, they said.
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“I think the Tea Party movement is to the Republicans in 2013 what the McGovernites were to the Democrats in 1971 and 1972,” said Don Gaetz, a Republican who is the president of the Florida Senate. “They will cost Republicans seats in Congress and in state legislatures. But they will also help Republicans win seats.”
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Because the Tea Party comprises thousands of local groups, it is impossible to determine whether its ranks shrank after the many electoral defeats last month, which activists said caused grief and deep frustration.
Greg Cummings, the leader of the We the People Tea Party in rural Decatur County, Iowa, said his group had picked up 12 members since the election, for a total of about 50. “If you were in a fight and someone gave you a good left hook, it doesn’t mean the fight is over,” he said.
But Everett Wilkinson, the chairman of the Florida Tea Party in Palm Beach County, said the number of active Tea Party groups statewide “has diminished significantly in the last year or so, certainly in the last couple of months,” with only a third of what there once was.
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“A lot of people gave their heart and soul to trying to get Obama out; they’re frustrated,” he added. “They don’t know what to do. They got involved with the electoral process, and that didn’t work out.”
FreedomWorks, a national group that has played a crucial role in organizing Tea Party activists and backing insurgent candidates, has been riven by turmoil, leading to the departure last month of its chairman, Dick Armey, a former Republican majority leader in the House.
Mr. Armey said in news accounts that he questioned the ethical behavior of senior officials in the group, though others told of a power struggle. He was eased out with an $8 million consulting contract, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press.
FreedomWorks spent nearly $40 million on the 2012 elections but backed a string of losing Senate candidates, including Richard E. Mourdock of Indiana, Josh Mandel of Ohio and Connie Mack of Florida. Some Tea Party firebrands lost their House seats, including Allen B. West of Florida and Joe Walsh of Illinois.
One notable success for the Tea Party was the Senate victory by Ted Cruz of Texas.
Mr. Cummings, who is the Midwest coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, a national group, said a major issue he would be focusing on now was Agenda 21, a United Nations resolution that encourages sustainable development. It has no force of law in the United States, but a passionate element of the Tea Party sees it as a plot against American property rights.
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Billie Tucker, an activist with the First Coast Tea Party in Florida, said she and others suspected that corruption on local election boards had led to Mr. Obama’s victory in the state. Activists want to investigate.
“Some people say it’s just a conspiracy theory, but there’s rumbling all around,” she said. “There’s all kinds of data, and no one’s talking about it, including, hello, the mainstream media.”
Another issue boiling is the “nullification” of the Affordable Care Act. Angry that Mr. Obama’s re-election means that the health care law will not be repealed, some activists claim that states can deny the authority of the federal government and refuse to carry it out.
At a Florida State Senate meeting this month, two dozen Tea Party activists called the law “tyrannical” and said the state had the right to nullify it.
Mr. Gaetz, the Senate president, a conservative Republican, said in an interview that he, too, disagreed with the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law. But he called nullification “kooky.”
“We’re not a banana republic,” he said. It is “dangerous to the foundation of the republic when we pick and choose which laws we will obey.” |
Former Bush administration official Stephen Hadley, a forceful advocate for a military strike against Syria, owns about $875,000 worth of stock in Raytheon, which manufactures Tomahawk cruise missiles . (Alex Brandon/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Military analysts who made frequent media appearances during the recent debate over a possible U.S. strike on Syria have ties to defense contractors and other firms with stakes in the outcome, according to a new study, but those links were rarely disclosed.
The report by the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit watchdog, details appearances by 22 commentators who spoke out during this summer’s Syria debate in large media outlets and currently have industry connections that the group says can pose conflicts of interest.
In some cases, the potential conflicts were clear-cut — such as board positions and shares in companies that make weapons that probably would have been used in any U.S. action. In other instances, including work for private investment and consulting firms whose clients are not disclosed, it was not possible to know whether those speaking had an interest in the debate.
The report also notes the prominent role of seven think tanks during the debate and their close links to defense companies.
“We found lots of industry ties. Some of them are stronger than others. Some really rise to the level of clear conflicts of interest,” said Kevin Connor, the group’s director and a co-author of the report. “These networks and these commentators should err on the side of disclosure.”
In several media appearances in September, Stephen Hadley, a former national security adviser to President George W. Bush, was a forceful advocate for strikes. He told Bloomberg TV that Republicans should back the president’s use-of-force resolution and argued in a Washington Post op-ed that failure to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against his own people would damage U.S. credibility if military action were threatened over Iran’s nuclear program.
While Hadley’s role in the Bush administration was always noted, there was no mention of his ties to Raytheon, manufacturer of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which likely would have been fired from Navy destroyers stationed in the eastern Mediterranean in strikes against Syria. Hadley has been on the board of directors of Raytheon since 2009 and, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing from June included in the new report, owned 11,477 shares of Raytheon stock, now worth about $875,000. Hadley was also paid $128,500 in cash compensation by the company last year, according to a filing with the SEC.
In one appearance, CNN noted that Hadley is a principal at RiceHadleyGates, an international strategic consulting firm based in Silicon Valley and Washington.
Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor at The Post, said Hadley’s opinions in the newspaper’s op-ed commentary were not colored by his association with Raytheon.
“More disclosure is generally better than less, but I’m confident that Hadley’s opinion piece, which was consistent with the worldview he has espoused for many years, was not influenced by any hypothetical, certainly marginal, impact to Raytheon’s bottom line,” Hiatt said in a statement.
A spokesperson said Hadley was traveling in China and unavailable for comment.
Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, a former commander of the U.S. Central Command, also made several media appearances to discuss the Syrian situation and cautioned that the kind of limited intervention that was being proposed has in the past been difficult to accomplish. But in the five appearances covered by the study, his ties to the defense industry were not disclosed.
Zinni has been on the board of directors of BAE Systems, a top defense contractor, since 2002 and was board chairman from 2009 to 2012. The company specializes in cybersecurity, intelligence analysis and several weapons systems. Zinni, in addition, sits on the board of advisers of DC Capital Partners, a private equity firm that focuses on investments in intelligence, homeland security and other sectors.
Reached by e-mail, Zinni said his board memberships are public. “The media who contact me for comment should post any relevant info re my background including my board positions if they desire,” he wrote.
Retired Gen. Jack Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff, made frequent appearances as well, including as a Fox News military analyst, during which he supported U.S. action against Syria. His military career and his affiliation with the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank where he is board chairman, were regularly cited.
But there was no disclosure of Keane’s ties to General Dynamics, where he has been on the board since 2004, and to SCP Partners, a venture capital firm focused in part on investments in defense and security, where he is a venture partner. General Dynamics’ Bath Iron Works is the lead designer and builder of the destroyers from which the Tomahawk missiles would have been launched. Keane’s office said he was not available to comment.
Asked about the report’s findings, Michael Clemente, executive vice president of news at Fox News, said in a statement, “We generally disclose contacts when our judgment is that it’s journalistically germane to the story.”
Two other networks where analysts covered by the report made frequent appearances, CNN and NBC, did not respond to requests for comment. |
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain was our game of the year in 2015, however the foundations for it were laid by standalone introductory chapter Ground Zeroes. Today, Konami has announced Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience which gathers both games and a bunch of DLC under one banner.
Due to launch via Steam on October 13, players can expect “additional Mother Base currency”, as well as a slew of items, including Rasp Short-Barrelled Shotguns, the Adam-ska Special handgun, a range of Personal Ballistic Shields, and a number of costumes for The Phantom Pain. Previously console-exclusive Ground Zeroes missions—Déjà Vu and Jamais Vu—are also included, as are a number of DLC packs and weapons for Metal Gear Online.
“Metal Gear Solid V has received collectively over 60 industry accolades and awards thus far,” says Konami president Tomotada Tashiro in a statement. “The Definitive Experience will give players an opportunity to play the complete MGSV experience, without interruption. Additionally, with Metal Gear Online, players also get access to a completely unique multi-player setting that is designed for a truly engrossing gaming experience as well.”
Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience is due October 13. Console versions will cost £34.99/$39.99, however Steam pricing is yet to be confirmed. Read Sam’s review of The Phantom Pain over here. |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign said on Monday a McCain opinion article about Iraq offered to The New York Times as a rebuttal to Democrat Barack Obama had been rejected.
Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain (R-AZ) speaks at a campaign picnic outside the Maine Military Museum in South Portland, Maine July 21, 2008. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
The McCain camp had submitted the article to The Times as a response to a piece by Obama published by the newspaper last week.
“My Plan for Iraq” had detailed Obama’s goal of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq in 16 months if he is elected on November 4.
The McCain article was largely a critique of Obama’s position, arguing against establishing a set timetable for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq.
McCain is attempting to make sure his voice is heard while Obama picks up headlines with a visit this week to Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe.
“During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be ‘very dangerous,’” McCain wrote.
An e-mail sent to the McCain staff by a Times editor said it would be terrific to have an article from McCain but that the one sent in was not acceptable as currently written and that a new draft should articulate how McCain defines victory in Iraq.
The McCain campaign, which does not feel McCain gets equal treatment in the U.S. news media, expressed dismay at the Times’ decision and suspected it was because the Times did not agree with McCain’s policy.
“John McCain believes that victory in Iraq must be based on conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables. Unlike Barack Obama, that position will not change based on politics or the demands of The New York Times,” said McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds.
The New York Times said it was standard procedure to have a “back and forth with an author about his or her submission” and looked forward to publishing McCain’s views.
“We have published at least seven Op-ed pieces by Senator McCain since 1996. The New York Times endorsed Senator McCain as the Republican candidate in the presidential primaries. We take his views very seriously,” said the statement from Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis. |
North Korea has detained another U.S. citizen, a Korean American professor, bringing to three the number of Americans being held in Pyongyang.
The Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang, which represents U.S. interests there because the United States does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea, confirmed to The Washington Post that a U.S. national had been detained. In Washington, the State Department said it was aware of the report.
Media in South Korea identified the man as Kim Sang-duk, a former professor at the Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST) in the northeastern Chinese city of Yanji, near the border with North Korea.
Kim was arrested at Pyongyang’s international airport Friday as he was waiting to board a flight, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported.
Kim had been teaching a class in international finance and management at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a sister institution, for a month and was leaving the country with his wife when he was arrested, the specialist website NK News quoted the chancellor of PUST, Park Chan-mo, as saying.
[What it’s like to be an American held in North Korea]
North Korea has taken a slew of Americans hostage in recent years and used them as bargaining chips in negotiations with the United States.
It is holding two other Americans.
Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student who went on a tour in North Korea while on his way to a study-abroad program in Hong Kong, was detained for allegedly trying to steal a propaganda sign from a Pyongyang hotel on New Year’s Day last year.
He was convicted of subversion in March after a court found that he had committed a crime “pursuant to the U.S. government’s hostile policy” toward North Korea and was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.
[North Korea sentences college student to 15 years of hard labor]
He has not been seen since March 2016, when he was convicted, and when Swedish diplomats were last allowed to meet with him.
Another American, former Virginia man Kim Dong-chul, was charged with spying last April and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Kim, who is in his early 60s, was born in South Korea but became a U.S. citizen in 1987, although he is thought to have been living in northeastern China in recent years.
Previous American detainees have been released after a few months following visits from high-profile Americans, including former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
But so far, the North Korean regime has not used Warmbier and Kim as leverage.
Read more:
North Korea sentences former Va. man to 10 years of hard labor
North Korea sentences U-Va. student to 15 years of hard labor in prison
U-Va. student held in North Korea ‘confesses’ to ‘severe’ crime
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
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Animals are dying in unnecessary agony because of a lack of understanding over how stunning stops them feeling pain when their throats are cut, research shows.
In conventional slaughterhouses, cows, sheep and chicken are stunned, usually with an electric shock, to ensure they are unconscious before their throats are cut.
This minimises suffering but in a number of Muslim abattoirs the animals are not stunned over fears it is not permissible, or 'halal'.
In a number of Muslim abattoirs animals are not stunned before slaughter over fears it is not permissible, or 'halal' but research suggests this is due to ignorance of the process (file image)
A study by researchers at the University of Bristol suggests some Islamic scholars are ignorant about the humaneness of stunning, leading to animals dying in pain,The Times reported.
Widespread research shows the welfare benefits of pre-slaughter stunning. The electric shocks lessen the pain felt by animals when their throats are cut.
A number of industry bodies have spoken out against the slaughtering of animals without pre-stunning, with the British Veterinary Association saying there is an 'unacceptable time lapse between slaughter and the onset of permanent insensibility [loss of feeling] when animals are not stunned'.
Animals must also be stunned before slaughter under EU regulations.
However Britain allows an exemption for those who oppose because of religious beliefs and the number of animals killed without stunning appears to be on the rise.
RITUAL KILLING OF ANIMALS FOR RELIGIOUS REASONS HALAL Halal slaughtering involves cutting through the large arteries in the neck with one swipe of a blade, while a Muslim butcher recites a religious verse. All blood is then drained away since the consumption of blood is forbidden under Islamic law. Under Islamic law, an animal must be slaughtered by having its throat cut while it is conscious. KOSHER According to the laws, in order for a meat to kosher it must come from an animal that meets the kosher rules. These are the animal must be ruminant and have split hooves. Ruminant animals chew food once and swallow, before regurgitating it and chewing again. Animals that Jews can eat include cows, sheep, goats and deer. They cannot eat pigs despite the fact it has split hooves because it is not a ruminant animal. Before slaughtering, the animal must be healthy and uninjured and a sharp knife is used to slice through the main arteries and windpipe, causing a drop in blood pressure that causes the animal to lose consciousness. Jews believe this is a way of killing that shows 'respect and compassion' as set out in Jewish law.
Some 2.4 million sheep and goats were put to death using the religious method in halal and kosher abattoirs in 2013 – a rise of 60 per cent on 2011.
According to analysis by the Food Standards Agency, some 37 per cent of sheep and goats, 25 per cent of cattle and 16 per cent of poultry were killed in this way in halal premises.
Researchers from the University of Bristol School of Veterinary Science questioned Islamic scholars and Halal consumers on the use of pre-slaughter stunning.
The study is published in the journal Meat Science.
Some 69 per cent of scholars said they did not agree that stunning prior to slaughter had been showed to reduce the pain felt by animals, according to The Times.
However more than 95 per cent of the scholars and 53 per cent of consumers agreed that if stunning did not result in death, cause physical injury or obstruct bleed-out, the meat would be considered Halal.
The study said: ' The lack of understanding of stunning among some scholars has resulted in the issuance of confusing fatwas on the suitability of stunned meat for consumption by Muslims.
'There is an urgent need for these scholars to be given theoretical and practical education on stunning and other modern slaughter techniques such as mechanical slaughter.
'This will help them make informed decisions about the suitability of these techniques for Halal production.'
Gudrun Ravetz, president of the British Veterinary Association said: 'Our view is that all animals should be stunned before slaughter, based on peer reviewed evidence that indicates an unacceptable time lapse between slaughter and the onset of permanent insensibility when animals are not stunned.
Britain allows an exemption for those who oppose because of religious beliefs and the number of animals killed without stunning appears to be on the rise. File image
'A number of notable bodies including the Farm Animal Welfare Committee and the EU Food Safety Authority all agree that there is a high probability that the cutting of sensitive tissues at the neck will trigger a significant pain response in a conscious animal.
'Given the barrage of evidence about the humaneness of stunning before slaughter the veterinary profession is persuaded that animals must be stunned. |
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Fifteen years ago, bemoaning the high cost of higher education, the governors of 19 Western states decided to start a nonprofit online institution to help meet their need for a trained work force. The result, Western Governors University, offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in education, business, the health professions and information technology. Everything is online except for student teaching and some nursing requirements.
Most of its 25,000 students are over 25, and have previously earned some college credits.
Instead of being required to spend a certain number of hours to earn a certain sequence of credits, students at Western Governors must show “competency” through assignments and proctored exams.
Marie Hermetz, who paid Western Governors about $9,000 to earn her master’s degree in health care management, said she heard about the program on the news and switched from one that would have cost up to $40,000.
“Doing it one class at a time, I would have graduated maybe never,” said Ms. Hermetz, 43, who had a bachelor’s degree in math. “This way, it took just under 18 months. And whenever I ran into trouble, my professors would make arrangements, whether it was through a webinar or a phone call or an e-mail, to help me.”
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Actually, Western Governors does not have “professors” in the usual sense: the online curriculum is not developed by the university, but chosen by outside experts, and students have “course mentors” with graduate degrees. |
The BBC has been ordered to disclose the names and details of 150 senior managers who received severance payouts after MPs invoked a rare parliamentary custom.
The Commons public accounts committee is to invoke the power of a standing order to force the broadcaster to release information about 150 redundancy payments to senior managers between 2010 and 2012.
Citing data protection issues, the BBC has previously fought attempts to divulge the names, but has now written to the former managers alerting them that the nature of their severance arrangements may now be made public.
The development came on Friday amid further fallout in the BBC payoffs controversy, with a statement challenging former director general Mark Thompson's claim that the BBC Trust was fully informed about a £1m severence settlement with a senior executive in 2010 issued by five trustees.
One ex-senior BBC manager, who received the letter warning that details of his severance arrangement may be published, told MediaGuardian: "I am not prepared to have details of what was meant to be a confidential matter released into the public domain without any kind of assurance of how it will be presented.
"My redundancy was totally in order, but there is no guidance from the BBC as to how the information will be presented. The concern I would have is that a senior manager such as myself – whose redundancy settlement was perfectly in order – will be lumped together with the very small number of senior managers whose deals seem to have been rather more generous. I cannot see myself giving consent for my name and details to be released."
In the letter sent to all 150 former bosses to give them the opportunity to raise any concerns, the corporation said: "PAC has recently confirmed in writing to the BBC that it is applying its Standing Order power to call for the 150 names and details of the 150 recipients of severance payments cited in the [National Audit Office] report, which includes you.
"PAC has informed us that on receipt of this information, it will then decide whether or not to make this information public taking into account the public interest in doing so. PAC further states that it will consider any representations concerning individual cases, that it takes the needs of confidentiality seriously and has chosen not to publish information regarding individuals on previous occasions."
On Friday the BBC Trust issued a statement from five trustees who were in post when the payoff for former deputy director general Mark Byford was being discussed in late 2010 – Richard Ayre, Diane Coyle, Anthony Fry, Alison Hastings and David Liddiment.
"We were not asked for approval of the financial package – formally or informally – nor did we give it. The Trust was assured that the package was within contractual terms and that the chairman of the BBC's executive remuneration committee had agreed to it being approved," they said.
Thompson, in his PAC evidence submission published on Friday, said he took "all reasonable steps to ensure that the BBC Trust was properly informed in advance" about the proposed redundancy settlements with Byford and Sharon Baylay, the former director of marketing who left with a £390,000 payoff.
"The timetable and the urgency of the email traffic between the Trust and various BBC managers supports the view that the Trust wanted to be able to express its view about the proposed settlements before the [executive remuneration committee] was asked to formally approve them," he added.
"The only non-automatic part of the proposed settlement with Mark Byford was the intention to delay the issuing of formal notice and to make a payment in lieu of notice: there is clear evidence that the trust was aware of both those points."
Earlier on Friday, it emerged that Lucy Adams, the BBC's HR director, has written to MPs to correct her evidence to parliament about her involvement in agreeing the £1m severance payment for a former senior executive.
Adams admitted in fresh evidence released by the PAC on Friday that she was involved in drafting a key memo to the BBC Trust that detailed the controversial £1m severance payment to Byford.
Thompson described Adams in evidence also published by the committee on Friday as "one of the main authors" of the memo – dubbed the 7 October note – which she claimed not to have seen when she appeared before MPs on the PAC on 10 July. In a letter made public on Friday, Adams said it was not clear which document the committee was referring to at the time.
The 7 October note, drafted in 2010, has become central to the BBC payoffs saga because it was drawn up to inform the BBC Trust of two controversial payoffs – to Byford and Baylay. The BBC Trust has since claimed not to have been fully briefed on these redundancy deals.
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Austrians elected a Green Party-backed economics professor as their next president, spurning the appeal of an anti-immigration nationalist who campaigned to weaken ties to the European Union.
With all regular votes counted, Alexander Van der Bellen defeated Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party by 51.7 percent to 48.3 percent after Sunday’s repeat run-off election to the mainly ceremonial presidency. While mail-in ballots will only be counted on Monday, Van der Bellen’s margin of victory was too great to change the outcome, and Hofer conceded defeat.
Van der Bellen, 72, said that he stood for the “old values” of freedom, equality and solidarity. He also signaled that he wanted to preside over a more active presidency, urging a focus on policies such as efforts to tackle unemployment.
Austria sent a “good signal” today “to the capitals of the European Union,” Van der Bellen, who ran as an independent, said in an interview with public broadcaster ORF. “You can actually win elections with a pro-European position.”
Together with a referendum in Italy also being held on Sunday, the Austrian vote was seen as a bellwether for populist sentiment in Europe after the U.K.’s Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency. Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam Dutch politician, offered Hofer his commiserations on Twitter, as did French National Front leader Marine Le Pen. Nigel Farage, the former head of the U.K. Independence Party, had cited Hofer’s EU-skeptic stance as further evidence of the pressures buffeting the EU “construction.”
German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, who heads the Social Democratic Party, hailed Van der Bellen’s win as a “victory of reason against right-wing populism,” according to an interview with Bild newspaper. EU President Donald Tusk extended his “wholehearted congratulations” to Van der Bellen in an e-mailed statement.
Year of Acrimony
The result defied projections of a razor-tight finish and ends an acrimonious year of campaign politics that polarized Austria. Van der Bellen, who pledged to prevent anti-EU forces from forming a government, now has to heal the rifts exposed over immigration and economic inequality.
It’s the first time in 70 years the country has elected a presidential candidate outside the Social Democratic or Austrian People’s Party, after both the established parties were eliminated in earlier rounds of voting. It’s also the first time that a Green Party leader has won a popular election in Europe to become head of state since the global environmental movement began.
Van der Bellen narrowly squeezed out Hofer in the first presidential runoff on May 22, but the result was overturned by the Constitutional Court because of irregularities in counting mail-in ballots. Austria’s Interior Ministry showed Van der Bellen won more rural support in Sunday’s repeat vote, and also took key regions in the industrial heartland of Upper Austria as well as in the mountains of Tirol.
Opening Doors
The result is a rebuff to some analysts who predicted Hofer would benefit from the same nationalist forces that propelled Trump to the presidency last month. Hofer campaigned on his ability to court favor inside a Trump White House as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I’m asking my voters to accept that in a democracy, the voter is always right,” said Hofer. He added that he’s looking forward to the next round of national elections where he’ll stand by Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache, who accused Van der Bellen of orchestrating Sunday’s victory with a “massive campaign of fear.”
Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern, a Social Democrat who warned last week that the EU must reform or slip into the abyss, struck a more conciliatory tone.
“Alexander Van der Bellen will be a good partner for an open-minded, future-oriented policy of chances and hopes,” Kern said. “To the voters of Norbert Hofer, I say nobody should feel like a loser today. We’re all Austria.”
— With assistance by Rainer Buergin, and Matthias Wabl |
The views may be pleasantly apocalyptic, and the second act may feature a motorbike duel with a robot B52, but it's the little things that really sell me on Gears of War 4 - the surprisingly delicate way it both harkens back to and departs from Epic's original cover-shooters. The fact that Swarm footsoldiers rush you when they're close to death, for example, where their Locust predecessors would often dig in till the bitter end. The presence of branching path sections that ask teams of two to support one another across a gulf, a classic Gears device enlivened by the addition of flying enemies and eccentric new flavours of sniper rifle.
And then there's the Overkill shotgun, which perhaps encapsulates how well the Coalition understands the series it has inherited. On the surface it's a quad-barrelled monster worthy of Painkiller, but in practice the Overkill is a flexible instrument that, much like the famous Active Reload mechanic, challenges you to keep a cool head under pressure.
Simply pull the trigger and you'll fire all four barrels at once to shattering effect. But if you hold the trigger, pause and release, you'll fire each pair of barrels separately for a tighter spread, allowing you to dent targets at range and really make the most of your ammo. Shotguns have always been Gears of War's principal skill weapons, the roaring Sphinxes that gate access to the upper echelons of competitive multiplayer. With the Overkill, the Coalition has crafted both an elegant tool for returning Gnasher pros and a bloodthirsty treat for the rest of us.
Everywhere you look in Gears of War 4, you'll find a studio engaged in careful dialogue with the past. This is literally the case in the story, which takes place a few decades after the destruction of the Locust, and sees two generations of the Fenix clan fighting side by side. In a bid to shore up what remains of civilisation, the Coalition of Organised Governments has herded Sera's surviving humans into gigantic walled cities, defended by robots, but not everybody is content to trade their freedom for security. Amongst the rag-tag Outsiders who scrape a living in the wilderness is the one and only Marcus Fenix, he of the thousand yard scowl. As the game's second act begins, the COG is holding the Outsiders responsible for a spate of abductions, and new leading man JD Fenix has returned to his father's estate in hopes of guidance and a little covering fire, if not a hug.
What follows is essentially a license handover reimagined as a family squabble, a clash between epochs in video game characterisation. JD is a blond and blue-eyed graduate of Nathan Drake High, accompanied by glib sidekick Delmont Walker and token ladybro Kait Diaz, whose parents are among the missing. Marcus remains a potty-mouthed crank, cut from the rock of the WW2 shooter and pickled to perfection by years of isolation. The script isn't exactly captivating so far - in opting for a more presentable college age cast, the Coalition has sacrificed a certain vivacity - but the reinvention of Marcus as a grouchy hermit, bellowing about his greenhouse in the midst of a COG bombing run, is worth a few laughs. I'm looking forward to finding out who else is back from Gears 3. With any luck, the Cole Train still operates somewhere deep in the wilds.
The art direction is also something of a generational mash-up. The Coalition has come up with its own spin on the original's "destroyed beauty" aesthetic - "reclaimed beauty", an admittedly clunky buzzword which pays into an unexpected riff on fossil fuel politics. By the time of Gears 4, Sera's reserves of underground immulsion are long gone, Mother Nature has taken back much of the surface, and the population now depends on a hodgepodge of renewable energy resources.
The game's plunging rural fastness is littered with the vestiges of the old world and ramshackle stabs at revival - windmills idling against a baleful sunset, enormous flywheels canted against cliff-faces, hydroelectric dams torn open by the "windflares" that now rake the planet's crust. In the course of the campaign's five acts (an estimated 10 hours) you'll take a ride in a deteriorating funicular and do battle inside a memorial to the Pendulum Wars, Sera's darkest hour prior to the emergence of the Locust. A hint: some of the antique weapons on display are functional.
Inspired by the landscape of north Italy, the game's palette is quietly enchanting - wiry underbrush and purple leafpile, mildew-spotted signage and ground-down masonry, flowing together in a way that makes the cover layouts less obvious to the eye, if no less tangible under the thumb. Gears of War's world has always been uniquely textured, and the Coalition has done a fine job of weaving its own vision into the tapestry, aided no end by some fancy bells and whistles - screen-space reflections on puddles, physically based shaders for a more tactile look, and a persistent dynamic weather system which, at its most severe, actually affects how you play.
When the winds are raging, movement becomes a chore, certain terrain fixtures can be shot loose to create tumbling hazards, and slower projectiles such as the Boomshot's rounds may be blown off course, allowing you to sneak the odd shot around cover. If all this sounds transformative, however, the wind was seldom this much of a presence during my few hours with the campaign. For the most part, Gears of War 4's cover combat follows on from that of Gears 3, its AI behaviours, animations and even exploits painstakingly rebuilt to take advantage of Unreal Engine 4.
The basic rhythms are much as in any Gears game: you'll enter an area, slam your back against a pillar and work your way gradually around to flanking positions, overlooks and weapon drops, relying on AI comrades to revive you as and when you overreach yourself. The Coalition has added a few new tricks - you can reach across cover to haul a foe onto your combat knife, which adds an extra element of risk and reward to close-quarters gunplay - but any longtime Gears detractors hoping for a change of tune will come away disappointed.
There are, of course, new weapons to spice up the familiar double act of rifles versus shotguns. The Embar rifle handles like a mix of Torque Bow and Longshot - you must hold the trigger to charge up a slug, but if you hold it a second too long the weapon will vent, a blunder that's sure to rouse the scorn of Twitch chatboxes. The Buzzkill and Dropshot, meanwhile, are ways of cheating the game's cover logic. The former coughs up sawblades that ricochet around objects, while the latter spits out a flying drillhead that slams to earth explosively when you release the trigger.
More important than the new firearms, though, are the creatures you'll wield them against. Gears of War 4 introduces two new factions, the crusty Swarm and the COG's army of automatons or "Dee Bees". They share a number of familiar combat archetypes - units that pin you down, skirmishers that flush you out, and the odd towering bullet sponge equipped with a power weapon. But each faction boasts a few oddballs that may throw veteran players off-balance. The Dee Bees occasionally field Guardians, slippery UAVs that sport a chaingun or a rocket launcher (detachable, once you've shot the vehicle down) plus a recharging energy shield. Their rolling Tracker units are Kamikaze terrain denial weapons, exploding at your feet to create a brief but deadly puddle of static electricity.
The Swarm feel indistinguishable from the Locust at first, their rank and file emerging from sinkholes that can be sealed with a frag grenade, but just wait till you meet the Juvies - Swarm infants caught mid-gestation, fatty tissues dripping from their muscles as they hop and flail towards you. The original game's Wretches are the obvious comparison, but Juvies are much nimbler around objects and harder to hit - I was reminded a little of the Doom reboot's fidgety reinvention of the Imp, which is an encouraging parallel indeed. They also represent something of a terrain variable: you'll encounter Juvie egg sacks that can be used as cover, or shot down from the ceiling to squish anything beneath, but woe betide the player who rouses the occupant in the process.
Weirder and deadlier still are the Swarm elites, especially the prancing Snatchers - they'll actually ingest you if they get the chance, carrying the hapless victim around in their bellies till blasted into submission. Carriers are the Swarm's artillery, their enormous torsos cracking open to release a cloud of toxic spores as they stomp slowly into melee range, and then there are the Pouncers, catlike, dart-tossing fiends with soft pink bellies that hop from surface to surface. As the name implies, Pouncers may try to pin you, but if you're alert to the warning signs you can usually catch the descending beast on the blade of a Lancer.
Beyond the campaign, Gears 4 offers up a brace of familiar modes - Warzone, TDM, King of the Hill, and Guardian - plus the already discussed Dodgeball, a co-op bots mode and Arms Race, a team-based version of the Gun Game mod for Counter-Strike. In the latter, all team members get a different weapon after every third kill, which good news in that a struggling player won't be left behind, and less good news in that allies may accidentally sabotage each other. Finding that your Gnasher has become a Longshot after cornering an opponent is every bit as exhilarating as you'd imagine.
There's also Escalation, a three ring objective capture mode with a metagame element that is aimed squarely at the eSports community. The idea is to win seven rounds, the twist being that losing teams can activate a weapon spawn between rounds, whether to give themselves an edge or bait the other team into taking a risk. Backed up by LAN support and a robust suite of commentator options, it seems a good pitch for the tournament crowd.
But the star attraction in multiplayer is, of course, the new take on Horde, Gears of War's influential wave survival mode, which again follows on from Gears 3 but retains a few ideas from the underrated Gears of War: Judgment. The battle now revolves around a movable fabricator, where you'll construct fortifications such as turrets, fences and decoys using globs of power that must be manually collected from the bodies of the slain.
This creates more of a frantic, push-pull rhythm, as players scurry out to gather energy at the risk of being caught trousers-down when the next round begins. It accompanies a set of loose player classes - Heavy, Soldier, Engineer, Scout and Sniper - which determine your starting layout and are geared towards certain roles, but flexible enough that you can change tactics on the fly.
Each class has a selection of abilities, largely passive, that can be levelled up - the Scout can equip a skill that awards bonus Power when harvesting under fire, for instance, while the Soldier might plump for the ability to plant up to five grenade mines at once. The class system doesn't quite feel essential yet, and there's the suspicion that it exists to justify the sale of ability cards, though all abilities can be earned and upgraded in-game. But having to factor in the fabricator's location and resource gathering on top of the usual Horde strategies is a fun complication, and you needn't give those cards a second thought once you've left the lobby screen behind.
The truly disarming thing about Gears of War's return is that it no longer has an obvious rival. The original's mechanics have been imitated by every blockbuster under the sun, from Killzone through Tomb Raider to the Tom Clancy franchise, but most of its disciples have either died off or evolved beyond recognition. If the Coalition's debut is a fairly conservative work at heart, one that is content to tinker ingeniously within sturdy parameters, it nonetheless feels strangely exotic. There is no game out there right now that plays like this one, that uses quite these variables in quite this way, and while the revisions aren't mind-blowing individually, they're gripping as a whole. Marcus Fenix may have aged disgracefully, but Gears of War 4 has the wind in its sails.
This article is based on a press trip to The Coalition's headquarters. Microsoft paid for travel and accommodation. |
(1) Existing law generally prohibits the possession or transfer of assault weapons, except for the sale, purchase, importation, or possession of assault weapons by specified individuals, including law enforcement officers. Under existing law, “assault weapon” means, among other things, a semiautomatic centerfire rifle or a semiautomatic pistol that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and has any one of specified attributes, including, for rifles, a thumbhole stock, and for pistols, a second handgrip.
This bill would revise this definition of “assault weapon” to mean a semiautomatic centerfire rifle, or a semiautomatic pistol that does not have a fixed magazine but has any one of those specified attributes. The bill would also define “fixed magazine” to mean an ammunition feeding device contained in, or permanently attached to, a firearm in such a manner that the device cannot be removed without disassembly of the firearm action.
By expanding the definition of an existing crime, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program.
(2) Existing law requires that any person who, within this state, possesses an assault weapon, except as otherwise provided, be punished as a felony or for a period not to exceed one year in a county jail.
This bill would exempt from punishment under that provision a person who possessed an assault weapon prior to January 1, 2017, if specified requirements are met.
(3) Existing law requires that, with specified exceptions, any person who, prior to January 1, 2001, lawfully possessed an assault weapon prior to the date it was defined as an assault weapon, and which was not specified as an assault weapon at the time of lawful possession, register the firearm with the Department of Justice. Existing law permits the Department of Justice to charge a fee for registration of up to $20 per person but not to exceed the actual processing costs of the department. Existing law, after the department establishes fees sufficient to reimburse the department for processing costs, requires fees charged to increase at a rate not to exceed the legislatively approved annual cost-of-living adjustment for the department’s budget or as otherwise increased through the Budget Act. Existing law requires those fees to be deposited into the Dealers’ Record of Sale Special Account. Existing law, the Administrative Procedure Act, establishes the requirements for the adoption, publication, review, and implementation of regulations by state agencies.
This bill would require that any person who, from January 1, 2001, to December 31, 2016, inclusive, lawfully possessed an assault weapon that does not have a fixed magazine, as defined, and including those weapons with an ammunition feeding device that can be removed readily from the firearm with the use of a tool, register the firearm with the Department of Justice before January 1, 2018, but not before the effective date of specified regulations. The bill would permit the department to increase the $20 registration fee as long as it does not exceed the reasonable processing costs of the department. The bill would also require registrations to be submitted electronically via the Internet utilizing a public-facing application made available by the department. The bill would require the registration to contain specified information, including, but not limited to, a description of the firearm that identifies it uniquely and specified information about the registrant. The bill would permit the department to charge a fee of up to $15 per person for registration through the Internet, not to exceed the reasonable processing costs of the department to be paid and deposited, as specified, for purposes of the registration program. The bill would require the department to adopt regulations for the purpose of implementing those provisions and would exempt those regulations from the Administrative Procedure Act. The bill would also make technical and conforming changes.
(4) The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local agencies and school districts for certain costs mandated by the state. Statutory provisions establish procedures for making that reimbursement.
This bill would provide that no reimbursement is required by this act for a specified reason. |
The Marijuana Policy Project, a grassroots organization supportive of marijuana legalization, has named Colorado Senate President John Morse as the worst state legislator with a stance on marijuana issues in the country.
Morse was included on the list primarily due to his role in attempting to repeal Amendment 64 in the last few days of the 2013 legislative session.
Amendment 64 was authorized via a statewide people’s ballot last year with a majority vote in all CO counties, and in May the Colorado legislature moved forward with a regulatory framework to support recreational sales.
Morse has received considerable push-back from voters due to his stance on marijuana and other issues since the 2013 legislative session.
Currently, over 10,000 petition signatures have been collected to support the recall, nearly 50% more than the required amount to initiate a recall.
Next Tuesday, September 10th, voters will be given the opportunity to decide whether or not Morse and fellow anti-legalization legislator Senator Angel Giron will be allowed to maintain their office.
Sen. Giron, of Pueblo County, was responsible for a separate anti-legalization bill, which would had criminalized marijuana if voters do not pass new taxes to support regulation. |
Noah McCall (Albany Police Department Facebook page) Noah McCall (Albany Police Department Facebook page) Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Partygoer accused of urinating on police officer 1 / 3 Back to Gallery
Albany
City police officers who went to the site of a loud party early Sunday said one of the partygoers urinated from a staircase onto an officer.
At 3:20 a.m., officers went to 470 Hudson Ave., where they say several people inside and out were drinking alcohol and causing a disturbance.
Noah McCall, 19, urinated on an officer, police said. McCall was charged with reckless assault, police said.
A resident was found with metal knuckles, police said. Luca Quinn, a 19-year-old State University at Albany student, was charged with criminal possession of a weapon.
Both men were arraigned in Albany City Court and released.
Police also requested a building and codes inspection of the house. The inspection found the building to be unsafe and uninhabitable.
Police were called to the home at least two other times in the last 15 months.
At about 12:15 a.m. on Aug. 30, police received a report of a loud party and found a group of people drinking alcohol. Police noted safety hazards on that visit and requested a building and codes inspection. The site was deemed uninhabitable.
On 1:15 a.m. Nov. 9, 2012, police found 14 people in the basement for what appeared to be an initiation for membership in a group or fraternity.
Officers said they saw several people face down on the basement floor with their faces submerged in water. They were being struck with wooden paddles and rubber hoses while being told to "beg for mercy" and having cold water from a garden hose sprayed on their heads.
Nine people were arrested on charges of hazing, criminal nuisance, unlawful assembly, obstruction of governmental administration and resisting arrest. |
To many parents, it may be confirmation of something they have long suspected. A new study suggests that children pose a greater distraction to drivers than using a mobile telephone at the wheel.
The research involved an analysis of 12 families over a period of three weeks, in which all their car journeys were monitored by four cameras installed in their vehicle.
The families taking part had an average of two children, between 1-8 years of age. In total, 92 trips were analysed by the researchers, looking for any evidence of potentially distracting activity undertaken by the driver, such as looking away from the road for more than two seconds.
In 90 of the 92 trips studied, the team detected distracting activity on the part of the motorist, with the average parent taking their eyes off the road for three minutes and 22 seconds, during a 16 minute trip.
The video recordings showed that children travelling in the rear seats accounted for 12 per cent of all potentially distracting activity, compared to mobile phones, which were responsible for one per cent.
Fathers were more likely to engage in distracting activities with their children and were distracted for longer periods than their mothers.
The most frequent types of distractions included turning to look at the child in the rear seat or watching them in a rear-view mirror (76.4 per cent), engaging in conversation with the child (16 per cent), assisting the child in some way, such as handing them food or drinks, (seven per cent) or playing with the child (1 per cent).
The study found that the presence of a front seat passenger did not significantly affect the way in which drivers engaged in potentially distracting child-related activities.
The research was conducted by the Monash University Accident Research Centre, in Melbourne, Australia, where rules regarding the use of mobile phones while driving are similar to those in the UK, with hands free phones permitted.
The team say the results suggest that children are 12 times more distracting to motorists than talking on a mobile phone.
Dr Judith Charlton, an associate director of the centre, said: “The costs of distracted driving are undeniable. One major and previously unrecognised distraction is kids in the back seat.”
The research comes just days after Brake, the road safety campaigners, supported by the Association of Chief Police Officers, called for tougher rules on mobile phones in cars, with a ban on hands-free devices, as well as hand-held ones. The charity also called for the penalty for calling or texting behind the wheel to be increased from £100 to somewhere between £500 and £1,000.
But Dr Charlton suggested that while the risks of distraction during driving are becoming increasingly well known, motorists often overlooked children as a source of the problem. She added that her research indicated there was a need for more education on the issue. Her team have now launched a larger study, involving 50 families.
The research comes just months after Norland College, the British nanny school, was involved in the launch of Nanny Drive iQ, a specialist driving school to teach childcare professionals techniques about driving with children.
Sarah Rowley, from the driving school, said: “Parents expect those who care for their children to have relevant qualifications, but often let a carer or nanny drive off with their children without knowing how skilled and confident they are behind the wheel.” |
Hannity: GOP's Failure 'Pushed Trump Into Arms of Chuck & Nancy'
Tucker: Trump Signing Dems' DACA Deal Would Be 'Massive Amnesty,' 'Collapse' of GOP
President Donald Trump has been criticized by some on the right for striking a deal with Democrats on raising the debt ceiling and then meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to discuss a plan to preserve the DACA program while increasing border security.
On "Fox & Friends," former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump made it clear during the campaign that he's a deal-maker and he's going to do what's in the best interests of the U.S.
"I think Washington needs to wake up and understand that this is a guy who is going to make the best deal for the country when he can," Spicer said. "If that's with Republicans, it's going to be with Republicans. If that's with Democrats, it's going to be with Democrats. If that's with a bipartisan group of individuals, it'll be them."
He said that Trump has a big heart and wants to find a way to protect so-called "Dreamers" from deportation, but he also knows the importance of border security and is committed to building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
"So like it or not, I don't see how you get a deal done that doesn't include the wall, because that's been a major priority of this president," Spicer said. "When you see what the final product is, I guarantee it's going to be on Donald Trump's terms."
Watch more above.
Coulter: 'If We're Not Getting a Wall, I'd Prefer President Pence'
Tomi Lahren: 'ESPN Values Diversity, But Maybe Not Diversity of Opinion'
Gorka: Trump Won on 'Make America Great Again,' Not 'Make the GOP Great Again' |
Doug, Mr. Hennigan & Chaille discuss starting a Bisbee gossip column, Bingo's new book, Doug's dad on tour and a couple of travel tips. Hey, they all can't be gems.
Recorded Oct 10th, 2017 at the FunHouse in Bisbee, AZ with Doug Stanhope (@DougStanhope), Brian Hennigan (@MrHennigan), & Ggreg Chaille (@gregchaille). Produced & Edited by Chaille.
Pre-Order a SIGNED copy of Doug's NEW book, " This Is Not Fame: A "From What I Re-Memoir"" at - http://bit.ly/2z4dmBg
This episode is sponsored by BlueApron.com - Get $30 OFF YOUR FIRST MEAL - WITH FREE SHIPPING - by going to BlueApron.com/STANHOPE
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ALL THINGS COMEDY Comedy Festival (OCT 26-29) presents The Doug Stanhope Podcast LIVE with Doug Stanhope, Chad Shank, Greg Chaille and Special Guests @ The Orpheum Theater Thu - 10/26 8:00pm in Phoenix, AZ. Tickets at https://phoenix.ticketforce.com/eventperformances.asp?evt=371
More Stanhope 2017 Tour Dates at http://www.dougstanhope.com/tour-dates/. Get on the Mailing List.
LINKS: Amy Dresner's book,“My Fair Junkie” - http://amzn.to/2gBVaZ9 Justin's Peanut Butter Packs - http://amzn.to/2zk0fNr Chad Shank Voice Over info at AudioShank.com Support the Innocence Project - http://www.innocenceproject.org/
The comedy clip is from Todd Barry's DVD “From Heaven” (2008 Comedy Central Records) and is available on Amazon.com - http://amzn.to/2xBXb1Y |
Oh, space. You're so hard to explore. Sometimes you bombard spacecrafts with hurtling rocks and deadly cosmic rays, and other times you're so empty you don't give astronauts a darn thing to hold on to. But while scientists haven't quite figured out how to keep radiation at bay, the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory—specifically, its Planetary Robotics Laboratory—are building machines that can get a grip on the most difficult surfaces astronauts will find out there.
Adhesion-wise, space presents a couple problems. First, robots typically struggle with uneven surfaces, let alone the kind of cliffs and crags you see on Mars. Second, space is kind of gravity challenged. "Out in zero gravity, even pushing tape against surfaces is difficult," say Jaakko Karras, a robotics electrical engineer at JPL. Without gravity to anchor your feet to the ground, it's easy to run afoul of Newton's third law. (For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So you'll be pushed away from the wall with the same amount of force you applied to it. Physics!)
And that's not just a problem in microgravity. Low gravity environments, like asteroids or comets, can be uncooperative too. (Just ask the European Space Agency's Philae lander.) "If you got out there and wanted to do some sort of sampling and just started drilling, you’re more likely to spin about the drill bit than the drill bit into the surface," Karras says.
So what's a robot to do? "Nature solves the problems around us all the time," says Karras. "A fairly common path for us is the biomimicry approach." When Karras and his team would test climbing robots out on vertical rock walls, lizards would blaze right past them. But rather than getting annoyed at the speedy little reptiles, Karras decided to take his cues from evolution instead. His team's adhesive makes use of van der Waals forces, which geckos use to climb smooth surfaces. For bumpy ones, his team built claw-inspired microspine grippers that can bend and flex. (You can see them in action in the video up top.)
Both gecko adhesive and microspine grippers are well on their way to scoring a ticket to deep space. Gecko adhesive is already being tested on the International Space Station. Right now, astronauts are using it to anchor things to interior panels, but NASA is considering using it as a replacement for Velcro, which kicks off a lot of dust and bristles—particulates aren't all that welcome in the fragile environment of the ISS. And microspines are a crucial part of NASA's asteroid redirect mission: The little spikes will cover robotic arms used to snatch up an asteroid's boulder and deposit it in orbit around our moon.
Karras also hopes that future missions will use microspines' vertical climbing skills to explore Mars' caves and lava tubes. "They haven't been explored yet because they're difficult from a mobility standpoint," Karras says. "But they may once have been collection points for liquid water, and they're sheltered, low-radiation areas. They're of interest for investigating the possibility of past and present life." So if we find any Martians in the next couple of decades, you have lizards to thank. |
HANOI (Reuters) - Abuses by Vietnam’s powerful police force are occurring at an alarming rate, a rights group said on Tuesday, and it urged the government to rein in offenders and create agencies to investigate complaints of beatings, torture and killings.
Tracking four years of alleged abuse of suspects in custody, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Vietnam’s Communist government needed to recognize the scale of the problem and urgently initiate police reforms.
“What we have uncovered is a human rights crisis in the daily operations of the Vietnam police,” Phil Robertson, HRW’s deputy Asia director, told a news conference in Bangkok.
“We’re convinced that what we’re presenting today is the tip of a much larger iceberg,” Robertson said, according to a transcript provided by HRW.
The group said many victims of police brutality were accused only of minor crimes like speeding or petty theft. It cited 14 deaths in custody - four unexplained, six alleged suicides and four from illness - and documented 31 cases of police beatings, among whose victims were eight children.
Robertson said the report was far from a quantitative survey and “more a snapshot of a serious situation”. The rights group did not interview witnesses or suspects itself for fear it could put them in danger.
It drew largely on what it described as patchy coverage of the issue in by Vietnam’s state-controlled media and from bloggers keen to document cases of police brutality.
Reforming the police force could, however, be a tall order in Vietnam. The force is overseen by the Ministry of Public Security, which has a big stake in politics and numerous areas of society and administration.
Several ministers, current and former, are politburo members and the remit of the ministry is far-reaching.
“STRONG COMMITMENT”
The rights group recommended that the government establish an independent police complaints commission, local-level internal affairs units, a tracking system to address allegations of abuse and ensure interrogations of suspects were videotaped.
Vietnam’s government rejected what it said were “false allegations” in the report, citing its signing of the U.N. treaty against torture and inhumane acts as evidence of strong commitment to preventing abuses of suspects in police custody.
“Every act of torture and corporal punishment during investigation and trial processes will be strictly handled in accordance with Vietnamese law,” deputy Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Tran Thi Bich, said in a statement.
Minister of Public Security Tran Dai Quang last week said during a hearing of the justice committee of Vietnam’s parliament that action was being taken against policemen accused of abuses and cases had risen from 2011 to the end of last year.
Quang said that of the 828 police accused of “infringing upon judicial activities”, 23 were charged with using corporal punishment. Quang did not disclose if any had been jailed. Robertson described the hearing as remarkable but said far more needed to be done.
“For now, it’s clear that the Vietnam police are mostly getting away with these abuses,” he said. |
Germany coach Joachim Low will explore his options against Azerbaijan as he attempts to identify a pecking order behind injured goalkeeper Manuel Neuer.
The world champions secured their place at Russia 2018 with a 3-1 win away to Northern Ireland on Thursday, extending their 100 per cent record in qualifying to nine matches.
But their preparations suffered a setback with news that Neuer could be sidelined for a further six months due to a metatarsal injury.
Barcelona shot-stopper Marc-Andre ter Stegen is the current replacement, but Bayer Leverkusen's Bernd Leno will be given another chance to impress on Sunday after an underwhelming display against Australia at the Confederations Cup.
"When Neuer is fit, he starts. We must see how [his injury] develops," Low said at his pre-match press conference.
"Marc-Andre has shown himself to be very capable. He has developed well with us.
"If you can speak of a goalkeeper behind Manuel Neuer, it is Marc-Andre ter Stegen. We also have confidence in him, just as in Bernd Leno and Kevin Trapp."
Low also confirmed the in-form Leroy Sane will earn his eighth international cap at the Fritz-Walter Stadion and will be joined in the starting XI by Liverpool midfielder Emre Can.
Manchester City attacker Sane, a member of Germany's Euro 2016 squad, pulled out of the Confederations Cup to undergo nasal surgery. |
Tricks of the trade: The world's best make-up artists reveal their secrets
From primer to eyeshadow, these are the products we use every day - but do we know how to use them? We asked international make-up artists Laura Mercier, Jackie Tyson and Gucci Westman to give us their inside tips.
Laura is known for her successful make-up range - her primer is a beauty icon. Gucci is a New York-based celebrity make-up artist who works with all the stars, including Demi Moore and Jennifer Garner. And Jackie is the make-up artist on The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent.
Here, they select the products we really need and give their differing views on how to use them...
Debating the truth: Make-up artists Laura Mercier (left), Gucci Westman (centre), and Jackie Tyson (right)
Should you apply primer on top of freshly cleansed skin or on top of moisturiser?
LAURA: Primer is a protective layer that seals in moisturiser and provides a smooth surface for foundation.
If you have an oily complexion, you may feel that the primer without moisturiser is enough.
GUCCI: My routine is more about colour- correcting, treating and highlighting the skin. A product that gives you an immaculate canvas is a pore minimiser, which would be my equivalent to a primer.
I use it only around the T-zone, where pores need to be made to look smooth and match the rest of the skin. Apply after moisturiser, and before you apply your foundation.
JACKIE: A primer provides a base for your foundation, which will ensure it will stay put longer, but will also help give the illusion of flawless, radiant skin.
Try Avon MagiX Face Perfector, £7 (avonshop. co.uk) or Beauty Flash Balm by Clarins, £26.50 (from Boots), which is a cult classic.
The X Factor: Jackie Tyson cannot live without her eyelash curlers and disposable mascara wands
Which make-up tools can’t you live without?
LAURA: My camouflage brush to apply concealer - it allows me to pinpoint areas where I need more coverage.
GUCCI: My sponges - they are amazingly soft.
JACKIE: My Shu Uemura Eyelash Curlers, £19.50 (020 240 7635). I also get through lots of disposable mascara wands - £6.25 for a set of nine (thepromakeupshop.com).
Professional tools: Invest in a set of brushes to get that flawless finish
What’s the best way to apply foundation to get a smooth, even coverage?
LAURA: Fingers for a cream foundation, a sponge for liquids and a brush for mineral powder.
GUCCI: Using a brush, start from under the eyes working out and up. Then apply highlighter to cheekbones, bridge of the nose and cupid's bow, pat it in with your fingers, and smooth out with a brush. Revlon brushes from £6.99 (Superdrug).
JACKIE: Use foundation only where you need it: around the eyes, nose and mouth. Blend well with a brush or fingers.
How can you get a lovely, healthy glow using bronzer without looking unnatural?
LAURA: Never overload your brush, and match texture to texture. A cream or gel is perfect over liquid foundation, for example.
If you don't want a powdery look, use a blusher with a hint of pearl to lift the texture and add a glow.
GUCCI: For mature skin, the more cream textures you can use, the better. Avoid powders as much as possible. It's easy to get a natural look with blusher - it's all in the blending.
After applying cream or powder blush, simply dust over the area with a clean powder brush.
JACKIE: Avoid powder bronzers for a more mature skin. POP Beauty has a fabulously easy-to-apply cheek stain called Apples Of The Cheeks, £12 (popbeauty.co.uk), that looks great on any skin tone and can be applied with fingertips.
Break out of your eyeshadow rut: Bellapierre has a good range of shimmer powders
How can you break out of a colour rut with eye shadow?
LAURA: Seek the advice of an in-store make-up artist - they'll give an objective opinion. When applying eye shadow, use a little at a time; it's easier to add more than take some off.
GUCCI: Go for a eye make-up palette that combines a few of your safer, familiar tones with a range of new colours.
JACKIE: Try to complement your outfit with make-up rather than match it. Bella Pierre has a good range of shimmer powders - individual pots cost £12.99 or a stack of nine is £59.99 (bellapierre.co.uk).
Can you define your mouth and get long-lasting colour that doesn't look too fake?
LAURA: Apply lipstick by dabbing with your finger to create the shape. The colour will look far more natural, and the pressing action will grind its pigment onto your lips.
GUCCI: Apply lip colour using your fingers, pat it on and clean up the edges with a small concealer brush. Revlon's new Colorburst lipstick, £7.99 (Superdrug and Boots) has a great lip balm feeling and provides a huge amount of colour.
JACKIE: Colour is best applied sparingly over the top of a good lip primer to fill in fine lines around the lip line. Blend gently with the ring finger. When buying lipstick, get exactly the same colour lip liner.
After applying a primer, such as Elizabeth Arden Advanced Lip-Fix Cream, £18 (Boots and department stores; 020 7574 2714 for stockists), apply the liner all over the lips to provide a colour base and give the lipstick something to cling to. Blot with a tissue and repeat two to three times for extralasting power.
Bobbi Brown's Lip Liner pencils, £14 (bobbibrown. co.uk), are long-lasting and the shades are all wearable. After applying, blend gently with the fingertips to remove any excess colour.
Nearly here: Yes To Tomatoes Totally Tranquil Facial Hydrating Lotion, £11.99, victoriahealth.com COMING SOON… Tomatoes in your face cream The Yes To Tomatoes range is rich in vitamin C and lypocene.
Totally Tranquil Facial Hydrating Lotion, £11.99 (victoriahealth.com) combines 26 minerals from the Dead Sea with tomatoes, rosemary and red pepper.
Nivea's Protect & Bronze, £12.55 (nivea.co.uk) is a dual-purpose suncream that protects the skin and enhances tanning.
It uses a plant extract called GA that helps increase the skin's melanin production.
Benefit Confessions Of A Concealaholic, £28.50 (benefitcosmetics. co.uk) has everything to hide blemishes in one handy kit, including eyelid brightener, primer and concealer brushes.
WE LOVE... For anyone who's ever had a disastrous home hair colour, Colour B4, £9.99, Boots, is a must.
Britain's first home hair colour remover erases blunders with one application. Launched in association with hair, image and style expert Scott Cornwall, Colour B4 is available in regular (to reverse an undesirable hair colour) and extra strength (for hair with multiple colour applications).
Pedicure perfect: Comfys have been designed to stretch, flex and rejuvenate your feet
HEAD TO THE BEECH!
These sandals may look scary, but are as comfy as slippers. There are four toe separators that flex and rejuvenate your feet.
Beauty addicts have discovered that they're the perfect footwear for polished toes after pedicures. Available in leather or velour.
Beech Sandals, £29 (victoriahealth.com).
WHERE CAN I FIND... ULTRAGLOW?
Created in the Seventies, Ultraglow was a must-have, along with shaggy perms and Sun-In hair lightener.
But the product was wise before its time because it contained minerals long before the rest of the cosmetics world had realised their benefits.
Wise before its time: Ultraglow Mineral Shimmer Powders, £4.21 (ultraglowshop.co.uk)
The original formula hasn't changed, but it now comes with a Kabuki brush for application, and is available in loose or pressed textured.
Complexsun is a matte version with a four-star UV rating.
The famous Ultraglow Magic Lips, £20.42, are also still around (remember the lip stains that came in black, red and green and changed to your personal shade of pink when applied?) and sell like hot cakes on the internet.
And there's also a great range of Ultraglow Mineral Shimmer Powders, £4.21, and a Magic Mascara, £9.95, which gives impressive coverage.
Ultraglow Original Pressed Bronzing Powder, £15.99 (ultra glowshop.co.uk). |
Okay, are y’all ready for the longest sex question I’ve ever answered? Because this one’s a doozy. Normally we edit the questions down to a nice size, but there’s a lot going on here and I think all of it’s valuable. So we’re publishing most of this question, almost intact:
I have been in a relationship with a bisexual girl for more than 10 months. We have a pretty okay relationship, we have our strong differences but there are things about her that I do adore. However, we are having some bedroom issues.
In February 2013, she went for an operation to remove a couple of cysts in her womb and she has been put on the mini-pill ever since. And since after that, our sex life has gone from hero to zero. We have had many chats (both peaceful and heated) about the lack thereof and she has said on many occasions that she will decide when we have sex. She said it’s her body and she has a right to decide what someone else can do with it.
I definitely have a higher libido than she does and here, I’m not sure if it is because she has had sex with men or women (I’m not her first girl) who have been demanding and have forced themselves on her. But all this is making me afraid to initiate sex in fear of rejection and yet I feel that it’s unfair that sex should solely be on her terms. She sees penetration as an “invasion” of her body and it is getting increasingly frustrating for me.
I do not want to jeopardize the relationship—I know sex isn’t everything but I don’t feel the intimacy with her. She says that I always want instant gratification that I get from sex and I always want it when I want it, which is not true. It seems that she only wants sex when she’s drunk or when she feels like it. Please help. I don’t know what else to do.
Alrighty, dear reader. This is going to be a multipart opus, because you’ve actually asked a lot of questions here, not just one.
I want to start, though, by commending you for not calling this lesbian bed death. I feel like that term gets bandied about a lot and it implies that a difference in libido is somehow a lesbian-specific phenomenon. It’s not. Any couple, no matter how they identify, can face this issue.
So now let’s start by picking apart these questions, one by one, and see if we can’t unwind this tangled ball of string into a more manageable spool.
Medications Make A Difference
You’ve acknowledged that there might be an external cause for the gap between your libidos. Medication, hormones, stress—these are all things that can make a difference in one’s desire to have sex. So it could be that this is a storm that you can weather—is she on this medication temporarily? Or it could be that she’s on the wrong medication for her. I don’t know enough about her medical condition (or about medical conditions in general) to tell you if that’s the case, but it’s something about which she can certainly talk to her doctor. However, some medications are long-term and have unavoidable libido side-effects—which might mean that this is the new normal. So what could that mean for you?
Her Body Is, In Fact, Hers
She says that her body is hers and she can decide who does what with it when, and that’s 100% correct. Even in your horniest state, it would be super ultra mega no-good to pressure her into having sex. Remember that consent counts only when it’s enthusiastic. You have the right to pursue a sexually fulfilling relationship, but that doesn’t mean that your girlfriend is personally obligated to sexually fulfill you even when she doesn’t want to.
But there is another side to that equation—your body is yours, and you are allowed to want things done to it. And you’re allowed to seek out those things. It’s normal and wonderful to want sex and to seek it out. So let’s talk about the ways you can do that within the parameters you’ve described.
The Price Of Admission
Before everyone gets on my case for using an idea that Dan Savage popularized, let me be clear. Dan Savage has said some VERY problematic things in his career, as many have. But he has helped normalize talking about sex and has contributed to the culture of being open and honest about our wants and needs. And this particular idea of his, despite so many problems with his other ideas, is a real winner.
Basically, think of your partner as a ride (while still thinking of them as a person! I’m not suggesting you objectify your partner!). There is a price you pay to ride the ride, and that price is often a compromise. I’ll give you an example from my own life: my girlfriend is wicked smart. Like, the kind of smart you cannot even believe exists. But she does have this weakness. And that weakness is Say Yes To The Dress. Sure, most of the time we’re watching thought-provoking documentaries or really excellent foreign films or any number of other things that are WAY MORE INTELLIGENT than Say Yes To The Dress. But the price of admission for my girlfriend is that sometimes we are gonna marathon this show and there’s nothing I can do about it. If there is a Say Yes To The F*cking Dress marathon, that is what we are watching. Instead of fighting against it, I go with it and we have fun critiquing the wedding industrial complex together. I’ve even come to grudgingly love it and find my inner Monte.
(My girlfriend’s note here: YOU DID NOT SPECIFY SAY YES TO THE DRESS ATLANTA! SAY ATLANTA! I HAVE MY STANDARDS.)
You can apply this idea to sex as well. I’ll give you another example from my own life: I cannot keep my mouth shut during sex. I dunno, I just let forth a torrent of filthy talk every time I get naked. That’s the price of admission for me—I don’t necessarily need someone to reciprocate it, I just need someone who’s okay with me doing that. Because I like it and I really don’t want to not do it.
Sometimes price of admission can change — it sounds like her boundaries about sex and penetration might be more recent, and may not have been there when you began this relationship, but that doesn’t make them less valid.
In your case, it sounds like you both have different prices of admission when it comes to having sex at all. Your price of admission is frequent sex. Her price of admission is no penetration, or only when she’s completely into it. Thus the apparent libido gap. Which brings me to my next point:
Sex Can Be More Than Penetration…
In your question, you state “she sees penetration as an ‘invasion’ of her body.” But if penetration is your criterion for sex, I’d challenge you to broaden your definition. Sex is a huge category that covers a bunch of different acts. Here are a few suggestions for things that could be considered sex that are not you penetrating her.
Using a vibrator on her.
Her using a vibrator on you.
Mutual masturbation!
Non-mutual masturbation/watching each other masturbate!
Her penetrating you (fingers, dildo, back door or front door if ya catch my drift).
Oral sex!
BDSM acts without penetration. (Yes, you can just flog someone and leave it there! Totally a thing!)
And much much more!
Whenever someone, a couple of someones, or multiple someones talk to me about a perceived libido gap, I always have to check and make sure they’re on the same page when it comes to defining sex for themselves as an individual, couple or group. Everyone has certain things they’re into, and when you’re having sex with someone else, you’re going to do the things that you’re both into, the acts where your interests intersect. Think of it as a Venn diagram.
It could be you’re both thinking you’ve got a huge libido gap because you’re both defining sex as acts totally on the opposite sides of your circles, but actually there are certain things you’re both into doing together that fall smack in the middle and are totally still sex acts. The only way to find out about that is to talk about it. For a more complete list of sex acts to peruse, I recommend this list on Scarleteen (yes, yes, I know, I am always talking about it, but that’s because the yes/no/maybe list is so good!) or this (admittedly a bit cheesy) interactive sex questionnaire. Your libido gap may not be as large as you think, you might just be looking in the wrong place on the diagram.
Or you discover that no, in fact, your libido gap (the difference between your respective prices of sexytime admission) is exactly as large as you think it is and it is truly a difference in how often you want to be having the sex in the intersection. You still have other options.
…And Relationships Can Be More Than Monogamous
Another valid way of addressing a libido gap is to consider sleeping with other people. If you’re both into it and you want to keep the non-sexual parts of your relationship going, you can always negotiate a less traditional relationship structure. You know, one that allows you to take your yayas outside the two of you and get your rocks off with someone else. Or many someone elses.
Now there’s a bit of a misconception I hear often—a non-monogamous relationship doesn’t mean you both have to be sleeping with other people to make it equal. It sounds like that wouldn’t be really happening for her if you all decide to go this route. No, what makes this kind of relationship egalitarian is that both partners’ needs are being met and both of you are happy. That means that, if you both agree on it, you could sleep with other people and she could sleep only with you, when she feels like it. Totally cool.
Or perhaps she really likes her nonsexual relationship with you, but would like to also have a sexual relationship with someone else.
Or! Maybe she finds that her libido increases when she gets her yayas yaya-ed by someone else and you are also bumping hoo-has with another human and then you come together for a sextravaganza. Some couples find that INCREDIBLY SEXY!
Or! OR! She might want to watch you fuck someone else. Some couples find THAT incredibly sexy.
The point is that there are options for bridging a libido gap. And those options can safely and respectfully include non-monogamy. For more thoughts on this subject, I highly recommend The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy and Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships by Tristan Taormino.
Regardless of what you decide, you should still feel okay talking about sex with your partner and asking for sex from your partner (if you both agree that you still wanna be having sex). So—
There Are Ways of Bringing Up Sex Without Pressure
I’ve actually written about this before, but let me do a reader’s digest version.
Always talk about sex at a time and in a place where you’re not having sex, or intending to immediately have sex after the conversation. Noisy coffee shops are my favorite. Driving in the car is my second favorite, though some have told me that location doesn’t work for them because it distracts them from driving. Regardless, pick a place that your partner won’t feel like you’re pressuring her to have sex right this second.
Ask permission to talk about sex and give that other person a chance to reschedule the conversation. If they say they don’t want to talk about it right now, say something along the lines of “that’s totally cool, no pressure. But this is a really important conversation to me. Can we work out another time to talk about it?”
Assume positive intent. Assume your girlfriend wants to make you happy. Assume that she is not mismatching y’all’s libidos on purpose. Because unless you’re dating a mustache-twirling cartoon villain, she’s not. If you are dating a mustache- twirling cartoon villain, pics please.
Be prepared to compromise on one of those above solutions. Be prepared to make an actual change in the way you’re doing things, and not expecting her to be the only one changing.
And I’m going to add another bullet point here, specific to you. Your partner seems to be not super into the way you’ve asked for sex in the past. So make sure to include this question: “How would you prefer me to express my want for sex in the future?” And again, really listen to what she says here, and be prepared to do what she asks.
Always Be Masturbating
Well, not always. You’ve got to eat, sleep and go to work. But yeah, masturbation is included in every You Need Help I answer because it’s important. And in this case, it can be an important tool for filling the libido gap with some spectacular orgasms. It can also be a sex initiator—many people get turned on when their partner starts touching themselves, and not wanting sex can turn into wanting sex totally organically.
However.
May I speak frankly?
I generally try not to give really specific advice because even though I answer the You Need Helps on Autostraddle sometimes, my relationship isn’t your relationship and the way I have sex isn’t the way you have sex. Things are different for everyone. But I want to point out a few things I read in your question:
“I have been in a relationship with a bisexual girl for more than 10 months. We have a pretty okay relationship, we have our strong differences but there are things about her that I do adore.”
“I do not want to jeopardize the relationship—I know sex isn’t everything but I don’t feel the intimacy with her.”
First off, you’ve only been in a relationship with this woman ballpark ten months. That’s not a very long time and already you’re experiencing problems—I want you to think about spending the next year this way. How about the next five? You also describe the relationship as only “pretty okay” and you don’t say you adore her, but rather you say there are things about her that you do adore. That sounds like a pretty ambivalent way to talk about what should be a fairly new relationship. It sounds like you’re compromising pretty hard here, and not just in the bedroom but outside it as well.
You also state that it’s not really about the sex, it’s about the intimacy that you’re not feeling. Which brings up yet another reason for a libido gap: that there are deeper problems with the relationship. Problems like not truly having feelings for each other, or not trusting each other. Or perhaps more personal problems for one or both of you (think depression or anxiety). And it’s these issues that are the problem—the mismatched libido is merely a symptom, not the cause. It’s up to you whether or not you want to work through those problems. But I need to be honest with you—if I were in the relationship that you have described here, I would end the relationship. I would be breaking up with my partner.
Which brings me to my last point. Sometimes a libido gap isn’t a libido gap. It’s just a gap, plain and simple. An everything gap. And that gap can be too big to bridge. We need to reframe breaking up in our community—everyone talks about it like the worst thing that could happen to a relationship. It can actually be the best thing. It means both of you get to be honest about what you’re truly feeling, instead of keeping up a charade and wasting time y’all could be out courting people who are fulfilling your needs. It could mean that you remain friends because you haven’t ventured into the place where your relationship (not the romantic kind) is irreparable. It could mean that you never speak to each other again, and that’s okay too! But whatever the case, we don’t have to look at it as a thing that has to get ugly. Or a moment that has to be entirely sad. Endings are beginnings too, and I recommend you end this era and begin something new and different.
Good luck, dear reader. I’m rooting for both of you. |
A number of the recent improvements made to Dropbox have focused around greater integration with Microsoft Office. The companies announced a partnership last fall, and you can now do things like open Office files in your Dropbox directly in Office Online, with changes being automatically synced back to the original file through Dropbox. Today, yet another new Office-related feature is being announced: the Dropbox app for iOS will soon let you create Office documents right inside it, without having to jump to another app.
Presumably, the files are then saved to your Dropbox folder and can be accessed through Office Online or the traditional desktop apps. We haven't had a chance to try it out yet and see if it truly offers the same features you'd find creating files through Microsoft's apps, but it's certainly an intriguing way for Dropbox to take on the Google Drive / Docs combo. Dropbox says the feature will be available "later this month."
Office document creation is the standout new feature here
Dropbox is also building on the commenting feature added last week. The feature lets users leave remarks on shared files that all other collaborators could see; you can now make and view those comments in the iOS app as well as through the web. Today's update also includes a slight navigation change. Rather than seeing simply an alphabetical list of your files and folders, the default Dropbox app view will instead show your most recently used files — that's anything you've uploaded, viewed, renamed, or edited on any device. While all these features are useful enough, the most intriguing feature here is definitely the upcoming Office document creation — we'll be keeping our eyes peeled to see exactly how that works.
Update, May 5th 11:34 AM ET: This article has been updated to reflect that comments are now available on iOS as well as the web. |
A Texas woman has filed a lawsuit against three police officers in Victoria, claiming that they brutally beat her and broke her ribs without a good reason.
Mary Frances Jones told the Victoria Advocate that the three police officers woke her up early in the morning on Dec. 22, 2013 over reports that a truck that she had purchased the day before had been seen driving in a local creek.
Jones said that she had been unaware at the time that her sons borrowed the truck while she was sleeping. After officers claimed that she was lying about owning the truck, Jones said she tried to go back inside her home, and that’s when they forced her to the ground.
“One of them had his foot on my arm, and the other kicked me and broke my ribs,” she recalled. “They hurt me. They hurt me bad, and they know they did.”
According to Jones, she had to plead no contest to a charge of disorderly conduct-vulgar language so that she could go to the hospital. Her fiance, 50-year-old Mathew Milberger and two sons, William and Danny Wallace, were also arrested and charged with disorderly conduct-vulgar language.
A police report filed by Officer D. Stone accused Jones and her family of yelling, “F*ck the police, f*ck yall, and various other profanities.” The report noted that Jones’ son was shocked with a Taser, but it did not mention that she suffered broken ribs, black eyes and other injuries.
Jones said the broken ribs eventually resulted in pneumonia, which left her on a ventilator. In all, she had been in the hospital six times because of the beating, she said.
Attorney Christopher J. Gale, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Jones, said that police had made her pay for showing “disrespect.”
“I think the police, while they’re trained in the concepts of law enforcement, they are not trained in regards to the application of them,” Gale explained. “When you express your opinion in any form or fashion with any kind of words and walk away from them, that’s a sign of disrespect.”
“It’s completely and utterly constitutional to walk away from somebody,” he added. “They’re just going to make you pay the price. That’s concerning. This is not a police state.”
The lawsuit accuses the officers of false arrest and imprisonment. And it asserts that Jones’ constitutional rights were violated because officers went beyond the “reasonableness” standard set by the Fourth Amendment. Jones is seeking $1 million in damages.
The Texas Rangers recently launched an investigation after another officer with the Victoria Police Department used a Taser on a 76-year-old man while he was already on the ground. |
LANSING, MI -- Enbridge directors say there are no areas where bare Line 5 metal is exposed to Great Lakes water but admitted during a Michigan Pipeline Safety Advisory Board meeting the outer coating layer has failed in places and the company doesn't usually repair that kind of protection system. Kurt Baraniecki, Enbridge director of pipeline integrity, told the state board on Monday, March 13 that anticorrosion protections on the controversial pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac are "working as designed," but there are 18 places where there is coating "
."
Baraniecki said a federal work plan incorrectly identified the delamination spots along the pipeline as "holidays," where the multi-layered coating has been completely lost and bare pipe metal is exposed. Baraniecki said "the consultants had generalized this" language in a
to assess the impact of invasive quagga and zebra mussels on the twin underwater pipeline segment, a required part of a civil
Enbridge reached with the U.S. Justice Department last year following the 2010 Kalamazoo River oil spill. "These are locations we've identified that could potentially have coating holidays," he said. Divers "are going to each of those locations to take samples of the biota and visually inspect the coating to see if it is still intact." He said Enbridge is "confident it is still intact" because of constant monitoring. Baraniecki's presentation was the main event at a rowdy pipeline board meeting on Monday that featured several busloads of protestors who packed the hearing room at the Michigan Public Service Commission building on W. Saginaw Highway. Security estimated there were about 260 attending, not including media, board members and state staff. Board co-chair Valerie Brader admonished the hostile audience several times during Baraniecki's presentation, reminding them that shouted questions, jeers and other interruptions only ate time away from the public comment period. At one point, a Petoskey man and his grandson sitting in the front row briefly left the meeting for the bathroom, where they undressed and coated themselves in chocolate cake batter to make a visual statement about the threat of a spill.
Man and grandson cover themselves in cake batter at rowdy Line 5 meeting "We wanted show you what the birds will look like... if the line breaks."
The packed meeting followed confusion related to Enbridge's biota investigation plan, which pipeline board member Jennifer McKay of the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council stumbled across on the company website in February. The plan
with the pipeline board because it referred to numerous holidays in the pipeline coating that had been identified during a June 2016 inspection of the pipeline. Enbridge called the holidays "
," but agreed to give a detailed presentation. In a March 8 letter, Attorney General Bill Schuette, Department of Natural Resources director Keith Creagh and Department of Environmental Quality director Heidi Grether called Enbridge's characterization of the holidays as merely hypothetical "confusing in light of the terms of the plan itself," which clearly identified them in maps and diagrams. Using a series of slides, Baraniecki said the pipeline has a coal tar enamel coating layer under two layers of outer fiberglass wrap, and cathodic protection inspections show the enamel layer is "still intact," although photographs show the outer wrap layer is missing, or "delaminated," in spots. He said a consultant that created the biota work plan, Gulf Interstate Engineering (GIE), used data from Ballard Marine and identified places where they believed bare pipe was exposed to the water, but Enbridge concluded it was a "mistake."
Enbridge director of pipeline integrity Kurt Baraniecki explains why Line 5 has delaminated outer coating during the Michigan Pipeline Safety Advisory Board meeting on March 13.
He said in-line inspection tools have not detected any holidays, but the delamination areas were discovered by visual inspection last year. "We're not certain what is causing the delamination" but they hope to figure that out. This year, Enbridge plans to hydrostatic test the original pipeline pressure used in 1953 when the line was installed to demonstrate the lines are as "good as they were when they were brand new." The maximum pressure allowed on the line is 600 pounds-per-square-inch and Baraniecki said the company will test the line at double that level. As part of the biota survey, divers will look at delamination areas and "if there are holidays, we will assess whether we need to do any repairs." Baraniecki said the purpose of the outer layers is to protect the pipe during construction and to prevent abrasion from soil or sediment during the line's lifespan, so it being compromised shouldn't diminish the coating system. "The outer wrap is not something we'd typically repair." That statement got the attention of Michigan State Police Captain Chris Kelenske, the state's emergency management coordinator. "If the outer wrap was necessary when it was put in, why would we not repair it, regardless of whatever the testing is?" he asked. Brad Shamla, Enbridge vice president of U.S. operations, jumped in. "We don't believe that going in and doing a repair is going to change the corrosion protections at all, but it's certainly something to look at," Shamla said, adding that the delamination spots amounted to "less than 0.1 percent of the system." Kelenske replied that, "from where I sit, any percent above zero is not good."
Enbridge Line 5 may be 'one peak current event' from failure, says scientist Meanwhile, state officials seek info about 'hypothetical' defects in pipeline coating.
After the meeting, McKay said the presentation left her with more questions. "I think Enbridge needs to do a full analysis on the coating and look at the outer wrap, inner wrap, coal tar enamel and determine what is the extent of loss and what does it ultimately mean for the fitness of service for this pipeline," she said. Board member Mike Shriberg, regional director for the National Wildlife Federation, said he had a hard time squaring Baraniecki's assertion that the line was as good as new when there's delamination in the outer wrap. "A pipeline that's in 'like new' condition isn't missing part of its coating,' he said. Shriberg, who represents an organization that is active in opposition to the pipeline in the public realm and in the court system, said Enbridge appears not to really know the depth of coating loss at certain points on its pipeline. "They're assuming it's just the outer wrap -- which is bad in and of itself -- but it could be much deeper," he said. "It left me with more questions than I started with." After the meeting, Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy said the company is satisfied that Baraniecki showed there's no exposed metal on the pipeline. As for the outer wrap delamination, Duffy said it "doesn't play a role in preventing corrosion, necessarily. It's just the outer thin wrap on the line. Bottom line: There's no exposed metal anywhere along the line. There's no holidays." |
An ancient Roman merchant vessel has been discovered off the Italian coastline, reportedly in such good condition that much of the food it was carrying might still be intact in its storage jars.
'There are some broken jars around the wreck, but we believe that most of the amphorae inside the ship are still sealed and food-filled," Lt. Col. Francesco Schilardi of the police divers' group told the BBC of the containers.
Local fisherman first became aware of the wreck when pieces of pottery began turning up in their nets. They notified police divers who used a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to locate the 2,000-year-old ship in the sea off the town of Varazze.
"We believe it dates to sometime between the 1st Century BC and the 1st Century AD," Schilardi said.
Tests on some of the roughly 200 pots, or amphorae, that the ship holds reveal that they contain pickled fish, grain, wine and oil, which were most likely en route to Spain to be traded for other goods when the ship sank.
The ship's remarkable state of preservation has been attributed to the layers of mud on the seabed, which covered the wreck and protected it from harm.
The vessel will remain on the ocean floor until Italian authorities decide whether to raise it.
"Right now, the area of the finding has been secured," Schilardi said, "and no fishing or water traffic is allowed." |
Political action committees with silly names are a dime a dozen — "Americans for Real Good Coffee" and "Americans for Crushing It" both actually exist — and most of them never end up with a dime to their name. But the Americans Against Insecure Billionaires With Tiny Hands PAC is standing out from the pack with a political ad demanding that Donald Trump release the exact measurements of his hands.
It's a spot-on parody of political ads, from the regular people expressing their dire fears about the future while engaged in everyday activities (setting the table, doing chin-ups, working at a construction site) to the swelling, ominous background music. There are some good hand puns: America, the ad declares, needs "a president who can grasp the complexity of the world and hold off the decline of a great nation."
"If the White House phone rings at 3 am, will his little hands even pick up the receiver?" one woman asks worriedly.
The video is tapping into a rich vein of criticism that Trump has historically found very difficult to tolerate: Call him a racist or a bully or a xenophobe if you must, but do not, under any circumstances, insult the length of his fingers.
During the primaries, Sen. Marco Rubio was the first to pick up on it: "I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5-foot-2," Rubio said during his brief insult comic phase: "And you know what they say about men with small hands? You can't trust them." (That isn't actually what they say about men with small hands, but we'll get to that in a minute.)
Jokes about Trump's small hands — or, in the phrasing more commonly used before 2016, his short fingers — have a long, entertaining, very Trump-like backstory. His sensitivity to the insult dates back decades.
Why Trump really hates the insult "short-fingered vulgarian"
Accusations of below-average finger size have dogged Trump for nearly 30 years. In 1988, Spy, a satirical magazine based in New York, coined an epithet for Trump that it would gleefully repeat for eight years: "short-fingered vulgarian."
Spy, which was published from 1986 to 1998, was busy skewering celebrities and public figures as Trump was building his national profile. Proudly avaricious and braggadocious, Trump embodied the spirit of the '80s. And Spy made him a frequent target of not just insults but also elaborate practical jokes.
"Donald Trump was our clickbait," Bruce Feirstein, a contributing editor for Spy, wrote for Vanity Fair in 2015:
He brought us word-of-mouth recognition, and more readers—just the same way he is now bringing eyeballs to newscasts, and page views to Web sites… Over the course of our years at Spy, we fact-checked his books and his finances (with predictable results), trolled him by sending miniscule checks — as low as 13 cents —to see if he’d cash them (he did), and wrote up his all-but-forgotten business debacles. (Remember the "Trump Castle World Power Boat Championship"?)
"Two-month anniversary of the publication of short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal," Spy noted in January 1988, its first use of the phrase. "Reader … is rushed to the hospital with hubris shock." (The same issue, presciently, floated the possibility of a Trump presidential bid, citing a survey that found 4 percent of Americans were sad he wasn't in the running.)
Spy would call Trump a "short-fingered vulgarian" 12 times in the next eight years, including once reprinting a correction from the Stanford student newspaper, which had written the phrase as "short-fingered Bulgarian" and had to apologize for insulting Bulgarians.
Trump, an expert troll, was getting trolled. He rose to the bait, responding in characteristic fashion: scribbling on the article in Sharpie marker and sending it to its writers. ("Face of a dog!" he once wrote over a photo of New York Times columnist Gail Collins, who had committed the other ultimate infraction: downplaying Trump's wealth by calling him a "thousandaire.")
What upset Trump wasn't being called a "vulgarian," a rich person with bad manners. It was the slur on his finger length.
"To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump," Graydon Carter, a founder of Spy and now the editor of Vanity Fair, wrote in 2015.
"There is always a photo of him — generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby."
Rubio's "small hands" joke was probably a slur on Trump's penis size
Before we get any further into the saga of Trump's hands, here's one important note: It is not at all clear that Trump's fingers are, in fact, unusually short. But what matters is that Trump himself seems to believe short-fingeredness is a terrible accusation that must be refuted.
The Washington Post's Philip Bump conducted a thorough investigation that included, among other things, the photographic concept of foreshortening, a 1902 study of the finger lengths of imprisoned criminals, and a comparison of the size of Trump's hands with the size of a sheet of paper.
Bump's conclusion: "Trump is not a 'short-fingered vulgarian,' for the sole reason that he is not short-fingered."
Still, Trump seems to take a slur on his fingers as a terrible insult, for reasons that Spy was far too arch to make explicit.
Palm readers, for one, have a host of stereotypes about short-fingered people: They're impulsive, stubborn, unconcerned with detail, prone to jumping to conclusions, and interested above all in doing big things. ("They build enormous buildings," the Benham Book of Palmistry even notes.) But while that's a scarily accurate description of Trump, it's unlikely this is what Spy meant.
Finger size also could be linked to testosterone, and has been cited as a predictor of everything from athletic prowess to ruthlessness on a trading floor. But that research — which, in any case, was conducted long after Spy first called Trump short-fingered — deals with the ratio of the length of a man's ring finger to the length of his index finger, not how long or short the fingers in question are.
Trump was probably drawing a much less obscure conclusion: He thought Spy was implying he had a small penis. "My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body," he told the New York Post's Page Six in 2006. "From what I hear, the same cannot be said of editors of the failed Spy."
Trump, as Trump does, was making the subtext text. While there are some superstitions linking hand size to strength of character, a far more common association is that small hands are an indication of, um, smallness elsewhere. (Urban Dictionary was on the case in 2008: "If you say someone has small hands it means that they have a small penis.")
And Rubio's remark has put the old jokes about Trump's hand size back into circulation, from funny tweets in March to the PAC today.
Hastily-Arranged News Conference Just Excuse for Trump to Show Off New Hands pic.twitter.com/CNJxNpLQV0 — Daniel Lin (@DLin71) March 2, 2016
It might set Trump's mind to rest if it were more widely known that the connection between hand size and penis size is spurious at best. The connection has been studied twice, once finding only a weak correlation and once finding no relationship at all.
But the feud over whether Trump is a "short-fingered vulgarian" has now lasted nearly 30 years. It would be a shame to stop it now. |
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Video title:
A Man Called Gaddafi: (His Life & Death) (Why Gaddafi had to die?)
Upload date:
April 4 2017
Uploaded by:
americanpatriot
Video description:
Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi (c. 1942 – 20 October 2011), commonly known as Colonel Gaddafi, was a Libyan revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He governed Libya as Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977 and then as the "Brotherly Leader" of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011. Initially ideologically committed to Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, he came to rule according to his own Third International Theory before embracing Pan-Africanism. The son of an impoverished Bedouin goat herder, Gaddafi became involved in politics while at school in Sabha, subsequently enrolling in the Royal Military Academy, Benghazi. Founding a revolutionary cell within the military, in 1969 they seized power from the absolute monarchy of King Idris in a bloodless coup. Becoming Chairman of the governing Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), Gaddafi abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the Republic. Ruling by decree, he implemented measures to remove what he viewed as foreign imperialist influence from Libya, and strengthened ties to Arab nationalist governments. Intent on pushing Libya towards "Islamic socialism", he introduced sharia as the basis for the legal system and nationalized the oil industry, using the increased revenues to bolster the military, implement social programs and fund revolutionary militants across the world. In 1973 he initiated a "Popular Revolution" with the formation of General People's Committees (GPCs), purported to be a system of direct democracy, but retained personal control over major decisions. He outlined his Third International Theory that year, publishing these ideas in The Green Book. In 1977, Gaddafi dissolved the Republic and created a new socialist state, the Jamahiriya ("state of the masses"). Officially adopting a symbolic role in governance, he retained power as military commander-in-chief and head of the Revolutionary Committees responsible for policing and suppressing opponents. Overseeing unsuccessful border conflicts with Egypt and Chad, Gaddafi's support for foreign militants and alleged responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing led to Libya's label of "international pariah". A particularly hostile relationship developed with the United States and United Kingdom, resulting in the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya and United Nations-imposed economic sanctions. Rejecting his earlier ideological commitments, from 1999 Gaddafi encouraged economic privatization and sought rapprochement with Western nations, also embracing Pan-Africanism and serving as Chairperson of the African Union from 2009–10. Amid the Arab Spring, in 2011 an anti-Gaddafist uprising led by the National Transitional Council (NTC) broke out, resulting in the Libyan Civil War. NATO intervened militarily on the side of the NTC, bringing about the government's downfall. Retreating to Sirte, Gaddafi was captured and killed by NTC militants. Gaddafi was a controversial and highly divisive world figure. Supporters lauded his anti-imperialist stance and his support for Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism, and he was decorated with various awards. Conversely, he was internationally condemned as a dictator and autocrat whose authoritarian administration violated the human rights of Libyan citizens, and supported irredentist movements, tribal warfare and terrorism in many other nations.
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That is the same thinking that got Europe into such deep trouble—the idea that one must welcome hordes of diversity in order to, what? still have enough people to buy cars or rent apartments, or require teachers—to fuel the economy. And, they pretty much say it in this article at a small town newspaper in Maine, to wipe our old white butts in nursing homes!
Watch, I’ll be accused of being a white nationalist (oh wait! I already am labeled as such!) just for writing about this story.
But, it isn’t me saying this, it is an immigration lawyer whose livelihood depends on more immigration just as a used car salesman looking for refugees to sell to (not disparaging used car salesmen!) does, or a nursing home owner who is trying to get workers at the cheapest hourly wage he can get!
Here is the story from Maine. ‘Lawyer, employer encourage hiring more refugees‘ which reports that refugees are now being spread out further from the normal resettlement sites in Maine (thanks to Catholic Charities).
“Why are we so old?” immigration attorney Jennifer Atkinson asked a small crowd gathered Nov. 16 for a talk about her work, hosted by the Camden Conference at Rockport Opera House.
“Look around…” she said. “We’re white. We’re so old because we’re so white.”
She put the area’s demographics bluntly, calling the Midcoast “a bastion of whiteness” within the oldest and whitest state in the country.
[….]
While some residents might be content with this, Atkinson said it doesn’t bode well for Maine’s economy or its future.
When you read these next lines consider this: I’m white and old enough to remember when the pressure on all of us college grads was to have ONLY two children or risk killing the planet. Guess who didn’t listen to that—the rest of the brown world didn’t listen! Heck we have 9/11 mastermind KSM telling interrogators that they are going to take us over by outbreeding us!
Statistically speaking, there is a correlation between whiteness, oldness and slow population growth.
[….]
Maine’s aging and decreasing population (the state had a net loss of 928 people last year) leads to cascading problems: low school enrollment, pressures on budgets, strains on services — especially health care — and declines in the working-age labor force. [928 doesn’t sound like a lot to me!—ed]
[….]
“To grow we have to be willing to become more racially diverse,” Atkinson said, “because that’s where the growth is, in non-white communities.
“There’s always the option to reach out to refugees and asylum-seekers,” she added, fully disclosing that doing so would be good for her Friendship-based practice, but also would benefit employers and the community as a whole.
Who is taking care of the old white people in nursing homes?
I don’t have time to discuss the next section, but you should read it, here. It is about a nursing home owner who has figured out that he can hire refugee labor probably much cheaper than a Mainer. When making arguments about why they hire refugees they NEVER admit it is about the hourly wage. They could probably find Americans for this work if they paid a decent wage! But, that would mess up their bottomlines!
(Your tax dollars subsidize the family’s needs when wages are too low.)
LOL! Big business owners are always pretending they are doing God’s work by hiring refugees!
Having had some experience with nursing homes in recent years, any one of you considering finding one for your elderly family member, especially one with some form of dementia, make sure that all those caring for your loved one (no matter their skin color) SPEAK ENGLISH WELL. It is hard enough for the mentally impaired as it is, and they need to be able to communicate well with a nursing aid. Something as benign seeming as a urinary tract infection can kill if not detected in time.
Questions I want answered:
Why is that Leftwingers are always pushing for more population growth (to fuel the economy) when they must know that growth of that sort will necessarily bring some degradation of the environment—more cars, more roads, more houses, more school construction, less open space, etc? I don’t get it! If there is some Open Borders Leftwinger who would like to explain it to me and our readers, I would very much welcome a guest column.
And this too? Why all the yammering at whites to have only 2 kids, I don’t see any of you nagging the Arabs or the Africans to do the same thing.
See our Maine archive by clicking here. |
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10K slice of OpenWebText - An open-source replication of the WebText dataset from OpenAI.
This is a small subset representing the first 10K records from the original dataset - created for testing.
The full 8M-record dataset is here.
$ python -c "from datasets import load_dataset; ds=load_dataset('stas/openwebtext-10k'); print(ds)"
DatasetDict({
train: Dataset({
features: ['text'],
num_rows: 10000
})
})
- Records: 10,000
- compressed size: ~15MB
- uncompressed size: 50MB
To convert to jsonlines:
from datasets import load_dataset
dataset_name = "stas/openwebtext-10k"
name = dataset_name.split('/')[-1]
ds = load_dataset(dataset_name, split='train')
ds.to_json(f"{name}.jsonl", orient="records", lines=True)
To see how this subset was created, here is the instructions file.
- Downloads last month
- 7,837
Size of downloaded dataset files:
14.7 MB
Size of the auto-converted Parquet files:
30.3 MB
Number of rows:
10,000
Models trained or fine-tuned on stas/openwebtext-10k