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A federal judge in California says that uninsulated power conductors owned by a local utility company were the cause of several wildfires that state agencies battled across California since 2017. U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup found that equipment from utility company Pacific Gas and Electric was the cause of some wildfires due to tree limbs and other debris knocking uninsulated power conductors together, NBC News reports. "The Court tentatively finds that the single most recurring cause of the large 2017 and 2018 wildfires attributable to PG&E’s equipment has been the susceptibility of PG&E’s distribution lines to trees or limbs falling onto them during high-wind events," Alsup's order reads, according to NBC. "The power conductors are almost always uninsulated. When the conductors are pushed together by falling trees or limbs, electrical sparks drop into the vegetation below. During the wildfire season when the vegetation is dry, these electrical sparks pose an extreme danger of igniting a wildfire," he added. Wildfires have damaged thousands of homes and killed dozens of people in the state over the past several years, including the massive Camp Fire that was contained by officials late last year after damaging 14,000 homes and killing 86 people. Pacific Gas and Electric told NBC in a statement that it was reviewing the judge's ruling and was committed to following "all rules and regulations that apply to our work." "PG&E’s most important responsibility is the safety of our customers and the communities we serve. We are aware of Judge Alsup’s latest order and are currently reviewing," PG&E said, according to NBC. "We are committed to complying with all rules and regulations that apply to our work, while working together with our state and community partners and across all sectors and disciplines to develop comprehensive, long-term safety solutions for the future."

JLS joins the stars of Skyfall as they show off their best suits for the film's premiere in London. 4. JLS joins the stars of Skyfall as they show off their best suits for the film's premiere in London.

TAUNTON – It took nearly two years, but police said they have DNA proof that a city woman broke into a camper trailer being stored at a self-storage facility. Police say Kerri Machnik, 46, formerly of Main Street, will be summoned into district court to face charges of breaking and entering into a trailer; malicious destruction of property under $1,200; and larceny of less than $1,200. Police say it wasn’t until this month that they received confirmation from a Plymouth County assistant district attorney that DNA taken from the crime scene matched that of Machnik. Machnik in August 2017 allegedly broke into a camper trailer parked on the fenced-in grounds of Compass Self Storage at 33 Chandler Ave. Police said they observed droplets of blood on the camper’s floor and blood smears from fingerprints. Samples of blood and fingerprints were processed by a Plymouth County Sherriff’s officer, who police say works with that sheriff department’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations. Items listed as stolen included a Vizio flat-screen TV, a large camping gazebo and all food. Police said when they met with him last week at his Wales Street home, the victim did not recognize Machnik from a prior booking photo, nor did he know her name. Police say Machnik has 46 prior adult court arraignments in her criminal file. Machnik was the subject of a 2014 Taunton Daily Gazette story after she and a city man were arrested for malicious destruction of property. The couple allegedly caused more than $1,100 in damage to an apartment building at 61 Main St. after being informed that they were being evicted. Cleveland-based Compass Self Storage, according to its website, has facilities in 14 states.

Madison — The speed limit on some Wisconsin highways would rise to 70 mph, under a proposal approved by the state Senate on a voice vote Wednesday. The bill would end Wisconsin's status as a lone island of 65 mph limits in the Midwest by increasing the maximum speed on stretches of interstates and some other four-lane highways that have overpasses, underpasses and ramps instead of other roads that directly cross traffic on the highway. The proposal now returns to the Assembly, which passed a different version on a bipartisan vote in March. The bill would mean that stretches of all interstates in Wisconsin could be marked up to 70 mph by Gov. Scott Walker's administration, as could stretches of state Highways 51, 53 and 151. The proposal's lead sponsor in the Senate, Republican Devin LeMahieu of Oostburg, called it "common sense legislation" that left a final decision on the speed limits up to state transportation officials. "This legislation authorizes, but does not require, the Department of Transportation to raise the speed limit on interstates and freeways where it is safe to do so," LeMahieu said. All of Wisconsin's neighbors have maximum speed limits of 70 mph or higher, and Wisconsin is the only state between Pennsylvania and Oregon that doesn't have a maximum speed limit of at least 70 mph. So far, Walker hasn't said whether he would sign the bill and the state DOT has not said how much time it would take to determine which highway stretches could rise to 70 mph and then change their signs accordingly. Spokeswomen for Walker and the DOT had no further comment on the Senate action beyond saying that their offices are monitoring the legislation. Until now, opponents have blocked the proposal's passage in Wisconsin by arguing that there would be inevitable safety effects from allowing the higher speeds. But a compromise among GOP lawmakers cleared the way for the proposal to move forward by ensuring that highways with at-grade crossings for intersecting roads or even driveways couldn't be cleared for 70 mph speeds. AAA Wisconsin has argued that the speed limit should not be changed in Wisconsin, particularly for heavy trucks, because an increase of 5 mph could lengthen the stopping distance for those vehicles by as much as 100 feet, or 20%. The motorists group cites federal data showing that large trucks were involved in 7.4% of fatal crashes in Wisconsin in 2012, while Minnesota and Iowa — which allow trucks to travel 70 mph on rural highways — had rates of 10% and 13.2%, respectively. Democrats such as Rep. Dan Riemer of Milwaukee have said that they won't vote for the bill until they see strong evidence that it won't make the state's roads more dangerous, arguing that the proposal's supporters owe that to the public. ■Broaden existing state law to make it a felony to physically harm or threaten to harm a current or former law enforcement officer, prosecutor or judge because of an official action taken by those authorities or their colleagues. The proposal goes to the Assembly. ■Allow search warrants to be issued so that blood can be drawn for testing from a driver who is suspected of a first-time intoxicated driving offense. Under U.S. Supreme Court rulings, a failure to get a search warrant for a blood draw could affect a criminal case if the driver didn't agree to the test first. But in Wisconsin, it's not possible currently to get a search warrant in first-time drunken driving cases. That's because search warrants are issued only in criminal investigations and Wisconsin is the only state in the nation in which first offense drunken driving on its own is a municipal violation, similar to a speeding ticket, and not a crime. In approving the measure on a voice vote, the Senate sent it to the Assembly. ■Make it a crime for a person to falsely claim that he or she received military honors in the absence of such awards. The Assembly will take the proposal up next. ■Make it a misdemeanor to put a global positioning device on people or their vehicle without their consent. There would be exemptions for law enforcement; parents and guardians using the devices to track their minor children; businesses that monitor where their vehicles go; and lien holders who use the devices to find vehicles for repossession. The Senate passed the measure on a voice vote Wednesday. The Assembly approved it in February.

Why are you running for office? I was inspired to run for the legislature out of a sense of service to my community. Everything that happens in Augusta impacts everyone in Maine, from the taxes we pay to the education we provide for our children. In my first session I focused on workforce development, job creation and growing Maine’s economy. The Speaker of the House selected me as one of only two freshman legislators to serve on a special committee charged to find ways to support and grow our workforce and our economy. My background in small business and education enabled me to be a contributor to the bold and creative solutions that will help jump start our economy and help people gain the education and training they need to make a livable wage. One of the best parts of my job as a legislator has been to assist citizens and small business owners with their individual concerns. It has been a joy to see the positive results in a person’s life when I have been able to intervene on their behalf. The people in my district are important to me and I am honored to represent them in Augusta; I will continue to work hard and be their strong voice in Augusta. Health care is a right not a privilege. That’s why I support life-saving health care for 70,000 Mainers, including nearly 3,000 veterans. No one should be bankrupt by mounting medical bills when they are sick. Our economy will also see a $1 million per day boost in economic activity, so it’s right morally and economically. What, if anything, would you change about welfare?I think the best anti-poverty program is a good job. Mainers deserve leaders who are going to work for economic opportunity for everyone. Though there is no data that Maine has widespread fraud in our welfare programs, fraud in any state program is unacceptable. By how much?No one can live on the current minimum wage and raising it needs to be part of a comprehensive economic program aimed at making Maine's economy work for everyone. Please explain your position on legalization?Maine law recognizes marijuana products for medical use because of their powerful properties to assist patients with serious medical conditions. If we recognize this substance as a medicine, I don’t believe we should also legalize its use for “recreation” any more than we do any other medicine.

Just one of many Leo’s lunchtime celebrations to come this semester — National Backwards Day — is currently going on at Leo’s. Personally, I was expecting to be totally confused when I walked in, with the pasta line in the normal location of the stir-fry line, and vice versa. But all I found was a cake with “NWOTEGROEG” written on it, some mixed up name tags (Kim the pasta chef was wearing the name Diane), and some pretty tasty meatloaf cupcakes with mashed potato frosting. But, I always love it when Leo’s spices it up for a little bit of fun in the middle of a dull day of classes. I say, head to Leo’s for Backwards Day and try to find some backwards things that I couldn’t. Enjoy some meatloaf cupcakes or a smoothie at Stacey’s Spot.

Two cemeteries in Washington County are prime examples of the wealth of history that graveyards can hold -- and the hard work required to maintain it. Amid the hubbub of shopping centers and the din of traffic from nearby Hwy. 61, the cemetery sandwiched between McDonald's and Tires Plus seems jarringly out of place. Few pause to notice the prim patch of well-tended green, bounded by an iron fence, that holds some of Cottage Grove's earliest pioneers. The cemetery, designated a historic site by the Washington County Historical Society, has ties to the founders of Mars Inc., the giant candy manufacturing company. Across the county, another cemetery lies hidden along a gravel road on one of the steep hillsides above Afton. It also holds many of that city's pioneers. Among them are several Civil War veterans, including one known as "the fighting reverend." Lonely and forlorn, ravaged by vandals and threatened by encroaching buckthorn and other overgrowth from a nearby woods, it is a cemetery in a battle for its life. Though Atkinson Cemetery in Cottage Grove and Mount Hope Cemetery in Afton are of the same vintage, historic significance and background, their fates have taken decidedly contrasting turns. The status of Minnesota's historic cemeteries is reflected in these two graveyards. There are more than 4,000 cemeteries and farm burial grounds in Minnesota; many are abandoned or under threat of vandalism and neglect, their history forgotten. "I would call it a significant problem," said Bonnie McDonald, executive director of the Minnesota Preservation Alliance. In 2002, the alliance placed Mount Hope Cemetery on its Top 10 list of most endangered historic sites in the state. The cemetery had been abandoned, and Washington County was considering the site as a location for a new radio tower, McDonald said. Since then, the graveyard has been removed from the endangered list: the county placed its antenna elsewhere because the city's title to the cemetery land was unsettled. While that may be good news in the short term, McDonald said, Mount Hope still faces the same problems as other historic cemeteries across the state. "Reinvesting or donating money to preserve cemeteries is a harder sell" compared to buildings, McDonald said. "It takes people." Two people, E. Katie Holm and Ken Martens, have taken a special interest in two of Washington County's oldest graveyards, and their work insures that the cemeteries' history won't be lost. It's not just dry dates and facts, but poignant stories of pioneer lives. Helped by a grant from the Independent Feature Project, Holm, a Minneapolis writer and photographer, spent about a year researching and documenting the history of Atkinson Cemetery and the lives of the city pioneers who lie there. For her efforts, she was named the city's preservationist of the year in 2005. "My family has always had an interest in cemeteries and genealogy," Holm said. Specifically, she credits her grandmother for sparking her interest in the stories that cemeteries have to tell. "Cemeteries show the history of each place -- where it started and where it's been," she said. "They show how people care for their memories." The cemetery, Holm found, was probably founded on heartache. John Atkinson had been one of Cottage Grove's first arrivals, in 1846. He founded the Universalist Church, set up a private school in his home and became an early city leader. When his 16-year-old son Martin drowned in 1854, he was likely buried on a parcel of land Atkinson owned. That site grew into the cemetery. In the early 1970s, before the area around it was developed, Atkinson Cemetery had been abandoned for 60 years, so overgrown no one even noticed it was there, Holm said. Once it was rediscovered, the city, joined by families and the city's Lions Club, began major restoration work. Most of the vegetation, save for a majestic oak tree, was removed. Grave markers were replaced, Holm said, but after years of vandalism and lost records, it's not certain that gravestones were put back in their original spots. The effort was aided by Forrest Mars, head of the giant candy company whose family -- inventors of M&Ms and Milky Way and Snickers candy bars -- is from the Newport/Cottage Grove area. A large monument in the cemetery pays tribute to the Mars ancestors, though it's unknown if any are actually buried there. "I would assume there's more people there than there are records for," Holm said. Notably, there is no gravestone for John Atkinson, but it's likely he's somewhere in the cemetery bearing his name. "As far as I know, no one knows where he's buried." Martens, a local historian who is active in the Afton Historical Museum, first visited Mount Hope Cemetery with his father as a boy, in 1967. The pair hiked up the hillside on Halloween day. "And we had to look for it, because there was no improvement here." As with Atkinson Cemetery, the first burials at Mount Hope were in 1854, four years before Minnesota became a state. Among the Civil War veterans buried here, Martens said, is the Rev. Simon Putnam, whose fiery ardor for the Union cause helped recruit dozens ofsoldiers. Many joined the First Minnesota Infantry, the unit credited with turning the tide at the Battle of Gettysburg. "I call him the fighting reverend," Martens said. Putnam, who founded the Congregational Church in Afton and whose house still stands across from the Afton Historical Society Museum, enlisted at age 39, bringing his 16-year-old son Myron along as a drummer boy. The Putnams ended up with the Third Minnesota Volunteers. While fewer than 20 members of the unit died in battle, nearly 300 died of disease. That was the case for both Putnams. The cemetery is actually two distinct areas, Martens said: A Victorian-era cemetery with more ornate stones and formal burial sites and, further into the woods, a primitive burial ground with cruder homemade stones and telltale depressions in the earth with no markings. "It's been lost and forgotten a lot of times, and then rediscovered and lost again," Martens said. There are 33 burials in the newer portion, though archaeologists suspect there could be 100 more. Vandals have made it a frequent target, and their damage is still evident. Buckthorn and other vegetation also are encroaching on the site, despite volunteers who occasionally mow it and Boy Scouts who do frequent cleanups, Martens said. "Nature takes over faster than you can clean it up." Martens has spent much time over the past 40 years poring through records and piecing together the stories of the people buried at the cemetery. "I feel like I'm a detective trapped in a time machine," he said. Partly through his work, there may be hope for Mount Hope Cemetery. The city of Afton is in the process of getting a clear title to the land. Once that's done, the cemetery could get the regular care that it needs, said Ken Johnson, head of the city's Public Works Department. That prospect tantalizes Martens. "There's still mysteries to be solved here," he said. "If we could preserve it, we could probably get to the answers someday."

Best Friend just called to ask if I was cold. He was still stuck on the weather which possibly meant he was stuck with that mood. I played it safe. I was always cold, writes Upala Sen. Best Friend left on an official trip for an “indefinite period”. Now he is the sort who starts feeling homesick the moment he steps out of south Delhi. So when he called to enquire about the weather “back home” (he had been away for two days) I decided to indulge him. The hot dude was away, so the mercury had plummeted in grief — I thought he could do with some extra niceness. Response: Grunt. I dropped the cute act and then asked him matter-of-factly if he had reached home. What I meant was, had he left office? But no sooner were the words out of my mouth than he bit my head off. “This is not home. This is a house, just a guest house.” Ouch! What did I say? Mercifully for my self-esteem bbsonline.org says that the words children use are words children hear, and not so much the words they prefer. Point to be noted. Likewise, I would get confused between home and house. According to mtannoyances.com (the full name is mother tongue annoyances) home is “anywhere you live -- your home may be a mobile home or an igloo” whereas, a house is “a physical structure with walls and a roof and a door”. I would think the difference goes deeper, where words lose their efficacy. The other day we were at a photoshoot. The model was friendly and as she wielded those makeup brushes with Van Gogian élan we chatted. “I am from New York,” she told us. It sounded crisp and smart and…to the point, 'Nu York' (as she put it) or for that matter New Delhi or Bombay. Take a peek into wordlab.com, it is full of exotic place names. And to think whenever I was asked where I was from I had to say Bandel. No, I have no problems owning up that I am a small-towner, but the name of my small town is undeniably a phonetic horror. So sometimes I mentioned the nearest city, at other times the state, and for the really really insistent I took a lesson in map pointing before I gave out the name. Till one day, for a change, someone asked me what my home town was like. And that got me thinking. Let's see: birthday parties with oily chips and return gifts, a magnolia tree outside my room, a-rupee-a-ride cycle rickshaws, early morning squatters dotting the Hooghly… Bandel was interminable childhood, certainly not worth sacrificing at the altar of phonetics. Besides, as per msgboard.snopes.com there are people who live in places called Gayville and Bitsch. We had shifted house five times when we were in Bandel. Come to think of it they were all homes. Some years back I was taking the Blueline from Tughlagabad to Dwarka, when a friend called. I had just moved to the city and was still feeling unsettled. And when she hung up abruptly with a “there’s someone at the door” it occurred to me that here I had no door of my own. I never mixed up those words again. And soon after I moved into a home. Now what did I say?

The Republican presidential candidate, taking a turn on the world stage, called London's problems with Olympic Games preparation "disconcerting." That prompted Cameron to retort Thursday that doubters would "see beyond doubt that Britain can deliver." And London Mayor Boris Johnson told tens of thousands gathered in Hyde Park: "There's a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know if we are ready. Are we ready? Yes we are!" A one-term Massachusetts governor with limited foreign policy experience, he is hoping to show voters back home he is ready to represent the U.S. strongly and smoothly at a time of global economic turmoil and security troubles. He also wants to emphasize his own tenure running the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City by attending this year's opening ceremonies. And he hopes to draw subtle contrasts with Obama.

Q: Can raspberry cordial kill stomach bugs in contaminated water? A: Yes. Raspberry and blackcurrant cordials can kill bacteria that cause some stomach bugs. Have you ever used cordial to prevent gastro bugs? Have your say on the messageboard below. For most of us, cordial is off the shopping list; we avoid it because it's full of sugar, bad for our teeth and some of its artificial colourings can make some kids hyperactive. But raspberry cordial has some very loyal fans, who don't necessarily enjoy its sweet taste. These people keep it in the pantry because they swear it can prevent – and possibly treat – stomach bugs. And they may be right, says microbiologist Dr Heather Cavanagh, whose research found some raspberry juice and blackcurrant juice cordials can kill at least 12 different types of nasty bacteria responsible for stomach bugs, including E. Coli and several strains of salmonella. Cavanagh first became interested in the use of raspberry cordial as a preventative and treatment of stomach bugs when she heard that some farmers in parts of New South Wales and Victoria were adding raspberry cordial to their livestock's drinking water to treat diarrhoea. She also began to hear stories of other people using raspberry cordial to treat stomach bugs: "I heard anecdotal reports from as far away as Queensland and Western Australia, I heard of how people used it to treat themselves and their family. Not just their animals". So she decided to see if there was any science to support these anecdotal reports. In the lab, Cavanagh tested juice made from a number of fresh berries – including raspberries, blackberries, blackcurrants, cranberries, mulberries, loganberries and boysenberries – as well as commercially available cordials made from these berries (these cordials were made with real berry juice, not apple juice and artificial colours as is sometimes the case). These juices and cordials were then diluted down with water to different strengths, the strongest was one part water to five parts cordial and the weakest was 1:100. Then each type of bacteria was mixed with each of the berry drinks. The researchers found a number of the raspberry and blackcurrant juice cordials killed most of the bacteria. And while there has been some speculation that it's the sugar content of cordials that kills bacteria, Cavanagh says there is something unique to raspberry and blackcurrant juices, which seems to be responsible. Those cordials that had the best antibacterial properties contained at least 35 per cent raspberry or blackcurrant juice, and worked when diluted down to one part cordial in 10 parts water. Undiluted raspberry juice and blackcurrant juice worked just as well as the cordials. But, Cavanagh says, there's a hitch. While her research suggests there's some truth to the red cordial story, there haven't been any clinical trials testing whether raspberry cordial can prevent or treat stomach bugs in humans or animals. "We know for certain that adding the right amount of these cordials to water will reduce the number of bacteria in the water," she says. "[But] we cannot say for certain that the cordial will definitely prevent stomach bugs in people, and we don't know yet if it will help as a treatment if you are already feeling sick. Although again there is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that it might." And even if red cordial does work, stomach bugs (gastroenteritis) are caused by a range of things other than bacteria – such as viruses, parasites, and certain medications – and raspberry cordial won't help in these cases. Also be careful about drinking too much cordial (even diluted at a 1:10 ratio) if you have vomiting or diarrhoea. Drinks with a high sugar content – such as undiluted soft drinks, sports drinks, juices or strong cordials – can promote fluid loss into the bowel and worsen dehydration, which is a risk for anyone with vomiting and diarrhoea. Dr Heather Cavanagh is a senior lecturer in microbiology at the School of Biomedical Sciences at Charles Sturt University. She spoke to Claudine Ryan.

Authorities believe the carcass washed ashore around 3 a.m. Sunday, March 24. According to the California Highway Patrol (CHP), the whale is about 40-feet long, the size of a semi-truck. There are several gashes on the whale’s side, though it is still unclear how the whale died. More details will become available after Diane Alps, President of the Channel Island Marine and Wildlife Institute and her colleagues release information from a necropsy performed March 25. According to the CHP, authorities do not plan on removing the carcass of the whale and will instead let nature take its course and carry the body out to sea. While experts were performing the necropsy on the 40-foot long mammal, rescue crews just up the coast in Oxnard spent Monday attempting to rescue another gray whale trapped in a bouy net near Channel Island Harbour. Spotted by passengers on a boat Sunday, responders Monday and Tuesday had a difficult time untangling the whale, which is around 20-feet long, due to the animal’s skittishness. “Every time we tried to get close to it, the whale would get scared and dive underwater, taking the buoy with it,” Mark Barney, a spokesperson for the United States Coast Guard (USCG), told the Los Angeles Times. According to Barney, because the whale kept swimming away, authorities have been unable to tell if the whale is injured, distressed or to what degree the animal is entangled. To help with the rescue, the USCG called in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for assistance. In the 17th century, gray whales were on the verge extinction due to commercial whaling, and while the Pacific Ocean population has since recovered, groups in the Atlantic Ocean never did. There are currently around 26,000 gray whales found throughout the world, all in the Pacific Ocean, and their Eastern North Pacific stock is the largest group. According to the Marine Mammal Center, gray whales have the longest migrations of any mammal. During summer, gray whales live in the Arctic in areas rich in their food, bottom-dwelling organisms. As fall arrives, however, there is less sunlight, less food, and the water turns cold, and the whales swim to Baja California, Mexico where they enter lagoons to give birth and mate. Therefore, gray whales can be observed passing by California in December and January during their southern migration, and again in March, April, and May on their northern journey. As human activity has increased along gray whales’ migration route, these mammals are facing a new set of challenges. While authorities have yet to determine the cause of the gray whale’s death in Malibu, the incident near Channel Island Harbour is a stark reminder of the impact human activity can have on these giant mammals.

A HORRIFIED Warwick resident is shocked and utterly lost for words after finding a "tortured" young koala right in the middle of the town. The butchered animal was found yesterday afternoon in the middle of the New England Highway, outside St Mark's Church. Pantera Louanna was cycling home from the shops yesterday afternoon when she found the maimed animal, which looked like it had been "bashed to death". "It's just... you don't see that often. Where was the rest of it and are there more?" Ms Louanna said she had no idea how the koala's remains got to where she found them. "It was very fresh. I've been around fresh kill before and this was fresh as fresh can be," she said. Seeing the precision with which the animal had been skinned, Ms Louanna worried the poor koala had been poached for its fur. "All the skinning under its face is perfect, you can see and feel its nose." Unsure of what to do, Ms Louanna took the koala back to her home in her plastic shopping bag and cleaned its remains. "I put its little bone chips in a cup. I salted it to preserve it and put it in the freezer." Ms Louanna said she was sad and lost for words and couldn't believe someone would do something so cruel. "What if more of these little creatures are suffering somewhere, getting poached? "It's just a reminder that farmers, everyone should be on the look out for it because it could still be happening." MS Louanna said she rang the Warwick Police who told her to contact a wildlife centre.

[U.S.A.], June 12 (ANI): Olympian skier Bode Miller is mourning the tragic death of his 19-month-old daughter Emeline Grier Miller. Miller shared the news on his Instagram account on Tuesday, which left his friends and well-wishers in a state of shock. As reported by the USA Today, the cause of the toddler's untimely death is drowning in a residential pool. The American alpine ski racer wrote, "We are beyond devastated. Our baby girl, Emmy, passed away yesterday. Never in a million years did we think we would experience a pain like this. Her love, her light, her spirit will never be forgotten. Our little girl loved life and lived it to it's fullest everyday. Our family respectfully requests privacy during this painful time." The post was also shared on Morgan's (Bode's wife) Insta page. Miller and Morgan, a model and professional beach voleyball player, married in 2012 after dating for some time. The couple had two kids together, a 3-year-old son, Edward Nash Skan Miller, and late baby Emeline Grier. They had revealed on Easter Sunday, i.e. April 01 of 2018, that a new baby is expected in October.

The Red Sox made it fairly obvious how badly they wanted to add bullpen depth this offseason. Dan Wheeler was someone they thought would help, so they went after the veteran hard — and it paid off. Wheeler was on Red Sox Live on Tuesday, and he spoke about how the Red Sox showed interest in him from the beginning, something that ended up being one of the deciding factors for him to come to Boston. Now, the Rhode Island native says he's ready for a chance to win a World Series, something he thinks the Red Sox are certainly capable of doing. The addition of Wheeler will also give the team added depth in the bullpen, which is exactly what Wheeler thinks is the key to a strong bullpen. To see his entire interview with Tom Caron and Peter Gammons, check out the video above.

NORWALK – A teen pleaded not guilty Wednesday to shooting a 15-year-old with a sawed-off shotgun at a bus stop. Deputies said after the shooting, the injured victim got on a bus and headed to school. Victor Campa, who turned 18 this month, is being tried as an adult in the Feb. 21 incident that occurred at Norwalk and Mines Boulevards in the unincorporated county area of Whittier. Prosecutors charged Campa with assault with a deadly weapon, possessing a sawed-off shotgun and being a minor in possession of a weapon. Dressed in a blue Los Angeles County Jail jumpsuit, a cuffed Campa appeared at his Wednesday arraignment at Norwalk Superior Court. He will be back in court Oct. 24 for a pre-trial hearing. Campa was being held at Men’s Central Jail, deputies said. The motive behind the Feb. 21 shooting hasn’t been revealed yet. The shooting occurred as a 15-year-old boy waited at a bus stop for a ride to school. Another teen rode up on a bicycle. Deputy District Attorney Brock Lunsford said the bicyclist pulled out what looked like a gun. The victim started running. “He hears a shot. He feels burning in his back and arm,” Lunsford said. The younger teen was shot in the back and arm with shotgun pellets. Residents said they heard gunshots and screaming. A neighbor called Frontier High School and reported that a boy had been shot and boarded the bus on his way to school. Security guards at the school met the teen when he got off the bus. He was later taken by helicopter to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. Two gang detectives spotted a teen matching the description of the shooter walking around the area. They searched his home in West Whittier and found a shotgun. However, Campa isn’t being charged with any gang allegation.

Schmid had no prognosis on Dempsey, who left in the 77th minute with a shoulder sprain. There also was no update on the injuries that kept forwards Obafemi Martins and Eddie Johnson out Sunday. However, midfielder Brad Evans could be back after missing two games on international duty.

Asia Pacific|Iran Sent Them to Syria. Now Afghan Fighters Are a Worry at Home. Iran Sent Them to Syria. Now Afghan Fighters Are a Worry at Home. YAKAWLANG, Afghanistan — Iran has trained and deployed thousands of Shiite Afghans as shock troops in Syria’s sectarian war. Members of the Afghan unit, the Fatemiyoun Division, wear a shoulder patch recounting words of praise from Iran’s supreme leader as a badge of honor. What those fighters might do when they come home is now very much on the minds of officials who fear that Afghanistan may become the next great sectarian battleground between Iran, as the declared guardian of Shiites, and Saudi Arabia, long the sponsor of conservative Sunni doctrine around the world. There is reason for worry. First, there’s a history: The factional divisions that drove Afghanistan’s devastating civil war in the 1990s were seized on by foreign powers who were seeking proxies. And there’s a new concern: A stark increase in attacks against Afghanistan’s Shiite minority, mostly by Sunni extremists loyal to the Islamic State, is already providing Iran a pretext to increase its meddling in the country. The attacks have received wide coverage in the Iranian news media. And one Fatemiyoun fighter who returned about three months ago from Syria said the violence against Afghan Shiites was a frequent topic raised by their commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Afghan fighter had returned to his home in Yakawlang, a village in Bamian Province where the Taliban massacred more than 300 Shiites in 2001. Every year, hundreds of residents kneel on the dirt in a hilltop cemetery and beat their chests in mourning for their loved ones, their names listed on a metal sign worn out by time and covered in rust. “The Guards commanders were saying that, if it comes to it, we will make Bamian into a base for you, a base for Fatemiyoun,” said the returning fighter, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being singled out for attack. “There was always talk about that; the commander would say that one day you will go defend in your own country,” said another fighter, who had lived in Iran for 20 years as a refugee before he joined to go to Syria. He said he enlisted after he saw a video of Islamic State fighters “playing football with a chopped head.” His relatives said he joined after a romantic heartbreak. Iran has long relied more on soft power than armed might in Afghanistan, playing up its cultural, religious and economic influence in western Afghan districts near the border. And though Iran resents the presence of the United States military on its border, it has mostly supported the American-backed administration in Kabul, choosing stability over chaos. But as the war in Afghanistan has stretched late into a second decade, and with the stability of the central government in question, Iran has begun hedging its bets, American and Afghan officials say. That has extended to improving its ties with the Taliban, a group it had long seen as an ideological enemy. Afghan officials acknowledge that they have not yet seen evidence that Iran was actively rallying Fatemiyoun veterans. But the officials are deeply concerned that the groundwork is being laid. And statements by Iran’s military leaders, as well as their use of Afghan fighters in other conflicts, suggests that Iran sees the force as an asset in future engagements. Brig. Gen. Ismail Qaani, the deputy commander of the Quds force within the Revolutionary Guards, recently told a memorial for Afghan fighters that Syria was just a temporary goal in a larger vision. “Fatemiyoun is a new culture — a collection of brave men who do not see boundaries and borders in defending Islamic values,” General Qaani said, as quoted in the local Iranian media. The war in Yemen is one indication of how Afghans are already being drawn deeper into the Iranian-Saudi rivalry, on both sides. Not only did Iran send smaller units of the Fatemiyoun to cross Syrian borders and fight in Yemen, but at least 1,000 Sunni Afghan refugees from camps in Pakistan have also been recruited to fight on Saudi Arabia’s behalf in Yemen, according to three senior Afghan officials. The core of what is now the Fatemiyoun Division included fighters from Shiite militias that had Iranian support during the Afghan civil war. Some even went to Iraq to fight on behalf of Iran against Saddam Hussein, or to Lebanon to oppose the Israeli invasion. Many of the Afghan fighters, mostly recruited from among Afghan refugees or illegal laborers in Iran, join for the salary of about $600 a month, and for the promise of Iranian residency paperwork after a deployment to Syria, which usually lasts three months. But they soon realize that the benefits are designed as a hook: The paperwork needs to be validated every year, and that requires enlisting again. Afghan officials say the Iranian police have intensified a crackdown on illegal Afghan immigrants, arresting as many as 200 a day. When they arrive at deportation centers, Iranian military officers are there to offer another option. “They said: ‘You had come from Afghanistan to work, to make money. We give you two options: You go to Syria, and we pay you money. Or you go back to your country,’” said the former fighter in Yakawlang, who asked to be identified only as Jawed. He was detained while working at an Iranian construction site and taken to a deportation center where, out of 200 Afghan detainees, he became one of about 60 who chose to serve in Syria. After returning to Afghanistan, he joined the Afghan Army. Extensive ideological indoctrination is a central part of their service. Recruits are told the war in Syria is a defense of some of the holiest shrines of the Shiite faith from attack by the Islamic State — a group their recruiters then describe as a creation of the United States to destabilize the Middle East. “My intention was Syria, to defend the shrine,” said the Afghan fighter who returned to his home in Yakawlang, and who wanted to be identified only by the name Abas. Abas described his fellow Afghan fighters being pitched into battles that resembled the brutality of the Afghan civil war. Other fighters described similarly heavy casualties. One said 15 of his comrades were killed on the first night they arrived at the front lines. And Jawed said there was a day when his unit lost 45 men. Follow Mujib Mashal and Fatima Faizi on Twitter: @MujMash and @FatmaFaizi.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may soon need another name. Trump-appointed acting CFPB director Mick Mulvaney is working so furiously to dismantle the agency’s regulatory oversight and enforcement that a better moniker might be the Corporate Financial Protection Bureau. The latest sign of this came May 9, when Mulvaney sent a bureau-wide memo announcing his decision to shutter the CFPB office that investigates potential student loan abuses and fraud. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the CFPB in helping student borrowers, who have been routinely scammed and misled. Over the past nine years, the agency’s Office for Students and Young Consumers recovered $750 million for students defrauded by lenders and con artists. The student lending office also helped more than 60,000 students from every state get answers about breakdowns in their loan process. It sued predatory loan processors and for-profit colleges, including Navient and ITT Tech. It stamped out illegal loan servicing practices at the country’s largest banks, including Citibank, Discover and Wells Fargo. The CFPB did not respond to questions about the decision by publication time, but did reply after the story was published (see update below). Mulvaney has stated he is moving the responsibilities of the Office for Students and Young Consumers under the broad umbrella of “financial education.” He has also announced a more sweeping reorganization of the bureau, including the creation of an Office of Cost-Benefit Analysis. Lenders and conservative media, however, have been unusually quiet about Mulvaney's memo. Meanwhile, the closure of the student lending office sparked outrage among Democrats and consumer groups. “Once again, Mick Mulvaney has proven how little he thinks of the Consumer Bureau, the fine men and women who work there and the people they serve,” said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) in a press release on May 9. Waters also lambasted Mulvaney’s reshuffling of the agency. Also slamming the decision is Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who called for Mulvaney’s resignation from both the CFPB and his job as White House budget director over Mulvaney's recent “pay to play” remarks to lobbyists and bankers. Other lawmakers criticizing Mulvaney’s decision include Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Oregon). The Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, the Center for Responsible Lending, the Center for American Progress and other groups have also condemned the move to eliminate the consumer watchdog. Update: Several hours after the story was published, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau press office responded to the questions I had sent earlier. Responding to whether the CFPB intended to keep the same number of investigators and continue to pursue the Navient lawsuit, the agency stated, "We'll decline to comment on pending litigation."

For politicians, compromise can be a surprisingly hard word. So it is today over the Brexit endgame. The talk is still of crashing out, no deals and blood red lines. But this is paradoxical. Politics, like life itself, is mostly built on compromises. That is why the Brexit sherpas are, in fact, still talking in Brussels and London. Even on Brexit, it remains likelier than not that the practical human instinct to compromise will eventually have its way. This is not, though, the certainty it ought logically to be. Brexit is not simply another political process to be settled through compromise. To many, it is also a series of absolutes. One is that Britain’s vote to leave the European Union was not just decisive but the immutable will of an entire people that cannot be questioned – or compromised. A second, never properly understood in Westminster, is that the EU sees leaving as a treaty process governed by rules that cannot be bent. Yet, as the writer Fintan O’Toole argued in a lecture this week, Brexit is not in practice monolithic. Indeed, Brexit metamorphosed at the precise moment that the leave vote was declared in 2016. With that declaration, Brexit moved from being a reactionary vision of restored British national destiny to being a practical and complicated task for politicians to sort out. More than two years on, it still is. For the fanatical leavers, Brexit remains what O’Toole calls an epic dream. That is one reason why people such as Boris Johnson refuse to accept ownership of the Brexit detail. For passionate remainers, it is the exact opposite, an epic nightmare against which only a second referendum, negating the collective national sin of the first, will suffice. Somewhere in the middle, however, stretching from deep inside the leave vote across the Brexit divide to somewhere well into remain, there are the many who now simply want a compromise they can live with. Theresa May is the flawed and awkward tribune of these pragmatists. It is a major part of her failure that she has never properly embraced this inescapable role. After 2016, she could and should have reached out to remainers by pledging to secure as moderate a Brexit as possible. Instead, she threw in her lot with the fundamentalist leavers in speeches to the 2016 Tory conference and at Lancaster House. This led remainers – and, just as important, the EU27 – to conclude that she wanted nothing more than a vestigial free trade deal and a minimum of regulatory cooperation. Since her failed general election, and in a characteristically last-minute, crabwise manner, May has sometimes crept towards a more centrist position. But she has done it in the least politically intelligent way possible. Instead of trying to use Brexit to reimagine modern Britain in a fairer way, as, at his best, her former adviser Nick Timothy urged her to do, she used it to indulge post-imperial fantasists on the right of the Tory party and the press, and to embrace forms of Ulster unionism that are rooted in the 1920s not the 2020s. May should have embraced some of the language and ideas of “soft” Brexit from the start. By doing so, especially after her June 2017 election catastrophe,she could have laid the ground for the necessary later cross-party understandings on the Brexit deal. She could, in particular, have tried to win round the SNP by pledging to devolve EU competences to Holyrood. And she could have tried to reach agreements with Labour on the customs union, Northern Ireland and employment rules. Instead, she allowed herself to become the hostage of incompetent and lazy rightwingers in her own party and the puppet of a sectarian DUP. Now, however, the Brexit process is approaching the crunch. Or rather, two umbilically-connected crunches. Crunch one will be over an agreement with the EU. Because the EU, not Britain, holds most of the cards, this agreement will either be softer than Chequers, in which case the Tory right will reject it, or harder, in which case the left will say no. It will not be the cherry-picking, bespoke deal May has promoted for the last two years. Crunch two will be getting the deal through parliament. This cannot be done by relying on Conservatives alone, since there is no Tory majority and because a significant minority of Tory MPs will oppose the deal, whatever form it takes. Even if the DUP backs May, the chances are that she will need opposition support. That is why she should have opened out to Labour, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats during the past year. And why she still should. Most of the media attention about the parliamentary arithmetic has focused so far on how Tory backbenchers will vote. Yet, when and if this second crunch point is reached, pro-Europeans on the opposition benches will face a crucial dilemma too. Do they vote for May’s deal in order to avoid no deal? Or do they vote with Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson to crash out? There will be immense party pressure on these MPs to vote down May’s deal. But there will be significant public pressure in the other direction too, demanding that opposition MPs give May’s deal a chance, avert a cliff-edge crash, and allow the country the opportunity to move beyond Brexit. The power of this dilemma will clearly depend on the content of the deal itself. For many remainers, voting for any form of Brexit will be a step too far in any circumstances. For more pragmatic remainers, though, the temptation to back a deal, depending on the softness of its content and the degree of compromise made by May, and which has also been agreed by the EU27, will be a serious option. Faced with a choice between an imperfect deal that retained significant connections to Europe, and no deal with Europe at all, many pro-Europeans may decide it is time for them to compromise too, because, like it or not, they have a dog in this fight.

Paul Manafort was found guilty on 8 counts. Here's how it went down. President Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was found guilty on eight counts of financial crimes today. The verdict: Manafort was found guilty of five tax fraud charges, one charge of hiding foreign bank accounts and two counts of bank fraud. The possible sentence: Manafort faces a maximum of 80 years in prison. The mistrial: Jurors were unable to reach a verdict on 10 charges, and Judge T.S. Ellis declared a mistrial on those counts. What Manafort's attorney said: Manafort's lawyer Kevin Downing said Manafort is "disappointed" the jury did not acquit his client on all charges. What Trump said: "Paul Manafort is a good man. He was with Ronald Reagan. He was with a lot of different people over the years. I feel very sad about that," the President said. And the other Trump news: The verdict came at the same time Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen was in a New York federal court to plead guilty to multiple counts of campaign finance violations, tax fraud and bank fraud. Deplaning in West Virginia ahead of tonight's rally, President Trump praised his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort as a "good man" and attacked special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation as "witch hunt" and a "disgrace." "Paul Manafort is a good man. He was with Ronald Reagan. He was with a lot of different people over the years. I feel very sad about that. It doesn’t involve me but I still feel..." Trump said. "It’s a witch hunt and it’s disgrace. But this has nothing to do with what they started out," Trump said. "It was not the original mission believe me. It was something very much different. It had nothing to do with Russian collusion." Trump did not answer any questions about his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who plead guilty to eight charges in his trial related to tax, fraud and campaign finance violation charges. A jury found Paul Manafort guilty on eight of 18 counts against him. Those eight counts carry a maximum sentence of 80 years. The judge has not set a sentencing date yet. A mistrial was declared on the remaining 10 counts: Three hiding foreign bank accounts and seven bank fraud or bank fraud conspiracy. Paul Manafort's lawyer Kevin Downing just made a brief statement following the verdict. He said Manafort is "disappointed" the jury did not acquit his client on all charges. "Mr. Manafort is disappointed at not getting acquittals all the way through, or a complete hung jury on all counts. However, he would like to thank Judge Ellis for granting him a fair trial, thank the jury for their very long and hard-fought deliberations. He is evaluating all of his options at this point. Thank you, everyone." Defense attorney Richard Westling asked Judge T.S. Ellis for 30 days to file for a judgement of acquittal. Ellis has not a set a date, and is waiting for the prosecution to weigh in on the 30 days. As Paul Manafort exited the courtroom, he was did not smile, but he gave a quick nod to his wife, Kathleen, who was sitting in the front row. Kathleen made no comment as she left the courthouse. After the trial concluded, prosecutors and defense attorneys were cordial and shook hands. Judge T.S. Ellis spoke directly to Paul Manafort at the podium to tell him he has been found guilty of several charges. He did not smile. Manafort's attorney Kevin Downing stood behind him. Manafort's wife, Kathleen, expressed no emotion and stared ahead. She had her hands clasped on her lap. The court has ended for the day. A sentencing date in the criminal trial of Paul Manafort has yet to be set. Prosecutors have until Aug. 29 to say what they plan to do about the 10 counts declared a mistrial. Judge T.S. Ellis has just excused the Manafort jury. Ellis encouraged the jury not to talk to the press but did not bar them from doing so. "I suggest to you that you have a duty of confidentiality," he said.

Johnny Cash was arrested in October 1965 when U.S. Customs agents found hundreds of pep pills and tranquilizers in his luggage. The Man in Black--who was returning by plane from a trip to Juarez, Mexico--spent a night in the El Paso jail, and later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count. Cash paid a $1000 fine and received a 30-day suspended sentence. Submitted by Watsons Pills on Mon, 2011-04-04 23:02. Submitted by roydawgg on Mon, 2010-11-15 02:56. Submitted by Pastor Cooter Brown on Mon, 2010-11-08 04:57. Submitted by liam42 on Sun, 2010-10-03 14:38. yea he shot a man in reno ....just to watch him die were good lyrics also listenin 2 him u would think he actually spent more than a week in jail but then again if u were naive enough listenin 2 rappers these days talkin jail n sellin drugs when only 5% prob speak some truth from there gangsta booths. Submitted by jerry_n_sue on Fri, 2010-08-27 23:43.

In 2004, Google promised to transform philanthropy. That goal remains elusive. JUST before Google first sold its shares to the public in 2004, Larry Page, one of its founders, excited the nonprofit world with a bold commitment to philanthropy. He vowed to dedicate about 1 percent of Google’s profits, 1 percent of its equity and a significant amount of its employees’ time to the effort, which became known as Google.org, or simply DotOrg. “We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems,” Mr. Page wrote in a letter to potential investors. Although Google intended to tackle major problems like climate change, global poverty and the spread of pandemic diseases, it declared that DotOrg would not be “conventional” — a four-letter word in Google-speak. For starters, the organization would operate in part as a business, thus freeing itself from various constraints placed on nonprofit groups. Google hired Larry Brilliant, a public health expert and Silicon Valley entrepreneur with no experience running a major philanthropy, to lead DotOrg, which was set up as a business unit within the company. It then poached prominent experts in development, energy and public health from prestigious institutions like the Aga Khan Foundation, Goldman Sachs and the International Water Management Institute. Nearly five years later, however, the hyperbole looks more like hubris. DotOrg has narrowed to just one octave on the piano: engineering-related projects that often are the outgrowth of existing Google products. Dr. Brilliant was sidelined in early 2009 after his loose management style created much disenchantment in DotOrg’s ranks. The company’s top executives rarely mention DotOrg, which is now run by Megan Smith, a business development executive who devotes only part of her time to the organization. Although Google gives tens of millions of dollars to charity each year and says the overall company is meeting its 1 percent giving goal, DotOrg itself is no longer making grants to nonprofit groups or financing new companies. Instead, it focuses on projects like using Google Earth to track environmental changes and monitoring Web searches to detect flu outbreaks. Most of the experts it initially hired have left, and Google, a company obsessed with numbers and metrics, struggles to measure DotOrg’s accomplishments. Google says it has changed its approach to philanthropy, but not its scope or ambition. Ms. Smith readily acknowledges that the organization has yet to prove itself, but she says it has already had a positive impact in various areas, such as public health and the environment. In the philanthropy world, many people have a more skeptical view of Google’s experiment. NOTHING illustrates DotOrg’s approach better than Google Flu Trends, an innovative tool that uses data collected from searches about flu symptoms to predict the location of flu outbreaks. In April 2009, Dr. Brilliant said it epitomized the power of Google’s vaunted engineering prowess to make the world a better place, and he predicted that it would save untold numbers of lives. Public health officials say the tool is undoubtedly useful. But “on an individual basis, does Flu Trends save lives? No,” said Ashley LaMonte-Fowlkes, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which helped Google test and develop it. Instead, she described it as “a really nice adjunct” to other tools that the agency uses to understand the spread of flu. One major shortcoming of Flu Trends is that in poor regions of the developing world, where devastating pandemics are most likely to start, computers are not widely available, so Google has little data to feed into the tool. Even in the United States, during the swine flu outbreak of 2009, Flu Trends had difficulty detecting the relatively small number of H1N1 infections. Some veterans of DotOrg say Flu Trends is an example of how Google’s engineering-centric approach frustrated and limited them. Those solutions also had to be something that Google engineers, who represent the cream of the world’s elite universities, believed that only they could create. For instance, in early 2008, some DotOrg staff members with traditional nonprofit backgrounds proposed a system to track drugs for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis through the supply chain, in order to combat drug counterfeiting and theft. Fake drugs, which can be toxic, are an enormous problem: the World Health Organization has estimated that more than 30 percent of drugs sold in developing countries in Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America can be counterfeit. The team’s idea was to engineer a FedEx-type system, relying in part on text-messaging, that would track drugs from the moment they left a manufacturer’s control until they reached a patient. The plan never went anywhere, however, because text-messaging was not sophisticated enough to challenge Google’s engineers, several former DotOrg executives said. The culture clash between the engineers — caustically referred to by former DotOrg executives as “the Brahmin” — and those from development organizations was exacerbated by DotOrg’s leader, Dr. Brilliant, according to a dozen former employees of DotOrg. Even Dr. Brilliant’s fans — and they are legion in Silicon Valley and the global health arena — say he lacks management skills. A spokesman for Dr. Brilliant’s current employer, the Skoll Global Threats Fund, said last week that he was unavailable for an interview because of a death in his immediate family. Dr. Brilliant did respond to some questions by e-mail, though he did not reply to a question about his management. He was hired on a whim after he won the coveted TED Prize, awarded annually to someone with a world-changing “wish,” in 2006 for his idea to build a global early-response system to identify new diseases and disasters as soon as they emerge, thus heading off pandemics. Dr. Brilliant was invited to speak to Google employees about his idea, and Mr. Page and his Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, happened to attend. They were smitten, and Dr. Brilliant was hired almost immediately. It took DotOrg almost two years to define the five areas in which it would work, and they were announced with much fanfare in January 2008: predicting and preventing diseases; growing small and midsize businesses; increasing access to information and public services; developing renewable energy; and helping to commercialize plug-in hybrids. Google.org vowed to spend $175 million in those areas over the next three years. It troubled several DotOrg executives that the largest grant announced that day, accounting for 20 percent of the $25 million committed at the time, went to InStedd, the organization that Dr. Brilliant had founded with his TED prize money. “No one seemed to understand that this looked like a tremendous conflict of interest,” said one former DotOrg employee who oversaw programs and asked for anonymity because Google’s severance contract included a confidentiality clause. During Dr. Brilliant’s tenure as executive director of DotOrg, InStedd received $11 million from the institution, while the Seva Foundation, another nonprofit that he had co-founded, received $2.5 million. In an e-mail, Dr. Brilliant said the grant to Seva illustrated Google’s “don’t be evil” mantra: Mr. Brin ordered it up to make Seva whole after Google hired Dr. Brilliant away. Dr. Brilliant also had to deal with other issues. On a personal level, he was distracted during part of his time at DotOrg because two family members were critically ill. It didn’t help that Sheryl Sandberg, a Google executive who was the architect of DotOrg as it was first conceived, left to join Facebook in early 2008. Ms. Sandberg’s first job out of college was with the World Bank in India, and many DotOrg executives considered her their champion. When she left, DotOrg became isolated. It operated out of San Francisco, rather than from Google’s campus in Mountain View, Calif. And with its executives spending most of their time in the developing world and thus unable to cultivate allies at the company, DotOrg all but ground to a halt. Dr. Brilliant lacked Ms. Sandberg’s access to the Executive Management Group, which comprises about a dozen senior Google executives close to Mr. Page, Mr. Brin and Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s longtime chief executive, who is moving to a new role as executive chairman in April. (Mr. Page, meanwhile, will become C.E.O.) Members of this group were usually too busy to attend meetings where grants were presented for approval, so Dr. Brilliant worked out a system of e-mailing the proposals to Mr. Page and Mr. Brin. If they did not respond within 48 hours, he made the decision himself. LAURENCE SIMON, a professor at Brandeis University and a friend of Dr. Brilliant’s who took a sabbatical to work at DotOrg in 2007, said that in his view, Google’s top executives grew frustrated with DotOrg when they were not being presented with clearly defined problems and solutions. “I think they expected there would be the same kind of ‘launch early and often’ approach demanded on the business side, but that’s not the way development works,” Mr. Simon said. When the Google founders did attend a meeting about DotOrg, they spent most of their time fiddling with their BlackBerrys. At one meeting, former DotOrg executives said, they were stunned when Mr. Brin dropped to the floor and started doing push-ups. “DotOrg was like quicksand — every time you thought you’d found your footing, a sinkhole opened,” the former Google.org program officer said. Jacquelline Fuller, a spokeswoman for DotOrg, said Mr. Brin, Mr. Page and Mr. Schmidt were not available to discuss the organization. By the end of 2008, many of the DotOrg executives hired from the outside had left in frustration, and morale ratings were among the lowest in the company, according to an employee survey. Mr. Schmidt was prodded by other Google executives to review and restructure the operation. After the review, Google suspended all grants that were not quite final. Grants were canceled to institutions like Harvard and Stanford for research projects in Africa even though Google’s senior management had approved them and they lacked only a final signature on the contracts. Mr. Schmidt moved DotOrg to the Mountain View campus in early 2009. That February, Dr. Brilliant was given the title “chief philanthropic evangelist,” and left the organization soon after to join the Skoll Global Threats Fund. Ms. Smith took over DotOrg. Engineers from outside DotOrg were assigned to review all of the grants it had made. Not surprisingly, they wanted to know why there wasn’t more engineering in, say, a grant made to assess the quality of basic education in Tanzania’s schools. They also wanted to know why DotOrg wasn’t working more to “scale” up small projects to have a broader impact. “They never understood that technology is a means to an end, and that in the developing world, sometimes basic technology, like the collection and compilation of data, can have enormous impact,” said another DotOrg program officer, who resigned after the reorganization. In the end, many grants were labeled “legacy” and discontinued when they expired. IN devising what DotOrg would become after Dr. Brilliant, the company went back to the Flu Trends model. It has developed a series of tools based on existing Google technologies, including PowerMeter, which lets people track their home energy use in real time, and Earth Engine, which uses Google Earth and satellite imagery to monitor aspects of the earth’s environment, including deforestation. So far, PowerMeter has failed to gain widespread adoption, in part because there are a number of competing products and many utilities did not get behind the idea. Earth Engine, which Google released last month, offers more promise. It includes years of satellite imagery of the planet, and lets scientists use Google’s cloud-computing infrastructure to analyze it. DotOrg’s projects related to green energy have received more attention from Google’s top brass, since they are pet projects of the founders and fit with the company’s broader, for-profit investments in clean energy technologies. The organization’s engineers are working on technology that would make solar energy less expensive and more efficient as part of an initiative to develop renewable energy cheaper than coal. Another effort, to accelerate the development of plug-in cars, has its roots in the original DotOrg. The company worked to modify a fleet of hybrids to draw power from the grid and set up charging stations on its campus. Google says it cannot easily separate the impact it has had in bringing plug-in hybrids closer to reality from that of others, like General Motors and Toyota, that are also promoting the technology. “Google was one of the entities helping to create the meme that plug-in hybrids are coming,” Ms. Smith said. DotOrg has also developed tools to respond to disasters, such as a database to track missing people after the earthquake in Haiti. There is also Resource Finder, a map-based tool set up after Pakistan’s floods that helps relief workers locate available hospital beds. Just as important as the projects themselves, Ms. Smith said, is the formal process for reviewing DotOrg proposals. The ideas, which can now be proposed by any Google employee, are handled very much the way Google handles any idea from its staff — with a rigorous product review. The process lays the foundation for many more projects in coming years, she said. Google puts its overall giving last year at $184 million, including in-kind contributions. Roughly half that amount went to nonprofit groups as cash. An additional 20 percent went to universities under a program that also gives the company an inside track on promising young engineers and research. Just 15 percent went to DotOrg projects. “We have ramped up our charitable giving, but it is now being done outside of DotOrg by other teams, which has allowed DotOrg to focus on developing engineering solutions,” said Ms. Fuller, the DotOrg spokeswoman who was recently named Google’s director of charitable giving, in an e-mail. THE reorganization has made it hard to assess whether Google is living up to its original promise. Many of the grants Google makes to organizations like Citizen Schools, Landesa, Ashoka and Unicef seem more like conventional corporate philanthropy than the revolutionary social innovation that Mr. Page pledged. Indeed, Ms. Fuller measures the philanthropic success of Google by comparing its giving with that of other companies. “I think the big picture is that relative to its peers, Google has been generous with its time and resources,” she wrote.

Bidding for and hosting the 2017 Track Cycling World Championships has been outlined as a means to continue Turkmenistan’s growth as a sporting hub today at the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) General Assembly. The intention was expressed following a lengthy address by the Central Asian country's President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov in which he reiterated his aim to use sport to raise the profile of the nation. Major events, including the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games taking place here in 2017, will inspire youth and encourage wider development, he claimed. His speech was followed by an interjection by Igor Makarov, the Ashgabat-born President of the Russian Cycling Federation who runs the Katusha Cycling Team. He outlined the attractions of the Ashgabat Sports Complex Velodrome built here, which is among the largest veledromes in the world with room for 6,000 spectators, before appealing directly to the President to consider bidding for the event. Makarov supported the election campaign of International Cycling Union President Brian Cookson, who was also present here today to see the facility. Despite being held virtually every year since 1893, the World Track Championships have only been held in Asia once before, in 1990 in Maebashi, Japan. They would represent a major step-up for Turkmenistan, and would represent the largest-profile sporting event ever held here. The 2017 Championships will follow a 2016 edition in London, with few other cities having yet declared interest. The President, a former dentist who assumed the office in 2006, was also awarded the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC) Merit Award by Shiekh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti who heads ANOC as well as the Olympic Council of Asia. Berdimuhamedov also heads the Turkmenistan National Olympic Committee and ordered the building of the Olympic Complex which will form the centre-piece of the continental event in 2017. “I am accepting this out of recognition of my devotion to sports,” he said, receiving it here rather than at next month’s ANOC General Assembly in Washington D.C. He follows two recipients last year in International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, and Senegal’s Lamine Diack, who last month stepped-down as head of the International Association of Athletics Federations. A lavish Gala Dinner following the ceremony here this evening, before the General Assembly itself takes place tomorrow.

Kenya's ambassador to the UN Macharia Kamau. Photo | FILE. Kenya's United Nations envoy Macharia Kamau is leading a global effort in New York to promote the rights of people living with disabilities. Ambassador Kamau will chair a three-day meeting at the UN headquarters on June 10-12. As president of the conference of countries that have ratified a disability rights accord, he will moderate conversation on issues affecting one billion disabled people worldwide. In an interview with Nation.co.ke on Sunday, Ambassador Kamau said Kenya has made some progress in addressing the needs of its disabled citizens. However, in many developing countries, he added, progress is slowed by lack of political will and inadequate resources. “In some of our countries the condition of people with physical, mental or emotional disabilities is deplorable,” Mr Kamau told reporters at the UN on Monday. He noted that in poor nations, disabilities often result not from physical injury but from the effects of poverty, such as nutritional deficiencies and unhealthy air quality in homes. Ambassador Kamau was elected last year as head of the disability rights conference. He also serves as president of the Unicef board of directors and co-chair of a UN group working to formulate a global development agenda for the years following completion of the Millennium Development Goals effort in 2015.

*Agents for the top two remaining free-agent left-handers, Jerry Blevins and Boone Logan, are signaling to teams that the pitchers will secure deals of at least two years and $12 million. *The Blue Jays are trying to add two relievers, a lefty to replace Brett Cecil and a righty as well. Signing one such pitcher for bigger money — say, Blevins or right-hander Joe Blanton — could limit the team’s options. *The Indians continue to explore the market, and bullpen coach Jason Bere was one of two representatives from the team to watch Craig Breslow’s throwing session on Monday, according to a scout in attendance. Breslow impressed scouts by throwing at a lower arm slot. The Mets and Dodgers each had two officials attend the session as well, and the Jays and Cubs were among the other clubs represented. *The Dodgers like Blevins and Blanton, but could pivot if a better value emerges. One problem: The team only wants to offer a one-year deal, perhaps taking it out of play on the more popular choices. *The Nationals — after bidding more than $80 million for Kenley Jansen, including deferrals — remain without a proven closer, but are less willing to spend on lesser relievers and reluctant to trade prospects. *The Mets are exploring free-agent and trade opportunities, with Blevins and righties Sergio Romo and Joe Smith among their free-agent targets. Whether the team is willing to spend significant dollars is unclear. *Romo and Blanton appear to be the top right-handed targets, with Smith, Fernando Salas and David Hernandez on the next tier. The White Sox’ David Robertson, Rays’ Alex Colome and Braves’ Arodys Vizcaino remain trade options, but the acquisition costs in each case might be prohibitive. *The Yankees are remaining in touch with agents for the available lefties, but only are interested in signing one who would accept a low base salary or non-roster deal. *The Angels, White Sox, Twins and Reds are among the other clubs seeking bullpen help.

Indeed, by Sunday, temperatures are expected to be back in the 50s, and then possibly into the upper 70s by Jan. 10. But first, the National Weather Service expects mostly sunny skies and a high of 59 degrees on Tuesday. The front will make its way into Fort Worth mid-day, but likely won’t be felt until the overnight hours, making for a chilly Wednesday wake-up with the temperature hovering just above freezing. Wednesday’s high is forecast for 46 degrees with partly cloudy skies, followed by a low of 28. Thursday is expected to get to about 40 degrees, with Friday potentially not escaping the 30s. Nightime temperatures are expected to dip into the mid-20s. The good news: No significant precipitation, if any, is expected. The incoming front won’t deliver a chill as deep as the one that came through on Dec. 17. From 12:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. that day, the temperature dropped 35 degrees, falling from 73 degrees to 38. The front brought single-digit wind chills and an overnight temperature of 16 degrees at DFW Airport and 15 degrees at Meacham Aiport. While this week’s temperatures shouldn’t fall into the teens, precautions to protect against freezing temperatures must still be taken.

To the apparent surprise of everyone, the Walt Disney Company has announced a deal to purchase Lucasfilm Ltd. According to the official press release, Disney has agreed to fork over $4.05 billion in cash and stock for George Lucas’ studio in a deal that brings together two of the world’s most important intellectual property libraries. As you might expect, Disney is itching to take advantage of its new toys. “This transaction combines a world-class portfolio of content including Star Wars, one of the greatest family entertainment franchises of all time, with Disney’s unique and unparalleled creativity across multiple platforms, businesses, and markets to generate sustained growth and drive significant long-term value,” said Disney CEO Robert Iger in this afternoon’s announcement. Under the terms of this agreement Disney will acquire control over all Lucasfilm iterations. This includes both its traditional film-making studio facilities, as well as the various technologies Lucasfilm has created over the years to further its various media properties. Thus, the gigantic Disney family now includes Lucasfilm itself, special effects house Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound and LucasArts, the company’s video game creation division. This acquisition alone would be huge news, but as if to pre-empt fan speculation on the future of Star Wars the same announcement also mentions that a new Star Wars movie is scheduled to appear in 2015. Though the vast majority of recent Star Wars media has been focused on the property’s various animated iterations and LEGO crossovers, this new film will be the first official cinematic continuation of George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy. Though very few details are offered on this film, it has officially been dubbed Star Wars: Episode VII, and barring any major catastrophes it should hit theaters at some point in 2015 (if we had to guess, we’d assume an early summer release in keeping with the tradition established by its predecessors). Perhaps even more intriguing however, is the announcement’s claim that Episode VII’s release will herald a new era in which new Star Wars movies hit theaters “every two to three years.” It specifically mentions Episodes VIII and IX by name, though offers no solid details on either film. While the effects of the move won’t be fully known for at least a few months, we can think of a number of a things this new union might change. For instance, currently Dark Horse Comics publishes all Star Wars comic books, but with Disney owning Marvel Comics we can’t see that agreement lasting for long. Likewise, both Disney and Lucasfilm have sizable divisions dedicated to creating video games based on their various media properties. Normally these companies have had to seek outside publishing agreements, but now that they’ve joined forces and massively expanded the number of games either company is capable of releasing in any given year, it makes a lot of sense for Disney to invest in its own games publishing wing. Finally, this agreement almost certainly heralds future crossovers between Disney and Lucasfilm characters. We don’t know any specifics, but it’s only a matter of time before we see toys depicting Mickey Mouse dressed as Darth Vader. Whether that sounds awesome or stomach-churningly disgusting is entirely up to your rapidly waning sense of childhood whimsy. Update: Scratch that last prediction. Apparently Disney characters dressed as Star Wars characters is already a thing. Our partnership with LucasFilm has produced over 20 yrs worth of stories. We have Star Wars for the near future, and hope for years to come.

CULTURED Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger last night warned that anyone who tries to kick his team out of a match will be booted back. Wenger delivered what was an uncharacteristically blunt warning at the end of a week notable for a controversial tackle by William Gallas on Bolton’s Mark Davies that helped spark a win which took Arsenal to the top of the Premier League. It also gave a glimpse of a new, darker side to Arsenal’s game. Tackles are there to be won and they are no longer soccer’s fancy Dans. “If people want to take us on they can...but beware,” Wenger said. “I still say Gallas’s challenge wasn’t nasty – he wanted to win the ball. One tackle and it’s different. We have learned to look after ourselves." The fourth-round tie against Stoke today will provide a stern test of their appetite for confrontation, given the stormy encounter and subsequent war of words the last time the sides met at the Britannia Stadium, when Wenger complained that his players had been intentionally hurt. But Wenger is ready for a battle this time. He said: “If Stoke’s approach is aggressive, I won’t mind. When you go there you know what to expect. You also need to compete. For us that is not enough – the first is to compete, the rest is to play." One man who disagrees with Wenger’s view is Stoke boss Tony Pulis, who reckons Arsenal are not as tough as when Patrick Vieira and Emmanuel Petit were patrolling the Highbury midfield. Pulis said: “If you look back at the team from a few years ago, they had Vieira and Petit. Now that was an unbelievably strong team." To keep the bite in his side, Wenger will have to ensure that he keeps Gallas. The Arsenal manager revealed that his fellow Frenchman has refused all new contract offers and said: “He is a free agent soon. He could leave.” Wenger is concerned that a seething anger has remained in Gallas ever since he was stripped of the captaincy for petulance. Wenger said: “Since the beginning of the season he has been outstanding and I don’t want to lose him."

HIGH POINT, N.C. — A man is in custody after allegedly robbing a High Point motel on two different occasions, according to a news release from High Point police. Timothy E. Johnson, 33, of Lexington, is charged with two counts of armed robbery. On July 19, officers came to the Motel 6 at 120 SW Cloverleaf Place after a report of a robbery. An employee said the suspect indicated he had a weapon, jumper over the counter and took an undisclosed amount of money. The employee was not injured and officers were unable to locate the suspect at the time. On Tuesday morning, officers came to the same Motel 6 after a report of a robbery that had just occurred. Officers spotted a person matching the description given by a motel employee running down South Main Street near Model Farm Road. The suspect was taken into custody. Johnson was identified as the suspect in both robberies. Johnson was placed in the High Point Jail under a $50,000 secured bond.

Texas would like to play Texas A&M at some point down the road. Tom Herman will tell you that. So will Chris Del Conte. Problem is, “down the road” keeps getting pushed, well, down the road. The Longhorns are all booked up through 2027 and, according to Chip Brown of Horns247, more elite non-conference series are on the way. Texas officials have had discussions with Clemson, an opponent the Longhorns have never faced, about a possible home-and-home in 2030 and 2031, the source said. But UT might be closer to a deal to play home-and-home with Penn State in 2030 and 2031, the source said. Texas and Georgia have played four times previously. The Longhorns won the first three but the Bulldogs took the most consequential meeting, a 10-9 victory in the 1984 Cotton Bowl that, thanks to No. 5 Miami’s upset of No. 1 Nebraska in the Orange Bowl later that New Year’s Day, cost No. 2 Texas its fourth national championship, instead allowing the upstart Hurricanes to win their first of four national titles over the next nine seasons. Penn State holds a 3-2 advantage over Texas, including the most recent meeting, a 39-15 whipping in the 1997 Fiesta Bowl. Texas and Clemson have never played.

In days gone by, when our economy was dominated by agriculture and manufacturing, an employee’s value was gauged by their inputs into the company. If they slacked off by not placing a bumper on a car fast enough, they were unproductive. And if they slept on the job, they were stealing time from their employers and could be fired. Today, however, we live in what is largely a knowledge economy in which an employee’s value is based on their outputs, not their inputs. This means their performance is often more about ultimate results and less about the hours clocked. In the knowledge economy, we want employees to be alert, not just active; engaged, not just present. We want them to be focused on producing the highest quality outputs possible. Sleeping on the job can make this happen. According to the National Safety Council in the United States, almost 70 percent of employees are tired at work. This level of fatigue is estimated to cost US$410 billion annually in societal expenses. As I discuss in my latest book “Boost: The science of recharging yourself in an age of unrelenting demands“, healthy adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep a night, but many of us don’t get enough shut-eye. Thirty-five percent of the population gets less than seven hours of sleep per night. Between 1985 and 2012 the percentage of adults in the United States who slept less than six hours a night increased by over 30 percent. And, compared to 60 years ago, today people get one and a half to two hours less sleep every night. The ensuing sleepiness results in potential dangers both on and off the job. For example, about one in 25 drivers report having fallen asleep at the wheel in the last 30 days. The problem is so bad that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers inadequate sleep to be a public health epidemic. Part of the explanation for this level of fatigue is that the boundary between work and home is blurring. Ninety-five percent of Americans now own a cellphone and 77 percent own a smartphone. As a result of the ubiquity of communication technologies, employees can now be contacted any time of the day or night, on or off the job. Research shows that 84 percent of employees report having to be available after hours at least some of the time. This essentially puts employees “on call.” And guess what happens when people are on call? They don’t sleep as well. So not only do societal trends reveal an overall reduction in sleep duration, technological trends that blur the boundary between work and home are intensifying our inability to get adequate sleep. This is tragic because work tires us out and sleep is one of the most important recovery mechanisms that exist. To combat the epidemic of sleepiness, we should allow the blurring of the line between work and home to go both ways. If employees are going to be required to be available after hours, they should also be allowed to sleep on the job. If employers are going to interfere with employees’ leisure time and their ability to recover from their daily job demands, organizations should then provide opportunities for the needed recovery to occur at work. There is a strong business case for this. Naps as short as 10 to 30 minutes can increase alertness, reduce fatigue and improve performance. Not only that, but recent research suggests that napping may be as effective as drugs at reducing blood pressure. That’s means organizations that implement napping policies can save on health-care costs. Many companies, such as Ben & Jerry’s, Zappos, and Nike, allow employees to nap at work. I believe this trend represents the workplace of the future. The idea that employees should not be allowed to sleep on the job is an outdated taboo from a bygone era. It is a holdover from the days when an employee’s value depended solely on his or her manual inputs. In the modern economy, however, your value as an employee, manager, or executive often rests on your ability to produce desirable outputs. Tuned in organizations recognize that fatigued employees can’t perform at their best. In essence, a tired employee is stealing performance from their employer. In the modern economy, if you are tired and not sleeping on the job, you should be fired. Jamie Gruman is a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Guelph in Canada. This article was first published on The Conversation. How Much Sleep Do Teenagers Really Need?

Shepherd wagons of yore were homes that sheepherders brought along on their travels. We've seen contemporary variations of these to converted shepherd's wagons covered with canvas and actually used as rustic living spaces. Ontario-based Canadian builder Güte (previously) constructed this lovely specimen that seems to be a cross between a shepherd's wagon, a camper and modernist tiny home. Dubbed the Collingwood, it sports rounded surfaces and nice, clean wooden surfaces inside. We built the Collingwood shepherd hut without clear distinctions of where the walls become the floor or roof of this shepherd hut. It is wrapped in and organic shell that fulfills the functions of all three of these important traditional structural elements. We wrapped the roof all the way around the Collingwood in a fluid wooden framed structure that sheds off every kind of bad weather. The exterior shell is fully insulated with batt insulation and waterproofed using the best ice and water shield. We use a combination of two types of roof cladding which will keep the weather out for a lifetime. There are thermal-paned windows that open, a solid oak dutch door, cast-iron wheels, traditional cast-iron push hardware and brass window locks, cedar shingles and steel roof cladding. It has two electrical outlets, and can be plugged in via the exterior. But there's a lot of camper-ish inspirations here too, as evidenced by the classic dining-table-turns-into-bed gambit. The 15-foot Collingwood can fit a whole family, thanks to the bunk bed off to the other side of the space, which has yet another roll-out storage platform tucked underneath, which could probably double as yet another bed. There's a wall unit that hosts storage and a fold-down table as well. With no built-in bathroom or kitchen, this is a pretty basic setup priced for USD $23,098. But the meticulous craftsmanship and interesting hybrid design may be worth it for those who want to live the modern shepherd lifestyle. Find out more over at Güte. This distinctive cabin on cast-iron wheels looks like a cross between a camper and a traditional sheepherder's wagon.

“They must not cry foul when we come down on them because certainly, we are coming down. Certainly, action is going to be taken and not far from now,” police spokesperson Assistant Commissioner Paul Nyathi said on Monday. Police visibility on Zimbabwe’s roads was reduced drastically from November last year when the military initiated a popular uprising against former President Robert Mugabe who had lost control of the police.

Williamstown Beach in Melbourne today. “It is the plan,” he said. better and preparing the new car. team forward is, I think, really special. than we did last year at this time. a race in his first season.

While the Gujarat government may have announced an incentive scheme to attract new investment in the textile value chain, existing units in the state fear that the same could affect their operations. Already reeling from sluggish economy, coupled with an accumulated input tax credit under the goods and services tax (GST) regime, existing textile units across the value chain fear incentivising new units would mean stiffer competition for them. With the state’s textile policy expiring on September 3, 2018, the Gujarat government recently announced a ‘Scheme for Assistance to Strengthen Specific Sectors in the Textile Value Chain’ effective from September 4, 2018, to December 31, 2023. As against the policy that attracted fresh investments in ginning, spinning and garmenting, the assistance scheme covers segments such as weaving, knitting, dyeing/printing, machine carpeting, technical textile, composite units and other activities in the textile value chain such as embroidery, winding, sizing, twisting and crimping. The scheme provides financial assistance through credit-linked interest subsidy of six per cent for micro small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and 4-6 per cent for large enterprises, with an upper ceiling of Rs 20 crore per annum. Further, the scheme offers subsidy in power tariff of up to Rs 3 per unit for weaving, and Rs 2 per unit for other eligible segments with a validity of five years. “The assistance scheme for textile value chain is meant for new units being set up in Gujarat. However, there is nothing for the existing scheme. On the basis of the subsidy, the newer units would be more cost-effective, and compete with us on price difference. Already, the existing textile industry in Gujarat is struggling because of multiple reasons. Hence, we are going to ask the state government for some relief against the new scheme,” said Jitu Vakharia, president of South Gujarat Textile Processors’ Association (SGTPA). Already, around 30 textile processing units have been shut in recent months, with the remaining 320 odd units functioning at only 70 per cent of the original capacity. Surat, the biggest textile market in the state, alone has seen daily production fall from 40 million metre per day to 25 million metre per day. According to industry sources, based on the subsidy under the new scheme, newer units could carry a 15-20 per cent production cost advantage over the existing ones. “Any such policy is for new investment, but this aggravates the scenario for the existing units. Earlier, we were facing competition from outside, but now the competition will be closer home. It is only now that the industry is reviving in terms of growing demand in the last fortnight or so. The move could pull us back unless similar benefits are provided for the existing units,” said Ashish Gujarati, president of the Pandesara Weavers’ Association. Apparently, the scheme also offers assistance covering all existing units which are compliant with the government’s energy, water and environment conservation norms, and have been in operation for more than three years. The scheme provides 20 per cent assistance on the cost of machinery with a ceiling of Rs 30 lakh, and 50 per cent assistance for audit fees with a limit of Rs 1 lakh. The benefits can be availed once in two years during the operative period of the scheme. Further, a one-time financial assistance of up to 50 per cent of cost, with a limit of Rs 25 lakh, is provided for technology upgrade and modernisation in textile value chain. The scheme provides assistance of up to 25 per cent of capital expenditure on common facilities and infrastructure, with a limit of Rs 15 crore for setting up textile parks.

New Belgium's Belgian roots took home a gold medal on Monday. The Fort Collins-based craft brewery won the Belgian-style Trippel category at the U.S. Open Beer Championship with its 8.5-percent ABV golden ale version that's spiced with coriander. Lafayette's Liquid Mechanics Brewing finished eighth in the top brewery contest, winning two gold medals and the top spot in the best beer name competition for its Beasts of Bourbon. Other Colorado breweries, Loveland's Crow Hop Brewing, Longmont's Oskar Blues Brewery and Aurora's Launch Pad Brewery, also each won a gold medal. Windsor's Mash Lab Brewing — which debuted in late 2016 out of a hot rod auto body shop — won a silver for its Barn Find Brown and a bronze for its Automatic amber ale. The U.S. Open competition is held annually every summer. There were more than 6,300 beers submitted for 117 different categories during this year's contest. The final round of blind judging was held at the Quarter Barrel Brewery & Pub in Oxford, Ohio. Vienna: Pretzel Assassin by Denver Beer Co.

Businessman and co-owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer Lewis Katz walks from Judge Patricia McInerney's courtroom Monday, Oct. 28, 2013, in City Hall in Philadelphia. Lewis Katz, co-owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, was among seven people who died in a plane crash in Massachusetts, the newspaper's editor confirmed. Bill Marimow told news website Philly.com that he learned about Katz's death Sunday morning from close associates. Katz was 72. "He loved his family and his friends and they loved him back in return. We've lost a great friend," Marimow said. All seven people aboard the private plane died in the crash, according to multiple reports. The Gulfstream IV, which was departing Bedford-based airport Hanscom Field, crashed and caught on fire around 9:40 p.m. ET Saturday as it was leaving for Atlantic City International Airport in New Jersey, according to Philly.com. The Massachusetts Port Authority did not immediately respond to Mashable's request for comment. Emergency personnel are at the scene of the accident, and Hanscom is currently closed for operations, according to a Port Authority release. Jeff Patterson, who lives beside the airport's runway, told The Boston Globe that the plane exploded in a blast, which caused black smoke and flames to rise 60 feet in the air. Katz and co-owner H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest bought out their partners for $88 million Tuesday, gaining control of the media company, which owns the Inquirer, Philly.com and the Philadelphia Daily News. "We all deeply mourn the loss of my true friend and fellow investor in ownership of The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Daily News and Philly.com," Lenfest said, according to Philly.com. "It is a severe loss, but I am pleased to announce that Drew Katz, Lewis' son, will replace his father on the board of our new company." The National Transportation Safety Board is currently investigating the cause of the crash, according to multiple reports.

Last month, the Southwest Florida Water Management District abruptly cut off funding for the Florida Friendly Landscaping program, leaving 16 counties scrambling for a quick replacement. Pinellas, Hillsborough and Pasco counties may have found it. Tampa Bay Water's board will vote Monday on picking up the $161,000 tab for continuing the program in those counties. The regional utility and its predecessor, the West Coast Regional Water Supply Authority, have been providing some funding for the water conservation program since 1995. If the utility's board approves, it would give Pinellas County an additional $56,000, on top of the standard $72,250; Pasco would get $60,000 in addition to its expected $74,250; and Hillsborough would get $45,000 on top of its $76,500. The board meets at 9 a.m. at its headquarters at 2575 Enterprise Road, Clearwater.

Freedom Specialty, an arm of Scottsdale Insurance Co., is partnering with healthcare underwriter Pro-Praxis, part of the Cooper Gay Swett & Crawford Group, for a specialized excess healthcare professional liability program. The Complex Healthcare program is available immediately and can be accessed through Pro-Praxis’ preferred distribution channels. The program underwrites excess professional liability coverage for physicians, hospitals and health systems of all sizes. Policy limits of up to $10 million will be available through the program, with and additional limits available through Pro-Praxis’ other carrier arrangements. This excess product compliments the primary liability products offered by the Scottsdale family and expands its abilities to address the capacity needs of a consolidating hospital/health system sector, the company stated. Categories: National NewsTopics: Cooper Gay Swett & Crawford Group, Freedom Specialty, healthcare, healthcare professional liability, Markets/Coverages, Pro-Praxis, Scottsdale Insurance Co.

Less time for Common Core testing? Students in 11 states and the District of Columbia will spend less time next year taking tests based on the Common Core standards, a decision made in response to widespread opposition to testing requirements. DENVER – Students in 11 states and the District of Columbia will spend less time next year taking tests based on the Common Core standards, a decision made in response to widespread opposition to testing requirements. The decision to reduce testing time by about 90 minutes was made by the states and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for Colleges and Career, or PARCC. The PARCC tests are administered to students in grades three to eight and once in high school. As a result of the decision, the math and English exams will only be given once a year, instead of twice. The 11 states involved are Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio and Rhode Island. “We’ve listened to the voices of all stakeholders — educators, parents, and students — and are using the lessons learned,” New Mexico Education Secretary Hanna Skandera said in a statement. The PARCC tests took effect this year and sparked a round of intense opposition from teachers, parents and students who said testing requirements take away from classroom instruction and put undue pressure on kids. Parents in pockets of the country opted their children out of test taking in PARCC states and elsewhere. Julia Sass Rubin, the mother of a seventh-grader in New Jersey and a founder of Save Our Schools New Jersey, a group that is critical of the test, said the reduced time is a good first step. She was among thousands of New Jersey parents who boycotted the tests. Mike Wetzel, spokesman for the Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, welcomed the decision. “But as a country, we still over-test and we want to see some significant changes in Washington next year,” he said. Wetzel was referring to the congressional debate to overhaul the No Child Left Behind education law, which has annual testing requirements. Colorado is among the states that didn’t wait for PARCC to reduce exam time. On the same day the PARCC reduction was made, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper signed into law a reduction in testing before third grade and later in high school. Similar testing reductions have been passed in many states affiliated with the Common Core standards, which spell out what skills students should be able to master at each grade level. “There needs to be some sort of evaluation and testing, but we need to allow local districts to use what works for them,” said Colorado state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, a rancher who made headlines earlier this year for taking a PARCC test and failing it. Sonnenberg got the answers right, but didn’t show his work. “There’s a lot of problems with these tests and it’s good they’re reducing them, but we have more to look at,” Sonnenberg said. PARCC is one of two exams developed by groups of states and tied to the Common Core standards. The other is Smarter Balanced. Associated Press Writer Geoff Mulvihill contributed to this report from Haddonfield, New Jersey.

Getting involved with a volunteer fire department is an incredibly rewarding way to make a positive contribution to your community. It is often a stepping stone to starting a career in a full-time fire department. That said, it’s not something that everyone can undertake. It takes a great deal physical stamina and mental strength to make this kind of commitment. What should I know about becoming a volunteer firefighter? Keep a clear head in life-or-death situations. Maintain your composure when assisting traumatic events like auto crash injuries and fatalities. Put yourself in extreme situations, such as going into burning buildings, crawling through tight spaces and entering other hazardous environments. Most volunteer fire departments want you to devote a minimum amount of time to service, so make sure you have time in your schedule and the flexibility to make that work. It also means that you must have the time to devote to the requisite firefighter training course. The length of the training can vary by state and the level of certification required — a Firefighter I certification may take six months of attending class two to three days per week. You must also commit to staying in great physical condition to maintain the stamina to perform the necessary firefighting tasks. Eat right, exercise and reduce or eliminate habits that can adversely affect your health, like tobacco and alcohol use. Here are three specific steps to take to become a volunteer firefighter. The first step should always be to make sure that there is a need. During your call or visit, ask questions about the process so you understand what to expect as you become a volunteer firefighter. If there isn’t a volunteer fire station in your community, check out surrounding areas. Some fire departments do have residency restrictions, so ask about those in your call. Call the non-emergency number and avoid tying up the fire dispatcher. Many fire stations will welcome you to drop in if they’re not busy. Some fire departments let you ride along with them, or tour their station to give you firsthand experience working in fire safety. They can also direct you to the proper authorities to help you get signed up. A background check to see if you have anything in your history that would prevent you from becoming a volunteer firefighter. Clearance by a doctor or a physical ability test, some fire departments require both. Fire departments controlled by a municipal government often require a full application process, usually including a drug test. If your application is approved, the next step in becoming a volunteer fireman or firewoman is to take the training course. The time requirement of these programs varies, but all firefighters must take a minimum 110-hour National Fire Protection Association-certified course. While this may not be as glamorous as fighting fires, all are an important part of running a volunteer fire department. Many departments offer emergency medical services and encourage members to earn EMS certifications. Being an EMT prior to applying to the station will boost your odds of acceptance in many cases. Whatever capacity you choose to become involved in with your local volunteer fire department, it will most likely be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life.

SOMERSET - The Golden Eagles wrestling team gave the Somerset senior night fans a lot to cheer about as the Eagles overpowered visiting Conemaugh Township 57-12 on Thursday. The Indians were able to win only four bouts, one by a pin at 112 by Matt Ofansko, while the Eagles piled up a total of six pins, two forfeit wins and two wins by decisions. Conemaugh Township fans even saw their top wrestler, Robert Horner go down to defeat for the first time this season. Horner lost a hard fought 2-1 decision to Somerset's Josh Mosgrave. The defeat was Horner's first in 15 matches. Scoring falls for the Golden Eagles were: B.J. Shultz (119), Lance Faidley (125), Josey Jano (135), Jared Hay (145), David Heining (215) and Dorsey Berkebile (275). "It is nice to win," Roger Baer, Somerset head coach said. "They did really, really good tonight. I was pleased. Mosgrave's bout was a highlight. Bertie (Horner) came in there undefeated. It was a nice win for us. "There were a lot of guys who wrestled well. Jake Johns did an excellent job. He held him (Kevin Slezak) off for the last couple of seconds to get the win," Baer pointed out. Johns and Slezak battled each other tough with Johns squeezing out an 8-7 decision. Quickest fall of the evening came at 275, the first bout of the dual meet, when Dorsey Berkebile pinned the Indians' Matt Mlaker in 27 seconds to give the Eagles an early 6-0 lead. Eric Wheeler picked up a forfeit at 103 to stretch Somerset's margin to 12-0. Township got on the board when 112-pounder Matt Ofansko pinned Kyle Murray to cut the Eagles' lead to 12-6. Pins by B. J. Shultz and Lance Faidley put the Eagles up by a 24-6 margin. Greg Sleek decisioned Somerset's Ben Svonavec 5-1 at 130 to make the score 24-9. Josey Jano's pin at 135 increased Somerset's lead to 30-9. The final team points of the evening for the Indians came at 140 when Township's Brian LeHew eked out a 3-2 decision over Dan Freeman to set the score at 30-12. Coach Baer's Eagles went on a roll from that point on, winning the next six bouts to set the final score at 57-12. "Once you get the momentum going it is hard. I just hope that it is good momentum to go into the Richland Duals this Saturday," coach Baer stated. Final home meet for the 3-7 Eagles will be Feb. 1 when they host Central High School.

Model Arti Venkatesh will play Dulquer Salmaan’s heroine in director Bejoy Nambiar’s Solo. Arti’s tweet also suggested the same, which reveals her excitement about making her entry into films. As per some reports there are two heroines in Solo. The other heroine has not been announced as yet. Bejoy Nambiar made his debut as a director with the Bollywood film, Shaitan. He has also directed David and Wazir. Solo will be completed in multiple schedules. Meanwhile, Dulquer is said to be planning to wrap up the shooting of Amal Neerad’s film in between. The Satyan Anthikkad film, Jomonte Suvisheshangal, is all set to release next month.

The business of weather has changed dramatically since former WCCO Minneapolis chief meteorologist Paul Douglas exited the station world in 2008. An entrepreneur with a handful of multi-million-dollar weather-tech startups to his credit, Douglas launched the syndicated weather outfit WeatherNation a few months after he was laid off, with the aim of providing weather content to stations and other media outlets across the country. He envisioned a large quantity of his business coming from supplying weather talent remotely from his Twin Cities headquarters for stations that perhaps had downsized. But as media consumption habits have changed, with users increasingly accessing weather information when and how they want it on their iPhones and Droids, WeatherNation is more in tune with products for people on the go. Weather is an enormous driver of traffic to local news. However, a small but vocal group of industry watchers say viewers, with a world of sophisticated weather content at their fingertips, are increasingly unwilling to sit through the bulk of their late newscast—and its multiple teases—to find out if they need to bring an umbrella to work the next day. Asking station bosses to rethink what's long been a vital part of their newscast is no small order. An informal panel of 20 local TV executives revealed a nearly unanimous belief that weather—both severe and uneventful—would continue to draw hordes of viewers even after the digital generation comes of news-viewing age. Only a few suggested it's worth planning for the day when those conditioned to get their weather at appointed times on television die off, replaced by a generation raised on cable news, Weather.com and smartphones—who would no sooner wait for a forecast in late news than they'd wait for sports scores. While stations have been paring down their on-air sports for years, they've been keeping their weather coverage consistent, and in many cases expanding it with quick meteorologist reports in the A-block. Station managers say weather has universal appeal among viewers—something the local sports teams cannot claim. “No other story affects more people locally,” says WHEC Rochester VP/GM Arnold Klinsky. Despite the prodigious array of digital offerings, general managers and news directors say people still want to get the forecast from a local meteorologist they trust. A Frank N. Magid study saw 54% of news viewers 25-54 cite a station or local TV meteorologist as their most trusted source of weather information, more than triple those who said the Weather Channel (17%) or the Web (11%). Local TV will need the resources, because the competition has never been tougher. In October, Verizon's pay TV service FiOS launched a WeatherBug Widget that offers customized weather reports on television. And Weather Channel picked up serious synergistic might when NBC acquired it in 2008. It gained 1.5 million unique visitors to its digital properties, such as Weather.com and a desktop widget, between September 2007 and September 2009, jumping from 34.2 million to 35.7 million. And its 4.63 billion page views this year through September are a major boost over the 3.83 billion from January to September 2007. Weather Channel also has 21 million mobile users to date. The Post-Newsweek stations look to take the fight to Weather.com with JustWeather.com—which offers not only local forecasts, but wind speed, interactive radar and even a “haircast” to tell you what the conditions might do to your 'do. WTVT Tampa has logged some 15 million page views on its MyFoxHurricane.com microsite since June, while its Hurricane iPhone app has gotten 3,000 takers at $3.99 a pop. Stations such as KHOU Houston marry the trusted voice of local weather knowledge and mobile media with WeatherCall automated phone calls about severe weather from the chief meteorologist; to date, more than 6,200 KHOU users have paid $6.95 for a year's worth of calls. With their brands established in the market over the last half century, station managers say the fight for second- and third-screen eyeballs is theirs to lose. “It's up to us to be the place people go for weather on the Web and cellphones,” says WXIX Cincinnati VP/General Manager Bill Lanesey. While some broadcasters are optimistic that the younger generation will assume their parents' viewing habits once they come of age, others say it's preposterous to think there will always be a sizable audience willing to stay up through most of the late news to get the forecast.

But I will say that I am anxiously anticipating going back to the drawing board with Clinton. Not Hillary. Bill. Hillary Clinton is cautious, measured and Eisenhower-like in her carefully cultivated Offend-No-One manner. Her husband, on the other hand, gives me just enough room to do actual satire, not direct transcription. Clinton’s presidency was kind of a mixed bag, what with the impeachment and all, but he did happen to be in the right place at the right time when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs hit the lottery. Generally speaking, I never lacked for amusing material from Jan. 20, 1993, until Jan. 20, 2001. Cartoonists have little internal checklists for caricature subjects. Hair? Check? Funny expressions? Check. Gaffe propensity? Check. Whiff o’ scandal? Check. Bill has all of these, but with a twist: He has a bit of likability, unlike the GOP presidential nominee. Bill also has a trace of human frailty and contrition. “Baby, I love you and I promise I’ll never, ever do it again.” He doesn’t blame the open mic. Watching Bill Clinton explain something, whether it’s something he did wrong or some arcane aspect of public policy, is truly more entertaining than anything Trump explains. Clinton, for example, can speak in complete sentences, not like a combination of cat meme and white supremacist rally. We want politicians to give us straight lines so we can write the joke. We don’t want them to actually write the joke. Otherwise, we’re out of work. I am going to look forward to lots and lots of Bill and Hillary cartoons, mostly of Bill mansplainin’ something or the other to his wife, the president, his long fingers wildly gesticulating while she’s womanlistenin’. Trump? Little fingers I can barely see. We are just talking about fingers, people. And if Trump wins, satire will move to Canada. I’ll be here, doing illustration.

Watch day three live streaming from Wimbledon 2016 on ESPN 3 and WatchESPN. Coverage begins at 6:30 am ET, with Centre Court action at 8:00 am. Watch live streaming coverage of Wimbledon 2016 on ESPN3, WatchESPN and ESPN. Live action begins on Monday, June 27 with a pack schedule. NEW YORK (Sporting Alert) — Results from the U.S. Open men’s and women’s singles that took place on Day 9 at Flushing Meadows, New York on Tuesday. Unseeded Peng Shuai of China finally made her first Grand Slam semi-finals in women’s singles, while on the men’s side, the second-seeded Roger Federer from Switzerland moved into the quarterfinals. NEW YORK (Sporting Alert) — Results from the U.S. Open Tennis tournament – men’s and women’s singles – at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, New York. Recording third round victories in men’s singles were the No. 2-seeded Roger Federer and the No. 6-seeded Tomas Berdych, but the fourth-seeded David Ferrer of Spain was upset by Frenchman Gilles Simon, the No. 26th seed. NEW YORK — Action at the 2014 U.S. Open continues on Sunday with fourth round games on Day 7 at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, New York. Order of play and live streaming coverage on day five at the U.S. Open Tennis tournament at Flushing Meadows, New York City on Friday, August 29. NEW YORK (Sporting Alert) — Roger Federer and Serena Williams were both easy winners in their respective opening round games at the 2014 U.S. Open Tennis tournament at Flushing Meadows in New York on Tuesday. NEW YORK (Sporting Alert) — First round matches on the schedule for Tuesday’s as the 2014 U.S. Open Women’s and Men’s tennis singles continue at Flushing Meadows, New York.

Inciner8 has donated £140,000 worth of technology and machinery to enable the safe cremation of victims of the disease. A Southport business has entered the New Year in good spirits, after receiving a prestigious award for their success in export and growth. Inciner8 fought off strong competition to win a Liverpool & Sefton Chambers of Commerce award in recognition of their international expansion and work tackling Ebola in Africa. For the past 12 months, Inciner8 has worked with the UN to provide safe medical-grade incineration facilities to prevent the spread of the contagious and deadly Ebola virus, which can be passed on even once a victim has died. Inciner8 has donated over £140,000 worth of technology and machinery to enable the safe cremation of victims of Ebola. In conjunction with the UN and the Red Cross they have also provided a 24hr response service to ensure equipment was delivered when required and offered training to locals to ensure donated incinerators could continue to be used beyond the crisis. Paul Niklas, Managing Director of Inciner8 said: "The last few years have truly been incredible, we've growth from a startup enterprise in 2003 to an international company, working with the World's leading organisations and supplying incinerators to over 150 countries across the globe. "We are delighted to be presented with the export award which is in recognition of all the hard work and motivation shown by each and every member of Inciner8 to grow the business to what is has become." Inciner8 received the award during the Liverpool & Sefton Chambers' Annual Dinner, which welcomed nearly 600 guests at the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral. Andy Snell, Director of International Trade at the Chambers said: "Through their innovation, creativity and determination to succeed, Inciner8 have positioned themselves as key international competitors, with a great future ahead."

Until further guidance is issued, USCIS is temporarily applying interim procedures to H-1B non-profit entity petitions filed with the agency seeking an exemption from the statutory H-1B numerical cap based on an affiliation with or relation to an institution of higher education, an official announcement said. Effective immediately, during this interim period USCIS will give deference to prior determinations made since June 6, 2006, that a non-profit entity is related to or affiliated with an institution of higher education – absent any significant change in circumstances or clear error in the prior adjudication – and, therefore, exempt from the H-1B statutory cap. "However, the burden remains on the petitioner to show that its organisation previously received approvals of its request for H-1B cap exemption as a non-profit entity that is related to or affiliated with an institution of higher education," USCIS said. Petitioners may satisfy this burden by providing USCIS with evidence such as a copy of the previously approved cap-exempt petition and the previously issued applicable I-797 approval notice issued by USCIS since June 6, 2006, and any documentation that was submitted in support of the claimed cap exemption. Furthermore, USCIS suggests that petitioners include a statement attesting that their organisation was approved as cap-exempt since June 6, 2006, the statement said. These measures will only remain in place on an interim basis. USCIS will engage the public on any forthcoming guidance, USCIS emphasised. As mandated by the Congress, USCIS can only issue 65,000 H-1B visas; besides an additional 20,000 for those having US master's degrees or higher are exempt from this cap.

Filmmaker Ritesh Batra's film 'Photograph' will be screened at the upcoming 19th Annual New York Indian Film Festival. The festival organisers have announced three of the films it will showcase during its annual week-long event in May. The festival, which will take place from May 7 to May 12 at the Village East Cinemas in Manhattan, will screen 'Sir', 'Photograph' and 'The Last Color' throughout the week, followed by a session with their respective directors. "We are proud to share a wonderful collection of new films from India," said festival director Aseem Chhabra. "This selection of exceptional titles showcases the beauty, power and glory of film storytelling at its best. Our audience will be excited by the protagonists and fall in love with their journeys," Chhabra added. The festival will open on May 7 with Rohena Gera's 'Sira'. The critically acclaimed film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last May, follows a wealthy Indian man who falls in love with his widowed servant. "Photograph", directed by Batra, will be screened on May 10. Batra's film is set in Mumbai as a struggling street photographer has a stranger pose as his fiancee after his grandmother pressures him to marry. Despite their vastly different upbringings, the two develop a surprising and heart-warming connection. It stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Sanya Malhotra. The fest will close with Vikas Khanna's 'The Last Color', which follows nine-year tightrope walker Chhoti and her friend Noor as they struggle to survive on the streets of the ancient city of Banaras, India.

CHICAGO – They hit the ice at the United Center on Thursday night for an exhibition. When they do so a week from now, it will be for real. The Blackhawks and the Senators are slated to open the 2018-2019 season on Thursday, October 4th in Ottawa. It will be the first of 82 games for the clubs, each hoping for an improvement from a disappointing, playoff-less 2017-2018 campaign. Thursday was a tune-up for that contest, the second-to-last preseason game for the Blackhawks and the Senators before things get real in a week. It continues to be a chance for a collection of younger players to show head coach Joel Quenneville what they’ve made of, and what they could contribute to the roster right now. But once again it was a long-time veteran who registered the only tally for the Blackhawks in a 2-1 loss to Ottawa at the United Center Thursday night. After a two-goal night against the Red Wings on Tuesday, Jonathan Toews notched his third goal of the preseason just over seven minutes into the first period. Unfortunately, it was the only goal for the Blackhawks on the night, as Ottawa goalie Mike Condon stopped 28 shots to keep the home team off the scoreboard the rest of the night. Anton Forsberg, who got the start and played all 60 minutes in net for the Blackhawks, was up for the challenge. But he allowed a goal early in the second period to Matt Duchene; then he gave up one 2:58 into the third to Max McCormick to close out the scoring. In his chance to make a case to start on opening night if Corey Crawford isn’t ready, Forsberg stopped 21-of-23 shots from the Senators in his best performance so far in the preseason. There is still a lot to work out for Quenneville and his staff over the next few days, but at least NHL hockey that counts is just around the corner.

A woman was horrified to find her father’s grave in Coventry covered with a huge pile of soil. Ian Hunter’s grave and the neighbouring resting place at Canley Garden cemetery and crematorium were left under a mound of earth around 4ft high after workers dug another burial plot. Mr Hunter’s daughter Amanda said the family keep the grave in an “immaculate” condition and were shocked by what they saw when they visited the cemetery on Wednesday night. Is this the worst parking in Coventry? Amanda told the Telegraph that there was space nearby that the soil could have been placed instead. She said: “My mum and my niece went up there to water the plants and they have completely buried my father’s grave and the grave next to his. “It’s absolutely disgraceful, I am horrified. It looks like they have been completely buried. “My mum said she has never seen so much earth, I am going to kick off. “They just cannot do this, I have never seen anybody’s grave here with soil dumped on it. “Why would you put it on people’s graves, especially when there is empty space nearby? Maybe we would understand if they were derelict but I don’t think that would even be okay. The family are due to mark the anniversary of Ian’s death and his birthday. Amanda said: “We’ve been making sure it’s immaculate. My dad’s first grandchild is on its way and he’s going to be named after him. “We have never not kept the grave tidy, we go every night. My mother is heartbroken. “You cannot even see the grave now, there’s so much soil. “I didn’t even know it was my dad’s grave when I saw the photos. Amanda Hunter at her father's grave with her mother, Joy Lydster. “My mum is 73 and we’ve spent so much time tending to the grave, we put fresh plants on there and we’ve only just paid to have it reset, because it’s 17 years this year. After speaking to staff at the cemetery, Amanda claims she has been told where her dad is buried is classed as a lawn area and this is why the area was used to dump the soil. She added: “He has been here for 17 years and we have never been told that. “They say it was on our paperwork but we weren’t aware and it’s never happened before. There were other options but they chose to put it there and that’s why it’s upset me so much. Amanda Hunter is pictured at her fathers grave in Canley Crematorium, CAnley, Coventry. When they dug a grave next to his the soil was dumped on his grave, destroying all the planting in the process. A spokesperson for Coventry City Council said: “Part of the process of creating a grave may, on occasion, result in soil temporarily being placed on a neighbouring grave until the interment has been carried out, as the soil needs to be located as close to the excavation as possible. “We do appreciate that this can be distressing for people visiting a family grave and we make every effort to avoid this where possible. The grave is restored to its proper condition as soon as possible.

Kidoodle.TV, the Calgary-based streaming service for children’s subscription video on-demand, has inked a deal that will expand its reach to 32 markets in the Caribbean, Central America and Asia Pacific. The platform, launched in January 2014, is available in Canada and the United States for $5 per month. The deal with Digicel Play, a communications and entertainment provider will make Kidoodle available across Digicel markets in the coming months. It’s the first move for a planned global expansion of Kidoodle. “Right now, the deals that we’re in discussions with will take us to over 55 countries by next year,” said Mike Lowe, founder and president of A Parent Media Co. Inc., which produces Kidoodle. TV. Lowe said the company does not release data on subscriber numbers. Kidoodle allows customers to upload videos from phones, tablets and computers. “It’s really important. For instance, in the Digicel deal we’re letting teachers upload lessons and daily content for their students to watch. So it really becomes a safe portal,” said Lowe. The company, which also has offices in Edmonton, Kelowna and Los Angeles, employees just over 40 people.

What do the Town of Hull and the Mashpee Wampanoags have in common? The Town and the Tribe are both in the same congressional district, and they have both received federal earmarks for their pet projects. In both cases it was former congressman William Delahunt that got them the money. Now both the Town and the Tribe employ citizen Delahunt to lobby on their behalf for more federal pork and consultant fees for their lobbyist. After stories this week here and in the Boston Globe, former Congressman William Delahunt has decided not to accept $15,000 a month for six months, for a total of $90,000, which he had in the pipeline for his lobbyist group. Delahunt’s first earmark for the town of Hull was for $951,500 and a second earmark was for $750,000, for a total of $1.7 million. Federal databases show Delahunt was the lone sponsor of two earmarks for the project during his final two years in office. Earmarks are legislative provisions channeling federal money to a specific project, often derided as “pork-barrel’’ spending. Read the latest Boston Globe story here. But is it smart? Probably not, and here's why. The Town of Hull is trying to get more funding for renewable energy projects, and their lobbyist, the former congressman, would have to get the current congressman to go along with new earmarks or support for federal programs money. It's bad enough if Delahunt is seen trying to profit form his work in Congress, but it's really bad if Delahunt is seen working against the new Congressman's reelection. Bottom line - There is no chance that present congressman Keating will be supporting Hull's new request if former congressman Delahunt is doing the asking. That means no more pork for you, Hull. Hull's $15,000 a month stipend for Delahunt to get a few hundred thousand dollars of federal earmarks is small potatoes compared to the stakes (pun) for the Mashpee Tribe. The work Delahunt is doing for the Indian tribe involves getting a mega-million dollar casino built for them in Southeastern Massachusetts. By a quirk of fate, the new congressman (Keating) now represents the whole of the region in which the tribe would be allowed to build its casino. Federal recognition of the tribe has to go through Rep. Keating, and a casino compact has to go through Governor Patrick. Lest we forget, Delahunt was the Governor's least favorite congressman, since he was the only one to oppose the Governor's pet project, Cape Wind. Delahunt is hedging his bet with Keating by keeping his options open with potential congressional candidates, E. Samuel Sutter of Fall River and Rob O'Leary of Barnstable. Can he help get a casino built in Southeastern Massachusetts and at the same time play king-maker in the next congressional race? No casino high-roller would ever take that bet. While Delahunt is playing with house money, the Mashpee Wampanoags are betting Delahunt can get it done, but do they know that Delahunt is knee-capping Keating? It's not enough that Delahunt gets more than one pension at taxpayers expense, now he's taking taxpayer dollars from Hull and future casino revenues from the Mashpees. You know what they say, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. To read all the Politics Etc. column in chronological order click here. To write a Letter to the Editor click here.

You are here: Home / Money / Business / U.S. vs Canada vs Politics Of Trade Tariffs. U.S. vs Canada vs Politics Of Trade Tariffs. (ThyBlackMan.com) The Canadian government, lining the pockets of its dairy producers, imposes high tariffs on American dairy imports. That forces Canadians to pay higher prices for dairy products. For example, Canadians pay $5.24 for a 10.5-ounce block of cheddar. In Washington, D.C., that same amount of cheddar sells for $3.64. Canadians pay $3.99 for a 1-pound container of yogurt. In Washington, D.C., you can get nearly twice as much yogurt for a little over $4. It’s clear that the Canadian government’s tariffs screw its citizens by forcing them to pay higher prices for dairy products. What should the U.S. response be to Canada’s screwing its citizens? If you were in the Trump administration, you might propose imposing tariffs on soft wood products that Americans import from Canada — in other words, retaliate against Canada by screwing American citizens. Canadian lumber — such as that from pine, spruce and fir trees — is used in U.S. homebuilding. Guess what tariffs on Canadian lumber do to home prices. If you answered that they raise the cost and American homebuyers are forced to pay higher prices, go to the head of the class. The ruse used to promote producer interests through tariff policy is concern about our large trade deficit. It’s true that we have a large current account trade deficit. However, that’s matched exactly by a very large capital account surplus. Translated, that means Americans buy more goods from other countries than they buy from us; that’s our current account deficit. But other countries find our investment climate attractive and invest more in the U.S. than we invest in other countries; that’s our capital account surplus. Have you ever wondered why foreigners are willing to invest far more money in Texas and California than they are willing to invest in Argentina and Venezuela? Do you think it’s because they like North Americans better than they like South Americans? No. We’ve always had an attractive investment climate, and we’ve had current account deficits and capital account surpluses throughout most of our nation’s history. In fact, the only time we had a sustained current account trade surplus was during the Great Depression, when we had a surplus in nine out of 10 years, with 1936 being the lone exception. Let’s delve a bit into the politics of trade tariffs. Whom do we see spending the most resources lobbying for tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum? Is it American users of steel and aluminum, such as Harley-Davidson and John Deere? Or is it United States Steel Corp. and Alcoa? Of course it’s U.S. Steel and Alcoa. They benefit from tariffs by being able to sell their products at higher prices. Harley-Davidson and John Deere lose by having to pay higher prices for their inputs, steel and aluminum, and their customers lose by having to pay higher product prices. There’s a lot of nonsense talk about international trade, which some define as one country’s trading with another. When an American purchases a Mercedes, it does not represent the U.S. Congress’ trading with the German Bundestag. It represents an American citizen’s engaging in peaceable, voluntary exchange, through intermediaries, with a German auto producer. When voluntary exchange occurs, it means that both parties are better off in their own estimation — not Trump’s estimation or General Motors’ estimation. I’d like to hear the moral case for third-party interference with such an exchange.

SINGAPORE- It was a close shave for 35-year-old Kim Sung Mo, the South Korean who was rescued by about 30 passers-by after he was hit by a trailer truck at the junction of Boon Keng Road and Bendemeer Road. Mr Kim escaped with a leg fracture and underwent surgery at Tan Tock Seng hospital on Wednesday night. "I felt very scared after I got knocked down. I was lucky that there was this group of helpful passers-by who rushed to lift the truck and pull me out in time," he said from his hospital bed in comments reported by evening daily Lianhe Wanbao yesterday. The incident took place at the junction of Boon Keng Road and Bendemeer Road at about 11.45am on Wednesday. The 25-year-old truck driver has been arrested. Police said that investigations were still ongoing. Footage of members of public helping Mr Kim was caught on camera and went viral online. Mr Kim, an employee from the Grand Hyatt hotel in Seoul, was in Singapore for a business trip. His parents are on their way to Singapore. Lianhe Wanbao also reported that his right leg was in a cast and his right arm in a sling when its reporter visited him. He also suffered abrasions to the face. Mr Kim said that he could not personally thank those who pulled him out to safety as he was feeling giddy at that time. "But I am really very grateful to them for saving me," he said in fluent English. The Singapore Civil Defence Force will be presenting public-spiritedness awards to the members of public who helped Mr Kim. While they have been able to identify more than 10 people who helped, they are still looking for the rest. The SCDF encouraged the others who helped to come forward by calling 6471-7147 or 6332-3001 .

The legendary creator of The Simpsons and Futurama brings his newest series to the streaming service. Abbi Jacobson of Broad City fame lends her voice to Disenchantment as Princess Bean. The newest animated series by Matt Groening won't be on the Fox network. Instead, Disenchantment comes to Netflix in the middle of August. The series focuses on the adventures of a princess and an elf. In an interview Groening said had been keeping sketch books with all kinds of fantasy characters, which is how Disenchantment came to be. Netflix also has some high-quality movies being added. As the Dark Knight just turned 10 years old, Batman Begins arrives to the big, red streaming service. There's also some Clint Eastwood gold arriving in Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby at the beginning of the month.

Law enforcement seized 2 pounds of methamphetamine with a street value of $35,000. ZANESVILLE - Two men who are part of a cartel and a major influence in Muskingum County where drug trafficking is concerned are in custody, according to Muskingum County Sheriff Matt Lutz. Terry M. Bocook, 39, of Zanesville, and Michel E. Yanni, 41, of Columbus, are being held in Muskingum County jail on trafficking charges, each with a $1 million bond. On Oct. 30, the Muskingum County/Zanesville City Joint Drug unit, along with the Central Ohio Drug Enforcement Task Force executed a search warrant at a Lexington Avenue address. As a result of the search warrant, a large amount of methamphetamine was recovered and Bocook was taken into custody as a major drug offender. "This is someone that has been on our radar for years," said Zanesville Police Chief Tony Coury. Later that evening, CODE conducted a traffic stop on Ohio 40 in Brownsville where Yanni was taken into custody after agents found a large amount of methamphetamine in his possession. In all, law enforcement seized 2 pounds of methamphetamine with a street value of $35,000. Bocook was formerly charged with one count of trafficking in drugs with a major drug offender specification and one count of engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity with a major drug offender specification, felonies of the first-degree, and money laundering, a third-degree felony. If convicted of all charges, Bocook faces a mandatory 11 years and up to 25 years in prison. Yanni was charged with one count of trafficking in drugs with a major drug offender specification, a first-degree felony, and one count of permitting drug abuse, a fifth-degree felony. If convicted on these charges, he faces a mandatory 11 years and a maximum of 12 years in prison. "This is not just your street corner drug dealing," Lutz said. "This is organized stuff."

NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — Apparently even rats like fancy digs. According to various reports, the plaza across from the swanky Plaza Hotel is being overrun by rats. The Grand Army Plaza Park has apparently become a new hangout for the four-legged vermin as some locals can attest to. “When I come in the morning around 6 o’clock, I have to get the spot. I see a lot of rats moving around the park,” one street vendor told 1010 WINS’ Juliet Papa. Some area regulars said a build-up of trash, less traps and feed for carriage horses in nearby Central Park didn’t help the situation. “There’s always rats around here. They’re big rats too,” said another man. Others, however, don’t see what everyone is clamoring about. “I’m coming over here almost everyday. I don’t see rat in the area over here,” one man said.

The World Cup may be drawing to a close but football never sleeps with the 2018-19 Premier League season to kick off on SBS on August 11. Catch World Cup stars the likes of Harry Kane, Paul Pogba, Romelu Lukaku, Eden Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne, Mo Salah - just to name a few - in action for their Premier League clubs. SBS will continue their coverage of one live game a week, kicking off with Newcastle taking on Tottenham on August 11.

Shares of Marathon Oil Corporation (NYSE:MRO) fell 10.3% in November, according to data provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence. Weighing on the oil stock was the price of crude, which plunged last month, overshadowing the company's solid third-quarter results. Crude prices tumbled 22% due to a complete reversal of the market's view on the oil supply picture. Instead of worrying that there might not be enough oil to meet demand as the U.S. reimposed sanctions on Iran, the market is now concerned that there may be too much after the U.S. granted waivers so that most of Iran's customers could continue buying its oil. That slump in crude caused most oil stocks to sell off last month, since lower prices will impact their cash flows. In Marathon's case, it had generated $630 million in excess cash this year due to higher-than-expected oil prices, the bulk of which it used to buy back stock. That slump in oil prices caused investors to quickly forget about Marathon Oil's strong third-quarter results. The company earned an adjusted $0.24 per share for the quarter, which beat the consensus estimate by $0.04 per share. Further, thanks to its strong drilling results this year, Marathon now expects to grow its production from shale by 30% to 34%, which is up from its prior range of 28% to 32%. What makes that even more impressive is that Marathon is growing at a faster pace without increasing capital spending. While the slump in oil prices will cut into Marathon's cash flow, the company remains well positioned to handle lower oil prices. That's because it built its business to thrive on $50 oil and also has a cash-rich balance sheet to help cushion the blow. That's why last month's sell-off looks like a good buying opportunity for those who are bullish on oil over the long term.

We'll have showers Monday morning. TRACKING SHOWERS: Tonight, we’ll have some scattered showers. If you live to the south or east of Harrisburg–we’re talking Adams, York, Lancaster, Dauphin, and Lebanon Counties–you’ll get widespread scattered showers and some pockets of heavy rain. The rain ends around daybreak. So, we’ll have most of the morning dry. While we start the afternoon dry, we don’t stay that way. The breaks of sun with help scattered showers and thunderstorms fire off. Look for them to pass in the late afternoon and evening. Don’t change your outdoor plans. You’ll have dry weather for most of the afternoon. Just be prepared for a thunderstorm with heavy rain or some showers for 30 minutes. Then, you’ll get the dry weather back. We’ll have highs in the 80s. LESS HUMID: The rain on Monday ends with the crossing a cold front. The cold front will bring less humid air. Enjoy a break from the humidity on Tuesday and Wednesday. Then, we turn more humid Thursday afternoon. Enjoy less humid weather mid-week. SUNNY MIDWEEK: Enjoy partly sunny skies on Tuesday and mostly sunny skies on Wednesday. Look for highs in the low 80s. We start Thursday with sunny skies. On Thursday afternoon, clouds quickly increase across the sky. We’ll get highs in the mid 80s as warmer air comes up from the south. Look for 80s most days this week. SHOWERS NEXT WEEKEND: Showers will sweep over us Friday with another cold front. Cooler air behind the front brings us highs in the upper 70s on Saturday. We’ll also have partly sunny skies on Saturday. Right now, we got a good shot at partly sunny skies on Sunday. While one model wants to bring in rain on Sunday, the others don’t bring the rain in until next Monday. MaryEllen and Andrea will track this through the week and keep you updated.

IF you are wondering why your cat sleeps 16 hours a day, stop. It is normal. Cats know how to sleep and can sleep anywhere they want to — any table, chair, top of a shelf, window ledge, in the laundry basket, on freshly ironed clothes, the newspaper, on the edge of just about anything. There’s no doubt about it. Did you know that the only animals that can sleep more than us are the opossum and the bat? As first cousins to the king of the jungle, we follow the pattern of hunters —mostly active during dawn and dusk because that is the time they could catch their prey. Such animals are c-r-e-p-u-s-c-u-l-a-r; a word longer than my tail! So our sleep pattern leaves us with plenty of time to sleep for hours during the rest of the day and night, or to break it into little naps. Of course, as a modern day indoor cat, one that is very well-fed and spoilt, I also sleep out of boredom, laziness and having nothing majorly exciting to do. Since cats in the wild must be on the alert in order to survive, we as domestic cats also follow the same pattern. Even when you think that we are deep asleep, our finely tuned senses are still active and ready to spring into action. If you watch your cat while he’s napping, you will see that his ears may rotate from time to time because he is in touch with his environment, and if he hears a noise or senses that someone is approaching, he will open his eyes to check out the situation before falling back to sleep. Try waking me up from my sleep, and I can transform from a deeply sleeping cat to a fully alert one in a matter of seconds. If I realise in the next minute that it was not really worth getting up, I can go back to sleep again. Where does your cat sleep? Cuddled in the crook of your knees on your bed? On the larger part of your pillow leaving just a little space for your head? Or right against the closed door to your bedroom? Humans also wonder why we sleep the way we sleep. Sometimes curled up, and at other times on our backs, like humans. What happens is that when the weather is warm, we look for cool places like the floor where we can stretch out. But in cooler weather, we prefer a place bathed in warm sunshine or snuggle up to a heat source like a laptop or our human or another cat; the idea being to reduce heat loss from the body. So when we are holding our face between our paws or curling up to hide our nose and tail underneath us, it is all to do with heat conservation. Those of us who like to sleep at night with our humans share a cosy bond. Yes, we do get a bit annoying for you when we get up way before you and (demand a very early) breakfast or playtime, but we are a lot better than your teddy bears.

Police suspect that the attack in the southern Swedish city of Malmo against the 38-year-old was a hate crime, The Local website reports. A screenshot of the flag hung in Malmo from The Local website. A man was severely assaulted in the Swedish city of Malmo on Sunday night after hanging an Israeli flag out of his window, according to local media reports. Police suspect that the attack against the 38-year-old was a hate crime, The Local website reported. "Our initial evaluation is that this is a hate crime," policewoman Marie Keismar said. The assault took place shortly before midnight on Sunday in the southern city. Beforehand, the window where the man hung the flag was smashed. "After that the man went out onto the street to see what was going on. Then he was attacked and it was on the basis of the flag. That is the information we have at present," Linda Pleym of the Malmö police said, according to The Local. The man was attacked by some ten people using iron pipes, who chased him from the building. He managed to escape but sustained serious injuries. He was found by police nearby street and transferred to hospital. No arrests have been made, but local witnesses have been interviewed. Police are treating the crime as an aggravated assault. They are set to interview the victim later on Monday. Several hundred Jews live in Malmo, a city of approximately 300,000 where a third of the population is made up of people who were born in Muslim countries or whose parents were born in those countries. Several dozen anti-Semitic attacks occur in Malmo annually, according to community leaders and police, including repeated attacks on Jewish institutions. Across Europe, attacks against Jews increase during periods of unrest connected to Israel. On April 16, the district of Skane, where Malmo is located, declined the Jewish community’s request to increase the number of security cameras around Jewish buildings, according to Michael Gelvan, chairman of the Nordic Jewish Security Council, and Per-Erik Ebbestahl, director of safety and security in the City of Malmo. County officials did not reply to request for further information by JTA.

Some hospitals may look as if they are held together with sticking plaster, but the NHS is actually a hive of new technology. Our reporters assess some of the more innovative work going on across the UK. Later this year, doctors in London hope to start the first human trial of a radical new treatment for children with drug-resistant leukaemia. One- or two-year-old infants will have gone through multiple rounds of chemotherapy, to no avail. The best hospitals can do is make them comfortable. The therapy is one of the most sophisticated medicine has ever seen. White blood cells – part of the immune system’s frontline defences – are collected from a healthy donor and effectively turned into a drug through genetic engineering. First, they are modified to hunt down their target: a protein that appears on leukaemia blood cells. Next, they are tweaked to make them invisible to drugs that suppress the child’s immune system during the treatment. Finally, the cells are modified again to ensure that when they are infused they do not attack the child. If the trial is approved and goes as planned, about 50 million modified cells will course into the arteries and veins of each sick child and destroy the leukaemia cells . The hope is to drive the cancer into deep remission within four to six weeks. The children can then have bone marrow transplants to reboot their immune systems. When bone marrow transplants are done without clearing leukaemia first, the disease has a tendency to come back. A similar procedure has already shown promise in adults. A medical team at Great Ormond Street hospital will run the trial for a French pharmaceutical company called Servier. But they have already had a glimpse of what the cells can do for children. Last June, a one-year-old girl, Layla Richards, became the first infant with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia to have the therapy. Her cancer did not respond to several rounds of chemotherapy and she had only a few months to live. Layla’s medical team had some modified immune cells on ice – prepared for the trial by researcher Hong Zhan. It had taken her 18 days to modify and purify the cells in a small clean room on the hospital’s lower ground floor. The team thawed the cells out and gave them to Layla in June under a special licence granted by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). Layla’s leukaemia abated and she had a bone marrow transplant three months later. So far, she is doing well. “This could really only have happened on the NHS, where there is a wealth of expertise and people across many disciplines willing to give their time and energy,” said Prof Waseem Qasim, leader of the clinical trial. At the cutting edge of keyhole surgery on the NHS is something that looks like a tiny pen lid-sized parasol. For years, doctors have operated through tiny incisions to remove appendices and gallbladders, diagnose and treat cancers, even mend or replace valves and arteries around the heart. Now, at Bristol Heart Institute, there is a trial for an even more ambitious procedure: to perform keyhole surgery in the middle of the heart. Every year, nearly 3,000 people in the UK have open-heart surgery to repair or replace their mitral valve, a small oval measuring about 3-5cm across, with an elliptical opening to allow blood to flow towards the aorta and out of the heart. If the valve becomes weak, blood can leak back into the heart, triggering problems ranging from palpitations to heart failure. Hard to reach and an unhelpful shape, opening up a patient’s chest has been the only way to solve the problem, putting it beyond the reach of hundreds of people considered too high-risk because they are frail (usually elderly) or have complicating problems such as lung disease. The Bristol unit, and two others in the UK, can now help those at-risk patients, using the parasol-shaped MitraClip, developed in the US. It is inserted through the groin, into a vein going up into the “wrong” side of the heart (to avoid blocking and damaging the aortic valve). A pin punctures the heart wall, the clip is pushed through into the valve and then drawn back until it clamps the opening together in the middle. One surgeon guides the tube by hand while another watches on a screen and gives directions: “left a bit, right a bit”, as BHI consultant Mandie Townsend describes it. The keyhole operation requires about double the staff in theatre for the four hours it takes, and the equipment is expensive. But patients usually recuperate on the cardiology ward and go home after two days, compared to two weeks in intensive care for those having a more common operation. If the trials are successful, and the cost savings justify it, the system is likely to be offered more widely in the UK. “Those patients come in and out of hospital with heart failure before they are treated: we send them home on day two, in a better clinical state and hopefully with a good quality of life, which is going to stop them re-presenting,” says Townsend. From tracking a newborn’s nappy changes to fixing your car or investing in a business in Bangladesh, in most areas of life it is possible to say “there’s an app for that”. Soon there might be one for people living with chronic pain, which means they have had it for more than three months and medicines, physio, surgery and every other attempt by specialists have failed to solve the problem. Depending on the exact definition, 8-60% of people in the UK have chronic pain syndrome. For the time being, they have to learn to live with it. Now a new app, PainSense, is being trialled on the NHS. It was developed by Yorkshire-based company ADI, which got the idea from a specialist psychologist and a local GP. Patients click on the app on their phone and are offered an index of 12 areas. Two outlines of a human body – front and back – allow them to mark where the pain is, and how intense. Questionnaires ask them what impact the pain is having on their life: how well they can work, quality of sleep and their mood, for example. A patient using the PainSense app on their smartphone. Based on their score, it prompts people to use other links in the app to get advice about relaxation, pacing exercise, managing their medication and other strategies to cope with the pain. As soon as the patient clicks save, the information is automatically attached to their patient record for the GP, specialist or physiotherapist to refer to at the next appointment. All elements of the app have been available only on paper so far: it is the convenience of the app that is key to its success, said John Eaglesham, ADI’s chief executive. “Patients have found it’s something with them 24/7 so they can dip in and use the resources at their convenience,” he said. The first trial last year was carried out by West Leeds clinical commissioning group, where, in another innovation, two patients were included in the steering group to refine the app as part of an overhaul of how it helped patients with chronic pain. In those nine months, more than 1,600 people were given free access to the app. Early figures for the whole package of changes, including the app, show referrals to community pain services increased as more patients were identified, but those to specialists reduced sharply, and average costs per patient fell. The CCG has now signed a contract to supply the app to at least 300 patients a month, paying the company £15 for each. Other NHS bodies in England are also now showing strong interest in the idea, said Eaglesham. The London Project to Cure Blindness was set up to find a cure for one of the leading causes of sight loss in the UK. It wanted to help patients with a form of age-related mascular degeneration (AMD) where damage to the part of the eye responsible for central vision – the macula – causes them to lose that area of vision. AMD is expected to seriously affect 700,000 people in the UK by the end of this decade – a scale comparable to dementia. Last autumn, a decade of work culminated in the first ever operation to use eye cells, grown from stem cells in a lab, to build a patch over the damaged part of the eye. Since then a second operation was carried out at Moorfields eye hospital in London, and doctors hope a third will be possible this spring. If it goes ahead, news of whether the three patients have had any of their sight restored will be made public. The trial of 10 operations over 18 months is focused on “wet” AMD, where the damage is from abnormal growth of veins in the eyes and happens over a short period of time, sometimes weeks. If it is successful, there are hopes that it could be used to help the much more common “dry” form of the condition, University College London’s Prof Pete Coffey, a founder of the project, told the Guardian after the first operation. Stem cells occur naturally in embryos and adult tissues, but can also be grown in laboratories. The most common use in medicine is harvesting the cells from bone marrow of healthy adults to transplant into patients with leukaemia and lymphoma. Other conditions for which stem cell therapy is being developed include deafness, diabetes, infertility, HIV/Aids and baldness. A significant problem, however, is the body’s immune system attacking the foreign cells, forcing patients to take drugs suppressing their immune system for the rest of their life. Eyes have long been considered a particularly promising area of the science because treatments there do not trigger the body’s immune defences. This article was amended on 1 February 2016 to correct the spelling of the name of researcher Hong Zhan.

Amazon.com's purchase of Austin-based Whole Foods Market is showing up in the wine category. As this year ends, Amazon has shut down Wine.Woot and its own wine marketplace in favor of Whole Foods' expansive wine operation. Now that Amazon owns Whole Foods, a licensed seller of wine, it comes under different state laws and can't sell directly from a producer. As a result, Dallas entrepreneur Matt Rutledge sees an opening in the marketplace. When Amazon.com purchased daily deals site Woot.com, based in Carrollton, in 2010 it also acquired Wine.Woot, a direct producer-to-consumer website that Amazon adopted for its own wine marketplace. Now, Woot founder Rutledge and Wine Country Connect president David Studdert, who co-founded Wine.Woot with Rutledge in 2006, have started a new business called Casemates. Rutledge said on his blog that Casemates "will need a strong and vibrant community to succeed." He launched a Kickstarter campaign to gauge consumer interest. Casemates.com went live Thursday when the Kickstarter campaign started. It has two weeks to go and already exceeded its $50,000 goal in the first day. At 7:30 a.m. Friday, it had 1,081 backers pledging $70,732. Rutledge, who is also co-founder and CEO of a Dallas-based tech incubator called Mediocre Corporation, said Wine.Woot pioneered the winery-direct retail model. Casemates plans to offer new wine deals three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The site expects to start selling wine sometime in January, Rutledge said in an interview. Casemates also plans to build tools to let customers share by-the-case orders with others nearby to lower the price. Casemates is a joint venture with Studdert's Sonoma-based Wine Country Connect. It's operating out of Mediocre's Carrollton office. Two other businesses under the Mediocre umbrella are meh.com and morningsave.com. Depending on each winery's registration status, up to 92 percent of the U.S. population can receive the winery direct shipments offered on Casemates, Rutledge said on Kickstarter.

President Obama being sworn in the first time around. Chicago Tribune – President Barack Obama took the official oath for his second term on Sunday at the White House in a small, private ceremony that set a more subdued tone compared to the historic start of his presidency four years ago. Gathered with his family in the Blue Room on the White House’s ceremonial main floor, Obama put his hand on a family Bible and recited the 35-word oath that was read out loud by U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts.

as Thaddeus Stevens . Along with a cast of many others, Lincoln overflows with god-like acting chops, which will result in deserving Oscar nods for Lewis and Field. Furthermore, the cinematography is stunning with Spielberg's signature style in every frame. No one can deny the care Spielberg took in crafting exquisite cinema. Although the script plays like a series of inspirational monologues, for the most part, there are sharp and thought-provoking sound bites on humanity that will stay with the viewer long after they leave the theater. However, Lincoln is not a movie about Abraham Lincoln — it's about a man in an Abe costume posing as someone who had overwhelming love for African-Americans, when in reality that was far from the Abraham Lincoln documented in history. Oh, Hollywood. The other piece of Lincoln : remixed and revisionist history. As a student of African-American history, I was deeply disturbed about the film's historical inaccuracies. Sure, a film can't get everything right, but the cardinal sin: Lincoln presented the end of slavery as if African-Americans idly waited and obediently prayed for rich white men to make a decision on their lives (despite a quick scene in the beginning with Black soldiers — Tony nominee Colman Domingo and British actor David Oyelowo — delicately asking Lincoln to abolish slavery). This was far from the case. African-Americans had a hand in abolishing slavery and made their own demands — similar to what African-Americans accomplished during the civil rights movement. In short, Abraham Lincoln's goal was to preserve the Union — not save Black people. There is no excuse for a chunk of historical fact missing from the 150-minute film. Lincoln is in theaters now.

This is a great oversized lot (.31) acres in Gulf Cove in a community close to the beaches of Englewood and Boca Grande. Nice lot to build a home as new homes are being built in this area, with access to a community boat ramp. Water available, not in scrub jay zone.

Can Pakistan banks weather the storm? The death of former premier Benazir Bhutto has shaken Pakistani financial markets and 2008 will be a challenging year for the country’s banking sector and economy. Uncertainty regarding the imminent elections is rapidly increasing the political turmoil and escalating violence is creating further pressure. Increasingly, the January polls look vulnerable. Heightened political uncertainty has placed the sovereign credit rating for Pakistan under question by international rating agencies. Pakistan’s risk on the international markets has risen. Pakistani five-year credit default swaps, used to insure against restructuring or defaulting debt, have widened by around 100 basis points to 480 basis points since the assassination, implying traders felt the country’s debt was a higher risk. Some traders believe the credit default swaps on Pakistan debt may rise to 850 basis points. The question is whether the political turmoil and unrest derails the economic reform process. Pakistan’s economy has performed very well over the last few years, with strong economic growth and increased foreign investment, including much from the Gulf states. The banking sector has recorded strong and increasing returns over the period. Forecast for economic growth is 7.2 per cent in the new year until June. Many foreign investors have seen Pakistan as a new breed of lesser-developed “frontier markets” offering better returns than mainstream emerging markets. Contrary to outsiders’ opinion of the country, Pakistan has organisational structures in place that could allow the economy to continue on its growth path. However, the authorities need to ensure the country does not fall into a cycle of chaos. Gulf financial institutions and investors have been active in Pakistan over the past few years. Dubai Islamic Bank launched an Islamic financial institution (pictured above) that has grown rapidly. There has also been a growing awareness of the benefits of Islamic banking in Pakistan. Pakistan’s banking sector has attracted foreign interest following a series of reforms and good performances that have led to rapid expansion and increasing income for local banks. Presently only Islamic banking is able to gain new banking licences, meaning that the only way foreigners can get into the market is to buy their way in. Samba Financial Group, the Saudi Arabian bank, acquired a 68 per cent stake in Crescent Commercial Bank of Pakistan. Other Gulf banks active in Pakistan include Emirates Global Islamic Bank and Qatar Islamic Bank. International banks have also been attracted by the market. Standard Chartered paid $487 million (Dh1.78 billion) in cash for a 95 per cent stake in Union Bank to create the sixth-largest bank in Pakistan. The price paid was 5.6 times the net asset value. ABN Amro acquired Prime Bank of Pakistan. However, the current situation is likely to delay any immediate investment deals in Pakistan, at least until after the elections, assuming they are held. Citigroup is considering the acquisition of a Pakistani bank and wants to double its branches in a year to capitalise on rising loan demand from consumers and small companies. A consortium led by Bank Muscat, Oman’s largest lender, is looking at acquiring Saudi Pak Bank for around $225m. The price would be around 2.8 times Saudi Pak Bank’s current net asset value. The consortium is said not to be put off by the country’s political turmoil. The potential risk in Pakistan is seen differently by Middle Eastern investors. Bank Muscat sees the move as an important part of its strategy to expand outside its home market as competition intensifies. A purchase would mark Bank Muscat’s entry into banking in the world’s sixth most populous country. Champions of Islamic co-operation argue Pakistan should be the GCC’s top priority, despite the turmoil. Part of the risk of the current position of Pakistan is that GCC investors may focus more on Pakistan’s neighbour, India. Nevertheless, Pakistan will remain as a target for Gulf investors due to the large size of the market and growth prospects.

Filed to: M.I.A.Filed to: M.I.A. World Recycle Week begins April 18, and M.I.A. has teamed up with H&M for a song, “Rewear It,” advocating recycling, as well as the general specter of climate change. In the accompanying video/advert, a selection of cool people around the world are seen to be essentially waking up to the concept of recycling, jamming out as M.I.A. appeals to “regenerate the nation” in a fairly sick kaftan presumably from H&M’s Conscious Exclusive Collection. H&M's Cambodian Garment Workers Are Only Asking for $177 per Month: Why Can't They Get It? If all [H&M] do is go and inspire another high-street brand to get in on caring and being conscious, or if H&M gets criticized for any of their factory processes, these are all good things. We should discuss them in public and we should have this back and forth. At least they’re even stepping into the [environmentally conscious] arena. Any of those things is progressive, and I think you have to give it a chance. ...the change has to start somewhere, and I think if they can slowly get around to it, you’ve got to give them a gold star and a pat on the back, and you’ve got to be encouraging. You can’t discourage it and divide them into [labels] who make it in organic, hemp fabric are more righteous and they deserve to be represented, and all high-street brands are evil. I don’t think we should build walls like that. Read more of the interview at Vogue.

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” The immortal words of Confucius resonate with anyone who has ever tried to glean useful information from log data. There are consensus-driven definitions of what exactly log analysis is, but a simplified, accessible explanation might be: to organize log entries into a human-friendly display and make business decisions based on what you learn. 1GB of log data is the equivalent of nearly 700,000 pages of text. Sifting through this manually would take nearly three years, or about the same amount of time it would take to read War and Peace 571 times consecutively (debatable as to which fate is worse). And if you consider that at least a few gigs of log data are produced per day even in small organizations, well… cue the data-parsing apocalypse. Suffice to say, attempting to make sense of all your logs without some kind of automated assistance will lead to information overload, wasted time and serious staff demoralization. Investing in a dedicated log analysis platform, be it an in-house build or 3rd-party software, should be seriously considered by the C-level powers. So the solution appears simple: just find or build an automated analysis platform, right? Just be careful. Adoption of the wrong platform might just exacerbate the issue. Non-intuitive visualizations and statistical views can lead to hours of screen staring and head scratching. * Broad collection – Make sure that all the log types you need are supported, including logs that originate from different operating systems, device types, and languages. * Aggregation – Log entries are structured/written in a wide variety of ways, depending on their point of origin. Aggregation helps clear up this chaos by correlating similar logs together based on their shared patterns or characteristics, e.g. the action performed or users performing them. An aggregation feature should have some level of customization, such as saving logs to user-defined groups for ongoing reference. * Search – A useful search function goes beyond a mere text box that returns matching log data. It’s important that queries return not only search-specific data results, but also allow users to easily access the context of those results, i.e. what occurred immediately before and after in the log. * Alerts – A system should alert users to repeated error occurrences, system anomalies, or the absence of typical events. Make sure alert settings can be adjusted to different delivery methods, time intervals and priority levels. Technologies may change dramatically from year to year, but time still equals money. Less time spent manually hunting bugs and system events leads to earlier and more rapid releases, more time for innovative feature development, and happier users. Those are the essential benefits from the DevOps perspective, but log analysis is a diverse art, and has a surprisingly broad range of uses. Who does it help beyond DevOps and IT? Security Engineers can exploit an Analysis platform’s search tools to find suspicious actions or breaches. The ideal platform should save search queries for repeated use, and automate the searches for a regular interval of security checks. Compliance – Log analysis can help keep your product in line with a range of compliance laws, and a strong automation component can speed up the process of auditing and review. Marketing and UX – Tools like Google Analytics and HubSpot might generally be considered irreplaceable for usage and engagement analytics. However, log analysis provides the same essential data: user traffic, referrals, usage time, click rates – they’re all in the log. Though some departments will be resistant to experimenting with what they perceive as a dev-only tool, the C-suite’s collective ears might perk up at the mention of paying for just one multi-purpose analytics platform. This cuts down operational costs associated with buying a litany of analytics softwares for different teams. The market is flush with out-of-the-box log analysis systems, varying in levels of price, quality and versatility. Be mindful of the level of technical support offered by each, particularly if you plan to use the platform for departments without a dev background. For those larger organizations that have the time, human capital and financial resources necessary to build in-house, this approach allows for made-to-measure customization for your particular industry and your business’s tech architecture. If this is your first time building in-house software, ponder this statistic during your cost-benefit analysis: the industry of data analytics enterprise software will reach nearly $200 billion in sales volume in the next two years. This is indicative of a general (though not exclusive) preference toward commercial software as opposed to in-house. Not everyone in your organization has prior familiarity with log analysis in and of itself, but they’re already familiar with its essential goal. In the world of big data, log analysis is merely another reflection of a universal business need today -- that is, to take mass amounts of information our technical environments generate and distill it to the essential info you need in order to constantly improve your product. To learn more visit Coralogix.

“Each season is a new story,” Lyon, France-based designer Marie Colin-Mad tells Co.Design of Milleneufcentquatrevingtquatre‘s new collection of silk square scarves, printed with intricately rendered abstract paintings. The name of the label may look like jibberish–or at least excessive–to non-French speakers, but it simply means “1984,” the birth year of the two designers, Colin-Mad and partner Amélie Charroin. It’s also the year that Eric Rohmer’s “Les Nuits De La Pleine Lune” was released, the film for which the designers named their artful new collection. Some of the scarf designs channel Piet Mondrian with geometric patterns. Other silken images are dreamy and surreal: prints of floating exit signs, matches, crumpled plastic bags, and a psychedelic lightning storm. Part of what makes these pieces so unique is that they don’t feature repeating patterns or motifs, like many textiles, but instead, each is printed with one large, single image, which folds into an abstract jumble of colors when worn. “We paint and draw and photomontage by hand,” says Colin-Mad. Then the designers silkscreen their bold, original images onto 51-inch silk squares. Often modeled like modernist capes, they could just as easily be hung on a wall as colorful tapestries. The collection is available in concept stores and high-end boutiques in Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Madrid, and Copenhagen, with prices starting at about $250.

She moves from place to place to place. We were told to stay out of her (expletive) life. Our bleeding hearts will never stop loving her. It’s like a death in the family. She still walks around, but that’s not our little girl, she’s that guy’s girlfriend. Elements pointing to the possibility that your daughter is taking drugs are: Isolating herself from you, leaving her job, losing her possessions and burning through money. Don’t give up on her. Don’t give her money or pay her debts, but if she needs food and shelter, offer it to her. Offer her professional help. People involved in toxic relationships don’t want their family members to witness or interfere; of course she will push you away. Your daughter has the right to make choices – even terrible and unhealthy ones. Don’t dwell on the idea that she needs to remain your “little girl.” Do be completely transparent about your extreme concern; tell her she is worth so much more than the life she seems to be leading. Tell her that when she is ready, you will be there for her. Keep your heart open, and don’t make this crisis about your loss, make it about her health and welfare. Dear Amy: My husband’s mother makes a dessert that he is very fond of. Years ago she gave me the recipe and I have made it many times. In the years since, my MIL has opened a restaurant. This is now one of her “signature” desserts. I recently wanted to make this dessert for my husband’s birthday, but couldn’t find the recipe. I asked my MIL for help. No. She said I couldn’t have the recipe and told me I could order one from her restaurant. She wants me to pay more than $60 for a pie-sized dessert. I am so mad about this I can’t think straight. She has always been self-centered and not particularly nice, but this is pushing me almost to the breaking point; she doesn’t care about her son’s happiness, or anyone else’s. For the sake of family harmony, I usually just ignore her and let my husband handle her. The kicker? She didn’t even invent this recipe. The original copy was photocopied from an old cookbook. Am I overreacting? Do you think I’m justified in calling her out on her extreme selfishness? Dear Upset: Your mother-in-law is being ungenerous; and yet, this seems in keeping with your assessment of her. And here’s the tough truth about people: We don’t tend to alter our behavior, even if others give us lots of chances to behave differently. Dear Amy: You completely blew it in your answer to “Upset Coach,” who left fifth-graders in the gym (with other parents present) when an aggressive parent became confrontational. You agreed with the school’s choice to reprimand this coach for leaving the gym. I completely disagree. Coach diffused the situation by leaving; he or she kept them safe. Dear Parent: This coach was responsible for the children’s safety while they were in the gym. Leaving them with a belligerent parent who is yelling at them does not assure their safety – even if there are other adults present.

A woman who fell in love with a puppy whose photo she saw online was left “empty-handed and broken-hearted” after a pet-shipping company kept her money but never sent the purchased pug. The situation has prompted the Better Business Bureau in Albuquerque to issue an alert about the company – Mail Pet Express Travel Agency – which says it’s located in Santa Fe. The address it uses is actually “a million-dollar mansion that is listed for sale … and has no connection to a business breeding, selling and/or offering to ship puppies,” the BBB says. The local BBB was unable to verify the company’s location, but its website – which has no content but takes you to a general search page – is registered in Yaounde, Cameroon. The Journal also was unable to locate the company. In addition, it does not have a required license from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ship animals, the BBB said. The broken-hearted woman contacted the supposed breeder after seeing pictures of the puppy. She was then contacted by the company and paid it $500 via Money Gram. Soon after, she received an email saying she had to pay an additional $1,520 fee because weather conditions meant the puppy would have to be shipped in an electrified crate, the alert said. That’s when she contacted the BBB. If you are thinking of using an animal shipping service, you can check the shipper’s licensing with the U.S. Department of Agriculture at aphis.usda.gov/ or by calling 844-820-2234. If you get a phone call saying your lottery ticket is a winner, you are likely the target of a scam. Especially if you didn’t buy a lottery ticket. The New Mexico Lottery says the most common kind of scam it sees is this: A caller, most often someone sounding like they’re from a foreign country, tells you that you have won the lottery. They say, for example, if you send them $5,000 in “earnest money,” they’ll send you your $100 million winnings, explains Vince Torrez, New Mexico Lottery executive vice president for security. The scam can happen by phone or email, and sometimes they’ll even use the state lottery’s logo, he says. The lottery does not call make any kind of initial call to people, informing them they have won. In fact, it works in the opposite way. You must notify the lottery if you have the winning numbers. (You can find out what those are from the lottery website or hotline, local media or some retailers.) You must produce your ticket, which will go through a validation process before you are awarded any prizes. This might seem obvious, but – you can’t win if you didn’t play. Even though it’s tempting to believe that you won something, it’s just not possible if you didn’t enter. Buy lottery tickets only from authorized New Mexico Lottery retailers. Never give your credit card numbers to anyone promising lottery cash prizes or memberships. Never respond or send money to someone who offers you a guarantee of winning a prize. The New Mexico Lottery does not guarantee you a prize, only a chance of winning one if you buy a legal ticket from an authorized retailer.

SINGAPORE - The Ministry of Education (MOE) confirmed on Friday that the holding site for the new junior college (JC) will remain at Mount Sinai, after it reassessed other options based on feedback from parents. This is because the Mount Sinai site, where the former Raffles JC used to be, has the space and facilities to complement a JC-level education, which other holding sites lack, the ministry said. The new JC will start in 2017 and enrol mainly Integrated Programme students from Catholic High School (CHS) in Bishan, CHIJ St Nicholas Girls' School in Ang Mo Kio and the Singapore Chinese Girls' School (SCGS) in Bukit Timah. The plan is for them to study at an interim site until the campus at the junction of Sin Ming Avenue and Marymount Road is ready at end-2019. The original choice of an interim school site in Bishan became unavailable and a new site had to be picked. Affected parents and students were informed of the decision on Friday evening, in a letter signed by director of finance and development division Wong Kang Jet, and director of school planning and placement division Lim Huay Chih. In the four-page letter, MOE said some parents had suggested the former Institute of Technical Education (ITE) campus at Ang Mo Kio Avenue 5 as a possible holding site at a dialogue session last Monday, as it is nearer to their children's current schools. "Hence, during the Q&A session, despite our assessment that Mount Sinai site is the best possible holding site for the new JC, we agreed, at the request of these parents, to re-examine the feasibility of available sites nearer to the original holding site, with a specific focus on the former ITE AMK (Ang Mo Kio) site," the ministry wrote. The ministry added that it had "studied in greater detail" how it could enhance the Ang Mo Kio site. It also considered aspects of the JC programme that had to be scaled down, as the Ang Mo Kio site is smaller than the Mount Sinai one. "Our assessment continues to be that the former ITE AMK (Ang Mo Kio) site is not as suitable for the new JC as compared to the Mount Sinai site, as it will not be able to support the programmes and provide all the students with sufficient facilities for a positive JC learning experience," it said. The ministry had decided on Mount Sinai as the interim site for the JC after the original plan of having the temporary campus at the former ITE Bishan campus at Bishan Street 14 fell through. The change in the interim location had upset some parents, who felt Mount Sinai was too far, and their children would spend too much time travelling. The permanent campus will be ready by end-2019, a delay from its original timeline of mid-2018, due to the construction of the Cross-Island Line.

Thanks for taking the time to read a little bit about me. My name is Paul and I'm a sole trading Electrician, based in South Leicester with 8 years experience. I am fully qualified, insured and registered with NICEIC Approved Contractor scheme (the highest level possible). I had two years of university level schooling before deciding a practical career was the one for me. I pride myself in quality, reputation as well as honesty. I always like to leave a job in a condition where I'm proud to have my name on it. I also like to pride myself in punctuality and fairness. I will turn up when I say I will and I will also charge a fair trade price for any job, no more or less. As some of the work I do involves working in places with vulnerable people I have an Enhanced DBS check to my name to give anyone who employs my services peace of mind.

A lot has changed for this little guitar slinger. While he'll often hold an acoustic, he's not known for his guitar playing today, he's no longer a blond, and he's a little taller now than he was when this pic was taken in the early '80s. He's still fairly fashionable, however. One has to believe this cute country kid was ahead of his class in ash-gray slacks. Do you recognize this future country singer? Today's he's one half of a popular Nashville duo. They're starting to pile up awards for their music, which includes several Top Vocal Duo of the Year honors. Click the button below to find out if your guess is right and to see more pictures of country stars as kids.

What: Shares of Advance Auto Parts soared nearly 13% on Wednesday morning after Starboard Value LP disclosed a 3.7% investment in the auto parts retailer. So what: Starboard is taking the stake because it feels that current market price of Advance Auto doesn't fully reflect the value of its businesses, triggering plenty of excitement on Wall Street that the prolific activist investor will keep pushing management until it does. In fact, Starboard suggested that if Advance Auto simply realizes margins and price multiples in line with close rival O'Reilly Automotive, theshares could be worth more than double their current price. Now what: Starboard said that it will discuss the Advance Auto opportunity in greater detail at the C4K Sohn Canada Conference 2015 later Wednesday. "In our presentation, we discuss how Advance's operating margins are approximately 800-900 basis points below its closets peers, O'Reilly Automotive and AutoZone, and our belief that Advance can close the bulk of that gap over the next several years by implementing a series of operational improvements," wrote Starboard Managing Member Jeffrey Smith. "Despite this tremendous margin improvement opportunity and a best-in-class business mix, Advance currently trades at an approximately 2-5 turn discount to its peers on an EBITDA multiple basis." While I'd certainly wait for the short-term enthusiasm to fade a bit, Starboard's involvement might be a powerful long-term catalyst worth betting on. The article Why Advance Auto Parts Shares Jumped This Morning originally appeared on Fool.com. Brian Pacampara has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of O'Reilly Automotive. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

WINDSOR, ONT.: Susan Patolot, left, enjoys a moment with her daughter, Ava, 2, during last year's Mother's Day brunch buffet at the St. Clair Centre for the Arts in downtown Windsor. (By Dax Melmer). WINDSOR, ONT.: Susan Patolot, left, enjoys a moment with her daughter, Ava, 2, during last year’s Mother’s Day brunch buffet at the St. Clair Centre for the Arts in downtown Windsor. (By Dax Melmer). Don’t forget your mothers this weekend. Sprucewood Shores Estate Winery celebrates Mother’s Day with a gourmet lunch and wine-tasting event. Chef Jeff Wright prepares a special menu and winemaker Tanya Mitchell pours five wines and offers a tasting seminar. See details under Special Events. Also, if you’re fan of classical music, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra returns to Caesars Windsor on Saturday, May 12. This show tells the tale of Beethoven’s last night on Earth. See Concerts. Have a great weekend! Bully: Lakeshore (PG) Alex, Ja’Maya, Kelby, David Long, Tina Long, Kirk Smalley. This is a documentary on peer-to-peer bullying in schools across America. Dark Shadows: Devonshire, Lakeshore, SilverCity (PG) Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jonny Lee Miller, Helena Bonham Carter. An imprisoned vampire, Barnabas Collins, is set free and returns to his ancestral home, where his dysfunctional descendants are in need of his protection. The Dictator: Devonshire, Lakeshore, SilverCity (14A) Sacha Baron Cohen, Megan Fox, Anna Faris, Ben Kingsley, John C. Reilly. This is the heroic comedy of a dictator who risks his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed. American Reunion: Devonshire, SilverCity (14A) Jason Biggs, Alyson Hannigan, Chris Klein, Mena Suvari, Seann William Scott, Tara Reid. Jim, Michelle, Stifler, and their friends reunite in East Great Falls, Michigan, for their high school reunion. Chimpanzee: Devonshire, Lakeshore (G) This documentary looks at a three-year-old chimpanzee who is separated from his troop and is then adopted by a fully-grown male. Narrated by Tim Allen. The Five-Year Engagement: Devonshire, Lakeshore, SilverCity, Star (14A) Emily Blunt, Jason Segel, Chris Pratt, Alison Brie, Lauren Weedman. This is a comedy that charts the ups and downs of an engaged couple’s relationship. The Hunger Games: Devonshire, Lakeshore, SilverCity (14A) Jennifer Lawrence, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Wes Bentley. Set in a future where the Capitol selects a boy and girl from the 12 districts to fight to the death on live television, Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister’s place for the latest match. The Lucky One: Devonshire, Lakeshore, SilverCity, Star (PG) Zac Efron, Taylor Schilling, Blythe Danner, Riley Thomas Stewart, Jay R. Ferguson. A Marine travels to North Carolina after serving three tours in Iraq and searches for the unknown woman he believes was his good luck charm during the war. Marvel’s The Avengers (2D & 3D): Devonshire, Lakeshore, SilverCity, Star (PG) Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth. Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. brings together a team of super humans, Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, and Hawkeye, to form The Avengers to help save the Earth from Loki and his army. The Pirates: Band of Misfits (3D): Devonshire, Lakeshore, SilverCity, Star (PG) Voice of Hugh Grant, Imelda Staunton, Jeremy Piven, Salma Hayek, David Tennant. Pirate Captain sets out on a mission to defeat his rivals Black Bellamy and Cutlass Liz for the Pirate of the Year Award. The quest takes Captain and his crew from the shores of Blood Island to the foggy streets of Victorian London. Safe: Devonshire, Lakeshore, SilverCity (14A) Jason Statham, Catherine Chan, James Hong, Anson Mount, Reggie Lee. A young girl whose memory holds a priceless numerical code, finds herself pursued by the Triads, the Russian mob, and corrupt NYC cops. An ex-cage fighter whose life was destroyed by the gangsters on her trail comes to her aid. Think Like a Man: SilverCity (PG) Taraji P. Henson, Michael Ealy, Meagan Good, Jerry Ferrara, Regina Hall. Four friends conspire to turn the tables on their women when they discover the ladies have been using Steve Harvey’s relationship advice against them. The Three Stooges: Lakeshore, SilverCity (PG) Sean Hayes, Jane Lynch, Will Sasso, Sofia Vergara, Jennifer Hudson. While trying to save their childhood orphanage, Moe, Larry, and Curly inadvertently stumble into a murder plot and wind up starring in a reality TV show. 21 Jump Street: Devonshire (14A) Channing Tatum, Johnny Depp, Holly Robinson Peete, Jonah Hill, Ice Cube. A pair of underachieving cops are sent back to a local high school to blend in and bring down a synthetic drug ring. Artcite: MayWorks Windsor 2012: A Festival of International Workers’ Solidarity, Social Justice and Community Cultural Projects. Artcite collaborates with the MayWorks Windsor committee to develop an activist-themed exhibition. The 2012 exhibit features the Windsor, Ont. collective Go Home’s installation, The Break Room; the Occupy Windsor Documentation Project and video histories of Occupy Windsor participants, through May 26. Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m. or by appointment. Call 519-977-6564. At 109 University Ave. W. Art Gallery of Windsor: Mary E. Wrinch: Muskoka landscapes and Wychwood Park gardens, through June 10; Jamelie Hassan: Re-enacting Resistance, through June 10; Land Marks: Contemporary Photographs, through June 10; Correspondences: British artists Simon Payne, Nicky Hamlyn and Angela Allen examine colour, frame and perceptual modalities, through June 10; Sundays in the Studio free drop-in studio workshop, Printmaking, 12:30 p.m.-2 p.m. Hours: Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursday and Friday 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Free admission. Call 519-977-0013. At 401 Riverside Dr. W. Chatham-Kent Museum: Quilts in Queue exhibit: Examples of Tufted quilt, Log Cabin quilt, Pineapple quilt, Rose of Sharon quilt, Victory quilt, Signature quilt and Commemorative quilt, through 2012. Daily 1-5 p.m. Call 519-354-8346. At 75 William St. N., Chatham. Gibson Gallery: O’h ya, ‘h ohdiwenagqh: Through the Voices of Beads: Bead workers have played a vital role in preserving Iroquois beliefs over the centuries. The exhibit features historical and contemporary pieces from the Royal Ontario Museum and works from the collection of Iroquois beadwork artist Samuel Thomas, through May 27. Hours: Thursday-Sunday 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Call 519-736-2826. At 140 Richmond St. Amherstburg. Henry Ford Museum: Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition: The exhibit marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of Titanic, through Sept. 30. Special timed tickets for members are US$10. Non-member tickets include admission to the museum for US$27 for adults, US$22.50 for youth, US$25 for seniors and children four and under are free. Call 1-313-982-6001. Hours: Open daily, 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Call 1-313-271-1620. At 20900 Oakwood Blvd. Dearborn, Mich. Mudpuppy Gallery: Recycle Show: See what art can be made from recycled materials, through May 27. Hours: Monday, 1-4 p.m., Wednesday-Saturday noon-8 p.m., Sunday, noon-6 p.m. Call 519-736-7279. At 264 Dalhousie St., Navy Yard Park, Amherstburg. Nancy Johns Gallery: Forty X Forty: Various artwork from local artists, available for purchase, through Saturday, May 12. Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Call 519-945-2222. At 4755 Wyandotte St. E. SB Contemporary Art: SB and Dodolab present The River and the Land Sustain You? Prof. William Starling visits Windsor to study the starling community around the Ambassador Bridge. His activities are in conjunction with Windsor’s Mayworks 2012. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, noon-6 p.m. Call 519-819-0536. At 1017 Church St. Windsor’s Community Museum: Living in 1812: Life on the Sandwich Frontier. This exhibit explores the daily lives of the various inhabitants in the Sandwich Frontier and how they interacted; Woof! Woof! Hot Diggity Doggie: This is a collection of dog stories, photographs, collars, tags, and artist renderings of family pets. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Closed Sunday and Monday. Call 519-253-1812. At 254 Pitt St. W. Patty Larkin & Lucy Kaplansky: 8 p.m. The Ark, 316 S. Main St., Ann Arbor. Tickets US$22.50. Call 734-761-1800. Sarah Jarosz: 8 p.m. The Ark, 316 S. Main St., Ann Arbor. Tickets US$20. Call 734-761-1800. Trans-Siberian Orchestra: 9 p.m. Colosseum, Caesars Windsor, 377 Riverside Dr. E. Tickets start at $45. Call 1-800-991-8888, ext. 4, or visit caesarswindsor.com. Abigail Stauffer, Pearl and the Beard: 7:30 p.m. The Ark, 316 S. Main St., Ann Arbor. Tickets US$15. Call 734-761-1800. Chickenfoot: 6:30 p.m. Fillmore Detroit, 2115 Woodward Ave., Detroit. Tickets US$39.50. Visit livenation.com. Mayer Hawthorne & The County, The Stepkids: 8 p.m. Majestic Theater, 4120 Woodward Ave., Detroit. Tickets US$25. Call 1-313-833-9700. Kenny White, Jess Klein: 8 p.m. The Ark, 316 S. Main St., Ann Arbor. Tickets US$15. Call 734-761-1800. Jonathan Edwards: 8 p.m. The Ark, 316 S. Main St., Ann Arbor. Tickets US$25. Call 734-761-1800. Slash: 6:30 p.m. Orbit Room, 2525 Lake Eastbrook Blvd. southeast, Grand Rapids, Mich. Advance tickets US$32.50. Call 1-616-942-1328. Blue Man Group: With no spoken language, Blue Man Group is best known for their wildly theatrical shows and concerts which combine comedy, music and technology to produce something very unique. Performances continue through Sunday, May 13, at Fisher Theater, 3011 West Grand Blvd. Detroit. Tickets range from US$120.60 to US$99.10. Call 1-313-872-1000 or visit broadwayindetroit.com. Brahms at Assumption Church: The Windsor Symphony Orchestra performs as part of the Masterworks series tonight and Saturday, May 12, at 8 p.m. at Windsor’s Assumption Church, 350 Huron Church Rd. Tickets range from $58-$22 for adults, $35-$20 for seniors, and $19-$11 for youth. Visit mywso.ca. French Without Tears: The Shaw Festival presents the play that established the international career of celebrated British playwright Terence Rattigan. Set in a villa on the coast of France, young British diplomats work to improve their French but their real preoccupation is with girls. Performances run Friday, May 11, through Saturday, Sept. 15, at the Royal George Theatre, Shaw Festival, 10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. Tickets range from $67.80-$33.90. Call 1-905-468-2172 or visit shawfest.com. I Pagliacci: Leoncavallo’s only successful opera, the tale of a hunchback pagliacci who becomes embroiled in a fatal love triangle, plays at the Michigan Opera Theatre, 1526 Broadway, Detroit. This production includes the addition of a dream sequence by director Bernard Uzan to music from Leoncavallo’s Zaza. Showtimes are Saturday, May 12, at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, May 16, at 7:30 p.m., Friday, May 18, at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, May 19, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, May 20, at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are US$121-$29. Call 1-313-237-7464 or visit michiganopera.org. Legally Blonde The Musical: The Windsor Light Music Theatre presents this show, based on the 2001 movie, Legally Blonde. This is the story of UCLA sorority girl Elle Woods, who, after being dumped by her Harvard-bound boyfriend, decides to follow him cross country when she’s accepted into Harvard law. Performances are Friday, May 11, at 8 p.m., Saturday, May 12, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, May 13, at 2 p.m. at Chrysler Theatre, St. Clair Centre for the Arts, 201 Riverside Dr. W. Tickets start at $25. Call 519-974-6593 or visit windsorlight.com. Masterwork Performances: Maestro John Morris Russell completes his 11th and final season as Music Director of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra with a pair of Masterworks performances on Friday, May 11, and Saturday, May 12, at 8 p.m. at Assumption Church, 350 Huron Church Rd. Saturday’s performance is SOLD OUT. Tickets are $58-$38. Call 519-973-1238 or visit mywso.ca. Mari Sings!: Soprano Mari Emilie Voelker with pianist Monique Simone perform songs in honour of Norwegian heritage by Grieg and Kjerulf along with classics by Handel, Poulenc, Offenbach and parodies by Barab. Free admission. The event is Saturday, May 12, at 7 p.m. at Paulin Memorial Presbyterian Church, 3200 Woodland Ave. Donations witll be accepted. Call 519-969-7561. Mother’s Day Brunch: Sprucewood Shores Estate Winery celebrates Mother’s Day with a gourmet lunch and wine-tasting event. Chef Jeff Wright prepares a special menu and winery’s winemaker Tanya Mitchell pours five wines and provides a tasting seminar. Tickets are $35 per person or $20 per person for children under 10. The event is Sunday, May 13, from noon to 2 p.m. at Sprucewood Shores Estate Winery, 7258 County Rd. 50 W. Call 519-738-9253 or visit sprucewoodshores.com. Rock ‘n’ Rodeo: The Canadian Transportation Museum and Heritage Village presents The Country 95.9 Rock ‘n’ Rodeo. During the weekend, there will be rodeo events, barrel racing, hot air ballon rides, dog race, and more. Live music from Windsor’s Crystal Gage and Canadian country singer Dean Brody. Advance tickets are $20 each day or $25 for Saturday and Sunday. Tickets at the gate are $25 a day and $35 for Saturday and Sunday. The event is Friday, May 18, gates open at 4 p.m.; Saturday, May 19, at 9 a.m. and Sunday, May 20, at 10 a.m. at Canadian Transportation Museum and Heritage Village, 6155 Arner Townline, south of Essex. Call 519-776-6909 or visit rocknrodeo.ca. Sports Optics Expo and Sale: Nine manufacturers of fine binoculars and spotting scopes exhibit and demonstrate their sports optics on the lakefront. Special guest appearances and book signings by Bill Rapai, Ernie Jardine and Sharon Stiteler. Free admission. The event is Saturday, May 12, and Sunday, May 13, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Pelee Wings Nature Store, 636 Point Pelee Dr. Leamington. Call 519-326-5193 or visit peleewings.ca. Walkerville High School Reunion: The reunion features a variety of events all weekend including a silent auction, dancing, karaoke, basketball game, golf tournament, buffet dinner and more. Tickets are $40 for an all access weekend pass. The reunion is Thursday, May 17, Friday, May 18, from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. and Saturday, May 19, from noon to 11 p.m. at Walkerville Collegiate School Grounds, 2100 Richmond St. Call 519-252-6514 or visit walkervilletartans.com.

You can create books as a graduation present or a Father's Day present using Weeva. Weeva allows you to create a memory book by inviting others to contribute stories and photos. The person who signs up invites friends and family to participate. It’s all handled electronically. It’s called Weeva because it allows you to weave the stories of someone’s life. Once you feel like the collection period is complete, you let Weeva know. Then Weeva edits stories for grammar and spelling. Designers lay out the book’s pages. The copy gets printed into a hardcover keepsake book. It takes about three weeks between the time you say you’re done collecting stories and the time the book is in your hand. Schools use it to honor a teacher with her class’ drawings and messages. Families use it for birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries or as an alternative baby book. Companies also are using Weeva to mark a business milestone or a professional achievement. You can create books as a graduation present or a Father’s Day present using Weeva. How many books has Gorsuch made? It’s like how the cobbler’s children have no shoes. She’s working on one for her son and his friends about high school for graduation. Her second one will be the family stories she’s wanted to collect. weeva.com.

>>> as anne just mentioned this oil is devastating people who live along the gulf coast among them residents of plaquemines parish . billy nungesser is the parish president . i know you're hearing it from the people who live in that parish. give me the sense of the range of emotions you're hearing on a daily basis. >> it's fear. it's disgust. it's -- you know, people in plaquemines parish aren't used to sitting around and waiting. we prepare for the worst and hope for the best. and we just don't see the efforts out there, number one. we told them it would come ashore. they said, no, it will be a few tar balls. it's come ashore. they're not equipped. there's no plan in place. the leadership is really lacking from all aspects of the coast guard and bp . seven skimmer boats in plack plaquemines parish as you see it takes them four or five days to get out there. it's just unacceptable. the people are disgusted, frustrated, as i am. and putting more troops on the ground is not the answer. we need a leader to step up and take charge and build this berm out there that the keep most of the oil out. >> mr. nungesser, would you say the frustration level is equal or equally shared between the federal government and bp or are the people in that area blaming one over the other? >> well, i think we're pointing the finger at both and they keep pointing the finger at each other. and the coast guard ultimately has the decision. they can direct bp to do anything. had they directed them to pay and build this berm 30 days ago, we would have over 20 miles of berm out the water receiving this oil on the beach. it's easy to clean it up off the beaches. you won't clean it up out of the marshes where it's destroying the habitat for the pelicans and all the wildlife in louisiana. it will destroy it for many years. and we told them that. it's now coming ashore. they need to admit they made a mistake, take a step back and let's get working out there, pull all stops out to protect our coastline. but they're still pointing the finger. more people on the ground is not the answer. organization, the equipment and building that berm to protect our coastline is the answer. we need to pull out all stops. >> we've got the memorial day weekend fast approaching here, mr. nungesser. obviously the traditional start to the tourism season. what impact are you expecting? >> all the tournaments, all the big fishing tournaments are canceled. all the festivals in this area have been canceled. we have no tourism. all we have is the workers here that are working on this spill. and it's pretty devastating. and we're talking about long, long-lasting effects in these marshlands. i'm so disappointed they won't spend $300 million to build a barrier island to protect us but i heard yesterday bp put up $500 million to check and research and study what's going to happen after the fact. we're not going to need that money because there's not going to be much left here to study. put that money up front. let's save the marsh while we still have a chance. we lost the battle. we haven't lost the war. it's time for a true leader to step up and let's make something happen. >> all right. plaquemines parish president billy nungesser. thank you for your time and our thoughts are with all of the good folks in your parish. >>> 7:12. once again here's meredith.

A "well-off," "motivated" and "knowledgeable" man spent over 13,411 yuan (1,963 U.S. dollars) in the first half of the year on Ximalaya FM, a popular audiobook platform in China, with favorite books including "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" and "Poor Charlie's Almanack." Such is the portrait of the user with the largest spend on Ximalaya FM during the period, which was unveiled in a report released by the think tank TopKlout in late July. Riding high on the momentum of audiobooks and e-books, along with CITIC Press Group, the app epitomizes the ever-changing and evolving industry, as well as the way alternative reading methods are injecting new life into books and the way they are received. "We've accumulated 470 million users during the six years since founding," said Wu Ting, from the public relations department of Ximalaya FM. "More than half of the user flow was brought by audiobooks, and the more active users listen to more than 15 books a year." The popularity of classic novels cannot be understated. Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) novel "Jin Ping Mei" tops the literature category on the platform, having been listened over 40 million times. Other classics such as the collection of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, and "Border Town" written by reputed Chinese writer Shen Congwen, are also among eight books with over 10 million listens in the category. For Shen Dayuan, vice general manager of CITIC United Cloud Technology, a content-oriented Internet company set up by CITIC Press Group, the combination of stories and audio is key to the revival of classic works on the platform. "Performing the stories with voices is a whole different way of expression and another art form," he said, drawing an analogy between audio novels and the still popular traditional art forms of cross-talk and sketches. "It's got an attraction of its own." "Our best-selling audiobook is 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,' as we invited Luo Xin, a famous TV host in Shanghai, to record the audio," he said. "As the book is already a bestseller in other forms, it should be no surprise that the market reacted so positively." Wu believes audiobooks help people make the most of brief time fragments and meets demand for saving time, given the frantic pace of modern life. "Similar to what it did for books, the industrial chain of audiobooks can in turn provide more possibilities for the traditional publishing business," she said. "The market potential is immeasurable." For instance, Ximalaya FM asks customers to vote for books they want to listen to, and the platform arranges recordings and productions of the most popular choices. Audiobooks in China have enjoyed an upsurge in recent years. According to a report published in April by iiMedia Research, another Chinese think tank, the total market value of audiobooks in China rose from 2.37 billion yuan in 2016 to 3.24 billion last year, and is expected to reach 7.83 billion yuan by 2020. For e-book dealers, with the debate over whether e-books will ever replace printed books cooling, they are already looking for ways to take advantage of the evolving market and guide their customers. "Take 'The Qin Empire' as an example," Shen said as he spoke of the six-book historical novel series based on China's Qin Dynasty (221-207 B.C.), first published in 2008. "We priced it at 199 yuan upon the release of the e-book two years ago, which most readers found unacceptable." "So we changed our strategy into pricing it at five cents per thousand words, which literally would cost no less than the original if one finished the series." A year later, the series became CITIC Press Group's best-selling e-book of 2017 on iReader, a major reading platform for e-books, enjoying a new life almost 1O years after being published. The example reflects not only the potential in e-books as a more convenient reading method, but also a coming-of-age for the consumption habits of Chinese customers. According to the iiMedia report, the number of Chinese who paid for online content doubled from 93 million in 2016 to 190 million in 2017, and is expected to grow by a similar margin to reach 296 million by the end of this year. The trend is benefiting the audiobook business, and driving its insiders to change their strategies. Apart from the aforementioned crowd-sourcing approach, Ximalaya FM is already allowing users to give 'hosts' of audiobooks rewards, much like what they can on popular live-streaming platforms. Moreover, they are looking to spend 3 billion yuan to support audio producers in every aspect. "We'll try to enable every possible way for good hosts to profit from their work, such as by providing subsidies and signing bonuses and others," Wu Ting said. A "well-off," "motivated" and "knowledgeable" man spent over 13,411 yuan in the 1st half of the year on Ximalaya FM with favorite books.

ALEPPO, Syria/BEIRUT/GENEVA (Reuters) - Rebel resistance in the Syrian city of Aleppo ended on Tuesday after years of fighting and months of bitter siege and bombardment that culminated in a bloody retreat, as insurgents agreed to withdraw in a ceasefire. The battle of Aleppo, one of the worst of a civil war that has drawn in global and regional powers, has ended with victory for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his military coalition of Russia, Iran and regional Shi’ite militias. For rebels, their expected departure with light weapons starting on Wednesday morning for opposition-held regions west of the city is a crushing blow to their hopes of ousting Assad after revolting against him during the 2011 Arab uprisings. However, the war will still be far from over, with insurgents retaining major strongholds elsewhere in Syria, and the jihadist Islamic State group holding swathes of the east and recapturing the ancient city of Palmyra this week. Rebel officials said fighting would end on Tuesday night and a source in the pro-Assad military alliance said the evacuation of fighters would begin at around dawn on Wednesday. A Reuters reporter in Aleppo said late on Tuesday that the booms of the bombardment could no longer be heard. Fighters and their families, along with civilians who have thrown in their lot with the rebels, will have until Wednesday evening to quit the city, a Turkish government source said. The ceasefire was negotiated by Turkey and Russia, without U.S. involvement. A commander with the Jabha Shamiya rebel group said that Aleppo was a moral victory for the insurgents. “We were steadfast ... but unfortunately nobody stood with us at all”, the commander, who declined to be identified, told Reuters. The plight of civilians has caused global outrage in the wake of a sudden series of advances by the Syrian army and its allies across the rebel enclave over the past two weeks. “We appear to be witnessing nothing less than ... a total uncompromising military victory,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday. The rout of rebels from their ever-shrinking territory in Aleppo sparked a mass flight of terrified civilians and insurgents in bitter weather, a crisis the United Nations said was a “complete meltdown of humanity”. There were food and water shortages in rebel areas with all hospitals closed. The United Nations earlier on Tuesday voiced deep concern about reports it had received of Syrian soldiers and allied Iraqi fighters summarily shooting dead 82 people in recaptured east Aleppo districts. It accused them of “slaughter”. “They have gone from siege to slaughter,” British U.N. ambassador Matthew Rycroft said. “Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later - Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica and now Aleppo,” said U.S. ambassador Samantha Power. The Syrian army has denied carrying out killings or torture among those captured, and its main ally Russia said on Tuesday rebels had “kept over 100,000 people in east Aleppo as human shields”. An official with an Aleppo rebel group said the bulk of about 50,000 people was expected to be evacuated. Fear stalked the city’s streets. Some survivors trudged in the rain past dead bodies to the government-held west or the few districts still in rebel hands. Others stayed in their homes and awaited the Syrian army’s arrival. For all of them, fear of arrest, conscription or summary execution added to the daily terror of bombardment. “People are saying the troops have lists of families of fighters and are asking them if they had sons with the terrorists. (They are) then either left or shot and left to die,” said Abu Malek al-Shamali in Seif al-Dawla, one of the last rebel-held districts. A Syrian military source said the evacuation of fighters would start at 5 a.m. (0300 GMT) on Wednesday. The source said fighters’ families would also leave, but did not mention other civilian evacuations. Behind those fleeing was a wasteland of flattened buildings, concrete rubble and bullet-pocked walls, where tens of thousands had lived until recent days under intense bombardment even after medical and rescue services had collapsed. The once-flourishing economic center with its renowned ancient sites has been pulverized during the war which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, created the world’s worst refugee crisis and allowed for the rise of Islamic State. The U.N.’s Colville said the rebel-held area had become “a hellish corner” of less than a square kilometer. Its capture was imminent, he added. The Syrian army and its allies could declare victory at any moment, a Syrian military source had said earlier, predicting the final fall of the rebel enclave on Tuesday or Wednesday, after insurgent defenses collapsed on Monday. Terrible conditions were described by city residents. Abu Malek al-Shamali, a resident in the rebel area, said dead bodies lay in the streets. “There are many corpses in Fardous and Bustan al-Qasr with no one to bury them,” he said. “Last night people slept in the streets and in buildings where every flat has several families crowded in,” he added. State television broadcast footage of a tide of hundreds of refugees walking along a ravaged street, wearing thick clothes against the rain and cold, many with hoods or hats pulled tight around their faces, and hauling sacks or bags of belongings. One man pushed a bicycle loaded with bags, another family pulled a cart on which sat an elderly woman. Another man carried on his back a small girl wearing a pink hat. At the same time, a correspondent from a pro-Damascus television station spoke to camera from a part of Aleppo held by the government, standing in a tidy street with flowing traffic. In some recaptured areas, people were returning to their shattered homes. A woman in her sixties, who identified herself as Umm Ali, or “Ali’s mother”, said that she, her husband and her disabled daughter had no water. They were looking after the orphaned children of another daughter killed in the bombing, she said, and were reduced to putting pots and pans in the street to collect rainwater. In another building near al-Shaar district, which was taken by the army last week, a man was fixing the balcony of his house with his children. “No matter the circumstances, our home is better than displacement,” he said. “The crushing of Aleppo, the immeasurably terrifying toll on its people, the bloodshed, the wanton slaughter of men, women and children, the destruction – and we are nowhere near the end of this cruel conflict,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said in a statement.

4. Marvin Williams looks more active, especially under the boards, than he did at any time last season. 5. Kemba Walker is playing very well, but that three-pointer still isn’t going in. 6. Where art thou, Tyler Hansbrough? 7. Until Cody Zeller actually makes a couple of three-pointers under pressure – he worked on that for much of the summer – no other NBA team is going to respect that shot. 8. I think it’s only a matter of time before Frank Kaminsky gets more minutes. 9. Al Jefferson undoubtedly gets up and down the court faster than he did last season after losing 25 pounds, but it doesn’t look to me like NBA teams are double-teaming him as often. 10. When he’s at his best, Spencer Hawes reminds me of Josh McRoberts. When he’s at his worst, he reminds me of Byron Mullens. Cowboys handling Greg Hardy all wrong, but are you surprised?

FORT COLLINS, CO - OCTOBER 15: Head coach Steve Fairchild of the Colorado State Rams looks on as he leads his team against the Boise State Broncos at Sonny Lubick Field at Hughes Stadium on October 15, 2011 in Fort Collins, Colorado. LAS VEGAS, NV - OCTOBER 29: Colorado State Rams head football coach Steve Fairchild watches his team take on the UNLV Rebels during their game at Sam Boyd Stadium October 29, 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada. UNLV won 38-35. Pete Thomas was so overcome with emotion he could barely speak to friends and family, much less assembled media after his team’s loss to UNLV. The sophomore CSU quarterback, as his teammates, had put so much stock into coming out with a victory that not getting the job done was, yes, a crying shame. And now, with four games left in a season that has taken a turn no one wanted it to take, some players officially need convincing to stay on board with the program. The locker room is slowly disintegrating along with the season and team leaders pledge to scramble to piece it back together. Colorado State has a bye this week and the general consensus is the time off will be good for everyone involved. As the faction of fans against retaining coach Steve Fairchild grows, the coaching staff will hit the road this week to recruit. To date, CSU has one official commitment — outside linebacker Deonte Wortham from Dallas. Practices will be held midweek, and end for CSU to break for the weekend. The Rams insist more tinkering can be done to turn things around, but they have already tried lineup changes, practice changes, getting back to fundamentals and scheme adjustments as a means to get out of the fog. A multitude of injuries has been detrimental to the team, however. “I feel like we still got some things that we can bring out,” safety Austin Gray said. “It’s a test of true character if you can bounce back. Defensively, CSU has fallen apart. Injuries have taken their toll with losses of mainstays such as linebacker Myke Sisson, cornerback Elijah-Blu Smith and defensive end Broderick Sargent. The suspension of safety Ivory Herd didn’t help, either. Still, things started to significantly slide right after the Utah State game on Sept. 24. Three of CSU’s last four games are at home — Nov. 12 vs. San Diego State, Nov. 26 vs. Air Force and Dec. 3 vs. the MWC’s biggest surprise, Wyoming. There is a road contest on Nov. 19 at TCU. Given how the team is played, getting three wins in that group might seem like a long shot for the 3-5 Rams. Still, everyone is staying on message.

French President Emmanuel Macron has quickly followed through on his campaign promise to pursue economic reforms. But critics call him authoritarian and the “president of the rich.” In an email interview, George Ross discusses Macron’s reform plans, his chances for success and the implications for EU politics. On March 12, thousands of farmers in the Indian state of Maharashtra marched 112 miles to the state capital, Mumbai, demanding government action to address concerns ranging from land transfers to loans. In an email interview, Surupa Gupta discusses the farmers’ demands and the obstacles in their way. Amid rising populist sentiment in the European Union, the system of “posted workers” has come under fire as member states seek to protect their workers from being undercut. In an email interview, Matthias Busse explains what is at the heart of the posted workers debate and what the EU is now doing to resolve it. Can Duterte Deliver on His Promise for Better Labor Conditions in the Philippines? Will Labor Reforms in the UAE Improve Life For Migrant Domestic Workers?

Clinical psychologist Angela Redlak talks with a patient at Renfrew Center Foundation in Charlotte, N.C. CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Kelly had an epiphany in her car two years ago on a lunch break. She thought about the lifestyles of other people in their early 30s, her age. They went out. They had kids. They led full lives. When she thought about her own life, she burst into tears. Her life revolved around her bingeing schedule. Kelly's plan that day: Go home after work at 2:30, binge and purge until her husband got home. Dinner with him. Binge and purge again. The eating disorder she had since she was 15 years old could kill her. She was the only one who could stop it. Eating disorders among women age 30 and older in the United States are increasing. Some women, like Kelly of Charlotte, N.C., have suffered from an eating disorder most of their lives. For others, there's a trigger, like a divorce or a parent's death. Many feel overwhelmed by aging and the pressure to look young. The medical complications of eating disorders tend to worsen as women age, says Angela Redlak, a clinical psychologist at the Renfrew Center Foundation in Charlotte, where Kelly is treated. They are more prone to develop osteoporosis, dental erosion, heart disease and arthritis. The chronic pain of these conditions causes many middle-aged women — unlike teenagers and women in their 20s — to acknowledge they have an eating disorder and seek help. Growing up in upstate New York, Kelly says she was always about 40 pounds overweight. Her mom told her she would buy her clothes if she lost weight. When Kelly started to like boys, she noticed they weren't attracted to overweight girls. She was 15 when she read a magazine article about anorexia and bulimia and decided that would be the easiest way to get thin. As soon as school let out for summer break after Kelly's sophomore year, she started dieting. When she went back to school in the fall, she'd lost 35 pounds. She weighed 123 pounds, a normal weight for her 5-foot, 5-inch, small-boned frame. In six months later, her weight had dropped to 95 pounds. During treatment for anorexia, she met some girls with bulimia, so she started binging and purging, too. When people told her she looked too skinny, she felt emboldened to get even skinnier. Then Kelly's two best girlfriends walked away from her. Boys made vomiting noises when she passed by in the school hall. Eventually the message got through and she gained weight. When her longtime boyfriend died in an ATV accident, Kelly turned to drugs, then alcohol. She stopped eating. In a new relationship she tried hiding her disorder, but every once in a while he suspected something. She would tell him to mind his own business. "I was sick of that life," she said. "It was having no life." Still, they married and moved to Charlotte three years ago. But Kelly's eating disorder moved with her. A while after Kelly's lunch-break epiphany, she contacted the Renfrew Center in south Charlotte. "Eating disorders are very deceptive by nature," says Redlak, Renfrew's clinical supervisor. To help pull women out of their disorder, Renfrew uses traditional talk therapy, group therapy, couples and family therapy. When Kelly started going to group therapy, she was with younger girls. "I was like, 'Look at what happens. Do you want it to follow you?' " she said. "It held me back from doing many things." When Kelly was in her 20s, she wanted to be a state trooper. Looking back, she thinks she would have pursued a career had she not suffered from an eating disorder. Now she works at a delivery company. After a year of therapy, Kelly says she is finally discovering who she is. "I realize I'm worth more than what I was doing to myself," she said. It is common for women age 30 and older to take responsibility for their disorder, says Redlak. Between 20 and 30 percent of Redlak's patients are over 30, and the number is growing. The trend seems to be true across the country, says Cynthia Bulik, director of the eating disorders program at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Fifty percent of her patients are older than 30, and that number is rising, she says. Bulik says societal pressure for lifelong thinness is prompting many women to develop the disorders later in life. It usually has a devastating effect on their families. Women who are 30 and older are often more motivated than adolescents to get help, Redlak says. But they don't necessarily have better outcomes, especially if they've had an eating disorder for many years. When Kelly was 15, she was dismissed by her dietitian and heard her doctor blame her mother for her eating disorder. Kelly doesn't blame anyone anymore. She focuses on getting better.

Coroner's Office says cause of death from "blunt and thermal trauma due to a motor vehicle accident" Thaddeus Kalinoski was one of the last people to see "Jackass" star Ryan Dunn alive. Thaddeus Kalinoski was one of the last people to see “Jackass” star Ryan Dunn alive. Kalinoski, an acquaintance of the 34-year-old movie and reality show star, spent time with Dunn Sunday night at Barnaby’s in West Chester before Dunn died in a car crash. Kalinoski snapped photos of he and Dunn drinking with friends. Not long after, Dunn died in a fiery crash when the Porsche he was driving went over a guardrail and burst into flames in West Goshen, Pa. A passenger in Dunn’s car, Zachary Hartwell of West Chester, also died. April and Phil Margera, parents of "Jackass" star Bam Margera say Ryan Dunn was like a son to them. They are devastated by his death. Chester County Coroner's Office announced Tuesday that the cause of death for both Dunn and Hartwell was "blunt and thermal trauma due to a motor vehicle accident and that the nature of the deaths was accidental." A toxicology report is not due back for a few weeks. Dunn appeared on MTV shows “Jackass” and “Viva La Bam” and the three “Jackass” big-screen adaptations. He also was the star of his own MTV show, “Homewrecker,” and hosted “Proving Ground” on the G4 cable network. Dunn’s passenger, 30-year-old Hartwell, worked as a production assistant on the movie "Jackass Number Two" and starred in Bam Margera's movie "Minghags." As for Kalinoski, he says that Dunn will never be forgotten. “He’ll be completely missed and we love him,” Kalinoski sobbed.

Saturday is Veterans’ Appreciation Day in Lantana. The public is invited to celebrate the veterans at Heroes Sports Bar and Grill at 224 N. Third St. The event is 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Dinner is $15 per person plus tax, according to a news release.

Local reliable plumber in Boxmoor Hemel Hempstead providing a prompt service with no call out fees. No job to small. I pride myself in being reliable and in maintaining excellent communication with my customers. I will always respond to all calls or emails promptly and effectively. I can give you a free estimate in a timely manner. I appreciate you work during the day and will work with you to carry out the work in a manner which reduces any inconvenience to you or your family. I can carry out repairs to burst pipes or leaking taps. With the 'beast from the east' on the way I can prevent your boiler from packing up by insulating your condensate pipe. I can move or replace radiators, replace faulty immersion heaters, replace or repair taps, unblock or repair waste pipes/traps etc.

Another role on a newly picked up series, NBC’s drama Infamous, will be recast. Infamous (form. Notorious) is described as an opulent soap in which a female detective (Meagan Good) returns undercover to the wealthy and troubled Lawson family she grew up in — as the maid’s daughter — to solve the murder of the notorious heiress Vivian Lawson who was once her closest friend. The role that is being recast is that of bad boy womanizer Julian Lawson, the handsome brother of the murdered Vivian. Neil Jackson played the part in the pilot. This is the third recasting on a new NBC series. The female lead in comedy Animal Kingdom, played in the pilot by Amy Huberman, is also being recast. Additionally, the network will have to recast a role in the comedy Guys With Kids played in the pilot as a guest star in second position by Sara Rue after her other pilot, ABC’s Malibu Country, was picked up.

Jonathan's relationship with an admiring editor (Megan Ward) is in jeopardy, unless he can present her with the perfect birthday gift. Mike: Bruce Kirby. Heidi: Peggy Rea. Manny: Ernest Borgnine. Jonathan: Jonathan Silverman.

Piedmont Avenue's Baja Taqueria is best known for its baja-style fish tacos — which were reportedly the East Bay's first, and which are, indeed, excellent — and for its selection of inventive, usually fish-centric wraps and 'rritos. But lurking on the menu among the prawn tacos and lobster (!) burritos is one of the best and most interesting vegetarian burritos around, composed of a toothsome whole-wheat tortilla; hearty, perfectly cooked black beans and rice; spicy, rich molé sauce, a little sour cream to cut the spice; and — here's the most important part — a serving of sweet, starchy, sublimely caramelized plantains right inside with everything else. This is the kind of veggie burrito that'll make you forget all about Chipotle — even, possibly, those fish tacos.

Carlos Slim is the king of Business Bros and CEOs for the fourth time in a row—unseating Bill Gates and the Microsoft machine in 2010 with his Mexican Telecom Empire. Carlos Slim is settling into a somewhat traditional position on the Forbes list, this being his fourth year, however turnover happens and it happens fast. One time Big 3 winner Warren Buffet has been bumped down to a still-incredibly-enviable fourth place, by Zara owner Amancio Ortega, proving the global obsession with endless basics is still incredibly acute. Carlos Slim is worth $73 billion, and has a good lead in the game. His gross earnings thus exceed Gates’ $67 billion by a comfortable margin, and have grown $4 billion since last year’s rankings. Carlos Slim is notable for his venerable philanthropic endeavors. The Mexican billionaire donates millions to education nonprofits and towards efforts to fight world hunger with Bill Gates. Carlos Slim is most notably the CEO of America Movil, worth $36.3 billion. Carlos Slim reigns supreme over a record 1,426 dollar billionaires—of which 210 are newbies, and 138 are women. Despite horrific economic news, Carlos Slim and co. seem to have only gotten richer over the past year. In a stunning display of satisfying karma, Facebook’s spot dropped notably this year (31 spots) as Mark Zuckerburg’s net worth declined by $4.2 billion. Carlos Slim is a benefactor in many ways—he has taken the struggling Spanish soccer team Real Oviedo under his wing by buying a majority in the franchise.

Mark Giordano will have a hearing with the NHL Department of Player Safety on Friday. The Calgary Flames defenseman is facing discipline for kneeing Minnesota Wild center Mikko Koivu on Thursday. The incident occurred at 6:17 of the third period of Calgary's 2-0 win at Scotiabank Saddledome. Giordano was assessed a minor penalty for tripping. Koivu left the game and did not return. The following grounds are being considered for supplemental discipline: kneeing. However, the Department of Player Safety retains the right to make adjustments to the infraction upon review.

Erectile dysfunction (ED) is the inability to achieve or maintain an erection sufficiently for satisfactory sexual performance. Aging is a major factor responsible for impeding the normal function of erection. Cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, spinal cord injuries, and hypertension, medications are some factors that have been found to cause erectile dysfunction. The first line of treatment for ED comprises oral medication of PDE5 inhibitors. The global erectile dysfunction drugs market was valued at US$ 4.35 Bn in 2016 and is projected to reach US$ 2.87 Bn by 2026, declining at a CAGR of 3.2% from 2018 to 2026. The market observed significant changes in 2018 mainly due to the loss of patent exclusivity in the U.S. of key revenue generating brands Viagra (sildenafil citrate), and is also expected to face a setback in the future due to loss of patent exclusivities of other recognized brands namely, Cialis (tadalfil) and Levitra/Staxyn (vardenafil). Male sexual function stridently declines after the age of 50 years along with increasing incidence of erectile dysfunction. Increase in susceptibility of geriatric population to erectile dysfunction increases demand for drugs to treat this abnormality. Moreover, psychological and physical changes, including hormonal alteration, can decrease libido and add to the cause of erectile dysfunction. According to a study conducted by New England Research Institutes in 2000, the worldwide prevalence of erectile dysfunction was 152 million in 1995. It is expected to increase to 322 million in 2025. Most of these cases are likely to occur in developing countries due to rise in geriatric aging population. Oral phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors are commonly used erectile dysfunction drugs across the globe. Viagra (sildenafil citrate) and other PDE 5 inhibitors such as Cialis (tadalafil) and Levitra/Staxyn (vardenafil) are extensively consumed for ED treatment worldwide. Loss of patent exclusivity of a branded drug results in revenue reduction by nearly 40% in the first year, which goes on decreasing to 30% and 20% in the following years. This is attributed to the launch of generic equivalents of these drugs being manufactured and marketed at 1/10th of the price of the original branded drug, thus resulting in higher consumption of generic drugs due to high efficacy and demand. Consequently, the generics segment is anticipated to be a promising area of investment even for original molecule manufacturers, as it is a mode of sustenance and offsetting expenditures of the companies. The global erectile dysfunction drugs market is segmented based on drug, distribution channel, and geography. In terms of drug, the erectile dysfunction drugs market is divided into Viagra, Cialis, Staxyn/Levitra, Stendra/Spedra, and others. The others drug class includes Zydena (medicated urethral system for erection), Mvix, Helleva, Vitaros, Caverject Impulse, generic products, and pipeline products. Cialis (tadalafil) sales exceeded that of Viagra (sildenafil citrate) due to patent expiration of Viagra (sildenafil citrate) in major countries in Europe. Patent expiry of Cialis (tadalafil) in 2017 is expected to drastically affect the market, considering the global sales of the drug was US$ 2.3 Bn in 2017. Geographically, the erectile dysfunction drugs market has been categorized into five regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. North America accounted for the largest share of the global erectile dysfunction drugs market in 2016, followed by Europe. High awareness, increase in funding for research and grants, favorable medical reimbursement policies, high prevalence of erectile dysfunction, rapidly growing geriatric population, and promising clinical pipeline products drive the erectile dysfunction drugs market in North America. Middle East & Africa is an attractive market. The market in this region is expected to expand at a significant CAGR during the forecast period. The erectile dysfunction drugs market in Asia Pacific is anticipated to expand at a moderate growth rate. Japan and China account for major share of the erectile dysfunction drugs market in Asia Pacific, primarily due to large geriatric people affected with erectile dysfunction in these countries. The global erectile dysfunction drugs market is consolidated with a few companies accounting for major share. Key players operating in the global erectile dysfunction drugs market include Pfizer, Inc., Dong-A ST Co., Ltd., Eli Lilly and Company, Bayer AG, VIVUS, INC., and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. Manufacturers are launching new products in the international market to tap the unmet needs of erectile dysfunction. Other prominent players operating in the global market include SK chemicals, Meda Pharmaceuticals Inc., Cristalia Produtos Quimicos Farmaceuticos Ltda. Apricus Biosciences, Inc., and Futura Medical plc.

Boyd Buchanan Lacrosse program has added to its senior coaching staff with the addition of Pat Wagner. Mr. Wagner and Chris Richardson will coach the high school Lacrosse team, with assistant coach Steve Frost. Boyd Buchanan Lacrosse began in the middle school with Chris Richardson as head coach. He led the team to three winning seasons from 2016 to 2018. In 2015, Mr. Wagner began his Lacrosse coaching career at Evangelical Christian School. He led the middle school team to a winning record of 12-5 in 2015. He became head coach of the high school in 2016 and won two consecutive state championships (2016 and 2017). Mr. Wagner played Lacrosse from middle school to college. In high school, he served as the goalie for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Men’s Club Lacrosse team. He went on to briefly play NCAA Div III Lacrosse at Millsaps College for two years. Mr. Wagner received his BS in Biology from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He attended Law School at University of Memphis Cecil C Humphreys School of Law and is currently a practicing attorney at Wagner & Weeks, PLLC.

Husbands better step up their game this year! Mother's Day is the day where everyone puts in a little extra effort to make mothers feel appreciated for all that they do. But sometimes, families get lazy and get gifts they obviously bought last minute, or they don't have any real plans for the day. It's infuriating! These women spend most of their days being a good wife and mother, so hurt feelings are completely understandable if others don't take the holiday seriously. So, what do wives and mothers do when it's obvious their families don't care that much? They cheat the next day. According to Ashley Madison's reports, last year, their numbers of sign-ups spiked by 442 percent after the holiday, all thanks to women searching online to have an affair. They expect their numbers to spike again by 500 percent this year. How should men avoid disappointing the hard-working mother of their children? Give them what they want. Ashley Madison conducted a survey with 10,817 moms and found that 58 percent want to have a romantic evening with their husband, 33 percent want to get away and relax at the spa in the afternoon, and only 9 percent want time alone to relax. However, their special day looks nothing like this. Instead, they are still stuck with mommy duty! The survey found 66 percent of moms end up taking care of kids with a planned activity, 21 percent get a card and flowers, and 13 percent get breakfast in bed from their kids ... but have to clean afterwards. Husbands, take notes if you don't want her stray!

Mississippi Burning: As Ferguson Erupts, Obama Honors Civil Rights Activists Slain by Klan in 1964 | Democracy Now! AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to President Obama’s comments Monday at the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony, where among those honored, posthumously, were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, who were killed 50 years ago by the Klan after traveling to Mississippi to register black voters. In this White House ceremony, President Obama noted it took more than four decades to bring the organizer of the murders, Edgar Ray Killen, to justice. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: On June 21st, 1964, three young men—two white and one black—set out to learn more about the burning of a church in Neshoba County, Mississippi: James Earl Chaney, 21 years old; Andrew Goodman, 20 years old; Michael Henry Schwerner, 24 years old—young men. And in that Freedom Summer, these three Americans refused to sit on the sidelines. Their brutal murder by a gang of Ku Klux Klan members shook the conscience of our nation. It took 44 days to find their bodies, 41 years to bring the lead perpetrator to justice. And while they’re often remembered for how they died, we honor them today for how they lived—with the idealism and the courage of youth. James, Andrew and Michael could not have known the impact they would have on the civil rights movement or on future generations. And here today, inspired by their sacrifice, we continue to fight for the ideals of equality and justice for which they gave their lives. Today we are honored to be joined by James’s daughter Angela, Andrew’s brother David, and Michaels wife Rita. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the nation’s highest civilian honor. We turn now to excerpts of a documentary titled Neshoba: The Price of Freedom, which tells the story of the three civil rights activists. NEWS ANCHOR: First, the known facts. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner went to Mississippi to help register Negroes as voters. Chaney, a 20-year-old Mississippian, was a veteran of the civil rights movement in his home state. He assisted in the training classes. Goodman, 20, a New York college student, had never participated in the civil rights movement, but a friend says Goodman could never understand how some people could be so lacking in compassion. Schwerner, 24, a seasoned New York social worker, left Mississippi where he had worked since January, to assist in the training school at Oxford, Ohio. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The film, Neshoba, goes on to document the role local Mississippi law enforcement agents and the Ku Klux Klan played in the murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. NEWS ANCHOR: It’s 35 miles from Meridian to Philadelphia, then 12 miles to Longdale, where the church had been burned. That afternoon, the three were seen at the church site and at the home of its lay leader. About 2:30 they headed west toward Philadelphia. AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from the documentary, Neshoba: The Price of Freedom. President Obama has just awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the three civil rights activists posthumously, murdered by the Klan 50 years ago, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner. That excerpt includes comments from U.S. Justice Department Attorney John Doar, who died earlier this month at the age of 92. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we go to Cincinnati to speak with a man who was just released from prison this week after almost 40 years, the longest-held prisoner ever exonerated. Stay with us.

This clears the way for debt agencies to charge higher fees on overdue loans. According to a Tuesday analysis from the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), millions of Americans have fallen behind on their student loans. The data, obtained from the U.S. Department of Education, reveals 42.4 million people in the U.S. owed $1.3 trillion in federal student loans by the end of 2016. Since 2013, the average amount owed per borrower increased by 17 percent. Back in 2015, the Obama administration issued a memo that prevented debt collectors from charging high interest rates on overdue student loans. So long as the borrower entered the government’s loan-rehabilitation program within 60 days of defaulting, agencies of the old, bank-based Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) were forbidden from charging up to 16 percent of personal and accrued interest. Still, some lawmakers argue that debt collectors continue to impose these fees, despite the Obama regulations. As part of an ongoing legal case, the U.S. District Court gave the Trump administration until March 16 to decide whether to uphold the Obama-era guidelines. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Suzanne Bonamici, both Democrats, penned a letter Monday asking Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to uphold the previous memo. “We urge the [Department of Education] to stand by its previous guidance and give borrowers in default a chance to rehabilitate their loans and successfully repay their debt without being charged massive collection fees,” the letter reads. This request was short-lived. The Department of Education revoked the Obama guidelines on Thursday and instructed guarantee agencies (companies that issue government-backed student loans) to collect on defaulted debt. As MarketWatch points out, a relatively small share of borrowers will be impacted by the new regulations. Starting in 2010, all new federal student loans were issued by the Department of Education, which doesn’t charge collection fees to borrowers who quickly agree to make good on their defaults. As a result, students who have taken out federal loans in the last few years need not worry about an increase in fees. But those who received loans from the FFELP—which discontinued new loans in 2010—have cause for concern. The Washington Post reports that nearly half of America’s outstanding debt in default comes from this bank-based federal lending program, while Tuesday’s CFA analysis finds that 16 million Americans are liable for bank-based federal student loans. One of the main criticisms from the Trump administration, as stated Thursday in a “dear colleague” letter, was that the Obama memo lacked public input. Only time will tell what the public has to say about the new administration guidelines.