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Facebook's new privacy settings ...
Ride like the wind ...
Today is Ride To Work (Motorcycle) Day
362 Emperor Julian issues an edict banning Christians from teaching in Syria.
1579 Sir Francis Drake claims San Francisco Bay for England.
1775 The British take Bunker Hill outside of Boston, after a costly battle.
1799 Napoleon Bonaparte incorporates Italy into his empire.
1848 Austrian General Alfred Windischgratz crushes a Czech uprising in Prague.
1854 The Red Turban revolt breaks out in Guangdong, China.
1856 The Republican Party opens its first national convention in Philadelphia.
1861 President Abraham Lincoln witnesses Dr. Thaddeus Lowe demonstrate the use of a hot-air balloon. 1863 On the way to Gettysburg, Union and Confederate forces skirmish at Point of Rocks, Maryland. 1872 George M. Hoover begins selling whiskey in Dodge City, Kansas–a town which had previously been "dry."
1876 General George Crook's command is attacked and bested on the Rosebud River by 1,500 Sioux and Cheyenne under the leadership of Crazy Horse.
1912 The German Zeppelin SZ 111 burns in its hanger in Friedrichshafen.
1913 U.S. Marines set sail from San Diego to protect American interests in Mexico.
1917 The Russian Duma meets in secret session in Petrograd and votes for an immediate Russian offensive against the German Army.
1924 The Fascist militia marches into Rome.
1926 Spain threatens to quit the League of Nations if Germany is allowed to join.
1930 The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill becomes law, placing the highest tariff on imports to the United States. 1931 British authorities in China arrest Indochinese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh.
1932 The U.S. Senate defeats the Bonus Bill as 10,000 veterans mass around the Capitol.
1940 The Soviet Union occupies Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
1942 Yank a weekly magazine for the U.S. armed services, begins publication.
1944 French troops land on the island of Elba in the Mediterranean.
1950 Surgeon Richard Lawler performs the first kidney transplant operation in Chicago.
1953 Soviet tanks fight thousands of Berlin workers rioting against the East German government.
1963 The U.S. Supreme Court bans the required reading of the Lord's prayer and Bible in public schools. 1965 27 B-52s hit Viet Cong outposts, but lose two planes in South Vietnam.
1970 North Vietnamese troops cut the last operating rail line in Cambodia.
1972 Five men are arrested for burglarizing Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.
1994 Millions of Americans watch former football player O.J. Simpson–facing murder charges–drive his Ford Bronco through Los Angeles, followed by police.
About the gender gap in silicone valley
That Google banned Google Glasses from its own shareholder meeting
That the rise of jellyfish reveals sickness of world's oceans
Just how Kodak failed
The repugican cabal, their supporters, and Münchausen Syndrome By Proxy
From Occupy Democrats
by Lisa Longo
Sometimes our children do amazing things. And we all like to brag about their amazing feats of agility, strength and intelligence. But sometimes you come across a parent who likes to complain instead of brag. We've all met them, the drama queens who love to tell you every misery and mistake their child makes. The tall tale tellers who say they don't want to create "more" drama, and then carry on with their melodramatic musings and pedantic pronouncements.
These parents take great pleasure in sharing their "misfortune" and seem to create circumstances that put their children in the worst possible light, but puts them in the spotlight. There is even a name for it, Munchausen Syndrome by proxy.
Münchausen syndrome by proxy(MSbP or MBP) is a controversial term that is used to describe a behavior pattern in which a caregiver deliberately exaggerates, fabricates, and/or induces physical, psychological, behavioral, and/or mental health problems in those who are in their care
We've been friends with such a parent. And it isn't easy. The constant catastrophes. The continual complaints and contrived circumstances that always end in this parent being "misunderstood". The doctors who don't get it. The hospital staff that won't agree with her diagnosis. The therapists who give bad advice. It is hard to watch. We've had our concerns and tried to help, but you can't help someone who is hell-bent on being the producer, director and star of their own scary movie. They simply don't want the help. It dims their spotlight.
But I've come to the conclusion that this syndrome is actually a national problem. And the biggest victims are a few repugicans in the House and the wingnut hate speakers on Faux and talk radio. Yes indeed, the repugican cabal seems to have a bad case of "deliberately exaggerating, fabricating and inducing physical, psychological, behavioral and/or mental health problems in those who are in their care."
Now, the House Democrats aren't totally pure and blame-free, and there are one or two liberal commentators that lean pretty far left to make their point, and they've got their own issues, mostly along the lines of what I think of as premature effectiveness. They have great ideas, but they so often just can't hold out long enough to get the job done.
There is a huge difference between telling supporters to go out and buy guns and ammo, stockpile food, water and gold, and telling them to go write a letter to your Congressperson or to make a call to your Senator.
That is the difference between conservative and liberal commentators. The barking Brick, vocal vomit spewing Dimbulb and hateful Hand-job tell listeners they have to bear arms because the "time is coming" when citizens will have to "defend themselves" from their own government. And yes, that is exactly what is said every day from 9am until 6pm on wingnut hate talk radio.
I know because I force myself to listen to their drivel. I consider it self-defense.
And just like the children of parents with Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, the followers of these dogmatic drama queens suffer the consequences. They believe what they hear is true, and then they act based upon the delusional drama they are fed constantly.
The repugican cabal Is Teaching Hate by Passing Their Bigotry Down To The Next Generation
Americans love to mark specific days to celebrate and honor important American achievements and various members of society, and cynics often state the obvious that days honoring children, grandparents, mothers, and fathers are promoted mercilessly by commerce to guilt consumers into spending their hard-earned cash. In 1910, as a complement to the day honoring mothers, a day celebrating fatherhood and to honor male parenting began humbly in Spokane Washington, and after a slow start, it has become a commercial success and for many, the one day each year they express gratitude for their fathers. There is little doubt that fathers play a crucial role in how their children grow and develop into adults, and it is true that one can learn a great deal about a father through their children's attitudes, work ethic, and morality whether for the better or worse, and after recent revelations two Republican legislator's sons posted vile bigoted remarks on social media, it informs they are, if not their fathers' sons, they are certainly repugican cabal sons.
First, it is important to acknowledge that not all repugicans are racists, homophobes, anti-immigrant, and sexist sycophants, but there is no denying the repugican cabal made great use of coded, but glaringly obvious, references to lazy African Americans, dangerous immigrants, and homosexuals ripping apart the moral fiber of America before, during, and after the campaigns in the 2012 election. None of the references were accidental, and they catered to the significant number of bigoted voters repugicans counted on to win their respective elections whether it was for state or national legislatures or the presidency of the United States. It cannot be disputed that repugicans would not risk alienating minority, immigrant, women, or gay voters if they were not certain their supporters would have little trouble decoding not-so-subtle bigotry and show up at the ballot box to support candidates that shared their bigotry. Subsequently, repugican politicians' children learned to recognize repugican cabal dog whistles to racists, homophobes, anti-immigrant, and sexist voters and two examples are Senator Jeff Flake (r-AZ) and Representative Joe Heck's (r-NV) sons.
Jeff Flake's son, Tanner, chose the moniker "n*ggerkiller" for an online game, made comments on YouTube freely using the n-word, referred to Mexican Americans as "the scum of the Earth," and used "f*ggot" and "Jew" freely on social media outlet Twitter. Heck's son, Joey, revealed he learned from repugicans' coded bigotry and used words such as "f*ggot" and "n*gga," and demeaned Mexican Americans claiming New York Jets' quarterback Mark Sanchez "can hop the border faster than he can throw the ball." He also parroted repugican anti-gay rhetoric that, "there are gays everywhere. Maybe that's god's way of thinning the population because faggots can't have babies." The young Heck also assailed presidential debate moderator Martha Raddatz as unqualified because of her gender, and that Willard Romney "made Barack Obama his 'slave.'" He also asserted President Obama was "promoting the sports of spear chucking and rock skipping; sports they do in his home country." Now, it is impossible to know for sure whether Flake and Heck's sons learned their bigotry while campaigning with their dad's or in the backyard playing catch, but they certainly noticed the dog whistles the fathers' cabal used during the 2012 campaign.
The repugicans made frequent use of terms their constituency understood to demean African Americans and minorities with words such as "illegals," Newt Gingrich decrying Obama as the "food stamp President," Romney claiming Obama supporters want "handouts," and "welfare;" especially during the repugican primaries in Southern states. Although not repeated openly by repugicans in Congress, repugican cabal leaders never tamped down claims by wingnut conspiracy delusional hacks questioning the President's citizenship, or assertions he was a "Muslim, power-mad socialist, dumb affirmative-action baby," or that he won the presidency because of promotion by "a race-crazed, condescending liberal elite." In a more direct form of racial animus, repugicans at all levels have been exposed for sending racist emails they dismissed as "politically inspired jokes" and never racially insensitive. It is likely that after four years of repugican propaganda, the racial hostility targeting the President did rub off on Flake and Heck's sons, and it seems obvious they failed to condemn the racial animus at home or their children would not feel comfortable spreading hate on visibly open social media forums that were sure to be exposed.
It is entirely possible that Senator Flake and Representative Heck are not bigots in repugican ranks, and it is true their supporters do not define the politicians, but it is curious they never condemned the racial animus of their supporters. The repugican fathers must understand that every time they address supporters decrying the gay threat, lazy African Americans stealing wealth from white people, immigrants polluting America, and the African
American President who "needs to learn to be an American," their children standing behind them absorb every word as gospel. Perhaps men like Flake and Heck spent quality time teaching their sons that part of campaigning is repeating bigoted rhetoric and just politics as usual and not their true sentiments, but based on their sons' openly bigoted remarks, it is doubtful they were doing anything but parroting what they spent their short lives learning at home and on the campaign trail.
It is truly tragic that the majority of bigotry both adults and children express openly was passed down from father, and mother, to children over generations. Children are not naturally bigoted, prejudiced, or full of hate, but they are natural sponges and they pick up every bigoted remark their parents utter whether it is demeaning gays, minorities, or a religion other than christianity. Politicians' children are not immune from their fathers' rhetoric, and neither are children of parents parroting demeaning remarks made during the long and perpetual campaigns Americans suffer through. The repugican cabal is guilty of perpetuating racial animus, anti-gay sentiments, and the hateful intolerance toward immigrants to garner support from the current and next generation of bigoted voters. Fathers cannot control what repugican politicians do in words and deeds, but they can shield their sons and daughters from their bigoted rhetoric; unless they are repugican politicians themselves and in that case, they have already programmed the next generation of bigots.
Haters always hate
Good idea - take this child who was born in Denver and knows only English and send her "back" to Mexico because her parents wanted a slice of The Dream back in 2002.
The repugicans Are Quietly Rolling Back Obama's Wall St. Regulations
It is not often, if ever, that a government gets the opportunity to track documented events that lead to devastation on a massive scale, and then have tools at their disposal to ensure a horrendous recurrence will never decimate its citizens' lives again. After the collapse of the financial sector in 2008, President Obama and Democrats took what were arguably critical steps to guarantee American financial institutions and Wall Street could never destroy America and the world's economy through unregulated use of derivative trading by enacting financial reform. The repugicans claimed the steps were vicious government overreach holding back unrestrained banking profits regardless the reforms protected the nation's economic health and the population's ability to survive after shrub-repugicans eviscerated America's economy. Leading up to the 2010 midterm elections, President Obama warned the American people that giving repugicans control of Congress was tantamount to granting them permission to drive the economy into the ditch, and his words were nothing short of prophetic.
Over the past two weeks, repugicans, with the assistance of a distressing number of Democrats, quietly took steps to re-deregulate derivative trading by eliminating crucial aspects of the 2010 financial reform bill (Dodd-Frank) to allow Wall Street and the financial sector to revisit and repeat the precise steps they took in creating the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression. In a typical repugican rebranding to give the financial sector free rein to rape and pillage the American and world economy, House repugicans labeled a deregulatory measure "job creation" and convinced doe-eyed Democrats to help erase aspects of 2010′s financial reform that assured Americans they can expect another economic crash so the wealthy can prosper when they reap all the profits from the next Democratic President's recovery efforts. Unsurprisingly, main stream media kept the devastating move out of the public's glaze as corporate-driven media stands to profit from the next financial bailout and recovery efforts while more Americans slip into poverty, lose their retirement savings, jobs, and homes that will dominate weeks' worth of news' cycles and headlines for years.
The move by repugicans was part of a slate of deregulatory bills to roll back recent financial reforms and deregulate complex financial products (derivatives) that created the 2008 financial crisis. Unfortunately, the deregulatory legislation targeting financial regulation (Dodd-Frank) had broad bipartisan backing, with one bill passing despite vigorous objections from the White House, leading regulators, and senior Democratic lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee. Nearly two-thirds of House Democrats opposed the measure which aims to eliminate U.S. supervision of overseas activities by U.S. banks, even though nearly two-thirds of them on the banking committee voted for it last month. The good news is that the measures will likely fail in the Senate and President Obama's veto, but it increases pressure on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to bow to repugican demands because they are wholly dependent on House repugicans for funding.
The repugican deregulatory measure explicitly restricts the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission from supervising overseas swaps trading by U.S. institutions meant to protect government and taxpayers who will ultimately pick up the tab when unsupervised trading leads to the same massive losses the world and nation's economies suffered during the last shrub-repugican deregulatory frenzy. The repugican move is precisely what President Obama warned Americans would happen if they gave repugicans the keys to the economy again and portends America is bound to suffer another, more devastating, financial meltdown within a few years of the President's masterful economic recovery maneuvers opposed by repugicans every step of the way.
What should be no surprise to any American with more than an amoeba's brainpower is that the largest and most powerful American financial groups enthusiastically support, and likely pay handsomely for, the deregulation measures because the secretive swaps trading is among the most lucrative for the financial sector and Wall Street. The banking industry use swaps to hedge their risk and speculate on financial markets' movements such as on interest rates and creditworthiness to the tune of more than $30 billion in annual profit. Profit, by the way, that flows directly to the wealthy and corporate banking sector that continues repugicans' thirty year effort of wealth increase for the one-percent as regular Americans continue suffering declining incomes and assets repugicans are systematically transferring directly to their wealthy campaign donors.
Over the past couple of years many pundits attributed repugican economic ideology to insanity borne of "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results," but repugicans know exactly what the results of deregulating the financial sector will be. It has been less than ten years since shrub-repugicans deregulated the financial sector that drove the nation into the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, and they are on a crusade to repeat the disaster again to enrich their masters in the banking, Wall Street, and corporate finance industry regardless the catastrophic effects on the American people. As a reminder, the last deregulatory enterprise cost tens-of-millions of Americans their jobs, their homes, and their life-long retirement savings that repugicans are on a tear to repeat as well as transfer Americans' Social Security retirement accounts to epic failure 401Ks many retirees lost in the last repugican crash.
There is no other way to describe what repugican intentions are in repeating the same deregulation frenzy except to deliberately destroy the American economy once and for all to allow their wealthy supporters the opportunity to step in and buy the United States lock, stock, and barrel. After sitting back and observing repugicans repeat the rest of the world's economic mistake of imposing austerity during a recovery to devastating effect on growth, unemployment, and social programs, and celebrating a job-killing sequester the International Monetary Fund (IMF) just cited as the reason they cut America's 2014 growth forecast because of "excessively rapid and ill-designed government spending cuts," there is no other conclusion but that repugicans want America to fail and are taking steps to hasten its demise.
Interestingly, the IMF specifically cited policy recommendations proffered by President Obama, and rejected out-of-hand by repugicans, to "repeal the sequester cuts and adopt a more balanced and gradual pace of fiscal consolidation" because the "automatic spending cuts exert a heavy toll on growth in the short term, and the indiscriminate reductions in education, science, and infrastructure spending will certainly reduce medium-term potential growth." Now, it is glaringly obvious that not only are repugicans intent on prohibiting job creation and potential growth, they are Hell-bent on recreating the same environment and conditions that allowed one of their primary funding mechanisms to all-but destroy the nation's economy in 2008, and have the audacity to give them the same tools to repeat their devastation again under the tired meme of "job creation."
Yet Another Big Money Financial Scandal
Five Traders Say Foreign Currency Exchange Rates Rigged
by Mark Karlin
Despite widespread criticism that the titans of the financial world engage in illegal or destructive profiteering practices – and escape punishment except for a few scapegoats, evidence and reports of trading improprieties continue to emerge.
Of all publications, Bloomberg.com headlines the most recent alleged global financial scandal: "Traders Said to Rig Currency Rates to Profit Off Clients." Yes, Bloomberg reports that five big-time currency traders (as in converting dollars to yen for example) say that they have engaged in or witnessed the fixing of exchange rates for greater profit.
In a rather complicated scheme that involves split-second timing, foreign currency traders, executing orders on behalf of clients, game the system to make larger profits at the expense of those who have retained them to convert currencies.
That's a wordy way of saying clients get cheated by some of the foreign currency traders, because the traders are driving up exchange rates and making money on the increased margin.
As a June 12 Bloomberg article reports:
"The FX [foreign currency exchange] market is like the Wild West," said James McGeehan, who spent 12 years at banks before co-founding Framingham, Massachusetts-based FX Transparency LLC, which advises companies on foreign-exchange trading, in 2009.
"It's buyer beware."The $4.7-trillion-a-day currency market, the biggest in the financial system, is one of the least regulated. The inherent conflict banks face between executing client orders and profiting from their own trades is exacerbated because most currency trading takes place away from exchanges.
Given the lawlessness and recklessness of the global financial giants in weakly regulated markets, imagine the larcenous behavior that likely occurs in a completely unregulated market.
Doesn't it appear that large "too big to fail" institutions – whether they be financial, corporate or the federal government spying on us – appear guilty as charged when their response to charges of illegality and impropriety is a limp, "Trust us."
Okay, trust a used-car salesman who when you lift up the hood of a rusty car -- parked on a lot of broken asphalt -- only to find no engine, and you gasp and tell the salesman that you won't buy the car without a motor, and his cool-as-a-cumber response is, "Trust me, it will run."
Bloomberg financial news quotes an expert as to the toll of gaming the foreign currency exchange system: "The price mechanism is the anchor of our entire economic system," said Tom Kirchmaier, a fellow in the financial-markets group at the London School of Economics. "Any rigging of the price mechanism leads to a misallocation of capital and is extremely costly to society."
So guess what? When it comes to foreign currency exchange profiteering abuses, there is no regulatory recourse, according to Bloomberg:
While U.K. regulators require dealers to act with integrity and avoid conflicts, there are no specific rules or agencies governing spot foreign-exchange trading in Britain or the U.S. That may make it harder to bring prosecutions for market abuse, according to Srivastava, the Baker & McKenzie partner.
Spot foreign-exchange transactions aren't considered financial instruments in the same way as stocks and bonds. They fall outside the European Union's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, or Mifid, which requires dealers to take all reasonable steps to ensure the best possible results for their clients. They're also exempt from the Dodd-Frank Act, which seeks to regulate over-the-counter derivatives in the U.S.
"Just because Mifid doesn't apply, the spot FX market shouldn't be a free-for-all for banks," said Ash Saluja, a partner at CMS Cameron McKenna LLP in London. "Whenever you have a client relationship, there is a duty there."
Ah, a duty! Just trust the traders. After all, their firms have signed a voluntary "code of conduct."
Nothing like that old free market neo-liberal Chamber of Commerce "let them regulate themselves" cover-up for financial hanky panky.
So if you have a yen for trading dollars into another currency, try the unlicensed street traders in the shady part of cities around the world.
They'll probably cut you a better deal.
But, of course, what Bloomberg is analyzing is big institutional movement of different currencies. There's not enough profit in manipulating the street action.
The truth be told
Hypocrisy Overload
From the "Pot calling the Kettle black" Department:
Dick Cheney Calls Edward Snowden a Traitor
Dick Cheney helped mislead the country into invading Iraq and has been convicted of war crimes, but he thinks Edward Snowden is a traitor.
Faux News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked Cheney what he thought of Edward Snowden. Cheney said, "I think he is a traitor. I think he has committed crimes that violate agreements given the position he had. He was contractor employed, but obviously granted top secret clearance, and this is one of the worst occasions in my memory of someone with access to top secret information doing enormous damage to the national security of the United States."
Wallace and Cheney then speculated on whether or not Snowden was spying for the Chinese. Cheney did say that he was deeply suspicious that Snowden was a spy, "because he went to China. It's not ordinarily a place you want to go if you're interested in freedom, liberty, and so forth."
What the former vice president left out of the conversation was that Snowden would have never had access to classified information without the explosion of the private contractor intelligence industry after the Patriot Act was passed. Without the Patriot Act, Edward Snowden may not have been in position to access classified information.
Cheney was part of an junta that fabricated intelligence in order to mislead the country into invading Iraq, so I don't think he has any room to be tossing the traitor word around.
The lunatic's capacity for hypocrisy is astounding. Ultimately Edward Snowden is responsible for his own actions, but the policies of shrub/Cheney junta opened the door for this to happen.
The word traitor is being thrown around almost as often as the term whistle blower, but I am not comfortable with either description. The facts are that Snowden is a leaker, who definitely committed crimes. If Edward Snowden did pass intelligence to the Chinese, he is a traitor and a spy. (Interestingly, if Snowden did or does pass information to the Chinese, what does that make Glenn Greenwald?)
Snowden's decision to flee to Chinese controlled Hong Kong was an odd one, but it could also be the byproduct of being a high school dropout who may not be that smart.
The lunatic is in no position to call anybody a traitor, but if anyone knows treasonous behavior it is certainly Dick Cheney.
NSA admits it listens in on US phone calls and reads US emails without a warrant
It's a pity that so many senators skipped the NSA's classified briefing on its secret spying program, because if they'd attended, they'd have heard something shocking: the NSA can and does access the content of emails and phone calls of Americans on US soil without a warrant. It's an important insight into the President's secret interpretation of FISA, one of America's most notorious spying laws.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."
If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.
Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.
The NSA is supposed to only spy on us dirty foreigners. As sketchy as it is to divide the world into the spied-upon and the un-spied-upon, it is nevertheless the law, and should be comforting to those the latter category. This revelation confirms that the Obama administration has doubled down on GW Bush's project of lawless, authoritarian surveillance, treating the Constitution and Congress's laws as mere formalities. So much for "the most transparent administration in history."
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
Reality is ...
FYI: 53 Senators Blew Off Briefing On Secret NSA Program Because They Wanted to Go Home
Fifty three senators skipped Friday's briefing on the secret NSA data mining program, because they wanted to go home early for Father's Day weekend.
According to The Hill:
The Senate held its last vote of the week a little after noon on Thursday, and many lawmakers were eager to take advantage of the short day and head back to their home states for Father's Day weekend.
Only 47 of 100 senators attended the 2:30 briefing, leaving dozens of chairs in the secure meeting room empty as Clapper, Alexander and other senior officials told lawmakers about classified programs to monitor millions of telephone calls and broad swaths of Internet activity. The room on the lower level of the Capitol Visitor Center is large enough to fit the entire Senate membership, according to a Senate aide.
The problem is that these same senators who skipped the briefing are in charge of overseeing the program. When congress doesn't take its oversight duties seriously, or even worse, abusing their powers to chase empty scandals, the freedoms of every American are at risk.
It doesn't matter how you feel about the Patriot Act and surveillance programs. This is about 53 members of the Senate who refused to stay at work, and do their jobs.
The problem of members not attending briefings is a rampant epidemic. Members of congress constantly blow off important briefings, and instead rely on special interest groups to tell them how to vote. This is how the NRA was able to stop wildly popular background checks legislation. Some members of congress vote how they are told to, because they fear that special interest groups will work against them in the next reelection campaign if they don't.
The next time a member of congress claims that they didn't know about something, the first question asked should be, "Did you attend the briefing?" The odds are pretty good that they didn't.
The fact of the matter is that a majority of the Senate doesn't care about secret domestic spying. Most of them either voted for or to reauthorize the Patriot Act.
The bigger story is that our congress is more interested in going home than doing the people's business. The main reason why our legislative process is broken is because the people we are sending to the House and Senate don't care enough to do their jobs.
There are millions of dads who will be working this Father's Day. They don't have the luxury of blowing off work, like 53 members of the United States Senate.
Affirmative action ruling contest: race vs. class
In post-Great Recession America, which is the bigger barrier to opportunity — race or class?
A decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court kept the focus on race as a barrier, upholding the right of colleges to make limited use of racial preferences to ensure a diverse student body. But in a ruling due this month, the court is widely expected to roll back that decision. Such an outcome would shift attention more toward a less constitutionally controversial practice: giving a boost to socio-economically disadvantaged students, regardless of race.
If that happens, it would reflect more than just a more conservative makeup of the justices. Over the last decade, clogged social mobility and rising economic inequality have shifted the conversation on campuses and in the country as a whole.
As a barrier to opportunity, class is getting more attention, while race is fading.
"The cultural zeitgeist has changed," said Peter Sacks, author of the book "Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education."
"The Great Recession really exacerbated the vast and growing inequalities between rich and poor in America," he said. "Talking openly about class has been taboo," he added, but in recent years the evidence of widening inequality has mounted and it's become "OK for the so-called 99 percent to talk about the 99 percent."
The shift is perceptible in a range of ways:
—You can see it in polling, like surveys from the Pew Research Center, which shows the percentage of Americans who feel racial discrimination is the chief impediment to black progress is falling, from 37 percent in 1995 to 23 percent in 2012.
Polling on affirmative action varies widely depending on how questions are phrased, but an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Wednesday showed strong feelings about using race in college admissions: Just 22 percent of Americans support letting universities consider applicants' race as a factor, and 76 percent oppose the practice. The proportions supporting racial preferences were similar for blacks (19 percent) and Hispanics (29 percent) as for whites (20 percent).
—You can read it in the tone of recent opinion pieces penned even by left-leaning academics and columnists, whose support for racial preferences has eroded under a mountain of evidence that quality higher education is tilting further toward the already-wealthy.
—You can hear it, too — in conversations on elite college campuses, where the dearth of low-income students is replacing race as a topic of debate. And in the words of the first black president, who has said there's no good reason his own daughters should benefit from racial preferences when they apply to college.
The shifting debate has painted supporters of race-based affirmative action into a difficult corner. Most agree the barriers to low-income students are a serious problem that should be addressed, and of course, many minority students are also low-income.
But they acknowledge widening income inequality has made it harder to make their case that special attention to race remains justified.
"This is the first time you have whites thinking they face more discrimination than blacks do," said Camille Charles, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies class and race. "You have people who have come to believe the system is set up to benefit black people at the expense of white people." Such beliefs, she said, reflect ignorance about the persistence of discrimination, about how much harder minorities were hit by the Great Recession, and about how affirmative action actually works (many incorrectly conflate "affirmative action" with "racial quotas," which the Supreme Court long ago ruled unconstitutional).
In his 2010 book "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth," Harvard economic historian Benjamin Friedman charted how during periods of prosperity, societies throughout history have expanded opportunities to disadvantaged groups and become more open and inclusive. During economic struggle, by contrast, they typically close ranks.
The Great Recession was no exception, he said, persuading more Americans that efforts to ensure minorities are represented among the scarce slots at top universities are "a luxury they cannot afford," Friedman said by telephone.
A report released Thursday by the Lumina Foundation underscored the large and persistent achievement gaps between races in the United States: Nearly 60 percent of Asian adults have a college degree, compared to 43 percent of whites but just 27 percent of blacks and 19 percent of Hispanics.
More alarming are the numbers for those between 25 and 29 — an indicator of recent trends. Whites and Asians are doing better than their parents. Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans are doing worse. That's a problem for everyone, said Lumina president and CEO Jamie Merisotis.
"Narrowing these gaps is a matter of economic and social collective self-interest," he said.
But other numbers in the same report revealed how profoundly family income determines how far you go in school: Four-fifths of 24-year-olds from families in the top quarter of income have college degrees, compared to just one in 10 in the bottom quartile.
Other research, while calling the black-white degree gap worrisome, concludes the gap measured by class alone is far broader. Students of all races from educated affluent families are seven times more likely to complete a bachelor's degree than students from low-income families with less education (68 percent compared to 9 percent).
One study of the freshmen entering the 193 most selective colleges in 2010 found two-thirds came from the top income quartile. Only 15 percent came from the bottom half of the country, income-wise.
At the top 20 law schools, another study found, more than three-quarters of students came from the richest income quartile.
"We continue to struggle with racial discrimination in this country, but class has become a far larger impediment to a person's life chances than race," said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, and a prominent advocate for replacing race-based affirmative action with class-conscious measures.
On college campuses, arguments over race and gender have predominated for decades, but the lack of socio-economic diversity is getting more attention. One sign of the trend is the emergence of a student group called "U/FUSED" (United for Undergraduate Socio-Economic Diversity), with chapters on about 20 prominent campuses. Chapters at campuses like Wesleyan University and Washington University in St. Louis have undertaken a range of efforts, from developing a financial literacy curriculum to lobbying for more financial aid.
But mostly, said Chase Sackett, who helped found the organization while an undergraduate at Washington University and is now a law student at Yale, the groups are getting people to talk about the previously taboo subjects of class, money and inequality.
College students are actually fairly accustomed to talking about race, he said, but class "was something that was under the rug." He said minority groups have been eager to join the conversation, seeing it as complementary to the issues they care about.
Kahlenberg, who informally advises the group, said such an organization would have been unthinkable in his own college days during the 1980s. But "the facts on the ground have changed." The test-score gap between blacks and whites, he noted, was once twice as big as the gap between rich and poor students. Now that's flipped and the income gap is twice as big as the racial one.
Sackett said he and the group don't necessarily oppose race-based affirmative action; they just want more efforts to deal with socio-economic diversity.
Indeed, many people ask, why not do both? Kahlenberg says he's all for that, but "universities never get around to the class part of the equation. They would rather have a class of fairly wealthy students of all races." A big obstacle is cost: By definition low-income students need more financial aid, while race-based preferences don't necessarily go to the neediest students. In fact, research has confirmed large proportions of minority students at selective colleges come from middle- and upper-income families.
Kahlenberg believes with some creativity, colleges can use class-based affirmative action to ensure racial diversity. That's happened at many schools in states where affirmative action is already banned. However, the broader consensus is that, at least in the short term and at the most elite schools, replacing race-based preferences with class-based efforts would cause minority enrollment to fall.
"Low-income will not replace diversity," said Ted Spencer, admissions director at the University of Michigan, which won the right to use race as an admissions factor in the 2003 Supreme Court case, but later lost it in a voter referendum. Michigan's numbers of minority students have not fully recovered.
But Spencer emphasized the court's justification for race-based affirmative action has never been only about minorities, or about rectifying society-wide discrimination, or about pitting racial barriers against class ones.
Rather, the court's justification was educational — that all students benefit from a racially diverse student body. Employers increasingly want students accustomed to working with people from different groups, and many students want that experience, too. If the court rules as expected, he's worried they'll have few options.
"As we prepare people for work and life," he said, "the absence of diversity on campus deprives all of our students of a very important part of their academic growth."
Who invented the "high five" victory slap currently so common in many sports? It dates back to the 1970s.
An interesting article in the Los Angeles Times describes what it's like to be an agricultural field worker: "Americans don't want to do the fieldwork. They'll go over and make hamburgers for $8 an hour with no insurance, no nothing, when they can make more money here," Teixeira said. "I don't care if you pay $20 an hour, they'll come here one or two days, and they're gone. It's a mind-set: They think fieldwork is below them."
The officer in charge of the Air Force's sexual assault prevention program has been arrested for alleged sexual assault.
The dark side of home schooling." The christian home school subculture isn't a children-first movement. It is, for all intents and purposes, an ideology-first movement. There is a massive, well-oiled machine of ideology that is churning out soldiers for the culture war."
Not that it would ever happen, but just in case: "do not talk to the FBI without your lawyer present. If Harvey's decades long experience is any indication, chances are that the agents will politely decline to interview you if you and your attorney insist on creating an accurate record of an FBI interrogation."
A list of people who have won Academy, Emmy, Grammy AND Tony awards. It's a short list with only 11 names. (Who would have thought John Gielgud won a Grammy?)
After the Great French Wine Blight in the nineteenth century, the French wine industry was saved when surviving varieties were grafted onto rootstock from America.
Lobsters show no signs of aging. If they get enough food and avoid parasites (and humans) they can theoretically live forever (and keep getting bigger as they continue to molt).
The health benefits of running may not apply to long-distance running. "recent studies suggest the significant mortality benefits of running may diminish or disappear at mileage exceeding 30 miles a week and other, very small studies have shown elevated levels of coronary plaque in serial marathoners—a problem that rigorous exercise theoretically could cause."
In 1942 a British forest guard in Roopkund, India made an alarming discovery. Some 16,000 feet above sea level, at the bottom of a small valley, was a frozen lake absolutely full of skeletons. All the bodies dated from 850 A.D. - and they may have been killed by a hailstorm. Details at Atlas Obscura.
Boston Children's Hospital Finds Root Cause of Diabetes
They say that with just a little more study, they could possibly cure type 1 diabetes.
By Melissa Malamut
What if you could treat diabetes without insulin shots? Boston Children's hospital is close.
Boston Children's Hospital could be on the verge of curing type 1 diabetes. Seriously. This huge news, which was announced today on their blog, could affect the 215,000 people in the U.S. younger than 20 who have diabetes (type 1 or type 2). That's a pretty huge number, so it's no wonder why it's been called an epidemic.
People who live with type 1 diabetes have to inject themselves with insulin to regulate the glucose in their blood. It's an immediate fix to the danger of low having insulin levels, but there are many long-term complications associated with diabetes, like heart and kidney diseases, nerve problems, skin issues, and problems with vision, among others. "Insulin injections can manage hyperglycemia by reducing the patient's glucose levels, but it is not the cure," says Dr. Paolo Fiorina of the Nephrology Division at Boston Children's Hospital in the report. The Nephrology Division was recently ranked number one in the country by U.S. News and World Report.
Fiorina was looking for the molecular pathway that triggers diabetes, hoping to find better treatment options with the ultimate goal of finding a permanent cure. "In order to truly cure diabetes, we needed to pinpoint exactly why this happens. And then prevent it," Fiorina says.
According to Boston Children's Hospital, Fiorina and his team found the root cause of type 1 diabetes:
Fiorina and his team studied hundreds of pathways in animals with diabetes. They eventually isolated one, known as ATP/P2X7R, which triggers the T-cell attacks on the pancreas, rendering it unable to produce insulin.
"By identifying the ATP/P2X7R pathway as the early mechanism in the body that fires up an alloimmune response, we found the root cause of diabetes," says Fiorina. "With the cause identified, we can now focus on treatment options. Everything from drug therapies to transplants that require less immunosuppression is being explored."
It will still be a few years before they can test the therapies in children, but the outcome of what was discovered here could be truly amazing.
"I believe it won't be long before we can cure diabetes with a number of different therapies depending on the needs of the patient," Fiorina says on the blog. "Then, if the right screening techniques for diabetes could be developed, it would be entirely possible in many cases that we could prevent the disease from ever developing in children. The future of diabetes treatment is very exciting."
Researchers develop easy and effective therapy to restore sight
Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed an easier and more effective method for inserting genes into eye cells that could greatly expand gene therapy to help restore sight to patients with blinding diseases ranging from [...]
SLAC X-rays resurrect 200-year-old lost aria
At first glance the beautifully bound 1797 Luigi Cherubini opera Médée looks like an impeccably preserved relic of opera's golden age. However, flip to the final pages of the aria "Du trouble affreux qui me [...]
Tennessee home to oldest cave art in US
The oldest and most widespread collection of prehistoric cave and rock art in the United States has been found in and around Tennessee, according to a new paper in the journal Antiquity that documents the art. It provides intriguing clues about what life was like for Native American societies more than 6,000 years ago. That is the age of the newly discovered cave art, one of which is seen here, showing what appears to be a human hunting. Other images are of a more direct spiritual/mythological nature.
The oldest collection of prehistoric cave and rock art in the United States has been discovered in and around Tenessee
Lead author Jan Simek, president emeritus and a distinguished professor of science at the University of Tennessee's Department of Anthropology, told Discovery News, "The discoveries tell us that prehistoric peoples in the Cumberland Plateau used this rather distinctive upland environment for a variety of purposes and that religion was part of that broader sense of place." Jan Simek, Alan Cressler, Nicholas Herrmann and Sarah Sherwood/Antiquity Publications Ltd.
A very large polychrome pictograph depicts humans, serpents and circles. The image, from the same overall site, but extending into Alabama, likely illustrated a myth spread across generations via word of mouth, with such permanent imagery further preserving its meaning, lost to history.
Simek explained, "Human images are often shown in activities suggesting heroic or ceremonial action, flying, transforming into animal shapes or reaching through the rock surface."
Simek said one of the images is "a black charcoal pictograph from an East Tennessee cave showing a transformational animal with the head, body, and tail of a dog or cat and the curving talons of a bird. Transformation is depicted in prehistoric art in both open-air sites and in dark zone caves in Tennessee."
He and his colleagues suspect that the open-air rock art and the cave art were connected as part of "an organized alteration of the landscape," with the creators of the images mapping "their conceptual universe onto the natural world in which they lived." This happened in three dimensions, with upper (celestial in nature), middle (plants and animals) and lower (darkness, death and danger) worlds matching content with where it was placed in the region.
Simek describes another image & quote of a bird was incised in wet mud banks deep inside Mud Glyph Cave in Tennessee. Mud, which is associated with the origin of the world by many Southeast native American peoples, was often used as a medium by prehistoric cave artists. This example is still plastic and therefore extremely fragile."
Analysis of rock and cave art often employs non-destructive, high-tech tools, such as this high-resolution laser scanner operated by the RLS group in Chattanooga, Tenn. It precisely records the ancient art for conservation and analysis.
According to Simek, "Many of the images, like this black charcoal pictograph of a rayed circle from Dunbar Cave in Tennessee, can also be seen on portable religious objects found in temple mounds and other prehistoric religious contexts."
Scorpions, with their painful stings, appear to have been part of the Native American vision of the "lower world." At this extensive site, scorpion images were found in deep caves and not in the upper "celestial" area. In this case, an artist, or artists, produced the images by painting wet ashes onto the cave wall.
"These tiny turkey engravings from Tennessee were extremely difficult to photograph, since they are only a few centimeters long and composed of very shallow lines made with a fine pointed tool," Alan Cressler, project photographer, told Discovery News.
"One of the best-known examples of Southeast cave art, these engravings of weapons and bird-human transformations form a complex composition in the dark zone of Devilstep Hollow Cave in Tennessee," Simek said.
Co-author Sarah Sherwood of The University of the South, added, "Rock art sites are only one type of specialized activity site we see in the area; we know that people came to the Plateau to find specific foods, including animals and plants (in fact, certain native plants were domesticated in the area more than 3,000 years ago) and to obtain non-food resources; rock art was an integral part of how people conceived and used their landscapes."
View all paintings on Discovery.com
Long-lost stone found in stream by archaeologists
A long-lost medieval stone has been rediscovered in a stream north west of Lampeter. The stone which dates back to the ninth or 10th century, was found just south-west of St Sulien's Church, in the village of Silian.
A medieval stone was found in a stream north west of Lampeter, just south-west of St Sulien's
Church, in the village of Silian
The church site is home to two further medieval inscribed stones and thought to have been of high-status having been in use for at least 1,500 years.
Archaeologists Nikki Vousden, who works for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, and Dr Roderick Bale of University of Wales Trinity Saint David University Lampeter, came across the stone while walking.
The stone named 'Silian 3' consists of a linear Latin cross with a lozenge shaped ring at its upper end. It measures some 70cm x 38cm and the pattern is rare, with only two other definite examples of crosses in lozenge shaped rings in Wales.
Ms Vousden said: "How the Silian 3 stone ended up in the steam is a mystery, especially as someone obviously once knew of its significance and took a cast.
"We are currently awaiting information as to the provenance of the cast and photograph, and will provide an update when this becomes available. Amazingly, the stone lay hidden in the stream until one day the water on its wet surface helped highlight the inscribed pattern and it was spotted."
The rare stone was first noted by Nash-Williams in The Early Christian Monuments of Wales: a cast of its incised face was kept at the National Museum of Wales.
It was ascribed to Silian because of the label on a photograph, also at the National Museum of Wales.
The stone is now being kept in St Sulien's Church.
Lost medieval city found in Cambodia
A lost medieval city that thrived on a mist-shrouded Cambodian mountain 1,200 years ago has been discovered by archaeologists using revolutionary airborne laser technology, a report said.
Post holes on an old temple site
In what it called a world exclusive, the Sydney Morning Herald said the city, Mahendraparvata, included temples hidden by jungle for centuries, many of which have not been looted.
A journalist and photographer from the newspaper accompanied the "Indiana Jones-style" expedition, led by a French-born archaeologist, through landmine-strewn jungle in the Siem Reap region where Angkor Wat, the largest Hindi temple complex in the world, is located.
The expedition used an instrument called Lidar -- light detection and ranging data -- which was strapped to a helicopter that criss-crossed a mountain north of Angkor Wat for seven days, providing data that matched years of ground research by archaeologists.
It effectively peeled away the jungle canopy using billions of laser pulses, allowing archaeologists to see structures that were in perfect squares, completing a map of the city which years of painstaking ground research had been unable to achieve, the report said.
Sydney Uni Professor Damien Evans leads several teams of archaeologists in the Siem Reap region
It helped reveal the city that reportedly founded the Angkor Empire in 802 AD, uncovering more than two dozen previously unrecorded temples and evidence of ancient canals, dykes and roads using satellite navigation coordinates gathered from the instrument's data.
Jean-Baptiste Chevance, director of the Archaeology and Development Foundation in London who led the expedition, told the newspaper it was known from ancient scriptures that a great warrior, Jayavarman II, had a mountain capital, "but we didn't know how all the dots fitted, exactly how it all came together".
"We now know from the new data the city was for sure connected by roads, canals and dykes," he said.
The discovery is set to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.
The discovery of Thom Dab temple
Damian Evans, director of the University of Sydney's archaeological research center in Cambodia, which played a key part in developing the Lidar technology, said there might be important implications for today's society.
"We see from the imagery that the landscape was completely devoid of vegetation," Evans, a co-expedition leader, said.
"One theory we are looking at is that the severe environmental impact of deforestation and the dependence on water management led to the demise of the civilization ... perhaps it became too successful to the point of becoming unmanageable."
The Herald said the trek to the ruins involved traversing rutted goat tracks and knee-deep bogs after travelling high into the mountains on motorbikes.
Everyone involved was sworn to secrecy until the findings were peer-reviewed.
Evans said it was not known how large Mahendraparvata was because the search had so far only covered a limited area, with more funds needed to broaden it out.
"Maybe what we see was not the central part of the city, so there is a lot of work to be done to discover the extent of this civilization," he said.
"We need to preserve the area because it's the origin of our culture," secretary of state at Cambodia's Ministry of Culture, Chuch Phoeun, told AFP.
Angkor Wat was at one time the largest pre-industrial city in the world, and is considered one of the ancient wonders of the world.
It was constructed from the early to mid 1100s by King Suryavarman II at the height of the Khmer Empire's political and military power.
Large Iron Age houses discovered in Norway
Archaeologists from the science museum in Trondheim have located the foundations of two large houses from the Iron Age, close to one of the biggest burial grounds in Hallem, near Stiklestad in Trøndelag.
The Lofotr Viking Museum in Borg
"This rarely happens in Norway, and it is completely unexpected" says archaeologist Marte Mokkelbost. The archaeologists have discovered two so-called "long houses" that confirm that Stiklestad was an area inhabited by people who were both wealthy and in power during the iron age.
The burial grounds at Stiklestad is one of the largest collection of cemeteries in Norway. The houses were found very close by, and one of the houses is more than 50 meters long and eight meters wide.
Professor in archaeology at the University in Trondheim, Lars Stenvik, explains that the houses may have functioned as halls, and not merely used as residences. "We think that this has been an important center for the chiefs in the iron age, and maybe all the way back to nativity," Stenvik tells NRK.
The archaeologists are now using metal detectors to search the premises, and hope to find artifacts that may have belonged to the people who lived here. Already, they have seen signs that part of the flooring in the house is still intact.
Stone Age Siberians may have rarely hunted mammoths
Contrary to their hunting reputation, Stone Age Siberians killed mammoths only every few years when they needed tusks for toolmaking, a new study finds.
Excavated mammoth bones from Siberia's Yana archaeological site suggest that people hunted mammoths mainly for ivory, which they used to make tools
People living between roughly 33,500 and 31,500 years ago hunted the animals mainly for ivory, say paleontologist Pavel Nikolskiy and archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Hunting could not have driven mammoths to extinction, the researchers report June 5 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
On frigid tundra with few trees, mammoth tusks substituted for wood as a raw material for tools, they propose. Siberian people ate mammoth meat after hunts, but food was not their primary goal.
Several European and North American sites have yielded single mammoth carcasses lying amid stone tools. Such finds could reflect either hunting or scavenging. Finds at Siberia's Yana archeological site provide an unprecedented window on the hunting and killing of mammoths over a long time period, says archaeologist John Hoffecker of the University of Colorado Boulder.
Mammoth bones appear in sufficient numbers at some sites in Europe to suggest that hunters there did seek more than ivory, says archaeologist Jiří Svoboda of Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Whatever happened at Yana, many groups were probably interested in obtaining mammoth meat, fat, bones, tusks and skin, Svoboda says.
Since 2008, scientists have unearthed 1,103 bones from at least 31 mammoths at Yana. Radiocarbon measurements indicate that mammoth remains gradually accumulated there over 2,000 years.
Right shoulder blades from two mammoths contain pieces of stone spear points. An ivory splinter, possibly from a spear's shaft, pierced one of these bones. Another shoulder blade and a thigh bone display holes made by spears. Angles of these wounds suggest that hunters struck mammoths from behind. "Yana people definitely attacked from the mammoth's blind spot," Nikolskiy says.
Most mammoth bones at Yana come from animals with slightly curved tusks that were the best size and shape for making hunting weapons, Nikolskiy and Pitulko propose.
Researchers have found five mammoth bones from the base of the animals' tongues at a campsite not far from where remains were excavated. Meaty parts of the animals were probably consumed there, the investigators say.
While hunting was not the main cause of mammoths' extinction in Asia and Europe, it may have been the last straw as warming temperatures shrank livable areas for the creatures.
Study of oceans' past raises worries about their future
The ocean the Titanic sailed through just over 100 years ago was very different from the one we swim in today. Global warming is increasing ocean temperatures and harming marine food webs. Nitrogen run-off from fertilizers is causing coastal dead zones. A McGill-led international research team has now completed the first global study of changes that occurred in a crucial component of ocean chemistry, the nitrogen cycle, at the end of the last ice age. The results of their study confirm that oceans are good at balancing the nitrogen cycle on a global scale. But the data also shows that it is a slow process that may take many centuries, or even millennia, raising worries about the effects of the scale and speed of current changes in the ocean.
Data from end of the last ice age illuminate the precarious nature
of global ocean chemistry
"For the first time we can quantify how oceans responded to slow, natural climate warming as the world emerged from the last ice age," says Prof. Eric Galbraith from McGill University's Department of Earth and Oceanic Sciences, who led the study. "And what is clear is that there is a strong climate sensitivity in the ocean nitrogen cycle."
The nitrogen cycle is a key component of the global ocean metabolism. Like the proteins that are essential to human health, nitrogen is crucial to the health of oceans. And just as proteins are carried by the blood and circulate through the body, the nitrogen in the ocean is kept in balance by marine bacteria through a complicated cycle that keeps the ocean healthy. The phytoplankton (microscopic organisms at the base of the food chain) 'fix' nitrogen in the shallow, sunlit waters of the ocean, and then as they die and sink, nitrogen is eliminated (a process known as 'denitrification') in dark, oxygen-poor pockets of the ocean depths.
Using sediment gathered from the ocean floor in different areas of the world, the researchers were able to confirm that as the ice sheets started melting and the climate warmed up at the end of the last ice age, 18,000 years ago, the marine nitrogen cycle started to accelerate. The ocean had stabilized itself in its new, warmer state, in which the overall nitrogen cycle was running faster, by about 8,000 years ago. Given the current dramatic rate of change in the ocean nitrogen cycle the researchers are not sure how long it will take for marine ecosystems to adapt.
"We are changing the planet in ways we are not even aware of," says Galbraith. "You wouldn't think that putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would change the amount of nitrogen available to fish in the ocean, but it clearly does. It is important to realize just how interconnected everything is."
This research was funded by: the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) through the Earth System Evolution Program
Huge Earth-Passing Asteroid 'Entirely New Beast'
The asteroid that buzzed earth in May was completely unique, even primitive, a researcher says.
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Sussex Disability Football League Sussex Disability Football League - developing disability football throughout Sussex.
Respect Table
Safeguarding Video
Results and Fixtures
League Fixtures (U16 & U12)
League Fixtures (Adult and U18)
An Open Letter To All Our Clubs
By SDFLadmin on 1st October 2019 in Uncategorised
On behalf of all of us at The Sussex Disability Football League I would like to welcome you to the 2019/20 season. May it be one of excitement and skill, of enjoyment and development and played in a safe, respectful and inclusive environment.
This will be the 11th season of the SDFL and since its inception it has seen a continued growth in participation, while also witnessing a strengthening of its aims and ethos. The clubs, as I have said many times before, are the bedrock of all that is good about match-days at Culver Road. You have embraced our Respect campaign in a truly wonderful manner. Most of you now have your own codes of conduct and all encourage your coaches and welfare officers to take full responsibility for players and team matters on the day. The way we all come together, once a month, to play on the same day is unique among other leagues and the way you go about it is remarkable.
Our youth section is developing very nicely and its an absolute pleasure to watch the talents youth players each month. We have some exciting new plans for the youth section and we cannot wait to share this with you, so watch this space…
There will be a few noticeable changes for this Sunday. After seeking and receiving feedback from coaches and players, all 7 a side matches will be 20 minutes in duration and the 9 v 9 fixtures will be 45 minutes in length.
The day itself will be longer than usual and because of this we can reduce our number of small sided pitches to 3. It is hoped that this will make things a little less frenetic and allow for a warm-up area in the space created by having one less pitch.
Thank you for all you do in working so hard in creating, offering and giving people opportunities in disability football. It's very cool. Looking forward to catching up with everyone very soon.
Best wishes, Steve (Chairman)
About SDFLadmin
View all posts by SDFLadmin →
Junior Presentation Details
Supporting Us (CO-OP)
The FA - Take Part in Football
The FA Full Time
Website Sponsored By: Go Walkabout Travel Insurance
© 2020 Sussex Disability Football League. All Rights Reserved.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Daily specials are written on a plate hang and from the menu above.
On a cold day in November, on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, Michigan artist Richard Schemm sold three pieces: One to actor Kate Blanchett, another to actor Josh Lucas and a third to Society gal, and patron of the arts, Ginny Williams.
Fotoula Lambros and Emily Thornhill are the Detroit based fashion firm, Femilia Couture.
The Salvation Army Captain in San Francisco had resolved, in December of 1891, to provide a free Christmas dinner to the area's poor persons.
The kids entered the inner-sanction of Santa's house to make their wishes. Maybe they were big enough to cover everyone.
Remember, it is you who invent, you who create and build. You have soul and heart, dignity, and you believe in a place called home.
CURRIER & IVES portrayed their times with fastidious detail, giving the public pictures that were typically American, easy to appreciate and affordable to the average man.


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Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, of Jamaica, waves after finishing at the women's 100 meter heat at the World Athletics Championships in Doha, Qatar, Saturday, Sept. 28, 2019. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)
Gold standard: Fraser-Pryce stands out with hair, fast times
DOHA, Qatar (AP) — Hard to miss Jamaican sprinter Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce on the track. She's the one with yellow hair . She's the one running in front, too. Fraser-Pryce turned in the top time of 10.80 seconds in the opening round of the 100 meters Saturday night at the world championships. Fraser...
Trump tees it up with Hall of Fame golfers Player, Sörenstam
STERLING, Va. (AP) — President Donald Trump is enjoying a unique mix of playing partners for his round of golf Saturday. The White House says Trump is playing with Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, and two retired pro golfers, Gary Player and Annika Sörenstam. Player is the...
Alisa Vainio, of Finland, competes during the women's marathon at the World Athletics Championships in Doha, Qatar, Saturday, Sept. 28, 2019. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
The Latest: Despite heat, 50k walks to go on as scheduled
DOHA, Qatar (AP) — The Latest on the track and field world championships (all times local): 5:45 p.m. This will not be a walk in the park. The IAAF says the 50k race walks will go on as scheduled. The races will take place Saturday night on the same course as the women's marathon, which kicked off...
Orlann Ombissa-Dzangue, of France, and Elaine Thompson, of Jamaica, compete in a women's 100 meter heat at the World Athletics Championships in Doha, Qatar, Saturday, Sept. 28, 2019. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)
Coleman aims for men's 100 gold at track worlds
DOHA, Qatar (AP) — The fastest athletes of all take center stage with the final of the men's 100 meters at the world track championships Saturday. Christian Coleman of the United States was the fastest qualifier from Friday's heats as he raced for the first time since a technicality helped him...
FILE - In this March 17, 2010, file photo, Louisiana Tech women's basketball coach Teresa Weatherspoon calls a play during practice in Ruston, La. The New Orleans Pelicans have hired Weatherspoon and AJ Diggs as assistant coaches with a focus on player development. (AP Photo/Kita Wright, File)
Pelicans add Teresa Weatherspoon, AJ Diggs to coaching staff
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The New Orleans Pelicans have hired Teresa Weatherspoon and AJ Diggs as assistant coaches with a focus on player development. The club says the new assistants have been assigned to work with the Pelicans' two-way players and will travel with them to assignments with New Orleans'...
Connecticut Sun's head coach Curt Miller, right, greets his players during a timeout in the second half of Game 3 of a WNBA basketball playoff game against the Los Angeles Sparks, Sunday, Sept. 22, 2019, in Long Beach, Calf. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)
Connecticut Sun relish role of underdog in WNBA Finals
UNCASVILLE, Conn. (AP) — Connecticut Sun players toil largely in the shadow of the WNBA's bigger names. Washington, the Sun's opponent in the finals that begin Sunday, features one of the biggest stars in league MVP Elena Delle Donne. Many pundits are picking the Mystics to win the title in the...
Mystics and Sun to play for WNBA crown
A year after getting swept in the WNBA Finals, Elena Delle Donne and the Washington Mystics are back. The Mystics will face Connecticut as the top two teams in the regular season will meet for the championship as Game 1 of the best-of-five series is Sunday in Washington. Last season the Mystics...
Argentinian Barcelona player Lionel Messi poses with United States forward Megan Rapinoe after they received the Best FIFA Men's, Women's player award during the Best FIFA soccer awards ceremony, in Milan's La Scala theater, northern Italy, Monday, Sept. 23, 2019. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)
Rapinoe, Messi win FIFA player of the year awards
MILAN (AP) — Lionel Messi won his sixth FIFA player of the year award, while Megan Rapinoe won her first at a lavish ceremony at Milan's iconic Teatro all Scala on Monday. Rapinoe was rewarded at the FIFA Best awards for leading the United States to the women's World Cup title in July, as was Jill...
US Olympic Hall of Fame welcomes Tommie Smith, John Carlos
Tommie Smith and John Carlos are part of the 2019 U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame class that will be inducted later this year. The sprinters were sent home from the 1968 Mexico City Games after staging a protest by raising their gloved fists on the medals stand. They were long left on the...
Collins fights back to beat Venus Williams at Wuhan Open
WUHAN, China (AP) — American Danielle Collins beat seven-time Grand Slam champion Venus Williams 7-5, 7-6 (5) in the opening round of the Wuhan Open on Sunday. Williams controlled the match early, going up 5-3 in the first set before dropping nine games in a row. A major turning point occurred when...


Los Po S Mexican Restaurant Holly Springs Nc is free HD wallpaper. This wallpaper was upload at April 18, 2019 upload by admin in .You can download it in your computer by clicking resolution image in Download by size:. Don't forget to rate and comment if you interest with this wallpaper.


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Surreal Scoop
News of the world as it should be, perhaps before it happens.
Heather Mills McCartney is dead!
Princess Diana found Alive
Scientists Admit To Cold Fusion Hoax Delay
Burglars "forced me to wear dress"
First "Big-Boned" skeleton discovered
Secret to hit song "3 times a lady" revealed
Resurgence of older porn stars
Hawking Rejects The Hand Of God Sees A Lucky Rabbit's Foot
Chilean Miners Express Sympathy For Chris Moyles
Transcript Of Pope Benedict's Future Meeting With God Discovered
agony aunt (1)
Annual Review (2)
middle-east (11)
Tony Blair is new peace envoy to Big Brother House
In a surprise move, Channel 4 has introduced former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie as the latest occupants of the Big Brother house. Mr Blair's sponsors have backed the move confirmed a spokesman for the quartet of the UN, EU, USA and Russia.
"The level of conflict within the house has been escalating to a point where only someone who has had the successes of Mr Blair can hope to bring a sense of normality," said Kurt Billingsworthski of the quartet referring to the Northern Ireland peace process.
"Let me be clear, this task will require a huge intensity of focus and work," said Mr Blair as he entered the house on Friday night as a replacement for evictee Billi Bhati.
Mr Blair got straight down to the task, when at 1am he was asked if people with short or long hair should have priority with the limited hair styling resources, he calmed the housemates instantly with a small speech delivered through the toilet door. "Look, we need to bring people together. People who have spent a great deal of time consumed by hatred and fuelled by complete conviction in their right to the use of hair straighteners," was his muffled reply.
Charley Uchea, one of the leading protagonists in the ongoing disputes within the house complained to Big Brother in the diary room. "A married man, Big Brother? I am being honest here and I think he is totally fake and two-faced. Who does he think he is, former Prime Minister and world statesman, so what? I have met Gary Neville, so Blair doesn't impress me!" she ranted. "I'm not being funny though, whilst he did a good job in the immediate aftermath of 11th September - rallying the international community and preventing the inevitable reactionary response being seen as the US versus the World - he painted himself into a corner with the war in Iraq since his success was dependent on the obvious lack of planning that goes with most US overseas endeavours," she added.
Cherie Blair, who joined the house at the same time as her husband commented that whilst the house was very different to her previous residence at Number 10 Downing Street there were some similarities.
"Over the last 10 years I became used to living at other people's expense. Before being evicted," said Mrs Blair, "I am now looking forward to 10 weeks living off Channel 4."
Written by EI2g at 7:56 pm
Categories: politics, Reality TV, TV
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Women's Institute admits "policy not fit for purpose"
Britain unveils GPS replacement
Foster's launch "blunt" lagers
ITV to be replaced by YouTube
Video solves "Car death family" mystery
Baby boom in paternity leave case
Farmers demand greater crop circle subsidies
Big Bro Posh Spice wannabe wannabe launches career
Queen condemns paparazzi intrusion
Creationists : "Maps are the work of the Devil"
New Olympic logo revealed
Hasty release of new cricket game


There is nothing more delicious then chocolate chip cookies, unless they are Chewy Chips Ahoy! Unfortunately, we need to avoid that sweet cookie (at least for a short time) because the cookie is being recalled by the company.
An unexpected ingredient causing negative health effects for customers.
Click on Detroit reported that Mondelez Global issued the voluntary recall Tuesday. It affects certain 13-ounce packages of cookies, company officials said.
The recall is for Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies only at this time. The affected products are 13-ounce Chips Ahoy chewy cookies with "best when used by" dates of Sept. 7, Sept. 8, Sept. 14 and Sept. 15 of 2019.
Customers who have purchased these cookies should not eat them and should call the company at 1-844-366-1171.
It is better to have a lonely glass of milk then get sick.


One of the most popular student piccolos in the world. This JPC700 Student Piccolo is durable and plays with a great sound. The JPC700 projects well with a silver plated head and body offering a sound that is strong and penetrating.


Sum up Stephanie Haskett in 200 words. Impossible. And she's only 20!
This young woman, a graduate of North Collegiate and a second year fine arts student at Georgian College, is hungry to learn about women's issues around the world. When she hits any book store she heads for the feminist, humanitarian and Jewish sections... she goes for books that intrigue her, books about the human condition, about struggle, about the query of persecution, about survival. She is deeply affected by the stories of people whose hearts respond in unusual ways.
Why? Well, she might not know this now, but very likely it is because she is one of them, one of those people whose hearts respond in an unusual way.
When she read Three Cups of Tea by journalist David Oliver Relin she learned about the journey of mountain-climber Greg Mortensen. Thwarted by his humanitarian nature, Greg abandoned his climb of K2, the world's most rugged mountain, and was diverted to a different kind of mountain...poverty and denial of the opportunity for education of Pakistani children, particularly girls.
It's a remarkable story, set in remote Pakistan and in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. It is a true story. It is a rivetting tale told with excellence by writer Relin.
It grabbed Stephanie's soul and she set out on her own to help Greg Mortensen and the Central Asia Institute in its continued journey of building schools in this hungry part of our world.
Stephanie began by slowly mastering the art of making cranes, the symbol of hope. What used to take several minutes now takes 30 seconds and Stephanie's 1000 cranes will provide an overhang at the art show she is organizing to raise money for Mortensen's work.
"At the beginning of the summer, I decided I wanted to do this show," says Stephanie. She contacted the Central Asia Institute and began to develop her posters and support material. She then held a car wash to raise money to support the show, to pay for posters, to cover costs.
Most of this work will be for sale. This show will showcase talent in all four years of design arts and the percentage of sales and money raised through donations and the sale of cranes will all go to the Central Asia Institute.
Stephanie's enthusiasm has attracted 23 paintings, 14 prints and drawings, 9 sculpture and jewellery pieces as well as her 1000 cranes, to be sold at $3 each.
The show, entitled HOPE, starts at 7 pm at the Campus Gallery at Georgian College.
Date? Thursday, October 15, one week from today.
The Campus Art Gallery is located in the Helen and Arch Brown Centre for Visual Arts. It's Building D, tucked behind the Automotive and Hospitality Building, at Parking Lot 10, off the main entrance.
What an opportunity to purchase an art piece, support a student (both at Georgian and in central Asia), add a meaningful crane to a gift package or to your own environment.


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Ultra limited Bugatti Centodieci Coupe: 1,600 hp piece of art
Bugatti continues to celebrate its 110-year anniversary with yet another supercar! The incredible 1,600 hp Bugatti Centodieci Coupe (means 110 in Italian) is a true piece of art limited to just 10 cars. The follow-up to the one-off 'La Voiture Noire' also known as the world's most expensive car – pays tribute to the '90s icon EB110.
Image courtesy: Bugatti
Tribute to the 90s icon EB110
The Bugatti Centodieci, which means 110 in Italian, is a reinterpretation of the 1990s icon: the EB110. And with the 110-year anniversary of the Italian supercar manufacturer this year, there is no better way to celebrate than to pay homage to the very car, that have brought the company to where they are today!
In the end of the 1980s, Bugatti started its comeback with the development of a brand-new car – the first one since 1956. The EB110 was created from scratch at a new production facility called "The Blue Factory" near Modena and in the neighborhood of Ferrari, Maserati and Lamborghini.
Designing the foundation for future supercars
Everything from the V12 engine to the complex carbon fiber body parts of the EB110 was developed without any predecessors. Amazingly, many of the technological components went on to be used in the Bugatti Veyron and Chiron. The carbon fiber monocoque (meaning 'single shell' in French) was the first of its type ever used in a production car and it weighed only 125 kg.
The flat, wedge-shaped and graphically two-dimensional style designed by Marcello Gandini had a remarkable futuristic look but the real star was the engine. The 3.5-liter engine with four turbochargers was tested under extreme conditions and broke several world speed records. The car's performance was way ahead of its competition making it the fastest and most extraordinary supercar of its time!
"Even sportier and more extreme than the Chiron and Divo, yet elegant and timeless like the La Voiture Noire"
-Bugatti
Bugatti Centodieci Coupe
The new Bugatti Centodieci Coupe is designed as a modern interpretation of the EB110 wedge shape and with the iconic W16 engine. Bugatti describes the design as: "even sportier and more extreme than the Chiron and Divo, yet elegant and timeless like the La Voiture Noire".
The Chiron platform has been used as the base, but new features and details have been incorporated into the Centodieci design. Five round air inserts have been placed in a diamond shape as a direct reference to the EB110. The iconic Bugatti horseshoe in the front has been reduced in size and the Bugatti Macaron logo is placed on the bonnet. New and extremely narrow LED headlights are a great example of a modern interpretation of the EB110 visuals.
In the rear, futuristic "flying" tail-light elements and a double-outlet dual exhaust complete the extreme look with a massive wing. Like in the EB110, the monstrous W16 8-liter engine is visible through a glass cover.
Bugatti Centodieci Specs:
20 kilograms lighter than the Chiron
Power-to-weight ratio: 1.13 kg per HP, 885 HP per ton
Over 90 kilograms of additional downforce compared to the Chiron
Engine: 8.0-litre, quad-turbocharged W16 engine
Power Output: 1,176 kW/1,600 HP @ 7,000 rpm
Permanent all-wheel drive and seven-speed DSG gearbox
0 to 100 km/h in 2.4 seconds, 0 to 200 km/h in 6.1 seconds, 0 to 300 km/h in 13.1 seconds
Top speed electronically limited to 380 km/h
Over 1,6 G of lateral acceleration
Handcrafted in Molsheim, France
Limited to 10 cars
Known Bugatti EB110s
The Bugatti EB110 was produced from 1991-1995 and in the period 139 cars were produced. Former Formula One driver Michael Schumacher purchased a yellow EB110 Super Sport in 1994 which gave Bugatti quite a bit of publicity. Schumacher retained the car until 2003.
In January 2018, RM Sotheby's sold a 1993 Bugatti EB110 GT at auction for $967,500 USD. The car has just one previous owner and 4,540 km on the clock.
More information on Bugatti Centodieci Coupe:
Price $10 million USD and limited to just 10 cars.
Buy from Bugatti here
SourceBugatti
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Raw footage: Bugatti Chiron Top Speed of 304.77mph


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Double boost for schools
Schools in Fakenham were given a double boost this week with glowing praise from Ofsted inspectors and fresh hopes of a big building revamp.The government report described Fakenham High school and sixth-form college as offering students an outstanding curriculum resulting in good achievements.
Schools in Fakenham were given a double boost this week with glowing praise from Ofsted inspectors and fresh hopes of a big building revamp.
The government report described Fakenham High school and sixth-form college as offering students an outstanding curriculum resulting in good achievements.
And meanwhile, education officials announced the town's Junior school would be getting a share in millions of pounds to re-build crumbling buildings, remove mobile classrooms and provide 21st century facilities.
The Queen's Road school is one of 20 identified for money to be spent on it as the county council prepares to bid for funds from the government's Primary Capital Programme (PCP0).
The 20 will feature in the first four years of the 14-year programme, which follows a similar scheme for high schools, Building Schools for the Future.
Rosalie Monbiot, Norfolk County Council cabinet member for children's services, said : "We have already invested £200m in our schools in the last three years and this strategy gives us the opportunity to continue with our efforts to transform the county's schools and make a real difference to the county's children.
"There is very real evidence that improved buildings can help motivate pupils to succeed and this project will enable us to address our ambition to raise inspirations and attainment by showing our commitment to Norfolk's children," she said.
Students' good achievements are due to an outstanding curriculum at Fakenham High School and College, according to government inspectors.
An Ofsted report on the school, which has 1389 students in its high school and 365 in its sixth-form college, said the school because of its specialist technology and vocational status was at the forefront of developing a wide range of courses matched to students' individual needs.
"The school plays a leading role in the growing collaboration between local schools and colleges and is thus able to extend the opportunities available. For gifted and talented students, there is a good range of additional examination courses and other challenges that are appreciated by students and parents," says the report.
There is well-organised support for students who fund learning difficult and this results in consistently good progress.
The report says that teaching and learning are good overall. While there is some outstanding practice, there is too much variation in quality across subjects.
"Most lessons are well planned to match students' abilities and ensure good learning. Students are generally attentive and behave well, although both students and parents note that a minority of lessons are disrupted and that this is linked to the quality of teaching".
While some subjects, including English, humanities and technology, provide students with very clear guidance on how well they are doing and what they are aiming for, this practice is not consistent across the school and marking is not always sufficiently helpful or frequent.
The report highlights the fact that achievement and standards at the school are good.
When students join the school in Year 7 their attainment is average but by Year 9 standards are above average, an improvement since the last inspection.
"Students make good progress in English, mathematics and science. All groups of students make equally good progress, including those who receive additional support for learning difficulties".
There is some variation in students' performance of different subjects, with outstanding progress in mathematics, but weaker results in some other subjects.
The report says that the school's specialist technology and vocational status has a positive impact on the students' achievement with the school meeting most of its targets in the specialist subjects of technology and mathematics.
Developments in vocational education were leading to further rises in standards in the current school year.
The school's success was due to good leadership and management.
"The head teacher provides a clear direction that is well-focused on raising standards for all students. Planning is based on clear priorities and involves governors and leaders at all levels.
New developments in teaching and learning had brought a sense of enthusiasm to the school.
The school believes that the Ofsted report is a fair one and inspectors had acknowledged the school's strengths, including its strong leadership, commitment to inclusion and its continuing record of improvement.
"We are especially pleased to have received the accolade of outstanding in connection with our curriculum where we believe we offer the individualised opportunities which enable all young people to make progress," said a senior management spokesman,


SOS spokesman, Trevor Cobbold, said that the imminent visit of New York Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, is an opportunity for informed public debate about school reports.
"Julia Gillard wants schools to be open and transparent about their performance. Yet, she is not applying the same standard to herself. She has restricted public information and debate about her proposal. It is all being decided under the cloak of secrecy.
"It is time for Gillard to come clean and reveal the details of what she proposes for Australian schools.
"Klein is being brought to Australia to tout New York's school progress reports. Let us have an informed debate while Klein is here and not just a one-sided presentation to bolster Gillard's secret negotiations with State and Territory Governments.
"Parents, teachers and the public are entitled to know what school performance information will be made public and how schools will be compared. They need to be able to assess whether the information can be used to construct misleading league tables, whether it will actually reflect school performance rather than family social background and whether the information is statistically valid and reliable.
"Gillard says she that she rejects 'simplistic and silly' league tables and wants to compare 'like schools'. However, the Klein model that so 'impresses' her fails both tests.
Mr Cobbold said that the Education Minister's refusal to provide the details of her proposal contradicts the Prime Minister's promise of open government.
"The Prime Minister's message clearly has not got through to his Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister. Instead, she is taking her cues from her champion, Joel Klein, on how to force through controversial measures without public debate.
"Secrecy and avoidance of public debate are characteristic of how Klein has implemented change in New York's schools. There too, teacher and parent organisations were excluded from the process. Gillard has clearly learned from him.


Friday morning. The Badlands of Ruhama. With Susan, Shosh, and friends. And the amazing scenery blessed with an abundance of calanit. What a great time we had.
This entry was posted in Israel Calling and tagged Biking, Ruhama by Ellis. Bookmark the permalink.


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Harbass specializes in advising governments on foreign debt renegotiation (London Club and Paris Club), transactions of foreign debt conversion into equity, debt conversion into products, leasing transactions for foreign debt instruments to carry out investments, recovery of loan portfolios with sovereign nations, analysis and optimization of foreign debt portfolios, and advising of multilateral organizations (IMF, World Bank, private commercial banks, etc.).