text:
Fort Worth company pays off $ 39.7 million on payday loans at 375% interest
By Milton D. Smead	 Last updated Aug 3, 2021
A Fort Worth financial firm will cancel its outstanding loans and pay consumers nearly $ 40 million after it engages in an alleged payday loan transaction that used Native American tribes as shields against state laws.
Think Finance Inc. has managed loans that charged interest rates above 375% and locked borrowers into plans in which loan repayment was nearly impossible, according to a 2016 complaint in Vermont.
The loans came from Plain Green LLC, an online loan company believed to be owned by the Chippewa Cree tribe of Montana.
The loan agreements were designed to avoid state laws that cap interest rates by making it clear that they were "not subject to the laws of any state in the United States."
Ann Baddour, director of the equitable financial services project at nonprofit Texas Appleseed, called the settlement an important step forward.
"There are so many different programs that have sprung up nationwide around payday lending and securities lending that are designed to circumvent state laws," Baddour said. "It's important that we push back on this. Interest rate caps are important.
The consumer settlement stems from Think Finance's bankruptcy filing in October 2017. Lawsuits against Think Finance's lending practices have been filed in Vermont, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and California.
The defendants agreed to stop the business practices that led to the lawsuits, but did not admit the wrongdoing. The agreement must be approved by the Dallas bankruptcy court and all parties before it becomes effective.
The $ 39.7 million to be paid by Think Finance will be paid into a trust for affected consumers, under the terms of the agreement. GPL Servicing, a subsidiary of Chicago-based Victory Park Capital Advisors, will invest $ 7.5 million in the trust. Victory Park funded a large part of Think Finance's activities. Tribal defendants and others named in the lawsuit will pay $ 16 million.
The settlement also requires the cancellation of all outstanding loans managed by Think Finance. The estimated number of these loans was not provided.
Jay Speer, executive director of the Virginia Poverty Law Center, said the proposed cancellation was important.
"I'm sure a lot of people are still paying for it," he said. "Many of these people have already paid back what they originally took out in the form of a loan."
Think Finance was founded in 2001 in Fort Worth and employs just under 200 people. She split her consumer lending arm into a new business, Elevate, in 2014. Think Finance is now focused on providing analytics and marketing services to payday lenders.
Earlier this year, the company and its subsidiaries were ordered to pay a total of $ 7 to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Texas had more than 2,000 payday loan stores in 2017, according to Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit that promotes social and economic justice in the state. Almost 300 of them were in the metropolitan areas around Dallas, Plano, and Irving.
Interest rates on payday loans and auto securities in Texas ranged from 209% to 530% in 2017. The average cost to pay off a $ 500 loan without refinancing was between $ 586 and $ 1,288. When borrowers refinance their debt, the total payment on a $ 500 loan can exceed $ 3,000.
The consumer loan industry is more active in Texas due to the state's permissive loan laws, experts say.
"Texas is an outlier nationally, and not in a good way," Baddour said.
A number of municipalities in North Texas have issued their own ordinances promoting payment structures that allow loan repayment.
Speer, of the Virginia Poverty Law Center, said there was no guarantee that such a move would deter companies from starting similar operations in the future.
"We have sued a lot of these companies, probably a dozen of them," he said. "But there is so much money in it. They just pay the price and keep going.
Think Finance and its lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
CORRECTION, 3:30 p.m., June 21: A previous version of this article stated that FirstCash Inc. is one of the largest payday lenders in the country. It operates primarily as a pawnshop. Payday loans made up just over 3% of FirstCash's revenue in 2018, according to the company's annual filing with the SEC.
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Bangkok has emerged as the world's top tourist destination, with 15.98 million visitors projected to descend in Thailand's capital city this year, according to the third annual Global Destination Cities Index released by MasterCard MA +0.30% on Monday.
Francoise (right) and Caroline Lledo, a mother and a daughter visiting Bangkok from France, said they enjoy the city's shopping.
Based on data MasterCard collected from governments, central banks, related public agencies and airlines so far this year, the projection for the entire year says Bangkok is surpassing London, the previous holder of the top place, by a very narrow margin.
Monday's report marked the first time any Asian city has been projected to be the top-ranked tourist destination. London came in second, with 15.96 million visitors expected in 2013, and Paris, third, with 13.92 million visitors. MasterCard looked at 132 cities.
Caroline Lledo, who was visiting with her mother from France, said Thailand has many offerings.
"We like culture and the people are so nice. We also love shopping here," Ms. Lledo said.
MasterCard Worldwide's global economic adviser Yuwa Hedrick-Wong cited overall value for money spent for why Bangkok is attractive. That is true for Thailand overall as well.
However, in terms of visitor spending, Bangkok is projected to bring in a total of US$14.3 billion dollars and is ranked at fourth this year, while New York continues to be the top city, where visitors will spend around $18.6 billion dollars in 2013.
Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) adviser Suwanchai Ritthirak cited official data in saying that each foreign visitor spends an average of 9.6 days and 4,100 baht (about US$141.50) in the country. Therefore, to boost Bangkok's ranking, more needs to be done to increase either or both factor.
Asia-Pacific destinations have outperformed cities in the other parts of the globe, said Mr. Hedrick-Wong. Looking at the past five years, he predicted that Asia will likely continue to see a boost in the number of tourists. Not only will more international visitors visit the region, but more Asians will be traveling to cities beyond their own countries.


text:
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Sequel Now on Production!
Production of Sony Pictures' 2019 hit, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, has already started!
This amazing news has been revealed by Sony Imageworks' Lead Animator, Nick Kondo, in a tweet published on Monday, June 8, 2020.
"First day on the job!" teased Kondo in his caption. Included in the tweet is a 10-second long video that shows the superhero's logo and the numbers "2022," the year of the sequel's official release.
Here's the Tweet from Nick Kondo:
First day on the job! pic.twitter.com/qfqcCAi9wF
— Nick Kondo 近藤 (@NickTyson) June 8, 2020
About the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
If you haven't seen the first Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse film yet, here's what it's about as described by Sony Pictures.
"Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse introduces Brooklyn teen Miles Morales and the limitless possibilities of the Spider-Verse, where more than one can wear the mask."
This animated movie was released just last year. The creative minds behind The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, have brought their talents together for an awesome visual style that's the first of its kind.
Make sure you catch up just before the film's sequel appears on a big screen!
Looking for stories like this? Feel free to drop by our Baguio City Guide website whenever! Also, do like and follow our official Baguio City guide Facebook Page to quickly catch up on updates.
You may also check out our official Baguio City Guide YouTube Channel for video content.
Nick Kondo Twitter Account
#Baguio City Guide News
#BCG
#BCG News
#Spider-Man
#Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Sequel
spider-man-into-the-spider-verse-sequel-now-on-production-bcg-news

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I did a compression test two months ago and all were around 180 +/-. A leak down test showed one cylinder <5% (cylinder #7 that had the broken spring) and the rest <3% leak down.
So, either the intake gasket is pulling up oil into the runners from the lifter valley, the rocker studs are draining down from the top of the heads, or the valve guides/seals aren't working. I checked and replaced the intake gaskets a few months ago. I sealed the intake rocker studs when I installed them. So, unless I'm missing something, it must be the seals or guides.
I'll take the heads to the machine shop for inspection next week.
Any other thoughts? Am I missing something else?
Last edited by Texasdoc; 12-28-2016 at 09:49 PM..


text:
\section{Introduction}
The mass of the top quark has been measured to be at the scale of the electroweak symmetry breaking, so that the top-Yukawa coupling has turned out to be of order one in the standard model (SM). It is a quite natural scale as compared to the other quarks. This fact would indicate a relation between the top quark physics and the dynamics of electroweak symmetry breaking. Top quark motivated models such as the top mode condensation, top color models, and top flavor models have been discussed in literature. These models generally predict rather strong dynamics for the electroweak symmetry breaking. Measuring the top-Yukawa coupling is essentially important not only to confirm the SM but also to test new physics models including them.

Information of Higgs coupling constants can be extracted at future experiments. However, measurement of the top-Yukawa coupling may be difficult because of the huge QCD backgrounds. Determination of the coupling constants can be performed at the International Linear Collider (ILC). At the ILC, the top-Yukawa interaction is expected to be measured through the process $e^-e^+ \to t \bar t H$\cite{tth} for a relatively light Higgs boson when it is kinematically allowed. For a heavier Higgs boson, it would be detectable via the vector boson fusion process $e^-e^+ \to  W^-W^+\nu\bar\nu \to t \bar t \nu\bar\nu$\cite{WBF-tt} in Fig.\ref{fig:diagram-full}.

\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=5.0cm]{feynman-diagram-w-fusion-tt.eps}
\caption{
The top pair production via  $W$ boson fusion
}
\label{fig:diagram-full}
\end{center}

\end{figure}
\section{Dimension-six top quark operators}
At low energies, the non-SM interaction can be expressed by using the higher dimensional operators. Such operators are introduced by integrating out the heavy new physics particles. In this section, we study the dimension-six operators which affect the top quark interaction.

Below the SM cutoff scale $\Lambda$, the new physics effect which is related to the top quark can be described by the effective Lagrangian as
	\begin{align}
	{\mathcal L}_\mathrm{eff}^{}
	= {\mathcal L}_\mathrm{SM}^{}+{\mathcal L}_\mathrm{dim.6}^{}
	+{\mathcal L}_\mathrm{dim.8}^{}+\cdots,
	\end{align}
where ${\mathcal L}_\mathrm{SM}^{}$ is the SM Lagrangian, and
	\begin{align}
	{\mathcal L}_{\mathrm{dim.}^{}n}= \frac1{\Lambda^{n-4}_{}}
	\sum_iC_i^{}{\mathcal O}_i^{(n)},\quad(n\ge6),
	\end{align}
where ${\mathcal O}_i^{(n)}$ are $SU(2)_L^{}\times U(1)_Y^{}$ gauge invariant dimension-$n$ operators, and $C_i^{}$ are the coupling strength of ${\mathcal O}_i^{(n)}$. In this talk, we treat only the dimension-six operators because they should give the new physics interaction.

The dimension-six operators have been already discussed in literature. All the gauge invariant operators are given in Refs.~\cite{buchmuller,gounaris1}. We concentrate on the CP-conserving top quark operators whose coefficients are real,
	\begin{align}
	&{\mathcal O}_{t1}^{}
	= \left(\Phi^\dag_{}\Phi-\frac{v^2_{}}2\right)\left(\bar{q}_L^{}
	t_R^{}\tilde{\Phi}+\mathrm{H.c.}\right),\nonumber\\
	&{\mathcal O}_{t2}^{}
	= i\left(\Phi^\dag_{}D_\mu^{}\Phi\right)\bar{t}_R^{}
	\gamma^\mu_{}t_R^{}+\mathrm{H.c.},\nonumber\\
	&{\mathcal O}_{t3}^{}
	= i\left({\tilde\Phi}^\dag_{}D_\mu^{}\Phi\right)\bar{t}_R^{}
	\gamma^\mu_{}b_R^{}+\mathrm{H.c.},\\
	&{\mathcal O}_{Dt}^{}
	= \left(\bar{q}_L^{}D_\mu^{}t_R^{}\right)\left(D^\mu_{}\tilde{\Phi}
	\right)+\mathrm{H.c.},\nonumber\\
	&{\mathcal O}_{tW\Phi}^{}
	= \left(\bar{q}_L^{}\sigma^{\mu\nu}_{}{\vec \tau}t_R^{}\right)
	\tilde{\Phi}{\vec W}_{\mu\nu}^{}+\mathrm{H.c.},\nonumber\\
	&{\mathcal O}_{tB\Phi}^{}
	= \left(\bar{q}_L^{}\sigma^{\mu\nu}_{}t_R^{}\right)
	\tilde{\Phi}B_{\mu\nu}^{}+\mathrm{H.c.},\nonumber
	\end{align}
where $q_L^{}=\left(t_L^{},b_L^{}\right)^T_{}$, $\Phi$ is the scalar isospin doublet (the Higgs doublet) with hypercharge $Y=1/2$, and $\tilde{\Phi} \equiv i\,\tau_2^{}\Phi^\ast_{}$ with $\tau_i^{}$ ($i=1$--$3$) being the Pauli matrices. The dimension-six operators for the tau-Yukawa coupling have been discussed in Ref.~\cite{trott}.

Because we have not measured any Higgs coupling yet, the size of the anomalous coupling $C_{t1}^{}$ is completely free from constraints from the experimental data. The top quark gauge interaction can be directly constrained by the Tevatron, but there are no severe bounds due to lower statistics.
From the indirect measurement, the LEP precision results can give a stringent limit to the anomalous couplings $C_i^{}\cite{gounaris2}$. The coupling $C_{Dt}^{}$ is subject to weaker bound than the others. We here set the coupling strength of ${\mathcal O}_{t2}^{},{\mathcal O}_{t3}^{},{\mathcal O}_{tW\Phi}^{},{\mathcal O}_{tB\Phi}^{}$ to be zero.
The couplings $C_i$ of the dimension-six operators can be constrained by perturbative unitarity\cite{LQT}. Their bounds for $C_{t1}^{}$ and $C_{Dt}^{}$ are evaluated as\cite{gounaris2}
\begin{align}
&\left|C_{t1}^{}\right|\le \frac{16\pi}{3\sqrt2}\left(\frac{\Lambda}{v}
\right),\\
&-6.2\le C_{Dt}^{}\le 10.2,
\end{align}
where $v\left(\simeq 246\mathrm{GeV}\right)$ is the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs boson.

\section{New Physics effect on the top-Yukawa coupling}

In this section, we study the phenomenology of the new physics effect in terms of the dimension-six operators. Han et al. have discussed those on the process of $e^-e^+ \to t \bar t H$\cite{han}. Those effects on the W-boson fusion $e^-e^+ \to W^-W^+ \nu \bar \nu \to t \bar t \nu \bar \nu$ are discussed in Ref.~\cite{KNT}.

The W-boson fusion process has been studied in the SM\cite{yuan,godfrey}, and its QCD correction has also been studied in Ref.~\cite{godfrey2}. In the SM without the Higgs boson, instead of including the dimension-five operators, this process has been investigated in Ref.~\cite{larios}.

Since we have introduced the dimension-six top-Higgs interaction, the partial decay width for the process $H\to t\bar t$ is modified at tree level, which is obtained by using the effective top-Yukawa coupling
\begin{align}
y^{\rm eff}_t(q^2,\Lambda) =
 y_t^{\rm SM}
 - v^2 \frac{C_{t1}}{\Lambda^2}
- q^2 \frac{C_{Dt}}{2 \Lambda^2}.
\label{eq:yeff}
\end{align}
The loop induced decay widths of $H\to \gamma\gamma, Z\gamma, gg$ are also given by replacing $y_t^{\rm SM}$ by $y_t^{\rm eff}(m_H^2)$ in the corresponding SM expressions.
In Fig.~\ref{fig:plot-width}, the values of the total width of the Higgs boson are shown for each set of the dimension-six couplings in Tab.~\ref{tab-set} , according to the unitarity bounds.
\begin{table}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{|c||c|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
$C_i$&Set A & Set B & Set C & Set D & Set E\\
\hline \hline
$C_{t1}$&$0$&$-\frac{16\pi}{3\sqrt2}\frac{\Lambda}v$&$+\frac{16\pi}{3\sqrt2}\frac{\Lambda}v$&$0$&$0$\\
$C_{Dt}$&$0$&$0$&$0$&$+10.2$&$-6.2$\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{Sets of the dimension-six couplings we used for
the analyses.}
\label{tab-set}
\end{center}
\end{table}
Set A corresponds to the SM case. The decay modes $H\to t\bar t$ (tree), $H \to \gamma\gamma$, $H \to \gamma Z$ and  $H \to gg$ (one loop) are largely modified at the leading order by the inclusion of ${\cal O}_{t1}$ and ${\cal O}_{Dt}$.

\begin{figure}[h]
\begin{center}
\rotatebox{0}{\includegraphics[width=5.5cm]{wh.eps}}
\caption{
The total width of the Higgs boson for several
cases of $C_{t1}^{}$ and $C_{Dt}^{}$
. $\Lambda$ is set to be 1 TeV.
}
\label{fig:plot-width}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

We here evaluate the cross section of the full process
$e^-e^+ \to W^-W^+ \nu \bar \nu \to t \bar t \nu \bar \nu$
in the method of the effective W-boson approximation (EWA)\cite{ewa}
by combining the result of calculation of the subprocess.
We also evaluated the cross section by the full matrix element calculation by using CalcHEP\cite{calchep} (and LanHEP\cite{lanhep}), and compared the consistency with the EWA results. The EWA gives reasonable results for a large value of $\sqrt{\hat{s}}$
as compared to $m_W^{}$. In order to keep the validity of the calculation
based on the EWA, we need to make the kinematic cut at an appropriate
value. Here we employ the cut $M_{tt}^{}>400$ GeV\cite{godfrey}.
The accuracy of the EWA has been discussed in Ref.~\cite{Johnson:1987tj}. Our results agree with those in  Ref.~\cite{larios} where
expected error is evaluated to be of the order of 10\% for the cut
$M_{tt}^{}>500$ GeV.

We add the dimension-six operators
${\cal O}_{t1}$ and ${\cal O}_{Dt}$ to the SM Lagrangian.
In Figs.~\ref{fig:SigmaCUT400-t1}(a)  and \ref{fig:SigmaCUT400-t1}(b)
  cross sections for $e^- e^+ \to W^-_L W^+_L
 \nu \bar \nu \to  t \bar{t} \nu \bar{\nu}$
 are shown as a function of $m_H^{}$
 after the kinematic cut $M_{tt} \ge 400$ GeV.
 The collision energy is set to be $\sqrt{s}=1$ TeV.
 The new physics scale $\Lambda$ is assumed to be $1$ TeV and $3$ TeV.
 Fig.~\ref{fig:SigmaCUT400-t1}(a) shows
 the results for Set B and Set C, and
 Fig.~\ref{fig:SigmaCUT400-t1}(b) does those for Set D and Set E.
 In both figures, the result in the SM case [Set A] is also
 plotted.

 The SM value of the cross section for $e^-e^+ \to W^-W^+ \nu \bar \nu
 \to t \bar t \nu \bar \nu$ is order $1$fb for heavy Higgs bosons
 ($m_{H}^{} \gtrsim 400$ GeV).
 At the ILC with an $e^-e^+$ energy of 1 TeV and
 the integrated luminosity of 500fb$^{-1}$, over several hundred events
 are produced.
 Naively, the statistic error of the cross section measurement
 can be less than  about 10\% level.
 The QCD corrections are evaluated to be the same order of magnitude\cite{godfrey}.
 Therefore, we can expect that the large correction of the cross section can easily be observed as long as it changes the cross section by a few times 10\% or more.
 The effect of ${\cal O}_{Dt}$ under the constraint from the LEP data
 may also be observed when it changes the SM cross section by
 10-20 \%.

Background processes are also taken into account.
 Main background is
 $e^-e^+\to \gamma t\bar t$ with $\gamma$ to be missed.
 It can be reducible by making a kinematic cut for the transverse
 momentum of the final top quark.
 In Ref.~\cite{larios}, the simulation study for the background reduction
 has been performed in the SM, and
 the background can be sufficiently suppressed by the kinematic cuts.
 Another important background is the top pair production process
 via the photon fusion $\gamma\gamma\to t \bar t$.
 This mode can be suppressed by the cut $E\!\!\!\!/ > 50$
 GeV\cite{WBF-tt}, where $E\!\!\!\!/$ is the missing energy.
 Finally, the direct top-pair production $e^-e^+ \to t \bar t$
 can be suppressed by imposing the cut for the invariant
 mass $M_{tt}$.

\section{Conclusions}
In this talk, we have studied the new physics effect of the dimension-six top quark operators. Theoretical and experimental constraints on these operators have been discussed. We have evaluated the cross section of the process $e^-e^+ \to W^-W^+ \nu \bar \nu \to t \bar t \nu \bar \nu$ in the SM with the dimension-six top-Higgs interaction, and found that the deviation from the SM result can be a few hundred percent greater than the SM one, which can easily be detected at a future linear collider including the ILC. Such a large deviation may also be detectable at the LHC via the process such as $pp \to W^-W^+ X\to t \bar t X$ even though the QCD background is huge. Detailed simulation study should be necessary to clarify the significance.

\begin{figure}[h]
\begin{minipage}{7.5cm}
\unitlength=1cm
\rotatebox{0}{
\includegraphics[width=6.5cm]{LL-ee-nntt-mh-t1-sqrts1TeV.eps}}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}{7.5cm}
\unitlength=1cm
\rotatebox{0}{
\includegraphics[width=6.5cm]{LL-ee-nntt-mh-Dt-sqrts1TeV.eps}}
\end{minipage}
\caption{Cross sections of
 $e^-e^+\to W^-_L W^+_L \nu \bar \nu \to t \bar t \nu \bar \nu$
 are shown as a function of Higgs boson mass for the cases of
 Set A, Set B and Set C [Fig.~\ref{fig:SigmaCUT400-t1}(a)], and
 for those of Set A, Set D and Set E [Fig.~\ref{fig:SigmaCUT400-t1}(b)]
 with $\Lambda=1$ TeV (solid curves) and $3$ TeV (dashed curves).
 The collider energy is taken to be $\sqrt{s}=1$ TeV.
}
\label{fig:SigmaCUT400-t1}
\end{figure}

\begin{footnotesize}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Former US President Carter has no plans to visit North Korea: Aide
Former US President Jimmy Carter speaks during an interview with Reuters in Kathmandu on April 1, 2013. A representative for Mr Carter denied reports on Monday that he was planning to visit North Korea soon to try to win the release of an American citizen being held in the reclusive nation. -- FILE PHOTO: REUTERS
Jul 30, 2013, 6:22 am SGT
http://str.sg/ZccN
WASHINGTON/SEOUL (REUTERS) - A representative for former United States (US) President Jimmy Carter denied reports on Monday that he was planning to visit North Korea soon to try to win the release of an American citizen being held in the reclusive nation.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported that Carter, 88, would be visiting soon to urge the release of Kenneth Bae, who was sentenced in May for committing crimes against North Korea.
Ms Deanna Congileo, a spokeswoman at the Carter Centre in Atlanta, said that is not the case. "President Carter has no immediate plans to visit North Korea," she said in an emailed statement.
Representatives of the Elders, an international group of former statesmen and women that includes Carter, also denied the South Korean report.
"The Elders have no plans to visit North Korea," said a spokesman for group, Ms Jennifer Woodside, adding that the last time they had visited North Korea was in April 2011.
Yonhap quoted a source in Washington as saying Mr Carter had made contact with the North to arrange for the visit and that he was likely to make the trip in a personal capacity to secure Bae's release.
"The issue of Kenneth Bae who has been held in the North for nine months is becoming a burden for the United States," Yonhap quoted the diplomatic source as saying. "Even if Carter's visit materializes, it will be focused on the issue of Kenneth Bae's release more than anything else."
Bae's family has said his health is deteriorating and has asked for help in securing his release.
The White House said if Mr Carter made such a trip, it would be in his personal capacity.
"We have seen footage of Mr Bae and it was clear that his health was deteriorating, which is of grave concern," State Department spokesman Jen Psaki told a briefing.
"We continue to urge North Korean authorities to grant Mr Bae amnesty and immediate release," she said.
Asked whether Secretary of State John Kerry would support Mr Carter's effort if he decided to go, Ms Psaki said Mr Carter had not decided to go.
DIPLOMATIC STANDOFF
Bae, who is in his mid-40s, was sentenced to 15 years hard labor by North Korea's Supreme Court after being detained in November as he led a tour group through the northern region of the country.
North Korea accused Bae of participating in activities designed to overthrow the government, by infiltrating at least 250 students into the country.
Bae has acknowledged being a missionary and has said he conducted religious services in the North.
He said he had been moved by his faith to preach in North Korea, ranked for years as the most hostile nation to Christianity by Open Doors International, a Christian advocacy and aid group.
Bae's arrest and conviction came amid a tense diplomatic standoff between North Korea and the US surrounding Pyongyang's missile and nuclear tests and its claim that Washington was plotting to attack the country.
In two months of daily verbal assaults earlier this year prompted by annual drills by the US and South Korean militaries, Pyongyang threatened to attack the two allies using its nuclear weapons.
Pyongyang has a history of trying to use American captives as a bargaining chip to drag Washington into talks, but the Obama administration has been reluctant to respond.
Mr Carter has made trips to the North on diplomatic missions and in 2010 helped win the release of another American, Mr Aijalon Mahli Gomes, a Boston native who had been sentenced to eight years hard labour for illegally entering the country.
Former President Bill Clinton flew to North Korea in 2009 and secured the release of two American women who had been sentenced to 12 years for illegally entering the country.


text:
The Beaumont Enterprise - News - 02/28/2006 - Cartoon flap no joke for resident
Now, here's what I'm talking about. If the property values don't plummet in this neighborhood, then political signs ought to be OK for everybody, right?
BEAUMONT, TX- John Caffery called it an act of cowardice by U.S. newspapers for not publishing controversial Muslim-based cartoons, so the local resident decided to take matters into his own hands. On the corner of Daisy and Norwood drives, Caffery erected a large sign Sunday afternoon with one of the cartoons. It also carries a message about the subsequent rioting throughout the world caused by the publishing of the cartoons in a Danish newspaper...The sign is four feet by eight feet, according to Caffery's estimation, and was made as "large as it feasibly" could be made, he said. A cartoon of Muhammad's head shaped like a lit bomb is depicted to the left and a statement on the right reads "For This Cartoon In Danish and Nowegian [sic] Newspapers Muslems [sic] Worldwide Have Rioted, and Killed and Now Offer $11 Million Reward to Kill The Cartoonist." At the beginning of the statement, an arrow points to the cartoon...City Planning Manager Steve Richardson said Caffery is within his rights to display the billboard and it doesn't violate any ordinances. The political message on display across from his residence didn't bother Ray Bradshaw. Caffery's neighbor can't see the sign from his Norwood Drive home and as of Monday afternoon he hadn't walked over to read it. The 81-year-old man, who's lived in the neighborhood for 22 years, said the sign doesn't bother him. "Every one of us is entitled to our own belief and opinions," Bradshaw said. "If you've got an opinion about something, well, that's all right by me."
Arizona Department of Real Estate...at your service!
Just read it. That's all I ask. Here you have the Arizona Department of Real Estate posting a web page on their site that says, point blank, there is no agency of the State of Arizona that is interested in hearing owner complaints about HOAs--go hire a lawyer. And the statement "These types of complaints are addressed under Arizona Revised Statutes, Title 33" is no help. Title 33 is the Arizona Property Code, which goes on forever. This is a great big brush-off.
George Starapoli found this web page (actually I think the State referred George to it as some sort of non-response to his questions directed at them) and Fred Pilot sent it to me. Don't you think every potential HOA buyer needs to know this? The State authorizes the construction of privately-governed housing units in order to facilitate development through privatization of local government functions. But then the State disclaims any responsibility for hearing about cases where the private governments they authorized are dysfunctional. Instead, they tell you to go hire a lawyer, which means spending $100,000 in legal fees and waiting for three or four years for a resolution.
That summarizes the situation pretty neatly, I'd say. But what is going to be done about it? Does anybody--except the association attorneys who are getting rich off this situation--think it is OK to leave owners with no effective recourse?
There's no amendment for owning pets? Doh!
Fred Pilot sent this link to an AP story about a survey that I saw in the morning's paper and was groaning about over my bagel and coffee. It's no wonder people don't read their CC&rs. They haven't read the US Constitution.
About one in five people thought the right to own a pet is protected by the First Amendment, and 38 percent said they believed the right against self-incrimination -- part of the Fifth Amendment -- is found in the First Amendment right, the survey found.
Condo, homeowner association bills head to debate in capital: South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Don Nordeen sent along this link that shows the lineup of forces in the Florida legislature, between the industry, led by the Becker-Poliakoff law firm, and owner activists represented by Cyber Citizens for Justice.
Representing boards again this year is the Community Association Leadership Lobby, or CALL, an arm of the Fort Lauderdale-based Becker & Poliakoff law firm. On the other side is Cyber Citizens for Justice, or CCFJ, a grassroots organization for unit owners. Taking over the job of steering bills friendly to unit owners through the Legislature is Rep. Rene Garcia, R-Hialeah.
East Brainerd, TN, Man Countersues Homeowners' Association
This story, sent by Fred Pilot, is from the Chattanooga area. Not what you normally consider a hotbed of HOAs, but that just shows you how this is no longer a retirement-belt issue. And the issue is interesting because of the HOAs claim that political signs hurt property values. I think that's a tough case to prove, but let them try.
Paul and Linda Gearinger's attorney has filed a counter lawsuit against the Hamilton Mills Homeowners' Association. The association sued the Gearingers for breaking a sign covenant and for creating a nuisance in the neighborhood. Part of the sign read, "Bush Lied; Soliders Died." The association's lawsuit claimed the sign was creating problems for a nearby homeowner tyring to sell their house. The suit states a potential buyer was turned off by the anti-Bush sign. Now, the Gearingers are counter-suing the homeowners' association, claiming it's using deed restrictions as a way to control and limit speech it does not like.
Overlawyered: Sued for taking baths too early
Mystery Reader sent this link to Overlawyered. Ah, the joys of owning one's very own condo.
Shannon Peterson, a special education teacher in the Arvada, Colo. public schools, "can't believe she's being sued for bathing before leaving for work." But the elderly couple who lives upstairs from her Denver condo unit have been complaining about noisy pipes, and unfortunately for Ms. Peterson they happen to have a son, Sheldon Smith, who's an attorney at the large law firm of Holland and Hart. Represented by their son, the Smiths "sued Peterson just before Christmas, citing the 'reckless and negligent use of her bathtub.'" Before that, the younger Smith had fired off a letter to Peterson, saying her "intransigence ... and tortuous conduct have resulted in incredible sleep deprivation for Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Your obstinacy has ruled the day. That will now cease." According to the Denver Post, his demand letter insisted that Peterson not run water in her bathtub before 8 a.m. Peterson says she can't afford steep legal fees on a schoolteacher's salary; a judge has scheduled a hearing on the suit for March 22. (Mike McPhee, "Lawsuit: Baths swamp sleep", Denver Post, Feb. 21).
Number of Unsold Homes Hits Record High
If the housing market is cooling off, which is becoming the general consensus, then watch for condos to start hurting first as people who bought them for investment purposes start dumping them before prices fall...which of course causes prices to fall.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The backlog of unsold new homes reached a record level last month, as sales slipped despite the warmest January in more than 100 years. The Commerce Department reported Monday that sales of new single-family homes dropped by 5 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.233 million units last month. That was the slowest pace since January 2005 and left the number of unsold homes at a record high of 528,000. Analysts viewed the new data as further evidence that the nation's red-hot housing market, which hit record sales levels for five straight years, has definitely started to cool.
George Starapoli's collected quotations from appellate court opinions about HOAs and state action
This came from George by way of Fred Pilot. Interesting reading.
Las Vegas SUN: All is lost in brutal game: Association picks up the chips
Fred Pilot sent this sad Las Vegas story about a woman who staged an assessment strike over a parking disute and now has lost her house and her retirement savings.
Homeowner group "regulation" advances in New Jersey
Thanks to Fred Pilot for this link. Owner activists think this bill is no good:
Several opponents argued the legislation needed further study in light of a court ruling two weeks ago declaring New Jerseyans do not sign away their constitutional rights by purchasing a home in a community governed by a private association. That state appeals court instructed a trial judge to determine whether rules adopted by the Twin Rivers Homeowners Association in East Windsor violate the free speech rights of its 10,000 residents. Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, said that ruling rejects the "cornerstone" concept of Caraballo's bill: that someone who buys property in a community association agrees to live by its rules. "You cannot require people to sign away their fundamental American liberties just because they want to live in a particular place," Jacobs said. She told lawmakers Caraballo's bill is "unconstitutional" and, if enacted, "will be challenged and overturned by the courts, at great cost to the state and its taxpayers."
'Pizza pope' builds a Catholic heaven
This is about the Catholic-themed planned community. Will this be the only religiously-themed HOA? Don't bet on it.
A FORMER marine who was raised by nuns and made a fortune selling pizza has embarked on a £230m plan to build the first town in America to be run according to strict Catholic principles. Abortions, pornography and contraceptives will be banned in the new Florida town of Ave Maria, which has begun to take shape on former vegetable farms 90 miles northwest of Miami. Tom Monaghan, the founder of the Domino's Pizza chain, has stirred protests from civil rights activists by declaring that Ave Maria's pharmacies will not be allowed to sell condoms or birth control pills. The town's cable television network will carry no X-rated channels.
NPR : New Jersey Homeowners Fight Aesthetic Rules
...where you can listen to me, among others. This is NPR's take on the Twin Rivers case.
The Beaumont Enterprise - News - 02/28/2006 - Cart...
Arizona Department of Real Estate...at your servic...
There's no amendment for owning pets? Doh! Fred Pi...
Condo, homeowner association bills head to debate ...
East Brainerd, TN, Man Countersues Homeowners' Ass...
Overlawyered: Sued for taking baths too early Myst...
Number of Unsold Homes Hits Record High If the ho...
George Starapoli's collected quotations from appel...
Las Vegas SUN: All is lost in brutal game: Associa...
Homeowner group "regulation" advances in New Jerse...
'Pizza pope' builds a Catholic heaven This is abou...
NPR : New Jersey Homeowners Fight Aesthetic Rules ...


text:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

<title>ExpandableGridView.OnGroupClickListener</title>
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de.mrapp.android.util.view

Interface ExpandableGridView.OnGroupClickListener

Enclosing class:

ExpandableGridView

public static interface ExpandableGridView.OnGroupClickListener

Defines the interface, a class, which should be notified, when a group of an expandable grid
 view has been clicked, must implement.

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Method and Description

boolean
onGroupClick(ExpandableGridView parent,
            android.view.View view,
            int groupIndex,
            long id)

The method, which is invoked, when a group of an expandable grid view has been clicked.

Method Detail

onGroupClick

boolean onGroupClick(@NonNull
                     ExpandableGridView parent,
                     @NonNull
                     android.view.View view,
                     int groupIndex,
                     long id)

The method, which is invoked, when a group of an expandable grid view has been clicked.

Parameters:

parent - The expandable grid view, the group belongs to, as an instance of the class
         ExpandableGridView. The expandable grid view may not be null

view - The view within the expandable grid view, which has been clicked, as an instance
         of the class View. The view may not be null

groupIndex - The index of the group, which has been clicked, as an Integer value

id - The id of the group, which has been clicked, as an Long value

Returns:

True, if the click has been handled by the listener, false otherwise

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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


The Wheels of Italy page has a very interesting page chronicling the Fiat 1100 genesis. There's some interesting text and some nice pictures.
In doing a little bit of web searching, I came across the website for the Fiat 1100 Club, Bangalore. This seems to be a club of nearly 100 fans of the Fiat 1100 – or the Premier Padmini.
Their website is here, plus some great photographs are available in their photo album here.


Performance Management as a term represents the evolution of a number of different applications and toolkits designed to assist in the reporting, analysis, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation processes of organisations. These requirements will vary across industry sectors and organisational size but most can be considered within the schenatic below.
The above schematic outlines how requirements vary according to the size and complexity of an organisation. The triangle represents how information flows from operations up to director level and the blue boxes the type of components needed according to organisation complexity. Only in larger more complex organisations does the need for dedicated consolidation requirements arise. In all organisations basic operational reports are essential with the budgeting and forecasting elements being required in all but the smallest companies.
What the schematic illustrates is the functional overlap between different components. Consolidation tools are used for budgeting and forecasting but this is mostly limited to aggregation of the various financial statements for group purposes. Consolidation tools also provide reporting functionality but again at a level appropriate for group use – it is highly unlikely that SKU data will be collected and reported on here.
At the level of budgeting and forecasting most applications will also be used for management reporting often at SKU level and indeed may also provide a basic group consolidation for initial analysis of the data providing hooks up to the group level and down into operations.
At the operational end of the spectrum, users will require different types of reporting and analysis. This is typically delivered either in simple list format with relevant groupings and summaries or in a cube format with the ability to slice and dice the data into different views to enable analysis of the data. Sometimes this cube data is used to provide basic budgeting and forecasting functionality through the use of additional versions giving a potential overlap into the budgeting and forecasting process.
In a typical organisation there will be many different applications used to create and manage this performance management process though it is usually through the Finance function that numerical coherence is provided. In recent years, mostly through a series of acquisitions, software vendors have attempted to assemble an application technology framework that when combined with people and processes can deliver a truly effective organisation wide performance management solution.


text:
Szkoła przy ul. Janickiego 22 – dwukondygnacyjna, 15-klasowa szkoła podstawowa zlokalizowana w Poznaniu, przy ul. Klemensa Janickiego 22 na Jeżycach.

Architektura

Szkoła zaprojektowana przez Witolda Milewskiego oraz Zygmunta Skupniewicza i oddana do użytku w 1958 miała nowatorskie w skali kraju rozwiązania architektoniczne. Poszczególne klasy zaprojektowano, nie jak dotychczas jako prostokątne, lecz kwadratowe - nie na trzy, lecz na cztery rzędy ławek. Zastosowanie takiego rozwiązania wymusiło dwustronne doświetlenie klas, a zatem umieszczenie ich wszystkich na najwyższej kondygnacji (pierwsze piętro). Na parterze znalazły się wszelkie pozostałe pomieszczenia, nie wymagające tak dobrego naświetlenia (administracja, gabinety specjalistyczne, szatnie, itp.). Układ konstrukcyjny budynku był poprzeczny, ściany nośne - klinkierowe, spoinowane, ściany wypełniające - z lekkich materiałów, izolacyjne, malowane na biało (kontrast dla klinkieru). Na ścianie zewnętrznej umieszczono ozdobny napis Szkoła im. hetmana St. Czarneckiego. Niedługo po zbudowaniu, obiekt bez konsultacji z architektami, poważnie przebudowano (dodano typową stolarkę, dodatkowe wejście i całość jednolicie otynkowano), co wywołało protest twórców, odwołanie do Izby Architektonicznej i przywrócenie stanu pierwotnego.

Otoczenie
W pobliżu znajdują się m.in.: VII LO, Collegium Wrzoska, dawne Weststadt i Trasa Niestachowska.

Przypisy

Budynki szkół i instytucji badawczych w Poznaniu
Budynki projektu Witolda Milewskiego
Poznań Janickiego

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
On October 15th, DIAS Fellow Dr. James Rogers and Arctic Ambassador of Denmark Thomas Winkler will be in discussion at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Iceland.
On 23rd of September 2021, the Arctic Ambassador of the Kingdom of Denmark, Thomas Winkler discussed the changes taking place within the Arctic. With global climate change leading to a so-called scramble for 'Arctic Resources', and with an ever more crowded Arctic fused with Great Power tensions, the discussions in the field of Arctic affairs is more urgent than ever.
Therefore, DIAS Fellow James Rogers and DIAS Fellow Carolin Löscher decided to combine their fields to collaborate in this interdisciplinary project; The Climate Change and Conflict. This included Professor Caroline Kennedy-Pipe coming to Danish Institute for Advanced Study as a visiting fellow.
Solutions can be found in the interdisciplinary collaborations across borders
The project explores the long history and 'Big Data' of climate change and human conflict to identify potentially correlation between climate extremes and periods of human conflict or cooperation.
The ambition is to engage with the world's leading scholars on climate change and international security. With Professor Caroline Kennedy-Pipe as a visiting fellow in the early fall that ambition was carried out. Her extensive international policy experience and pioneering academic work on Arctic (in)security was a welcome and valued addition to the Climate Change and Conflict project.
The Guardian lists Caroline Kennedy-Pipe as one of the United Kingdom's leading scholars of war and currently she works on Arctic Security, Russia and the High North. She was a Specialist Advisor to the House of Commons Defense Committee, and regularly advises governments and militaries on Arctic security within the context of global climate change.
We look forward to welcoming more visiting fellows at Danish Institute for Advanced Study.
Read more about climate geopolitics:
Great Power Competition in the Anthropocene Arctic – link to book (free of charge)
On Thin Ice? – Perspectives on Arctic Security – link to book (free of charge)
DIAS Fellow James Rogers – jrg@sdu.dk
DIAS Fellow Carolin Löscher – cloescher@biology.sdu.dk
Professor Caroline Kennedy-Pipe – C.M.Kennedy-Pipe@lboro.ac.uk


text:
Frontpage Yellowknifer Seven-month sentence for 'junior member' of cocaine network
Seven-month sentence for 'junior member' of cocaine network
Brendan Burke
Travis King, described by prosecutors as a "junior member" of a Yellowknife cocaine ring, won't serve penitentiary time after receiving a seven-month sentence Wednesday – two days after he tearfully renounced his criminal past, vowing to become a law-abiding citizen.
"My sentence should support his efforts – not crush them," said Justice Louise Charbonneau as she handed down her decision in NWT Supreme Court.
Twenty-two-year-old King, wearing a neatly-tucked dress shirt, was backed by his mother and another supporter who sat in the Yellowknife courtroom.
King pleaded guilty to possessing the proceeds of crime – under $5,000 – following his arrest in May 2017. He was one of six people charged following an RCMP probe into drug trafficking in the city.
Mounties seized $415 on King's person – later admitted to be the proceeds of crime – after a covert surveillance team moved in on the offender and another man at a Fred Henne Territorial Park campsite. Significant amounts of cocaine and crash, along with ammunition and a shotgun, were seized by police after executing search warrants at the campsite, a downtown apartment unit and a vehicle.
King was on a recognizance at the time of his arrest after being charged in May 2016 with possessing cocaine for the purpose of trafficking.
King was found to be carrying more than 100 grams of cocaine following a traffic stop in Hay River.
He was sentenced to 30 months in custody for that offence in June. With credit for time spent in remand custody, he was left with 23 months left to serve. Seven months after his conviction, King has 16 months left to serve.
Because King is still serving his sentence, the term imposed on the proceeds of crime conviction would be added to the 16 months he has left serve.
Sentences of more than two years trigger prison terms. Offenders who have been sentenced to terms less than two years serve their sentences at jails in the territory.
On Monday, King's lawyer Peter Harte asked Charbonneau to impose a sentence of six months for the proceeds of crime conviction – a term that would amount to 22 months, sparing King from prison.
The Crown called for nine to 12 months in custody, a term that would have triggered prison time for King.
At only 22, Harte said King being sent to prison would be "enormously problematic."
Charbonneau agreed on Wednesday, saying prison would "not be helpful," for King, given his young age and the fact that he is making efforts to turn his life around.
Charbonneau said King's statements, made on Monday, were "sincere and determined."
She cited the need to denounce and deter criminal organizations that prey on the vulnerabilities of drug users, but also noted the importance of rehabilitation for King, who, she said, had an "extremely difficult" upbringing.
A pre-sentence report detailing King's childhood and circumstances "was a truly heartbreaking read," said Charbonneau.
Reminding him that the seven-month sentence is "still quite lenient," Charbonneau said she hopes to see King in the future – just not in a courtroom.
Because, she said, "we'd all be better off as a community if Mr. King succeeds."
King hugged his mother before being led into police custody away from the Yellowknife courtroom.
Previous articleMissing snowmobiler a hoax, say RCMP
Next articleNew format for Arviat's JLM tourney
As the Yellowknifer's crime reporter, it's my job to keep readers up to speed on all-things "cops and courts" related. From house fires and homicides to courtroom clashes, it's my responsibility to be there - day or night, rain or shine. When I'm not at court gathering stories, I'm in the office, making calls to lawyers, emailing RCMP and tracking down sources. After hours, I rely on the public to let me know what's happening and where. Entering my second winter in Yellowknife since leaving my hometown of Peterborough, Ont., in October 2017, everyday on this beat continues to be challenging, rewarding and fulfilling. Got a story? Call me at (867) 766-8288 or shoot me an email at editorial@nnsl.com.
Remembering Mr. Diveky
Endoscopy services return to Stanton Hospital
Ndilo man's legal battle with GNWT continues after vehicles he wished to keep hauled from site


text:
Airport information and maps for Central Jersey Regional Airport:
Share this airport:
JVI Airport Information:
IATA / ICAO Codes: JVI /
Central Jersey Regional Airport
Location: Manville, New Jersey, United States
GPS Coordinates: 40°31'27"N by 74°35'53"W
Area Served: Manville, New Jersey
Operator/Owner: Central Jersey Airport Services Inc.
Airport Type: Public use
Elevation: 86 feet (26 meters)
View all routes: Routes from JVI
Facts about JVI
Map of Nearest Airports to JVI
List of Nearest Airports to JVI
Map of Furthest Airports from JVI
List of Furthest Airports from JVI
Facts about Central Jersey Regional Airport (JVI):
Because of Central Jersey Regional Airport's relatively low elevation of 86 feet, planes can take off or land at Central Jersey Regional Airport at a lower air speed than at airports located at a higher elevation. This is because the air density is higher closer to sea level than it would otherwise be at higher elevations.
The closest airport to Central Jersey Regional Airport (JVI) is Princeton Airport (PCT), which is located only 9 miles (15 kilometers) SSW of JVI.
The furthest airport from Central Jersey Regional Airport (JVI) is Margaret River Airport (MGV), which is located 11,736 miles (18,887 kilometers) away in Margaret River, Western Australia, Australia.
In addition to being known as "Central Jersey Regional Airport", another name for JVI is "47N".
Central Jersey Regional Airport (JVI) currently has only 1 runway.
On the airport property is the Van Nest - Weston Burying Ground, a small cemetery.
Map of Nearest Airports from Central Jersey Regional Airport:
List of Nearest Airports from Central Jersey Regional Airport:
1 9.22 miles (14.84 km) SSW Princeton Airport (PCT) Princeton/Rocky Hill, New Jersey, United States
2 19.65 miles (31.63 km) ENE Linden Airport (LDJ) Linden, New Jersey, United States
3 20.52 miles (33.02 km) SSW Trenton-Mercer Airport (TTN) Trenton, New Jersey, United States
4 21.29 miles (34.27 km) NNE Morristown Municipal Airport (MMU) Morristown, New Jersey, United States
5 25.36 miles (40.81 km) ENE Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) Newark/Elizabeth, New Jersey, United States
6 29.38 miles (47.28 km) NE Essex County Airport (CDW) Caldwell, New Jersey, United States
7 30.55 miles (49.16 km) WSW Doylestown Airport (DYL) Doylestown, Pennsylvania, United States
8 33.24 miles (53.50 km) ENE Downtown Manhattan Heliport (JRB) New York City, New York, United States
9 34.16 miles (54.98 km) SE Monmouth Executive Airport (BLM) Belmar/Farmingdale, New Jersey, United States
10 34.85 miles (56.09 km) ENE West 30th Street Heliport (JRA) New York City, New York, United States
11 35.16 miles (56.59 km) S McGuire AFB (WRI) Wrightstown, New Jersey, United States
12 35.85 miles (57.70 km) ENE New York Skyports Inc. Seaplane Base (QNY) New York City, New York, United States
13 36.04 miles (58.00 km) NE Teterboro Airport (TEB) Teterboro, New Jersey, United States
14 36.14 miles (58.15 km) ENE East 34th Street Heliport (TSS) New York City, United States
15 36.30 miles (58.42 km) SSE JB MDL Lakehurst (NEL) Lakehurst, New Jersey, United States
Map of Furthest Airports from Central Jersey Regional Airport:
List of Furthest Airports from Central Jersey Regional Airport:
1 11,735.96 miles (18,887.15 km) SW Margaret River Airport (MGV) Margaret River, Western Australia, Australia
2 11,711.91 miles (18,848.45 km) SW Busselton Regional Airport (BQB) Busselton, Western Australia, Australia
3 11,706.61 miles (18,839.92 km) WSW Manjimup Airport (MJP) Manjimup, Western Australia, Australia
4 11,685.63 miles (18,806.14 km) SW Bunbury Airport (BUY) Bunbury, Western Australia, Australia
5 11,657.92 miles (18,761.55 km) WSW Albany Airport (ALH) Albany, Western Australia, Australia
6 11,622.24 miles (18,704.14 km) SW Rottnest Airport (RTS) Rottnest Island, Western Australia, Australia
7 11,614.55 miles (18,691.76 km) WSW Katanning Airport (KNI) Katanning, Western Australia, Australia
8 11,613.70 miles (18,690.39 km) SW Jandakot Airport (JAD) Jandakot, Western Australia, Australia
9 11,602.26 miles (18,671.98 km) SW Perth Airport (PER) Perth, Western Australia, Australia
10 11,546.85 miles (18,582.81 km) SW Jurien Bay Airport (JUR) Jurien Bay, Western Australia, Australia
11 11,470.47 miles (18,459.89 km) SW Geraldton Airport (GET) Geraldton, Western Australia, Australia
12 11,451.23 miles (18,428.93 km) SW Morawa Airport (MWB) Morawa, Western Australia, Australia
13 11,425.95 miles (18,388.24 km) SW Mullewa Airport (MXU) Mullewa, Western Australia, Australia
14 11,418.24 miles (18,375.83 km) WSW Esperance Airport (EPR) Esperance, Australia
15 11,416.87 miles (18,373.62 km) SSW Kalbarri Airport (KAX) Kalbarri, Western Australia, Australia


Title: "Spirit of Grace Darling. The women of Boulmer who helped to launch the local lifeboat, - it was necessary to drag the vessel overland for a mile & a quarter".
M/S of two teams of women pulling ropes attached to the new lifeboat, they drag the vessel out of the lifeboat house. M/S of a group of women standing in front the lifeboat, they all giggle and nudge each other, the lifeboat has the name - Arthur R. Dawes - painted on the side. Panning C/U of the women, they range in age from teenagers to the over sixties.


Fiorano Software Technologies, a leading provider of enterprise integration middleware and 3i Infotech, a global information technology company, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver Business Productivity and Digital Transformation solutions for the enterprise segment.
"3i Infotech values the partnership with Fiorano Software as strategic and important to support our current growing initiatives. This collaboration will enable us to provide more efficient experiences to our customers by reducing complexity, infusing speed and thereby improving their seamless journey in their Digital Transformation program, "said Mohua Sengupta, EVP & Global Head of Services, 3i Infotech.
With Fiorano Software's innovative features to integrate heterogeneous business applications and multi-vendor technology infrastructures and 3i Infotech's unique solutions portfolio comprising well-defined frameworks to meet evolving digital needs, the emphasis will be on addressing new technology challenges and mitigating the productivity hindrances faced by businesses when integrating and automating business processes across complex and disparate systems.
According to Rajesh Rao, Business Development Director, Fiorano Software, "Fiorano has been actively promoting its products in several emerging markets including MEA and ASEAN. 3i Infotech being one of the leading and fastest growing IT companies brings necessary edge to penetrate this market."
With Fiorano innovative integration and middleware technology added to their end-to-end solutions range, 3i Infotech aims to deliver higher value and the best suitable product & services to increase the competitive advantage of its customers.


Rachel and Kirsty are visiting beautiful Greenfields Farm. They've been given the very special job of taking care of all the baby animals that live there. But the farm is not as peaceful as it seems . . . The ducklings are barking, the lambs are meowing, and the foals are oinking. Jack Frost has kidnapped the Farm Animal Fairies' magic animals and everything at Greenfields is all mixed up!
Penelope needs Rachel and Kirsty's help to get her magic foal back. They're determined to save it from Jack Frost's icy petting zoo!


Have you ever wondered when an Oklahoma probate is actually necessary?
Although a lot of effort is put into avoiding Oklahoma probate, there are times when it is simply the only option to change the title to a piece of property or free up funds held in a bank account.
4. Accounts with no beneficiary. Typically, with retirement accounts, investment accounts and many times on bank accounts, there is the opportunity to name a beneficiary, This is the person or people who automatically receive the proceeds of the account (with proof of death of the owner and proof of beneficiary identify of course). If a person does not name at least one beneficiary on an account such as this, that usually means the account is going to probate. Without probate, the company holding the account will not release it (here are two small exceptions to the general rule: Oklahoma small estate affidavit and Oklahoma affidavit of delivery of personal property).
5. Mineral Interests. A person dies owning an Oklahoma mineral interest but the interest is not held in a trust and the title is solely in the name of person who dies. Many times the operator of the Well will not continue to pay royalties without an order from the Oklahoma probate court specifying who the heirs are.
These are general examples but there may be ways in the specific situation to secure the funds without probate.
Another resource for figuring out when an Oklahoma probate may be required is the Oklahoma Bar Association's article Is a Probate needed?


text:
Innovators: Mobile Passport's Hans Miller Wants to Get Rid of All Airport Lines
The Mobile Passport co-creator knows that his app is still somewhat of a secret—here's why it's okay if the world knows about it.
By Meredith Carey
Joy Asico
'Innovators' profiles the people driving the future of travel—those who lead rather than follow, who break things, take risks, and solve problems in fresh ways.
You may not know his name, but if you've taken a plane in the last 20 years, you've been impacted by any number of innovations that Hans Miller has had a hand in. For starters, he helped staff up and build the TSA after it was founded in response to September 11. If you've boarded a plane with your ticket in your Apple Wallet, that's Miller, too—who helped implement them across airlines and airports in the U.S. And his most recent venture, Airside Mobile, has created one of Traveler editors' must-haves: Mobile Passport.
The Mobile Passport app, which lets you zip through Customs and Border Protection, often in under 60 seconds, has been a boon to editors who don't want to pay for Global Entry, as you simply enter your passport information and answer entry questions (such as, are you bringing in more than $10,000?) before you get to the arrivals immigration hall. Best of all? There's no fee—unless you opt for the premium version, which stores your information for future trips—and no interview. Mobile Passport has a designated lane in some 28 airports and 4 cruise terminals, with San Juan's airport, ferry, and cruise terminals all joining in the last few months.
We sat down with Miller to learn about his impact on the way we travel, how mobile biometrics is going to come into play in the coming years, and why we shouldn't be worried about more people getting in on the Mobile Passport secret.
You've spent the last 20-odd years in and around the aviation space. How did you get your start?
I was working as a consultant for McKinsey on September 11, [2001] and, a little while later, I got a phone call from Ben Smith, who was starting the TSA. Congress had passed a law saying, hey, the U.S. government has to stand up a new agency a year and all of the folks that were doing aviation security screening have become federal employees. There was a whole pile of requirements. So I was employee number 11 at the TSA—back when the whole agency could fit in one room. I got a chance to lead the first federal checkpoint at BWI and it was a wild ride. In the first 10 months, we hired 60,000 people at 450 locations.
Your most recent venture, Mobile Passport, has been around since 2014, but it's still considered a secret tool for getting through immigration. What misconceptions do you want to clear up about what Mobile Passport can do for travelers?
One of the one of the misconceptions I think people have is that if everybody discovers Mobile Passport, it will stop being fast. And that's not true. People think we're still a secret because they don't see the line. But what Mobile Passport really does is make it easier for CBP [Customs and Border Patrol] officers to do their jobs. One officer can check five times as many people with Mobile Passport than they can otherwise. Sometimes there are a few people on those lines, but overall, it's that the lines are just moving really fast. Roughly 8 million people have signed up for Mobile Passport at this point, which is comparable to PreCheck, frankly.
We also designed our whole approach to this on privacy, which we think is going to become a huge deal in the travel space, because of regulations like the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] in Europe and new laws in California. We really tried to anticipate [security issues] by not having a big database of everybody's PII [or personally identifiable information]. Every traveler that uses Mobile Passport, their information is only stored on their device. It's encrypted. It's protected. The first 20 years of the internet, everyone was focused on collecting data. We think the next 20 years for a lot of companies is going to be about divesting data and letting the consumer control their own information. And that's really where we're building our future.
The largest change that's happened in the past year for Mobile Passport is the premium offering, which allows you to store your passport information and more on your phone so you don't have to reenter it every time you enter the country, like you do with the free option. What was the thought process of launching the premium option?
Like any company, we have to have revenue to support ourselves. After five years of providing the service completely for free, we looked around were like, Wow, we're at 32 locations, we've got millions of people using the app, and we need a bunch of engineers to make sure that it's running properly, and have staff to make sure we're handling customer comments. So we needed to have revenue—and as I said before, we don't collect or sell data. That's not our game.
The folks who are going to use Mobile Passport Plus the most often are going to get the most value out of it. It enables those power-users to support the service overall and we can still give that great experience to people who are new to the service for free. We thought that was a win. Yes, it's $15 a year, but you can put any number of family members' passports on there alongside yours.
For those who are new to Mobile Passport, what's the ideal order of operations, so to speak, for best using the app? When should we download it? When do we start putting information in?
I certainly recommend downloading the app and setting up your passport as early as possible, because you can never be sure how much bandwidth you're going to have when you land. In terms of submitting, entering your passport information and answering the entry questions, it really doesn't take that much time. We suggest that people do that once the plane has landed in the United States, maybe while you're taxiing to the gate. Odds are you're sitting at your seat twiddling your thumbs waiting for a chance to get off the plane. What isn't good is when people try to submit before they take off, because your flight will likely extend outside of the four-hour window you have after entering your information.
You've spoken about potentially rolling out a product at Airside that uses biometrics. What has that ideation been like and what might travelers be able to expect from you?
I don't think it's a big secret that the travel industry overall is very interested in what they call seamless travel, or the idea that your face can be your boarding pass and your ID all rolled into one so that you can simply stroll past the camera to check in, to check your bag, to go through security, to visit a lounge, to board the aircraft, and to go through customs. The challenge with making that real is less around the facial recognition algorithms, which have made huge progress in the last 10 years. Yes, there's still work to be done—but they're remarkably good. The challenge really is around what reference photo do you compare the passenger to. Can you trust that reference photo? Who is responsible for that photo?
In the United States today, facial recognition pilots that are up and running are all using U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Traveler Verification Service, which is essentially a password database for lack of a better word. And it's a very good system. In some cases, the CBP has allowed the airline to use that same system for boarding or security. But there are limits to how far that system can be extended. So then the question is, is an airline going to build a big database of photos [to use for lounge access or other things]? The answer, at least in North American and Europe, is a resounding no.
We think we can enable the traveler to access their government-issued ID data and photograph electronically, whether that's through a passport chip or through a government database service to confirm their identity. We can enable the consumer to say, "Hey, this is me. I'm entering my information into my secure Airside account that lives only on my device that has state-of-the-art encryption to confirm that it's me."
Then, say, a hotel could integrate this into check-in, so you could get a pop-up on your phone asking if you want to share this information with the hotel to confirm that it really is you. Then, because it's not being stored in a big database, the hotel would only have limited access for a certain amount of time, and you could revoke it if you wanted to. It would only be ever stored on your device.
We think it creates a new model for facial recognition and biometrics that's much more aligned with privacy legislation. Consumers and travelers would have a heck of a lot more control over their data. We see it as a compliment that can fill in the blanks for where the government may not be able to support certain transactions.
What pain points do you see that could be innovated on further in the aviation space?
I think we could make PreCheck enrollment a lot simpler and faster and help many more people enroll in PreCheck. I think that would make a big difference. When PreCheck is running the right way, it's a phenomenal experience. The more people can sign up for it, the more lanes can be opened and the better it'll be. I think it could be a slam dunk.
Exploreinnovators 2019


Bed occupancy has risen in recent years, and a majority of trusts were above 92 per cent for at least half of last winter.
This has consequences for clinical safety. As bed occupancy rises, the boundaries between different bed pools break down until eventually there is little distinction between surgical and medical beds, the infection control cordon around orthopaedics is breached, female surgery spills out into gynaecology, older teenagers are bedding out in paediatrics, and patients are sleeping overnight in the emergency department and the day surgery unit.
When patients end up in the wrong beds, they have longer lengths of stay (which makes the bed occupancy problem worse), which in turn is associated with poorer care and higher cost – a vicious cycle. There is also evidence of increased mortality and higher emergency readmission rates.
Acute hospitals take a pragmatic approach to deciding which beds should be used for each specialty. The financial planning process allocates budgets in some detail, and this translates into staff and therefore staffed beds. But nobody realistically expects every specialty to keep within its own detailed bed allocation all the time. That would require a very low bed occupancy which is simply unaffordable – see for instance the example occupancies in the bottom row of the figure below.
So specialty beds are usually combined into larger bed pools, such as medicine, surgery, orthopaedics, paediatrics, and maternity – some adult bed pools are shown in the middle layer below. By working flexibly within each bed pool, services can run at higher bed occupancy for the same overall risk of running out of beds. Smaller services such as maternity and critical care may form close relationships with neighbouring units and lower their risk that way.
But if bed occupancy is too high even for these arrangements, then the boundaries break down and the hospital essentially becomes one giant bed pool with all the risks outlined above, as shown by the top layer below. What can be done to avoid this, if opening extra beds isn't an option?
We saw in the previous article how bed occupancy can be calculated for a chosen risk of running out of beds, and we can use the same method to work out whether morning and weekend discharges are likely to help.
1) the actual variation in bed usage during the week – we saw this chart in the previous article.
4) doing both, so that the average discharge rate matches the average admission rate every hour of the week.
We can tell whether these interventions make much difference by looking at the horizontal grey lines marking (from the top down) the 1 per cent, 10 per cent, and 30 per cent risks of running out of beds. They narrow as discharges improve, but not dramatically.
And when that intra-week risk is combined with the week-by-week variation to calculate the overall bed occupancy, the benefits of better discharge patterns turn out to be negligible, as shown in the table below.
But (an operational manager might splutter at this point) surely morning discharges do help with 4 hour waits in the emergency department? Indeed they do, sometimes. We will see why, and when, in the next article.
If better discharge patterns produce disappointing results, what about reducing lengths of stay (LoS)?
The chart below shows a scenario in which any patient with a LoS over 21 days has their LoS somehow reduced by 20 per cent, or 10 per cent if it is over 7 days. This turns out to reduce the number of occupied beds by a whopping 11.5 per cent.
Yes, it's an arbitrary scenario. No, I haven't shown how achievable it is in practice.
But the point is that we aren't scratching around for tenths of a percentage point any more – this is a huge difference. And it arises because the majority of these beds are occupied by those patients who have the longest lengths of stay.
In this article we have only looked at one example, but similar conclusions have been reached with all the general and acute bed pools that we have so far looked at: reducing the longest lengths of stay, as opposed to increasing morning and weekend discharges, is where efforts should be focused. And of course this is also the conclusion that NHS England and NHS Improvement have come to in their own analysis.


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Review of Unibet's £30 free bet offer written by our betting expert. Read all the necessary information about the bonus at Unibet!
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Unibet started their UK operations in 1998, and they are continuing to build their presence in Britain. One way they are doing this is with £30 free bet bonus for new UK customers. Simply sign up with their website via a link on www.football-bookmakers.com to get up to £30 back in free bets if you lose your first bet.
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This offer may not last forever, so once you register, start placing bets straightaway. The book at Unibet covers Tennis, Football, Golf and the Premier League (especially competitive odd) as well as the major American sports like Baseball, NFL, Ice hockey and many more. So with an offer this simple and a betting book with this many opportunities, it would be silly to pass up this chance at a £30 free bet bonus.


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Concrete Creeks. Excursion 9. A string of parks.
Johnstons Creek would have once been a pretty little bushland waterway but when the surrounding land was subdivided, houses and factories turned their backs on it. In 1838 it was described as 'that invaluable stream of water', but by 1892 it was condemned as a 'fever bed' with calls to commence the building of a canal because of the creek's 'menace to public health arising from the sewage nuisance'.
Our excursion this weekend takes us from one of the worst of those 'nuisance' areas at Wigram Road, to The Crescent in Annandale, and back again. The canal that was eventually built is wide but water is only flowing in the central gutter today. Signs warn us that this is a Flood Zone, so I'll be back next time the weather is wild.
On either side of the canal is a string of tiny parks and reserves, each named separately, presumably as a way of keeping up with the backlog of municipal worthies who deserve recognition. In Canal Reserve we walk over several cheesy homilies neatly written in coloured chalk.
Beside JV McMahon Reserve we watch a pair of ducks emerge from where they have been dallying beneath a footbridge.
Near Minogue Crescent Reserve we see a woman practising solitary Twister beneath the arches of the area's most impressive landmark, the Johnstons Creek Sewage Aqueduct.
In AV Henry Reserve there is a bubbling spring in the centre of a swamp which, a notice informs us, may be affected by sewage overflow.
We cross the creek by walking over the road bridge at The Crescent, then turn back and descend into Smith & Spindler Park where, with its wider grassy sward and smoother path, we now encounter the dreaded joggers, spandex cyclists, whole families on wheels, and off-leash dogs. We notice that a children's playground has been reopened just this week.
To our left is the canal which, for some reason, has been blocked from view by a dense planting of casuarina trees. To our right, beyond the grass, is Nelson Lane, currently decorated at regular intervals with piles of discarded domestic ware, the product of lockdown busy-ness.
Our limbs still intact and our lungs too, we hope, we press on back to Wigram Road, via the narrower Hogan Park, where a town house dweller has annexed public space outside their back gate to create a canalside pleasure dome complete with outdoor chairs, a swing, pot plants and plastic grass.
Labels: bicycles, canals, city, furniture, gardens, parks, suburbia, watercoursesTags: Annandale, Covid-19, Forest Lodge, Glebe, Johnstons Creek, stormwater canals, suburban exploration, Sydney, Sydney history, Urban exploration, watercourses
Concrete Creeks. Excursion 7. The tip.
It's over three weeks since we visited this light industrial triangle between Johnstons Creek and Pyrmont Bridge Road. There have been other excursions in between but now I'm back to find out what happens to the creek beyond the forbidding metal fence where it drops into an open canal behind Water Street. Just a few neatly kept little houses remain here, tucked between hulking factories and warehouses, and we have come on a Sunday hoping to avoid large trucks squeezing into delivery bays. I walk down a driveway between two houses in Water Street and find that it opens onto a gravelled space bounded on three sides by buildings and on the fourth by a thick jungle of banana trees, castor oil plants, convolvulus and asthma weed. With no machete available I can only peer down the steep slope for glimpses of the canal wall, recognisable by its symbiotic graffiti.
Frustrated by the banana jungle we move east to a wider industrial street that leads directly down to the canal. I have never been on Chester Street before but later I will read that there was once a household garbage tip amongst the houses on this side of Johnstons Creek. It was the source of much friction between the adjoining boroughs of Camperdown and Annandale in the late 1800s. For fifteen years countless newspaper column inches were taken up with reports of council meetings and letters to the editor on the subject of the Camperdown tip, whose 'deadly effluvia' made the creek filthy and 'endangered the lives of the residents of North Annandale'. There are no houses here now and no tip. Instead there is a motor repair business with a wild piece of wall art.
We walk down the hill to a newly-built footbridge over the canal. On the other side of the dip the street climbs up between the Federation houses of re-gentrified Annandale.
Everything here looks new, but the two playgrounds are roped off to prevent children from disobeying social distancing rules. This tiny canalside reserve is called 'Douglas Grant Memorial Park' in honour of an Aboriginal man whose original name was Ng:tja. The survivor of a massacre, in 1887 he was taken as a toddler from his North Queensland home thousands of kilometres away and brought up in Annandale as a member of his captor's family. His story is told on two plaques. It does not end well.
By taking a short walk along where this narrow park skirts a series of backyard fences, I can look across to the place where I had earlier tried bush-bashing. The clear band of water that I couldn't see from the other side reflects the sky, but the graffiti is old and dilapidated, as if the renovation of the area has made the canal too public for spray painters.
This nook in Annandale is a revelation to me. But not to locals of course. Not the cyclists and joggers intermittently crossing the bridge. The two young men casually shooting a basketball. The squealing children doing wheelies on their scooters. Nor the three teenagers sitting at a picnic table and idly chatting not quite 1.5 metres apart.
Labels: canals, city, gardens, graffiti, history, parks, people, public art, suburbia, watercoursesTags: Annandale, bridges, Camperdown, Covid-19, graffiti, Johnstons Creek, stormwater canals, Street art, suburban exploration, Sydney, Sydney history, Urban exploration, watercourses
Concrete Creeks. Excursion 4. Deep water.
For the fourth of our piecemeal visits to Johnstons Creek we return to Parramatta Road and plunge into the narrow streets on the northern side where a light industrial triangle is squeezed between the creek and Pyrmont Bridge Road. The streets slope down to a concrete pathway that covers this section of the canal. We turn left and find ourselves at the sandstone bridge on Parramatta Road, where thousands of cars pass Stanmore McDonald's every day. The creek traces a silvery line through the shadows under the road.
Turning around to follow the flow of the creek we walk between the backs of properties, respectable Victorian houses on one side, factories and derelict houses on the other. The path comes to an abrupt end at a metal grate and fence. Beyond is a deep channel of coolness where we can hear the creek falling. A bird calls from somewhere in the overhanging shrubbery.
We scramble up into a grassy area at the foot of Water Street. I will later read a lengthy real estate advertisement from 1850, when the farm here was subdivided into housing allotments. This grassy area is described as "a RESERVED WATERING PLACE at deep water on Johnstone's Creek [that] will add materially to the comfort of the occupants". There are still some residences in Water Street as well as warehouses and the last house before the reserve has a small but unusual garden.
Walking back to the car I spot an abandoned shopping trolley and for a moment think I have come upon a cache of toilet paper. But no, the cartload only consists of styrofoam packaging cylinders.
Labels: canals, city, gardens, graffiti, history, suburbia, tunnels, underground, watercoursesTags: Annandale, Covid-19, Johnstons Creek, Parramatta Road, stormwater canals, suburban exploration, Sydney, Sydney history
Pedestrian vs Pedestrian
There are still people in Sydney who pine for the line painted down the centre of city footpaths to separate pedestrians moving in opposite directions.
Much has been written about the historical battle between pedestrians and motorists when the car took over from horse-drawn vehicles and commandeered the road. And in contemporary times, with the resurgence of bicycle riding, much is being written about the battles between cyclists and motorists on the road, and between cyclists and pedestrians on the footpaths.
But I have been interested for a while in the civil war amongst walking citizens, and the boundary lines that have, from time to time, been drawn up in an attempt to keep the peace. Turning up photographs of these lines has been difficult but, in a current museum exhibition I found what I have been looking for.
Street photography at the Museum of Sydney displays photographs taken by the men who, from the Depression 1930s to the Post-war 1960s, used to stand in licensed positions and take snaps of city footpath walkers then press upon them a ticket with the address of a nearby studio where they could purchase same-day prints.
For people who bought them it was perhaps the best photo they had of themselves, the best photo their families had to remember them by. But the exhibition's curators also invite visitors to see what else they can find beside the main subjects of the photos – items of clothing or accessories that date the pictures, figures in the background, still-recognisable locations in Sydney. I looked for and found the centre lines.
A by-law requiring foot passengers to 'keep to the right' on footways existed in Sydney from around 1900 but it was largely ignored. In a letter to the Mayor in 1902 a Mr George Richards fumed that 'the people walking in our city are like a lot of cattle that has got into a barn and wander about looking for a place to get out. Surely you can do something to prevent this sort of thing'.
The City of Sydney Archives and clippings books reveal that Mr Richards was not the only one infuriated by the unruly users of Sydney's footpaths. One columnist in 1911, for example, complained about there being 'no visible admonition to keep to the right'.
Somewhere along the way the rule changed to 'keep to the left' so that pedestrians did not have their backs to the traffic if they stepped off the footpath onto the roadway. By the mid-1920s authorities in Melbourne had not only copied this rule but had painted white centre lines.
But it was not until 1948, after two years of to-ing and fro-ing between Sydney City Council, the Police Department and the Department of Motor Transport, that Sydney had a trial of centre lines on parts of George, Market, Pitt and King Streets, along with the stencil 'KEEP LEFT' at appropriate locations.
The trial was a success and the area of the city with lines down the middle of footpaths was extended. They were regularly repainted by the Department of Motor Transport but the KEEP LEFT stencils were not maintained because they were considered to be of little value.
In 1961 the Council wanted to extend the scheme further from Sydney Central to Haymarket and Railway Square, but the Department of Motor Transport had had enough, thanks to restricted finance and a heavy volume of work. The existing lines, which by then were painted yellow, were allowed to wear away.
They were not re-introduced and, in justification, the City Planner pointed out that 'pedestrian traffic by its nature is unpredictable and it is not considered feasible that pedestrians can be controlled in the same way as vehicular traffic, nor is it considered desirable that they should be'.
Nevertheless, in the following years a steady stream of letter-writers pleaded for the return of the centre line. Mr Byott of Belfield's 1974 letter was typical: 'After suffering another Christmas shopper's charge on the footpaths in the City its about time something was done about it. Please bring back the "YELLOW LINE" that adorned Sydney City footpaths a decade ago, so at least the poor employees in the city area (like myself) get a bit of a "fair go" at all times'.
Council toyed with the idea of reintroducing the centre lines but, apart perhaps from a period in the 1980s (something I've been unable to confirm) they never have.
However newspaper letter writers like Ms Alicia Dawson of Balmain have not forgotten. In 2015 she complained about the 'very frustrating pace of stop/sidestep/duck and weave' on city streets and cried, 'Bring back the white line up the middle of the footpath or otherwise I might well be driven to march around the city carrying a large hot dog smothered in tomato sauce on a stick while yelling "keep left, keep left" at the top of my voice.
In 2017 Ms Dawson was still harping on the subject and others agreed, urging the City of Sydney to 'reinstate the system of the 1940s and 50s, when Sydney footpaths had a painted line down the centre'. Yet others were incredulous: 'Are you serious? What a waste of time and money to paint lines down the centre of footpaths. Will we have to use hand signals if we wish to overtake?'
Ms Dawson may consider that 'other people' on city streets lack manners, but letter writers and columnists who hold similar sentiments are not particularly polite themselves. Mobile phone zombies, they growl about fellow footpath users. Self-absorbed texters. Oblivious to the swirling tide around them. Cursing into mobile phones. Smombies. Large contingents of residents walking shoulder to shoulder. A phone-twiddling human wall. Dopey dawdlers. The swayer describing a zigzag path. All over the place. Crisscrossing. A free-for-all. Dawdling tourists. Heel steppers. Sudden stops and turns. Slowcoaches. Slow old people with huge, boxy Volvo bums. Running groups and other pavement irritants. Window shoppers. People who bash into others with a backpack. Gophers that nearly run you over. And the worst pavement tyrants, those mothers with bigger-than- Texas prams.
So the indignation, the jostling and the sledging continue, and the keep-left rule is all but forgotten. There are some who still believe that the thin yellow line would have a calming effect but probably, as the City Engineer said back in 1974, the reintroduction of marked centrelines on footways would be of doubtful value.
The photographs were all taken by a street photographer in Martin Place, Sydney, between May and December 1950. The have been reproduced courtesy of the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, Sydney Living Museums.
Brown-May, Andrew, 'The highway of civilisation and common sense', Urban Research Program Working Paper No.49, ANU, 1995.
City of Sydney Archives 1902/0068 (1902); 268/60 (1960-1978); CRS 1083/14/70 (2011)
Sydney Morning Herald letters to the editor and columnists 2003-2017 (details available)
Labels: city, history, rules and regulations, territorialityTags: city, footpaths, pavement marks, pedestrians, street photography, Sydney, Sydney history
These are not block boys
I would like to set the record straight about this picture of young boys taken by Sydney photographer Sam Hood in the 1930s. It is one of a set of three in the collection of the State Library of New South Wales all of which have been titled by the Library 'Block boys at St Peters'. Because the boys are handling wood blocks, perhaps the label was originally written as some kind of pun, but it is entirely misleading. These are not block boys. That term belongs to another class of Sydney youths and I will come to them later.
The unfortunate labelling of this picture has been repeated by other cultural institutions (here and here, for example) and has even been expanded into erroneous explanations about what the boys are doing, which have then been broadcast – and not only on internet plagiarists' sites. I was provoked into writing this blog post after seeing a beautifully mounted blow-up of the picture hanging in The Henson in Marrickville with a credit to the State Library of NSW. Nice addition to the décor but a pity the hotel has been provided with an incorrect description, which states that the boys '… are helping to build roads using a method called woodblocking'.
The real story is just as interesting, but without the connotations of child labour. The boys are not constructing a road. They are hanging round with their push carts and hessian bags to collect discarded wood blocks, which they will take home as fuel for the family fire or stove. Wood blocks were once widely used in Sydney for street paving. Until the late 1800s the city's roads were generally unsealed but the 1890s saw woodblocking come into widespread use by municipal councils, with hardwood blocks steeped in tar being laid like bricks, hammered close together and top-dressed with more tar. But by the early 1930s this method of road building was no longer used and councils started ripping up the worn wood blocks on some roads and replacing them with asphalt or concrete, often in large-scale Depression-era programs that provided employment for out-of-work men.
Those tar-impregnated woodblocks would have burnt well. They were prized by householders as free fuel and were quickly purloined as soon as the road workers dug them up. The Sam Hood picture was taken during the hard times of the Great Depression and the local boys are contributing to their families' wellbeing in a practical way. The two other pictures taken by Hood in St Peters at the same time have been damaged a little, perhaps while the negatives were in storage but, with a bit of staging for the camera, they clearly show what is going on. In both of these there is also a girl collecting blocks alongside the boys.
And just to prove my point I searched for and found the photograph in question published in a contemporary newspaper. Sam Hood had his own commercial studio but also took press photographs, working full-time for a while in the 1930s for the Labor Daily. Â On 4th April 1935 that newspaper printed his photo on page 8 under the heading Its an Ill Wind — Â with the caption:
Cement is replacing wood blocks on Cook's River Road, near St. Peters station, and the boys of the neighbourhood took advantage of the occasion to collect cartloads of fuel for the winter.
St Peters, by the way, is an inner suburb of Sydney and what was Cook's River Road is now part of the Princes Highway.
So who were the actual Block Boys? In the early 1900s the City of Sydney employed a small army of youths to sweep up the tons of manure deposited by horses on the city's streets. Equipped with long-handled brooms and scoops, these block boys, or 'sparrow starvers' as they were jokingly called, were each assigned a city block to keep clean. But by the 1930s motorized vehicles were outnumbering horse-drawn vehicles in the city and street cleansing was subsumed into the more generalised duties of Council's other outdoor workers. The coveted job of block boy was phased out.
Not many photographs were taken specifically of these youths, but they often turn up in photographs taken for other purposes. The picture below is a detail from a photograph in one of the Demolition Books kept at the City of Sydney Archives. The block boy leans on his broom in Sussex Street to watch as the photographer documents the building behind him, which is slated for demolition.
I have a large, framed copy of this picture hanging in my house. Left over from an exhibition at Sydney Town Hall, it was given to me by the city's archivist some years ago as thanks for a small job I had done. I chose this particular photograph because it is a double exposure. The boy's doppelganger is lounging beside him.
Davies, Alan, Sydney exposures: through the eyes of Sam Hood and his studio, 1925-1950. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 1991.
Fitzgerald, Shirley, Sydney 1842-1992. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1992.
Fitzgerald, Shirley, The sparrow-starvers: block boys 1890-1930, catalogue for an exhibition of documents from the City of Sydney Archives, Sydney Town Hall, June 1997.
Shepherd, Allan M., The story of Petersham 1793-1948, Sydney: The Council of the Municipality of Petersham, 1948.
Labels: city, history, paving materialsTags: Newtown, paving, Sydney, Sydney history
Monument Australia
Hamilton North, NSW 2292
City of Sound
Scriberpunk


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John Cena plans to spend Valentine's Day with new girlfriend Shay Shariatzadeh
Updated: Jan 15, 2020, 08:33 IST | A correspondent |
Speaking to Extra TV, John Cena, said: "It's just a reminder to care about who you care about. The takeaway from Valentine's Day is to remind you to love what you love."
John Cena with girlfriend Shay Shariatzadeh
WWE legend John Cena has revealed what Valentine's Day means to him and plans to spend the day with his new girlfriend Shay Shariatzadeh. Cena has been dating Shay, 29, since his split with WWE star Nikki Bella in 2017.
Speaking to Extra TV, Cena, 42, said: "It's just a reminder to care about who you care about. The takeaway from Valentine's Day is to remind you to love what you love."
He added: "Well, you know every experience in life is a chance for us to know who we are and who we're not and just because I went down one avenue in life doesn't mean I'm going to repeat going down that avenue."
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Grey is one of the four so-called "expensive colors" and is a sure-fire shade for lingerie. Dusky brassieres look neutral yet don't lose themselves on your body.
Apart from granite embroidered black bras, there are so many other calm and worthy grey shades. Dark grey racerback bras look especially professional while ash lace bras provide just enough coverage and reveal.
Cloudy grey bras go together with every clothes color and look gorgeous when combined with pink, red or dark green accents.