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Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs Minutes of Evidence
Examination of witnesses (Questions 1 - 19)
MONDAY 8 FEBRUARY 1999
DR PATRICK HAREN, MR HARRY MCCRACKEN, MR COLIN FALLON and MR OWEN MCQUADE
1. You are most welcome. As you are four rather than three, it would be helpful if your colleague could be introduced to us as and when. I do not know whether there is anything you would like to say to us, over and above the material you very helpfully sent to us in advance, before we embark on questions. We will try and make the order in which we ask questions logical. If there are occasions when you would like to gloss something that you have said in answer either here and now or subsequently in writing, please do not hesitate to do so and, likewise, if we have supplementary questions which, on analysing the transcript, we feel we should have asked, we will not hesitate to send you supplementary questions thereafter. Let me verify whether there is anything you would like to say before we embark on questions?
(Dr Haren) Thank you for your welcome, Chairman. The fourth member of the team is Mr Owen McQuade who has been in contact with the Committee to set up the meeting today and he will be involved if there are issues which we should be following up on to the Committee. On the question of whether there is anything additional that we would wish to say, I think in the memorandum to the Committee we have tried to respond to what we understood to be the main headings of questions. We have also passed to the Committee a copy of the much further review report which tries to cover the background to the storms and our response during the storm and then also looking to the future as to the measures that we see immediately that can be put in place and we have given an indication as to how we see some further review and analysis going forward over the next few months. My feeling probably is that it may be better to rest on that documentation for the moment and then attempt to refer to it in our responses to questions, if that is satisfactory to the Committee, but maybe to begin by taking the areas that are of particular interest to the Committee.
2. Thank you very much indeed for those opening remarks, and they are helpful. We are conscious that the memorandum which you have sent to us and the full printed document which has literally just been published, although they tread on the same subjects, were devised for slightly different purposes and they are somewhat different in terms of the total information that they contain. We have a slight disadvantage in that, although I understand this document was published in Belfast on Thursday, for reasons which we in no way complain about, they did not actually reach our hands until this morning and therefore by definition neither I nor my colleagues have really had an opportunity at all to look at the longer document. It might be helpful if there was the briefest word about what fuller information there is in this that was not in the memorandum. We quite understand that they were devised for different purposes.
(Dr Haren) I think the distinction I would make between them probably is a distinction in the depth of analysis. In the main report, there is all of the background to the recommendations which we have broadly included in the memorandum which we sent forward to the Committee and we deliberately tried to capture as far as possible as many of the conclusions of the report as possible in the information memorandum that we sent forward and the Committee had asked not only to look at our response during the storm and goodwill payments, but also to look towards the future, and the conclusions are very much geared towards the future. I think the distinction is perhaps more a distinction of detail. There is a lot of analytical background within the report which is simply the data that is available to us to measure what happened on the system, to try to characterise the magnitude of the storm, to try to provide some of the statistics which give weight to the assessment that we make that this was one of the worst storms that we have seen on the system, to try to advert to other evidence, such as the evidence from other power systems in Scotland and in the Republic of Ireland where the storm had a similar impact, and to gather together that type of information as supporting evidence for what guides us in reviewing our own performance during the storm and also for reviewing what is possible. Then, underneath the individual recommendations, there are clearly quite a number of recommendations in the area of communications with customers, which were a particular problem. We have tried to give some indication of the detail of the understanding that we have of that problem from communications that we have had from customers, from interaction with district councils. We have tried to capture the sense that everybody has of the level of frustration that people experienced, the difficulty that they had in getting through on communications lines, and then some specific areas, such as the issue of special needs for individual customers and how to tackle those special needs. What we have attempted to do is to identify the problems and then to draw from those problems towards conclusions and recommendations which would help to ameliorate that situation in the future or, in fact, to eliminate or correct the problem entirely in certain situations. I think it is mostly at the level of detail again in the area of restoration and in relation to investments in networks we have been able to go into a much greater level of detail in the review report itself and to refer to the background to our policy on refurbishment of networks. We referred to the interactions between ourselves and MMC in relation to investment patterns and again that leads towards a recommendation, which is that we should have a slightly accelerated level of reinforcement programmes going forward. We have given in that example the recommendation, but we probably have not given as much of the background behind that recommendation in the information memorandum as we have within the review report. I think the information memorandum broadly covers the ground although at a higher level.
3. I am going to ask a very straightforward question to start with simply to set the scene. What is the overall length of your 33kV, 11kV and low voltage network respectively and what proportion in each case is, first, overground and, second, underground?
(Dr Haren) Chairman, I should have said that, if you will allow, I would like to bring my colleagues in individually on some of these questions and ask Harry McCracken to respond in this area particularly, of networks and network investments.
(Mr McCracken) There are over 50,000 kilometres of network altogether. Quite a considerable proportion of that is underground in urban areas. In relation to the storm and the extent of the network which was exposed during the storm, it was the overhead network both at 11kV and 33kV levels. At LV level some 6,000 kilometres is overhead. On the 11kV network some 20,000 kilometres is overhead, and on the 33kV network some 3,000 kilometres is overhead. The totality of those subtracted from the 50,000 kilometres of network in total gives the remainder that is underground.
4. I failed to write down the final figure you gave us for 33kV?
(Mr McCracken) 3,000 kilometres, Chairman.
5. What proportion of each was affected by faults from the storm on Boxing Day?
(Mr McCracken) I think probably the easiest way to think of it, Chairman, is that the totality of the network would have been affected. As we look at the damage that has resulted from the storm on the network, the total number of faults that we had on the system on Boxing Day alone was some 3,000 faults and out of that there were something like 600 to 700 high voltage faults. Table 3 on page 11 gives a figure of 3,010 faults on Saturday 26th and that was the period of the storm in which the most damage was experienced. Out of that there were 2,400 faults at the LV level and approximately 690 to 700 faults at the HV level.
6. I am conscious of the fact that it was the worst storm for 70 years. Colleagues on the Committee will be familiar with my quoting the definition on Act of God in Blackstone's Law Dictionary as being an act of God which no reasonable man would expect God to commit! I do not know the extent to which the storm that we had on Boxing Day and thereafter fits in with global warming developments, but there is no question at all that global warming is quite clearly introducing different patterns of meteorological dynamic behaviour. Is that a subject on which NIE have themselves taken any long-term advice on how the pattern is likely to alter?
(Mr McCracken) I think it is too early for us to say what conclusion should be drawn from the weather pattern itself. Certainly we are very conscious as a result of the last two years that the storm patterns have an extraordinary coincidence with that particular time of year and they have a degree of predictability about the way in which they arrived last year and this year out of weather forecasts which are not forecasting the exact day of the storm but are clearly indicating a level of storm activity. I know that as we look across into the system next door in the Republic of Ireland, they are saying that they feel that they may need to go back and look at their policy in relation to undergrounding in certain areas because there may be a need to be prepared for this level of storm activity being much more frequent in the future. We are certainly clear in our own minds that we will be looking very carefully at the issues and opportunities for undergrounding in certain areas, typically at the low voltage level where underground is less uneconomic than it is to undergrounding at higher voltage levels. At lower levels, where maybe ultimately it is less uneconomic to do it, then we are conscious that it is at that low voltage line level that we experience some of the greatest difficulties in restoring the final groups of customers and a lot of the damage which is done at that level is done by trees and by branches of trees and if the system was undergrounded in those areas then we would be able to shorten the restoration process. Normally that requires a policy change, and the policy then is implemented over a period of years, but we certainly feel that that is an area that we should look very closely at. We have not been able to come to a conclusion. I am not sure that we ever get definitive information which allows us to come to a conclusion on that. I think what we get is a sentiment which says this is something that we should begin to look more closely at and invest more in rather than less, e.g. in an undergrounding area.
Mr Grogan
7. What are your targets for availability of each network and what level of storm damage are they designed to resist?
(Mr McCracken) If I could approach the last question first. A normally well-constructed overhead line is designed to withstand wind speeds of 85 miles per hour with a safety factor of some 2.5 in terms of strain, and if you do the arithmetic then I think it brings the wind velocity up to something like 150 miles per hour that an overhead line should be able to withstand. There are many reasons why an overhead line probably will not withstand that sort of wind speed. One is to do with the configuration of the particular pole, whether it has transformers and other equipment on it which reduces mechanical strength. Another one would be to do with the siting factor in terms of the ground that the pole may be planted in and how well it can withstand that sort of force. Thirdly, it would be to do with the age of the pole and the extent to which there has been deterioration in the poles. Poles normally have an asset life of 40 years. Like any asset, as it approaches the end of its useful life there is some level of deterioration. In the main, that level of deterioration, even up to 40 years of age, still gives a reasonably serviceable pole. The fact of the matter is that under these sorts of conditions, the pole is not serviceable, so you will certainly have to look at an earlier pole replacement programme and, in fact, that is one of the recommendations that comes out of the report. We do not set availability factors for overhead lines. We would want to have a frequency of interruption rate which would be lower than six times per annum and this is a figure that has been debated internationally. There is no internationally accepted figure and I think it was probably Electricite de France that originally proposed this figure and it is becoming more widespread in its adoption. That would be the nearest that anyone would have in terms of the availability of a single overhead line.
8. What was the effect of the storm on the capacity of the primary distribution network and the secondary distribution network? Were any of the failures the result of the distribution system being unable to carry the weight of local demand?
(Mr McCracken) No. The failures that we experienced during the storm were all what I would call mechanical failures of the components of the network. I am not aware of any failures that we experienced being due to the unavailability of the network to carry the customers' demand.
9. What was the effect of the storm on the capacity of the networks?
(Mr McCracken) I am not quite sure that I understand the question. Capacity in the sense that we would use it would be the capability of the network to carry the load on the network, that would be the customer demand and the effect of the storm would have been to reduce the capacity of the network to meet customer demand, but with any lines that would have been out due to the storm, then naturally the customers connected to those lines would have been out as well. To the extent it affected lines at the higher voltage level—and there were some lines affected at the transmission level, although I think there was only one damage fault at the transmission level—the overall capacity of the network would have been to some extent affected, but it would have been quite minimal.
Mr McGrady
10. I think we all agree about the extent of the great failure of supply over the Christmas holiday period of 1998 even after the 1997 event. Dr Haren has already stated that there is a certain predictability of this event, if not to the day then certainly to the season. Is it not the case that one of two things happened? Firstly, that no real cognisance was taken of what happened in 1997? (and that was to be repeated in 1998 and indeed may be repeated in the future unless dramatic action was taken?) Secondly that the age of the network and the fact that it is largely a rural network coupled with the lack of investment in it over the past number of years, particularly since privatisation, that have given us a supply system which is simply not dependable? How can you assure the Committee that this will be remedied in the immediate future?
(Dr Haren) As to the predictability point, there is a forecast for a storm and what transpires is that there is a storm. The magnitude of the storm is not always well predicted, and certainly the impact of the storm is not well predicted and that is in terms of which parts of the network will be most hit by the storm, where the storm will pass and what the damage is to the network as a result of the storm as it passes. We have referred to the level of damage on rural networks and a lot of the damage was due to a direct wind effect on conductors and on conductor components. A lot of it was due to trees and fallen branches at low voltage network level and some of it was due to broken poles. In fact, the percentage of poles that were damaged on the network, while the impact of damage was very significant in that we had on Boxing Day a total of 160,000 customers affected, was just over 1,100 and that represents only 0.3 per cent of a pole population of 400,000. What we are talking about are impacts upon rural networks and those impacts having very definite effects on customers, but they are by no means an indication that the networks are networks that are under-invested in or networks that are in some sense much of a lower standard than they ought to be. I think what Mr McCracken indicated is that one of the policy issues that arises is whether you are dealing with 40 year asset lifetimes in a pole looking forward into the future or whether we should say, as we recognise, that a pole coming towards the end of its useful life in the period of 30 to 35, 35 to 40 years is going to have to be replaced at a much earlier stage or at an earlier stage than it is today. That is an investment decision and ultimately it is a pricing decision because we are very conscious of trying to manage both the investments in the networks and also the impact of price on the customer. I will ask Colin Fallon in a moment to comment on what it is that we did since last year and I will ask Harry McCracken to comment on investment since privatisation, but broadly speaking we were looking at a storm impact this time which was a multiple of five to ten times greater than the impact of the storms last year, depending on which parameter we use. We are looking at a level of communications attempts by customers which is several orders of magnitude different to what it was last year. What we did since last year was we geared up very substantially in the area of communications to be able to handle much higher volumes of calls. We continued on the networks with network reinforcement and refurbishment programmes and those refurbishment programmes post-privatisation are running at broadly twice what they were pre-privatisation. It is not a question, therefore, of there being under-investment in networks post-privatisation as there is a much higher level of investment in networks post-privatisation. In a particular area, which is the area of 11kV networks, we will be making the case that, as we go forward, we should be looking at a somewhat accelerated level of refurbishment on 11kV networks. We made the same point when we were in discussions on our price control at the MMC, and the broad view then was that we should have a slightly lesser programme rather than a slightly greater programme. At the end of the day, we still all must be looking at assets which are capable of lasting for 30 to 40 years and what we are talking about is changing at the margin how it is that those assets might be re-invested in earlier. Some of the programmes of refurbishment that we have indicated also in our recommendations are to go back again over areas of network and try to spot on an individual basis where it is that individual poles may need replacing, and to try to address those poles, but we are broadly satisfied with the investment levels that have been going into the networks, with the type of refurbishment programmes that we have and the difference between the experience that we have, in the Northern Ireland network and the Republic of Ireland and Scotland is not great. What we see are very similar patterns of customers off supply, very similar patterns of restoration times and very similar patterns of communication problems. Perhaps I could ask Colin Fallon to address the communications question and Harry McCracken the investment question.
(Mr Fallon) Chairman, since Christmas 1997, we have put a contingency plan in place which was built round our 24-hour services that exist normally at our four control centres and at our call centres. We had built this contingency plan on the basis of responding to another event like Christmas 1997 and the structure of this was round an incident management regime. We have a duty manager working on a 24-hour basis who is able to respond to an emergency and manage any incident that should arise. That was put into place after the Christmas 1997 storms and that is something that we used in this event. That team involves an incident manager, it involves another manager who is responsible for managing resources, it involves someone who looks at the status of the network, someone who arranges our internal communication within the organisation to make sure that everybody is moving forward consistently as a team to approach whatever emergency should arise, and it also involves someone who looks at our external communication and that is dealing with customers and dealing with the media. That plan was put into action prior to Boxing Day. I think the problem may have been that the scale of what we dealt with on this occasion during Boxing Day was something like 162,000 customers off supply, whereas in Christmas 1997 the equivalent figure would have been 60,000 customers off supply, so it was a much greater emergency than perhaps we had planned for. Since Christmas 1997, we had increased by a factor of three our capability to take telephone calls and that meant that our maximum call handling capacity was roughly 1,500 calls an hour as compared with something like 560 after Christmas 1997. We have also installed a messaging system which is the second line of response to customers. When all call handlers are busy, the messaging system is able to give a recorded message to customers and we have increased its capability by a factor of 14 from Christmas 1997 and, in fact, during the emergency we took 153,000 calls on that messaging system. We felt that we had put in place adequate plans to deal with a similar emergency to 1997, but in the event what faced us in 1998 was something that, by whatever measure, was very much greater. Indeed, in terms of call handling capacity, we had to deal with something like seven times more calls in 1998 than we had to deal with in 1997.
11. Mr Fallon, what you are saying is that the contingency plan in place for incident management response which you put into effect as a result of the 1997 storm, presumably only dealt with the parameters that were applied to that (the 1997) storm. Did you not build into that contingency plan a much "greater incident" management factor to deal with factors which could be greater than the 1997 event? There seem to be two elements of this. You talk about the age of poles and their dependability after a certain life-span, and you talk about branches of trees falling on lines and I can accept all that. Surely normal practice maintenance would indicate that trees in proximity to lines would be maintained in a proper way and would not normally be causing a problem during a storm. Secondly, surely, the poles carrying the lines would be regularly inspected and replaced and not lead to the widespread problem, which we had. There is quite a lot of criticism implied by the fact that in the first six years of privatisation you underspent by £109 million. Why was that?
(Mr McCracken) I will come back to the question of trees and how we deal with those at the moment and how we propose to deal with them in the future after I get through my view of the investment programme. I would like to give some figures going back to 1982/83 through to 1986/87 and then 1987/88 through to 1991/92. In the five-year period from 1982/83 to 1986/87, there was £111 million invested in the network (and these are all at the same price base). In the five-year period 1987/88 to 1991/92 there was £206 million invested in the network. In the five-year period 1992/93 to 1996/97, which is the first period of our price controls as a private company and it is the period which Mr McGrady refers to when he refers to an underspend (I do not know if I recognise the figure of £109 million, but I am sure we can agree the figure is about £100 million), the expenditure was £242 million and, in the five-year period that we are now into for 1997/98 through to 2001/2002, the expenditure will be £330 million. As Dr Haren has said, ten years before privatisation compared to ten years post-privatisation there will be about twice the amount invested in the network. At the moment we also invest something like £90 per customer in the network. The average of the GB companies is about £60 per customer. All the investments we make in the network feed directly through to customer prices. A rigorous assessment is carried out at any time that one faces an investment consideration of any type and it should only be done if clearly there is a benefit to customers. In 1993, this company did not have a refurbishment programme in the network at all. We inherited a network with one of the poorest reliability records of any network of any company in the UK—Scottish Hydro was the one that was worse, that was given in the report. It was quite easy to determine at that time that the capital programme we had did not address the most pressing problem that we had in the Northern Ireland network, and that was the poor reliability of the rural network. We designed and put in place a refurbishment programme which has been referred to many many times now and that refurbishment programme was designed to address the totality of our rural network at the 11kV level within a period of 15 years. At that time we thought that that was a considerable programme and the measure we used for that was it was then, and still is today, the biggest refurbishment programme of any electricity company in the UK. That programme was further tested at the MMC, as Dr Haren has mentioned, when we went there to discuss our new price controls. We actually put forward a case for increasing that refurbishment programme. The MMC decided, on the basis of arguments of other parties and against the price background in Northern Ireland, that the 1,500 kilometre per annum programme was sufficient. It was against that background that we have the programme that we have in place today. If I could move on and deal with the question of the underspend. The period that we are looking at is the first revenue period from 1992/93 through to 1996/97. I have already referred to the fact that we altered our capital strategy at that stage to incorporate the refurbishment programme. There were a number of projects mainly at the transmission level within that programme, and for a number of reasons those projects could have been deferred and they were deferred. For example, we are doing a project in Belfast at the moment which is the laying of underground cables and that is something like a £6 million project. The transmission projects are very expensive and it does not take a lot of them to add up to quite a considerable amount of money. That project for cable laying for a new transmission substation in Belfast did not go ahead on the first recommendation and is going ahead now. The underspend is probably more rightly regarded as a deferment. I have no doubt as I sit here today and look at the type and categories of expenditure which were deferred at that time that it was right to defer that expenditure. One of the consequences of that deferment is that customer tariffs are two per cent lower today than they would have been if we had spent that money. I can see no project within that deferment that we made at that time which would say to me, if I had made that investment as the capital programme as it stood at that time things would have been any different during this storm. The fact of the matter is that it was quite simple what happened during this storm, i.e. a lot of wooden poles broke and a lot of trees came down through overhead wires and there was nothing in the investment programme that would have avoided that. The more correct question is, if you had that money available to you, why not put more of it into the refurbishment programme and it is only the refurbishment programme that directly addresses the problem of the rural network and that is a perfectly valid question. My only answer to that is that, at the time, we thought we had a more than adequate programme of 1,500 kilometres per annum. We tested that at the MMC in 1996, two years later. The MMC, although we put an argument for a 1,750 kilometre per annum programme, decided that we did not need it. This programme, until we went through this storm, had been thought by everyone against whom it was tested to be a very adequate programme. There is also a view around that I would need to address, and that is in relation to a view that we seem to have a capital programme that was built up component by component, tested against the public interest issues at the MMC, and once we have built it up component by component we should forget about how it was built up and regard it as an amount of capital that we will spend in whatever way we choose, and I find that quite a perplexing argument. The components that have built up the capital programme were each individually tested for their public interest issues and I fail to understand how it is that, once we have been through that very detailed argument, we can then regard the programme as having total flexibility. As has been pointed out, this is customers' money, and customers will have a view as to whether it should have been spent in the way it was originally argued or not. On the issue of trees, it is a relatively simple solution in relation to trees but it is not an easy solution. In fact, it is quite difficult to get access to land to trim trees. There is a fair amount of opposition not only from interest groups but from the farming community. In fact, I saw some comment in the press from the Ulster Farmers Union following the announcement that I made that we were going to be much more aggressive about getting in to cut trees in future. We will cut some 3,000 kilometres of trees over lines this year and we are looking, as part of the report, to push that up to 5,000 kilometres per annum. If we do that we will cover the whole network once every five years and if the trees are cut properly they should not grow back through the lines quicker than that. There were some 3,000 trees down during the storm, many of which came down through our lines and the fact of the matter is you will never get permission to cut down a tree because once in every 30 years it may come down through your line.
Mr McGrady: The five-year programme which you indicated ran from 1992/93 to 1996/97 you spent £243 million on. It is interesting to note that the customers over that same period had embedded in their electricity bills capital expenditure provision which would have given you funding of £339 million, almost £96 million additional to that which you spent. What you are saying to me appears to be that the problems of 1998 and 1997 were not specifically or dramatically as a result of under-investment but simply of inadequate or impossible management, whichever it may be. We will have to look at what you are saying in detail and come back to that at a later time. Thank you.
Mr Beggs
12. In addition to the faults which occurred, would you outline for the record the range of faults which had to be dealt with by NIE?
(Mr McCracken) Could I refer Mr Beggs to pages 12 and 13 just by way of an element in the report. In general the type of faults that we experienced on the network were faults that resulted from mechanical strain placed on the components of the network as a result of the very severe winds. I have already mentioned that a chief component would have been the poles themselves, but that would also have applied to the overhead conductors, the insulators, the stirrups and binders and they would be the main components which make up an overhead line. We have already mentioned the fact there were quite a number of faults which were due to trees coming down and bringing lines and poles down with them. There would have been a fair amount of airborne debris involved in faults as well. I am not sure if there is a more particular aspect of the damage that you would be searching for in that question.
13. The question of preventative maintenance comes in. Many of the poles which came down—and there are still many poles down throughout the country—were completely overgrown with ivy and so the poles were actually falling on trees and catching them. Surely this kind of maintenance should have been on-going. Many of the problems with poles being blown out of the ground could have been attributed to the lack of preventative maintenance.
(Mr McCracken) Chairman, can I come back again just to re-confirm the fact that the level of work going into the rural overhead line network today is by far and away in excess of whatever went into it before. As Dr Haren has said, there was 1,133 poles damaged out of 400,000. Statistically that is an extremely small proportion of the total pole population that was affected by this. Ivy was one of the lessons that we learnt from the 1997 storm and what we put in place was a programme to go round and remove the ivy from all the poles. I cannot guarantee as I sit here today that the ivy has been removed from all poles, but what I can say is that we have a programme for doing so. In fact, we are being asked if we could not go round and remove the ivy from trees, because one of the problems we face is the fact that the trees that are covered in ivy are the ones most likely to come down because they are rotten and they obviously present a much larger surface area to the wind. That is a problem we recognised last year and we have addressed it. It is like any programme you put in place to address a network which is 30,000 kilometres long, it takes a finite period of time to roll through that programme. Our recommendations in the report are designed to put in place some of these remedial measures faster than what we had thought was required to date.
14. So you are accepting that historic underspend in network capital expenditure contributes to some extent to the problems experienced?
(Mr McCracken) Yes. I think the point I am making is that while in the public sector the network was considerably underfunded.
15. To what extent were repair efforts hampered by inclement weather subsequent to the rainstorm on Boxing Day?
(Mr McCracken) Repair efforts on Boxing Day were nearly impossible until some time after midnight and the winds abated. Repair efforts were got under way before light the next morning. The very poor weather conditions continued throughout Monday and Tuesday. The Sunday immediately following Boxing Day was particularly bad. The weather was a significant factor in about the first two to two and a half days in getting repairs carried out. One of the main problems was that, to understand the nature of the event that we were involved in, it was necessary to inspect the network. The network throughout Northern Ireland was affected by this storm. There was 30,000 kilometres of network which we needed to look at to find all the damage. We use helicopters both during circumstances like this and in normal operations to inspect the network, but the fact of the matter was that the flying capability of the helicopters for at least two days after the main event was very limited due to very poor weather and to very restricted daylight hours. All these were quite significant factors in allowing us (1) to understand the size of the problem that we had on our hands and (2) to address it.
16. Has any assessment been done by NIE on the extent to which the closure of any centres has contributed to the delay in effecting repairs or do you intend to continue what is perceived to be purely a cost-cutting exercise in closing centres and centralisation?
(Mr McCracken) We have 13 customer service centres and that number has been a number that we have had for quite some time. We have rationalised some of the work centres. As we approach any decision about where resources are required, obviously that is considered very very carefully in terms of both normal workload and against our ability to respond in severe weather conditions. We have given an undertaking in the report to go back and look at that carefully again and ensure that we understand, in the light of what we have learnt out of this particular occurrence, that the regional network that we have on the ground is sufficient to deal with this sort of circumstance. We have more people involved in climbing poles than we have ever had, so our ability to bring people to bear in this sort of situation and to be able to manage this sort of situation I would not agree has been significantly affected by any rationalisation that we have carried out over the last three to four years, but we are acutely aware of the need to look at it as a result of our findings in this particular experience. This was a radically new learning experience for all of us.
17. Finally, how do you plan to help your own customers to help you to identify where problems are?
(Dr Haren) I think the most difficult part of this storm from the point of view of customers was their inability to make contact with the company and to register the information with the company that they were off supply. We believe that in similar storm conditions and from the experience of other electricity companies around the world, including companies which are dealing with hurricane conditions, such as in the southern states of the US, the evidence is that it is not possible to allow 160,000 customers to simultaneously make contact with the company immediately after a major storm event, but what the customer does want to be able to do is to make contact over time with the company and the systems that we are trying to put in place and are investigating to add into the systems that we have already will be aimed at providing a much better level of communication directly with the customer and that level of communication is very important from our point of view and I think that is the dimension that I would relate to Mr Beggs' question, i.e. that we need to know from the customer what it is that is happening on the ground in order to get a full picture of the restoration problem. We have a very broad picture of the restoration problem, but at a detailed level we eventually have to be dealing with an understanding about each individual customer's situation or what small pockets of customers are off supply as we get into the latter stages of the restoration process. The aim would be to have a better level of communication with the customer than we were able to have this year.
(Mr Fallon) I do not think it is correct to say that we have closed many sites. We still have 13 customer service centres operating throughout the Province. Where we have reduced staff at these customer service centres, it is genuinely in the interest of customers because we have more people working from home, more people working flexibly and they are going straight to customers' premises in the morning to carry out work or they are going straight to sites to carry out work. Many people have commented on the fact that these same centres might form a focus for dealing with telephone calls and, as Dr Haren has said, it is very difficult to deal with high volumes of telephone calls in any type of situation, and to disseminate it over a number of locations proves even more difficult. There is no simple answer to this, but we believe, like many of our colleagues in the industry, that the answer will include probably fairly advanced information technology and technological methods for dealing with telephone calls. The escalation plan is actually part of an overall programme of improvements that we have put in place, but we should be aware that these IT solutions and things like interactive voice response, which is a messaging system, are not easily delivered, they do take time. The improvements that we have put in place since last Christmas were adequate to deal with a storm the size of the one last Christmas or a storm of much greater severity. In the end, when we were tested with something which was about ten times the size of last year, they did not meet up to that demand. What we are doing now is putting in an interactive voice response system that we had already planned from last year, but, as I said, procurement of these systems can be difficult, especially where there are technical problems along with them. It is necessary to provide this sort of thing to deal with high volumes of telephone calls, but the interactive voice response is a voice response of such quality that it will give customers much more information than the single message that we provide this year currently would. There is an improvement path that includes interactive voice response and it also includes a trouble management system. Our escalation plans this year were part of that plan. Our report is accelerating some of these recommendations, bringing them forward. It is also proposing that we enhance some of the facilities that were provided so that we can continue this improvement path, provide a better response should a similar event occur next winter, but that will be part of this continuing improvement and the systems that we hope to put in to provide a much better service to the customer will be completed during the year 2000.
Mr Robinson
18. Leaving aside the analysis and recommendations contained in the report, I would like to hear from you how you assess the performance of NIE in what is generally perceived by your customers to have been an absolute shambles and a very poor performance in the way the company, conducted itself? Nobody blames you for the storm. Many people blame you for the lack of response to it. Quite frankly, if you were a private company most of your customers would have been looking to your competitors by now. I think many people out there are wondering why there are not some changes at a management or board level as a result of what was a deplorably poor performance?
(Dr Haren) We all have to deal with what are the objective facts of the crisis that we faced and those objective facts indicate that this was a storm which was totally unprecedented in a period of 30 to 70 years. It was certainly unprecedented in 30 years in terms of its impact upon our networks. The level of customer communications that we had to try to handle was unprecedented. In the period of a week we were trying to dealing with 600,000 customer calls. We had major difficulties dealing with those calls. We had particular difficulties dealing with the calls in the first 36 hours of the storm when we were looking at 160,000 customers that were affected by the storm as against 60,000 customers that were affected last year. What we found was a problem of a magnitude which was considerably in excess of the problem that we had experienced last year. The evidence by which we have to make judgments is the evidence of what we find on the ground in terms of our restoration process. That restoration process in turn affects the communications process. One of the complaints from customers was that we had an inability to predict when it was that customers would be back on supply. Our ability to predict when we can get customers back on supply is not just simply a resourcing issue, it is also an issue of the complexity of the faults that we face on the ground and, of course, the overall volume of faults and the volume of customers affected. The experience that we had in that area which affected one aspect of communications was not different from the experience in the Republic of Ireland and Scotland and the problems that were experienced in the Republic of Ireland and Scotland were no less in any of these areas, i.e. in the area of restoration, in the area of total numbers of customers affected within a geographic area and in terms of the communications stress and their inability to deal with that communications stress. The problems were similar and the responses from the individual companies were similar and when we make as objective a comparison as we can with those companies, then we can certainly see room to find steps that can be taken which will improve the situation in the future but not something which says there is a magic wand solution to the problem of dealing with vast numbers of customers off supply trying to communicate with the company. In terms of the overall impact upon customers, out of the 162,000 customers affected by the Boxing Day storms almost 100,000 of those were restored by midnight and, of all the customers affected by storms during the week, 81 per cent of the customers were restored within 24 hours. So by any measure we would say that we dealt with that crisis in as strong a way as we possibly could, given the magnitude of the crisis. We have clearly said that we had major difficulties on communications. The problem of communications that we experienced is not just a problem which is unique to the electricity network. We know, for example, the communications system itself run by BT here and in Scotland experienced its own stresses. The volumes of calls are signalled objectively as being of such a magnitude as to be recognised as unprecedently large volumes flowing on the telecommunications networks and we can only point to those as objective evidence of the magnitude of the crisis that we faced. We have already had discussions with Ofreg and with other companies and we have not seen any new information which comes to us which says that this could have been entirely different, but we certainly believe that, as we go into the future, there will be technological-based solutions which are not ones available sitting on the shelf that can be applied overnight but ones that we have to work on and develop with some of the communications suppliers which we hope will change this by a factor going into another storm, but we will never be able to deal with 162,000 customers wanting to communicate immediately with the company.
19. I take it from that answer that you consider that the company did a remarkable job. You do not seem to think, as perhaps the overwhelming majority of people in Northern Ireland think, that it was a very poor performance. All we had there was a series of reasons why there were problems as opposed to why the company had not planned adequately to deal with the kind of problems that would arise. Of course emergencies arise and nobody is blaming NIE for the storm, but I think everybody recognises that a company with the responsibility that NIE has would make adequate preparation to deal with those kind of emergencies in the circumstances. There seems to have been fairly poor planned maintenance. There was no adequate means of contact, no adequate response service and apart from people being on after 24 hours, there were people over a week after the event who still had not got their service back. You consistently missed deadlines that you gave publicly when services would be restored, none of which allowed people to put much confidence in NIE for the future.
(Dr Haren) I reject entirely the suggestion that there were very poorly planned maintenance programmes. We have described at length to the Committee the type of planned maintenance programmes that we have. We have set those planned maintenance programmes in the context of a comparison to what is performed by other utilities. We have set them in the context of the type of discussion that we had at MMC during our price control which measured those planned maintenance programmes as to their adequacy, as to their desirability in terms of price and as to their comparability with any other system of the same type of mix of rural and overhead networks as we have ourselves. Our response to the storm was not an inadequate response, it was a response which restored 80 per cent of customers within 24 hours. The fact that there were some customers out for a week is exactly similar to the experience on Scottish and Republic of Ireland networks which were similarly affected and the pace of restoration and the extent of restoration were broadly similar between our system and theirs. As to whether we missed deadlines, we can only give the best information that we have available during the crisis. I referred to the difficulty of giving good and accurate information during a crisis when you are dealing with large volumes of faults and when you are dealing with extended networks and very difficult working conditions, where storm-type conditions were coming back during the week of progress. Again the evidence from other networks in the Republic of Ireland and Scotland, which were similarly affected, would show that the experience there was very similar to ours. I did not pretend to say that this was a satisfactory experience from the point of view of the customer. We have said very clearly in our review document that we regard this as being quite unsatisfactory from a customer viewpoint. What we have said is that the solutions which everybody would like to believe are very easily found are not so easily found and I referred in particular to the issue of communications where the solutions are by no means easily found, but our intention is to find the very best practice solution that is available and to apply it.
Prepared 29 July 1999


text:
Владисла́в Васи́льевич Петро́в (2 сентября 1929, Павловский Посад, Московская область — 18 апреля 1995, Москва) — советский и российский юрист, специалист по советскому колхозному, российскому земельному и экологическому праву; доктор юридических наук (1971), профессор (1972) и заведующий кафедрой (1984—1995) земельного и колхозного права юридического факультета МГУ; лауреат премии имени Ломоносова (1977) и заслуженный деятель науки РСФСР (1990).

Биография
Владислав Петров родился 2 сентября 1929 года в городе Павловский Посад Московской области; в 1952 году окончил Московский юридический институт. После получения высшего образования он в течение десяти лет работал в правоохранительных органах Павловского Посада, а также занимал руководящие должности в городских комсомольских органах.

В 1962 году Петров защитил диссертацию в Казанском государственном университете: на тему «Правовое положение неделимого фонда колхоза» — стал кандидатом юридических наук. В период с 1961 по 1968 год он являлся старшим преподавателем на кафедре гражданского, трудового, колхозного и земельного права, являвшейся частью юридического факультета Казанского университета. Затем, в период с 1968 по 1972 год, он занимал пост декана юрфака университета в Казани. В 1971 году он защитил докторскую диссертацию «Примерный устав и проблемы социалистической законности в колхозах».

Переехал в Москву: между 1983 и 1995 годами Петров являлся заведующим кафедрой экологического, природоресурсового и аграрного права, входившего в состав юридического факультета МГУ (по другим данным: в 1984—1995 годах). Он также состоял ответственным редактором журнала «Вестник Московского университета» (серия «Право», с 1981); руководил и участвовал в нескольких научно-методических советах и рабочих группах, действовавших при государственных органах СССР и занимавшихся разработкой проектов советских Земельного, Водного и Лесного кодексов, а также — законов об охране природы, о защите окружающей среды и атмосферного воздуха; об охране животного мира.

В 1977 году Петров стал лауреатом Ломоносовской премии — как соавтор книги «Правовая охрана природы в СССР», вышедшей годом ранее. Несколько лет возглавлял межвузовские научные программы, созданные для сотрудничества юридических факультетов стран, являвшихся членами СЭВ — группы работал над правовыми проблемами охраны окружающей среды. В конце существования СССР, в 1990 году, Петров стал соавтором учебника «Правовая охрана окружающей среды в странах Восточной Европы», изданного в Москве и предназначенного для студентов юридических ВУЗов стран-членов СЭВ. В 1990 году ему было присвоено звание «Заслуженный деятель науки РСФСР». Скончался в Москве 18 апреля 1995 года.

Дочь Татьяна (род. 1957) — юрист, профессор МГУ.

Работы
Владислав Петров являлся одним из основателей советской школы экологического права: он принимал участие в формировании научной доктрины «экологического права» — «особого межотраслевого правового метода обеспечения конституционных прав будущих поколений… на здоровую окружающую среду». Активно занимался «экологизацией» целых отраслей советского и российского права (занимался проблемами экологического мониторинга и экологической экспертизы):
 «Правовая охрана природы в СССР» (отв. ред., соавт., 1976) — Ломоносовская премия
 «Земельное, колхозное право и правовая охрана природы» (соавт., 1972)
 «Экология и право» (1981)
 «Правовая охрана окружающей природной среды в странах Восточной Европы» (соавт., 1990)
 «Правовая охрана природы в СССР» (1984)
 «Экологическое право России» (1995)
 «Правовая охрана природы в СССР» (соавт., 1979)
 «Экологическое право: схемы и методика решения задач» (1989).

Литература
 Петрова Т. В. Предисловие // «В. В. Петров. Научные труды. Избранное» (2014).
 Видные ученые-юристы России (Вторая половина XX века) : энцикл. словарь биографий : по состоянию на 1 авг. 2004 г. / Рос. акад. правосудия; под ред. В. М. Сырых. — М.: Рос. акад. правосудия, 2006. — 547 с.: портр.; ISBN 5-93916-056-5.

Ссылки

 Статья  на сайте фонда знаний «Ломоносов»
 Биографическая справка
 Публикации  в системе ИСТИНА МГУ
 Солопова М. А. Наш земляк Владислав Васильевич Петров: профессор, юрист, исследователь экологического права

Юристы СССР
Юристы России
Юристы XX века
Специалисты по земельному праву
Выпускники Московского юридического института
Преподаватели Казанского университета
Лауреаты Ломоносовской премии МГУ
Авторы учебников права

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The Virtual office service offered by them was a blessing in disguise as we needed an office address in the US and our management based out of India didn't want to invest in an office space immediately as we set up our US operations. We did a lot of research and found that the usual registered agent services that are available in the US have a lot of restrictions in terms of documents that they would receive and forward on our company's behalf. Brunswick Office suites offered us a quality of service that is far superior than any of the "run of the mill" agents. I would highly recommend them to small companies and start up firms that are setting up their US operations.


text:
A Valentine's Day Playlist for Rekindling Your Love
Songs that will make you believe in true love this Valentine's Day
Need to recover from heartbreak or not getting that text back? Street has you covered with some soulful, romantic songs that will make you believe in love again this Valentine's season.
"Melting" by Kali Uchis
With her rich sensual vocals and lines like "I am watching every stand–up comedy / just hoping that it will rub off on me / so you will smile at everything I say," Kali Uchis will make you want to fall in love. Each metaphor captures a sense of pure bliss that is hard to resist. You're going to melt when you hear this song.
"Ordinary People" by John Legend
As the youngest EGOT recipient and a Penn Alum, John Legend has perfected the love song. Candid and reflective, "Ordinary People" addresses the ups and downs of maintaining a relationship. Paired with Legend's angelic voice and piano playing, you'll want to take a risk and love.
"Best Part" by Daniel Caesar
Daniel Caesar and H.E.R. serve as the perfect R&B duo on this song about total love and adoration. This song is just beautiful from the lyrics to the vocals, beckoning the listener to share it with someone they love. Paired with its dreamy music video, it's quite literally a long walk on the beach.
"The Night We Met" by Lord Huron
If you haven't heard this song yet, don't worry, it will be playing at any wedding you attend. It is a hauntingly beautiful song that portrays the feeling of falling in love with someone new. This love is lost, but the band Lord Huron makes you feel like they'll risk anything to have it back.
"Moon River" Cover by Frank Ocean
Last Valentine's Day, Frank Ocean surprised everyone with this beautiful cover originally performed by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's one of the best love songs from one of the most romantic movies performed by one of the most beloved artists in R&B. This song will make you want to break up, make up, and fall in love all over again. Or at the very least, it'll make you cry in your dorm room.
"Coming Home" by Leon Bridges
"Coming Home" is Leon Bridges' ballad to his love and hometown. This song is about a love that is comforting, warm, and sweet. For a few minutes, you'll feel soothed from the fast pace of modern college life.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Every Show Should Handle Sex Like American Gods
Katharine Trendacosta
Filed to: american godsFiled to: american gods
All images: Starz
On cable TV, we have become used to seeing a lot of sex and nudity on certain networks and in certain TV shows. Game of Thrones is the most famous of the lot, causing the term "sexposition" to be coined for how it paired important information with sex and nudity to keep the audience engaged. Sex is titillation, something forbidden or scandalous enough to get attention from an audience. But that's not how American Gods approaches it at all.
"A sex scene is correct for this show when the story doesn't work without it," said executive producer Michael Green at an interview before the show premiered. "When it's uncuttable. When it's woven into the fabric of either character or plot. So it's arguable that our most daring episodes are the ones with no sex scenes at all because they just weren't necessary for the story we were telling. We didn't want anything to be titillating for its own sake, otherwise it's just not this show."
It would be so easy to think these American Gods scenes were for titillation if you simply looked at headlines about them. They've been called "insane," "the most explicit gay sex scene ever," "shocking," and "wild," all of which miss the point of how intentional and perfectly planned and placed they are. The context of the sex matters. These news articles may get into more detail, but the headlines scream of an obsession with the act, not the show.
"We wanted the show to be sex-positive, and the titillating, exploitive aspects of sex are usually the more base ones where it's a biological function of sorts," executive producer Bryan Fuller told us. "There is something masturbatory about most sex sequences, even though it's not masturbation because there's a partner, but it feels masturbatory in expression. And one of the things I am very fascinated with in American culture is the sex negativity."
"Sex negativity," or at least the idea that sex is still taboo and that talking about it should make us giggle, is evident in those headlines. It's why while Green and Fuller intended to make a show where the sex fit in seamlessly to the story, these scenes keep getting yanked out into the spotlight, and then re-presented for mere titillation. And that's just wrong.
The American reaction to sex in its entertainment, as opposed to depictions of violence, is strange and contradictory. "Case in point on Hannibal, we couldn't show making love explicitly but we could show them killing each other explicitly and that was something that network standards and practices are comfortable with and recognize the gross disconnect of that fact," Fuller said.
"But one of the things is we were are so adamant about making people fear the consequences of sex and sexual expression that we forget to teach people how to have a spiritual connection sexually," said Fuller, articulating what is probably the philosophy underpinning ever sex scene in the show. "And the wonderful, healthy bonding aspects of a happy, healthy, sexual experience. And really, we wanted to depict that in different ways. Because sex is worship and sex is a grand joining with another person that you can't really recreate in any other circumstances. So it's very important to us to focus on the positives of sex and extrapolate from there."
You can see that idea in all three big characters associated with sex so far: Bilquis, Salim, and Laura.
Bilquis (Yetide Badaki) is a goddess of love who needs sex as worship. From the beginning of the show, we see her swallow people with her vagina during sex. It's impressive as a showpiece, yes, but it critical to remember that she needs this to survive. Compare Badaki's vulnerability in the scenes surrounding the sex, to the goddess' power and vitality during them.
Badaki's audition included the scene where she meets up with a man she found online, takes him back to her room, and swallows him whole. But the scene is still intrinsic to understanding the character. "I mean, we're talking about the Goddess of Love," said Badaki. "And then people always see love as passive. I think love is very active."
Badaki loves the way American Gods has been presenting sex overall. "I just loved how we weren't punishing characters for wanting it or exploring it or needing it," she said. "At the end of the day, it's only repression that leads back to that transgression."
Another scene that set headlines on fire was between Salim (Omid Abtahi), a Muslim immigrant to America, and a Djinn (Mousa Kraish). The two have sex and the Jinn has flaming eyes and it appears they are in space, all visual cues to the transcendence of the experience. But just focusing on the explicitness of the sex misses the vital parts of what makes Salim's story beautiful. The scenes before it, where Salim spends the whole day waiting in an office for a meeting that never happens, and when he confesses to the Jinn how hated he is by the family who got him the job, are equally important, too. It makes the connection Salim makes during his sex with the Jinn mean so much more. And the sex itself feel so much more meaningful, but for the character and the audience, because Salim is finally getting something he deserves from someone who cares about him.
"There's something watching that—the first few times, I got numb to it after a while—but the first few times I teared up too because I was just thinking about all of the gay men who have this strange, stunted expression of their sexuality because of the overwhelming shame that they are forced to feel culturally," said Fuller, who is gay. Interestingly, the actors playing the parts were not, which meant talking them through the scene a great deal to get it right.
Fuller had nothing but praise for the actors. "Omid talked very openly about being a straight guy who knows gay people in the Middle East who are very much like Salim and he has great empathy for them," he said. "We were putting two straight guys in that sexual situation and we were very upfront that we wanted this to be explicit. We wanted this to be a sex-positive experience, not only for the audience but for the characters. And both of them were such enlightened beings talking about how they wanted to represent even though they were representing themselves."
The sex was still about the characters, and it means something to the characters beyond just a mere hotel hook-up. "Salim is arguably, actually, the only traditionally religious person we have on the show. He is a practicing and believing Muslim," said Green. "And what I got after watching it many times, and it was only after we started seeing his later scenes, that I realized that this is a character who would attribute his encounter with the Djinn as a gift from his god. So that it would be, in a way, a reward for worship and a life-affirming, life-changing reaction."
Fuller agreed. "To put Salim, as a guy whose only sexual expression was probably back-alley blowjobs, into a position where he is making love to a being of fire that is worthy of his worship and mythological interest, was taking something that could potentially just be pornographic and translating it through a spiritual prism that gave it and Salim a beautiful and happy sexual expression that was redefining for his being," he said.
Fuller also sees Salim as a symbol of the lack of sexual repression he wants this show to help stand for. "That was our wish fulfillment for people in countries where there are death camps for homosexuals. Or there are death sentences for homosexuals," Fuller explained. "And the absurdity of something as beautiful as a sexual connection being perverted into something that is ugly and sinful, so we wanted to make sure that in that sex scene, that it was in your face, that we were challenging the audience and making it so aesthetically beautiful that it was hard to deny what was happening between this man and a demigod."
This past weekend's episode focused on the history of Laura (Emily Browning), the eventual wife of Shadow (Ricky Whittle). We see their first meeting, where Laura goes home with Shadow. While they are attracted to each other, there is still something... off about the first time they have sex.
"That originally was just written as, you know, we have to progress the story quickly, we have to see her bring him home, and we want to see the fact that Laura—there's nothing prudish about her," explained Browning. "She's very open. And we actually discussed that scene on the day for longer than we shot it, with Craig Zobel the director of episode four." She and Whittle re-choreographed the whole sex scene on the day in order to show that, from the beginning, the two characters have very different—and incompatible—ideas about each other.
"We said, 'How about if Shadow is really sort of sensual and gentle with her, and you can really see it's just not what she wants, and so she kind of slaps him a few times to try and get something else out of him?'" said Browning. "That first sex scene, she's essentially saying 'be rough. That's what I want you to do. I know that you're a gentle guy and you're respectful, but I'm saying that's what I want.'"
Sex is a large part of how we examine Laura's relationships. After the first sex scene where she goads Shadow into giving her what she wants, we also see the two together after they're married. Browning continued: "You cut to a later sex scene with them and again, he's just being gentle and you see her bored. And I like that idea that maybe he wasn't so perfect. Maybe he was being his idea of a perfect man, but he wasn't being Laura's idea of that. That's not what she wanted." These sex scenes, complicated by Laura's need for excitement and the resulting boredom, help explain why Laura would ask Shadow to rob the casino for her and why Shadow would agree. Which is how he ends up in jail, to protect her.
Contrast that sex with the affair Laura has with Robbie (Dane Cook). "That moment when she's with Robbie and she, like, pushes his hip down, that was a proud moment for me," said Browning, very excitedly. "Even though she's doing something horrible, it's like 'Look, my husband's in prison. You are not threatening in any way to me. You are already here. So, this is a transaction between us.' And I think you so rarely get to see that." Laura isn't a good person, but she knows what she wants, sexually, and here she gets what she wants. It doesn't make her affair okay, but it does deepen Browning's character, letting us know more about her.
Browning also ended up echoing the same sentiment Green had said earlier, in an entirely separate interview. "I felt like all of the sex scenes were necessary points in the story."
It's important that the actors on American Gods feel the same way as the writers. That they all think the sex scenes they're participating in, along with the accompanying nudity, means something more than exploitation or titillation. It means something that sex isn't the defining feature of American Gods, but isn't also removed or shied away from.
American Gods should be the blueprint for any show including sex. For example, while I love Outlander, season one's constant threat of sexual violence became exhausting to the point where the parts of the story that did merit explicit scenes became a bit lost. And, again, the makers of Game of Thrones have become infamous for throwing a bit of sex n' nudity on the screen if they're worried the audience is getting bored.
It's also important to note that all of American Gods' sex has, thus far, not included rape, a horrible trope that far too many series casually use to create drama. On American Gods, sex has been transcendent, boring, a form of worship, and even a "transaction," the show has happily never stooped to this sort of storytelling.
Everyone should be paying attention to American Gods and taking notes. Everyone should be having conversations with their actors like the ones had with Omid Abtahi and Mousa Kraish. Everyone should listen when an actress thinks there's something missing from a scene, like what happened when Browning spoke up. Everyone should feel like Badaki does, about how people should not be punished for their different needs.
When there have been complaints about sex in TV, and there certainly will be more in the future, this series is the perfect guide to how it should be addressed. Because American Gods is smarter about sex than anything we've ever seen on-screen.
Get Your First Look at Mr. World, American Gods' Creepy Villain-in-Chief
The American Gods TV Series Fixes One of the Book's Biggest Problems
American Gods Examines the Hidden Cost of Immigrating to the United States
Katharine is the former managing editor of io9.
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Best Food Altamonte Springs
Greek cooking has a long history and is known for its wide scope of dishes, from delicate flame-broiled meats and lively plates of mixed greens to new fish and sweet baked goods. As the southernmost country in Europe, the territory Greece and the islands by and large experience a Mediterranean environment ideal for cultivating and viticulture.
Moreover, its situation in the Aegean has given direct admittance to new fish throughout the previous 10,000 years. Conventional Greek food is portrayed by excellent fixings, new spices, and carefully hidden family plans. Food Altamonte Springs gastronomy is one of the best and balance of the world's exemplary cooking styles – a foodie's paradise.
Conventional Foods for Holidays and Special Occasions
The Greek Orthodox Church is a significant organization in Greece, and it is assessed that more than 90% of the country's populace has a place with this confidence. Most Greeks will cling to the dietary prerequisites of significant strict dining experience days and Fridays during Lent that disallows meat and cheddar. Easter Sunday is the main day in the Greek Orthodox confidence. After serious faith gatherings on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday is a bubbly day of eating and celebrating. Run of the mill Greek Easter food sources incorporate tsoureki (sweet bread) and Taranaki (spit-broiled sheep).
We have most likely that your gastronomic undertakings in Greece will leave you more than fulfilled. Every one of the pictures in this post, except for one, was of dinners we ate during our movements all through Greece. Throughout the mid-year of 2013, we visited Athens, Peloponnese, Rhodes, Kos, Kalymnos, and Santorini. As should be obvious, we examined a touch of everything, and we urge you to do likewise! If all else fails, ask local people for the spots they suggest. Crush some lemon squeezed on it, request a pitcher of basic wine, and appreciate!
Regularly alluded to as "Greek ketchup," this is a typical meze, side dish, and plunging sauce made with plain Greek yogurt, garlic, cucumber, salt, lemon juice and dill. Converts into "town serving of mixed greens," primary parts are tomatoes, cucumbers, feta cheddar, and olive oil, however numerous cafés will add their own fixings, for example, ringer peppers, olives, and onions.
Greek Salads & Desserts
Greeks love their meat, yet they additionally comprehend the estimation of an even dinner. No conventional Greek supper is finished without an enormous, lively plate of mixed greens. The most exemplary Greek serving of mixed greens is known as the "xoriatiki Salata "or town plate of mixed greens. This serving of mixed greens typically contains tomatoes, cucumbers, feta cheddar, onions, oregano, and olive oil. Albeit the town plate of mixed greens is for the most part the go-to decision, Greece has unending vegan well-disposed alternatives.
A conventional Greek dinner will end with a treat to purge the sense of taste. Many are basic, however, others are work escalated and require a specific level of ability, particularly when working with critical phyllo batter. Greek bread kitchens each have their strictly confidential mysteries for getting ready wanton baked goods and exemplary Greek desserts. Pastries are typically sold by weight and delightfully bundled in cardboard takeaway boxes. Tip: in case you're welcome to somebody's home for supper and you need to establish a decent connection, appear with a crate of new pastry shop desserts.
Exemplary Ingredients & Meze (Appetizers and Shared Starters)
Center fixings exemplary and conventional Greek food sources incorporate olive oil, spices (oregano, rosemary, and thyme are the most widely recognized), tomatoes, cheddar, hamburger, pork, sheep, fish, shrimp, and wine. Other Greek strengths incorporate yogurt, nectar, olives, cheddar, hotdog, baklava, and olive oil. The following are a portion of the new fish items you can discover in places like the Athens Central Market.
Meze is another way to say "mezedes" and these are basically little shared plates like tapas in Spain and the meze of Cyprus. A spread of meze can be requested as starters, or combined with wine or ouzo and eaten as an easygoing dinner. Meze are by and large a way to drink with a full stomach and to set you up for the remainder of the supper to come. Meze are generally joined by bread for plunging and served on little plates. The following are a couple of exemplary meze dishes.
Customary Greek Foods & Local Specialties
At the point when the meze bit of the dinner is done, the principal courses will carry out. Contingent upon where you are in Greece, conventional dishes can go from new got mullet and octopus to simmered pork and barbecued sheep cleaves. While the islands appreciate admittance to new fish consistently, northern Greeks incorporate more red meat and pork into their eating regimen. Most great cafés and taverns will join occasional fixings into their menus to guarantee that clients are getting the freshest food conceivable.
Each city, town, town, and island in Greece has its own culinary claims to fame. Local dishes are maybe the most ideal approach to taste the nearby fixings. Santorini, specifically, fuses one-of-a-kind nearby items like cherry tomatoes, fava beans, and the assertion grape, into its gastronomy.


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Il Governo Plenković I è stato il 14º governo della Repubblica Croata. Ha ottenuto la fiducia al Parlamento croato la sera del 19 ottobre 2016, con 91 voti favorevoli, 45 contrari e 3 astenuti (139 presenti da 151 deputati eletti). La stessa sera Plenković e suoi ministri hanno prestato il giuramento davanti al Parlamento. Da quel giorno Andrej Plenković ha ricoperto così il ruolo di Primo Ministro (Presidente del Governo).

Il Governo Plenković era formato da politici provenienti dall'Unione Democratica Croata (HDZ), dal Ponte delle Liste Indipendenti (Most) e da due ministri indipendenti.

Andrej Plenković ricevette dalla presidente della Repubblica Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović l'incarico di formare il nuovo governo il 10 ottobre 2016, dopo che il partito da lui guidato risultò il maggiormente votato alle elezioni politiche dell'11 settembre 2016.

Il Governo si è sciolto il 23 luglio 2020 ed è stato sostituito dal nuovo Governo presieduto sempre da Plenković.

Eventi
Il 27 aprile 2017 il Primo ministro ha rimosso tre ministri esponenti del Most, così terminando la coalizione HDZ-Most. Venerdì 28 aprile 2017 tutti quattro ministri del Most hanno rassegnato le proprie dimissioni. Dal 28 aprile 2017 al 9 giugno 2017 il Governo funzionava come il governo di minoranza dell'HDZ. Nuova coalizione di governo, composta dall'Unione Democratica Croata (HDZ) e dalla maggioranza del Partito Popolare Croato - Liberal Democratici (HNS), è formata l'8 giugno 2017 e nuovi ministri hanno ottenuto la fiducia al Parlamento il 9 giugno 2017 con 78 voti favorevoli e 46 contrari (124 presenti da 151 eletti). Il 12 giugno 2017 vice primo ministro e ministro degli affari esteri ed europei Davor Ivo Stier (HDZ), insoddisfatto della nuova coalizione di governo, ha rassegnato le dimissioni; il Parlamento ha confermato Marija Pejčinović Burić (HDZ) come nuova vice primo ministro e ministro degli affari esteri ed europei il 19 giugno 2017 (78 voti favorevoli, 35 contrari, 113 presenti). Il 14 maggio 2018 Martina Dalić (HDZ)
ha rassegnato le dimissioni come vice primo ministro e ministro dell'economia, imprenditoria ed artigianato (coinvolgimento nella scrittura del c.d. lex Agrokor - la legge Statale per il salvataggio dell'azienda privata Agrokor d.d. /Agrokor s.a./;
l'affaire Agrokor 2017-2018). Il 25 maggio 2018 il Parlamento ha confermato Darko Horvat (HDZ) come nuovo ministro dell'economia, imprenditoria ed artigianato (77 voti favorevoli, 11 contrari; 88 presenti) e Tomislav Tolušić (HDZ), ministro dell'agricoltura, come nuovo vice primo ministro (77 voti favorevoli, 8 contrari; 85 presenti).

L'attuale esecutivo (dal 9 giugno 2017 coalizione HDZ - HNS) gode dell'appoggio dei seguenti partiti presenti in Parlamento:
Unione Democratica Croata (HDZ);
Partito Popolare Croato - Liberal Democratici (HNS);
Partito Democristiano Croato (HDS);
Partito Social-Liberale Croato (HSLS);
Alleanza Democratica Croata di Slavonia e Barania (HDSSB);
Partito Popolare - Riformisti (Reformisti);
Bandić Milan 365 - Partito del Lavoro e della Solidarietà (BM 365);
Deputati rappresentanti delle minoranze nazionali/etniche: tre deputati del Partito Democratico Indipendente Serbo (SDSS), cinque deputati di altre minoranze ed alcuni deputati indipendenti.

Composizione del Governo

Nella tabella sottostante è indicata la composizione del 14º Governo della Repubblica di Croazia (Governo Plenković) dal 9 giugno 2017.

Note

Altri progetti

Plenković I


UCB has carried out active flight operations for NASA-funded astronomy and space science missions since the mid 1990s. The first mission was the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE), launched on June 7, 1992. Mission operations for EUVE were initially conducted at NASA/GSFC, and science operations at UCB. Outsourcing of full flight operations from GSFC to UCB began during the extended mission phase in April 1996, and was completed in March 1997 after a long period of parallel operations with a thorough verification of the UCB operations environment. This was a rather ground breaking achievement as it was the first time a university was entrusted with the responsibility to carry out full operations for a NASA mission. From this point onward EUVE was successfully operated from its dedicated mission control center at the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics (CEA) in downtown Berkeley for nearly four years until mission termination on January 31, 2001.
Meanwhile, science operations were also carried out at SSL for the Fast Auroral SnapshoT Explorer (FAST), a NASA SMEX mission launched in August 1996. One year later, SSL was awarded a contract for a second SMEX mission – the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI). This contract included all flight operations to be conducted by UCB from the moment of payload separation at launch. It also included the establishment of a local Berkeley Ground Station (BGS) to allow for spacecraft commanding and science data recovery.
Additionally, UCB proposed to NASA to transition flight operations for the extended mission phase of FAST from GSFC to SSL. For this purpose, a new multi-mission MOC/SOC was then established at SSL in 1998 to provide full flight operations support for both FAST and RHESSI. The latter launched in February 2002. The next mission supported by the MOC/SOC was the Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer (CHIPS) – a NASA UNEX mission, launched in January 2003.
A very significant step-up in expansion of the MOC/SOC and its capabilities, and in challenges for the operations team came in February 2007 with the launch of the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) – a NASA MIDEX mission involving five spacecraft called probes that were launched on a single Delta II launch vehicle. The five probes – THEMIS A-E – were subsequently maneuvered into synchronized, highly elliptical, nearly equatorial Earth orbits with periods of one, two, and four days to form conjunctions inside the Earth's magnetospheric tail.
For the extended mission phase of THEMIS, beginning in fall of 2009, the Project was split into two parts. THEMIS-Low was a continuation of the THEMIS mission with three of the five probes (THEMIS A, D & E) in one-day period orbits, but maneuvered into a closer formation at apogee. The other two probes (THEMIS B & C) were transferred from Earth to lunar orbits via low-energy transfer trajectories to start a new mission, called Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun (ARTEMIS).
To date the UCB operations team designed, planned, simulated and executed more than 760 thrust maneuvers across all five THEMIS/ARTEMIS spacecraft, including V maneuvers with magnitudes of 1 cm/s to 300 m/s, attitude precession and spin-rate control maneuvers. Maneuver calibration and fuel bookkeeping methods were significantly refined and improved over the course of the mission to meet the challenging requirements associated with maneuvering spacecraft that were not designed to leave Earth orbits, but were now to travel along sensitive translunar trajectories.
In late 2007 UCB/SSL was invited to provide all mission operations functions for a third SMEX mission, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) while Caltech as the PI institution manages the SOC. The UCB operations team worked closely with the spacecraft vendor during the spacecraft bus and observatory AI&T phase, and contributed an integrated system of ITOS workstations, as well as personnel support for development and configuration management of telemetry pages, STOL scripts, and command/telemetry dictionaries. UCB also provided ITOS workstations to Caltech to support instrument development.
Overall, the UCB team clocked 1,740 hours of on-console operations prior to launch. NuSTAR launched on June 13, 2012. Following launch and on-orbit commissioning, the MOC receives target pointing and exposure requests from the SOC, processes these and uplinks corresponding sequence tables to the observatory multiple times per week. UCB performs all network scheduling functions, as well as flight dynamics, Level-0 processing and engineering data trending and analysis functions for NuSTAR.
In April 2013, a second MIDEX mission, the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON), was awarded to UCB as the PI institution. Responsibility for implementing and operating the entire ICON Mission Operations System (MOS) resides within the Operations Group at UCB/SSL. The MOS consists of the MOC, the SOC, and the Science Data Center (SDC). ICON will be the eleventh NASA Explorer spacecraft operated from UCB/SSL.
UCB/SSL provides all flight dynamics and communications network scheduling functions for all of the supported missions in an integrated multi-mission environment. A summary of all missions supported by the MOC/SOC at UCB/SSL is given in the table below.


Actor and "Booze Traveler" host Jack Maxwell takes a selfie with Stone & Key Cellars owner Jason Harris, and a bottle of the local winery's rosè, at the Culinary Arts Institute of Montgomery County Community College.
Jack Maxwell is an actor and the host of Travel Channel's "Booze Traveler." He spoke at the Culinary Arts Institute of Montgomery County Community College in Towamencin Jan. 14.
Although his Italian could use some work, there's no mistaking the Italian heritage of the host of Travel Channel's show "Booze Traveler" because of the way he talks with his hands.
On Jan. 14 Jack Maxwell — who also acted in the TV shows "Beverly Hills 90210," "Lost," "24" and "Without a Trace" — visited the Culinary Arts Institute (CAI) of Montgomery County Community College in Towamencin, and talked about his culturally immersive globetrotting adventures on "Booze Traveler." There was the time he hung out with Maasai warriors and won the privilege of getting live cow's blood mixed in with his gourd of honey wine. "I left there beaming ... because it was an honor," the South Boston native said, explaining that cows were a limited resource there. "It just fascinated me; not just because they were different, just reaching them and them reaching me."
There was also the time Maxwell was partying with soccer fans in Turkey when he was presented with a kind of beef he didn't recognize. At that time, he hadn't eaten red meat in 20 years. "It's not just your body you want to be healthy — you gotta take care of your soul," he said, justifying stepping outside his comfort zone and trying the meat.
An energetic Maxwell stood in front of cooking stations at the CAI and delivered a sermon on how travel opens up a person's world. "Your world is only as big or small as you want it to be," he said.
Among his travel tips: Don't do too much too fast; be a good guest; instead of focusing on the same landmarks that the other tourists do, make time to talk to the people that live there; and go off the beaten path. "Go to someone who's sitting on a porch milking a goat," he told one member in the audience that was going on a cruise to Greece and Italy.
When asked how he handled a language barrier, Maxwell said it's always benefited him to pick up on a few words or phrases and use them. "Make sure they know you don't speak their language," he said, recommending installing a translator app on your phone.
Maxwell's talk coincided with an announcement by MCCC of an international study program for CAI students through the Marco Polo Institute in Italy. MCCC president Dr. Kevin Pollock said it's "unlike anything we've had at the college."
Gaetan Giannini, MCCC's dean of business and entrepreneurial initiatives, predicted that the international study option would be available in the fall 2019 semester for culinary students in the "final third" of their course load.
The proposed program will provide students with potentially career-changing opportunities to prepare artisanal Italian cuisine, while connecting with that country's people and the culture — something Maxwell is passionate about.
Satisfying his curiosity about other places through their food and beverages on "Booze Traveler," Maxwell mingled, snacked and had a chance to sample wine from the Montgomery Township-based Stone & Key Cellars and liquors from Lansdale's Boardroom Spirits at a post-event reception. Ryan Weiss of Round Guys Brewing Co. presented him with a bottle of Last Waltz, a special, small-batch variety of beer the Lansdale craft brewer only makes once a year.


To end the boredom and routine work of classroom environment, Aryans Group of Colleges organized a Modeling competition in the college campus situated on Chandigarh-Patiala Highway, near Chandigarh. Many students from B.Tech, MBA, BBA, BCA, B.Ed, BA, B.Com, Polytechnic, and Nursing participated in the competition.
Dr. Anshu Kataria, Chairman, Aryans Group congratulated all the winners of Mr. & Ms. Aryans contest. "Ms. Nitu shukla" was selected as "Ms. Aryans" and "Mr. Manish" was selected as "Mr. Aryans", "Ms. Sonali Roy" was selected as "Best Walk", "Ms. Wincy Mathew" was selected as "Best Dress", "Ms. Samiksha" was selected as "Beautiful Smile", "Mr. Khan Zahoor" was selected as "Best Personality" and in the last "Ms. Photogenic" was "Ms. Sonali Kasrija".
Dr. Parveen Kataria, Director General, Aryans Group, congratulated all the winners and said that co-curricular activities provide recreations which are conducive to mental, emotional and moral health.
She further said that the Group would always welcome such gestures of the students and the Group would encourage the students to organize such events more frequently. Dr. Kataria further said that co-curricular activities help in harmonious development of students.
This entry was posted in CULTURAL and tagged Mr. Aryans, Ms. Aryans. Bookmark the permalink.


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Home Community Insights Once Again, Nigerian Government Subsidizes Electricity
Once Again, Nigerian Government Subsidizes Electricity
October 13, 2020 | by	Samuel Nwite | 0
On September 28, the Federal Government of Nigeria averted proposed nationwide strike by Organized Labour, over the increment of petrol pump price and electricity tariff, by promising to, within two weeks, implement effective measures that will cushion the effects of the price hike.
As part of the agreement, the Federal Government was given two weeks by a committee made up of stakeholders and representatives from both the government and Organized Labour, to set the ball rolling.
On Monday, the Federal Government announced that, as part of its efforts to implement measures that will ease the strains of the price hike, it will work out modalities to ensure that customers overcharged by the eleven electricity Distribution Companies (DisCos), as a result of the electricity tariff hike will be fully refunded.
Earlier in September, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), increased electricity tariff from N30.23 per kilowatt-hour to N62.33 per kwh. As a result of the tariff increment, five distinctive bands (A-E) were created to reflect the various service levels and minimum hours of power supply.
Customers were to be allotted electricity supply according to the hours of electricity they consume in their respective Bands. Customers in [Band A] are to enjoy a daily minimum supply of 20 hours, those in [Band B] minimum of 16 hours, [Band C] will have minimum of 12 hours, [Band E] minimum of 8 hours, and those in [Band D], a minimum of 4 hours daily electricity supply.
According to NERC, the increased tariff will only apply to customers in Bands A, B and C, while D and E remain frozen until they are allotted more hours.
And as part of efforts to improve service delivery in the power sector, the Special Adviser to the president on Infrastructure, Ahmed Rufai Zakaria, said about six million Nigerian households will be metered. He added that the tariff relief plan will be implemented this week to uphold the agreement between Organized Labour and the Federal Government.
"The implementation of the above tariff reliefs will be executed within this week as the suspension of the Service-Based Tariff is removed; the distribution of six million free meters to Nigerians and refunds for any customer overcharged by the DisCos will be implemented.
"We completed our work with Labour on electricity tariffs. The federal government will use Value Added Tax, VAT proceeds from the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI), to reduce the September increases by 10 percent to 31 percent for bands A to C, Band D and will remain frozen," he said.
However, the tariff subsidy is expected to last for three months, which leaves gaps in the agreement between Labour and the Federal Government, and some unanswered questions.
The agreement entails that the Federal government, among other things, will roll out measures, including tax waiver on the minimum wage and intervention fund to reduce the burden of the petroleum pump price and electricity tariff hike.
"A specific amount is to be unveiled by the Federal Government in two weeks' time, which will be isolated from the Economic Sustainability Programme Intervention Fund that can be accessed by Nigerian Workers with subsequent provision for 240,000 under the auspices of NLC and TUC," said the Minister of Labour and Employment.
While the move offers reprieve to Nigerians on electricity, fuel price hike remains unaddressed as it involves multifaceted mechanisms that the government is struggling to develop.
Filed in: Community Insights
Trump Pardoned Anthony Levandowsk …by Ndubuisi Ekekwe11 mins ago


Is there a chance the XP table gets replaced with the revised table from the website?
The revised XP table on the website is the one we suggest using. At some point we will issue a new printing with the revisions included in both the PDF and the Print edition.
I'm looking at the table of contents on the thumbnail side of my PDF viewer, and I notice it looks... like it needs a serious reorganizing.
And there is no tab for the table of contents of the book... which is annoying since I find I have to go back there to find anything.
The standard resolution PDF file from the latest update (Wandering_Heroes_of_Ogre_Gate_PDF-3.pdf) seems to be broken and unreadable. The lower resolution version opens without any problems.
Okay. Let me look into that. Thanks.
Hi. I just tried downloading it on my end and it opens and reads okay. Can you try downloading it one more time and see if it works on a fresh download (also what type of reader are you using?). Let me know if it keeps happening.
After about a dozen attempts on two different computers and a tablet, I was finally able to get a valid download of the file from RPGNow.
Sorry to hear it took so many downloads. Does the file look okay when you open it? I spoke with RPGnow, and they said there was nothing wrong with the file. They suggested reporting this problem to customer service if it occurs again.
500 pages is a beast, but 238 MB for a pdf is absolutely massive. What's the difference between the standard version and the small version?
The small file is lower resolution, which brings the size down to about 40 megs or so, but reduces the quality of the images.
I just sent the files for the print version LS. We should have a print edition as soon as the proof can be checked.
Holy! That's a lot of Wuxia moves. I want to order the physical book!
Will you be offering s POD version of this? Thanks!
We hope to have a print version of the game out in about a month or two. There will be a link to the sales page on our website.


HWH is providing project management services for the Cherokee Nation on the new $200 million regional health center funded in part by a Indian Health Services grant in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. This monumental healthcare project is now in the final design stages and includes over 240 exam rooms. An "on stage/off stage" circulation path was created throughout the facility with the overall approach to maximize daylight and views, and minimize wayfinding issues for patients and families.


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Unicorn Media Offers Live Video Ad Insertion With Unicorn OnceLIVE
Anthony Ha @anthonyha / 10 years
Unicorn Media is launching a new product today that it says could become a key ingredient in helping video publishers make money from live content.
The company demonstrated Unicorn OnceLIVE for me last week. I watched a video of live TV sports coverage on my iPad, then it cut away to a short commercial break. On the surface, nothing too unusual, but founder and CEO Bill Rinehart says that's kind of the idea — to deliver a "television-like experience" in an online environment.
At the same time, he said that if I'd been watching a normal video live stream, I'd probably just see the same ads that were being shown on TV — except the network isn't getting paid for the online eyeballs, turning the live broadcast into a "cost center" rather than a moneymaker. Unicorn OnceLIVE should turn that around, allowing publishers to strip out the TV ads and replace them with videos from third-party ad networks and their own in-house ad services, with different ads targeted to different users. In other words, publishers should be able to monetize live video just like any other type of video.
Unicorn says its ads work on iPhones, iPads, Androids, BlackBerry devices, Roku, Boxee, TiVO, game consoles and smart TVs. The ads are delivered entirely on the server-side, with no plugins or software required for the viewer.
Rinehart says the company focuses on working with large media businesses. In fact, Anthony Baker, principal program manager of the video platform at MSNBC, says Unicorn has allowed MSNBC to support video ads on 27 different apps — in part because, as MSNBC builds new apps, it doesn't have to spend as many development resources on the ad side. Baker's team is using Unicorn's video-on-demand ad product right now, but he says he's also "very interested" in OnceLIVE.


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HOOKED ON EAST TEXAS: Crappie fishing on Lake Palestine
New Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock sworn in
Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock - both history-making candidates - took their oaths of office Wednesday.
Author: Addie Haney
Published: 9:12 PM CST January 19, 2021
Updated: 6:43 PM CST January 20, 2021
WASHINGTON — After a lengthy journey from primary to general election to runoff, Georgia's newest U.S. Senators were finally sworn in. It was a moment layered with historic significance.
Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock - both history-making candidates - took their oaths of office Wednesday, Jan. 20 just before 5 p.m. Their swearing ins took place roughly 24 hours after Georgia certified their wins and the same day President Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States.
Ossoff becomes Georgia's first Jewish senator and the youngest current U.S. senator. The 33-year-old was escorted into the Senate by New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker before taking his oath on Hebrew scripture that belonged to Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, according to his team. Rothschild served as rabbi to the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, also known as The Temple, and was an ally and friend to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the civil rights era.
At the same time, the current pastor of King's historic church, Rev. Raphael Warnock, was sworn in. Warnock, who still leads Ebenezer Baptist Church, becomes Georgia's first-ever Black U.S. Senator - and only the 11th in the nation.
Re-watch the moment the two senators took their oaths below.
Their oaths - along with the California senator appointed to fill Vice President Kamala Harris' seat - were administered by Harris, who broke barriers herself by becoming the first woman of Black and South Asian heritage to hold the office.
RELATED: Outgoing Sen. Kelly Loeffler delivers farewell speech
Their wins in the January runoff election came after another history-making win by Biden in the state of Georgia. It was the first time a Democrat carried the state in a presidential election since 1992.
What is the schedule for Joe Biden's inauguration?
Inauguration Day 2021: Who is performing at Biden's inauguration?
What are the oaths of office for presidents and vice presidents?
Smith County seeing an increase in mail-ballot applications along some with rejections