text:
[Federal Register: March 25, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 58)]
[Notices]
[Page 15363-15364]
From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:fr25mr04-86]
[[Page 15363]]
Preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement for Issuance of
an Incidental Take Permit Associated With a Habitat Conservation Plan
for Pacific Gas & Electric Company's Operation and Maintenance
Activities in the San Joaquin Valley, California
AGENCY: Fish and Wildlife Service, Interior.
ACTION: Notice of intent.
SUMMARY: Pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the
Fish and Wildlife Service (we, the Service) advises the public that we
intend to gather information necessary to prepare, in coordination with
the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG), and Pacific Gas &
Electric Company (PG&E), a joint Environmental Impact Statement/
Environmental Impact Report (EIS/EIR) on the PG&E San Joaquin Valley
Operation and Maintenance Habitat Conservation Plan (Plan). The Plan is
being prepared under section 10(a)(1)(B) of the Federal Endangered
Species Act of 1973, as amended, (Act). PG&E intends to request a
permit for 31 species federally listed as threatened or endangered and
36 unlisted species that may become listed during the term of the
permit. The permit is needed to authorize take of listed species that
could occur as a result of implementation activities covered under the
Plan.
The Service provides this notice to: (1) Describe the proposed
action and possible alternatives; (2) advise other Federal and State
agencies, affected Tribes, and the public of our intent to prepare an
EIS/EIR; (3) announce the initiation of a public scoping period; and
(4) obtain suggestions and information on the scope of issues and
alternatives to be included in the EIS/EIR.
DATES: Public meetings will be held on: Tuesday, April 6, 2004, from 4
PM to 7 PM, and on Wednesday, April 7, 2004, from 4 PM to 7 PM. Written
comments should be received on or before April 26, 2004.
ADDRESSES: The public meeting on Tuesday, April 6, 2004 will be held at
Siefert Community Center, Room 2, 128 West Benjamin Holt drive,
Stockton, CA, (209) 937-7350, and the public meeting on Wednesday,
April 7, 2004 will be held at Mosqueda Community Center, Room 6, 4670
East Butler Avenue, Fresno, CA (559) 621-6600. Information, written
comments, or questions related to the preparation of the EIS/EIR and
NEPA process should be submitted to Lori Rinek, Chief, Conservation
Planning and Recovery Division, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
Sacramento Fish and Wildlife Office, 2800 Cottage Way, W-2605,
Sacramento, California 95825; FAX (916) 414-6713.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Craig Aubrey, Fish and Wildlife
Biologist, or Lori Rinek, Chief, Conservation Planning and Recovery
Division at the Sacramento Fish and Wildlife Office at (916) 414-6600.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:
Persons needing reasonable accommodations in order to attend and
participate in the public meeting should contact Lori Rinek at (916)
414-6600 as soon as possible. In order to allow sufficient time to
process requests, please call no later than one week before the public
meeting. Information regarding this proposed action is available in
alternative formats upon request.
Section 9 of the Act and Federal regulations prohibit the ``take''
of a fish and wildlife species listed as endangered or threatened.
Under the Act, the following activities are defined as take: harass,
harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture or collect listed
animal species, or attempt to engage in such conduct (16 U.S.C. 1538).
However, under section 10(a) of the Act, we may issue permits to
authorize ``incidental take'' of listed species. ``Incidental take'' is
defined by the Act as take that is incidental to, and not the purpose
of, carrying out an otherwise lawful activity. Regulations governing
permits for threatened species and endangered species, respectively,
are at 50 CFR 17.32 and 50 CFR 17.22.
Take of listed plant species is not prohibited under the Act and
cannot be authorized under a section 10 permit. We propose to include
plant species on the permit in recognition of the conservation benefits
provided for them under the Plan. These species would also receive no
surprises assurances under the Service's ``No Surprises'' regulation
(63 FR 8859).
Currently, PG&E intends to request a permit for 67 species (covered
species) under the Plan: 31 listed and 36 unlisted species. These
include the federally listed endangered vernal pool fairy shrimp
(Branchinecta lynchi), vernal pool tadpole shrimp (Lepidurus packardi),
blunt-nosed leopard lizard (Gambelia sila), Tipton kangaroo rat
(Dipodomys nitratoides nitratoides), giant kangaroo rat (Dipodomys
ingens), Buena Vista Lake shrew (Sorex ornatus relictus), riparian
woodrat (Neotoma fuscipes riparia), riparian brush rabbit (Sylvilagus
bachmani riparius), San Joaquin kit fox (Vulpes macrotis mutica),
large-flowered fiddleneck (Amsinckia grandiflora), California
jewelflower (Caulanthus californicus), palmate-bracted bird's beak
(Cordylanthus palmatus), Kern mallow (Eremalche kernensis), San Joaquin
woolly-threads (Monolopia congdonii), Bakersfield cactus (Opuntia
basilaris var. treleasei), hairy orcutt grass (Orcuttia pilosa),
Hartweg's golden sunburst (Pseudobahia bahiifolia), Greene's tuctoria
(Tuctoria greenei), Keck's checkermallow (Sidalcea keckii), and the
threatened valley elderberry longhorn beetle (Desmocerus californicus
dimorphus), California red-legged frog (Rana aurora draytonii), giant
garter snake (Thamnophis gigas), bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus),
mariposa pussypaws (Calyptridium pulchellum), succulent owl's clover
(Castilleja campestris ssp. succulenta), Hoover's spurge (Chamaesyce
hooveri), Hoover's erastrium (Erastrium hooverii), Springville clarkia
(Clarkia springvillensis), Colusa grass (Neostapfia colusana), San
Joaquin Valley orcutt grass (Orcuttia inaequalis), San Joaquin adobe
sunburst (Pseudobahia peirsonii), and their habitats.
The 36 unlisted species proposed to be covered under the Plan
include: midvalley fairy shrimp (Branchinecta mesovallensis),
California tiger salamander (Ambystoma californiense), limestone
salamander (Hydromantes brunus), California black rail (Lateralis
jamaicensis coturniculus), Swainson's hawk (Buteo swainsoni), white-
tailed kite (Elanus caerules), golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos),
greater sandhill crane (Grus canadensis tabida), western burrowing owl
(Athene cunicularia hypugaea), bank swallow (Riparia riparia),
tricolored blackbird (Agelaius tricolor), San Joaquin antelope squirrel
(Ammospermophilus nelsoni), lesser saltscale (Atriplex minuscula),
Bakersfield smallscale (Atriplex tularensis), big tarplant
(Blepharizonia plumosa spp. plumosa), tree-anemone (Carpenteria
californica), slough thistle (Cirsium crassicaule), Mariposa clarkia
(Clarkia biloba ssp. australis), Merced clarkia (Clarkia lingulata),
Vasek's clarkia (Clarkia tembloriensis ssp. calientensis), hispid
bird's-beak (Cordylanthus mollis ssp. Hispidus), Congdon's woolly
sunflower (Eriophyllum congdonii), delta button-
celery (Eryngium racemosum), striped adobe-lily (= Greenhorn)
(Fritillaria striata), Bogg's Lake hedge-hyssop (Gratiola
heterosepala), pale-yellow layia (Layia heterotricha), Comanche layia
(Layia leucopappa), legenere (Legenere limosa), Congdon's lewisia
(Lewisia congdonii), Mason's lilaeopsis (Lilaeopsis masonii), Mariposa
lupine (Lupinus citrinus var. deflexus), showy madia (Madia radiata),
Hall's bush mallow (Malacothamnus hallii), pincushion navarretia
(Navarretia myersii spp. myersii), oil neststraw (Stylocline
citroleum), and Jared's pepper grass (Lepidium jaredii ssp. jaredii).
Species may be added or deleted during the course of Plan development
based on further analysis, new information, agency consultation, and
public comment.
The Plan area includes the network of PG&E facilities within
approximately 12,094,000 acres of the San Joaquin Valley. The Plan area
comprises portions of nine counties: San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced,
Fresno, Kings, Kern, Mariposa, Madera, and Tulare. The boundaries of
the Plan area are generally defined by the north and eastern boundaries
of San Joaquin and Stanislaus County lines, until reaching Mariposa
County where it follows the 3,000-foot elevation contour or Federal
lands, whichever is lower, south along the western Sierra Nevada
foothills. On the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, the plan
boundary follows the western boundary of San Joaquin, Stanislaus,
Merced, Fresno, Kings, and Kern Counties. The southern limit of the
plan area boundary is the 3,000-foot elevation contour near the Kern
County line.
Implementation activities that may be covered under the Plan
include activities associated with the operation, maintenance, and
minor construction of PG&E's gas and electric transmission and
distribution system as mandated for public safety by the California
Public Utilities Commission, the California Energy Commission, and the
Department of Transportation. More specifically, these activities may
include: gas pipeline protection, recoating, repair and replacement;
electric line protection, repair, reconductering, and replacement;
electric pole repair/replacement; vegetation management to maintain
clearances around facilities; and minor new gas and electric
extensions. Under the Plan, the effects on covered species of the
covered activities are expected to be minimized and mitigated through
participation in a conservation program, which will be fully described
in the Plan. This conservation program would focus on providing long-
term protection of covered species by protecting biological communities
in the Plan area.
Components of this conservation program are now under consideration
by the Service and PG&E. These components will likely include:
avoidance and minimization measures, monitoring, adaptive management,
and mitigation measures consisting of preservation, restoration and
enhancement of habitat.
Environmental Impact Statement/Environmental Impact Report
PG&E and the Service have selected Jones & Stokes to prepare the
Draft EIS/EIR. The joint document will be prepared in compliance with
NEPA and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Although
Jones & Stokes will prepare the EIS/EIR, the Service will be
responsible for the scope and content of the document for NEPA
purposes, and DFG will be responsible for the scope and content of the
CEQA document, as the state lead agency pursuant to CEQA and the
permitting entity pursuant to the California Endangered Species Act and
Fish and Game Code 2081.
The EIS/EIR will consider the proposed action (i.e., the issuance
of a Section 10(a)(1)(B) permit under the Act), and a reasonable range
of alternatives. A detailed description of the proposed action and
alternatives will be included in the EIS/EIR. It is anticipated that
several alternatives will be developed, which may vary by the level of
conservation, impacts caused by the proposed activities, permit area,
covered species, or a combination of these factors. Additionally, a No
Action alternative will be considered. Under the No Action alternative,
the Service would not issue a section 10(a)(1)(B) permit.
The EIS/EIR will also identify potentially significant impacts on
biological resources, land use, air quality, water quality, mineral
resources, water resources, economics, and other environmental issues
that could occur directly or indirectly with implementation of the
proposed action and alternatives. For all potentially significant
impacts, the EIS/EIR will identify mitigation measures where feasible
to reduce these impacts to a level below significance.
Environmental review of the EIS/EIR will be conducted in accordance
with the requirements of NEPA (42 U.S.C. 4321 et seq.), its
implementing regulations (40 CFR 1500-1508), other applicable
regulations, and Service procedures for compliance with those
regulations. This notice is being furnished in accordance with 40 CFR
1501.7 of NEPA to obtain suggestions and information from other
agencies and the public on the scope of issues and alternatives to be
addressed in the EIS/EIR. The primary purpose of the scoping process is
to identify important issues raised by the public, related to the
proposed action. Written comments from interested parties are invited
to ensure that the full range of issues related to the permit request
are identified. While written comments are encouraged, we will accept
both written and oral comments at the public meeting. In addition, you
may submit written comments by mail or facsimile transmission (see
ADDRESSES). All comments received, including names and addresses, will
become part of the official administrative record and may be made
available to the public.
Dated: March 17, 2004.
Ken McDermond,
Deputy Manager, Region 1, California/Nevada Operations Office,
Sacramento, California.
[FR Doc. 04-6664 Filed 3-24-04; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4310-55-P


Immigration Partnership Winnipeg (IPW) helps create a community that has a strong desire and capacity to receive newcomers and make them feel at home.
IPW is a Local Immigration Partnership (LIP). LIPs are multi-sectoral collectives that bring a new form of collaboration, at the community-level, to newcomer settlement and integration. They are designed to establish, facilitate and implement a community-wide strategy for improving the settlement and integration of immigrants.


text:
Shane Bieber: Not Your Everyday Walk-On
May 14, 2015 at 5:02 am by Sarah Stigers
Shane Bieber launches a fastball. Stephen Manga/Daily Nexus
Some people say you cannot help being romantic about baseball. It's a part of a greater American tradition, it fills memories from our childhood and can hold a community together. Baseball is the great equalizer, and the game is a part of many sports fans' lives.
But for some, the game is not just a part, but a large part of life. Like those on the UCSB baseball team, players spend hours training, practicing and playing their entire lives to reach high school, college, minors, then pro ball.
Gaucho sophomore right-handed pitcher Shane Bieber is among these players. Bieber, the usual Sunday starter for the Gauchos squad, started playing baseball as a young boy, encouraged by his father. Bieber grew up as an Angels fan.
While he played basketball and football along with baseball in his youth and through high school, a sophomore year wrist injury he encountered while playing football was the turning point in his full focus on baseball at Laguna Hills High School.
"Football was always a secondary sport for me," Bieber said. "When I broke my wrist and had to get surgery, I realized that once I rehabbed and got back to 100 percent health, it was time to focus on baseball, looking toward the future."
In his first year playing for UCSB, Bieber started 11 times over the course of the season, earning a 3.76 earned run average with a 3-4 record. His first win in Gaucho blue came in his second appearance after seven shutout innings against Princeton.
"I've always enjoyed pitching the most because you are able to control the game one pitch at a time," Bieber said. "It feels like you have the biggest impact on the games that you pitched."
This year, UCSB pitching staff's success is a testament to its starters and the hard work they put in weekly to become ranked No. 3 for lowest collective ERA among all pitching staffs in the NCAA.
This season, Bieber has thrown 95 innings in his 13 appearances and currently holds a 7-2 record. Bieber is throwing for a 2.08 ERA in the season and 1.80 in conference.
"When people ask me what I was thinking during some of my better outings, I have a hard time coming up with an answer, because I guess when you're in the zone, you don't think that much," Bieber said. "If I don't remember what I was thinking, it was a good day. I just try to trust my stuff and throw to [senior catcher Campbell Wear] and let the guys get themselves out."
Bieber currently falls in the top 10 of multiple conference leaderboards. His seven wins put him tied for fourth in overall wins this season with two other Gaucho starters. His 2.08 season ERA is sixth-best in the conference and his 79 strikeouts tie him at fourth-most strikeouts in the conference with UCSB's junior lefty Justin Jacome.
"This year is awesome. The guys are great, the camaraderie is high and the morale is pretty high, too," Bieber said. "As far as the success goes, we have so much talent and I think we can go a long way."
With still another year left on the Gauchos, Bieber will be returning for another chance to play with a team just as successful as this year's team.
"I'm not sure what's next. I'd like to go pro, but it's difficult, like everyone knows. I'm just trying to take it one step at a time," Bieber said. "After this year, I'll be playing summer ball in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. But I'm looking forward to next year and working on Gaucho baseball."
A version of this article appeared on page 10 of May 14, 2015's print edition of the Daily Nexus.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Will Federer's downward slide lead to his retirement? Follow @merinews
Roger Federer ranks as one of the best players to have ever played the game of Tennis such as Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Ivan Lendl, and John McEnroe - just to name a few legends. But Federer's recent performances has shown that age and slack in reflexes is showing in his game, and that he might be forced to contemplate retirement soon if he is unable to compete at the highest level.
In a string of inconsistent performances, Federer has not been able to show his class against top players. The recent example being his quarter-final exit in BNP Paribas, where he was completely outplayed by Rafael Nadal - losing the match 6-4 and 6-2. It was a below-par performance from Federer. Is the Swiss legend nearing his retirement?
Roger Federer wins 224 games in Grand Slams, second overall
Swiss tennis player Roger Federer to miss Rio Olympics due to knee injury
International Tennis Players: Thirty and going strong
Roger Federer goes down to Novak Djokovic in the US Open final
From 2003–09, the Swiss player was at his menacing best thrashing almost all players who came in between his titles. He won an incredible 15 Grand slam titles during that period along with innumerable ATP tour titles as well. It was a phenomenal run and Fedex had got into the habit of winning titles after titles.
But post 2010 till date he has won only two Grand slams – the 2010 Australian Open and 2012 Wimbledon, and a few ATP tour titles here and there. This is not the Federer one is accustomed to seeing on the court. In 2011, it was for the first time that the player did not win a single grand slam title since 2003. The three remaining Grand Slam Championships of 2013 could play a pivotal role in his career and retirement.
Off late what surprises Fedex fans is the way he loses regularly against players such as Murray, Djokovic, and Nadal. Federer while playing against lower-ranked players looks great but when he comes up with higher-ranked players, his shots become weak, he makes unforced errors, plays rash shots and loses the match in the process.
Losing against players like Tomas Berdych does not auger well for Fedex. The modern game of tennis is extremely competitive - typified by players like Murray who overcome lack of natural talent through hard work and cutting-edge trianing and coaching. There is evidence of lack of speed in Federer's game of baseline powerplay. Look at the way Federer is being attacked by players such as Djokovic and Murray on the baseline. Though, he is gradually coming to terms, but other players are coping faster than the Swiss.
Earlier, he used to raise the bar while playing against top players and it would get the best out of Federer. In his past 2 grand slam seasons in 2011 and 2012, he has faltered in the semi-finals four times, whereas between 2005-2008, he only lost in three semi finals and won 13 such encounters.
We are three months into 2013 and Federer is still trophy-less. From the above stats one can clearly state that the player is past his prime. But the million-dollar question in many tennis fans' mind is - when will the player retire? Irrespective of when he retires, he will go down as one of the legends of the game. There was a time, when he was the king on the court, but things have changed now.
Federer is scheduled to play only 14 tournaments this calendar year. Do we need to read into this reduction of tournaments as a hint of retirement? But one can also look the other way around and say he is doing so to prolong his career and is taking a conscious effort to play only in high-profile tournaments. But there are a number of factors that lead us to think that retirement is far away from Federer.
He is just 31 years old, and many players continue to play well in their 30s. He still has not last the flair and charisma, which one was habituated to see in him. On his day, no one can entertain us more than the Swiss legend with his magic on the court. It would be difficult for anyone to take a guess on his retirement for it is best not to pressurise him. Great players know when the time is ripe to retire.
Ivan Lendl
Former hockey players support govt decision to call off hockey series with Pakistan
Luckiest man of Indian cricket: Duncan Fletcher gets an year's extension
I am sick of these posts being made. He will retire when he retires. Yes he is past his best and yes he is not the player he was 3/4 years ago. But this whole is he retireing has to stop. He is the defending wimbledon champion, that's not bad for a guy in his 30s. He is not done yet, Though he is getting there. I give him a chance at wimbledon this year, but that would probably be it in terms of GS titles. I am sure he will stick around another year or two before hanging up the racket.
EPL: Forget title race, watch out for the race to elusive Champions League spot
Will Federer's downward slide lead to his retirement?
Some mouth-watering snacks from the..
Six interesting things you must know..


There are certain circumstances in which a person can legally challenge a will or trust. Two frequent causes of contests are lack of mental capacity and undue influence. In Michigan, a last will and testament, trust, or beneficiary designation is only valid if the person executing the document has the mental capacity to understand what they are signing. Lack of capacity can be caused by many factors, including dementia, mental illness, physical illness, or medication.
Documents can also be challenged if they may have been executed under undue influence. Undue influence may exist if a person has the opportunity to exert influence, the person making the document is susceptible to influence (for instance due to age, frailty, or medical capacity), and the influencer benefits from the executed document. One example would be an elderly person who disinherits his children, and leaves his entire estate to a home health aide, because the aide isolated him and threatened to withhold his medication unless he did so.
A will executed under mental incapacity or undue influence is not valid. If you suspect that an invalid will has been submitted to probate, or that a trust is operating under an invalid trust document, a contest in probate court is the only way to prevent the will or trust from being treated as valid.
Even if a will or trust seems terribly unfair, a contest will not be successful unless the probate court finds that the document is not valid under Michigan law.
Will contests are far more frequent than contested trusts or beneficiary designations. If a will is found to be invalid, the estate of the deceased person, or decedent, will be distributed according to the last valid will he or she executed. If there was no prior valid will, the estate will be distributed according to Michigan's intestacy laws—in other words, how the state presumes most people would want their assets distributed.
If you believe a Michigan will that is not valid has been (or will be) submitted to probate, you have limited time in which to act. Your first step should be to contact a Michigan probate attorney who has experience in will contests and probate litigation. (Some probate attorneys advise personal representatives on estate administration, but do not litigate cases).
An attorney who is experienced in contested probate matters will review the facts of your case, and explain Michigan probate law as it applies to those facts. At Suzanne R. Fanning PLLC, we have decades of experience representing heirs and beneficiaries in will and trust contests, and extensive knowledge of capacity issues. We are also mindful, always, of the fact that the people involved in these cases are grieving the loss of a loved one. We advocate for our clients with compassion as well as with skill.
Attorney Suzanne R. Fanning has many years of experience representing clients in Michigan probate litigation. Our office is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with ample free parking nearby. The firm is only minutes away from the Washtenaw County Courthouse. Suzanne R. Fanning PLLC regularly works with clients in Washtenaw, Wayne, Monroe, Livingston, Genesee and Lenawee Counties and throughout Michigan, as well as clients outside Michigan who require the help of a local attorney.
We invite you to learn more about the firm and our services, and to contact us to discuss how we can help you. We look forward to working with you.


Robotics company Cloudminds has teamed up with Japanese investment powerhouse and telecommunications company, SoftBank to develop a highly robust authentication solution using blockchain technology, according to an announcement today.
The solution enables users to log into websites without using their ID and password. It authenticates users by associating them with their mobile phones and records this data as a single entity on the blockchain. The two companies have combined CloudMinds' device authentication and Softbank's user authentication to create it.
The solution uses an SDP protocol for the authentication process which results in a strong defence against DDoS attacks, according to a statement. The framework is aimed at providing a robust foundation for universal identity management. A further statement highlights the challenges involved in device onboarding, service authorization and network connection processes.
Cloudminds, which develops cloud-based AI solutions for robots was founded in 2015. Its Permissioned Chain (CMPC) technology uses Legitimate Proof-of-Work (LPoW) to validate transactions. The company claims that this ensures a stronger defense against 51% attacks, which have recently attacked several major cryptocurrencies.
The authentication solution is designed to work for enterprise applications such as the Identity of Things (IDoT). IDoT allows for intelligent devices to be connected through a universal identity management platform. This means that any intelligent device is able to authenticate another device on the network. The CMPC technology also allows for a hierarchical structure of connected devices.
In September 2016, SoftBank acquired Arm, the global supplier of technology used in computing chips. In the same year, 17.7 billion chips using Arm technology were shipped across the world. The company's CEO Masayoshi Son has said, in his CEO message, that Arm-based chips will be in running shoes, glasses and milk containers. Son is also a keen investor in robotics startups and will now have blockchain-based systems to add to the Softbank war chest.


text:
Oil Struggles to Hold Momentum That's Slowed Down by U.S. Supply
February 1, 2018 EnergyNow Media
February 1, 2018, by Heesu Lee
The rally that lifted oil prices to the highest level since 2014 is losing momentum as a jump in U.S. production and a rebound in stockpiles reignite concerns over a glut.
Futures are trimming Wednesday's advance of 0.4 percent after slumping 2.5 percent over the first two sessions this week. U.S. output surged above 10 million barrels a day for the first time since 1970 in November and nationwide stockpiles ended 10 consecutive declines last week. Yesterday's relatively small gain was spurred by data that showed the first draw in gasoline inventories since early November.
Crude advanced for a fifth month in January, the longest such streak since 2011. The rally was driven by falling U.S. stockpiles and a weaker dollar amid efforts by OPEC and its allies to trim a glut. Still, the gain in prices was seen spurring American drillers to pump more, prompting fears that stockpiles would once again start to build. Additionally, inventory increases were on the horizon due to seasonal refinery maintenance.
"Shrinking U.S. stockpiles had supported crude above $60 a barrel this year, but as we enter the off-season for crude demand, inventories will rebound," Kim Kwangrae, a commodities analyst at Samsung Futures Inc., said by phone. "OPEC nations wouldn't want a sudden rise in oil prices because that will only spark U.S. production."
West Texas Intermediate for March delivery lost 5 cents to $64.68 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 4:51 p.m. in Tokyo. The U.S. benchmark crude climbed 23 cents to close at $64.73 on Wednesday. Total volume traded was about 10 percent above the 100-day average. Front-month futures are still down 2 percent this week.
Brent for April settlement was at $68.84 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange, down 5 cents. The March contract expired Wednesday after rising 3 cents to $69.05. The global benchmark crude traded at a premium of $4.36 to April WTI.
U.S. output climbed to 10.038 million barrels a day in November, the Energy Information Administration reported Wednesday. That's the highest level since November 1970 in monthly data collected by the agency since 1920.
Nationwide crude stockpiles climbed 6.78 million to 418.4 million barrels last week, according to the EIA. Contributing to the expansion in stored supplies of crude was a 41,000-barrel increase in domestic daily production as well as the biggest tranche of imported oil since August.
U.S. gasoline inventories dropped by 1.98 million barrels last week, according to the EIA, helping ease some concern over lackluster demand. March futures on the Nymex added 0.2 percent to $1.8979 a gallon. The February contract expired Wednesday after settling at $1.9075 a gallon.
BHP Billiton Ltd., seeking to accelerate the sale of its U.S. shale unit, is prepared to offer the assets in as many as seven packages, including three in the prized Permian Basin, according to people with knowledge of the producer's plans. OPEC likes to trumpet its record-breaking compliance with output cuts. Yet one of its largest members has been opening the taps and doesn't plan to scale back any time soon.
U.S. Reaches Oil-Output Milestone Months Earlier Than Expected
Refiner Bankruptcy Boosts Bid to Solve Trump's Biofuel Problem
Iraq Oil-Export Ambitions Seen Putting Strain on OPEC Accord


text:
Taif University is located in Al Hawiyah, Ta'if, Saudi Arabia. It was established in 2004. The University is one of three created by TU. The university is a member of the Association of Arab Universities and offers undergraduate and graduate programs in various fields of study.

Programs
Taif University offers a wide range of undergraduate and graduate programs, including arts, science, engineering, business, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and law. The university has a total of 16 faculties, which include the College of Science, the College of Engineering, the College of Medicine, the College of Dentistry, and the College of Pharmacy.

External links
Taif University Official website
 Saudi Ministry for education home
Biotech collaboration with Saudi Arabia

Universities and colleges in Saudi Arabia
Educational institutions established in 2004
2004 establishments in Saudi Arabia
Public universities and colleges in Saudi Arabia

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


GREENVILLE, SC - Bon Secours Wellness Arena and Habitat for Humanity of Greenville County announce that the two organizations will partner to build a very special Habitat House in May 2019, with the first week of the build to take place onsite at Bon Secours Wellness Arena.
Construction of the house will begin in the Arena's outdoor plaza along I-385, near the GSP International Airport Box Office and outdoor marquee - with the marquee being used to display facts and figures on the affordable housing issue in Greenville and to promote the sponsors/volunteers taking part in the build during the daily volunteer build sessions. At the end of the week, the public will be invited to a free concert at the Arena to celebrate the effort before the house is moved to a permanent site within the City for completion.
Habitat for Humanity of Greenville County and Loaves & Fishes are the inaugural "STAGE Partners" for the Arena. STAGE, or Serving Together: Arena's Giving Experience, is the new name for the Arena's community outreach program that was announced in October. Since that time, the Arena's food service provider Centerplate has donated over 1,000 lbs. of excess food from events to Loaves & Fishes for distribution to their network of 98 agencies. "This build is the next step in our plan to impact our local community through our dynamic nonprofit partnerships as part of STAGE," shares Matt Irwin.
More details will be released after December on the build, as well as the concert to cap the week of in May. For sponsorship inquiries, please reach out to Barbara Martin at Habitat for Humanity (barbara@habitatgreenville.org) or Matt Irwin at Bon Secours Wellness Arena (mirwin@bswarena.com).


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FTC Returns More than $748,000 to Consumers Who Signed Up for a "Free" Internet Auction Kit with Hidden Charges
For Release
consumer refunds
Western Region San Francisco
Online Advertising and Marketing
The Federal Trade Commission is mailing 53,595 refund checks totaling $748,070 to consumers nationwide who signed up for an online auction kit that was supposed to be free, but wasn't. The kit actually cost consumers up to $59.95 per month if they failed to cancel a trial membership in a business opportunity program called Online Supplier.
The refunds are the result of actions the FTC brought against Commerce Planet and three of its principals, Michael Hill, Aaron Gravitz, and Charles Gugliuzza. According to the FTC's amended complaint, Commerce Planet operated a website that deceptively pitched consumers a "free" kit with information about how to start a business selling products using online auction sites. Many consumers who ordered the kit were unwittingly enrolled in the Online Supplier program and charged monthly fees without their consent.
The company and defendants Hill and Gravitz agreed to settlements with the FTC. The court orders settling the allegations against these defendants required them to pay redress and prohibited them from engaging in the deceptive negative option and unauthorized billing practices described in the complaint. A court subsequently found Gugliuzza liable for the consumer injury and entered an order requiring him to pay consumer redress.
The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the trial court's findings, but remanded the case to allow the trial court to amend the order against Gugliuzza. Money collected from the judgments in each order is being used to send the refunds announced today.
Consumers who have questions about the refunds should contact the FTC's refund administrator, Analytics Consulting, LLC, at 1-844-817-0897. Recipients should deposit or cash checks within 60 days, as indicated on the check. The FTC never requires people to pay money or provide account information to cash a refund check.
FTC law enforcement actions led to more than $2.3 billion in refunds for consumers in a one-year period between July 2017 and June 2018. To learn more about the FTC's refund program, visit www.ftc.gov/refunds.
The Federal Trade Commission works to promote competition, and protect and educate consumers. You can learn more about consumer topics and file a consumer complaint online or by calling 1-877-FTC-HELP (382-4357). Like the FTC on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, read our blogs, and subscribe to press releases for the latest FTC news and resources.
Press Release Reference:
FTC Settlements Bar Deceptive Online Marketing of "Free" Internet Auction Kits
CONTACT FOR CONSUMERS:
Refund Administrator, Analytics Consulting, LLC
Mitchell J. Katz
Commerce Planet, Inc., a corporation, et al.
Related Refunds
Commerce Planet Refunds


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London Fashion Week Goes Fur-Free, Setting a Real Trend for All Other Events to Follow!
By Natasha Brooks
Lead Image Source : Pixabay
Here's some exciting news to give animal advocates a reason to celebrate — London Fashion Week has announced it is going fur-free!
This announcement comes after Humane Society International UK (HSI UK) petitioned London Fashion Week to drop the cruel material. Wendy Higgins, Director of Communications for HSI UK expressed, "This is a pivotal moment in the demise of the cruel fur trade. We are thrilled that the British Fashion Council has made this trail-blazing decision for London Fashion Week to go fur-free. It sends out a clarion call of compassion to the other fashion weeks in New York, Paris and Milan to similarly take a bold ethical stance, and it challenges too those designers still using fur to re-examine their morals. Fur cruelty is no longer welcome on the catwalk at London Fashion Week, and that is a powerful and exhilarating victory for animals that we hope others will follow … The future is fur-free … we all just took one step closer to realizing that future."
This wonderful news falls in line with the growing trend away from fur in the fashion industry. Earlier this week, Burberry announced it was going fur-free, joining major fashion powerhouses like Gucci, Versace, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, Armani, HUGO BOSS, Michael Kors, and Jimmy Choo, just to name a few. Additionally, California cities West Hollywood, Berkeley, and San Francisco have bans on the sale of fur, as do Sao Paolo, Brazil, and India. Los Angeles is also considering a ban.
The UK is a world leader in the anti-fur movement, having enforced the world's first fur farming ban in 2000. However, there is still much more work to be done, as the country still permits the import of fur, an issue HSI is also trying to change. And although so many leading designers have dropped fur, there are still some like Prada and Dolce & Gabbana that do.
Why is fur so terrible? Aside from the clear answer that it is the product of murdered animals who live in cramped, barren cages their entire lives only to be gassed or painfully electrocuted (often anally) and skinned (while some are still alive!), the fur industry also has an environmental impact.
Higgins explained: "There is nothing luxurious about incarcerating wild animals in tiny metal cages their whole lives and then gassing or electrocuting them for frivolous fur, and nothing glamorous about polluting our environment with a cocktail of toxic chemicals and substances such as chromium and formaldehyde used in the dressing and tanning process. The fur trade comes with a hefty environmental price tag from start to finish, and no amount of greenwashing by the fur trade can change that. All materials have an eco-footprint, but fur is right at the top of that list. Consumers are recognizing that and demanding higher ethical standards than that."
HSI reports that 130 million animals like mink are raised for the fur industry each year, but this number does not include the hundreds of millions of rabbits killed for their fur annually, information that is not reported by the fur industry. And in the wild, animals like coyotes suffer slow, agonizing deaths in traps before being skinned so their fur can trim hoods on jackets — downright appalling and nauseating. How anyone could see wearing a dead animal as "fashion" is beyond us, and we are so glad London Fashion Week is making it even more clear that fur is SO out.
We hope the rest of the fashion industry soon follows suit! Sign this petition to get Dolce & Gabbana to ditch fur. And sign this petition to get Prada to do away with fur.
And remember to share this exciting news with your network as a reminder that FUR IS OUT!
Image Source: Pixabay


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Slither.io officially launched by Raw Thrills
By Bryony Andrews On Mar 19, 2019 1,237
The hit title slither.io is finally set to arrive in the arcade. Created by independent Lowtech Studios. slither.io will launch with a 55" display and three player positions in a compact cabinet to maximise operator revenue and location appeal.
Building on the massively successful online game base, the arcade version adds exclusive gameplay features that keep players engaged and entertained.
Achieving more than 200 million downloads to date, the family-friendly slither.io was named the Top Trending Game of 2016 by Google Play. Slither.io remains a leading free action game app on both Android and iOS. Licensed products are available for slither.io including toys that were nominated by Licensing Industry Merchandisers Association (LIMA) for top toy in 2018. New gameplay features have been, and will continue to be, introduced, keeping fan interest and loyalty high.
Sacoa sets sights on DEAL 2019
Apple Industries to bring a new dimension to AEI 2019


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Over the years, I had the opportunity to conduct a number of lengthy interviews with Prof. Benzion Netanyahu concerning his activities in the United States in the 1940s, when he served as executive director of the American wing of the Revisionist Zionist movement.
The interview published below took place in June 2009, as I was working on my book Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the "Jewish Vote" and Bipartisan Support for Israel (coauthored with Prof. Sonja Schoepf Wentling), which was published last month.
RM: In your view, why were American Jewish leaders so cautious during the 1940s?
BN: Part of the problem was how they saw themselves. In their contacts with President Roosevelt, Jewish leaders thought of themselves as weak or helpless. Take, for example, Rabbi Stephen Wise–leader of the American Zionist movement, the American Jewish Congress, and the World Jewish Congress. He thought of himself as a servant of President Roosevelt. He referred to Roosevelt as "Chief," and he really meant it that way–Roosevelt as was the chief, and Wise was the servant. Wise was happy to just follow along with whatever Roosevelt wanted. He was content as long as FDR just remembered his name or gave him a few minutes of his time every once in a while.
RM: What about the Jewish advisers within Roosevelt's inner circle?
BN: FDR used Jews if they served some purpose that he needed. Samuel Rosenman was useful to him as a speechwriter. Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was useful to him as secretary of the treasury. Only a certain kind of a Jew could reach that position in Roosevelt's administration–the kind of Jew who would not talk about Jewish issues or problems. FDR used the Jews, but there was no room in his heart for the plight of the Jewish people. In his mind, the suffering of Europe's Jews was not included in the "Four Freedoms," the four great principles for which America was fighting in World War Two. Roosevelt had no time for the problems of the Jews.
RM: Just before Yom Kippur in 1943, the Bergson Group [led by activist Hillel Kook, who was known as Peter Bergson] and the Va'ad ha-Hatzala [an Orthodox rescue committee based in New York City] mobilized more than four hundred rabbis to march to the White House to plead for rescue. The president refused to meet with a delegation of their leaders. Later, a columnist for one of the Yiddish newspapers wrote that if four hundred priests had come to the White House, the president would not have refused to see them. Was their indeed a double standard applied to Jewish concerns?
BN: To answer that question, just consider how the international community would have responded if millions of Englishmen or Frenchmen were the ones who were being annihilated, rather than millions of Jews. Would the world have just stood by, quietly? Would you have needed to have protest groups organizing marches and taking out newspaper ads in order to wake up the world's conscience? No. The nations of the world would have immediately risen in angry protest, without any prompting. They would never would have allowed such a thing to continue. But when the Jews were the victims, it was a different story. It was as if the Jews were untouchables. It was as if the nations did not want to besmirch their hands by touching the Jews.
RM: What could American Jewish leaders have done to change Roosevelt's position?
BN: Roosevelt understood the language of political power. Jewish leaders should have done, and could have done, what my colleagues and I did–we went to the Republicans. And then Roosevelt got the message. We built relationships with Republican members of Congress, and leaders of the Republican Party such as [former president Herbert] Hoover and [1936 presidential nominee Alf] Landon , and we lobbied them before the Republican convention in 1944. They put a plank in their party platform that year calling for "unrestricted immigration and land ownership" for Jews in Palestine and it called for making Palestine a "free and democratic commonwealth" for the Jewish people. That was the first time one of America's political parties took such a position.
RM: Stephen Wise said he was deeply embarrassed that the Republicans were trying, in his view, to upstage the president on Palestine.
RM: Was Congressman Emanuel Celler was the key figure in convincing the Democratic Party to do that?
BN: Some of the Jewish congressmen were very good. Some were not. Celler was one of the best. I had many meetings with Celler during those years. He was very friendly and supportive. Sometimes when we discussed with him an idea for a newspaper ad, or a resolution in Congress, he would want to use language even stronger than we proposed. He was not afraid to criticize the president on Jewish issues, even though he and Roosevelt were from the same party. Celler was a courageous man.
RM: How would you characterize Sol Bloom, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who was the most powerful Jew in Congress?
BN: Bloom was a very small man, a narrow-minded politician. He was worried about keeping his powerful position. He stayed close to the State Department and Roosevelt, and did what they wanted, so he could keep his position.
RM: Would you say there was a certain similarity between Bloom's attitude and that of Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Wise?
BN: They were both in a position to push the administration, but they were both afraid to do so. If American Jews had pressured FDR with regard to opening Palestine, he could have compelled the British to put aside the White Paper so Jews could escape from Europe to Palestine.
RM: What was the response of grassroots American Jews to the news from Europe, as compared to the response of the leadership?
BN: Certainly the grassroots Jews responded in a more heartfelt way than the leaders. And the lower they were on the economic ladder, the more they seemed to care. Our work had the support of the poor people, the little newspaper vendor on the corner, or the kosher butcher or the school teacher. Those who were better off were more assimilated, and they paid very little attention to what was happening. They slept soundly at night, because they closed their eyes to the Jewish tragedy. This is something I could never understand. How could they just turn away and continue to go about their business as they usually did? How could they still eat in the finest restaurants, when the Jews in the ghettoes were starving? How could they sleep at night? There were times I literally could not sleep at night because of what was happening in Europe, and I could not understand how anyone else could.
RM: Was that also true of Jewish leaders?
BN: Jewish leaders, too, were going about their business, and involved in all kinds of issues. And they probably were sleeping soundly at night. They did not understand the full urgency of the situation. And they had other problems, such as the problem of their big egos, especially in the case of someone like Stephen Wise. I had a meeting with him in 1940, shortly after I first arrived in the United States. He knew my father, Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, who was a prominent speaker for the Keren Hayesod and other Zionist causes. When I sat down with Wise, I began speaking in Hebrew. I looked upon him as if he was the chief rabbi of America, so I assumed that of course he would know how to speak Hebrew. He answered me in English–he said, "As a matter of principle, I do not speak Hebrew in private conversation." In fact, as I later discovered, he could not speak Hebrew at all–he just could not stand the idea that anybody might think that he could not speak Hebrew. He was a bluffer. A man who was so shallow and petty was not suited to be a Jewish leader, especially one who had the responsibility to lead American Jewry in responding to the Holocaust. It is a mark of the poverty of the Jewish people that these were its leaders in those terrible times.


Light cycle games have been around for quite around. Although the 1982 classic Tron popularised the genre, high-speed bikes that inexplicitly leave solid trails behind go all the way back to the 70s with games like Barricade and Blockade. A new member in this family is Positron, developed by Retroburn. We played it at PLAY Expo Blackpool 2018.
The concept of Positron is simple: you control a bike that races through a maze, trying to find the exit. On its way, the bike leave a trail behind that is as shiny as is it solid. One collision with said trail or a wall and your bike shatters in a colourful explosion.
Positron does not hide where it gets its inspiration from — both its name and gameplay give it away. Nor does it need it, as there is a good reason why light cycle games still work 40 years after the first titles emerged in the arcades.
That said, Positron offers a little more than just racing through mazes. There is also a versus mode in which the primary antagonist is not the wall around the next corner but other players (or AI). The goal is simple: cut off your opponents with your trail while not being cut off yourself. This mode is planned to support up to 16 players, so the area will be crowded.
Lastly, there is a 'snake mode' that, well, features Snake-style gameplay. Here, your light cycle's trail does not grow indefinitely, but instead needs to be extended by collecting power-ups — once more without crashing into anything solid.
Positron is fast-paced. Every mistake is fatal. However, upon shattering into pieces, your light cycle respawns almost instantaneously. There are no loading screens to sit through before you can give it another shot. Additionally, even the more complicated mazes only take a short time to complete. This makes a high failure rate significantly more tolerable, even for beginners.
Visually, Positron offers high-contrast neon colours and even gives them a minor purpose: when you get close to a maze's exit, they change. Upbeat music accompanies this simple for effective visual style.
Positron does not reinvent the light cycle wheel. Instead, it takes an easy-to-access, high concept idea and pairs it with appealing visuals, multiple game modes, and smooth performance. If the final product runs as frictionless as its demo, Positron could very well be the next go-to light cycle game.
Positron is expected to be released in Q4 2018 for PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch.


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World Cup games will be screened across 35 different cities
PVR Cinemas has signed a partnership with the International Cricket Council (ICC), which will see PVR live screen the ICC T20 World Cup 2021 on the big screens.
As per the agreement, the multiplex chain will live screen all of India's matches along with the semi-finals and finals. The games will be screened across India in over 75 cinemas in 35 cities, including Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities. These include New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Chandigarh, Indore, Jamnagar, Jalgaon, Nagpur, Amritsar, Dehradun, Surat, and Vadodara, amongst others.
Speaking about the partnership with the ICC for the World Cup, PVR Ltd. CEO, Gautam Dutta said,
"The big screen offers a unique opportunity to maximise the coverage of the ICC Men's T20 World Cup. Cricket and movies complement each other as in India they are considered as two religions that unite the country.
'Movie watching and cricket watching is a shared entertainment experience and when magnified on the big screen leads to an adrenaline rush from fans quite similar to a stadium."
The partnership comes at a crucial time for PVR and the entire cinema industry, devastated by the Covid pandemic. Although cinemas have started to reopen gradually, only Telangana, Rajasthan, and Karnataka allow full cinemas to operate at total capacity while other states operate at 50 percent occupancy.
PVR also released a statement, which read,
"PVR has a loyalty base of 1.2 million as part of its PVR Privilege programme, which will help leverage the footfalls of movie lovers who are also cricket fans at its cinemas."
The partnership comes on the back of PVR's recent partnership with NODWIN Gaming to screen esports tournaments live in their theatres.
Aditya Chaudhuri
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All George Donoho
Authors > Geo Geo > George Donoho
George Donoho quotes
"We're excited about opening. We're excited about being in Mountain Home. And I think the public is excited to have us here."
George Donoho quote
"I haven't had a better group of people to work with than those who work in this store. They did an awesome job (setting the store up). The pride they've taken in this store is amazing. Even when they're working hard, it's done with a smile."
"The employee appreciation night is just a way for us to show our gratitude to our employees and their families for the work they've done over the last couple of months."
"We're expecting big things around here. It's definitely a growing market."
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Books & the Arts
April 16, 2012 Issue
The use of food as a weapon during World War II.
By Richard J. Evans
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—pestilence, war, famine and death—have always ridden together. Throughout history, war has brought death not only in battle but also from starvation and disease. In pre-industrial conflicts, marching armies trampled crops, seized food supplies, pressed young farmhands into military service and starved out cities under siege. Large groups of soldiers, traveling over great distances and living together cheek-by-jowl in makeshift and unhygienic conditions, spread epidemics, causing further suffering. In the Thirty Years' War, from 1618 to 1648, up to a third of the population of Germany is estimated to have died from this deadly combination of causes. World War I was the first international conflict in which more troops were killed by enemy action than by disease. In the same conflict, more than half a million Germans died from malnutrition as a result of an Allied blockade of Germany's overseas food supplies. Epidemics have rarely been a weapon of war, one reason being that they have a habit of spreading without regard to which side their victims are fighting for. But starving out the enemy always has.
World War II and the Battle for Food.
By Lizzie Collingham.
Penguin Press. 634 pp. $36.
The combatant nations of World War I learned through logistical error and terrible suffering the importance of securing adequate food supplies in a prolonged armed conflict. Not least as a result of this experience, as Lizzie Collingham shows in her superb new study The Taste of War, these same nations went to considerable lengths to keep their armies and civilian populations alive and well fed during World War II. For Germany and in particular its leader, Adolf Hitler, the memory of mass malnutrition and starvation during the earlier conflict was an ever-present trauma. From early in his political life, Hitler wanted to conquer "living-space" for Germany in Eastern Europe and draw on the huge grain resources of Ukraine to feed the German armed forces. The Nazis had no intention of repeating the mistake of World War I, when rationing was introduced too late to save the situation. Indeed, although Collingham claims that rationing was introduced in Germany in August 1939, it had already been in place for two years before that. Already by the mid-1930s, military and arms industry conscription, the requisitioning of huge tracts of agricultural land for military purposes and the imposition of foreign exchange controls to curb food imports had led to a dramatic fall in food pro-
duction and a concomitant rise in food prices. In 1936 prices were frozen, and on January 1, 1937, rationing was introduced for butter, margarine and fat; consumption of coffee and citrus fruit was restricted early in 1939. The German economy was on a war footing long before the war began.
Hitler managed to keep people at home in Germany reasonably well fed until the later stages of the war. Collingham reckons that around 40 percent of the bread and meat eaten by the armed forces and civilians in the Reich was produced in the occupied territories or by laborers deported from these countries to work on German farms. Her claim that "in Germany the population only began to experience hunger after May 1945," however, rests on too easy an acceptance of postwar memories, when many Germans blamed the Allied occupation for failing to feed the German population. Food supplies in Germany had already begun to break down in the fall of 1944, as the armed forces lost control over Eastern Europe with the westward advance of the Red Army, and road and rail communications within Germany were being severely disrupted by Allied bombing. The Nazi regime cut domestic bread rations from 12,450 grams in May 1944 to 9,700 in August, 8,900 in December, and 3,600 in April 1945. The meat ration was reduced from 1,900 grams to 550 over the same period. Nobody could live on what they were officially allowed to buy; a huge black market, run by escaped foreign workers, emerged, with gangs engaged in regular shootouts with the Gestapo. The incidence of diseases like tuberculosis, boosted by malnutrition and debilitation, rose sharply in 1944. And indeed, Collingham concedes that there were "worsening food shortages in Germany's cities until, in the last months before the Allied victory, the supply system broke down."
If food shortages were bad in Germany, they were catastrophic in Eastern Europe. Germany, as Collingham notes, "exported wartime hunger to the countries it occupied." Beginning with a "hunger plan" hatched by the leading civil servant in the Food Ministry, Herbert Backe, and expanding in scope and ambition into the "General Plan for the East," devised at the behest of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Nazi food policy envisaged the deliberate starvation of between 30 and 45 million Slavs (Collingham's claim of 100 million seems exaggerated), its effects to be accelerated by denying them access to medical care. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, cities like Kharkov, bombed and blasted by air attacks and house-to-house fighting, were left without basic facilities such as water, sewerage, gas and electricity. The infrastructure was destroyed. The occupying German forces banned civilians from entering or leaving the city. The retreating Soviet forces had already implemented a scorched-earth policy, denying the incoming Germans food by burning or ruining all the warehouses stockpiled with grain, corn, flour and vegetables. Half the population was evacuated; those who remained were condemned by the Soviets as traitors. "There are no stores," wrote a contemporary living in the city, "no markets, no shops of any kind…. The town is void of eatables like a desert." By the end of 1942 a third of the remaining 450,000 inhabitants were dead, almost all of them from starvation. In Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg), besieged for more than two years by German forces under orders to starve the city out rather than take it by storm, with all the heavy military losses that would imply, at least a million people died of starvation, and there were widespread reports of people eating dead bodies in their desperation to stay alive.
The mass murder of "useless eaters" began as early as September 1939, as the invading Germans crammed Poland's Jews into unsanitary and overcrowded ghettos, where they were forced to live on what were literally starvation rations. In the Warsaw ghetto one observer saw only "nightmare figures, ghosts of former human beings" suffering from "emaciation and sickliness." Desperate inhabitants fought over scraps, losing all human dignity. Thousands died every week; altogether as many as 100,000 starved to death, according to Collingham, though many of the dead had in fact succumbed to diseases such as typhus that were a consequence more of lack of public hygiene than lack of food. Worse was to come. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union was followed by massive victories and the capture of millions of prisoners of war, who were herded into makeshift enclosures in the open and left to starve to death. Cases of cannibalism were reported here too. Collingham says that 2.35 million died, but this is an underestimate: the generally agreed-on figure is as high as 3.3 million.
The invasion and war in general had an enormous impact on the Soviet Union. Collingham estimates that a third of all people worldwide who died during the war lived in the Soviet Union. Fully 15 percent of the Soviet population did not survive the war—eighty-five people for every Briton or American dead. Around 9 million Red Army combatants were killed, a reflection, among other things, of Stalin's callous disregard for life as he forced his generals time and again to throw their troops into the fray. In Moscow in 1942, after the German assault had been turned back, it was said that "the sight of men and women falling dead of starvation on [the] streets became too commonplace to attract crowds." The disruption of communications caused by the German invasion meant that troop rations, meager at the best of times, could be interrupted for days on end. Red Army soldiers became expert foragers, digging up crops, stealing peasants' honey and potatoes, requisitioning animals and killing them to eat. Some would make a stew of boiled nettles or pine needles to ward off scurvy.
Not only peasants but also town-dwellers suffered. The entire economy was geared ruthlessly to war production. Civilian production virtually collapsed. This happened not least because everything, including food production and distribution, was entirely state-run. Nevertheless, the regime squeezed the agricultural sector into supplying not only the armed forces but also munitions and armaments workers and their families with food, above all with bread, handed out in factories rather than in distribution centers to ensure it went to sustain the war production effort directly by feeding the workers first. People marginal to war production—the elderly, the sick, the disabled, the very young—were denied the basics of existence and died. Overall perhaps as many as 3 million Soviet citizens perished from starvation during the war, though this figure is difficult to square with Collingham's claim that the total number of civilian dead in the Soviet Union was as high as 20 million.
The United States, worried about the Soviets' ability to survive under such conditions, shipped huge quantities of food under the lend-lease agreement. An American officer who accompanied one shipment was shocked by the sight of groups of "starved wretches" who gathered on the quayside where shipments were being unloaded to scoop up and eat on the spot "raw meat, scraps or steaming chicken guts thrown out with the [American] ships' galley garbage." But however bad life may have been under the Soviet regime, it was far worse under German occupation. Death awaited Red Army soldiers who surrendered, so they fought on. Hunger did not destroy morale. The Soviet Union was "fighting on empty" but it continued to fight, ultimately all the way to victory. The German submarine fleet's attempt to stop American supplies from reaching the northern seaports of the Soviet Union scored some successes, but ultimately it succumbed to the Allied convoy system, the superiority, in the end, of Allied intelligence and decrypting ability, and the inadequacies of the U-boat fleet. And the situation slowly improved: by 1943 the Soviet Union was receiving more lend-lease food than Britain.
Yet it was not just the Germans who used food as a weapon and tried to deny it to their enemies. The drive for self-sufficiency bolstered by the capture of food-producing areas abroad was part of Japanese military thinking as well. Manchuria, already occupied in the 1930s, was seen as ripe for settlement by Japanese farmers, coercing the existing Chinese and Korean peasants into selling their land cheaply. But the settlement plan was not a success, and Japan's heavy reliance on imported food meant that when the war in the East began at the end of 1941, supplies were quickly cut off by the Allies, just as conscription and a drastic fall in the deep-sea fishing catch caused a fall in domestic Japanese agricultural output.
Japanese forces abroad depended almost entirely on food supplies from the occupied areas. But just as the harshness of German occupation policy in Europe alienated food producers and caused a fall in production, so too the Japanese massacres of Chinese farmers, particularly in the rice-growing areas of Malaya, combined with the conscription of farm labor for road and railway building and the imposition of a huge indemnity on the Chinese population in southern Burma, left the remaining peasants unwilling to work and determined to hide their produce from the conquerors.
Compounding the disaster, the Japanese tried to introduce regional self-sufficiency in an area where food supplies depended crucially on inter-regional trade. The American blockade established in 1943 administered the coup de grâce to the Asian rice trade, with American submarines sinking increasing quantities of Japanese shipping. Malnutrition became starvation; starvation became famine. In Manila the price of rice increased tenfold between 1941 and the middle of 1943; by the end of 1944 it was forty times more; by the middle of 1945 it had increased fourfold again. Chaos and mismanagement were more to blame for this situation than any deliberate policy of starvation on the part of the Japanese. But like the Germans, the Japanese prioritized their own survival over that of those they ruled.
Collingham explains that the Japanese high command began the war in the belief that the "Japanese army [could]…continue fighting without food, if they had strong morale." But hunger often saps morale and undermines the fighting spirit, as the Japanese troops were to discover; and in the Asian theater of war, there was no threat of annihilation by the enemy to keep them going, as there was for the Red Army in Europe. As Collingham notes, "During the course of its war with China and America the Japanese military went from being one of the best-fed armed forces in the world to a state of miserable starvation." Over the decades nutritional experts had devised an innovative and highly effective dietary regime involving non-Japanese food as well as the basic staple of rice (mixed with barley to provide vitamin B). But the disruptive effects of the war with China and then the American blockade forced a halving of the military food ration; and this was still twice as much as the food ration allowed to Japanese civilians.
As American submarines disrupted supply lines, Japanese soldiers on the Pacific islands were particularly badly affected, with 15,000 starving to death on Guadalcanal alone. The survivors who surrendered were emaciated, suffering from scurvy, "thin as thread," as their commander noted. Ninety percent of the 158,000 Japanese troops in New Guinea died of starvation and tropical diseases, and there were widespread reports that they were killing and eating some of the prisoners they took. In the Philippines 400,000 out of nearly half a million Japanese troops starved to death. The American blockade proved a highly effective weapon. On the other side of the globe, the Germans harbored hopes that similar measures would be able to starve out the British. The story of the Battle of the Atlantic, when German submarines sought to cut off supply lines from North America to the United Kingdom, has been told many times, but usually from the naval angle; Collingham gives it a fresh look by focusing on what the ships carried rather than on how they got their cargo across the ocean. More than half the calories consumed by the British were contained in imported food, but administrative confusion, a prewar depression in the shipbuilding industry and the diversion of the fastest merchant ships to war uses such as carrying troops all created severe bottlenecks in the food supply within two years of the outbreak of the war, if not earlier.
By the winter of 1942–43, the U-boat menace had aggravated the situation. Around 860,000 tons of shipping were lost in November 1942 alone, amounting to 9 percent of food shipments to Britain. Further problems were caused by the diversion of resources to supply the Allied landings in North Africa. "The country never realized how nearly we were brought to disaster by the submarine peril," noted the wartime Minister of Food Lord Woolton in his memoirs. Yet improvisation usually got food to the right places when supplies failed to arrive. The British did not starve.
It was a different story across the far-flung territories of Britain's overseas empire. The Middle East Supply Centre successfully reorganized trade and agriculture in the region to ensure that people continued to be fed despite the arrival of large numbers of British troops. Similar efforts were not undertaken elsewhere, however. In the absence of rationing or price controls such as had been imposed in Britain, rising demand caused by the need to buy up supplies for British troops fueled inflation, which soon put many foodstuffs out of reach of the poor in parts of the empire. Food supplies were cut off by wartime activity—some African colonies, for example, had depended heavily on imported rice from Burma and other British territories in the Far East, now no longer available because of the Japanese invasion of those countries. A drought in East Africa made things worse and famine ensued, spreading beyond British territories to claim 300,000 lives in Rwanda alone. Isolated island territories such as Mauritius were particularly vulnerable, and their inhabitants began to suffer severe malnutrition.
Worst of all was the situation in Bengal. The complacent and inefficient colonial administration in India did nothing to curb inflation, speculation and hoarding, even when Burma fell to the Japanese, depriving the subcontinent of 15 percent of its rice supply. Provincial governments in India reacted by banning the export of food to other provinces, strangling the machinery of trade in food in what one food controller called an outbreak of "insane provincial protectionism." The winter rice harvest of 1942 failed because of a fungal disease that spread rapidly in unusually warm and humid weather. No measures were taken to impose rationing or force hoarders to disgorge supplies, for fear of provoking political dissent in the economic elites who were benefiting financially from the situation.
Churchill ordered a 60 percent cut in military and civilian shipping to the Indian Ocean, commenting that Indians should not take food supplies that could be used by the mother country. Thus Britain as well as Germany exported food shortages to its empire. Even if this was not, as with Germany, the product of a deliberate policy of starvation, the result was much the same: famine victims poured into Calcutta in the summer of 1943, a vast, slow, dispirited noiseless army of apathetic skeletons, as one observer described them. As many as 3 million people may have died from starvation and from diseases, such as cholera, associated with the movements of large numbers of people across the country.
The government imposed strict censorship to stop news of the famine from spreading, and it was only when Viscount Wavell was appointed viceroy of India in September 1943 that decisive action was taken. Worried about morale among the Indian troops charged with the recapture of Burma, Wavell overrode the disastrous policy of regional protectionism and introduced an effective system of rationing and distribution. Even so, Wavell had to overcome considerable resistance from Churchill and the government in London. Surprisingly, perhaps, the memory of the famine played almost no part in the Congress Party's demand for Indian independence after the war; most of its leaders were in prison and did not witness the severity of the disaster. And the Indian elites who backed independence had been partly responsible for the famine themselves, as they had occupied prominent positions in provincial administrations during the war, above all in Bengal, where the famine was concentrated.
Meanwhile, other parts of the British Empire were mobilized to increase food production for the war effort. Australia doubled the amount of land devoted to vegetable farming and supplied vast quantities of dried and canned foodstuffs to the American forces in the Pacific. The United States itself had such enormous surpluses of food that it was able to provide a rich diet to the Pacific islands when it won them back from the Japanese. "We fed the Japanese," one Tuvaluan islander put it; "the Americans fed us." GIs, sailors and marines poured into the islands, spending liberally and fueling a rapid rise in prosperity. Yet as the conflict subsided, there was hunger everywhere, especially in the defeated nations. By the end of the war, indeed, food production in Europe had fallen to 36 percent of its prewar levels.
The desperate situation in the Soviet Union was made worse by the failure of the harvest in 1946. A year later perhaps 2 million Soviet citizens had died from starvation and associated diseases. In many places rationing remained in place well into the 1950s. The Americans viewed deprivation in Germany as a punishment for the crimes of Nazism, and stopped food relief from entering the country until they realized that a discontented and depressed population might become nostalgic about Hitler or could succumb to the lure of communism, as Stalin, even at the cost of his own population's survival, sought to gain support in satellite states and the Soviet zone of occupied Germany by pouring in food. Only gradually, as the world economy recovered and then began to boom, did the situation improve.
Examining in detail the role played by food in the greatest of all political conflicts, the Second World War, was a brilliant idea on Collingham's part. The Taste of War is breathtaking in its breadth and scope, global in coverage and yet anchored in detailed research. Despite the inevitable mistakes and inaccuracies of detail, which should be corrected in the paperback reprint, this is a book that anyone interested in the role played by control of food supplies in the war will want to read. Much of the material is fresh and compelling, and many of the individual vignettes, anecdotes and quotations are heartrendingly moving in their depiction of the immensity of the suffering many people had to endure.
Yet by looking everywhere for the impact of the "battle for food," Collingham's book has an inbuilt tendency to downplay other aspects of the conflict. Often this involves picking out one side in a controversial area simply because it supports the argument that food supplies were of crucial historical importance. For example, the sharp acceleration of Germany's mass murder of Jews in the late spring and early summer of 1942 was justified by some German officials as necessary because of the critical position of food supplies to the German forces and civilian population at the time. Yet it is possible that the officials were simply providing what seemed to them to be a convenient military rationalization for an ideologically motivated policy. After all, there is evidence that senior SS officers had already decided in the autumn of 1941 that Europe's Jews were to be taken to the east: the first large-scale gassing facilities began to be constructed in October and November of that year; the Wannsee Conference, held early in 1942 after several weeks' postponement, already envisaged the ultimate extermination of the world's Jews. All this was driven by the paranoid belief of the Nazi leadership that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were puppets of an international Jewish conspiracy against Germany that had to be stopped at any price.
It would be unfortunate if readers took away from this impressive book only the belief that the battle for food "shaped the events of World War II," to quote the promotional copy, or that "access to food drove both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan to occupation." Other, more significant factors were involved; the food supplies of Eastern Europe, for instance, were important to the Nazis principally as a way of securing Germany for the greater struggle with the United States that lay ahead. The Taste of War is a book, then, that has to be read in conjunction with other histories of the war; it views the conflict from one angle only, and the war needs to be seen in the round.
Richard J. EvansRichard J. Evans is the provost of Gresham College, London. His many books include The Third Reich in History and Memory and, most recently, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914.


HARDIN - The other day a work crew of City of Liberty employees took a bucket truck to Hardin to eat at the Mexican Restaurant. In the process they drove under the canopy of the restaurant doing considerable damage to the canopy and the bucket truck. According to City Manager Gary Broz this has now become a personnel issue that the City is dealing with and that an adjuster is coming out soon to assess the damage to the bucket truck.
LIBERTY, September 11, 2017 – Latest FEMA registration information for Liberty County as of 9-11-17.
8,205 Liberty County residents have registered for assistance and FEMA has paid out $ 5,160,624.56 dollars locally to date.
LIBERTY COUNTY, September 6, 2017 – Curfews have been lifted in Liberty, Dayton, Daisetta, Hardin and Liberty County.
LIBERTY, September 4, 2017 – Some have asked about mail delivery in Liberty. The problem is NOT that the local post office is not delivering the mail. The problem is that the mail is not being delivered by the postal service for delivery. Some first class mail was delivered today but today in the first day that mail has made it to Liberty.
Dayton City Closures DAYTON, August 27, 2017 - City hall, Civic Center, Library, Municipal Court and the Landfill will be closed to the public Monday August 28th, 2017.
DAYTON, August 22 , 2017 - Flooding in Liberty in problem areas is occurring in Liberty on Sunday morning. Problem areas include Beaumont Ave at Texas Street, Grand Ave from Kentucky to Lakeland, Texas Street from Beaumont Ave to Cornell and Bowie Street near Cos.
LIBERTY, July 11, 2017 - The DAYTON POLICE DEPARTMENT has moved to their new facility located at 2004 NORTH CLEVELAND DAYTON, TEXAS.
The DAYTON MUNICIPAL COURT (where you pay tickets) has move also. Their facility is next to the Police Department 2002 NORTH CLEVELAND DAYTON, TEXAS.
LIBERTY, June 23, 2017 - 1.3 million elderly Americans live in nursing homes. 70 percent rely on Medicaid to pay bills that average $83,000 a year. No doubt most people would prefer to avoid living in a nursing home. But the fact is that many elderly Americans get to a point where they need long-term continuous care.
Cowboy Classic Golf Tournament Cancelled LIBERTY, June 22, 2017 - The Cowboy Classic Golf Tournament has been cancelled for Saturday. Rain out date is now July 22nd. Still at magnolia ridge country club.
Fire at Whataburger LIBERTY, May 31, 2017 - The Liberty Fire Department was pressed into service around 5:05 AM on Wednesday morning for a fully involved structure fire at the Whataburger in Liberty. Flames were coming from the roof and dark black smoke was billowing from the entrance doors facing the McDonalds.
LIBERTY, May 26, 2017 - The Dayton City Council will meet on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 6:00 PM each day for discussions concerning the new City Manager.
What does a Tomahawk cruise missile cost?
The cost of the Tomahawk has long been an issue. The Navy, according to a public fact sheet on its website, places the price tag of a Block IV missile at $569,000, but that's in fiscal year 1999 dollars.
LIBERTY, March 7, 2017 - We are fixin' to have a ST. PATRICK'S MASS and IRISH FEAST next Sunday, 19 March, at St. Stephen's Church, Liberty. From Beaumont, go to the 3rd light on US 90 (Main St.) turn North, cross tracks, go to 2nd light (Trinity St.) turn right, Church is next to Prosperity Bank. Bring some Groceries, if you like. Gentlemen are encouraged to wear they KILTS, and all others, wear something GREEN.... Please pass on to all of your troops, I think you will enjoy this one!


text:
from finch import Finch
from time import sleep

# Instantiate the Finch object and connect to Finch
tweety = Finch()

# Get the Z-Axis acceleration
zAccel = tweety.acceleration()[2]

# Do the following while the Finch is not upside down (z value in gees above -0.7)
while zAccel > -0.7:

    left_obstacle, right_obstacle = tweety.obstacle()
    # If there's an obstacle on the left, back up and arc
    if left_obstacle:
        tweety.led(255,0,0)
        tweety.wheels(-0.3,-1.0)
        sleep(1.0)
    # Back up and arc in the opposite direction if there's something on the right
    elif right_obstacle:
        tweety.led(255,255,0)
        tweety.wheels(-1.0, -0.3)
        sleep(1.0)
    # Else just go straight
    else:
        tweety.wheels(1.0, 1.0)
        tweety.led(0,255,0)
    # Keep reading in the Z acceleration
    zAccel = tweety.acceleration()[2]

tweety.close()

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: R: ggplot2 not facetting correctly I am having the issue where when I try to facet data in ggplot to make bar graphs, not all data gets added into the correct facets...
I have a very large dataset, so it's inconvenient to share, but I will post examples of what one facet should actually look like.
So here is my code:
  ggplot(data=data,aes(x=data$practice_cat,y=data$pct_pop)) +
  geom_bar(stat='identity') + facet_grid(type ~ size_f) + coord_flip()

And this is the plot that I get:

However, the faceting is not true to the data. It seems like facet_grid is attributing certain rows to the incorrect facet. For example, for the facet total and > 10 NPIs, the graph should look more like this:

How do I fix this?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Who doesn't love Ewoks? They are cute and cuddly, but also able to take care of themselves should the Empire invade their homeworld. Now you can have a whole tribe full of Ewoks with this Star Wars Action Figure Ewok Pack.
You get 5 Ewoks in this awesome set: Flitchee, Nanta, Teebo, Kneesa and Tippet! Display them with the rest of your figures to remember the battle of Endor.
This set makes a great Christmas gift and it is just £44.99 from Forbidden Planet. Buy one today and sing the Ewok song to celebrate. Also available at Amazon.com.


text:
Treason Lobby's Obama plays 'Calvinball' with immigration laws
Long-time fans of the popular Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip are familiar with this game created by Calvin who was always looking for ways to best his imaginary friend, Hobbes. The game is very simple: If you don't like the rules, change them to suit your needs.
This is what President Obama has been doing the past several years to curry favor with the "immigrant community" a.k.a illegal aliens and their radical supporters that include members of both the Democratic and Republican parties, and the mainstream media.
Beginning with the Morton Memos in 2011 that outline "prosecutorial discretion" and followed the next year by Obama's Deferred Action for Childhold Arrivals that was estimated to benefit nearly 2 million youths here illegally, Obama has systematically and unilaterally weakened our immigration laws in order to achieve political gain.
Now published reports are telling us that Obama is considering an executive order that would legalize and give work permits to half of the nation's 12 million illegal aliens while 18 million Americans are unable to find full-time work.
What gives this man the right to trade our sovereignty and economic well being for votes? To strip us of our right to decide for ourselves what is best for the country?
From Day One he has paid only lip service to helping ordinary Americans, and he's done precious little of that as of late. He finds the time to meet with "immigrant rights" groups in the White House or in nearby tents, but where are the meetings with ordinary Americans? Why are those who thumb their noses at the rule of law and our borders considered "stakeholders" in the immigration issue while the guy in the street is nothing more than an unemployment statistic?
Obama is no friend of the ideas and principles that the Founding Fathers carefully crafted while creating this republic, and he has to be called out on it.
In terms of his disdain for the Constitution, Barack Obama is worse than Richard Nixon. Upon the latter's resignation, newly appointed President Gerald Ford told the American people, "Our long national nightmare is over." Sadly, that nightmare is beginning to pale in comparison to what Obama is doing. What we are witnessing at this moment is far worse than Nixon's trampling of the rule of law because our very form of government is under attack from the man who promised us transparency but instead is giving us tyranny.
In a recent column, John Fonte, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, cites Alexander Hamilton's question of whether people can govern themselves or be ruled by "accident" or "force" and concludes this way:
"Liberal George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley (who voted for Obama) has become a leading scholarly critic of this administration's unconstitutional executive actions. Professor Turley told the House Rules Committee, 'What we're witnessing today is one of the greatest crises that members of this body will face. . . . It has reached a constitutional tipping point that threatens a fundamental change in how our country is governed.' "Indeed, government without the consent of the governed constitutes a major change in how our constitutional republic is governed and answers the question posed by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 1 in the negative."
Book Review: "Sisters of Treason" by Elizabeth Fremantle
Sheriffs ignore gun laws: Sheriffs at odds with gun laws back 2nd Amendment
Loopholes and policy: AG Eric Holder says 'our immigration laws are broken'
Fox News hosts have heated debate over immigration and voter ID laws
Attorneys challenge the Obama administration; Push to enforce U.S. laws
Fox News analyst says Obama's gun laws will lead to more ISIS style beheadings


The Texas State Law Library receives continuing legal education (CLE) materials from the State Bar of Texas. These courses allow attorneys to earn CLE credit, which is required by the Bar. Below you'll find a listing of some of our CLE materials arranged by subject matter. Most of these materials circulate for a period of 3 weeks.
You can also search through the text of our CLE collection's tables of content to locate a specific course or seminar.
We may have older editions of a CLE course that are not listed here in our archives. You can search for older editions using the library catalog. If you have questions about these materials, please Ask a Librarian.
by State Bar of Texas. State Bar of Texas. 2008.
by State Bar of Texas. State Bar of Texas. 2009.
by State Bar of Texas. State Bar of Texas. 2010.
by State Bar of Texas. State Bar of Texas. 2011.
by State Bar of Texas. State Bar of Texas. 2012.
by State Bar of Texas. State Bar of Texas. 2013.
by State Bar of Texas. State Bar of Texas. 2014.
by State Bar of Texas. State Bar of Texas. 2015.
by State Bar of Texas. State Bar of Texas. 2016.
Adobe Reader or similar PDF software is required to view the tables of content. Get the free Adobe Reader.


text:
Michigan Female Seminary Collection
Western Michigan University Archives & Regional History Collections
The collection is composed of various materials from the Michigan Female Seminary and date from 1872 until 1902.
Michigan Female Seminary (Organization)
The Michigan Female Seminary, opened in January, 1867, was a private school supported by the Presbyterian Church. It provided education for young girls aged fifteen and above. It was located on top of a hill on the northwest corner of Gull and Riverview. Eventually it offered college-level classes that could be transferred to the University of Michigan. The school remained open until 1907.
0.25 Cubic Feet
Arrangement Note
Acquired Collections and the Starring Endowment
The collection amounts to .25 cubic feet and is composed of catalogs, programs, Oak Leaves, a speech and one photograph. The items range from 5 ½"x4" to 7"x8 ¾". They are in fairly good condition although some of the programs are discolored at the edges and the paper is very delicate. The catalogs are filled with a wide variety of information including classes, calendar, and names of teachers, trustees and students. Some of the later editions contained black and white photographs of the building, both interior and exterior shots, the grounds and the students. The Oak Leaves is filled with student writings and notes about students and alumni along with advertisements for local businesses.
Schools -- Michigan -- Kalamazoo
RH. Regional History Collections
Michigan Female Seminary Collection Finding Aid
Lynn Houghton
Part of the Western Michigan University Archives & Regional History Collections Repository
https://wmich.edu/library/collections/archives
Charles C. and Lynn L. Zhang Legacy Collections Center
1650 Oakland Drive
Kalamazoo MI 49008-5307 US
arch-collect@wmich.edu
Michigan Female Seminary Collection, RH-A-3332. Western Michigan University Archives & Regional History Collections.
Michigan Female Seminary Collection, RH-A-3332. Western Michigan University Archives & Regional History Collections. https://aspace.library.wmich.edu/repositories/3/resources/24 Accessed January 28, 2023.


The Board of Directors are saddened to report that Eurasian Water Milfoil has been found in Shadow Lake. A Boat Wash attendant found what was thought to be milfoil tangled in some fishing line along the boat ramp. There was no sign of it in the water around the boat ramp so it was hoped that someone had correctly discarded it on the ramp before entering the water. The sample was sent to the State of Vermont for identification. The State Department called us back confirming it was Eurasian Water Milfoil, myriophyllum spicatum (Ewm) and they felt the lake shoreline should be checked. Within days, a convoy of volunteers and the State's specialist went around the lake with their kayaks.
The specialist found a patch of milfoil (Ewm) and took some more samples. She recommended that the State divers should come to ensure that it was only in one area. The divers did check the circumference of the lake and confirmed the milfoil seems to be in only one area. The State has had some success in getting milfoil out of other lakes and they feel this early detection is key, containing it and possibly eliminating it all together if we move quickly.
We are continuing to work with the State at this time. They plan on putting bottom barrier benthic mats of blackout plastic down over the patch, attaching them to the lake bottom. These barriers may be in the water for up to two years. This process will hopefully kill off the milfoil because it needs sunlight to thrive. The State specialists will professionally remove any single plants they may find around the patch but so far they do not see too many plants spreading out, which is good news! The State requires that a permit be issued for the work to be done in the lake. Once the permit is applied for, a 10 day public notice will be published in the local newspaper. The State is supplying all the plastic barrier material and netting for this process along with their time to get this going, at no charge to us. We will be paying for the rebar used to hold the mats down and the certified contractor (which we are required to use) who will install the bottom barriers. This first step of the process is estimated to cost around $500 but the actual numbers will be reported at the annual meeting. This money will come from the Boat Wash fund. The fund which so many have generously given to each year.
If you see any of the plants in the water please make note of where you are on the lake but DO NOT TRY TO PULL ANY MILFOIL PLANT OUT OF THE LAKE! They segment and break apart very easily and then they can spread. Report the location to any Director as soon as possible. If you DO SEE ANY OF THE MILFOIL FLOATING LOOSE ON TOP OF THE WATER, PICK IT ALL UP, GETTING IT OUT OF THE WATER! THROW IT AWAY IN YOUR TRASH or let it die by drying it out, far away from the water.
This is a large challenge we are all facing but "when the winds of change blow … adjust your sails." Although we are very disappointed; we need to take a deep breath and move forward, keeping a pro-active thought process on this fight against all types of invasive species! A prime example of forging ahead was just two days after the milfoil patch was found, a Boat Wash attendant checked a boat going into the water and their motor had weeds tangled all around their propeller, a very stringy weed (we hadn't seen before) and milfoil mixed in with it. The samples have also been sent into the State Lab for identification BUT this boater would have brought it right into the lake by the boat ramp area, if it hadn't been for the Boat Wash staff. This incident is a testament to how important it is to keep supporting the Boat Wash so it can continue inspecting watercrafts. We don't want to get more milfoil, or other invasive species, in more areas of our lake. It is very important to try to keep this invasion to a minimum!
If you have any further questions or want to volunteer to help on the containment project please contact any director as soon as possible.