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El pèl-roig és un color de pèl diferent del cabell ros i el cabell castany, producte d'una mutació genètica coneguda com a rutilisme i caracteritzada per un alt nivell de feomelanina i baix d'eumelanina.

El pèl-roig és un color poc comú en els humans: entre un -1 i un 2% de la població mundial és pèl-roja, un percentatge global menor que el d'esquerrans. El pèl-roig es troba principalment a la població del nord i oest d'Europa, encara que apareix també, amb baixa freqüència però, a altres parts d'Europa, Àsia i Àfrica. El pèl-roig sembla causat per un gen recessiu al cromosoma 16 que causa una mutació a la proteïna del receptor de la melanocortina 1 (MC1R). Aquest gen està associat amb fototips de pell baixos, pigues i sensibilitat a la llum ultraviolada. Les reaccions culturals cap als pèl-rojos han sigut des de la ridiculització fins a l'admiració; és un estereotip comú en algunes cultures el "caràcter del pèl-roig".

A més dels humans, el color pèl-roig es pot trobar en el pelatge d'altres mamífers com el cérvol, la farda, el gat, el gos, l'orangutan i la vaca de les Highlands.

Distribució geogràfica

Històrica

Existeixen molts relats d'escriptors grecs descrivint pèl-rojos. Un fragment del poeta grec Xenòfanes de Colofó descriu els tracis com a pèl-rojos amb ulls blaus. L'historiador grec Heròdot descriu els "budini", segurament udmurts i finesos permiacs al riu Volga (Rússia), com a pèl-rojos. L'historiador grec Cassi Dió descriu Boudica, la reina celta famosa dels icens, de: "ser alta i terrible en aparença ... una gran massa de cabells rojos ... damunt les espatlles".

El romà Tacitus va comentar de «els cabells rojos i les llargues extremitats dels habitants de Caledònia», els quals va relacionar amb tribus gal·les que tenien una relació amb germànics i belgues. També s'han trobat pèls rojos d'un habitant de Bàrcino en l'excavació del carrer Sotstinent Navarro de Barcelona.
Segons el croniste musulmà Ibn Idhari, el califa andalusí Hixam II era pèl roig; de fet, per l'origen vàndal dels amazics que ajudaren Tàriq ibn Ziyad en la conquesta omeia d'Hispània (any 711), molts d'ells eren de pell clara i ulls blaus.
També hi hagué pèl-roig a l'Àsia, especialment entre els tokharis, els quals van ocupar el que hui és la regió autònoma xinesa de Xinjiang.

Moderna
El pèl-roig es troba, avui dia, principalment al nord d'Europa. S'associa el pèl-roig amb les Illes Britàniques, especialment amb els escocesos, gal·lesos, irlandesos i còrnics. El pèl-roig es troba més freqüentment a l'Anglaterra més septentrional, on hi ha una freqüència de més del 15%. Al País de Gal·les, el pèl-roig té un 10% de freqüència.

A Escòcia, on el 13% de la població —uns sis-cents cinquanta mil escocesos— és pèl-roja (amb major concentració al sud-est, prop d'Edimburg, on voreja el 50% de la població), l'any 2014 circulà una teoria pseudocientífica segons la qual el canvi climàtic els posava en perill d'extinció, un mite originat l'any 2007 en Austràlia.
Eixa teoria, com la de la pèrdua del dit menut del peu, es desmunta pel fet que cada persona té dues còpies del gen MC1R, una del pare i una de la mare: quan la variant és recessiva, encara que el fill no el manifeste sí que pot transmetre'l als descendents, per la qual cosa es calcula que el percentatge d'escocesos rojos seria d'un 40%; això, a més del fet que la selecció sexual premi la singularitat, fa que siga pràcticament impossible que s'extinguisca.

Irlanda també té molts pèl-rojos; on el 10% té els cabells rojos o amb tonalitats vermelloses (strawberry blonde). Es pensa que més del 35% de la població irlandesa porta el recessiu "gen pèl-roig".

El pèl-roig o els cabells amb tonalitats rogenques també es troben en altres poblacions d'Europa, particularment als països nòrdics i bàltics així com parts dels Països Baixos, Bèlgica, França, Espanya, Itàlia, Alemanya, Portugal, Rússia i el sud-est d'Europa. Als Estats Units d'Amèrica, s'estima que entre el 2 i el 6% de la població és pèl-roja. Açò dona als Estats Units d'Amèrica la població més grossa de pèl-rojos del món, entre 6 i 18 milions, comparats als aproximadament 650.000 a Escòcia i 420.000 a Irlanda.

Entre els amazics també s'hi pot trobar ocasionalment pèl-rojos.

A Àsia, també es podien trobar cabells rojos foscos o amb matisos esporàdicament al nord de l'Índia, a l'Iran i al Pakistan, i fins i tot al Japó. Comunament es poden trobar pèl-rojos entre els que foren descendents de pobles iranians, com els paixtus.

Bioquímica i genètica

El pigment feomelanina és el que dona al pèl-roig el seu color distinctiu. Els cabells rojos són els que més feomelanina tenen i molt més que el pigment obscur eumelanina. El color castany vermellós té a part iguals feomelanina i eumelanina.

La genètica del pèl-roig, descoberta el 1997, sembla estar associada al receptor melanocortina 1 (MC1R), el gen de la qual es troba al cromosoma 16. El pèl-roig està associat a la pell clara i a la sensibilitat pels rajos ultraviolats. El gen recessiu MC1R, el qual dona a la gent pigmentació vermella als cabells i una pell clara, també està associat a les pigues, encara que no és estrany veure un pèl-roig sense pigues. El vuitanta per cent dels pèl-rojos tenen una variant del gen MC1R, i la prevalença d'aquests al·lels és més alta a Escòcia i a Irlanda. Els al·lels que codifiquen els cabells rojos són pròxims als al·lels que marquen el color de la pell, resultant en una expressió interrelacionada entre el fenotip de les pells clares i el color vermell dels cabells.

Genètica
La genètica dels cabells vermells encara no està del tot resolta, se sap que hi ha connexions entre el pèl-roig amb el melanoma, malalties de la pell en general, i diferents reaccions a l'anestèsia. El gen MC1R no està lligat amb el color dels ulls. Existeix l'evidència, però, de la connexió del color dels ulls amb altres colors de cabells com el castany. L'herència del pèl-roig és pròxim al que els genetistes anomenen "herència autosòmica recessiva". Això significa que els pares de xiquets pèl-rojos porten el gen pèl-roig, però aquests possiblement no són pèl-rojos.

Hi ha proves que indiquen que el pèl-roig pot ser un exemple de dominància incompleta. És a dir, que en presència de l'al·lel, el color vermell pot fusionar-se amb altres colors, resultant diferent tipus de pèl-roig com són el ros-vermellós (Strawberry blonde) o el castany-vermellós (Auburn). Això també pot ser la causa que alguns hòmens rossos o castanys tinguen la barba roja.

Els al·lels Arg151Cys, Arg160Trp, Asp294His, i Arg142His al MC1R són recessius al fenotip pèl-roig.

Existix la possibilitat que el gen HCL2 (també coneguts com a RHC, RHA) al cromosoma 4 estiguen relacionats amb el pèl-roig.

Un altre estudi, de 2009, associa la mutació del gen MC1R a la malaltia de Parkinson: segons els autors, els pèl-rojos tenen el doble de possibilitats de contraure-la que els morenos.

Evolució

El pèl-roig és el tipus de color de cabells natural més estrany i les raons per la seua ocurrència no estan gens clares. La pell clara associada al pèl-roig deu ser un avantatge en climes d'altes latituds on la llum solar és escassa. Estudis fets per Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza (1976) van fer la hipòtesi que la pigmentació en pells clares prevé el raquitisme en latituds fredes fomentant la producció de nivells alts de Vitamina D i permet que la pell retinga millor la calor que qualsevol amb la pell fosca. Rees (2004) va suggerir que la vivor i la raresa del pèl-roig pot haver fet que es tornara desitjable en una parella i que fos més comú davant la selecció sexual.

Harding et al. (2000) va proposar que el pèl-roig no era resultat de la selecció positiva però sí que podria ser degut a una manca de selecció negativa. En Àfrica, per exemple, el pèl-roig es desselecciona a causa dels alts nivells de sol, els quals serien nocius per a la pell clara. Tanmateix, al nord d'Europa açò no passa i així els pèls-rojos apareixen mitjançant deriva genètica.

Hi ha estimacions sobre l'aparició original del gen actiu actual del pèl-roig que diuen que va ser fa entre 20.000 i 100.000 anys. En un estudi fet el 2001 per l'Oxford University, alguns comentaristes especulaven que els homes de Neanderthal tenien els cabells rojos, i que alguns pèl-rojos amb pigues hui dia comparteixen un poc d'herència genètica amb els Neandethals. Altres investigadors discreparen aquestes afirmacions, i els cercadors que realitzaren l'estudi varen dir que malinterpretaren les seues troballes.
Un altre estudi publicat el 2013, fet per la Universitat del País Basc entre més de mil persones de tot Espanya, revela que la mutació V60L, associada no només al pèl-roig sinó també a la pell clara i sent més freqüent del que es pensava, fou determinant per a la síntesi de la vitamina D, però més susceptible a l'aparició de melanoma.

Els cabells rojos solen ser grossos i ondulats, per la qual cosa s'encrespen més fàcilment; a més, el seu color els fa més sensibles als raigs del sol i la contaminació, la qual els fa perdre intensitat i adoptar un color paregut al de la palla: per això, es recomana usar productes capilars antioxidants i nutritius, lliures de sulfats i parabens, i evitar les fonts de calor; tanmateix, els pèl-rojos presenten menys quantitat de cabells blancs.

Percepció cultural
Hi ha la percepció que la gent pèl-roja pareix més jove,
però un estudi del Centre Erasmus de Rotterdam conclou que els portadors de la variant del MC1R responsable dels cabells rojos, ulls blaus i pigues són percebudes com dos anys majors de l'edat real.
Segons altres estadístiques, els pèl-rojos suporten millor el dolor en la pell, tenen més relacions sexuals o, en el cas dels hòmens, són un 50% menys propensos a tindre càncer de pròstata.

A Dinamarca és un orgull tindre un fill pèl-roig, i a Breda celebren un festival de pèl-rojos, el Roodharigendag, a principis de setembre.
En resposta a la predicció que assegura que l'últim pèl-roig naixerà cap a 2060, la Irish Redhead Convention de Crosshaven oferix cites ràpides entre rojos per a assegurar la pervivència dels gens.
Fins i tot hi ha un documental en gaèlic irlandés, Rua (Mary Crumlish, 2008), que tracta d'oferir una visió més amable del rutilisme amb pèl-rojos històrics com la guerrera Macha Mong Rua i contemporanis com la humorista Catherine Tate.

En canvi, l'adagi popular valencià «home roig i gos pelut…» (amb diverses variants) identifica als pèl-rojos com a elements a evitar.

Vegeu també
 Albinisme

Referències

Enllaços externs

 Alerte Rousse blog en  i
 Why is red hair with brown eyes so uncommon? MadSci Network
 Distribution of hair and eye color and sex in 592 statistics students. from Snee, R. D. (1974).
 Painkiller Requirements May Be Less in Redheaded Women
 Box NF, Wyeth JR, O'Gorman LE, Martin NG, Sturm RA. Characterization of melanocyte stimulating hormone receptor variant alleles in twins with red hair. Hum Mol Genet. 1997 October;6(11):1891–7.

Pèl


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Home » Kenya » Secrecy Savannah: Is Kenya being Shaped into Africa's Flagship Tax Haven?
Secrecy Savannah: Is Kenya being Shaped into Africa's Flagship Tax Haven?
$21-32 trillion has been siphoned off into tax havens, and now there is evidence to suggest the City of London is trying to make Kenya the world's next tax avoidance hub.
By Martin Kirk, Blessol Gathoni
The skyline of Nairobi. Photograph by Dan Kori.
If anyone doubted the sheer scale of corporate power and the importance of tax havens to it, they had the unedifying spectacle of Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, to enlighten them last month. In already infamous evidence to a US Senate Committee, Cook demonstrated that the international tax system is broken and big corporations are the last people to fix it. He said outright that he won't consider repatriating the staggering $100 billion they have hoarded offshore if it means paying standard US corporation tax.
This is just businesses doing what businesses do. Apple are not going to voluntarily take on extra costs, regardless of moral argument, when they do not have to and their competitors are not. The problem is structural, not individual. This is why, if the tax-avoiding instincts of companies like Apple – along with Glencore, Google, Starbucks, and in fact most large multinationals – are to be neutralised, the only thing to do is tackle the system of tax havens that makes every individual example of avoidance possible.
The imperative is overwhelming. Tax havens exist for one purpose only: to provide a way for the rich to get around the taxes that pay for the infrastructure and services on which we – and they – rely. Tax havens have become, over the last 30 years, a key driver of vast inequalities around the world. The system has grown so big that it is now an arterial drain on public budgets everywhere. According to James Henry, ex-Chief Economist of McKinsey, somewhere between $21 and 32 trillion has been siphoned away from the mainstream economy through these means.
1 Kenya: a future tax secrecy savannah?
2 The City of London's long arms
Kenya: a future tax secrecy savannah?
The global tax haven system is a network with many parts, and the more parts, the more extensive and powerful the network. 30 years ago, there were a handful of relatively small tax havens, serving a small elite. Today, there are more than 80, and they are a parasite on the mainstream, public economy.
There is now mounting evidence that elite financial interests are planning to create a new tax haven – to add another node to the global spider web. This time it is on the African continent, which already gives far more to than it receives from the world economy. According to a recent report from the African Development Bank and Global Financial Integrity, Africa has already lost in the region of $1.4 trillion in illicit financial flows between 1980 and 2009. If successful, this hub will be a key mechanism to extract even more wealth from some of the world's poorest countries.
RELATED POST: Displacement and Resistance: The Ogiek of Kenya
Until now, there hasn't been a major tax haven in mainland Africa. Attempts have been made in the past to create one – always at the behest of huge, Western financial institutions, be that Barclays' efforts in Ghana or the bungled attempts in Botswana – but we may now be looking at the most serious attempt to date. Kenya, it seems, may be in the sights of the tax haven capital of the world: The City of London.
This time, the Corporation of the City of London is trying to expand its shadow economy into Kenya. The City of London and its 'independent' lobbying arm, CityUK, have been conducting high-level negotiations to help the country develop as an 'International Financial Centre'.
This may sound like a benign and even worthwhile activity. Kenya, after all, must develop, and being an International Financial Centre sounds like a good way of going about it. But what does being an "International Financial Centre" actually mean?
When speaking to business insiders, the Kenyan authorities are clear. Alex Owino, a project manager at Kenya's Finance Ministry, told a meeting in the City of London in 2011 that they plan for Nairobi to become a regional 'offshore' financial services hub, modelled on Ireland.
Nick Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World, has no doubts. "Make no mistake. This is a tax haven they want to set up. International Financial Centre is a euphemism", he says. Commenting on their inspiration, he continues, "Ireland is a swamp of regulatory laxity, which is how they have attracted so much money. This is the business model of a tax haven: secrecy, financial regulatory laxity, tax loopholes. What is Kenya's offering going to be?"
The City of London's long arms
Being the midwife of new tax havens is increasingly a feature of the City of London's offering to the world.
For a start, there is the public record of what the City of London Corporation and CityUK do as a matter of course. They regularly lobby at high levels around the world for financial liberalisation, including promoting low tax zones. They do this as part of their objectives to promote UK financial services, presumably because UK financial services benefit from more low and no tax zones by virtue of their role as "the world's biggest financial centre". In other words, financial liberalisation and tax havens are good for the UK's finance-driven businesses.
Then there's what insiders have said about the intent of the bankers in the City of London. In evidence to a British Parliamentary inquiry earlier this year, two very senior former bankers said this:
Witness 2: The UK does not have [withholding tax]. Hence it is mainly arbitrage on other people's tax systems. I am not saying that this is a good thing, I am just saying it is not in the UK. [emphasis added]
RELATED POST: Kenya's Coalitions of Convenience and Ethnic Politicking
Witness 1: That's an important point. What you are seeing, and what is left is, exporting the avoidance. They may be sitting in London, but they are exploiting other countries' tax regimes. From the UK's point of view, you might see that things have gone fairly quiet. Whether or not that will be the case, the key is that while these people are very creative, and the good tax structures are still there, the business always has the capability to come back. [emphasis added]
They gave their testimony anonymously, for reasons we can surely guess, but we do know that Witness 1 is a former employee in Structured Capital Markets at Barclays, and Witness 2 was Head of Debt Structuring Group at "Bank A".
And finally there's the high level attention the City of London has been paying Kenya recently. Successive Lord Mayors of London – the Lobbyists in Chief of the City's financial interests – have been in and out of the country rather a lot. Despite Kenya being just one of 43 countries in one of 50 Market Advisory Groups run by the City, it has received personal visits from Lord Mayors in 2011, 2012, and 2013.
This should be a source of intense embarrassment to UK Prime Minister David Cameron as he uses his G8 pulpit this month to present the rich world's prescription for tackling tax evasion. Can people in the developing world have much faith in the man who not only presides over the tax haven capital of the world, but who goes to fight for the City of London on matters of taxation far more than he has ever challenged it?
Some people in Kenya are alert to the dangers. Activist groups including ours, /The Rules, are running a campaign right now to try to stop the imposition of a staggering 16% tax increase on staple foods such as milk, maize and other basic necessities. They rightly object to high tax increases on the poorest while corporate tax exemptions and theft are costing the country $1.1 billion a year. They see this as a portentous step along the path to reorienting Kenya's tax regime – a path they have good reason to believe is leading inexorably to Kenya becoming Africa's flagship tax haven.
If they're right, even more power, and Kenya's future prosperity, will rest in the hands of the global financial elite – the very same elite who caused the global financial crisis and have proven at every turn that their interests are at odds with those of the majority.
Martin Kirk was reporting from New York, Blessol Gathani from Nairobi.
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"It's going to be an issue, and it's going to present problems and challenges in terms of how that data is used, how it's protected," said Matt Murphy, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who is now vice-president of compliance for Khiron Life Sciences, a Toronto-based cannabis company.
Murphy downplayed the concerns about the U.S. going to great lengths to figure out who bought a gram of cannabis â€" he said they're more worried about terrorists and illegal migrants â€" but he said that potential privacy breaches could affect people's employment, or simply cause public embarrassment.
Some key players in the industry are clearly thinking about privacy issues, but with 10 provinces with different distribution systems, and the inherent complexity of e-commerce, it's difficult to fully understand who all will have access to private cannabis-related data, and how it will be protected.
In a statement in late-September, the Ontario Can nabis Store said that it will take a "privacy by design" approach to online sales, which will be the only option available in the province until next year.
The OCS is working with Shopify to provide e-commerce services for cannabis, and Loren Padelford, vice-president and GM for Shopify Plus, said the company has built special syste ms to store customer data exclusively in Canada.
But Padelford also gave an idea of the complexity of the situation. In addition to collecting enough identifiable information for verifying a customer's age and delivering the drugs to them, there's a complicated financial system to consider.
Shopify routes payment information to "payment gateway" companies such as Stripe.
Both VISA and Mastercard issued statements to the Fina ncial Post downplaying the amount of customer data they have.
But anybody who's ever looked at a credit card statement knows it also identifies individual retailers, which could identify the nature of the purchase.
Brynne Moore, a spokesperson for Scotiabank, suggested that they won't really be treating cannabis data any different from other financial information.


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A Restoring Prosperity Case Study: Louisville Kentucky
Series: First Suburbs Restoring Prosperity
Edward Bennett and Carolyn Gatz Wednesday, September 17, 2008
PDF File Download
Louisville/Jefferson County is the principal city of America's 42nd largest metropolitan area, a 13-county, bi-state region with a 2006 population estimated at 1.2 million. It is the largest city by far in Kentucky, but it is neither Kentucky's capital nor its center of political power.
The consolidated city, authorized by voter referendum in 2000 and implemented in 2003, is home to 701,500 residents within its 399 square miles, with a population density of 4,124.8 per square mile.² It is either the nation's 16th or its 26th largest incorporated place, depending on whether the residents of smaller municipalities within its borders, who are eligible to vote in its elections, are counted (as local officials desire and U.S. Census Bureau officials resist). The remainder of the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) population is split between four Indiana counties (241,193) and eight Kentucky counties (279,523). Although several of those counties are growing rapidly, the new Louisville metro area remains the MSA's central hub, with 57 percent of the population and almost 70 percent of the job base.
Centrally located on the southern banks of the Ohio River, amid an agriculturally productive, mineral rich, and energy producing region, Louisville is commonly described as the northernmost city of the American South. Closer to Toronto than to New Orleans, and even slightly closer to Chicago than to Atlanta, it remains within a day's drive of two-thirds of the American population living east of the Rocky Mountains.
This location has been the dominant influence on Louisville's history as a regional center of trade, commerce and manufacture. The city, now the all-points international hub of United Parcel Service (UPS), consistently ranks among the nation's top logistics centers. Its manufacturing sector, though much diminished, still ranks among the strongest in the Southeast. The many cultural assets developed during the city's reign as a regional economic center rank it highly in various measures of quality of life and "best places."
Despite these strengths, Louisville's competitiveness and regional prominence declined during much of the last half of the 20th Century, and precipitously so during the economic upheavals of the 1970s and '80s. Not only did it lose tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs and many of its historic businesses to deindustrialization and corporate consolidation, it also confronted significant barriers to entry into the growing knowledge-based economy because of its poorly-educated workforce, lack of R&D capacity, and risk-averse business culture.
In response, Louisville began a turbulent, two-decade process of civic and economic renewal, during which it succeeded both in restoring growth in its traditional areas of strength, most notably from the large impact of the UPS hub, and in laying groundwork for 21st century competitiveness, most notably by substantially ramping up university-based research and entrepreneurship supports. Doing so required it to overhaul nearly every aspect of its outmoded economic development strategies, civic relationships, and habits of mind, creating a new culture of collaboration.
Each of the three major partners in economic development radically transformed themselves and their relationships with one another. The often-paralyzing city-suburban divide of local governance yielded to consolidation. The business community reconstituted itself as a credible champion of broad-based regional progress, and it joined with the public sector to create a new chamber of commerce that is the region's full-service, public-private economic development agency recognized as among the best in the nation. The Commonwealth of Kentucky embraced sweeping education reforms, including major support for expanded research at the University of Louisville, and a "New Economy" agenda emphasizing the commercialization of research-generated knowledge. Creative public-private partnerships have become the norm, propelling, for instance, the dramatic resurgence of downtown.
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The initial successes of all these efforts have been encouraging, but not yet sufficient for the transformation to innovation-based prosperity that is the goal. This report details those successes, and the leadership, partnerships, and strategies that helped create them. It begins by describing Louisville's history and development and the factors that made its economy grow and thrive. It then explains why the city faltered during the latter part of the 20th century and how it has begun to reverse course. In doing so, the study offers important lessons for other cities that are striving to compete in a very new economic era.
Download Case Study » (PDF)
Carolyn Gatz
Nonresident Senior Fellow - Metropolitan Policy Program
U.S. States and Territories
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Hero WOD
The Memorial Day Murph is a CrossFit Hero WOD (workout of the day) named in Michael's honor performed at CrossFit affiliates across the globe on Memorial Day.
Michael Patrick "Murph" Murphy (7 May 1976) was a United States Navy SEAL officer who was awarded the U.S. military's highest decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his actions during the War in Afghanistan. After participating in several War on Terrorism missions, he was killed on 28 June 2005, after his team was compromised and surrounded by Taliban forces near Asadabad, Afghanistan. The U.S. Navy ship USS Michael Murphy, and several civilian and military buildings have been named in his honor.
The workout is named "Murph" and consists of a 1 mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 air squats, and a final 1 mile run. The pull-ups, push-ups, and air squats can be partitioned and scaled as needed. Participants are encouraged to wear a 20lb body vest. This workout was one of Murphy's favorites. He called it "Body Armor".
Clintonville Murph
The Clintonville Murph started in 2014 with a handful of gym members getting together to honor fallen veterans.
Since then it has grown to include hundreds of members and local businesses who provide charity sponsorships for the Lt. Michael P. Murphy Foundation and scholarships for Bishop Watterson High School student athletes.
We believe in these programs and the positive opportunities they offer. All entry and corporate sponsorship dollars go towards these charities after event costs. We are proud to have grown our contributions by thousands each year through generous sponsorships and participation.
Suffer & Recover with Friends
We expect up to 200 members and non-members to complete the workout and over 100 friends and family participating in the before and after festivities. Connect with others in your CrossFit Community and give your support during and after the workout! The festivities include:
Our workout will kick off at Matt Spitler's house (85 Montrose Way). We'll start our 1 mile run (uphill) to Crossfit Clintonville Gym and the last mile (downhill) back to Matt's house. When crossing the finish line you will see an ice bath recovery station, water, recovery drinks, and recovery food. We'll have a DJ pumping out inspirational jams at the beginning of the race and at the finish line and will carry us on into our after-party! Adult beverages will be on hand along with games and our infamous Slip N Slide Race!
For everyone's safety, we'll have traffic cops blocking traffic at Dunedin, Dunedin and High and Oakland Park at Indianola and Babysitters will be available.
Parking for the event will be first available/most convenient. We encourage you to use public transportation if possible. Remember, the race FINISHES at 85 Montrose Way
Start and Finish Line >


In a male tech-savvy environment where everything is literally at a click of a button without sounding kitsch, there is Caroline Drucker: a Canadian in Berlin, Partner Marketing Manager at the audio platform SoundCloud. An era were blogs are jam-packed full of the up-to-date stories of ones actions, likes and dislikes, imagining how Caroline lives seems to have taken a different route in our minds; compared to her actual home life.
With a love for the hand-made she enjoys kicking back and making her own garments on the sewing machine. Being a fan of post-digital activities while working in one of the biggest technological environments, Caroline can be called a curiosity. It's interesting to find that she relishes in activities, which need no words and above all no digital gadgets, no interface – just hands and patience. Her home is a distinctive illustration of her many travels and hard work. Living adjacent to where the berlin wall once stood, she can calmly create a barrier between the outside and drift off to ''the nether world'' as she calls it. Moving to Berlin over 10 years ago she was able to make friends, network and absorb this city's charms to find her own feet. We are really excited to have her, share her experience with us.
Caroline will take part in a panel discussion about the special friendship economy of Berlin's Start-up scene at Next Berlin that takes place on May 8th & 9th.
There is no full written interview available. Please watch the video above to enjoy the interview with Caroline.


Pediatric health information for you and your family powered by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
optimal health involves a trusting relationship between the health professional, the child, the family, and the community as partners in health practice.
Information about health, behavior, and development from before birth through the teen years geared for parents, kids, and teens.
For information on living a heart-healthy life. The American Heart Association is the nation's oldest, largest voluntary organization devoted to fighting cardiovascular diseases and stroke.


relating to state employee defense and indemnification from certain claims and actions.
relating to the liability of the state, counties, municipalities, and employees thereof for certain torts, and including effective date and applicability provisions.
creating the Iowa end-of-life options Act and providing penalties.


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Malawi Legal Aid Bureau
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Established under Section 3 of the Legal Aid Act, 2011, the Legal Aid Bureau has a primary statutory mandate to provide legal aid services to the indigent and vulnerable people in need of legal services. The Bureau has been given powers under Section 5 of the Legal Aid Act to do all such things that as it considers necessary or desirable to secure the provision of legal aid in Malawi.
The Legal Aid Bureau strives to be a lead actor in providing accessible, ethical, and high quality legal aid services to vulnerable people in Malawi; and to provide civic education and information about the law to the public.
The Legal Aid Bureau's core objectives are;
• To provide legal aid, legal advice, legal assistance, including representation in any court, tribunal or similar body to the indigent in Malawi.
• To provide civic education and information about the law to the public.
Legal Aid Bureau plays an important role to ensure that poor people have access to justice and legal remedies as provided for under section 41 of the Constitution. Legal Aid Bureau provides legal aid services to persons of insufficient means to hire private lawyers. Priority for legal aid is given to vulnerable groups, such as women, children, the elderly and the sick.
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Need a soundtrack to your weekend? I recommend this mix.
The roots of "Lovers Rock" lies in the late 60's when Jamaican singers like Alton Ellis, The Heptones and Ken Boothe got success combining the sound of Chicago and Philadelphia soul with rocksteady.
In the mid-70's, in south London, "Lovers Rock" became a real music genre and a way of life that influenced an entire generation.


I'm new to these parts so when I first see her along the lake, I keep my distance.
Time takes on new meaning the moment you feel life change.
After a few more bends, past the fragrance of algal pools and submerged beechwood, I make my approach.
I'm gradual and polite, respectful of her own morning ritual, until she senses my wake, takes in my scent, accepts me as I am–a non-threatening suitor of nature.
She allows me to close in from behind and I inch my way closer into her slipstream.
At last we are neck and neck, then alternating the lead.
We glide, we stretch, we continue to meander through still wind on a lake of glass and not a soul surrounds us.
A breeze seems to mean our surroundings agree.
We ruffle in a gentle wind and I know it's true. There's a warming inside. There's that thud of my heart.
Now we travel as one along the outskirts.
Alongside fronds and lily. We zag through mist.
A dragonfly dives down, the only soul it seems, more spontaneous than we. Now it rides a thermal. Now it swoops down to engulf a trio of gnats. It rolls and spins, the daredevil it is and we want to laugh.
A languid summer sun attempts a showing, first as an eastern orb fraying the edge of haze, but the cloud cover wins in their own kind of race, that kind so far and distant, alien to anything we might care about down here on this surface, on what should be a mundane morning cruise but is everything but.
You can feel it inside.
No one knows how long it will last.
But forever—we'll have this morning.


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In this guide we investigate, score and rank the ethical and environmental record of 15 tuna brands.
We also look at MSC certification, slavery on tuna fishing boats, shine a spotlight on the ethics of Fish4Ever and give our recommended buys.
Last updated: Saturday 8th of April 2017
This is a product guide from Ethical Consumer, the UK's leading alternative consumer organisation. Since 1989 we've been researching and recording the social and environmental records of companies, and making the results available to you in a simple format.
Learn more about us →
What to look for when buying tuna:
Is it sustainably caught? The fishing industry is riddled with unsustainable methods, that lead to over fishing, destruction of habitats and indiscriminate fishing of unwanted species, that are then thrown, dead back into the sea. Look for fish that are caught using sustainable practices.
Is it local? Look for local fishmongers selling locally caught fish to cut down on food miles and put money back into the local economy. A fishmonger will often know how and where their fish is caught too, so make sure to ask check whether they source sustainably.
Do you need it at all? The most sustainable - as well as most animal friendly - option is not to buy tuna at all. Consider substituting for a vegetable protein instead to ensure that you avoid environmentally unfriendly fishing practices.
Our Best Buys, based on ethiscore, are:
Reel Fish
Reel Fish is available from Waitrose. Fish4Ever is available from Abel and Cole, Planet Organic and across independent UK stores.
Recommended Buys
Of the supermarkets' own-brand products, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose MSC certified tuna are the better options.
The most ethical option in terms of sustainability and animal rights is not to buy tuna.
What not to buy
What to avoid when buying tuna:
Profits over people? In 2016, Greenpeace published a report about slavery on a Thai tuna fishing vessel. The industry has also been implicated in trafficking; physical and psychological violence towards workers; and degrading and unsafe working conditions. Look for a company with strong commitments to workers' rights.
Is it caught using long-line fishing? This method uses extremely long lines with multiple hooks attached. The long-lines are not selective, killing species of all kind, and are often lost into the sea, meaning that the harm continues for many decades. Avoid fish caught using this method.
Is it albacore tuna? This variety of tuna is one of the least sustainable options. Opt for a more sustainable choice, such as skipjack, and avoid companies that do not disclose the variety caught.
Companies to avoid
We would recommend avoiding tuna brands John West and Princes. Although John West scores reasonable well on our table, it comes bottom of Greenpeace's Tuna League Table, as does Princes. According to the 2016 table, 98% of the tuna John West sold is caught using environmentally destructive methods.
Score table
Updated live from our research database
← Swipe left / right to view table contents →
Score(out of 20)
Ratings Categories
Positive Scores
Fish Tales Tuna MSC [S]
Company Profile: Fish Tales
Product sustainability
Fish4Ever tinned tuna [S]
Company Profile: fish4ever
Reelfish Tuna [S]
Company Profile: The Reel Fish Co
Charles Bassett White Tuna MSC
Company Profile: Conserverie Chancerelle
Marks & Spencer tinned tuna MSC [S]
Company Profile: Marks & Spencer Group plc
John West tinned tuna
Company Profile: John West Foods Limited
Waitrose tuna MSC [S,E]
Company Profile: Waitrose Limited
Sainsbury's tinned tuna MSC [S]
Company Profile: J Sainsbury plc
Co-op tinned tuna
Company Profile: Co-operative Group Ltd
Aldi 'Ocean Rise' canned tuna
Company Profile: ALDI SOUTH Group
Lidl NiXe Tinned Tuna
Company Profile: Lidl UK GmbH
Princes tinned tuna chunks MSC [S]
Company Profile: Princes Ltd
Tesco tinned tuna [S]
Company Profile: Tesco plc
Morrisons Tuna
Company Profile: Wm Morrison Supermarkets plc
Princes tinned tuna
ASDA tinned tuna
Company Profile: Asda Group Ltd
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Our Analysis
Tuna is one of the Big Five that make up 60-80% of the UK's seafood consumption. According to Greenpeace, the UK eats more tuna than any other country in the world, except the USA.
John West canned tuna is the UK's market leader, accounting for 23% of total UK sales in 2015/16. In second place is Princes canned tuna which accounts for 15% of sales.[1]
Tuna is a globally important source of food and, accordingly, one of the most commercially valuable fish. Global fishing of tuna has increased continuously from less than 0.6 million tonnes in 1950 to above 6 million tonnes in 2010.
Unfortunately, the fishing of tuna is not spared the many problems of the global fishing industry.
Environmental Concerns in Tuna Production
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, in 2013 the main tuna stocks were more-or-less fully exploited (meaning there was no room for fishery expansion), some were overexploited (meaning that there was a risk of stock collapse), and very few were underexploited.
According to the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation, of the total tuna catch in 2015, 76% came from stocks considered to be at 'healthy' levels. This percentage has been decreasing over the years reflecting the increasing pressure on tuna: in 2011, 94% of the catch had come from healthy stocks, followed by 86% in 2012, and 87% in 2013.
Not Just Tuna
Fishing for tuna involves methods that unnecessarily kill 'non-target', commercially-valueless species. A number of these are threatened with extinction, including species of sharks, turtles and marine birds.
FADs and turtles
Such fishing methods can also kill juvenile tuna that have not reached reproductive maturity or species of tuna that are overfished. This is because different species of tuna often swim in the same school and indiscriminate methods fail to differentiate between them.
MSC certification - conservation or 'bluewashing'?
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is an international certification and ecolabeling programme for sustainable seafood. On our score table above we have awarded an extra positive mark for product sustainability to products that carry the MSC certification.
Its blue logo is intended to influence consumer choice and shift aggregate consumer demand away from unsustainable sources of seafood towards more sustainable ones. The logo was designed to communicate to consumers the three main principles of the MSC:
That the target seafood populations are healthy
That fishing happens in a way that does not impact on the environment unnecessarily
That the fishery involved is managed effectively and responsibly
Since its inception, it has had a meteoric rise, according to the Ethical Markets Report 2016 published by Ethical Consumer. In 2003, MSC-certified fish sales were valued at £10 million while, in 2015, that figure had grown to over £1.5 billion. In 2015, 76% of wild-caught seafood sold in Sainsbury's supermarkets, 53% in Lidl and 51% in Waitrose carried the MSC logo, according to the same report.
The controversy around MSC
In recent years, the MSC has come under severe criticism from a range of environmental groups and marine scientists.
In 2013, scientists based in US, Mexican and Dutch research institutions, and environmental groups including Greenpeace USA published a review of all the formal objections raised against fisheries proposed for MSC certification between 2000 and 2012. The authors concluded that:
"An analysis of the formal objections indicates that the MSC's principles for sustainable fishing are too lenient and discretionary, and allow for overly generous interpretation by third-party certifiers and adjudicators, which means that the MSC label may be misleading both consumers and conservation funders".
Of a total of 19 formal objections raised to proposals for certification, only one was ever upheld. Objections accounted for 12% of the number of fisheries certified. However, the size of these fisheries was large and they accounted for more than a third of all MSC-certified seafood by tonnage.
James Simpson from the MSC argues that the results of the objection process are more nuanced:
"This analysis argues that the only outcome from an objection that is considered 'successful' is for the fishery to fail its MSC assessment. In fact, quite a lot of objections have been upheld and resulted in additional measures to protect stocks and the environment. In many cases, NGOs such as WWF have used the objections process to convince fisheries to agree to new measures to protect the environment. These have been hugely successful."
He added that a more recent analysis in 2016 provided information on 31 objections, two of which led to a fishery failure and 16 of which led to a change in scoring (which usually results in new conditions and, thus, further changes at sea). Therefore more than half of objections were successful in influencing certifications.
Six main criticisms
The MSC has been criticised on six main fronts:
1. The MSC will certify all fishing gears and methods including ocean floor dredging and gill nets which many environmental organisations regard as inherently unsustainable and destructive.
Contrary to that the MSC argues that "to be certified, stocks must be within safe biological limits. Stocks deplete and recover as part of their natural cycles, they are never static. The key issue for sustainability is how that change is managed. It is considerably easier to get a low-impact fishery MSC certified (eg rope-grown mussels) than for a high-impact fishery to clear the MSC bar."
"The only MSC certified sustainable dredge fishery in the UK is a dredged scallop fishery. None of the others have met the MSC standard. Solid, peer- reviewed science like an MSC assessment is useful to highlight those exceptions and can provide a blueprint for other high-impact fisheries to improve their performance."
2. The MSC criteria allegedly allow for depleted fisheries to be certified provided that the fishing operators commit to measures to rebuild the fisheries. Critics argue that stocks are certified as sustainable before there is evidence that the fish stocks are recovering.
The MSC responds that "Many stocks rebuild before MSC assessment, and occasionally some rebuild as part of their certification, eg. New Zealand hoki and South Africa hake".
3. The MSC standards allow certification of fisheries that have high levels of bycatch and do not use all proven mitigation methods. In January 2017, more than 40 environmental groups, in a public letter to the MSC, expressed the view that MSC-certified fisheries do not adequately protect non-target, non-commercial species such as sharks, dolphins, turtles, porpoises and whales from ending up as bycatch.
The authors of the letter wrote this with regards to the Atlantic Canadian Swordfish Longline fishery:
"At the time of certification, this fishery was acknowledged to kill 35,000 endangered, vulnerable and near-threatened sharks per year, as well as impacting 200-500 endangered sea turtles annually. Despite the knowledge that this fishery has a very high bycatch to target catch ratio, and that the quantity of bycaught species can even exceed that of the target species, MSC granted certification."
4. Further, the authors of the same letter note that the MSC certification fails to reward and differentiate the fisheries with no bycatch. They offer the example of Canadian swordfish fished with harpoons, a method that produces no bycatch, which carries the same certification as the aforementioned long-line fishery. Consumers have no way of distinguishing on the basis of the 'eco-label' and the harpoon fishery derives no commercial advantage.
5.The MSC certifies fisheries that are destined for fishmeal which critics consider as an unsustainable and wasteful end-use of seafood.
James Simpson from the MSC counters that "many of these fisheries catch fish that humans are not prepared to eat. With the population set to reach between 9 and 11 billion people by 2050, fish farming is necessary and – compared to land-based proteins – a low-impact protein. The volume of seafood going to fishmeal has been static for a considerable amount of time (decades). Certification of these fisheries is a key step to ensuring the practice is sustainable."
6. The MSC process is said to favour large-scale industrial fisheries over more sustainable, small-scale ones.
The MSC, on the other hand, argues that "Small scale fisheries are not automatically more sustainable than large-scale. While the individual small boats may have lower impact than their larger rivals, it is important to consider the cumulative impact of a large number of small boats operating in a small area of coastline."
Additionally, the MSC emphasises that it is a not-for-profit, mission-driven organisation that invests its surplus back to conservation activities. It points out that its governance structure engages a diversity of stakeholders including NGOs, scientists, fishing companies, retailers, and processors.
It maintains that "fisheries that meet the MSC Standard have the independent science and peer-reviewed evidence-based reports to demonstrate their sustainability. Certified fisheries have invested heavily to become sustainable...".
Finally, the MSC points out that its standards are performance based, i.e. certified fisheries must not only have the right processes and documents in place but they must also demonstrate proof of application through on-the-ground audits.
Lee Switzer of Fish 4 Ever had this to say about the MSC certification:
"We see the MSC certification as being an industrial approach. It is the industrial boats that have caused the damage, so of course it is good that they are sorting themselves out, but it is not the best version of sustainability. For us, the MSC's standard or description of over-fishing is set quite low. … The fundamental problem with the MSC is that it is being promoted by its users as the last word in sustainability and because it has so much power behind it, that idea has taken root, drowning out and excluding a myriad number of better approaches and initiatives."
How MSC's critics explain these problems
Critics attribute the weakened certification standards to the funding structure of the MSC. The MSC charges a licensing fee on the wholesale value of the quantity of seafood that carries the MSC logo.
Over the years, the importance of this fee revenue has increased substantially going from 7% in 2006, to 49.4% in 2011 to 73% of total revenue in 2015/16.7 The rest of its revenue comes mainly from charitable donations.
The MSC does not conduct the fishery assessments or audits itself. These are carried out by third-party companies who are paid by the fishery operators who voluntarily apply for MSC certification.
The fishery operators are free to choose the assessment company (certifier). Critics argue that certifiers have an incentive to inflate the performance scores of a fishery as successful certification guarantees income from the required annual audits and from the re-certification process which must occur after five years of initial certification. Fisheries can also be expected to prefer those companies likely to produce a positive result both for the initial assessment and the subsequent audits.
However, James Simpson from the MSC points out that "10% of fisheries have failed the MSC assessment process".
He goes on to say that "Independent assessments are intellectually, the most robust mechanism for auditing sustainability. This is the mechanism used for ISO compliance, and all of the major certification schemes including Fairtrade, Soil Association Organic and FSC."
The performance of independent certifiers has nevertheless been a source of concern for campaigners across these other schemes too and remains a genuine problem in the field.
Critics also claim that raising a formal objection to a certifier's proposal for certification carries a financial cost to the objector and can only happen within a prescribed window of time. This means that small organisations may not be able to afford to bring an objection forward. And even if all or part of an objection is upheld, it is the certifying company that ultimately decides whether to recommend certification for the fishery.
According to the MSC, this is not the whole picture: "Under FAO rules, MSC is allowed to pay for small organisations to make objections and has done so in the past. However, most objections are made by large, well-funded NGOs and the FAO rules mean that they have to pay part of the cost. Given the choice, MSC would cover these costs for all objectors, but that is not the MSC's decision."
Is the MSC logo meaningless then?
The advocates of internationally agreed and enforced limitations on fishing volumes point out that the MSC reflects the inherent weaknesses of market-based systems. However, there is a pragmatic question as to what happens in the absence of such agreements between states.
The MSC system has strengths and weaknesses. These are summarised by the US Seafood Watch which offers information to consumers in the manner of the Marine Conservation Society in the UK.
When, in 2013, Seafood Watch assessed the MSC certification against its own Fisheries Criteria, it rated the MSC criteria as good at minimising impact on fish stocks, adequate at both minimising impact on habitat and resources and at promoting effective management of the fishery, but poor at minimising the impact of the fishery on other species (e.g. through large levels of bycatch).
The MSC offers a different picture. According to the MSC Global Impacts Report 2016, an analysis of MSC certified fish stocks in Northern Europe shows that they are now more abundant than prior to certification. Uncertified stocks show much greater variability, with average fishing remaining too high to ensure productive fish stocks.
On our scoretable, we have, for many years, awarded a mark for product sustainability to products that carry the MSC certification and we did so in this product guide as well.
The MSC system, despite its weaknesses and contested effectiveness, is transparent. As well as the Global Impacts Reports, you can go onto the MSC website and read in detail the assessments for each of the individual certified fisheries. But prepare for a long read as many assessments are more than 300 pages long before you even get to the peer review documents.
This transparency allows the debate on marine conservation to continue on an informed basis. This must be considered alongside the shadowy practices of large parts of the global supply chain of seafood.
And, according to the MSC, the bar is being ratcheted up rather than down:
"This year, we introduced the latest upgrade to the MSC Standard. Five years of work with scientists and NGOs around the world that raises the bar even further, has now incorporated new tougher protections for the oceans and vulnerable habitats. The world's top 10% of fisheries which are now certified are already working towards these new standards. And there's maybe another 10% trying to join them."
The controversies regarding all ethical certification schemes, such as the ones around the Forest Stewardship Council and Fairtrade, will be familiar to Ethical Consumer readers. As they become more important, such schemes rightly become new sites for political debate and activism.
The emerging critiques of the MSC are just part of this process and are, inevitably, a key element in the new way politics must be done in unregulated globalised markets until such time as meaningful regulatory regimes can be agreed and enforced.
Should I eat Fish?
Given the state of marine environments under the pressures of overfishing and pollution, many people argue that refraining from eating fish altogether may be one way to allow marine environments to be partially restored.
On the other hand, fish are estimated to account for 17% of protein consumption by humans which raises the question of how this amount could be replaced. Vegetarians and vegans would argue that the answer to this question is plant protein that is sustainably grown.
Apart from environmental considerations, there is also an ethical argument against eating fish grounded on considerations of animal rights and animal welfare.
The Vegetarian Society argues that fish are sentient beings capable of experiencing pain and distress. If you believe that the right to life extends to fish or that no sentient being should be made to suffer and experience pain for human benefit, then even the most environmentally sustainable method will not be acceptable.
Even tuna fished in artisanal ways of low environmental impact may be treated in ways that do not accord with people's standards of the ethical treatment of animals. For example, large tuna hooked with a line may be brought to deck using massive metal hooks that dig deep into the flesh and then clubbed to death with repeated blows to the head.
In the Mediterranean, schools of tuna may be penned in nets for a very long time during which the fish are very stressed and gradually exhausted. When brought on deck they are bled to death by severing a large vein near their gills.
Human Rights Abuses in Tuna Supply Chains
Fishing vessels supplying tuna processors have been implicated in human trafficking; slavery; physical and psychological violence towards workers; degrading and unsafe working conditions; exhaustingly long working hours; and inadequate provision of nourishment, and living and sleeping quarters.
A Greenpeace South East Asia report, called 'Turn the Tide', published in December 2016, offers a stark case-study of human slavery aboard a Thai vessel catching tuna for the country's multi-billion-dollar tuna canning and export sector.
Buying cans of tuna in UK stores connects us as UK consumers to these complex, often hidden, global, supply chains. These can start from the messy, bloody deck of a Thai-owned fishing vessel crewed by immigrant workers from Burma and Cambodia, employed without legal papers. The chain passes through the clinical cleanliness of the cannery of a global industrial behemoth in Bangkok, to the logistics and transport web that links the seaports of the world.
From there, cans of tuna are moved to gigantic distribution centres in the UK and finally to a supermarket shelf. Tuna bought in a supermarket can link us directly to stories of environmental destruction and human suffering or to stories of environmental protection and human flourishing.
Our buying choices can promote one or the other but we need to be aware of these stories in order for our choices to be informed.
John West Tuna
As you can see from our score table above the market-leading brands are, unfortunately, not the ones whose policies and practices do the most to protect the environment and the employees in their supply chains.
The John West brand is owned by the Thai Union Group, a global company based in Thailand, which is the largest canned tuna producer and exporter in the world. It owns market-leading brands of seafood in the UK, Europe, the US and China, along with fishing vessels in Western Africa, tuna processing and canning facilities, can manufacturing factories, shrimp farms and fishmeal manufacturing facilities.
The UK market leader, John West, does not score well in our ranking system, with an Ethiscore of 5.5 out of a possible 20. This is partly because of the shortcomings of its corporate policies and partly because of the criticisms received by its parent company the Thai Union Group. John West scores better than the supermarkets because, not being involved in product lines other than seafood, it does not receive the range and frequency of ethical criticisms that UK supermarkets do.
Thai Union produces about one-fifth of the world's tuna products. According to Greenpeace's 2016 Tuna League Table, 98% of the tuna it sells is caught using environmentally destructive methods. The company continues to source tuna from vessels that fish using purse seine nets in conjunction with Fish Aggregation Devices. This is despite public commitments by the company to achieve 100% sustainability in tuna sourcing by the end of 2016.
John West is, at the time of writing, the focus of a Greenpeace campaign which asks the major UK supermarkets to stop stocking the brand. Tesco announced in July 2016 that they had de-listed a number of John West lines, but not all, because they did not meet the same standards as their own-brand tuna.
Waitrose announced that all tuna sold in its stores would need to be caught by pole-and-line or be MSC-certified by the end of 2017. Greenpeace is now targeting Sainsbury's because it has not made similar commitments.
An Associated Press investigation in 2015 and a Greenpeace report in 2016 both claimed that Thai Union was sourcing seafood from vessels on which human and labour rights abuses were perpetrated, including slavery, forced labour and the provision of degrading conditions of employment and living. The same vessels were alleged to be engaging in illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU).
The wider issues within the Thai fishing industry are well documented. In 2015, the European Union threatened Thailand with an import ban on all fishing products originating in the country unless Thailand took decisive action against illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, which is often associated with labour abuses.
In the same year, the US State Department's 2015 'Trafficking in Persons' (TIP) report maintained Thailand at the bottom-ranked tier 3 level based on the inadequacies of its efforts comply with minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.
Princes Tuna
Princes is owned by the Japanese conglomerate, Mitsubishi, whose industrial activities extend from automobiles to food, nuclear energy and semi-conductors.
Princes is also sourcing tuna caught in purse seine nets with large amounts of bycatch. According to Greenpeace's Tuna League Table 2016, "only 25% of its tuna is pole-and-line or free-school-caught, despite its commitment to source 100% sustainable tuna by the end of 2014".
Independent Tuna Brands
The best scoring brands in our ranking system are: Fish Tales, Fish4Ever and Reel Fish.
They are all small, independent companies which we consider to be providing consumers with products with a lower environmental impact. They were all awarded extra points for 'Company Ethos' because of their policies on sustainability, transparency, traceability and sourcing.
These are companies that will only source tuna from small fleets of small fishing boats that use pole-and-line.
They also claim to use local canneries and that the fish are not transported long distances in order to be processed. For example, Fish Tales disclose that for tuna caught in the Maldives it uses a cannery also based in the Maldives, except for situations when the capacity of that cannery is exceeded, in which case, it uses a cannery in Thailand.
All firms disclose the fishing territories their fish is sourced from as well as the species of tuna.
They have all been recommended by Greenpeace as #JustTuna brands that try to minimise the environmental impact of their activities and promote the wellbeing of the people involved in their supply chains.
Fish Tales tuna products are all MSC-certified whereas Fish4Ever and Reel Fish Co do not carry the MSC logo.
Fish Tales sells skipjack tuna sourced from the MSC-certified fishery in the Maldives in the Indian Ocean which is the only fishery that has an MCS rating of '1' (most recommended).
According to the MCS, when last assessed in 2014, the fishery stocks were found to be in a healthy state. Moreover, the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission has implemented harvest control measures even though the stocks are healthy which may suggest that the fishery is well-managed although that is a controversial topic.
Fish4Ever and Reel Fish sell skipjack sourced from the eastern Atlantic off the coast of Portugal and West Africa, and from the Indian Ocean, which carries an MCS rating of '2'.
Albacore Tuna
The Good Fish Guide
The Marine Conservation Society (MCS), not to be confused with the similarly named MSC, champions the need for marine wildlife protection, sustainable fisheries and clean seas and beaches. Its many successes and campaigns to date include the introduction of a Marine Act to better protect UK seas and marine life, and influencing sustainable seafood choices by major retailers and consumers through the 'Good Fish Guide' (free App on iPhone and android)
According to the MCS, there are three main considerations when thinking about the environmental sustainability of canned tuna: the species of tuna, the fishing method and the fishing territory it was sourced from.
1) Species
According to the MCS's 'Good Fish Guide', skipjack is "one of the best choices out of the commercially fished tuna species" as "stocks worldwide are still in fairly good shape". However, the increasing amounts fished are becoming a cause for concern.
The next two most commercially important species of tuna for UK markets are yellowfin and albacore. Yellowfin, which is often found in cans and as fresh tuna steaks, has suffered from overfishing. It is illustrative that, in April 2016, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) announced that the Yellowfish fishery in the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, the first in the region to get the MSC logo in 2012, can no longer be considered sustainable and has suspended its certification.
The MCS 'Good Fish Guide' gives albacore tuna a 'recommended' rating of 2 (in a scale starting with '1' being the most recommended fish to eat and '5' being a fish to avoid) provided it is caught by pole-and-line or trolling. In the UK, albacore is not as widely available as skipjack and it commands a price premium.
The majority of canned tuna sold in supermarkets in the UK is skipjack tuna. Unfortunately, the market-leading brands, John West and Princes, do not consistently offer information on the species of tuna used, either on the labelling of their products or on their websites.
2) Fishing method
According to the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), in 2015, 64% of the tuna catch was made by purse seining, followed by long-line (12%), pole-and-line (9%), gillnets (4%) and other methods (11%).
The MCS notes that the sustainability of a species needs to be thought about alongside the method of fishing.
Long-line fishing
This method involves releasing extremely long fishing lines – some of them long enough to stretch from London to Brighton – to which are attached shorter lines and thousands of baited hooks. It is not selective and can end up catching other species, such as seabirds, sharks and turtles that go after the bait.
Long-lines, which are made of non-biodegradable monofilaments, are often lost and can drift at sea indefinitely, snagging, entangling, and killing marine life for decades after they ceased to be used by fishing vessels.
Purse seining
Purse seining involves fish being encircled by a large 'wall' of net, which is then brought together to retain the fish by using a line at the bottom that enables the net to be closed like a purse. This method can be highly specific, with little bycatch when targeting adult schools of one species, but 70% of purse-seining is done using fish aggregation devices (FADs) and a tenth of everything caught in this way is unwanted bycatch of juvenile tuna and other marine life.
FADs are floating devices around which tuna and other large fish instinctively aggregate in vast numbers. According to Greenpeace, even when skipjack tuna is targeted with conventional purse seine fishing with FADs, the catch can also be up to 20% baby bigeye and yellowfin tuna, caught before they've had a chance to breed. Greenpeace considers this method so destructive that it campaigns for it to be banned.
Pole and line
Pole and line fishing, or bait-boat fishing, is the oldest fishing method. Used by local fishermen and sport fishers, it causes far less harm to the environment than commercial methods do. Trolling is a fishing method in which five or more baited lines are towed behind a slowly moving vessel. Both methods are very selective because only fish of a certain size can be caught, leaving juveniles to grow to spawning age and replenish the stock in the future. They also eliminate the problem of bycatch. However, pole-and-line methods in the case of tuna may involve large amounts of fish bait used.
Greenpeace Australia strongly advises consumers to choose pole-and-line-caught tuna. Aside from the reduced bycatch, pole-and-line is a very labour intensive method which means more employment for local fishermen living in coastal communities and island states.
The larger fishing vessels employing large nets and long-lines come from nations that are often very far from the nations surrounding a fishing territory, and use sophisticated technology with little crew. This means that although the Pacific tuna industry has been valued at over $7 billion per year, most of the profits do not end up with the countries in whose waters the tuna is fished.
In the Pacific, which provides 60% of the world's tuna, only a tiny fraction of the value stays in the local economy. Most developing coastal states cannot afford the expensive industrial vessels. For the price of a high-tech purse seine vessel, around twenty pole and line vessels can be bought which means more opportunities for local ownership.
John West and Princes fail to display on their labels the fishing method used.
3) Fishing territory
Fishing territory is important as fish of the same species may thrive in one territory with healthy stocks while the same species may be nearly depleted in a different territory. A striking example is that of the Western Indian Ocean where the activities of Somalian pirates had, at one stage, discouraged fishing and, as a consequence, the stocks of yellowfin tuna and other fish were healthy. As the activity of pirates declined, fishing vessels returned and the stocks are now reported to have declined significantly.
The MCS offers an illustration of how fishing method and fishing territory interact to affect their system of rating the sustainability of fish. Skipjack as a species ranges across this spectrum from '1' to '5' with the highest rating only awarded to skipjack caught by line-and-pole by certified fleets off the coast of the Maldives. In contrast, the same species caught by fixed nets or gill nets elsewhere in the Indian Ocean is given a red 5. When caught by pole-and-line, skipjack is given a green rating of 1 or 2 irrespective of the fishing territory.
Albacore tuna caught by pole-and-line or trolling in the Atlantic is given a rating of 2.
For yellowfin tuna, the situation is more complicated. The MCS recommends yellowfin tuna caught in the Western and Central Pacific even if caught by long-lining or purse-seining (non-FAD associated) but advises to avoid yellowfin caught in the Atlantic and even more so in the Indian Ocean even if pole-and-line caught.
In making a decision about which tuna to buy, species, fishing method and fishing territory are clearly all of relevance. Brands and companies that do not disclose this information can be suspected of having something to hide and are therefore not a good choice.
To check the MCS fish ratings, see Good Fish Guide website.
Pole and line method
Company behind the brand
Fish 4 Ever is the canned fish brand of OrganiCo Realfoods. OrganiCo was founded in England in 1991. It specialises in organic Mediterranean produce from small, artisanal, traditional farmers and agricultural co-operatives. Fish 4 Ever was started in 2001.
The company sources fish from small, local fleets that preferably use labour-intensive methods of fishing that create and sustain local employment. The company also selects local canneries not far from where the fish are landed so that transport miles are reduced and the local economy keeps a larger share of the value chain.
The company refuses to source from long-distance, foreign-water fleets of industrial-sized vessels that remove fish and economic value from the territories they operate in. Land-based ingredients used in its canned fish such as olive oil are 100% organic.
Fish 4 Ever is an associate organisation of Sustainable Fish Cities and it has collaborated with environmental NGOs such as the Environmental Justice Foundation, the Slow Food Movement, the International Pole and Line Federation and the Marine Conservation Society.
See our Q&A with Fish4Ever.
If you want to find out detailed information about a company and more about its ethical rating, then click on a brand name in the Score table.
This information is reserved for subscribers only. Don't miss out, become a subscriber today.
Mintel – Fish and Shellfish UK November 2016
Places to buy
Waitrose sells Reel Fish Tuna on its website.
Planet Organic stocks Fish4Ever tuna.
Ethical Consumer makes a small amount of money from your purchase. This goes to fund our research and campaigning. We ethically screen all the sites we link to.
How to use Ethical Consumer
Product guide to rice
Product guide to tinned tomatoes
Product guide to olive oil


text:
Murphy, Falcon & Murphy Files Lawsuit on Behalf of Baltimore Orioles Outfielder Nolan Reimold
Posted in Medical Malpractice,News on April 14, 2015
In a lawsuit filed today in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, attorneys Hassan Murphy, Mary McNamara Koch and Jon Simon Stefanuca of Murphy, Falcon & Murphy, P.A. allege that the Baltimore Orioles outfielder, Nolan Reimold, sustained serious physical injuries as a result of negligent medical care at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Reimold was diagnosed with a herniated disk and underwent spinal surgery at The Johns Hopkins Hospital on June 25, 2012. The complaint alleges that, after the surgery, Ziya Gokaslan, a neurosurgeon at Hopkins, discharged Reimold on January 10, 2013 to full play without any activity restrictions before his neck bones were fused.
Reimold resumed his normal exercise program with the inadequate bone fusion and appeared in 40 games during the 2013 season, hitting .195/.250/.336 in 140 plate appearances. The complaint alleges that the 2012 surgery failed because Reimold was permitted to engage in strenuous physical activities even though he had not fully recovered from the 2012 surgery. As a result, Reimold was forced to undergo an additional repair surgery on July 22, 2013 and he missed the remainder of 2013 season.
Reimold said,
I was under the impression that everything was fused. Dr. Gokaslan released me to full play without any activity restrictions, and told me I was good to play and workout. I did my best to get back on track. I had no idea that every game I played caused me further injury because my bones weren't fused.
In 2009, Reimold won the American League Rookie of the Month award and was named Topps All-Star Rookie Outfielder. Prior to his surgery in 2012, he was the Orioles' hottest hitter, hitting .313 with five home runs and 10 RBIs in his first 16 games. In 2015, the Orioles signed Reimold to a minor-league deal with an invitation to spring training.
According to Hassan Murphy,
Nolan's injuries and subsequent absence from the game were entirely avoidable. Unfortunately, because Dr. Gokaslan discharged Nolan before his bones were fully fused, his career took a turn for the worse, and he missed valuable time when he could have been playing at the highest level.


Silver prices have been in free fall over the last week, collapsing down to $17.60 on Monday and resting at 4 year lows. The daily sentiment index is now at 4%, meaning 96% of traders polled believe silver is going lower from here.
This is a very emotional time for many people that own precious metals in their portfolio. Investors love to buy assets when prices are high and they hate to own assets (or purchase more) when prices are low. It is one of the most fascinating parts of human psychology surrounding the financial markets, and it doesn't exist anywhere else in normal life (no one rushes out to purchase a TV because a store just promised to raise the price $2,000 for "one day only").
Silver trades like a technical beast. Stop loss triggers are set up on the charts, meaning computers are programmed to sell when prices reach certain levels. Professionals that know where these stops are clumped together, and have the ability to move the (extremely tiny) market downward in the short term, can push the price down to those levels and trigger the stop losses. It creates a cascading waterfall selling effect on the way down. It also washes away any sellers or stops remaining in the market.
The bearish argument is that the momentum is in your favor on the downside. The dollar has experienced incredible strength over the past few weeks and it looks like it has no signs of stopping.
Let's briefly walk back through the bigger picture more bullish supply/demand factors that may impact the market over the longer term.
Every year new industrial uses are created for the metal increasing the demand potential in the years ahead. As the Fed winds down its QE program for now, the dollar is strengthening which is hurting both silver and gold in the short term. However, precious metals trade on a global stage and while the Fed is tightening, Europe is just beginning a new QE program while Japan continues to unleash a steady stream of printed currency. China has experienced a $15 trillion growth in their credit markets since 2008, which is larger than the entire size of the U.S. financial system. While the U.K. temporarily has QE on hold, they (along with every developed country in the world) have interest rates at 0.0%. It is possible that some day we will wake and find that the world would like to own just a small percentage of their portfolio in currency that is not purposefully being devalued.
Silver is currently priced well below the cost of production which is taking a large chunk of the ready mining supply off the market and removing the potential for additional supply completely in the years ahead. Imagine trying to put together a group of investors to build a new mine knowing that what you take out of the ground will lose money. Investors will laugh at you and tell you to take your money and go fund a hot new app in San Francisco.
After a 65% drop in price over the past 4 years, silver has first been forgotten, then hated and now despised as an asset class. I was not buying silver on the way up during the last $17.50 to $50 run because I prefer to buy assets after major price declines when sentiment is washed out. I never dreamed this opportunity would appear again. Can it fall to $15, $10, $5 from here? Sure. This market has the potential to do anything in the short term.
I still believe, and I am probably the only person left on the planet today, that there will be consequences for the central banks policies over the last 6 years (which are still in effect today). The world now believes that there are no long term consequences for holding rates artificially low or printing money to stimulate the economy in the short term. They believe central banks are gods.
Maybe this time is different, but I'm betting with my portfolio that it's not.
Are there other ways you are betting on silver other than buying physical?
From the Scotiabank report heh.
""The absence of geopolitical concerns has enabled investors to move out from bullion metals and enter in the dollar index, boosting optimism for the US economy, thus making bullion lose its shine."
Yep all is well in the world and the US economy is roaring along hahahahha.
So desperate and yet, some people actually pay them for such nonsense.


An autonomous drone is assisting with stocktaking by detecting and counting containers.
ŠKODA AUTO is pressing ahead with the implementation of technologies in line with Industry 4.0 principles: at its Mladá Boleslav plant, the Czech car manufacturer is currently testing a drone that can identify and count containers outside the factory from the air. The drone is a result of collaboration between the ŠKODA brand's logistics department and the Czech company Robodrone, and is paving the way to implementing drone-assisted stocktaking in everyday operations in future.
With its six rotors, the drone based on Robodrone's 'Kingfisher' model can fly up to 20 km/h and can carry a load of up to 5 kg. During the current testing phase, it fully autonomously records the number of empty containers outside a factory hall in Mladá Boleslav three times per day. The data are then automatically transferred to the IT systems at ŠKODA AUTO's logistics department, where they can be processed.
Highly complex LIDAR technology used to accurately measure distance and speed.
As GPS is not precise enough to determine the locations of the containers, the drone is equipped with LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology to accurately measure speed and distance. A LIDAR sensor captures up to 300,000 images per second. The drone navigates using a 3D map, which is created based on this technology. Simultaneously it detects and counts the equipment containers all thanks to algorithms.
Up until now, this kind of technology was not available on the market – ŠKODA AUTO therefore developed the algorithms specifically for this application in collaboration with Czech company Robodrone Industries. In total, the car manufacturer invested around 200,000 euros in this technological innovation.
Test operations have been running since May. In the medium term, the drone will be seamlessly integrated into regular operations – in the second development phase, the 'Kingfisher' will get its own 'nest': the battery-powered device will then be able to autonomously navigate to a charging station. This will also be equipped with a weather station which will provide the drone with information about the weather at short notice.


text:
Q: nftables does not write to syslog Running Debian 10 on a LXC container:
# apt-get -y install nftables
# nft --version
nftables v0.7 (Scrooge McDuck)
# nft flush ruleset
# nft add table inet filter
# nft add chain inet filter input
# nft add rule inet filter input log
# nft list ruleset
table inet filter {
    chain input {
        log
    }
}

Then, I go to /var/log/syslog, create some network traffic and... I see no message from nftables at all.
I also tried (unsuccessfully) to define the rule this way:
nft add rule inet filter input log prefix \"FINDME \" counter

More tests:
# logger test && tail -1 /var/log/syslog
Aug 18 20:39:53 my-server root: test
# echo "test2" | systemd-cat && tail -1 /var/log/syslog
Aug 18 20:40:52 my-server cat[1907]: test2
# uname -v
 #1 SMP PVE 5.4.34-2 (Thu, 07 May 2020 10:02:02 +0200)

Why is nftables not writing to my syslog ?
As a bonus question: would there be any way to trigger an action when a match occurs? For example store blocked IPs on a database.

A: Well... Thanks to the clue of @anx I figured out that apparently netfilter has some difficulties to send the data to rsyslog.
It probably has something to do with the fact that the host is a LXC container without own kernel and the cgroups in the hypervisor... (Buff, I'm getting into dark territory)... Well... Whatever.
Anyway, if somebody happens to have a similar issue, I managed to get some log by sending the data into ulogd. These are the steps to get a basic example working:
# apt-get -y install nftables ulogd2
# nft flush ruleset
# nft add table inet filter
# nft add chain inet filter input '{ type filter hook input priority 0 ; }'
# nft add rule inet filter input log prefix "FINDME" group 0 accept
# nft list ruleset
table inet filter {
    chain input {
        type filter hook input priority 0; policy accept;
        log prefix "FINDME" group 0 accept
    }
}
# tail -f /var/log/ulog/syslogemu.log

A: I run into a very similar problem: nftables did not log when run inside a network namespace. The solution from Julen did not work for me.
As I'm not running any container, I could fix my problem using
echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_log_all_netns

More details:
https://blog.raymond.burkholder.net/index.php?/archives/787-nftables-network-namespace-logging.html

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Q: Android Facebook SDK - How to log in as another user? I am using the official Facebook SDK for Android in my app.
I have managed to log in successfully,
but the problem arises when I try to log in as another user:
I click on the link that says Logged in as [name]... Not you?
but my application proceeds anyway and posts to my wall...
(as if I have clicked "Allow")
I discovered that clicking on that link throws a facebook exception and retries the request,
so I tried putting a call to logout() in the catch clause.
That made it possible to log in as a new user,
but the next time I run the app,
again, the old user is logged-in...
(Logged in as [old_user]. Not you?)

My question is:
Why does the first user's login persist forever
and how to properly handle a click on "Not You" link?

My current solution is to always call logout() before authorize() method
but this forces the user to always have to enter his/her email/password
which is not acceptable either.

A: The facebook access token is saved by SessionStore.
When loggin into Facebook, it will try to restore the access token from SessionStore.
So, I think you can explicitly call facebook.logout and SessionStore.clear() when user exit your application.


The Temple Of Hip Hop ) to a common workers boot and turned it into a worldwide fashion statement and multi-million dollar company. It is this same appreciation today that gives value, gratitude and thankful recognition to our elders, pioneers, icons, and for fathers and mothers of Hip Hop Kulture. It is also this same appreciation that had many early Hiphoppas calling each other God, Goddess, King and Queen, You see, when weappreciate something and give it clear value, it matters.
I remember a time not long ago when it was not popular to declare "I Am Hip Hop", our philosophy was not as widely accepted as it is today. We were criticized, laughed at and even threatened. But those of us who had clear sight and appreciated the ultimate truth that saying "I Am Hip Hop" brought, gave new value to our culture and worldwide movement. What we gave value to in the past, grew and continues to grow and appreciates in value today. This is the very foundation of why we celebrate Hip Hop Appreciation Week every year. Not only does it show our gratitude and appreciation for what we truly value, it increases our value and adds value to our future generations to come. And really get what I'm saying here, by us showing appreciation for our selves as Hip Hop, we add value to our selves both individually and collectively. As we continue this trend (or way) we (Hip Hip) increase in value! And keep in mind that we are not talking about monetary value (although that is included) we are talking about our value as human beings, we are talking about our actual value to GOD! Lets go a little deeper.
Many Hiphoppas growing up today don't realize what a bland, corny and boring scene the Unites States of America was before Hip Hop rescued us. Many Hiphoppas today don't remember a time when we had no outlets or platforms to express ourselves, politically, socially and spiritually. Let alone a platform that allowed us to express all these views at once. For me as a white teenage suburbanite in the East Bay Area of California, hearing groups like Public Enemy, N.W.A. and Boogie Down Productions gave me appreciation for life on a whole new level. It gave me a clear vision into the lives of people I had no direct access too. They brought me into a world where the power of self-expression cancelled out the devil. I began to relate and gain compassion for the struggles of black youth not only in America but all across the world. Hearing their stories brought me appreciation for the fact that my friends and family were not getting shot and killed and that the neighborhood where I had been raised was not life threatening. I began asking questions after hearing that the black man is God, I would ask "Can I be God too?" and GOD would answer me back "Can you?" and I would say "Yes I believe I can". You see Hip Hop pointed me to GOD. Instead of wanting to know how to become a rapper, I wanted to know how to become God. I wanted to know the same force that empowers people like Chuck D and KRS ONE.
And this is the real point here. We truly appreciate what we love. And GOD loves us so much that we were made Hip Hop as an answer to end our suffering. I knew that I had compassion before I knew Hip Hop, but once I realized that I indeed possessed compassion, my value as a human being increased. I realized that those around me who may have liked listening to their favorite rappers were not hearing the same voice that I was hearing. A voice that had me questioning my ENTIRE environment. I began questioning my school, my church, my diet, my beliefs, my habits, my courage, the government, even my own parents, the list is endless.
Next, the depth of my character began to change and grow, I was no longer satisfied with any institution or system of beliefs. I began to look into the Tao and Zen, I began to study the Bhagavd Gita and Gnostic texts. I searched for revelations in Rastafarian, Coptic and Native Aboriginal beliefs and prophecies. Through this quest I was introduced to Great Spirit and the feminine power of GOD, the Goddess. I was shown an ancient history that far surpassed anything I had been taught in church or school. And as I was seeking I was becoming ALL of these. However in the end, my search for God had distanced me from everyone and everything I knew. I could no longer function in "normal" society. I couldn't keep a job, a home or a friend. In every sense I had given up hope. Eventually my quest lead me to the doors of the Temple of Hip Hop and my Teacha KRS ONE: the empirical evidence that God is real in my life. This is why Minista Zin Uru appreciates Hip Hop !
You see Hip Hop saved me from my self, and it can save you to !! God revealed to me my life purpose through Hip Hop. At the darkest most desperate hour in my life, when all my friends had abandoned me, after my then wife left with the kids and I could not find employment anywhere, all I had was my self, God and Hip Hop. Thats it. Hip Hop gave me an outlet, a reason to get up everyday knowing that my situation was truly temporary. I wrote and recorded and worked on my rhyming skills, lyrics and songs. I was on the phone constantly encouraging others going through similar situations as myself. I found a way to pray and communicate with GOD after all religious institutions had turned their back on me. Hip Hop overcame my depression. And all of this happened when I was still broke, unemployed and living in places I did not want to live because I had nowhere else to go. Hip Hop and God are always there for us, if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Our promise is always on the other side of our fear. We must be willing and equipped (through knowledge) to go through the fire of fear to get to our promise on the other side. This is how GOD appreciates us, this is how GOD adds value to our lives, by stripping away those things that no longer serve us, by revealing the truth no matter how much it may hurt at the time.
This is how we increase in value: perseverance. This is my heart speaking to you Hiphoppa. We cannot take this word appreciation lightly. For if GOD values and appreciates us so much, that we were given the opportunity to be created Hip Hop, how do we show the same appreciation to GOD? The answer is simple: We must appreciate and add value to our selves and each other !! For if we are ever to become more like our creator we must shed the outdated ideas and limiting beliefs of who and what our Creator is and can do. We must be willing and able to sit in stillness without casting blame on other people for our situations and circumstances. Yes there are many horrible things happening in our world everyday, yes there are conspiracies and plots being instigated by truly sinister forces. However these tests are here to strengthen us, not defeat us. These conditions and circumstances that we as Hip Hop find our selves in at this very moment on this very day are obstacles to be overcome !! Every time we voice and give power to the monster that is trying to consume us that monster grows. And just the same, every time we voice and give power to the force that frees us, we give that force power and it grows in our life. Every time we show true appreciationfor GOD and Hip Hop , the influence and strength of GOD and Hip Hop grow and manifest in our lives. What a revelation, what a gift, and what an honor.
Every time we compromise and give into the outer world and it's disbelief we shrink in power, however every time we stand firm in the truth of our GOD we are empowered !! Let us not mimic the self-destructive ways of the mainstream whose very image of hip-hop DEPRECIATES their value, instead let us preserve the original techniques and spirit of our elders and pioneers whose APPRECIATION for Hip Hop created value and wealth where there was none before. Let us continue to grow in this new power emanating from Spirit, let us grow andappreciate Hip Hop in our lives and in the lives of others. Let us continue to create events and projects that allow others who are disenfranchised and suffering to find their way back to GOD. Let us appreciate our families, our icons, our brothers, our sisters, our friends and most importantly our children. This is how we show GOD that we appreciate this life we have been gifted. This is how we appreciate GOD !!
Hiphoppa we have no more time. The world is crumbling around us, so what will rise from this rubble? Will we be the new Nation that Great Spirit is calling us to be? Will we rise to the challenge? Can a new world be created through us? A world where our families live and thrive together, a world where we don't have to spend all of our precious time here on this wonderful planet Earth indebted and in fear of a system that has no appreciation for us. Can we meet and fulfill the promise of GOD? For it is evident to us that GOD truly values andappreciates us as Hip Hop. For we can truly see the effects of GOD in our very lives. We must hold this up, we must lift GOD up, we must value and appreciate what GOD has given us in Hip Hop. Beyond the hurt, beyond the frustrations loneliness and doubt, we must be truly ready to become a whole new creation. It no longer serves us to become better versions of our old self.
In closing I would like to encourage those of you reading this to take some real time these next few weeks and asses your current state of living. Show your self some realappreciation. Are you satisfied with where you are in life? I know many of you may not even know where to begin. My best advise is to always begin with earnest and heart felt prayer. Remember that time alone with God is time alone with self. God needs to be alone with each of us as individuals everyday. If your hurting emotionally, physically or spiritually, now seems to be the time to get right with God. There is nothing to fear. GOD loves you and wants to connect with you right where you are. No obstacle is to great for God. However like Hip Hop, God is a lifelong commitment. Do not haphazardly call God into your life if you are not ready and wanting real change. Remember that your promise is on the other side of your fear, and many people today fear GOD. Hiphoppa face your fears, we must allow God to heal our selves and environment through us. Happy Hip Hop Appreciation Week!! There it is.


text:
The dust of Uruzgan
The work The dust of Uruzgan represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in City of Stirling Library Services. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.
The Resource The dust of Uruzgan
Fred Smith
Smith, Fred, 1970-
Afghanistan -- History -- 2001-2021
Afghanistan -- Military relations -- Australia
Australia -- Armed Forces -- Afghanistan
Diplomats -- Australia -- Biography
Military assistance, Australian -- Afghanistan
Afghan War, 2001-2021 -- Campaigns -- Afghanistan | Uruzgan
Musicians -- Australia -- Biography
Afghan War, 2001-2021 -- Participation, Australian
A personal story of Australia's war in Afghanistan as told by Fred Smith, star of 'Australian Story', Australian diplomat in Afghanistan and Australian Defence Forces favourite singer and composer of 'Dust of Uruzgan'. Fred Smith has been described as 'Australia's secret weapon' in international diplomacy. Now, with Australian forces out of Afghanistan, this book is the first comprehensive insider account of Australia's deep involvement there. Part memoir, part history, part anecdote, it is set against a subsistence agricultural province with a 5% literacy rate, in which tribal leaders colluded and conspired against one another in a society where trust had been smashed by 35 years of brutal warfare. The cast of characters includes charismatic tribal leaders, corrupt Provincial Governors, domineering warlords, bustling US colonels, and courteous interpreters, all of whom Fred worked with daily during his unique mission. Dust of Uruzgan recounts the struggles, setbacks and successes of a contingent of Australian soldiers, diplomats and aid workers trying to make a difference in the midst of a hellhole, where truth and clarity were often buried and where 40 young Australian soldiers perished in the dust of Uruzgan
Context of The dust of Uruzgan
The dust of Uruzgan, Fred Smith

 Data from The dust of Uruzgan - City of Stirling Library Services

Data Citation of the Work The dust of Uruzgan


text:
CHCNAV expands its European Office
European office
CHC Navigation Accelerates Growth with relocation to New European Office
New office enables geospatial GNSS technology firm to accommodate further expansion.
Shanghai, China – December 3rd, 2019. CHC Navigation has moved its European Headquarters to the bustling Infopark Innovation and Technology Center in Budapest, Hungary.
As a backbone of CHCNAV's growth strategy in Europe, Middle East and Africa, the new office is more than double the original office's footprint and includes a fully equipped training center to serve our EMEA customers and business partners.
"This new location will be contributing to our growth plans and to keep pace with our clients' needs, allowing us to provide exceptional value and superior service along the way," said George Zhao, CEO of CHC Navigation.
About CHC Navigation
Founded in 2003, CHC Navigation is a publicly-listed company creating Innovative GNSS Navigation and Positioning Solutions. With a global presence across the world and distributors in over 100 countries and more than 1 300 employees, CHC Navigation is today recognized as one of the fastest-growing company in Geomatics Technologies.
www.chcnav.com