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Home Sport Lionel Messi expects Sunday's final to be his last World Cup game
Lionel Messi expects Sunday's final to be his last World Cup game
Lionel Messi believes Sunday's final will be his last appearance for Argentina in a World Cup.
The Argentina forward scored his fifth goal of Qatar 2022 in Tuesday's 3-0 semi-final over Croatia and admitted afterwards he does not expect to appear in a sixth World Cup in four years time.
He said: "I am obviously very happy for finishing my journey in World Cups in a final, to play the last game in a final. That is really very gratifying.
"Everything that I lived in this World Cup has been emotional, seeing how much it has been enjoyed in Argentina.
"There are a lot of years from this year to the next one. I don't think I will be able to do that. To finish this way is brilliant."
Messi, 35, has won almost every accolade in the game. He has won the Ballon d'Or – awarded to the world's best player – a record seven times and also won the Fifa Best Men's Player award once.
Other honours include four Champions League triumphs, 11 top-flight titles and Copa America glory in 2021. The World Cup is the only glaring omission, having lost the final to Germany in 2014.
Now Messi, who will make a record 26th appearance in a men's World Cup in Sunday's final against either France or Morocco, has one more chance to lift the biggest trophy of all.
"The target is the collective objective," he said. "We are going to do our best as we have done up until now so that this time it really happens, we really win it.
"I have been enjoying it the last few years being with the national side. I am really enjoying everything that is happening to us. To get the Copa America, to reach the world cup with 36 games unbeaten, and to finish all that trajectory in a final is just incredible.
"I hope the people in Argentina enjoy themselves and what we are doing. They shouldn't doubt we are giving absolutely everything."
The Paris St-Germain forward is one of only six men to have played in five World Cups alongside Antonio Carbajal, Lothar Matthaus, Rafa Marquez, Andres Guardado and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Currently joint top scorer with Kylian Mbappe in Qatar, Messi also became the first player to score in four different World Cup tournaments for Argentina in a tournament that has seen him become his country's leading marksmen in the World Cup on 11 goals.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The automatic recognition of historical, handwritten manuscripsts is not a solved problem. Powerful commercial sorting systems do exist in closed applications, such as address reading of scanned handwritten envelopes. However, historical documents present a huge challenge: the noisy images, unknown character shapes, unknown words and unknown linguistic statistics make the use of traditional approaches impossible. We have investigated how to process historical documents and their transcriptions in such a way that a continuously learning, high-performance computer could learn how to search words in such documents. The result is an advanced architecture, MONK, which allows volunteers and interested human users to enter text labels over the internet. Read more.


The Gardens - 899 Royal Oak Avenue, Victoria, BC 3T2, Canada. Strata Plan VIS1730. Crossroads are Royal Oak Avenue and Royal Oak Drive located Saanich East neigbourhood in Victoria. This townhouse is 2 storeys with 27 units. Completed 1989. Crossroads are Royal Oak Avenue and Carolwood Drive. Maintenance fees include building insurance, garbage pickup, water and yard maintenance.
Nearby Schools are Claremont Secondary School, St Margaret's Schools, Island Catholic Schools Diocese of Victoria, Braefoot Elementary School, St Andrew's Regional High, Reynolds Secondary School, Maria Montssori Academy School and St Michaels University School. Supermarkets and Grocery Stores nearby are Gobind Food Market, Thrifty Foods, Whole Foods Market, Fairway Market, Market On Yates and The Market on Millstream. Nearby parks include Rithet's Bog, McMinn Park and Strom Ness Park.


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Tag Archives: Prosper Petroleum
Boreal forest, First Nation treaty rights, Health impacts, Open-pit mines, Tar sands crude, Water quality
The High Cost of Oil
November 22, 2014 Roger Straw
Repost from Outside Magazine, December 2014
[Editor: Don't miss the excellent 3-minute video. Scroll down, and expand to full screen mode. – RS]
The crude that would feed the XL pipeline comes from a once pristine part of Alberta that now resembles mining operations on a sci-fi planet. At places like Fort McKay, home to First Nations people who've lived there for centuries, the money is great but the environmental and health impacts are exceedingly grim. The world has to have fuel. Is this simply the price that must be paid?
By: Ted Genoways, November 11, 2014
Tar sands being scooped and loaded. Oil companies hope to mine the entirety of Fort McKay's heavy-grade bitumen deposits by 2030. Photo: Aaron Huey
Less than a year after the end of World War II, when Celina Harpe was just seven, she sat beside her grandfather on the steps of his cabin, overlooking the Athabasca River in the northern reaches of Alberta.
"It was spring," she told me recently—the time of breakup, when the ground is still packed with pearlescent snow but the sun weakens the river ice until it cracks and starts to move. The force of the current pushed giant floes onto the banks and up the ridge.
"Look at the beautiful river, the way it looks now," her grandfather said.
Adam Boucher was an elder of the Fort McKay First Nation, descended directly from the hereditary leaders of the Chipewyan people, who in the 19th century had intermarried with French and Scottish voyageurs as they established traplines for the North West Company and Hudson's Bay Company. Boucher was a child when his uncle, as headman of the Chipewyan band, added his X to Treaty 8 with Queen Victoria, surrendering their ancestral land around Moose Lake to Canada and Great Britain in return for a reserve along the Athabasca. Aside from land used for logging, mining, or white settlements, the people of Fort McKay were promised unfettered rights to hunt and fish in perpetuity. "As long as the sun shines and the river flows and the hills don't move," Boucher later recalled.
For people who see the oil industry as an all-consuming beast, tar-sands mining looks like the stark, apocalyptic endgame of fossil-fuel extraction.
In the 50 years that followed, Boucher saw his people's access to hunting grounds and traplines fenced off as logging interests moved in. And in 1946, after suffering through wartime shortages of oil and gas, Alberta's provincial government unveiled a joint project with an Edmonton-based company called Oil Sands, Ltd. They made plans to build a test facility at Bitumount, barely 15 miles downriver, to prove the viability of an experimental hot-water process developed by Karl Clark of the Alberta Research Council, a provincial R&D corporation. The goal was to separate heavy-grade bitumen—a black, gooey form of petroleum, also known as tar sands—from the deposits underlying the ground all around Fort McKay. By the time of the ice breakup that year, the site had been cleared and crew quarters erected, and a power plant was swiftly being built.
Seeing all this, Boucher feared losing access to the spruce bogs around McClelland Lake, not far from the Bitumount site, where First Nations people gathered blueberries, cranberries, and kinnikinnick. He worried that mining would inevitably harm the river.
"You know the water is sacred?" he asked his granddaughter. "You know we need the trees?"
Celina nodded. "Yeah, I understand that."
"I see it, what's going to happen in the future," Boucher said. "All the trees will be gone. They're going to dig big holes, and they're going to dig up all that black stuff. You know that tar? That's what they're after."
They sat quietly on his steps, watching the river move.
"I won't see it. I'm too old," Boucher told her. "But if you have children, you're going to have to tell them not to drink this river water."
Taking Canadian Highway 63 straight north from Fort McMurray, during the half-lit hours of the morning commute, I moved past the old downtown, with its bars and weekly-rate hotels, past the sprawling suburbs and high-speed ring road, into expanses of peat-rich muskeg and forests of tamarack and spruce. As the sun climbed, cars became scarce and the road seemed to stretch endlessly toward the horizon. Traveling from McMurray to McKay doesn't take long—it's less than 40 miles—but the transformation you see in that short distance is astounding.
At first there were few signs of the massive development I'd been told to expect, but the farther I drove, the more industrial the scene became. There were 18-wheelers barreling up to unmarked interchanges and thundering into merge lanes, along with passenger coaches and repurposed school buses ferrying workers from camp barracks to a place that locals euphemistically call "the site."
The trucks and miners are headed not toward a single site but to a patchwork of them. If you were viewing this region from the air, you'd see a crazy quilt of open-pit mines flanking the Athabasca River for more than ten miles. There, at the bottom of cavernous quarries roughly 150 feet down, dragline conveyers scrape away at a dense layer of sandstone suffused with tar. The method of mining and refining this resource, the latest development in our desperate effort to extend the fossil-fuel era by a few more decades, is one of the most labor-intensive extraction processes ever undertaken. It requires grand-scale removal just to make the narrow profit margins work. More than 250 square miles of former boreal forest have already been stripped away, and by 2030 the industry hopes to extract all the mineable tar sands from the 1,853 square miles of deposits, an area larger than Rhode Island.
A Syncrude refinery near Fort McKay. Photo: Aaron Huey
Tar sands have been mined here on a smaller scale since the 1920s, but the U.S. government gave the industry a huge boost when it invaded Iraq in 2003, sending global oil prices sky-high. Since then two new pit mines have opened north of Fort McMurray, another three are under development, and still more extraction is on the way, by means of a process called SAG-D. That stands for steam-assisted gravity drainage, which involves using high-pressure steam to make the tar sands less viscous and easier to move through pipes.
How you view these developments is something of a Rorschach test. For people who see the oil industry as an all-consuming beast, tar-sands mining looks like the stark, apocalyptic endgame of extreme fossil-fuel extraction. Environmentalists point out that all this massive machinery burns almost two barrels of oil for every three taken out; that the steam-separation process is one of the most water-intensive in the world; and that the resulting fuel, according to estimates by the U.S. State Department, emits about 17 percent more greenhouse gas when burned than standard light-grade crude (a number that watchdogs like the Natural Resources Defense Council insist is a lowball guess).
The greatest concern is what happens if this development is allowed to continue. The oil industry itself estimates that less than 10 percent of tar-sands deposits in Alberta have been extracted. James Hansen, the former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the first scientists to sound the alarm about climate change in the 1980s, estimates that the remaining reserves of tar sands contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the entire global oil industry—in all of human history. Hansen has been unequivocal about the consequences if such resources are exploited. "If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing," he wrote in a New York Times editorial, "it will be game over for the climate."
All of which might have escaped the attention of the American public if not for the Keystone XL pipeline. The proposed $7 billion project, intended to carry bitumen and a soup of chemical diluents from northern Alberta to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast—for further processing and shipment around the world—has turned into a six-year battle between environmentalists and industry supporters. As the proposal has made its way through State Department reviews and court fights, other pipelines carrying similar heavy-grade Alberta crude have ruptured in various parts of the U.S. The most notable are Enbridge's Line 6B, which spilled more than a million gallons into Michigan's Kalamazoo River in 2010, and ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline, which in 2013 spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons in Mayflower, Arkansas. These accidents have forced people to ask just how safe it is to extract, transport, refine, and burn tar-sands crude.
This has been a major controversy for years in the U.S., where the Obama administration is simultaneously attempting to placate environmentalists and encourage a fossil-fuels industry that has created more new jobs than most other sectors since the 2007 recession. It's also a hot topic in Canada. Enbridge's Northern Gateway Pipelines, which would carry tar sands to the Pacific Coast of British Columbia for shipment to China and other parts of Asia on oil tankers, have met with nearly a decade of heated opposition from Canadians—including more than 130 First Nations. Last year, to draw more attention to tar-sands development, Ontario native Neil Young traveled to the mining region to see things up close. "Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima," he declared afterward. "Fort McMurray is a wasteland."
A boy from Fort McKay plays inside a scoop shovel set up at a highway rest stop near Syncrude's refinery. Photo: Aaron Huey
Industry backers and mine employees were outraged, and many took to Twitter, posting photos of their backyards or favorite hiking spots with the hashtag #myhiroshima. To them, tar sands represent an economic lifeline and the gateway to North American energy independence. Many Albertans enjoy thumbing their noses at environmentalists, who they dismiss as whiney doomsayers.
They also complain that critics have obsessed too much over the boomtown ugliness on view at Fort McMurray. The much covered gold-rush scene there has featured 40,000 young itinerant workers who have flocked to the region hoping to get rich quick, bars and gambling parlors lining the highway, rampant prostitution, Hell's Angels competing with a Somali gang for control of the cocaine trade, and more than 100 traffic deaths in a span of only eight years.
Two years ago, after yet another journalist wrote about the booze, drugs, and hookers, the town fathers of Fort McMurray, population 75,000, decided to clean up their image. They shuttered Teasers Strip Bar, the Oil Can Tavern, Diggers Variety Club, and the Oil Sands Hotel. Soon after, the whole sin district was razed and turned into a parking lot. Mine workers now do their drinking inside the locked-down confines of the residential camps, which sit roughly 20 miles north of Fort McMurray and are closed off with chain-link fencing and barbed wire to thwart nosy reporters, including this one. Officials at both of the main companies operating in the area—Suncor and Syncrude—declined to let me view mining operations or the camps when I was in Alberta.
Meanwhile, though the short-term social ills of the extraction boom may have been tamed a bit, there's been surprisingly little discussion of the long-term environmental consequences for the string of First Nations villages along the Athabasca River, downstream from the interconnected tailings ponds of chemical by-products produced by the tar-sands refining process. Neil Young's Hiroshima comparison grabbed headlines, but his more explosive claim focused on research presented by provincial doctors working in those communities. "The native peoples are dying," Young said at a September 2013 press conference in Washington, D.C. "People are sick. People are dying because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened."
When I called Celina Harpe, now age 75 and an elder in the Dene band of the Fort McKay First Nation, she said it was true. People were dying young and unexpectedly, of rare and aggressive forms of cancer.
"By the time they find out, they're on stage four," she said. "Too late. They're gone." She urged me to come see for myself but discouraged the idea of staying overnight. The lights of the 24-hour mining operations just over the ridge meant that her village was never dark anymore, and the echoes of nearby air cannons all through the night made it impossible to sleep. "You go to bed, it's like you're in a war zone."
Worst of all, everything her grandfather predicted had come to pass. The trees were being clear-cut, the moose and beavers were disappearing. All the native villages along the Athabasca River were fearful of contamination. And just as her grandfather had warned, it wasn't safe to drink the water.
The headwaters of the Athabasca pool up under the Columbia Icefield in Alberta's Jasper National Park before running north, carrying snowmelt for more than 800 miles. In the 19th century, when Scottish fur traders hit impassible rapids during their explorations, they put out and founded Fort McMurray. Eventually they pushed farther north, establishing traplines, searching out navigable routes to the Arctic, and founding Fort McKay and Fort Chipewyan, where the river widens and empties into Lake Athabasca.
Fort McKay, with just over 400 permanent residents, has traditionally been the least developed and discussed of these settlements—neither as big and hurly-burly as Fort Mac nor as remote and idyllic as Fort Chip. Instead, McKay has been significant as the contact point, the place where the ambitions of white traders (and, later, white loggers and oil speculators) meet the traditional interests of northern bands dependent on wild game for food and fur-bearing animals for warmth and shelter.
McKay was never accessible enough to be subsumed by the arrival of white culture, but it was too close not to feel its impact—especially after the arrival of Highway 63 in 1964, and then the logging road that connected the boreal forests north of McKay to the highway that leads back to McMurray.
Suncor mine and tailings ponds near Fort McKay. Photo: Aaron Huey
In the late sixties, the Alberta government partnered with Sunoco to form the Great Canadian Oil Sands consortium—today known as Suncor. Soon after, the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo sent oil prices soaring, and provincial regulators ushered through a second project, known as Syncrude. This was the beginning of a decades-long struggle that pitted the people of Fort McKay against the collective clout of Canada's largest petroleum companies, with the government—a party that had a vested financial interest—serving as sole adjudicator.
Seemingly unchecked by regulations, the mines expanded into giant black caverns, where massive shovel loaders now scoop the coal-like rock, 70 tons at a time, into dump trucks three stories tall. Heavy haulers deliver mined material into a double-roll crusher, then a conveyor system carries the ground-up rock into a cyclofeeder.
In sprawling coking and refining facilities, hot water melts the tar sands into a slurry, sending clouds of thick smoke and steam across the landscape. What remains is chemically separated to produce a thin top layer of bitumen froth, but everything else—the heavy sand, the toxic wastewater, and the leftover chemicals—is by-product, and it's emptied into tailings ponds the size of enormous lakes.
As I drove along the highway, piles of discarded sand, held for eventual reclamation, swirled up into a lashing white dust storm, mixing with the smoke and fly ash billowing from the stacks of an on-site refinery at Syncrude. The embankment dam along the road, the main containment wall for the Mildred Lake Settling Basin, is more than 11 miles long, one of the largest earthen dams on the planet. At the time, the rainbow-sheened ponds bracketing the highway spread across more than 50 square miles of former wetlands, and they are expanding at a rate of nearly half a billion gallons each day.
Lakes this large and foul have an impact. In April 2008, Robert Colson, a heavy-equipment operator with Syncrude, spotted what he could only describe as lumps floating on the company's nearby Aurora tailings pond. He had been puzzling over the scene for a few minutes when a group of ducks came flapping in and landed. "And that's when I realized what was going on," he said later. More than 1,600 migrating waterfowl were killed on that day alone.
When I pulled off onto a sandy turnout to get a better look at the Mildred Lake Basin, I could see a parade of empty yellow hazmat suits propped up on the banks and set bobbing on tethered oil drums in the lakes. Their arms stretched wide in a pantomime of panic, they served as makeshift scarecrows, nicknamed "bitu-men." I could hear the constant fire of 100-decibel air cannons, installed on the shoreline and timed to go off intermittently to frighten away waterfowl and other birds.
All of this was in place at the time of the waterfowl deaths in 2008, but none of it had been switched on. Still, Syncrude officials denied that they bore responsibility, saying the deaths were "an act of God." The government eventually levied only a nominal fine—roughly eight hours' worth of corporate revenues—and even then Syncrude complained that these environmental strictures were unworkable, warning that the company would be breaking the law every hour of every day.
I turned west from the highway, toward Fort McKay, and drove past construction crews who were widening the old road. I could see the signs of recent expansion everywhere—heavy equipment parked in newly laid gravel yards, surges of black smoke rising from diesel engines in the distance. When I finally reached the edge of the village, I wasn't sure I'd actually arrived. A looping mud road crisscrossed the tree-stripped hillside, where haphazard clapboard houses were scattered. Trucks and four-wheelers stood parked in gravel driveways and on patchy front lawns.
"Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima," Ontario native Neil Young said after seeing the mining region up close. "Fort McMurray is a wasteland."
Fort McKay has no restaurant and just one market, which was shuttered when I was there. Many of the residents, most of them registered First Nations members, get by on some form of subsistence hunting or trapping, as allowed for in Treaty 8. Tepee smokehouses rose from behind backyard privacy fences. As I moved along the river, a potent ammonia smell hung in the air, but it was a sunny day and people were packing tackle and rods onto their motorboats.
But the river is no longer the central sustaining force in the community. After the start of the latest tar-sands boom, fishermen began to report rising numbers of deformities: whitefish and walleye with tumors and skin lesions, burbot with misshapen spines, northern pike with bulging eyes.
In 2007, the Fort Chipewyan health board asked Kevin Timoney, a scientist who had done extensive work in the Peace-Athabasca Delta area, to study the water and soil quality in the region. His findings were distressing: elevated levels of arsenic and mercury in fish, the water supply, even the river sediment. Timoney estimated that tar-sands mines were exposing deposits of heavy metals, especially arsenic, which were then running into the water. Alberta Health and Wellness, the provincial health ministry, conceded that arsenic exposure was widespread but countered that it was impossible to control "due to its presence in the earth's crust."
Soon after, a report by the Pembina Institute, an environmental-impact assessment firm, estimated that Tar Island Pond One, owned by Suncor, was producing a steady daily leak of more than 1.5 million gallons of toxic chemicals and heavy metals including arsenic, mercury, and lead. By Suncor's own admission, the pond released 400,000 gallons of sludge into the river every day, almost enough to fill a river barge. And that was just one pond. Environmental Defence, a Canadian environmental-action group, estimated the combined daily leakage from all the tailings ponds into the Athabasca River to be nearly three million gallons. But still the government refused to intercede.
Suncor's operations near Fort McKay. Photo: Aaron Huey
The situation has grown so grim that the United Nations issued a call in May 2014 for the Canadian government to launch a special inquiry into the treatment of First Nations people, specifically citing, among other concerns, that more than half of all native people on government reserves face health risks due to contaminated drinking water. Government officials have failed to act, the report said, because they see the interests of native people as counter to the best interests of Canadians. James Anaya, then the U.N.'s special rapporteur on indigenous rights, warned that lawsuits and government claims over treaty violations have languished so long that many First Nations have "all but given up."
Officials at Suncor declined to discuss the environmental impact of tar-sands mining with Outside. Will Gibson, Syncrude's media relations adviser, said in a phone interview: "Human activity is going to have an impact. Industrial activity is going to have an impact. For us, it's important to mitigate that impact." He pointed to Syncrude's large expenditures on R&D for new processes aimed at reducing emissions and minimizing the negative effects of mining. As for health risks, he said that the company's extraction techniques, past or present, "would never have any impact in terms of causing cancer."
Celina Harpe's home, a tiny fifties-era house with slate blue clapboard siding, sits below the roadbed, perched on a bend in the Athabasca. Harpe greeted me there but didn't want to talk inside, because it was cramped and drafty. Instead we walked across the road to the elder-care section of the community center.
Celina Harpe, an elder in the Fort McKay First Nation. Photo: Aaron Huey
Harpe is small and unsteady, but her short curly hair is still dark and her eyes are bright behind her square, tinted glasses. Seated inside, looking out through a broad bank of picture windows, she remembered again how her grandfather had warned her about the river's future. Soon, she said, she would have no choice but to move to Fort McMurray. She turned her hands over to show me lesions on her knuckles and between her fingers. "My hands get all these sores. Do you see?" she said. "We can't drink that tap water because it's no good…. It's got too much chemicals. If it can do this to your hands, what do you think it's doing to our insides, you know?"
Harpe said it hadn't always been this way. Her sister, Dorothy McDonald, became chief in the eighties, after their father, Phillip McDonald, was killed in a crash on the logging road in 1976. Before Dorothy took over, the encroachment of tar-sands development had already left many people concerned about their health, so Celina's father had arranged for pump stations to be installed, dispensing water trucked in from Fort McMurray. But one pump tower burned in late 1981, and another froze during the bitter winter of 1982. People went down to the river and drew their drinking water straight from the Athabasca.
After several weeks of getting by this way, Dorothy, as the newly elected chief, received a message from Suncor: there had been a spill. One of Suncor's tailings ponds had been releasing oil, grease, and other contaminants into the river for days—up to 17 times more than the legally permitted limit. McDonald demanded action from officials at Alberta Environment—the province's main environmental protection agency—but they declined to do anything.
"So she took Suncor and Syncrude to court," Harpe said. "She charged them for polluting the water." A provincial judge eventually found Suncor guilty of violating the Fisheries Act—not of poisoning the community—and ordered the company to pay just $8,000.
About the same time, Harpe, who had gotten a job as a community-health nurse because she could translate for English-speaking provincial doctors and tribal people who spoke Cree and Dene, started to notice a rash of illnesses that had never affected Fort McKay before. Later, when she became the first native liaison coordinator at the Fort McMurray hospital, she heard similar complaints coming from the residents of Fort Chipewyan. When doctors came back with diagnoses, she had trouble translating. "We never heard of asthma," Harpe told me. "We didn't know there was such thing as cancer. We had no name for it." Before long it seemed as if everyone in the community was sick or had a family member who was seriously ill.
Shovels and wreaths at the funeral of Joe Vermillion, a resident of Fort Chipewyan who died of lung cancer. Photo: Aaron Huey
"I lost one son first with sickness before I lost my husband," Harpe said. The main room of the community center was ringed with black-and-white portraits of band members. "That's me there," she said. Harpe couldn't remember exactly when the photos were taken, but her portrait looked to be about a decade old.
"Beside me there, that lady, she died," she said, pointing to the next photograph. "My cousin Stella, she's gone. She just died in January." She began moving down the line. "Her, my auntie, there in that corner by the flowers, she's gone. He died last year, that gentleman. That guy is still alive. He died, this other one that's next to Johnny." Many of the people didn't appear old, 50 at most. "That couple there, they're gone. He's still alive. She's still alive. She's gone. She's gone. She's gone. He's gone. She's gone. That lady's gone." I asked at what age people were being diagnosed with cancer. "People are dying at 35, 40," she said. She shook her head.
"It's pretty sad, because my father was a good chief. My sister was such a good chief. My sister Dorothy's right there," she said, pointing to a portrait. "Dorothy passed away."
Dayle Hyde turned into the dirt parking lot of the Fort McKay community school. She wanted to show me another side of the village, starting with the place where her own education began—and where her father was the teacher, and later principal, for more than three decades. Hyde, in her early thirties, is worldly compared with a lot of the younger people in Fort McKay. She wears cat-eye glasses and has a nose ring. She went away to high school in Fort McMurray and later graduated from the University of Alberta with a degree in native studies and a minor in art and design. Now she's the communications director for the Fort McKay First Nation. She's also the middle child of Dorothy McDonald.
Hyde said her mother's court case had energized Fort McKay and sparked further protest. Most notably, in 1983, McDonald had organized a blockade of the logging road, the one where Dorothy's father had died. "They allowed one logging truck to go through the community," Hyde said, "and then they erected a roadblock and wouldn't allow any others to go through."
The mines expanded into giant black caverns, where massive shovel loaders now scoop the coal-like rock, 70 tons at a time, into dump trucks three stories tall.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were sent to end the standoff, but McDonald refused to back down. Though the January dark sent temperatures plummeting to minus 20, band members kept vigil around the clock. Finally, on the sixth day, three cabinet ministers agreed to hear out Fort McKay's concerns about logging and tar sands.
To honor McDonald and her stand, the band later erected an enormous community center on the same road as the old blockade site. But Hyde balked at the notion, pushed by elders like her aunt, Celina Harpe, that the roadblock was the kind of opposition the community needed now.
"Let me make something clear," Hyde said. "When my mom was being very aggressive, we didn't get anywhere." Yes, the government arranged for meetings, but nothing changed. Officials commissioned studies that were never completed and made empty promises that were designed only to defuse tension.
The real turning point, Hyde said, was when her mother began to focus on what she called "parallel development"—the concept that if industry was benefiting, then the community should benefit in a proportionate manner. Pollution should be offset by jobs and contracts for native-owned companies.
Tribal leaders started by getting a single janitorial contract, for cleaning offices at Suncor's headquarters. McDonald also pushed the company to give something back to McKay. She convinced executives to make a small donation toward the construction of a playground at the local school—the first project sponsored by one of the tar-sands developers—and the school's principal (her husband, Rod Hyde) got matching funds from Suncor. This was the end of vocal opposition, Hyde said, and the beginning of negotiation and partnership.
Tar-sands mines and tailings ponds, near Fort McKay, in Alberta, operated by Canadian companies Syncrude and Suncor. Photo: Aaron Huey
In 1987, McDonald filed a claim with the Canadian government, charging that 23,000 acres of property surrounding Fort McKay—which were being developed under private lease—were part of the land deeded to the band under Treaty 8. Instead of claiming that the community had been harmed by development, she contended that it was owed compensation for treaty violations. In 2006, two decades after McDonald filed the original claim and a year after her death due to complications from lupus, the Treaty Land Entitlement Settlement Agreement paid the band $41.5 million in compensation for land that belonged to them under the treaty—and, more important, agreed that they were titleholders to 8,200 acres of land under exploration for tar-sands development.
Hyde drove me up the ridge to where construction crews were building new modern homes and laying cobblestone driveways. It could have been an affluent suburb to any midsize city in America—all aluminum siding and fake stone facades. People down by the river have derisively dubbed this new development Beverly Hills. They accuse Jim Boucher, the chief for 24 of the past 28 years—and a man who originally opposed oil-sands projects but now supports them—of putting profits over health. Celina Harpe was blunt. "He's selling us out," she said. "He doesn't care as long as it puts money in his pocket."
Boucher declined to speak with me, but in interviews with local media he has bristled at such characterizations. "We were antidevelopment for a long time," he told one reporter. "But at the end of the day, it came down to the point where government would approve the projects and our rights were diminished by virtue of what they were doing. Gradually, we came to recognize we had no other option but to develop an economy of our own."
Hyde said the big houses were part of the mixed bag created by the tar-sands boom. Companies netting hundreds of millions of dollars per year are reaping huge profits, but they're also paying excellent wages: in Fort McKay, entry-level skilled workers can expect to pull down six-figure salaries.
"It's not been accepted per se, but it's a realization that if we're going to stay here, this is one of the things that we have to deal with," she said. "We're never going to stop the oil-sands development. It's never going to go away until the oil is gone. The best that we can do is to try to mitigate some of those negative impacts."
Trying to lessen the impact of tar-sands development seems a nearly impossible task. Everything about the work sites is sprawling, and it stretches ever closer to the edges of Fort McKay. The tree line across the river is now denuded in places where new digging is set to begin. Fences and barricades have been erected along newly constructed mine roads, blocking band members—often without warning—from reaching traditional hunting grounds. And new projects bring more and more mine workers.
The residential camps where those workers live house thousands of people, almost all of them men from Canada and the U.S., in row after row of modular multi-story buildings. At Suncor, the barracks—square roofed and vinyl sided, like overgrown trailer homes—stand close to the highway but are ensconced behind tall chain-link fences. At Syncrude, the buildings are painted with black and white stripes, practically daring those who live inside to compare them to cell blocks. And many do. Though photography is forbidden and workers are instructed not to write publicly about life in camp, there are many YouTube videos, Twitter pictures, Facebook updates, and blog entries complaining about the drab institutional architecture and lockdown conditions. One especially poetic employee wrote online that Wing 39 of Imperial Oil's Wapasu Camp East, where he lived, stood "austere in the Arctic night," bringing to mind "prison camps of the Soviet Gulag."
Miners are paid between $100,000 and $200,000 per year. If a man works and puts away his money for two or three years, it's possible to leave with a nest egg of half a million dollars.
Inside, hundreds of identical eight-by-ten rooms stretch down long corridors, each furnished only with a bed, a nightstand, and maybe a TV. There are game rooms and large cafeterias, but workers aren't afforded much downtime. Most are pulling 12-to-14-hour shifts for three weeks straight. Every morning they are loaded onto buses, swiping site badges and passing through metal detectors. And they work nonstop, even through the subzero cold and the round-the-clock darkness of deep winter, until they are returned to the camps for sleep.
The workers endure these conditions for a simple reason: most can earn salaries between $100,000 and $200,000 per year. If a man works and puts away his money for two or three years, it's possible to leave with a nest egg of half a million dollars. And once they've done that, these men will leave northern Alberta and never look back.
It's not so simple for the First Nations mine workers of Fort McKay. Most of the major tar-sands developers reserve positions for native applicants—and now, employing more than 1,600 full-time First Nations workers, they are virtually the only game in town. Even the people who don't work directly in the mines are often employed by subcontractors. The Fort McKay Group of Companies, which began with that single janitorial contract, has an earthworks division to remove mud from tailings ponds and reinforce containment dykes, but it also builds access roads and installs guardrails. The companies have joint ventures offering catering and lodging services for mine workers. They provide office help and logistical assistance. No matter how far removed, the jobs in Fort McKay exist because of the tar-sands developers, so even those who hate the mines now depend on them, whatever the risks.
"Fort Chip, walked away from," O'Connor told me. "And now McKay's been walked away from." Photo: Aaron Huey
Celina Harpe's husband worked as a crane operator at one of the mine sites. One night, riding the transport boat home, he fell into the Athabasca River. He struggled to keep himself afloat, but his rubber work boots filled with water and pulled him under. Such sudden deaths are a fact of life in the mines; there have been six on-site fatalities so far in 2014. But for most people in Fort McKay, it's not the threat of workplace injury that worries them. Instead they fear that on-site exposure to chemicals and fumes, followed by exposure from drinking water and wild game and breathing toxic emissions every night, means that they never get any relief from the effects of the development. In the eighties, Dorothy McDonald commissioned an air-quality study by epidemiologists at the University of British Columbia, who tested hair samples and found that four of McKay's 44 children had above-normal levels of lead. Long before residents of Fort McKay have a chance to set foot on a work site or earn a single paycheck, they are at elevated risk of exposure to heavy metals. One known outcome of such exposure is autoimmune disorders—particularly lupus, which is what shortened the life of Dorothy McDonald.
So while their white counterparts get rich working in the mines and then head back south to Fort McMurray or Edmonton or the U.S., the native residents of Fort McKay stay and face the uncertain consequences.
When I told Dr. John O'Connor what Dayle Hyde had told me, that band leaders of Fort McKay were looking for ways to work with developers to minimize impact, his face tightened with worry. Officially, O'Connor is the director of Health and Human Services at Fort McKay First Nation, but in practice he's a country doctor, shuttling from one village to the next along the Athabasca to provide primary health care. White bearded, with a stethoscope always around his neck, he moves slowly, taking his time with each patient. But when we discussed tar-sands developers and the Alberta government, O'Connor couldn't hide his misgivings. Together, he said, industry and government have forced communities like Fort McKay to join in their own destruction.
"It's almost a choice of, 'Do I die by starvation, or do I die by poisoning?' " he said, his voice soft and resigned. O'Connor, 57, grew up in the working-class section of Limerick City, Ireland, and retains a gentle accent. "Damned if you do and damned if you don't. What decision can you make?"
Dr. John O'Connor, director of Health and Human Services at Fort McKay First Nation, shuttles from one village to the next providing primary health care. Photo: Aaron Huey
O'Connor questions the very notion of parallel development. Certainly, the profits are not shared equally—and neither are the risks. In 2003, not long after O'Connor began making weekly visits to Fort Chipewyan in his capacity as an Alberta provincial doctor, the local school-bus driver came in to schedule an appointment. He had lost a lot of weight and couldn't figure out why. Blood tests revealed that he was suffering from cholangiocarcinoma, an aggressive form of cancer that attacks the bile ducts. O'Connor had never seen a single patient with it. "Never in my practice did I expect to see a case," he told me.
But O'Connor knew a great deal about the illness because his father had been diagnosed with it a decade before—and died, as did O'Connor's patient in Fort Chip, within a matter of weeks. He knew the illness was exceedingly rare, affecting just one in 100,000 people, but soon there were more cases: one in 2005 and another in 2006. Two more people died before he could do blood work. And it wasn't just cancer of the bile ducts. Within five years, O'Connor diagnosed five cases of leukemia and four cases of lymphoma. Six residents of Fort Chip died of colon cancer.
In March 2006, Alberta Health and Wellness announced that it would conduct a thorough review of death and cancer statistics. They would track people through their treaty and federal ID numbers to include tribal members who had left Fort Chipewyan and became sick elsewhere. They would also study the related communities in other parts of the Athabasca River Valley. But then, just a few weeks later, Health Canada and Alberta Health and Wellness announced that the cancer rates in Fort Chip "were comparable to the provincial average." Case closed.
O'Connor claims that government officials admitted to him that they were missing data from several months in 2004 and 2005, the most recent years available, but only alerted him to this after the study was completed. Worse, a review conducted by the National Review of Medicine, a prominent medical newspaper in Canada, alleged that the government had fudged the average by using a population parameter of 30,000 instead of the village's actual population of fewer than 1,000. Multiple subsequent tests concluded that the cases ruled into the government study actually represented about a 30 percent higher rate of cancer than expected for a community the size of Fort Chip.
Around the same time, Suncor commissioned an independent study to evaluate the human-health risk leading up to a proposed expansion project that has since been scrapped. Normally, authorities would consider more than one extra case of cancer in a population of 100,000 people to represent an unacceptable public-health hazard. The Suncor report—undertaken by Golder Associates, a firm that routinely performs environmental-impact assessments for the province—found that elevated rates of arsenic in Fort Chipewyan's drinking water had raised the community's cancer risk by the equivalent of 450 extra cases per 100,000.
That couple there, they're gone," Harpe said as we looked at photos of Cree Band members. "He's still alive. She's still alive. She's gone. She's gone. He's gone."
Alberta Health and Wellness quickly rejected the findings and announced that the agency would do its own study. In the meantime, Canada's health minister went before the Legislative Assembly of Alberta to assure lawmakers, "We're satisfied that arsenic levels in the area are actually lower than in other areas."
After O'Connor publicly complained about the investigation, he received a letter from the registrar of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta saying that Health Canada believed he'd made false allegations of elevated cancer rates, raised undue alarm in the community, obstructed efforts to investigate his claims, and engendered mistrust in Health Canada. If the review committee upheld the claims, O'Connor's attorney warned him, it would be "career ending." He told me that when he heard this news, he ran to the bathroom and vomited.
But as the review of O'Connor slowly progressed, other researchers began to collect data and uncover trends supporting his theories. In February 2009, the Alberta Cancer Board prepared a new independent analysis of the cancer data collected by Health Canada and Alberta Health and Wellness—this time including the full data.
The language of the report was clear. "The number of cancer cases observed in Fort Chipewyan was higher than expected for all cancers combined and for specific types of cancer, such as biliary-tract cancer and cancers in the blood and lymphatic system," the authors concluded. They also acknowledged that cancer rates in the community had climbed in recent years.
In November 2009, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta dropped all charges against O'Connor—though it insisted that he could have been more cooperative with government efforts to investigate. By then O'Connor was the director of Health and Human Services at Fort McKay. He promised to be as helpful as possible if the government would perform a health study of the Fort McKay community. The village shared so many family connections with Fort Chip, he argued, it only made sense to study them together. Initially, provincial authorities promised to do just that—and even said they would appoint O'Connor to the investigatory team. But years have passed and nothing has happened.
"Fort Chip, walked away from," O'Connor told me. "And now McKay's been walked away from."
When I arrived at Mel Grandjamb's house, set on the fringe of all the new construction, he was waiting in his driveway next to a motor home. Behind him stood his three four-wheelers, his motorboat, his sixties-era muscle car, and his Hummer. Inside, the hallway of his house was covered in furs from one end to the other.
Grandjamb, a chief of Fort McKay First Nation in the early nineties and the former CEO of the Fort McKay Group of Companies, is one of the last trapper holdouts in the community, maintaining his traplines to this day. Wolves, wolverines, martins, fishers, foxes, coyotes, lynx, beavers, rabbits: they hung on evenly spaced hooks, their metal provincial tags still intact. Grandjamb traps now as a way of staying connected to a traditional lifestyle he learned from his father in the backwoods around Moose Lake.
"My first couple of years, we actually used dog teams to the trapline," he said. "No one uses dog teams anymore. That part of the culture is gone."
But Grandjamb shrugged off the changeover to gas-powered engines, and he doesn't fault the petroleum interests developing the tar sands. "Industry is industry," he said. It exists for one purpose—profit—and pushes relentlessly toward that goal. If people want to control industry, they should elect government officials committed to strict regulation. "If there wasn't a license to operate funded by the provincial government, these plants wouldn't be operating," he said.
As sanguine as Grandjamb seemed, the fact is that Fort McKay First Nation had opposed recent development northeast of Fort McKay, near Moose Lake, more vocally than it had at any time since Dorothy McDonald was chief. The spot, which is the ancestral home of both the Cree and the Dene, is sacred to band members. Around Moose Lake, he said, "you get out to your cabin, you hear the fire going and the wolves howling, and it's life."
Syncrude operations in Fort McKay. Photo: Aaron Huey
But then, in 2010, Brion Energy, a subsidiary of PetroChina, applied to start steam-assisted extraction of tar sands near Moose Lake. Band leaders, including Chief Jim Boucher, argued that the Brion project violated the buffer zone around Fort McKay, as established by their legal victory in 2006. Leaders in other villages rallied to their defense, hoping to set a firm precedent forcing developers to consult native communities before beginning new projects.
At that time, members of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation—south of Fort McMurray, in Lac La Biche—had a case before the Alberta Court of Appeals, in which they argued that tar sands have so harmed fish and wildlife populations that mining operations constitute a violation of their treaty rights to hunt, fish, and trap. And the Fort Chipewyan First Nation was challenging Shell Oil's planned expansion of the Jackpine mine and the company's Pierre River tar-sands project. "If Fort McKay can set precedents for what's necessary to preserve their cultural rights," Eriel Deranger, spokeswoman for Fort Chip, told a local newspaper, "it strengthens our arguments."
But in February 2014, Fort McKay withdrew its complaint. A confidential deal with Brion promised that the Fort McKay reserve would receive environmental protections, construction contracts at the new site, and an undisclosed amount of cash—which the city expects to be in the millions. "We didn't get a no-development zone," Fort McKay's lead negotiator, Alvaro Pinto, acknowledged.
Tribal members like Celina Harpe complained that Boucher didn't press hard enough to protect the community. "They didn't even ask for a 20-kilometer buffer zone," she told me. "The chief sold us out without our consultation, without our advice."
When Brion representatives came out to pitch the benefits of the deal in a meeting at the community center, they met with anger. According to Harpe, a Brion spokesperson told the crowd, "Native people are complaining, and they never had it so good." Harpe said she leaped to her feet and began banging the table. "You white trash!" she shouted. "You don't know how many people we buried, how much sorrow. You don't know what the oil companies have done to us people."
Dayle Hyde confessed to understanding how Harpe felt. "Moose Lake is sacred to the people of Fort McKay," she told me. That's where Dorothy McDonald had felt most at home and where her family had scattered her ashes. "That was our place to go, and now that's going to be changed as well. It's another thing we have to deal with and live with."
Mel Grandjamb, a former chief of Fort McKay First Nation who supports tar-sands development, dismissed the idea that the industry could be slowed down. "They'll never stop this. Never."
But Hyde insisted that fighting Brion was unrealistic. To show me why, she spread out a large map of the area—and pointed out a provincial park to the west of Moose Lake, then the land specifically set aside for the Fort McKay reservation. All around, millions of acres were depicted in jagged squares of different colors, representing all the land already leased by dozens of oil companies. "This whole area," Hyde said, "at some point or another, people are going to be trying to figure out how to develop it." Alberta Energy Regulator, a private consulting firm specializing in energy resources, argued that Fort McKay's request for a buffer zone should be denied because it would result "in sterilization of a significant bitumen resource."
The Alberta government, despite Fort McKay's legal foundation, sided with Brion. "When you have an industry that's the economic driver of the whole province," Hyde told me, "there doesn't seem to be a neutral party. I was left with the impression that the Alberta government is more interested in the well-being of Alberta as a whole rather than the people in a small community. They wouldn't be—what's the word they used?—'sterilizing' the resources at Moose Lake for the betterment of a small number of people."
She let out a quick, defensive laugh, then wavered nervously into tears. "I find this map really depressing."
Mel Grandjamb understands the feeling, but he steadfastly refused to blame the oil companies. He had grown tired of environmentalists questioning the compromises of the leaders of Fort McKay—flying in on airplanes and arriving in cars to criticize the fossil-fuel industry.
"It's good to say, Everything stops," he said. "But does that mean I walk to town tonight? Does that mean I get in the canoe and I paddle upstream for three days?" He shook his head dismissively at the very idea. "They'll never stop this. Never."
Grandjamb's words seemed to follow me on my drive back across the toxic tailings ponds encircling Suncor and Syncrude, back down Highway 63 to the brand-new airport, where I dropped off my rental SUV and wandered through the terminal's sole gift shop, selling piles of T-shirts that read FORT MCMURRAY and PROPERTY OF OIL SANDS.
Grandjamb was right: there's no stopping this—not unless we collectively demand something different. And there are few signs of that happening.
Just days later, I got word that Alberta's provincial government had approved another project. Originally explored by Koch Oil Sands, then sold to Prosper Petroleum for development, the site is slated for the extraction of tar sands from more land around Moose Lake, one more piece in the lease-map jigsaw puzzle. Leaders in Fort McKay complained to the Alberta government that they had not been "adequately consulted" about this new site and its potential health impacts on the reservation. The government agreed with Prosper that the community had failed to precisely define "adequately."
Ted Genoways (@tedgenoways) is the author of The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food, published by Harper in October.
Alberta Energy RegulatorAlberta Health and WellnessAlberta Research CouncilAthabasca RiverBitumount AlbertaBoreal forestBrion EnergyEnbridgeEnvironmental DefenceFirst Nation treaty rightsFort ChipewyanFort McKayFort McKay First NationFort McMurrayHealth impactsKalamazoo RiverKoch Oil SandsLtd.Mayflower AKMichiganNASA Goddard Institute for Space StudiesNatural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)North West Company and Hudson's Bay CompanyNorthern Gateway Pipelinesoil sandsOpen-pit minesPembina InstitutePetroChinaProsper PetroleumSuncorSyncrudeTar Island Pond OneTar sands crudeTreaty 8Treaty Land Entitlement Settlement AgreementU.S. State DepartmentWater quality


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Анна Шатилова ( *26 листопада 1938, Московська область, СРСР) — радянська та російська диктор та телеведуча. Народна артистка РРФСР. Закінчила Московський державний обласний університет (філологічний факультет).

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United States -- Foreign relations -- Central African Republic
The concept United States -- Foreign relations -- Central African Republic represents the subject, aboutness, idea or notion of resources found in Biddle Law Library- University of Pennsylvania Law School.
The Resource United States -- Foreign relations -- Central African Republic
10 Items that share the Concept United States -- Foreign relations -- Central African Republic
Blocking property of certain persons contributing to the conflict in the Central African Republic : communication from the President of the United States transmitting blocking property of certain persons contributing to the conflict in the Central African Republic, pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 801(a)(1)(A)
Continuation of the national emergency with respect to the Central African Republic : communication from the President of the United States transmitting notification that the national emergency with respect to the Central African Republic declared in Executive Order 13667 of May 12, 2014, is to continue in effect beyond May 12, 2017, pursuant to 50 U.S.C. 1622(d) ; Public law 94-412, Sec. 202(d) ; (90 Stat. 1257)
Continuation of the national emergency with respect to the Central African Republic : communication from the President of the United States transmitting notification that the national emergency with respect to the Central African Republic, originally declared on May 12, 2014, by Executive Order 13667, is to continue in effect beyond May 12, 2016, pursuant to 50 U.S.C. 1622(d); Public Law 94-412, SEC. 202(d); (90 STAT. 1257)
Continuation of the national emergency with respect to the Central African Republic : communication from the President of the United States transmitting notification that the national emergency, with respect to the Central African Republic, originally declared in Executive Order 13667 of May 12, 2014, is to continue in effect beyond May 12, 2015, pursuant to 50 U.S.C. 1622(d)
Continuation of the national emergency with respect to the Central African Republic : message from the President of the United States, transmitting notification that the national emergency with respect to the Central African Republic declared in Executive Order 13667 of May 12, 2014, is to continue in effect beyond May 12, 2018, pursuant to 50 U.S.C. 1622(d) ; Public law 94-412, Sec. 202(d) ; (90 Stat. 1257)
Continuation of the national emergency with respect to the Central African Republic : message from the President of the United States, transmitting notification that the national emergency with respect to the Central African Republic declared in Executive Order 13667 of May 12, 2014, is to continue in effect beyond May 12, 2018, pursuant to 50 U.S.C. 1622(d); Public law 94-412, Sec. 202(d); (90 Stat. 1257)
Crisis in the Central African Republic : hearing before the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred Thirteenth Congress, first session, November 19, 2013
Deployment of U.S. military personnel in the Central African Republic : communication from the President of the United States transmitting a letter informing the Congress that approximately 20 U.S. armed forces personnel were deployed to the Central African Republic to support the resumption of the activities of the U.S. embassy in Bangui
Responding to the humanitarian, security and governance crisis in the Central African Republic : hearing before the Subcommittee on African Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, One Hundred Thirteenth Congress, first session, December 17, 2013
Status report on activities in Bangui, Central Africa Republic : communication from the President of the United States transmitting notification that on May 19, 1996, heavy fighting broke out between government forces and mutinous troops in the capital city of Bangui, Central African Republic and that on May 20, 1996, the deployment of U.S. military personnel was ordered to conduct the evacuation from the Central Africa Republic of private U.S. citizens and certain U.S. government employees
Context of United States -- Foreign relations -- Central African Republic

 Data from United States -- Foreign relations -- Central African Republic - Biddle Law Library- University of Pennsylvania Law School

Data Citation of the Concept United States -- Foreign relations -- Central African Republic


text:
Fabrice Hadjadj (Nanterre, 15 de septiembre de 1971) es un escritor y filósofo francés, director del Instituto Philanthropos. Sus principales libros están dedicados a análisis sobre la tecnología y sobre la corporeidad (carne) humana.

Biografía
Hadjadj nació en Nanterre. Sus padres eran judíos de ascendencia tunecina y se adhirieron a la ideología maoísta. En su adolescencia y primera juventud, era ateo y anarquista, manteniendo una actitud nihilista hasta que, en 1998, se convirtió al catolicismo. Su libro Réussir sa mort: Anti-méthode pour vivre, ganó el Grand Prix de literatura católica en 2006. Actualmente Hadjadj enseña filosofía y literatura en Toulon. Está casado con la actriz Siffreine Michel. Tienen 9 hijos. En 2014, Hadjadj fue nombrado miembro del Consejo Pontificio para los Laicos.

Publicaciones
 Traité de Bouddhisme zen à l'usage du bourgeois d'Occident (bajo el seudónimo de Tetsuo-Marcel Kato), Éditions du PARC, 1998

 Et les violents s'en emparent, Éditions Les Provinciales, 1999

 A quoi sert de gagner le monde: Une vie de saint François Xavier, Éditions Les Provinciales, 2002; revised edition 2004

 La terre chemin du ciel, Éditions du Cerf, 2002

 La salle capitulaire (with Gérard Breuil), Éditions Les Provinciales, 2003

 Arcabas: Passion Résurrection, Éditions du Cerf, 2004

 Réussir sa mort: Anti-méthode pour vivre, Presses de la Renaissance, 2005

 Massacre des Innocents: Scènes de ménage et de tragédie, Éditions Les Provinciales, 2006

 La profondeur des sexes: Pour une mystique de la chair, Éditions du Seuil, 2008

La profundidad de los sexos: por una mística de la carne, Nuevo Inicio, 2009 (versión española)
L'agneu mystique: Le retable des frères Van Eyck, Éditions de l'Oeuvre, 2008

 Pasiphaé: ou comment l'on devient la mère du Minotaure, Éditions Desclée de Brouer, 2009

 La foi des dėmons: ou l'athéisme dépassé, Éditions Salvator, 2009
La fe de los demonios (o el ateísmo superado), Nuevo Inicio, 2009 (versión española)

 Le jugement dernier: Le retable de Beaune, Éditions de l'Oeuvre, 2010
Tenga usted éxito en su muerte: anti-método para vivir, Nuevo Inicio, 2011

 Le Paradis à la porte: Essai sur une joie qui dérange, Éditions du Seuil, 2011
El paraíso en la puerta : ensayo sobre una alegría que perturba, Nuevo Inicio, 2012 (versión española)

 Job: ou la torture des amis, Éditions Salvator, 2011
Job o La tortura de los amigos: teatro, BAC, 2015 (versión española)

 Comment parler de Dieu aujourd'hui: Anti-manuel d'évangélisation, Éditions Salvator, 2012
¿Cómo hablar de Dios hoy?, Nuevo Inicio, 2013 (versión española)

¿Qué es una familia? La trascendencia en paños menores (y otras consideraciones ultrasexistas), Nuevo Inicio, 2015.
Résurrection, Mode d'emploi, Magnificat, 2015 (versión francesa)

 The Resurrection: Experience Life in the Risen Christ, Magnificat, 2015 (versión inglesa)
Resurrección: experiencia de vida en Cristo resucitado, BAC, 2017 (versión española)
La suerte de haber nacido en nuestro tiempo, Rialp, 2016.
Puesto que todo está en vías de destrucción, Nuevo Inicio, 2016.
Últimas noticias del hombre y de la mujer, Bibliotheca Homo Legens, 2018.
99 lecciones para ser un payaso, Bibliotheca Homo Legens, 2018.
Juana y los poshumanos o el sexo del ángel, Bibliotheca Homo Legens, 2019.

Referencias

Judíos conversos al catolicismo
Pontificio Consejo para los Laicos
Católicos de Francia
Filósofos de Francia del siglo XXI
Judíos de Francia
Ensayistas de Francia del siglo XXI
Nacidos en Nanterre


Wolf Event Management is proud to present NZ's #1 Fleetwood Mac Tribute show live on stage in the South Waikato's finest proscenium arch theatre The Plaza!
The Fleetwoods have been selling out venues for the last 12 months and we've been planning on bringing them here for a show, as if you're anything like us you love the sounds of Fleetwood Mac too! They're one of the headline acts for Bluewaters Music Festival NZ 2019 (R18) so why not get a second, more intimate dose of Fleetwood greatness.
Expect concert level sound and lighting - this will not be a show you want to miss.
They'll be supported by the fantastic Jack Wallis.
You can expect two fantastic high intensity sets from the Peter Green era through to the 80s. You can expect all the hits from Landslide, The Chain, Rhiannon and so much more.
1st Release tickets available for only $35+BF Nov 16th from the website.


Will had know they would drag him into the quarrel sonner or later.
Their quarrel sprung from misunderstanding.
No one in his right mind wants anything to do with a domestic quarrel.
They had a bitter quarrel about some money three years ago and they haven't spoken to each other since.
Among other common reasons for breaking up are housing problems, infidelity, negligence towards familiy duties, a conflict of values and, above all, alcohol abuse which riuns family life and leads to quarrels and acts od violence.
What did you quarrel about/over?
The parents quarrel very often and the children are not taken care of.
Ken always stands up for his mom when his parents quarrel.


text:
Scott Morrison to pull plug on Queensland election campaign
News Politics Australian Politics Scott Morrison to pull plug on Queensland election campaign
9:54am, Oct 14, 2020 Updated: 10:19am, Oct 14
Ms Frecklington and Mr Morrison campaign together on the Gold Coast on October 10. Photo: AAP
Marty Silk
Prime Minister Scott Morrison is set to pull the plug on his election campaign for the Liberal National Party in Queensland.
Mr Morrison will return to Sydney, an area classified as a COVID-19 hotspot by Queensland health authorities, for national cabinet on Friday.
The Prime Minister's return to Sydney means he will have to spend 14 days in the ACT if he wants to return to the Sunshine State.
That would allow him to return to Queensland no sooner than a day before the state election on October 31.
"We'll go a bit further north before the end of the week," Mr Morrison told Rockhampton radio 4RO on Wednesday.
"We've got national cabinet on later in the week so I'll have to return to Sydney for that at the end of the week."
"It's been great to move through the area, and it's particularly good to be here with [federal MP] Michelle Landry. She really is an amazing local member."
Scott Morrison up close and personal with defence vehicles in Queensland on Sunday.
Mr Morrison did not join state LNP leader Deb Frecklington, who is on the campaign trail in Whitsunday, on Wednesday morning.
It's his fourth day in the state and the third day that he hasn't hit the hustings with Ms Frecklington.
However, Mr Morrison and Mr Frecklington did reportedly attend a $1500-a-head luncheon together in Brisbane on Tuesday. The Prime Minister was reportedly again targeted by protesters, angry about refugees held in a Brisbane hotel.
That followed an ugly confrontation at the University of Queensland on Monday, where Mr Morrison was abused and chased after being bundled into a waiting police vehicle. His official car was also splashed with red paint.
Federal Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has so far avoided going to Queensland to campaign alongside Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.
Ms Frecklington will be keen to change the focus of her campaign after spending Tuesday answering questions about her attendances at fundraising dinners involving property developers.
She had to repeatedly deny receiving donations from developers, which is illegal in Queensland.
Mr Morrison also revived his criticism of Queensland's border closure, claiming there was "double standard" about exemptions.
He also spoke of the toll the border closure has taken on the state's tourism sector.
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show only 600 short-term visitors arrived in Queensland in August, down 99.7 per cent from August 2019.
Most visitors to Queensland are from New Zealand, making the travel bubble involving NZ, NSW and the Northern Territory tantalising for tourism businesses. The first flights under the bubble arrangements will land on October 16.
"Protecting health does come at a cost and the cost has been very severe for the tourism industry and they should only be there as long as they absolutely have to – that will always be my view," Mr Morrison said.
"That's a judgment for the [state] government and they've got to weigh all that up, and get that right, and apply it without having double standards."
Ms Palaszczuk will start Wednesday campaigning in Gladstone.
She's hitting the hustings in the safe Labor seat held by Glenn Butcher on a margin of 20.7 per cent.
Day of political turmoil as premiers face no-confidence motions, election in chaos


Home \ Tag "FireFly Studios"
Firefly Studios today released the minimum system requirements for the eagerly awaited sequel to the hugely popular castle sim simulator, Stronghold Crusader, with the upcoming release of Stronghold Crusader 2.
Firefly Studios today announced a huge new update for the award-winning free-to-play MMORTS game, Stronghold Kingdoms.
Firefly Studios has given the medieval online castle game a new update. Seven new strategy cards that have been added to the game along with three new tutorial videos that are set to release within the next few weeks.
Firefly Studios has just announced Stronghold HD and Stronghold Crusaders HD.
With Stronghold Kingdoms being officially out of beta, Firefly Studios wanted to mark the occasion by releasing a new Launch trailer for the game.
Firefly Studios has announced that their popular Castle MMO has now gone gold.
Firefly Studios has released another one of their new tutorial videos for their free-to-play MMO, Stronghold Kingdoms.
Firefly Studios has just released a new tutorial video for their free-to-play MMO Stronghold Kingdoms, currently the second most popular free-to-play game on Steam.
Firefly Studios releases the third video in the Stronghold Kingdoms tutorial series, this one focusing on the game?s Enemy AI ? bandit camps, wolf lairs, and enemy siege camps.
The creators of Stronghold Kingdoms, Firefly Studios, have announced the launch of the game?s sixth English-language game world for players.
Firefly Studios has announced that Stronghold Kingdoms still holds the rank of second most popular free-to-play game on Steam for over six months.


GetValue reads the specified field from internal memory.
Be careful. The first field has a number 0 and the last field has a number FieldCount-1.
You have to read a record with ReadRecord before using GetValue.
It returns a double value for numeric fields (Numeric, Float, Double, Currency, Integer).


Loch Lomond Golf Club played host to a day of fun and exciting competition as Team Challenge Company hosted our GPS Interactive Treasure Hunt and Games Night for guests from The Young Presidents Organisation and their families.
Thankfully, the weather held off for the morning to let all the teams head out onto the beautiful Golf course, set on the bank of Loch Lomond, to go head to head and complete tasks at each checkpoint in order to earn maximum points. There were several bonus rounds to help the teams earn some extra points for their teams – it was fastest finger in these bonus rounds, which really amped up the competition.
Once the teams arrived back at the Golf Club they quickly were served a hot drink to warm up them up, before they were shown a brilliant presentation displaying what they teams had been up to on their GPS Treasure Hunt. The videos certainly were comical and made for plenty of laughs! Some of the highlights were 'Fireman Sam' being spoken in welsh - well at least that's what they called it! Some form of Pilate Press-ups, to Frieda the dog trying to escape her team on many an occasions!!
Once the teams had been entertained with their antics from the morning, it was time to present the teams with their scores! Stepping up to the podium in first place was Lucy's Lobes, winning by just less than 100 points to Petra's team, which is certainly impressive as Petra's team had the most competitive families at the event!
After our GPS, we had the Kids Bridge Build competition. The teams were presented with a tray of materials, containing only straw, paper and sellotape. It was their task to successfully design and construct a bridge that could maintain the weight of our electric car driving over it. The tension was mounting as time was running out to the build the bridge... Taking part we had Noah, Patrick, Jack, Lucas, Jamie, Charlotte and the Burnt bananas.
Excitement filled the room when it came to testing the bridges. There was silence as the first team carefully drove the car across the bridge. Unfortunately, it was Patrick who was out in the first round, followed by Noah, The burnt bananas, Charlotte and Georgie.
Head to head in the final was a joint team, Jack and Lucas against Jamie. Stepping in to take home yet another Team Challenge trophy for the second year Running was Jamie, which left Jack taking home his second wooden spoon of the day!
The fun and games did not stop there! We brought along our Full HD Sports Simulator. This brilliant activity left the sports fans in awe as they battled against one another playing football in their favourite teams stadiums, and Golf on some of the best Golf Courses in the world! This activity always impresses, and this group was no exception!
Thank you to Petra for all the effort in organising the event, we all had a fabulous day and we hope you all did too at such a wonderful venue. Hope to see you all again soon!


Unsurprisingly, low-income families are much less likely than high-income families to reap the tax benefits of 529 college savings plans. From the start, the vision for Child Development Accounts (CDAs) has been for a universal and progressive policy aimed at long-term asset building for all. Including all children and providing greater benefits to those most in need can achieve full inclusion in asset building.
A new Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis brief aims to advance CDA policy by identifying 10 elements for universal and progressive CDAs at scale. All 10 design elements are modeled in SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK), a CDA policy experiment created to demonstrate and test the policy idea of universal and progressive accounts from birth.
A significant initial deposit into a 529 college savings plan may trigger changes in education-related attitudes and behaviors from the beginning. Substantial early deposits can also jumpstart asset accumulation through investment growth. For example, the $1,000 initial SEED OK deposit, which was invested in the Oklahoma 529 plan, increased by more than 70% over about 10 years—even though the investment endured a sharp drop during the Great Recession. Without automatic deposits, very few low-income children will have any college savings.
The CDA in SEED OK and the four statewide CDAs—Baby Scholars in Connecticut, the Harold Alfond College Challenge in Maine, College Kick Start in Nevada, and CollegeBoundbaby in Rhode Island—use 529 college savings plans. These CDAs take advantage of the existing 529 plan policies that subsidize asset accumulation for middle- and especially high-income families through the federal income tax system, and modify the offering in ways that can serve all families.
The 10 policy design elements identified in this brief are informed by theory, research, and experience. At present, 529 college savings plans are the CDA policy structure of choice at scale. In short, no existing financial platform other than 529 plans provides a comparable combination of features required for a cost-efficient, sustainable, and progressive CDA policy that reaches all children nationwide.
Margaret M. Clancy is the policy director and College Savings Initiative director at the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. She is responsible for design and leadership of large-scale policy demonstrations, including the SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK) research experiment.


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text:
Ecuador finds hidden bug at UK embassy - is the U.S. spying on Julian Assange?
Tuesday, July 09, 2013 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: Ecuador, Ed Snowden, WikiLeaks
https://www.naturalnews.com/041103_Ecuador_Ed_Snowden_WikiLeaks.html
(NaturalNews) The massive U.S. surveillance state is very powerful and has tentacles everywhere, as evidenced by the fact that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden can't find a country which will grant him asylum from an American government incensed with him over his disclosure that Washington spies on us 24/7/365.
Now, according to reports, that surveillance apparatus may have been employed against a tiny South American country which is harboring WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who first drew the ire of the U.S. and other Western countries when he disclosed loads of top-secret military intelligence provided him by Army PFC Bradley Manning.
From Reuters Canada:
Ecuador has found a hidden microphone inside its London embassy, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is living, and will disclose on Wednesday who controls the device, its foreign minister said. Ricardo Patino said the microphone was found inside the office of the Ecuadorean ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ana Alban, at the time of a visit to the embassy by Patino to meet with Assange on June 16. Assange lives and works in a different room within the embassy.
Is the U.S. responsible again? Or did the British place the microphone? It's possible it was a joint operation.
'We have found a hidden microphone'
Assange has made the embassy his home since Ecuador granted him asylum in June 2012. He is facing charges in Sweden of rape and sexual assault leveled by two women, which he says is politically motivated and which he has called false. British authorities have said they will arrest Assange if he leaves the embassy.
Assange says he believes if he is sent to Sweden he will eventually be extradited to the United States, where he would face charges of the release of thousands of confidential documents via WikiLeaks.
"We regret to inform you that in our embassy in London we have found a hidden microphone," Patino told a news conference in Quito July 2.
"I didn't denounce this at the time because we didn't want the theme of our visit to London to be confused with this matter," Patino, who met with British Foreign Secretary William Hague to discuss Assange, said.
"Furthermore, we first wanted to ascertain with precision what could be the origin of this interception device in the office of our ambassador," said Patino. "We are sorry to say so, but this is another instance of a loss of ethics at the international level in relations between governments."
By protecting Assange Ecuador has damaged its relations with Great Britain and the U.S. as well. After meeting with Patino, the Foreign Office said nothing much had been accomplished between the two countries, in a bid to break the diplomatic rift.
"Sieging/bugging of Ecuador's London embassy and the blockading of Morales jet shows that imperial arrogance is the gift that keeps on giving," WikiLeaks said via its Twitter account.
'My work will not be cowed'
In December, Assange said WikiLeaks was preparing to release more than 1 million documents in 2013. Speaking from the balcony of the Ecuadorean embassy in London, Assange did not provide many details about the impending release but said the documents "affect every country in the world."
"This building ... has become my home, my office and my refuge," he said. "Thanks to the principled stance of the Ecuadorian government and the support of its people, I am safe in this embassy to speak from this embassy."
Continuing, he said, "My work will not be cowed. But while this immoral investigation continues, and while the Australian government will not defend the journalism and publishing of WikiLeaks, I must remain here."
More recently, Assange said there was nothing that could prevent further releases of documents from Snowden.
"There is no stopping the publishing process at this stage," Assange told ABC News. "Great care has been taken to make sure that Mr. Snowden can't be pressured by any state to stop the publication process."
http://ca.reuters.com
http://www.cnn.com
Ecuador at FETCH.news


SwingThought TOUR is fueled by purpose-driven investment & sponsor support that is unified under our vision for golf engagement through our SwingThought platform (launching in 2019). In addition to unmatched player prizes and sponsorship, we invest in hosting events on better courses, better training for our staff and better technology (big enhancements in 2019!). We plan to continue to ramp up our investment in the coming years and turn often de-valued golfers, courses and communities into valuable influencers. This future impact will drive greater opportunity for SwingThought across real and digital world activity.
Players have the opportunity to experience all aspects of life as a true touring golf professional. This includes experiencing the best developmental competition across a schedule built around geographical series. The schedule includes different varieties of championship golf courses that prepare our players for any type of course they may face at golf's highest levels.
Our team is led by a knowledgeable staff who are PGA and USGA certified. The SwingThought TOUR is the most proven avenue to the PGA and Web.com Tours. Alumni have won an amazing 17 Major Championships. In 2018, 63 of the 135 players who competed in Web.com Tour Q School Final Stage competed on the SwingThought TOUR, including 21 of the 49 players who earned status. Multiple SwingThought TOUR winners went on to advance in the same year. In 2017, 17 of the top 25 on the web.com money list are SwingThought TOUR alumni.
We are committed to providing a better solution to mini tour models for players. Mini tours need to profit off of player funds to exist and our tour does not as it serves a greater purpose for the future we are building for golfers, courses & communities.
SwingThought TOUR is wholly owned & operated by Golf Interact parent company to SwingThought brand with purpose statement of organizing & simplifying a golfer's journey. Golf Interact is a sports technology company with a vision to be the thought & innovation leader in golf.
We love to interact with players, fans, volunteers, sponsors and golf course representatives so contact us today!
Use the form to send us a direct message.
Since 2015 SwingThought has invested more money than any other group directly into players at the developmental pro level through sponsorship and prizes fueled by support beyond player funds for event entry.
Our events are conducted by a knowledgeable staff who are PGA and USGA certified with a combined experience totalling over 50 years. The rules of golf have gone through major changes recently and SwingThought TOUR invests in continuing education for its staff including rules school in October 2018.
SwingThought TOUR puts extra care and investment into the scheduling of events, course set up, event operations and more to make sure our customers have the best experience available.
Members of our SwingThought TOUR team are proud employees of our parent company, Golf Interact, LLC.


The Faces of Margraten tribute has taken place twice so far, namelijk in 2015 and 2016. Respectively approximately 3,300 and 4,100 photos of U.S. WWII soldiers who have been either buried in or memorialized at the Netherlands American War Cemetery and Memorial were on displays. We gave a face to our liberators! You will find more information on and photos of both editions in our archives. Click one of the dates to go to the archive for that year.