text:
Obrázky stránek
A Course of Legal Study: Addressed to Students and the Profession ..., Svazek 1
Od autorů: David Hoffman
(Here follows an extract from Mr. Hoffman's work, the reviewer then proceeds.)
In a subsequent part of the preface Mr. Hoffman has given some very useful hints on the study of the law, which should be treasured up by every student in perpetuam rei memoriam.'
"What particularly pleases us is the enlarged and liberal view with which Mr. Hoffman recommends the student of the common law to a full and careful study of the Admiralty, Maritime and Civil law. If the note on the excellence of the civil law (p. 254) were not too long, we should gladly insert it in this place. We comme nd it, however, as well as his observations on the law of nations and the admiralty law, most earnestly, to all those who aspire to eminence as statesmen, or scholars or lawyers.'
The whole of the review is so highly interesting and abounds with so much learning and accurate critical observation, it is regretted that the object of this notice allows the publisher of Mr. Hoffman's work to make but one other extract. The learned reviewer closes with the following observations.
•We must now hasten to a close, although there are some discussions which the perusal of Mr. Hoffman's work has suggested, which we very reluctantly pass over. In quitting the work we have not the slightest hesitation to declare, that it contains by far the most perfect system for the study of the law, which has ever been offered to the public. The writers, whom he recommends are of the very best authority; and his own notes are composed in a tone of the most enlarged philosophy, and abound in just and discriminating criticism, and in precepts calculated to elevate the moral as well as intellectual character of the profession. The course, proposed by him, is very ample, and would probably consume seven years of close study. But much may be omitted where time and opportunity are wanting to exhaust it. We cordially recommend it to all lawyers as a model for the direction of the students who may be committed to their care; and we hazard nothing in asserting that if its precepts are steadily pursued, high as the profession now stands in our country, it will attain a higher elevation, an elevation which shall command the reverence of Europe, and reflect back light and glory upon the land and the law of our forefathers.'
As to the second edition, which the author has submitted to the Profession as well as to students, the publisher has at present no means of judging of its merits, except from what may justly be anticipated from the author's intervening experience, and from his well known zeal and industry, which induces the publisher to look for a great demand for these volumes, the typographical arrangement and execution being moreover in advance of the first edition, handsomely executed as that is known to have been. Booksellers will please address the publisher.
BALTIMORE, March, 1836.
Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred
and thirty-six, by David HOFFMAN, in the Clerk's office of the District Court of Maryland.
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Q: PostgreSQL full text search not using index after importing data with COPY I am trying to make PostgreSQL use an index for prefix searching using full text search. It works fine in general, but only if I create the index AFTER importing the data. Maybe this is some kind of intended behavior, but I do not understand it.
First I create the index and then import the data using the COPY command:
CREATE INDEX account_fts_idx ON account
    USING gin(to_tsvector('german', remote_id || ' ' || name || ' ' || street || ' ' || zip || ' ' || city ));
COPY account (id, remote_id, name, street, zip, city ...) FROM '/path/account.csv' WITH DELIMITER ',' CSV;

Then I run a PREFIX (maybe that's important) search using the following select statement:
EXPLAIN ANALYZE SELECT a.id, a.remote_id, a.name, a.street, a.zip, a.city, al.latitude, al.longitude
FROM account a
LEFT JOIN account_location al ON al.id = a.id
WHERE (to_tsvector('german', a.remote_id || ' ' || a.name || ' ' || a.street || ' ' || a.zip || ' ' || a.city)
@@ (to_tsquery('german', 'hambu:*')))

Which results in poor performance, because the index is not being used:
Hash Left Join  (cost=28.00..3389.97 rows=319 width=94) (actual time=1.685..1237.674 rows=1336 loops=1)
  Hash Cond: (a.id = al.id)
  ->  Seq Scan on account a  (cost=0.00..3360.73 rows=319 width=78) (actual time=1.665..1236.589 rows=1336 loops=1)
        Filter: (to_tsvector('german'::regconfig, (((((((((remote_id)::text || ' '::text) || (name)::text) || ' '::text) || (street)::text) || ' '::text) || (zip)::text) || ' '::text) || (city)::text)) @@ '''hambu'':*'::tsquery)
  ->  Hash  (cost=18.00..18.00 rows=800 width=24) (actual time=0.001..0.001 rows=0 loops=1)
        Buckets: 1024  Batches: 1  Memory Usage: 0kB
        ->  Seq Scan on account_location al  (cost=0.00..18.00 rows=800 width=24) (actual time=0.001..0.001 rows=0 loops=1)
Total runtime: 1237.928 ms

Now comes the strange part: If i drop the index and recreate it using the same CREATE INDEX command, the same SELECT query uses the index and is very fast.
Hash Left Join  (cost=61.92..1290.73 rows=1278 width=94) (actual time=0.561..1.918 rows=1336 loops=1)
  Hash Cond: (a.id = al.id)
  ->  Bitmap Heap Scan on account a  (cost=33.92..1257.78 rows=1278 width=78) (actual time=0.551..1.442 rows=1336 loops=1)
        Recheck Cond: (to_tsvector('german'::regconfig, (((((((((remote_id)::text || ' '::text) || (name)::text) || ' '::text) || (street)::text) || ' '::text) || (zip)::text) || ' '::text) || (city)::text)) @@ '''hambu'':*'::tsquery)
        ->  Bitmap Index Scan on account_fts_idx  (cost=0.00..33.60 rows=1278 width=0) (actual time=0.490..0.490 rows=1336 loops=1)
              Index Cond: (to_tsvector('german'::regconfig, (((((((((remote_id)::text || ' '::text) || (name)::text) || ' '::text) || (street)::text) || ' '::text) || (zip)::text) || ' '::text) || (city)::text)) @@ '''hambu'':*'::tsquery)
  ->  Hash  (cost=18.00..18.00 rows=800 width=24) (actual time=0.001..0.001 rows=0 loops=1)
        Buckets: 1024  Batches: 1  Memory Usage: 0kB
        ->  Seq Scan on account_location al  (cost=0.00..18.00 rows=800 width=24) (actual time=0.001..0.001 rows=0 loops=1)
Total runtime: 2.054 ms

So why does the index has to be created after the import?
And more important to me: Will new rows (added normally via INSERT INTO) added to the index?

A: @Denis pointed me into the right direction. I looked at the VACUUM, ANALYZE command and found the solution:

For tables with GIN indexes, VACUUM (in any form) also completes any pending index insertions, by moving pending index entries to the appropriate places in the main GIN index structure. (PostgreSQL Documentation: VACUUM)

After running VACUUM account the SELECT query uses the index as excpected.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Google+ is a very powerful tool for marketers. The level of post engagement you can get on Google+ far exceeds that of Facebook unless you're willing to pay for it. Facebook wants you to buy engagement through Sponsored Posts. Google+ doesn't do that and because it's part of the Google ecosystem of services there are multiple opportunities for engagement. You may have also noticed that Google+ posts often show up in Google search results.
Like with anything the key to getting noticed is to stand out. The more noticeable you make your Google+ posts the more likely people are to engage with them. The secret to this is post formatting. Unlike Facebook, Google+ allows you to customize the format of your posts — provided you know the cheats! You can make text bold, italic, strikethrough or mix and match. It's also easy to do numbered lists and bullet lists as well. Use the guide below.


text:
practice area practice area
Bankruptcy & Finance
Business Litigation & Dispute Resolution
Business Regulation & Regulated Industries
Corporations, LLCs & Partnerships
Limited Liability Companies
Internet Law & Cyber-Security
Electronic Contracting
Legal Opinions & Ethics
Mergers & Acquisitions Law
Month-In-Brief
Recent Developments in Business and Corporate Litigation
View All Resources Areas
Diversity and Inclusion in the Profession
About BLT
The Rule of Law and Business: Lessons from Experiments in South America
12 Min Read By: Alejandro Trujillo April 14, 2022
"The Rule of Law and Business: Lessons from Experiments in South America" is the eighth article in a series on intersections between business law and the rule of law, and their importance for business lawyers, created by the American Bar Association Business Law Section's Rule of Law Working Group. Read more articles in the series.
"The rule of law is crucial for promoting economic growth, sustainable development, human rights and access to justice. Where the rule of law is strong, people and businesses can feel confident about investing in the future."
Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
The United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG 16) reflects a global commitment to "Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels."[1] Considered both a goal, in and of itself, and a key enabler for the rest of the United Nations 2030 agenda, SDG 16 is grounded in the understanding that promotion of the rule of law is good for business.[2] Despite this global and unequivocal recognition of the link between the rule of law and business, business lawyers still face resistance when introducing the Rule of Law as a tangible aspect of their professional practice, in part due to an apparent lack of opportunities to advance this fundamental principle in a pragmatic way, while providing advice to their clients.
Experimenting with reimagining what lawyers can do to advance business and the rule of law, CAMINNOS Soc. Civ., a business lawyer–led organization, is testing and developing novel approaches to business law tailored to support communities in rural South America using innovative approaches to individual and collective entrepreneurship. CAMINNOS works with new entrepreneurs to help them build capacity to engage with real world challenges by helping them cultivate experience- and results-driven thought leadership. One of the main goals of this approach is to empower small and medium business owners to engage with lawmakers to collaborate around using business frameworks to proactively solve or regulate societal problems. In supporting this kind of capacity building through law in business, CAMINNOS (co-founded and led by the author) operates on the understanding that the Rule of Law is of paramount importance—for businesspeople—in solving business problems and creating a healthy business environment in the long run.
CAMINNOS's approach to business advising is grounded in educating clients on their Rule of Law obligations. At the big picture level, CAMINNOS uses Base-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) business models[3] and blockchain technology[4] to empower rural communities in strategic sectors to generate resources for development in their territories, with a focus on sustainability.[5] In CAMINNOS's case, the governance model of its community-owned companies provides families within each community with control and equal voting power to determine how to reinvest the companies' revenue into sustainable development projects. Moreover, the start-up companies that CAMINNOS structures and advises allow each of the communities that have ownership in them to create an additional income source, to diversify their local economies through revenue reinvestment, and to change their members' mindset, from a welfare to an entrepreneurial mentality.[6] Thus, CAMINNOS acts to serve not only its clients' businesses but also its clients' larger vision of how these business will live in and impact society for the good.
Legal advising is at the core of these projects, and CAMINNOS adapts traditional approaches to lawyering by designing into them capacity-building programming and technical support that allow clients to learn how to operate their business entities independently by complying with sector regulations providing transparency, and promoting good governance across large shareholder bases. Based on this experience on the ground, CAMINNOS sees the role of the lawyer, particularly for lawyers advising small, medium, and new businesses, as including educating clients on the rule of law, including by emphasizing corporate ethics and the role of environmental sustainability and social impact together with profit.
At CAMINNOS, business law advising is not only about helping clients mitigate risk but also about empowering clients to learn to identify and address the legal frameworks underlying the root causes of such risks. Implementing such an approach, in 2021, CAMINNOS developed a project to introduce indigenous populations to the rural tourism sector through companies owned by the members of their communities. This project was the winning initiative in the Local Innovators Contest 2021[7] organized by the Local Innovation Network[8] and Ashoka,[9] and selected from the proposals of more than 120 local government leaders paired with social entrepreneurs. The innovative component of the project was the design of a digital inclusion program that allowed collaboration between business lawyers, local government, and rural communities to develop and implement a digital tourism program formed as business entity run by its shareholders, with equal participation from business and the community. By facilitating multistakeholder collaboration[10] in response to client demands, CAMINNOS was able to find long-term and systemic legal and business law solutions to the difficulties and limitations that rural tourism in Bolivia had to face during COVID-19 lockdowns. Reaching out to key allies, CAMINNOS gathered the National Protected Areas Authority, tech startups, NGOs, and academic institutions to design strategies to support rural communities in the tourism sector, creating legal frameworks to integrate such communities as direct participants in the sector. This collaborative public-private pipeline was able to implement a digital tourism program for rural communities to gain skills to create digital tourism experiences and digital artwork using blockchain technology that promoted and sold the works as non-fungible tokens[11] in cryptoart galleries. The initiative was selected from among 80 public-private partnership proposals, as the most innovative project in the Local Innovators Contest 2021 international competition. This project and CAMINNOS's work provide an example of the potential at the intersection of business and public policy that will be replicated in 2022 by other communities and the public sector in Bolivia and Argentina.
From working at the intersection of business and law, CAMINNOS has learned that business lawyers are key to activating the potential for businesses' leadership within the business community. Moreover, CAMMINNOS has found that delivering innovative legal advice to clients that allows them to go beyond compliance with "minimum" safeguards to focus on the more enterprising "do no harm"[12] principle invigorates business and inspires business leadership. It also creates within business clients an interest in and a commitment to engage in strengthening the rule of law by building and growing more accountable business institutions. These actions can be defined as part of the "changemaker" movement, a rather uncommon term for the legal profession, yet understandable enough to indicate that professionals on this level of engagement are committed to assume a different approach to attain new and better results in their effort to uphold the Rule of Law and achieve their clients' social goals. Driven by its clients' goals and aspirations, CAMINNOS is creating a community development model through new governance structures in rural communities, causing a change of mindset that redefines the relationship and power dynamics in communities, with a special focus on gender equity and the interactions between communities and other actors such as governments, private investors, NGOs, and civil society movements. The organization continually works to promote specific legal regulation to change the status of sustainable development for rural areas to allow indigenous communities' inclusion in disruptive and scalable industries, such as the energy and technology sectors, enabling them as business actors.
Applying business law frameworks, CAMINNOS has trained rural communities on how to construct and operate community-led gas stations, as well as how to reinvest their profits into sustainable development projects. Anchored in business law and principles of rule of law, CAMINNOS has also deployed multidisciplinary teams of researchers, engineers, and financial and legal specialists to structure a corporate governance model that has enabled the creation of community-owned gas stations for five communities, granting ownership to more than 4500 families and enabling them to exercise their shareholder rights and comply with corporate regulations that govern commercial entities in that jurisdiction.
Some of the lessons that CAMINNOS has learned through its work are specific to South America. However, the core of CAMINNOS's approach appears to have universal application. For example, incorporating advising on the nature and value of the rule of law into traditional business advising to help clients cultivate business leadership skills is an approach that business lawyers advising new or socially minded business clients can immediately experiment with and adopt. Moreover, business lawyers can also begin to develop networks beyond the legal community so that, where affordable, they can offer their clients collaborative and big picture opportunities for business growth and innovation that support and enhance the rule of law in a way that advances their clients' leadership positions. In this context, an innovative approach to legal advising can be understood as a process to provide clients with effective solutions to systemic social and environmental issues, using strategic and multidisciplinary approaches, grounded first and foremost in business law and, more broadly, in principles of rule of law. The concept itself calls for an intervention that goes beyond traditional legal counseling, requiring a deeper understanding of the social problems, the culture, and the context, driving business lawyers to question whether existing law is helpful to the highest aspirations of the businesses and business clients they serve in given circumstances and how the Rule of Law can be upheld and relied upon in such work.
As an added fruit, given that the impact of socially conscious business projects is measured in both financial and social terms, this approach to business lawyering also allows lawyers to measure their own social impact, in addition to their financial impact—a measure that might make them more appealing and attractive to socially-minded entrepreneurs, who are increasingly numerous. Keep in mind that measuring social gains initially requires the design of a theory of change model, understanding the underlying needs of your clients and the communities they wish to serve and translating them into objectives, which must be aligned to identified needs in the relevant communities, needs also targeted as pressing social issues listed in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals[13] promoted by the United Nations.
Any errors or omissions, and the opinions expressed in this Article, are the author's own. The author can be contacted at [email protected]. ↑
https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/sdg-16/ ↑
The term is used in economics to refer to the poorest two-thirds of the economic human pyramid, a group of more than four billion people living in abject poverty. Business for the Base of the Pyramid as a strategy was popularized by C.K. Prahalad, as well as other writers, such as Ted London, reframing the world's poor living on less than US$ 1.25 per day as "resilient and creative entrepreneurs" as well as "value-conscious consumers." ↑
Blockchain can be understood as a system to record information in a way that makes it extremely difficult to change or be hacked. It works as a decentralized ledger that records the origin and ownership of a digital asset. It gained notoriety as the technology used to created and support cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital coins. It is used for many purposes, such as to register digital assets, create Decentralized Finance (DeFi) structures, program Smart Contracts, and form Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO), among its most common applications. ↑
More information can be found at https://caminnos.org/. See, "Assessing the Impact of Social Enterprises Using the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and IRIS," http://www.sonencapital.com/news-posts/assessing-impact-social-enterprises-using-u-n-sustainable-development-goals-iris/. "Social entrepreneurship is increasingly recognized as a means of addressing the world's most pressing social and environmental problems. However, assessing the impact of social enterprises continues to be challenging. Part of the challenge is to find a shared language of impact in the myriad approaches used by social entrepreneurs, impact investors, and development agencies to code, classify, and interpret impact." ↑
See, e.g., "Rural Youth Innovation Award honours youth leaders fighting COVID-19," https://www.ifad.org/en/web/latest/-/rural-youth-innovation-award-honours-youth-leaders-fighting-covid-19. CAMINNOS works closely with rural communities, and we will see two of the projects launched by this organization led by an attorney in Bolivia that are examples of systemic change as an effect of strategic legal advice. ↑
The Local Innovators Contest is an initiative driven by Ayni | Systemic Innovation Communities, an alliance between different organizations of the Latam region with a strong commitment to innovation and the transformation of our cities. Its fifth edition, Collaborative Cities, was targeted to foster territorial transformation through open and participatory work between local government leaders and social innovators (social entrepreneurs). More than 120 teams registered for this initiative to co-design transformative solutions to local problems in areas as diverse as citizen participation, waste management, environmental issues, social inclusion, health, and food security, among others. ↑
The Local Innovation Network (Red de Innovación Local) supports local government teams to become leaders in the development of their communities through the improvement of their management capacities, the construction of collaborative networks, and the promotion of innovative public policies. ↑
Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, an NGO based in the United States and ranked as the fifth best NGO in the world by independent media organization NGO Advisor, builds and cultivates a community of over 3900 social entrepreneurs and change leaders who transform institutions and cultures so they support changemaking for the good of society. ↑
"Driving deep social change most often requires us to work in collaboration with diverse stakeholders on shifting a system together. While such multi-stakeholder collaboration can have a transformational impact on a system, it also comes with its own challenges and requires a specific type of leadership and strategy to be effective." Ashoka Europe Fellowship Program developed a course to strengthen the leadership skills and strategy of social entrepreneurs for facilitating multi-stakeholder collaboration: https://fellowship-europe.ashoka.org/multi-stakeholder-collaboration. ↑
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital art pieces registered as unique tokens or items, using blockchain technology to create a smart contract that grants authenticity and proof of ownership. Its value is in the blockchain, which removes the middleman and confirms the origins or authorship of the art. ↑
See "Emerging Voices: 'Do No Harm' and The Development of General Corporate Human Rights Obligations," Gabriel Armas-Cardona, Opinio Juris (August 28, 2015), http://opiniojuris.org/2015/08/28/emerging-voices-do-no-harm-and-the-development-of-general-corporate-human-rights-obligations/. (Emphasizing that "The principle of 'do no harm' has been used as a touchstone in corporate human rights obligations since at least 2002 and is a surprisingly suitable standard for developing a structure for general obligations." Yet, this principle is not designed to guide the actions of business entities towards social good contributions, but to restrict them to avoid human rights violations.) ↑
See "Assessing the Impact of Social Enterprises Using the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and IRIS," http://www.sonencapital.com/news-posts/assessing-impact-social-enterprises-using-u-n-sustainable-development-goals-iris/, quoted at note 5. ↑
By: Alejandro Trujillo April 14, 2022
Best Practices in Second Request Document Review
By: Andrew Goodman January 21, 2022
Law Firms Form Carolinas Social Impact Initiative to Support Inclusivity and Economic Mobility in the Carolinas
By: Thomas N. Griffin III, Allen K. Robertson, Thomas L. Mitchell November 12, 2021
Global Rule of Law Trends Pose Challenges for ESG Movement
By: Elizabeth Andersen November 5, 2021
Alejandro Trujillo
Alejandro Trujillo is a Fellow at ASHOKA (a leading social entrepreneurship non-profit)…
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


April is well known, whether we like it or not, as a time of annual public service price increases.
Whilst you can't prevent the increases, which includes council tax, energy costs and pension contributions, Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis has revealed eight ways to beat the April bill shocks.
Below are the tips from Martin Lewis, which could help consumers avoid rises from April 1 and save some extra cash.
On Monday March 25, the price of a first class standard letter will rise to 70p, as will second class to 61p.
The cost of large letters will increase by even more.
However, stamps do not have an expiry date, so if you will use them in the future, for example at Christmas or Easter, it may be beneficial for you to stock up on them now.
We reported recently that changes to the UK's pension contribution scheme will affect millions across the country from April.
Every UK worker aged 22 or more, who earns more than £10,000, is automatically enrolled to pay into a pension alongside your employer.
From April 6, the total that must be contributed increases from 5 per cent to 8 per cent of your salary, and the minimum your employer must contribute rises from 2 per cent to 3 per cent.
That means if your employer is only putting in the minimum, your contribution will rise from 3 per cent to 5 per cent (so £100 per £5,000 of salary).
However, as it's from pre-tax income each £100 you contribute only reduces your take-home pay by £80 as a basic rate taxpayer and £60 at the higher rate.
You can opt-out of this, but Martin Lewis strongly suggests that employees don't.
While it does reduce your pay packet, if you contribute, your employer does too.
So not doing so is giving up a pay rise - as it's giving you money you wouldn't have otherwise got (even though it's not immediately usable).
3. TV licence fee to rise - but do you need one?
The colour licence will increase by £4 to £154.50 from April 1. So renew now if you've forgotten to do so here.
You need a licence if you watch or record TV as it's being broadcast, or use specifically the BBC iPlayer. If you only watch catch-up content on for example the ITV Hub or NetFlix, you don't need one.
In addition, if someone aged 75 and over lives in your home, licences should be free.
If not and you've been paying unnecessarily, you can reclaim it (a whopping £38m was refunded to over-75s from 2015-2018).
4. Council tax increase on average of £75 - but are you do thousands back?
The average council tax rise from April 1 in England is to be 4.5 per cent, equivalent to £75 on a typical band D property. Rises are expected in Wales and Scotland too.
However up to 400,000 households in England and Scotland are reportedly in the wrong band, according to Martin Lewis.
In 2007, Martin Lewis came up with the council tax check and challenge system, which allows people to safely check if theirs is too high.
Over 10,000 people have said they successfully lowered their council tax band and received a refund.
Free tools to do this can be viewed here which also includes help on bill reductions for certain households.
People pay for prescriptions in England will see a 20p price rise on April 1, (they're free in the rest of the UK).
Yet you can get a prescription season ticket (officially called an NHS prepayment prescription certificate) where for a one-off £29.10 for 3 months or £104 a year it covers all your prescriptions - so use one a month and it wins.
More than 800,000 people missed out on savings averaging £50 a year by not having one.
To get it head here or ask your pharmacist.
Some pensioners could miss out on winter fuel payments.
The energy price cap on standard tariffs is rising from £1,137 a year for someone with typical usage to £1,254 a year from April 1 .
As over half the country are on these default tariffs, that means a chunky 10 per cent rise for most.
However, Martin Lewis has said that people can cut costs by over £300 by switching to the cheapest supplier.
It only takes five minutes via this website (which also gives you cashback) or any approved site.
7. Water bills are UP on average by 2% - some save £500 a year on a meter.
Rises from April 1 vary by region.
You can't switch supplier, yet in England and Wales most can switch to a water meter for free.
Martin Lewis' rule of thumb on this is if you've more or the same number of bedrooms in your home as people, it's worth checking out.
People can use this calculator.
Basic NHS check-ups are up £1.10 to £22.70 in England and 30p to £14.30 in Wales from April 1.
Some other charges rise too. Try to get an appointment before then. There's no change in Scotland or NI.


text:
export {default as Index} from './Index'
export {default as Length} from './Length'
export {default as URLCoder} from './URLCoder'

export {default as NotFound} from './NotFound'

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: How to catch error while parsing json without using if for each key? here is How i parse json:
let myObject = MyObject()
let string1 = if jsonObject["string1"] as? String{
    myObject.string1 = string1
}else{
  throw InValidJson
}

let string2 = if jsonObject["string2"] as? String{
    myObject.string2 = string2
}else{
  throw InValidJson
}

let string3 = if jsonObject["string3"] as? String{
    myObject.string3 = string3
}else{
  throw InValidJson
}

but that too much code, as i am using if every where, is it possible to do something like the following:
do{
   myObject.string1 = if jsonObject["string1"] as! String
   myObject.string2 = if jsonObject["string2"] as! String
   myObject.string3 = if jsonObject["string3"] as! String

}catch(){
   error.description
}

so i don't need to check every key, as my json is too large.
Thanks

A: You can do this:
guard let string1 = jsonObject["string1"] as? String,
  string2 = jsonObject["string2"] as? String,
  string3 = jsonObject["string3"] as? String else {
  //handle error
  return
}


Himeji Castle, Hyogo Prefecture. 1601-9C.E.
Castle, stone, wall, war, leadership, security, pine, white, heron, Himeji.
Sightseeing, history, architecture, geography, animals, color, nature.
Descriptions, "looks like," counter for floors.


Science, technology and innovation (STI) are continuously recognized as strategic drivers of economic growth. With the right tools and convenient environment, innovators and the business community can tap on the potential of STI to develop innovation solutions for the development issues facing their communities, through boosting skills, sourcing ideas and knowledge transfer.
That is why the IsDB has put Science, technology and Innovation at the heart of its growth strategy, investing heavily in these sectors through its flagship programmes, the Engage Platform and Transform Fund.
Engage is a digital hub to create a global innovation ecosystem for the world's developing communities, connecting innovation with market opportunities and funding.
Closely aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals (the UN Global Goals), Engage focuses on accelerating progress towards achieving greater food security, healthier lives, inclusive and equitable education, sustainable management of water and sanitation, access to affordable and clean energy, and sustainable industrialisation across the developing world.
It is a place to interact with and incubate imaginative ideas that will address sustainability challenges, providing the perfect online environment to engage with a large network of influential global stakeholders.
The platform offers three main services: Match Making, Technology Transfer and Calls for Innovation.
Through Engage, innovators, SMEs, private sector companies, Government decision makers and NGOs will benefit from tailored mentoring services and expert knowledgesharing that will help activate their ideas and proposals to an internationally recognised standard.
To ensure its members have access to a steady flow of financing facilities, the IsDB established The Transform Fund. The $500 million fund, which works in tandem with Engage, will help support science, technology and innovation initiatives in our member counties.
The fund will drive meaningful change to millions of people by giving every scientist, technologist and innovator the opportunity to make a difference to the world around them.


text:
Google BufferBox Hits San Francisco As Online Order Lockers Spreak
By Chris Davies/Sept. 30, 2013 3:56 pm EST
Google's BufferBox acquisition has spread to its second location, San Francisco, offering residents a place to have online shopping delivered when they can't be at home. The next launch outside of BufferBox's Toronto debut, BufferBox is still in its early roll-out in San Francisco, Google said today.
That means locations are relatively limited, at least initially, though Google promises that will increase over time. There's currently fourteen spots where a BufferBox locker system has been installed, according to the service's location map, ranging from convenience stores through to coffee shops.
BufferBox works by offering a bank of kiosks for temporarily storing received goods. Shippers send a parcel to a central warehouse, and then BufferBox distributes it out to the different lockers around the city.
When your package is available, you get an email with a confirmation and a PIN code to actually open up the locker. After 72 business hours of not having been collected, abandoned packages are re-collected by BufferBox.
It's a similar setup to what Amazon attempted to do with its own Amazon Lockers system, though of course available to every online retailer wanting to make a delivery, not just the one. Amazon ran into some issues with its roll-out recently, however, with RadioShack and Staples ending the partnerships after concerns that they weren't benefiting from giving Amazon customers the convenience to shop online and pick up locally.
Whether Google and BufferBox will encounter the same problems remains to be seen. Google seems keen to push its own Google Shopping Express service with the lockers, but the general availability of the cubbies to store goods from any retailer might encourage more positivity than Amazon's single-vendor service.


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Out of the office: Co-working spaces provide…
Out of the office: Co-working spaces provide community, productivity
The quiet room of Creative Density in Denver's Uptown neighborhood hums with activity as Nelson Harvey, left, a freelance journalist, Katherine Duerksen, a human resource consultant for charter schools, and Matt DeVoe, a sales rep for a technology company out of New York, share the room.
By Emilie Rusch | erusch@denverpost.com | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED: October 10, 2014 at 10:32 am | UPDATED: April 26, 2016 at 9:08 am
After two years of working from home, Bruce Wolk desperately needed a change in scenery.
It was "mind-numbing," the Denver-based freelance writer said, recalling the many days he spent alone in his small home office.
"The truth of the matter is, it's so incredibly isolating," Wolk said. "Each hour seems like three."
Then, he discovered co-working.
Three days a week, Wolk sets up shop and laptop at Creative Density, a two-story house in Uptown that's been converted into a haven for fellow freelancers, remote workers and small start-ups.
There are comfortable chairs and tables grouped in rooms for both the music-fueled and quiet-loving. There's fast wireless Internet, strong coffee, private meeting space and best of all for Wolk, a sense of community.
"I needed to find a space where I could work easily and at the same time interact with other people," Wolk said.
"There can be four, five people here, and everyone will be merrily working along and all of a sudden, a spontaneous conversation will break out," he said. "You really can't do that at home."
Co-working is exploding in popularity across the U.S., with new and increasingly specialized spaces cropping up on a regular basis.
In Denver, there are co-working spaces for lawyers, artists, cannabis startups and more. Many established spaces are planning major expansions in coming months.
Craig Baute, founder of Creative Density, said despite what many think, you don't have to be a tech genius or entrepreneur with a world-changing start-up idea to take advantage of co-working — although there are spaces for them, too.
The majority of co-workers in Denver and elsewhere are remote workers and freelancers, said Baute, who also sits on the board of Coshare, a national co-working association.
"It's a good fit if you enjoy routine, to get out of the house, go do your work and then leave work at the office. That's an amazing benefit," Baute said. "People don't realize the distractions that might happen at a coffee shop, and also that you don't get to know people."
Co-working can offer bottom-line benefits, too.
In return for a low-cost, low-commitment investment, most co-workers report an uptick in productivity and work quality, according to surveys by Desk Mag, an online co-working magazine. Many also report new work leads they would not have landed from home.
A key part of the equation is flexibility, co-workers said.
Typically, co-working spaces operate on month-to-month memberships, with no long-term contracts. You pay for what you want — whether that's three-day-a-week access to a shared co-working lounge or 24/7 access to your own personal desk — only the months you want it. If business picks up or slows down, you can adjust your membership accordingly.
That flexibility is something you won't find trying to lease a traditional office space, said Jennie Nevin, founder of Green Spaces, a co-working space for green and socially conscious individuals in River North.
"You don't have to sign a long-term lease," Nevin said. "You don't have to get the Internet set up. You don't have to buy a copier."
Memberships range in price depending on use, starting at $50-$75 for once-a-week co-working privileges, according to the member websites of Denver Coworks, an alliance of local co-working spaces.
Part-time co-working memberships — or about three days a week — fall in the $150-$200 range, while full-time access to a co-working lounge can run $195-$300.
Designated desks begin at $300-$400, while semi-private and private offices go up from $550. Renting a traditional office for one person, in comparison, costs $500 on average, Baute said.
Many companies will even cover the cost of co-working for their remote workers.
"Keeping you a happy employee means you'll stay longer. That's a huge financial benefit," Baute said. "To a business doing the cost analysis, it's 'Duh.' "
At Shift Boutique Workspaces in Alamo Placita, they hear time and again from members that co-working also results in higher productivity, community manager Sibila Lantzy said.
Shift, a sleek, modern space with free gym, fitness classes and in-house kegerator, offers co-working spaces and designated desks, as well as two floors of private offices.
"You're paying for the space, getting dressed, leaving the house, and you tend to stay more focused," Lantzy said. "You don't have laundry. You don't have the TV on in the background."
Madison Carroll works remotely for a healthcare software company based in Tucson and said as soon as she moved to Denver about a year ago, she started looking for a co-working space.
She checked out at least five different spaces before she found Shift, she said.
"It was perfect," Carroll said. "It was really close to me, and it just felt like home."
The days she spends at Shift are "definitely" more productive than the ones spent at home, too, she said.
"You do laundry, you do something else. You don't work," Carroll said. "When I come here, I work. I'm here to work."
For freelancers and small businesses, the community-centric environment can also mean connections to new clients and work.
Both Carroll and Wolk said they had either given or received paying work from someone they met through their co-working space.
In one case, Wolk said, a Web designer whose client needed content for a site she was building asked him to write it. Other times, he has passed on work to other writers whose expertise better fit the job.
"There is a synergy here that obviously you don't find working from home or Starbucks," Wolk said.
Admittedly, though, co-working is not for everyone.
People whose jobs require a high level of privacy and confidentiality may be better off looking elsewhere, Lantzy said.
The same goes for larger teams and startups, particularly once they reach that 10-plus employee range, Baute said.
"You're developing your own office culture at that point," he said.
Emilie Rusch: 303-954-2457, erusch@denverpost.com or twitter.com/emilierusch
Emilie Rusch
Emilie Rusch covers commercial real estate and retail for The Post. Reach her at 303-954-2457.
Follow Emilie Rusch	@emilierusch
A new pizzeria is coming to Stanley Marketplace — and you can bring its dough home with you
The Coperta team is opening a new "modern pizzeria" in the former Sazza space at the Stanley Marketplace in Aurora. The as-yet-unnamed pizzeria will be family-friendly but also include ample cocktails and wine.
Finally going to hike a 14er? Here's a list of the best ones for beginners
These five peaks are time-tested hikes for novice fourteener folks. Bonus: Most are close to Denver.
Apollo 11 fever! How Colorado is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing
Check out our roundup of public, family-friendly events happening this month to celebrate America's historic first steps on the moon.
How to push fresh herbs beyond the garnish: Use with abundance and abandon
Fresh herbs are one of the most straightforward and effective ways of elevating simple home cooking into something notable, and I cook with them almost daily. A few snips of chives on scrambled eggs, a shower of torn basil on tomato salads, sprigs of rosemary in the sauté pan for a steak, and a pinch of chopped parsley for the...


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North Park, a San Diego community, and commercial hub of 30th and University
Today, 30th Street is still a vibrant commercial hub within a residential community serving as the main thoroughfare from Normal Heights, to North Park, South Park and Golden Hill. All these communities include a historic mixture of old craftsman and Spanish Revival homes, older and newer apartments, cottages and newer condos. Families and singles reside in North Park and still form a community rich in both its culture and diversity. The commercial and residential community has grown into an inviting and eclectic social hub during the last 20 years. The availability of parking on 30th street is vital for businesses, their customers, residents with no onsite parking, and to comply with ADA requirements.
April, 2019 a City-wide bicycle special interest group presented mobility plans to a City Mobility Manager, Councilman Ward, and board members on the North Park Planning Committee. May 14, 2019 the board voted to recommend, originally called "Option A", the elimination of all 571 parking spaces on 30th St. between Juniper and Adams. This was an option Councilman Ward presented, along with two other options, but no options to leave ALL the parking spaces, as is. The Mayor made his final directive, two days after the meeting, to remove all 571 spaces. Councilman Ward and NP Main Street, has recently come up with another plan for joint use by cars and "protected" bikes lanes. They have not mentioned loosing parking spaces and the center lane. The fact is, in order for cars and protected bike lanes to be on 30th., parking spaces and the center lane will be lost. They have not given this plan a name, but it is identical to what originally was called Option B. They also don't divulge Option B, is only between Howard and Upas, with removal of 142 spaces out of, currently 258. And the remainder of 30th end up with the Mayors "Option A", removal of all spaces between Adams and Howard, and Upas and Juniper.
The elimination of any parking will result in businesses losing customers, overflow parking to adjoining streets, residents with no onsite parking unable to find spaces, and decrease air quality due to cars circling blocks to find parking. There will be no shift in commuters to bikes due to a lack of a modern mass transit system to serve people's needs for their work commute. No accommodation was made for ADA mandates, buses, delivery zones, street sweepers, emergency vehicles, employees, and residents to the 30th St. corridor. There is only one public paid parking garage, at 30th and North Park Way, serving a vast stretch of 30th St. that reasonably serves the area around it. It's unreasonable to think people are going to walk blocks and blocks to their homes or to Adams Ave. area or Juniper Street area.
Mayor Faulconer's order and Councilman Ward's recent suggestion, contradicts State and City laws and ignores the public process in various ways. However, three blocks west is Utah Street, and parallels 30th Street, is wider, less traveled, no bus stops, no businesses, and is specified on the Master Bike Plan. There is no "protected bike lane" specified for 30th Street.
Save 30th Street Parking was formed when the Mayor signed on May 16, 2019, a Directive to City Staff to proceed with the removal of the parking spaces on 30th Street. We alerted as many as possible residents, businesses and started collecting legal funds in preparation for litigation .
We have hired land use and environmental attorney, Craig Sherman, APC. Lawsuit filed on August 13, 2019. He will represent us in court where the non-compliance issues will be presented to a judge. As of 11-20-19 we're awaiting a court date.
WE NEED YOUR HELP TO SAVE 30TH STREET PARKING. Please donate to our legal fund.
Online: Save30thstreetparking.org
Mail checks: C/O Pat Sexton, 3238 Haller ST., San Diego, CA 92104. Payable- CLGA (Center for Local Government Accountability) 501c3 tax deductable. Memo- 30th. Street Project
Info: Save30thstreetparking@gmail.com
Facebook: Save 30th Street Parking @Save30thstreetparking


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Rapids Involved In Three Team Battle For Home Vitality Blast Quarter-Final
Worcestershire Rapids are involved in a three-team battle for a home Quarter-final in the Vitality Blast heading into the final week of North Group matches.
The Rapids are now lying in second spot with two games to play after their narrow defeat against Leicestershire Foxes at the Fischer County Ground yesterday evening.
Durham Jets have reclaimed top spot after their victory over Northamptonshire Steelbacks at Wantage Road.
They are a single point ahead of the Rapids who in turn are two points in front of third placed Lancashire Lightning who overcame Birmingham Bears at Emirates Old Trafford.
The Rapids wind up their group campaign by entertaining Notts Outlaws tomorrow (2.30pm) and visiting the Bears on Friday.
The Lightning have to face the Bears in the return encounter at Edgbaston on Wednesday.
Ross Whiteley, commenting on the meeting with the Foxes, said: "It is disappointing not to chase down that total after a good performance with the ball.
"I thought our bowlers kept them back quite nicely, never allowing them to really get on top.
"But it is tough when you lose three wickets in the powerplay. That puts you under pressure and their bowlers from overs six to 10 bowled nicely and we were always up against it from there.
"Callum (Ferguson) has been great for us, scoring some big runs for us and hopefully that continues.
"It looked like he might get us home tonight but it wasn't to be.
"I think Durham go ahead of us and we need a couple more wins but we are still backing ourselves to get a home quarter-final."
NORTH GROUP LEADING POSITIONS
Jets Played 12, Won 9, Lost 3, Tied 0, No Result 0, Points 18, Run Rate 0.886
RAPIDS 12, 8, 3, 0, 1, 17, 0.727
Lightning 12, 7, 4, 0, 1, 15, 0.778
REMAINING MAIN FIXTURES
Jets v Lightning
RAPIDS v Outlaws
Bears v Lightning
Jets v Falcons
Bears v RAPIDS


Leading live events business, NEC Group, has today announced that the Genting Arena will be rebranded to Resorts World Arena, as part of its continued partnership with Genting UK.
Genting UK has held the title sponsorship of the 15,700-capacity venue since January 2015 and will continue to do so using the new brand name, as a means of aligning it to the popular Resorts World Birmingham leisure and entertainment destination – directly opposite the Arena – which opened three years ago.
The decision also follows NEC Group's results for the year to 31 March 2018 announced in July, highlighting how attendance at the Group's two arenas grew by 17% against the previous year to over 1.6 million.
Phil Mead, Managing Director of NEC Group Arenas said: "The alignment of the Resorts World brand to our world class arena will serve both parties well in maximising branding opportunities. Resorts World Birmingham was the first piece of the Group's leisure strategy to transform the NEC campus into a 24-hour leisure and entertainment destination, and has helped us to increase campus footfall, reaching 7.5 million in 2018.
The official rebrand will commence from 3 December 2018. Further information for customers can be found on the current Genting Arena website.


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Ida Gerhardt (11 May 1905, Gorinchem – 15 August 1997, Warnsveld) was a classicist and Dutch poet of a post-symbolist tradition.

Life
In her hometown Rotterdam Ida Gerhardt attended the Erasmus Gymnasium, where the poet J.H. Leopold was her Classics Teacher. He made an indelible impression on her. There she also met her future life partner Marie H. van der Zeyde. From 1924 to 1933 Gerhardt studied classical languages, first in Leiden and later in Utrecht. In 1942 she graduated cum laude on the translation of Lucretius' De rerum natura, Books I and V. From 1937 she was a teacher in Groningen, then in Kampen. In 1951, at the request of the non-conformist pedagogue Kees Boeke, she joined him at the school section of the Werkplaats Kindergemeenschap in Bilthoven. She retired in 1963 and settled in Eefde.

Literary career
Just before the outbreak of World War II in May 1940, Ida Gerhardt made her debut with her first collection of poems, Kosmos. Her poems are characterized by a special focus on nature and landscape, especially the landscapes of the rivers Merwede, Waal, Lek and IJssel. Formed by her classical education and inspired by Christian beliefs, she does not confine to landscape descriptions, but always looks for kosmos, the unity in and of all creation. In her view there is meaning in nature and it is the poet's sacred duty to uncover this. Every poem is a complex network, full of sometimes mysterious relations between words, elements of nature, personal (even private) experiences, and the higher reality. Therefore, her work is often classified as symbolist or post-symbolist.

Gerhardt's poetry was published when another poetics prevailed, which meant that her poetry in official criticism remained in the shadow. A real appreciation of her work emerged  from 1970 onwards. In 1979 she received the Award for Mastership from the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, in 1980 the P.C. Hooftprijs. She also received recognition for her careful translation of the Psalms, which she made together with her friend, Marie H. van der Zeyde (1972). For her Latin translations of Virgil she received the prestigious Martinus Nijhoff Award. Her Collected Poems appeared in 1980 and were reprinted several times.

The literary award Ida Gerhardt Poëzieprijs is named after her.

Bibliography
Kosmos (1940)
De natuur en haar vormen (De rerum natura) (1942)
Het veerhuis (1945)
Buiten schot (1947)
Bij de jaarwende (1948)
Kwatrijnen in opdracht (1949)
Vergilius' Het boerenbedrijf (Georgica) (1949)
Sonnetten van een leraar (1951)
Het levend monogram (1955)
De argelozen (1956)
De hovenier (1961)
De slechtvalk (1966)
De ravenveer (1970)
Twee uur: de klokken antwoordden elkaar (1971)
Vijf vuurstenen (1974)
Vroege verzen (1978)
Het sterreschip (1979)
Nu ik hier iets zeggen mag (1980)
Verzamelde gedichten (1980)
Dolen en dromen (1980)
De zomen van het licht (1983)
De adelaarsvarens (1988)
Hoefprent van Pegasus (1996)
Gebroken lied: een vriendschap met Ida Gerhardt (1999)
Verzamelde gedichten, in three parts, (1999)
Zeven maal om de aarde te gaan (2001)

Sources and references
 Anneke Reitsma, In de taal zelf verscholen : over de poëzie van Ida Gerhardt (Amsterdam : Arbeiderspers, 1983)
 Marie Helene van der Zeyde, De wereld van het vers : over het werk van Ida Gerhardt (Amsterdam : Athenaeum—Polak & Van Gennep, 1985)
 Ad ten Bosch, Gebroken lied : een vriendschap met Ida Gerhardt (Amsterdam : Athenaeum/Polak & Van Gennep, 1999)

External links
 Koninklijke Bibliotheek - profile of Ida Gerhardt (in Dutch)
 Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren - profile of Ida Gerhardt (in Dutch)
 "On translating 'The Carillon' by Ida Gerhardt" - John Irons

1905 births
1997 deaths
Dutch women poets
People from Gorinchem
P. C. Hooft Award winners
20th-century women writers
20th-century Dutch poets
Dutch translators
Latin–Dutch translators
Translators from Hebrew
20th-century translators
20th-century Dutch women

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


SIMPLY ENTER YOUR DATE OF BIRTH ABOVE ON THE RIGHT HAND CORNER AND FOLLOW THE STEPS.
Research study in the history of mankind for "Dating on line" shows there has never been an automated dating site with an algorithm that could analyse an individual just by entering his/her date of birth and pin pointing at all the attributes and traits on different levels free of cost then by using the paid services all the data is then saved to match each applicant with their most compatible date (1st most compatible match and 2nd most compatible match) from all walks of life with an automated introduction letter sent to both applicants arriving in their message box with one another's identity to contact each other,for every new match found depending upon the availability. Astromonial.com recommends all members to take AGE, HEALTH and ETHNIC background into consideration and to pick their 1st most compatible match out of the choice given. Members have to log in each time to check their messages. This service carries on until the expiry of the membership or if the applicants decide to discontinue earlier then they can just click Unsubscribe to stop all further incoming mail.
This technology has been invented by Mr Neville Wittenbaker over a period of 30 years which has seen arise in divorce, separation, domestic violence and children going astray. The whole idea of this compatible dating technology is to make this world a happier place.
The main cause of separation, divorce, domestic violence and children going astray is when all the attributes and traits are not well balanced in couples.
HOW DOES ASTROMONIAL.COM MATCH A PERFECT COUPLE?
For example if applicant 'A' sexual urge/libido is high or sexual urge/libido is low, very emotional or not emotional, high will power or low will power, Very proud and easy going or not very proud and easy going, empathy level, work ethics, decision making ability etc: then it will match you up with applicant ' B' who shares the same level of attributes and traits to make a perfect match.
Astronomical .com matches all attributes and traits up to 80-100% in all couples. When all the attributes and traits are matching 80 – 100% it then recognises the couple as the 1st best most compatible match further when one in the couple is or is not emotional then it recognizes the couple as the 2nd most compatible match still with 80% matching.
2019 Company name. All rights reserved.


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Dick Metrey
Dick Metrey has held numerous senior management positions in the US Navy, serving as Technical Director of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Caderock Division for 15 years; where he was responsible for the business base and technical program of the organisation; including planning, execution, staffing, strategic planning and fostering new starts and innovation to provide the foundation for future programs. Prior to this role, he was directly responsible as principal advisor to the Assistant Secretary of the US Navy for matters pertaining to Naval research, Warfare research, development and acquisition. He has been recognised for his public service with many prestigious awards and selected to serve as the United States representative on several international forums and high-level committees, including the Congresssional established Advanced Submarine Advisory Panel. Mr Metrey has published numerous articles, has been a keynote speaker at seminars at home and abroad.
Mechanical Engineering, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, U.S.A
Master Sc. Mechanical Engineering, George Washington University, Washington Dc.
Postgraduate course in mathematics, George Washington University
Postgraduate course in thermo-dynamics and heat transfer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Postgraduate course in management, Harvard University
Presidential Rank Meritorious Executive Award
Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Medal
Navy Superior Civilian Service Medal
George Washington University Alumnus Achievement Award
Membership Sigma Xi
Chair, Advanced Manufacturing Technology Centre, Central TAFE
Chair WA Innovation Centre Advisory committee
Co-authored and published a number of technical and scientific papers with scientist of international reputation, including Nobel Prize Laureates.
Specialist Associate, aadi Defence Pty Ltd.
President, Maritime Technology Alliance Inc.
Director, Naval Surface Warfare Centre. Carderock Division
Technical Director, David Taylor Research Center (DTRC)
Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Surface Warfare, US Navy
Director and Principal Point of Contact, Program of Naval Cooperation with the Peoples Republic of China
Chief US Negotiator, Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) Co-Production Agreement with the Federal Republic of Germany
Head, Combat Systems Branch, Naval Sea Systems Command
Program Manager, Navy Advanced Prototyping Program
Dick Metrey served as Director of Naval Surface Warfare and had a profound impact on the Navy's approach to researching, developing, testing and evaluating Naval vessels. He has been recognised for his contribution to the engineering profession as well as his ingenuity and integrity through numerous awards.
Some Projects of Dick Metrey


While awaiting this film, I'd like to go back to the very start of the franchise with the first Dark Horse Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus. This volume collects over four hundred pages of story in digest form for $25. Unlike Marvel's Essentials and DC Comics' Showcases, these keep the stories in full color, if not the original size.
For a long time, I wouldn't go near this franchise. It's not because of any quality issues — it's because, to be honest, both of the titular species scared the living crap out of me. Growing up in Baltimore, I used to go to a shop at The Mall in Columbia called Forbidden Planet (at least I think that's what it called — feel free to correct me in the comments if you remember the store). It was amongst my first exposures to science fiction and general nerd culture. It also had life-size Alien and Predator models in the front windows which terrified me. Eventually, I saw Aliens and Predator and started to get further into their respective universes. This omnibus is my first foray into the comics, and I was impressed by what I found.
The meat of the book is a pair of storylines: the initial, unnamed story (which will be called "AVP" for the sake of this review) and its sequel "War," both written by Randy Stradley with art by Phil Norwood (Chris Warner steps in for one chapter). These star Machiko Noguchi who, in the first story, survives a hunt on the planet Ryushi, is branded by a dying Predator hunter, and eventually joins up with them. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because this arc very loosely inspired the plot of the first Aliens vs. Predator film. There are a few other bits picked up by the movie, such as the sequence of the eggs being taken from the queen, but the "AVP" comic has a much tighter plot and a much more interesting main character.
While Machiko is more or less a Ripley clone — pardon the Alien Resurrection pun — she has a nice character arc, going from ice-hearted office drone to action girl, driven by the desperate circumstances around her. Unlike some of the films where you root for the characters to die, the characters presented here, especially the doctor dealing the loss of her husband, actually click with the reader.
"War" picks up one year later with Machiko living amongst the hunters. As they go on another hunt, she meets three other characters … from another comic. It gets a little annoying, in that the story crosses over with Aliens: Berserker, not collected in the omnibus (although it is available in Aliens Omnibus 4). The events of Berserker are explained in enough detail to get the plot moving, but this half of the story falters because of the crossover and in part because, in my opinion, Machiko's arc moved too fast off-panel. It does wowever wrap up the storyline nicely and sets the stage for Aliens vs. Predator: Three World War, which is well worth a read, even if the trade won't be out for quite a few months.
Sandwiched between "AVP" and "War" are "Blood Time," again by Stradley and Norwood, and "Duel," by Stradley and Javier Saltares. The former is a nearly-silent character piece about a hunt uninterrupted by humans. This is how my dream Aliens vs. Predator movie would play out: no humans, no talking, just a two-hour bug hunt. It'll never happen, of course, but it's nice to see that it could actually work. "Duel," bridging the gaps between the two major stories, is closer to the tone of Aliens, featuring the first sign of Colonial Marines in the comic. It references the "Acheron disaster" (the first film), has one of the few mentions of Weyland-Yutani, and introduces what would become part of the franchise's nadir: the Predalien. In the book's defense, the creature is executed much better here.
Ian Edginton takes over writing duties for the final third of the Omnibus, joining up with Alex Maleev for "Eternal," with a story that I can't bear to spoil here. This is easily one of the cleverest stories in the franchise despite an odd bit of Predator physiology that I don't think is ever brought up again. If the new Predators does as well as I hope it should, then I'd really like to see "Eternal" adapted as its sequel. (If push comes to shove, I'd even write it myself!) Maleev also writes and draws the tantalizing "Old Secrets," which folds the Predator into our own history and religion.
The last story is "The Web," by Edginton with Derek Thompson, and Brian O'Connell drawing the black-and-white art. This is an unexpected mad scientist tale about a character from "AVP" that I had nearly forgotten about. It seemed unfinished, and worthy of a much longer story than the one provided.
After reading these seven tales, a template for the Aliens vs. Predator stories develops. Basically, humans land on a place seeded with Alien eggs, the Predators come to hunt, and the humans get stuck in the middle. Where the stories get interesting is how they play with the formula. "Eternal" and "The Web" use this formula to turn the Predators into prey; "War" and "Blood Time" go into Predator society to understand why they hunt. Because any scenes without humans are essentially silent, the authors use the room to add monologues which speculate on the creatures; Stradley especially uses the interplay of words and images to consider human culture in view of the Predators. This actually gets a little boring after a while, but the art kept my attention throughout.
Thankfully, none of the stories in this volume have overly glossy, early-Image-Comics-style art despite being published in that dark, dark early '90s era. The art is surprisingly non-gratuitous; perhaps the fact that both species of creatures bleed green helps reduce the bloodiness. Norwood and Saltares have a sketchier style to their art, while Maleev's art is shadowy and atmospheric, much like his later work on Daredevil. In all cases, the artwork is extremely detailed, with care taken to draw every Predator's mesh outfits, every Alien's organic ridges and the labels on every piece of human technology. None of this is lost in the shrinking of the pages down to digest size. My only art complaint is again with "The Web," but only in that it looks like inked pencils and not like a full comic; I would love to see it fully colored and fleshed out. Thankfully, none of the bizarre yellow-green lighting that sometimes makes appearances in Dark Horse books (I'm looking at you, Dark Empire) appears here.
Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus Volume 1 is a great look back to one of the backbone franchises of Dark Horse Comics. Some of it might seem cliché now, but keep in mind that this originated many of the tropes seen in the franchise. The smaller size does nothing to hurt the story and in fact might make the details even easier to see (it's also cheaper than tracking down old issues or out-of-print trades!). Check this out if you're a fan of the franchise or just of science fiction comics in general.
I was really interested to hear the artwork in this book isn't what one would typically expect of the early '90s. As a fan of both franchises, my assumptions about the art were really the only thing keeping me from trying this series out, so I'll have to check it out now.
This review makes me really interested in reading these stories. I've been a lover of the Aliens (1-3) and Predator (1 & 2) movies since I was a kid in the '80s and always wanted to know more about these creatures.
I'm glad our reviewer gives us a lens through which to look at these different stories to show they're not too similar, even if fairly formulaic.


The spray-on professional grooming grip for tighter plaits, neater banding and easier mane training. Eliminates flyaway strands for perfect looking plaits. Protein enriched to help strengthen hair and prevent breakage, the ultimate solution for training manes and tails to lie flat. Water-based pH balanced formula with a pleasant scent.


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OKEx partners with Indian exchange to tap into country's 'huge potential'
Jude Lopez
One of India's biggest cryptocurrency trading platforms and liquidity aggregators, CoinDCX, has announced its partnership with Malta-based exchange OKEx.
This wasn't all, however, as the Indian exchange also announced the launch of its new DCXfutures product to cater to the increasing demands for access to Futures, Options and higher leverage trading for the Indian market.
DCXfutures will allow up to 15x leverage trading for popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), XRP, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), EOS, Cardano (ADA), and Tron (TRX).
CoinDCX CEO and Co-founder Sumit Gupta welcomed the announcement and said,
"With the huge potential of cryptocurrency markets to accelerate economic growth and wealth generation in India, we believe that this collaboration takes India one step closer to joining the '5 trillion dollar club' as one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, allowing us to avail of new opportunities and take on new challenges."
Presently, the DCXfutures option can only be accessed via an invite. The press statement highlighted that the public will only have access to DCXfutures from Q2 of 2020.
Expanding on India's potential to drive cryptocurrency adoption exponentially, Zac Zou, Head of OKEx India, said,
"India is primed to be the driving force behind the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies, which is why we are keen on adding more equitable currencies to the ecosystem."
This announcement comes on the heels of the Malta-based exchange Binance announcing that it is integrating its P2P trading platform with one of India's largest crypto-exchanges, WazirX. With a rise in the number of exchanges based out of India partnering with global exchanges, the regulatory landscape for crypto looks fairly positive in the country. India continues to have a rather large unbanked demographic that can in the long run, benefit from exposure to digital assets.
Related Topics:binanceCoinDCXOKExWazirX
Litecoin's correction to $73 may not be all bad news
Crypto-Broker Instacoins Receives Operating License in Estonia
Jude Gerald Lopez is a full time News Editor at AMBCrypto covering the US and Indian market. He is a post-graduate in English literature with around 4 years of teaching experience in Indian literature.
Binance announces $10M recompensation plan after COVER exploit
Binance P2P makes headway in Asia as it adds Sri Lanka Rupee, Cambodia Riel
Synthetix's sUSD listed on Binance's Innovation Zone
Ethereum 2.0 receives Binance's staking support
Ethereum Classic hard fork receives Binance's support
Binance lists DAI and de-lists EOS from P2P platform


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Q: Is "a current" ever grammatical? As I understand it, the indefinite article "a" cannot be used before the word "current". "A current ..." doesn't make sense to me. We say "the next" and "the previous", so we should say "the current", that's it.

Regardless of which info category is selected on the Status bar menu, at any time you can click and hold on the Status bar to learn the dimensions, number of channels, color mode, bit depth, and resolution of the current document.
Photoshop CC: Visual QuickStart Guide

But nevertheless it is used in this way sometimes. Is it grammatical? If yes, then how it works?

Expired or superseded documents. The only exception to this are Academic Regulations, where versions from previous years are still available via Governance Zone. In all other cases, to consult a previous version of a current document or an expired document, please contact us.
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If you are lodging directly with us, each applicant and their spouse/partner must provide a copy (not the original) of a current document from each of the four categories (i.e. four documents per person). A single document cannot be used for more than one category.
https://www.sro.vic.gov.au/fhogapply

A: If there is more than one document current in a particular context, meaning, for example, that there are documents that have not expired, you can certainly refer to any one of them  as "a current document".
You can even use it in a general sense:

A current document will have a date in the upper right hand corner that is not earlier than today's date.

In short, the usual rules for selecting articles apply, and are not affected by the choice of adjective.


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Mythmaking Machines
How Jackie and Barry both shore up and subvert the very important person biopic template.
By Sam Adams
Sept 21, 20169:15 AM
Natalie Portman in Jackie and Devon Terrell in Barry.
Photo illustration by Slate. Images by Black Bear Pictures and Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Biopics are the prestige-movie version of franchise films, so it's not surprising that the Toronto International Film Festival, which among other things serves as the unofficial kickoff for awards season, was full of them this year. A movie about a well-known figure is already imbued with some of that figure's importance, and even an unknown true story acquires a veneer of verisimilitude. When the Weinstein Company took out "for your consideration" ads in the leadup to awards season for 2014's The Imitation Game, based on the story of World War II codebreaker Alan Turing, reading "Honor the man. Honor the film," it was merely stating upfront what other, less awards-thirsty studios normally imply.
Jackie and Barry, both of which screened at TIFF this year, follow the important person template, promising from their titles on down intimate looks at the lives of iconic political figures: Jacqueline Kennedy and Barack Obama, respectively. The former, which stars Natalie Portman and had its world premiere in Venice the week before, was instantly touted as an awards contender and promptly acquired by Fox Searchlight for a December release; Barry was recently picked up by Netflix. But both make interesting alterations to the familiar biopic form, and in Jackie's case, nearly turn it inside out.
Pablo Larraín's portrait of a grieving Kennedy in the days after JFK's assassination is framed by the grieving first lady's conversation with a figure identified only as the Journalist (Billy Crudup), who's come to her Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, home for an exclusive and often contentious interview. At times, their encounter, clearly modeled on her sit-down with Life magazine's Theodore H. White, plays like therapy or, more to the point, a grief counseling session, with Jackie tearfully recalling the look on her dead husband's face as they sped toward the airport. But it's more often a battle of wits, one that the journalist is clearly losing. Jackie secures early on the right to redact and rewrite her answers, using him as a repository for her most intimate feelings and then declaring them off the record. She even questions the value of the whole enterprise, given the medium of print's shaky hold on media supremacy. "When something is written down, does that make it true?" she asks. "It's all we have," the journalist responds. "It was," Jackie says. "We have television now."
JFK's assassination is at the heart of Jackie, but the film devotes more time to the 1962 CBS special where the first lady showed the newly restored White House to a television audience of some 80 million. "A Tour of the White House With Mrs. John F. Kennedy," which aired for an hour on Valentine's Day, was the first network TV documentary deliberately framed for a female audience, and it presents Kennedy as a cross between a presidential historian and the nation's homemaker-in-chief. But documents revealed by the John F. Kennedy Library for the broadcast's 50th anniversary detailed the extent to which Jackie was not only the program's star but its author, editing the script to make sure the private donors who funded the restoration were mentioned by name. Even when the president "drops in" near the end of the program to see how things are progressing, it feels like a moment she's in control of, putting her back in her place but also reaffirming her power.
Larraín, working from a script by former Today show producer Noah Oppenheim, places Jackie Kennedy in a long line of political image-makers, including those in his movies No, where Gael García Bernal plays an advertising exec tasked with selling the Chilean populace on the prospect of democratic elections, and Neruda, in which Bernal plays a government thug intent on derailing the radical poet's career. His Jackie isn't always onstage, but she never stops being aware of her own image, even when's pouring out her anguish to John Hurt's Catholic priest.
In Jackie, it's sometimes difficult to distinguish whether Portman is playing the role or the role is playing her. She seems off-balance at first, like an actor who's been handed her script a few minutes before going onstage; her black wig and boxy suit hang off her slim frame as if they've been grabbed out of a costume trunk. Her speech is a flat mid-Atlantic monotone, so calculated it goes beyond the numbness of grief and suggests she's being piloted from afar. It's a great performance, but it's also at times barely distinguishable from a deliberately bad one.
While others rush to fill the vacuum of power, Jackie's Jackie fixates on her husband's legacy. Will his death mean something, or will it become the answer to a trivia question? Will he take his place alongside Abraham Lincoln, or with William McKinley and James Garfield? She resists entreaties to change out of her blood-stained suit until the complete image of her grief has been captured by the cameras, and she argues that JFK's funeral should be modeled on Lincoln's. She feeds the journalist a reference to Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's Camelot, with its lyrics about "one brief, shining moment," and repeats it to make sure he doesn't miss the point. She's the Eliza to JFK's Hamilton, buttressing his legacy and ensuring her own place in the narrative.
Barry isn't nearly so sophisticated in its mythmaking. Adam Mansbach's script, which follows Obama's first year at Columbia University, is crammed with leaden winks to the 20-year-old's future; after he expresses cynicism about the political process to a fellow student, she responds, incredulously, "So what, you don't believe in change?" (Womp womp.) But the movie arrives at the right time, as the infectious possibility of Obama's early years in office has been swamped by the prospect of him being replaced by a candidate who openly appeals to racists and suggested for years (though he now falsely claims otherwise) that the nation's first black president was not a real American.
Barry was directed by Vikram Gandhi, a fellow Columbia grad whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from India before he was born, and it's especially attuned to the tensions the young Obama faces as a biracial student who was partly raised abroad. When people ask where he's from, a hint of resignation creeps into Australian actor Devon Terrell's performance: He knows that answering the question—Honolulu, Seattle, Jakarta—will only prompt more. He's not comfortable at the black student union or on the nearby streets of Harlem, where a sympathetic book vendor offers him a copy of The Souls of Black Folk, but when he starts dating that fellow student, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, her white liberal parents raise an eyebrow; you get the sense that they're all right in theory with their daughter dating a person of color, but they'd rather not have it sprung on them at the Yale Club. The problem, he explains to her later, is that she's "not used to being visible." He may have read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, but Barry feels seen, and scrutinized, everywhere he goes. He's always the other.
Although Barry is intent on dropping hints about Obama's fate, we never catch a glimpse of the Obama depicted in Southside With You, the pumped-up community organizer who thinks he can make a difference in the world: "Politics is bullshit," says Barry's Barry. "The president is an actor." Although it's set earlier than Southside, Barry feels like its spiritual sequel, or the darkness-before-the-dawn middle of a trilogy. Where most biopics concentrate on great figures doing great things, Barry leaves it to us to connect this lost young man with the leader he would become. Jackie knows what story she wants to tell; Barry is still staring at a blank page.
Barack Obama Movies


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Godzilla: Strike Zone Hits Google Play Before Movie Launches Next Week
Tim May 7, 2014 @timotato 14
The world's most highly anticipated movie, set for theatrical debut on May 16, is Godzilla. Like other blockbusters before it, Godzilla has been made into a mini game called Godzilla: Strike Zone by Warner Bros., a game which to my standards, does not do the King of the Monsters any justice.
In Strike Zone, your first mission is to HALO jump into a hot zone, with your primary objective to be to locate civilians and then move them to a safe zone. According to the game's description on Google Play, your courage is to be tested, as you go face-to-face with Godzilla himself.
While the game is rather short, and the graphics are nothing to write home about, any game that features Godzilla is always a blast from the past for me.
If you love Gojira as much as the next person, go grab the game which is completely free (with no IAPs) on the Play Store.
Godzilla Strike Zone
Google Camera Update 2.1.042 Brings Back Photo Capture During Video Recording
Official Amazon App for Android Updated With New Icon and "Single Sign On" Feature


In addition to the 6 Sävehof teams, 53 other teams from 8 different countries played in Girls 12. They were divided into 9 different groups, whereof IK Sävehof 6 could be found in Group 9 together with HK Aranäs 2, Skuru IK 2, Torslanda HK 2, Apeejay School, AG Håndbold and HK Ankaret 2.
IK Sävehof 6 continued to B-Play-off after reaching 6:th place in Group 9. In the playoff they made it to 1/16 Final, but lost it against IK Baltichov 1 with 5-14. In the Final, Torslanda HK 1 won over Lugi HF 2 and became the winner of B-Play-off in Girls 12.
IK Sävehof also participated in Girls 11 during Partille Cup 2017. They reached the Semi final in G11 A-Play-off, but lost it against Alingsås HK with 10-16.


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Thestor alpina är en fjärilsart som beskrevs av Grum-grshimailo 1890. Thestor alpina ingår i släktet Thestor och familjen juvelvingar. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.

Källor

Juvelvingar
alpina


As a newborn entity of IER & Automatic Systems, EASIER will leverage the best of two of the world's leaders and most successful airports, airlines and public transportation providers, while developing new products and services to offer a unique and differentiated passenger experience.
PASSENGERS SYSTEMS EXPERTISE – IER and Automatic Systems, have lots of joint experience in passenger process solutions across the world. We know what it's like to travel and how the ground journey can influence their experience as passengers.
SOLUTION DESIGN –Our vision is to provide travelers with a memorable travel experience from the very start of their journey on the ground.
VALUE ON INVESTMENT For Airport, Airline and Public Transportation operators willing to take the self-service experience to the next level, EASIER provides the most relevant offer -from check-in to access control and boarding- based on exclusive hardware, software, and services, helping them reduce costs and increase revenues while enhancing passenger experience.
ROBUSTLY RELIABLE – Together, we develop a full range of high-end products that are founded on Automatic Systems' and IER key strengths: performance, mechanical reliability, single-user detection, innovative style and throughput management.


A mobile big man with a smooth perimeter game and plenty of natural talent. Well coordinated and athletic for a 7 footer with a sweet 3 point stroke.
Markkanen's size/skill combination is impressive. At nearly 7 feet tall he can handle the ball, hit shots on the move, and he looks like a natural on the court. He's got small forward skills but also has enough power and strength to guard at the rim. He's a quick, athletic player who changes ends effortlessly. He's a threat on the fast break, thanks to his speed and hustle.
Markkanen is a highly skilled shooter who has great form on his jumper and hits a high percentage from 3 and from the free throw line. He has the potential to be a really good NBA three point shooter and a tough match-up for opposing big men. His quick release allows him to flash open off screens and get his shot off before the defender can recover.
Does a good job of fighting for rebounds and crashing the offensive boards, showing good timing and the ability to play above the rim. Plays with good awareness and aggression, hustling up and down the court and making effort plays. Some young big men look lost, like they're still learning the game. Markkanen seems to have it. He comes from basketball bloodlines and his knowledge of the game shows in how he plays.
Defensively Markkanen is a decent shot blocker thanks to his size and quick reaction as a help defender. He's not a major force in the paint but his high basketball I.Q. helps him defend multiple positions and he gets in good position when guarding on the perimeter.
At an impressive 6-11 he has a chance to be an elite three point shooter in the NBA and if he can improve his all around play-making and defense he can be an All Star for many years to come.
Markkanen is a good but not great athlete and can look a bit heavy-footed at times. He doesn't have great length for his size, which will be a detriment guarding the rim at the next level and battling for rebounds. He doesn't project as a great overall defender and will earn his living on the offensive end.
His interior defense is a weakness, mainly due to lack of length, strength and toughness. He'll need to play bigger and meaner to defend the lane at the NBA level.
Does a good job of hedging on pick and role defense but is slow to recover to his man and can be overall slow in his lateral movements.
Although he has an advanced perimeter game for a big man, he's still refining his ball handling and passing skills.
A bigger and more athletic Ryan Anderson or a supercharged version of Mehmet Okur.


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Bob Waggoner (Lynch-Bages Patron's Dinner Chef) on Talk of the Town!
For those of you who may have missed this before the l'Eté du Vin Gone Country Auction, you'll want to watch Bob Waggoner on Channel 5's Talk of the Town cook a scallop dish that is now being served at Watermark! Chef Waggoner did a fantastic job on the dish, and was a crowd favorite at the Château Lynch-Bages Patron's Dinner on July 20, 2012. Thank you Chef Waggoner!
NewsChannel5.com | Nashville News, Weather
Pairings: Where the Stars Align featuring Nashville Chefs and West Coast Wines January 19, 2023
Nashville Wine Auction Presents Beneficiaries with End-of-Year Checks December 22, 2022
Nashville Wine Auction raises more than $330k at the inaugural Music City Harvest Party October 28, 2022
Nashville Wine Auction to Host the Inaugural 'Music City Harvest Party' September 7, 2022
Nashville Wine Auction raises more than $2.1 million at the 43rd Annual l'Eté du Vin August 8, 2022


No contract shall exist between the Client, which expression shall include all persons on whose behalf the Client books, and Ski Peak Limited (hereinafter called Ski Peak) until a Booking Form signed by the Client and an appropriate deposit has been received and confirmed in writing by Ski Peak. Deposits and insurance premiums are not refundable unless we are unable to accept your booking.
Payment of the balance due must be made no later than 8 weeks before the departure date. For bookings within 8 weeks of the departure date the total cost of the holiday is immediately payable. In all cases Ski Peak reserves the right to cancel the holiday arrangements, without any obligation to refund or make alternative arrangements, where the Client fails to make payments as stipulated.
All prices have been based on an exchange rate of €1.25 = £1.00 and known costs as at 1st October 2013. There will be no surcharges levied once the full payment of your holiday has been received by Ski Peak. Until such time as full payment has been received we reserve the right to pass on the amount of any increases due to transportation costs including the cost of fuel or dues, taxes or fees chargeable for services such as landing taxes or embarkation or disembarkation fees at airports imposed on us in connection with your holiday. No increase in costs as a result of currency fluctuations will be charged unless the exchange rate changes by more than 5%. In all cases Ski Peak will absorb an amount equivalent to 2% of the holiday price, excluding insurance premiums and any amendment charges. If this means paying more than 10% of the holiday price you will be entitled to cancel your holiday with a full refund of all money paid to Ski Peak except for any premium paid for holiday insurance and amendment charges. Should you decide to cancel because of this, you must exercise your right to do so within 14 days of the date of the invoice.
1, 2, 3 and 4 provides for a refund in the event you have not yet travelled. 1 and 3 provides for repatriation. Please note that bookings made outside the UK are only protected by ABTOT when purchased directly with Ski Peak Limited.
In the unlikely event of Ski Peak making a major alteration to or cancelling a holiday, Ski Peak shall offer the client the choice of a holiday from the brochure (where the price is less Ski Peak will refund the difference) or alternatively a full refund. The client will be entitled to compensation in the event of Ski Peak making a major alteration to or cancelling a holiday, save for reasons beyond its control. This compensation is given according to the period by which alteration or cancellation precedes departure date: nil if more than 57 days before departure, £40 if 56-29 days before departure, £60 if 28-15 days before departure and £100 if less than 15 days before departure. Unless it involves a significant reduction in the time spent in the resort, a change in flight time, destination airport or carrier/type of aircraft by Ski Peak shall not constitute a major alteration.
Cancellation shall take effect only when written notification from the person signing the booking form is received by Ski Peak. Cancellation fees shall be levied according to the period by which cancellation precedes departure and are expressed by a percentage of the total holiday price (inclusive of extras) as follows: loss of deposit and insurance up to 57 days before departure, 35% if 56 – 43 days before departure, 55% if 42 – 29 days before departure, 75% if 28 – 15 days before departure and 100% if 14 days or less before departure. Travel documents, vouchers etc. must accompany the written cancellation in order for the latter to be effective. You may change your booking up to 14 days before departure by transferring it to another person if you are unavoidably prevented from travelling, and the transferee meets any conditions which may apply to the holiday and agrees to the terms of the booking agreement. The right of transfer is subject to the payment of an administration fee of £25 per person together with all additional charges of whatever sort imposed by the suppliers providing the component parts of your holiday charges.
Ski Peak cannot accept responsibility for clients missing aircraft due to late arrival of connecting aircraft or late check-in at the airport. Clients are responsible for the provision of all necessary valid documents. All UK nationals will require a valid full passport for travel to France. We advise that you apply for a full passport not less than 8 weeks before departure. No visas are required by UK nationals at the time of going to press.
Ski Peak shall be entitled to recover from the Client the amount of all claims made against Ski Peak in respect of any damage caused by the Client to the accommodation or other property. The Client undertakes to deport himself in an orderly fashion and not to disrupt the enjoyment of others on holiday with him or to prejudice Ski Peak's reputation with the owners of its accommodation or its suppliers. The holiday of any client in breach of this clause shall be terminated and Ski Peak shall have no further contractual obligations towards him.
(i) Where you do not suffer personal injury or death, Ski Peak accepts liability should any part of your holiday arrangements booked with us not be as described in the brochure and not be of a reasonable standard. Subject to (iii) below, we will pay you reasonable compensation if this affects the enjoyment of your holiday. Any sums received by you from suppliers, such as from airlines due to the Denied Boarding Regulations 1992 (in this case sums paid by the airline constitute the full amount of your entitlement to compensation for all matters flowing from the airline's action) will be deducted from any sum paid to you as compensation by Ski Peak. (ii) Where you suffer death or personal injury as a result of an activity forming part of your holiday arrangements with Ski Peak, we accept responsibility subject to (iii) and (v) below. Where such death or personal injury arises in the course of air travel, rail travel, sea travel or hotel accommodation, our liability and/or the amount of compensation you will receive will be limited in accordance with the provisions of any relevant International Conventions. (iii) Ski Peak accepts liability in accordance with (i) and (ii) above unless the cause of the failure in your holiday arrangements or any death or personal injury you may suffer is not due to any fault on the part of Ski Peak or its servants, agents or suppliers, and was your own fault, or the actions of someone unconnected with your holiday arrangements or due to unusual or unforeseeable circumstances or events which could not have been anticipated or avoided by ourselves or our servants, agents or suppliers even with the exercise of all due care. (iv) It should be noted that the acceptance of liability on our part referred to in (i), (ii), (iii) above is subject to assignment by you to Ski Peak of your rights against any servant, agent or supplier of Ski Peak which is in any way responsible for the failure of your holiday arrangements or any death or personal injury you may suffer. (v) Where you book an optional excursion or make further arrangements for your holiday whilst in resort, or where you book such an excursion or make such extra arrangements through Ski Peak, whether before departure or whilst in resort, and make payment for such excursion or extra arrangements directly to the relevant supplier, Ski Peak accepts no liability for any failure in such arrangements, or any death or personal injury which you may suffer. (vi) In respect of the provision of lift passes Ski Peak act as an agent and not as a principal.
All baggage and personal possessions remain at all times and in all circumstances at the owner's risk except where Ski Peak has proved to be negligent.
Should you have any cause for complaint whilst on holiday, our local representatives should be immediately advised of your dissatisfaction so that remedial action, where possible, can be taken without delay. If you wish to pursue a claim against us, written notice must be given to us no later than twenty eight days after the end of your holiday.
These conditions and any contract to which they apply are governed in all respects by English Law.


The strongest typhoon on record to hit the U.S. commonwealth of Saipan has devastated the island, leaving nearly 800 homes damaged or destroyed.
Samaritan's Purse sent an airlift to Saipan with 30 tons of emergency shelter materials, household water filtration units, solar lights and medical supplies. A portion of these items will then be transported to the neighboring island Tinian to support relief efforts. We are also deploying a mobile medical team to treat typhoon-related injuries.
"All I want for my son's birthday is for the power to be back on," said Chielo, a mother of two on the island of Saipan. Marion, her eldest son, turns 14 years old next month.
Chielo, Marion, and Mitch received tarpaulin and solar lights from Samaritan's Purse.
Thousands of families like Chielo's remain without power, water and shelter after Typhoon Yutu decimated the islands of Saipan and Tinian on 24th October.
To meet the continued needs of affected families, Samaritan's Purse airlifted a second wave of relief supplies on 16th November to the Northern Mariana Islands. The Samaritan's Purse DC-8 will bring 300 generators to families on the island of Tinian—where power is not expected to be restored for some nine months. Hundreds of rolls of heavy-duty plastic tarp will help additional families on the larger island of Saipan.
We initially responded with an airlift of 30 tons of relief supplies to aid hurting families—including emergency shelter material, water filtration units and solar lights. Partnering with local churches, we have already distributed these items to more than 1,800 families affected by the storm's 180-mph sustained winds and heavy rain (as of 14th November).
While Chielo and her sons Marion and Mitch remain without power, their hope has been restored—their family was the first on the island of Saipan to receive assistance from Samaritan's Purse.
Samaritan's Purse is sending another planeload of relief supplies to Saipan aboard our DC-8 aircraft.
With wind gusts over 200 mph, Typhoon Yutu ripped off the roof of the family room—where they frequently gathered to play games, eat meals and spend time together. The family room was not only a gathering place for their own family but for the community, hosting many youth activities and Sunday School.
In a government raffle nearly 50 years ago, Bernadita won the parcel of land on which her home sits. Earning 89 cents per hour, she and her husband slowly built a home and filled it with priceless family memories.
Two years ago, however, her husband suddenly passed away. Yutu is the first typhoon to strike the island since her husband's passing—and it left her home completely destroyed.
Bernadita and her family hid in a closet to escape the ferocious wind of Super Typhoon Yutu.
In the morning, their entire roof had collapsed inward—leaving gaping holes for rain to further destroy their home. Bernadita had no idea where to turn.
Just days later, members of the Samaritan's Purse Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) carried a large tarpaulin and solar lights to Bernadita's doorstep—recognising her great need. Still sleeping in the home, she was extremely grateful for lights and the opportunity to charge her phone via the included solar charging port. Bernadita's sons are going to help her properly install and secure the heavy-duty plastic tarpaulin to ensure that Bernadita and her family remain safe and dry.
Please continue to pray for the people of Saipan. Pray that they will experience God's love in the midst of the storm.


Just wondering if this workshop is still to be held on Wed 23 October as mentioned on the flyer? Or has it been moved to 27 November as indicated on the registration site?
Sorry for the confusion but we have had to reschedule to the 27th of November. I'l be posting and emailing shortly to confirm that.