text:
\section{Introduction}
Whole slide images (WSI) are digitizing histology slides often analysed for diagnosis of cancer~\cite{Campanella19}. WSI can contain several billions pixels, and are commonly tiled into smaller patches for processing to reduce the computational burden (Figure~\ref{fig:patches}). Another reason to use patches is because the area of interest (tumor cells) occupies only a tiny fraction of the image, which impedes the performance of conventional classifiers, most of which assume that the class object occupies a large central part of the image. Unfortunately, patch-wise labels are usually not available, since the detailed annotations are too costly and time-consuming. An alternative to supervised learning is weakly-supervised learning, where only a single label per WSI is available.

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a weakly supervised learning algorithms, which aims to train a model using a set of weakly labeled data~\cite{Dietterich97,Maron98}. Usually a single class label is provided for a bag of many unlabeled instances, indicating that at least one instance has the provided class label. It has many applications in computer vision and language processing~\cite{Carbonneau18}, however learning from bags raises important challenges that are unique to MIL. In  context of histopathology, a WSI represents a bag, and the extracted  patches (or their features) represent instances (we often use these notations interchangeably).

With the advent of convolutional neural networks (CNN), deep learning based MIL has become the mainstream methodological choice for WSI~\cite{Srinidhi21}. Campanella et al.~\cite{Campanella19} was one of the first works to conduct a large study on over 44K WSI,
laying the foundation for MIL applications in clinical practise. Since the instance labels are not known, classical MIL algorithm usually selects only one (or a few) instances based on the maximum of the prediction probability at the current iteration.  Such approach is very time consuming, as all patches need to be inferenced, but only a single patch contributes to the training of CNNs at each iteration. Ilse et al.~\cite{Ilse18} proposed to use an attention mechanism (a learnable weights per instance) to utilize all image patches, which we also adopt.

More recent MIL methods include works by Zhao et al.~\cite{Zhao20}, who proposed to pre-train a feature extractor based on the variational auto-encoder, and use a graph convolutional  network for final classification.

Hashimoto et al.~\cite{Hashimoto20} proposed to combine MIL with domain adverserial normalization and multiple scale learning.
Lu et al.~\cite{Lu21} precomputed patch-level features (using pretrained CNN) offline to speed up training, and proposed an additional clustering-based loss to improve generalization during MIL training.
Maksoud et al.~\cite{Maksoud20} proposed  to use a hierarchical approach to process the  down-scaled WSI first, followed by by high resolution processing when necessary. Such approach demonstrated significant reduction in processing time, while maintaining the baseline accuracy.

\begin{figure}[t]
  \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.7\textwidth]{ims/mil_patches2.pdf}
  \caption{An example of patch extraction from WSI from the PANDA challenge dataset~\cite{Panda2020}. We tile the image and retain only the foreground patches, out of which we take a random subset to form a bag.}
  \label{fig:patches}
\end{figure}

We observed that most MIL methods assume no dependencies among instances, which is seldom true especially in histopathology~\cite{Srinidhi21}. Furthermore, a lack of instance-level loss supervision creates more opportunities for CNNs to overfit.

In this work, we propose a deep learning based MIL algorithm for WSI classification with the following contributions:
\begin{itemize}
    \item we propose to explicitly account for dependencies between instances during training. We embed transformer encoder~\cite{Vaswani17} blocks into the classification CNN to capture the dependencies between instances.

    \item we propose an instance-wise loss supervision based on instance pseudo-labels. The pseudo-labels are computed based on the ensemble of several models, by aggregating the attention weights and instance-level  predictions.
\end{itemize}

 We evaluate the proposed method on PANDA challenge~\cite{Panda2020} dataset, which is currently the largest publicly available WSI dataset with over 11000 images, against the baseline methods as well as against the Kaggle challenge leaderboard with over 1000 competing teams, and demonstrate state-of-the-art (SOTA) classification results.

\section{Method}
\label{sec:method}

MIL aims to classify a bag of instances $\ensuremath{\mathbf{H}} = \{\ensuremath{\mathbf{h}}_1,\dots,\ensuremath{\mathbf{h}}_K\}$ as positive if at least one of the instances $\ensuremath{\mathbf{h}}_k$ is positive. The number of instances $K$  could vary between the bags. Individual instance labels are unknown, and only the bag level label $Y=[0,1]$ is provided:

\begin{equation}
Y =
\begin{cases}
0 ,& \text{iff  all  }  y_{k} = 0, \\
1 ,&\text{iff  any }  y_{k} = 1.
\end{cases}
\end{equation}
which is equivalent to $Y = \max_{k} \{ y_{k} \}$ definition using a Max operator.

Training a model whose loss is based on the maximum over instance labels is problematic due to vanishing gradients~\cite{Ilse18}, and the training process becomes slow since only a single patch contributes to the optimization. Ilse et al.~\cite{Ilse18} proposed to use all image patches as linear combination weighted by attention weights. Consider
$\ensuremath{\mathbf{H}} \in \mathbb{R}^{M\times K}$ to be instance embeddings, e.g features of a CNN final layer after average pooling. Then a linear combination of patch embeddings is

\begin{equation}
\label{eq:weighted_sum}
\ensuremath{\mathbf{z}} = \sum_{k=1}^{K} a_k \ensuremath{\mathbf{h}}_k =  \ensuremath{\mathbf{H}} \aa
\end{equation}
where the attention weights of patch embeddings are $\aa=\textit{softmax}\big{(} \tanh \big{(} \ensuremath{\mathbf{H}}\ensuremath{\mathbf{V}})\ensuremath{\mathbf{w}}\big{)}$,

where $\ensuremath{\mathbf{w}} \in \mathbb{R}^{L\times 1}$ and $\ensuremath{\mathbf{V}} \in \mathbb{R}^{M \times L}$ are parameters. The attention weights are computed using a multilayer perceptron (MLP) network with a single hidden layer.

\subsection{Dependency between instances}

The assumption of no dependency between the bag instances often does not hold. For example, for grading the severity of prostate cancer, pathologists need to find two distinct tumor growth patterns in the image and assign Gleason scores to each~\cite{Bulten21}. Then the International Society of Urological Pathology (ISUP) grade is calculated, based on the combination of major and minor Gleason patterns. ISUP grade indicates a severity of the tumor and plays a crucial role in treatment planning. Here, we propose to use the self-attention to account for dependencies between instances.
In particular, we adopt the transformer, which was initially introduced to capture long range dependencies between words in sentences~\cite{Vaswani17} and later applied to vision~\cite{Dosovitskiy21}. Whereas traditional convolutions are local operation, the self-attention block of Transformers computes attention between all combinations of tokens at a larger range directly.

A key component of transformer blocks is a scaled dot product self-attention which is defined as $softmax(QK^T  / \sqrt{d})V$, where queries $Q$, keys $K$, and values $V$ matrices are all derived as linear transformations of the input (in our case the instance features space $\ensuremath{\mathbf{H}}$).
The self-attention is performed several times  with different, learned linear projections in parallel (multi-head attention).
In addition to self-attention, each of the transformer encoder layers also contains a fully connected feed-forward network and layer normalization (see Figure~\ref{fig:net})~\cite{Vaswani17,Dosovitskiy21}.

\begin{figure}[t]
  \centering
    \includegraphics[width=1.0\textwidth]{ims/mil_network2.pdf}
  \caption{Model architecture overview. The backbone CNN (blue) extracts features at different scales, which are spatially averaged-pooled before feeding into the transformer encoder layers (green), to account for dependencies between instances.  The input to the network is $B\times N\times 3\times W\times H$. Where $B$ is the batch size, $N$ is the number of instances (patches extracted from a single whole slide image), and $3\times W\times H$ is the spatial patch size.}
  \label{fig:net}
\end{figure}

We propose two variants of utilizing transformers. In the simplest case we attach a transformer encoder block only to the end of the backbone classification CNN after avg pooling. The idea is similar to the approach proposed in Visual transformers, but before avg pooling~\cite{Dosovitskiy21}.
The difference here is that in Visual transformers, the goal was to account for dependencies between the spatial regions (16px$\times$16px) of the same patch. Whereas we want to account for the dependencies among the patches.  Another relevant work was proposed by Wang et al.~\cite{Wang19} to utilize self-attention within MIL, but for text-based disease symptoms classification.
We maintain the dimensionality of encoded data, so that the input, output and hidden dimensionality of the transformer encoder are the same. We  call it Transformer MIL.

We also consider a variant of a deeper integration of the transformer with the backbone CNN. We attach separate transformer encoder blocks after each of the main ResNet blocks~\cite{He16} to capture the patch encodings at different levels of its feature pyramid. The output of the first transformer encoder is concatenated with next feature scale space of ResNet (after average pooling), and is fed into the next level transformer encoder, up until the final encoder layer, followed by the attention layer. We want to capture dependencies between patches at multiple scales, since different level of CNN output features include different semantic information. Such a Pyramid Transformer MIL network is shown in Figure~\ref{fig:net}.

\subsection{Instance level semi-supervision and pseudo-labeling}

\begin{figure}[ht]

    \centering
    \subfloat[]{\includegraphics[angle=90,width=0.5\textwidth]{ims/im1.jpg} }
    \subfloat[]{\includegraphics[angle=90, width=0.5\textwidth]{ims/im3.jpg}}%
    \caption{An example ISUP grade 5 prostate cancer WSI. (a) Green mask overlay shows ground truth location of cancer regions (provided  in the PANDA dataset~\cite{Panda2020}). (b) an additional heat map overlay visualizes our pseudo-labels of ISUP 5 (weighted by attention), achieved from training on weak (bag-level) labels only. Notice the close agreement between the dense pseudo-labels and the ground truth. In practice, pseudo-labels are computed per patch; here we used a sliding-window approach for dense visualization.}
    \label{fig:overlay}
\end{figure}

One of the challenges of MIL training is the lack of instance labels to guide the optimization process. A somewhat similar issue is encountered in semi-supervised learning~\cite{Xie2020},
where pseudo-labels are used  either offline or on the fly based on some intermediate estimates or another network's predictions. Here, we propose to generate pseudo-labels for each image patch and use the additional patch-wise loss to assist the optimization process.

\begin{equation}
\label{eq:add_loss}
L = L_{bag} +  \lambda \sum_k L_{patch}
\end{equation}
where the total loss $L$ includes a bag-level loss $L_{bag}$ (based on the ground truth labels) and a patch level loss $L_{patch}$ (based on the pseudo-labels). We use cross-entropy loss function for both bag-level and patch-level losses.

We opt for a simple approach to generate pseudo-labels based on ensembling of several identical models trained from random initialization. The final ensembled labels are hard label (rounded to the  nearest classes). Consider a trained network, its bag-level prediction output is based on the final output vector $z$ (see Eq.~\ref{eq:weighted_sum}), followed by a linear projection onto the number of output classes:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:final_sum}
\c  = sigm(\ensuremath{\mathbf{W}}\ensuremath{\mathbf{z}}) = sigm(\ensuremath{\mathbf{W}}\ensuremath{\mathbf{H}}\aa)
\end{equation}
here we assumed a final sigmoid function (but the same holds with softmax). We approximate the individual  instance level prediction as
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:ind_pred}
\c_k = sigm(\ensuremath{\mathbf{W}}\ensuremath{\mathbf{h}}_k)
\end{equation}

\begin{algorithm}[t]
\SetAlgoLined
\DontPrintSemicolon
\SetAlgorithmName{Pseudocode}{}
\KwResult{Train N MIL models (N=5)} \;
\For{all patches in the bag}{
  Run inference on patches for each image\;
  Ensemble predictions of attention weights $\aa$ and instance  classes $\c_k$\;
  \eIf{bag label is not zero}{
   for patches with top 10\% of highest attention $\aa$ weights, assign the ensembled labels as pseudo-label\;
   for patches with top 10\% of lowest attention $\aa$ weights, assign the zero labels as the pseudo-label\;
   otherwise flag the patch as unknown pseudo-label\;
   }{
   assign zero pseudo-labels for all patches, since here we know that all patches must have zero labels\;
  }
 }
 \caption{Pseudo-labels assignment}
 \label{alg:psuedolabels}
\end{algorithm}

Pseudocode~\ref{alg:psuedolabels} shows the  algorithm to compute the pseudo-labels. For some patches, whose ensembled attention weights are neither small nor large (defined by 10\% threshold), we do not assign any pseudo-labels, and mark then and unknown to exclude from the $L_{patch}$ loss.
Given the pseudo-labels we re-optimize the model using the additional patch-wise loss.  The 10\% heuristic was chosen to retain only most confident patches, that contribute the most to the final bag-level classification.  A relevant approach was recently proposed by Lerousseau et al.~\cite{Lerousseau20}.  However the goal of their work is a dense segmentation map, and not the improvements to the global classification accuracy, and the pseudo-labels are calculated differently, through thresholding of current prediction probability estimates on the fly.

 \section{Experiments}
 \label{sec:experiments}
We implemented our method in PyTorch~\footnote{https://pytorch.org/} and trained it on  4 NVIDIA Tesla V100 16GB GPUs, batch size of 16. For the classification backbone, we use ResNet50 pretrained on ImageNet~\cite{He16}.  For the transformer layers, we keep a similar configuration as in~\cite{Vaswani17}, with 4 stacked transformer encoder  blocks. The lower pyramid level transformer has dimensionality of 256 for both input and hidden. The final transformer encoder has input dimension of 2308 (a concatenation of ResNet50 output features and the previous transformer outputs).  We use Adam optimizer with initial learning rate of $\alpha_{0}=3e-4$ for CNN parameters, and $3e-5$ for transformer parameters, then gradually decrease it using cosine learning rate scheduler for 50 epochs. We use 5-fold cross validations to tune the parameters. For transformer layers only, we use weight decay of $0.1$ and no dropout.

\subsubsection{PANDA dataset}
Prostate cANcer graDe Assessment (PANDA) challenge dataset consists of ~11K whole-slide images from two centers~\cite{Panda2020}. Currently, this is the largest public WSI dataset available. The grading process consisted of finding and classifying cancer tissue into Gleason patterns based on the architectural growth patterns of the tumor~\cite{Bulten21}. Consequently, it is converted into an ISUP grade on a 1-5 scale, based on the presence of two distinct Gleason patterns. The dataset was provided as part of the Panda kaggle challenge, which attracted more than 1000 teams, with the goal to predict the most accurate ISUP grades.
Each individual image on average is about 25,000px$\times$25,000px RGB.
The challenge also includes a hidden dataset, whose images were graded by multiple pathologists. The private dataset labels are not publicly available, but can be used to asses your model blindly via Kaggle website (invisible to the public as the challenge is closed now). In our experiments, we use a medium resolution input images (4x smaller than the highest resolution).

\subsubsection{Patch selection}
To extract patches from WSI, we tile the the image into a grid of 224px$\times$224px patches. At each iteration, the grid has a random offset from the top left corner, to ensure randomness of the patches. We then retain only the foreground patches.
From the remaining patches, we maintain only a random subset (K=56), which is a trade-off between covering the tissue content and GPU memory limits (see Figure~\ref{fig:patches}). We use batch size 16, which makes the data input size $16\times K\times 3\times 224\times 224$ at each iteration. During testing, inference is done using all foreground patches.

\subsection{Results}
\subsubsection{Transformer MIL}
We evaluate and compare our method to the Attention MIL and its Gated Attention MIL~\cite{Ilse18}, as well as to a classical MIL with Max operator~\cite{Campanella19}.
For evaluation metrics we use Accuracy, Area Under Curve (AUC) and Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) of ISUP grade prediction (see Table~\ref{tab:panda1}). QWK metric measures the similarity between the predictions and targets, with a maximum value of 1. QWK was chosen as the main metric during the PANDA challenge~\cite{Panda2020}, since it is more appropriate for the tasks with predicted classes being severity grades/levels. All metrics are computed using our 5-fold (80\%/20\%  training/validation) splits, except for the \emph{Leaderboard} column results, which come from the evaluation on kaggle challenge hidden private test-set. Even though the challenge is closed now, it allows for blind submission of the code snippet, which runs on the  PANDA hidden set and outputs the final QWK number. These results are not added to the kaggle leaderboard, and are allowed only for post-challenge evaluations. Table~\ref{tab:panda1} shows that  the proposed two transforms based approaches outperform other methods both in our validation sets, and on the challenge hidden set.  We have also inspected the self-attention matrices and found that for many cases, they have have distinct off-diagonal high value elements.
In particular, instances with WSI tumor cells of different Gleason scores have higher off-diagonal values, indicating that such a combination is valuable for the final classification, which was captured by the transformer self-attention.

\subsubsection{Patch-wise pseudo-labels}

We train 5 models and ensemble their patch-level predictions. We use $\lambda=100$.  We show the performance of adding the pseudo-labels supervision in Table~\ref{tab:pseudo1}. In all cases the performance has improved compared to the baselines shown in Table~\ref{tab:panda1} by $\sim1\%$. Table~\ref{tab:pseudo1} also shows the QWK results of the winners (top 3 places) of the PANDA kaggle challenge. Notice that our single model results are on par with the winners of the challenge (who all use ensembling of several models). We also experimented with ensembling, and the ensemble of our 10 models, achieves the leaderboard QWK of 0.94136, which would have been the first place in the leaderboard.

We have also tried but found no benefit of repeating pseudo-labeling several rounds, because the pseudo-label values almost do not change after the 1st round.

\begin{table}[ht]
	\centering
	\caption{Evaluations results on PANDA dataset. The Leaderboard column shows the QWK results of the private leaderboard of Kaggle's challenge, which allows direct comparison to more then 1000 participants.}
	\label{tab:panda1}
	\begin{tabular}{|l|c|c|c|c|}

		\hline
		 &  Accuracy & AUC &  QWK  & Leaderboard \\ \hline
		Attention MIL~\cite{Ilse18}           & $0.793\pm0.035$ & $0.983\pm0.021$   & $0.948\pm0.036$ & $0.915\pm0.086$ \\
		Gated attention MIL~\cite{Ilse18}      & $0.795\pm0.037$ & $0.981\pm0.011$  & $0.936\pm0.042$ & $0.914\pm0.069$  \\
		Max MIL~\cite{Campanella19}                  & $0.770\pm0.055$ & $0.973\pm0.048$    & $0.910\pm0.053$ & $0.868\pm0.091$  \\
		\hline
		Transformer MIL        & $0.801\pm0.014$ & $0.988\pm0.015$    & $0.960\pm0.034$ & $0.930\pm0.012$  \\
		Pyramid Transformer MIL & $\mathbf{0.805}\pm0.011$ & $\mathbf{0.989}\pm0.018$    & $\mathbf{0.961}\pm0.032$ & $\mathbf{0.932}\pm0.015$  \\
		\hline

	\end{tabular}

\end{table}
\begin{table}[h]
	\centering
	\caption{Evaluation results of adding pseudo-labels to our baseline transformer MIL approaches.
	We also include the results of the top three places of this challenge\protect\footnotemark (who all use ensembling of several models). Our results indicate that pseudo-labeling further improves the performance, with our single model providing results on par with the top winning teams.}

	\label{tab:pseudo1}
	\begin{tabular}{|l|c|c|}

		\hline
		 &   QWK (val)  & QWK (Leaderboard) \\ \hline
		Attention MIL~\cite{Ilse18} + Pseudo-labels       & $0.9502\pm0.0319$ & $0.9304\pm0.0542$ \\
		\hline
		Transformer MIL + Pseudo-labels     & $0.9614\pm0.0367$ & $0.9347\pm0.0353$ \\
		Pyramid Transformer MIL + Pseudo-labels   & $\mathbf{0.9652}\pm0.0168$ & $\mathbf{0.9365}\pm0.0513$  \\
		\hline
		First place - Panda kaggle challenge~\cite{Panda2020}    & - & $0.94085$  \\
		Second place - Panda kaggle challenge~\cite{Panda2020}    & - & $0.93768$  \\
		Third place  - Panda kaggle  challenge~\cite{Panda2020}    & - & $0.93480$  \\
		Pyramid Transformer MIL (ours, ensemble of 10)    & - & $\mathbf{0.94136}$  \\
		\hline
	\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\footnotetext{https://www.kaggle.com/c/prostate-cancer-grade-assessment/leaderboard}

\section{Discussion and Conclusion}
 \label{sec:conclusion}

We proposed a new deep learning based MIL approach for WSI classification with the  following two main contributions: the addition of the transformer  module to account for dependencies among instances and the instance-level supervision loss using pseudo-labels. We evaluated the method on PANDA challenge prostate WSI dataset, which includes over 11000 images. To put in perspective, most recently published SOTA methods evaluated their performance on datasets with the order of only several hundred images~\cite{Zhao20,Hashimoto20,Lu21,Maksoud20}.
Furthermore, we compared our results directly to the leaderboard of the PANDA kaggle challenge with over 1000 participating teams, and demonstrated that our single model performance is on par with the top three winning teams, as evaluated blindly on the same hidden private test-set. Finally, recently proposed visual transformers~\cite{Dosovitskiy21} have shown a capability to replace the classification CNN completely, allowing for the possibility to create deep learning based MIL model solely based on the transformer blocks; we leave these investigations for future research.

\bibliographystyle{splncs04}

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A Santa Maria del Carmine é uma igreja em Florença, na Itália, no distrito de Oltrarno. É famosa por abrigar a Capela Brancacci que contém afrescos magníficos de Masaccio, Masolino da Panicale e Filippino Lippi.

A igreja foi construída em 1268 como parte do Convento Carmelita, que ainda existe hoje. Foi renovada nos séculos XVI e XVII, danificada por um incêndio em 1771 e reconstruída internamente em 1782. O fogo não tocou a sacristia, portanto permaneceram intocadas as Histórias de Santa Cecília, de Lippo d'Andrea e o monumento de mármore a Pier Soderini por Benedetto da Rovezzano. A nave tem um afresco a trompe-l'oeil de Domenico Stagi.

Obras de by Alessandro Allori, Pietro Nelli, Gherardo Starnina e Giovan Battista Vanni podem ser encontradas no Convento.

Capela Brancacci

Capela Corsini

Os Corsini, provavelmente a família mais rica de Florença nos séculos XVII e XVIII construiu também uma capela em 1675. O arquiteto Pier Francesco Silvani escolheu um estilo Barroco então popular em Roma. A pequena cúpula tem afrescos de Luca Giordano. O teto em Rococó é de Giovanni Domenico Ferretti.

Igrejas de Florença

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The story is straightforwardly written by the author and it makes the story feel more simplistic, easy to follow, and allows the reader to focus more on the character. Ha Jin intertwines his Chinese culture with the English language. The story should be done like this because the setting is in Mao-era China. However, his story doesn't require too much context when it comes to understanding the plot because the historical context has nothing to do with it. At the same time, he makes the setting realistic and natural, which makes prevents separation between the characters and their surroundings.
Kang's obsession in the girl is strange as it could be experienced in real life. What I am interested in is the absence of the girl's actual person, and how Ha Jin chooses to keep her name a secret until the end of the story. This decision by the author makes Kang's infatuation with her much more unique, as it heightens his pettiness over his love for a voice. The addition of a love triangle provides another conflict to Kang's story, as he feels like he is being challenged by Shi's existence. He knows that the latter is younger, better looking, and comes from a better background than him, and Ha Jin's inclusion of such information shows us the realization that Kang acknowledges about Shi.
Kang himself is a well-rounded character with a believable personality. He is naive, delusional, and pitiful. His delusion comes from fantasizing about the body to the 'voice' of the transmitter; he is naive because he has childish views on love; he is pitiful because of all the other traits. Regardless of what you feel about Kang, the way Ha Jin writes him makes him a sorry character.
The phrase "love is in the air," takes a very literal connotation in Ha Jin's creation of the relationship between Kang and Lili. But we never get any sort of perspective from Lili so it seems to be an entirely one sided relationship. The tone of the story almost seemed comical, but in an unintentional way. The description of Kang's "froggy eyes," and his "square thumbs," adds to his innocence and his child-like, naive behavior. He truly has no concept of intimacy or of flirtation, or even of women in general. The description of what Lili might look like through Kang's eyes and his back and forth inner dialogue about women adds to his boyish cluelessness. He only describes already unattainable celebrities, and he tries to reason with himself, but comes to the same conclusion: none are as good as Lili. I found these comparisons funny because Kang doesn't know these women either, in fact he might know more about the woman through the transmitter.
Kang also seems to be somewhat irrational and melodramatic, he even admits to himself that "he hated his own listless voice." He becomes winey and ridden with anxiety, all over a woman he has only heard and not seen. I found the ending of the story to be somewhat abrupt but not necessarily surprising. Kang describes Shi Wei as a strapping and wealthy young man; stiff competition for scraggly Kang. But Wei's relationship with Lili has nothing to do with his appearance, he is simply more forward. Collectively, I found the story to be odd and interesting. Kang is an incredibly emotional character, overwhelmed with what he believes to be "love," but is essentially left in a position of despair and confusion.
"Love in the Air" by Ha Jin captured the soldiers very well, in a very heartbreaking way. The soldiers were all depicted as young men, so young that they don't even know if women have hair on their bodies, who are so lonely they will fall in love with a voice, or lose their position over the mention of a woman in the area. It's heartbreaking how these characters have a sense of hope when it comes to this woman and it's heartbreaking that they are so lonely they need this sense of hope to continue on.
The plot of this story is very interesting, a man falling in love with the voice of a woman he is telegraphing in the army. It automatically creates a forbidden love when he is limited to saying only necessary words for her, or the Russians could find him. His chances with her are zero because of the nature of their situation. Conversing is so forbidden he can't even ask her name. The plot itself creates a perfect amount of tension and creates some very real stakes for the narrator, something that can be hard to do in a story. This story also does not have a lot of action. It is mostly reflective, the narrator thinking. In a few places there is some dialogue, but there is not a lot of movement. The interesting plot and the tension created by the plot are necessary to keep the story from being stagnant and dull.
I really appreciate that the narrator never talks to her again and never meets her at all. It makes it realistic. In this situation, if he had talked to her, called her, found out her name on his own, it would have felt fake, forced, too easy. But that doesn't happen. He's a soldier, not a knight in a fairy tale, and the sad ending is necessary. It was also necessary for Shi to be caught and punished for his behavior. It is again heartbreaking when the narrator thinks the woman is now fickle and he feels angry towards her for talking to Shi. It shows just how much he has placed her up a pedestal, because of his loneliness and youngness, and how far his thoughts and obsession have progressed.
Terri and Mel's relationship, and perhaps love on a broader scale, is illustrated through their back and forth reactions. Mel, very bitingly, tells Terri to shut up for once on page 146, but then there is romance between the two on page 147 and so-on and so-forth.
It is clear through the randomness of their accounts of love that they really know nothing about love. They tell stories about relationships, but not love explicitly. As as side note, I once heard the last line in a movie and have been so in love with it ever since, although I can't find a way to explain why.
In "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," Raymond Carver does something very interesting when he makes the decision to write in first person yet never really let the narrator speak. The story is seen through the eyes of Nick, yet we never really hear from Nick or ever get as much information about him as we do the other characters. On top of that, most of the story is dialogue and it is dialogue from Mel, Terri, and occasionally Laura. This choice puts more focus on the characters than anything else. There is the setting, which Nick mentions a few times, but because this is mostly dialogue it makes you really focus on who these characters are and what they are talking about.
What is also interesting about the setting is that the story never moves. The characters never get up and go anywhere. They do not get up and go to dinner like they say they will. They do not even realize, except for Nick, that the sun has gone down. This does not stop the story from going anywhere though. Carver puts you in the heads of his characters so that setting does not have to change. You are with Mel when he is talking about the older patients that were in the car crash and you are with Terri when she talks about Ed. Carver almost puts a scene inside a scene and somehow makes it work so that the story moves while staying still.
The author immediately directs our attention not to the narrator, but to the character Mel right at the beginning. Indeed, a majority of the story, while told in the first person, is more from the other characters rather than Nick the narrator. The story is structured in the way where there are more dialogue than details of action and description. What little description there is are meant to give us a small picture of what the setting is. In this story however, Carver shows us the setting isn't important and would rather we zero in on the characters. The dialogue is important not just for characterization, but for plot, something that may not work in other stories but works in this one. The first line "My friend Mel McGinnis is talking" therefore, is insignificant at first, but it does show that Carver wants us to know that the narrator isn't much of a central character, the others are.
Terri is shown to be a rather odd character, who still believes that her previous husband loves her through his abuse of her. Mel, on the other hand, is more realistic and points out that that is not love. I love the foil between the two different characters because one doesn't understand a healthy love while the other knows that love shouldn't be abusive. This is actually a fairly simple point in the story, but adds much to the characterization of both Terri and Mel. I also think Carver uses Nick the narrator as some kind of bridge between us the reader and the other characters. At the same time, Nick is also a character as much as Terri, Mel, and Laura because he is given the task of being the reader's looking glass.
The usage of dialogue in this story gives us insight into the history of the character more than what the characters are going through at the present. More than likely, us readers would be more interested in the past of these people because if the author chooses to write them as they are in the present, then it would be boring, flat, and dull. Within the dialogues are actually mini-stories in themselves, such as Terri's previous boyfriend/husband and Mel's situation with the elderly couple. Yet, all of these stories are something about love, so the entire story can be called a love story, but not in the conventional way.


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Effingham County beats South Effingham 30-17 to win third straight game in county football rivalry
Donald Heath
Rev. Chance Ward of the Goshen United Methodist Church had a few words for the Effingham County High School football team before its pregame meal Friday.
Ward played for coach Erk Russell at Georgia Southern so he knows a thing or two about football. And Ward's divine connections now also shouldn't be taken lightly either.
Ward's message before the Rebels' battle with cross-county rival South Effingham: Come out and persevere.
"That's exactly what this game came down to," ECHS coach Buddy Holder said after his Rebels pulled out an exciting 30-17 victory over the Mustangs before an overflowing crowd at Rebel Field.
For some drivers, it took 30 minutes to get out of the parking lot after the game. On the field, it took two and a half hours to decide the outcome of a game that shifted like a pendulum.
Two fourth-quarter touchdown runs by sophomore Desmond House proved to be the difference.
The Rebels won for the third straight time in the series and for the sixth time in the last seven meetings.
"We made our share (of big plays) but when it comes down to it, they made more than we did," SEHS coach Donnie Revell said. "Hats off to coach Holder and his staff. They did a great job of preparing. My staff did the same thing. It was a heck of a football game."
Both teams displayed Rev. Ward's key to victory. After surrendering a quick touchdown to start the game, the Mustangs gradually gained control and took the lead only to see ECHS fight back.
The Rebels (3-1), trailing 17-16 early in the fourth quarter, flipped the field and the game with a well-timed, end around to speedy Randy Scott, who found a wall of blocking along the home sideline. Scott gained 49 yards on the play, and ECHS got another 15 when the Mustangs were penalized for a late hit.
Within a play, the hosts had moved from their own 20-yard line to the Mustang 16.
"We felt like (the reverse) was there for a long time, but you don't want to just pull that thing out too early," Holder said. "It was a great call by (offensive coordinator) Sterling McNeal and the kids executed it and it got us out of a hole."
Three plays later, House, who ran for 134 yards on 20 carries, scored the second of his three touchdowns in the game.
"Keep fighting -- that's what we preach in practice. That's what we preach in the weight room. Just get to the next play and anything can happen," Holder said. "At halftime, we told the kids it was going to come down to who likes to get hit or who likes to do the hitting the most."
Not every motivating word worked like a charm Friday. The Mustangs (1-2) outgained the Rebels 118 to minus 3 in offensive yardage in the third quarter.
Continued offensive success helped SEHS grow increasingly confident. The Mustangs, who converted seven of their first 10 third-down plays to first downs, made what appeared to be a game changing play when scrambling quarterback Taylor Jackson found Shemar Moore wide open for a 36-yard touchdown pass to give SEHS a 17-16 lead midway through the third quarter.
Jackson finished the game with 191 passing yards and 57 rushing yards.
"You can tell, (Jackson) gives great heart and great effort in everything he does," Revell said. "The things he does help keep us in football games. I'm proud of him and what he tries to do and how hard he works at it. I think he's a special kid."
The Mustangs had a special play from their special teams to take away the early momentum from ECHS. Punter Eric Norman faked a punt and scooted 51 yards down the sidelines for a touchdown to tie the game, 7-7.
The play answered Ashaud Roberson's 7-yard TD, which gave the Rebels a lead less than three minutes into the game.
House's 24-yard scoring run put ECHS back in front 13-7 midway through the second quarter.
But the quick-footed Jackson brought the Mustangs back. Twice on third down, he scrambled for first downs. And faced with his third third-down play of the drive, Jackson eluded the rush, kept his eyes downfield and found Moore open for a 46-yard gain to the ECHS 8.
The play set up Liam Rickman's 40-yard field goal to cut the Rebels' lead to 13-10 with less than 50 seconds left in the half.
But ECHS quarterback Jerid Stokes completed three passes for 45 yards in the hurry-up offense, leading to Zach Thomas' 32-yard field goal.
Stokes, who completed his first nine throws, finished 10 of 12 for 119 yards.
Ironically, on a night when the two rivals played evenly, total offensive yardage ended 343 yards apiece.
Holder and Revell saw a lot of reasons for both teams to be proud.
"It was a chance for kids from both schools to line up in front of the entire county and show what their hard work and dedication, all through the summer, has been," Holder said. "It was a great time for these kids to show off to a lot of people."
SEHS looks ahead
South Effingham will play host to West Laurens (2-1) on Friday. The Mustangs lost to the Region 2-4A squad 34-2 last year in Dublin.
This season, the Raiders opened with shutout wins over East Laurens (56-0) and Crisp County (16-0) before losing to Dodge County (22-10). Junior quarterback AJ Mathis and senior running back Dorian Edmond are key offensive leaders for WLHS.
ECHS looks ahead
Effingham County (3-1) travels to Statesboro to meet the improved Blue Devils (2-1) at Womack Field.
It a rematch of one of the area's most exciting games in 2017 when the Rebels roared back from a 20-point third-quarter deficit to win 38-34.
Statesboro (2-1) has already equaled last year's win total and has an impressive 23-6 victory over Liberty County this year.
The Blue Devils lost to undefeated Veterans 21-0 last Friday.
Quarterback Drake Horton engineers Statesboro's run-oriented offense, which features backs Davardrion Lipsey and Jaylen Roberson.
Effingham County at Statesboro
Records: ECHS (3-1), SHS (2-1)
Where: Womack Field, Statesboro
When: Friday, 7:30 p.m.
South Effingham vs. West Laurens
Records: SEHS (1-2), WLHS (2-1)
Where: The Corral, Guyton

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Pictured above, the CNUSD History Day champions from ERHS.
On Saturday, February 2 at Dr. Augustine Ramirez Intermediate School, the Corona-Norco Unified School District hosted their annual History Day competition with 27 of local Eastvale, Corona, and Norco schools participating.
Pictured above, exhibits at CNUSD NHD.
The differing categories for project creations are elementary students in California can create a poster, while the junior and senior divisions that consist of 5th-8th graders, and 9th-12th graders respectively, having the choice to create a historical paper, documentary, website, performance, or exhibit.
Pictured above, Luis Carrillo and Laurel Kirchhoff.
Pictured above, an exhibit at CNUSD NHD.
Pictured above, Keith Armbruster, a CNUSD NHD judge.
Good luck to all of the CNUSD students competing on March 16th at Valley View High School in Moreno Valley at the Riverside County NHD Competition, and congratulations to our winners here at Roosevelt, which were: Adrian Tayag, Alline Huang, Jacob Macayaon, Makenzie Dorsey, Hennie Ayano, Britney Cheng, Joshua Dineros, Lindsay Ruiz, Dimple Garuadapuri, Tianna Calderon, Alexis Amoo, Amani Aberra, Thanvi Kiran, Tiffany Lin Lin, Sara Wu, Sophia Lu, and Daniela Terrones. Congratulations Mustangs and good luck!


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Send electronic claims via HIPAA 837P, 835, 270/1, 276/7 and 278.
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Honoring Our Heroes on Memorial Day
The San Marcos Academy family joins others across the country today in observing the Memorial Day holiday, which honors those men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military.
The garrison flag is flown at Ingram Stadium for special occasions at the Academy.
Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day and was officially proclaimed back on May 5, 1868, to honor those soldiers who died during the Civil War. The purpose of Decoration Day was to place flowers or other decorations on the graves of those who gave their lives in defense of the country. On that first Decoration Day, General James Garfield spoke at Arlington National Cemetery, and 5,000 volunteers decorated the graves of the 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers buried there.
Many Americans wear a red poppy on Memorial Day in honor of those who made the ultimate sacrifice. In December of 2000, a resolution was passed establishing the National Moment of Remembrance, where citizens are asked to voluntarily and informally observe a moment of remembrance and respect at 3 p.m. local time.
Several San Marcos Academy graduates have given their lives in service to our nation, and the names of these heroes are listed on our Wall of Honor, where we also provide a list of other alumni who have previously served or are currently serving in the Armed Forces. As we remember and thank all of these men and women, we would like to provide a brief profile of a few of them.
Memorial Day Hero: CPT Paul W. Peña
CPT Peña, a 2000 graduate of San Marcos Academy and 2004 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, was killed in action in Afghanistan in January of 2010. Peña was laid to rest at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio in a moving ceremony with full military honors.
The large oak tree in the parking lot at the Academy was dedicated in memory of CPT Peña in May 2010, and the SMA Alumni Council established at that time the Captain Paul W. Peña Outstanding Alumni Award. This award is now given annually to an alumnus who exemplifies excellence and has lived a life that brings credit and honor to the school. CPT Peña was selected as the first (posthumous) recipient of the award. In addition, a Memorial Scholarship was established and named for CPT Peña. This scholarship is awarded annually to a deserving Academy student.
Memorial Day Hero: Benjamin STEPHEN Fordham
Steve Fordham was a 1962 graduate of SMA, where he was captain of the football team as well as senior class president and a member of the basketball and track teams.
From SMA, Fordham went on to attend Wharton Junior College and then Baylor University, where he graduated in 1966. He enlisted in the Marines and was sent to OCS. As a Second Lieutenant, he was deployed to Vietnam in October of 1967 and immediately ordered into action.
Fordham was wounded in November and received the Purple Heart, pinned on by President Lyndon Johnson himself. Fordham was returned to the front, endured the siege of Khe Sanh, and was married during a brief "R and R" in Hawaii. Then, sadly, he was killed in action on April 15, 1968.
Steve Fordham receives his Purple Heart from President Lyndon B. Johnson
In the year of his death, members of Fordham's family established the Steve Fordham Award, which is given annually to the most valuable player on the football team at SMA. The Fordham trophy sits in the display case in Carroll Hall.
Memorial Day Hero: Danny Little
Danny entered SMA in 1961 as a sophomore and graduated in 1964. In his senior year, he was promoted to Captain of B Company in the First Battalion. He also played on the football team, ran track, and sang in the Cadet Choir.
In September of 1964, Danny enlisted in the Army and was assigned to Special Forces Airborne-Infantry Operations and Intelligence. He served his first tour of duty in Vietnam from May 24, 1967 to May 23, 1968 and earned a Bronze Star.
Staff Sergeant E6 Little returned for a second tour of duty in May of 1969. Just nine days before he was to return to the United States, in April of 1970, Little's family was notified that he was missing in action. He was declared KIA three months later; his remains have never been located.
In 1994, Danny's classmates dedicated a native live oak tree in his honor near the Senior Gate. His parents, Alice and Willis Little of Abilene, attended the dedication. Little's medals and some other remembrances are on display in the Carroll Alumni Room.
Memorial Day Hero: Joseph H. Fankhauser
SSGT Joseph Henry Fankhauser attended the Academy during his middle school years while he and his mother lived in San Marcos. Following his graduation from Mason High School, near the Panhandle, Frankhauser entered the Marines. He would serve in Okinawa, Japan, and in Washington, D.C. He completed four tours of duty in Iraq and was serving his second tour of duty in Afghanistan when he was killed in action on April 22, 2012.
During his 12-year military career, Fankhauser earned numerous awards, including two Purple Hearts. On the first anniversary of his death, a tree was dedicated on the Academy campus in his memory. A memorial scholarship was also established at the Academy by Joe's mother, Mary Wyscarver.
Photos: Joseph Fankhauser during one of his deployments; Portraits and other memorabilia donated to the Academy by Joseph's mother.
Memorial Day Hero: Harvey H. Storms
A member of the Class of 1934, Harvey Storms was the son of two former Academy students, Harvey Storms, Sr., and Estelle Storms.
After his graduation from SMA, Storms attended Southwest Texas State University and then Texas A&M, where he completed his ROTC training and graduated in 1939. He came back to SMA at that time, teaching there for two years. He was then the first faculty member to report for active duty following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Memorabilia honoring Major Harvey H. Storms in the Carroll Hall Display Case.
Major Storms returned home safely from World War II but would later find himself on duty during the Korean Conflict, beginning in 1947.
As part of a unit under Gen. McArthur's leadership, Major Storms was assisting with an organized withdrawal to the 38th Parallel in Korea. During this withdrawal, Storms took a bullet. Though injured, he continued to fight off the enemy's advance, and was reported missing in action in 1950.
San Marcos Academy President Raymond Cavness delivered the eulogy for Major Storms, saying, "We here today cannot estimate with accuracy how many men in that action owe their lives to the valor of Major Harvey H. Storms. No mortal did more to better deserve his endless sojourn in heavenly rest."
Harvey Storms was memorialized at SMA in 1970, when the Ex-Student Association voted to name their new Foundation the Harvey H. Storms Foundation.
In 2018, Major Storms' remains were finally recovered in Korea and repatriated to the United States. The Academy celebrated his return home during Homecoming 2019, when the family was presented with a flag flown over the campus. Major Storms will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery on June 12, 2020.
Recognition of Harvey H. Storms during Homecoming 2019.
Honor Those Who Served on Memorial Day
As you enjoy this Memorial Day weekend, be ever mindful of those who gave their lives in defense of our great nation. Please join others across the country at 3 p.m. on Monday, May 25, in the National Moment of Remembrance as we honor all our Memorial Day heroes.
We cherish too, the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led,
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies.
(From "We Shall Keep the Faith" by Moina Michael, November 1918)
harvey storms, memorial day, paul pena
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to show the steps you have taken to integrate into and contribute to the Australian community. Examples would include evidence of employment, membership of community organisations and school enrolment for all eligible children.
In addition, the new requirments limit the number of times an applicant can fail the citizenship test to three and introduce an automatic fail for applicants who cheat during the citizenship test.
The test will be designed to demonstrate appreciation of Australian values, with potential questions on respect for women and children regarding child marriage, female genital mutilation and domestic violence. For the first time ever, domestic violence, gang related activity and organised crime associations will be included in more for forensic police checks. A government claims that the new test would also look more thoroughly into people's history for even minor offences which were inconsistent with Australian values such as social welfare fraud and abuse.


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Judicial Discrimination: NBA President Says He Expects NJC To Do The Right Thing
NBA president-elect, Olumide Apata. Photo: [email protected] Akpata
Ahead of Monday's interview by the National Judicial Council (NJC) Committee for the appointment of a Chief Judge for the Gombe State Judiciary, the President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Olumide Akpata has declared that he "expects the NJC to do the right thing".
Akpata made the declaration in a telephone interview with Channels Television on Sunday,
Akpata was reacting to news reports that the Gombe State Government had excluded the name of the most senior judge in the state, Justice Beatrice Illiya from the list of names forwarded to the NJC for consideration as appointment for Chief Judge.
Justice Illiya herself had written a petition to the NJC to complain about this exclusion and had copied the NBA in the petition.
In her petition, the most senior judge said that after the retirement of Hon Justice Hakila Herman, she was appointed as the Acting Chief Judge of Gombe State but after the mandatory 3 months provided by the constitution, Governor Inuwa Yahaya refused to extend her tenure.
Instead, another judge of the State, Justice Muazu Pindiga was appointed and his three months tenure as acting Chief Judge has been renewed for the fourth time because the executive has refused to do the right thing.
In August 2020, when the NJC directed the Gombe State Judicial Service Commission (JSC) to re-submit the names of the nominees for appointment as substantive Chief Judge of Gombe State by doing the right thing and including the name of the most senior judge, Justice Beatrice Illiya, the State JSC defied the directive, arguing that seniority is not a factor to be considered in the appointment of a Chief Judge of a State.
Justice Beatrice Illiya says she is being discriminated against because she is female and Christian.
The NBA President who was copied in the petition has however declared that the NJC at its meeting on Monday would do the right thing and insist on the appointment of the most senior judge of the state.
Posted on November 22, 2020 Author Solomon ElusojiCategories LocalTags National Judicial Commission (NJC), NBA, Olumide AkpataLeave a comment on Judicial Discrimination: NBA President Says He Expects NJC To Do The Right Thing
Nasarawa Impeachment: Lawmakers Petition NJC Over Chief Judge's Conduct
The Nasarawa State House of Assembly has moved a resolution to petition the National Judicial Council (NJC) on the role of the Chief Judge of the state during the crisis that engulfed the state as a result of the plot to remove Governor Al-makura.
The PDP dominated House of Assembly, which resumed plenary on Monday after weeks of the impeachment saga, accused the Chief Judge, Suleiman Dikko, of partisanship in the discharge of his duty, citing the breach of section 188 sub-sections 5 and 7 of the 1999 constitution.
The House majority leader, Mr Godiya Akwashiki, who moved the motion under matters of public interest, also accused Justice Dikko for breaching the constitution in the formation of the probe panel which acquitted Governor Al-makura.
The House then directed the clerk to write to the NJC on the Chief Judge after the motion was passed.
Also, the lawmakers moved to suspend one of their colleagues, Tanko Tunga, from the All Progressives Congress for six months with a 50% pay cut for act of misconduct.
This is the first sitting of the State Assembly with the full complement of lawmakers from both the PDP and the minority APC, since the impeachment plot against Mr Al-makura was hatched.
It is believed in many quarters that loyalists of the Governor now face the heat and threat to their political careers.
Posted on August 18, 2014 August 19, 2014 Author Channels TelevisionCategories PoliticsTags 1999 Constitution, channels television, Channels TV, channelstv, Chief Judge, Godiya Akwashiki, Gov Al-Makura, Justice Suleiman Dikko, Nasarawa state, National Judicial Commission (NJC), NJCLeave a comment on Nasarawa Impeachment: Lawmakers Petition NJC Over Chief Judge's Conduct
Lawmaker Blames 1999 Constitution For Controversy In Rivers State Judiciary
The Chairman of the Rivers State House of Assembly Committee on Judiciary, Mr Golden Chioma on Tuesday blamed the 1999 Constitution over the appointment controversy being witnessed by the Rivers State Judiciary.
Speaking on Channels Television's Sunrise Daily, Mr Chioma said " the format of the 1999 Constitution did it in such a way that the other two arms of government- executive and legislature- has ample opportunity to checkmate who becomes" the chief justice of a state.
"If the National Judicial Commission (NJC) makes a recommendation, the governor has the right to accept or reject the recommendation" insisting that "it is not sacrosanct that when the nomination comes the governor must accept it".
He further noted that the issue has become a subject of litigation because "it has not happened before" adding that "the Rivers state governor had to go to court because he didn't like the recommendation.
"If the House of Assembly votes on that issue and the votes are against the recommended person, that recommendation aborts at that time", he added.
Debunking claims that the refusal by the governor to appoint the judge nominated by the NJC has some form of stripping the judiciary of its independence, he said Justice Akanbi had "dealt on it" in his judgment, and urged Nigerians to look at the judicial interpretation of the recommendation that was subject to litigation.
He slammed the NJC for rejecting the first person nominated by the Rivers State Judicial Service Commission (JSC) for having "rejecting" qualities adding that "it smacks of some funny issues.
"The JSC that is on ground and has cause to interact with the parties, should be given more credit" and accused the "NJC of having some other issues which, the other people that went to court were not satisfied with" maintaining that the "most important thing here is having gotten a judicial interpretation, I will want all parties to abide by the law".
On Tuesday 18th of March Justice Lambo Akanbi nullified the recommendation of Justice Daisy Okocha, by the NJC as the most senior judge of the state High Court to occupy the position of the Chief Judge of Rivers State.
He faulted the recommendation of the NJC which specifically recommended Justice Daisy Okocha as "wrong, null and void."
Justice Akanbi also stated that Governor Amaechi cannot be compelled to accept whatever name the NJC sends to him because "the governor is not a rubber stamp."
Akanbi stated that "the letter of the NJC of July 2, 2013, and received by Amaechi that only the most senior judge must be appointed contrary to the recommendation of the JSC is wrongful and null and void."
Akanbi, who cited examples of Kwara and Osun as states where the presidents of the customary courts of appeal have been appointed as judges, pointed out that Rivers State would not be different, emphasizing that the reason given by the NJC was insufficient.
Meanwhile, the other nominee, Justice P.C. Agumagu, sworn in by Governor Rotimi Amaechi has been suspended by the NJC as a judicial officer.
His suspension came after he accepted a the appointment as the Chief Judge of Rivers State. The NJC insists that the 'appointment' is very flawed, and that Hon. Justice Agumagu should not have let it happen.
Posted on June 17, 2014 June 17, 2014 Author Channels TelevisionCategories Sunrise DailyTags Africa, Africa News, channels television, Channels TV, Golden Chioma, Justice Daisy Okocha, Justice Lambo Akanbi, Justice P.C. Agumagu, National Judicial Commission (NJC), News, Nigeria, Nigeria news, Rivers State, Rivers state House of Assembly, Rotimi AmaechiLeave a comment on Lawmaker Blames 1999 Constitution For Controversy In Rivers State Judiciary
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Casares is one of the most charming whitewashed villages on the Costa del Sol and it stands out for its biodiversity and the variety of its landscapes, which are part of Andalucía's protected natural areas. It is situated between Estepona and Manilva and is surrounded by the stunning Natural Parks of the Sierra Bermeja and Sierra Crestellina.
Casares is split into two urban areas: Casares Costa, which is a beachside strip of residential urbanisations, a commercial centre, bars and restaurants and the old historical village of Casares (known locally as Casares Pueblo), which is located 15 kilometres from the beach, up into the mountains, sitting 430 metres above sea-level.
Casares was already known outside its borders in Ancient Roman times when the Emperor Julius Caesar was healed from his hepatic diseases thanks to the sulphurous waters and the curative mud of La Hedionda baths, which are located just outside town, while he was returning to Rome. Ruins of the first Phoenician, Iberian and Roman settlers have survived in its surroundings.
The village streets are narrow and wind steeply through the buildings; if visiting this town, one has to be prepared for a steep and energetic climb, rather than a tranquil stroll through the village. Its castle, located on the highest part of the town, was founded in 12th century by the occupying Moors.
This village is also known to be the birthplace of Blas Infante, a politician, lawyer and writer who was born here in 1885, considered the father of Andalucía.
Casares is unspoilt by mass tourism, it is ideal for anyone looking for tranquility, green scenery and amazing views towards the coast. If you are looking for a tranquil beach location to buy a property, but with amenities close by, Casares Playa is the perfect place.
Sur Estates has a wide selection of bargain and distressed properties for sale in Casares in developments like La Perla de La Bahia, a luxury beachfront complex located in Casares Playa and in new developments like five-star golf resort of Finca Cortesin, where the Volvo World Match Play Championship is currently held.
Casares Playa
www.casares.es


Exploring different technological solutions for implementing volumetric display devices (VoDs).
Enabling self-contained interactivity on VoDs.
Integration of VoDs with multi-display environments (MDE) resulting in hybrid MDEs.


When Randy Crouch arrived on the scene at the Little Cypress-Mauriceville High School campus less than two months ago, he realized he had a big job to do and a short time in which to get it done.
Crouch has been getting his coaching staff assembled and hoping he will have enough coaches to have a spring practice for his football program. The University Interscholastic League allows both Class 5A and 4A schools to utilize a 30-day period to have 18 full-contact practice sessions.
The schools that opt to take advantage of these spring practices must wait an extra week after the schools that didn't have spring practices to begin training in August.
"If I can get the assistant coaches in here that I want, then we'll have spring practice in May," Crouch said hopefully. He has brought in fellow West Orange-Stark defensive backfield coach Mike Pierce as the Bears' new defensive coordinator. Troy Bolton, who coached with Crouch during his first stint at LC-M, will assume the duties as the Bears' offensive coordinator.
Other members of the LC-M football coaching staff include Jonathan Friend, an LC-M graduate, Vidor graduate Alan Deshazo and David Kendrick of Port Neches-Groves. Crouch still needs three more coaches to be in place this month so the Bears can have spring training in May.
Crouch is no stranger to the Battlin' Bears football program, serving as LC-M's offensive coordinator from 1994-97. He has spent the last 11 years working with the West Orange-Stark Mustangs, most of which as the offensive coordinator.
During that time he had been instrumental in the success of both programs. The Bears finished second in district play in 1995 and made it to the regional finals two years later in 1997, which was the football program's highest-ever finish.
And with the Mustangs, Crouch helped guide them to district championships in 1998, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, including undefeated seasons in 1998, 2000, 2005, 2006 and 2008. The Mustangs made it all the way to the state finals in 2000.
So it's no secret that Crouch knows what it takes to put a winning team on the football field, which has made the LC-M football fans and players excited and optimistic about the future.
Crouch has been affiliated with football since his teenage years when he played for the Sulphur (La.) Tors and was named a high school All-American in 1971. He played college football as an offensive guard for Louisiana Tech and was a member of the Bulldogs' Division II National Championship Team in 1973 and was named to the All-America team in 1974.
After working as a graduate assistant at Louisiana Tech he was hired as the Bulldogs' offensive line coach from 1978-87 and took his first high school head coaching job at DeQuincy (La.) in 1987, before returning to Sulphur High as the head football coach from 1988-1990.
His biggest chore will be getting the right players in the right positions for his multiple offense that will include the spread and shotgun formations. "We probably will be under the center more than we were at WO-S," Crouch surmised.
The basic defense Crouch plans to use this fall will be the "50", which is a five-man front, two linebackers and four defensive backs. "However, with all of the multiple offenses schools are using, we will have to be able to make adjustments, like maybe falling into a four-man front with either three linebackers or five defensive backs," Crouch explained.
Crouch said that the kids in the football program are doing what they are being asked to do. "We're showing them some new offensive and defensive schemes during the athletic periods and they seem to be catching on all right," he pointed out.
The other half of Crouch's new job at LC-M is serving as the school's athletic director. "The coaches in the other sports handle their business professionally, which really makes my job easier," Crouch said.
He pointed out that the soccer teams and the girls' volleyball and basketball teams all made the playoffs and the boys' basketball team played as good as anyone in District 20-4A the last month of the season, but unfortunately missed making the state playoffs. The baseball and Lady Bears' softball teams also will probably make the playoffs.
Crouch, who has resided in the LC-M community for the past 15 years, also has the full support of his family, starting with his wife of 33 years, Dewanna, his three children, daughter Lauren, who is a dentist in the Phoenix area and is married to LC-M graduate Phillip Harmon who is a medical doctor.
His oldest son Jared, who also graduated form Louisiana Tech, works for Halliburton in Oklahoma City, while his other son, Ryan, is attending Lamar in Beaumont and is working with the new football program there.


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This font was the basis for the later designed Bolyar Pro and Bolyar Ornate typefaces.


The giveaway is for one print copy of A Tale of Two Centuries (US only) and an e-copy of A Tale of Two Centuries (INT).
I think the sweater for the Italian girl isn't as dated perhaps as it should be, but otherwise I love it. I also loved the excerpt. It's been a long time since I've been excited to read something. Thanks for sharing!
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text:
Contract with fire companies OK'd
By Thad Komorowski
Published Tue, Mar 29, 2011
A contract that grants a 3 percent annual raise for the town's five volunteer fire companies was approved Monday night.
The Town Board voted unanimously to accept the agreement, which runs from 2012 to 2014.
The first year will pay a rate of $193,640, followed by subsequent annual rates of $199,450 and $205,430.
Supervisor Robert B. Cliffe, who negotiated the deal along with Councilman Arthur Gerbec, called the contract beneficial for both the companies and the taxpayers.
"They do an unbelievable amount of work for very little," Cliffe said. "It was very, very reasonable."
The companies are all on the lower end of the pay scale when compared with others across the state, he noted. All the individual companies need to have fundraisers to support their operations. In the last three-year deal, the annual increases were about 9 percent.
In another matter, the board will review a proposal by the YMCA to run a summer day camp in the town youth center rather than close the facility as in the past two years.
Councilman Larry Helwig said the organization will take over the facility five days a week, hire existing staff and pay the utility bills. The high cost of utilities was one of the reasons the board decided to close the center to save money during the warm weather.
While participants from other municipalities will be solicited, Wheatfield residents would be given a 20 percent discount for the camp.
Representatives from the "Y" will give a public presentation at 7 p.m. before the April 11 board meeting.
In other business, the board:
*Approved a public improvement project application for phase one of the Brookfield Subdivision on the east side of Ward Road, near Brent Drive, to begin with 10 homes. There are numerous conditions the developer, Ryan Homes, must meet before construction can start. There is a major concern about drainage, according to the resolution. The project, which will eventually have 84 homes, was originally approved in 2008 but "went to sleep with the economy," said engineer Tim Walck of Wendel-Duchscherer Architects & Engineers.
*Failed to pay a $216.95 claim filed by a town resident who said town snowplows ripped her invisible fence for dog control out of the ground this past winter. The device was installed about 12 inches from the pavement, which some councilmen commented was not a reasonable distance.
e-mail: niagaranews@buffnews.com


Carols are such an important part of our Christmas celebrations. We've been listening in our house since the day after Thanksgiving...well, technically I guess we started Thanksgiving morning. I spent years trying to enforce the "December first" rule—no carols before December 1. But it is a battle I've lost to my spouse.
Carols give us a "sentimental feeling"—to quote a secular carol. They remind us of Christmases past, happy memories of family and friends and food and gifts. But the Christian Christmas carols do so much more—they teach theology, mostly good theology, the theology of the incarnation—God come to earth as a human being.
For many people, they may not really study the scriptures or ponder the meaning of Emmanuel-God with us. But they can sing by memory many Christmas carols. And so they have the words of the scriptures on their lips but may not have them in their hearts. Today I want us to consider the wonderful meaning that is found in our Christmas Carols and I'm looking at one in particular today. Can you recognize the carol from the coded title of my sermon today. It is: ??? Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
This hymn is an example of how the words are on our lips but may not make it all the way to our consciousness. How many know at least the first verse by heart? How many have deeply considered the meaning of the words? I generally haven't, but for today I looked at each word. I will share some of what I found, beginning with the very first word, Hark...who says hark anymore? It is an archaic word according to dictionary.com. It is no longer in common use but it was a term to get people's attention. Herald is someone who comes early with an announcement. And an angel is really the term for messenger, in particular a messenger from God. We have an assortment of angel figures here in our sanctuary. Beautiful, artistic, stylish representations of God's messengers...but most likely an inaccurate representation. For angels appearances as relayed to us in scriptures are always a fearful occurrence. Check it out, when a messenger of God appears, the angel's first words are invariably..."Do not fear!" These beautiful angels do not inspire fear so, in my mind at least, angels are probably much more fearsome than depicted here.
OK, that's my explanation of my title and also an in depth look at the first line of the carol. Now I want to look specifically at the theology found throughout this carol. I invite you to follow along in your hymnbooks since we will sing this when I'm done. I'm taking it largely word by word so it may be helpful to follow along. I will note that the hymn was written by Charles Wesley who is the brother of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. He was very particular about being theologically sound. Yet, as I pointed out, scriptures didn't report the angels singing. This isn't Charles Wesley's mistake. His original opening line was even more old school, but perhaps more theologically correct: "Hark, how all the welkin rings". Understand that? Welkin, I discovered, mean the vault of heaven. Wesley wrote the opening verse without the refrain and no mention of the angels singing. His good friend George Whitefield made the changes which we sing today. And I think we'd side with Whitefield, the idea of angels singing fits in with how we praise our Lord. I'll move on.
Next comes a universal invitation to us, the singers of the carol: " Joyful, all ye nations rise, join the triumph of the skies". The triumph of the skies is pictured as a multitude of angels-the angelic host-announcing or singing of the birth of the baby in Bethlehem. It is a triumph because God's plan for salvation is being put into place. It began back in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve's sin—which I will get to--and salvation is fulfilled in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the victory of the Cross. And we are invited to join in the praise joyfully.
Second verse: begins with a reminder of the place of Jesus in heaven. He is adored by the angels of heaven, and he's the everlasting Lord...skip a line; "Veiled in flesh the God-head see, hail the incarnate deity." This is an important line. Wesley makes note of the fact that Jesus is man and God, fully human, fully divine. He is God, but he is veiled in flesh; not that the flesh makes him less God in any way. It suggests almost a disguise; Jesus is God but those around him see only a man. But an incarnate deity, God made man, also tells us that Jesus was fully human. He had the same needs that we have; need for food and water and air to breathe. The need for companionship and love. And destined like all men to die. "Pleased in flesh with us to dwell" tells us the theological truth that Jesus willingly came to earth as Emmanuel, God with us. Paul wrote this, "For in (Jesus) all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell". (Colossians 1: 19) As I said, Charles Wesley was very thorough in his desire to make the hymn both theologically correct and to make it poetic and musically pleasing.
Back up to line two of verse two quickly. "Late in time behold him come" is a little confusing to me. There had been 400 years between the time of the last Old Testament prophet and the birth of Jesus, he could be referring to that. But we certainly recognize the prophecies of Isaiah as Jesus is acknowledged as the offspring of the virgin Mary.
Verse three, hail the Prince of Peace, a name that we recognize from our verse of the month from Isaiah, a title for the promised Messiah. Jesus is that promise Messiah. The Sun of Righteousness is a title filled with meaning. Note Sun is s-u-n, not s-o-n. Wesley goes back to the prophet Malachi for this, Malachi 4:2: "But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings." This is not specifically the Messiah, but it has often been interpreted as referring to him. The Sun represents light, Jesus is the light of the world and Mr. Wesley brings that to the verse, Light and life to all He brings. Then back to Malachi, risen with healing in his wings. Wings here is obviously not to be taken literally, Jesus doesn't have wings. But with poetic license, he ties into the healing Jesus brings, healing the world of sin and the penalty of sin; born that we no more may die.
If you're following the hymn, you'll note I skipped a line there. Paul writes a wonderful soliloquy in Philippians: "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross." (Philippians 2: 5-8) The Carol simplifies it; "Mild he lays his glory by".
The last line of verse three comes from John's gospel from his conversation with Nicodemus; in John 3: 3 Jesus told him, "Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again." Jesus tells us we must be born again, he came so that we would have this, "second birth" as Wesley put it. The gospel in rhythm and rhyme.
Now in mystic union join Thine to ours, and ours to Thine." I won't take this line by line, but I said I'd get back to the garden of Eden. The line about the woman's conquering seed and bruising the serpent's head brings us back to God and Adam and Eve after the fall. God told the serpent, "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." (Genesis 3: 15) Jesus came from the seed of woman and Jesus will be the one by whom the serpent is bruised/defeated. A plan put in place in the garden, fulfilled by the seed of woman, a baby in a manger.
Like I said, there is a lot of theology in these verses. Reminders of just who Jesus was and is. Reminders of what Jesus came to do and what he did. Reminders that God's plan is in place and the new Kingdom began with Jesus and will be fulfilled when he comes again. In our gospel today, John answered John the Baptists questions with the assurance that he was the fulfillment of prophecies. "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them." It is an expansion of what we heard from Isaiah this morning about the coming Messiah, "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy." And James reminded us, "Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord." God's plan is in place and God is in control.