text:
News & Stories > Imaging method predicts how well stem cells can differentiate into cardiac muscle cells
Imaging method predicts how well stem cells can differentiate into cardiac muscle cells
by Mariel Mohns | July 28, 2021
Stem cell research holds great potential for regenerative therapies and treatments to combat cardiovascular disease, which is responsible for over 30 percent of all deaths worldwide.
Highly functional cardiomyocytes—the muscle cells responsible for the contraction of the heart—are important for disease modeling, drug screening, and other regenerative medicine approaches.
However, the process of differentiating stem cells into cardiomyocytes is costly, labor-intensive, and highly variable.
"There's this need for quality control in stem cell differentiation, for scale-up for industrial applications," says Morgridge Institute for Research Investigator Melissa Skala.
In a new study published today in the journal Nature Communications, the Skala Lab developed a non-invasive imaging technique that can predict the efficiency of cardiomyocyte differentiation as a method of quality control.
"If we can predict the outcome of stem cell differentiation into cardiomyocytes at a very early stage, then we can save time, money, and speed at the manufacturing stage," says Tongcheng Qian, lead author and assistant scientist in the Skala Lab.
It takes about 14 days for human pluripotent stem cells to differentiate into cardiomyocytes, during which the cells have drastic changes in metabolic activity.
The researchers measured autofluorescence of NAD(P)H and FAD, two molecules that are involved in cellular metabolism, at various timepoints throughout the differentiation process. Since this method uses the innate autofluorescence of the cells, it is non-invasive and can be performed in real-time without damaging the cells.
Tongcheng Qian
While there have been many studies that look at metabolic changes during stem cell differentiation, Qian and Skala say the predictive modeling of their research is important.
"For applications or biomanufacturing, we can then intervene at early timepoints to change media conditions or change confluency to improve the outcome," says Skala, also a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The team saw metabolic changes as early as day 1, with low versus high differentiation efficiency conditions.
Qian collected the imaging data from tens of thousands of cells, and then passed on the data to co-first author Tiffany Heaster, who now works at Genentech after earning her PhD through the Skala Lab.
"It's a simple logistic regression model," says Skala. "But Tiffany built it in a rigorous way with separate testing and validation; all the checks you need to do robust science."
Qian says that in the future, he'd like to incorporate more factors into the model to have a really precise prediction.
"Just to deal with the reproducibility of that data was actually very impressive," Skala adds. "And it was completely consistent with data taken two years previously; I was like 'science works!' and it makes you feel a lot more confident about what you're seeing."
The researchers hope that this work provides the framework for how the imaging technique could be applied at a larger scale for bulk manufacturing.
Analysis of NAD(P)H and FAD autofluorescence reveals distinct metabolic changes in stem cells on Day 0 and Day 1 of differentiation.
"Cardiomyocytes can be differentiated in a suspension culture, too," says Qian. "If we do differentiation in suspension, or organoid differentiation, then it's more like an industry manufacturing scale."
He says that in the future, he'd also like to try to see their autofluorescence technology applied to predicting other cell lineage differentiation, like immune cells or blood cells, which could have other applications.
The project was a perfect example of how scientific ideas are born from collaboration, with Qian's interest in stem cells and his background in chemical engineering paired with Skala's expertise in optical imaging.
"This project was done by a lot of collaboration. It's a team effort," Qian says in appreciation of Heaster who did the predictive modeling, and the undergraduates and lab members who assisted with analysis.
Skala adds: "It's a combination of expertise, which is what we love about science."
Read more from the researchers in their Nature Communications "Behind the Paper" feature.
Metabolism research has morphed from mundane to essential


text:
Q: How to change the background color of an NSPopupButton? I am trying to tackle a problem which sounds pretty simple: changing the background color of an NSPopupButton.
Interface Builder only allows changing the style to a pre-defined one and doesn't allow changing the background color. Also, setting up an IBOutlet didn't help since NSPopupButton doesn't have a setBackgroundColor method.
I also tried subclassing NSPopupButton to override the drawRect method. Here's what I have tried:
- (void)drawRect:(NSRect)dirtyRect
{
    [[NSColor redColor] setFill];
    NSRectFill(dirtyRect);
}

This draws a red rectangle over the NSPopupButton rather than setting it as a background color.
Any ideas on how to go about solving this?

A: You should create a subclass of NSPopUpButtonCell, then override
- (void)drawBezelWithFrame:(NSRect)frame inView:(NSView *)controlView

NSPopupButtonCell is a subclass of NSButtonCell which defines several methods for drawing individual cell components, eg bezel, title, image.
You can then expand the NSPopupButton and change its cell subclass to your new subclass and it should use your drawing methods.
Cocoa primarily uses NSCell to handle drawing, unlike iOS

A: Swift version of @DanBrooker's answer. The example shows setting a background color
class PopUpButtonCell: NSPopUpButtonCell {

    override func drawBezel(withFrame frame: NSRect, in controlView: NSView) {
        guard let context = NSGraphicsContext.current?.cgContext else { return }
        NSColor.red.setFill() // NSColor.white.setFill()
        context.fill(frame)
    }
}

A: The button is draw by the system, so there isn't a real way to set the background color in a way that the system draws it like you want.The only thing that you can do is to draw it in the drawRect method, also drawing the title, and drawing a portion of the rectangle.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


CL should team up with the above mentioned "GLOBAL" internet organization. The fact that more then half of the American population was/is not aware about the "laws and regulations the government wants to impose upon our freedom of speech and "thoughts", was but presented as a law to fight copyright issues ……..???????? I call it censorship…….so when you say go vote, the party i vote for is unfortunately not represented.


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With the increasing cases of privacy breaches and password leaks, it is important to stay secure in today's day and age. However, with different usernames and passwords required on major web services, it can often get confusing to remember them all. In a bid to make that easier, Mozilla Corporation, best known for its popular Firefox web browser has launched Firefox Lockbox password manager for Android devices.


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text:
"It's a disgrace": Birmingham MP's condemn "meagre" free school meal packages
By Nathan Clarke on	 January 12, 2021 Education, News, Politics, welfare
Credit: @dontknowwattodo
Birmingham MP's and Councillors have condemned the "disgusting" food parcels provided to children over lockdown.
Jack Dromey, MP for Erdington, likened the contents of the parcels to "something out of Oliver Twist".
"Some of the food parcels that have been posted on social media in the past 24 hours have been disgraceful. These companies are profiteering from free school meals."
"I find it disgusting that large corporations are putting profits before kids", said Birmingham Councillor for Bromford and Hodge Hill Majid Mahmood.
I find it disgusting that large corporations are putting profits before kids!
The government is forking out £30 vouchers for #FreeSchoolMeals but the same items can be bought from a supermarket for around £5 🤷🏽♂
This from a constituent in #BromfordandHodgeHill👇🏽 pic.twitter.com/VIc4K1XDPt
— Cllr Majid Mahmood (@CllrMajid) January 12, 2021
Preet Kaur Gill, Labour MP for Edgbaston, has called on the government to scrap the food parcel scheme and instead provide food vouchers worth the full £30.
"Families are entitled to £30 worth of food. The government must explain why they are only receiving £5 worth".
Manchester United footballer and anti-poverty activist Marcus Rashford said the parcels were "just not good enough".
"Not even a loaf of bread"
My sons school in Birmingham collected this morning #FreeSchoolMeals pic.twitter.com/6EPlgU3l7C
— melanie (@kiasaas) January 12, 2021
One Birmingham mum said it was a "crying shame" that the government continue to fail struggling parents.
Melanie Powell, an early years practitioner and mum of two, said:
"When I first opened the bag, I thought, 'not even a loaf of bread".
"The message it sends to me is that the health of kids diet is not important. I'm grateful for the food but there is still nowhere near enough for a week".
#FreeSchoolMeals On the left £30 of food. On the right what private company Chartwells have supplied having been awarded a government contract to supply for £30 free school meals.
Utterly shameful profiteering off some of the country's most disadvantaged kids! pic.twitter.com/XcmUm8qM1h
— MunchBunch (@Munchbunch87) January 11, 2021
"I'm not sure what the families are expected to make with them"
Kerry Lenihan, director of the Aston and Nechells foodbank in Birmingham, believes these parcels are "nowhere near adequate."
"For some children the meals they receive in school are absolutely vital to ensuring they get the nutrients they need to grow up healthily. Removing this lifeline, especially with the added pressures from the pandemic, is careless at best and negligent at worst."
Government to investigate
Ms Lenihan has criticised the governments decision to outsource the distribution of food.
"If the government cannot manage the distribution of food parcels adequately then they should give the funding directly to the schools. Teachers genuinely care about their pupils and can ensure those needing food are given adequate provisions"
Chartwells, a catering company providing parcels to families in Birmingham, has promised an immediate investigation.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention, this does not reflect the specification of one of our hampers. Please can you DM us the details of the school that your child attends and we will investigate immediately.
— Chartwells (@Chartwells_UK) January 11, 2021
The Department of Education is also investigating the matter. In a statement they said:
"We have clear guidelines and standards for food parcels, which we expect to be followed. Parcels should contain a varied range of food".
Nathan Clarke
Multiplatform journalist covering crime, education, health and politics in Birmingham

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Music, Arts & Culture » Music
Alt-country progenitors the Old 97's play the Fremont Theater on March 25
by Glen Starkey
In the mid-'90s, the alt-country genre developed via the likes of Uncle Tupelo, Whiskeytown, and the Drive-By Truckers, among others, and the Old 97's were right in there with them.
Formed in Dallas in '93, the self-described "loud folk band" started playing bars but toured the country following the release of their debut album, Hitchhike to Rhome. I didn't really come upon the band until their 1997 release Too Far to Care, their third LP, which opened with "Timebomb"—still one of my all-time favorite songs.
PHOTO BY PAUL MOORE
LOUD AS FOLK: The Old 97's bring their alt-country sounds to the Fremont Theater on March 25, brought to you by Numbskull and Good Medicine Presents.
"I got a timebomb, in my mind Mom./ I hear it ticking but I don't know why./ I call the police, but they don't like me./ I hear 'em whispering when I walk by./ I got a landmine in my bloodline./ I'm not immune to getting blown apart./ She's like a claymore, that's what she's there for./ She's waiting 'round here to get blown apart./ Having her on my brain's like getting hit by a train,/ She's gonna kill me. Oh Celeste, oh Celeste."
This Saturday, March 25, Good Medicine Presents and Numbskull Productions will bring the Old 97's to the Fremont Theater (7 p.m.; all ages; $21 presale at Boo Boo's or ticketfly.com, or $25 at the door).
Amazingly, these many years the band has retained its original line-up: Rhett Miller (guitar and vocals), Murry Hammond (bass and vocals), Ken Bethea (lead guitar), and Philip Peeples (drums). Their name comes from the train song "Wreck of the Old 97," and all told they've released 11 studio albums, most recently Graveyard Whistling last month.
PHOTO BY JASON GONULSEN
FIVE-PART HARMONIES: Ha Ha Tonka (pictured) opens for the Old 97's on March 25, in the Fremont Theater.
The new music is just as hooky, jangly, raucous, and well-written as ever. Miller explained that this follow up to their previous album Most Messed Up—which he called a "wheels-off account of life as a musician, life on the road"—is more about the "aftermath." One standout track is "Good with God," which Miller co-wrote with Brandi Carlile.
"I'm not afraid, I'm good with God/ I got my sins, in fact I got a lot/ I got a soul that's good and flawed/ I'm good with God, I'm good with God/ I'm not afraid, got no regrets/ I paid my dues, I paid my debts/ I made a mess but it's my bed/ No regrets, no regrets// Goodness knows I've done you wrong/ I'm not too gone to see/ All's I know is I'm good with God/ I wonder how she feels about me/ Oh yeah I wonder how she feels about me."
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE JOSH ABBOTT BAND
BUY YOUR TICKETS: Rising country stars The Josh Abbott Band play the Fremont Theater on March 30, courtesy of Numbskull and Good Medicine Presents.
According to Miller via the band's website, "[The album] grapples with spirituality and mortality. Our songs normally hide deeper meanings in the subtext, but they're more on the surface for this record."
He set about responding to the life-on-the-edge themes of Most Messed Up, considering titles such as The Hangover and The Aftermath before settling on Graveyard Whistling.
"That felt like the theme to me—dealing with knottier ideas, taking a lighthearted approach to something much bigger. The trick Old 97's have held on to is to take a song that may have a darker theme and present it as something to be screamed along to in a club. I don't want to sing sad songs in a sad way. You don't even realize there's a tombstone sticking out in the middle of it until the eighth or 10th listen."
Through it all, the four are still a band in the truest sense of the term: "I think our longevity can be attributed primarily to our friendship and ability to overcome those moments when egos want to overtake and obliterate everything in their path," Miller said. "We're just very lucky to be able to do this for a living. It's insane and beautiful and we never, ever take it for granted."
PHOTO COURTESY OF FORTUNATE YOUTH
PEACE, LOVE, AND UNITY: Socially conscious reggae act Fortunate Youth plays SLO Brew on March 23.
Ha Ha Tonka, which released their new album Heart-Shaped Mountain earlier this month, will open the show. In press materials, they call the new recording an "album about love and growth. At a time when divisiveness fills the headlines, Ha Ha Tonka is fighting the good fight and building narrative tributes to friends and loved ones, memories past, and prospects of the future. They five-part harmonize on intimate familiarities—the nascent stages of relationships, deep and lasting bonds, maturation, fear, and loss."
You should also mark your calendar for country act the Josh Abbott Band, playing a Good Medicine show next Thursday, March 30, at the Fremont Theater (7 p.m.; all ages; $20 presale at Boo Boo's or ticketfly.com or $25 at the door). They're touring in support of their fourth album, Front Row Seats.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ZEN MOUNTAIN POETS
PINT NIGHT: Neo-prog folk jazz act Zen Mountain Poets play SLO Brew on March 28.
Peace, love, and unity—those are the themes you'll hear in the music of So-Cal reggae act Fortunate Youth, who are currently touring in support of their new self-titled album. They're slated to play SLO Brew this Thursday, March 23, with opening acts Josh Heinrichs and Iya Terra (10 p.m.; 18 and older; $15 general admission or $30 for admission and a signed album on ticketweb.com).
Fortunate Youth has spent the last seven years touring nearly non-stop, which helped propel their albums to No. 1 on Billboard's reggae chart. They've also raised more than $50,000 for charities ranging from Cancer Awareness to helping children who have lost music programs due to underfunding.
On Tuesday, March 28, neo-prog folk jazz act Zen Mountain Poets play SLO Brew for pint night (10 p.m.; 21-and-older; free).
The space between nostalgia and longing
PHOTO COURTESY OF SNOWAPPLE
FAIRYTALE OPERA: Amsterdam-based trio Snowapple returns to Steynberg Gallery on March 29, playing their folk, pop, and improv multi-instrumentalist show.
Snowapple returns to the Steynberg Gallery this Wednesday, March 29 (7:30 p.m.; all ages; $15 tickets; call 547-0278 for reservations), touring in support of an extended version of their album Tracks—"a themed album with brand new songs about traveling between nostalgia and longing," according to the trio. "They are folk songs, soulfully sung, and they always keep the rhythm of a train that takes you from the Baltic plains to the African savannah."
The trio features three gifted multi-instrumentalists from Amsterdam, and much of their music is about their own extensive travels as well as the travels of others: "for instance, the fatal wandering through the Sahara of Isabelle Eberhardt, or the one way journey that someone makes leaving his devastated country."
The self-described fairytale folk, pop, opera, improv act is unique indeed!
PHOTO COURTESY OF SARAH DARLING
COUNTRY GAL: Rising country chanteuse Sarah Darling plays Eberle Winery on March 24.
Humboldt County-based Diggin Dirt plays Frog and Peach on Thursday, March 23 (10 p.m.; 21-and-older; free). Formed in 2011, they've been delivering everything from roots rock reggae to Afrobeat to heavy funk to appreciative audiences. "We search the earth for the dirtiest of grooves to make you dance and enjoy every bit of life," the band said in press materials. "You gotta dig that dirt!"
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Sarah Darling plays Eberle Winery this Friday, March 24 (7 p.m.; $20 tickets at eberlewinery.com). She recently released her third album, Dream Country, as well as her new single "Where Cowboys Ride." She's had more than half a million downloads worldwide and two No. 1 videos on CMT and GAC. Her biggest hit, "Home to Me," led to performances on Conan O'Brien, Fox & Friends, and opening spots for Carrie Underwood and Kacey Musgraves.
Berkeley-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Simon Lunche was just 9 years old when he formed his band The Blondies, which he helmed for nine years before going solo. He's also Gibson Guitars' youngest endorsed artist in the famed guitar manufacturer's 114-year history, and his velvety voice has been compared to Jeff Buckley, his music to The Beatles. He plays Linnaea's Café this Friday, March 24 (7 p.m.; all ages; pass the hat).
Portland-based rock band Shoring returns to our area for four shows, touring in support of their self-titled debut that comes out at the end of this month: Friday, March 24, at Otter Rock Café (8:30 p.m.); Saturday, March 25, at 927 Beer Company (3 p.m.); and Sunday, March 26, at Thai Bounty (3 p.m.) and Frog and Peach (10 p.m.; 21-and-older). Expect singer-songwriter fare backed by a rock quartet.
PHOTO BY ART TURNER
CANADA'S FINEST: Folk act The Wailin' Jennys play March 25, at Harman Hall in the Performing Arts Center.
Beloved folk act and Red House Records recording artists The Wailin' Jennys play this Saturday, March 25 (7:30 p.m.; all ages; $38 to $56 tickets at 756-4849 or online at calpolyarts.org), at Harman Hall of the SLO-PAC, in support of their new album Bright Morning Stars. The trio started serendipitously when three singer-songwriters got together for a one-time-only performance at a tiny guitar shop in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Now they're loved worldwide.
The Byrom Brothers dance concert happens this Saturday, March 25, at Mongo's starting at 9 p.m. Monty Byrom has written songs for Eddie Money, The Stray Cats, The Knack, and David Lee Roth among others. He also fronted Billy Satellite, New Frontier, and the Academy of Country Music-nominated Big House.
Get your dose of hot swinging jazz this Sunday, March 26, when the Basin Street Regulars hosts the Midnight Rose Jazz Band for two sets as well as the outstanding Cabrillo High School Jazz Band playing intermission, in the Pismo Vets Hall. There's an open jam starting at 11 a.m. (bring your instrument), followed by the dance concert beginning at 1 p.m. ($10 admission at the door).
New Orleans-based Deltaphonic plays Frog and Peach this Wednesday, March 29 (10 p.m.; 21 and older). Touring in support of their upcoming release, See Red, a swampy blues collection that blends Mississippi hill country blues with New Orleans funk and rock 'n' roll, the duo pumps out a really big sound!
Get out and sing!
On Saturday, March 25, the brand new Templeton Harmony, "an all ages—no audition community choir and service group," will form at 1 p.m. at the Templeton Park Gazebo.
"Love to sing? Want to sing with others? Never sung in a choir? Want to help those in need? Then this is the perfect opportunity to sing and shine!" organizers said.
There is no cost to join Templeton Harmony; the only commitment to participate is agreeing to work with the group on one or two community service projects each year. For more info, call Matt's Music at 237-0054 or email matt@mattsmusicandmore.com.
Keep up with New Times Senior Staff Writer Glen Starkey via Twitter at twitter.com/glenstarkey, friend him at facebook.com/glenstarkey, or contact him at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
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The three techniques we will do are the tarnished foil technique, the blackboard technique and the Josephs coat technique. I will share the other two cards in upcoming posts. Be sure to come back to see how those are done.
This card starts out with a Blushing Bride card base, 11″ x 5 1/2″, scored at 4 1/4″. Next up was a 4″ x 5 1/4″ layer of Basic Black CS. Before adhering this layer to the card, I rubbed it with the embossing buddy. I used Versamark ink to stamp the bride from the Wonderful Moments stamp set in the lower right corner. The flower from the Better Together stamp set was stamped in the upper left corner in Versamark ink. I then poured white stampin' emboss powder over both, shook off excess and melting it with my heat tool. After that cooled a little, I used a ruler and a white marker to draw lines around the outer edge of the black layer (as seen in photo).
I adhered the Basic Black layer to my card base with snail adhesive and headed over to my Big Shot. I die cut the wavy banner from the Bunch of Banners Framelit Dies out of Blushing Bride CS. The circles were cut using the Layering Circles Framelit Dies out of Whisper White and Blushing Bride CS. The Layering Circle Framelit set is a great combination of circles and scalloped circles in a bunch of sizes that layer over one another beautifully. I stamped the "for the bride" sentiment from the Wonderful Moments stamp set in Blushing Bride ink onto the top Whisper White circle. These pieces were layered onto the card front using snail adhesive and Stampin' Dimensionals.
For the interior of the card, I used a 4″ x 5 1/4″ layer of Whisper White CS and stamped the sentiment and swirls from the Wonderful Moments stamp set in Blushing Bride ink. This was adhered to the inside with snail adhesive.
I'm thrilled with how it came out and I hope you are too! If you want to make one of these cards for yourself, I invite you to come to a local class or order my "class to go" option or order the supplies from my store to make your own. What ever you decide to do, I hope it's stress free! Remember – "There's NO STRESS in stamping".


text:
Q: Drops to BusyBox, but can continue upon exiting So I just installed 11.10 on my Dell Precision T5500 from the live cd.  The live cd worked fine, but when I attempt to boot from hard drive I end up at the BusyBox prompt.  However, if I simply type "exit" and Enter it continues booting and I get the Ubuntu graphical login screen.  How do I fix things so I don't stop at the BusyBox prompt?
I found an interesting similar problem at http://samiux.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/howto-avoid-to-drop-to-busybox-in-ubuntu-810/, but can't exactly implement the solution since the /boot/grub/menu.lst file doesn't appear to exist in 11.10.
Any ideas?  It would be nice to be able to reboot my system remotely.

A: You can try the solution you found by editing /etc/default/grub instead; edit the line labelled GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and run sudo update-grub to make the changes take effect.
You should end up with something like
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash bootdelay=90"

This has the same effect as editing menu.lst (actually, it's now called grub.cfg) but in a way that the Ubuntu packages understand, so when a kernel or grub gets updated, the changes will persist. You generally don't want to be editing the grub config manually.


I was searching Google for a seat when I came across this forum. Then I saw a truck I recognized from Facebook in one of the post's here and realized it was Bill's.
Anyways, I've got a 1960 F100 that we bought last summer. I drove it almost home when it died 2 miles from the house. Finally got it running again, for the most part, last week. Still need to get the insurance up before I go drive it up and down the road, which I'm itching to do.
We named her Annabelle and she has a transplanted 292 y-block. She is a red step-side with white grill, bumpers and wheels. Nothing really fancy, unless you consider all the rust and bondo under the red paint. There are big plans for chrome and paint and engine and sheetmetal work, but will be slow in coming.
Hopefully this site will become as big as FTE or the HAMB websites, but with a more straight-forward focus on these fridge's. Thanks Bill for creating this site.
KC-Ray wrote: I was searching Google for a seat when I came across this forum. Then I saw a truck I recognized from Facebook in one of the post's here and realized it was Bill's.


text:
March, 2015 Very Rev. Gregory J. Dobson, VF, Pastor of St. Mary of the Angels, sends request to Most. Rev. Richard J. Malone to begin the application process. He lists 22 reasons he believes the church is worthy of this designation. This request is granted by the bishop.
May, 2015 Fr. Dobson acquires through the Bishop the Vatican's Application from the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (CDWDS) which the Pope entrusts to review such applications. The Application's 119 questions are translated from Latin into English by Rev. David Flood, OFM at St. Bonaventure University. The work to answer the questions begins.
May 2015-May 2016 - Rev. Dobson places Jennifer Kane, a parishioner with B.A in Journalism and M.A. in English (St. Bonaventure University alumna) to lead the research and write the application which becomes a detailed report concerning the origin, history, and the religious activity of the church (its worship life and its pastoral associations and charitable works) along with photos illustrating the exterior/interior architecture of the church with emphasis on its art and furnishings for liturgy and worship. A thorough examination of the history and origins of St. Mary of the Angels from 1852 to present day is necessary to accurately answer many of the 119 questions. Extensive professional photography which she coordinated among five photographers is necessary to supply the photographic evidence requested by the CDWDS in Rome. Parish staff and parish archivists assisted in compiling the information.
May, 2016 the Application is finished and printed in the form of a 100-page hardbound book and presented to Bishop Malone.
June, 2016 After review and modifications to the Application, Bishop Malone sends it to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops seeking its nihil obstat or favorable judgment which must accompany the Application.
August, 2016 Most Reverend Joseph E. Kurtz, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, grants its nihil obstat representing the USCCB and sends the Application to the CDWDS in Rome on August 5 via the Papal Nuncio.
August, 2016 the USCCB letter dated August 1, 2016 along with the completed Application is received by the CDWDS in Rome.
February, 2017 The CDWDS approves the Application and grants the title— Minor Basilica—acting on behalf of Pope Francis under its Prefect, Robert Cardinal Sarah, who signed the decree.
March 3, 2017 The CDWDS sends to the Papal Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, its letter and official Decree confirming that the Church of Saint Mary of the Angels in Olean has been granted the title, Minor Basilica. This decree is signed by Cardinal Sarah and dated 14 February 2017, the Feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius.
March 6, 2017 Bishop Malone receives the Decree and letter of affirmation from the Papal Nuncio.
March 17, 2017, Feast of St. Patrick, Bishop Malone announces the Decree at a media conference at Our Lady of Victory National Shrine and Basilica at 9:30am. Fr. Greg, who attended the OLV announcement, announces to the St Mary's congregation on the same day at the 12:15 Mass.


text:
package raven.sqdev.styles;

import org.eclipse.swt.SWT;
import org.eclipse.swt.layout.GridData;
import org.eclipse.swt.layout.GridLayout;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Composite;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Text;
import org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI;

/**
 * The style used for Code
 *
 * @author Raven
 *
 */
public class CodeStyle extends SQDevStyle {

	/**
	 * Creates an instance of this CodeStyle
	 */
	public CodeStyle() {
		super("Code", "Code", "/Code", true);
	}

	@Override
	public Composite createComposite(Composite parent, String content) {
		if (!needsOwnComposite()) {
			return null;
		}

		Composite base = new Composite(parent, SWT.BORDER);

		GridLayout layout = new GridLayout(1, false);
		layout.marginHeight = 1;
		layout.marginWidth = 1;
		base.setLayout(layout);

		Text code = new Text(base, SWT.BORDER | SWT.MULTI | SWT.WRAP | SWT.READ_ONLY);
		code.setText(content);

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text:
Waiting for Dark: Inside Two Anarchists' Quest for Untraceable Money
Author: Andy GreenbergAndy Greenberg
Then One
Amir Taaki and Cody Wilson are cruising north through Texas on Interstate 35 in the 4:30 am predawn darkness. One of the headlights on the aging BMW Wilson's driving is burned out, and he's wearing sunglasses. "They're prescription," he says drily.
It's May Day, every anarchist's favorite holiday, and the two 26-year-olds have marked the occasion by releasing a piece of software that represents their best attempt so far to undermine every government in the world. A call from a lawyer friend has reminded them that creative US prosecutors might hit them with conspiracy or other charges. So they've decided to skip town.
Half an hour earlier, they pulled out of Wilson's apartment in Austin and began the long nighttime drive to Dallas, where Wilson has booked Taaki a last-minute flight to Barcelona. Taaki has friends there living in a squat in an abandoned police station. Wilson himself plans to lay low in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. A 29-year-old Canadian friend, cryptographer Peter Todd, is riding along in the back seat.
Not far into the drive, I see Wilson fiddling with something near the gearshift, and he explains that he's just removed the battery from his cell phone to prevent its being used by police to track him.
Amir Taaki (left) and Cody Wilson in Wilson's Austin apartment.
Julia Robinson/WIRED
In the passenger seat, Taaki, who doesn't even own a working cell phone, just laughs. The diminutive Iranian-Brit sports a black mustache and what can properly be described only as a mullet. He seems to be treating his sudden escape from the US as an exciting adventure. But Wilson, a square-jawed southerner with a trim beard, displays something closer to paranoia. "What are the chances we'll make it through the next three hours without being pulled over by the cops?" he asks. No response.
Concerns about the police are justified for Wilson and Taaki, who have dedicated their careers to building some of the most controversial software ever offered to the public. Wilson gained notoriety last year as the creator of the world's first fully 3D-printable gun, a set of CAD files known as the Liberator that anyone can download and print in the privacy of their home to create a working, lethal firearm. Taaki and his collaborators recently unveiled a prototype for a decentralized online marketplace, known as DarkMarket, that's designed to be impervious to shutdown by the feds.
Wilson and Taaki intend Dark Wallet to be the most user-friendly method yet to spend bitcoins under the cover of anonymity's shadow.
The programming provocation they released a few hours ago is called Dark Wallet, a piece of software designed to allow untraceable, anonymous online payments using the cryptocurrency bitcoin. Taaki and Wilson see in bitcoin's stateless transactions the potential for a new economy that fulfills the crypto-anarchist dream of truly uncontrollable money. They envision a digital payment network that circumvents every authority's attempts to tax it, seize it, censor it, track it, or imprison those who would use it to trade in contraband like weapons, drugs, and even abhorrent services like murder-for-hire and child pornography.
And yet for all that, Dark Wallet isn't necessarily illegal. Taaki and Wilson, who spent two years in law school before dropping out to pursue his anarchist dreams, argue their creation is just a piece of code and thus protected by free speech laws. Then again, Wilson also has described it publicly as "money-laundering software." The evening before, he received an unhappy email from his lawyer friend, cautioning him about expressing criminal intent in an interview with me that was published two days earlier. Wilson's half of the ensuing phone conversation went like this: "How can we cower now? We're the people who do things and tell them to put up or shut up … [pause] … I guess you'd rather I go back to running guns? … [pause] … OK, I'll talk to you later."
Hence the unplanned road trip.
The drive through the empty Texas landscape gives me a chance to ask the looming question: How will the world change if Taaki and Wilson succeed in their quest to make money truly anonymous? "There's going to be a bit of a shake-up," says Taaki, who speaks with a British accent that borders on cockney. "No one knows how it's going to turn out."
He pauses. "The assassination markets are going to be a bit shit." Untraceable murder-for-hire, in other words, could be an unfortunate side effect of their financial innovation.
Cody Wilson.
Then he seems to regain his resolve. "I believe in the hacker ethic. Empower the small guy, privacy and anonymity, mistrust authority, promote decentralized alternatives, freedom of information," he says. "These are good principles. The individual against power."
Warming to his subject, Taaki raises his voice as if he's speaking to a crowd larger than the three of us here in the car. "But it's important to be clear that it may not be good on balance, either," he says. "The world is not perfect. Good and evil rise together."
Wilson cuts in from the driver's seat, shifting into agitprop mode. "It's time for a good old-fashioned pendulum swing," he says. "Where the people fear the government there's tyranny. Where the government fears the people there's liberty. They're afraid, therefore it's good."
But Taaki seems willing to contemplate a more uncertain outcome of the anarchy he and Wilson seek to create.
"It will be different, more diverse," he muses, as if imagining this new reality for the first time. "We'll step out into a new world, and we can explore it in any direction we choose."
The 21st century has already seen its first experiment in crypto-anarchy: the billion-dollar, anonymous online drug marketplace known as Silk Road. In October 2013, the FBI seized the well-hidden server that hosted the site on the anonymity network Tor. The agency also arrested its alleged founder, 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, calling his work a vast narcotics and money-laundering conspiracy.
Cody Wilson would call it a mere proof of concept.
In a packed bar on East London's Brick Lane two months after the Silk Road crackdown, Wilson stood onstage—inexplicably wearing a single leather glove—and scolded the audience of the London Bitcoin Expo: "Ross Ulbricht is alleged to be the founder and operator of Silk Road, the glittering jewel of all things libertarian, black market, and wonderful. And it's a severe indictment of the modern libertarian conscience that he can't get any support at all." (At the time, just $3,800 dollars had been donated to the fund-raising site created by Ulbricht's family, FreeRoss.org, well short of their $50,000 goal. That lukewarm response likely had much to do with prosecutors' claims that Ulbricht had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoins to contacts he believed were hit men who would kill his enemies, including a blackmailer and a potential informant.)
"If bitcoin means anything it means a thousand silk roads... it means, fuck your law!" —Cody Wilson
Wilson called out those in the bitcoin community who applauded the takedown of Silk Road as a step toward "legitimizing" their cryptocurrency, helping to shift it from a lawless anarcho-money innovation to some sort of sanitized sequel to the status quo payment system—Visa and Western Union with smaller transaction fees. "Ladies and gentlemen, the problem with Silk Road was that it was centralized," Wilson continued. "One man ran it and they found a server. People were back at the drawing board on day two. There are going to be peer-to-peer Silk Roads not managed by one man.
"If bitcoin means anything, it means a thousand Silk Roads," he said, to rising applause. "It means, fuck your law!"
Six months later, that prophecy has already begun to come true. Even before Wilson's appearance in London, "Silk Road 2.0" had launched, dealers and users swarming the site by the thousands to trade bitcoins for everything from black tar heroin to forged passports. A mini industry of anonymous copycats has followed, sprouting up overnight like psychedelic mushrooms on cow patties: 1776, Agora, Alpaca Marketplace, Andromeda, BlackBank, Bluesky, Cannabis Road, Cloud-Nine, Evolution, Hydra, Majestic Garden, the Marketplace, Mr. Nice Guy, the Onion Market, Outlaw Market, Pandora, Pirate Market, Silk Street, Silkkitie, Tor Bazaar, Tortuga, Underground Marketplace—and likely more that have kept their names better hidden from nosy reporters. According to a study published in May by the nonprofit Digital Citizens Alliance, more than 40,000 mostly illegal products are now listed for sale on the obscured corner of the Internet known as the dark web, more than twice as many as before the Silk Road bust.
Amir Taaki.
New sites equivalent to Google and Yelp for the online underground allow users to sort through the multiplying outlets. Many of the next-generation contraband sales sites have implemented a clever mechanism known as multisignature transactions, designed to prevent users from losing any funds stored by the vendor if its administrators disappear or the site is seized by law enforcement. And as Wilson predicted, the next generation of anarcho-enterprises already promise to make the feds' next seizure vastly more difficult: Taaki's DarkMarket and a project spun off from it called OpenBazaar are intended to function without any central server or administrator. Anyone can buy or sell directly to anyone else in these flat, peer-to-peer systems, so that snooping cops would have to collar users one-by-one to take the market down.
Bitcoin powers all of these budding anonymous bazaars, making it a point of vulnerability in the quest for truly anonymous markets. Indeed, the cryptocurrency created by Satoshi Nakamoto and launched in 2009 has never been the perfectly untraceable payment system that some naive criminals believe it to be.
Bitcoin works only because every transaction is recorded in a public ledger known as the blockchain, an unforgeable accounting file that's constantly being replicated and distributed to thousands of computers running bitcoin's software. The blockchain doesn't identify who's spending or receiving bitcoins with real names, only jumbled strings of characters known as bitcoin addresses. In theory, that makes the digital currency as anonymous as cash and as frictionless as PayPal.
But in practice, bitcoin isn't anonymous so much as pseudonymous; if a user's name is tied to his or her bitcoin addresses, anyone—cop, corporate data hound, random snoop—can follow the blockchain to learn every detail of where his or her bitcoins end up. "It doesn't matter if the bagman is wearing a mask and a hoodie if the bills are marked," as Johns Hopkins computer science researcher Ian Miers puts it. "With bitcoin, all the bills are marked."
Bitcoin's pseudonyms can be cracked when the feds send a legal request to a law-abiding bitcoin service or exchange, many of which increasingly require proof of a user's identity. When I used bitcoin to buy marijuana from Silk Road and two other online black markets last year (purely as a demonstration, rest assured), UC San Diego researcher Sarah Meiklejohn traced all three drug buys from my known address at the bitcoin service Coinbase through the blockchain, and quickly figured out exactly how much I'd spent at each of the three contraband markets.
Yet it takes only a technical nudge to drop bitcoins into the shadows. Send your coins through a "laundry" service like Bitcoin Fog or BitBlender, and the service will mix them up with coins from other bitcoiners and, if you're lucky, give you back the same amount. (Users of the services occasionally complain that their coins instead disappear without a trace.)
Those laundries, along with a growing movement of more private bitcoin alternatives like Darkcoin and Zerocoin, can be described as simply trying to make cryptocurrency more like cash, says Jon Matonis, the executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation. Hundred dollar bills, he points out, are also mostly anonymous and untraceable.
Matonis warns that if governments push too hard to control cryptocurrencies, more than they do with old-fashioned cash, bitcoiners will turn to more anonymous payment tools or even integrate their features directly into the bitcoin protocol. "For regulators, this is not a consequence-free zone," Matonis says. "Every measure is met with a countermeasure." Shine too strong a light on the inner workings of the crypto economy, in other words, and it may retreat into the dark altogether.
Wilson and Taaki intend Dark Wallet to be the most user-friendly method yet to spend bitcoins under the cover of anonymity's shadow—without switching to a niche alternative coin or trusting any shady middleman.
Every coin spent through the program, an add-on to Google's Chrome browser, gets matched up and merged with another transaction in a process called CoinJoin. The trick is a bit like Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, who agree to murder each other's victims: When Dark Wallet combines two transactions on behalf of two users, their coins are spent simultaneously. The blockchain only records one movement of money, and since the CoinJoin negotiation is encrypted, there's no way to tell whose coins end up where. As Dark Wallet's user base grows—today it's already in the low thousands despite still being in development—those CoinJoins will grow to combine three or even more transactions. Add enough users and the system becomes "a magnificent layer of uncertainty" over "a massive confusion of addresses," as one early tester describes it.
Dark Wallet also offers what it calls "stealth addresses" that allow a user to receive bitcoins at an encrypted address, where only he or she can retrieve them using a private key. When a coin passes through either a CoinJoin transaction or a stealth address, it becomes vastly more difficult to track, making taxation, regulation, and prosecution virtually impossible. "We want a bitcoin that laughs at the regulatory pageantry," Wilson says. "We're going to permanently problematize bitcoin's reputation."
Bitcoin's reputation is hardly spotless now. It's already being used for darker purposes than drug markets: The International Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that several major child pornography sites accept bitcoin. Late last year a site called Assassination Market attempted to use bitcoin to crowdfund the murder of political figures. Fans donated more than $50,000 for anyone who killed then-Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke—a bête noire of the cryptolibertarian crowd—though there haven't been any known attempts to claim its bounties.
A recent article on a blog supporting the Islamic State, the extremist group that's occupied portions of Iraq, praised bitcoin as a potential channel for funding jihadi fighters. It specifically cited Dark Wallet as a useful tool for hiding those flows of money. "Dark Wallet is a new Bitcoin wallet designed to completely hide the activities of it's [sic] users, providing total online anonymity.... This allows our brothers stuck outside of the [Islamic State territory] to avoid government taxes along with secretly fund the mujahideen with no legal danger upon them," reads the post. "It is simple, easy, and we ask Allah to hasten it's [sic] usage for us."
If Dark Wallet works as promised—a big "if," given that the software is still entirely experimental and only scheduled to enter a more public test phase later this summer—it may indeed provide those violent revolutionaries a new source of funding. "It's a destructive model," says Juan Zarate, a former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush who has worked on efforts to root out terrorist financing and seize the assets of Saddam Hussein. "To say you're going to encourage or facilitate illicit activity regardless of the consequences strikes me as not only irresponsible but bordering on flat out illegal."
Taaki responds that Dark Wallet isn't about financing bloodshed. "Humanity doesn't need tools for funding violence, and that's not what this is about," he says. "We do need tools to buy and sell drugs online, to gamble online, to transfer money to Iranians and North Koreans, to enable kids to run businesses on the Internet, to manage resources collectively."
Wilson takes a harder line. "Well, yes, bad things are going to happen on these marketplaces," he says. "To quote the old civil libertarians, liberty is a dangerous thing."
In fact, he chose Dark Wallet's name as a reference to "going dark," a term the FBI uses when it describes its worst-case scenario of all communications becoming perfectly encrypted, foiling the bureau's crime-fighting surveillance. But the potential to create a new, lawless society in the shadows of an impotent government is exactly what Wilson has in mind. "Bitcoin is what they fear it is," he says in the voiceover to a fundraising video for Dark Wallet that has collected more than $70,000 from supporters. "A way to leave. To forbid. To make a choice. There's a system approaching perfection just in time for our disappearance."
"So," he intones dramatically, his figure in the video half-hidden in shadow. "Let there be dark."
Wilson and Taaki make an unlikely pair: Wilson dresses in neat polo shirts and baseball caps; when I first met Taaki, he was wearing stained sweatpants and four layers of moth-eaten sweaters. Wilson has proven to be a master of fundraising and recently signed a $250,000 deal to write a memoir for Simon & Schuster. Taaki, despite his bitcoin obsession, seems to be chronically broke. And while Wilson holds forth like a Nietzschean, Tyler Durden–style prophet of the apocalypse, Taaki speaks more like a wild-eyed idealist.
But over the past two years, Taaki and Wilson have traveled together to half a dozen countries, the Texas-rooted Wilson following the itinerant Taaki in his wandering. They seem to deeply enjoy each other's company; they're capable of bringing one another to tears of laughter recounting favorite 4chan memes. And when it comes to politics, they're both ready to tear down every existing power structure and start from scratch.
Amir Taaki grew up the oldest son of an Iranian real estate developer and his British artist wife in the small southeast English town of Broadstairs. He remembers his grammar school teachers as "fascists." One, for instance, would scream at students and punish them by throwing a bottle full of beads on the floor, forcing kids to pick them up one by one. Miss one and he would scatter the beads again.
Taaki discovered early on that he had an innate talent with computers and programming. He used it to exact revenge, hacking into the school IT administrator's computer repeatedly. He also cut holes in the school fence to escape to the supermarket in the middle of the day and broke into the teachers' offices with friends to carry out what they called "operations": rearranging the furniture, cutting surveillance camera wires, changing door knobs. He was expelled at the age of 17. "I never liked being told what to do, really," he says. "A lot of my life has been a bit of a struggle against that."
At home, Taaki's father was as strict as his teachers but less predictable: His sister Jamila remembers their father flying into a rage if his son swore or even said something in the wrong tone. Yet he often overlooked more serious mischief; Taaki and his sister once broke into an old hotel, stole the bibles from every room, doused them with cleaning fluid, set them on fire, and threw them down a well to see how deep it went. For that, their father never punished them. "Amir has always been very special and always had this general sense of disobedience," Jamila says. "The squats, open-source software—all of it is about actively controlling your destiny instead of being part of some set and ready system."
Wilson's childhood was positively conventional by comparison. Growing up in Arkansas, he was a Boy Scout, then a varsity track athlete and a straight-A student. He initially adopted the politics of his parents, neoconservative Republicans with what would today be described as a Tea Party distrust of big government. Wilson's father practices as an asset protection lawyer, and in some ways Wilson sees his quest for untouchable currency as the logical extension of that work.
The elder Wilson also was a pastor at several churches; father and son spent hours debating philosophy and theology. "I was not his equal," Dennis Wilson says of his son. "The hardest theological questions asked of me in my years of being a pastor were asked by my son before the age of 15."
Wilson read his father's copy of Friedrich Hayek's libertarian gospel The Road To Serfdom for the first time even earlier, when he was 10. By high school he was a Marxist. By college he discovered critical theory and anarchism, and spent those years honing radically antistate views. "When I wasn't doing anything else, I was sitting in the library, doing this massive survey of political thought," Wilson says. Today, library copies of Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and Foucault are strewn around his Austin apartment, next to components of AK-47s and 3-D-printed pistols.
Wilson holding a Liberator 3D-printed pistol in his kitchen in 2013.
Jay Janner/Austin American Statesman via AP
After graduating from the University of Central Arkansas with a degree in literature, Wilson enrolled in law school at the University of Texas at Austin, thinking he would follow in his father's footsteps. But his new radical hobbies were far more interesting. "I wanted to do something, other and beyond this terrible hell of the same," he says.
After the Citizens United ruling on campaign finance in 2010, he and a friend decided to create a fund-raising political action committee for bankrolling extreme attack ads against candidates from both political parties. "We would pick the biggest sellout and go after them," Wilson says. "We thought we could define a new class of super PAC that could run American political culture into the gutter. It seemed fun."
When that project failed to raise serious money, Wilson came up with the idea of becoming some kind of arms dealer. With the buzz around consumer 3-D printers like the Makerbot growing in 2012, he saw the potential to create the first fully printable lethal firearm. As he saw it, this Wiki-Weapon would pose a brilliant quandary for gun control advocates: If firearms become purely digital, the second amendment and the first merge, and free speech protections apply to weapons. "Everywhere there's a computer, there would be the promise of a gun," he told me when we first spoke in 2012. "I see a world where contraband will pass underground through the data cables to be printed in our homes as the drones move overhead. I see a kind of poetry there. I dream of this very weird future and I'd like to be a part of it."
That summer, Wilson launched a fund-raiser for the project, which he called Defense Distributed, on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. The campaign managed to collect a few thousand dollars before being booted from the site, its funds seized for violations of Indiegogo's terms of service. So Wilson, who had watched WikiLeaks battle against a payments embargo orchestrated by PayPal, Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, and others in early 2011, solicited bitcoin donations instead. He won't reveal exactly how much he raised. But as bitcoin's exchange rate against the dollar rocketed in late 2012 and 2013, he says the cryptocurrency came to represent more than 99 percent of his funds.
"Amir has always been very special and always had this general sense of disobedience." —Jamila Taaki
In May of 2013, after months of testing, Wilson fired the world's first 3-D-printed pistol in a remote central Texas firing range. He called it the Liberator. He quit law school the same week.
Despite a State Department demand that Defense Distributed take down the gun's blueprints or face an investigation for possible illegal export of munitions, the files immediately spread across the web and were downloaded more than 100,000 times in two days. A year later, Congress still hasn't caught up: An attempt to add a provision against 3-D-printed gun components to the Undetectable Firearms Act last year fell flat, as lawmakers deadlocked on issues that many of them seemed to dismiss as science fiction.
Taaki, meanwhile, took a more wayward path. He tried a career as a videogame programmer but left his job amid infighting among the open source developers. Disillusioned with programming, he wandered Europe and the Middle East for years, living off his winnings as an online poker player. He slept in squats, jumped turnstiles, and learned Esperanto. As gambling started to feel rote and mechanical, he began to imagine programming his own poker site based on open source code, exposing the cryptographic algorithms so that the games would be provably fair. As he explored ways to handle payments on the site, a mathematician friend sent him Satoshi Nakamoto's bitcoin white paper, which in late 2010 still seemed like a theoretical moonshot. After several days of reading bitcoin forums, "suddenly everything connected and it was like, oh wow, fuck, a big fire in my head," he says.
Over the next few years, Taaki lived through the peaks and pitfalls of the early bitcoin boom, gaining a track record that has made him a hero to some bitcoiners and a hoodlum to others. In 2011, for instance, he built one of the first bitcoin exchanges, Britcoin. He also later consulted at a bitcoin trading firm called Bitcoinica that went bankrupt after a massive hack. Many of the company's users blame Taaki for open-sourcing the code and revealing credentials that allowed much of its funds to be stolen. He's named as one of the defendants in a pending lawsuit in California that seeks $460,000.
With a kind of willful optimism, Taaki dismisses that fiasco as a "lot of drama." He forged ahead with new projects like a complete reimplementation of bitcoin known as libbitcoin, a full rewriting of the currency's code that many consider cleaner and more modular than Nakamoto's original work. He published it along with a libbitcoin manifesto expressing the need to keep bitcoin from being coopted by centralized power, complete with a fist as the PDF's watermark.
Cody Wilson speaking at the London Bitcoin Expo in a Brick Lane bar.
Ray Tang/Rex/REX USA
In 2012, Taaki spotted Wilson's bitcoin fund-raiser for Defense Distributed. He wrote to Wilson two days after his campaign was banned from Indiegogo and asked Wilson to speak at a bitcoin conference in London, where they met for the first time. "We started a kind of friendship almost instantly," Wilson says, as I watch them tell the story of their bromance in the basement of an Austin anarchist bookshop for a radio broadcast called the Crypto Show, on the eve of their Dark Wallet release. "Amir and bitcoin lived together in my mind from that same point."
"I'm touched," Taaki adds, grinning.
Wilson puts his arm around Taaki and gives him a squeeze. "Love you, man."
A few months after Wilson's Liberator debut, Taaki emailed Wilson about his idea for a new bitcoin application tailored to the needs of crypto-anarchists. Wilson saw it as a fitting sequel to his 3-D-printed gun: a piece of code that opens an uncloseable can of worms for the federal government. "You've set yourself up to regulate bitcoin," Wilson says, addressing his enemies in Washington. "Regulate this.'"
Their goal, with both the 3-D-printed gun and untraceable currency, isn't simply to help people violate the law. In fact, it's to give people tools that make illegal behavior so commonplace and technically trivial that the law ceases to be relevant. In Wilson and Taaki's version of the future, technology, not law, makes the rules. "We're declaring ourselves sovereign," Taaki says. "We're making the government obsolete."
In a dim room in an abandoned meat market on the graffiti-covered outskirts of Milan, Taaki sits in a folding chair before a rapt group of Italian anarchists. It's late 2013, and for the past 10 days, Taaki and his programming mentor and partner Pablo Martinez have been managing a group of more than a dozen coders and designers from around the world—a loose-knit collective spanning more than 10 countries that calls itself unSystem—that's been camped out in an upstairs room, working on Dark Wallet.
Wilson stopped by the squat a few days ago, on his way to the London Bitcoin Expo, to hand over the first portion of the money from his fundraiser, which will be doled out to pay unSystem's coders when they hit certain milestones. But it's Taaki who's organized the no-frills venue, brought unSystem together, and serves as its host. Following a schedule with little regard for night and day, he and the other coders hack on Dark Wallet for hours, hold impromptu teaching sessions on various crypto schemes, smoke heroic amounts of marijuana, and sleep on mattresses in a frigid, unheated room next door.
Now, lit by the devilish glow of a wood-burning stove behind him, Taaki lays out for the visiting anarchists a view of the crypto-anarchic future that's far cheerier than his surroundings. "Bitcoin will enable humans to organize in ways that weren't before possible," he says, gesturing wildly with a giant spliff held upright in his right fist like a middle finger. "It will allow people to assemble together and build structures that we've never imagined."
WikiLeaks, he reminds the group, was able to raise donations in bitcoin to circumvent the financial blockade against it. When Kim Dotcom's copyright-flouting file-transfer website Megaupload and all his bank accounts were seized by the feds in 2012, Dotcom reemerged months later with a new, bitcoin-accepting encrypted storage startup.
Taaki goes on to describe the bitcoin anarchist's elusive ideal: decentralized, autonomous corporations whose equity is tracked in the bitcoin blockchain rather than in legal contracts and whose funds are held at a bitcoin address controlled in part by every stakeholder. With tricks like multisignature transactions, it's theoretically possible to create accounts in which thousands of people control a pool of bitcoins simultaneously with no leader, and coins can only be moved when some majority agrees to cryptographically sign a transaction.
In that future, math and consensus, not violence, might govern the control of resources. The result, as Taaki describes it, would be a new society where code replaces courts and men with guns as the arbiter of civilization. "We have new tools, a new class of mathematical contracts, based on the incorruptible rules of the cosmos," he says, his voice resonating through the empty building.
This is Taaki at the height of his idealistic rhetoric. But after his speech, a member of the audience finds Taaki on a couch upstairs, in a room filled with unSystem coders in front of laptops. The Italian visitor asks him an innocent question: If bitcoin is such a force for good, why give Dark Wallet such a menacing name? "It's like the word faggot or nigger," Taaki says without hesitation. "Those words were used as slurs, and then they were taken back. That's what we're doing with the black market. The black market is cool! The black market is better than the white market!"
"Dark like a Spaniard!" Taaki continues, grinning impishly and raising his voice for the benefit of his half dozen Spanish friends who traveled to Milan with him from Catalonia. "Dark like an Italian! Dark like my balls!
"We're villains! We're going to reclaim our word, and we're going to be proud of it."
Six months of coding and wanderlust later, Taaki has made his way from Milan to New York to Toronto to Wilson's home in Austin, where the plan is to release an early version of Dark Wallet and then to continue refining the software for another month before heading to California. The two friends sit in Wilson's living room as Taaki fiddles with Wilson's AR-15 in his lap. Perhaps thinking about the legal advice from his friend, Wilson tells Taaki that he has a "bad feeling."
Taaki stops playing with the gun. "You think I should skedaddle?"
"If you're going to go, you should go now," Wilson says. "Do you have any money to buy a ticket?"
"I have 50 euros," Taaki replies. Wilson says he'll buy the ticket.
Later that night, they're on the road to Dallas. As the trip stretches into its second hour, the sky begins to glow from behind the horizon, and the conundrum of how anonymous money will change the world still hasn't been answered.
"I see a world where contraband will pass underground through the data cables to be printed in our homes as the drones move overhead" —Cody Wilson
Now it's Peter Todd, a bitcoin consultant whom Taaki and Wilson have given the title of chief scientist of the Dark Wallet project, who's posing the hard questions from the back seat. What if, he asks, untraceable bitcoins are used to secretly fund the campaigns of entrenched political leaders, empowering the powerful instead of the powerless?
"I don't give a fuck about elections," Taaki answers.
"I guess my question is, have you ever said 'this might make the world worse if I shook it up in this way?'" Todd asks.
"Bitcoin is about empowerment for those that want to be empowered. Yes, it has a cruelty to it," Taaki says.
"But maybe it empowers 'might makes right' values," Todd says.
"We can only think a few steps ahead," Taaki answers. "It's all pie in the sky."
"I just think we're better at tactics than strategy," Todd says.
After a few moments' silence, Wilson quotes some Nietzsche: the moment in Thus Spoke Zarathustra when the book's prophet preaches to the people about the Last Man and the Overman. But no one picks up the thread.
The sun begins to rise out of Taaki's passenger-side window. "I don't know," he says. "No, the world won't be a wonderful place with bunny rabbits and a beautiful utopia where everyone has equal amounts of money.
"But it will be interesting, won't it?"


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text:
'Nowhere to go but up'
by Barry Yeoman on January 8, 2016
Don't blame the recent flooding along the Mississippi River on the rain. We created this mess.
Originally published in onEarth.
A flooded bridge after the recent deluge in the Midwest. Photo courtesy of Army Corps of Engineers.
TWO DAYS AFTER CHRISTMAS, Jamie Nash-Mayberry received a text message from one of her students during a rare out-of-town vacation. "When u get time," it said, "check out the river stages."
After heavy rainfall, the Mississippi River had been steadily rising, and by early January, the floodwaters would ultimately kill 25 people in Illinois and Missouri. The student had texted from Wolf Lake, Illinois, where Nash-Mayberry teaches social studies at Shawnee High School. The farm community butts up against the Mississippi 100 miles south of St. Louis, and residents have long worried about what might happen if its earthen levee gave way.
Back in 2010, after reading a newspaper article about the region's aging levees, Nash-Mayberry began teaching her students about flood risks in their community. This real-life lesson energized the kids, many of whose families have lived in Wolf Lake for generations. They wrote to elected officials and to Oprah Winfrey. They hosted a summit that attracted levee-board members and Army Corps of Engineers commanders. It was a palpable lesson in citizenship, and each class passed its learning on to the next.
Now, with the river levels rising, Nash-Mayberry's classroom lessons were playing out in real time. Wolf Lake sits in a vulnerable spot: Not only are its levees dilapidated, but that stretch of the Mississippi is thick with hardware like wing dikes, which are rock jetties that jut perpendicularly into the river from the banks. Structures like these are designed to help barges navigate by concentrating the river's flow. But as I wrote in this 2014 cover story for onEarth, wing dikes also make floodwaters more turbulent, slowing them down and raising them higher.
As her vacation wound down, Nash-Mayberry continued to receive texts and emails from current and former students, some wondering whether to evacuate. She arrived home to a community mobilizing to stave off disaster. On the 30th, she rustled up meals for fifty farmers hauling their crops to higher ground—they had been stored in grain bins in the floodplain—so their 2015 harvest wouldn't be lost. The following day, she went down to the bottoms near the river, where she (along with her husband and father) helped farm families load their most precious belongings into trailers.
"The homeowners were flustered," she says. "When you would ask, 'Do you want to save this?' or 'What's the plan?' they really couldn't answer you. They would say, 'I don't know. I don't know. Ask so-and-so.'"
Then, on January 2, came the sand boils: eruptions of river water into Wolf Lake's corn and soybean fields, carrying sand stolen from the levees as the water tunneled underground. Boils threaten the structural integrity of the levee, and the eruptions need to be ringed by sandbags to equalize the upward water pressure with a downward force. Hands were needed to fill those bags, so Nash-Mayberry posted a plea on Facebook and made one call after another. About 40 people showed up, she says: teachers, students, parents, and grandparents. "It was a community effort," recalls Nash-Mayberry. "It made me feel like the [teaching] project has helped give the younger people a sense of Hey, we can make a difference."
Sandbagging operations in Wolf Lake. Photo by Kayla Treece.
Wolf Lake's levee stayed intact, and damage was kept to a minimum. With river levels dropping, the county's voluntary evacuation order was lifted on January 6, and teachers returned to school on the 8th to move computers downstairs from storage. "But all you've got to do—to realize how it could have been—is look directly to our south," Nash-Mayberry says.
There, in Alexander County, a levee protecting 500 people breached twice beginning on New Year's Day. Videos posted by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency show a torrent of water funneling through a gap in the Len Small Levee and houses and silos poking through what looks like a deep river. After the same levee broke in 2011, inundating the community of Olive Branch, residents there considered moving to higher ground. But FEMA buyout funds were so slow to arrive that the energy to relocate dissipated. A $5 million state buyout in Olive Branch last year was suspended because of a budget impasse.
Almost three hours north of Wolf Lake, Grafton, Illinois, suffered a landslide that blocked the main road through town. Across the river, Missouri suffered considerable damage, too. The floodwaters shut down highways and forced wastewater treatment plants offline. Raw sewage poured into nearby rivers and streams. In West Alton, just above the juncture of the Mississippi and Missouri, some houses sat fully under water that was trapped between the levees designed to protect the town from the two rivers. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon estimated 7,100 structures were damaged in four counties in the St. Louis area.
Scientists point out that the floods, which followed a 10-inch rainfall over three days, were not natural disasters. "The historical Mississippi River would not have responded in such a profound way to this storm," says Robert Criss, a hydrologist and geochemist at Washington University. But along with the wing dikes and other navigation structures, we've seen local governments continue to approve real estate development inside floodplains. To protect the new buildings, they build higher and stronger levees, which give the river ever less room to expand when the rains come.
"The modern river, highly channelized and almost completely walled off from its floodplain, exhibited a sharp response because the water had nowhere to go but up," Criss says.
After the historic Midwest flood of 1993, Illinois encouraged the removal of vulnerable buildings from floodplains. In Grafton, FEMA funded a voluntary buyout of 70 homes and 18 commercial buildings, and town officials steered development uphill. As a result, except for the landslide, damage in Grafton—which has no levee—was minimized. Even Bobbie Amburg, one of the few residents living in the floodplain (her house is elevated), was unfazed. "The water is surrounding our house right now and we are coming and going by boat," Amburg, a member of the Board of Aldermen, wrote me January 1. "[But] we are all doing well."
Missouri, by contrast, has tended to be more permissive about floodplain development.
As a result, "a serious problem has been aggravated," Criss says. "We have just seen another example that we should not have needed. The Show Me State has been repeatedly shown, yet numerous decision makers blunder on in denial."
Evan Webb, a graduate of Shawnee High School, shot this video in Alexander County, Illinois, where he grew up, and published it Jan. 1, during the most recent floods.


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What Philly's Congress Members Think of Trump's Climate Deal Exit
Most – including the Republicans – quickly denounced the president's decision.
By Claire Sasko·	 6/2/2017, 9:27 a.m.
President Donald Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago, Thursday, April 6, 2017, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Donald Trump has announced that the U.S. will leave the Paris climate agreement.
Environmentalists, globalists, political and business leaders and some of Trump's advisers have condemned his decision to leave the climate deal, which unites 192 countries that pledge to pursue aggressive and progressive plans to fight climate change. On the other hand, the exit comes as a relief for White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon and the Republican senators who called on Trump to do so.
Mayor Jim Kenney has joined more than 80 mayors around the country who have spoken out in defiance of Trump's decision and promised to continue enacting climate policies in accordance with the global accord.
In a statement yesterday, Kenney detailed renewed plans to combat climate change in Philadelphia and said Trump's decision "goes against the interests of Philadelphians."
Here's what Philly's Congress members have to say about Trump's decision to withdraw from the climate accord, starting with Republicans (with the exception of Sen. Pat Toomey, who hasn't yet weighed in on Trump's decision).
Republican Rep. Patrick Meehan:
"The #ParisClimate Agreement isn't perfect. But by abandoning it, America is relinquishing that seat at the table." pic.twitter.com/skkXaDX8JE
— Patrick Meehan (@RepMeehan) June 1, 2017
Republican Rep. Ryan Costello:
"I am disappointed by the Administration's decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. This decision is a setback to sustainable energy innovation across our country and forfeits an opportunity for the United States to lead on an issue of economic and environmental significance. While the Paris Agreement has its flaws, the solution should not be to pack up, walk away, and surrender our position of influence. The solution should be to work with our partners and improve this initiative while championing critical protections for American families and businesses. As a member of the Climate Solutions Caucus, I am committed to working with my colleagues to encourage greater American ingenuity, innovation, and leadership to reduce carbon emissions and protect our environment."
Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick had urged the Administration to remain in the Paris Climate Agreement as recently as May 28th, when he called for Trump to address the threats posed by climate change "proactively and head-on … retaining our seat at this table is vitally important."
Democratic Sen. Bob Casey:
"This is a double-barreled blow to both Pennsylvania jobs and our environment. By pulling out of an agreement to combat climate change, President Trump has put Pennsylvania workers at a disadvantage when it comes to competing for clean energy jobs. Foreign countries will now take the lead in growing an industry that produces jobs with family sustaining incomes. Additionally, pulling out of this climate change agreement will undermine the clean air that every Pennsylvanian has a right to expect. Vulnerable children will be particularly impacted by the lack of action to protect clean air. Without action on climate change, more children will suffer from diseases like asthma and malnutrition. Climate change is a serious challenge which requires action, not retreat."
Climate change decision by @realDonaldTrump is a double-barreled blow to PA jobs & our environment 1/
— Senator Bob Casey (@SenBobCasey) June 1, 2017
Climate change decision by @realDonaldTrump will put PA workers at a disadvantage when it comes to competing for clean energy jobs 2/
Because of @realDonaldTrump climate change decision foreign countries will take the lead in growing an industry that creates good jobs 3/
W/ this decision @realDonaldTrump is helping grow incomes for workers in foreign countries instead of workers here at home 4/
Additionally @realDonaldTrump climate change decision will undermine the clean air that PA citizens have a right to expect 5/
Vulnerable children will be particularly impacted by @realDonaldTrump decision. More will suffer from asthma, malnutrition. 6/
Climate change is a serious problem which requires action, not retreat. Today, @realDonaldTrump has put U.S. on path of retreat 7/
Democratic Rep. Dwight Evans:
"President Trump just announced his decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement. I do not support the President's decision. I will continue to act on climate because our future generations depend on it and we have a lot to lose if not. In fact, 59 percent of Americans believe in climate change and know protecting our earth is crucial. Nevertheless, President Trump's action to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement does not mean that my colleagues and I will advocate less for what is in the best interest of the Philadelphians, Pennsylvanians and the American people. On the contrary, today's decision calls on the resistance to speak out. I will continue to be your voice and speak up in Congress on climate issues."
President Trump says he will withdraw the US out of #ParisAgreement. I will continue to #ActonClimate b/c future generations depend on it!
— Dwight Evans (@RepDwightEvans) June 1, 2017
Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle:
"I am incredibly disappointed that President Trump is withdrawing our country from the Paris Climate Accord, the landmark voluntary agreement between 195 countries to collectively address the growing threat of global climate change. This decision erodes our alliances and international standing, makes us less safe, and puts us at an economic disadvantage as other nations develop the clean energy economy of the future. President Trump's failure to capture the opportunities associated with leading the global effort against climate change demonstrates a lack of vision and a propensity to put politics above all else.
All Americans should be deeply concerned by the President's retreat from American leadership and ideals on the global stage, from climate change to human rights. This combined with the President's failure to fully support NATO, signals to the world that under his leadership our country is in a state of withdrawal. The United States, the leader in reaching the 2015 agreement, is the second highest emitter of greenhouse gases. Previously, only Syria and Nicaragua declined to join the agreement. I cannot believe that President Trump would choose to join these ranks with this historic mistake. Rather than 'negotiating better deals', the President is removing us from the bargaining table altogether."
Trump pulling US out of Paris Accord is a historic mistake. Btwn NATO last week & now this it's clear Trump believes in a weak America.
— US Rep Brendan Boyle (@RepBrendanBoyle) June 1, 2017
Democratic Rep. Robert Brady:
"The announcement today By President Trump is short-sighted and a giant step backwards as he has now linked arms with Syria and Nicaragua and ignored the more than 190 nations who are part of the Paris accord. He has also ignored the views of the Pentagon who see climate change as a major national security issue.
In defense of his action the president pulls out of our rapidly warming air false statistics that claim the withdrawal will help the American economy and the business sector. Today's action was incredibly irresponsible, no matter how many times he states he is putting America first."
Follow @ClaireSasko on Twitter.
Claire Sasko	Staff Writer @ClaireSasko
csasko@phillymag.com
Martin Luther King Jr. Day Opportunities to Volunteer and Celebrate in Philadelphia


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Айос-Теодорос — греческий топоним. Может означать:

 Айи-Теодори или Зейтинли-кёю — деревня на острове Гёкчеада в провинции Чанаккале в Турции.
 Айос-Теодорос (Кея) — деревня в Греции, на острове Кея, в сообществе Иулида.
 Айос-Теодорос (Халки) — остров.

См. также
 Феодор (значения)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Dr. Jonathan Roberts graduated with a B.S. degree from Cornell University and an M.S. degree in nutrition from the Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition. Dr. Roberts received his DDS from the Columbia University School of Dental Medicine and continued his education by serving a general practice residency at the Northport VA Hospital on Long Island. His postgraduate training in prosthodontics was completed at Memorial Hospital in New York. Dr. Roberts has served on the prosthodontic teaching staff at the Northport VA Hospital, Memorial Hospital in NY, the Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, NY and is currently an Assistant Professor in the postgraduate prosthodontics program at Columbia University.
Throughout the years he has lectured extensively on various topics in prosthodontics. Dr. Roberts has been actively involved in many local and national professional societies and has held several leadership roles. Dr. Roberts has been practicing in Midtown Manhattan for many years and is excited to be practicing in this new state of the art facility. Embracing the new technology has made it possible to fabricate tooth colored restorations and crowns in a single visit.
Dr. Jonathon Roberts is a highly experienced Prosthodontist in the NYC, Manhattan area. With expertise in prosthodontics, cosmetic dentistry, and general dentistry he will be able to help you with your dental concerns. Call Prosthodontics of New York at 212.758.9690 to schedule a consultation.


The Little Grebe, also known as a Dabchick (Afrikaans name Kleindobbertjie) always faces away from the sun to dry their feathers and warm them. They are common residents on lakes, dams and other freshwater bodies.
The chicks have striped heads and the juveniles have not yet got the beautiful adult colouring.
The little Grebe lays 2-7 eggs on a floating nest and carries its babies on its back. We spotted these Grebes at the Abrahamskraal hide in the West Coast National Park.


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The Enigma
"Oh…nothing much." They spun around to see that Ithani and Armita were standing closely behind Bobbas. Too close for comfort. The younger Culao sister smiled sweetly at them. "I just wanted to make sure you won't be able to follow us. Right, Armita?" The older sister nodded again.
Owain looked at them, befuddled. "Wait, what are you talking about? What's going on, Armita?"
Ithani kissed her teeth as she cupped Armita's chin and moving her head back and forth. "Unfortunately, my big sister can't talk to you right now. She's too busy following my orders and one of them was not to talk to you."
"Orders?" Chiara wondered.
"That's right. She only obeys me now since that's what sisters do," she confirmed and bared her teeth. "And here's one now: Armita, retrieve the Lashival for me."
As soon as she said that command, Armita's head suddenly shot up. While she wore a determined look on her face, her eyes were glassy. Before a surprised Owain or Chiara could react, she quickly rammed the handle of her left butterfly knife into Bobbas's stomach and then hit him on the back of the head with the other when he buckled down in pain, knocking him unconscious. Before he could even fall to the ground, Ithani caught him in her arms. "Thank you, Armie!" she said in a singsong manner as she clutched their target tightly like a doll. "You make your sister so happy now!"
At first Owain stared at the two Isharans in shock but he quickly overcame his bewilderment. "What are you two doing!? Tell me what's going on here!" he demanded angrily.
"You want to know, do you, hm?" Ithani let out a boisterous laugh and stared at Owain and Chiara, who were taken aback by her appearance. Her red eyes twinkled as she looked at them, amused by their reactions. "Well, my dear sister and I are going to take our friend over here and bring him back to the Kasama."
"You're a Duermon!?" Chiara gawked. Ithani just smiled condescendingly at her. "B-b-but how? Tristé would have…"
"I would like to tell you, but, unfortunately, I don't have much time. You see, the Kasama is waiting for me, and I don't want to keep him waiting," she apologized mockingly.
Owain quickly pulled out his bow and aimed an arrow at her. "Like hell I would let it happen!" From the corner of his eyes, he saw that Chiara had done the same.
She just laughed. "I figured you would say that so I decided to keep you busy." Clearing her throat, she shouted in a terrified voice, "Armie, please protect me! They're trying to kill me!"
Armita turned to look at them; her face was now distorted with fury though her eyes were still glassy. Without any hesitation, she stepped in front of her sister so Owain couldn't take a shot. Then she quickly lunged at them and began slashing at them, leaving them no time to defend themselves. At the same time, she made sure that she was still between them and her sister so they couldn't have a chance to strike the latter. "Stop it, Armita! Don't you recognize us?" Owain pleaded desperately as he used his bow to block another fierce attack.
"It's us, Owain and Chiara!" as the latter was positioned behind Owain, to protect her. With the attacks coming in quick succession, she didn't have time to cast a spell or two. "We're comrades, remember?"
However, she was relentless in her attack against them while Ithani crackled. "Don't bother pleading for your pathetic lives! My sister will hunt you down until you're dead!" she taunted as she slowly dragged Bobbas away from the fighting. She then cried out again, "Armie, they're trying to hurt me! Help me!"
As soon as she heard her sister's cries, Armita increased the intensity of her attacks, attacking them with quicker slashes. "I must protect my sister," she mumbled numbly, continuing to swing her knives at them.
Owain flinched when he felt the blades made several slices on his arms. Though the wounds were shallow, they still pained him. However, he felt his endurance was slowly ebbing away. His knees were feeling wobbly, and he was losing his grip on his bow. Armita must have sensed it too because she suddenly did a roundhouse kick, which connected and hit him on his right side.
"Oof!" he gasped, landing on top of poor Chiara, who yelped with surprise. Rubbing his sore side, he glanced up to see Armita staring down at them with her blank eyes. She pointed her knives down at them as if she was waiting for permission to kill them. Sure enough, it came.
"You got them where I want them!" Ithani praised her older sister. By now, she had dragged Bobbas to a safe distance where they couldn't reach him. "Now kill them before they could have a chance to hurt us!"
An obedient Armita nodded and began to thrust her knives at them. Out of instinct, Owain quickly used his body as a shield to hopefully lessen the impact on Chiara and squeezed his eyes shut as he waited for the first stab to occur. It didn't happen though. Instead, he heard a metal clang as if her knives struck something glass. Opening his eyes, he saw a strange barrier, which must be what Armita had hit, and a pair of black boots. Confused, he looked up to see whose boots do they belong to and could only gape at the sight before him. Right in front of him was an Aerian.
He was stunned. The whole time he had thought that the fabled winged people were just a myth, but lo and behold, one was standing with her back toward Chiara and him. She had long, white hair that fluttered in the wind. She also wore a blue-and-white playsuit and knee-high boots; from his view, he could see that armor covered her arms and legs. In her hands was a blue-and-gold winged spear. "An Aerian?" a baffled Chiara gaped.
However, the Aerian's attention was on her opponents, especially Ithani. After her attack was blocked, Armita had leapt back and placed herself in front of her possessed sister, who seemed amused. The mind-controlled Isharan had a wary look on her face as she posed in a fighting stance and stared at the angel. "A Duermon?" the Aerian wondered aloud, staring at Ithani with her red, glowing eyes, and got into a fighting position as well.
Ithani smirked. "I was wondering when you're going to show yourself, Aerian," she taunted as she tightened her grip on their target. Upon seeing Bobbas captured, their savior tensed up. "I see that you noticed my 'friend' over here. I can't wait to see your face when the Kasama uses him against you and those imposters!"
"As if I'll let you get away!" the Aerian retorted and charged at her.
The Duermon smiled and as soon as the Aerian was close by, screamed, "Sister, protect me! The Aerian is trying to kill me!" At once, Armita jumped in the way and blocked the attack. Without any hesitation, she swung her knives at the Aerian, who was forced to back away. Nevertheless, she refused to give up and attempted to reach Ithani again. Each time, Armita would stop her and counter. During the battle, Owain was able to see the front of the Aerian and was frightened by what he saw – the visor that covered the top half of her face had hundreds of red eyes. They would look this way and that way; some would blink as if they were actually from a living being.
Meanwhile, Ithani just crackled as she watched with amusement at the angel's futile attempts. The whole time Owain and Chiara could only watch in amazement that they didn't notice Talic and the others arrive behind them until they were right next to them. "Are you two all right?" Talic asked as he and Tristé helped them up. Cuzo guarded in front of them, watching the battle unfold in front of him; his fur was straight up as he made a low and dangerous growl.
"We're fine," Owain answered and glanced over at Armita and Ithani. He then noticed that Talen wasn't with them and began to panic. What if Talic and Tristé were under a spell as well? "Where's Talen?" he ventured.
Tristé pointed over to the Aerian. "Over there. Apparently she was disguised as that boy the whole time."
"We were interrogating Talen when he or rather she suddenly blurted out, 'There's something wrong' and hurried back to camp before we could stop her. Imagine our surprise to see Talen changed into an Aerian right before our eyes," Talic explained. He kept looking over at Armita with a worried expression. "What happened? Why is Armita fighting her?"
He and Chiara shook their heads. "I don't know, but Ithani is actually a Duermon in disguise. She managed to hypontize Armita to do her bidding and now has Bobbas!" the Kreesian exclaimed. "What should we do?"
Talic didn't immediately answer. Owain noticed that he wore a grim expression and realized that his friend was afraid that Armita's mind was lost like Leomas's. They needed to find a way to break Ithani's spell but how? He couldn't attack her because Armita would use herself as a human shield. At the same time, they couldn't risk falling under the spell too.
Luckily for them, the Aerian made their decision for them. After parrying with Armita, she found an opening and used her spear to knock her opponent off her feet. Then she quickly created bindings made out of light and shadows, which she wrapped around Armita's arms, legs, and waist to restrain her before she could jump back to her feet. A furious Armita cursed as she struggled to get free, but the angel ignored her as she knelt down. Touching two fingers on the Isharan's forehead, she muttered something underneath her breath. Armita's eyes widened as her body jerked before it relaxed as she fell unconscious. Owain breathed a sigh of relief; it looked like Armita will be all right. Talic must feel the same way since he immediately ran over to her to check on her. "I'm going to see if she's hurt," Chiara said hastily, hurrying after him.
All of a sudden, he heard laughter. Shit! He was so busy watching the fighting that he forgot about Ithani. Turning around, he was shocked to see her holding a needle ring. She has it in her person the whole time!? What happened next shocked him. Still laughing, she pricked her finger, coated the ring with her blood, and then tossed it in the air, creating a portal to another part of the Isha desert. Wait a minute; he thought only the gods could use the needle rings! The Aerian most likely thought so too because she stood there for a moment, stunned.
Seeing their reactions, Ithani smiled condescendingly. "While I enjoy meeting you all, I need to go. The Kasama is waiting for me after all," she apologized as she backed slowly into the gateway with her prisoner in toll. She looked over at him and the others before she added, "By the way, thank you for the lovely present. The Kasama will be most thrilled to have him as our guest of honor."
Upon hearing those words, the Aerian quickly overcame her shock and went into action. Before Ithani could enter the portal, the angel created a magic circle below her feet, preventing her from escaping, and flew at her with her spear aimed at the Isharan's heart. Instead of being terrified of her impending death, Ithani just smiled and raising her hand, said, "Since Armie couldn't do a good job of delaying you, I guess I'll have to do it myself."
All of sudden, the Aerian cried out in pain and crashed into the ground. Alarmed, Owain and Tristé ran over to her as she slowly got on her knees while clutching her left arm. "Are you all right?" he asked, helping her sit up. Even though she looked like she was in agony, she nodded without looking at him. Her armor was sinking back into her skin at the time so he was able to notice something glowing under her clutched hand and realized that it was a Velscendus Cult insignia tattooed to her arm. That was when it dawned on him what happened before; Ithani must have used it against the Aerian to cause her intense pain. Looking back at Ithani, he was dismayed to see that the barrier preventing her from escaping was gone, and she and Bobbas were now on the other side of the portal.
"Ha ha! Nice try, Aerian!" she taunted as the portal slowly shrank. "I hope you like my goodbye present for you! But don't feel be that upset. My master will be coming back for you and end your sad existence once and for all once we have complete control of the Lashival!"
Cursing, the Aerian pushed Owain's hands off her and attempted to perform one last attack. With all of her might, she threw her spear at the possessed Ithani, but it was too late. The portal closed shut, and the weapon hit nothing but air. Frustrated, the angel collapsed to the ground and pounded her fists to the sand. Owain could only watch helplessly. Their target was taken away right in front of them, and he was now in the hands of a dangerous enemy.