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Home › Podcasts › Episode 249 – Freedom is just another word for – I need to eat
Episode 249 – Freedom is just another word for – I need to eat
The Iron FistPosted on April 21, 2020 Posted in Podcasts — No Comments ↓
https://media.blubrry.com/iron_fist_velvet_glove/p/podcasts.captivate.fm/media/750c52d7-052b-4c84-8dcf-abf40daa0858/episode249.mp3
According to The Fist, many Americans are demanding the freedom to work because they are broke and they know that no-one is going to help them.
Why Does Trevor Bang on about America
Because it is more interesting. When an authoritarian regime like China fucks people it's just plain obvious. Everyone knows. But when the USA does it through economic power and controlling the narrative it is not so obvious and people don't know. That is more interesting.
Plus, it's not every day you get to witness the demise of the most powerful civilisation in history.
The USA is truly a failed state.
USA Protestors
Find some sympathy.
Libertarian ideals mix with a Methodist work ethic in a state where welfare assistance won't be forthcoming and the prols know it.
These rallies have the same DNA as the Tea Party.
These people are angry and they want to protest their precarious circumstances but they have been brainwashed by Fox and by American culture so they don't understand who they should blame.
As a matter of pride it's easier to say I want to work rather than I have to work.
Trump tweets "Liberate Michigan"
Trump is Gaslighting
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes such as low self-esteem. Using denial, misdirection, contradiction, and misinformation, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's beliefs. Instances can range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents occurred to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.
The term originates in the systematic psychological manipulation of a victim by her husband in the 1938 stage play Gas Light,[4] and the film adaptations released in 1940 and 1944.[5] In the story, the husband attempts to convince his wife and others that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment and insisting that she is mistaken, remembering things incorrectly, or delusional when she points out these changes. The play's title alludes to how the abusive husband slowly dims the gas lights in their home, while pretending nothing has changed, in an effort to make his wife doubt her own perceptions. He further uses the lights in the sealed-off attic to secretly search for jewels belonging to a woman whom he has murdered. He makes loud noises as he searches, including talking to himself. The wife repeatedly asks her husband to confirm her perceptions about the dimming lights, noises and voices, but in defiance of reality, he keeps insisting that the lights are the same and instead it is she who is going insane.[6]:8 He intends on having her assessed and committed to a mental institution, after which he will be able to gain power of attorney over her and search more effectively.
Trump is blaming Democratic State Governors and The Who and China.
He could win. Trump supporters will walk over broken glass to vote for him. Democrat supporters won't or can't do the same for Biden.
Fortunately we have a calendar of shame
From the John Menadue Blog
But a more useful comparison is Australia versus Texas as they have similar population sizes and urban population densities even though Australia is actually bigger than Texas – a fact which may not be generally known in the Lone Star State outside Austin.
Australia's population is 25.5 million and Texas' is 29.9 million. As at April 18 in Australia we have carried out 391,000 tests – Texas 170,000. We have 6,533 reported cases – Texas 17,760. Australia has 2,647 active cases – Texas 13,131. In Australia 65 have died – in Texas 439. In Australia 3,821 have recovered and in Texas 4,190. Our fatality rate so far is 1.7% – in Texas it is 9.5%.
Texas has done less than half the testing of Australia but, despite lower testing rates, Texas has more than twice the number of reported cases and five times the number of active cases.
In Australia the death toll is highest among the old. In Texas it is highest among poor Texans and those of Hispanic origin. Indeed, the toll is heaviest on those who – when they do vote – tend to vote Democrat. A convenient outcome for Republican Governor, Greg Abbott.
So well may we say: only in America!
US Federal Authorities are seizing medical supplies
From the New England Journal of Medicine
Andrew W. Artenstein, M.D.
Baystate Health, Springfield, MA
As a chief physician executive, I rarely get involved in my health system's supply-chain activities. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed that. Protecting our caregivers is essential so that these talented professionals can safely provide compassionate care to our patients. Yet we continue to be stymied by a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and the cavalry does not appear to be coming.
Our supply-chain group has worked around the clock to secure gowns, gloves, face masks, goggles, face shields, and N95 respirators. These employees have adapted to a new normal, exploring every lead, no matter how unusual. Deals, some bizarre and convoluted, and many involving large sums of money, have dissolved at the last minute when we were outbid or outmuscled, sometimes by the federal government. Then we got lucky, but getting the supplies was not easy.
A lead came from an acquaintance of a friend of a team member. After several hours of vetting, we grew confident of the broker's professional pedigree and the potential to secure a large shipment of three-ply face masks and N95 respirators. The latter were KN95 respirators, N95s that were made in China. We received samples to confirm that they could be successfully fit-tested. Despite having cleared this hurdle, we remained concerned that the samples might not be representative of the bulk of the products that we would be buying. Having acquired the requisite funds — more than five times the amount we would normally pay for a similar shipment, but still less than what was being requested by other brokers — we set the plan in motion. Three members of the supply-chain team and a fit tester were flown to a small airport near an industrial warehouse in the mid-Atlantic region. I arrived by car to make the final call on whether to execute the deal. Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected.
Hours before our planned departure, we were told to expect only a quarter of our original order. We went anyway, since we desperately needed any supplies we could get. Upon arrival, we were jubilant to see pallets of KN95 respirators and face masks being unloaded. We opened several boxes, examined their contents, and hoped that this random sample would be representative of the entire shipment. Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system's urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure. I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back, feelings that did not abate until midnight, when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse.
From Intelligencer
In this instance, the executive managed to secure the supplies, but what is most horrifying about his account is that this experience was not all that surprising to him — he expected interference from federal officials, and did everything he could (including staging the shipment in food-service trucks to avoid detection) to get around that interference.
Those measures do not seem unusual, horrifyingly enough. Last month, 3 million masks ordered by the state of Massachusetts were seized by the federal government. Last week, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, was arranging secret chartered flights of supplies as a way of outmaneuvering federal interference. "The governor has clearly outlined the challenges this administration has faced as we've worked around the clock to purchase PPE for our health-care workers and first responders," a spokesperson for the governor told the paper. "The supply chain has been likened to the Wild West, and once you have purchased supplies, ensuring they get to the state is another Herculean feat," he continued. "These flights are carrying millions of masks and gloves our workers need. They're scheduled to land in Illinois in the coming weeks and the state is working to ensure these much-needed supplies are protected and ready for distribution around the state." A source "knowledgeable about the flights" told the paper that the governor didn't want to be more open about the shipments "because we've heard reports of Trump trying to take PPE in China and when it gets to the United States."
… in many cases, states are legally barred from deficit spending, which means in times of crisis, especially those producing huge budget shortfalls through collapsing tax revenue, they are functionally unable to respond at all. In such situations, the federal government is designed to serve as a backstop, but over and over again throughout this crisis, the White House has said states will get little to no help — that they are entirely on their own. (The federal medical stockpile isn't meant for the states, as Jared Kushner has said, as though the country is anything more than its states.)
On top of that outrage, the Feds are bidding against states who are trying to buy their own supplies, and refusing to interfere in those auctions between states, which have driven prices up by ten times or more. But while you might think that was as bad as federal management of this crisis could be, it is not. This new outrage is deeper: Even those states that are trying to manage their own resources, buying equipment themselves with incredibly scarce resources to aid in a time of crisis, are being stopped, and those resources seized on the way to delivery.
You could call this piracy. You could call it sanctions. The federal government is choking supply chains to states like it chokes supply chains to Iran and North Korea. These blockades aren't as complete as those surrounding sanctioned regimes, of course, and some amount of the disruption may be honest confusion in a time of crisis. But the disruption is being brought about by federal interference, and unlike the kind of disruptions you'd want to engineer against antagonistic states, the purpose seems completely unclear — indeed the policy is inexplicable and indefensible.
. What business do the DHS and FEMA have with ventilators and PPE purchases by governors and local hospitals? "This is like a story out of the last days of the Soviet Union," David Frum wrote on Twitter, of the NEJM letter. "This is what it means to be a failed state," wrote the essayist Umair Haque, echoing him. In the absence of an explanation, it is hard to come to any conclusion other than that this is simply mafia government, exerting control for the sake of control, not in spite of but because of the crisis-led demand, and squeezing the American people, as they die in hospital beds and attend — with inadequate protection — to the sick and scared.
Trump and the WHO
The Crikey Version
From Crikey
Q: Did the WHO really appoint Robert Mugabe to be its goodwill ambassador?
A: Yes. It happened in October 2017. WHO's newly-appointed director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made an early blunder when he announced the (now deceased) Zimbabwean dictator would be a WHO goodwill ambassador. He was forced to rescind the appointment four days later.
Dr Tedros, as he prefers to be known, is a former Ethiopian government minister with a PhD in community health from the UK's Nottingham University. He is the first African leader of the WHO and the first to have no medical qualifications.
Q: Did the WHO endorse dubious Chinese claims on COVID-19?
A: Yes, to a degree. On January 14 the WHO tweeted that "early investigations" showed Chinese authorities had found "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" of the coronavirus.
Yet three days before — on January 11 — a CT scan of whistleblower doctor, Dr Li Wenliang, confirmed that both his lungs were infected with the new virus.
Q: What about Taiwan?
A: Tricky. Taiwan has been one of the world's undisputed leaders in containing the spread of the coronavirus, but it's shut out of the WHO because of China's opposition.
WHO's geopolitical problem reached farcical heights when WHO's assistant director-general Bruce Aylward appeared to dodge a question on Taiwan from a Hong Kong interviewer last month. Asked if the WHO might consider allowing Taiwan to join, Aylward claimed, after a long pause, that he had been unable to hear the question, asked to move to a different topic, and then appeared to hang up when pressed on Taiwan.
Q: Did the WHO really endorse the Chinese government's decision to allow wet markets to re-open?
A: Yes it did. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg slammed the move as "unbelievable, extraordinary". Scott Morrison called it "unfathomable", given that a market in Wuhan city is considered the source of the COVID-19 virus, possibly from an infected bat. The infectious disease SARS is also thought to have emerged from animals, present in the Guangdong province of southern China in 2002.
Q: Is China exporting traditional medicine remedies linked to exotic animals with the WHO's support?
A: Yes. As China specialist and emeritus professor at Swinburne University of Technology John Fitgerald wrote in Crikey last week, China's president Xi Jinping is a champion of traditional chinese medicine which uses ingredients drawn from exotic animals such as pangolins which are found in wet markets:
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a significant and growing source of revenue for China … A thriving and growing international consumer market for pangolin meat and scales, rhinoceros horns, leopard bones, tiger plasters, black bear bile, donkey hide, and kangaroo penises is a predictable outcome of the grandiose repackaging and political marketing of TCM as a global equivalent to evidence-based medicine in Xi Jinping's New Era of global leadership.
The Guardian Version
From The Guardian
When a pandemic strikes, the world's leading experts convene – physically or virtually – in a hi-tech chamber in the basement of the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization.
It is called the "strategic health operations centre", or SHOC, an appropriately urgent acronym for a place where life and death decisions are taken, and it is where critical choices were made in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak.
… The whole thing does look like something that Hollywood set up, imagining a pandemic," a WHO official said.
"You sit there and you hear these experts from all over the world and they're really leading people. The best expertise available to get the best advice possible, it's a very impressive sense that hey, this is really how it is supposed to work."
On 22 January, it was in this setting that the WHO emergency committee convened to make a pivotal decision on whether to advise the organisation to declare a "public health emergency of international concern" (PHEIC) – a formal red alert for the world.
The WHO had been sharing information with member states constantly since the first cluster of pneumonia cases was first identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of December, but declaring a PHEIC still had huge symbolic importance.
The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, sat in the SHOC with his top advisers watching as a succession of speakers gave their views on the screens in front of them.
First there were reports from China, and then Japan and Thailand where cases had been recently confirmed. Then it was the turn of the 15 members and six advisers on the emergency committee, drawn from around the world.
The debate was highly technical but it had one critical issue at its heart. It was known by then that the virus had spread from person to person, but the question was how easily?
If human-to-human transmission was only happening in close quarters, in families, or between patients and health workers, then perhaps it could be largely contained without a worldwide alert, and all the global economic disruption that entailed. If the virus was spreading freely among communities, there was not a moment to lose.
The emergency committee was split down the middle on the question. So Tedros told it to convene again the next day, in the hope new data might create a consensus.
"Tedros's only obligation under the law is to convene a committee but not to follow it. But he feels that politically he needs to get a unanimous decision before he acts or at least an overwhelming majority," Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health law at Georgetown University, said.
The second day's meeting however, changed no one's mind, and the impasse remained. Tedros had the committee adjourn pending further study and put it on notice to reconvene at short notice. A international health emergency was declared a week later, on 30 January, after clear evidence of community spread of Covid-19 had emerged.
The events of January were always destined for scrutiny. The WHO conducts an after-action report in wake of every pandemic. But by seeking to make the global body the scapegoat for the debacle of the US response, Donald Trump has ensured each detail will become exhibits in a highly-politicised show-trial, likely to last as long as the election campaign.
Furthermore, the president has used claims of WHO's dysfunction to justify cutting off US funding to it, worth over $400m a year, and hindering the organisation's ability to help counter the spread of the pandemic in fragile and poor countries around the world.
In a hail of accusations hurled at the WHO in recent days, Trump has accused it of withholding critical information about the danger of Covid-19, and being under the control of China.
None of the accusations are supported by the facts.
China argued against declaring an emergency on 22 January, but could not have carried the argument alone. The other emergency members and advisers were experts from the US, Thailand, Russia, France, South Korea, Canada, Japan, Netherlands, Australia, Senegal, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and New Zealand.
Their advice is confidential, but for the vote to have been split, several western, or western-aligned, representatives must have voted with Beijing.
While the emergency committee took a week to decide to declare a PHEIC, Trump spent more than a month after that playing down the threat to the US, during which the country fell weeks behind the rest of the world in diagnostic testing and stockpiling essential equipment.
There is no evidence to support Trump's claim that the WHO hid information at China's behest. The US is well represented in the top ranks of the organisation. There were more than a dozen officials from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) embedded in the WHO in January and February.
US health leaders were part of regular conference calls, weekly or twice weekly, beginning on 7 January. From 10 January those calls included warnings about the risk of human-to-human transmission.
From CBS
What exactly is a wet market?
Wet markets sell fresh food and producev
– as opposed to 'dry' goods such as clothing – and some stock live animals such as chickens, as well as seafood and wild animals.
A recent study into key predictors of virus spillover risk found threatened wildlife species (with reduced populations because of exploitation) potentially shared more viruses with humans.
Research published in the Royal Society Proceedings B journal shows infectious diseases from wildlife have emerged at an increased pace in the past century
Last week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the future of overseas wet markets could be in doubt because they will pose a big challenge.
"We can clearly see the great risks to the health and wellbeing of the rest of the world as a result of these types of places and facilities," he said.
Mr Morrison has urged the WHO to turn its attention to the markets' risks.
"We don't have them here and there is a good reason," he said.
Wagga City Council
From The Daily Advertiser
A CALL to dump Wagga's sister city in China has been narrowly supported by the city's councillors at Tuesday night's council meeting.
Cr Paul Funnell, who initiated the motion, pushed to sever the the city's connection with Kunming, as well as other arrangements associated with China.
He said the city was not in "a true friendship" with Kunming, which was an extension of a totalitarian regime that "lied to the world" about the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Cr Funnell said it was not a "knee-jerk reaction" to coronavirus, nor a debate fuelled by racism, but an attempt to set an example.
"We must end that relationship arrangement and not condone such behaviour. This action is in no way stopping international trade, communication or the opportunity to deal with China in a fair, transparent and mutually beneficial manner," he said. "What it does do is say we will not tolerate lies and subterfuge."
They have put us to shame.
This article is from the April 13 issue of The Sydney Morning Herald Digital Edition. To subscribe, visit https://www.smh.com.au.
Anthony Dennis
Only Uruguay proved willing and able to help the 128 passengers and 83 crew from aboard the Bahamas-registered Greg Mortimer, operated by the Australia-based Aurora Expeditions.
The ship had been refused permission to berth by other South American nations including Argentina and Chile after borders were suddenly closed due to the pandemic.
Ernesto Talvi, Uruguayan minister for foreign affairs, who worked closely with Australian counterpart Marise Payne on the repatriation mission, declared in La Republica after the aircraft carrying the Greg Mortimer passengers landed in Melbourne early on Sunday morning: '' They arrived. Task accomplished.''
Many Uruguyans on social media stated that the evacuation of Australians was in a sense a favour repaid from nearly half a century ago.
'' Australia was kind to many Uruguayans in dark times for us in the '70s,'' tweeted Javier Dominquez, a citizen of Montevideo. Another Uruguayan, Lili de Leon, said: '' We remembered that Australia is the home of many, many Uruguayans that fled the country through the dark years of the dictatorship'' .
The successful operation is the subject of immense national pride in Uruguay, the story dominating front pages over the Easter holiday weekend.
Dr Adrian Aguiar, an intern at Montevideo's British Hospital, wrote at the weekend in El Pais, Uruguay's main national daily newspaper on Saturday, of the decision to mount the medically perilous mission. '' They are not Uruguayans and they are in a foreignflagged ship, but they are human beings,'' he wrote.
We have some new patrons
FluTracking
Would you install the app?
The Australian government is planning to launch an app in a matter of weeks that will trace every person who has been in contact with a mobile phone owner who has tested positive for coronavirus in the previous few weeks, in a bid to automate coronavirus contact tracing, and allow the easing of restrictions.
Here's what we know about the app so far.
Scott Morrison told reporters on Thursday that the app, currently being vetted by the Australian Signals Directorate, would be similar to or based on the Singapore TraceTogether app.
That app works by using Bluetooth to record anyone you get close to who also has the app. The two apps exchange anonymised IDs, which are stored encrypted on phones and deleted after 21 days.
Can it trace my location?
Deputy chief medical officer Paul Kelly said the app would not track location. The Singapore version of the app does not track location, either.
Ultra Orthodox Jews Refuse to comply
From The Age
Police raided an ultra-Orthodox Jewish prayer group in Melbourne's inner-east on Thursday morning where a group of at least 10 men were praying in contravention of social-distancing rules.
Just after 11am, about 10 police vehicles swooped on an apartment above an IGA store in Glen Eira Road, Ripponlea.
Police warned men meeting at the same venue on Wednesday and issued several warnings to the organiser of the group to not hold gatherings.
Police attended the location again on Thursday after being made aware of people heading to the address for a meeting.
About two weeks ago, prayer groups organised by members of the Satmar Hasidic sect, an offshoot of the Adass grouping, were revealed to be meeting for daily "minyan" prayers that require 10 men to attend, in defiance of social-distancing rules.
No immediate action was taken in response to reports about the prayer meetings but they prompted police interest and officers have since patrolled the locations at which they know they have taken place.
Federal Labor MP Josh Burns, whose Macnamara electorate takes in Ripponlea, said the behaviour was "dangerous" and "stupid".
"Personally I am opposed to vaccination and I wouldn't want to be forced by someone to take a vaccine in order to be able to travel," the world No 1 said in a live Facebook chat with several fellow Serbian athletes on Sunday. "But if it becomes compulsory, what will happen? I will have to make a decision.
"I have my own thoughts about the matter and whether those thoughts will change at some point, I don't know.
"Hypothetically, if the season was to resume in July, August or September, though unlikely, I understand that a vaccine will become a requirement straight after we are out of strict quarantine and there is no vaccine yet."
‹ Episode 248 – Does the Abrahamic God exist?
Episode 250 – Anzac Day 2020 ›


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Un kringle es un pastel escandinavo, es una variedad nórdica del pretzel. La palabra proviene del nórdico antiguo kringla, que significa 'anillo' o 'círculo'.

En Dinamarca

En Dinamarca, kringle denota más la forma anudada del pretzel que el tipo de pastel del pretzel. Un kringle pueden estar hecho de hojaldre o de masa de levadura, relleno con remonce o con mazapán y pasas de uvas.

En Estados Unidos
En los Estados Unidos, los kringles se enrollan a mano con masa de pastelería danesa (masa wienerbrød) que ha reposado toda la noche, y a continuación se moldean, se rellenan y se hornean.

Históricamente, Racine, Wisconsin ha sido el centro de la cultura danés-estadounidense. El kringle y la cultura danesa son parte importante de la identidad cultural de Racine, y varias pastelerías locales hacen y envían cientos de miles de kringles cada año.

Véase también
 Roscón de Reyes

Referencias

Repostería
Gastronomía de Dinamarca

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Board of Directors | Unified Office provids cloud VoIP/UC business solutions for SMBs.
Daniel E. Smith, Jr. was co-founder, President and CEO of optical networking pioneer Sycamore Networks, Inc. The company developed a broad range of optical networking products that enabled network service providers to transform the capacity created by their fiber optic networks into bandwidth for the delivery of high-speed data services. Previously, he co-founded and led Cascade Communications, another pioneering data communications company, which is now part of Alcatel-Lucent. Dan served as an officer in the United States Navy from 1971-73. He is currently a member of the USS Constitution Museum's Board of Trustees, and a member and past chairman of Lehigh University's Board of Trustees. Dan graduated with an MBA in Finance and General Management from Harvard University, and a BS in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University.
Ray has spent the last 20+ years as an entrepreneurial technology professional, he has extensive sales and customer engineering experience along with proven management team leadership in dynamic, emerging technology companies. Recently Ray playeda key leadership role in professional and customer services, business development, pre-sales and technical marketing while at Sonus Networks, a market leader in Voice over IP technologies. Ray was a founding member of Sonus's services organization, recruiting many of its most senior members. From 1996 until 1999 Ray was a key technical leader and sales consultant for Cascade Communications' worldwide sales organization. During his tenure Cascade was purchased by Ascend Communications. Ascend, a leader in remote access technologies for the Internet market, was subsequently absorbed by Lucent in a merger. Prior to 1996, Ray's tenure with Digital Equipment Company included positions as Senior Consultant for Worldwide Network Operations, and Technical Leader and Senior Consultant for the Network Products Group. Ray's commitments to excellence and ideas were recognized by Digital. Mr. Pasquale received a Customer Satisfaction Award, Storage Systems Excellence Award, and Delta Ideas Recognition Award. He attended the University of Maine.
Rick Burnes is the Co-founder and CEO of Charles River Ventures, a venture capital firm dedicated to helping startups turn their ideas into real, viable businesses. Founded in 1970, Charles River Ventures takes a value-added approach to investingby providing entrepreneurs with access to more than just financial backing, such as offering its network of industry contacts or helping to build advisory boards for fledgling companies. At Charles River Ventures, Mr. Burnes' investments havefocused mainly in the fields of communications and information services. He has played a significant role in noteworthy investments such as: Cascade Communications, Chipcom Corporation, Epoch Systems, Abacus Direct, Summa Four, Concord Communications,Prominet, Aptis and Sonus Networks.
Mr. Burnes holds a Master's Degree in Business Administration from Boston University, and an undergraduate degree in History from Harvard College. He serves as Chairman for the Boston Museum of Science and the Entrepreneur's Foundation of New England, as well as Vice Chairman of Sea Education Association, and Director of The Boston Foundation.


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On May 11, 2018 the USCIS released a policy memorandum delineating forthcoming changes on how unlawful presence will be calculated for individuals holding principal or dependent F, J and M non-immigrant status.
VIDEO: 5 in 15 - Immigration, Labor, & Employment Legal Trends: Sexual Harrassment, Transgender Employees, Employment Manuals (NLRB's Boeing Decision), Department of Homeland Security Oversight, Immigration Challenges
Kerr Russell attorneys Kate McCarroll and Katherine Cser discuss the top five issues today in immigration, labor and employment law.
EVP Portal and the 2019 H-1B lottery
By Miroslava Orduño Rincón - As I mentioned in various other posts, fee receipt notices for cases selected in the 2019 H-1B Fiscal Year lottery started to roll this week. The process of notifying individuals that were selected and rejected takes several weeks, with lucky winners usually finding out first and the rejected packages arriving later. Understandably, the process is nerve wracking for applicants, specially for those who are running out of optional practical training (OPT) time.
Download Kerr Russell's updated firm brochure and overview of services
Kerr Russell is proud of Detroit. We are proud to have had a seat at the table here since 1874. Our exceptional attorneys understand the unique challenges facing business leaders. Our legal solutions are prompt, accurate, economical, and focused around your needs in every area. We know Michigan business like the back of our hands.
"And this is how it goes. For more than 15 years." Finding resolution for DACA, Dreamers
DACA. Dreamers. These words have become part of our American lexicon, invoking debate passionate enough to bring our federal government to a halt. The terms, and the individuals to whom we pin these labels, are the topic of national discussion, from the break room to cable news to the halls of Congress.
How does a federal government shut down affect immigration agencies?
Unless lawmakers come to a last-minute agreement, the U.S. government will shut down at 12:01 AM on Saturday, January 20, 2018. The last such Federal shutdown occurred from October 1-16, 2013. A Federal government shutdown results in a stoppage of all budget-funded and "non-essential" services.
Honoring the legacy of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and every day, we at Kerr Russell honor Reverend King's leadership and his legacy as well as the critical importance of diversity and opportunity in this great land of ours. Strength comes from difference; a multiplicity of voices brings positive change; understanding and inclusion inspire creativity and innovation.
What is Temporary Protected Status?
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is available to nationals of designated countries who are present in the United States, but unable to safely return to their home country. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security designates which countries are eligible for TPS on account of an armed conflict in the country; an environmental disaster (e.g. earthquake or hurricane); an epidemic; or other extraordinary conditions.
Problems with Dependent Visa Issuance at U.S. Consulates
Two of my clients have experienced similar errors at U.S. Consulates in China and Egypt as it concerns dependent visas for spouses that have never held that status. This appears to be a new issue, and I have filed a report with the American Immigration Lawyers Association AILA. I will provide updates as I receive them. My full analysis follows ...
Immigration Insider - Travel Restrictions, USCIS Ends Deference to Extensions of Nonimmigrant Status, Online Naturalization Application, New H-1B Filings (Winter 2017)
Implementation of Presidential Proclamation Regarding Travel Restrictions On September 24, 2017, President Trump issued a third travel ban, after the initial two versions were found unconstitutional by the U.S. courts.
Miroslava Orduño Rincón addresses document retention regarding employees' Form I-9
In the latest issue of dbusiness, Miroslava Orduño Rincon, immigration partner, addresses the question: "Should an employer retain copies of documentation presented by employees for Form I-9?" View the original post here.
What is the Diversity Visa Lottery?
Established in 1990, the Diversity Visa (DV) Lottery program allocates 50,000 immigrant visas (green cards) each year to individuals from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. For example, citizens from most African and European countries are eligible – those from India, Mexico, Canada, and other high-volume U.S. immigration countries are not. Applicants to the DV Lottery must meet minimum education or work experience requirements to be eligible for the program. Entries are submitted online, and winners are randomly chosen.
USCIS Changes Existing Policy Regarding L-1B Extensions
Via a policy memorandum dated October 23, 2017, the USCIS has rescinded prior guidance from 2004 concerning the significance of a prior L1B at the time of an extension application.
Mutual Suspension of Visa Issuance Between the United States and Turkey
Following the arrest of a U.S. Consulate employee by Turkish authorities in Istanbul, the United States Mission in Turkey announced on October 8, 2017 the immediate suspension of all non-immigrant visa services at all posts in the country.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) is urging employers to express support of H-1B program
The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) is urging employers who "have utilized the H-1B program successfully and responsibly" to write to their members of congress to express their support for the program.
USCIS Resumes Premium Processing for Selected H-1B Petitions
On September 18, 2017, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it would be resuming premium processing for H-1B petitions subject to the 2018 cap. The resumption of this service applies both to Bachelor and Master's Cap applications.
Immigration Insider - In-Person Interviews Expanded, Attorney Representation at Border, Denial of Advanced Parole, and DACA (Fall 2017)
The Fall 2017 edition of Kerr Russell's Immigration Insider has been published.
Immigration Alert: Potential Impact of the Presidential Election
Following the election, our office has received numerous inquiries from clients regarding how their immigration status will be impacted by the Trump presidency.
Meghan Kennedy Riordan authors "Independent Contractors or Employees?"
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) legally mandates that United States employers verify the employment eligibility of every person one hires.
Kate McCarroll authors "I-9 Compliance in Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions"
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has recently increased its investigation and enforcement efforts in regards to I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification Form) compliance. In June 2011, ICE agents served subpoenas on 1,000 employers across the United States which required that they turn over original I-9 forms, as well as significant corporate documentation, for review.
+Related News
19 Kerr Russell Attorneys Recognized as DBusiness Top Lawyers for 2020
A total of 19 lawyers from Kerr Russell are named as dBusiness Magazine 2020 Top Lawyers. The attorneys are selected through a peer review process. dBusiness polled 19,000 attorneys across Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Washtenaw, and Livingston Counties.
Miroslava Orduño Rincón Recognized as Crain's Notable Woman in Law 2019
Crain's Detroit Business released their list of the Notable Women in Law 2019. Miroslava was selected for her career accomplishments, track record of success in the field, contributions to the community and mentorship of others. She is recognized along with 21 other regional attorneys.
Kate McCarroll Recognized as Most Influential Woman in Immigration Law 2019
Acquisition International magazine recently announced the winners of the Global Excellence Awards 2019. Kate McCarroll received the honor of Most Influential Woman in Immigration Law.
15 Lawyers From Kerr Russell Are Recognized In The Best Lawyers In America© 2020
A total of 15 lawyers from Kerr Russell are named to the prestigious 2020 Edition of the Best Lawyers in America©. The award is given annually in recognition of being named as part of the "top legal talent in the U.S."
Kerr Russell sponsors, partners attend Metropolitan Detroit's Best and Brightest Companies to Work For 2018 event
Kerr Russell was pleased to be a silver sponsor for today's Corp! Magazine / The Best and Brightest Programs event held at the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center, celebrating those who create innovative, engaging, inclusive work cultures. Attending on behalf of the firm: Kate McCarroll, member - immigration; Miroslava Orduno Rincon, member - immigration; and Roy Sexton, director of marketing.
Immigration Insider - Updates regarding premium processing, petition denials (Fall 2018)
Increase in Premium Processing Fee U.S Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) announced that beginning October 1, 2018, the fee for premium processing will be raised to $1,410 (from $1,225). USCIS explained that the purpose of the fee increase is "to more effectively adjudicate petitions and maintain effective service to petitioners." Premium processing is currently available for some I-129 and I-140 petitions, and allows petitioners to request 15 day processing of certain filings with payment of the additional fee.
Kerr Russell attorneys, friends attend second annual New Americans Appreciation Gala - September 6 at The Henry
It was a beautiful evening celebrating the remarkable accomplishments of immigrants in America. Kerr Russell's Brandy Mathie, Robert Anderson, James Cambridge and Mary Cambridge, Miroslava Orduno Rincon and KeVin Knox, and Roy Sexton attended the 2nd annual New Americans Appreciation Gala on September 6 at The Henry in Dearborn.
Kate McCarroll published in Michigan Lawyers Weekly - "Remembering 'Sara and Jane': Thoughts on immigration law and abuse victims seeking asylum"
Congratulations to Kate McCarroll, member (immigration), whose opinion piece "Remembering 'Sara and Jane' - Thoughts on immigration law and abuse victims seeking asylum" was published by Michigan Lawyers Weekly. Excerpt: "Early in my career, I handled asylum cases for two women who fled to the United States because they had been abused by their husbands and feared further harm. They were the only asylum cases I ever handled. Each won her claim, and I am hopeful that they are now U.S. citizens, living happy, productive, safe lives in the country that opened its arms to them when they were most afraid."
Kerr Russell - DBusiness Magazine's "Faces of Corporate Law 2018"
Kerr Russell is proud to serve as DBusiness Magazine's "Faces of Corporate Law" 2018. Partners pictured: Jackie Klima (construction/surety), Mike Carroll (construction/surety), Miroslava Orduno Rincon (immigration), and Rich Buslepp (corporate).
Kerr Russell featured as advertiser in Corp! Magazine's annual Human Resources Guide
Be on the lookout for Corp! Magazine's special edition "2018 Human Resource Guide." From the publisher: "In partnership with the Best & Brightest Companies to Work For, this issue focuses on best practices in the workplace.
Immigration Insider: Change in Delivery of Secure Documents, FY 2019 H-1B Lottery Petitions, and I-751 Removal of Conditions Extension (Summer 2018)
Change in Delivery of Secure Documents In an effort to increase the "security, integrity, and efficiency of document delivery," U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) announced that beginning April 30, 2018, it would utilize a new delivery method for "green cards," employment authorization documents (EADs), and travel documents (e.g. re-entry permits). The new method requires beneficiaries to present identification to confirm identity and sign for their documents in order to receive delivery.
New process for delivery of secure USCIS documents via U.S. Postal Service
In an effort to increase the "security, integrity, and efficiency of document delivery", the USCIS has announced that effective April 30, 2018, it will begin utilizing a new delivery method for "green cards", employment authorization documents, and other travel documents such as re-entry permits.
Detroit Public Television's PBSNewsHour and Nightly Business Report to be sponsored by Kerr Russell
Kerr Russell is pleased to support Detroit Public Television, and, beginning April 2, the following spot will air during PBS NewsHour (weekdays, 6-7 pm) and the Nightly Business Report (weekdays, 7-7:30 pm). View the spot here.
Kerr Russell's latest ad "Driven By Results" debuts in Crain's M&A, Biggest Deals issue this week
Kerr Russell's latest ad "Driven By Results" debuts in Crain's M&A, Biggest Deals issue this week. The ad emphasizes the firm's 143-year presence in Detroit as part of the larger business and legal community. "We understand the region. We know what moves Michigan. We are committed to the community."
Ken Lombardo, Robert Anderson featured in Crain's Detroit Business
Congratulations to Robert Anderson and Ken Lombardo for being featured in this week's Crain's Detroit Business "People on the Move." Both were named members (partners) of the firm, effective January 1. You can view the Crain's piece online here.
Influencing the Legal Landscape - new Kerr Russell ad to appear in dbusiness
Kerr Russell introduces the third ad in the new "Est. in Detroit 1874" series: "Influencing the legal landscape." The piece emphasizes the firm's 143-year presence in Detroit as part of the larger business and legal community. "We don't sit on the sidelines. We are active in industry groups and we're driving legislative change. We are leaders in the law."
Kerr Russell highlighted in Best Lawyers - Business, Winter 2017 issue
Look for Kerr Russell attorneys and advertising (pages 92-95) in the Best Lawyers - Business, Winter 2017 issue. Earlier in 2017, a number of Kerr Russell's attorneys and practice areas were honored with U.S. News and World Report Best Lawyers recognition.
Kerr Russell selects Robert Anderson, Kenneth Lombardo as new members
Kerr Russell is pleased to announce that Robert S. Anderson, immigration law, and Kenneth R. Lombardo, corporate law, have been selected to become members (partners) of the firm, effective January 1.
Kerr Russell team makes holiday donations to Capuchin Soup Kitchen, Wigs 4 Kids, Ronald McDonald House Charities of Ann Arbor, and Children's Hospital of Michigan
One of our traditions here at Kerr Russell is to hold a holiday raffle to benefit three local charities as well as to conduct a toy drive for local children. This year's raffle (many of the beautiful and festive prizes picture here) raised a record total of $3,450 which will be divided equally among three organizations: Capuchin Soup Kitchen, Wigs 4 Kids of Michigan, Inc., and Ronald McDonald House Charities of Ann Arbor.
Kate McCarroll named one of Crain's Business Detroit's Notable Women Lawyers in Michigan - 2017
We at Kerr Russell are so proud to have two of our attorneys recognized by Crain's Detroit Business as Notable Women Lawyers in Michigan - 2017. Great work, Kate McCarroll, on your selection! From Crain's announcement...
Merry and bright ... Kerr Russell welcomes the holiday season
It's a time to celebrate, reflect and remember. However you mark the holidays, we hope your days are filled with warmth and thankfulness, good times, and endless cheer. As another year draws to a close, we at Kerr Russell are grateful to you. You give purpose to our work and add meaning to our relationships. Your trust is a cherished gift. Enjoy these images as we get our offices ready to celebrate the holiday season. Design by Mandy Lark of Lark Interior Design.
Miroslava Orduno Rincon receives AVVO's Top Contributor Award
Miroslava Orduno Rincon, member - immigration, was just named by AVVO as a Top Contributor for 2017, amassing 1500 points for the calendar year. According to AVVO's website, points are garnered when member attorneys "answer questions in Q&A forums, publish informative guides on the issues and practice areas they know best, and evaluate the contributions of their peers."
Culture of Connection - new Kerr Russell ad to appear in Michigan Lawyers Weekly and dbusiness
Kerr Russell introduces the second ad in the new "Est. in Detroit 1874" series: "A culture of connection." The piece emphasizes the firm's 143-year presence in Detroit as part of the larger business and legal community. "We are relationship focused. We know our people and our clients are the lifeblood of our firm."
Kerr Russell hosts Inforum's Downtown Detroit Luncheon Affinity Group to capacity crowd on November 8
Kerr Russell hosted the November meeting of Inforum Michigan's Downtown Detroit affinity group on November 8. Companies represented included Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Atlas Advisors, The Children's Center, Community Foundation of Southeast Michigan, Michigan Office for New Americas, General Motors, Nachi Robotic Systems, FranNet of Michigan, Iannuzzi Manetta and Company, Presbysterian Villages of Michigan, HAP, and AXA Advisors.
Kerr Russell salutes Zonta Club of Pontiac North Oakland for 90 years of service
Kate McCarroll, member, writes, "Thank you, Zonta Club of Pontiac North Oakland, for your service to women in our community and worldwide. Inspiring women of all ages to think big, effect change, and mentor others is as essential today as it was on your founding day. Thank you."
Kerr Russell launches new advertising in upcoming issues of dbusiness and Crain's Detroit
With this month's issue of dbusiness, focused on Top Lawyers in Metro Detroit, Kerr Russell launches its new brand advertising with "A Track Record of Results." Working with Identity Public Relations and Marketing, Kerr Russell's marketing team developed the creative to emphasize the firm's longstanding place in Detroit's legal and business history.
Kerr Russell ranked in the 2018 U.S. News - Best Lawyers® "Best Law Firms" list nationally in 1 practice area and regionally in 17 practice areas
U.S. News & World Report and Best Lawyers, for the eighth consecutive year, announce the "Best Law Firms" rankings.
Kerr Russell colleagues run Detroit Free Press Half Marathon
Over the past weekend, three Kerr Russell colleagues ran in the Detroit Free Press half marathon. Congrats to Kate McCarroll, member, and Andrea Bartolotta and Kristina Kalfayan, administrative team.
Kerr Russell team places second and scores longest drive at Detroit Chinese Business Association golf outing
At the 22nd Annual Detroit Chinese Business Association (DCBA) International Golf Opening at Indianwood Golf and Country Club, our attorneys experienced a great afternoon of golfing and kinship, plus a wonderful dinner with opening remarks by Executive Office, Oakland County, Michigan's Deputy Executive Matthew Gibb.
Miroslava Orduno Rincon volunteers at DACA Renewal Clinic
Kerr Russell Member Miroslava Orduno Rincon volunteered at the September 18 DACA Renewal Clinic - Detroit.
Inforum Detroit Affinity Group, 9/13 at Punch Bowl Social Detroit
Attorney Miroslava Orduno Rincon attended today's Inforum Detroit Affinity group with Director of Marketing Roy Sexton.
Immigration Alert: Executive Order & Travel
On Friday, January 27, President Trump signed an Executive Order which bars individuals who are citizens of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia from entering the United States for at least 90 days.
Kerr Russell Attorneys Named 2016 Super Lawyers
Kerr Russell attorneys have been named SuperLawyers for 2016, two have been named to the Michigan Top 100 and four have been named as Rising Stars.

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Quick links... News Weather Morning News In-Depth FOX 17 Unfiltered Sports Politics Coronavirus Morning Mix Trusted Advisor Contests Closings and Delays
Teachers association protest to 'ensure safe start for students, community'
Teachers, parents and members of the Vicksburg Education Association protest district's back-to-school plan
Teachers with the Vicksburg Education Association protest Vicksburg Community School's back-to-school plan due to safety concerns.
By: Lauren Edwards
VICKSBURG, Mich. — The Vicksburg Education Association said teachers have met with the Vicksburg Community Schools administration twice, trying to come up with a safe plan for returning to school.
VEA President Jennifer Rodas said both sides have not come to an agreement.
So, Wednesday afternoon the association protested on the fields next to the administration building.
"Today we're really trying to show unity and solidarity towards our cause in ensuring safe start for our student and our community," said Rodas during an interview with FOX 17. "We start back August 31 and the current plan has all of our students in our district back fully face-to-face."
She said currently the plan is for students between kindergarten and fifth grade to attend school five days a week, and they're not required to wear a mask, while sixth graders to high school seniors come in four days a week wearing masks, she said.
Wednesdays will be used for the older students who choose the virtual learning option and want to meet with teachers on those days.
The association believes the plan is too risky. They fear an outbreak can happen.
"The Health Department has said it's not really a matter of "if" but "when," Rodas said regarding the possibility of an outbreak. "It could just be one isolated incident or multiple isolated incidents that we can isolate and quarantine and take care of. It could also be a situation like in Georgia, where we don't know how many students teachers staff would be out and for how long."
FOX 17 reached out to Vicksburg Community Schools about the concerns. They released a statement saying in part:
"We know that our district has our best interest in mind and I know that they're getting guidance for the Health Dept. We as a staff just feel that we need some more time to to really know whats it's going to look like. Our district is committed to social distancing but not to the 6-feet. Our district is committed to mask-wearing but not be K-5 when they're to at their desks."
It also stated that VCS will be releasing the details of their final plans for the school year on Friday August 14. Families will be given the option to do either virtual or in-person learning.
Rodas said teachers would like to start the year with 100 percent virtual learning. The association believes teachers need more time to assess how things go before allowing students back into the buildings.
"We know that our district has our best interest in mind and I know that they're getting guidance for the Health Department," Rodas said. "We as a staff just feel that we need some more time to to really know whats it's going to look like. Our district is committed to social distancing but not to the six-feet. Our district is committed to mask-wearing but not be K-5 when they're to at their desks."


This is an in-depth guide to Software Testing for the ISEB Foundation certification. Some of the information here I've already previously used as a software developer and some of it is new information on testing techniques. I have so far dipped in and out of various chapters, but now plan to read this thoroughly with the aim of getting the ISEB Foundation certification. Testing is a vital part of the software development process and the information here is useful for any developer/IT professional.


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Moldova Energy
Moldova Natural Gas
Summary Table
Million Cubic Ft
(MMcf) Global Rank
Gas Reserves
0 N.A.
353 93rd in the world
96,410 72nd in the world
Yearly Deficit
Gas Imports
Gas Exports
Net Imports
(Data shown is for 2015, the latest year with complete data in all categoreies)
Gas Consumption in Moldova
See also: List of countries by Gas Consumption
Moldova consumes 88,888 million cubic feet (MMcf) of natural gas per year as of the year 2017.
Moldova ranks 72nd in the world for natural gas consumption, accounting for about 0.1% of the world's total consumption of 132,290,211 MMcf.
Moldova consumes 21,895 cubic feet of natural gas per capita every year (based on the 2017 population of 4,059,684 people), or 60 cubic feet per capita per day.
Moldova imports 100% of its natural gas consumption (96,057 MMcf in 2015).
History of Gas Consumption and Production
Population of Moldova
Statistical Review of World Energy - British Petroleum
U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)


No economist of the 20th century was as persistent in focusing on the problems of developing countries or so creative in exploring what could be done to accelerate their development as Professor Sir Hans Singer, who has died aged 95. He had a career lasting seven decades from 1936, as an émigré from Hitler's Germany receiving his doctorate at Cambridge, to a lecture last November. Extraordinary vision and energy issued from a small man, of modest appearance and mild-mannered stance, head often cocked to one side and bushy eyebrows, with a friendly but questioning smile. He was widely loved and deservedly feted.
Singer was one of the first economists employed by the United Nations, joining the UN economic affairs department in 1947. Working alongside the UN's first economist, David Owen, with Sidney Dell, VKRV Rao and Michal Kalecki, Singer gave intellectual edge to the rapidly expanding international organisation. Those were the days when the UN was acknowledged to be in the lead, the World Bank still being preoccupied with reconstruction in postwar Europe, and Singer rapidly became its working economist of choice, moving from new department to new department.
Singer left the UN in 1969 to become one of the first fellows of the new Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. His prodigious output continued, though now under his own name. John Shaw, in his biography published in 2002, lists Singer's output: 107 books, 83 major reports, over 260 professional articles and an almost uncountable number of book reviews, letters to the press and other pieces. Singer added a few more books and articles during the last four years.
Undoubtedly, Singer's best known work relates to the declining terms of trade experienced by developing countries. Generally referred to as the Prebisch-Singer thesis, we now know the underlying analysis ought to be attributed to Singer himself, as argued in a recent book by John and Richard Toye.
The thesis, first published in 1949, tracked the long-term decline in terms of trade between developing and developed countries and analysed the causes. At the time, when Keynesian preoccupations were with short-term fluctuations in commodity prices, Singer's work attracted controversy. Many economists disputed the existence of a decline, but today professional opinion has shifted in Singer's favour. Much of the action Singer recommended has however not been taken, so that countries still dependent on coffee, cotton and other primary commodities for the bulk of their export earnings continue to lose out.
Singer made many other fundamental contributions to development thinking. In the 1950s, as secretary to the committee which recommended the creation of a UN fund for economic development, Singer did much of the technical work to create a soft-loan facility for poor countries. The fund was to be called by the acronym Unfed, until Singer pointed out how unfortunate a name this would be. So, as he delighted in telling, it became Sunfed, the Special UN fund.
None the less, Eugene Black, president of the World Bank at the time, did his best to keep it unfed, opposing the proposal for seven or eight years, and referring to Singer as "one of the wild men of the UN". By the end of the 1950s, the idea of concessional loans to poorer countries was accepted and became the basis for IDA, the International Development Association, established in 1960 and still serving today as the World Bank's main arm and multibillion-dollar mechanism for concessional lending to developing countries.
In 1961, the UN responded to President Kennedy's call in the general assembly to set up a Development Decade focused on reducing world poverty. Singer was the main drafter of the blue book which provided guidelines for implementation. His ideas on aid and development always had a creative eye to policy applications. He was the first to write about the problems of "fungibility" - how development assistance provided for one purpose could be used to support quite another, since it eased general budget constraints. This was one reason why Singer opposed tough conditionality in the use of aid.
Singer fashioned many of the ideas underlying food aid and the creation in 1963 of the UN World Food Programme, which bestowed on him its Food For Life award in 2001. Singer was one of the first economists to work in the Economic Commission for Africa and later served as the first director of research for Unido, the UN industrial development organisation (1967-69). For Unicef, Singer wrote the first document on children and economic development, which he thought so important that for several months he set aside his work on terms of trade. Indeed, there are few UN development agencies to which Singer did not at one time or another contribute.
Some of Singer's most significant contributions came at the IDS. He helped draft the Sussex Manifesto: Science and Technology to Developing Countries during the Second Development Decade (1970). He revisited his theory of declining terms of trade, to give more attention to the part played by technological advance in developed countries. Singer was one of two main advisers to the World Employment Programme of the International Labour Office. In 1972 I was co-leader with him of the mission that produced the ILO Kenya report, Employment, Incomes and Equality. Singer on this mission originated the concept of redistribution from growth, which later became the theme for a seminal World Bank-IDS study, Redistribution with Growth. The Kenya report was also the first international document to draw attention to the positive contributions of the informal sector and laid the foundation for the "basic needs strategy" which for a few years became fashionable orthodoxy after the World Employment Conference in 1976.
Singer was born into a Jewish family in the Rhineland. At Bonn University, his brilliance brought him to the attention of the renowned economist Josef Schumpeter. In 1933, when Singer had to flee Nazi Germany, Schumpeter wrote to John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge, and Singer became only the fourth student to obtain a doctorate under his supervision. Soon after, Singer embarked on Men without Work (1938), a study of unemployment in Britain, supervised by William Temple, then Archbishop of York and later of Canterbury, with William Beveridge as its main adviser. Singer and his colleagues, Walter Oakeshott and David Owen, lived with poor families in five towns, to ensure a first-hand feel for the issues. Their study had an important influence on Beveridge's famous 1942 report on Social Insurance and Allied Services and his later Full Employment in a Free Society.
Notwithstanding these contacts and a post at Manchester University (1938-44), Singer was interned for about six weeks in the early months of the second world war, until released at Keynes' personal intervention. Singer often said he developed his deep sympathy for marginalised people in developing countries by growing up as a Jew in a Catholic area of Protestant Germany and later coming to Britain as a refugee. In 1945-46 he was at the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, and in 1946-47 at Glasgow University, till the call came to New York.
Singer maintained his extraordinary warmth, gentle manner and human concerns over his whole life. In the UN he was admired for his outstanding professional qualities, ready willingness to help and scrupulous avoidance of gossip and infighting. The UN old guard remembered him as maintaining his integrity even when singled out for attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy (for his work on Sunfed). Indeed, because of these pressures, Singer resigned from the UN in 1953, and only an appeal by Dag Hammarskjold, newly appointed as secretary general, stopped him leaving.
Singer was married for 67 years to Ilse Plaut Singer (obituary, March 13 2001), who brought her own moral commitments and an incisive and independent perspective to their partnership.
Singer always found time for others - for students as for colleagues - even while maintaining his prodigious output. He gave what was to be his last lecture without notes, pausing only to elaborate a point or to explain his early calculations for the UN on how much aid would be needed if developing countries were to accelerate their growth and development. Knighted in 1994, for services to economic issues, Singer is survived by his son Stephen.


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Resume Reading — Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Environmentalism
Biology Technology
Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Environmentalism
To stop destroying nature, developers are mimicking it.
Anastasia Bendebury & Michael Shilo DeLay By Anastasia Bendebury & Michael Shilo DeLay October 7, 2020
As the rains return to the Pacific Northwest, so do the mushrooms. Fine mist drips from the crowns of evergreens, through the mosses…By Anastasia Bendebury & Michael Shilo DeLay
As the rains return to the Pacific Northwest, so do the mushrooms. Fine mist drips from the crowns of evergreens, through the mosses and down into a layer of fragrant duff that shelters an ecosystem of mycelium, bacterial decomposers, and insect aerators. Under the canopy of old-growth forests, everything is dying, being taken apart at the molecular level—but at the same time, it is being reborn. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, home to organisms that nurture new forest life. It's a landscape of cataclysm and of regrowth, where nature shows off its singular ability to recover and revive, year after year.
The environmentalist movement that was cultivated here has given rise to an entire generation of engineers, scientists, and designers who have started to pay closer attention to the ways that nature can be the most sagacious teacher. Mycologist Paul Stamets, for one, has shown that a mycelium extract can decompose petroleum waste and sprout oyster mushrooms in its place. These visionary scientists are leaders in the biomimicry movement, in which scientists are harnessing nature's processes to right our environmental wrongs. Featured below are five current examples of biomimicry seeding a sustainable future.
brilliant butterflies: Morpho butterflies, like the one on the left, get their vibrant coloring from tiny filaments on the surface of their wings. On the right are a vial containing green "photonic capsules," which show colors without any dyes by reflecting particular wavelengths of light, and microscope images of blue, green, and red photonic capsules.Charles Patrick Ewing; Jin-Gyu Park
Colloidal Pigments
Making the vibrant dyes we use for everything from house paints to fabric to cars is a toxic, energy-intensive process. The very property that creates the most satisfying, long-lasting colors is exactly the resonant, high-energy behavior that makes them so deadly. Phthalo green, chrome yellow, cadmium red are lovely, but they come with a pernicious price—all are composed of heavy metals poisonous to humans in varying degrees. Many members of the natural world, though, appear in a dizzying array of hues, all while avoiding the pitfalls of heavy metals. How do they do it, you might ask; can't we just do what they do?
Most biological pigments aren't synthesized from scratch—they're usually borrowed from someone else. The soft pink of salmon comes from a diet of coral-shelled shrimp and krill. The bright red plumage of cardinals? From the carotenoid-rich diet of the most succulent forest berries. The color emanates from these creatures on the molecular level, and isn't very long-lasting. Its stability requires constant renewal. In search of more permanence, material scientists have been looking to more ingrained biological colors for inspiration.
Also in Technology
Why I Built a Dumb Cell Phone with a Rotary Dial
By Justine Haupt
In 2007, when touchscreens first started coming on the scene, I was excited, like everyone. As a lifelong science-fiction fan, they always seemed to me to be the obvious choice for future user interfaces. But, for over a decade, I've...READ MORE
For some reason, many blue creatures in nature have a structural approach to color, rather than the molecular approach outlined above. Take, for example, the opalescent wings of a morpho butterfly. Though they appear an electric blue, the wings themselves are colorless in the traditional sense. There's no vibrating molecule of blue pigment. Instead, the color comes from the organization of the butterfly's surface. Each magnificent wing is covered in billions of tiny filaments, each a tenth of the width of a human hair. These colorless structures capture light like the inside of a kaleidoscope, reflecting and refracting it until it comes back that luminous indigo. The structural color of the morpho wings is angle dependent, though—it shimmers and changes as the butterfly flutters. For something more stable, researchers looked to the noble bluebird.
"The colors of nearly every blue bird that you see in nature comes from nano-pores in the feathers, and not from any pigment," says Vinothan Manoharan, head of a group at Harvard that studies how to create structural colors. These pores are scattered across the surface of the feathers, "disordered in the way that they would be, for example, if you took a bunch of ball bearings and threw them into a bucket without doing any arranging."
This means that, using their methods, it's theoretically possible to produce cosmetics, posters, and inks that are completely free of heavy-metal pigments. Widespread use of this technique could lead to a world where object and color are, quite literally, inseparable.
Evaporation Station: This video shows prototypes of the Sahin bacterial spore evaporation engine.ExtremeBio
Evaporation Energy
In nature, any spontaneous flow between two reservoirs can be harvested to produce power. Place a water wheel in a river, a windmill on a naked hilltop, attach some magnets, connect a circuit, and you've got yourself some electricity. As humans cast about for ways to power our existence without tracking so much mud through nature's spotless temple, there's one approach that has been largely overlooked—evaporation.
In some ways, it makes sense; evaporation is such a quiet process. One could be forgiven for barely noticing it—a waft of steam from a cup of coffee on a crisp, fall morning, or mist rising from the roof after a sudden summer downpour—it's more the domain of poets than the rest of us. But about a decade ago, Ozgur Sahin of Columbia University was studying the mechanical properties of bacterial spores when he was shot through with a bolt from the blue.
His measurements astounded him—the force the spores generated as they cycled between small and thirsty and massive and moist was enough to act like a powerful, humidity-controlled muscle. He still remembers the awe he felt when he realized what was happening. "These tiny soil-dwelling organisms had been carrying this potential all this time and had gone unnoticed," he recounts. The next stage was to create some way to demonstrate the untapped promise—machines that could run on pure water.
"It took several years and the help of brilliant students and colleagues to make those engines a reality," Sahin explains, but eventually, his team created a functional prototype. It was a small box filled with spore muscles—thin strips of plastic coated on one side with a spore mixture—that straddled the air-water interface. When the cycle starts, the shutters on the top of the box are closed, which allows the reservoir that contains the muscle to fill with water vapor. The moisture causes the muscles to relax, which opens the shutters. As the water evaporates from the spores the muscles contract, which resets the cycle.
As the muscles cycle through wet, dry, wet, dry, their motion turns an electromagnetic generator, as long as there is water in the reservoir. A former colleague of Sahin's, Xi Chen, is iterating on nature in an attempt to produce an artificial protein that is even more water-responsive than the shell of the original bacterial spores.
This method, if scaled up, could be extraordinarily effective considering that almost 90 percent of the atmospheric moisture is the result of evaporation from air-water interfaces. The team believes their technology can match existing green-energy alternatives, but without the intermittency issues of solar and wind.
strong like spidey: Spider silk is one of the toughest materials in nature. Researchers think a synthetic replica could be used for everything from prosthetics to fabric. Bettina Calder / Shutterstock
Spider Silk
Spider silk "is arguably nature's toughest material, and has other properties like biocompatibility and electro-thermal conductivity," explains Sean Blamires, the principal investigator leading University of New South Wales' Spider Silk Research Laboratory. The extraordinary material has a host of properties that make it well-suited for a variety of applications. Its surface chemistry makes it ideal for use as a biocompatible coating for implants, one which lowers the risk of rejection while it accelerates healing. Its supreme strength makes it ideal for artificial muscle fibers in next-generation prosthetics, and its biodegradable nature makes it an excellent option for packaging, so we can finally stop wasting the most durable materials on earth for the most temporary task.
In addition to the space-age applications, there's a more prosaic vision of a smoother future—where biologically-based strength, elasticity, and toughness make spider silk an extremely attractive alternative to man-made fibers like rayon. Although rayon technically comes from recycled wood products, the process of manufacturing industrial quantities is stunningly dirty. To extract usable fibers from wood pulp, workers have to apply a sequential mix of caustic chemicals, and are exposed along the way to carbon disulfide, a volatile byproduct that can cause everything from priapism to death by respiratory failure.
Synthetic spider silk solves all of these problems. Engineered bacteria produce spidroins, the component proteins of spider silk. These proteins are then purified, concentrated, and resuspended in water. When the protein mixture is squeezed through a tapered syringe into a saline solution, it results in clean, spinnable fiber that can be degraded at the end of its life by naturally-occurring enzymes. This unrivaled sustainability has attracted the attention of high-profile designers like Stella McCartney, who has partnered with a company called Bolt Threads to produce some of the world's first knit hats and tennis dresses made from engineered spider silk.
Blamires, though, is less interested in the newest tennis dress than he is in understanding why spider silk is so uniquely stiff, tensile, and tough. His group is working on a survey of silk production in different spiders, across a variety of ecosystems. They hope this will help them get a better grasp on the evolution of silk's coveted properties. "We think that knowing the natural silk production processes and its variability therein is very important. We should look at what nature does and try to imitate it," he concludes. Which is just fine, as long as he remembers to make sure that the big room, full of big spiders, is safely locked before he goes home for the night.
sweaters for skyscrapers: These smart windows use techniques found in the chromatic structures in cephalopod skin to fine-tune the amount of sunlight reaching into buildings.Courtesy of Shu Yang
eSkins
Urban centers are well known to be "heat islands," places where temperatures are several degrees hotter than in the surrounding countryside—a side effect of the ways that we've been building cities for the last few centuries. Roads are dark, flat surfaces that absorb an inordinate amount of heat. Buildings, especially skyscrapers, have their own heat peaks—all those central cooling towers and countless window AC units just dump the hot air onto the already-sweltering pavement.
For Shu Yang, professor of material science at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Center for Analyzing Evolved Structures as Optimized Products, the answer to this urban heat problem is biomimetic design on the city scale. Yang's work focuses on the fundamental concept of homeostasis, informed by her collaborations with biologists. She notes that her team "sees a unique functionality, and then looks to biology" for instruction on how to approach the problem. In her world, insight into nature starts on the scale of miniature and is transmuted to the monumental.
Take, for example, the problem of office buildings. Most older offices spend almost 40 percent of their electrical budget on heating and cooling. It's usually a centralized process that's insensitive to minute changes in the environment. A corner office in direct sunlight is sweltering, while the conference room under the eaves of the building always requires a sweater. Yang is interested in the idea that if buildings could be more like animals—if they had a way of sensing their environments—maybe they could change their behavior in order to be more habitable.
To achieve this, Yang's team combines the biological with the structural. Intrigued by the chromatic structures in cephalopod skin—small pigment sacs that allow creatures to go from transparent to opaque at the slightest sign of danger—her team developed a material with similar properties that could be used to finely tune building conditions. It can be added onto existing buildings like a second skin that's completely transparent when relaxed, but becomes opaque when stretched.
In the future, she imagines merging this new material with kirigami design, where applied tension can create complex, three-dimensional shapes. This could produce building skins where "one side is reflective, but you don't normally see the reflection. When it starts to get hot, we can tilt the panels to reflect the light." She imagines that these skins could be entirely autonomous if merged with materials that respond to humidity changes—maybe those spore muscles mentioned earlier?
glow in the dark: Researchers are learning how to use the bioluminescent light produced by marine animals, like this squid and jellyfish, to light cities. Wikimedia; Chris Favero
Bioluminescent Cities
Last but not least, bioinspired design may be the most enchanting way to address widespread light pollution.
A little more than 100 years ago, inhabitants of even the largest cities would have been able to look at the night sky and get some sense of their cosmic context—but with increasing illumination, and the brightness of the newest generation of LED bulbs, many are worried that we may be headed for a future where the night sky is little more than a distant memory.
The future, though, could be a little more green—blue-green, to be specific. Inspired by the bioluminescent light produced by marine animals, Glowee CEO Sandra Rey has designed a lighting system that is literally alive.
As Rey recently told Bloomberg, "in the sea something that is very common is not extraordinary—and so you have to understand that if it's common it means that it is efficient. Behind us we have 3.8 billion years of research and development."
In the lab, her team seeks out bacteria with the most powerful, long-lived, and stable bioluminescence. They grow these creatures in massive quantities, to crowded conditions which causes the bacteria to activate light-releasing pathways. Under standard conditions, the bacterial soup is a golden color, similar to a patch of yellow brick road. But when the lights go down and oxygen is bubbled through the stock-still, mustard-colored medium, something magical happens. The liquid swirls, sparkles, and suddenly catches into a phosphorescent glow. The result is a stable, peaceful blue light that lends its surroundings the feeling of wandering through an enchanted forest.
In the future, Rey imagines Glowee's living lamps as the default option. The company plans to start from urban furniture and signage—but with time, hopes to rethink the whole way we see our cities at night. With this achievement, humans may quite literally see themselves in a new light.
Michael Shilo DeLay and Anastasia Bendebury are biologists and co-creators of the science blog, Demystifying Science. Follow them on Twitter @Demystifysci.
Lead image: Ondrej Prosicky / Shutterstock
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La T-11 és un tram d'autovia el trajecte és de Reus a Tarragona substituint l'antic traçat de la N-420. La construcció d'aquesta autovia va ser entre 1998 i 2001. Part del desdoblament de la N-420 entre les Borges del Camp i Reus, a quatre quilòmetres a l'oest de Reus i circumval la ciutat del nord-oest al sud-est enllaçant amb l'antic traçat de la N-420 (transformat en autovia) prop de l'aeroport de Reus per finalitzar a l'extrem oest de Tarragona, al pont sobre el riu Francolí. La longitud total de l'autovia és de 17,3 km. Des de febrer de 2008 el tram des de Boella / Aeroport fins a Tarragona es troba immers en obres després de la reordenació dels enllaços amb l'Autovia de la Mediterrania, Autopista del Mediterrani, els accessos amb els barris de Ponent i el centre comercial Les Gavarres, així com el encreuament amb el Corredor Mediterrani.

Referències

Carreteres de Catalunya


text:
David Cameron's Brexit referendum shows no honor
There was no need for the referendum. He walked himself into political oblivion without a backward glance.
Irish Voice Editorial
Former British Prime Minister David Cameron.
Former British Prime Minister David Cameron left office after his government's most abject political failures, having foisted an entirely unnecessary EU Brexit referendum on the British people in June which went badly wrong.
Instead of banishing his right wing critics with a victory in the referendum, Cameron was defeated in a massive upheaval which shows no sign of settling down.
The reality is there was no need for the referendum. Cameron won the election and an overall majority quite handily and didn't need the Tea Party right. He walked himself into political oblivion without a backward glance.
He has left quite a mess behind. Fundamental questions about the future of the United Kingdom persist as well as fears for the Northern Irish peace process with this new reality.
What was Cameron's final response to the ignominious defeat? Why, it was to reward every Tom, Dick and Mary on his staff who helped with the benighted idea of the Brexit referendum.
Brexit has destabilized Europe, caused major problems for the European Union, led to as yet unforeseen consequences in Ireland and has not been welcomed by any responsible leader save the mad Rupert Murdoch right wingers with their jingoistic fantasies of "Great" Britain once again.
It was the Dad's Army voters who swung the Brexit referendum while the millennials were shocked that the cosmopolitan culture and country they lived in, especially around London, could so easily be fractured by the vote.
Now, as it turns out, 48 people in all were rewarded on the Cameron honors list, a compilation of cronies which the London Independent newspaper stated "would have embarrassed a British medieval court."
Honors fell like confetti on the folks who came up with the disastrous Remain campaign which was defeated by those calling for Britain to leave. Such luminaries as Isabel Spearman, who was Samantha Cameron's stylist, was made an OBE, as was Thea Rogers, who gave Chancellor George Osborne an image makeover as his chief of staff.
Incredibly, two of Cameron's government drivers, Sean Storey and Martha Gutierrez Velez, also received honors.
As the Independent noted, "There were peerages for Ed Llewellyn, who was Mr. Cameron's chief of staff since he became Tory leader in 2005; Gabby Bertin, his former press secretary; Andrew Fraser, the Tory treasurer; Olivia Bloomfield, a former governor of Cheltenham Ladies' College who raised millions for the Tories; Camilla Cavendish, who headed the Downing Street Policy Unit and Liz Sugg, who was Number 10's head of operations."
And so on and on it went until the honors lists numbered in the high forties. Spin merchants and PR persons were especially gratified when showered with peerages and the like. As a former spin doctor himself, Cameron no doubt appreciated their "vital" work.
What the average British person is left with is the stench of us versus them, a form of benign corruption where jobs and honors for the influential boys and girls will always be the law of the land.
It also shows how embedded the class system in Britain is. All of Cameron's toadies were drawn from the same public school/Oxford or Cambridge elite. With the exception of John Major in modern times, all British leaders have come from that milieu.
What the Cameron "honors list" shows is that nothing has really changed despite a bright lick of paint and new faces during the Cameron era.
Related: Northern Ireland, Brexit


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