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TV Reviews All of our TV reviews in one convenient place. When Jon Stewart announced that he would be taking a three-month leave of absence to direct his first feature film—a passion project and political drama based on Maziar Bahari’s memoir Then They Came For Me—it took a few moments before the panic set in over the second bit of information, somewhat lost in the shuffle: John Oliver would take over as a guest host, the first extended substitute in Stewart’s tenure. No tragedy had ever kept Stewart away—and some of his greatest moments have come from steeling himself to perform in light of harrowing events. But a project of personal significance led Stewart to seek out some well-deserved time off to pursue directing a film. Since Craig Kilborn left the show under acrimonious circumstances, and Stewart took over, The Daily Show has moved in a sharply political direction, which led to a dramatic improvement and steady rise in popularity as the George W. Bush presidency offered consistent opportunities for political lampooning. The Daily Show is so synonymous with Stewart to the point where in his other appearances, whether on Crossfire or as the first in-studio guest on Rock Center With Brian Williams, he seemed just a tad out of place. He took a show without a clear direction and placed a permanent stamp on it—with the help, it must be said, of former Onion writers Ben Karlin and David Javerbaum—to the point where there are serious questions about what The Daily Show without Jon Stewart would look like. Well fear not, because everything about the first week without Stewart in 14 years suggests everyone involved is just trying to keep the ship afloat while the captain goes ashore to explore for a bit. In that regard, it's a little bit like the fourth season of Community, only not as soulless and a lot funnier. Advertisement Of the correspondents—and really, of all working comedians at the moment—Oliver is a natural choice to take over the chair on a temporary basis: He’s a relatively younger stand-up veteran with comedic acting and hosting experience who focuses on political humor. His most notable quote to those who know his work (or are only casually aware he exists) is an observation on the inability to pass gun control legislation in the United States. In his first week, Oliver acquits himself just fine as a guest host. He’s funny and engaging, and he proves capable of building a rapport with the studio audience, vamping and improvising when necessary, adopting Stewart’s trademark self-deprecation (though trading the Jewish bent for British stereotypes). But that’s not the prime value of Stewart as a host. Sure, he has impeccable timing and just the right mix of righteous indignation, furious anger, and pure disbelief at ridiculous political news. Where Stewart truly shines, however, is in the relationship he’s developed and maintained with the viewing audience, the personal history he’s cultivated over the past 14 years covering momentous political occasions, pratfalls and breakthroughs, horrors and delights. John Oliver’s first week demonstrates that someone else can do a show just like Stewart, with all the mannerisms and similar delivery—but without the lead anchor, this isn’t really The Daily Show. No voices, no turning to different cameras, no established impressions or opinions or callbacks. Oliver doesn’t have a wealth of history to play off of to make fans of the show laugh at him. It’s telling that the show doesn’t have a re-recording of the introduction or a new graphic to reflect the guest host. This is Stewart’s show until he retires or dies, and the deference Oliver shows to Stewart even when using mock arrogance about slowly taking over demonstrates how everyone feels about the end of Stewart’s tenure, which is no longer an unfathomable figment far off in the distant future. Advertisement Now, to the shows themselves, which drum up a typical amount of comedy for a summer week when only the occasional scandal provides riffing fodder. Oliver has the benefit of mining the NSA scandal for a few days of material, something that always made Stewart’s shows better. Without something significant to comment on, the comedy can get a bit lean. And it’s yet another instance where The Daily Show proves it hasn't gone soft under a Democrat President, continuing to mock hypocrisy wherever it appears. But the best segment of the week was the first real in-depth reference to Stewart’s absence, as each correspondent showed up to give Oliver shit about his hosting duties and complaining about seniority or glass ceilings that should’ve afforded Jason Jones or Jessica Williams a shot. The show should’ve stopped there, since every subsequent joke about Stewart’s working holiday and Oliver’s green hosting status only weakens the earlier, stronger material. Stewart is gone for a few months, so there’s no need to keep bringing it up. Just move ahead with the satirical news commentary, and finish these episodes. From these first four shows, it appears that Oliver won’t have to stretch too much to fill Stewart’s shoes. Guests like Seth Rogen have built-in promotional reasons for appearing (and along with Evan Goldberg, Rogen has done quite the publicity circuit on podcasts and television the past few weeks). Armando Ianucci offered Oliver the chance to gush over one of his idols, Mavis Staples took up interview time with two songs, and Oliver notes that Fareed Zakaria has been a guest so many times that it pales in comparison to his own interview segment experience. With that and prerecorded 60 Minutes-style reported pieces, Oliver isn’t being tasked with replacing Jon Stewart, just with holding his place for a couple months. Comedy Central has scheduled repeats for part of Stewart’s absence shooting his directorial debut, meaning that this is a very temporary patch—but if Stewart’s film performs well, perhaps The Daily Show will adopt Johnny Carson-style guest hosts. Advertisement For now, Oliver won’t have to struggle to fill Stewart’s place or make the show his own. All he has to do is keep the train on its tracks until the real conductor returns. But what the first week of The Daily Show without Stewart in over a decade really reveals is that Comedy Central now has an institution on its hands unlike anything nighttime cable entertainment has ever seen. This is The Tonight Show of cable, with Larry King Live as the only quasi-equivalent in the past few decades. And when the inevitable time comes for Stewart to retire or move on if he so desires, Comedy Central will have an extremely difficult challenge finding the right person to follow a middling comedic supporting actor who took hold of an opportunity, found his voice, and became a cultural icon. Stray observations: This isn’t just like what happened when Johnny Carson got ready to retire. There were clear paths of succession there. Oliver isn’t looking to build a résumé as a future successor. And many longtime correspondents—like Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Rob Corddry, and Wyatt Cenac—have moved on to other things. But there’s no precedent for this situation at Comedy Central, and there aren’t many comedians or actors as well-suited to Stewart’s gig, with the timing, the ambition, and the intelligence to do what he does on a nightly basis. Best performer in the rag-on-Oliver correspondent fest: Samantha Bee. Somebody get her a chance to play the lead. Best interview of the week: Armando Ianucci. It’s impossible to say enough nice things about the guy, and for Oliver’s first interview that stretches to online bonus content, it’s just about perfect.

Sure, it doesn't always translate to the regular season (just ask the 49ers' two-time preseason-powerhouse running back Thomas Clayton), but Quinton Patton's stellar output this offseason gives San Francisco some much-needed optimism at a wide receiver group that sorely needs it. The excitement surrounding Patton started the moment he was drafted. Hailed as a steal in the fourth round, the young wide receiver out of Louisiana Tech was so fired up to begin his professional career that he took money out of his own pocket to book a flight out to the Bay Area immediately after being selected by the 49ers. In that singular moment, it seemed clear that the young receiver would quickly endear himself to head coach Jim Harbaugh-a man who abides by a family-instilled mantra to "attack the day with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind." Attack with enthusiasm he did. Upon arrival, Patton suffered an unfortunate finger injury that prevented him from catching passes in training camp. Despite the setback, he was still able to develop his route running, playbook knowledge, and separation skills. Since the finger healed, Patton has put the coaching staff and fans on notice that he's for real. In limited action during the past two preseason games, he's scored two touchdowns and displayed a knack for making plays when the ball is in his hands. As Niners Nation detailed in its scouting report of Patton back in April, many had the wideout graded as a second round selection. He was viewed as a guy likely to develop into a solid number two wide receiver. In the report, SB Nation's Dan Kadar noted good route-running skills and an ability to make sudden moves. Those accolades have rung true in his time on the field thus far. In fact, the quick moves to evade defenders after the catch are not so unlike Michael Crabtree-the fallen receiver San Francisco is desperately trying to compensate for. Is Patton the biggest guy? Standing at 6'0, 204 pounds, certainly not. Is he the fastest guy? His 4.53 seconds in the 40-yard dash, while not shabby, isn't necessarily blazing speed. But that's why they play the game. A wide receiver the 49ers selected in 1985 didn't have the greatest speed or the biggest frame and he went on to become the best the game has ever seen. Before the torches and pitchforks come out, I'm not suggesting Patton is the next Jerry Rice-nobody will ever be. I'm merely reinforcing the idea that measureables are only a fraction of the equation. The rest of it comes down to drive, determination, intelligence, and the ever important, albeit indefinable, "it" factor. These are the categories in which Patton appears poised to excel. Thus far, Kyle Williams is penciled in as the de facto number two WR but don't be surprised if Quinton Patton leapfrogs him at some point. Williams is much more of a slot receiver and Patton has the makings of a great number two alongside Anquan Boldin. Even if Patton remains in the number three slot, he's going to see the field and he's going to make some much-needed noise for the Niners. With a lack of film to study at the pro-level, look for Roman and Harbaugh to leverage that advantage and get the rookie receiver into the mix often against Green Bay. KEEP READING

Fukushima Prefecture has teamed up with major entertainment company Yoshimoto Kogyo Co. as the prefecture reopens a scenic local railway line that had been partially closed due to damage from torrential rain six years ago. Special tours were launched recently that took visitors on the Tadami Line with comedians from Yoshimoto along for the ride. The prefecture hopes the initiative will attract visitors by publicizing the attractions of the line, which offers spectacular mountain and valley views. “Thank you very much for traveling on the Tadami Line today,” Reiji, a member of comedy duo Nakagawake and a railway enthusiast, said in his welcome announcement as he played the role of a conductor on a Tadami Line train on Sept. 14, the first day of an overnight tour arranged by Yoshimoto. Reiji, clad in a conductor’s uniform, and 26 tour participants from the Tokyo metropolitan area rode on a scenic section of the line, which is operated by East Japan Railway Co. “There are only a few railway lines full of such superb views,” Reiji said. “The Tadami Line gives us a taste of all four seasons.” JR East plans to restore services on all sections of the Tadami Line by fiscal 2021. Part of the 135.2-km line, which links Aizu-Wakamatsu Station in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, and Koide Station in Uonuma, Niigata Prefecture, remains suspended following the July 2011 rain disaster, which led to the collapse of bridges over the Tadami River. The Tadami Line is famous for traversing secluded areas where access is very difficult. Before the disaster, the average number of passengers daily on the suspended section between Aizu-Kawaguchi Station and Tadami Station, both in Fukushima, was only 49. JR East will shoulder one-third of the total estimated reconstruction costs of ¥8.1 billion for the section, while the rest will be covered by the Fukushima government and 17 municipalities in the prefecture. The railway plans to start reconstruction work next spring. The prefectural and municipal governments will be responsible for ¥210 million of maintenance costs a year after the full restoration of the Tadami Line. On the recent tour, participants had the opportunity to paint their own akabeko, traditional cow figurines. The visitors also enjoyed sights in Aizuwakamatsu, a major tourist destination in Fukushima. “The abundant nature around the Tadami Line healed my heart,” Shoko Takano, an 18-year-old on the tour, said. “Comedy performances in the evening party were also interesting,” she said. The Fukushima Prefectural Government and Yoshimoto Kogyo have designed a total of 12 tour programs featuring train rides on the Tadami Line “We hope a lot of people will use the Tadami Line,” Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori, who joined the latest tour, said. “We aim to make it the country’s No. 1 local railway line.”

This is my first submission to this blog. I’ve been reading it for about a month and I’ve learned so much about the fat acceptance movement and how awesome it is to have others like you sticking up for the right for their fat bodies to exist. Thank you so much for creating this space! About a week ago, my parents and I toured a college about two hours away. It was a prestigious college and I was going to apply for there after I graduate this year. So we got matched with a tour guide and everything was going well. He was pretty cute and muscular. There were others in the tour group with us, all thin people except for me, my parents, and one other girl. This becomes relevant later. Eventually, we were let into the dorm rooms to see what they look like. Dorm rooms are notoriously small. The tour guide explained how, to create more space, you could buy these plastic bed risers to raise up the beds and have more storage space. Then, one of the parents on our tour asked the guide, “Hey, is there a weight limit on the risers? You don’t want to break those.” The tour guide stared at me and the other girl. “If it’s a problem, then they can run a couple miles on the trails out back. If you’re just too large, you’re going to have to find somewhere else to go. There won’t be enough space for you here.” he said in a joking manner. Thin privilege is being able to attend a college tour and check out the dorms without being shamed for your weight and told to just go somewhere else to find space. I just hope there are colleges out there that don’t like to shame people.

Dennis Kucinich asks for recount of NH Primary votes Click here for more info and video News Updates from Citizens for Legitimate Government09 Jan 2008Where Paper Prevailed, Different Results By Lori Price 09 Jan 20082008 New Hampshire Democratic Primary Results --Total Democratic Votes: 286,139 - Machine vs Hand (RonRox.com) 09 Jan 2008Hillary Clinton, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 39.618%Clinton, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 34.908%Barack Obama, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 36.309%Obama, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 38.617%Machine vs Hand:Clinton: 4.709% (13,475 votes)Obama: -2.308% (-6,604 votes)2008 New Hampshire Republican Primary Results --Total Republican Votes: 236,378 Machine vs Hand (RonRox.com) 09 Jan 2008Mitt Romney, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 33.075%Romney, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 25.483%Ron Paul, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 7.109%Paul, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 9.221%Machine vs Hand :Romney: 7.592% (17,946 votes)Paul: -2.112% (-4,991 votes)NH: "First in the nation" (with corporate controlled secret vote counting) By Nancy Tobi 07 Jan 2008 81% of New Hampshire ballots are counted in secret by a private corporation named Diebold Election Systems (now known as "Premier"). The elections run on these machines are programmed by one company, LHS Associates, based in Methuen, MA. We know nothing about the people programming these machines, and we know even less about LHS Associates. We know even less about the secret vote counting software used to tabulate 81% of our ballots. [ See also CLG's Coup 2004 and Yes, Gore DID win!.]Please forward this update to anyone you think might be interested. Those who'd like to be added to the Newsletter list can sign up: http://www.legitgov.org/#subscribe_clg.Please write to: [email protected] for inquiries.CLG Newsletter editor: Lori Price, Manager. Copyright © 2008, Citizens For Legitimate Government ® All rights reserved. CLG Founder and Chair is Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D.UPDATE: My video on this matter:

Grist on the Ground Inside the camp that’s fighting to stop the Dakota Access pipeline At sundown, Montgomery Brown meets me by the information tent. He has a paper plate piled with brownies in one hand and a toothbrush in the other. The 25-year-old youth organizer and Navy-trained combat medic from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe has been up since daybreak. Brown and I walk past hand-painted “NO MEDIA” signs. We wander through a kitchen, where volunteers are chopping vegetables and boiling pots of soup over an open fire, past kids chasing each other in a game of tag. Clusters of towering white teepees and neon, synthetic tents hug the ground. They are grouped into small encampments for a half mile in every direction, around central fires that burn day and night and send plumes of smoke into the sky. “Every time I walk around this camp,” Brown says, “… I hear those kids laughing and playing — it just reaffirms that I’m not just fighting for myself or my family. I’m fighting for everybody.” Welcome to the camp that is ground zero for the pushback against America’s new mega-pipeline. Less than a mile upstream on both sides of the Missouri River, Dakota Access LLC, a subsidiary of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, has broken ground on a new 1,172-mile pipeline that would transport more than 500,000 barrels of Bakken crude oil per day across the heartland. Called the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL for short) or the Bakken Pipeline, it is the largest crude pipeline proposed in the American West since the defeat of Keystone XL, and it is on track to be operational this winter. The pipeline, the tribe and its lawyers say, endangers Standing Rock’s only source of drinking water by cutting across the Missouri. Construction, according to tribal historians, has also unearthed sacred burial sites and artifacts across swaths of land near the reservation’s borders. On Sept. 9, a federal judge denied the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s motion for an injunction against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but, within an hour, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, and the Army stepped in to urge Dakota Access LLC to halt pipeline construction in the area within a 20-mile radius of Lake Oahe. On Sept. 12, Standing Rock appealed the court’s decision and added additional claims to their suit against the Army Corps. (Follow Grist’s coverage of the pipeline here.) What began in April as a small group of about 20 members of the Standing Rock Sioux gathering in prayer and keeping constant vigil on the riverbank has swelled to a sprawling encampment of more than a thousand. The outpouring of support — and people — into the camp has grown into a bona fide movement that’s rallying to protect both native treaty rights and the integrity of our planet’s resources. The inhabitants promise to defend the Missouri River from the pipeline no matter what. Here’s a glimpse of what life at the camp is like. “We all drink water.” They’ve arrived at all hours of the day for the past three weeks, from all corners of the country. Members of more than 280 indigenous tribes are at the camp, which is located just steps away from the border of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. There are Black Lives Matter groups and grassroots organizers. From afar, the occupation has received support from mainstream environmental groups (Sierra Club, 350), politicians (Bernie Sanders, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), and even celebrities (Leonardo DiCaprio, Rosario Dawson, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, Shailene Woodley). Some of the people gathered here have not, traditionally, been allies. Members of the Crow Nation haven’t been welcome guests in Sioux territory since 1876, when they allegedly scouted for Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. On Aug. 27, Crow Nation representatives bearing peace pipes and hundreds of pounds of buffalo meat arrived at the camp gates and were met formally by Standing Rock leaders. A murmur went through the crowd — this was history. “There has never been anything like this in Indian country before, ever,” said LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a tribal historic preservation officer for the Standing Rock Sioux. Recently, Allard found herself at lunch with a member of the Crow and a member of the Pawnee — a meeting that would have been inconceivable until now. It helps that the unifying thread of the protest — water — is so undeniably universal. The Missouri River provides water for Standing Rock Reservation, as well as for other towns, agricultural operations, and natural habitats downstream. Standing Rock’s lawyers say a spill would cause an “existential threat” to the tribe’s resources and way of life. Recent spills in the region include a 1-million-gallon crude spill into the Kalamazoo River in 2010, and a 2015 spill of 50,000 gallons into the Yellowstone River in Montana. “We have an understanding as a people that we’re all related, at some point,” said tribal council member Robert Taken Alive. “We all drink water.” Origins The story of the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance actually begins three miles away, on the southern side of the Cannonball River, at a significantly smaller encampment called Sacred Stone Camp. The camp is owned by LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, who has known since 2014 that the proposed route for the Dakota Access Pipeline would cut through her property, near her water well and a family member’s grave. At the beginning of April, she and around 20 others began to camp and pray that others would join them to halt the pipeline. In July, she got word that construction would begin and sent out a video message on Facebook for help. Her prayer was answered. Get Grist in your inbox Always free, always fresh. The DailyThe BeaconThe Weekly Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy “People just started coming,” Allard said as she sat by the Sacred Stone Camp fire in late August. “People hawked everything they could, and I thought, Oh my God we’ve got to take care of these people. People would come and their cars broke down, and they were here to stay.” Allard began using her paycheck to feed and shelter the volunteers that drove into camp. Soon, though, their numbers grew to the point that Sacred Stone could not accommodate them, and activists sent the overflow to the camp across the river. The intentions of the original group at Sacred Stone is likely the reason that the first thing one learns upon arriving at camp is that most campers do not consider themselves environmental “protesters.” They call themselves “protectors” of the earth and its resources. They are not interested in fighting, but in defending. “We’re not here for violence or vengeance,” said Robert Eber, who identifies himself as “the maintenance guy,” and says he’d been at Sacred Stone since day one. “We’re here for love and healing, for all of mankind.” Now, the camp across the river has evolved into a small city. Tidy donations tents are stocked with piles of warm clothing, blankets, women’s sanitary items, baby food, and firewood. There’s a daytime school for children to attend. When the state pulled water and port-a-potties from the camp, the tribe replaced them within an afternoon. Each day, hundreds of campers are fed for free. Unrest In the prairie, days are parching hot and the nights are cold. Torrential rains drive people into their cars or into the lobby of the nearby Prairie Knights Casino. Planes fly over the camp throughout the night. A security checkpoint staffed by state troopers on Route 1806, the road from Bismarck to Standing Rock, reroutes cars on a poorly marked detour through unpaved county roads. The state withdrew emergency relief services after hearing rumors of pipe bombs. At the camp, the message that tribal leaders pipe through the loudspeakers each day is one of peace and unity. Leaders frequently caution activists not to treat law enforcement or construction workers with hostility. Still, tensions have steadily escalated. Twenty-eight people were arrested in August during a peaceful demonstration. Dakota Access LLC subsequently sued the arrestees, including Standing Rock Tribal Chair David Archambault, for trespassing — a rich irony for these descendants of America’s natives, to be arrested on the land where their ancestors were pushed during the forced migrations of the 19th century. On Aug. 31, seven more activists were arrested, including two men who locked themselves to construction equipment. On Sept. 6, two activists locked themselves to excavators at different construction sites in actions that were not sanctioned by tribal leadership. Several people, including presidential candidate Jill Stein, who arrived at the scene, spray-painted construction equipment with phrases like “decolonize” and “black snake kills,” the latter a reference to a Lakota prophecy about a black snake that would come to America with the power to destroy the world, or unify it. On Sept. 13, in the midst of a global day of actions in solidarity with Standing Rock, more than 20 people, including two journalists, were arrested for criminal trespass. Dozens of law enforcement officials in riot gear and armed with assault rifles were present. Robert Eber, “the maintenance guy,” was distressed by the images he had seen on Facebook of young people defacing bulldozers and standing atop construction equipment wearing bandanas. He worried the public would assume that the camps were encouraging violence. “We have no guns,” he said. “We’re armed with prayer.” The seventh generation The “black snake” isn’t the only prophecy making the rounds at camp: According to Crazy Horse, a revered mid-19th century Oglala Lakota chief who led tribes to victory at Little Bighorn, the Lakota people would undergo generations of spiritual genocide and environmental degradation following American colonization of the West. Then, a seventh generation would wake up and rise — a generation that would lead the healing and restoration of the planet, rejuvenate a forgotten spirituality, and create harmony among people of all colors and creeds. “You see it happening,” said Allison Renville, a political activist and 32-year-old member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Sioux tribe. Young people, when asked why they had come to camp, frequently referenced a sense of fulfilling destiny. The younger generations at camp are there to fight a pipeline, but some also say they have come to heal from the wounds that genocide inflicted, and to embrace their heritage. At dinner around the campfire one night, a young Abenaki man explained to some non-native outsiders that his generation was seeking to reclaim environmental and earth-based wisdom from the elders before they passed. “Ceremony seems to have skipped a generation or two,” he said. “We’re bringing it back.” By the last week of August, some of the camp’s young people had built two sweat lodges near the river, in accordance with tradition. “It’s all the young people that did this,” says LaDonna Brave Bull Allard. “When the young people stood up, people stood up with them.” Along with prayer and fate, the young people at camp are using more visible tools for resistance. They have used hashtags and Facebook Live to broadcast the camp’s message. In July, Bobbi Jean Three Legs, Montgomery Brown, and Joseph White Eyes, all in their 20s, organized and chaperoned a nearly 2,000 mile, intertribal relay run from North Dakota to Washington, D.C. (among three other runs), to deliver a petition of more than 160,000 signatures against the pipeline to the White House and to the Army Corps of Engineers in person. “If this pipeline goes through, it is gonna affect our generation the most,” said Bobbi Jean Three Legs to a packed crowd at a youth concert on the evening of Sept. 8. “If anything, it’s going to affect the kids that aren’t born yet. We don’t want that.” Whether the Dakota Access Pipeline actually goes through is still up in the air. Energy Transfer Partners, which has already invested $1.6 billion in the project, has publicly vowed to see the project through to completion. The Standing Rock tribe and its supporters, in turn, have vowed to stay at camp until the pipeline project is called off altogether. No matter the outcome, this fight is just the beginning for many at camp. One dusty afternoon, as we hid from the sun under a brown tarp near the main artery of the camp, a tribal council member told me that the camp “had already won” a significant battle just “by coming together.” After all, the Dakota Access Pipeline is just one of many threats to tribal nations, clean water, and a warming planet. This generation of protectors has a future to defend. Ed. note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the year in which the Battle of the Little Bighorn took place.

President Obama’s new plan to fix the Gulf oil spill is so crazy it just might work… As BP’s high-priced industry experts flail, the president last week turned to a rag-tag band of big-think scientific renegades, and sent them on a mission to somehow MacGyver a way to stop up the leak — before it’s too late.OK, maybe that’s going a bit far. In fact, the news that Obama and his energy secretary, Steven Chu, sent a team of leading physicists and engineers to the Gulf to work with BP offers further evidence of the administration’s essentially technocratic approach to governance, and its faith in knowledge-based expertise. That might seem like common sense, but it represents a shift from the Bushies’ belief in the problem-solving power of industry, and its willingness to let science take a backseat to the concerns of its religious base. Still, asking one of the key inventors of the hydrogen bomb, along with an engineer who helped develop techniques for mining on Mars, counts as out-of-the-box thinking. Here’s a quick rundown on the president’s unlikely team: The Old Hand: Richard Garwin In 1951, 23-year old Richard Garwin was working at the Los Alomos nuclear laboratory, when he was asked by Edward Teller to devise an experiment that would demonstrate the principle of “radiation implosion.” Garwin’s detailed sketch served as the basis for “Mike,” an 80-ton device, that was detonated the following year as the world’s first hydrogen bomb. “I wasn’t the inventor,” Garwin has said. “I was sort of the architect.” In 1952, Garwin went to work for IBM — where he remains a fellow emeritus — on the understanding that he could spend a third of his time working with the federal government on national security issues. He’s a recipient of the national medal of science, and a member of the JASON, an elite think tank that studies complex scientific problems on behalf of the U.S. government. In 1991, Garwin convened a symposium of experts to discus ways to stem oil flows from Kuwait wells, set on fire by Iraq during the Gulf War. For Garwin, now 82, could this be his last hurrah? The Establishment Man: Tom Hunter Tom Hunter yesterday announced his resignation as the president of Sandia National Laboratories, an outpost of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex that conducts high-level research for the National Nuclear Security Administration. He had been at Sandia since 1967, and served as president since 2005 — a job that reportedly paid him $1.7 million a year. He has a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin. Hunter said yesterday he had no particular plans for what he’d be doing in retirement. That may have changed. The Maverick Genius: Alexander Slocum Alexander Slocum, a professor of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaches a world famous design and manufacturing class that culminates in a remote-controlled robot competition. He holds more than 60 patents for inventions relating to biotechnology, robotics and computer science, but his research interests also include “going faster on my snowboard, staying down longer SCUBA diving!,” according to his website. A colleague told Bloomberg: “He has a lot of creative ideas. One in 10 are really brilliant ideas, but nine are dumb. You can’t miss that one that is brilliant.” No word on whether inspiration struck in the Gulf. The No-Nonsense Engineer: George Cooper George Cooper might have the most relevant experience for the mission at hand. A professor of engineering at UC Berkely, he spent much of his career in industrial research with Britain’s National Physical Laboratory and now serves as Senior Petroleum Engineer at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. But he can branch out too: According to Bloomberg, he once worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to adapt mining techniques for use on Mars. The What-Am-I-Doing-Here? Guy: Jonathan Katz Jonathan Katz, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, is another member of JASON. But Katz’s major research focus has been astrophysics, and in an interview Friday with a St. Louis paper, he didn’t seem confident that he had been much help with the mission. “I was honored to be invited and enjoyed the experience,” said Katz. “Did I have anything much to contribute? I think I have some ideas for how to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, but I don’t have anything very specific to offer on the present problems. It is very much in the hands of the real pros.” Asked if he’d be willing to go back, Katz said: “I’d be happy to, but someone’s got to send me an email or a phone call.”

This article is over 1 year old Conservative MP’s Alan Partridge-esque delivery and local radio-style jingle are a unique contribution to election campaign Greg Knight, the Conservative candidate for East Yorkshire, has launched one of the most unexpected video hits of the general election campaign. The 51-second clip mixes his awkward delivery of Theresa May’s campaign lines with a jaunty jingle at the end, which really must be heard, as the camera zooms in on a poster inexpertly sticky-taped to the wall. The video also features an unwitting guest star in the shape of a party worker, who for some reason is in shot as Knight strides through the doorway. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A mystery man briefly makes an appearance in Greg Knight’s video. Photograph: Greg Knight campaign A longer version of the song, called “Greg’s 2017 general election song” is available on his website. The lyrics are: You’ll get accountability with Conservative delivery, Make sure this time you get it right, vote for Greg Knight Internet users have been quick to jump in and remix the video. This version features new footage cut into the end of the clip, replacing the campaign posters with the 1980s pop star Jimmy Somerville dancing along to the upbeat message of Conservative delivery – something the former Bronski Beat and Communards singer may not personally endorse, given his involvement in the Pits and Perverts miners’ benefit concert depicted in the movie Pride. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A remix of the Greg Knight campaign video featuring Jimmy Somerville Another user has put a different twist on the ending, replacing Knight’s anthem with Wiley’s Can’t Go Wrong, designed to appeal perhaps more to the youth vote in East Yorkshire. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A remix of Knight’s campaign video featuring Wiley’s Can’t Go Wrong Knight, who first became an MP in 1983, is also the inspiration for a full-length campaign song, which can be found on YouTube, and features the opening verse: Hey! Don’t you know Greg Knight’s been working hard for you? Hey! He’s been working hard for East Yorkshire too. Hey! Don’t you know Greg Knight’s a winner through and through Hey! And he’ll do the best that he can do

Desperate times call for Jon Stewart. The former Daily Show host’s surprise appearance on Stephen Colbert’s Election Eve Late Show, during which he went off on “that angry tax- and draft-dodging little orange groundhog” running for president, did nothing to prevent a Donald Trump victory. But now that Trump is actually in the White House and signing discriminatory executive orders left and right, he apparently could no longer keep his opinions to himself. So there was Stewart Tuesday night, alongside his old friend Colbert, sharing his first thoughts on President Trump’s first week and a half in office. With a dead animal strapped to his head and a red tie that went down past his feet, Stewart appeared on the Late Show to tell Colbert about some of the additional executive orders Trump has up his oversize sleeves. “I’ve gotta say, I love your outfit,” Colbert told him. “Is this your Donald Trump impression?” After a pause, Stewart said, “I thought this is how men dress now. The president sets men’s fashion. And I saw the inauguration: super long tie, dead animal on head. Boom!” The costume recalled a bit that Stewart did with Colbert early in his stint as Late Show host, all the way back in December 2015. In that appearance, Colbert forced his friend to wear a Trump-esque wig and rub Cheeto dust on his face so that people would listen to his message to Congress about renewing the Zadroga Act to help 9/11 first-responders. “No one’s going to listen to you,” Colbert said at the time, “unless you Trump it up a little bit.” That, of course, was back when Donald Trump was still a punchline and not the president of the United States. Stewart brought with him a stack of new executive orders yet to be announced by President Trump. No. 1: “By the authority vested in me by the Constitution, I, Donald J. Jonah Jameson Trump, hereby direct that, to secure our border, China shall immediately and without hesitation send us their wall. Done.” As for how we get Mexico to pay for it, he added, “When the wall arrives at the southern border, we shut the lights and pretend we’re not home. It’s C.O.D., Mexico has to sign for it.” For his next “encyclical,” Stewart said. “I, Donald J. Lincoln Kennedy Trump III do pronounce America now finally has an official language.” No, it’s not English. “The new official language of the United States is bullshit.” As Trump, he declared that he has instructed his staff to “speak only in bullshit,” adding, “None of that, ‘Sure, I’ll speak bullshit at work, but at home I’ll use facts and real information.’ No. Bullshit all the time. Immersion—it’s the only way to be fluent.” But if you thought the whole thing was just a silly bit and we would not be getting the classic Jon Stewart rant we deserve, you had to wait for the final executive order. “I, Donald J. Trump, do declare by executive order that I, Donald J. Trump, am exhausting,” Stewart read. “It has been 11 days, Stephen. Eleven fucking days. The presidency is supposed to age the president, not the public!” The reason Trump was so “exhausting,” he continued, is that “every instinct and fiber of my pathological self-regard calls me to abuse of power.” “I, Donald J. Trump, am exhausting because it is going to take relentless stamina, vigilance, and every institutional check and balance this great country can muster to keep me, Donald J. Trump, from going full Palpatine, with the lightning coming out of the fingertips and the ‘fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate.’ We have never faced this before—purposeful, vindictive chaos.” Putting the executive order prop down, Stewart continued, “But perhaps therein lies the saving grace of I, Donald J. Trump’s presidency. No one action will be adequate. All action will be necessary. And if we do not allow Donald Trump to exhaust our fight and somehow come through this presidency calamity-less, and constitutionally partially intact, then I, Donald J. Trump, will have demonstrated the greatness of America, just not the way I thought I was gonna.” With that, he hugged Colbert, tore off his tie and walked off stage.

Actually, it’s about Ethics in Shilling Videogames The following is a reprint from Unwinnable Weekly Issue Forty-Three. If you enjoy what you read, please consider purchasing the issue or subscribing. ——— We are all in marketing. That might sound cynical, but it is a basic fact you will embrace as you get older. Give it time. If you’re online, using social media or commenting on things on the Internet, you’re cherry picking and curating who you are, what you put forth, and what image you want to present to others. You’re a marketer for who you are and what you’re about and what you stand against. And nowhere do I see a greater reluctance to face this than in videogame circles online, where it is especially true. It is a space where most public conversations typically devolve into discussions of “ingroups” and “outgroups.” It doesn’t make one “right” or the other “wrong.” It’s just a byproduct of the Internet and the hummingbird mentality it can foster when frantically navigating it. It’s human nature, confused. We are primal hunters with devices, bottomless information stones, gathering others we can hang with online and sometimes hunting for those we cannot. It’s an Internet binary and it presupposes that there are only two ways of looking at things. We need buckets and we need to put everything around us in them. I’d like to posit there might actually at least be a third way of looking at things. This extends to videogames as well – again, especially. By way of example, there are other types of people besides the ones who either care or don’t care about videogames. There are plenty of people who care, don’t think about them that much and just go about their days without feeling the need to discuss them. And lots of other gradations therein. Whether we play videogames or not, we are simply individuals trying to make sense of this world and our place in it. But I see a lot of this fussing happening in videogames over buckets. People want labels for other people and their roles. The labels must be right or else chaos. It is masturbation. And so, in that spirit, indulge me. I want to zoom in on one label I’ve been struggling with lately, and seeing others struggle with as well – whether they know it or not. There’s been a sharp uptick in my brain in recent months since launching my counterculture game-industry interview repository, don’t die, of trying to unpack and unravel the label “videogame journalist.” It’s not at all the focus of the site, but a byproduct of deeply pondering the stuff around videogames that consciously or otherwise has been swept to the side the last few decades. Why are some people considered “true gamers” and others will preface things they say by copping to that? Why do games want to be so narrow? When was the last time a big studio opened, and why are the ones that are open today remaking the same games over and over? Stuff like that. That’s what my site is about. But when it comes to “videogame journalism,” I realize that, really, I’ve been struggling with this since I started writing about games professionally in 2007 as an editor at The A.V. Club. I remember people in gaming circles being legitimately bewildered, though enthusiastic, at my wanting to be a part of their world. I remember hearing “you do real writing, so why would you want to waste your time here?” Back then, the answer was simpler: It was fun and it was a change of pace from my other duties. Normally I wouldn’t rattle off what I had to do, but would like to use this opportunity to illuminate because it’s germane here. In addition to constantly being pitched “funny” headlines by people outside the office, I managed the local section online and in print. One time I interviewed Gallagher. I was hired specifically to help bring the now-defunct local sections online and set the tone, template and voice for the whole thing while running my own doomed section for Chicago in print and on the new (also doomed) website. But covering games for the national-facing side of the publication enabled me to flex and strengthen different writing muscles as a burgeoning critic and in time build a Rolodex of colleagues from all facets of the games industry. I also remember this question coming not just from other writers, but PR people as well: “Are you a games journalist?” I didn’t understand. This is not meant to be arrogance but just a reflection of how my brain worked from the outset with this stuff: I never considered games writing “journalism” because there are no Pulitzers for covering marketing. These days I don’t think I’d say it takes a third party to crystallize the respectability of any endeavor, but that’s what I used to think. And really, who cares, anyway? Sure, call it journalism, if that means something to you. To be fair, I’m not sure I considered what I did at The A.V. Club journalism either. I called it entertainment writing. But I think for my friends at all those (also doomed) game publications that are now gone, they were speaking of their self-conscious desire for legitimacy in the eyes of others, which no reasonable person can honestly fault. They wanted it to mean something to them and the people around them. The people they didn’t even know or had just met. There have always been many stigmas around videogames. Who would want to be associated with them? But a lot has changed since 2007. There are many new, more toxic stigmas now plaguing videogames. If I am again being honest, usually what I see online when people discuss “videogame journalism” is people self-consciously fancying themselves as philosophy majors or intellectuals out of some sort of desire to justify that their time spent playing and writing about games was not in vain. That it meant something. To anyone. I’m not sure I can blame them there, but I’m also not sure that it does mean much. Yet. I think what we are seeing play out in videogames right now is an industry attempting to grow up and struggling. Hard. The writers have a hand in this, but it is not entirely their fault. But I think that unless the mentality of this group of writers shifts, they too are as doomed as The A.V. Club’s local section and the many games outlets my colleagues used to manage and write for. You can’t keep doing the same things and expecting different results. * * * It’s time we retire the term “videogame journalist.” Most writers in the field need to accept that they, too, are marketers unless their approach or something else in the landscape shifts and changes. One approach I usually see as people attempt to intellectualize games is to compare them to other mediums – music, books, etc. But something I haven’t seen much of is people contrasting those who write about videogames as part of the equation also holding back the medium from meaningful progress and evolution. You know, comparing the people who write about games to the people who write about music, books, etc. In 2006, pop-culture essayist and author Chuck Klosterman wrote a piece for Esquire wondering why there isn’t a Lester Bangs of videogames. It’s an interesting point to read again in 2015, but I think the reason we can still wonder this sincerely is because most people in 2006 who actively played videogames weren’t reading Esquire. I remember tweeting that piece out last year and sending it to some colleagues. The general response? Games have a few people who are “pretty close.” We need more: more than a few people, and to be more than “pretty close.” I am not saying there aren’t talented people who write about videogames. Far from it. I’m just saying it’s time we consider different approaches to covering the medium, and not allow PR companies or marketing firms dictate the tone or gatekeep too aggressively the sorts of stories we can or cannot go after. I think we’re making tiny inroads here and there, but “pretty close” isn’t nearly enough. It’s a phrase that passes the responsibility to someone else and seeks to take refuge in the fact that there are not many outlets doing more than talking about games solely in the context of being products. My mind also turns to another music writer, Richard Goldstein, who in the ‘60s was considered to be one of the first rock critics. A recent LA Times profile on Goldstein describes him as: …one of the earliest practitioners in the burgeoning field that would come to be known as rock criticism, writing about music was a lifeline. Fresh out of Columbia University’s journalism school in 1966, the utopian energies of rock provided a window through which he could glimpse a very different kind of future being born. And he recognized instinctively that this new music required a new kind of writing to comprehend it. So he invented it. It, of course, isn’t that simple. As Goldstein says, he did not set out to “invent” anything, he was just pulling a thread. As he tells his interviewer: There has to be an experiential connection to the music that’s manifest in a strong style. It’s a very personal kind of writing, even when it involves expertise. That was the basic element in my work, and I think it still distinguishes the genre. Rock writing is a holdout against the idea that the author is dead. To be clear: I am not planting a flag and calling myself something so self-important as “one of the first videogame journalists” or anything so trivial. I, too, feel I am pulling a thread with my don’t die project, and found it surprising that an “experiential connection” that exists in games is simply reaching out to the people who buy and play games and talking to them for their stories. If the videogame industry wants to better understand itself it should ditch its cliquishness and be better about reaching across the aisle far more – to anyone and everyone. And so, for this, I again reached out to the audience. In preparation for this story, I circulated an online survey. I asked a couple of questions about game journalism. What is it? What is it not? What is the harm in blurring the lines? Who does it hurt or help if the audience isn’t clear about what it is or its role? Most of the people who responded are consumers. You know, the folks all this fuss about videogames is ostensibly to benefit. Chief among the reasons we should retire the term “videogame journalism” is that 50 random different people across the globe cannot agree on a single definition of the phrase. Not even a single part of the definition. And it isn’t just these folks I heard from who I talked about this with in the last month. There are plenty of people who work in games PR and at publishers I talked to last week alone who are equally confused and concerned not so much about the term or what it means, but the fuzziness and the relative damage being done with this needless confusion. In answering my question on game journalism, and how it differs from music or sports journalism, one person wrote: “Neither music journalism or sports journalism is quite as concerned with evaluating the consumerist worth of products. Both tend to focus more on the human stories which emerge from their respective industries, whereas modern games journalism is more concerned with product reviews.” I know some people who have been upset over some of my Kill Screen reviews because they “more resemble film criticism” and I have been publicly prickly over review scores and how they can oversimplify or dumb down conversation around games. Really, some people just want to know whether they should buy a thing. And I can’t blame them. I use Metacritic as a consumer. I bet you do, too. It’s a useful tool. But is it the only tool we can or should have at our disposal in sifting through games to spend our time on? Absolutely not. It devalues the medium. Imagine if you heard classical music or fast food only discussed like this: “Yeah, I mean, that Whopper was pretty good. I’d give it a 78. But that Rigoletto is a slouch, barely better at 79.” You wouldn’t. It tells you nothing at all about anything, other than the fact that your friend may be, well, slightly off. But a few weeks ago when a dev colleague of mine was expressing surprise on Twitter over the lack of mixed or negative reviews Bloodborne on the review-score aggregator Metacritic, I hopped in and said this is yet another example of how numbers being considered so important in the industry is dumb. A colleague of mine who works in PR dismissed my opinion, saying actually Metacritic is very popular. Of course Metacritic is popular. I just said I use it myself. But if we want to act like the game industry is doing well and creatively growing, we should re-examine the fundamental parts of it and not just keep going with what has worked before – because what has worked before is not only breaking, but it is changing whether we embrace it or not. It’s best to at least understand and label what’s going on here and, you know, put it in a bucket so we can move on. * * * We cannot talk about videogame journalism and what it is or isn’t without talking about the Internet. And we can’t talk about game coverage on the Internet without discussing YouTube and Twitch. There’s a generational divide here, a growing schism between those of us who grew up when the biggest debate in videogames was Nintendo or Sega and those of us when the biggest debate in videogames is…well, actually, I don’t know what kids these days think about videogames. I just know that my friends in their twenties and students I’ve had in the past in game design programs say things like they want to make games to prove themselves as artists and yet will outright dismiss people whose opinions don’t instantly mesh with their own. The challenges they prefer to take on come exclusively from games, not discourse. It is the march of progress and technology. Why would anyone want to read a wandering column when you could watch a to-the-point video that tells you in an entertaining way what a personality thinks and, hey, you get to see the game too – all inside two minutes? Again, I don’t blame anyone for favoring that. But I do think when, as The Observer reported in January that “Minecraft is more popular on YouTube than Frozen, Drake and Beyonce,” it’s worth hitting pause and reflecting on what’s going on here. From The Observer: One bleak doomsday projection about the Internet Age is a future world where instead of living our own lives, we simply watch other people living theirs. Finally, it looks like we’re approaching that dystopia… The number one personality behind the trend of people watching other people play games is the notorious Pewdiepie, a Swedish YouTube star and multimillionaire who records himself playing video games. Basically, he sits in his home screaming “Nooooo” and “Fuck you!” at a screen for about ten minutes at a time. Obviously, not all videos or streamers covering videogames online are like this. And I am certainly not saying written outlets are inherently “better” than this not just emerging, but already dominating space. The audience has spoken, and they are watching while they are also listening. This stuff is popular. As it should be: The Food Network is also hugely popular, and it’s the same basic concept. I have no issue with this, even though this same technological march has gutted or killed – or at least lobotomized – many of the publications I used to write for in this space. It’s just how things go. Streamers didn’t kill The A.V. Club local sections, the Internet’s disdain for print and physical objects did. It’s just how things went. But I don’t think this is the way things always need to go. It’s worth noting a few things here. Pewdiepie, 25, is one of many, many streamers who have devoted followings. He tends to be the common example here because, well, buckets. His YouTube channel currently has more than 36 million subscribers. The excerpt above just casually mentions he is a multimillionaire. But really, think about it in more digestible terms. With 36 million subscribers, every video he releases – and he creates steadily, and not just stuff about games, which of course helps sustain and grow his popularity – he gets more potential exposure shortly after clicking on his mouse to upload than many of the best-selling albums have over the course of their being on shelves or available online for decades. Thirty-six million subscribers means roughly anything he puts online is more popular than Nirvana’s Nevermind (somewhere around 30 million sales) or Michael Jackson’s Bad (also around 30 million). Think about it. An audience that size, bigger than the population of Canada (a country), and they are all paying attention to one person’s opinions about videogames. That is staggering on a basic human level. As a species with technology, we are passing the torch and the megaphone to a group whose biggest personalities can’t yet buy beer. That’s fine. Really. I’m not shaking my fist at a cloud or telling these kids to get off my lawn. Plenty of room. The objective truth of the situation is that many streamers who gain access to developers are being favored over traditional writers. There are plenty of personalities in their own right in the writing landscape, but not likely to be more new ones anytime soon. As I mentioned earlier, this isn’t a case of good vs. bad. Many of these streamers have great big audiences – from another objective standpoint, it makes sense for games PR companies to start favoring them over us. They have bigger reach, as the kids like to say. The new normal for games PR in this landscape is get these people talking about your game and evangelizing for it. In many ways, it is no different from the old landscape. It’s just that the old landscape had built-in filters. Workflows. Processes. Editors. People who will send stuff back and ask, “Are you sure you want to say that?” or “Where did you get that information?” The trade-off is we all – viewers, PR, writers – have to spend so much more time understanding streamers and YouTubers to get a feel for them and their political slants or the other various lines we as a society have decided you should not be crossing. It’s the trade-off in favoring individuals over publications. Whereas the latter have established voices and tones – the individual, who knows? Maybe you watched the 40 hours that person seemed totally fine and relatable, and then you flip away and then they go on a racist tirade or who knows what. And we’re not necessarily talking about adults with lengthy careers behind them. We’re talking about teens or people in their twenties finding audiences and making decisions along the way you may or may not agree with that they may not even find objectionable themselves. When you’re making $8,000 or $200,000 a month playing videogames via partnership programs and you’re effectively living out a childhood wet dream, are you really going to pump the brakes and worry yourself over editorial control and things like native advertising? Do you want to risk your reputation and audience by hating on the “wrong” game? So, in a general sense (for PR people) it isn’t about who is or isn’t a journalist, it’s simply about that reach. And the truth is we’ve all been marketers all along. Let’s not fool ourselves: Writing about games on a professional level has roots back to Nintendo Power and EGM. Back when there was no industry and the media around them needed to be propped up exclusively on information coming from game companies. They were enthusiasts, much like how we were enthusiasts, much like how streamers carry on in that fashion. We all love games. This desire to make covering it something more than it isn’t makes it something else altogether. Can you write artfully about games? Of course. If you have talent, are insightful and have a broad frame of reference, you can entertain your audience in any medium. But gaming’s inferiority complex manifests itself in so many strange ways: Are videogames art? Are videogames a sport? All these things are self-conscious distractions that ultimately only serve to do the audience a disservice. Before I elaborate further – the next example requires quotes from a variety of anonymous sources – I’m just going to dive in with an anecdote from my own career to substantiate these following claims. (I just checked with me; I’m fine with me going on the record.) As I got a year or two into my games writing at The Onion, I started to notice it getting increasingly difficult to get review copies in time for my deadlines as I explored the full spectrum of grades and opinions you can have on a chosen game. I noticed I had to handhold a lot of games PR people a tad more aggressively in a way that I never had to when, say, arranging interviews with Robert Smigel or all the members of The Kids in the Hall or getting albums to review from publicists. I had to remind people in games PR they owed me games so I could do my job. I had to ask for tracking numbers to assure it was put in the mail. I cannot tell you the number of times I ended up having to buy a game off the shelves, get reimbursed by The Onion, and have a review run later after a game came out rather than coincide with its release, just because PR was reluctant to prioritize a more mainstream outlet that felt just as comfortable running positive reviews as it did negative ones. Along the way, I simply lost count. If you’re PR, of course you will send out review copies to writers who tend to be more favorable. Again, I don’t blame them for that. They’re just trying to do their jobs, much like I was mine. It’s a silly thing to be self-righteous about, but I remember a friend not in the industry at the time advising me to “just start writing positive reviews” to make this stuff less of a time suck. But for some reason, I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t – I was putting my name on it. What I wrote had to be what I felt. Honestly, the reviews that are always the hardest to write are the ones where you are left feeling indifferent. Writing “positive” reviews is not any easier than writing “bad” reviews, and I never took pleasure in slamming titles. I had to write my truth. Even if it’s just what I thought about some videogame. I took it seriously. It was my name. It was my job. But the game industry is not one that welcomes and encourages healthy criticism on the whole. It wants to keep things narrow. The human stories that survey respondent was referring to earlier are, honestly, difficult to do in the current media landscape. * * * As games have gotten increasingly more expensive to make and the industry as a whole, as it likes to brag, is becoming “bigger than Hollywood,” access to developers with stories that stray from what PR would prefer to focus on are getting tougher and tougher to pull off. They are not impossible, but as one anonymous dev told me for don’t die: …there needs to be this steady information drip to all the websites, and it’s kept on a very tight schedule. They want it all feeding into their grand marketing plan. And so when you’re talking about something that they don’t want you talking about, that throws off and endangers their schedule. This is not unique to games. That’s just PR. That’s their job. But oddly, I heard about a strange surge of this around the marketing for the new Mortal Kombat game, Mortal Kombat X. I say “oddly” because it’s a series that is hugely popular and should have no problem garnering attention and sales. It has a proven track record, its fair share of nostalgia among people who played games for a long time and people know what it is and what to expect. It’s like Madden: there’s a new one, so people will buy it. The surge I am speaking of here comes via my email inbox from a few writers who prefer to also remain anonymous. They were frustrated over the preferential treatment they perceived YouTube personalities were getting over them at a studio visit to NetherRealm Studios in Chicago. The reason? YouTube personalities stick to the script. As one of these writers told me, “YouTubers don’t ask hard questions, they ask about fact sheet features list bullet-point shit. Because that’s what their audiences want…they just want to know how long the campaign is, who’s on the roster, DLC, and whatnot. They wanna know how good the graphics are, not the context for all this stuff. And fine, that’s totally okay, it’s just not what I want to write about.” And the thing about covering games that aren’t yet out, interviewing developers, requires going through PR to gain access. They are the gatekeepers and the devs have a script of their own they need to be sticking with. It’s a tricky balancing act for PR. I do not write this at all saying their jobs are easy or that they are single-handedly responsible for warping the conversation around games. Their side just have a hand in it like everyone else. Both these writers wanted to cover Mortal Kombat’s violence conceptually, and were met with resistance in a variety of ways. The same writer from before told me, “I went to the studio day because [a PR rep] told me the team would be stupid-busy with crunch and I couldn’t visit solo or at any other time. Then, at the event, some tall English guy…was talking with one of the devs and asked if they were still on for solo time the next day. So there’s that.” Another writer, also via email, preferring to be called a “veteran news journalist” said they were not allowed to bring their photographer “despite the fact that half the people that come are YouTubers and streamers…just filming themselves playing the game.” They both told me about PR “hostage holding” with members of the dev team – basically, because PR didn’t feel comfortable with the angles for these stories, these writers were kept from spending time talking to certain members on the dev team. One of them told me they were “told I don’t get any other interviews because ‘I wouldn’t get any different kinds of comments.’” These writers felt as I did: Their names were on these pieces and they wanted to do the pieces they wanted to do. Not only that, but they were the pieces they already got greenlit by their editors to do. It was the work they were expected to do. It was their job. And just as I rarely ran into resistance on, say, my unusual interview angles with Jeff Tweedy or Lewis Black – I continue to find it so odd that there is so much reluctance for transparency and cooperation in videogames on stuff like this. This story about a PR event with writers being jerked around is the same at any game event you can imagine or have heard about. Regardless of who is seeming to be “favored” in this hierarchy of influencers, if you’re at E3, GDC, or a pre-arranged studio visit, there is a script that must be stuck to. I know because I’ve done my fair share of these and they are not fun if you want to do something different or more ambitious than play a game while people narrate the game at you while you play the game and then listen to people, also gated by PR, discussing at length the things they’re supposed to be talking about in the game you just played and nothing further. Again, this is not unique to games. I’ve just never seen it so severely practiced anywhere else. I reached out to a number of streamers as well as people involved with PR on Mortal Kombat for comment on this story and received no response. I have no judgment on this at all, just letting you know: I did reach out, and I did try. And so, we have an industry here with roles that cannot function as they are traditionally defined. “Games journalist” or not, we have people doing marketing – trying to write something inventive and a little creative but being told “no”. Please don’t confuse my name-dropping of comedians and rockstars I spoke with as intended to impress. They are conversations I will always treasure having had and appreciate that I got paid to have them: But I know they were only talking to me to sell tickets or shift units off shelves. That doesn’t mean there can’t be creativity at play here and that if we work together we can’t entertain the audience a bit more together, though. But videogames by and large will have none of that: Just tell people why they should buy stuff, or give preferential treatment to those with a bigger reach who can just show them why they should buy it. It is very odd that there was pushback on Mortal Kombat X and discussing its violence on Conan O’Brien’s “Clueless Gamer” that featured the title back in January and they, of course, discussed its violence. In the hierarchy of videogames and games publicity, though, PR bows to mainstream media expressing an interest in your title. It is a big boon: remember the incredulousness I was met with I started covering games? And like videogames themselves, believe me: The Onion is nowhere near as mainstream as you might think they are. Conan is a household name pretty much no matter where you live. But this sort of stuff didn’t start with Mortal Kombat and I know it also didn’t start just as I was coming of age in this landscape. I’ve spoken with people who wrote about games since the late ‘80s who for a variety of reasons fizzled and moved on from that pursuit. Part of it’s just that writing for the Internet is a grind and burnout is a thing, and part of it is that being an intelligent and curious individual doesn’t vibe well with trying to write about games on an ongoing basis if you want to support yourself and keep feeding your brain. In the late ‘80s and ‘90s, the rates at most places are what most people who don’t write perceive them to be – which, without naming outlets or their rates, I’ll just tell you this: think of your typical games outlet today, and most pay freelance writers, if they have a budget for such things at all, one-fifth of what you think they’re getting. Wouldn’t you want to move on, too? And so, I know I am nowhere near the first person to try to articulate this strain of symptoms and the condition they add up to comprise. It’s just that most people who write about games move on or they’re so grateful they get to live out that aforementioned wet dream they choose not to rock the boat. But that harms the consumer in the end. A colleague of mine who used to be my reviews editor at a magazine that’s now gone – and how sad is that my stating this conjures up multiple possible places this could be – told me the other night he never explicitly heard marching orders to only give positive reviews. But there’s an unspoken, apprehensive fear of crossing game publishers or game PR people: If you give negative press, they’ll delay you in getting stuff to write about. And in those days, good luck finding games to write about if you aren’t being given the competitive edge of advance copies and access to developers for features and comments. But those days are long gone. Today, everyone is a journalist. Everyone is a writer. Everyone has an opinion, and so we are all equally drowning each other out. Very few are saying anything new. And so, forgive me for again dipping a few decades back again, but this talk of the early days of rock criticism and Lester Bangs offset by exploring the thriving streaming scene makes me think of another comparison I haven’t heard others levy: payola. If you have streamers encouraged to stick to the script who are making cash hand over first, don’t you sort of wonder where all that money comes from? And doesn’t this term, really, sort of apply to before the rise of streaming, anyway? Where’s that article or mindset of recognizing that in games? Calling it what it is? I’m not at all accusing anyone of anything and I don’t know who that would really harm, but if individuals can be made irrelevant or at least late to the party for expressing less than glowing opinions at times, and we’ve seen publications fall in favor of individuals – isn’t it at least worth pondering the possibilities therein? And isn’t it worth pondering the fact that with all these dollars behind games, a responsible press would be sniffing around on such things? And isn’t it reasonable to also wonder whether the audience for games might want something more and something different from the bigger companies who could reasonable afford to? Doesn’t the potential audience for games get a voice in this, too? It might not be on your script, but shouldn’t it be? * * * So, I don’t know. As is my wont, and why I started don’t die: I don’t have many answers myself. Given the above, how could I possibly? How could any writer in this field? I have worked in and around this industry for a long time and honestly just found it embarrassing that there are so few answers. I just have questions and recognize patterns of behavior. That’s hardly a poignant note to go out on here, though. So, instead, I will turn, again, to one of my survey responders: The vast majority of writing about games would be more accurately identified as criticism, opinion writing, bland news-cycle churnalism which involves no reporting work, or ideologically-based cultural commentary. On the rare occasions that an act of journalism is performed by a member of the games media, the reporters doing the work (original, objective reporting telling a story using multiple sources) are almost never working under an editor that has produced original reporting in a non-videogame context… Slapping the ‘journalism’ label on everything a ‘games journalist’ produces also results in irrational expectations from readers: ‘aren’t these game reviews supposed to be objective, since you’re a journalist, and journalists are supposed to strive for objectivity?’ No, they’re not, because reviews aren’t journalism. There you go, all of #gamergate solved in one Q&A. All I can add to this is that I don’t ever remember people talking about pinball journalists. Maybe some of what us marketers do can be occasionally considered journalism, but are we journalists? Hardly? Does it matter? No. Should we be focusing instead on games and how they can continue to grow and shift? Yes. Eventually. But we need to reframe the conversations that feel so omnipresent elsewhere if we want to move on. Until then, we are all only in marketing. ——— David Wolinsky has opinions about videogames. He’s the creator of don’t die, a videogame-industry confessional forum and the co-producer of The Electric Cybercast II: Online, the world’s only podcast about videogames. Support his Patreon and follow him on Twitter @davidwolinsky.

We stopped in a bookstore yesterday because Dylan and his lima-bean-sized bladder urgently needed a restroom. On our way back to the stall, he marveled, “Look at all those copies of Harry Potter and the Daily Hello’s.” It turns out there’s a new Harry Potter book out–did you know this? By now, much to the chagrin of Harold Bloom and A. S. Byatt, the billion-selling boy wizard heptology is as beloved in high-culture circles as it is at summer camps and on school buses. Even the notoriously cranky Michiko Kakutani has called the 4,000-page Levicorpus corpus a “monumental spell-binding epic.” In the vein of last month’s appreciation of Ingmar Bergman, schlockmeister, I’d like to take a minute to celebrate Harry Potter not as bildungsroman, modern mythology, political allegory, or cultural phenomenon. Instead, I read the Harry Potter books as enormously sophisticated Scooby-Doo mysteries. Structurally, these aren’t fantasy novels at all. They’re fair-play mysteries in wizard’s clothing–novels with not just plots and characters and setpieces, but “solutions” as well. J. K. Rowling is justly praised for her elaborate and meticulous world-building, but I’m convinced that a lot of that endless detail is just there for standard detective-novel purposes: to distract, to confound, to envelop the real “clues” in a Cloak of Invisibility. There’s a long tradition in American children’s literature of letting your young readers play along with the detectives, racing them toward a solution: think The Westing Game or Encyclopedia Brown. But Rowling seems to draw more from the Agatha Christie tradition: a multiplicity of colorful “suspects,” many with hidden agendas; red herrings galore; and a final drawing-room exposition-fest in which Hercule Dumbledore explains How It Was Done. Just as in a murder mystery, the guilty party is always the least likely suspect. In the first four books (belated spoilers): Quirrell, not Snape, is after the Sorcerer’s Stone. Ginny, not Draco, has unlocked the Chamber of Secrets. Ron’s pet rat, not Sirius Black, betrayed Harry’s parents (an unlikely-suspect twist to rival The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or And Then There Were None). The phony Mad-Eye Moody, not Karkaroff, is gaming the Triwizard Tournament. Some of these reveals even involve the Hogwarts equivalent of a Scooby-Doo rubber mask coming off the crotchety caretaker: Quirrell’s turban, Pettigrew’s Animagus disguise, Barty Crouch, Jr.’s Polyjuice Potion. “Like, zoiks, Hermione–it was Old Man Milligrew all along!” And Rowling does play fair–there are always clues hiding in plain sight, ones that even we mere Muggles could figure out, with a little ingenuity. Why is Barty Crouch’s name on the Marauder’s Map? What’s an anagram of “Tom Marvolo Riddle”? Who gave Neville that book about Gilly-weed? To Potter initiates, these convoluted-sounding questions are clues as obvious as the footprints under the window, the bloody knife and ripped bell-cord in the village squire’s study, the maid’s scream. The later books deviate a bit more from the murder-mystery template, but there are still plenty of puzzles tossed to the reader–where did we see the locket and the diadem before? Who are “R.A.B.” and the Half-Blood Prince? What did Dumbledore’s cryptic dying words mean? Why does the barkeep have a goat? Even in the final book, with Harry and company already knee-deep, for once, in a classic heroes’ quest, looking for magical MacGuffins called “Horcruxes,” Rowling can’t resist tossing them a new mystery to sniff out, about the “Deathly Hallows” in Dumbledore’s past. In the Deathly Hallows epilogue (more spoilers!) we never learn what grown-up Harry, Ron, and Hermione do for a living. I think that’s because they drive around Britain in a van solving mysteries. Each adventure ends with some Voldemort type ranting at the trio in noseless fury, “And I would have got away with it–if it weren’t for you pesky kids!” I bet Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter book–talk about a hard act to follow–will be a classic mystery of some kind. I don’t know if it’ll be a hard-boiled gumshoe case, a true-crime police procedural, a classic manor-house throwback, or what, but it’ll be a mystery novel. She’s been writing them all along, after all. It’s just that no one’s noticed.

Armie Hammer happens to be a big fan-favorite pick for the DCEU with either Green Lantern or Captain Marvel (Shazam). The actor was actually at one time attached to George Miller's defunct Justice League movie back in 2008 as Batman, but the movie was cancelled before it had a chance to start filming. Speculation that Armie Hammer might be involved in the DCEU started on Twitter, as fans noticed Armie Hammer and DCEU co-runner Geoff Johns started following each other; in addition, Joe Manganiello, who at the time was set to play Deathstroke in Ben Affleck's Batman movie, started following Armie Hammer as well. With Armie Hammer speculated for the DCEU, fans started guessing which character the 6'5" actor could play. Green Lantern immediately sprang into a lot of fans' mind as the character is rumored for the Justice League movie and will be appearing in the Green Lantern Corps film. With DC also developing a Shazam movie, Captain Marvel has been another pick amongst fans for Armie Hammer. So fan art was created of the actor by online artists. Now MTV recently caught up with Armie Hammer in the following video in order to get his reaction to fan art of himself as Green Lantern and Shazam. "Oh, yeah. No. I don't want to see that," Armie Hammer laughed about the Green Lantern fan art. When asked if the Captain Marvel Shazam art will make him feel any happier, Armie Hammer laughed and said, "I feel like that is something Freddie Mercury would wear." It was suggested that Armie Hammer looks pretty cool and could pull off playing Green Lantern, with Hammer replying, "Oh, boy. I think that whoever did that did a fantastic job." Armie Hammer also said he would be up to play any of the characters. "Josh, I am a complete whore. I will work with anybody for anything. If you have a job for me, I'll take it," Armie Hammer joked. For the record, Armie Hammer has also said on multiple occasions that he hasn't received a call about being in the DCEU. Watch around the 9:48 mark:

In news that may not be a shock to anyone, Vitor Belfort has finally ended the spectulation surrounding his random drug test in February. Following the drug test, the Nevada State Athletic Commission abolished all Testosterone Replacement Therapy exemptions and Belfort withdrew from his UFC middleweight title bout with Chris Weidman. Speculation at the time was that Belfort failed the drug test, but Belfort was not a licensed fighter in the state, so they did not make his results public. Today, Belfort released a statement in PDF format through his Instagram in preparation for a June 17 licensing hearing for a bout with Chael Sonnen in Nevada. "As I always said I have nothing to hide from anyone," Belfort stated on the Instagram post. He continued "I am releasing my statement along with all my privates test results( click the link below).Looking forward to get my license in Nevada and fight in July." Belfort linked to a PDF statement that also includes the results of several subsequent drug tests. From the statement: At the time that test was taken, I was considering filing for a therapeutic use exemption (TUE) for testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) from the NSAC. While I had not made formal application for a TUE, the NSAC nonetheless requested I take the test and I willingly complied. I further confirmed to the NSAC, in writing, the widely known fact that I was then presently on TRT and had been for many years leading up to that test and that I had further taken the TRT dosage recommended by my doctors the day prior. The results of the February 7, 2014, test indicated that my testosterone level was above the therapeutic range. While levels slightly outside the normal therapeutic range are not uncommon for some undergoing a TRT regimen, and my doctors immediately modified my therapy to return me to within the therapeutic range (as you can see the 22nd February test results was normal), I do want to acknowledge that the February 7, 2014 test indicated my level was above the range. Since that February 7, 2014 test, I have taken several subsequent tests, in late February, March, April and May, and the results of each test indicate my levels were either normal or below normal. To avoid any ambiguity, I am releasing, along with this statement, the results of all the test noted above and will provide the same to NSCA for their consideration as part of my licensing application. I further welcome any additional testing that the NSAC deems appropriate and necessary Belfort is effectively asking for no punishment for a failed NSAC drug test. This would be unheard of in the past. However, with a new NSAC executive director, it's always possible that things are done differently. It won't be the ED's decision though, Belfort will have to go in front of the commission and present his case, which will then be put to a vote. Given that his follow-up tests weren't NSAC ordered (at least it doesn't read as such), I don't know how much weight will be given to them. It's also a massive factor in the decision making process that this is the second drug test Belfort has failed in Nevada. But, this does put an end to the constant pushback from the Belfort camp as well as the UFC, who have both seemingly deemed the February test results "irrelevant." Update: Vitor's statement includes all of his test results. You can look through the PDF, but Jordan Breen summed them up quite well:

Windsor Regional Hospital CEO David Musyj goes to great lengths to find out what’s happening at his Ontario hospital. A lawyer-turned-hospital administrator, Musyj can often be found in scrubs, working different jobs to learn about problems facing his staff. Watch the fifth estate's special Rate My Hospital report Sunday at 11:30 a.m. local time on CBC-TV and 7 p.m. ET on CBC News Network. Though not quite undercover, he's had moments where a patient didn’t realize he was, in fact, the CEO, Musyj told CBC's the fifth estate in an interview for Rate My Hospital, a special investigative report on Canadian hospitals. It’s not just a shtick. Musyj believes the more he learns about his hospital, the better it will be. And the more Musyj learns about his hospital, the more he shares. "I'm accountable to this community," Musyj said. "It’s their facility, it’s their health care. I want them to know what's going on." The Windsor Regional Hospital was one of only a quarter of acute-care hospitals — 132 out of more than 600 — across the country that filled out a survey sent to them by the fifth estate for its Rate My Hospital investigation. The survey asked about quality of care and patient safety initiatives. Musyj said he doesn't understand why hospital CEOs refused to send the information to the public broadcaster. "I know the people that pay my salary want this data available," Musyj said. "As a result it should be in place. End of discussion." Watch the fifth estate's special Rate My Hospital report Sunday at 11:30 a.m. local on CBC-TV and 7 p.m. ET on CBC News Network.

Five U.S. cities rolled out programs targeting unwanted junk mail today to trim landfill waste and related disposal costs. Chicago, Berkeley, Calif., Ithaca, N.Y., Kansas City and Salem, Ore., introduced a Mail Preference Service Tuesday, allowing residents to put an end to unsolicited junk mail, such as credit offers, phone books and advertisements. The annual collection and landfill cost of these mailings and phone books is estimated at up to $10 per household. It may not sound like much, but it can add up when you consider that Chicago has more than 1 million households, while Kansas City boasts approximately 200,000. The cities are characterizing the program as both a zero waste effort and austerity program. It was designed by Catalog Choice, a nonprofit that hosts a localized website for each city that allows residents to sign up for the program. Cities then receive data on participation rates and environmental impacts. "We've identified waste reduction as a crucial strategy to meet the goals of our Chicago Climate Action Plan," Suzanne Malec-McKenna, Commissioner of Chicago's Department of Environment, said in a statement. "The Mail Preference Service with Catalog Choice will cut paper waste at the source, and offers an ease of use that we know Chicago citizens and businesses will appreciate." U.S. residents are subject to more than 100 billion pieces of unsolicited mail each year, according to Catalog Choice. The city of San Francisco recently moved to ban the distribution of phone books unless publishers get residents to opt-in.

AP Vice President Joe Biden said today that he is prepared to give recommendations to President Barack Obama by next Tuesday on what should be done to curb the nation's gun violence. "I have committed to him that I will have the recommendations to him by Tuesday," Biden said at a meeting with different sporting groups, according to a pool report released from the meeting. "I have a real very tight window to do this," he added. "The public wants us to act." Biden's meeting with the sporting groups came as reports emerged of another school shooting at a California high school. Obama commissioned the White House task force on gun violence after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. According to the pool report, Biden said that there were some recommendations that had come up repeatedly in his meetings with different groups — closing the so-called "gun show loophole" and instituting universal background checks. He also mentioned a possible limit on high-capacity magazines, as well as improving the "ability of any federal agency to do research on gun violence." Biden is also scheduled to meet with various gun-owners groups — including the National Rifle Association — as well as entertainment-industry executives on Thursday. On Wednesday, Biden caused a stir when he said the White House had determined it could "take executive action" on measures to curb gun violence. Please enable Javascript to watch this video // OO.ready(function() { OO.Player.create('ooyalaplayer', 'xmMHI4ODpCcZX7oOHxZfGnNqzK3FPE15'); }); //

President Park Geun-hye will meet National Assembly Speaker Chung Sye-kyun on Tuesday to discuss solutions to a deepening political crisis sparked by a corruption scandal involving her confidante. Park will visit the parliament at 10:30 a.m., the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae said. The president and speaker are expected to discuss a range of issues, including her recent nomination of a new prime minister, which opposition parties, as well as some members of the ruling party, have demanded be withdrawn, Jung Youn-kuk, presidential spokesman, told reporters. Along with Chung, the president also hopes to meet with the leaders of the opposition parties, the spokesman added. A day earlier, the opposition parties led by the Democratic Party rejected Park's recent offer for talks with the leaders of both ruling and opposition parties, demanding she first cancel her premier designation. (Yonhap)

Two California radio amateurs — one of them in Hawaii — have set new world distance records on the 2.3 and 3.4 GHz microwave amateur bands. Wayne Overbeck, N6NB, operating from a radio-equipped rental car on the big island of Hawaii, worked Gregory Campbell, W6IT, operating Overbeck’s own fixed station near Orange, California, on both bands — a distance of more than 4024 km (2495 miles). The contacts blew away records that had stood for more than 20 years and more than doubled the previous distance record for a two-way voice (SSB) contact at those frequencies, Overbeck said, adding that most previous microwave distance records have been set using CW. “Ours was the first-ever SSB contact between Hawaii and the mainland on 2304,” Overbeck noted. He said Chip Angle, N6CA, and KH6HME (SK) made the first transpacific SSB contact on 3.4 GHz in the 1990s. The record-setting contacts occurred on June 19 (June 18 in Hawaii) on 2.3 GHz at 0257 UTC and at on 3.4 GHz at 0300 UTC. W6IT was in grid square DM13cs, while N6NB/KH6 was in BK29hq. According to the database of distance records maintained by Al Ward, W5LUA, the old records were 3982 km, set on by N6CA and KH6ME on July 14, 1994, on 2.3 GHz (CW) and on July 28, 1991, on 3.4 GHz (SSB). Overbeck flew to Hawaii carrying gear for all bands from 144 MHz through 10 GHz “in two large suitcases, plus a roll-aboard and a backpack” — weighing about 150 pounds in all. In Hawaii, he rented a small SUV and built a rover-style station that included a rotating roof platform constructed using parts obtained from a home improvement store. Overbeck said that when a tropospheric duct formed that could convey signals thousands of miles across the Pacific, he drove around the slopes of Mauna Loa — 13,000 feet up —and selected several promising sites for long-haul DX, “not necessarily the highest possible sites,” he added. “By Thursday, June 18, the duct seemed to be peaking,” he said. W6IT activated N6NB’s fixed station and quickly worked N6NB/KH6 on six bands, including 2304 and 3456 MHz for world records. Overbeck said he also heard W6IT on 902 MHz and 5.7 GHz, but local, non-amateur interference in California — likely from Part 15 WiFi devices — prevented W6IT from hearing N6NB/KH6 on those bands. A video of the record-setting 2304 GHz contact between N6NB/KH6 and W6IT (recorded from the Hawaii end of the circuit) is online.

In November 2014, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, was a featured guest at a dinner for graduates of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school of business. The other honoree that night: Donald J. Trump. For Dermer, it was an extra-special occasion. As the Israeli envoy explained to the crowd at a Washington hotel, according to the text of his prepared remarks, the mogul had been an inspiration for the diplomat. Story Continued Below When Trump’s "The Art of the Deal" was published in 1987, a teenage Dermer read the cutthroat manifesto and resolved to become an entrepreneur like Trump. The book even convinced him to attend Trump’s alma mater of Wharton. “Mr. Trump,” Dermer said, “the truth is, I wanted to be your apprentice.” Dermer quickly indicated that his quip about Trump’s hit reality show of the same name was lighthearted: “But seriously …,” he continued. An Israeli official confirmed the accuracy of the speech text. But the basic story is true. And it illustrates a remarkable reversal of fortune for Dermer. Since his September 2013 arrival in Washington, Dermer has been distrusted and even personally disliked by Obama administration officials. “Acerbic,” one senior administration official called him, describing his tenure as “an abject failure.” “Openly partisan,” growled another. During one particularly tense stretch two years ago, Obama aides half-seriously mused about revoking Dermer’s diplomatic credentials and sending him home. Now, Dermer is poised to become a VIP in Trump’s West Wing — giving his boss and confidant, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, powerful access to the new White House regime. Dermer has already met with Trump, coordinated with his team and given the incoming president valuable political cover: He has defended Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, against charges of anti-Semitism. He has parried criticism of Trump’s controversial choice for ambassador to Israel, and applauded his vow to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. And during the late December United Nations debate over Israeli settlements, Dermer advised Trump’s team and tweeted that Israel “deeply appreciate[d]” Trump’s opposition to a U.N. resolution critical of Israel that President Barack Obama allowed to pass. That cozy relationship reflects more than Dermer's longtime admiration for Trump — it also illustrates what Dermer has predicted will be a policy of "no daylight" between the U.S. and Israel under Trump. Gone will be Obama’s pressure on Israel to halt its settlement-building in Palestinian areas. Gone will be talk of a diplomatic thaw between Washington and Tehran. Trump has even threatened to tear up America's commitment to the July 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran, which Netanyahu strongly opposed. After three years of sometimes-messy public disputes with Obama officials about U.S. policy toward Israel, Iran and the wider Middle East, Dermer can now practice the art of the deal with the man who taught it to him. “It is in the best interests of the U.S. to have a close working relationship with Israel, which we will undoubtedly have with President Trump and Ambassador Dermer,” said Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, in a statement. “Ambassador Dermer is a smart, thoughtful, passionate diplomat whose advice and counsel will be respected by the new Administration.” Dermer, who declined to comment, remained quietly neutral during the campaign. But he communicated with Trump’s team through the candidate’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew sympathetic to Netanyahu’s conservative Likud government — which has infuriated Obama by undermining his nuclear deal and continuing its settlement-building. Dermer also has a previous relationship with Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, whom Israeli officials consider among America’s most “pro-Israel” politicians. In 2014, Dermer traveled to Indianapolis to support legislation, backed by Pence, banning state dealings with entities that boycott Israel or its settlements. During the trip, Pence joined Dermer for an Indiana Pacers-Miami Heat NBA game. (As the loser of a bet with his host, Dermer wore a Pacers yarmulke the next day.) Since the election, Dermer has proved a political shield for Trump. When Trump tapped Bannon to be his senior White House counselor in mid-November, for instance, some Jewish activists opposed the appointment — citing instances of what they called anti-Semitism in Breitbart News, the media organization Bannon chaired until joining Trump’s team in August. As the charges swelled to politically dangerous levels, Dermer paid a symbolically crucial Nov. 17 visit to Trump Tower, where, after meeting with the president-elect, he told reporters that Trump was a “true friend of Israel.” Dermer also added, unprompted, that Israel’s government looked forward to working “with all of the members of the Trump administration, including Steve Bannon.” Dermer has since boosted Trump in other ways: He has pronounced Trump’s choice for U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, “an excellent choice” amid criticism over Friedman’s hard-line views and lack of diplomatic experience. At a Hannukah reception at the Israeli embassy in Washington last month, Dermer endorsed Friedman’s call for moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem — calling the controversial diplomatic position (also endorsed by past presidential candidates who later backpedaled in the face of Arab opposition) “a great step forward to peace.” The change in power can’t come soon enough for the 45-year-old Dermer, who was born and raised in Miami Beach, where his father was a conservative Democratic mayor. After college, Dermer worked for the Soviet dissident-turned-politician Natan Sharansky in Israel, where he met Netanyahu. After serving as an adviser to Netanyahu there, Dermer moved to Washington, where he officially assumed the job of ambassador in October 2013. The Obama White House was wary of Dermer from the start, mindful that Netanyahu had been a thinly veiled supporter of Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign, and even considered denying him diplomatic credentials. But Obama officials decided that Dermer’s close bond with Netanyahu — he has been dubbed “Bibi’s brain” — made him a valuable intermediary with the prime minister. Tensions between Obama and Netanyahu over the Iran nuclear negotiations further strained the relationship, which devolved into outright acrimony in early 2015. That’s when Dermer, working in secret with then-House Speaker John Boehner, arranged for Netanyahu to deliver a speech to Congress criticizing the Iran nuclear talks. Obama officials called Dermer’s failure to notify the White House about the planned speech an outrageous violation of protocol. Furious Obama officials suggested to reporters that Dermer’s diplomatic credentials might be at risk. And White House logs show that Dermer became a relatively infrequent visitor to the West Wing. Dermer’s last recorded visit to the White House as of September, the most recent date for which data is publicly available, was a meeting last Jan. 12 with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough. An Israeli official disputed the idea that Dermer ever felt unwelcome at the White House. “The ambassador didn't feel that on a personal level,” the official said. “And when he reached out to the White House with something, he would always get a call back and they dealt with things professionally. He never felt like persona non grata.” Now Dermer is parting ways with Obama’s team in a blaze of acrimony. In a flurry of media interviews last month, he blasted as “outrageous” and “shameful” Obama’s decision not to veto last month’s U.N. resolution condemning Israeli settlement-building, and accused Obama of secretly orchestrating the vote, which the White House has denied. Prior to the U.N. vote, Dermer had contacted Trump advisers, asking that Trump try and stall such a resolution, which Egypt had initially proposed. In an unusual intervention in world diplomacy for a president-elect, Trump called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and asked that he pull the resolution. Trump also issued a public statement calling Obama to veto any such move, which Dermer followed with a public thank-you on Twitter. “Israel deeply appreciates the clear and unequivocal call of President-elect @realDonaldTrump to veto anti-Israel resolution at the UN,” Dermer tweeted. Meanwhile, Dermer is lashing out at his old foes in Obama’s West Wing. When asked recently by one interviewer about Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, Dermer pronounced the trusted Obama aide, who has a background in creative writing, “an expert in fiction.” Obama officials respond with withering assessments of Dermer’s tenure. “The job of any ambassador is to advance his or her country’s agenda with the host government, and if you take that as a core task, then by any measure Ron Dermer failed,” said one official. “His style and his tactics neither served the Israeli government or the Israeli people.” “Ron has been widely recognized as perhaps the most openly partisan ambassador from Israel in recent times,” added another official, who warned that partisanship in the Washington debate over Israel poses a threat to the country’s security. But Dermer’s admirers from Trump Tower to downtown Washington see things very differently. “He likely is to become much more influential,” said Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “now that he will be interacting with a more friendly White House, which doesn't spend its waking moments wondering how to undermine him and his government.” Obama officials would dispute that language. But there’s little doubt that Dermer’s job is about to get easier. “I think that you’re going to have a policy of no daylight between the new administration and [Israel],” Dermer said in a Dec. 28 interview on MSNBC, “which will be very different from the policy that you’ve had over the last eight years.”

When I became vegan on January 16, 2013, I never realized what all I was giving up. Although I do not regret going vegan and will be one for the rest of my life, there are some things that are annoying and overrated with making this life decision. Making this life change was one of the hardest choices of my life, but I did not know that the biggest struggle would be other people. Yes, I do miss the simplicity of going through a drive through and getting a meal without having to special order it. However, the largest issue I find myself running into, same as with many other vegans, is the fact that you feel degraded by others who seem to treat you as an outcast. Here are some of the things I miss since becoming vegan: 1. People will ask you constantly about your protein intake. Usually when I someone finds out I am vegan, one of the very first questions I get asked is if I get enough protein. Long story short, there is protein in everything. Beans, grains, legumes, and nuts have more protein, so they are easy ways to get that balance. I eat now without feeling bloated, and I get the right about of protein needed per day instead of eating more than needed. 2. People will quiz you about what you eat. Don't get me wrong... I love being able to enlighten people about the alternatives to eating animal products. However, sometimes these questions are asked in more of a forced way, such as, "How do you not eat meat?" or "Does vegan food even taste good?" If you ask a vegan, or anyone with different from the norm of eating habits, what one eats, you will likely get an answer, but try your best to seem as if they are doing something wrong. 3. People will make jokes. I get it, really, I do. There are jokes, such as "How do you know if someone is a vegan? They will tell you!"... besides the fact that the subject agreement is wrong with that statement (haha), the reason you can usually tell if someone is a vegan is because food gets brought up into discussion. However, picking jokes at one's eating habits really does get tiring after a while. 4. You will likely feel responsible to look a certain way. Of course, we all have the social pressures of how we are "supposed" to look. However, those pressures are much more intense when people assume that vegans can only eat fruits and vegetables (since most do). Vegans can eat anything that does not contain animal products; meaning chips, potatoes, even some candy is fair game. Not every vegan is going to look like one is in shape to go to the Olympics, and the pressure to look that way is uncalled for. 5. You will get questions when you go out to eat and will more than likely be asked if you can eat anything. Eating at the same places I did before going vegan isn't the difficult part. Taking off the cheese and/or meat from a dish seems simple, but one is usually asked additional questions, such as "Are you sure?," which can come off in more of a negative way than intended. Also, people try to be considerate by asking where you eat, but it makes you into more of a spectacle instead of someone who eats differently than average. Unless it's an all meat restaurant, vegans are used to adapting. 6. You will be made up to be a big deal. I have been vegan for a while now, and no, it's not the first thing I bring up a conversation, despite popular belief. However, when the vegan can is opened, there seems to be no way of shutting it. Questions, comments, reactions, stares . . . it's almost as if you are a rare animal in a cage at a zoo. As much as I understand that people want to ask questions because it is interesting to them, I do wish it was more common to be vegan, or even vegetarian for that matter, because then I could feel more normal. 7. You will miss being oblivious to the reality. The reality of why many vegans are vegan is flabbergasting. Despite the health and environmental benefits, animals' lives are finally respected. However, what comes with that is the problem of knowing what you used to be ignorant to. Without getting into too much detail, ignorance is bliss. But, I do not regret being vegan and learning about what truly happens to the innocent animals that are taken advance of everyday, no matter the difficultly that comes along with the knowledge. Becoming vegan is one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. Don't get confused by this and assume that I don't like being vegan. It's one of my favorite things about me, although the comments can be overwhelming. If you become vegan, know that you will have to grow a tough skin. If you are vegan, I'm sure you can relate to this to your life. And if you aren't vegan, I hope this article helps you realize the impact you can easily have even if you are trying to be helpful. Here are some websites to help you either along your vegan journey or simply to educate yourself more with why vegans take the leap to veganism: www.peta.org https://www.vegansociety.com/ http://vegankit.com/be/ http://www.vegan.com/how/

When men were men, and verbs were passive Over the past few weeks, we've been discussing America's growing anxiety about passivity. That's the verbal voice, not the attitude towards life, though the composition mavens sometimes get the two mixed up. Arnold Zwicky found that the Avoid Passive rule originated in U.S. composition handbooks early in the 20th century (perhaps first in Strunk's 1918 Elements of Style), along with a metaphorical association between passive verbs and weakness. Today, after three generations of anti-passive propaganda, most American students are taught to "strengthen your verbs" to stimulate "active thinking and writing", and to avoid the "excessively wordy, weak" prose (and hairy palms?) caused by "the first deadly sin: passive voice". Because George Orwell recommended Passive Avoidance in his essay "Politics and the English Language", Geoff Pullum quoted an ironic observation from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage: "Bryant 1962 reports three statistical studies of passive versus active sentences in various periodicals; the highest incidence of passive constructions was 13 percent. Orwell runs to a little over 20 percent in 'Politics and the English Language.'" Since Strunk & White provide another of the streams feeding the massive river of contemporary anti-passivity, I checked a couple of pages of E.B. White's prose, and found 21% passives. Yesterday, as I read Winston Churchill's The River War in search of collective nouns, I was struck by the frequency of passive verbs. And as you'll see below, the numbers back me up -- in the passages I checked, Churchill uses passive verbs about as often as active ones. But Churchill, even more than Orwell, Strunk and White, is a model of forceful eloquence. Should 21st-century composition teachers reverse course, and advise their students to bulk up on passives so as to develop powerful, muscular prose? The opening paragraph of The River War has about nine tensed verbs, depending on how you count (does "is drained and watered" count for one or two?). Of these, four (or perhaps five) are passive (in red below), three are active (in blue below), and two involve forms of "to be" that perhaps should not count one way or the other: The north-eastern quarter of the continent of Africa is drained and watered by the Nile. Among and about the headstreams and tributaries of this mighty river lie the wide and fertile provinces of the Egyptian Soudan. Situated in the very centre of the land, these remote regions are on every side divided from the seas by five hundred miles of mountain, swamp, or desert. The great river is their only means of growth, their only channel of progress. It is by the Nile alone that their commerce can reach the outer markets, or European civilisation can penetrate the inner darkness. The Soudan is joined to Egypt by the Nile, as a diver is connected with the surface by his air-pipe. Without it there is only suffocation. Aut Nilus, aut nihil! One of the three active verbs (lie) is intransitive and has no passive counterpart. So depending on how we count things, this is something between 4/9 (44%) and 5/7 (71%) passive verbs. Let's be conservative and say that 44% of the tensed clauses are headed by a passive verb, while 3/9 (33%) have an active verb as head. But wait, you say -- Churchill is just laying out the geography. Once he starts describing the actions of men at war, those active verbs will surely spring up on every side. But not so. Consider this vigorous and forceful passage: The known strength of the Khalifa made it evident that a powerful force would be required for the destruction of his army and the capture of his capital. The use of railway transport to some point on the Nile whence there was a clear waterway was therefore imperative . [...] The route via Abu Hamed was selected by the exclusion of the alternatives. [...] The pla n was perfect, and the argument in its favour conclusive. It turned , however, on one point: Was the Desert Railway a possibility ? With this question the General was now confronted . He appealed to expert opinion. Eminent railway engineers in England were consulted . They replied with unanimity that, having due regard to the circumstances, and remembering the conditions of war under which the work must be executed , it was impossible to construct such a line. Distinguished soldiers were approached on the subject. They replied that the scheme was not only impossible , but absurd. Many other persons who were not consulted volunteered the opinion that the whole idea was that of a lunatic , and predicted ruin and disaster to the expedition. Having received this advice, and reflected on it duly , the Sirdar ordered the railway to be constructed without more delay. [...] Lieutenant Girouard, to whom everything was entrusted , was told to make the necessary estimates. Sitting in his hut at Wady Halfa, he drew up a comprehensive list . Nothing was forgotten . Every want was provided for ; every difficulty was foreseen ; every requisite was noted . The questions to be decided were numerous and involved. How much carrying capacity was required ? How much rolling stock? How many engines? What spare parts? How much oil? How many lathes? How many cutters? How many punching and shearing machines? What arrangements of signals would be necessary ? How many lamps? How many points? How many trolleys? What amount of coal should be ordered ? How much water would be wanted ? How should it be carried ? To what extent would its carriage affect the hauling power and influence all previous calculations? How much railway plant was needed ? How many miles of rail? How many thousand sleepers? Where could they be procured at such short notice? How many fishplates were necessary ? What tools would be required ? What appliances? What machinery? How much skilled labour was wanted ? How much of the class of labour available? How were the workmen to be fed and watered? How much food would they want ? How many trains a day must be run to feed them and their escort? How many must be run to carry plant? How did these requirements affect the estimate for rolling stock? The answers to all these questions, and to many others with which I will not inflict the reader, were set forth by Lieutenant Girouard in a ponderous volume several inches thick; and such was the comprehensive accuracy of the estimate that the working parties were never delayed by the want even of a piece of brass wire. 25 passives, 12 actives, 11 copulas: we have 25/48 = 52% passives, 12/48 = 25% actives. OK, you'll say, people are making decisions and plans in that passage; but what about the fighting? Won't we get more active verbs then? Maybe. Here's the start of the battle of the Atbara: During the halt the moon had risen , and when at one o'clock the advance was resumed , the white beams revealed a wider prospect and, glinting on the fixed bayonets, crowned the squares with a sinister glitter. For three hours the army toiled onwards at the same slow and interrupted crawl. Strict silence was now enforced, and all smoking was forbidden . The cavalry, the Camel Corps, and the five batteries had overtaken the infantry, so that the whole attacking force was concentrated . Meanwhile the Dervishes slept . At three o'clock the glare of fires became visible to the south, and, thus arrived before the Dervish position, the squares, with the exception of the reserve brigade, were unlocked , and the whole force, assuming formation of attack, now advanced in one long line through the scattered bush and scrub, presently to emerge upon a large plateau which overlooked Mahmud's zeriba from a distance of about 900 yards. It was still dark , and the haze that shrouded the Dervish camp was broken only by the glare of the watch-fires. The silence was profound . It seemed impossible to believe that more than 25,000 men were ready to join battle at scarcely the distance of half a mile. Yet the advance had not been unperceived , and the Arabs knew that their terrible antagonists crouched on the ridge waiting for the morning; For a while the suspense was prolonged . At last, after what seemed to many an interminable period, the uniform blackness of the horizon was broken by the first glimmer of the dawn. Gradually the light grew stronger until, as a theatre curtain is pulled up , the darkness rolled away , the vague outlines in the haze became definite , and the whole scene was revealed . 10 passives, 15 actives, and 3 copulas: we're down to 10/28 = 36% passives versus 15/28 = 54% actives. For another sample, here's Churchill's description of the action at Om Debreikat that finishes the Khalifa: After about an hour the sky to the eastward began to grow paler with the promise of the morning and in the indistinct light the picquets could be seen creeping gradually in; while behind them along the line of the trees faint white figures, barely distinguishable, began to accumulate . Sir Reginald Wingate, fearing lest a sudden rush should be made upon him, now ordered the whole force to stand up and open fire; and forthwith, in sudden contrast to the silence and obscurity, a loud crackling fusillade began . It was immediately answered . The enemy's fire flickered along a wide half-circle and developed continually with greater vigour opposite the Egyptian left, which was consequently reinforced. As the light improved , large bodies of shouting Dervishes were seen advancing; but the fire was too hot , and their Emirs were unable to lead them far beyond the edge of the wood. So soon as this was perceived Wingate ordered a general advance; and the whole force, moving at a rapid pace down the gentle slope, drove the enemy through the trees into the camp about a mile and a half away. Here, huddled together under their straw shelters, 6,000 women and children were collected , all of whom, with many unwounded combatants, made signals of surrender and appeals for mercy. The 'cease fire' was sounded at half-past six. Then, and not till then, was it discovered how severe the loss of the Dervishes had been. It seemed to the officers that, short as was the range, the effect of rifle fire under such unsatisfactory conditions of light could not have been very great. But the bodies thickly scattered in the scrub were convincing evidences. In one space not much more than a score of yards square lay all the most famous Emirs of the once far-reaching Dervish domination. The Khalifa Abdullah, pierced by several balls, was stretched dead on his sheepskin; on his right lay Ali-Wad-Helu, on his left Ahmed Fedil. 10 passives, 11 actives, 5 copulas and similar things. 10/26 =38% of the tensed clauses are headed by passives; 11/26 = 42% by actives. Grand total for the samples of Churchill in this post: 45 passives (42%), 41 actives (38%), 21 copulas (20%). I'm not seriously advising composition students to increase their use of passive verbs. They should write clearly, and let the verbs fall where they may. But the passive voice definitely needs some better PR, if only among writing teachers. Perhaps we should start with a lexical make-over. We could try replacing the word passive with a competely new borrowing from a classical language, like the "hyptic voice". (Greek ὕπτιος meant "laid on one's back; turned upside down; backwards", and was also sometimes used to refer to the passive voice of verbs.) This might work -- hyptic is a little weird, but there are useful resonances with hip and hypnotic. Or we could try a positive-sounding name based on the value of the passive in focusing different thematic roles --"thematic verbs" or "the focusing voice". We could say, "use thematic verbs to maintain the velocity of your narrative". Or, "seize and hold your readers' attention with the focusing voice". I'm not very good at this naming business, so let's have a Rename the Passive contest. If you've got a great idea, let me know. The winner gets a year's subscription to Language Log, a lifetime supply of by-phrases, and other exciting prizes. Posted by Mark Liberman at August 4, 2006 07:33 AM

A Republican congressman on Sunday said any “radicalized Islamic suspect” should be hunted down and killed. In a Facebook post, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), a viral YouTube star who was elected to Congress last November, argued that Christendom “is at war with Islamic horror.” “Their intended entry to the American homeland should be summarily denied. Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down,” Higgins wrote. “Hunt them, identity them, and kill them. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.” ADVERTISEMENT The post came one day after attacks in London left seven people dead. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria claimed responsibility for the attacks on Sunday. “Not one penny of American treasure should be granted to any nation who harbors these heathen animals. Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter,” Higgins said in the post.

Get ready for the next Nestene invasion for this classic Eighth Doctor story... 'It's like The Village That Time Forgot!' The inhabitants of the quiet seaside town of Thorington in Suffolk are living the same day over and over again. What's so special about the 1st of September 1991? Why haven't the villagers noticed that the same song has been number one for years? And just where on Earth has the sea disappeared to? The Doctor and Lucie must solve the mystery before the 'visitors' return... Written by Jonathan Clements, Doctor Who: Brave New Town features a brilliant new take on a classic Doctor Who monster, and a rip-roaring adventure for the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) and Lucie Miller (Sheridan Smith). You can download the story today for just £2.99 on CD and discuss it with other listeners on Big Finish's Facebook page. You can also explore the Doctor and Lucie's other journeys together by checking out the Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures range page. The Nestenes and their Auton foot-soldiers return this month in our new blockbuster set UNIT: Extinction. Check out the trailer below! Starring Jemma Redgrave as Kate Stewart, Ingrid Oliver as Osgood and Warren Brown as Lieutenant Sam Bishop, this new release brings the modern version of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce to Big Finish in our first boxed set based on the new series of Doctor Who. Pre-order your copy today!

Altice is not a readily recognizable name, but it's a company with big ambitions to be a global player in the cable TV market, and today it's made its splashiest acquisition in the United States by announcing the $17.7 billion takeover of Cablevision. This follows the $9.1 billion purchase of majority control of St. Louis-based Suddenlink Communications in May, which was Altice's initial entry into the US. Already established with a number of significant brands in western Europe, Altice provides the so-called quad-play package of internet connectivity, fixed and mobile telephony, and pay-TV services. The combined footprint of Cablevision and Suddenlink immediately vaults it to the position of being the fourth largest US cable provider, setting it up to expand its offerings in a new market. The $17.7 billion deal has already been approved in writing by the Cablevision shareholders, who are getting a nice 22 percent premium on the company's closing stock price on Wednesday, receiving $34.90 per share. Owned by the Dolan family since its founding in 1973, Cablevision is now being sold on to investors who seem determined to force their way into a market that is undergoing a period of significant upheaval. Altice claims that its two new US properties "will benefit from additional international operational expertise, enhanced scale and further investment support that are at the core of the Altice business model and strategy." In other words, where success can't be found, it can be bought. Completion of the Cablevision takeover is expected in early 2016.

The process which led to Norway’s Yes vote on OOXML was so surrealistic that it deserves to be recorded for posterity. Here’s my version of the story. It is not impartial. I was the Chairman of the Norwegian mirror committee for SC34 (K185) for 13 years until resigning a couple of weeks ago in protest against Standard Norway’s decision to vote Yes. On the other hand, I was present throughout the whole process and have more first-hand knowledge of what went on than anyone (excepting two employees of Standard Norway). Here I describe the fateful meeting on Friday March 28. More background will follow. The meeting started at 10 and we spent an hour on other business before proceeding to the main agenda item: reviewing Ecma’s responses to the comments that accompanied our No vote in the August DIS ballot. I led the first part of the meeting and then handed over to the VP of Standard Norway for the last part, as I had done on previous occasions when OOXML was under discussion. There were nearly 30 people present: three employees of Standard Norway (the VP, the committee secretary, and the JTC1 representative); the rest were technical experts. The VP opened by declaring that our only purpose was to discuss the comment responses and decide whether they had been addressed to our satisfaction. If so, Norway’s vote would change from No to Yes. I suggested that we should also take account of changes made at the BRM and base our decision on a total assessment. The VP did not disagree, but insisted that the discussion should focus on the comments. He also made it clear that the goal was to achieve consensus and that there would not be any voting. The next four hours were spent going through the 12 comments submitted by Norway. My tally of the final result was as follows: Consensus that the comment had been satisfactorily resolved: 2 comments. Consensus that the comment had not been satisfactorily resolved: 2 comments. No consensus that the comment had been satisfactorily resolved: 8 comments. Regarding those last 8 comments, there was a roughly 80/20 split between those who were dissatisfied and those who were satisfied. (Since there was no voting, this is just an estimate, but it’s pretty accurate.) There was not even a shadow of consensus that the comments as a whole had been satisfactorily addressed and I naturally assumed the No vote would stand. But lo… at this point, the “rules” were changed. The VP asserted that “Ecma has clearly made steps in the right direction.” The most important thing now was to ensure that OOXML came under ISO’s control so that it could be “further improved”. However, the committee was not allowed to discuss this. The VP thereupon declared that there was no consensus, so the decision would be taken by Standard Norway. Halfway through the proceedings, a committee member had asked for (and received) assurance that the Chairman would take part in the final decision, as he had for the DIS vote back in August. It now transpired that the BRM participants had also been invited to stay behind. 23 people were therefore dismissed and we were down to seven. In addition to Standard Norway’s three, there were four “experts”: Microsoft Norway’s chief lobbyist, a guy from StatoilHydro (national oil company; big MS Office user), a K185 old-timer, and me. In one fell swoop the balance of forces had changed from 80/20 to 50/50 and the remaining experts discussed back and forth for 20 minutes or so without reaching any agreement. The VP thereupon declared that there was still no consensus, so the decision would be taken by Standard Norway. The experts were dismissed and the VP asked the opinion of the Secretary (who said “Yes”) and the JTC1 rep (who said “No”). The VP thereupon declared that there was still no consensus, so the decision would be taken by him. And his decision was to vote Yes. So this one bureaucrat, a man who by his own admission had no understanding of the technical issues, had chosen to ignore the advice of his Chairman, of 80% of his technical experts, and of 100% of the K185 old-timers. For the Chairman, only one course of action was possible. That’s the story. Here’s the management summary, based on the song we used to sing as kids when going on long trips in the car: There were 30 in the bed and the little one said, “Roll over, roll over.” So they all rolled over and 23 fell out. There were 7 in the bed and the little one said, “Roll over, roll over.” So they all rolled over and 4 fell out. There were 3 in the bed and the little one said, “Roll over, roll over.” So they all rolled over and 2 fell out… There was 1 in the bed and the little one said, “Norway votes Yes!” The meeting was a farce and the result was a scandal. But it’s not over yet, and one thing is clear: the “little one” is unfit to represent the interests of Norwegian users. It’s time he was told, “Roll over, roll over…” Advertisements

(CNN) It's not often a football team is booed by its own fans during a game in which it scores 10 goals, but that was the surreal situation at Real Madrid's Bernabeu stadium Sunday. Rafael Benitez has not proved a popular appointment with Madridistas, and the coach's standing with supporters dropped to a new low when Rayo Vallecano -- the Spanish capital's third-best team -- took a 2-1 lead after only 12 minutes. The crowd of 61,564 -- in a stadium that can hold over 85,000 -- let their feelings be clearly heard. However, the tide turned when Vallecano had two players sent off before half an hour had been played, and Real took full advantage to become the first team to hit double figures in La Liga since 1960. Gareth Bale doubled his season's tally with four goals, while Karim Benzema grabbed a hat-trick and Cristiano Ronaldo netted twice. Danilo had given Real a third-minute lead from Bale's pass. Wales forward Bale, who has also struggled to win over Real's fans, received a standing ovation when he was substituted in the 74th minute after his first four-goal haul; somewhat bizarrely replaced by a defender with the score 8-2. "We conceded the goals early, but then the team reacted," Benitez told reporters. "I am not going to judge the decisions of the referee, but from the sending-off the team did what it had to do, try to play well and score goals." Rayo coach Paco Jemez was furious after Tito was given a straight red for a two-footed tackle on Toni Kroos and Raul Baena went for two yellow cards. The latter, for a pull on Sergio Ramos, allowed Ronaldo to level from the penalty spot. "La Liga has lost credibility. We feel trampled upon and humiliated," he said. "It is a long time since I have seen something so grotesque and shameful that doesn't benefit us or Madrid. All of us lose credibility." Real stayed third in the table, two points behind Barcelona and Atletico Madrid, while Rayo was in the relegation zone. Defending champion Barca won its fifth trophy of 2015 earlier Sunday, beating River Plate 3-0 in the Club World Cup final in Japan. Atletico, meanwhile, had the chance to take the lead in Sunday's late game at Malaga but lost 1-0. Atletico had Gabi sent off for a second booking in the 56th minute, and Brazilian striker Charles' late shot deflected in off visiting defender Diego Godin to move Malaga away from the bottom three. Villarreal, which beat Real Madrid 1-0 last weekend, stayed fifth with a 2-0 win at Real Sociedad thanks to a goal in each half from Denis Suarez. Fourth-placed Celta Vigo remained a point above the "Yellow Submarine" after winning at Malaga by the same scoreline. English Premier League Watford striker Odion Ighalio celebrates his second goal against Liverpool. Benitez's former club Liverpool suffered a chastening 3-0 defeat at promoted Watford on Sunday. Jurgen Klopp has enjoyed notable victories over Manchester City and Chelsea since replacing Brendan Rodgers as manager in October, but these have been offset by dropped points against teams such as West Brom, Newcastle and Crystal Palace. Liverpool never recovered after stand-in goalkeeper Adam Bogdan dropped an early corner to gift Nathan Ake the opener, and Nigerian striker Odion Ighalo added a goal in each half. "We lost our minds after the first goal, we lost our compact formation," said Klopp, whose team ended the weekend in ninth place, 14 points behind leader Leicester. "I would say hopefully it's the most disappointing moment in my whole Liverpool FC life." Seventh-placed Watford has already equaled its best Premier League points total -- 28, when relegated in 2007 -- and was boosted when eighth-placed West Ham could only draw 0-0 at managerless, third-bottom Swansea. Italian Serie A Mario Mandzukic has scored six league goals this season. Juventus continued its charge towards the leading positions as striker Mario Mandzukic scored twice in a 3-2 win at Carpi. The fourth-placed defending champion is two points behind Fiorentina and Napoli, who won respectively against Chievo Verona and Atalanta. Former Real Madrid striker Gonzalo Higuain scored twice in Napoli's 3-1 victory to extend his leading tally in the scorers' standings to 16. Leader Inter Milan has a one-point advantage after losing 2-1 at home to Lazio in Sunday's late match. Antonio Candreva, who gave Lazio an early lead, scored an 87th-minute winner after his penalty was saved, then both teams had a player sent off in time added on.

If you appreciate this essay by Fjordman, please consider making a donation to him, using the button at the bottom of this post. The English patriot Paul Weston, chairman of the party Liberty GB, was arrested by the police on April 26 2014 in his native Britain… for the crime of quoting Winston Churchill, Britain’s Prime Minister during the Second World War. Yes, it has come to that. The passage quoted by Weston was published in 1899. It focuses on Churchill’s negative observations about Islam while serving during the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of the Sudan. The young man commented on the repressive and warlike nature of Islam and concluded that “ No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” As the commentator Daniel Hannan noted: You may or may not agree with these comments, which Mr. Weston cited. That does not change the fact that this was a political arrest. A British political candidate running for elections was arrested in mid-speech simply for publicly addressing potential voters by quoting a former Prime Minister. For this, Paul Weston was arrested and put in a cell for some hours. He was suspected of having committed a “racially aggravated crime under Section 4 of the Public Order Act.” I’m not quite sure what that is, but it sounds very much like something George Orwell might have invented in one of his novels. Reality has moved beyond parody. Britain, once a champion of political liberty, is no longer a free country. It is now a Monty Python sketch — except it’s not funny — or a banana republic without the bananas. Sadly, it’s not the only European country that could be classified as such these days. From Hamburg to Helsinki, from Marseille to Stockholm and from Barcelona to Brussels, the natives have to endure seeing their heritage being dismantled and being turned into strangers in their own cities. In this atmosphere, saying negative things about Christianity is not merely allowed, but in certain quarters actively encouraged. At the same time, saying negative things about Islam may end your career, trigger violent threats and maybe even get you arrested by the police. The supreme irony in all of this is that if Paul Weston had quoted Adolf Hitler’s favorable views on Islam instead of Winston Churchill’s unfavorable views, he would presumably have encountered no problems. That’s because Hitler’s positive view of Islam is more in line with that of today’s ruling Multiculturalists. There is a tendency in the mass media to portray opposition to Islamization as something “far-Right,” at the same time as they portray Nazis as far-Right. This is questionable. The political terms “Left” and “Right” date back to a random seating arrangement in France in the late eighteenth century. Perhaps we need a new political vocabulary, more in tune with the realities of the twenty-first century. For example, some of the established so-called “right-wing” parties are every bit as much in favor of mass immigration and open borders as the “left-wing” parties are, if not always for the same reasons. That fact now undermines the very fabric of the Western democratic system. Many Western citizens do not want mass immigration to their countries, but they get it, anyway. Nevertheless, to the extent that you talk about Left vs. Right, you could argue that the national Socialists (Nazis) formed a part of the political Left, just like other Socialist parties and movements. It was Vladimir Lenin and his followers, not Adolf Hitler, who founded the first major totalitarian state of the twentieth century. The Nazis copied tools of propaganda and methods of repression pioneered by the Communists. People are often led to forget that today. There is arguably a direct line from the revolutionary terror of the Jacobins during the French Revolution to the revolutionary terror of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, from the political mass murders under Robespierre in the 1790s to the political mass murders under Lenin after 1917. Most (some might even claim all) of the mass-murdering totalitarian movements in the modern world have come from the political Left. It is therefore strange that to be “left-wing” is now seen as something neutral or positive, whereas to be “right-wing” is seen as suspect. Viewed in the light of history, it should be the other way around. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders has been criticized and branded an “extremist” for comparing the Koran to the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”). Yet as Wilders notes in his book Marked for Death, no lesser man than Winston Churchill, who led the fight against Hitler and the Nazis, did the same. Churchill did this in his six-volume history The Second World War, which partly earned him the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature. In it, the conservative British statesman called Mein Kampf “the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.” [Original quote by Winston S. Churchill in The Second World War, vol. 1, The Gathering Storm, page 50.] Hitler openly lamented the fact that the Franks had defeated the invading Arabs in AD 732. “Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers,” Hitler told his inner circle, “then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone.” [Original statement by Adolf Hitler, 28 August 1942. Quoted in page 667 of Hitler’s Table Talk; 1941-1944, translated by N. Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Enigma Books (1953)] Albert Speer wrote in his diary that Hitler regretted that Islam had not conquered Germany, as it was much more compatible with Nazism. “It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion,” he told Speer. “Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” [A quote from Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, chapter 6] Hitler repeatedly expressed his great respect and admiration for Islam and his contempt for silly Christian notions of compassion. Similarly, Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS and the Gestapo and by extension one of the most feared men in Germany and Europe, was full of admiration for Islam. He was sad that the combined Polish, German and Austrian troops of King Sobieski of Poland had halted the invading Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Himmler told Felix Kersten, his personal masseur and confidant, that Islam with its concept of Jihad and promises of beautiful women and instant rewards in the afterlife if you fall in battle was a wise religion, well-suited as a male warrior creed. [Source: Felix Kersten’s memoirs, Totenkopf und Treue, page 203.] The SS leadership for the same reason considered Islam to be a practical religion for soldiers. The admiration between Islam and Nazis was often mutual, and sometimes still is. Scholars such as Andrew G. Bostom have meticulously documented this fact. DONATE TO FJORDMAN: For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.

The MMO industry moves along at the speed of information, and sometimes we’re deluged with so much news here at Massively Overpowered that some of it gets backlogged. That’s why there’s The MOP Up: a weekly compilation of smaller MMO stories and videos that you won’t want to miss. Seen any good MMO news? Hit us up through our tips line! This week we have stories and videos from TERA, Rend, Tree of Savior, Dragon Nest, Neverwinter, Armored Warfare, EVE Online, Overwatch, ARK, Wakfu, Destiny, and Pokemon Go, all waiting for you after the break! New Games and Testing Glory Ridge : This mobile MMORTS has launched for both Android and iOS. “Players can jump into a world filled with epic guild territory warfare, challenging boss battles, and empire building.” : This mobile MMORTS has launched for both Android and iOS. “Players can jump into a world filled with epic guild territory warfare, challenging boss battles, and empire building.” Rend: The team gave a behind-the-scenes report on what’s happening in the studio. Patches Armored Warfare : The new PvP Waterway map is being loosely modeled after the Panama Canal. : The new PvP Waterway map is being loosely modeled after the Panama Canal. Dragon Nest: New spin-off classes are being developed for this MMO overseas. Events Odds and Ends Videos Giant bees and sharks with laser beams on their heads are just the tip of ARK’s newest update:

Abstract Introduction During social interactions, our own physiological responses influence those of others. Synchronization of physiological (and behavioural) responses can facilitate emotional understanding and group coherence through inter-subjectivity. Here we investigate if observing cues indicating a change in another's body temperature results in a corresponding temperature change in the observer. Methods Thirty-six healthy participants (age; 22.9±3.1 yrs) each observed, then rated, eight purpose-made videos (3 min duration) that depicted actors with either their right or left hand in visibly warm (warm videos) or cold water (cold videos). Four control videos with the actors' hand in front of the water were also shown. Temperature of participant observers' right and left hands was concurrently measured using a thermistor within a Wheatstone bridge with a theoretical temperature sensitivity of <0.0001°C. Temperature data were analysed in a repeated measures ANOVA (temperature × actor's hand × observer's hand). Results Participants rated the videos showing hands immersed in cold water as being significantly cooler than hands immersed in warm water, F (1,34) = 256.67, p<0.001. Participants' own hands also showed a significant temperature-dependent effect: hands were significantly colder when observing cold vs. warm videos F (1,34) = 13.83, p = 0.001 with post-hoc t-test demonstrating a significant reduction in participants' own left (t (35) = −3.54, p = 0.001) and right (t (35) = −2.33, p = 0.026) hand temperature during observation of cold videos but no change to warm videos (p>0.1). There was however no evidence of left-right mirroring of these temperature effects p>0.1). Sensitivity to temperature contagion was also predicted by inter-individual differences in self-report empathy. Conclusions We illustrate physiological contagion of temperature in healthy individuals, suggesting that empathetic understanding for primary low-level physiological challenges (as well as more complex emotions) are grounded in somatic simulation. Citation: Cooper EA, Garlick J, Featherstone E, Voon V, Singer T, Critchley HD, et al. (2014) You Turn Me Cold: Evidence for Temperature Contagion. PLoS ONE 9(12): e116126. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0116126 Editor: Marcus Gray, The University of Queensland, Australia Received: September 17, 2014; Accepted: December 1, 2014; Published: December 31, 2014 Copyright: © 2014 Cooper et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. Data are accessible at Figshare (http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1248937). Funding: This work was supported by Wellcome Trust Intermediate Clinical Fellowships awarded to NAH; Wellcome Trust Intermediate Clinical Fellowships awarded to VV; and European Research Council support to HDC. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Adaptive social behavior is dependent on the efficient communication of affective and motivational signals between individuals that together facilitate understanding of others' mental and emotional states. In humans, perception of these signals is associated with a marked tendency to mimic, which is well described for emotional facial expressions [1], body postures [2], gesticulations [3] and elements of speech [4]. This tendency, which typically occurs without conscious intent, has been proposed to facilitate emotional understanding across individuals. Empirical data demonstrating correlations between tendency to mimic emotional facial expressions and self-report measures of empathy [5], [6] support the encapsulation of mimicry within the broader concept of empathy [7]. Following de Vignemont and Singer we define empathy as occurring if: ‘(i) one is in an affective state; (ii) this state is isomorphic to another person's affective state; (iii) this state is elicited by the observation or imagination of another person's affective state; (iv) one knows that the other person is the source of one's own affective state' [8]. In contrast we define the narrower concept of emotional contagion as sharing of affect (points i, ii and iii above) in the absence of an awareness that the other is the source of one's own affective state (point iv above). Though somatically mediated motor signals have traditionally dominated research in this field, recent evidence has demonstrated that effects of emotion contagion can be observed for facial temperature [52] and have even been observed at the level of hormones [9]. Thus, observing a familiar person or a stranger undergoing a Trier Stress test increases cortisol levels not only in the stressed person but also passive observers watching the scene through a one-way mirror or TV screen. Similarly, evidence for contagion effects have also been observed at the level of the autonomic nervous system in the domain of facial flushing, pupil size and skin temperature. For example, pupillary signals have demonstrated a role in signalling the intensity of sadness [6], [10] and skin temperature the experience of anger [11], [12]. Perceptual sensitivity to another's pupil size during sadness has also been shown to predict inter-individual differences in empathy [6]. Similar to somatic motor responses, autonomic contagion has also been described during social exchange. For example, during psychotherapy heart rates of therapists and their clients tend to speed up and slow down together [13]. Pupil size has also been demonstrated to decrease during both the experience [14] and observation of sadness in others [10]. However, whether such contagious effects generalize across different axes of the autonomic nervous system is currently unknown. Until a decade ago, neuroscientific approaches to the study of empathy were lacking. However, with the discovery of mirror neurons within the premotor cortex, which respond during both performance and observation of a conspecific performing the same action, a potential neural mechanism mediating how we understand other people's actions and intentions was proposed [15], [16]. Shortly after the formulation of such action–perception models of motor behavior to imitation [17], they were extended to the domain of emotions with the first empathy models [18] suggested that perception of another's emotional state should automatically activate a similar representation within the viewer together with associated autonomic and somatic responses. Subsequently, a huge number of human functional imaging studies have provided empirical support for such shared networks in the domain of feeling and emotional states. Most have been performed in the domain of pain and show an overlapping anterior insula and anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC) network underlying both the first-hand experience of pain as well as its observation in others [19], [20] for meta-analyses see [21], [22]. Such shared neuronal networks of empathy have also been observed in the domain of neutral touch [23]–[25] as well as pleasant and unpleasant touch [26], [27] disgust and taste [28], [29] as well as positive affect such as joy or reward [30], [31]. In sum, multiple studies have found evidence for our human capacity to share affective states with each other, be it at the level of motor mimicry, autonomic or the neuronal activity. To date however, no study has asked whether sharing of autonomic physiological responses also extends to peripheral skin temperature. All homeothermic animals including humans rigidly regulate their core body temperature through a variety of involuntary thermoregulatory responses, such as shivering and non-shivering thermogenesis, cutaneous vasomotor responses, sweating, piloerection and panting [32]. Of these, sympathetically mediated changes in peripheral skin blood-flow (manifest as a change in peripheral temperature), is the most acutely sensitive to environmental temperature change [33]. However, changes in peripheral body temperature are additionally linked to changes in emotional state [11], [12], e.g. hot, clammy hands in anxiety or facial flushing in embarrassment, and can be modulated by mental imagery, hypnotic suggestion [34] and disruption of the sense of body ownership using the rubber hand illusion [35] and illusory self-identification with an avatar [64]. Together these findings suggest sensitivity of peripheral body temperature to top-down cognitive processes and a complimentary role in social communication. To investigate emotional contagion in the domain of body temperature we measured the left and right hand temperature of thirty-six healthy volunteers while viewing videos of two actors placing their right or left hand in warm or cold water. We predicted: 1) that viewing another's hand in warm/cold water in the absence of any emotional cues would be associated with congruent temperature changes in the viewer's hand. 2) That viewed changes in the right hand would be associated with congruent (contagious) temperature changes in the viewer's left hand (reflectional symmetry). 3) That these temperature changes would occur in the absence of more general measures of arousal e.g. change in heart rate. 4) That contagion of another's peripheral temperature change would be greater in participants with high emotional empathy as measured through psychological trait questionnaires. Methods Participants Thirty-eight healthy participants with normal or corrected to normal vision were recruited via advertisement on the UCL psychology online research website. Two participants were subsequently excluded from the analysis of temperature responses due to technical failure and 14 from the heart rate analysis due to battery failure. Thus a total of 36 participants (13 males, mean 22.9±3.1 years) were included in analysis of temperature response and 22 (8 males, mean 22.9±3.5 years) in the combined analyses of heart rate and temperature responses. Written informed consent was obtained in accordance with the declaration of Helsinki (Helsinki 1991) and the procedures were approved by the joint Ethics Committee of the National Hospital and Institute of Neurology, London. Video temperature stimuli Ten custom temperature stimuli videos were produced. Each video began with one of two actors (one male, one female) sitting in front of a transparent container partially filled with water. In four of the videos the actor then gradually added hot water from a steaming kettle into the container, checking the temperature of the water every few seconds with one hand. One video showed the male actor placing his right hand in the water and one his left. The other two videos showed the same procedure with the female actor. Four additional videos showed each actor filling the container with a bag of ice then testing the cold water with his/her left or right hand. The first 40 s of each video showed the actor cautiously filling the semi-filled transparent container with water from a steaming kettle or ice from a bag and intermittently testing the water temperature with his or her hand. The remainder of the videos used in subsequent analyses focused exclusively on the actor's hand placed in the water. These sections of the videos showed the water and the actor's hand only with no facial or other body movement cues that may communicate emotional state. Two additional control videos (each of 120 s duration) showed the same combination of factors i.e. bowl of water and actors hand, however in these videos no hot water/ice was added to the water and the actor's hand was held in front of the water container. One control video showed the female actor's left hand and the other the male actors' right hand (screen-shots illustrated in Fig. 1). PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 1. Experimental Timeline. The experimental timeline along the bottom shows video playback, red bars represent playback of warm, blue cold and beige control videos. The graph on the top left shows an example of single participants left (black) and right (green) hand temperature responses to a single illustrative cold video. The orange line illustrates changes in ambient temperature. The pictures on the top right show snap shots from the warm, cold and neutral videos. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0116126.g001 Study design The study adopted a randomised within-subject design, with each participant viewing all ten of the videos in counter-balanced order. After each video participants gave subjective ratings for both the observed water temperature (“How Hot or Cold is the Water?”) and the temperature of the actor's hand (“How Hot or Cold is the Actor's Hand?”) using a keyboard controlled visual analogue scale ranging from ‘Very Cold’ (far left) through ‘Neutral’ (centre) to ‘Very Hot’ (far right). Each video was separated by a 60 second inter-trial interval. The task was written and presented, and behavioural responses logged via a desktop computer running Cogent software on a Matlab platform (Mathwork, Nantick MA). See Fig. 1 for study timeline. Physiological data recording All testing was performed in a dedicated testing room kept at a constant temperature of 21°C. Participant's right and left hand temperature and heart rate, as well as ambient room temperature, were recorded throughout the study. Minute (3×2 mm) thermistors were attached to the palmar distal phalanges on the fourth finger of each hand to measure temperature change. Convection and conductive heat transfer to the environment was minimised by attaching the thermistors with micropore tape and placing participant's hands palm upwards on cushions throughout video playback. Ambient temperature was recorded throughout using a third thermistor suspended 20–30 cm in front of the hands. To minimise muscle movement related temperature change participants were asked to keep their hands as still as possible during video payback and use the index finger of both hands to input responses once the video had finished playing. Heart rate was simultaneously monitored using a pulse oxymeter (Nonin 8600; Nonin Medical) attached to each participant's left small finger. Each thermistor was connected to a separate Wheatstone bridge (detailed below) with outputs, pulse oximetry signals and stimulus timing pulses all passed to a Cambridge Electrical Designs (CED) Power 1401 data acquisition interface then recorded at a rate of 100 Hz on a second PC running the program Spike2 (see Fig. 2). PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 2. Experimental Setup. Graphic illustrating the experimental setup. Thermistors were attached to the participants' left and right hands with a third thermistor used to record ambient temperature. All three thermistors were connected to Wheatstone bridges (labelled Thermistor transducer) with the output passed to a CED 1902 signal amplifier. Output from the CED 1902 and the Pulse oxymeter (attached to the left hand) were fed into a CED Power 1401 data acquisition interface and the digitized output recorded in a PC running Spike2. A second PC running cogent in Matlab presented all of the task stimuli and passed a timing pulse to the CED Power 1401 to ensure accurate temporal alignment of the data. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0116126.g002 Custom temperature Gauge Each 10 kΩ thermistor (EPCOS NTC B57861S103F40) was connected to a custom Wheatstone bridge built using three additional 10 kΩ (+/− 1%) resisters balanced with a rheostat (Fig. 3A). Each of the three Wheatstone bridges were then connected to a CED 1902 low noise, high-gain isolated pre-amplifier via 8-pin DIN plugs. Amplified potential differences were then passed to the CED 1401 data acquisition interface as described above. The thermistors used (Resistance (R 0 ) = 10 kΩ, B25/100 (beta) = 3988K at a rated temperature (T 0 ) = 25°C) had a near linear resistance change (Equation 1, Fig. 3B) and rate of change of resistance (dR/dT) (Equation 2, Fig. 3C) over the physiological temperature range of interest (20–40°C). PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 3. Temperature Gauge Characteristics. A) Graphical illustration of the structure of each of the three Wheatstone bridges each built using a 10 kΩ thermistor and three additional 10 kΩ thermistors. B) Resistance properties of the thermistors illustrating a near linear response over physiological temperature range of interest (20–40°C). C) Rate of change in resistance for the thermistors across the physiological temperature range. D) Theoretical temperature resolution of the temperature gauge across the physiological temperature range. E) Calibration of the temperature gauge. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0116126.g003 The 10 Volt range and 16 bit resolution of the CED 1401 data acquisition devise coupled with the 30-fold gain of the CED 1902 amplifier enabled us to achieve a theoretical temperature sensitivity in the order of 0.00002°C that was near linear over the physiological temperature range of interest (20–40°C). (Equations 3–5, Fig. 3D). Finally, we calibrated the high-sensitivity temperature gauge against a digital thermometer (Kane-May 8004 digital thermometer) recording four points over the physiological temperature range 22–35°C. This demonstrated a linear relationship between voltage and temperature change (R2 = 0.98, p = 0.001, Temperature °C = 21.087× Voltage (V) +20.059 (Fig. 3E). To ensure that results were not influenced by potential differences in the sensitivity of the two finger thermistors half the participants had thermistor 1 attached to the left hand and thermistor 2 to the right hand and vice versa. Equation 1: Equation 2: Equation 3: Equation 4: Equation 5: T = temperature in °C, T 0 = 25°C, R = resistance, R 0 = 10 kΩ, K (temperature in K) = T+273.15, beta = 3988 K, K 0 = T 0 +273.15, Range1401 = 10 V, Gain1902 = 30, Rpd (potential divider resistance) = 10,000, Vpd (potential divider supply voltage) = 24 V. Physiological data analysis Left and right hand temperature recordings were first corrected for minor fluctuations in room temperature by subtracting ambient temperature recordings at the equivalent time-point then de-trended to remove linear drifts across the experimental session. The container-filling phase (40 s), plus the subsequent 10 s (and equivalent pre-video playback period in the control condition) was used to measure video specific baseline temperature recordings. Video induced changes in participants' own hand temperature over the remaining 130 s were then calculated in 10 s epochs by subtracting baseline temperature from ambient corrected left and right hand temperatures. Data were then averaged within subjects to obtain a mean response to each video type e.g. warm/neutral/cool and left/right observed hand then analysed in second level repeated measures ANOVAs using SPSS 21. Video induced changes in heart rate were analysed in an equivalent manner. Empathy Questionnaires Subjects completed two questionnaires: the Mehrabian Balanced Emotional Empathy Score (BEES) [36] and the Davis Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) [37], [38]. The BEES contains 30 items e.g. “It upsets me to see someone being mistreated” rated on a 9-point agree/disagree scale and provides a well-validated measure of emotional empathy. The IRI contains 28 items rated on a 5-point does/does not describe me well scale. It provides a composite measure of dispositional empathy as well as sub-scales of Perspective Taking (PT) "I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective", Empathic Concern (EC) “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me”, Personal Distress (PD) "Being in a tense emotional situation scares me” and Fantasy Scales (FS) "When I am reading an interesting story or novel, I imagine how I would feel if the events in the story were happening to me”. BEES and Davis IRI total empathy score as well as the Davis sub-scores were then used in a step-wise multiple regression analysis in SPSS21 to investigate whether inter-individual differences in empathy predicted contagion of another's temperature change. Temperature contagion was defined as an individual's mean increase in temperature to all warm videos minus their mean decrease in temperature to all cool videos (averaged across both left and right hands). Results Ratings of observed temperature stimuli Repeated measures ANOVAs with factors temperature (warm, cool) and observed hand (left, right) confirmed that our experimental manipulation significantly modulated participants' ratings of both the water and actors hand temperature, with both rated as appearing significantly warmer in the warm compared to cool conditions F (1,34) = 449.25, p<0.001 and F (1,34) = 256.67, p<0.001 respectively. There was no significant main effect of observed hand (left, right) or observed hand by temperature interaction for either rating demonstrating that the perceived temperature was equivalent for left and right hand video stimuli in both warm and cool conditions. We therefore collapsed ratings for observed (left, right) hand and repeated the ANOVAs including the neutral condition (warm, neutral, cool). This again confirmed that stimulus type (warm, neutral, cool) significantly affected ratings of the observed temperature for both the water and hand; F (1,34) = 305.79, p<0.001 and F (1,34) = 201.16, p<0.001 respectively. Post-hoc paired-sample t-tests confirmed significant differences (all p<0.001) between each pair of stimuli (Fig. 4A). PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 4. Behavioural and Temperature responses to Warm and Cool stimuli. A) Participants mean subjective ratings for the observed water temperature (“How Hot or Cold is the Water?”) and temperature of the actor's hand (“How Hot or Cold is the Actor's Hand?”) reported using a keyboard controlled visual analogue scale ranging from ‘Very Cold’ (far left) through ‘Neutral’ (centre) to ‘Very Hot’ (far right). B) Participants mean temperature change for their right (right leaning diagonals) and left (left leaning diagonals) when viewing warm (red) cold (blue) and neutral (grey) stimuli. Bold diagonals denote congruent responses (e.g. participants' left hand response when viewing left hand stimuli) and non-bold diagonals incongruent responses (e.g. e.g. participants' left hand response when viewing right hand stimuli). C) Mean time course response to viewing all warm videos for the left (red) and right (orange) hand displayed in 10 s epochs. D) Mean time course response to viewing all cold videos for the left (dark blue) and right (light blue) hand displayed in 10 s epochs. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0116126.g004 Temperature analysis Repeated measures ANOVA with factors observed temperature (warm, cool), observed hand (left, right) and participants own hand (left, right) demonstrated a significant main effect of observed temperature on participants' own hand temperature F (1,35) = 13.83, p = 0.001, with post-hoc t-test demonstrating a significant reduction in participants' own left (t (35) = −3.54, p = 0.001) and right (t (35) = −2.33, p = 0.026) hand temperature during observation of cool videos but no change to warm videos (p>0.1) (Fig. 4B). We also observed a significant main effect of participant hand (F (1,35) = 4.78, p = 0.036) and a significant participant hand × observed temperature interaction (F (1,35) = 13.49, p = 0.001). Post-hoc t-tests showed that this was driven by a significantly greater reduction in left versus right hand temperature when viewing cool videos (paired t (35) = −3.80, p = 0.001) demonstrating greater sensitivity of participants left hand to observed changes in temperature. Importantly, we did not observe significant observed × own hand or temperature × observed × own hand interactions (p>0.1) suggesting that induced changes in temperature were not influenced by laterality of the observed hand. Finally, there was no change in participants' own left or right hand temperature when they observed the neutral videos (p>0.1) (data illustrated in Fig. 4B). The time scale of induced changes in participants' own hand temperature when viewing warm and videos are illustrated in Fig. 4C and 4D respectively and demonstrate a maximum 0.2°C temperature drop 2 minutes into the cool videos and a maximum 0.033°C temperature rise occurring 10–50 s after onset of the warm videos. Heart rate analysis Repeated measures ANOVA with factors observed temperature (warm, cool), observed hand (left, right) and participants own hand (left, right) demonstrated no significant effect of observed temperature on participants own heart rate (all main effects and interactions p>0.1). Relationship between temperature contagion and empathy Finally we investigated whether self-reported empathy scores predicted an individual's contagion of another's observed temperature. Multiple regression analysis demonstrated that both the BEES and the Empathic Concern (EC) sub-scale of the Davis IRI (but not the other Davis sub-scales) significantly predicted contagion of observed temperature changes (F (2,35) = 6.82, p<0.003) with an adjusted R2 = 0.25. Exploration of the factors within this model demonstrated a nuanced relationship between empathy and contagion of another's temperature change; specifically in this model the BEES (which provides a single composite measures of empathy) negatively predicted temperature contagion (t (35) = −3.68, p = 0.001, β = −0.92) while the EC sub-scale of the Davis (which selectively measures empathic concern) positively predicted temperature contagion (t (35) = 2.79, p = 0.009, β = 0.69) (Fig. 5). PPT PowerPoint slide PowerPoint slide PNG larger image larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 5. Relationship between sensitivity to temperature contagion, BEES and the empathic concern subscale of the Davis IRI. A) Relationship between sensitivity to temperature contagion and BEES. B) Relationship between BEES and empathic concern (EC) subscale of the Davis IRI. C) Relationship between EC residuals (after regressing out relationship with BEES) and sensitivity to temperature contagion. D) 3D scatter plot illustrating the relationship between sensitivity to temperature contagion (TC), BEES and empathic concern subscale of ARI (EC). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0116126.g005 Discussion Here we aimed to investigate emotional contagion in the domain of body temperature by showing healthy volunteers video clips of actors with their hands in warm or cold water while simultaneously recording their own right and left hand temperature. We show that healthy participants exhibit contagion of another's hand temperature even in the absence of visible emotional or facial cues. This temperature contagion was particularly prominent for cool stimuli and was more marked for the observers' left hand. However, it should be noted that ice cubes were clearly visible throughout the cool condition but steam visible only at the beginning of the warm videos which may have contributed to this finding. We found no interaction between the laterality of the hand observed and experiencing the change in temperature arguing against common rotational or mirror symmetry effects described in naturalistic social interactions [7]; though note that viewed hands were oriented perpendicular to their own. Interestingly, self-report measures of empathy additionally predicted inter-individual differences in sensitivity to temperature contagion. This demonstration of contagion of observed body temperature extends the range of human mimetic responses to another axis of the autonomic nervous system. It also lends empirical support to extension of perception-action mechanisms to non-volitional, non-emotional responses exclusively mediated by the autonomic nervous system [9], [10]. Maintaining a stable internal thermal environment is critical to the life-preserving actions of bioactive proteins, such as enzymes and ion channels. As a consequence, core body temperature is rigidly regulated by the brains of all homeothermic animals including humans through a variety of involuntary thermoregulatory responses, such as shivering and non-shivering thermogenesis, cutaneous vasomotor responses, sweating, piloerection and panting [32]. In response to a reduction in environmental temperature skin temperature falls rapidly and triggers firing of strategically located COOL-sensitive neurons [39]. Feed-forward thermal afferent information is then relayed via the external lateral parabrachial nucleus (LPBel) to the hypothalamic thermoregulatory centre in the preoptic area (POA) resulting in an inhibition of its tonic discharge. This ultimately results in disinhibition of sympathetic premotor neurons within the rostral medullary raphe (rMR) orchestrating cutaneous vasoconstriction, tachycardia, skeletal muscle shivering [32], [40] and non-shivering thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue [12]. Interestingly, different effectors mechanisms are associated with partially separable central control systems [41], expressed physiologically as a greater sensitivity of vasoconstrictive responses to temperature change [33]. This difference in central control mechanism may also underpin why, in our current study, we saw isolated changes in hand temperature (likely mediated by a direct POA-rMR pathway) but not heart rate (mediated by an intermediate projection to the dorsomedial hypothalamus (DMH)) [32]. WARM sensitive neurons projecting via the dorsal parabrachial nucleus (LPBd) play a similar role in orchestrating cutaneous vasodilation and tachycardia in response to environmental warming [42]. In addition to bottom-up feed-forward pathways triggered by changes in skin temperature, thermoregulatory responses are also sensitive to top-down influences for example though visual imagery, temperature biofeedback and hypnotic suggestion [43]. This was first highlighted by Hadfield in 1920 in a case report of a patient who was able to selectively increase and decrease their right and left hand temperature by almost 3°C through suggestions of heat or cold [44]. Subsequently, similar selective increases and decreases in left and right hand temperature have been demonstrated in response to hypnotic suggestion in adults [45] and children [46] as well as biofeedback [47], [48], instructed imagery [49] or combinations of these techniques [50], [51]. More recently, synchronous changes in facial temperature have also been reported in mothers observing their child at play [52]. A review of these studies [43] has highlighted that temperature decreases are typically easier to elicit and of greater magnitude than temperature increases, and occur in the absence of heart rate change, as we observed. These top-down influences on thermoregulatory responses have also been exploited clinically in the treatment of Raynauld's syndrome [53], [54], though large inter-individual variability in ability to regulate finger temperature has limited its more widespread clinical adoption [55]. Direct cooling of the hand has been shown to increase blood flow (an indirect measure of neuronal activity) within the posterior insula [56], a region proposed to provide a cortical representation of all visceral afferent input [57], [58]. Whether similar increases in insula activity are also associated with temperature changes observed in a conspecific is currently unknown, though the wealth of fMRI studies showing shared empathic in other domains would predict that they would. In this regard, it is also instructive to note that in monkeys many POA thermosensitive neurons are additionally affected by non-thermal emotional stimuli such as rewards or aversive stimuli [59] suggesting that hypothalamic POA-rMR effector pathways may be recruited by top-down cognitive processes. Insight into the mechanism underlying temperature contagion may also be usefully informed by studies of disrupted body ownership induced either experimentally using the rubber hand illusion [35] or in the clinical disorder cold-type complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) [60]. In both of these conditions unilateral disruption of body ownership is associated with a localised reduction in body temperature suggesting that the conscious sense of our physical self and its physiological regulation are linked. During experimental induction of the rubber hand illusion activity changes are observed within insula cortex as well as premotor and intraparietal cortex [61] suggesting a potential role for the insula in reported temperature changes. In CRPS patients (a neurological disorder associated with pain, abnormal temperature regulation and often dystonia in a single limb) changes in limb temperature were reported dependent upon its location in space [60]. For example, when the affected (cool) limb was moved across the midline its temperature spontaneously increased with a converse effect described for the healthy limb. On the basis of these findings the authors argued for a space-based rather than somatotopic frame of reference with descending projections from parietal cortex onto brainstem autonomic centres hypothesised as the mechanism through which changes in the spatial location of the limb result in associated temperature change. It is thus possible that inter-personal comparator processes within the intraparietal junction play a similar role in temperature contagion. Finally, in contrast to our prediction of a simple relationship between sensitivity to temperature contagion and empathy score we found a more nuanced relationship. Specifically, an inverse relationship between BEES emotional empathy score and sensitivity to temperature contagion. i.e. those individual who scored highest on the BEES showed the least sensitivity to temperature contagion. However, when we included both the BEES and the Davis IRI (including subscores) into a stepwise linear regression analysis we showed that though BEES continued to show a negative relationship to temperature contagion the empathic concern subscale of the IRI showed a positive relationship. The basis for these findings is currently unclear, though may relate to subtle differences in the concepts captured by the BEES and EC scales. For example, though we showed a tight positive correlation between BEES and EC scores (R2 = 0.65, p<0.001) across participants it was participants with relatively high EC compared to BEES scores that showed the greatest propensity to temperature contagion. Alternately this finding may relate to the nature of our experimental stimuli in which we were careful not to show discernable emotional cues. It would be important for future studies to clarify the precise nature of the relationship between individual differences in emotion contagion, empathic distress and concern particularly to such low-level contagion phenomena. To conclude, here we show that healthy individuals are sensitive to observable signals of another's peripheral body temperature and further show contagion of their temperature, particularly in the context of cold. Inter-individual differences in temperature contagion are marked and show a complex relationship to inter-individual difference in empathy. Interestingly, abnormal temperature regulation is also observed in disorders of social cognition such as autism [62] and Schizophenia [63] suggesting interest in measuring temperature contagion in these populations. Acknowledgments We are grateful to Tina Gonsalvez for help in producing the videos used in this study. Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: NAH TS HDC EF. Performed the experiments: JG NAH. Analyzed the data: NAH JG EF VV EAC. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: EF. Wrote the paper: EAC NAH TS JG VV HDC EF.

The young backstop ranks among the game's premier up-and-coming catchers, a quality receiver who proved fully capable of handling one of baseball's best pitching staffs in his first full season as a starter. And Zunino has some serious pop in his bat, clubbing 22 home runs, a Mariners record for a catcher. SEATTLE -- Mike Zunino proved two things last year for the Mariners. The young backstop ranks among the game's premier up-and-coming catchers, a quality receiver who proved fully capable of handling one of baseball's best pitching staffs in his first full season as a starter. And Zunino has some serious pop in his bat, clubbing 22 home runs, a Mariners record for a catcher. Now the challenge for the 23-year-old Florida native is to take the next step and become a more-complete offensive player after batting just .199 in 131 games in 2014. And manager Lloyd McClendon believes that is the only thing standing between Zunino and All-Star status, which the skipper feels isn't far away for a youngster who zoomed from being the third pick in the 2012 Draft to the Mariners' starting catcher in less than two years. "The natural progression is he knows the league a little better from an offensive standpoint now," McClendon said. "He's got to become a better hitter. We know he has the power. But he has to commit himself to becoming a better hitter, shorten up his stroke in certain situations, and he's committed to doing that. I'll remind all of us that it's just not that easy sometimes. Hitting the baseball is probably the most difficult thing to do in any sport. He'll get better. He'll work at it." Zunino managed the rare feat of totaling more extra-base hits than singles last year. His 22 homers, two triples and 20 doubles added up to 44 extra-baggers compared to 43 singles, which is why Zunino ranked fifth on the team in slugging percentage at .404 despite his lowly batting average. It's not hard to see how Zunino can improve his overall offense by taking more of what the pitchers are giving him rather than looking to pull the ball as much, and Zunino spent the first part of the offseason pondering those possibilities before getting back to work at the University of Florida in recent weeks to focus on refining his swing. "You check out your highlights or whatever from last year, and see where you had success, and sort of take a step back from the season and how guys attacked you and what you were doing," Zunino said. "It was nice to take a little time, totally clean the slate off and get back in the batting cage. You start with the basics. It's been feeling really good." Zunino, the son of Reds scout Greg Zunino, has always been a student of the game. He watches opposing hitters and how they react to his own pitchers' offerings, so the trick now is to apply some of that to his own approach at the plate. After some offseason conversations with McClendon and hitting coach Howard Johnson, he's ready to put things into play. Video: Must C Crushed: Zunino can't bunt, hits long homer "For me, it's just totally committing on going to right-center," Zunino said. "That's been my strength for a while, and that keeps my bat in the zone longer. When you don't feel 100 percent or start to get a little fatigued, you try to generate too much, and that was pulling me off my swing. If you can get that path to right-center and stay balanced, I think that's going to be the key to changing things." With all the talk about adding newcomers Nelson Cruz, Seth Smith and Justin Ruggiano to the lineup, Seattle's success also will come down largely to the continued maturation of youngsters like Zunino, Dustin Ackley, Brad Miller and Chris Taylor. And if Zunino takes a solid step toward becoming a better all-around hitter, that will add another potent right-handed bat to the mix. With pitchers and catchers set to report to Peoria, Ariz., in less than two weeks, Zunino is eager to see how it's all coming together for a club that improved by 16 wins last year, finishing at 87-75. "You see all the moves and everything they're doing, and we're feeling really good," he said. "There's only excitement out here and a good buzz. I think we're all ready to get back to work and pick up where we left off last year."

Let’s have a rational discussion about the word “emotional.” But first, I’d better calm down. Maybe I’ll have a soothing cup of herbal tea and pet the cat. Oh wait, I don’t have a cat. Which is lucky for former CIA director Michael Hayden, or else we’d both be so overwrought we’d be clawing his eyes out over his diss of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). Make that sexist diss. In case you missed it, Hayden took off after the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee on “Fox News Sunday,” suggesting that Feinstein’s “emotional” reaction to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation and rendition programs had clouded her judgment. Feinstein had said that releasing the committee’s report on the CIA would “ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted.” Uh oh. Apparently being worked up over a little torture gets you kicked out of the Big Boys clubhouse. “That sentence, that motivation for the report, may show deep, emotional feeling on the part of the senator,” Hayden snarked. “But I don’t think it leads you to an objective report.” I don’t employ the term “sexist” lightly.Hayden was citing a column by my colleague David Ignatius describing Feinstein’s desire for a report “so tough” it would prevent any recurrence. Interestingly, Ignatius used the adjectives “determined,” “implacable” and, more critically, “obdurate” to describe the senator. Those are accurate, and they come without gender baggage. Unlike, say, “emotional.” If you wonder whether I am being fair in using the “s” word to describe Hayden’s comments, consider: Would he have used that word to describe Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who has been pushing for declassification? Talk about emotional: On Monday, Udall termed Hayden’s “baseless smear” of Feinstein “beyond the pale.” Or how about Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who recently took off after the intelligence community’s “culture of misinformation”? Didn’t think so — and neither does Feinstein. “Kind of stereotypical,” she told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “An old male fallback position.” Look, there is a distinction between sexist and consciously sexist. Did Hayden intend to denigrate Feinstein in a “quien es mas macho” segment straight out of “Saturday Night Live”? I doubt it. Watch Hayden’s response to an astonished Chris Wallace and you can see him thinking, Gee, maybe I went too far. But to give Hayden the benefit of the doubt and excuse him of conscious sexism does not excuse him of sexism. He wouldn’t have used that word about a male senator. Moreover, if he had, it wouldn’t have carried the same — pardon the phrase — emotional weight. Emotional is a term that, applied to women, connotes weakness. In the Feinstein context, it suggests a “you can’t handle the truth” prissiness about the brutal business of intelligence gathering. More broadly, it conveys a sense of being overwrought or irrational. Don’t get so emotional, women are told — and, worse, Calm down ! Yet when men are involved, a little emotion isn’t always a bad thing. Consider its use in the report about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and the George Washington Bridge. As Amy Davidson of the New Yorker noted , the report employs “emotional” to describe both the governor and his now-nemesis, former deputy chief of staff Bridget Kelly. Except that, at least according to his hired guns , Christie’s emotionality betokens his innocence of involvement with the lane closures. “It was an emotional session, in which the Governor, welling up with tears, expressed shock at the revelations,” they write. To the extent that Christie’s emotions get the better of him — he “began the meeting by entering his office, slamming the door and then standing at the head of the table” — that serves to underscore his sincerity. Kelly’s emotional displays, by contrast, are supposedly emblematic of her weakness and guilt. She sat in the back of the room and “seemed emotional” during one meeting; after another, she “looked as if she had been crying.” Meanwhile, they smarmily suggest, “events in Kelly’s personal life may have had some bearing on her subjective motivations and state of mind.” For example, the first e-mails about lane closures occurred around the time that her “personal relationship” with Christie campaign manager Bill Stepien “had cooled, apparently at Stepien’s choice, and they largely stopped speaking.” This is “Fatal Attraction” meets George Washington Bridge. Just substitute traffic backups for dead bunnies. Bridget Kelly, it’s safe to say, is no Dianne Feinstein. But the two women might have something to discuss over a nice cup of chamomile. Read more from Ruth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.

Even if your best friend owns a top publishing company, giving you an immediate “in,” this does not guarantee publishing success. First, you have to write a quality book that has a clear target audience. And your book must answer a common problem or need that audience shares. Then you have to develop a marketing plan, and stick to it for at least two years. Let’s begin with the process that should commence before you write your first word. Begin by reading A LOT. Read both books you passionately love and books you can’t seem to make it past page five. Then figure out what the author did in the book you loved, and what was wrong with in the book you couldn’t finish. Write down these points so they are crystal clear to you. Read other people’s books for inspiration and to discover what you should avoid as a writer. The next step is to plan out your book. Narrow down your subject, and then divide it into chapters. Each chapter should address a specific aspect of the problem your book is going to solve. In each chapter, break the specific aspect down into several parts. This will help your readers take in you information a bit at a time instead of overwhelming them with every bit of information clogging up the pages until they feel like they’re about to go blind. It’s not quite spoon-feeding the information to your readers, but it’s close. The next two steps are obvious. Write your book and then revise it. And then revise it again. And perhaps again. Of course, writing is extremely hard, and writing a book can seem like an impossible task. There are many books out there that give you guidelines to help you become familiar – and even love – the process of writing and revision. Find a number of books about writing. Better yet, find a number of books about writing the specific type of book you aspire to write. 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Billionaire philanthropist David Koch is in his Madison Avenue office showing me one of his more unusual possessions, a mechanical-looking doodad on the coffee table next to the couch. “This is a plastic version of my artificial knees,” he says. “If you spent as many years as I did begging girls for favors, you’d have bad knees, too.” The 70-year-old Koch actually wore out his knees playing basketball. Until recently, he held the record for most points scored in a single game at M.I.T.: 41. “I played basketball when you could be white and be good,” he says. Koch has a seemingly limitless storehouse of such Elks club–inflected jokes, which are often followed by his loud, wheezy honk of a laugh. Koch is six foot five, with unusually long arms to match. Although the shirt he’s wearing is custom-made and his tie is Hermès (a gift from his late friend Winston Churchill Jr.), he could readily be mistaken for a mid-level executive at a large company in his native Kansas. With an estimated net worth of $17.5 billion, Koch is the second-richest man in New York City, behind Michael Bloomberg. Across the room on the floor of his office sits a scale model of El Sarmiento, the sprawling yellow Addison Mizner–designed mansion he owns in Palm Beach (the matching yellow “biography” of the house he commissioned rests nearby). Sitting on a shelf is a replica of a Paranthropus boisei skull presented to him by the Smithsonian in recognition of the $15 million he gave in 2009 to build the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the National Museum of Natural History. “You ever been up to Boston?” he asks. He asks if I know about “the cancer building at M.I.T.” The building in question—the one right in front of the Koch Biology Building, and a few minutes’ walk from the David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice—is the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, funded with an anchor gift of $100 million from its eponymous donor in 2007 and set to open in December. “Isn’t that a marvelous Steuben?” he asks, beaming. He’s pointing at a glass brontosaurus, depicted with a little smile. “It has a sense of humor.” The sculpture was a gift from the American Museum of Natural History, presented to Koch after he donated $20 million to establish the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing. Koch remembers taking a trip to the museum with his workaholic father. “I was gaga about dinosaurs as a kid,” he says. “When we were 14, Father took my twin, William, and I. We’d come to town from Kansas to look at boarding schools. I was blown away. It’s my favorite museum in the city. So when they asked if I wanted to contribute, I said, ‘God! Me? What a thrill!’ ” His sense of wonder could easily read as a put-on, but people who know him say his childlike quality is genuine. “He’s almost guileless,” says his friend Sherry Lansing, the former CEO of Paramount. “He’s constantly surprised when he gets attention.” Koch and I first met in 2008, just weeks after he’d pledged $100 million to renovate Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater, the longtime home of the New York City Ballet and New York City Opera. Koch (his name is pronounced like the soft drink) was in a buoyant mood. The Times had run a glowing portrait of him; an act of the State Legislature had been undertaken to change the venue’s name to the David H. Koch Theater. That donation marked the capstone of a $500 million philanthropic spending spree Koch had been on since 2000, and he seemed to revel in the attention he was enjoying, especially from the leaders of the city’s great cultural institutions. “Sometimes I feel like a beautiful girl, saying, ‘God! Does every guy that goes out with me just want to sleep with me?’ ” he said. “ ‘Don’t they like me for my personality?’ ” He brayed with laughter. But several months ago, when we reconnected, Koch’s outlook had darkened. Koch has seen his share of misfortune: He and his brother, William, lived through a protracted falling out; David survived a plane crash in which 34 people were killed; and he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1992 and is still fighting the disease. But his bleak mood had other origins. Earlier this year, he found himself attacked for being the financial engine of the largely white, largely male, very angry crowds that were gathering in towns across the country—a few waving overtly racist or menacing anti-Obama signs—to protest the president’s proposed health-care bill and other issues. Koch denies being directly involved with the tea party—“I’ve never been to a tea-party event. No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me”—but he and his brother Charles were being accused of supporting the group through an affiliated conservative organization. Rachel Maddow had effectively called Koch the tea party’s puppet master. “The radical press is coming after me and Charles,” he said. “They’re using us as whipping boys.” Burnishing his reputation was no longer his concern; now, it seemed, he needed to save it.

While the meteoric rise of Dallas Cowboys rookie quarterback Dak Prescott was one of the top storylines of the 2016 NFL season, it has left the team with a major offseason decision as they prepare for the upcoming year. As the team appears to be fully behind Prescott, the Cowboys will have to decide what to do with long-time starter Tony Romo, who has been their signal caller since the 2005 season. Even team owner Jerry Jones doesn’t seem 100 percent sure of the best next move. During his weekly segment with 105.3 The Fan in Dallas, Jones had this to say: "The team we have, especially the offensive side, was built for Tony," Jones said, according to the Dallas News. "This is what it is. It's a juncture we have to address. I don't know how ultimately we will resolve this and nobody should be alarmed because you don't have all the answers. There are some issues here that you just have to see how the cards are playing. But we'll work to this." Also on Forbes: Romo is midway through a six-year, $108 million contract, signed before the 2013 season, that also included a $25 million signing bonus and $55 million in guaranteed money. The contract, as written, runs through the 2020 season, but, as is often the case in the NFL, the Cowboys have an opportunity to cut or trade Romo this offseason and carve out additional salary cap space for other team needs. If the Cowboys cut Romo before the June 1 deadline, they would yield the same salary cap result as if they were able to execute a trade. But if the team does so after June 1, they would only suffer a “dead money” salary cap hit of $10.7 million while also shedding $14 million off their books for the upcoming year. Even though Romo turns 37 years old before next season, he remains in high demand due to the lack of quality quarterback options throughout the league. One of the potential destinations for Romo is reportedly the Houston Texans, who are located 240 miles down the road from the Cowboys. The Texans signed Brock Osweiler last offseason to a four year contract worth $72 million that also included $37 million in guaranteed money and a $12 million signing bonus. Osweiler did not, however, have the 2016 campaign that he and the team had envisioned and was benched at the end of the season for back-up quarterback Tom Savage. The Texans were still able to make the playoffs and win a game against the Oakland Raiders despite the struggles at quarterback, but they lost to the eventual Super Bowl Champion New England Patriots in the Divisional round. Although Houston already has considerable money invested at the quarterback position, ESPN’s Adam Schefter still believes the team will pursue Romo and would be able to sign him if the quarterback shows an interest in playing for the team. Dan Graziano, also of ESPN, sees Houston being a strong fit for Romo as well. Recently he spoke of the potential pairing and how all factors could potentially play out: “But I think if he goes to Houston, that’s a team that makes the playoffs and consistently gets done in by poor quarterback play. That’s a team that looks and goes, ‘man if we could just get something at the quarterback position, we could be a Super Bowl contender.'” That’s a team that will look at Tony Romo and think he can help.” Of course the Cowboys ultimately don’t need to do anything with Romo as he is still under contract and given that Prescott’s cost is relatively low, due to his rookie contract extending through the 2019 season. If the Cowboys chose to keep Romo he would give the team a $24.7 million salary cap hit for the 2017 season. While that is an enormous number for a backup quarterback, Prescott still counts for a cap hit of just $635,848. The overall investment is $25.4 million in the two quarterbacks that are both good enough to start. While Prescott will want to re-negotiate before his contract ends after the 2019 season, his cap hits are just $725,848 and $815,849, respectively, for the 2018 and 2019 seasons. The Cowboys decision regarding Tony Romo will be one of the more fascinating storylines of this offseason. It will be a high stakes cat and mouse game with the Cowboys wanting to trade the quarterback, if they decide they want to move on, and prospective teams that may be inclined to pick up the quarterback after he is potentially released. In addition to the Texans, CBS Sports’ Jason La Confora believes the Cardinals, Broncos or Chiefs are also likely options. With Carson Palmer announcing his return for the 2017 season and Alex Smith firmly entrenched as the starter in Kansas City, it is unclear how Romo could fit into the lineups in those two cities. The Romo story is not going away and decisions about the quarterback’s future could greatly change the Super Bowl outlook for the 2017 NFL season.

Video transcript After the fall of the Soviet Union, and even China's migration to a market-based economy-- even though they call themselves Communists, their economy is now, essentially, capitalist-- there's been a general consensus around the world that capitalism is the way to go. And just to put my bias out there, right from the get go, I am in that camp. I would consider myself a capitalist. But what I want to do in this video is do a little bit more of a nuanced discussion of capitalism versus, say, socialism. Because I feel like there has been-- especially here, in the United States, and in the West-- a knee jerk reaction against anything that even has a whiff of the government getting involved or even a whiff of socialism. So I want to think more about what are we trying to achieve with the capitalist system. And where we could fall into the things we don't want to achieve if some of the aspects of capitalism are allowed to go on without any type of controls or, maybe, some type of regulation. I don't want to advocate anything. I just want to give, maybe, a framework for thinking about it. So you ask any capitalist, including myself, you say, well, what's good about capitalism? And I would say, well, you know it aligns everyone's incentives. So it's good incentives. If you work harder, you can earn more, you can generate a capital for yourself. You can use that to improve your standard of living. You can reinvest that capital. So it's a good incentive structure. I'm not saying that everyone is motivated purely by the desire to earn. I think there's plenty of people in the world who are motivated for the desire for social good, for elevating mankind. But the general census in a lot of parts of-- is that those type of things are specific to certain domains. But, in other domains, if someone's running a trucking company, it's not clear that someone would run a trucking company optimally just for the good of mankind. Maybe they would run some type of nonprofit that way. But a trucking company, or a farm, or something like that, who knows. So in general, you have a good incentive structure. There's also this notion in a capitalist economy that it's a meritocracy. It is meritocracy. And I'm going to, actually, put a box around this because a meritocracy, in my mind, is super duper important. Because even if you talk to us-- almost everyone is a fan of a meritocracy. Even the communists were a fan of a meritocracy. They would give exams to people and have the people who were successful have more authority within the communist regime. So a meritocracy is something that everyone lays claim to. And actually a lot of socialists or communists would claim that extreme forms of capitalism, when the wealth disparity becomes two extreme or where you have inherited wealth, actually goes against the idea of meritocracy. So let me actually put meritocracy here as well. And we'll talk about that in a second. And then the other ideas is that you have innovation in capitalism. And these are all related ideas. That if the incentives are good, if capital gets in the hands of people who are most deserving of it because they've somehow earned it, they've somehow innovated, that can also lead to innovation because the right people are handling the capital. Now, if we go to the socialist side of things, they'll say, well, look, there's a social cohesiveness to this. So let me write this down. And I won't speak to the-- I don't claim what I'm going to do in this video is comprehensive of all of the pros and cons of either. I just want to give a little bit of nuance to the discussion. So social cohesiveness. You won't have this situation where you have a gazillionaire sitting behind a walled compound with armed guards and their people right on the other side of that walled compound starving to death. And these people don't even, necessarily, view themselves as part of the same society, that they somehow have a responsibility to each other. And that is happening in some parts of the world where you have severe disparities in wealth. The rich people don't even view themselves as the same species as the poor people or even vice versa. You have the other idea of-- and I'll put this in quotes-- fairness. And I'll put it in quotes because one could say, well, it's fair if you make more, if you work harder, you should get more. If you innovate more, you should get more. And then their notion of fairness says, well, yeah, but look sometimes this wealth gets so extreme. sometimes you have this notion of inherited wealth. Generation after generation. Old money. What's fair about that? That people are just randomly born into a situation where they can just extract the interest off of their wealth and never have to work. And other people have to work super hard and they really get nothing for it. So this notion of fairness, I'll put it over here as well. Fairness. Because there's arguments for either. And so, like I said, I'm definitely biased to the capitalist side of things. I think there is an importance to these things that we have on the right hand side. But the reality, at least what we've seen in the economic experiments of the 20th century, is that even though communists and socialists might speak to these types of things, to a large degree there's less social cohesiveness. The senior communists in the Soviet Union would drive fancier cars. And they did have a very different lifestyle then the workers. And they would hide that lifestyle. And then it would lead to a lot of hypocrisy. In general, the extreme forms of socialism-- not clear that it was a meritocracy. It might have been just the best people climbing up the party ladder that get to the top as opposed to the people who would innovate and actually produce in a better way. But with that said, I want to give fair warning, that capitalism, if it goes unchecked in certain ways, it could also lead to those same problems of socialism. And the main problems there, when you think about good incentives. I think the incentives, and once again, I'm giving my opinion here, the incentives work out well when you have a bunch of competitors who can compete and innovate. And it makes complete sense that, let's say, that this person comes up with an innovation. And because they have that innovation, they're able to provide a better good that's cheaper to society. And so they make more profits. And it seems reasonable that person should get more profits, and more wealth, and grow. And it could even be good for society because this person's an innovator. Maybe there was an element of luck there. But it seems like they're competent at managing these resources. So it's good for society to give them more resources to manage. The areas where it becomes less clear that capitalism is unambiguously good, is a situation where this person becomes out right dominate. So let's say that this person becomes so big that none of these other players can even compete with them. So they all disappear. This person can just undercut everybody. And all the other players disappear. And this is the situation of a monopoly. And the problem here is, when this guy had competition he had every incentive to work harder. He had every incentive to innovate. It was a meritocracy because the person who innovates well grows the fastest. But once you get to a monopoly stage, and everyone else has died down, this is the only player in the economy, then all of a sudden, he has no incentive to innovate. This corporation or this person can just keep raising prices. There's no competition. There's no one else to say, hey, I can have a better product or I can sell it to you cheaper. And so it actually goes against the ideas of innovation. That's why it's really important. And that's why it's part of, especially in the United States, the economic system that you try to break up monopolies. That you don't like monopolistic practices. The other risks that you have when you start having a lot of wealth and a lot of influence in one entity, or one person, or one corporation-- and this can happen in a democratic or even a non democratic regime-- is that, the control of resources aren't just control of those resources. Aren't just control of land, and buildings, and railroads. They can also use it to influence government. And in the United States, this has been institutionalized in the form of lobbying. And when you have excess resources and you can influence government in this way, you can get the government-- so let's say this is the government over here-- to, essentially, do things for you. So it works to your advantage. And may be allowing you, eventually, to become a monopoly. So you can view this as crony capitalism, where lobbying can be a form of legalized bribery. And in that way, you kind of own the elected officials. I'm not saying that this is happening everywhere but it could happen. And in that situation, you have the government acting on behalf of these. And, once again, it goes against the idea of a meritocracy because when you have this cycle developing, maybe this person right over here has the innovation. But this person doesn't have the clout, doesn't have the influence with the government. And so this guy gets the government contract for the planes. Or this guy gets the tax benefits from the government so that he can be even more competitive. He can undercut this guy even though this guy has the innovation. The other element-- and I could talk about this for hours. And these are just things to think about-- are the idea of inherited wealth. And I'm not saying that inherited wealth is a bad thing. But there's this idea that, let's say, someone through their competence, maybe competence with a little bit of luck, is able to accrue a huge amount of wealth. And maybe they're not even a monopolist. But they're able to get a huge amount of wealth. But they were able to do it-- that they're really good managers. They're kind of these really smart dude. He can he can really manage a lot of resources well. The question arises is, what happens when this person passes away? In a very purely capitalist situation, you pass this onto your children. So you pass this onto your children. And the issue here is, one, what did this person do to earn it? And also from a society's point of view, maybe this person here is a dummy. Maybe there was another kid over here who was born at the exact same time, who is way smarter and who-- but this kid is now in control over 100 gazillion dollars. And he can completely mismanage the resources so that they're completely wasted. And so you have this idea of-- over time-- inherited wealth in a capitalist society can go against the ideas of meritocracy. It can go against the idea of good incentives because if this guy inherits enough money, he has no incentive to work. Why should he have to study hard and go and tackle math and all that? He's inherited enough money that he gets millions of dollars just off of the interest. Why should he educate himself? He got daddy's or granddad's money. And so it also goes against the idea-- and why should he try to innovate? Why should he ever do anything? He could maybe just hire some of these people and give them a minimum salary, whatever it takes. And so it goes against these ideas of fairness and all that. And I'm not saying that I'm against inheritance. I'm just saying this is something to think about. And there's some, probably, threshold of inheritance that it starts to undermine some of these ideas of a meritocracy, and good incentives, and fairness, and all that. And that's why I think it's funny when people who call themselves "old money" are proud of it. They view themselves as, somehow, being part of a better caste because "old money" means that you did not earn the money yourself. That your granddad or you're great grandad earned the money. And you've just happened to be born in this family and are, essentially, just living off of the interest. And it's funny because they'll talk about "new money" as if they're not as good as old money. But at least in new money people-- maybe it was through luck, but maybe it was through competence or innovation-- this is something that, at least in my mind, I'd respect more than old. Old money, you've done nothing. What's the difference between old money, or a king and a queen, or the aristocracy of Europe, that goes against a lot of the philosophical underpinnings of what the United States is even based on. So I'll leave you there. I just want to add a little bit of a nuance to the conversation. And I will say-- I'll say it again-- I come to this conversation with a capitalist bias. But I'm hoping that this gives you a little bit of more nuance. So that instead of saying, capitalism is an unambiguous good and socialism is an unambiguous bad, these are the things that we should try to promote. And to do that, we do have to do some things, like make sure that everyone is educated so that we can have a meritocracy. If everyone is educated, then you have a level playing field. You have this notion of equal opportunity. And that does involve some type of, on some scale, redistribution of-- at least in the form of education. Maybe you do need some way for people to get health care. You don't want people dying in the streets. I'm not going to take a stance here, but I'm just showing you that you can't just, even though I do consider myself a capitalist, you can't just say that everything has to be purely capitalist and you can't have any notion of government intervention. You maybe want the government to invest in things like long-term research. Where they don't have an immediate profit motive, but 50, 100 years down the future it might allow the society to thrive or whatever else. So I'll leave you there.

Life is gradient descent Rohan Kshirsagar Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 24, 2017 How machine learning and optimization theory can change your perspective A grassy continuous non-convex function. Credit to C Rand Recently, I’ve been learning about Gradient Descent. It’s a really beautiful algorithm that helps find the optimal solution to a function, and forms the foundations of how we train intelligent systems today. It’s based off a very simple idea — rather than figuring out the best solution to a problem immediately, it guesses an initial solution and steps it in a direction that’s closer to a better solution. The algorithm is to repeat this procedure, until the solution is good enough. My theory is that this is the way we humans work. We all follow some form of gradient descent, both passively and actively, when living our lives. Understanding this framework of gradient descent explicitly can help with improving the set up of your goals, speeding up progress on those goals, understanding other people, and seeing the bigger picture. The objective of this post is two fold: 1) To view life through the lens of gradient descent and 2) To view gradient descent through the lens of life. Throughout the post, I will provide examples that use this terminology precisely. Let’s begin by understanding gradient descent. For the mathematically inclined If you want to minimize the equation x² (whose derivative is 2x), and your guess for the solution is 3, then you can take a baby step (.1) in the direction opposite of the gradient at x=3, which is -6. So the next guess might be 2.4, the next one 1.8, the next 1.5… until finally we reach zero. This is drastically simplifying the use of gradient descent because we can solve for the solution directly in this case, but bear with me for now. For the visually inclined Imagine a marble at the rim of a large bowl. This is the first guess of a solution. It starts far from the bottom center of the bowl, but it eventually gets there by rolling there, bit by bit. Instead of teleporting instantaneously from the rim to the bottom, it takes a gradual path, following the path of least resistance. How standard supervised machine learning works In machine learning, this method is used to iterate a solution towards the minimal cost using labeled data. For example, if we want the classifier to predict whether an image has a cat or not, we’d provide it with a labeled set of images that do and don’t have cats. To carry out one iteration of gradient descent, the classifier at it’s current state will be used to classify all the images, use the predictions and the labels to compute the cost, and then compute the gradient to figure out how to shift the classifier weights to predict more images correctly. You can view this process as figuring out where the classifier is on the hill and rolling it a bit in the right direction. In life’s gradient descent, we are these marbles in a multitude of different hills. These hills vary across different emotions and measures, such as happiness, wealth, love, status, craft, etc. Let’s call these functions. In each of these functions, we are sitting somewhere on a hillside trying to get to the valley or the peak (let’s call this optima). As long as we have a measurable cost/reward function, and some relevant data that we can supervise, we have a good basis for practicing gradient descent. Leo wants to be a better striker in soccer. Leo’s reward function is determined by things like the number of goals he scores, the minutes he plays, the teams he scores them against, and the trophies he wins. Currently he’s scoring about 10 to 15 goals a season, but he thinks he could hit 25 to 30 with a solid improvement. He drills for 2 hours longer a day than everyone else on the team and takes penalties for an hour every Sunday. This brings his goal count to 18 the next year. After looking at his goal count, he sees that almost none of his goals are coming from headers on crosses. This sets the direction for his progress. He does all sorts of calf raises and box jump work outs. His aggression in the box increases. All these changes culminate into a 22 goal season. In parallel, Leo also has a cost function he’s trying to minimize — injuries. Any injury would be a gigantic setback towards any of his reward functions. On a daily basis with his trainer, he analyzes his body for any pains, stresses, inflexibilities and assuages them. At any point in time, Leo is evaluating a set of different fitness functions and meanwhile assessing the fitness functions themselves. Maybe his objective of being a better striker should change to attacking midfielder. That way he can maximize goals for his team. The key ingredients to Leo’s gradient descent algorithm are functions that can measured (number of goals in a season or days out on injury), data that contributes towards or detracts from the function (headers, key passes, strains, fractures, etc), and baby steps in his routines after having analyzed the data. Batch vs Stochastic Gradient Descent Let’s jump back to machine learning for a sec. In my image classification example, we compute the predictions for all of the images, and used the results of all of those to iterate our solution. This is actually a specific variant of gradient descent called batch gradient descent. We could just as well take a single image (randomly picked), predict, compute the cost, and iterate our classifier in the right direction. This is called stochastic gradient descent; it basically says that we might step in the wrong direction once in a while, but on average, we’ll step in the right direction. Stochastic gradient descent is cheap to compute, but can be noisy. How does this translate to life? View each day as a sample and our actions as the features for each sample. By looking at our actions with respect to our goals, we can see how we’ve erred and adjust our behaviors. This is actually ingrained in our culture in the form of New Years Resolutions. However, humans suck at this. We don’t keep track of our goals. We have notoriously terrible memories — we’re not computers. We heavily overweight the most recent samples. We heavily overweight the most emotional samples. Kahneman and Frederickson, proved this in dozens of studies, coining this the peak-end rule. Okay, you say, batch gradient descent doesn’t work. Why not use stochastic gradient descent? We can observe our behaviors on a daily basis, and adjust towards our goals. We humans are busy and lazy. If we had enough will power to monitor and change our behaviors on a daily basis, then we’d probably be at the optimal solution to all our goals. This reminds me a joke that Todd Barry told. He described a TV special about a wardrobe organization strategy that involved meticulously arranging the direction of the hangers based on what you wear — and he thought, anyone who manages to keep that habit is already the most organized person in the world. Fortunately, machine learning researchers and practitioners have already come up with a solution to this issue. We can combine the best of both worlds using mini-batch gradient descent. Analyzing your errors on a weekly or biweekly basis is a good balance between human psychology and changing directions toward a local optima. In addition, we have computers to help record each sample uniformly. Most successful weightlifters keep a journal logging every single one of their lifts and meals. Data-driven companies are ubiquitous these days. Fitbits, smartphones, smart-scales are all useful tools in helping compute the gradient. Gradient descent is putting the blinders on Bob chillin at a local optima The pursuit of a goal can blind us in two ways. First, when taking baby steps in the ‘right’ direction, we might not see that going in the ‘wrong’ direction for a bit or starting from somewhere else could help us get to a better solution. In the diagram to the left we can see that if the stick figure, Bob, moved to the left he’d get to a more optimal valley. Be wary that gradient descent is a local optimizer We have many different fitness functions, or hills, in our lives. Traversing any of these hills can blind us to all the other hills out there! Imagine Leo the soccer player, scoring goals in machine-gun rapid fire in his local 12 year old league. As long as he keeps honing his skills there, he won’t be improving his skills in a more challenging and diverse soccer environment, such as Europe. Leo needs to move to a hill with a much deeper valley. Moreover, the function that we’re looking at might not even be the right one. These functions change through passive or active means. This happens all the time growing up. Remember when you measured yourself by how many Pokemon cards you had or how expensive your shoes were? Those were probably not the right function to measure yourself by. This can help you understand people Two people who live under the same roof, work in the same position, or look identical, can be traversing completely different functions. Bob and Alice could be two cashiers and Bob is measuring himself by how many smiles he receives from his customers and Alice is measuring herself through the rate of customers she gets through per hour. When thinking deeply about someone, try not to assess them by their base traits (job, wealth, intelligence, etc) but rather by the hills they traverse, the valleys and peaks they hike towards, and their process for selecting these hills. Speeding up your progress (or hiking faster) In gradient descent, the learning rate affects how much change we enact to get closer to the local optimum. Once we’ve figured out the right direction, the learning rate is how far we jump in that direction. This is why so many self-help guides advise taking baby steps. Baby steps imply a small learning rate. Baby steps decrease your chances of failing in your endeavor. If our learning rate is too high, we might actually diverge from the optimum solution. Essentially, drastic changes can move you away from the optimum. You can see what that looks like below: An example of a high learning rate is attempting a black diamond in your first attempt at snowboarding. This increases the chances of injury, repeated failure, possibly leading to demotivation. Perhaps the optimal learning rate is a green or blue hill, providing ample learning opportunities without as much risk of diverging from your goal. Key takeaways In any goal-oriented situation, this framework of gradient descent bubbles up useful insights. You can ask yourself useful questions such as: Am I at a local minimum right now? What’s my batch size (1 week or 1 year)? Is there somewhere else that has a more optimal solution? Can I tweak my learning rate to be a little faster? Am I following the steepest path towards my objective? Is my cost function the one I really want? People that are good at setting up these functions and learning rates can move along to more complicated learning techniques, by adapting learning rates on the fly, or restarting from many random positions in your function to get closer to the global optimum. Why do so many people advocate travel? It makes finding new functions to traverse and find better solutions to existing functions using the idea of random-restarts. The world’s top companies are experts at adapting these functions, measuring a ton of data, and setting directions to better solutions. Agile software development is a methodology heavily connected to the idea of gradient descent — start with a solution as soon as possible, measure and iterate as frequently as possible. Real life gradient descent is more possible than ever before Today, there’s an entire market dedicated to the Internet Of Things (IoT). Wearables to measure your movement, pillows for your sleep, and water bottles to measure how much you drink. All the activity on your phone and laptops is tracked in a plethora of ways. Analyzing this rich time-series data crafts a more precise compass for gradient descent. If you didn’t learn anything towards self-improvement — I hope you learned a thing or two about gradient descent and machine learning. If you didn’t learn a thing about machine learning, then I hope you learned something about forming goals and progressing towards them. In my next post, I will speak more concretely in setting up these goals in the form of small measurable habits. If you liked this, click the💚 below and follow me so other people will see this here on Medium.

Spread the word 62 10 Maybe your horse just looks a little off and doesn’t attack his feed like normal, writes Robert N. Oglesby DVM. Perhaps he occasionally looks at his sides or paws the ground, as the pain worsens he lays down and rolls. If the pain is very severe, he will roll violently. These are all signs of colic. Colic means the horse has abdominal pain. There are many different causes but the horse will act the same. Surgical vs Medical Colic Veterinarians divide colic into two main types: surgical and medical colics. Surgical colics are displaced segments (twists) of bowel and hard impactions, they require surgery to fix them. Medical colics are usually caused by migrating worm larvae, gas, softer impactions, and occasionally inflammatory bowel diseases. Medical colics will respond to lubricants and pain relievers. Occasionally medical colics will require oral or IV fluids. Most surgical diseases will mimic medical colic initially and temporarily improve with medical treatment, only to return within the next few hours. If surgery is an option for your horse it is important to get early diagnosis since the horse’s ability to survive surgery lessens as he becomes sicker. The prognosis for surgery is much improved by early referral. Currently, 60% of surgeries are alive after 1 year at most of our educational veterinary hospitals. Early referral will improve these odds. What To Do Until the Vet Arrives If you come in to find your horse displaying signs of colic what to do depends on how severe the signs: If the signs are mild: Take away all his feed, small amounts of water are OK. The next step is to take his temperature; if he has a fever (above 101) call the vet. Put a lead rope on him and walk or lunge him at a trot for about 10 to 20 minutes or go for a trailer ride for 30 min. Many mild colics will improve with either of these treatments. Then put him back in the stall and watch him. If you are unsure about his condition, offer a small handful of feed and see if he will eat it. A colicky horse will as a rule not chew and swallow feed, though he may play with it. If he is over his bout of colic, continue to check him frequently for 4 to 5 hrs. to make sure the pain does not return. He should not be fed for 12 hours after his appetite returns completely. He should be allowed water. If he remains painful or you are unsure about his condition call the vet. Even if Old Faithful gets over his pain talk with your vet about possible causes and prevention. If your horse is very painful you are going to need help. The first priority is to call the vet. You would like to prevent the horse from hurting himself and one of the best ways of doing that is to walk him. If the horse is so violent that he is dangerous: stay away; otherwise halter him and walk him until the vet arrives. If the horse insists on laying down, that is ok so long as he does not roll. Lately many colic specialists have questioned whether rolling causes bowel twists, but until the jury is in, try to prevent it. » Coping with colic This article reprinted with permission from Horseadvice.com, an internet information resource for the equestrian and horse industry since 1994. On the WWW at www.horseadvice.com we have tens of thousands of documents on the web about horse care, diseases, and training. First published in 2005

Despite the fact that four of the lawyers linked to porn-trolling enterprise Prenda Law have been forwarded to criminal investigators, the organization is charging full-steam ahead with one of its last cases: LW Systems v. Hubbard. The case is an Illinois state lawsuit making vague allegations over computer hacking against a defendant with a lawyer who some have said is actually in cahoots with Prenda. The case landed Prenda an incredibly broad order that allows it to subpoena subscriber information from practically any ISP in the country. So Prenda lawyer Paul Duffy has used that power to launch a barrage of threat letters telling people to pay up or get sued. In mid-April—just a week after Duffy pled the Fifth to avoid testifying about his actions in Prenda litigation—his law firm was sending out demand letters asking for $2,400. Now, the anti-Prenda blog Fight Copyright Trolls has published a newer version of the letter, which also appears to be signed by Duffy. The new letter has gone out under the name of Anti-Piracy Law Group, and it suggests that letter recipients might have their neighbors or family members contacted about the allegations in the lawsuit. Since those accusations concern adult content, that action seems like a threat that could increase the embarrassment factor for recipients. Duffy writes: The purpose of this step is to gather evidence about who used your Internet account to steal from our client. The list of possible suspects includes you, members of your household, your neighbors (if you maintain an open Wi-Fi connection), and anyone who might have visited your house. In the coming days we will contact these individuals to investigate whether they have any knowledge of the acts described in my client’s prior letter. The new letter also makes more specific allegations about digging into the electronic history of targets. It warns against destruction of evidence, including "files on your computer, your credit card purchase history, and your Google search history." The letters don't specifically mention that the firm will be talking to the neighbor about pornography accusations. However, LW Systems identifies itself as being in the adult content business within the complaint, and the letter says that LW Systems' content has been widely stolen One lawyer who has been named as a "senior manager" of Prenda and its affiliates, John Steele, spoke to Ars last week and denied any involvement with Prenda. Steele did acknowledge he's paid a "modest flat fee" as an employee of Livewire Holdings, which owns LW Systems. Ars contacted Duffy to ask about the new letters but hasn't heard back.

313 · 60 comments Chandigarh records worst air quality ever. 194 · 93 comments Modi’s reforms have robbed India of its economic prowess - Demonetisation has wiped out 2% of GDP and ruined the lives of millions of workers 141 · 49 comments Karnataka accounts for 44% of India's investment plans - TOI 79 · 33 comments Is Modi making Corruption systemic? 88 · 9 comments UN expert finds holes in 'Swachh Bharat Mission', gets panned 60 · 9 comments Cooked Butter Chicken for dinner few hours ago, served with rice and naan. Look out for the recipe in the comments. 90 · 18 comments Delhi Job Fair: Arvind Kejriwal-led government gives 8288 on the spot jobs · 14 comments [NP] Can we talk about the cancer that are Indian YouTube channels? 90 · 51 comments Congress vindicated by GST rates cuts: P. Chidambaram 59 · 2 comments Raji: An Ancient Epic - An Isometric Action Adventure Inspired by Indian Mythology - Demo plus Kickstarter (X-Post /r/Games)

UN human rights expert and retired Princeton law professor Richard Falk said today that there is compelling evidence that Israel violated the laws of war by “conducting a large-scale military operation against an essentially defenseless population.” “There needs to be an investigation carried out under independent auspices as to whether these grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions should be treated as war crimes,” the professor said, adding that he believes “that there is the prima facie case for reaching that conclusion.” “This is the first time I know of where a civilian population has been essentially locked into the war zone, not allowed to leave it despite the dense population and the obvious risks that were entailed,” Falk pointed out, “the civilians in Gaza were denied the option of becoming a refugee.” Professor Falk made international news when, less than two weeks before Israel began the war on the Gaza Strip, he was detained by Israeli officials for over 20 hours at a Tel Aviv airport while trying to enter the country as the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories. He was eventually expelled from the country, provoking an angry response from the United Nations and human rights groups. Unsurprisingly, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Aharon Leshno-Yaar made no attempt to answer the charges, choosing rather to attack Professor Falk’s history of criticism for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, insisting “Professor Falk’s bias against Israel is well known.” Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz

I was going to write about last night’s Republican presidential debate. After all it was ostensibly about the economy. But I can’t. I won’t. There is nothing to say other than these two observations: First: the questions themselves were designed to allow the candidates to spout standard Republican ideology unfettered by reality. For instance, early on one question began with a meandering statement about how the national debt is unsustainable, and how the social security system is headed for bankruptcy. Neither is true. Neither is true at all. However, in the tightly controlled and hermetically sealed world of the GOP party base, both those statements are regarded as rock solid facts. Thus the candidates were able to answer with the necessary Republican critique that we must balance the budget, slash social spending, and cut taxes on the wealthy. In other words the answers were given to questions that did not reference the real economy, but only the make-believe economy that Republicans now inhabit. Second: this disconnect with reality gets even worse when we take a look at the various tax or economic plans on offer. They are all, without exception, based on the same supply-side twaddle that got us into the mess we are currently digging ourselves out of. The notion that by cutting taxes on the wealthy we somehow spur investment has been so thoroughly debunked by recent experience that it defies belief that anyone still trots it out as a viable policy. Yet every single one of them does. Not only this, they all imagine that the magic of supply-side economics will suddenly hurl the economy out of its present torpor and into an unprecedented period of growth such that the massive hole in the deficit caused by the tax cuts, and the subsequent loss in revenues, will be made up for by the lower tax rates being applied to all that new activity. We will, apparently, make it up in volume. This is, of course, fantasy. It always has been. It always will be. But it sounds nice and plausible. Especially if the people listening focus simply on the tax cut they will receive and not on the flood of red ink it will cascade through our national finances. At this point I must give Rand Paul some kudos: he, at least, bashed away at the idea – put forward by Rubio – that we can balance the budget and yet increase military spending simultaneously. What, Rand asked, is conservative about hiking any spending if it is not financed by taxes? Rubio blustered in response, presumably because he is unprepared for anyone asking simple questions about his math. And that’s it. The Republicans are stuck in a policy cut-de-sac because their base wants to hear certain things even if those things no longer relate to economic reality. So the holy trinity of tax cuts, smaller government, and deregulated business are trotted out over and over even if they are not solutions to what ails us. They are presumed to be solutions. So we have to assume a set of problems to make them relevant. Hence the questions that were devoid of recent fact. I doubt any of these people will get elected, but that doesn’t alleviate the problem: the entire Republican party is hiding within its alternative world. So Congress is steeped in these same solutions to the same imaginary problems. We have a Congress and a Republican party that wants to legislate for an alternative world and not the one they actually live in. So when reality and the imaginary worlds collide, and when the legislation has no bearing on what’s going on around us, nothing happens to move the lives of the voters forward. Hence the gridlock. There will be no change in the foreseeable future. Or until someone in the Republican party returns to earth and comes up with something new. Don’t hold your breath.

Seattle seawall’s novel fish features are a potential model for the world Michelle Ma UW News As tourists and residents visit Seattle’s downtown waterfront, it may not be immediately apparent they are walking on arguably the largest, most ambitious urban seawall project in the world that prioritizes habitat for young fish and the invertebrates they feed on. The first segment of the new seawall along Seattle’s Elliott Bay is nearly complete, stretching north from the Colman Dock to the Seattle Aquarium. The new seawall includes habitat features that protect and encourage young salmon to migrate along the shore, while still allowing for normal waterfront commerce and activity. University of Washington researchers have published an initial analysis of the effectiveness of the new habitat features as part of an ongoing partnership with the Seattle Department of Transportation. The study found that adding steps ― which are shelf-like structures protruding from the vertical underwater wall ― helped recruit a greater diversity of organisms such as algae and small invertebrates that juvenile salmon feed upon as they migrate along the shore through Puget Sound and out to the ocean. “The big question with urban shorelines is how to protect infrastructure while maintaining stability with sea-level rise and storms — and still try to restore natural processes,” said Jason Toft, a research scientist at the UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and a co-author of the new study appearing in the book “Living Shorelines: The Science and Management of Nature-Based Coastal Protection.” “We are trying to address what other cities can learn from Seattle’s approach, and what we can add to the global discussion of how to both protect and restore our shorelines.” The city took inspiration from these findings and installed “marine mattresses” along the seawall, which are mesh bags filled with rocks that create a shelf-like surface and make the nearshore shallower for fish. Engineers also constructed uneven, cobbled surfaces along the vertical wall to encourage more organisms to congregate by the shoreline. They designed clear glass squares in the seawall’s pedestrian sidewalk to let more natural light penetrate to the water below. All of these modifications are designed to help young Chinook, pink and chum salmon navigate, grow and avoid predators along the engineered shoreline. Juvenile fish prefer shallow water, and the mesh shelves help raise the seafloor and offer protection from predators. The young fish also avoid intense shade, so the glass squares help funnel natural light through the cantilevered sidewalk to the water below and also facilitate more natural migration movement among fish. As shown in this preliminary study, the underwater structures featured in the new seawall attract more sea life and invertebrates, which are important sources of food for salmon. The researchers placed large concrete panels on the existing seawall in Elliott Bay with several types of texture and relief. Over a three-year period, they found that adding shelves along the vertical panels was most important in recruiting a diversity of algae and invertebrates to the concrete, and this led to incorporating shelves into the new wall. Beginning next year, the UW scientists will begin a formal, 10-year monitoring study along the entire seawall. That study will rigorously assess whether the light squares are effective and track how fish respond to the various new features. “This is a big experiment,” said Jeff Cordell, lead author and a UW research scientist in aquatic and fishery sciences. “Monitoring once it’s all done is very important. It will be difficult to measure in terms of increases in salmon returns, but we can gauge success by other means such as increases in salmon feeding behavior and amount of food available around the new habitat enhancements.” The UW research team also published a supporting paper this spring in the Journal of Applied Ecology. This study looked at how building along waterfronts affects fish habitats around the world, and how waterfronts can be designed to improve the area for fish despite their heavy industrial use. Coastal cities like Sydney, Australia, and New York City, along with Seattle, are increasingly interested in incorporating ecologically friendly features into urban thoroughfares, and researchers are currently developing and evaluating these features. “Seattle’s downtown waterfront is an unprecedented attempt to improve fish habitat along an urban shoreline, so it’s a great opportunity to learn from and apply around the world,” said lead author Stuart Munsch, a fishery biologist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and a recent UW doctoral graduate in aquatic and fishery sciences. “There are a lot of situations where you aren’t truly going to restore a shoreline. But even working within the constraint of heavy human use along shorelines, you can still do a better job than putting concrete or boulders in the intertidal zone.” The study also stresses the importance of looking at the bigger picture of how fish behave and use habitat ― instead of just counting total fish ― when evaluating whether new engineered habitat features work. In Seattle, for example, researchers will be watching to see if fish swim under the piers to feed, or if smaller, more vulnerable fish are attracted to the shallower, protective waters that an engineered beach provides. “If you really want to understand habitat value, you have to go beyond catching and counting fish,” Munsch said. “You have to look at their behavior and take a dynamic perspective on how they use habitat.” The studies were funded by the National Science Foundation, the Seattle Department of Transportation, King Conservation District, Washington Sea Grant and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, partly through its the Estuary and Salmon Restoration Program. ### For more information, contact Cordell at [email protected] or 206-543-7532; Toft at [email protected] or 206-221-5460; and Munsch at [email protected] or 206-302-1748.

The following is one of my favorite running stats on the stock market: Over the years I’ve noticed that whenever these types of long-term numbers are presented there tend to be two extreme responses: See, put your money in stocks, close your eyes and you’ll be fine in a couple decades. Who has a twenty year time horizon? How many people have the patience to wait that long? There is some truth in each of these statements, but as with most things the historical data is never black or white, but a shade of gray. The future is uncertain, so investors should always think in terms of probabilities, never guarantees. What this data tells me is that the longer your time horizon, the higher your probability of seeing a gain in the stock market. Does this mean that you’re guaranteed to earn a certain level of returns in stocks if you hold them for a specfied time frame? No. Will these same results be guaranteed to repeat themselves in the future? No. Has anyone figured out a better way of compounding your money in stocks beyond increasing your holding period? Not many. Are there investors out there who actually have twenty year time horizons? Absolutely — Millennials just starting out in their career, middle-aged workers playing catch-up with their retirement savings and even retirees who will likely have 2-3 more decades to invest during their retirement years. The difference in each case comes down to how much each of these investors should hold in stocks and what their needs are in the meantime. I like to think that every single retirement contribution has it’s own twenty or thirty year time horizon. The usual caveats apply here — these numbers are before inflation, taxes or costs are taken into account (although one of the biggest benefits about a longer holding period is that you can reduce the impact of trading costs and taxes on your portfolio). With that disclaimer out of the way, here are a few more interesting long-term stock market stats I found while computing these numbers: The worst total return over a 20 year period was 54%. But the worst 30 year total return was 854%. The standard deviation of annual returns over 20 and 30 year time frames has been remarkably low — just 1.3% and 2.8%, respectively. The volatility in returns has historically fallen off a cliff as you extend the time horizon in the market. Volatility in the stock market during the 1930s was insane. Not only did the market drop more than 80% during the Great Depression, but during that period there were two separate quarters that saw stocks rise in excess of 80%. In contrast to the large losses seen in 1930s, the bull market of the 1980s and 1990s produced an amazing run of gains for long-term investors. If you would have invested at any point between 1973 and 1985 you would have earned anywhere from 12-18% per year over the following twenty years. Annual returns are all over the place and rarely do investors experience average performance in any given year as you can see from this graph: Further Reading: What Constitutes Long-Term in the Stock Market?

Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world A popular gay events promoter in Israel has been strongly criticised for using images appearing to mimic recent Islamic State beheading videos. The events promoter Drek (דרעק), owned by Imri Kalman holds club nights across Tel Aviv. Kalman owns other gay events, and the bar Shpagat which has been named the most popular gay bar in Tel Aviv by Time Out. The poster was released to promote an club night on Friday, and included an image of a man kneeling in the sand wearing orange, with another man, wearing black, and features the flag of ISIS in the top left hand corner. It has been criticised for mimicking the videos released by ISIS which appeared to show James Foley, Steven Sotloff and David Haines, being beheaded. The event was held at Tel Aviv’s Haoman 17 club called “Drekistan at the Haoman”. Ynet News reports that an accompanying description read: “As the new Islamic State gains traction in the Middle East, we at Drek have decided to give in to Sharia law and cheer the stubborn Da’esh [ISIS].” Others have noted that the Hebrew word for stubborn translates as “hard-necked”, and that it was an apparent reference to the beheadings. The image was deleted after Facebook followers criticised it, some calling the image “disgusting”.

On the opening day of Gamescom 2015, I crept away from the buzzing hum and dazzling lights of the show floor to sit down with Guild Wars 2 Lead Designer Crystin Cox to discuss Heart of Thorns and the horizontal progression development system we now know as the mastery system. I was treated to a full breakdown of each mastery branch with a live demo, and it was full of great information about the masteries involved and the thought process behind the system’s development. We also hit on specializations, verticality, and the beta weekend during my follow-up questions, so be sure to keep reading for all things HoT. Deep-dive into the mastery system The presentation kicked off by explaining the motivations behind the mastery system and Crystin was very keen to talk about her vision for horizontal endgame progression. Crystin Cox, Guild wars 2 Lead Designer: “We were really inspired by classic games such as Metroid and Zelda and wanted to do something that felt rewarding in that way. When you get an ability in those games it opens up a new world for you, and we wanted to capture that feeling in an MMO. That’s where the mastery system came from. We want our in-game progression to be about earning abilities that actually make a difference to what you’re doing in the game by opening up more of the game for you, especially when it comes to Heart of Thorns and the new area we’re adding. We worked very hard with the content designers to make sure that it felt like the things you’re getting with the mastery system are very contextual and impactful for what you’re doing in that region by opening up new content and abilities that are more meaningful than numbers going up. We want you to see the gliding stuff and think, ‘I wanna do that!’ We want it to be about time investment in an area and achievement, with the two combining to let you master something.” Gliding through the jungle We then moved swiftly on with plenty of information about the gliding mastery chain. Cox: “All the maps within the Heart of Maguuma are vertical, dense, and lush… they’re really pretty and gliding means you can see those NPCs and enemies walking around below, and you can stealth or dodge roll to evade in the air from some enemies that’ll actually snipe you out of the air. There are a lot of places you can’t get to without unlocking higher level gliding, so it pays off as a reward without using random numbers. Once you unlock updrafts, you can fly into pillars of wind that boost you up into the air, which’ll help you get further into the map. There are actually updraft puzzles where you have to hit a whole bunch of these updrafts in a row, and if you hit all of them you’ll eventually get to a reward at the end. We really wanted it to be the case where you unlock a mastery, and then that mastery helps you find another mastery point to unlock another.” The Itzel mastery line The presentation wouldn’t be complete without delving into the Itzel masteries, especially since the treefrog-inspired jungle dwellers will feature heavily in the expansion’s story. Cox: “In the Itzel mastery line, one of the unlocks is the bouncing mushroom, which are completely what they sound like: springy mushrooms you can jump on that can be used for all kinds of things. They can be used for jumping into a fight, or even jumping out of a fight, and they’ll of course help you get to places you couldn’t otherwise get to. We’ll have them in some jumping puzzles too. They also unlock the adrenal mushrooms, which are rarer than the bouncing mushrooms, but when you use them they refresh all of your skills immediately. If you’re doing a big fight, you can push out all of your abilities and then get the mushroom and go again. If you learn to speak the Itzel language through the mastery chain, they’ll open up to you a little more and be a little more trusting of you, and you can talk to their vendors to buy things you couldn’t buy before, and there’s a little bit of lore that comes along with that.” The breakbar-defeating magic of the Exalted We don’t know too much about the Exalted yet, so I was very glad to hear more about the strange race’s mastery chain. Cox: “The Exalted are a more magical race and you meet them much deeper in the jungle. They’ve got all kinds of artefacts and ruins they’ve left around that you can learn to use through the Exalted markings mastery. They can do all kinds of things like teleport you places or let you control a golem or light up a path that’s in darkness so you can get through it. Exalted assistance lets you summon an Exalted warrior to come and fight with you, and they’ll actually res you too if you get into trouble. Cox: “Exalted honing is pretty cool because it teaches you a technique to allow you to pierce through impenetrable bark, which is what the heavier Mordrem have on them. Once you get through that you get through the breakbar, basically. Once you have honing unlocked, it’ll be much easier for you to tackle combat. I’m not saying it’s going to be super easy – it’ll still be challenging and you’re not going to be able to just solo everything – but it’ll be a little easier for you to get through Champions even though you’ll still want a group. It’ll give you a big combat advantage, especially for classes that do have a lot of breakbar ability… it’ll be a big bonus for them. Exalted purification lets you summon a champion to fight who is most definitely not meant to be soloed! Once you defeat him, you get some very cool loot though.” Nuhoch masteries and a new swarming enemy The main enemy of the bullfrog hylek tribe, the Nuhoch, was detailed during the presentation. Cox: “The Nuhoch fight these guys, the new enemy army called Chak, who are an insect army that swarm and also throw goop. The goop gets stuck on you, slows you down, and deals damage. This stacks as more goop piles on, and eventually you get too much on you and will be encased in it. Since these guys swarm you tend to run into a lot of them, so one of the things the Nuhoch can teach you to do in their Masteries is to clear the goop by using your heal skill. As soon as you unlock that mastery, any heal skill can be used to instantly clear all the goop off you. You should use it at the right time to avoid building too many stacks, and this makes the Chak fun enemies. The Nuhoch have a whole system of tunnels they use to get around that you can get access to, and they also help you with your hunting. This lets you loot special collection and crafting things from creatures you kill in the jungle. Central Tyria masteries ensure the original world stays relevant The ArenaNet team hasn’t abandoned Tyria, and the presentation included a great rundown of the Central Tyria masteries. Cox: “We don’t want to leave behind our original content and have people stop playing it, so the existing world, which we call Central Tyria in the Mastery tab, has its own set of masteries. We haven’t really shown them before, but we’ve got the Pact Commander Mastery which is a line that’s all about being a mentor. These are all about encouraging you to play with the lower level players and helping them come up, and the first mastery actually gives you a special commander icon that is a Mentor’s Badge that lets you tag your chat with “Mentor” so everything you say is designated as being there to help. Eventually you can actually revive much faster; this gives you a little bit of a speed boost to reviving players who are level 80, but if a player is much lower level than you, you can revive them very quickly and you get rid of the downed penalty. Cox: “We’re very much encouraging you to play with new players and help each other out. There’s a bunch of other quality of life improvements in this line: You’ll get a Swiftness bonus when you’re in cities and also auto-looting, which is something I’ve wanted in the game for a very long time! We want you to go out and explore, be friendly, and get people to come with you to have fun. “We also have a fractal mastery line to tie in with the overhaul of fractals, so we have a whole lot of new rewards. You can unlock new dailies to go along with your fractals, you can actually craft a bunch of new infusions, and there are these little contextual buffs called singularities that you can pick up inside specific fractals that’ are unique for that fractal. “We also have the themed legendary precursor crafting mastery; each journey for a legendary is themed, so if you’re doing The Moot, the theme is food and parties. It’s a three-step process and in the end you’ll have your precursor. Now there’s a fourth tier in here, because for the new set of legendaries we’re putting in, you’ll be able to go all the way to the full legendary item. Three new legendaries will launch on the day with HoT, and then we’ll add three more in updates over time.” Cox: “The new legendaries are a little different in that they’re not tradable, so we really want this to be a prestige achievement for you, and not just something you can buy from the Trading Post. We think it’s much more rewarding that way… I understand that people have historically spent a lot of gold and I appreciate that, but legendaries are legendaries and we really want them to be special. “There are 39 masteries, but it is a very easily extendable system; after all, we’re still GW2 and we’re still that living world MMO, so we’re dedicated to bringing you new updates and content and that’ll include new masteries.” Some follow-up questions Massively Overpowered: So how would you summarise the mastery system to someone who hasn’t much GW2 experience? Cox: It’s meaningful progression that gives you exploration perks, quality of life additions, and all sorts of meaningful abilities that actually affect the way the world works and make you feel that you’re actually gaining mastery over it while learning. Rather than just watching numbers go up, you’re perfecting your game and interacting with that world to do that. At the start of the game, you learn by levelling to 80, and then when you get to 80 you really do now gain that mastery over your environment and learn to do things that are very contextual and rewarding. What’s the biggest selling point for the new mastery system? “Mastery unlocks feel incredible to achieve and we don’t want to lessen that by making you do it 15 times!” -ArenaNet’s Crystin Cox Well, the unlocks are account based, which is a huge selling point. We’re very alt friendly, and we want you to play multiple characters without grinding back through things you’ve already done. Mastery unlocks feel incredible to achieve and we don’t want to lessen that by making you do it 15 times! We think of these as something you as a player have learned, so we extend them to all of your characters. Character progression is more about your class, but this is about you mastering a region or ability through exposure. People continually ask whether the Heart of Maguuma masteries will ever possibly extend to outside the region. It’s a massive ask and may be impossible with the current Tyria zones, but are there any other region-specific contextual masteries that could happen in other zones? Cox: We never say never, and we’re not cutting ourselves off from that. What we have said is that we don’t want to create a situation where, as the game progresses it gets harder and harder to get in, so you will not be required to complete all the Heart of Maguuma masteries to play content that comes later on. Maybe you will see gliding in another map in the future – maybe, who knows – but you would never have to have it in another zone first or anything like that. Masteries are very regional and contextual, for instance, jumping mushrooms don’t exist anywhere else! Things such as legendary precursors an happen anywhere, though, so we’re not going to stop you from doing those on any map. Verticality is something you’ve been playing with for a long time. How did it grow from Dry Top and Silverwastes to what we’ll see in the Heart of Maguuma? Cox: So much of it is owed to the artists. We knew we wanted the new zone to be a jungle, and we threw the words “make a jungle!” at them and to their credit and because they’re amazing, they really thought about what it’s like to be in a jungle, and what it’s like to be inside its depths. They have lots of threats, lots of things hanging over you, you can fall down into things, and they really took that and made the zone dense and crazy. You go and cut a line through it as you explore, and they made these wonderfully dense and vertical maps to make it really feel like a jungle. They sort of lead you where you’re supposed to go, and there is that winding path element to the map to help you see where to go. A lot of it is down to the map design… the environment artists we have are really incredible. I have to ask about the challenging group content we keep being teased with. Will there be some new dungeons and world bosses dotted around the Heart of Maguuma? Heart of Thorns is coming out this year, so sometime between now and the end of this year, you’ll see our new challenging group content. -ArenaNet’s Crystin Cox We haven’t talked yet about that challenging group content, and I saw the reaction when the fractals went out and we said that it wasn’t the challenging group content we were hinting at. It’s coming soon, and one of the things we’re saying at Gamescom is that Heart of Thorns is coming out this year, so sometime between now and the end of this year, you’ll see our new challenging group content. Speaking of the r-word, fans are very happy to have access to the future beta tests running up to release with their pre-orders. Can you tell us more about those beta plans? Cox: Masteries are one of those things you’ll get to play with in the betas… you’ll get to glide, explore a piece of the new map, and run our adventures. Those are little single player challenges we give you and they have leaderboards that will show you the scores of all your friends. They’re proving popular and are a lot of fun! The announced specializations can be played in beta too, and you can also take them out into the existing Tyria locations to test against whatever content you like. I’m really happy that you can make a Reaper or Chronomancer and run out to Orr or wherever you like, even PvP. While we’re touching on specializations, one of the gripes I’ve seen is that the new system may be too simplistic. What would you say to allay that fear? Cox: I’d say it’s still very deep. The previous system was very deep and we did like that about it, but it was difficult to understand and to actually interact with, so our focus wasn’t really to remove any depth and there’s still a load of build you can do, perhaps more than any other MMO I know of, and we have 8 classes that can do very many roles with many ways of playing. That’s still very much true, and we just wanted to make it easier to understand and know what you’re getting out of that. I understand that maybe our hardcore players don’t need that, but ease of use is always important even for those experienced players and we don’t want to bog anyone down. It’s so much faster to get in there and get your build ready for playing. Would you like to comment on the mastery system’s focus on rewarding exploration and the thought process behind that? The mastery system is our answer to end game progression, and as long as we are adding content to the game, we see ourselves adding masteries. -ArenaNet’s Crystin Cox A large part of the appeal of Guild Wars 2 is getting out into the beautiful world and exploring. You’re encouraged to go out and find what’s going on, and it’s not like kill ten rats repeated. We wanted it to be more experiential, and we want you to feel connected to what you’re experiencing. The mastery system is our answer to end game progression, and as long as we are adding content to the game, we see ourselves adding masteries. What spurred on the decision to go with beta access to everyone who preorders? Cox: The beta process for us is actually really important, and I know a lot of companies use it as just another marketing tool. We really do need it for testing, and we rely on systems where we can get people in, get tests ran, get feedback and data, and start iteration cycles. We are asking people to play stuff that isn’t done and we need that feedback to get it to the finished stage. We do have marketing stuff to try and encourage players to test it out and ultimately play Heart of Thorns, but the most important thing is this interactive cycle where players who are wondering about the product and the nuts and bolts can get in to test it. The proof will be in the pudding to a large extent. We love this game and we worked so very hard on the expansion to do ourselves proud. We know that players have sunk hundreds and thousands of hours into the game, and we’re not going to pull the rug from under them. We want to make more GW2, we want to make it cooler, and we want to keep expanding on it as a living world. All can say is that we have a track record of supporting our games and giving great value, so we’re focused on making this the very best expansion we can make. Fence sitters can sit on the fence until the party comes, and that’s okay. We’re not running a closed door policy, and they can still come with no judgement after release. What would you like people to really take away in terms of the impact of the mastery system on both the Heart of Maguuma and Central Tyria? Cox: The mastery system really is our take on what endgame is, and it’s a big departure away from advancement of stats and numbers. These are meaningful abilities that you’ll train to progress your whole account and will open up more possibilities for you. This is what we see as true progression in an MMO. Thanks to NCsoft and ArenaNet, and especially to Crystin Cox, for arranging and facilitating this meeting.

On The Front Lines Citing First & Fourth Amendments, Rutherford Institute Asks Appeals Court to Reinstate Lawsuit Over Marine’s Arrest, Detention Due to Facebook Posts RICHMOND, Va. — Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute have filed a brief with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to reinstate a lawsuit on behalf of a decorated Marine who was arrested by a swarm of Secret Service and FBI agents and local police and forcibly detained in a psychiatric ward for a week because of controversial song lyrics and political views posted on his Facebook page. Rutherford Institute attorneys filed the lawsuit in May 2013 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia challenging the government’s actions as procedurally improper, legally unjustified, and in violation of Raub’s First Amendment rights. In February 2014, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed the lawsuit, rejecting concerns over government suppression of dissident speech as “far-fetched.” In asking the Court of Appeals to reinstate the lawsuit, Institute attorneys argue that Raub was unjustly deprived of his liberty because of a failure in the mental health system to competently evaluate Raub’s mental condition. The lawsuit also alleges that Raub’s seizure and detention were the result of a Chesterfield County mental health screener’s dislike of Raub’s “unpatriotic” views on federal government misconduct, thereby violating the ex-Marine’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech. “What may sound far-fetched to the courts is a grim reality to Americans who are daily being targeted for daring to exercise their constitutional rights to speak their minds, worship as they please, criticize the government, defend themselves and their families against over-reaching government surveillance and heavy-handed police tactics,” said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State . “Ultimately, Brandon Raub’s case tests our tolerance for free speech and those dissidents who keep the First Amendment relevant, because if we cannot proclaim our feelings about the government, no matter how controversial—on our clothing, or to passersby, or to the users of the world wide web—then the First Amendment really has become an exercise in futility.” On Aug.16, 2012, Chesterfield police, Secret Service and FBI agents arrived at Brandon Raub’s home, asking to speak with him about his Facebook posts. Like many Facebook users, Raub, a Marine who has served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, uses his Facebook page to post song lyrics and air his political opinions. Without providing any explanation, levying any charges against Raub or reading him his rights, law enforcement officials handcuffed Raub and transported him to police headquarters, then to John Randolph Medical Center, where he was held against his will. In a hearing on Aug. 20, government officials pointed to Raub’s Facebook posts as the reason for his incarceration. A Special Justice subsequently ordered that Raub be held up to 30 more days for psychological evaluation and treatment. In coming to Raub’s aid, Rutherford Institute attorneys challenged the government’s actions as a violation of Raub’s First and Fourth Amendment rights. On Aug. 23, Circuit Court Judge Allan Sharrett ordered Raub’s immediate release, stating that the government’s case was “so devoid of any factual allegations that it could not be reasonably expected to give rise to a case or controversy.” Attorneys Anthony Troy and Charles A. Zdebski of Eckert Seamens Cherin & Mellott, LLC, and William H. Hurd and Stephen C. Piepgrass of Troutman Sanders, LLP in Richmond are assisting The Rutherford Institute in bringing the lawsuit. Case History Click here to read more about Brandon Raub.

TNA Star Working With WWE Superstars TNA wrestler Ethan Carter III has been confirmed in working with WWE Superstars JTG and Ezekiel Jackson in a fitness website called Fitness Spartan. Former WWE superstar Tyler Reks is also involved in the project. For more information, check out their official website here. Natayla Talks Total Divas and More WWE Diva Natalya opened up to The Rack radio, with hosts Sir Rockin and Lindsay Ward, about a bunch of topics including Total Divas and Tyson Kidd. Below are some of her highlights of the interview. On how Tyson Kidd adapted to the cameras: “He is actually more shy than me. We’re actually kind of the opposite; TJ is very focused on his in-ring ability and I’m more of the outgoing, chatty-cathy and I find myself having autograph sessions where I have 20-minute conversations with each person that is in line. TJ is very introverted; he’s like a cat and I’ve always compared it to being like a cat because you always have to earn it with him. I’m like one of those dogs that runs up to the door and is jumping around. But TJ is like a cat, and is like ’Beat it. You’ll get attention from me when I’m ready to give you attention’. So, he’s definitely adjusted to it, but he’s having a lot fun on the show too. On What to expect on Total Divas season two: “I hate to say it, but I think things are heating up. I didn’t plan for it to heat up so much, but Summer certainly has pushed my buttons in a lot of ways I didn’t expect. I thought I was past that and yeah, she is defiantly going to be a new source of conflict for me but I like to think that show is like ‘The Golden Girls’; we usually end up working it out. I have yet to work it out with Summer, so I’m hoping that at some point Summer and I can go to Starbucks together and have a Caramel Macchiato and talk things out because right now, we’re not there yet.” On the strangest gift she has ever gotten:

Welcome to Receiptrocity, bringing you the strangest and most entertaining receipts America's restaurants have to offer. If you've got an interesting, notable or funny receipt, scan/photograph it and send it over to [email protected]. [Photo: CBS] Quick: you see Zac Efron and Heather Graham in a club, what do you do? Well, if you're one anonymous Russian billionaire, you send over a $100,000 bottle of champagne. Sure, why not? According to CBS, Efron and Graham received a Nebuchadnezzar of Armand de Brignac from, shall we say, a fan of means at Chicago club Board Room on Tuesday. The wine is so expensive it has a nickname: the Ace of Spades. Also, whoever the guy was, he left his server a $22,000 tip. Check out the full receipt (the other bottles the guy bought weren't exactly cheap, either) below: · Rich Fan Of Heather Graham, Zac Efron Drops $135K Tab At Board Room [CBS] · All Receiptrocity Coverage on Eater [-E-]

Share. The special edition is priced at $49.99 USD. The special edition is priced at $49.99 USD. The upcoming Shadow of the Colossus PS4 remake from Bluepoint Games is getting a collector's edition. As detailed on PlayStation Blog, the Shadow of the Colossus Special Edition is priced at $49.99 USD. Along with the base game, the collector's edition comes with a steelbook collector’s case with an outer sleeve, artist postcards, a printed manual, a physical world map, and Colossi stickers. Shadow of the Colossus' special edition Also included are two custom PS4 themes, a Colossi avatar set for PS4, and the following in-game digital extras: Ancient Bow, Cloak of Fate, and the “Spotted Steed” Agro skin. Exit Theatre Mode Sony has also revealed Shadow of the Colossus will be compatible with 4K HDR displays on PlayStation 4 Pro, supporting 4K resolution with 30 fps. The game will also feature 60 fps on PS4 Pro. Shadow of the Colossus will come to PlayStation 4 on February 6, 2018. For more on Shadow of the Colossus read our preview of the PS4 remake, which we think is gorgeous but a bit janky, and our original Shadow of the Colossus review. Alex Gilyadov is a freelance writer for IGN. Be sure to check out his YouTube channel and follow him on Twitter.

Let's add up the extraordinary announcements this morning. 1) Taxpayers are injecting £37bn of capital into just three banks, RBS, HBOS and Lloyds - with RBS and HBOS taking £31.5bn of that (this is nationalisation Jim, though perhaps not precisely as we know it); 2) RBS and Lloyds TSB/HBOS have promised to the government that they'll maintain mortgage lending and small-business lending at 2007 levels - which is massively more than they are currently lending (this is hugely significant - given that a shortage of credit is to a large extent behind the economy's deceleration into recession levels); 3) Lloyds TSB is paying less to buy HBOS than it originally announced, to reflect the disclosure that HBOS's problems are rather worse than it thought just a couple of weeks ago; 4) Barclays is raising £10bn from selling new shares and securities to private-sector investors, abandoning its dividend for the second half of this year, and taking other actions; 5) So total capital raising today, including fairly modest amounts being raised from private sources by the UK businesses of HSBC and Santander, is nudging £50bn (wow); 6) The Bank of England and other central banks have announced they are lending as many dollars as are needed by banks (phew); 7) Eurozone governments are today fleshing out their plans to inject capital into their own banks and to guarantee lending between banks (double phew); 8) Stock markets and money markets are in slightly better shape this morning - which is something of a relief, because if they can't be buoyed by so much taxpayers' money being chucked at the banks, then we would be in rather more serious trouble than I feared.

Democratic 8-0 Democratic 7-1 Democratic 6-2 Democratic 5-3 Tied 4-4 Republican 5-3 Republican 6-2 Republican 7-1 Republican 8-0 Summary of results in the Oregon gubernatorial elections, 1986–2014. Elections in Oregon are all held using a Vote by Mail (VBM) system. This means that all registered voters receive their ballots via postal delivery and can vote from their homes. A state Voters’ Pamphlet is mailed to every household in Oregon about three weeks before each statewide election. It includes information about each measure and candidate in the upcoming election. Voter registration [ edit ] Resident citizens of Oregon can register to vote with or without a political party. Monthly and annual voter registration statistics are published by the Oregon Secretary of State.[1] Online [ edit ] In March 2010, Oregon became the fourth state in the country (along with Arizona, Washington, and Kansas) to allow online voter registration.[2] Automatic [ edit ] In March 2015, the Oregon legislature passed a bill to adopt an automatic voter registration procedure using information from the State DMV.[3] The state has roughly 2.2 million registered voters out of an estimated 3 million eligible voters as of 2014 and the bill will potentially register half of the 800,000 unregistered, eligible voters.[4][5][6] Eligible individuals found through the system will have 21 days to opt-out or register with a political party; otherwise they will be automatically registered to vote as "Non-affiliated" with any party. Campaign finance [ edit ] The Oregon Constitution allows for a broader right to free speech than at the federal level including the topic of political campaign donations.[7] The Oregon Supreme Court has consistently ruled that campaign contribution limits are a violation of free speech and has struck down many laws and ballot measures that enacted contribution limits.[8] As a result of these rulings, Oregon is one of the only four states that have no campaign contribution limits of any kind.[9] The most recent attempt to enact campaign contribution limits was Ballot measures 46 and 47 in 2006. Measure 47 passed, but 46 did not, and in the absence of the kind of Constitutional support it would have provided, 47 did not take effect. Women's suffrage [ edit ] In 1912, Oregon became the seventh U.S. state to permit women to vote. The amendment to the Oregon Constitution, passed by ballot initiative, was largely the result of decades of advocacy by Abigail Scott Duniway, who founded a weekly newspaper, The New Northwest, in part to promote voting rights for women. The National Women's Suffrage Association recognized Duniway as a leading women's advocate in the American West in 1886.[citation needed] Women became eligible to run for the state legislature in 1914; within a year, women had won seats in both its houses.[10] The Oregon System [ edit ] No. 1. The Glasgow (Scotland) voter has only one name—his ward councilman—to vote for, and he has the best city government in the world. No. 2. The Des Moines (Iowa) voter has only five men on his ticket, and has the best city government in the United States. No. 3. The Portland, Oregon, voter has in this year of our Lord 1912, about 100 candidates for office on his ticket; and 39 long initiative and referendum proposed state laws, and 22 proposed city laws—and altogether proposing an indebtedness on the taxpayers of forty to fifty millions of dollars. It is safe to say that all this proposed law making will not even be read by one-fourth of the voters—and no man can know what his rights or obligations may be under these circumstances. A 1912 editorial cartoon about the cumbersome nature of direct democracy:The Glasgow (Scotland) voter has only one name—his ward councilman—to vote for, and he has the best city government in the world.The Des Moines (Iowa) voter has only five men on his ticket, and has the best city government in the United States.The Portland, Oregon, voter has in this year of our Lord 1912, about 100 candidates for office on his ticket; and 39 long initiative and referendum proposed state laws, and 22 proposed city laws—and altogether proposing an indebtedness on the taxpayers of forty to fifty millions of dollars. It is safe to say that all this proposed law making will not even be read by one-fourth of the voters—and no man can know what his rights or obligations may be under these circumstances. In Oregon, the initiative and referendum process dates back to 1902, when the efforts of the Direct Legislation League prompted Oregon to amend its Constitution for the first time since 1859. The process of initiative and referendum became nationally known as the Oregon System.[11][12] There are three types of ballot measures that may appear on statewide ballots: initiatives, referendums, and referrals. Initiatives and referendums may be placed on the ballot if their supporters gather enough signatures from Oregon voters; the number of signatures is a percentage based on the number of voters casting ballots in the most recent election for the Governor of Oregon. initiative Any issue may be placed before the voters, either amending the Constitution or revising or adding to the Oregon Revised Statutes. Constitutional initiatives require the signature of 8% of recent voters to qualify for the ballot; statutory reforms require 6%. referendum The public may act to undo any bill passed by the Oregon Legislative Assembly, by putting a referendum on the ballot. A referendum requires 4% of recent voters to qualify for the ballot. referral The Legislative Assembly may refer any bill it passes to the public for approval, and must do so for any amendment to the Constitution. Additionally, the Legislative Assembly may refer revisions to the Constitution; a revision differs from an amendment in that it may alter multiple provisions of the Constitution. The constitutional foundation for ballot measures (and legislation produced by the Oregon Legislative Assembly) may be found in Article IV of the Oregon Constitution,[13] and Chapter 250 of the Oregon Revised Statutes relates to initiative and referendum as well.[14] Oregon voters have acted on 851 statewide ballot measures (359 initiatives, 64 referendums, and 428 legislative referrals) since the system was introduced in 1902.[15] Vote by Mail [ edit ] History [ edit ] The VBM system was first approved for testing by the Oregon Legislature for local elections in 1981. The system met with fairly widespread success and was made permanent for the majority of counties for local/special elections in 1987. It was used for the first statewide special election in 1993. The Oregon Legislature approved a proposal to expand VBM to primary and general elections in the spring of 1995, but Governor John Kitzhaber vetoed the bill. However, by January 1996, Oregon became the first state to conduct a general election totally by mail to fill a vacancy in a federal office when it elected Senator Ron Wyden to replace Bob Packwood with a 66 percent turnout. In June 1998 supporters of expanding VBM to primary and general elections used the initiative to put the issue on the November general election ballot as Measure 60. No paid signature gatherers were used to put the measure on the ballot – a first since 1994, and on November 3, 1998 Oregon voters decide to expand VBM to primary and general elections by a vote of 757,204 to 334,021. In the 2000 election cycle, Oregon for the first time used VBM in a Presidential Primary election and then a Presidential General election, with a 79 percent turnout. Voters' Pamphlet [ edit ] A state Voters' Pamphlet is mailed to every household in Oregon about 3 weeks before each statewide election. It includes information about each measure and candidate in the upcoming election. If a voter does not receive a Voters' Pamphlet, they can order or pick one up from any County Elections Office, or the Secretary of State's Office. Some counties may print a voters’ pamphlet with local measures and candidates as well and these may be included with the state pamphlet or mailed separately. For each statewide election, the Voters' Pamphlet is also available in an accessible online format at the Oregon Secretary of State's Election Division Website.[16] An audio Voters' Guide is also available for each statewide election. Copies of historical voters' pamphlets from Marion County (containing most statewide races and ballot measures) are online at the Oregon State Library.[17] Balloting [ edit ] Ballots packs are mailed to every registered voter 14 to 18 days before the election. When the ballot pack comes in the mail, it includes: An official ballot A secrecy envelope A ballot return envelope After filling out the ballot the voter then places the ballot in the secrecy envelope, then inside the return envelope and must then sign it in a space provided on the outside return envelope. This is then either mailed back through the US mail with first class postage, or dropped off at any County Elections Office or a designated dropsite. Ballots must be received in a County Elections Office or a designated dropsite by 8pm on Election Day (postmarks do not count). If the ballot arrives at the County Elections Office after 8pm on Election Day, it is not counted. Once received, an Elections Official at the elections office where the ballot is received will compare the signature on the ballot return envelope to the signature on the voter registration card to verify that the voter is registered to vote. Once verified, the secrecy envelope containing the actual ballot is removed and polled with the other ballots. Once the "polls" close at 8pm on Election Day, the ballots are removed from their secrecy envelopes and counted. Recent elections [ edit ] 1996 elections [ edit ] 1998 elections [ edit ] 2000 elections [ edit ] 2002 elections [ edit ] 2004 elections [ edit ] 2006 elections [ edit ] 2008 elections [ edit ] Presidential race [ edit ] The 2008 presidential, senatorial and congressional elections in Oregon were held on November 4, 2008, to determine the President, Oregon's Junior United States Senator, and who would represent the state of Oregon in the United States House of Representatives. Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama won 56.7% of Oregon's vote in 2008, soundly defeating Republican candidate John McCain. Most rural counties favored McCain, though Obama improved the Democratic tickets performance than John Kerry did in 2004, and Obama's strong support in the more urban Willamette Valley allowed him to win the state decisively. U.S. Senate race [ edit ] The Oregon Senate Election of 2008 was held on November 4, 2008. Republican Senator Gordon Smith was seeking re-election. Smith was the only Republican Senator from the west coast (excluding Alaska) and the only Republican currently holding statewide office in Oregon. He was opposed by Democrat Jeff Merkley, the Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives and David Brownlow of the Constitution Party of Oregon. Merkley won by a narrow margin, with Smith conceding two days after the election.[18] U.S. House races [ edit ] The 2008 congressional elections in Oregon were held on November 4, 2008, to determine who will represent the state of Oregon in the United States House of Representatives, coinciding with the presidential and senatorial elections. Oregon's five seats in the House, apportioned according to the 2000 United States Census. Both prior to and following the election consists of four Democrats and one Republican. This remains unchanged although CQ Politics had forecasted district 5 to be at some risk for the incumbent party. The only competitive race was the Oregon's 5th congressional district which had been represented by Democrat Darlene Hooley since 1996. In February 2008, she announced that she would not seek re-election in 2008.[19] The race to replace her was expected to be one of the most competitive in the nation, since the district contained about 2,000 more Republicans than Democrats at that time.[20][21] Despite the initial closeness of the race, Democratic nominee Kurt Schrader won against Republican nominee Mike Erickson, 166,070 (54.5%) to 116,418 (38.2%) who had been winner of a contentious primary in which an opponent, Kevin Mannix, raised an allegation that Erickson paid for a former girlfriend's abortion. The girlfriend subsequently went public with the information, but Erickson denied knowledge of the event.[22] Mannix refused to endorse Erickson in the general election.[23] 2010 elections [ edit ] 2012 elections [ edit ] 2014 elections [ edit ] 2016 elections [ edit ] See also [ edit ]

Catalonia’s branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel suggested that European governments are “responsible” for a terrorist attack in the Barcelona area. BDS Catalonia made the accusation on Friday, a day after the Islamic State terrorist group said its militants killed in the Spanish region 14 people and wounded another 100 in two incidents in and near its capital, Barcelona. Following a paragraph that states that BDS Catalonia “wishes to condemn the attacks committed” and to “express solidarity with the victims and their relatives,” the statement asserts that “we also condemn the responsibility of European governments in what they are doing with their foreign and domestic policies, and their complicity in human rights violations worldwide.” Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up In the only reference to terrorism in the statement, the authors wrote: “We also do not forgot the victims of military occupations, of wars and terrorism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestina, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Mali, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and many other places where what happened yesterday in Barcelona is a daily occurrence.” Finally, the authors added, “we emphasize our opposition to Islamophobia, Xenophobia and all forms of discrimination.” Solidarity, the authors added, “is our most powerful weapon. #Barcelona.” ACOM, a Madrid-based pro-Israel network whose legal actions over the past years resulted in dozens of court rulings declaring the BDS movement discriminatory, sent the BDS Catalonia statement in an email to journalists, calling it “grotesque.” “A movement based on hatred, the perpetuation of conflict and defense of terrorism like BDS cannot avoid proving at all times its immorality and double standard,” ACOM wrote in the email. “This is what happened in the latest lamentable statement by BDS Catalonia.

During the 16th and 17th centuries there was a strong belief throughout Europe, when it came to magic, but most countries bore very similar ideas. Popular and elite magic were very important to the everyday lives of people during this time, as well as crucial to their beliefs. These beliefs generally did not conflict with their religious views, but often became integrated with them, although the Church did not always accept them. There was a wide spread belief that “witches” or “cunning folk” had special powers. Magic at this time was not looked on with the scepticism it might be today, and it was generally believed to be fact, so much so that there were plenty if books written on the subject by theologians and demonologists. It was commonly believed that these cunning folk had the ability to use magic, and they provided it as a service. These services usually consisted of curing people from black or malefic magic as well as sickness, providing love spells, thief detection or treasure finding, although treasure hunts would have been uncommon since they were rarely successful. If people were in need of healing from natural disease, they might go to a cunning person rather than a doctor, to be treated with folk medicine or herbs. While these services could vary from country to country the core idea stayed very much the same. Cunning folk were important to early modern Europeans as they were a main part of communities, and there was usually one near most villages, towns and cities. Although this was believed to be white magic, according to law it was no different to black magic. But this type of magic was mainly availed of only by the lower class, and the elite mostly did not want anything to do with it, or if they did they would keep it quiet. Astrology and alchemy was considered the magic for the elite. Astrology, the study of the movements of stars and planets and their effect on the world was the more popular one, and one of the main uses of it was predicting the future. The other elite magic was alchemy, which was popular, but often studied discreetly, as it was often frowned upon. The aim of alchemy was to achieve enlightenment and immortality.

Welcome to the Infinity RPG Kickstarter, help us fund an RPG based on the massive Infinity skirmish miniatures game! The Infinity universe was launched by Corvus Belli as a hugely-popular tabletop skirmish game in which sci-fi themed miniatures simulated futuristic battles across the alien battlefronts of Paradiso and the internecine conflicts of the Human Sphere. Before there was a skirmish game, though, there was an RPG: Infinity started life as a homemade RPG setting for the early roleplaying adventures of Corvus Belli founders Alberto, Carlos, Fernando, and Gutier. We've been playtesting the Infinity RPG with hundreds of people for the last 9 months, working hard to recapture the excitement of those first sessions and ensure that the feel of the Infinity universe will be captured in your own campaign! This Kickstarter has funded the production of a beautiful full colour, hardback 368 page core rulebook for the roleplaying game. It will be sent out in PDF in December and the printed books in February 2016. We are also going to fund Faction supplements, campaign, amazing geomorphic tiles, custom dice, accessories, upgrades to increase the content in certain books and much more. Download a Free Quickstart of the Infinity RPG from DriveThruRPG MODIPHIUS always gives great value: Over £100 worth of PDF's for just £40 (Approx €54 / $60) PDF MASTER Pledge Over £70 worth of printed books and a miniature for £40 (Approx €54 / $60) Print & PDF Bundle Pledge Over £170 worth of printed books, miniature & PDF's for £60 (Approx €81 / $91) Print & PDF Master Pledge Each of these pledges is increasing in value with each day so join in! CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE PLEDGES USING PAYPAL IN OUR STORE! We have listed the most popular Pledges in our webstore. Simply select and pay with Paypal. We will invite you to the Pledge Manager later in October where you can add more items or upgrade. As each goal is unlocked we'll reveal more so keep checking back! We also unlocked a Spanish translation of the Player's Guide PDF at £100k! See Add On's below for more info on each book or click here. We also want to get the word out about this amazing universe and the incredible adventures you can have there! And if you help us do that, here are some fun goals we can achieve together: RETWEET LINK: http://bit.ly/INFINITYKS We'll reveal more Level Up Goals soon! As well as the Level Up's above, we have unlocked lots of extra bonuses through the campaign: Free Printed Player's Guide with each printed Core Book or Collector's Edition Free Spanish Player's Guide with every Player's Guide in PDF Free 40 Page Printed Adventure with each printed Core Book or Collector's Edition Free RPG Miniature of your choice with each printed Core Book or Collector's Edition 32 Pages of Bonus Content for Player's Guide 16 Pages of Bonus Content for Collector's Edition Added NPC and Plot Deck to Bureau Noir Operatives Pledge & Add On Added PDF's of all unlocked Geo-morphic Tiles & Card decks to GM Screen Added Double-sided Poster Map and 32 page adventure booklet to GM Screen Shadow Affairs Campaign boosted by 80 pages of content to 192 pages Added all unlocked printed card decks, geo-morphic tiles, GM Screen and GM dice set to Dire Foes Pledges Online Character Generator - We're commissioning an online character generator App which will walk you through the Lifepath to easily create multiple characters and export them in a PDF. Check out the example Mutant Chronicles App in testing http://mc3.modiphiusapps.hostinguk.org Our third Stretch Goal unlocks a set of exclusive RPG Miniatures by Corvus Belli. You will be able to select Add On's of each minis if you have the £20 PDF Core book Pledge or higher. Corvus Belli plan to release different versions of these in the future. Just choose how many packs you want and you will be asked in a post Kickstarter Survey which figures you chose. You will find RPG stats for these particular characters as Pre-Gens in the Player's Guide and the one of the introductory campaigns In the twisted jungles of Paradiso, humanity fights for its survival. The fierce, alien warriors of the Combined Army have poured through the Acheron Gate, descending upon the emerald jungles of the newest colonial world in a seemingly unstoppable torrent. The bestial Morat pound the Paradiso Front, where brave men and women fight ceaselessly to maintain a desperate defensive line which the sly Shasvastii penetrate with devastating ease. In the star-swept skies above, the collected might of humanity’s armadas maintain a life-or-death blockade to cut off an endless horde of alien reinforcements. And if any of humanity’s fractious forces should falter, then all may be lost… But beyond that terrifying holding action, the intrigues and adventures of the Human Sphere spin on. Space pirates cruise through the shattered planetoids of Human Edge. Scientist adventurers delve the oceans of Varuna. Merchant guilds scheme amidst the scourging sands of Bourak. From Yutang, the Emperor gazes forth from an uneasy throne. Titanic war machines stride across the icy plains of Svalarheima. Byzantine hypercorps struggle for dominance amidst the chrome towers of Neoterra. For the last ten years, players have tested their mettle upon the battlefields of the Human Sphere in Corvus Belli’s hugely-popular Infinity skirmish game. Now you can expand your adventures, diving deep into the amazing, never-before-seen depths of the Infinity universe with the ultimate science fiction roleplaying game. You can find out more about the INFINITY tabletop game here: Official Corvus Belli Site: What Is INFINITY Corvus Belli YouTube Page INFINITY YouTube Faction Videos With the INFINITY Roleplaying Game CoreBook you can play with the full dynamic 2d20 game system featuring: Cinematic action driven by the twin engines of Heat and Momentum The triple battlefields of Warfare, Infowar, and Psywar A multifaceted Zones system which brings the game world to life All New Artwork of the Infinity universe commissioned by Modiphius and Corvus Belli Find out more about the 2d20 System further down the page Explore the definitive guide to the Infinity universe with: A complete Chronology of the Human Sphere detailing centuries of bloodshed The culture, history, and intrigue of seven powerful factions Gazetteers for all twelve planets of the Human Sphere, including beautiful, full-color maps Leap into your character by: Forging your identity with an immersive Lifepath character creation system Fighting for your faction with the fractious, innovative Wilderness of Mirrors scenario design system Facing dozens of fearsome, ready-to-play adversaries who stand between you and your destiny! A 368 page book packed with everything you need to roleplay in the Human Sphere and beyond! We are also unlocking many more books and accessories - see the Stretch Goal graphic below to see how many! Check out a sample of the book here. Here are our popular Pledge Levels, we'll be adding more as they are unlocked. Check the Contents graphic below the Pledges to see a summary of what's in each pledge! The £10 Player's Guide Pledge and above now includes a SPANISH translation of the Player's Guide in PDF. We will be adding more Pledge Levels as they are unlocked! NOTE: This graphic does not include all bonuses unlocked. Additional Notes: Bureau Noir Operatives Case now includes the NPC & Plot Decks Dire Foes Pledges now includes GM Dice Set, All Unlocked Card Decks & Tile Sets plus GM Screen and O-12 Box to put contents in. We have added a Spanish Edition of the Core Book in PDF: MANUAL BÁSICO DE INFINITY: EL JUEGO DE ROL EN PDF (Aprox. 27€ / 30$) La edición en formato pdf y en español del manual básico de Infinity: El Juego de Rol y la Guía del Jugador, además de tu nombre en los créditos de los mecenas y acceso a los extras desbloqueados. (Spanish Edition of Corebook & Player's Guide in PDF by Nosolorol). PLEASE NOTE: This is not included in Pledges with All The PDF's. You can also select it as a £20 Add On Modiphius works hard to support retailers. Simply choose the Retail Pledge of £20 for 10 copies of the Infinity RPG Core book. After the Kickstarter has closed you will confirm your retail store details in the Pledge Manager and can add other books from the line. You will only pay the balance (and get a retail discount) when we ship the goods. Please note only books are currently available with the Retail Pledge, it does not include other accessories or miniatures sets. Please contact us for more info Check Shipping below to see how these items affect your shipping cost. All Book Add On's are Print copies. PDF's are included free with the PDF Master or Print & PDF Master Pledges and above. Miniatures Add On's are limited to pledges of £18 or higher. Any pledge may choose Add Ons. Spanish Core Book: We have added a £20 Add On of the Core Book PDF in Spanish by Nosolorol. This is not included in Pledges or Add Ons with 'All The PDF's All Book Add On's are Print copies. PDF's are included free with the PDF Master or Print & PDF Master Pledges and above We'll be charging shipping after the Kickstarter closes using a Pledge Manager, but here's a table showing you how much the shipping will be. It's possible these prices may decrease as we get better deals, but you will not pay more! You will have the option of one single shipment or multiple shipments depending on what you order. We are shipping from the UK to the rest of the world, and are using local shipping centres in the USA/Canada and Australia to further reduce the costs for you however if you would prefer to pay for Airmail for your packages direct from the UK to get them sooner then we'll provide an option in the Pledge Manager There will be three main shipments of physical products. Books will be sent out in to PDF to backers as they are completed. You will be able to choose one, two even three shipments in the pledge manager. Wave 1: The Core Book, Player's Guide PLUS Shadow Affairs Campaign, and any other books to be confirmed PLUS The Tokens, Character & NPC Sheets, RPG Minis & Dice (Feb 2016 Print, PDF's sending from Dec 2015). North America & Australia March) Wave 2: The Faction Books plus other books to be confirmed. Bureau Noir Operatives Box, Card Decks & Geo-morphic Tiles (July 2016, North America & Australia/New Zealand August) Wave 3: Final books not shipped in first two waves (October 2016, North America & Australia/New Zealand November) The 2d20 system is a dynamic, narrative system, designed to produce varied and interesting results from dramatic and action-packed situations. Characters roll two d20s, attempting to roll as low as possible on each one – the more dice that roll low, the more successes the character scores. Tasks will require one or more successes to be successful, and any successes scored beyond that minimum become Momentum, which can be spent to achieve a variety of advantageous effects. However, this can come at a cost: characters who wish to succeed can push their luck, rolling extra d20s to boost their chances of success and the Momentum they generate. However, each extra d20 comes from the character’s resources – such as ammunition – or adds to a pool of Heat that represents all the things that can go wrong in a mission, which the GM can spend to complicate adventures and scenarios and make the characters’ lives interesting. You can expect lots of support for 2d20. The system is currently in use with the Mutant Chronicles RPG and the planned Conan and John Carter RPG's from Modiphius with more to be announced. We are talking to partners about producing German and French editions of the Infinity RPG at a later date. When we have more information on these we will announce them but cannot confirm any dates yet. We have confirmed with Spanish publisher Nosolorol to produce the Infinity line in Spanish. You can now get a Spanish PDF of the corebook and Player's Guide for £20 (see Pledges). Modiphius Entertainment was founded by Chris and Rita Birch, and has been running since the spring of 2013 when we launched the big award winning Achtung! Cthulhu RPG. We've since published 12 books, co-published 6 more (including the award winning Mutant: Year Zero) and created a line of miniatures and accessories. In 2014, we re-booted the epic Mutant Chronicles roleplaying game and mid September start shipping the first wave of 17 books with the beautiful 500 page core book and five supplements. This year we launched the Thunderbirds boardgame with Matt Leacock (Pandemic, Forbidden Island, Roll Through The Ages) based on the 50 year old iconic TV series and are shipping them later this month! You will discover we really care about giving you excellent service, we try to answer questions quickly and work hard to keep a friendly and fun atmosphere. You are joining the Modiphius family - a large community of people passionate about the games we love.

Toronto FC announced Thursday that the club has signed defender Johan Brunell. He will be added to the roster upon receipt of his ITC (International Transfer Certificate) and work permit. Brunell, 25, joins Toronto FC after most recently playing for Finnish club, FF Jaro. Brunell joined FF Jaro in 2010 and played his first five seasons (2011-15) in the Veikkausliiga (First Division) making a combined 70 appearances, scoring 5 goals. The club played in the Ykkönen (Second Division) in 2016 and Brunell made 20 appearances. In six seasons, Brunell made a combined 101 appearances with 5 goals for FF Jaro. Brunell joined Toronto FC as a trialist ahead of the 2017 pre-season camp in Los Angles, California. TRANSACTION: Toronto FC signs defender Johan Brunell JOHAN BRUNELL Position: Defender Height: 6’2 Weight: 178 lbs Birthdate: May 29, 1991 (Age – 25) Birth Place: Jakobstad, Finland Nationality: Finnish Last Club: FF Jaro Pronunciation: “Yo-han Bruh-nell”

LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 16: Bill Murray attends the premiere of ‘Hyde Park On Hudson’ during the 56th BFI London Film Festival at The Empire Leicester Square on October 16, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Dave J Hogan/Getty Images) Photo: Dave J Hogan/Getty Bill Murray has signed on to star in the Barry Levinson comedy Rock the Kasbah, written by Mitch Glazer. According to THR, Murray will star as a washed-up music manager who takes his last client on a USO tour to Afghanistan. “When he finds himself abandoned, penniless and without his passport, he discovers a young girl with an extraordinary voice, who stows away with him back to Kabul to compete on the popular television show The Afghan Star, Afghanistan’s equivalent of American Idol,” the movie’s production company said in a statement. Do you, Bill Murray.

Setting a Full Testing Framework for Django (and more!) Date Mon 20 July 2015 By Emmanuel Fleury Category tools Mon 20 July 2015Emmanuel Fleury Initial Thoughts Having a production website and making some development on it is sometimes quite dodgy. You really need to know what you are doing before pushing your new developments to the production site. That is why you really need to have a quite wide spectrum of tests and barriers to prevent you to push unwanted code or security issues, or broken features in front of your users. In fact, the Python language and the Django framework have already quite good tools to help you to do this. My point here will be to list the ones I tried and that I found useful for a few of my projects. Django Unit Testing The principle of Unit Testing is to check each unit (feature) of the software in an independent way from the others. Related to websites, it means that we have to identify each service it provides and to check each service independently from the others. Usually, we measure the quality of a test suite (the set of all the tests we have written) by measuring how much code we executed at least once when running the whole set. More you cover code, more your confidence in the code get higher. Of course, this way of doing is not always bullet-proofed, because the bugs may come from the interaction of services. But, at least, it gives you a basic criteria of quality that you can apply to your code. The Django framework has already integrated a full unit testing framework borrowed from the Python language itself. If you already developed a few unit testing in Python, things will not change a lot. First of all, a little bit of vocabulary: Test case : The smallest piece of a test suite, it is a single test (or several very similar tests) on a precise feature of your software. Test suite : A set of test cases that tries to cover as much code as possible of the tested software. Test fixture : Enclose all the operations that are performed before (to get the environment ready for the test) and after (to clean the environment after the test in order to get ready for the next one) the test get executed. The Python Unit Testing framework call the method setUp() before each test case and the method tearDown() after each test case. Test runner: The program that will find all the test cases present in the Django project, that will run it in a given order and that will collect the results and display it. Writing a test suite is quite easy, take the root of your Django project (where settings.py lies) and write a test.py file as follow: from django.test import Client , TestCase class TestLoggedUser ( TestCase ): def setUp ( self ): self . client = Client () self . user = User . objects . create_user ( 'test_user' , '[email protected]' , 'secret' ) self . user . save () self . client . login ( username = 'test_user' , password = 'secret' ) def tearDown ( self ): self . user . delete () def test_logged_user_get_homepage ( self ): response = self . client . get ( reverse ( '/' ), follow = True ) self . assertEqual ( response . status_code , 200 ) def test_logged_user_get_settings ( self ): response = self . client . get ( reverse ( '/settings/' ), follow = True ) self . assertEqual ( response . status_code , 200 ) In the previous example, we check if a logged user can get the homepage of the website and its own settings. The fixtures take care of creating, logging and, then, deleting the user before and after each test. Executing the tests is done through the manage.py command (you may add the option --verbosity=3 to get more output): $> ./manage.py test Creating test database for alias 'default'... ............................................. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 45 tests in 13.102s OK Destroying test database for alias 'default'... Integrated HTML validator with django-html-validator The django-html-validator is a Django application developed to check automatically if the served HTML pages are valid for the W3C checkers. As usual, installation is quite simple through pip : $> pip install django-html-validator Then, add the following to your settings.py file: HTMLVALIDATOR_ENABLED = True Note that, by default, the validation is done on-line through a request to the W3C server. If you want to work off-line (or do not want to overload the network), you can use the Nu HTML Checker project to validate locally the webpages. Get the vnu.jar file from the last build and install this file somewhere in your project. Then, in settings.py , set the variable HTMLVALIDATOR_VNU_JAR to point to this vnu.jar file. HTMLVALIDATOR_VNU_JAR = './contrib/vnu.jar' Then, when you define a new test case, the only thing you need is to import a ValidatingClient which behaves exactly like a usual Client but that also check the HTML against W3C verifier. It is written as follow: from django.test import TestCase from htmlvalidator.client import ValidatingClient class CheckExample ( TestCase ): def setUp ( self ): self . client = ValidatingClient () def tearDown ( self ): pass def test_example ( self ): response = self . client . get ( '/example/' ) self . assertEqual ( response . status_code , 200 ) Then, when running the tests with ./manage.py test : $> ./manage.py test Creating test database for alias 'default'... .......VALIDATION TROUBLE To debug, see: /tmp/htmlvalidator/test_example-619.html /tmp/htmlvalidator/test_example-619.txt And, looking at test_example-619.txt shows: Arguments to GET: Error: Start tag "body" seen but an element of the same type was already open. From line 95, column 8; to line 95, column 13 There were errors. (Tried in the text/html mode.) After fixing the bug, the tests are running without any problem: $> ./manage.py test Creating test database for alias 'default'... ............................................. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 45 tests in 13.102s OK Destroying test database for alias 'default'... Code coverage with coverage.py coverage.py is a framework allowing to perform code coverage while your tests cases are walked through. Installation is quite easy: $> pip install coverage Usage is also a child play, just run your test base with the following command: $> coverage run --source='.' manage.py test $> coverage report -m Name Stmts Miss Cover Missing ------------------------------------------------------- my_program 20 4 80% 33-35, 39 my_other_module 56 6 89% 17-23 ------------------------------------------------------- TOTAL 76 10 87% And, generating a full HTML report to visualize which lines are covered and which are still to be covered is as follow (the tests must have been ran before): $> coverage html $> firefox htmlcov/index.html A full example of such HTML report can be seen on this page. So, here we only follow the covering of the code, but we can also follow the covering of the templates, together with the integrated HTML validator it might be useful to know if we covered most of the generated HTML or not. In fact, the coverage.py module has a django_coverage_plugin module that does exactly this. Install the module: $> pip install django_coverage_plugin Add the following lines to your ~/.coveragerc (create one if you do not have one): [run] # The 'timid' line might be unnecessary # timid = True plugins = django_coverage_plugin Then, run the coverage checking with the following command line: $> coverage run --rcfile='/home/user/.coveragerc' --source='.' manage.py test $> DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=myproject.settings coverage report -m --rcfile='/home/user/.coveragerc' Name Stmts Miss Cover Missing ------------------------------------------------------------------------- myproject/__init__.py 1 0 100% myproject/admin.py 30 0 100% myproject/models.py 78 3 96% 35, 60, 145 myproject/settings.py 49 0 100% myproject/templates/_account_bar.html 30 2 93% 14-15 myproject/templates/_footer.html 1 0 100% myproject/templates/about.html 51 0 100% myproject/templates/homepage.html 146 0 100% myproject/templates/site_base.html 16 0 100% myproject/templates/subnav_base.html 8 2 75% 11-15 myproject/urls.py 14 0 100% myproject/views.py 306 26 92% 129, 203-228 myproject/wsgi.py 15 15 0% 16-39 manage.py 7 0 100% ------------------------------------------------------------------------- TOTAL 752 48 94% Finally… We got something quite complete, we are able to run unit test cases on the whole project. test for W3C compliance of the generated HTML files and have a coverage report of all these tests over Python files and templates. I did not check for other web framework than Django, but I believe this one as already quite advanced. What could be improved is that most of theses features come from external development and are not fully integrated in the Django framework. It would be exremely nice to have it from scratch in the Django base libraries.

EU intends to send 800 soldiers, while deepening its trade relationship with other African states. The EU will send 800 soldiers to the Central African Republic (car) to keep the peace between Muslims and Christians, officials announced April 2 ahead of a major EU-Africa summit. The first soldiers of the mission, called eufor–car, will arrive by the end of April with the rest arriving by May. Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom will take part, along with Georgia, which is not in the EU. Estonia, France, Georgia, Poland and Spain will send the bulk of the soldiers, with Germany promising air transport and Britain engineering and logistical help. The EU will also contribute €26 million (us$35.7 million). Given historical developments, this is a new path for Germany—to show responsibility in Africa beside classic development policy. Angela Merkel, German chancellor France already has 1,600 soldiers in the country . It will be sending another 400 as part of the EU mission. On the same day German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande gave a joint press conference where both pledged support for the mission and for each other. Ms. Merkel said that the two countries were “seeking to be a motor” for the Continent. German foreign policy in Africa is beginning “a new path” she said, saying that Germany aimed “to show greater responsibility within Africa as well as classical development policies.” The focus of the summit was a shift from aid to trade. “Our neighboring continent Africa is gaining greater significance,” said Merkel, calling for “more trade, more investment and more empowerment—so that African problems can also be solved by Africans themselves.” Yet behind the EU officials’ pleasant sounding words is a more selfish reality. Europe has been giving aid to Africa; now they want to be able to sell to Africa instead. The EU currently allows African countries free access to European markets without demanding anything in return. But in October, that will change—African nations will lose that free access unless they sign a deal with the EU giving Europe a certain amount of free access to the African markets. African nations will lose free access to European markets in October unless they sign a deal with the EU giving Europe a certain amount of free access to the African markets. “The Europeans obviously want to sell their plant and machinery and spare parts to Africa. And there would be no tariffs, so they would be [in] a better position than the Americans or the Chinese who would face such levies,” said Francisco Mari, an expert at the development agency Brot Fur die Welt (Bread for the World). They’ve gotten Africa used to having free access to the EU and are now threatening to take that away unless the EU is granted greater access to Africa. In both trade and military spheres, Europe is getting more interested in its neighboring continent. A big reason for that is money—Africa is rich in resources. And as the continent gets richer, there’s a greater potential for the EU to sell things to them as well. Europe claims Africa as a “zone of EU-privileged interests.” It presents a key test for Europe as the EU emerges as a world power. America is no longer willing to confront Islamic extremism or contain unrest that could affect Europe. For the first time in decades, the EU will have to take the lead itself. As it extends its reach and trade clout, Africa is its closest and weakest neighbor—making it the easiest outlet for a revival of European imperialism. However, even as Europe expands into Africa, radical Islam is also spreading its presence. “Northern Africa is turning into a battleground with enormously important prophetic implications,” wrote Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry last year. Europe’s “new path” in Africa is both a response to radical Islam’s push in places like Mali and the Central African Republic, and a catalyst for further confrontation. For more information on the future of Europe in Africa, read Mr. Flurry’s article “Watch Algeria!”

A months-long tour isn’t the only way that St. Vincent is celebrating the release of her self-titled third record. The Chicago-born coffee company Intelligentsia has announced that it will be releasing a brand new blend of its “Flecha Roja” coffee in collaboration with Annie Clark called “Bring Me Your Mugs” (after her St. Vincent track “Bring Me Your Loves.”) Intelligentsia has previously collaborated with Wilco and Anticon for blends, but with Clark’s addition they now have an indie rock icon to rival James Murphy’s coffee prowess. Coffee site Sprudge shared a statement from Clark about her relationship to coffee which you can see below, alongside a picture of her new blend. “Bring Me Your Mugs” is on sale now in Intelligentsia stores and will soon be made available on St. Vincent’s website. “I love coffee. I sometimes get excited at night thinking of the coffee I’ll get to drink in the morning. Coffee is reason to wake up. There are other reasons, of course. But coffee is the incentive, at the very least. I love Intelligentsia coffee. I have stood at their counter waiting for my order, like a fan waiting for a show. Eager. Expectant. So when my favorite coffee shop approached me about collaborating on a signature coffee, I was thrilled.”

Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Motorola Mobile division scored a win as its Moto X smartphone impressively outperformed devices from Samsung, LG and HTC in tests of network connectivity undertaken by Signals Research Group. The Moto X got "top honors, by a country mile" in the research firm's report, which noted the handset garnered more than 35 percent higher average throughput than the other devices across all correlated and uncorrelated test scenarios. In addition, the Moto X could sustain a data call at signal levels as much as 9 dB lower than levels for the other devices tested. Those other devices include the Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy Note II, HTC One and LG G2, which were tested over the 700 MHz Band 17 used by AT&T (NYSE:T). The Moto X was tested on 700 MHz Band 13, used by Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ). Michael Thelander, Signals Research's founder and CEO, said use of different bands did not cause differences in the devices' performance, given that Band 13 and Band 17 are fairly close together on the spectrum chart. "I'm confident that if we had tested a Moto X phone that supported Band 17 in Band 17 that the results would be largely the same," told FierceWirelessTech. Signals Research shows throughput versus orientation angle by device (-90 dBm) in this chart. Smartphone D (designated by the purple line) is the Moto X. Signals Research declined to specify which smartphones were represented by the other lines.The figure shows 12 of the 860 results for each phone. The power level selected for this figure was in the mid-range of the values used. At a Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) modem event in November, Thelander said that when it comes to accepting devices for use on their networks, mobile carriers are more focused on compliance with specifications than performance. His firm's new over-the-air benchmark study reinforces the notion that regardless of how robust of a network an operator builds, the customer experience will be dramatically impacted by the quality of devices employed on it. And crummy device connectivity impacts more than just the individual user carrying the poorly performing device. "If you've got a device out there that's making inefficient use of resources, it's impacting everybody else on the network," Thelander said. All of the tested devices, which each used a Qualcomm chipset, were commercially procured and none of the handset vendors or operators had prior knowledge of the test campaign. Signals Research also collected preliminary data from Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone 5s but did not report results due to higher layer issues that were encountered, Thelander said. Regarding the five devices for which results were reported, each was tested for about 14.4 hours in an anechoic chamber using a variety of angles and some 35 power levels. There were about 860 tests for each phone with each test lasting 60 seconds. The tests were conducted with equipment and other support from Spirent Communications and ETS-Lindgren. The disparity in the devices' performance was partly a reflection of how well the devices leveraged MIMO capabilities. "Even when conditions warrant the use of MIMO, its effectiveness is highly dependent on the mobile device," Thelander said. Signals Research separately tested two of the smartphones using only Transmission Mode 2 (TM2)--that is, base station transmit diversity mode--rather than the TM3 open-loop MIMO mode. Results proved the incremental performance benefits of MIMO under ideal conditions. But they also showed that MIMO can result in a slightly negative performance when faced with poorer channel conditions or lower signal strength, implying that the network and device "probably should have reverted to transmit diversity instead," Thelander said. "Sometimes MIMO gets used more than it should," he added. "I'm a huge fan of MIMO and I know that it works, but it isn't a panacea," Thelander said. Signals Research also tested the impact of a plastic protective cover on a higher-end smartphone. Initial results indicate that there could be a modest degradation, perhaps 10-15 percent, in performance at higher signal levels when MIMO is being used. For more: - see this Signals Research webpage Related articles: Qualcomm pitches Gobi modem as device differentiator Interference and the beer analogy

PHP7: More strict! (but only if you want it to be) Er Galvao Abbott Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 18, 2015 It wasn’t easy (we knew it wouldn’t be) and certainly wasn’t pretty (we sort of knew that as well), but it’s finally official: PHP7 will come with Scalar Type Hints (STH) and an optional “strict mode”. Background, or “Let’s talk about typing, shall we?” PHP, as you may well know, is a dynamically[1] typed language, and it has been that way since it’s conception. As with many PHP characteristics, this fact has been used to criticize it over and over again. What most people don’t get, though, is that there are plenty of other language examples out there which explicitly decided to use dynamic typing[2], including (but not limited to): Perl, Ruby, Javascript, Objective-C and so on. Oddly enough, you don’t see people trashing those around, do you? I’ve never had any issues with dynamic typing. In fact, I’ve explained many times to my students that, although one could surely argue that programming with such a language could be considerably more difficult — since you may “chaotically” change types… well, pretty much anywhere — it would be very wrong, IMNSHO[3], to state that dynamic typing leads to bad code. As often happens with PHP detractors[4] criticism is either taken out of context, incomplete or outdated. This is not different when it comes to types. For an example, PHP has, and had for a very long time, a number of ways of dealing with types, so even if you’re still able to change them, you can ensure a specific type is being used at a specific point (is_type() functions, [set|get]type(), and so on). Even type hinting has been used for quite a while although, one might say, in an “incomplete” way: you can make functions/methods accept only arrays or instances of specific objects as parameters. Game Changers, or “So, what’s new?” There are basically three RFCs that were accepted for PHP’s next major, PHP7: Scalar Type Hints v5[5] — (forked) RFC by Anthony Ferrara on Andrea Faulds’ original PHP7 will come with Scalar Type Hints, namely int, float, string and bool. These will allow us to better hint on function/method parameters and return values (see the next one). Also, this won’t only apply to user-defined functions but to native functions as well. Additionally, we’ll be able to declare a per-file strict mode, which will make PHP raise an exception (see the third RFC below) when an incoherent type is passed to functions/methods. Return Type Declarations[6] —RFC by Levi Morrison This will allow us to hint on return types for functions/methods, giving us better control of what is returned and an easier way to detect incoherent behavior. Exceptions in the engine[7] — RFC by Nikita Popov As of now using incorrect types — for the aforementioned array and object hints— will result in a (catchable) fatal error. As a result of this RFC being accepted, as of PHP7 this behaviour will result in an (Engine) Exception, making it easy to detect type hinting related problems and allowing us to react properly or even do a more graceful exit on these cases. The Common Misconception or “WOW! PHP WILL BE STRICTLY TYPED!!!” NO, IT WON’T! This is basically a step towards a more strict way of coding in PHP. Will we see more steps in that direction in the future? We don’t know and we’re OK with that for now. What’s brilliant about the body of work represented by these RFCs is that by implementing their concepts and specially making the “strict mode” optional the choice of being more strict remains with the programmer. This way it provides some measurement of strictness while respecting the fact that PHP is, and — AFAWK — will always be a dynamically typed language. Don’t wanna use it? You think this sucks? Well, carry on, don’t use it. It’s simple like that. Wrapping up, or… Wrapping up! PHP7 will be a fantastic new major for PHP. Along with other already decided features (see Phil Sturgeon’s post[8] for more information), the introduction of STH and the optional strict mode represent exciting new possibilities for the language. All of this combined will take PHP to a whole new level, keeping the language relevant and exciting, and showing everyone else that we’re not afraid of growing. Long live PHP! Footnotes and References [1] I personally prefer “strictly” and “dynamically” rather than “strongly” and “weakly” because the latter implies that there’s something inherently wrong with dynamic typed languages. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dynamically_typed_programming_languages [3] In My Not So Humble Opinion [4] Yes, they’re so common they are a “thing” now =P [5] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/scalar_type_hints_v5 [6] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/return_types [7] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/engine_exceptions_for_php7 [8] https://philsturgeon.uk/php/2015/03/15/php-7-feature-freeze/

Photos by Lindsey Newhall Abdul leaned forward a bit toward the boy sitting across the table. "Glad to see you again," he said in his native southern Thailand dialect. "How are they treating you at the other gym?" "Good," the boy said between spoonfuls of short noodles. "I like it there. Fighting a lot now." Abdul nodded, rubbed his eyes, cloudy with the beginning of cataracts, and clutched the side of his stomach gently. The boy, Kob, had been one of his students in the village until two years ago, when Kob moved across the island to Singpatong-Sitnumnoi, a large fighter's gym. He still comes back to visit his first gym, though. Less than an hour from his current gym in Patong Beach, Kob stops by Sor Abdul Gym every time he returns to Somphan Village, his hometown in northern Phuket. Kob ate his noodles quietly next to a few other young fighters from Singpatong, all deferential to the serene Muay Thai gym owner seated across from them. They'd heard about his recent medical problems and cautiously asked how he was doing. He lifted his shirt to show the bandages on his abdomen, assured them he was okay and that he'd recover. No one was training at Sor Abdul Gym anymore, mostly due to Abdul's current medical condition. It was glaringly obvious the gym was not in use: half the bags were in heaps on the ground, their contents strewn about as if thieves had shred them to scavenge valuables. Rice bags and housewares were stacked in the ring. Still, despite the messiness, I didn't expect to find a gym like this in Phuket, of all places. It was too modest, just a single old ring and a few punching bags. I've seen gyms like this before, mostly in rural parts of the mainland, but never in such a tourist-heavy, vacation-destination island like Phuket. Then again, the gym fits in with its surroundings. Somphan Village is virtually untouched by the tourism industry that changed the face of the rest of the island. This is the old Phuket, what the island used to look like before the development of luxury resorts, bar streets, and backpacker hostels. Dilapidated as it currently is, Sor Abdul Gym has been a fixture of Somphan Village for the last 30 years. Abdul, now in his sixties, retired from fighting in his early adulthood to a life of running small business around his Somphan home, including his current businesses: a rubber tree farm and the little mom-and-pop shop that served us our noodle breakfast. Abdul originally started the gym back when his two sons, now grown, were small children. "I wanted my sons to know Muay Thai, so I built a place where they could train." It was a tiny gym then, even smaller than it is now. Word spread around the village that a former fighter was passing on his skills to a new generation. Boys began showing up, asking Abdul if they could train too. He never turned them away. Instead, he let them train for free. "The gym has always been for the children and their trainers to use to make themselves better." Gyms like these are common in rural Thailand, and often function as something of a club or community center. In its 30 years, Sor Abdul has seen about 150 local boys come through. Abdul doesn't hire trainers; he simply provides the space and equipment. No money is exchanged—he doesn't pay trainers and students don't pay him. The trainers, often family members of the boys, work with their students in hopes of developing successful fighters, thereby giving the children a viable career path and making money off fights. Abdul's policy also includes not taking a cut of the fight purse; unlike most gyms, which take about half, Abdul lets the boxers and their families keep the entire purse from each fight. "I don't make money from Muay Thai," he clarified when I asked directly, and said he built the gym because he saw a need in the community. Kob, now fighting out of Singpatong, is one of the many boys whose fight career began at Sor Abdul. Inspired to fight after watching a local friend win a match, Kob started training around age 12. Abdul taught him all the basics, just as he's done for every beginning student at his gym, before sending him off to another gym—in this case Singpatong—once he reached a higher skill level. Now 16 and with around 60 fights to his name, Kob is competing frequently under Singpatong's management in both Phuket and Bangkok. When I asked Kob what became of the friend his age who inspired him to start training, Kob said his friend quit Muay Thai long before he was ever good enough to make it to Bangkok. There was a hint of pride in his smile, especially when he added that he himself has recently been winning significant fights in the capital. According to Kob, there are major differences in training at Sor Abdul versus Singpatong. "Here it's all local people," Kob said, "but in Singpatong, it's professional Thai fighters from all different provinces, and lots of foreigners. And we train a lot harder there." Singpatong, with its intense training and large foreign population, is a far cry from this quiet, isolated locals-only gym. No sign of Sor Abdul expanding his gym or pursuing the foreign market, though. Unlike every other gym I've visited in Phuket, no out-of-towners train here, nor is there any infrastructure to handle future foreign customers. "I wouldn't know how to deal with foreigners," Abdul said. "I don't understand their language or customs." Abdul's main priority is to use Muay Thai to benefit the community. "In Muay Thai, you take care of each other," he said, adding that he hopes to recover from his surgery soon so he can get his gym back in order. "Muay Thai is not a business in this village. It's for the people." On our drive out of the village back to Singpatong, I wanted to ask Kob if he'd come back to this tiny gym in his hometown to train again once Abdul reopens the gym, but I knew decisions like that are rarely left up to the young fighters in question. I asked him anyway. He said he didn't know what he'd do, but would probably stay at Singpatong. Assuming he wants to continue fighting, staying at Singpatong would be the better choice. Sor Abdul is a starter's gym, where local talent is born before being turned over to more established, structured gyms for development. When I asked Kob, only 16 years old, what his dream for the future is, he gave me the standard answer of becoming a champion fighter, winning titles and all the glory that comes with it. "But after I finish fighting, I think I want to be a trainer like Abdul or Num [the head trainer at Singpatong]," he said. "I think it's a good dream." Special thanks to P' Inyas for help with language interpretation. Check out these related stories: An American Sociologist Is Studying the Behavior of Muay Thai Life of a Pad-Man: A Muay Thai Trainer's Remorse In Old Issan: The Genesis of a Muay Thai Gym Owner

Boris Johnson has held talks with senior members of Donald Trump’s team as the Government seeks to strengthen its links to the US president-elect before he takes office. The Foreign Secretary met Mr Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and the president-elect’s chief strategist Steve Bannon after flying to New York on a hastily-arranged trip. Mr Johnson will also meet key Republicans in Washington. Boris Johnson The meeting came after Theresa May condemned Mr Trump’s comments about groping women as “unacceptable” but indicated the special relationship between the UK and US would flourish when he was in the White House. Mrs May, who is expected to meet Mr Trump in the spring, said she has had two “very good, positive” conversations with Mr Trump. But challenged about the 2005 tape recording of Mr Trump bragging to TV host Billy Bush about women and how he could “grab them by the pussy” because of his celebrity status, Mrs May was blunt in her response. I look very much forward to meeting Prime Minister Theresa May in Washington in the Spring. Britain, a longtime U.S. ally, is very special! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 8, 2017 Asked “as a woman” how she felt about the comments, Mrs May told Sky News: “I think that’s unacceptable, but in fact Donald Trump himself has said that and has apologised for it. “But the relationship that the UK has with the United States is about something much bigger than just the relationship between the two individuals as president and prime minister. “That’s important, but actually we have a long-standing special relationship with the United States. “It’s based on shared values and it is a relationship where, actually in the UK, we feel we can say to the US if we disagree with something that they are doing.” The status of the transatlantic relationship has been the subject of intense scrutiny since Mr Trump won the US presidential election in November. Many people would like to see @Nigel_Farage represent Great Britain as their Ambassador to the United States. He would do a great job! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2016 That interest has been partly fuelled by the president-elect’s apparent close relationship with the former Ukip leader Nigel Farage and the fact both Mrs May and Mr Johnson have been critical of the tycoon’s comments in the past. One controversy followed the president-elect’s comments about parts of London being no-go areas for the police. Mr Johnson said then: “The only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump.” Mr Johnson’s visit followed talks between the Trump camp and Mrs May’s closest advisers Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. Donald Trump owns golf courses in Scotland (Andrew Milligan/PA) Mr Trump has tweeted that he was looking forward to meeting the Prime Minister in Washington in the spring, describing long-time US ally Britain as “very special”. A date for the meeting is yet to be revealed, but it is expected to come within weeks of Mr Trump’s inauguration on January 20. Mrs May said: “I have had two very good, positive conversations with Donald Trump already – I think we are going to look to build on that relationship for the benefit of both the US and the UK.

Al Sharpton said he was just kidding when he said he was leaving the country if Donald Trump became president. Just days after the Republican nominee was declared the winner, the civil rights activist said comments he made previously like that “he was reserving his ticket to get out of here if he wins” was “all in jest.” “All of us said that,” Sharpton told a TMZ cameraman. “That was said in jest. We’re not going anywhere. Clearly, it was said in jest. If that’s the comfort they got, they might as well get ready for an uncomfortable ride.” (RELATED: Amy Schumer Not Leaving The Country After Threatening To Do So) “Mr. Trump better saddle up.” WATCH: “I mean it’s not the results we wanted,” he said. “Very sad. But we survived almost as bad on some cases worse. We’re dealing with a guy who used divisiveness and bigotry and won. Now, how do we protect what we’ve done in the last 8 years that he’s going to come after that President Obama established? How do we protect it? “He can rest assure we are not going to take our foot off the pedal. He is going to have the fight of his life.” WATCH:

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — An Indiana senator who is a longtime critic of outsourcing jobs to foreign countries says he’s finalizing his sale of stock in a family arts and crafts business that operates a factory in Mexico. Sen. Joe Donnelly, considered one of the most vulnerable Democrats up for re-election in a deep red state next year, vowed on July 14 to sell stock worth as much as $50,000 in the Stewart Superior Corp. The promise came after The Associated Press first reported that the company, which is operated by Donnelly’s brother and has been in his family for generations, benefits from the same trade practices Donnelly has blasted throughout his political career. The Donnelly campaign said in an email Monday night that the senator signed over his stock in the company on Aug. 11 for $17,410 and plans to donate the proceeds to 10 different charities across Indiana. “Joe will donate the amount paid in the sale of the stock to ten foodbanks across Indiana and is grateful for their continued work to serve Hoosiers in need, and is eager to continue to work across the aisle to stand up for Hoosier jobs and build support for the End Outsourcing Act,” campaign manager Peter Hanscom said in a statement to the AP. Donnelly has yet to file a mandatory financial disclosure documenting the sale, which Senate ethics rules require him to file within 30 days of receiving notification of the transaction. His campaign says that he is still waiting to receive payment. Donnelly has long criticized free-trade policies for killing American jobs. He accused Carrier, an air conditioner and furnace maker, and its parent company of exploiting $3-an-hour workers when it announced plans to wind down operations in Indiana and move to Mexico. However, Stewart Superior continues to capitalize on some of the same trade policies and low-paid foreign labor, operating a factory in the state of Jalisco through a Mexican subsidiary company, Diverstech Color de Mexico. Since at least 2012, Stewart Superior and its subsidiaries have been shipping thousands of pounds of raw materials to the Mexican factory, where it produces ink pads and other supplies, according to customs records from Panjiva Inc., which tracks American imports and exports. The finished products are then transported back to a company facility in California, the records show. Since the AP’s first report, Stewart Superior has removed sections from its website mentioning the Mexican operation. But the company initially touted the factory, stating that it “brings economical, cost competitive manufacturing and product development to our valued customers.” The issue has the potential to haunt Donnelly during the coming campaign. Already the National Republican Senate Committee hired a mariachi band, which performed outside Donnelly’s formal campaign kickoff event this month.

2 charged after man shoots carjacking suspect on SW Side Two men, one of whom was shot, have been charged after a carjacking turned violent and the victim opened fire Wednesday morning in the West Elsdon neighborhood on the Southwest Side. Guillermo Parada, 25, and 22-year-old John Zuniga have both been charged with robbery while armed with a firearm, according to Chicago Police. Parada also faces one count of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon. At 11:32 a.m. Wednesday, a 29-year-old man was standing outside his vehicle in the 5300 block of South Pulaski when he was approached by two males who demanded his keys, police said at the time. One of the males was armed with a handgun. The victim, who has a valid concealed carry license, pulled out a weapon and fired, striking one of the suspects, police said. The suspect, identified as Parada, was shot in the groin and taken in good condition to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, authorities said. The other suspect ran away but was later taken into custody. A weapon was recovered. Parada, who lives in the Marquette Park neighborhood, and Zuniga, of the West Lawn neighborhood, both appeared in bond court on Friday, court records show. Parada was ordered held in Cook County Jail on a $750,000 bond, while Zuniga was ordered held on a $450,000 bond. They are both due back in court on May 17.

Image 1 of / 21 Caption Close Image 2 of 21 Paleontologists uncovered the vertebrae of a titanosaurus saurpod at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. Paleontologists uncovered the vertebrae of a titanosaurus saurpod at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. Image 3 of 21 Several pieces of fossilized bone from a teropoudus are laid out for paleontologists. Several pieces of fossilized bone from a teropoudus are laid out for paleontologists. Image 4 of 21 A paleontologist cleans a cervical piece from a teropoudus discovered at an Exxon Mobil natural gas operation in Argentina. A paleontologist cleans a cervical piece from a teropoudus discovered at an Exxon Mobil natural gas operation in Argentina. Photo: Exxon Mobil Image 5 of 21 A paleontologist cleans a cervical piece from a teropoudus, discovered at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. A paleontologist cleans a cervical piece from a teropoudus, discovered at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. Image 6 of 21 A paleontologist cleans the fossilized dinosaur bones found at a shale gas site in Argentina. A paleontologist cleans the fossilized dinosaur bones found at a shale gas site in Argentina. Image 7 of 21 The vertebrae of a teropoudus are laid out for paleontologists. The vertebrae of a teropoudus are laid out for paleontologists. Image 8 of 21 An eroded portion of a titanosaurus hip is discovered at an Exxon Mobil operation in Argentina. An eroded portion of a titanosaurus hip is discovered at an Exxon Mobil operation in Argentina. Photo: Exxon Mobil Image 9 of 21 An eroded portion of a femur, or thigh bone, is discovered at an Exxon Mobil natural gas excavation site in Argentina. An eroded portion of a femur, or thigh bone, is discovered at an Exxon Mobil natural gas excavation site in Argentina. Image 10 of 21 The foot of a titanosaurus sauropod is discovered at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. The foot of a titanosaurus sauropod is discovered at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. Image 11 of 21 A team of paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. A team of paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. Image 12 of 21 A paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. A paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. Image 13 of 21 A team of paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. A team of paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. Image 14 of 21 A team of paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. A team of paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. Image 15 of 21 A team of paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. A team of paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. Image 16 of 21 A paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. A paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. Image 17 of 21 A paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. A paleontologist works to uncover fossilized bones found at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. Image 18 of 21 A petrified piece of wood is discovered during excavation at the Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. A petrified piece of wood is discovered during excavation at the Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site in Argentina. Image 19 of 21 Jorge Sapag, governor of Argentina's Neuquén province, looks at a turtle shell found along with dinosaur bones at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site. Jorge Sapag, governor of Argentina's Neuquén province, looks at a turtle shell found along with dinosaur bones at an Exxon Mobil natural gas exploration site. Image 20 of 21 the team of paleontologists arrive at the Exxon Mobil site in Argentina where fossilized dinosaur bones were recently discovered. the team of paleontologists arrive at the Exxon Mobil site in Argentina where fossilized dinosaur bones were recently discovered. Image 21 of 21 Looking for shale gas, they found Godzilla's nemesis (photos) 1 / 21 Back to Gallery HOUSTON — An Exxon Mobil shale gas project in Argentina had to be diverted when a road construction crew struck dinosaur bones of titanic size. Preparing to explore for natural gas in western Argentina last spring, Exxon uncovered fossils from a herd of Titanosaurus Sauropods, a broad category of some of the largest creatures to ever roam Earth. The fossils date to the late Cretaceous period, about 66 million to 100 million years ago. The discovery was made in the enormous Vaca Muerta Shale, a promising region that has touched off the South American country’s own shale boom. The region is known for being rich not only in oil and gas, but in dinosaur skeletons, as well. A team of paleontologists descended on the field for a two-week dig in November and a larger group will return next month. They found Titanosaurus vertebrae, feet, hip, neck, and thigh bones. Exxon said the team also made a rare discovery of a Teropoudus skull, a carnivorous, bipedal dinosaur. Despite the intimidating name, Titanosaurus Sauropods were herbivores. Adding to the mystique, they share a name with an aquatic nemesis of Godzilla that appeared in the 1975 Japanese film Terror of Mechagodzilla. But the real Titanosauruses, a catch-all designation for a family of heavy-weight dinos, were land dwellers who walked on four legs. An Exxon Mobil spokesman said the company has provided materials and services for the team of four paleontologists, two assistants and a photographer. “ExxonMobil has diverted our operations to ensure the integrity of the dig site and has funded the first phase of paleontological work,” said Tomas Hess, ExxonMobil Argentina’s public and government affairs manager. “Currently, the team is finishing its cleaning of the fossils and comparing the results to other fossils at the museum in Rincon de los Sauces as well as other nearby museums.” The paleontologists plan to expand their excavation region in the Bajo del Choique and La Invernada blocks of the Vaca Muerta. The finds will be presented at the Argentina Paleontological Symposium in May, according to Exxon Mobil. Also on FuelFix: Photos show camel fossils unearthed by Apache project

NEW DELHI: Soon, there will be no liquor shops on national and state highways. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court reserved its order but made it clear that it would ban liquor vends on highways.A bench of Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justices D Y Chandrachud and L N Rao repeatedly said it would ensure that the menace of drunken driving on highways came to an end while dealing with a PIL by NGO ‘Arrive Safe’, which said 1.42 lakh people died annually in road accidents, many of them caused by drunken driving. The NGO had said proximity and accessibility of liquor vends on highways was a major reason for drunken driving.Lawyers appearing for Puducherry, Punjab, Haryana and liquor merchants’ associations pleaded that licences to run liquor vends were given as per rules and there should not be any sudden change causing huge loss to the exchequer.What startled the bench was the number of these vends on highways. On a stretch of 1km of national highway passing through Mahe (Puducherry), which links two parts of Kerala where bars have been banned, there are as many as 64 liquor vends, which translates to a liquor vend every 15 metres. Mahe has a population of just 42,000.

Conservative Sen. Lindsey Graham has made it clear he's extremely concerned about the threat of Islamic terrorism, but he isn't willing to outlaw a whole religion over it. When a voter in Iowa suggested barring Islam in the U.S. in response to ISIS, Graham quickly shut him down, the Des Moines Register reports. "You know what, I'm not your candidate," Graham said, cutting him off. "I don't want you to vote for me. I couldn't disagree with you more." As he's said before, Graham told his audience Sioux City on Thursday night that he would deal with ISIS by increasing the United States' military presence in Iraq. Explaining his terse response to the voter's suggestion to outlaw Islam, Graham told people, "I'm not trying to please him." "I'm not putting up with that," he said. "He's got a right to say whatever he wants to say, but I have an obligation to the Republican Party, to the people of Iowa and the country as a whole to be firm on this. I'm not buying into that construct. That's not the America that I want to lead." Graham demonstrated a few times in Iowa his willingness to speak candidly. In an interview from Iowa with the Huffington Post, the longtime senator teared up talking about his friendship with Vice President Joe Biden. "If you can't admire Joe Biden as a person, then probably you've got a problem," he said, calling the vice president "the nicest man I think I've ever met in politics." Graham has a long way to go if he wants to gain traction in Iowa, one of the first states to nominate presidential candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties. A recent Quinnipiac poll of likely Iowa GOP caucus goers showed Graham was registering at just 1 percent support.

OSLO, Norway — The National Democratic Front of the Philippines announced a new chief negotiator on Wednesday evening just hours before the start of the scheduled talks here in Oslo. Fidel Agcaoili, former vice chair of the NDFP peace panel, is replacing peace panel chair Luis Jalandoni. ADVERTISEMENT The NDFP explained that it was the result of the granting of Jalandoni’s request to resign from the chairmanship of the panel. The NDFP explained that it was the result of the granting of Jalandoni’s request to resign from the chairmanship of the panel. “The national leadership of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines has granted the long-standing request of Comrade Luis G. Jalandoni to resign as the Chairperson of the NDFP negotiating panel,” the NDFP said in a statement. With his resignation as chair, Jalandoni will still be closely involved in the peace process as a senior adviser for the NDF panel like Communist Party of the Philippines founding chair Jose Maria Sison. “I have been asking to resign since 11 years ago. I am 81 now. It’s time for younger ones to take over the function of chairmanship,” Jalandoni said. Jalandoni expressed his gratitude that he was able to serve as chair since the creation of the peace panel in 1992. A former priest, Jalandoni has been in the movement for decades and is married to Coni Ledesma who is also a member of the panel. “I am 81 now. It’s time for younger ones to take over the function of chairmanship,” Jalandoni said. Jalandoni said that his pending request to pass on the chairmanship was postponed by equal requests for him to continue serving. “I was requested to continue serving but now I think this is a very opportune time,” Jalandoni said citing high expectations and big potentials in the talks with the present government. Meanwhile, the composition of the panel, which has been unchanged since 1992, will have a new member– the recently released political prisoner Benito Tiamzon. ADVERTISEMENT “It’s a good time to set aside and have Fidel serve as the chairperson. I am glad that Benito Tiamzon will be giving more strength to the panel with his wide experience and also his deep commitment,” Jalandoni said. While changes in the composition of the peace panel may present challenges, Agcaoili expressed that the present situation of the negotiations is offering more opportunities. “There are many favorable opportunities. There is the political will of President Duterte and the political will of the movement to arrive at agreements and to bring out reforms,” Agcaoili said. And the main challenge for him, Agcaoili said, is “to get the government to accept the needed the reforms that must be done.” “The role of Luis is very challenging. I find it difficult to take over the role but I will do my best,” Agcaoili said. The NDFP asserted that despite Jalandoni’s resignation the panel will continue to be as one explaining that the people’s movement is guided by collective leadership. Read Next LATEST STORIES MOST READ

The 400, the most prolific 747 type, first entered service with Northwest Airlines in 1989. It was the fourth iteration of Boeing's popular jumbo, featuring a more advanced flight deck, a lighter build and, perhaps most importantly, a significantly boosted range. The most recent iteration can travel more than 8,000 miles, enabling airlines to fly from North America to Southeast Asia or Australia without stopping to refuel. An extended-range model, which added fuel tanks to the cargo hold, is used exclusively by Qantas. That plane has a nearly 9,000-mile range, which covers the 8,500-mile trek from Sydney to Dallas, Texas (with a fueling stop on the longer westbound return). The Airbus A380 will replace the 747-400ER on that route beginning in September. During the last three decades, more than 500 747-400s have been built, with British Airways, Lufthansa and United placing some of the largest orders. That latter carrier still operates one of the longest 747 routes, transporting nearly 400 passengers the 7,000 miles from San Francisco to Hong Kong every day. The versatile 777-200 has replaced its aging sibling on many of UA's other long-haul routes, though, offering significantly improved performance and a better passenger experience, with amenities such as more comfortable seats, WiFi and in-flight entertainment. The 747-400's retirement doesn't mark the end for the entire aircraft line. Boeing's built an extended version, the 747-8, in an attempt to reclaim some of the superjumbo market from Airbus, and Lufthansa has begun operating that higher-capacity plane on routes between Germany and the US. And while carriers like British Airways, Delta and Qantas are phasing out the 747 entirely, other airlines are reassigning their planes to regional service. Thai's 747 travels throughout Asia, for example, and even carries passengers on the one-hour trip from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, while Cathay Pacific continues to operate the type between Hong Kong and regional destinations such as India and Bali. And while passengers may want to avoid traveling 16 hours on a 747 that excludes power outlets and seat-back TVs, such as those operated by United, getting to fly the quad-engine jet on a short hop is nothing short of a thrilling treat. Even shorter routes will transition to more efficient aircraft over the next few years, but for the time being, you can still experience the original superjumbo on select flights. In the commercial aviation world, there's nothing more exhilarating than traveling in seat 1A, where the curvature at the nose makes it possible to see at a near-forward angle during takeoff and landing. And, if you're lucky enough to be traveling in business class, climbing the stairs up to the exclusive second deck is an experience in and of itself.

While we've paid a lot of attention of late to traditional PC gaming desktops, because of their near-monopoly on the ability to run virtual reality hardware, that may be about to change. VR aside, gaming laptops have been the more interesting story over the past several years, with great leaps in performance, design and portability. There are already around 20 million gaming laptops in gamers' hands right now, according to GPU-maker Nvidia, and the company hopes its new generation of mobile graphics hardware will grow the category even further. The new laptop-friendly GTX 10-series claims to offer a dramatic increase in performance over previous mobile GPUs, and supports virtual reality, which could be a real game-changer for gaming laptops. The new GeForce GTX 1060, 1070 and 1080 GPUs are part of what Nvidia calls its Pascal architecture. One big difference from the previous generation, code-named Maxwell, is that the M designation has been removed from the mobile product names, so the successor to the GTX 980M is now called the GTX 1080, not the 1080M. Nvidia The message from Nvidia is that there are now no significant performance differences between laptop and desktop gaming. There are some very slight spec differences, based on size and power/cooling needs, but Nvidia says the performance should be within 10-percent of an equivalent desktop card, and show as much as a 76-percent performance boost over the previous generation of mobile graphics chips. This means that rather than just the small handful of models with GeForce 980 desktop chips, many new gaming laptops will support VR, and at prices expected to be as low as $1,300 in the US. And, some of these VR-ready laptops will be as thin as 18mm or as light as 4 pounds (1.8kg). The new 10-series GPUs are capable of running many new games at full-HD resolution at above 120 frames per second, or at 4K resolutions at above 60 frames per second. Nvidia is also aggressively supporting overclocking, including factory overclocking for laptop GPUs for the first time, where a PC maker tweaks a card for extra performance before sending it to you. Hands-on with the new Nvidia GeForce 1070 We've already had a chance to test one of the first laptops with a new Nvidia GPU. This is an Asus ROG G752 gaming laptop, with the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 GPU. We've previously tested and reviewed the same laptop earlier this year with the GeForce 970M GPU, so it's a product we've very familiar with. The first difference in this new version is that we were able to hook up and use an Oculus Rift VR headset, using the HDMI port on the side of the system. Previously, both the Rift and the HTC Vive required high-end desktop graphics cards, and the only way to use VR hardware with a laptop was to use one of the very small handful of systems with Nvidia's shrunken-down version of the desktop GeForce 980 GPU, such as the Origin PC Eon17-SLX or the Acer Predator 17X. Sarah Tew/CNET The performance charts below outline our experience with this new Pascal laptop GPU. Performance was much faster than the older laptop graphics chips, but not as fast as the desktop versions of the GeForce GTX 1080 (we haven't had a chance to test a new desktop 1070 GPU yet). Keep in mind, however, that we're testing this new hardware with early Nvidia drivers, and we expect improved drivers for these new graphics chips in the near future. Nvidia says laptops with the new GTX 10-series GPUs should be available to order immediately, and models from every major PC maker are expected by this holiday shopping season. 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra Velocity Micro Raptor Z55 (GeForce 1080) 4717 Asus ROG G752VS (GeForce 1070) 4110 Acer Predator 17 X (GeForce 980) 3050 Asus ROG G752VT (GeForce 970M) 1729 Note: Longer bars indicate better performance Bioshock Infinite gaming test Velocity Micro Raptor Z55 (GeForce 1080) 221 Asus ROG G752VS (GeForce 1070) 193 Acer Predator 17 X (GeForce 980) 134 Asus ROG G752VT (GeForce 970M) 96 Note: Longer bars indicate better performance (FPS) Asus ROG G752VS (GeForce 1070) Microsoft Windows 10 Pro (64-bit); 2.7GHz Intel Core i7-6820HK; 64GB DDR4 SDRAM 2400MHz; 8GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070; 512GB SSD + 1TB HDD Acer Predator 17 X (GeForce 980) Microsoft Windows 10 Home (64-bit); 2.7GHz Intel Core i7-6820HK; 16GB DDR4 SDRAM 2133MHz; 8GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 980; (2) 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD Velocity Micro Raptor Z55 (GeForce 1080) Microsoft Windows 10 Home (64-bit); 4.2GHz Intel Core i7-6700K; 16GB DDR4 SDRAM 2400MHz; 8GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080; 512GB SSD + 3TB HDD Asus ROG G752VT (GeForce 970M) Microsoft Windows 10 Home (64-bit); 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ; 16GB DDR4 SDRAM 2133MHz; 3GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 970M; 128GB SSD + 1TB 7200rpm HDD

Vote topic That, in relation to Bill C-51, An Act to enact the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act and the Secure Air Travel Act, to amend the Criminal Code, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts, not more than two further sitting days shall be allotted to the consideration at second reading stage of the Bill; and That, 15 minutes before the expiry of the time provided for Government Orders on the second day allotted to the consideration at second reading stage of the said Bill, any proceedings before the House shall be interrupted, if required for the purpose of this Order, and, in turn, every question necessary for the disposal of the said stage of the Bill shall be put forthwith and successively, without further debate or amendment. See context in the Debates.

The government has "no intention" of introducing legislation to weaken encryption, minister for internet safety and security Baroness Shields told the House of Lords in the wake of the TalkTalk cyber attack debacle. The debate was brought by Liberal Democrat Lord Strasburger, who claimed Cameron "does not seem to get" the need for strong encryption standards online, with no back door access. Strasburger said: "[Cameron] three times said that he intends to ban any communication 'we cannot read', which can only mean weakening encryption. Will the Minister [Shields] bring the Prime Minister up to speed with the realities of the digital world?" However, Shields, former digital advisor to Cameron and chair of Tech City UK, denied Cameron intended to introduce laws to weaken encryption. Liberal Democrat peer Lord Clement-Jones asked if she could "absolutely confirm that there is no intention in forthcoming legislation either to weaken encryption or provide back doors." Shields replied: "I can confirm that there is no intention to do that; that is correct." She said: "The Prime Minister did not advocate banning encryption; he expressed concern that many companies are building end-to-end encrypted applications and services and not retaining the keys. She added that companies that provide end-to-end encrypted applications, such as Whatsapp, which is apparently used by the terror group calling itself Islamic State, must be subject to decryption and that information handed over to law enforcement "in extremis". Earlier this year prime minister David Cameron pledged to ban or "back-door" encrypted communications in the UK if the Conservatives win the next election. "The question remains, are we going to allow a means of communication where it simply isn't possible to [intercept]?" Cameron continued. "And my answer to that is: no, we must not. The first duty of any government is to keep our country and our people safe." On Monday the UK's digital minister Ed Vaizey floated the idea of adding kitemarks to websites that have strong security measures in place, following the attack on TalkTalk's business last week. ®

Please select your country: United States Argentina Australia Austria Belarus Belgium Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Canada Chile China Colombia Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Czechoslovakia (1945-1992) Denmark East Germany (1949-1990) Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Ireland Israel Italy Japan Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Macedonia Malaysia Malta Mexico The Netherlands New Zealand North Korea Norway Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Russia Saudi Arabia Serbia Singapore Slovakia Slovenia South Korea Spain Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Turkey Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Vietnam U.S.S.R. (1922-1991) Yugoslavia (1945-1992) Africa » Cameroon Africa » South Africa Worldwide Other Not an American user? Description Screenshots is a 3D action platform game and sequel to Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy . After completing their quest from the original title, Jak and Daxter are shot into another time and space and the future of their planet, and everything is different. The two are split up, with Jak thrown into jail by Baron Praxis, the ruler of Haven City. For two years Jak is experimented on with dark Eco, turning him into an almost Hulk-like character, mean and filled with rage.Rescued by Daxter, the two must set off and find a way to shut down the operation and get revenge for Jak's uncontrollable change. Along the way they will meet new friends and deadly enemies (known as Metal Heads), but at least now Jak has something special on his side: weapons, and lots of them. Including a shotgun, sniper rifle, machine gun and a powerful blast weapon. Gameplay includes platforming, vehicle racing, rescue missions, hover boarding, playing mini games and shooting at various enemies (including boss fights). There are no user screenshots for this game Promo Images Alternate Titles "Jak II: Renegade" -- European title "Jak II: Hors La Loi" -- French title "Jak II: El Renegado" -- Spanish title Part of the Following Groups User Reviews Critic Reviews Forums There are currently no topics for this game. Trivia 1001 Video Games Difficulty Related Web Sites appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.Possibly due to the incredible level of difficulty, the game included an unadvertised feature that made challenges and missions easier if you failed them repeatedly.

A day after firing assistant coach Mike Kitchen, Blackhawks general manager Stan Bowman continued his organizational overhaul Tuesday by firing Rockford IceHogs coach Ted Dent. Dent coached the Hawks' American Hockey League affiliate for six seasons and signed a three-year extension in April 2016, but a couple of incidents over the last few months sealed his fate in the organization. A source said Dent drew the Hawks' ire in March when he apologized to fans on Twitter after the Hawks traded Spencer Abbott and Sam Carrick, two of the IceHogs' best players, to the Ducks. Dent later deleted the tweet. The Hawks traded another IceHog, Mark McNeill, to the Stars for Johnny Oduya, and after the moves Dent told WREX-TV in Rockford: "We needed to be better and we weren't, so Chicago kind of dismantled our team. ... It's not every day you lose three of your top six forwards." Two sources said Dent also angered the Hawks when he sent a frustrated text message to players saying if they had any questions about the lineup, they should contact Bowman directly. "The Chicago Blackhawks thank Ted for all of his contributions throughout his tenure with the organization," Bowman said in a statement Tuesday. "He played a major role in helping a number of players reach the NHL level ... many of whom became Stanley Cup champions." A look at the Blackhawks roster now, and what it might look like next season. (Chris Hine) (Chris Hine) Rockford finished last in the AHL's Central Division this season with a 25-39-9-3 record and missed the playoffs. Bowman said Saturday he was disappointed the IceHogs didn't contend. "That's a good training ground," Bowman said. "The American League is also for players to get opportunities to succeed and fail that they might not get at this level. We want to be better there as well. "There's no doubt we're not happy with the fact our team didn't make the playoffs. We have to find ways up and down our organization to be better." Dent compiled a 221-179-33-21 record in his six seasons as coach. He was an assistant with the IceHogs from 2007 to 2011 and with the Hawks' previous AHL affiliate, the Norfolk Admirals, in 2006-07. [email protected] Twitter @ChristopherHine [email protected] Twitter @ChrisKuc

Tim Esterdahl | Jan 06, 2014 | Comments 7 0 Flares 0 Flares × The 2013 sales year has ended and Toyota says the Tundra has pretty much kept pace with the rest of the market. Is that a win or a loss for Toyota? Here’s our take. Before we debate the results of the year, let’s remember, it has been a year of change for the Tundra. The truck was officially revealed the first of February and the new trucks hit the dealers lots throughout the fall. As a consequence, sales were up and down throughout the year with the anticipation of the new truck and there were whispers of a supply problem of 2014 trucks in August and September. Officially, here is how the year ended with our unique sales chart that shows numbers per brand, not broken out by model. (BTW, tell us whether you like this chart or not). Before we get to Toyota, we have to mention the really strong year that Ford and Ram had. Also, it is interesting that GM was down quite a bit in December (actually, overall GM was down 6.3 percent for the month – yikes!). Lastly, we see Nissan and Honda had a so-so year. For Toyota, you can look at the numbers several ways (aren’t statistics fun!). Focusing on the Tundra, for December, the truck sold 10,988, +7.2 percent and for the year, 112,732 units sold – + 10.9%. With these numbers, you could argue that: The year was a WIN – they kept pace with the larger truck makers. Also, even though critics initially panned on the new truck, the truck sales didn’t tank as much as they made it seem. – they kept pace with the larger truck makers. Also, even though critics initially panned on the new truck, the truck sales didn’t tank as much as they made it seem. The year was a LOSS – with all the other makers seeing much larger gains, Toyota actually lost sales. We mean, you could argue with the Ford, Ram and GM each being 15% and over, Toyota lost sales with only being at 12%. Of course, the sales numbers are really about bragging rights. The facts are that Toyota has never really challenged the “volume” numbers of the other makers, yet they have really held their own in the full-size truck market without many fleet, a diesel or an HD offering. What do you think? Was 2013 a “win” or a “loss?” Related Posts:

Recently my father called me to make the following announcement: “I’ve decided that I’m going to be buried toe-to-toe with Lester Davis — and I’m immensely happy about it,” he said. Lester Davis is my father’s best friend. “But you mustn’t say anything to Zohra about this,” my father added. Zohra is his wife. My father is in perfect health, so the phone call prompted no immediate alarm, but it did make me think that my father can’t be the only one with surprising plans for his ideal forever. The example set by Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century English philosopher, might be considered truly avant-garde. Mr. Bentham asked that his head be embalmed and fixed on top of his skeleton, which was to be dressed in his own black suit and placed in a glass case, “in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought,” as he put it.

It was expected that the disputes among the ranks of the Islamic State (IS) in Qalamoun would lead to the dismissal of its emir Abu Aisha al-Banyasi, as he was at odds with Abu al-Walid al-Maqdisi. However, the dismissal was not expected to come in the form of a killing. As-Safir revealed in an article published days ago the brittleness of the internal structure of IS in Qalamoun. Disputes among commanders were escalating, leading to the dismissal of the previous emir Abu al-Huda al-Talli and the assignment of Banyasi instead. As-Safir was able to secure information from a member of IS in Qalamoun’s media team who affirmed that the assignment of Banyasi did not solve the problem, and his dismissal was expected at any moment. However, and despite the gloomy situation the member depicted — describing it as a "crisis of hypocrisy" and saying that "disputes are not among individuals but are much deeper" — the dramatic escalation leading to the killing of Banyasi was not foreseen. Disputes revolved around the stand vis-à-vis Jabhat al-Nusra, especially after the arrival of Maqdisi and the issuance of a statement accusing Jabhat al-Nusra of treason and betrayal. A number of IS commanders refused to follow the lead of Maqdisi. As a result, two camps emerged, and entered in fierce conflicts. After apologizing to the commander of Jabhat al-Nusra in Qalamoun, Abu Malik al-Talli, for Maqdisi's statement, Abu al-Huda al-Talli was the first to pay the price. Subsequently, Abu Malik al-Talli was dismissed and replaced by Banyasi. Information indicates that Maqdisi was the one to name Banyasi as a replacement, based on his composure and neutrality toward the dispute that erupted over Jabhat al-Nusra. Easily convinced and influenced, Maqdisi believed Banyasi to be the best candidate. Maqdisi ended up surprised, however. Upon assuming the position, Banyasi proved no different than his predecessor, refusing to act against Jabhat al-Nusra and its commander. He also refused to take escalatory measures against the organization. This raised the ire of Maqdisi, who started to think about ousting Banyasi. At the same time, an incident took place that may have pushed the personal sensitivity between the two men to its zenith, rendering any reconciliation impossible. Maqdisi had a quarrel with Jabhat al-Nusra checkpoint guards, which ended up with his arrest and that of his guards. Banyasi mediated with Abu Malik al-Talli to release them, and indeed, he responded and Maqdisi was released a few hours later. However, following the incident, the dispute between Maqdisi and Banyasi became further entrenched and a few days later, the killing of Banyasi came as a shock to everyone. IS remained silent about the death of Banyasi and tried to keep it low profile. It was leaked that Banyasi was killed by a regime-led airstrike. However, it was not long until it was revealed that the killing resulted from internal disputes. Although some IS media figures are still trying to deny it, saying that the rumored news is yet another media propaganda barrage the organization has been facing since its inception, they were not able to give a clear answer about the true details of the killing. They hid behind the pretext that they were not able to communicate with their leadership to fact check the information. According to information leaked a couple of days ago by Jabhat al-Nusra media spokespeople, who publicly celebrated the death of Banyasi, the dispute between Maqdisi and Banyasi reached a deadlock. This happened after Maqdisi issued a fatwa against Banyasi due to his amicable ties with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was clearly shown through the mediation he made with its commander to release Maqdisi. Some Jabhat al-Nusra spokespeople noted that Banyasi had a "calm temper and was loved by everyone." Such a personality did not match the aspirations of Maqdisi, who wanted a spiteful person who can be influenced by his takfiri penchants. This is why it was imperative to get rid of him. Regardless of the details of the killing and who the perpetrators are, whether Maqdisi or Abu Balqiss (the military emir of IS), the incident will inevitably constitute a new twist of events not in the restructuring of IS but on the level of the developments in Qalamoun. This is particularly true concerning relations between IS and Jabhat al-Nusra and its repercussions on the battles fought against the Syrian army and Hezbollah. Will this incident constitute the first step toward the collapse of IS in Qalamoun or a catalyst for commanders to give up on Syrian nationals and hand the emirate over to "foreigners" with all the ensuing extremism toward other parties? On another note, Turkish forces entered Syrian territory and went as deep as 30 kilometers (19 miles) under the pretext of moving the remains of Suleiman Shah, the grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire. Relying on an agreement concluded with the French mandate as a pretext, Turkish authorities occupied Syrian land near the border to bury the remains before returning them to their initial location [at some future point in time]. However, it seems that the goal of Turkey is far from just restoring the remains and occupying the land. Such a move seems to be aimed at ending the aspirations of Kurds for an autonomous government in the areas under Turkish control. Moreover, Turkish authorities are preparing for the likelihood of IS launching an attack after Turkey signed an agreement with the United States to train "moderate" Syrian armed individuals in order to attack IS and other terrorist groups in Syria.

The government has postponed its web-filtering legislation to defuse it as an election issue IT was ironic that Communications Minister Stephen Conroy announced the postponement of his internet filtering legislation via an adviser last week. Advice was not something he was fond of taking. Sensing a voter backlash on the legislation, which was supposed to be introduced into the parliament before the federal election, Rudd and Conroy are banking on removing it as an election issue. But will they? If Conroy had introduced the legislation before the election, he might have risked the ire of the Greens and Electronic Frontiers Australia, but at least it would have been done and dusted. It would then be up to other political parties to say that they would try to overturn it, a much more difficult task. Now the election could be turned in part into a referendum on the issue. Read Next Labor's private polling on internet filtering has consistently shown that a large number of computer-illiterate mums and dads are worried about what their kids can access online. They want Conroy to make it safer for them. This is the reason he has continued to withstand so much virulent criticism from those who do not live in a nuclear family and who do not feel threatened by the internet. They include people who use it for business, those who use it for pleasure and those, especially in their 20s and30s, who use it as a way of social networking. On this point Conroy has seriously misunderstood the fears that business has about how a national internet filter could degrade our already under-performing online environment. Not just the technical performance of internet service providers, which will have to scan all their traffic all the time, but whether he will blacklist international business sites such as Amazon and YouTube that sell or offer a host of material that would be refused classification (RC) under Australia's proposed prudish censorship laws. He also has miscalculated the number of people who use the internet to seek out sexual material. At last count there were 238 million adult sex sites on the internet and millions of searches every day are for sexually related material. Does Conroy think all these people live in Upper Volta or New Zealand? His insistence on calling them pedophiles and perverts has only hardened their resolve to bring him down. Sexual pleasure on the internet is a personal freedom that many adults will not give up lightly. The networking and social sites are the new pubs and clubs for generations X and Y, and they resent government intrusion into these areas like a Digger would resent government monitoring the local RSL. Conroy is oblivious to these concerns and, privately, very angry these people won't see his point of view. It's a Mexican stand-off where Conroy has put his revolver back into its holster but it's still cocked and loaded. There is every chance a post-election internet filter will be more censorious than the proposed pre-election one. The Rudd government has been quietly increasing controls on sexual material coming into the country through other means. Anyone coming back to Australia from an overseas trip now has a new question on their incoming passenger card. It asks if you have any pornography in your suitcase. They've also raised the bar for those who bring in more than 25 DVDs that would be refused classification such as a DIY euthanasia film or an adult film where a couple spanks each other; both of which are available on Amazon and YouTube. Yet you can get five years' jail for them now. Australian Christian Lobby chief executive Jim Wallace has boasted publicly of having numerous meetings with Conroy about banning sexual imagery in Australian homes and Rudd addressed the group's national conference last November. With another four years to run after an election win, Conroy could go back to the original plan he floated, which was to blacklist the X18+ classification entirely. Conroy changed his mind about this one night on SBS television's Insight program in March last year when challenged by Australian Sex Party leader Fiona Patten. She pointed out X18+ material was legal in Australia and that filtering legal adult erotica would be the thin end of the wedge. Suddenly, he changed his policy to "we will only ban material that is refused classification and already illegal". Curiously, Conroy fronted Patten in the green room after the show and regaled her with "Why didn't you just call me about this? We could have sorted it out. You didn't have to set up a political party against us." The threat of a new party focused on the internet filter didn't deter him, though. Not even blinding inconsistencies and duplications such as the fact the new blacklist of illegal sites will sit on top of an existing blacklist that has different parameters. Under the present Broadcasting Services Act introduced by the Howard government in 1999, the Australian Communications and Media Authority maintains a blacklist of prohibited content that includes X18+ content, R18+ content that does not have a restricted access system and content that is even classified MA15+ and provided by a mobile premium service. This list is secret to the public and supplied to filtering companies. According to Conroy, this list will remain alongside the new one, which will blacklist only refused classification material. Why? Unbelievably, the Coalition is edging closer to supporting this farce unless it degrades the network or can be proven to be technically obstructive. Coalition communications spokesman Tony Smith is beginning to shift from John Howard's old policy, which was that the millions of dollars that government spent on providing free end-user software to families should be put to use by parents without having to duplicate the whole thing at ISP level. Through senator Scott Ludlam, the Greens appear to be leading the charge in the parliament against the filter. But when you consider they preselected the architect of Conroy's internet filter, Clive Hamilton, at last December's Higgins by-election, you have to wonder about their commitment. There are plenty of rumours going around that they will do it again. Preselecting Hamilton for a marginal Victorian reps seat would be a huge mistake for the Greens and would undermine much of Ludlam's efforts to date. And that pretty much leaves the Sex Party, a political party that was founded on the issue of internet filtering, to lead the charge. Conroy may think he has won the battle but this war is far from over. In the green room no one can hear you scream.

China's President Xi Jinping attends the opening session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in Beijing. REUTERS/Jason Lee WASHINGTON/BEIJING (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will hold their first face-to-face talks next week, a highly anticipated meeting between leaders at odds over trade, China's strategic ambitions and how to deal with North Korea's weapons programs. The White House said Trump would host Xi next Thursday and Friday at his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida and "discuss global, regional, and bilateral issues of mutual concern." Trump and his wife Melania will host Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan at a dinner next Thursday, a White House statement said. It will be the first meeting between Xi and Trump, whose presidency began on Jan. 20, amid heightened tensions between the world’s two largest economies over issues including North Korea, the disputed South China Sea, Taiwan and trade. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang gave no details of the agenda in announcing Xi's travel plans at a daily news briefing in Beijing, but spoke of the need to see the big picture while fostering mutual interests in trade relations. Related: For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available now on iOS and Android. "The market dictates that interests between our two countries are structured so that you will always have me and I will always have you," Lu said. "Both sides should work together to make the cake of mutual interest bigger and not simply seek fairer distribution," he said in response to a question about trade frictions. U.S. administration officials say North Korea, the large U.S. trade imbalance with China and Beijing's pursuit of expansive claims in the South China Sea will top the agenda. The summit will follow a string of other recent U.S.-China meetings and conversations aimed at mending ties after strong criticism of China by Trump during his election campaign. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ended a trip to Asia this month in Beijing, agreeing to work together with China on North Korea and stressing Trump's desire to enhance understanding. China has been irritated at being told repeatedly by Washington to rein in North Korea's nuclear and missile programs and by the U.S. decision to base an advanced missile defense system in South Korea. Beijing is also deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions toward self-ruled Taiwan, which China claims as its own. During his election campaign, Trump accused China of unfair trade policies, criticized its island-building in the strategic South China Sea, and accused it of doing too little to constrain North Korea. Trump also incensed Beijing in December by taking a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and saying that Washington did not have to stick to a "one China" policy. He later agreed in a phone call with Xi to honor the long-standing policy and has also written to Xi since seeking "constructive ties." (Reporting by Christian Shepherd in Beijing and David Brunnstrom and Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Writing by Michael Martina and David Brunnstrom; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Bernadette Baum)

Imagine a private conversation between two of the most influential figures of fifth century Athens: the adventurer responsible for the Sicilian Expedition and the city's eventual downfall, and the man who described himself as its gadfly, inspired Plato, and changed the shape of philosophy forever. Such is the plot of Plato's (first) Alcibiades, often referred to as the Alcibiades Major because a second dialogue attributed to Plato in antiquity is named in our lists of Plato's works as Second Alcibiades. Alcibiades is a dialogue between the notorious character after whom it is named and Socrates, set at a time when Alcibiades was still a young man, before his entry into his political and military career, and Socrates, about 17 years older, was already established in the city as a major philosophical practitioner. Although in antiquity the work was uniformly attributed to Plato, over the course of the last century commentators have generally treated it as spurious. In addition to obvious consequences for the work's interpretation, this shift has also resulted in the relative paucity of commentaries. Billed as "the first full, political and philosophically rigorous account" (3) of that work, regardless of its authenticity (7), Politics in Socrates' Alcibiades seeks to show that "Socrates redirects Alcibiades' political ambition . . . by generalizing the notion of argument" (3). A better statement, a little bit later, explains that "the dialogue is best understood when read in light of Socrates' methodological versatility" (8). Archie sees that versatility as a political approach, in this case intended to "change Alcibiades' beliefs and to bridle his arrogance" (9). Although certainly plausible and in line with interpretations that focus on the dialogue's educational aspect, this interpretation of the Alcibiades is also narrow. The book is divided into five parts largely intended to capture Archie's focus on Socrates' varied methods, although the division between Parts I and II appears to have been drawn at the wrong place. Part I lays out the main argument (Chapter 1) and surveys the basic landscape around the Alcibiades, focusing on the interpretations of Michael Stokes, Ian Kidd, and Jaakko Hintikka (Chapter 2). Although Chapter 3 is a continuation of the work's reception and interpretation, it has been placed in Part II, which purports to deal with the dialogue's treatment of women, a subject confined to Chapter 4. From that point forward, each part consists of a single chapter devoted to a single theme. In accordance with Archie's characterization of Socrates' versatile method as political, Chapter 5 examines "political decisions," namely the options Socrates offers and the decisions that Alcibiades makes in response, seen through the prism of decision theory; Chapter 6 looks at political priorities and their consequences for one's soul; Chapter 7 applies insight from Plutarch's On Listening to the Alcibiades. A very brief conclusion, Chapter 8, suggests certain ways in which the dialogue can educate modern readers. The book has two addenda, a very short one building on a parallel investigation of Plato's Apology and the Alcibiades first raised in Chapter 6 and a longer one on "Socratic traditionalism." Commentaries on dialogues often begin with a tour of the setting, characters, and main signposts of the arguments. Especially in light of the relative obscurity of the Alcibiades, which Archie rightly points to in his introductory remarks, I was surprised not to find background on the Alcibiades that could help situate Archie's arguments better and avoid the occasional repetition of basic information that sometimes made Politics in Socrates' Alcibiades feel more like a collection of articles than a book. It is unfortunate that the proofreading missed many errors. Archie considers the five themes he chose to focus on essential to an understanding of the dialogue, but he singles out listening as the most important among them. His judgment is reflected in the outcome, for it is his application of Plutarch's insights to the Alcibiades that makes for the most animated and creative part of the book. Unfortunately, as Archie's rather limited conclusion indicates, it is not pursued to its full potential. The dialogue, he argues, illustrates that Alcibiades could have benefited from his encounter with Socrates if only he had "listened appropriately" (9). Thus, the work "intends for us to see that listening can be a source of moral uplift or a source of moral corruption" (9). Alcibiades' last utterance, however, is a promise to Socrates to begin to concern himself with justice immediately (135e4-5). To come to Archie's conclusion, therefore, the reader would have to know how the rest of Alcibiades' life turned out and ascribe its trajectory to Socrates' failure to persuade him. Now, Plato was not averse to foreshadowing future events in his works (e.g., the various references to Nicias' reverence for seers in Laches), and the stature and notoriety of Alcibiades make it highly unlikely that any reader of the Alcibiades would not make the connection immediately. Yet, even those, such as Xenophon (Memorabilia, I.ii.24-28), who concluded that Socrates' alleged corruption of Alcibiades was first and foremost on the Athenians' minds when they charged Socrates with corrupting the youth of the city have tended to point to Alcibiades' character and circumstances as the causes of his downfall. So did Socrates succeed or fail in his attempt to redirect Alcibiades? Outstanding among his contemporaries for his good looks, lineage, athleticism, and wit, Alcibiades was highly sought after. Most of his admirers eventually gave up their hopeless pursuit of him, but not Socrates. At the beginning of their encounter, both men remark on his persistence and reluctance to make a move, which Socrates attributes to his daimònion. Its objection lifted, Socrates states that he has witnessed suitors who thought highly of themselves fall away one after another because Alcibiades' opinion of himself was far higher: he lacked nothing and needed no one. The moment of their encounter is critical, for Alcibiades is preparing to enter political life. In the words of Jacqueline de Romilly, whose work on Alcibiades is curiously absent from Archie's account, the Alcibiades fills a crucial gap between Alcibiades' youth and later life, equivalent to Prodicus' account of Hercules' choice between aretè and kakìa (Alcibiade, 56). Even though to Socrates Alcibiades professes a fervent preference for justice, his conduct from that point forward makes it clear that he took a rather different path. Like others before him, Archie is certainly right in considering Alcibiades' ambition the cause of his undoing, but there is a danger here of allowing the rest of Alcibiades' story -- the part after his conversation with Socrates -- to divert our attention away from other important political lessons in the Alcibiades. Socrates' role is to steer Alcibiades towards justice, yet the way in which he goes about it is worth considering. Although eventually Socrates would turn to a customary questioning intended to show Alcibiades that he is not ready to advise the city on matters about which he knows very little, his foray into the conversation is different: he begins by telling Alcibiades that he suspects the young man harbors even greater ambitions than to rise above the rest of Athens on his natural gifts alone (104e4-106a1). This move could well be part of a strategy intended to show Alcibiades that he has not really thought about his plan by putting Athenian politics in proper perspective. If so, however, it is a dangerous move because it introduces the idea that Alcibiades should set his sights much higher. Archie uses the term "provincial" (120) to describe Alcibiades' initial ambition, and that strikes me as exactly right. As Archie points out, Alcibiades is quite "conventional" (79); it is Socrates who seems to have the higher ambition for Alcibiades. The young man's reaction to Socrates' claim is worth noting: Socrates appears to have made up his mind on the matter, so there is no real point in denying it. If he were right, how could Socrates help him realize it (106a4-8)? Nothing in his response to Socrates' provocation indicates that he denies having harbored such ambition. In addition to not having given much thought to the state of his soul, however, Alcibiades is approaching the administration of the city with the same attitude that the Corinthian envoys would use to describe the Athenian temperament in Thucydides' history: the Athenians, they would argue, are "bold beyond their strength, adventurous above their own reason, and in danger hope still the best" (1.70, Hobbes trans.). Socrates shows that the same is true of Alcibiades by enlisting a series of tools, as Archie notes. Not least among these is the criticism of Alcibiades' presumptuousness by the wives and mothers of Spartan and Persian kings, Athens' true competitors and thus the true measure of Alcibiades' success or failure. Archie considers these speeches a crucial part of the dialogue, and he is, once again, correct. Here too, however, he does not make as much of them as he could. First and foremost, the dramatic date of the dialogue puts the conversation at the heart of a period during which Sparta and Persia had transformed Athenian politics and would continue to do so for a long time. Together with Athens, these states formed the triangle that defined Alcibiades' dizzying shift of allegiances during the war, perhaps the clearest sign of his hopeless, irreparable character. But their speeches also contain several allusions to the future Alcibiades. For instance, to bring Alcibiades' noble lineage down to its proper rung, Socrates makes much of the measures taken by both Persians and Spartans to ensure the purity of their lines of succession (121b6-d2). The Spartan queen is guarded at public expense, Socrates tells Alcibiades! Well, apparently she was not guarded well enough if we are to believe Plutarch (Alcibiades, 23.7-8), who claims that while hiding in Sparta Alcibiades seduced Timaia, the wife of King Agis and daughter-in-law of Lampido, the very queen who through Socrates takes Alcibiades to task. The child that resulted from that affair would be refused succession, so the Spartan royal line would remain intact, but a vile injustice had been done, and Alcibiades' character had once again been exposed for what it was. Although he treats both the speeches in general and this part in particular (117), Archie does not comment on these allusions to what was to come. In several of Plato's works, Socrates comments on the inability of parents to teach their sons how to be virtuous, and on more than one occasion he names Pericles as one such parent (Meno, 94a7-b8; Protagoras, 319e2-320b1). In addition to his own sons, Pericles had to oversee the rearing and education of Alcibiades, whom his father entrusted to him as a child, something that Socrates knew well. In light of these facts, it is hard not to see Socrates' criticism of Alcibiades' lack of thoughtfulness, intellectual and moral laziness, and overestimation of his abilities as a critique, also, of Periclean Athens. In that regard, the Alcibiades recalls Menexenus, another work whose relationship to Plato has been the subject of debate, in which Socrates explicitly mocks Pericles' most famous depiction of Athens (in Thucydides' report of his Funeral Oration). The possibility that behind Socrates' scrutiny of Alcibiades lies a critique of the city itself should come as no surprise. Pericles had been responsible for both, and for Socrates the city and the individual are always locked in a mutually formative relationship (Republic VIII). Archie attributes Alcibiades' ultimate failure to a disharmony between his commitment to self-cultivation and his eventual downfall (118-19). I am not sure that covers it. Socrates' parting prophecy to Alcibiades was that the power of the city would overcome them both (135e6-8). What Socrates did not say, but the reader of the Alcibiades knows well anyway, was that it would be for very different reasons. Both men would turn out to be harmonious in their own way: Socrates in his commitment to justice and Alcibiades in his commitment to himself. His promise to let nothing keep him from attending to Socrates and to pursue nothing other than justice turned out to be no more reliable than the rest of his commitments to anyone but himself. It seems that if Socrates succeeded in anything in this encounter, his success was fleeting at best. Alcibiades' relationship to Pericles, his critical role in the downfall of Athens, and his rare but loaded appearances in Plato's works all call for a return to the Alcibiades. Despite the fact that Archie focuses almost exclusively on politics writ small, his decision to heed that call and consider the dialogue from the perspective of Socrates' versatility is a welcome move and its result a step in the right direction.

Hi everyone! Today I’m going to be talking about recovering after my surgery that was a Knee fusion and Symes amputation when I was eight years old. I’ll include some tips and helpful information that will hopefully help you or someone you know through the recovery process after surgery! If you’d like to read my post about preparing for a hospital stay – read that HERE. What is PFFD? Proximal femoral focal deficiency (PFFD), also known as Congenital Femoral Deficiency (CFD), is a rare, non-hereditary birth defect that affects the pelvis, particularly the hip bone, and the proximal femur. The disorder may affect one side or both, with the hip being deformed and the leg shortened. Because of this condition, I personally have had to wear a prosthetic leg from birth, and undergone operations to fix the deformed leg including having the foot amputated. Tips after surgery: Please don’t rush to get better: Make sure to give yourself a break. Your body will take it’s time to recover after such a trauma like surgery – so please don’t try to force yourself to be better quickly as this can damage the healing tissue and wound which will just end up delaying the recovery process. I had to stay bed bound for about the first two weeks to a month after my amputation and I was so desperate to get up and move around – but I knew that if I did it would take me even longer to recover! Keep notes of your medication routine: After my amputation I was on a lot of different medication for pain relief and to relieve phantom pain – and it really did get confusing. The best thing me and my Father did was write down the times of each medication and then a simple tick next to it after I’d taken it, this way I knew regularly what I’d taken and hadn’t taken. It’s so easy to think you’ve forgotten and take an extra dose by accident – which can be very dangerous.. so please keep track of your medication intake! Tell your Doctor if you are still in pain: I was really struggling with shooting pains and phantom pains after my amputation and at first I was hesitant to say anything as I didn’t know if it was normal straight after surgery and if anything could even be done about it. It ended up becoming unbearable so I mentioned it to a nurse and I was medicated straightaway which really relieved the pain.. so please don’t be afraid to mention whatever you are suffering with even if you think it’s nothing. Try to keep your spirits high: Going through surgery is so incredibly stressful and probably the best advice I can give you is to try and stay in the best mood possible. It’s really easy to get down when you have stay in bed and aren’t able to do much.. some things I found useful were binge watching TV shows, listening to music, watching films, and having family and friends visit me often really kept me distracted. Also concentrating on my schoolwork as after all I was only 8 years old! Staying clean without a bath/shower: After my surgery it was so unbelievably difficult to get in and out of a bath and shower so what I was advised to do by my Doctor was to wash in the bathroom just on the edge of a bath with clean water, a sponge and soap. This was so easy and helped me so much to stay clean and I always felt so much better afterwards! It still keeps you very clean and it’s also important to keep your wound clean to prevent infection. It’s much better than just skipping a shower; or forcing yourself to climb into one which could damage your recovery process and be rather dangerous. Listen to the advice of the professionals around you no matter how hard: I really struggled to get into wearing my prosthetic leg again after my amputation.. it felt different and I was so hypersensitive about having to put my stump inside a prosthesis because it still had stitches and looked very new to me still – I felt I couldn’t do it. My prosthetist and my Doctors were telling me that the more I practiced the more I would get used to it – but I didn’t listen and ended up being wheelchair bound for a year. After that year I finally started to practice wearing a prosthetic again they were right – now I can wear my prosthetic leg and I can walk without a second thought! Eat and sleep well: This goes without saying for most of us all of the time, but the amazing effects on our body from eating and sleeping better than usual have been proven time and time again. It’s a great idea to try and focus on eating better and enough while you are recovering so your body is getting the nourishment it needs, having a good sleep schedule and making sure you are getting enough rest will help you feel better during the day. I really struggled after surgery to keep a good sleeping pattern and it made my phantom pains a lot worse as I was stressed and tired. Don’t forget also to stay hydrated and drink lots of water! 🙂 Be honest about your feelings: Surgery is very tough and most of the time you go through quite a bit of pain at first before things start to improve. I was a very lucky child to have such an amazing family as I was going through my surgery and what helped me was being able to tell them when I was struggling with pain or just feeling very weak and low. My family were extremely supportive of me and I think everyone out there should know that sharing your feelings and admitting you may be suffering in pain or just having a bad day – or even not recovering after surgery as well as you’d hoped is really important because this way you will get the support you need in order to be okay again. I really hope that you all found this list useful and I will always add to it in the future if I think of any more points that I feel will benefit others out there going through surgery! I tried to name the most important ones here that really helped me recover as a young child having an amputation. 🙂 Don’t forget to follow my social media pages located top right of this page! 🙂 I hope you have a wonderful day and wish you and everyone you know the best of luck in any surgery you may be having soon or one day in the future. As always; don’t be afraid to drop me a message! ❤ . Advertisements

Auburn this week became the first jurisdiction in the Sacramento region to officially regulate home-sharing operations like Airbnb, a popular online platform on which residents rent private rooms for money. The City Council voted unanimously Monday to approve an ordinance that requires Auburn residents to register with the city before starting a home-sharing operation. The approval came after heated discussions in this foothills community of 14,000 people, with some residents expressing concern about traffic and congestion in their neighborhoods. City leaders say the home-sharing operations supply needed rooms, allowing visitors to stay in Auburn instead of neighboring Rocklin or Roseville. Auburn has only one hotel, the 96-room Holiday Inn on Grass Valley Highway. “This will keep visitors in our community,” Councilman Daniel Berlant said. “The hope is they’ll eat at our restaurants or shop here.” Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Sacramento Bee The ordinance allows home-sharing establishments in all residential zones. Proprietors will need to pay a $57 licensing fee and obtain a $27 business permit. If neighbors within 100 feet object to the enterprise, proprietors can appeal to the Auburn Planning Commission and the City Council. The city will not be collecting occupancy taxes on the rooms. The new rules take effect Feb. 12. Associate planner Lance Lowe noted that nontraditional accommodations, like a yurt or a garage, will remain illegal. Auburn officials previously relied on health and safety codes to close down a yurt, a tent-like outdoor structure, and a converted office that were being rented out in the city because the buildings were deemed uninhabitable.

There is a lot of excitement over decentralizing electric power as renewable energy becomes more accessible. Throughout our history, the US has had one central utility with a monopoly on electricity, but that is changing, quickly. What’s more is electricity prices are always increasing, so renewable energy technology is now achieving “grid parity” in certain places. Microgrids have emerged as a popular solution as people have taken solar and other clean energy production into their own hands. Microgrids allow communities, institutions, or individuals to power smaller communities and decentralize power from utility providers. According to Navigant Research, the microgrid market will reach 0 billion by 2020, up from .3 billion in 2013. “Microgrids are democratizing power — cities today are realizing that they need to provide the power to the people, who want to choose their electricity supply, and choose their provider. You never had this option before,” said Arjun Gupta, a system design engineer at Urban Green Energy, which provides renewable energy solutions for commercial clients around the world and works on projects in the micro grid space However, as more and more communities and companies (including Google and IBM) try to embrace this elegant solution for their energy needs (as Germany and the UK have already done) public utilities in a number of states have voiced concerns over private microgrid creation. Utility companies see personal grid development as an economic threat. In some places there have been significant legal ramifications when individuals try to create microgrids in public utility territory, rendering them essentially illegal. “The whole trend represents a challenge to the existing legacy utility business model,” Michael Burr, founder of the Microgrid Institute explains. “This opens the door to possibilities in the future where customers choose something other than the standard utility offering. The more that happens, the more customers leave the public utility.” He cites Hawaii, where electricity costs are high and solar power is abundant, as a market where microgrids are a promising alternative — and thus a legitimate threat — to the larger public offering. In fact, he claims that the major issue surrounding microgrid development is less about public versus private development and more a question of ownership. “One of the biggest issues involves ownership and financing models, especially in terms of a community microgrid,” Burr says. Dealing with rates, tariffs and pricing structures can be nearly paralyzing for the energy community to deal with.

Marc Serota/Getty Images According to a report on MLB.com, future Hall of Fame third baseman Chipper Jones will retire at season's end. Jones, who has been the face of the Atlanta Braves franchise for the past decade or so, has been considering hanging it up over the past few seasons, but continued to battle back from injury. After dispelling retirement talks just last week when he said he was "kidding around" about quitting the sport, Jones has apparently decided he will be finished as a player no later than the conclusion of the 2012 campaign. As one of the most prolific switch-hitters of all time, and the Braves' leader in career home runs, Jones has occupied a large portion of the team's payroll for some time now. It's not clear if Chipper would remain with the organization in some capacity beyond 2012, but his tutelage to young hitters would likely be welcome by Atlanta. A press conference is surely forthcoming, but has yet to be set. Stay tuned.

That is why he directs his multimillion-dollar contributions not to political candidates or super PACs — but to spreading Ayn Rand’s thinking around the globe. Over the years, he said he had contributed more than $20 million to the Ayn Rand Institute, to create free online courses about her work and other projects. Millions more have gone to other similarly minded groups. “I’m not an altruist, I’m not a do-gooder,” Mr. Barney said. “But I would like to have others experience the understanding and the benefits that I’ve had from philosophy.” If rationality, hard work and self-interest are fundamental Randian values, so is the pursuit of happiness. And that is what led Mr. Barney to rise early that day — only to have to wait at the front of the ski lift line. Standing there, he mentions to the lift operator his intent to be first down the run. “You look like you’re first in a lot of things,” the lift operator replies. Soon enough, Mr. Barney is gliding down the mountain, listening on his earbuds to a favorite Broadway tune, “One Day More,” from “Les Misérables,” with its call to the masses to man the barricades. An ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Worldview “The greatest tragedy in all schools today is the ‘D.D.D.’” — a dropout who is in debt and doesn’t get a degree, Mr. Barney said over an artistically arranged dessert plate. The term is one of the many expressions that his staff refers to as “Carl Barneyisms,” the abbreviations, aphorisms, quotations and guidelines that pepper the boss’s daily conversation and fill employee binders. For years, Mr. Barney worked six-and-a-half-day weeks sending notes to colleagues and friends at all hours about newly discovered enthusiasms — videos, books, middle-of-the-night brainstorms or even gadgets, like the MagicJack, the as-seen-on-TV device to connect a phone to a computer for inexpensive calls. “If he finds something that he really likes, he’ll send it to 10 of his friends,” said John Allison, the former chief of the bank BB&T and a longtime friend who once received a Keurig coffee maker from him. Many of his work ideas are cataloged in “P.D.s” (procedure directives), “D.L.s” (data letters), “I.L.s,” (information letters) and “M.M.s” (management memos). “M.M. 302,” for example, is titled “Student Satisfaction and Success — S.S.S.” and offers the antidote to what he calls the “dreaded D.D.D.”

Snowstorms such as the one that dropped several inches of snow across southern Minnesota Wednesday can turn roads treacherous. Now drivers can see how bad the roads are by viewing conditions as seen from the cab of snow plow. On Wednesday, the Minnesota Department of Transportation unveiled its now "Plow Cam" tool on its 511mn.org traveler information site. Some of the agency's 838 plows have been equipped with cameras that show road conditions and location of plows in real time. "“The plow cams are another way for travelers to make good decisions about their travel plans during the snow and ice season,” said Kelly Braunig, 511 program manager. “If they go on the 511 site and see that travel is not advised, they can actually see an image of the road the cameras take as the plow is traveling. Seeing is believing.” To see the images, travelers can go to the 511mn.org site and click on the "Plow Cameras" tab on the left side of the screen. That will bring up a map that shows the location of plows along with photos replete with captions that give the plow number, date and time. MnDOT is piloting the program this winter and has placed cameras in about a quarter of its fleet. The agency will evaluate how effective it is and decide if cameras will be installed in additional plows. Travelers can also see what the roads look like by clicking on images supplied through the Road Weather Information System. Cameras at 97 locations along major highways give a snapshots of road conditions. The addition of plow cam images comes after a few other enhancements made to the online traveler information service. Over the past few months, MnDOT has added features that allow motorists to personalize up to 20 routes that they drive and get instant information about problems or hazards they may encounter along the way. The service also sends that information directly to a driver's phone. MnDOT also upgraded the 511mn.org maps to display orange glows surrounding crash symbols to indicate significant delays and red triangles that appear over a weather icon when conditions such as fog, high winds, rain, ice or snow are present. “All the new features we’re putting on 511 come down to intelligent transportation,” said Braunig. “We want to be on the cutting edge of that. If motorists can just pick one or two features to use, they can make better travel decisions.”

First I’m going to outline how to read these reports. There are four key sections used: SRC is “the eye test” measure of a players ability. It’s passed through several scouts and a player is rated based on what these scouts see. Potential/capability of development is probably the most interesting metric in these reports because we are looking at younger players. There is no upper limit here, so the higher the number, the greater the future potential. +/- is a statistic that you may be familiar with from other sports - however in this context +/- looks at the positive actions a player makes compared to the change in scoring. Considering the base of 100 - anything above this is good and anything below this is not good and something NYC want to avoid in their players. Finally, level of play is another useful factor to consider. It allows us to look at a level of experience a player has played so far in his career. For NYC and the players we are going to look at, it’s useful because the Front Office may be wanting players to either build experience or bring in players that have played at a higher or similar level. For example a signing like Pirlo brings a great deal of experience and has played at the highest level - so there’s no doubt he’s able to play in Major League Soccer. Finally, the GSN Index is a combination of all these four factors. It means that you can compare a player with any other professional to see what their current and future quality is. For me it’s difficult to fully trust a black box like this - but in this analysis it serves as a useful metric to compare the potential transfer targets of NYCFC. Onto the players…

Mike Pence Michael (Mike) Richard PencePence meeting with Senate GOP ahead of vote to block emergency declaration 'And the award for best political commentary by an Oscar nominee goes to...' UN nuclear watchdog: Iran maintains compliance with 2015 pact MORE, the Republican vice presidential nominee, on Saturday called Democrat Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE the “most dishonest” presidential candidate since former President Richard Nixon. ADVERTISEMENT The Indiana governor railed against Clinton after the FBI released its notes from the investigation into her use of a private email server from her time as secretary of State. “It’s just more evidence,” Pence said in an interview set to air on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “that Hillary Clinton is the most dishonest candidate for president of the United States since Richard Nixon. "What's evident from all of the revelations over the last several weeks is that Hillary Clinton operated in such a way to keep her emails, and particularly her interactions while secretary of State, with the Clinton Foundation out of the public reach, out of public accountability," he said. “I think it all truly does disqualify her from serving as president of the United States."

Olympic legend Sebastian Coe organised the 2012 London Games Lord Coe has described allegations of widespread doping in athletics as a "declaration of war" and says it is time to "come out fighting" to protect the sport's reputation. The Sunday Times published data from 5,000 athletes, which it says reveals an "extraordinary extent of cheating". Athletics' world governing body, the IAAF, said the blood results were not positive tests or proof of doping. "The fightback has to start here," said Coe, an IAAF vice-president. "It is a declaration of war on my sport. There is nothing in our history of competence and integrity in drug testing that warrants this kind of attack." What exactly are the allegations? The Sunday Times and German broadcaster ARD/WDR examined leaked data from the IAAF database of results of 12,000 blood tests between 2001 and 2012. The reports by the British and German media outlets said that more than 800 athletes - and a third of all medallists in endurance events at recent Olympics and World Championships - had suspicious blood-test results and that they were not followed up by the IAAF. To review the data, the Sunday Times and ARD/WDR used two of the world's "foremost anti-doping experts", scientists Robin Parisotto and Michael Ashenden, and they said that while "abnormal" results were not proof of doping, they were suspicious. What is blood doping? Sports nutritionist Eleanor Jones says blood doping can help endurance athletes by increasing their ability to transport oxygen around the body. She told BBC Radio 5 live: "It works like giving blood, except that after you've replaced that donation naturally in your body, you then reinfuse the blood that you removed originally, so you might have 110% of your normal blood volume." What was the IAAF's response? In a statement released on Tuesday, the IAAF called the allegations "sensationalist and confusing". It said: "What the IAAF cannot accept under any circumstances from the ARD/Sunday Times, or the scientists whom they have retained, is an accusation that it has breached its primary duty to act in the best interests of the sport of athletics." The IAAF called the allegations "guesswork" and said it "categorically refutes all allegations", and specifically rejected the claim that it "failed in its duty to pursue an effective blood-testing programme at all times". The IAAF says it conducts approximately 3,500 in- and-out-of-competition anti-doping tests every year We are not sitting on our hands - Coe Speaking to BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday, Lord Coe backed the IAAF's stance, saying he and the governing body were angered by accusations that they had done nothing to tackle doping. Coe cited the introduction of the Athlete Biological Passport programme in 2009 as one of the ways the IAAF has been at the forefront of attempts to eradicate doping in sport. What is the Athlete Biological Passport? An Athlete Biological Passport is an electronic document about the athlete that contains certain biomarkers from through his career. If these markers change dramatically it alerts officials that the athlete might be doping. "Every athlete in 2012-13 was subjected to a blood test, which was unprecedented. We have led the way on this and have consistently done so," said Coe - who won Olympic gold in the 1500m at the 1980 and 1984 Games and wants to be the next IAAF president. "To be selectively suggesting that an elevated one-off reading is the same as a positive test is just so wide of the mark. The blood passport itself is designed to create a profile and it is that profile that has chased some of the highest-named athletes out of our sport. "It has caused intense embarrassment but we have always taken the view that we would rather have short-term embarrassment and protect the clean athletes. "This is what it is about and that is why we are so angry at the moment." Sergey Bubka, Coe's rival for the position of IAAF president, says even more transparency in the organisation is needed to aid the fight against doping. The former Ukrainian pole vaulter also believes a "faster and more efficient" anti-doping system is necessary to ensure the organisation stays "a step ahead of the dopers". "This is a battle we can't afford to lose, for the sake of athletics and all sports," he said. "We must be more proactive and even more transparent in our aggressive pursuit of a zero tolerance policy against doping cheats." BBC Sport's Richard Conway After reports of widespread doping and questions over the validity of 146 Olympic and World Championship medals, athletics is fighting back. Lord Coe believes this is a seminal moment for the sport and in making this intervention, believes that information has been selectively used in this case. The Sunday Times has its say The Sunday Times then issued its own statement on Wednesday standing by its story and accusing the IAAF of being "disingenuous" by dismissing their story as sensationalist after spending "just two days conducting what it describes as a 'thorough' investigation". It also questioned the governing body's level of commitment, adding: "It only employs 10 people to oversee a testing regime covering thousands of athletes across more than 200 countries. "Its refusal to accept any criticism raises serious questions as to whether the IAAF is truly committed to its primary duty of policing its sport and protecting clean athletes." The two experts used by the Sunday Times said they "rebutted each and every one" of the IAAF's "serious reservations", saying their judgements were based on the "entire blood-test profile for the athlete not just on individual scores".

The next nation to win a first World Cup View On reddit.com submitted 2 years ago by malalatargaryen posted in /r/soccer Personally I think Colombia will be the next team to win a first World Cup, with lots of very good young players and a team that has looked very competitive in recent years (in senior and youth levels) - but there's the Netherlands (always the bridesmaid, never the bride), there's Portugal (great youth structure, and finally managed to win a trophy), there's Chile (who are no more the also-rans of South America), there's the USA and China (large populations and lots of money always help), and many more (especially, but not exclusively, in trophy-less Africa) - who do you think will be the next debutante World Cup champions? (The names of the nations on the poll are in alphabetical order - no intended bias towards or against any of them).

UPDATE: Both titles officially received bad news late Friday. The Agents of SHIELD spinoff is not happening at ABC “at this time.” And The Following is searching for a new home beyond Fox. There are dead shows, and then, like in The Princess Bride, there are shows that are “mostly dead.” As networks make a flurry of decisions in preparation for their upfront presentation to advertisers in New York City next week, there are a few big titles whose fates have been heavily rumored during the last 24 hours—yet still are not officially decided. The first is Fox’s The Following, which is not yet confirmed dead by the network. In fact, Fox isn’t confirming the fates of any of its bubble shows until its fall schedule is annonced next week. But things are not looking good for a fourth season of Kevin Bacon’s serial killer thriller. We’re told studio Warner Bros. is ready to search for a new home for the series. While there have been rumors that Hulu—which streams previous episodes of The Following and is also considering rescuing Fox’s The Mindy Project—is a candidate, we’re told the streaming outlet is unlikely to rescue the dark drama. With Stalker’s chances of renewal looking slim over on CBS, The Following’s cancellation would mean that EP Kevin Williamson wouldn’t have a show of his own on the air next season—he’s an executive producer on The Vampire Diaries, but that show really now belongs to Julie Plec and Caroline Dries. The Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. spinoff, which is in development and was to star Adrianne Palicki and Nick Blood, is rumored to be decased as well. Perhaps that renewal of Agent Carter meant S.H.I.E.L.D. not landing a second venture? Or maybe it was the backlash from vocal fans, who expressed that losing two of the best new characters on the flagship would be a mistake? ABC will not address the spinoff, while Marvel says it has not yet been informed of ABC’s verdict either way. Since the project is a spinoff of an ABC series, it seems very unlikely that Marvel could find another home for this Mockingbird-centered story if ABC indeed gives the spinoff a thumbs down. Obviously there are many regular bubble shows that are still awaiting a verdict, too—with the exception of a series order for Supergirl, CBS has been dead silent. But we’re in the thick of a frantic period of TV broadcasters making big decisions, so expect more series orders today—and some verdicts on existing shows, as well. Follow @jameshibberd and @natalieabrams for up-to-the-minute details.

Jay Z was the target of an alleged multi-million dollar extortion plot that was thwarted by the LAPD Friday (April 18), according to TMZ. Producer Chauncey Mahan worked with Jay Z from 1998 and 2002 was in possession of a number of Jay Z master recordings that Jigga and his associates assumed were lost. TMZ says the value of the recordings is estimated to be between $15 million and $20 million. The story says Mahan reportedly had the masters in a Northridge, California storage facility and contacted Live Nation, with whom Jay Z has a partnership for Roc Nation, regarding the recordings. Mahan, who worked with Hov on Vol. 3… The Life And Times Of S. Carter and The Dynasty Roc La Familia (2000- ), allegedly planned to put the tapes up for auction or return them to Live Nation for a $100,000 “storage fee,” TMZ says. When Mahan went to meet with Jay Z’s representatives Friday, he was met by the LAPD. He was detained and brought in for questioning. He also provided the LAPD with the recordings until a judge determines ownership of the recordings. Mahan was released and Jay Z’s representatives filed a grand larceny complaint with the NYPD Friday. The Beverly Hills police department is also investigating the extortion allegations, as Live Nation is based in the California city. RELATED: Jay Z Unable To Avoid Depositions In Roc-A-Fella Logo Lawsuit

For months leading up to the election, Trump’s faithful pressed that of all the amazing and wonderful things a Trump presidency would deliver, one of those things would be the end of the Affordable Care Act… aka… Obamacare. Anyone who has had to deal with Obamacare can tell you, without a doubt, that it is anything but “affordable.” Yeah. About that. President-elect Donald Trump said that, after conferring with President Barack Obama, he would consider leaving in place certain parts of the Affordable Care Act, an indication of possible compromise after a campaign in which he pledged repeatedly to repeal the 2010 health law. In his first interview since his election earlier this week, Mr. Trump said one priority was moving “quickly” on the president’s signature health initiative, which he argued has become so unworkable and expensive that “you can’t use it.” Yet, Mr. Trump also showed a willingness to preserve at least two provisions of the health law after the president asked him to reconsider repealing it during their meeting at the White House on Thursday Mr. Trump said he favors keeping the prohibition against insurers denying coverage because of patients’ existing conditions, and a provision that allows parents to provide years of additional coverage for children on their insurance policies. So the whole thing about repealing Obamacare is pretty much off the table, it seems. He’s going to “make adjustments.” That’s not a repeal. He did go on to say that some of his priorities would be deregulating banks to allow for lending and securing that border. A priority, but he didn’t really say what the plan was. The expected check to begin construction on the border wall hasn’t come in, yet. He said he would create jobs through nationwide infrastructure projects and improved international trade deals. He also said he would preserve American jobs by potentially imposing tariffs on products of U.S. companies that relocate overseas, thereby reducing the incentive to move plants abroad. That sounds “shovel-ready.” I’ve heard the phrase before, but I can’t quite remember where. The tariffs will likely kill the economy by driving up the price on goods, but until it happens, let’s just keep acting like Trump was a fine choice. It makes his fan base happy and it keeps everybody else off the ledge for another day. He deflected a question on whether he would follow up on a campaign vow to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate his election opponent, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, over her use of a private email server while secretary of state: “It’s not something I’ve given a lot of thought, because I want to solve health care, jobs, border control, tax reform.” Shorter: He had no intention of going after his friend, once the election was over. Mr. Trump declined to identify a single top priority upon taking office, saying: “I have a lot of first priorities.” He did say, though, that he would rely heavily on his vice president-elect, Mike Pence, who had a decade of experience in Congress before becoming Indiana’s governor. “Mike will have a big role. He’s very capable,” Mr. Trump said. He said he wanted Mr. Pence to handle “different areas of policy” and “be very much involved in health care.” He also said Mr. Pence would serve as his “liaison” with Congress, adding that he and House Speaker Paul Ryan are friends. On foreign affairs, Mr. Trump said he has spoken with or heard from most leaders except Chinese President Xi Jinping. He said he got a “beautiful” letter from Russian President Vladimir Putin, adding that a phone call between them is scheduled shortly. So Pence will be doing all the heavy lifting. I’m glad he got a “beautiful” letter from his man-crush, though. I’m sure that will go a long way in dispelling the uncomfortable rumors of collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin. He also suggested replacing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should not be a priority, but rather the focus should be on ridding the planet of ISIS. If he sticks to his past suggestions, he would rather we align with, or just let Russia take the lead there. *sigh* With midterm elections in 2018, Republicans are faced with a real dilemma. Can they hold on to the majority in the House if Trump proves either ineffective, or as the GOP version of Obama, making no actual moves to keep any of his campaign promises? Their refusal to stop him when they had the chance may come back to bite them, yet.

It is more than 40 years since I first read Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium. Published in 1957, the book deals with millenarian religious movements in late medieval and early modern Europe, but as Cohn makes clear, the millenarian mentality did not end with the waning of religion - 20th-century secular totalitarian movements exhibited similar patterns of thinking. Communists and Nazis alike anticipated a historic cataclysm, a rupture in history in which human life would be utterly transformed. Both were implacably hostile to conventional religion. And yet, as Cohn shows, they replicated an apocalyptic conception of collective salvation that was structurally identical to that of powerful strands in medieval Christianity. It was no longer God that would bring about the salvation of the world. "Humanity" - or a privileged section of it, thought to be especially progressive or racially superior - would initiate the miraculous transformation. While the content of belief had been modified with secularisation, the structure of thought had not changed. History was still seen in apocalyptic terms as a struggle between good and evil, which would end - though only after the most violent conflicts - with the victory of good. Reading Cohn's masterpiece left me with a suspicion of world-transforming political projects that has remained with me ever since. At the same time, I was convinced that no view of the modern world which neglects the persistent power of religion could be taken seriously - a view that events have only reinforced. Not only has religion not faded away, as secular thinkers expected, but repressed religious passions permeate secular politics, often with malignant consequences. When I came to know Norman Cohn, I was interested to learn that the book was triggered by conversations among captured Nazis on which he had eavesdropped as part of his work in intelligence during the Second World War. Though they knew their cause was lost, these Nazis took perverse comfort from a kind of negative eschatology. They had failed to create their racist utopia; but through their crimes, they believed, they had brought the old world to an end. In later books, notably Warrant for Genocide: the Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1966) and Europe's Inner Demons (1975), Cohn showed how this kind of eschatological thinking mixed with Christian demonology led to the great witch-hunts of early modern times, and eventually to the supreme crime of the Holocaust. It is impossible to understand 20th-century politics unless Cohn's insights into the religious origins of totalitarian movements have been fully absorbed, but the importance of his work extends well beyond totalitarianism. Eschatological thinking can have a malign effect in liberal democracies. To take only the most obvious example, an eschatological turn of mind lay behind a good deal of the support for the Iraq War. Sometimes this thinking was explicitly religious, as with the American Christian fundamentalists who supported the war as a prelude to Armageddon; but the same mentality was expressed by neoconservatives who saw regime change as the start of a "global democratic revolution", and by liberal interventionists who imagined that toppling Saddam Hussein would inaugurate a new world order ruled by human rights. In each case, the particularities of Iraq - its status as a composite state, created in colonial times and divided by deep-seated enmities - were ignored, and the risks of civil war and anarchy discounted. The warnings of history were lost in an epiphany of a new world. There is a line of reasoning which accepts that totalitarian ideologies were shaped by apocalyptic and utopian thinking, while insisting that liberal humanism is entirely different. They - the Nazis and communists - may have been deluded and irrational; we - enlightened meliorists - have purged our minds of myth. In fact, the belief in progress in ethics and politics, which animates liberal rationalism, is itself a myth: a view of history as a process of redemption without the Christian belief in a single transforming event, but nonetheless a faith-based narrative of human salvation. It is obvious that human life can sometimes be improved. Equally, however, such gains are normally lost in the course of time. The idea that history is a process of amelioration is an article of faith, not the result of observation or reasoning. Reading Cohn will not lead secular thinkers to relinquish their cherished myths. The need to believe in them is far more powerful than intellectual curiosity. But, for those who want to understand the origins of the conflicts of the past century and the present time, The Pursuit of the Millennium may be, as it was for me, a life-changing book. "Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings" by John Gray is published in March by Penguin (£20)

Follow John New EPA rules taking effect in six years could mean big pollution cuts in tractor trailers — and big diesel price increases, say the oil companies. It's pretty rare when a group of drivers begs a government agency to regulate them. But when it could avert what they think would be even worse regulations from another agency, anything's fair in love and war. The drivers in this case are the nation's long-haul truckers or, more precisely, the American Truck Dealers (which represents 2,000 dealers) and the Owner-Operated Independent Drivers Associations, which says it represents 156,000 truckers. LeSabre Semi Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a Republican member of the Cabinet, feigns being a blocking back for President Barack Obama as he arrives backstage to meet with GOP House leaders before speaking to their issues conference at the Renaissance Baltimore Harbor Place Hotel in Baltimore, Md., Jan. 29, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza; http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse) A state-by-state emissions framework could prove prohibitively costly to automakers DoT yes, EPA no! Last month, the groups wrote to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, asking him to fight a proposal to transfer fuel-efficiency oversight for heavy trucks from the DoT's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency. That legislation (contained in various bills to cap greenhouse gases, so far not enacted) would let the EPA regulate the fuel economy of medium- and heavy-duty trucks under the Clean Air Act, as it does now for light-duty passenger vehicles. The problem is that under legislation passed in 2007, the NHTSA has to evaluate not only the deleterious efforts of vehicle emissions, but also such economic issues as any possible job losses due to the new regulations, and the overall health of the trucking industry. NHTSA must look at jobs, industry health The EPA's mandate to keep the air clean does not include any of those provisions. Under current law, the NHTSA must issue its first regulations by 2016 or before after studying test procedures and methodologies to measure fuel consumption in heavy trucks. Language from the association treated the issue of potential job losses gently, but pointed out what many truckers feel to be an unavoidable truth: "An EPA heavy-duty truck fuel economy standard could result in significantly higher prices for new trucks." Well, yes, it could. But so could a NHTSA standard. In fact, it's entirely possible that the two departments would cooperate to set a single standard, regardless of which one issues it. Already working together It's already clear that under the Obama Administration, the two agencies are being told to work together on single standard, as they did for light-duty passenger vehicles Standing side-by-side with the Transportation Department, the EPA unveiled its final gas-mileage rules for 2012-2016 vehicles on April 1. That fulfilled a promise by the Obama campaign to bring both agencies and the automakers together soon after it took office. Single national standard The goal was to craft a single national standard for auto producers. Automakers had feared squabbling between the two agencies, leaving them without enough notice to make capital commitments to tool up for future fuel-efficient vehicles. The costs of complying with the tighter rules, which are estimated to save 1.8 billion gallons fuel, have been calculated at $52 billion. It's unclear if that is entirely incremental cost. The two agencies are now beginning to address a single set of standards for 2017 and later. Trucks: big polluters Trucks rack up far more miles than do passenger cars, with far lower fuel economy, so they produce a disproportionate amount of emissions for the actual number on the road. Historically, they have been far less stringently regulated than light-duty vehicles. But while a small number of pure electric vehicles will start to filter into the market over the next few years, long-haul trucking is expected to rely on fossil fuels--diesel or perhaps natural gas--for decades to come. [Detroit News]

(Image: Face covered via Shutterstock)The Los Angeles Times recently published a review of the new television series, “Deception,” a detective drama which features Meagan Good in the lead role. The author of the review, the Times’ television critic, Robert Lloyd, points out that this series is like another series, “Scandal,” in that both have an African-American woman in the lead (Kerry Washington is the lead in “Scandal”). “Still rare on network TV,” he adds. Two photos accompany this review in the newspaper, one an insert within the review, the other, larger, above the headline. Good is absent from both. Tate Donovan, one of the principals in the show, is shown in the photo – no one else. In the insert, we see a woman striding forward. The caption reads: “Bree Williamson plays Vivian in this series where secrets begin spilling almost immediately.” Lloyd is certainly correct in noting that it is rare for an African-American woman to play the lead in a television series. He should have added that it is also rare for women (and men) of other non-white ethnicities. But isn’t it also rare to see a review of a television series, or of a film or a play, where the lead is absent from accompanying photos? Actually, it is rare to see two photos accompany a television series review. This makes Good’s absence all the more noteworthy – and illegitimate. But why the absence? Accident? Inadvertence? Choice? Twice a year, The New York Times in its Sunday paper includes a thick magazine devoted to fashion, one issue is devoted to women, the other to men. In The New York Times Style Magazine: Fall Fashion 2012 (August 19, 2012), including the cover of Emma Stone, if one looks at every personage in either an ad (most of the pages are fashion advertisements) or a feature, every face is white until page 48 (with the exception on page 30 of the very light-skinned Nicole Richie) when a Brunello Cucinelli ad with five models includes one black male model, although with a light-brown scenic background, this model – of light-caramel complexion and in brown clothes – blends in to such a degree with the tableau that he isn’t altogether visible in terms of his role here as the first black model to appear in the pages of the issue. Not only that, but in the choreography of the staging, he is looking down so that he is the only model whose eyes the viewer cannot see. And then one must turn 19 more pages of white models before another black model appears in an ad by Tommy Hilfiger, where one finds one Asian female model and one black male model (of light skin) and of the ten models in the photo, the black model is the only one not looking directly forward toward the camera. And so it goes throughout the issue, where images of African, Asian, Native American, or Latino/Latina personages together appear, by the author’s count, on less than 15 percent of the pages (and much less often as actual advertisement models, as opposed to incidental appearances in small insert feature pictures, so that in terms of the prominent advertising copy, the percentage is much less – and the total would be still less again were it not for the fact that Lisa Kebede is featured in a photo shoot in the latter part of the issue. And in The New York Times Syle Magazine: Women’s Fashion (February 17, 2013), by the author’s count, black advertisement models appear on but three pages of the entire issue, Asian models on but four pages, and with the exception of the actor Edgar Ramirez, Latinos/as – and Native Americans – on none at all. And when starting from the front of the issue, one must turn page after page of white-only pages until one arrives on page 20, at a Louis Vuitton ad featuring paired Asian, black and white models in literal, mannequin-like poses and appearance, but the black models (dark-skinned here, breaking the prevailing norm whereby, in the case of those of African ancestry, it is light-skinned models who appear in these pages) and the Asian models are in full profile, the black models in the rear of the ad page, whereas the white models are in the foreground and are in partial profile so that their faces are the only ones seen in full. Of course, this paucity of faces and models of people of color has been the standard practice in these fashion issues and continues to be, as it is in fashion magazines in general. But if defective cars can be recalled, then such magazines, clearly defective, should also be recalled. These are neither new facts, nor new complaints, nor new criticisms, but nonetheless, I think it is essential and necessary to continue to examine and try to unveil, and certainly, denounce, the mechanisms which lead to such habitual occurrences. A decade ago, a film, After the Sunset, knew two different advertisement posters in its publicity campaign. The first advertisement featured the five principle actors – Don Cheadle, Pierce Brosnan, Naomie Harris, Selma Hayek and Woody Harrelson – in a circular arrangement. This advertisement poster was replaced with a new arrangement when the film was released. In this second poster, each of the actors was pictured in box frames horizontally across the top of the poster. However, in each of these two advertisement posters, something was missing. There were five actors, five faces, but only four names. Whose name was missing? Doubtless, Naomie Harris was the least known of the five principal actors. She was also a black woman. An accidental omission on the part of the production company? But accidents don’t happen in the construction of publicity posters. Time, effort, research and the like go into this construction. It is an exceedingly purposeful enterprise. A choice, then? Undoubtedly. One can imagine the producers of the film saying things like, “Naomie Harris is a newcomer and cannot open a film by herself or even in collaboration with other actors. The other principal actors are all well known and three of them, Brosnan, Hayek and Harrelson, have already opened films. Harris has taken a first step in having her picture above the credits. When she is better known, she’ll have her name above the credits too.” It is a reasonably imagined statement which lacks all reason … and for one very simple reason: what would have been lost, what would have been damaged, what difference would it have made if her name had been included beneath her picture? Nothing would have been lost or damaged. But something would have changed. Harris would not have been the object of an indignity and of a theft, the theft of her name and of her professional standing. Much effort goes into deciding what kind of advertisement should be used for a film. Different arrangements, different layouts are suggested. Doubtless, focus groups may be used to see which arrangement elicits the most positive response, etcetera. But no extra effort would have been required to add Harris’ name to the poster. There was room enough on each of the two posters to add her name without altering the tableau or its appeal. Did few people notice the absence of her name? But no one would have objected if her name were added. But what we do know is that a black woman was left nameless. And for nothing – because adding her name would have taken no more than the movement of fingers across a keyboard. Something substantial was stolen from Harris. And in this way, something was stolen from everyone who viewed that poster. The face’s name. Is it an accident that a black woman was the object of this theft? Accidents do happen. But when there is a pattern of continual “accidents,” then one must conclude that it is the pattern – and in this sense, a purpose (“on purpose”) – and not the accident, the aleatory, which should be singled out for focus and analysis and condemnation – and there must be a vehement insistence that it cease. More: the producers of After the Sunset could very well have left Naomie Harris’ picture off of the publicity poster (“She is not well known yet, etcetera”). In this way, there would have been no accident and, therefore, no pattern seemingly and practically sustained. But: they did choose to put her picture above the credits with the other actors. And with this addition, they incurred professionally and ethically – by any even minimum standard of equity and respect – the requirement and the necessity to include her name along with her picture. Because otherwise, they simply enact the display of a face and a body. They use a face and a body. And there is a name for such “use,” a name even worse than the exploitation this use represents. Some may object: “That was a decade ago, long ago.” Yes, but precisely because of that, Meagan Good, today, cannot be characterized as a “newcomer” whose time for appearing in photos of her own show can be reasonably delayed to a “future time.” Yet, one more prolepsis is necessary so as to make sure every possible claim that the absence of Good’s photo was “only an accident” has been addressed. In the smaller photo inserted in the review of “Deception,” the caption speaks of Bree Williamson (“who plays Vivian in the series”). But neither Williamson nor Vivian are mentioned in the review – which does mention all of the ostensible principals of the cast with a quick description of the characters they portray and the relation of the characters one to the other. The thought did run through my mind that Good’s photo was not excluded by virtue of purpose, but indeed by unassailable accident. Since neither Williamson nor her character are mentioned in the review, and since the caption only speaks of “the series” but doesn’t mention the title, perhaps this was a photo meant for another series. No. The caption says precisely what the review says: “secrets begin spilling almost immediately.” The review’s narrative content and one of its accompanying photos might not be perfectly aligned, and this “misalignment” might be an accident of inadvertence, but Good’s photographic absence is precisely present within a pattern whose secret was spilled long ago and which must cease immediately. Pattern. Some more glaring than others … A Los Angeles Times article during the same period as the appearance of After the Sunset reviewed the shows during fashion week. Two models, one black, one white, neither with international or national prominence, were pictured in two different photos, one photo larger then the other. The white model was in the smaller, less prominent photo. One model was named, the other was not. Was the missing name the model in the smaller, less prominent photo? No. The missing name was of the black model. Accident? Or the trace of a line of demarcation? But tracing the actual motive and determining whether or not it is determined by a distinction of color is not always easy to do. Every individual instance can in fact be the outcome of a “genuine accident” or some other idiosyncratic circumstance or happenstance: “Naomie Harris just happened to be the least well known.” But so long as accidents fit into the pattern, the pattern is something that illegitimately remains in existence – and therefore every accident cannot ever claim to being an accident. And so we arrive at something even more fundamental in relation to these absences. In the case of The Los Angeles Times and Meagan Good’s absence in photo accompaniments, and in the case of the film After the Sunset (and in all such other cases past, present, and future, alas) wasn’t there someone among all the editors and writers in the one case, or among all those at both the production company and the advertisement team, who could have noticed the absences? Didn’t someone notice? Perhaps someone did. But whatever notice might or might not have taken place, it was not enough to rectify the problem. But if no one noticed, then we have unveiled one of the mechanisms involved in the continuation of a historical and still present system of exclusion, if even by continual accidents which are not accidents at all. But if someone did notice, then we have also unveiled a key mechanism, because in this latter instance the notice would not have functioned with any effect at all, would not have functioned normatively for the person or persons who did notice. Their notice would not have included the only thought that necessarily must follow, namely that the indignity of the absence, the theft of the absence must be immediately annulled, must not be meted out, and even more that in this instance, a pattern, which is to say, a pernicious mechanism, a pernicious structure of harmful exclusion however small or “inconsequential” it may seem, must not and never again be reinforced. But if these latter thoughts did run through someone’s mind and that notwithstanding, Good’s appearance and Harris’ name were not added, then it tells us that we have even farther to go than we would have imagined. And if such thoughts did not take place at all it also indicates that we have … even farther to go that we would have imagined. But then, it is a given for anyone with the barest discernment that despite the consequential and laudatory civilizational advances initiated by the epoch of the “60s” (the period stretching roughly from 1955 to 1975) in relation to our species’ understanding of and desire to nullify the destructive patterns and socio-institutional forms of oppression, exclusion, discrimination, and prejudice regarding race, gender, and sexual orientation and regarding such patterns and forms in realms of the interpersonal, the family, the workplace, etcetera … we still have far to go. Either, both and all, alas. Yet, the pattern of “accidents,” the mechanisms and structures of continuing exclusion and inordinate disparity ought to be no secret at all to those involved in the perpetuation of such “accidents.” But the continuing existence of said patterns, mechanisms and structures means that none of the participants in the perpetuation of these social forms notices enough to care or enough to be affectively and ethically moved or to realize that every such exclusion, no matter how small and incidental, exists in relation to other small and incidental exclusions which, when added up, form a very large structure and one which harms not only the excluded, but harms everyone else, as well, in that it continues to allow us to live in a world where exclusion and disparity are continuing norms. And our comfort with these norms allows us all to not care enough and, each in our own ways, to not notice enough – and thereby this comfort, this illegitimate comfort, contributes to our failure to bring these circular patterns, mechanisms, and structures to an end. But still more, it must be stated that this not noticing or not caring enough is something that cannot be justified in any way at all. Because noticing is not an act or a state of consciousness (or conscience!) difficult to achieve. Such acts are no more difficult to achieve than the simple act of breathing, certainly given the social and socio-historical transformations that have taken place in the last 50 to 60 years of human history. In fact, the kind of noticing about which I speak should now be the simplest and most automatic kind of act and the kind of affective experience and ethical impulse that would have given us Naomie Harris’ and the aforementioned black fashion model’s names, Meagan Good’s photographic presence, and socio-institutional equities which we should not await but which, as the good itself, being neither a substance nor a goal, must always be enacted immediately, on the spot, now or never.

We’re always hearing how expensive it is to bring up a baby but this doesn’t have to be the case. You can afford that baby. If you’re thrifty and willing to compromise, there’s no need to blow the budget when your new arrival joins the family. Here are some tips on how to save money on baby items. 1. How vital is the item? The average list of baby-related must-haves is pretty scary but not all of them are vital essentials. If you’re new to the parenting world, it can be very hard to tell the difference between what you need and what are just fancy extras that are nice to have if you can afford it. Sound out people who have gone through the first year of parenthood and ask them which items they really needed. 2. Second hand isn’t necessarily inferior A lot of the things that you’ll be buying will only be in use for a matter of months so it makes little sense to buy everything brand new if you’re on a budget. Don’t be afraid to buy second hand items like baby mattresses where possible, but be sure to check that what you’re buying meets the relevant health and safety standards, especially for buggies and the like. Don’t look to buy used car seats though as you can’t be sure of their safety and whether they have previously been involved in an accident. 3. Delay your purchases as much as you can It’s tempting to rush out and start buying baby items from the moment that your pregnancy is confirmed but this will inevitably mean that you spend a considerable amount of money. If you know other people who have had kids in the last few years, you may well get given a lot of their cast-offs that they’re keen to get rid of. This can save you having to buy a lot of the basics and you can concentrate on filling in the gaps. For most parents-to-be, buying items on the off-chance that they’ll be needed means that they end up wasting a lot of money. If you’re brave enough, you might want to leave the items that you’re not sure whether you’ll need until after the birth so that you won’t waste money on things that you’ll never use. 4. Look for bargains Throughout your baby-related shopping, look out for sales and discounts that you can take advantage of. You can often save money by shopping online so it’s worth keeping an eye on what sales are on, even if your due date isn’t for several months. Shop around to make sure that you’re really getting the best deal. Having a baby doesn’t need to be as costly as is often claimed, and it’s definitely possible to save money in this area without compromising on your new-born’s start in life. Don’t feel that you’ll need to buy everything on recommended baby lists – if you talk to other parents, you’ll probably find that they wasted money and found that they were completely over-prepared. And if you want, check out Compare the Market. They can help you find 0% credit cards which will be really handy when making all of these baby purchases. Make sure you pay them off in full at the end of the month though, otherwise baby clothes won’t be your only worry. So, how have you saved money on baby costs? Please share.

Attack on Titan 2 Confirmed For PS4 And Xbox One, Other Platforms Undecided By Sato . August 24, 2017 . 3:00am Koei Tecmo recently announced that they’re working on a sequel to the 2016 action game, Attack on Titan, and it was confirmed that the game is coming to PS4 and Xbox One. When Attack on Titan 2 was announced Koei Tecmo didn’t provide any information on its platforms, but speaking to DualShockers, President and Chief Operating Officer Hiashi Koinuma, it was confirmed that the game is being made for PS4 and Xbox One. When asked about the possibility of a Nintendo Switch version, Koinuma said that they’re aiming to bring the game to as many anime fans possible, and while they’re not ruling out the possibility of a Nintendo Switch version of Attack on Titan 2, they can’t promise one either. Koei Tecmo is hoping to show more of the game as well as its final platforms announcement come October or November. Attack on Titan 2 is in development for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. You can check out its announcement trailer and first screenshots in our previous report.