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Rebecca "Beckie" Scott,[1]OC MSM (born August 1, 1974) is a Canadian former cross-country skiing athlete. She is Chair of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Athlete Committee, and served as an International Olympic Committee member by virtue of being elected to the IOC Athlete's Commission along with Saku Koivu between 2006 and 2014.[2] Career [ edit ] Beckie Scott during the torch relay for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, July 2012 Scott was born in Vegreville, Alberta, but grew up in Vermilion, Alberta. Supported by her parents, she began cross-country skiing at the age of five. She entered her first competition at age seven, and attended the Junior National Championships in 1988. She went on to win seventeen World Cup medals in sprint, individual, and relay cross-country skiing events. Scott is a three-time Olympian, participating at the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan, the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin, Italy. Her best placed finish in Nagano was 45th, but Scott won a gold medal in cross-country skiing at the Salt Lake City games. She originally finished third in the five-kilometre pursuit, but she was upgraded to the gold medal when winner Olga Danilova and runner-up Larissa Lazutina were eventually disqualified for using darbepoetin, a performance-enhancing drug.[3] Scott was awarded a silver medal before receiving her gold medal in June 2004, almost 2 and a half years after the Olympics ended. She became the first Canadian and first North American woman to win an Olympic medal in cross-country skiing. Scott is an Officer of the Order of Canada,[4] and has been honoured with a variety of awards in Canada. She has been inducted into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame, the Canadian Ski Hall of Fame,[5] and the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame. She holds an honorary Doctorate of Laws from the University of Alberta.[6] On March 29, 2005, Scott agreed to join the World Anti-Doping Agency's athlete committee.[7] On February 23, 2006, Scott was elected as an athlete member of the International Olympic Committee along with Finnish ice hockey player Saku Koivu.[8] Scott retired on April 12, 2006, as the most decorated Canadian cross-country skier. 2006 was also her best season, with multiple victories and podiums on the World Cup circuit, to go with her Olympic silver in one of her races in Turin, and she lost out on winning her first World Cup overall season title to the great Marit Bjoergen by the smallest margin. In September 2012 Scott was appointed to WADA's executive committee.[2] In September 2018, Scott resigned from the WADA compliance and review committee responsible for making a recommendation to end the Russian Anti-Doping Agency's suspension from WADA.[9] World Cup results [ edit ] All results are sourced from the International Ski Federation (FIS).[10] World Cup standings [ edit ] Season Age Season standings Overall Distance Long Distance Middle Distance Sprint 1994 20 NC N/A N/A N/A N/A 1995 21 NC N/A N/A N/A N/A 1996 22 NC N/A N/A N/A N/A 1997 23 50 N/A NC N/A 50 1998 24 33 N/A NC N/A 31 1999 25 44 N/A NC N/A 21 2000 26 15 N/A 21 20 9 2001 27 15 N/A N/A N/A 17 2002 28 22 N/A N/A N/A 10 2003 29 9 N/A N/A N/A 10 2004 30 16 23 N/A N/A 6 2005 31 18 22 N/A N/A 12 2006 32 2 3 N/A N/A 3 Individual podiums [ edit ] 4 victories 15 podiums No. Season Date Location Race Level Place 1 2000–01 14 January 2001 Soldier Hollow, United States 1.0 km Sprint F World Cup 3rd 2 2001–02 19 December 2001 Asiago, Italy 1.5 km Sprint F World Cup 3rd 3 2002–03 19 December 2002 Linz, Austria 1.0 km Sprint F World Cup 3rd 4 15 February 2003 Asiago, Italy 5 km Individual C World Cup 2nd 5 20 March 2003 Borlänge, Sweden 1.0 km Sprint F World Cup 3rd 6 2003–04 12 March 2004 Pragelato, Italy 1.0 km Sprint F World Cup 2nd 7 2005–06 10 December 2005 Vernon, Canada 7.5 km + 7.5 km Skiathlon C/F World Cup 2nd 8 11 December 2005 Vernon, Canada 1.5 km Sprint F World Cup 1st 9 15 December 2005 Canmore, Canada 10 km Individual F World Cup 2nd 10 17 December 2005 Canmore, Canada 15 km Mass Start C World Cup 1st 11 21 January 2006 Oberstdorf, Germany 7.5 km + 7.5 km Skiathlon C/F World Cup 1st 12 8 March 2006 Falun, Sweden 5 km + 5 km Skiathlon C/F World Cup 3rd 13 9 March 2006 Drammen, Norway 1.0 km Sprint C World Cup 2nd 14 15 March 2006 Changchun, China 1.0 km Sprint F World Cup 2nd 15 19 March 2006 Sapporo, Japan 7.5 km + 7.5 km Skiathlon C/F World Cup 1st Team podiums [ edit ] 2 podiums – (1 RL , 1 TS ) No. Season Date Location Race Level Place Teammate(s) 1 2000–01 13 January 2001 Soldier Hollow, United States 4 x 5 km Relay M World Cup 2nd Renner / Thériault / Fortier 2 2005–06 18 December 2005 Canmore, Canada 6 x 1.2 km Team Sprint C World Cup 2nd Renner Notable placings [ edit ] 1998 Olympic World Games (Nagano): 45th combined pursuit 2002 Olympic World Games (Salt Lake City): 1st in the Combined Pursuit 2003 World Championships (Val di Femme, Italy): 4th in Individual Sprint 2005 World Cup (Vernon, BC, Canada): 2nd in the Pursuit without a Break (first World Cup medal finish) 2005 World Cup (Vernon, BC, Canada): 1st in the Sprints (first World Cup first-place finish) 2005 World Cup (Canmore, AB, Canada): 2nd in the 10 km Interval Start 2005 World Cup (Canmore, AB, Canada): 1st in the 15 km Mass Start 2005 World Cup (Canmore, AB, Canada): 2nd Team Sprint with Sara Renner 2005 World Championships (Oberstdorf, Germany): 4th in Double Pursuit 2006 Olympic Winter Games (Turin): 2nd in the Team Sprint with Sara Renner, 4th Individual Sprint. 2006 World Cup Points (Season): 2nd overall

Today, we’ve released Opera 22 for Windows and Mac – a safe and highly compatible browser that gives you one of the best experiences of the web. Not only is Opera fast and powerful, it’s also beautiful. If you’re already running Opera, you will receive this update automatically. A new web browser with a fresh look We have gone through considerable effort to make Opera look slick and modern, while still blending in nicely with its surroundings. Since our browser was born in Norway, we decided to take Opera’s look a step further by selecting five new, inspiring themes that showcase the local scenery. They complement Opera and add a touch of Scandinavian style to your desktop. We hope you like them as much as we do! You can switch between these new themes by selecting Opera Menu → Themes on Windows: Or View → Show Themes on Mac: For an even greater selection, drop by the themes section of the Opera add-ons site. You can also set any image you find online as a theme by right-clicking on it and selecting Use Image as Theme. Silent, seamless updates It’s very important to update your browser regularly, to keep you safe and secure when surfing the web. To help, Opera releases a new version every few weeks. While updating is necessary, we know how annoying it can be to have windows popping up asking for your password just to update your browser. This is especially true when you are immersed in your favorite website. With Opera 22, we have introduced a new silent-update mechanism on Opera for Windows. This update will be the very last time you seen that irritating authentication dialog while surfing the net. From now on, you can browse away without distraction, and feel safe knowing Opera is always up to date and secure. We have also introduced a technology to reduce the size of the updates, which means that updating Opera uses less bandwidth. If you are interested in the technical details of these installer changes, read our earlier developer blog post. Key fixes and improvements New Default themes Silent updates on Windows (this will be the final release that displays the update dialog) Smaller updates to conserve your bandwidth Updated Chromium to 35.0.1916.114. For the long list of changes refer to the Opera 22 Changelog.

Because of a belief that academia skews too far to the left, the Texas Board of Education voted 10 to 5 in favor of buying history and social studies textbooks that adhere to a more conservative ideology. Here are some of the changes they are mandating: Inserting paragraph clarifying that the poor guy Rosa Parks wouldn't give up her seat for was on crutches and really needed to give his dogs a rest; also, he later died More focus on civic issues, particularly the separation of church and infidel Discussion of the debate between liberal and conservative geologists about what constitutes an "igneous" rock Tamping down traditional pro-Stalin stance Special ethnic world history appendix Expanded section on Latino contribution to American landscaping Dividing number of Vietnamese civilian casualties by two due to their small stature Christopher Columbus was for lower taxes but all the Native Americans he encountered wanted to do was spend, spend, spend

It won’t just be Britain that is doing the leaving after the Brexit vote. A number of large companies, particularly banks, are likely to pack up at least some of their workers and move them out of London now that the U.K. has voted to exit the EU. In all, the city that has long been considered the financial capital of Europe could lose as many as 40,000 workers in the wake of Brexit. Much of the exodus could come from the big U.S. banks. Foreign financial firms were some of the remain camp’s biggest backers, saying the consequences of voting to leave the EU would make London a less advantageous place to do business. Goldman Sachs spent at least $500,000 helping to fund the remain campaign. Goldman has 6,000 employees in London. It hadn’t said how many it may move out if the vote went for “leave.” Other banks have been more upfront in saying that they would have at least some of their staff exit London. Last week, Morgan Stanley said it would relocate as many as 1,000 workers if the U.K. was to leave the EU. Morgan Stanley now says it has no definite plans to relocate workers. J.P. Morgan Chase, prior to the vote, said it was likely to move 4,000 employees out of Europe. But on Friday morning after the vote, Dimon said JPMorgan was committed to keep a large staff in London. Still, he said J.P. Morgan is likely to move at least 1,000 people out of London. “For the moment, we will continue to serve our clients as usual, and our operating model in the U.K. remains the same, Dimon said in a memo to staff obtained by Business Insider. “In the months ahead, however, we may need to make changes to our European legal entity structure and the location of some roles.” In the past few years, banks have threatened a number of times to move workers out of London because of special bonus taxes and caps. Few firms have actually followed up on those threats. Many U.S. banks have set up shop in London because it gives them access to trade European markets without the restrictions that you face outside of the EU. John Cryan, Deutsche Bank’s CEO, has said it would be odd for his bank to trade the sovereign debt of EU nations from an office outside of the EU. Deutsche Bank has 12,000 employees in London, and it said it was looking to relocate a good portion. In the wake of the vote, Cryan, a Briton by birth, said it was a bad day for Europe. Even British banks are looking to leave Britain. HSBC, the most global of the large U.K. banks, said it was likely to cut as many as 1,000. Bank analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods have estimated that the big U.S. banks allow could move just over 7,200 workers outside of London. What’s more, Lloyds of London, the insurance firm, has said that a material number of the 34,000 employees in the insurance industry could be moved out of the U.K. PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimates that Brexit could cost between 70,000-100,000 financial services jobs by 2020. In all, there are around 360,000 workers in the City of London, which is the EU’s financial center. Nearly 11% of those people, or roughly 40,000, come from other places in the EU. While no-one even in the Leave campaign has raised the threat of forced repatriation, whatever the U.K. and EU agree among themselves in how to govern their relations in future is unlikely to make them feel more secure about their positions.

The lens that I watch baseball through has shifted many times. Growing up, the game was a thing I aspired to, a dream for my future. Somewhere along that path, the internet became a thing, and somehow, I ended up seeing baseball as a thing to write about, as I found community with other fans while I lived thousands of miles from where I grew up. Most recently, the way I see the game has begun to evolve again, as I have a son headed towards his second birthday, and I wonder what our relationship to baseball will be. Frequently, now, I think about how I’m going to introduce him to baseball, and what parts of the game might draw him in. Yesterday, the idea of showing my son how fun baseball can be got a bit more daunting, as the game lost its seminal ambassador for the sport as an opportunity to experience unbridled enjoyment. Yesterday, my son lost the opportunity to watch Jose Fernandez. Not just to watch Jose Fernandez pitch, but more importantly, to watch Jose Fernandez love the game of baseball. I present Exhibit A, which you’ve probably seen a thousand times before, but never gets old, and will now make me cry every time I see it. That wasn’t Fernandez’s reaction to winning a World Series, or making the postseason. That wasn’t even Fernandez’s reaction to winning a ballgame. That was Fernandez reacting to a Giancarlo Stanton home run that tied a game in mid-July of 2013, a day on which the Marlins entered play 34-57, the worst record in the National League. This was Fernandez celebrating the chance to go to extra innings in a game that, for all intents and purposes, didn’t matter. Jose Fernandez celebrated a home run he did not hit, in a mostly meaningless game, during a lost season, with more enthusiasm than I have ever celebrated anything in my life. That is among the most genuine expressions of joy I have ever witnessed, in any context. There’s just no faking that kind of unbridled response. That reaction was a portrait of who Fernandez was, and I’m devastated that we’ll never get to see it again. Can you imagine what it would have been like to watch Fernandez win a postseason game? Win a World Series? I can. I can imagine watching my son watch Fernandez pitch, and seeing him fall in love with baseball not because Fernandez was a remarkable talent — though he absolutely was that — but because Fernandez would show him that baseball was worth falling in love with. Could show him that baseball could be the most fun game on earth. The most fun thing on earth. I will have to continue to imagine that, because we’ll never get to see it. My son will never get to see Fernandez pitch live. More tragically, Fernandez’s own unborn child won’t get to even meet their father, maybe the most heartbreaking fact of this whole heartbreaking story. We’re losing Fernandez as a baseball player and a source of joy; his family is losing something much more than that. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch this video about Fernandez’s reunion with his grandmother. Warning: it’s going to make you cry even more. Your browser does not support iframes. I cannot imagine the pain they must be going through right now, the loss they must feel. It dwarfs any loss we have, those of us who didn’t actually get to know him except through a screen. But Fernandez’s joy was so unrestricted that even a screen couldn’t keep us from feeling it. And that joy for life and love of the game itself — more than the breaking ball that no one could hit, more than the strikeouts, more than the pure dominance as one of the best pitchers we’ve ever seen — is the legacy Fernandez really leaves behind. And that is what I am going to tell my son about Jose Fernandez. Not that we were lucky enough to see a superlative talent take the field for too short a time, but that we were given a walking reminder of what it is like to genuinely enjoy the life we are given. Of all the stories about Fernandez, and the great memories of time spent with him from those who knew the man behind the smile, one hit me harder than the rest. And it’s just a simple picture, but I can’t stop seeing it. This is my favorite photo. I took it after he got a W vs Dodgers. He grabbed chair, watched fireworks. A big leaguer but always kid at heart pic.twitter.com/QwDzQ1sKCx — Allison Williams (@AllisonW_Sports) September 25, 2016 Fireworks got old for me a while ago, but they obviously never got old for Jose Fernandez. And I’m jealous of that, in a good way. I can’t throw 100 or spin a breaking ball like Fernandez, but I can enjoy the small things in life the way he did. And I can tell my son that this is the kind of passion for life that is worth admiring. Fernandez’s enthusiasm and joy are what we all need more of in our lives, and what baseball needs more of in its future. As Harry Pavlidis said on Twitter today: we need a ‘player who most embodies the spirit and joy of baseball’ award named for Jose. Give it to Adrian Beltre this year. — Harry Pavlidis (@harrypav) September 25, 2016 Fernandez and Beltre are the best of what baseball offers. For all the “play the game the right way” arguments, there is no better way to play baseball than the way Beltre plays it, and Fernandez played it: with a genuine enjoyment of the sport we all love, and no desire to withhold that joy from anyone watching. We were lucky enough to get Beltre long enough that he’ll end up enshrined in Cooperstown, and generations of baseball fans to come will get to hear stories of how much fun he made the game. Fernandez might have joined him someday; he certainly had Hall of Fame talent. But now, it’s on us to keep Fernandez’s spirit alive, to pass on his infectious love of the game. And so, when my son gets old enough to watch baseball, we’re going to go on MLB.com, and we’re going to watch Fernandez pitch together. And we’re going to watch Fernandez rob Troy Tulowitzki of a base hit. We’re going to watch Fernandez hit a home run and admire it. And when we see the Braves get angry about Fernandez enjoying his first career home run a little too much for their taste, we’re going to watch Fernandez react like this. And we’re going to laugh together, as Fernandez laughed then. And I’m going to teach my son that it’s much better to be the guy who enjoys life too much than to be the guy trying to enforce the perceived proper enjoyment level upon others. I won’t have Jose Fernandez around to help teach those lessons in real time, but Fernandez’s passion for life and baseball did not end yesterday. I’m crushed that we’ll never get to see him play again, and heartbroken for his family, but I’m excited to tell my son about the guy who reminded me that baseball is worth loving. I’m excited for Jose Fernandez to still show my son that life is enjoyable. Thank you for your gift, Jose. I only wish we got more of it. A brief note from Jeff Passan, which seems too important to not mention. Jose Fernandez was deeply involved with @LiveLikeBella, a childhood cancer foundation. Please consider a donation: https://t.co/1h8thurR19 — Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) September 25, 2016 If we want to honor Fernandez, perhaps the best thing we can do is support the cause he supported.

Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Middleweight number one contender Chael Sonnen is familiar with controversy. To take it one step further, he's also no stranger to controversy that pertains to failed drug tests because of elevated testosterone levels. So it should shock no one that Sonnen, while doing his regular "Chael's Corner" segment on "UFC Tonight" this evening, came to the defense of Alistair Overeem, the heavyweight fighter who has recently found himself in the middle of a media melee because of his failed random drug test after a press conference for UFC 146. "The Reem" was set to challenge UFC Heavyweight Champion Junior dos Santos in Las Vegas, Nevada, on May 24, 2012. He still very well may do that, but his hearing with the Nevada State Athletic Commission (NSAC) on Apr. 24, 2012, will determine his status for the fight. In the meantime, Overeem is "innocent until proven guilty," a fact that Sonnen wants us all to remember: "Congratulations to MMA media, right when I think you're incompetence can't get to any higher level, the Alistair Overeem story comes out. You kids on the interweb, running your little 'dot com's' from the couch in your mother's basement, you beneficiaries of Mark Cuban's tax write-off, you've gone and screwed up the Alistair Overeem case, beyond belief. Is it repairable? I doubt it." Check out what else Sonnen had to say about "The Reem" and his failed test after the jump: "Hey. If I'm a member of the media and someone tells me that Alistair Overeem failed a drug test, the very first thing I'm going to say is: ‘Really? What substance did he test positive for?' Now, you see, those basic questions are where the wheels begin to fall off the bus to this entire story. Alistair Overeem did not test positive for anything. End of story. So why is his name getting drug through the mud? Why are they saying, 'Well, he's got an elevated T-to-E ratio. Ok, fair enough. Let's say his T-to-E ratio is outside the norm. That's not illegal. That's outside the norm. That's a red flag. That is a red flag, and Alistair will owe an explanation. If it's not against the rules, why are we having this conversation? MMA Media: Ya failed! It reminds me of a time when Ronald Reagan was President, and somebody in his cabinet had to stand trial. He gets acquitted and he says, 'Well, great. I've won the trial, but who do I see to get my reputation back?'" Of course, there are some valid points in his rant, but Sonnen isn't exactly approaching this story from an objective position. He may very well be right. Overeem may end up being vindicated, be totally clean, and the MMA community may owe him an apology. But, certainly, Sonnen should be able to see the reason(s) people are skeptical. Kenny Florian (a co-host for "UFC Tonight") made just such an argument against Sonnen's scathing tirade. He clearly isn't giving Overeem the same benefit of the doubt: "If you have common sense, you realize that is not a normal ratio. A male's normal ratio of testosterone-to-epitestosterone is 1-to-1. You have the Nevada State Athletic Commission that allows you to have a 6-to-1 ratio. Overeem's ratio is 14-to-1. How does it get there? Did it just happen, out of the blue? Is this guy just more superhuman than everybody else out there? No. That's happening because he's taking something. Alright? That's the only way you get there. You know, we'd all love to take this stuff. But what it does is, it gives you an unfair advantage because you can train harder, you can train longer, you can recover faster. To me, maybe I can get another 20 fights under my belt if I take this stuff, but I can't. I'm not gonna use it to fight another human. I think it's unfair. Something's going on there. At the end of the day, there is gonna be a legal meeting to determine whether Overeem fights or not. But, it's obvious -- he's taking something. " Are they both right, or are you picking a side in this debate? Who ya got in this debate? And do you think we'll actually see Junior dos Santos vs. Alistair Overeem come to fruition? For everything you need to know about Overeem, his abnormal T/E ratio, his upcoming NSAC hearing and so much more be sure to hit up our complete fighter archive right here.

Many of you are fed up with Left bias in the media. The US election campaign highlighted MSM prejudice against candidates who are patriotic, respect sovereign democracy, reject supranational rule and defend Western values. Google came under fire after Wikileaks exposed its involvement in the Democrat campaign. Repeated tests indicate its search engine produces heavily biased content. During the campaign, I compared search results for Donald Trump in Google, Bing and Yahoo. Google consistently returned the most hard Left content against Trump. Today, I decided to test it again. This time, I compared Google to a newer search engine (http://www.4conservatives.com) that highlights conservative content. I searched for “donald trump muslim ban” and posted a screenshot of the results above. As you can see, the difference is dramatic. Google’s search results are on the left and http://www.4conservatives.com on the right. Many of you have contacted me and expressed anger at the mainstream media for bias not only against Trump, but conservatives more broadly. I share your dismay at the state of affairs in much of the media. But instead of disengaging, try http://www.4conservatives.com. It’s a bit slower than Google because it searches the web and filters for Right-leaning content. You can imagine how long it takes to filter out all the PC dross. However, I have found a greater variety of content i.e. news and in-depth analysis from various conservative journals over a greater period of time. I’ll combine both search engines in my work and hope http://www.4conservatives.com will provide you with a more intellectually stimulating and politically diverse reading experience. At the very least, it’s a place where you’re not automatically smeared by the monotone Left as a bigot, racist, or some version of “phobe” simply for having views outside the PC box.

Official word arrived Thursday that the co-op that formed to figure out a path forward for iconic 50-year-old SoMa nightclub The Stud has succeeded in securing funds to purchase the business from current owner Michael McElhaney, with hopes to preserve the club and keep it alive for decades to come. Organizer Mica Sigourney, whose drag name is VivvyAnne ForeverMore, tells SFist, "We sent out a call to leaders in nightlife and were overwhelmed by the immediate and enthusiastic response. The co-op for me really is a dream team of creative and brilliant folks. I'm really looking forward to the future of nightlife with this team." Panic spread throughout the local LGBT community and a wave of eulogies began last month after McElhaney announced his plans to sell, as he faced a steep rent increase to $9,000, more than double what he'd been paying under two elderly, longtime property owners. The property recently changed hands, and with a monstrously large condo complex rising next door on what was for decades a surface parking lot used by Muni and Golden Gate Transit, it appeared The Stud's days were numbered. McElhaney says he's happy to be transferring ownership to the diverse and multi-talented co-op, saying, "If these awesome folks can't make it work, no one can." Supervisor Jane Kim has stepped in with some assistance, and she says in a release, "We can’t underestimate the importance of the Stud to the LGBT community. Not only has The Stud been the site of important artistic and political events, it currently serves one of the anchor business for the future Tenderloin/SOMA LGBT Heritage District." She adds, "I’m honored to be helping lead the efforts to make sure the Stud is open for another 50 years." The next step, says Sigourney, will be to sit down with the new landlords and secure a long-term lease, and the team is hoping that they will be able to leverage the history and legacy of The Stud in that negotiation. “We have the funding, resources and talent to make The Stud a profitable, successful business,” says Sigourney. “We hope the new building owner will give us the chance to sign a market value lease and allow us to keep this historic bar a space where everyone is welcome.” Our beloved clubhouse. The iconic STUD SF. Day of reckoning. A photo posted by Steve Fabus (@stevefabus) on Jul 3, 2016 at 12:31pm PDT Business at the venue, which has tended in recent years to be concentrated on the weekends, will naturally need to be boosted in order to make the new rent. This is where several members of the nightlife community come in who have joined in the worker-owned collective, including DJ and promoter Mark O'Brien, Swagger Like Us founder Kelly Lovemonster, artist and DJ Siobhan Aluvalot, and drag star Honey Mahogany, all of whom will be tasked with throwing new events at the venue, promoting them, and bringing in their various friends and fan bases. Also involved are several people with business, operations, and production experience, as well as former David Campos aide Nate Allbee, who helped Campos author the voter-approved Legacy Business Historic Preservation ordinance, which The Stud co-op will be leveraging as well. As I've discussed here before, The Stud has been brought back from the brink more than once over the years, and it feels right and necessary that it should be saved again, despite the unrelenting forces of real estate in a city like SF. “The real-estate market shows no signs of slowing down. If historic businesses are going to survive, our community will have to innovate,” says Sigourney. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.” Previously: The Stud Has Almost Died Before, And It Can Be Saved Again, If People Show Up

Loading ... Loading ... Just over a month ago we wrote about the curious case of Frank Ranelli of Alabama and the growing problem of asset forfeitures all across the United States. Ranelli, who owned a local computer repair shop in Ensley, Alabama, showed up to work one day in 2010 only to later be raided by local police who proceeded to confiscate thousands of dollars worth of assets. Nothing ever came of the case and despite no official charges and no jury trial, Ranelli, after 7 years of effort, has been completely unsuccessful in recovering the assets that officers took from his business. The morning of June 29, 2010, began much like any other day for Frank Ranelli, the owner of FAR Computers in Ensley, Alabama. Ranelli, who had owned his computer repair business just outside of Birmingham for more than two decades, was doing some paperwork in his windowless office when he heard loud banging on the front door. Within a matter of moments Ranelli was placed under arrest and all of the computer equipment in his store, much of which belonged to customers, had been confiscated by Alabama police never to be returned. Within moments, a Homewood police sergeant had declared a room full of customers’ computers, merchandise and other items “stolen goods,” Ranelli recalled. He ordered his officers to “arrest them all,” according to Ranelli, who was cuffed and taken to the Homewood jail along with two of his shop employees. The police proceeded to confiscate more than 130 computers – most of which were customers’ units waiting to be repaired, though some were for sale – as well as the company’s business servers and workstations and even receipts and checkbooks. “Here I was, a man, owned this business, been coming to work every day like a good old guy for 23 years, and I show up at work that morning – I was in here doing my books from the day before – and the police just f***ed my life,” he said. Now, new revelations from the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office illustrate precisely why asset forfeitures, and all the inherent conflicts of interest therein, are suddenly becoming a hot topic of debate all across the country. According to records obtained by Newsday from Suffolk County Comptroller John Kennedy, former DA Thomas Spota doled out a staggering $3.25 million – $550,000 more than originally reported – in “bonuses” to public prosecutors, from a pool of seized assets, without a single legislative approval. Newly disclosed records show Suffolk district attorney employees have received $3.25 million in bonuses since 2012 — $550,000 more than reported previously — as county lawmakers prepare for a hearing Tuesday on a bill to tighten legislative control over how proceeds from seized criminal assets are spent. Bonus recipients included deputy chief homicide prosecutor Robert Biancavilla, who received a total of $108,886 between 2012 and 2017, and division chief Edward Heilig and top public corruption prosecutor Christopher McPartland, who each received $73,000, according to records obtained from county Comptroller John Kennedy’s office through the Freedom of Information Law. The bonuses, which were funded from assets seized in criminal cases by the district attorney’s office, did not receive legislative approval. The original figure of $2.7 million came from documents provided by County Executive Steve Bellone’s office, which only included bonuses for top management employees. “Asset forfeiture money that comes into this county counts into the millions of dollars,” Calarco said. “That’s a lot of money to be spent at the sole discretion of an individual with no oversight.” Meanwhile, according to PIX11, these new revelations of potentially misrepresented bonus payments come after the former DA was forced to resign his post just a few weeks ago upon being accused of obstructing an FBI investigation that led to the conviction of former county Police Chief James Burke. Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota, who was indicted on charges that he helped cover up the beating of a handcuffed prisoner by a police chief, says he will step down from his post. “I will be leaving my post as district attorney at the earliest opportunity after the resolution of normal administrative matters relating to my retirement,” Spota said in a statement released by his office Thursday. “The governor will be notified of my decision today. The Chief Assistant District Attorney, Emily Constant, will thereafter assume my duties and responsibilities.” He said he has notified Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo of his decision. Spota, a Democrat, and the chief of his anti-corruption bureau, Christopher McPartland, are accused of obstructing an FBI investigation that led to the conviction of former county Police Chief James Burke. Both pleaded not guilty at their arraignment Wednesday in federal court on Long Island. But sure, elected officials are inherently trustworthy enough to work with local police to confiscate millions of dollars in cash and then unilaterally disburse those funds in a judicious manner…why would anyone think such a system would ever go awry? Source: www.zerohedge.com Help Us Be The Change We Wish To See In The World.

Russian Spy Met Trump Adviser Carter Page and Thought He Was an ‘Idiot’ Russian intelligence agents working in New York City met with Carter Page, a one-time foreign-policy adviser to President Donald Trump, and attempted to recruit the business consultant as a spy in 2013. While the effort was ultimately unsuccessful as the FBI broke up the spy ring in 2015, the meetings between Page and the Russian intelligence officers constitute one of the most substantive ties to date between a member of the Trump camp and Russian intelligence. Those meetings will likely add to the urgency of the multiple ongoing investigations of the administration’s ties to Moscow and the campaign’s possible coordination with Russian intelligence to tip the election in Trump’s favor. In a 2015 complaint describing the FBI’s investigation of the spy ring, Page is only identified as “Male-1.” BuzzFeed first reported that Page is the business consultant in question, and he has confirmed it. The new revelations will almost certainly mean more scrutiny for Page, an otherwise obscure figure who catapulted to prominence last year after Trump said the former investment banker was advising the campaign. In 2013, though, Russian intelligence took a dim view of Page. In the 2015 complaint that details an FBI investigation into a three-man Russian spy ring, the foreign agents describe their attempt to recruit Page, describing him as an ambitious climber eager to make money in Russia’s energy sector. “He got hooked on Gazprom,” Victor Podobnyy, an officer of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, told his boss, Igor Sporyshev. “It’s obvious that he wants to earn lots of money.” Podobnyy, officially an attaché to the Russian mission of the U.N., told the Page that he would work with Sporyshev, as Russia’s trade representative in New York, to win contracts for Page. “He went to Moscow and forgot to check his inbox, but he wants to meet when he gets back,” Podobnyy told Sporyshev on April 8, 2013. “I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am.” Podobnyy noted that Page wrote him emails in Russian “to practice,” and said “he flies to Moscow more than I do.” But Podobnyy never intended to deliver on those promises and instead pumped Page for information. “This is intelligence method to cheat, how else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor,” Podobnyy told his supervisor. “You get the documents from him and tell him to go f-ck himself.” According to a summary of the allegations against the Russian spies, Page provided Podobnyy with his views on the future of the energy industry, as well as related documents. Collecting such information about the Western outlook on the energy industry, the lynchpin of the Russian economy, would represent one key task for Moscow agents stationed in the United States. All three defendants in the complaint worked in the economics division of the SVR. Based on the FBI complaint, it appears Page never realized his Russian contact worked on behalf of Moscow’s intelligence services. In a statement to ABC News, Page said his contact with the Russian operative only consisted of sharing “basic immaterial information and publicly available research documents.” Page’s exact role in the Trump campaign remains unclear, and the White House has repeatedly sought to distance itself from the energy consultant. When Trump revealed Page’s involvement in the campaign in a March interview with the Washington Post editorial board, Washington foreign-policy hands didn’t know what to make of the man. A relative unknown, Page’s views were something of a mystery, and he lacked government experience. Since then, Page has emerged as a central figure in the shadowy relationship between the Trump team and Moscow. An advocate of closer relations between Russia and the West, Page travelled to Moscow for a July 7 speech. That trip is now a focus of congressional and FBI investigators examining whether the Trump lieutenants colluded with the Kremlin in its campaign to hack into American political institutions and leak the fruits of those raiding missions to boost Trump’s campaign. A dossier of unconfirmed intelligence reports authored by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, alleges that Page met with the head of Russian oil giant Rosneft Igor Sechin, considered to be one of President Vladimir Putin’s key deputies. According to Steele’s reporting, Page and Sechin discussed lifting sanctions imposed on Russia as a resulted of its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and support of pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine. Parts of the Steele dossier were summarized in intelligence briefings for then-President Barack Obama and President-elect Trump in January. In one of its most explosive allegations, the Steele dossier claims that Page also met with a member of the Russian government during his July trip. During that meeting, the Russian official, Igor Divyekin, allegedly revealed that the Kremlin had in its possession compromising information on Hillary Clinton and discussed releasing it to the Trump campaign. According to Steele, Divyekin may also have hinted that the Kremlin was also in possession of so-called “kompromat” on Trump, which Trump “should bear in mind in his dealings with” Russia. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

It's not just the bees that are harmed by controversial crop pesticides called neonicotinoids – the birds are also disappearing in places where there are high concentrations of the pesticide in the environment, a new study suggests. The study led by researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands compared concentrations of the neonicotinoid pesticide imidacloprid measured in lakes and other surface waters around the Netherlands to local changes in 15 farmland bird species from 2003 to 2010. They found that in areas where concentrations of the pesticide were more than 20 nanograms per litre, populations of birds such as barn swallows, tree sparrow and common starlings fell 3.5 per cent a year, compared to the average population trend for their species. They published their findings in the most recent issue of the journal Nature. Neonicotinoids were always regarded as selective toxins. But our results suggest that they may affect the entire ecosystem. - Hans de Kroon, Radboud University "Neonicotinoids were always regarded as selective toxins. But our results suggest that they may affect the entire ecosystem," said Hans deKroon, a co-author of the paper, in a news release from Radboud University. Neonicotinoid pesticides have been used since 1995 in the Netherlands and are also commonly used in North America. They are typically coated on agricultural seeds for crops such as corn and canola to protect the plants from insect pests such as aphids. Studies showing harmful effects of the pesticides in bees have prompted the European Commission to introduce a partial, temporary ban on three kinds of neonicotinoids, including imidacloprid, in Europe. Studies showing harmful effects of neonicotinoid pesticides in bees have prompted the European Commission to introduce a partial, temporary ban on three kinds of neonicotinoids. (Emily Chung/CBC) Neonicotinoids act as a neurotoxin for insects, but previous studies have shown they're not very toxic to birds. Because of that, the Dutch researchers think the decline in birds is probably due to pesticides unintentionally killing off the insects they rely on to feed their young during the breeding season. However, they said they can't rule out the possibility of other ways the pesticide may be affecting birds, such as through direct ingestion. According to a study published by Environment Canada researcher Pierre Mineau in 2013, at a single kernel of imidacloprid-treated corn can kill small and "blue jay-sized birds," and sicken larger ones. However, in the Dutch study, all the birds either ate exclusively insects or fed their young exclusively insects during the breeding season. Other factors tested In a video posted by Radboud University, de Kroon said his team "looked very thoroughly" for other possible factors besides neonicotinoid pesticides that could explain the results. "Our analysis shows that based on our data imidacloprid was by far the best explanatory variable for differences in trends between areas," he added. The researchers discovered the trend by looking at bird count data along with data about imidacloprid concentrations in waterways collected by the local water boards. While many bird species started declining before farmers started using imidacloprid in 1995, local differences in their decline didn't appear until after that time. In an analysis piece accompanying the paper in Science, University of Sussex biologist Dave Goulson, who studies bees and other insects, noted that only five per cent of imidacloprid applied to crops is actually taken up by the crops themselves. The rest blows away or gets washed into waterways, and may get taken up by other plants. A number of other researchers have previously suggested that neonicotinoids could be having a negative effect on birds, including Mineau and University of Saskatchewan biologist Christy Morrissey. On mobile and can't see the video below? Click here.

I've been intrigued by the new Handoff capability in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite since I saw it demoed in June at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. It's a brilliant idea: Let apps notice when they're running on another device you're using and offer to transfer the activity to them. For example: Entering an email on your Phone? Your Mac or iPad can pick up the email you're working on, so you can finish on a larger screen and keyboard. But what's it like in practice? Now that iOS 8 is shipping and I have several devices compatible with Handoff, I've been seeing what it can do. The quick answer: When it works, it's great, but there aren't enough apps to take full advantage of it yet. Also, it seems flaky on OS X. First, you should know what is compatible with Handoff: iOS devices with a Lightning connector along with 2012-or-later Mac models support Handoff. Both have the radio chips that support both Bluetooth Low Energy and Wi-Fi Direct. If your device is compatible, you enable Handoff in the General system preference on your Mac and General pane of the Settings app in iOS; in both cases, look for an option that includes the word "Handoff." All the devices have to be signed into the same iCloud account -- Handoff doesn't work with other users. (That's what AirDrop is for.) Finally, make sure both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are turned on for all devices. Right now, the apps that work with Handoff are Mail, Calendar, Messages, Notes, Reminders, Maps, Safari -- all from Apple -- and the third-party GoodReader. (If there are others, I haven't found them.) [Oct 16 update: Apple Keynote, Numbers, and Pages now support Handoff.] Using Handoff is easy enough: Open a compatible app one on device, and a few seconds later any compatible devices within Bluetooth range detect that it's running and offer to pick up the activity, if they have the same app. The offer is subtle: The app's icon appears in the lower-left corner of the lock screen or on the left side of the App Switcher (double-press the Home button to open the App Switcher, then swipe left). iOS 8's Handoff feature shows apps available for handing off their activity in the left side of the App Switcher (left) and the bottom left of the lock screen (right). The Handoff feature in OS X Yosemite -- when it works -- shows the available app on the left side of the Dock. In iOS, Handoff works great. The icon appears within seconds, and the handoff is fast. Although you need Wi-Fi turned on, you don't need a Wi-Fi network. After the devices handshake via Bluetooth, the actual transfer happens over a Wi-Fi Direct connection between the devices -- no router or access point. I could hand off work when my iPhone and iPad were on the same Wi-Fi network, on different networks, and when there were no networks around (such as on my train ride). Note that I couldn't always hand off data when there was no Wi-Fi network nearby -- sometimes I got error messages after the Bluetooth part was complete. But it worked most of the time in such networkless environments, and it always worked when I had a Wi-Fi network connection. This means you can work on, say, a long email or detailed set of notes on your iPad and use Handoff to send that information to your iPhone, which then transmits via a cellular Internet connection. Or you could send a live map or Web page from your iPhone to your non-cellular iPad. It's like on-demand tethering without a carrier tethering plan. But in OS X Yosemite's public beta, Handoff is balky, rarely working. It rarely sees Handoff apps running on iOS devices, and they rarely see Handoff apps running in OS X -- I've succeeded in making it work only a handful of times. We'll see if Handoff works as smoothly in the final version of OS X Yosemite -- likely to ship in a couple weeks -- as it does in iOS 8. And Handoff would be even more useful if apps like iWorks and Microsoft Office adopt it. I suspect Apple will Handoff-enable iWork quickly after OS X Yosemite's release, but it's probably a hard sell for Microsoft, which really wants you to use its operating systems instead. I recognize that passing documents over a direct handoff can lead to duplicate files. That's an issue with iWork, though not with server-based apps like Reminders or Mail, or with snippet-based apps like Safari and Maps. For document-oriented apps like iWork or iMovie, Handoff would need to coordinate with iCloud Drive to use the cloud master file if available, and reconcile the local versions if there's no Internet connection available to connect to iCloud. iCloud Drive does that anyhow behind the scenes, so as long as iCloud Drive knows which version is latest, this Handoff/iCloud cooperation should work. Anyhow, I really like Handoff: It's brought a convenience I didn't know I wanted. Now I want more.

An ad for the Superland amusement park. One incident of racism, though small in relation to the decades of massive, institutionalised discrimination exercised by Israel against its Palestinian Arab citizens, has triggered an uncharacteristic bout of Israeli soul-searching. Superland, a large amusement park near Tel Aviv, refused to accept a booking from an Arab school on its preferred date in late May. When a staff member called back impersonating a Jew, Superland approved the booking immediately. As the story went viral on social media, the park’s managers hurriedly offered an excuse: they provided separate days for Jewish and Arab children to keep them apart and prevent friction. Government ministers led an outpouring of revulsion. Tzipi Livni, the justice minister, called the incident a “symptom of a sick democracy”. Defence minister Moshe Yaalon was “ashamed”. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that the “racist” policy be halted immediately. Such sensitivity appears to be a reaction to an explosion of popular racism over the past few months against the one in five Israelis who belong to the country’s Palesinian Arab minority. Some Israeli Jews have started to find the endless parade of bigotry disturbing. Israeli TV recently revealed, for example, that a group of children with cancer who had been offered a free day at a swimming pool were refused entry once managers discovered that they were Bedouin. According to another TV investigation, Israel’s banks have a secret policy of rejecting Arab customers who try to transfer their accounts to a branch in a Jewish community, even though this violates banking regulations. The settlers, whose violence was once restricted to setting fire to the crops of Palestinians or rampaging through their villages in the West Bank, are now as likely to attack Arab communities inside Israel. Torched mosques, offensive graffiti on churches and cars set ablaze in so-called “price-tag” attacks have become commonplace. Similarly, reports of vicious attacks on Arab citizens are rapidly becoming a news staple. Recent incidents have included the near-fatal beating of a street cleaner, and a bus driver who held his gun to an Arab passenger’s head, threatening to pull the trigger unless the man showed his ID. Also going viral were troubling mobile-phone photos of a young Arab woman surrounded by a mob of respectable-looking commuters amd shoppers while she waited for a train. As they hit her and pulled off her hijab, station guards looked on impassively. However welcome official denunciations of these events are, the government’s professed outrage does not wash. While Netanyahu and his allies on the far right were castigating Superland for its racism, they were busy backing a grossly discriminatory piece of legislation the Haaretz newspaper called “one of the most dangerous” measures ever to come before the parliament. The bill will give Israelis who have served in the army a whole raft of extra rights in land and housing, employment, salaries, and the provision of public and private services. The catch is that almost all of the country’s 1.5 million Palestinian citizens are excluded from military service. In practice, the benefits will be reserved for Jews only. Superland’s offence pales to insignificance when compared to that, or to the decades of state-planned and officially sanctoned discrimination against the country’s Palestinian minority. An editorial in Haaretz this month observed that Israel was really “two separate states, one Arab and one Jewish. … This is the gap between the Jewish state of Israel, which is a developed Western nation, and the Arab state of Israel, which is no more than a Third World country.” Segregation is enforced in all the main spheres of life: land allocation and housing, citizenship rights, education, and employment. None of this is accidental. It was intended this way to guarantee Israel’s future as a Jewish state. Legal groups have identified 57 laws that overtly discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian citizens, with a dozen more heading towards the statute books. Less visible but just as damaging is the covert discrimination Palestinian citizens face every day when dealing with state institutions, whose administrative practices find their rationale in the entrenchment of Jewish privilege. This week a report indentified precisely this kind of institutional racism when it found that students from the country’s Palestinian minority were confronted by a series of 14 obstacles not faced by their Jewish compatriots that contributed to denying them places in higher education. The wave of popular prejudice and racist violence is no accident either. Paradoxically, it has been unleashed by the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric of rightwing politicians like Netanyahu, whose constant fearmongering casts Palestinian citizens as disloyal, a fifth column and a demographic threat to the state’s Jewishness. So why if the state is so committed to subjugating and excluding Palestinian citizens, and Netanyahu and his ministers so determined to increase the weight of discriminatory legislation, are they decrying the racism of Superland? To make sense of this, one has to understand how desperately Israel has sought to distinguish itself from apartheid South Africa. Israel cultivates, as South Africa once did, what scholars term “grand apartheid”. This is segregation, largely covert and often justified by security or cultural differences, to ensure that control of resources remains exclusively in the hands of the privileged community. At the same time, Israel long shied away from what some call South Africa’s model of “petty apartheid” – the overt, symbolic, but far less significant segregation of park benches, buses and toilets. The avoidance of petty apartheid has been the key to Israel’s success in obscuring from the world’s view its grand apartheid, most obviously in the occupied territories but also inside Israel itself. This month South Africa’s departing ambassador to Israel, Ismail Coovadia, warned that Israel was a “replication of apartheid”. The idea that the world may soon wake up to this comparison deeply unnerves Netanyahu and the right, all the more so as they risk being identified as the party refusing to make concessions towards peace. The threat posed by what happened at Superland is that such incidents of unofficial and improvised racism may one day unmask the much more sinister and organised campaign of “grand apartheid” that Israel’s leaders have overseen for decades. A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.

Voters head to the polls in the 2016 D.C. Primary Election. Here's what you need to know. WASHINGTON — Democrats in D.C. will head to the polls on Tuesday to choose their party’s nominee for president and for several District Council seats. Republicans and the D.C. Statehood Green party will also hold a primary but have no contested races. D.C. Republicans will also choose ward chairs and national committee candidates. Find a sample ballet specific to a party or ward on the D.C. Board of Elections site. When and where to vote The polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. Voters can find their polling location here. Voters who have moved within the District but have not updated their voter registration information will have to vote at the precinct associated with their old address, said election board spokeswoman Margarita Mikhaylova. New mobile app The D. C. Board of Elections has a new mobile app that voters can use to look up information on Election Day. The board’s mobile app is free and available in the app store for iPad and iPhone users and in the Google Play store for Android device users. Search for “Vote4DC” to download the app. PC users can download the app using any web browser here. New voting equipment The 2016 primary election marks the first time that D.C. voters will use new voting equipment. The new system is expected to speed up check-in for voters and provide faster vote tabulation, board spokeswoman Mikhaylova said. The new equipment still uses an optical scan machine that tabulates votes. But the ballots can either be marked with a pen or with the help of a new device that will guide voters with disabilities through the ballot, mark their choices and print out a completed ballot. The new equipment will also allow poll workers to wirelessly transmit election results from precincts to the board once the polls have closed. That should speed up the vote-counting process, Mikhaylova said. Election workers will check in voters using an electronic poll book access on an iPad. Election workers will be able to scan Department of Motor Vehicles-issued ID cards or voter registration cards to pull up the correct voter instantly. They can also use the manual search option to quickly identify voters. On Election Day, election workers will also be able to direct voters who show up at the wrong polling place to the correct one. Voters will still submit a signature, but they will sign the tablet instead of a paper poll book, Mikhaylova said. The electronic poll books have streamlined the check-in process during early voting, she said. About 15,000 voters cast their ballots as of late Friday afternoon. Early voting ended Saturday. More than 300,000 registered voters are eligible to vote Tuesday. Races on the ballot for all wards President Democratic voters throughout the District will choose a candidate to nominate for president — the last primary in the nation. Although both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have secured enough delegates to secure their party’s nomination, Bernie Sanders is still actively campaigning in D.C. Here are the candidates: Hillary Clinton “Rocky” Roque De La Fuente Bernie Sanders D.C. Republicans cast their ballots in the presidential contest in March. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio won 10 delegates and Ohio Gov. John Kasich won 9 delegates. Both candidates have since ended their campaigns. US. House of Representatives Democrats will choose a delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives in this year’s primary election. Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton is running for re-election unopposed. She’ll face Statehood Green candidate Natale Stracuzzi in the fall. Republicans have not selected a candidate for the seat. D.C. Council At-Large Voters across the District will choose a candidate for one at-large council seat. Here’s a look at the race broken down by party. Democrats: David Garber Vincent Orange- incumbent Robert White Republicans: Carolina Celnik Statehood Green: G. Lee Aikin U.S. Representative “Shadow Representative” For Democrats, Franklin Garcia is running for the shadow representative position unopposed. Republicans have not put forward a candidate. Ward 2 For Democrats, current Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans is running unopposed. Republicans have not put forward any candidates. Ward 4 For Democratic voters, the following candidates are on the ballot: Leon T. Andrews Jr. Ron Austin Calvin H. Gurley Brandon Todd — incumbent Ward 7 Former Mayor Vincent Gray is hoping for a political comeback and to win back his old seat on the Council. He lost his 2014 re-election bid in a primary challenge to Mayor Muriel Bowser amid the then ongoing federal investigation into his campaign finances. The investigation wrapped up last year after the U.S. attorney’s office said that Gray would not face any charges. He will challenge current Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander. For Democratic voters, the following candidates are on the ballot: Yvette Alexander — incumbent Delmar Chesley Vincent Gray Grant Thompson Ward 8 For Democratic voters, the following candidates are on the ballot: Maurice T. Dickens Bonita Goode Aaron Holmes LaRuby May — incumbent Trayon White WTOP’s Amanda Iacone contributed to this report. Follow @WTOP on Twitter and like us on Facebook. © 2016 WTOP. All Rights Reserved.

FRISCO, Texas (Friday, Feb. 20) – FC Dallas downed DC United, 3-1, tonight in a preseason match at Toyota Stadium. FC Dallas nearly unlocked DC United’s defense in the eighth minute when Mauro Diaz played a cutting pass to the back post for right back Atiba Harris. The defender timed his run well and played a first-touch pass into the area for Ryan Hollingshead to finish, but the second-year midfielder was unable to keep his shot on frame. The teams took turns possessing the ball for 10 minutes apiece with no major scoring opportunities until Michel was shown a straight red card in the 23rd minute for a studs-up tackle on Sean Franklin. Despite the disadvantage, FC Dallas struck three minutes later on a beautiful goal orchestrated by left back Moises Hernandez. The defender came forward and combined with Fabian Castillo on the left flank. After receiving the return pass, Hernandez played a left-footed cross to the back post for Blas Perez. The Panamanian forward rose above his marker at the far corner of the six-yard box and headed a pass back across the face of goal to Hollingshead, who roofed the shot with his first touch to score his third goal of the preseason. DC United tied the match, 1-1, in the 62nd minute on a goal scored by substitute Jairo Arrieta. After coming on for Chris Pontius in the 57th minute, Arrieta quickly established himself as a threat. The forward got on the end of a cross by Perry Kitchen in the 60th minute, but his header caught too much of the back post and was cleared away from danger. Just two minutes later, Arrieta finished off the chance at the same post after being set up by Nick DeLeon and Bobby Boswell. FC Dallas responded in the 79th minute when Hollingshead knocked a pass to the top of the area for substitute Tesho Akindele. With his back to goal, Akindele flicked a heel pass into the path of Castillo and the Colombian did the rest. Cutting through the middle of two defenders, Castillo poked a pass to himself, went around a third defender and beat DC United goalkeeper Andrew Dykstra to the loose ball before pushing an easy shot into the back of the net for the 2-1 lead. Akindele used his speed to earn FC Dallas a penalty kick in the 88th minute. After being brought down from behind in the box, the reigning MLS Rookie of the Year stepped up and finished off the penalty kick with a hard shot over the right shoulder of Dykstra to make it a 3-1 final. Scoring Summary: DAL – Ryan Hollingshead (Blas Perez, Moises Hernandez) 27 DC – Jairo Arrieta (Nick DeLeon, Bobby Boswell) 62 DAL – Fabian Castillo (Ryan Hollingshead, Tesho Akindele) 79 DAL – Tesho Akindele (PK) 88 FC Dallas – Dan Kennedy, Moises Hernandez, Walker Zimmerman, Matt Hedges, Atiba Harris, Victor Ulloa, Michel, Fabian Castillo (Kyle Bekker 89), Mauro Diaz, Ryan Hollingshead, Blas Perez (Tesho Akindele 69). Substitutes Not Used: Jesse Gonzalez Total Shots: 11 (Fabian Castillo 3); Offsides: 0; Corners 4; Saves: 2 (Dan Kennedy, Jesse Gonzalez 1). D.C. United – Andrew Dykstra, Sean Franklin, Bobby Boswell, Steve Birnbaum, Taylor Kemp, Perry Kitchen, Davy Arnaud (Connor Doyle 87), Nick DeLeon (Michael Aguilar 77), Chris Rolfe, Chris Pontius (Jairo Arrieta 57), Fabian Espindola. Total Shots: 8 (Nick DeLeon 2); Offsides: 2; Corners: 1; Saves: 5 (Bill Hamid 5). Misconduct Summary: DAL – Michel (ejection) 23 DAL – Walker Zimmerman (caution) 52 DC – Davy Arnaud (caution) 56 DAL – Blas Perez (caution) 60 DC – Jairo Arrieta (caution) 61 DC – Fabian Espindola (caution) 78 Referee: Armando Villarreal Referee’s Assistants: Jeff Greeson, Mike Kampminart Fourth Official: Michael Tomlinson Weather: Cloudy, 66 degrees FC Dallas head coach Oscar Pareja On the game being chippy… It says a lot about the dedication that we put into the exercise. Not that we want that to happen, but sometimes for both teams, it was very hard to keep them away. Despite not playing for points, they were putting everything on the field. So, the game going like that was normal competitors trying to make things happen. I thought it was very real today. It was not just an exhibition. It was people playing for pride and I like that. On playing with 10 men… It wasn’t in the plan to play with 10 men for 70 minutes, but we took the best out of that exercise against a very good team. We were tested today. Our fitness was tested. The strength, mentally and physically, was tested too for players who I needed to get that job done. It was very well accomplished by people like Mauro who played 90 minutes in a position that demands a lot of running. Victor (Ulloa), Blas (Perez), Fabian (Castillo), Ryan (Hollingshead)… the back four, held us for very long with a zero. So, it was good. I was very pleased. FC Dallas defender Atiba Harris On playing with 10 men tonight... It's always difficult playing down a man, but it's preseason and it was the perfect opportunity to test ourselves. It wasn't the prettiest game, but we stuck together physically, mentally, and we came through with the result. On the process of converting from midfielder to right back.... When Oscar called and made the proposal, I told him I was 100 percent committed. I wanted to be back in Dallas, and through the preseason I've just been getting more and more comfortable in this position. FC Dallas defender Moises Hernandez On the first goal (his cross to Perez)… We were working on that a lot in practice this week… Those give-and-go’s where I’d give the ball to Fabian (Castillo) and he’d give it back to me. On that play, I overlapped and he found me. I crossed it to the back post. Blas (Perez) did well to get to the back post and fortunately we got a goal out of it. Talk about playing against DC United two matches in a row... It got a little feisty there. We played them last week. We wanted to get that win. Playing them back-to-back was good for us because last game was kind of tough. We knew this game would be intense. We are just happy we got the win today in front of our home crowd. What was the biggest difference between the two games? I felt like we were more prepared this time around. We practiced a lot on the things we felt we needed to improve after last match. I felt like we did things well. We played with 10 men most of the game and still were able to be dangerous. That’s going to help us out. It shows that we have a lot of character. On Mauro Diaz… Mauro (Diaz) is a great player. He helped us a lot on both sides of the ball. I noticed him a lot when we were defending. He worked hard defensively. Having Mauro healthy there in the middle helps the team a lot.

By Darryl Howerton #21 Welcome to the seventh annual NBAge Draft Rankings 2017 where we rate the best prospects and compare them to the NBA general managers’ picks as the years go by, using win shares as the defining criteria to who drafted better. Through the previous six NBA Drafts, we have outperformed NBA GMs by 226.2 win shares, scoring our best with lottery picks (57-percent edge and a +438.2 win-shares advantage) and overall first-round selections (53-percent edge and a +330.3 win-shares advantage). To review our past rankings, just click on any of the following links with the corresponding draft (2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016). Again, this top 50 list is not a mock draft where we predict the draft order. We are rating the best prospects in our humble opinion. This is our recommendation on the prospects that NBA GMs should be drafting. Listed below, you will note that players are also ranked according to birth year and given a results-based Projected Plus-Minus score on how they should fare by age 23. 1. Zach Collins Power Forward/Center 6-10, 232 Gonzaga 20 years old (11/19/97) 1st in Class of 1997 (+3.23 PPM) Collins is the best all-around player in the draft, with an elite defensive skill set that makes him both a quality rim protector (4.1 blocks per 40 minutes) as well as a nimble pick-and-roll defender, boasting an individual 79.4 defensive rating (team points allowed per 100 possessions while on-court) at Gonzaga as a freshman. His per-40 points and rebound averages (23.2 and 13.6) forecast offensive production, but it is Collins’ efficiency that has smart GMs swooning over his potential (.703 true shooting percentage, which includes 10-of-21 makes on his occasional three-point shot attempts). It is tough to find fault with a defensive anchor that makes 74 percent of his free throws, 67 percent of his two-point attempts and 48 percent of his college three-pointers. Weakness: Over-aggressiveness leads to foul trouble (6.2 fouls per 40 minutes). 2. Sindarius Thornwell Shooting Guard 6-4, 212 South Carolina 22 years old (11/15/94) 9th in Class of 1994 (+1.29 PPM) Thornwell is the most NBA-ready player in the 2017 NBA Draft, having an old-school game that translates well to an NBA starter role. The 2 guard became a prolific scorer in his senior season, leading South Carolina to the Final Four, while averaging 25.2 points per 40 minutes. Thornwell was efficient from all over the court (.591 true shooting percentage), making 40 percent of his 8.0 three-point attempts per game. He was especially comfortable scoring and creating in the paint, with a mid-range touch complemented by a basketball IQ that served him well as a QB in the key. His 6-10 wingspan also allowed him to rebound (8.4 boards per 40) and score amongst the bigs, while his defensive wiles enabled him to guard multiple positions. Weakness: 3.3 to 2.9 assist/turnover ratio per 40. 3. Tony Bradley Power Forward 6-9, 249 North Carolina 19 years old (1/8/98) 6th in Class of 1998 (+0.57 PPM) Though Bradley only played 15 minutes per game as a freshman on North Carolina’s NCAA championship team, the Tar Heel teen excelled in his role. Looking at Bradley’s per-40 minute stats, it is obvious he could score (19.5 points), rebound (14.0 boards) and dominate the paint game (57 percent on two-pointers) while coming off the bench. This spring, the power forward has showed NBA scouts he also can hit midrange jumpers consistently, something he was not asked to do in his short time in college. Bradley’s 7-5 wingspan also helped him become a reliable defender where he netted 1.6 blocks per 40 minutes. After a few years of seasoning, he should prove to be a reliable NBA starter on both sides of the ball for years to come. Weakness: Bradley only made 61 percent of his free throws. 4. Lonzo Ball Point Guard 6-6, 190 UCLA 19 years old (10/27/97) 7th in Class of 1997 (+0.44 PPM) Ball uses size and deceptive athleticism like a fastball pitcher uses changeups, keeping his opponent off-balance at all times. Ball, like so many standout point guards nowadays, has triple-double potential in his well-balanced game of scoring-rebounding-playmaking, averaging per-40 minute stats of 16.6 points, 6.8 rebounds and 8.7 assists. His angular cross-body shot release may have trouble translating to the NBA, but it worked at UCLA, with Ball knocking down 41 percent of his college 3s and 73 percent of his 2s. Ball’s transition defense is scary—with his defensive length and open-court playmaking—while his halfcourt D is potential stopper material and already good enough to start at the NBA level. Weakness: Does not get to the free-throw line often, averaging only 3.1 free throw attempts per 40 minutes and making only 67 percent at the line. 5. John Collins Power Forward 6-10, 225 Wake Forest 19 years old (9/23/97) 9th in Class of 1997 (+0.14 PPM) If NBA scouts gave out an NCAA Most Improved award, Collins would be the 2016-17 award-winner for the leap he made from frosh to soph year. Collins can do everything expected from an old-school power forward: in his per-40 minute stats, he averages 28.8 points, 14.8 rebounds and 2.4 blocks; makes 62 percent of his two-point attempts; gets to the line 10 times per 40 and makes 75 percent of his free throws. Collins also has the touch and work ethic to establish stretch-4 range at the NBA level some day. He already has the pick-and-roll game down offensively; still working on it defensively—actually working on many areas defensively. Weakness: He can be a black hole once getting the ball down low, averaging only 0.8 assists per 40. 6. Isaiah Hartenstein Center 7-0, 250 Germany 19 years old (5/5/98) 7th in Class of 1998 (-0.15 PPM) Even though he only played 384 minutes for Zalgiris, this 19-year-old big showed he has the toughness and athleticism to compete at the next level. If his 10.8 rebounds per 40 minutes in the Euroleague do not impress you, perhaps the lefty’s 14.8 points, 1.7 blocks and 2.7 steals per 40 as a teenager will do the trick. Hartenstein moves very well for a seven-footer. In fact, most of his points come from running—in transition, getting quick post ups after breaks, alley-oops, etc. He is a great defender for his age—in the post and on the perimeter—because he is good on his feet, getting up and down the court like a forward. On offense, he is coming along, but you’ve got to like his potential because he is so young. Weakness: His 7.6 fouls per 40 suggest he won’t be playing 30-plus minutes in the NBA any time soon. 7. Jonathan Isaac Power Forward 6-11, 205 Florida State 19 years old (10/3/97) 10th in Class of 1997 (-0.31 PPM) Next to Zach Collins, Isaac is the best defensive player coming out of the 2017 NBA Draft. That is not to make light of his offensive skills. Isaac is good, but still needs to work on consistency and NBA range to his three-point game, whether he plays the 3 or 4 (he made 35 percent of his college 3s). Isaac had a 93.6 defensive rating, 2.3 blocks per 40 minutes and 1.8 steals per 40. He can cover the pick-and-roll, protect the rim and contest a three-point shooter all in the same range of motion. His per-40 stats also included 18.3 points and 12.0 rebounds on a .614 true shooting percentage, so there is some potential there too. Weakness: He might not have NBA floor-spacing ability as a rookie, but he has a reliable midrange jumper. 8. Malik Monk Shooting Guard 6-4, 197 Kentucky 19 years old (2/4/98) 8th in Class of 1998 (-1.08 PPM) Monk is a scoring machine, more in the NBA mode of instant offense off the bench. His 24.8 points per 40 indicate a true scorer who is halfway efficient (.586 true shooting percentage) at knocking down his shots (82 percent at the line; 50 percent on 2s; 40 percent on 3s) while competing at the highest level. He is a competitive combo guard in the truest sense of the word, both offensively and defensively. Weakness: Lacks size and all-around floor game that most NBA starting wings possess. 9. Josh Hart Shooting Guard 6-4, 209 Villanova 22 years old (3/6/95) 9th in Class of 1995 (-0.41 PPM) Hart carves out a nice niche for himself as perhaps one of the best 3-and-D wings in the draft, with Thornwell being his only peer. It’s arguably the position of best value since most GMs swing for home runs with high-potential bigs and smalls, while ignoring the in-between game. Hart showed good all-around game, averaging per-40 minute stats of 25.2 points, 8.4 rebounds, 3.3 assists, 2.5 steals and 1.1 blocks. His .591 true shooting percentage showed his range from college 3s (40 percent), 2s (47 percent) and free throws (83 percent at 9.9 attempts per 40). His footwork, wingspan (6-8 ¼) and toughness make for a lethal combination on D, enabling him to defend any position he is guarding. Weakness: Critics note he does not have the youth and athleticism of some other lottery prospects, but then again, those lottery youngsters do not possess Hart’s heart, work ethic or winning attitude. 10. Caleb Swanigan Power Forward 6-8, 246 Purdue 20 years old (4/18/97) 11th in Class of 1997 (-0.40 PPM) Swanigan plays bigger than 6-8, thanks to his 246-pound frame, 7-3 wingspan and massive hands (10 ¼ inches wide and 9 ½ inches long). He is an offensive force, but do not let that distract you from his defensive abilities. The bulky power forward is a well-balanced player with next-level productivity, averaging per-40 college metrics of 22.7 points, 15.3 rebounds and 3.3 assists. Swanigan’s all-around game is efficient, with a high true shooting percentage (.620) showing how lethal he was from the college 3 line (45 percent), from 2s (55 percent) or from the free throw line (78 percent). He can post-seal and space-shoot with the best of them out there. He works. He improves. He plays D. You’ve got to like that. Weakness: He is a true power forward and not a position-less hybrid. Teams trying to make Swanigan the next Draymond Green small-ball center may be disappointed. 11. Lauri Markkanen Power Forward 7-0, 225 Arizona 20 years old (5/22/97) 12th in Class of 1997 (-0.45 PPM) Anyone in the market for a stretch giant need look no further than Markkanen, who is clearly the best shooting big in the draft, boasting a per-40 scoring average (20.2 points) that was equally efficient from college-3 range (42 percent at 5.7 attempts per 40 minutes), two-point range (55 percent) and at the free throw line (84 percent). His 130.1 offensive rating is a sign of what he can do to properly space the floor. Nothing scares him off the three-point line, with a quick draw and agile line dribble, to boot. With Dirk Nowitzki soon approaching retirement, Markannen will surely be the one to replace him as best shooting seven-footer in the game. Weakness: His per-40 stats in assists (1.1), steals (0.5) and blocks (0.7) were remarkably low, even for a big man. That lack of all-around game shows up particularly on defense. 12. Markelle Fultz Point Guard 6-4, 195 Washington 19 years old (5/29/98) 10th in Class of 1998 (-1.83 PPM) Fultz’ youth—he just turned 19 last month—will account for some growing pains in the NBA, especially since he is still learning the game. But he does have a knack for the counting stats, putting up 26.0 points, 6.6 rebounds and 6.0 assists per 40 minutes, while all else went to Ls around him. Fultz has an assortment of moves that allow him to get to the rim, create plays for others or free his self behind the three-point line. His true shooting percentage (.558) was above average. Weakness: As well as he played individually offensively, Fultz’s team (2-16 in Pac-12) and offense (ranked 170th out of 351 Division I teams) were subpar, which may be due to lack of cohesion and consistency within the team frame, especially on defense. 13. Jayson Tatum Small Forward 6-8, 204 Duke 19 years old (3/3/98) 11th in Class of 1998 (-1.97 PPM) Tatum is one of the best scorers in the draft. He may not have the efficiency and consistency as some of the names above him here, but nobody has a more versatile offensive repertoire than Tatum, who can post up, spot up, pick-and-roll, pick-and-pop and transition with the best of them. He also has all-around potential, where his points per 40 minutes averages (20.2) are nicely supported by his per-40 rebounds (8.8), assists (2.6), steals (1.6) and blocks (1.4). Weakness: For someone with such a scorer’s mentality, one would hope he’d shoot better than 34 percent on college 3s, 50 percent on 2s and got to the free-throw line more than 5.8 times per 40 minutes. 14. T.J. Leaf Power Forward 6-10, 220 UCLA 20 years old (4/30/97) 13th in Class of 1997 (-0.86 PPM) With only a handful of legit stretch 4s available, the draft has become the best place to fill your team’s void for that position, should you be lucky enough to have the proper draft pick. After all, you’re likely spending anywhere from $15-$20 million annually for the right to sign such players in the free agent market … which brings us to Leaf, who made 47 percent of his college 3s, 64 percent of his 2s and has per-40 minute numbers of 21.7 points and 11.0 rebounds. If a stretch 4 is what you are looking for, Leaf more than fills the bill. Weakness: Has trouble with defense: pick-and-roll hedge and recovery, post-D, you name it. 15. De’Aaron Fox Point Guard 6-2, 170 Kentucky 19 years old (12/10/97) 14th in Class of 1997 (-1.03 PPM) Fox is the fastest man in the 2017 NBA Draft and he might become the fastest player in the entire League next season. Whether it’s getting from the top of the circle to the rim or racing downhill in transition basketball, nobody attacks the hoop from the point guard position as well as Fox. His per-40 stats were 22.6 points, 5.3 rebounds and 6.2 assists. Weakness: Too bad he couldn’t hit college 3s (25 percent), or else Fox might get a starting opportunity as a rook. 16. Nigel Williams-Goss Point Guard 6-2, 190 Gonzaga 22 years old (9/16/94) 16th in Class of 1994 (-0.49 PPM) Unlike fellow NBA-potential Washington point guards, Williams-Goss learned how to win in college, though he had to transfer to Gonzaga to do so. As a result, what he lacks in athleticism over Dejounte Murray and Markelle Fultz, he makes up for in basketball IQ, now establishing himself as a first-round prospect, just like them. Williams-Goss learned the lesson that less is more (usage rate dropped), if you trust your teammates, they in turn, trust you, and when you add this all up together, you too can reach the NCAA Finals. His per-40 numbers are 20.5 points, 7.3 rebounds and 5.7 assists, while he led the nation in win shares (8.1), posting a 122.0 offensive rating and 86.3 defensive rating. Williams-Goss made 37 percent of his college 3s, 53 percent of his 2s and 87 percent of his free throws. Weakness: Some think Williams-Goss does not have the athleticism it takes to make it at the next level. 17. Jordan Bell Small Forward 6-7, 224 Oregon 22 years old (1/7/95) 15th in Class of 1995 (-1.23 PPM) Bell is a defensive force and his defense/rebounding skills should translate to the next level. Bell posted an 89.0 defensive rating as a junior and had three-year career per-40 averages of 3.1 blocks and 1.7 steals, not to mention some solid offensive per-40 stats as well (15.2 points and 12.2 rebounds). Though he does not have much offensive range, Bell does well with the few two-point attempts (66 percent) and free-throw attempts (70 percent) he does get. Bell is an excellent athlete and gets many of his buckets off his own deflections and/or running the break with others. Weakness: As mentioned above, Bell is limited offensively. Not a go-to weapon, by any means. 18. Justin Patton Center 6-10, 229 Creighton 20 years old (6/14/97) 15th in Class of 1997 (-1.24 PPM) Patton showed some signs of developing into a good NBA center, posting per-40 minute averages of 20.5 points, 9.8 rebounds and 2.3 blocks. He made 68 percent of his 2s, and did make 8 of 15 college 3s. He sprints the floor unlike any center, trying to beat everyone down floor. Attacks pick-and-roll rim runners with the same aggression. Have to love his hustle and work ethic. Has all the tools to become a strong NBA rim protector, but it’s going to take time for him to grow into his body and compete with men at the NBA level. Weakness: Looks like he shied away from contact down low in college (3.9 free throw attempts per 40 minutes), perhaps because of his low free-throw percentage (52 percent). Rebounding should have been better, too. 19. Bam Adebayo Power Forward 6-9, 243 Kentucky 19 years old (7/18/97) 16th in Class of 1997 (-1.49 PPM) Despite his youth, Adebayo is already a man among boys, possessing the size and strength it will take to play the power forward position at the next level. His 5.2 body fat percentage and 7-2 ¾ wingspan complement a 6-9, 243-pound frame that makes him the most unique physical specimen of this draft. Add to that Adebayo’s per-40 stats of 17.3 points, 10.6 rebound and he should have no problems finding a place on somebody’s roster. Weakness: He lacks an outside game—only making 65 percent of his free throws—and has little playmaking ability on offense (1.1 assists per 40 minutes). 20. Josh Jackson Small Forward 6-8, 203 Kansas 20 years old (2/10/87) 17th in Class of 1997 (-1.78 PPM) Has the best NBA body and athleticism of anybody in the 2017 NBA Draft. If well honed, Jackson could become a perennial All-Defense performer at the next level. That really is his calling card. Jackson’s shot is not there yet, but you have to commend him for working on it (57 percent on free throws, 37 percent on college 3s and 55 percent on 2s). His per-40 stats at Kansas as a frosh were nice—21.2 points, 9.6 rebounds and 3.8 assists—but it was his defensive tangibles that stood out from other forwards (2.2 steals per 40, 1.4 blocks per 40, 96.0 defensive rating). Weakness: Finding his offensive place in NBA halfcourt sets. 21. Kennedy Meeks Power Forward 6-9, 277 North Carolina 22 years old (2/5/95) 20th in Class of 1995 (-1.51 PPM) NBA GMs tend to be afraid to draft seniors—sorry, basketball puritans—but Meeks is an example of where they are wrong to do so. His steady progression through an NCAA championship program is everything good about college basketball, and his per-40 stats say as much (20.6 points, 15.5 rebounds and 1.9 blocks). His defense is spotty, but he has shown good timing on blocks, making him a big-bodied rim protector and a good board man. Weakness: In addition to working on his shot, Meeks must also show he can adeptly handle the NBA pick-and-roll at his size. He did well enough in college, and was especially adept at guarding the other big bodies. 22. Aleksandar Vezenkov Power Forward 6-9, 225 Cyprus 21 years old (8/6/95) 18th in 1995 (-1.53 PPM) The savvy scorer can hurt you in a variety of ways, from pick-and-pop to setting up shop to running in transition. That said, most of his buckets come on some form of spot-up shooting. His per-40 17.3 scoring averages is only amplified by his efficiency (41 percent on international 3s, 69 percents on 2s and 84 percent at the free throw line). The FC Barcelona Lassa stretch 4 is a smart one and his lefty range goes as deep as 30 feet. Weakness: Vezenkov is becoming a better team defender, but that does not mean you cannot exploit his defensive deficiencies on one-on-one coverage. 23. Frank Mason Point Guard 5-11, 189 Kansas 23 years old (04/03/94) 17th in Class of 1994 (-1.82 PPM) Mason stepped up his scoring during his senior season and did so in spectacular fashion, essentially playing himself into the 2017 NBA Draft. His skill set is unique enough to earn him playing time as a backup point guard on half the teams in the NBA. He is instant offense, but also has the point guard skills to keep everyone involved. Before his senior season, the knock on Mason was he could not score—now he averages 23.2 points per 40 and shot 50 percent on his 2s, made 47 percent of his college 3s and shot 7.3 free throw attempts per 40 at 79 percent. Weakness: Defensively, Mason’s size makes him vulnerable, but that should not be as big an issue when he is matched up with other backup point guards. 24. Semi Ojeleye Small Forward 6-5, 241 SMU 22 years old (12/5/94) 19th in Class of 1994 (-2.03 PPM) Ojeleye became The Man at SMU, commanding a 25.8 usage rate in 1195 minutes during the 2016-17 season after playing only 143 minutes in two underclassmen campaigns at Duke in 2014-15 and 2013-14. The newfound scorer produced 22.2 points per 40 minutes, making 42 percent of his college 3s, 53 percent of his 2s and 79 percent of his free throws. He also took to the boards like a beast—just as he had done at Duke in limited action—now averaging 8.0 rebounds per 40. Weakness: Can be a bull in a china shop when trying to create, which could lead to foul trouble during his rookie season. 25. Donovan Mitchell Point Guard 6-1, 211 Louisville 20 years old (9/7/96) 19th in Class of 1996 (-1.63 PPM) Mitchell has shown glimpses of becoming an NBA guard and his significant improvement from his freshman to sophomore season speaks well of his work ethic and continued upside. At 6-1, he is unfortunately more of a combo guard off the bench than a starting point guard, but thankfully he has the defensive skills—plus a 6-10 wingspan, along with 5.9 percent body fat— that make him a good fit for teams that have tall point guards (2.6 steals per 40 minutes and 93.0 defensive rating). His per-40 stats include 19.3 points, 6.0 rebounds and 3.4 assists. Weakness: He is not much of a shooter, maintaining only a .534 true shooting percentage to go with 35-percent range on his college 3s. 26. Anzejs Pasecniks Center 7-2, 229 Latvia 21 years (12/20/95) 19th in Class of 1995 (-2.08 PPM) Not only has Paseckniks seen his body fill out to a sturdy size for a center, his overall game is beginning to blossom, evidenced not only by the increase in playing time in ACB and Eurocup ball (8.2 minutes per game in 37 contests in 2015-16 to 15.8 mpg in 50 games in 2016-17), but also the Player Efficiency Rating increase (from 11.74 to 18.38). His per-40 stats at Gran Canaria were 18.3 points and 7.6 rebounds, as he made 66 percent of his two-point attempts. Weakness: Unlike most centers who have trouble making free throws, Pasecniks actually has good form and looks like he would make them in spite of his struggles at the line (56 percent last season). 27. Luke Kennard Shooting Guard 6-5, 196 Duke 20 years old (6/24/96) 20th in Class of 1996 (-1.96 PPM) Kennard has a knack for scoring efficiently which should translate at the next level with his size, coaching and athleticism. Teams looking for offense off the bench will like the lefty’s per-40 scoring rate (22.0 points) and efficiency (.630 true shooting percentage—44 percent on college 3s; 53 percent on 2s; 86 percent at the line). Has good midrange game. Weakness: Defense. At best, he’ll be the player NBA teams try to hide on D. At worst, he may be unplayable. 28. O.G. Anunoby Power Forward 6-6, 232 Indiana 19 years old (7/17/97) 20th in Class of 1997 (-2.16 PPM) He is athletic. He is strong. He can finish. And like his Star Wars-like name suggests, he can fly. Picture LeBron James attacking the rim and that is Anunoby. All the other stuff LeBron does—pass, score, create, etc.—well, that is not Anunoby. But O.G. does finish at the rim ala LeBron and that is a great quality to have. Plus, he defends like a top-notch forward. As a result, Anunoby posted per-40 stats at Indiana like 17.6 points, 8.7 rebounds, 2.1 steals, 2.1 blocks. Weakness: His true shooting percentage (.611) is deceptive because he is such a good finisher (makes 70 percent of his 2s). But his free-throw struggles (56 percent) and three-point slumps (dropped to 31 percent) clearly show what he needs work on. 29. Isaac Humphries Center 7-0, 255 Kentucky 19 years old (1/5/98) 12th in Class of 1998 (-2.35 PPM) Humphries only played 313 minutes for Kentucky as a sophomore, but the giant teenager stood out as a force on the boards nonetheless, averaging 13.5 rebounds per 40 minutes, nearly matching his 13.3 points per-40 scoring average. His 2.3 blocks per 40 and 93.9 defensive rating are all you need to know about what type of big you’ve got here. He’s a shutdown post defender whose offensive game is years away from NBA play. He is an ideal fit for the NBA’s new G-League where teams can draft-and-stash prospects. His rebounding prowess is so pronounced at such a young age, he is worth a second-round pick’s investment. Weakness: His lack of offensive game at the college level (.526 true shooting percentage) is not a good sign. 30. Harry Giles Power Forward 6-9, 232 Duke 19 years old (4/22/98) 13th in Class of 1998 (-2.42 PPM) Giles has a good motor, runs the floor well and is a glass-eater on the boards. In fact, he loves rebounding just as much as he does scoring points, if the per-40 stats are any indication (13.6 points and 13.2 rebounds). His 2.3 blocks per 40 also make him a valuable big. Weakness: Giles has no outside shot—he has zero college 3s—and possibly no outside shot at all—he was only 12-for-24 at the free-throw line in 300 minutes at Duke. The Best of the Rest 31. Matthias Lessort 6-9, 250, Power Forward Martinique via France Derrick Walton Jr. 5-11, 189, Point Guard USA (Michigan) Monte Morris 6-1, 175, Point Guard USA (Iowa State) Derrick White 6-3, 190, Point Guard USA (Colorado) Frank Jackson 6-2, 202, Point Guard USA (Duke) Frank Ntilikina 6-5, 190, Point Guard France (SIG Strasbourg) Johnathon Motley 6-8, 238, Power Forward USA (Baylor) Dillon Brooks 6-5, 220, Shooting Guard Canada (Oregon) Sterling Brown 6-5, 225, Shooting Guard USA (SMU) Dennis Smith 6-2, 195, Point Guard USA (North Carolina State) Ike Anigbogu 6-9, 252, Center USA (UCLA) Jarrett Allen 6-9, 234, Center USA (Texas) Chris Boucher 6-8, 182, Power Forward Canada (Oregon) Thomas Bryant 6-10, 248, Center USA (Indiana) Justin Jackson 6-7, 201, Small Forward USA (North Carolina) Eric Mika 6-9, 233, Power Forward USA (BYU) Isaiah Hicks 6-7, 233, Power Forward USA (North Carolina) Ivan Rabb 6-9, 220, Power Forward USA (California) Alec Peters 6-7, 232, Power Forward USA (Valparaiso) Damyean Dotson 6-5, 205, Shooting Guard USA (Houston)

New data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows that the average Arctic sea ice extent in July set a new monthly record low--even though the rate of ice loss slowed "substantially" in the last two weeks of the month. Average sea ice extent for July 2011 was 3.06 million square miles, 81,000 square miles lower than the previous record low, set in July 2007. image: NSIDC Sea ice declined at an average pace of 90,200 square kilometers (34,800 square miles) per day, which is slightly faster than the average for 1979 to 2000 of 84,400 square kilometers (32,600 square miles) per day. Ice loss slowed towards the end of July as a high-pressure cell centered over the northern Beaufort Sea broke down and a series of low-pressure systems moved over the central Arctic Ocean. This change brought cooler conditions and likely pushed the ice apart into a thinner but more extensive ice cover. NSIDC on the conditions through July: Continuing a trend as least as important as the diminishing extent of sea ice, NSIDC reports that the oldest and thickest sea ice continues to decline: Until recently, the central Arctic Ocean and Canadian Archipelago served as refuges for some of the oldest, thickest ice. However, the new data show that ice age is now declining in these areas. A map of ice age for the third week of July, combined with sea ice concentration for July 31, 2011 shows that in the eastern Beaufort Sea, the ice has essentially melted back to the edge of the multi-year ice cover (ice older than one year). Multi-year ice is more resistant to melting completely in summer, so it is not yet clear how much more ice will melt. Another tongue of old ice extends from near the pole towards the New Siberian Islands. These maps show sea ice concentration (left) and ice age (right) over the Arctic Ocean. In the Beaufort Sea off the coast of Alaska, ice has melted back to the edge of a tongue of older, thicker ice. In the ice age image, red shows ice 5 years old and older, green shows 4-year-old ice, light blue shows 3-year old ice, dark blue is second-year ice, and purple shows first-year ice. Image and caption: NSIDC Completing the picture: NSIDC also reports that the edge of sea ice has retreated from the shores of Siberia and Eurasia, meaning that the the Northern Sea Route shipping lane may fully open up. Reduced ice cover means it is already possible this year to travel the route, however. Above Canada and Alaska though, the Northwest Passage "remains choked with ice", NSIDC says--however ice loss in the Passage is "well ahead of average" and is nearly matching the rapid loss seen in 2010. More on Arctic Sea ice Arctic Sea Ice Melt On Track To Set New Record Low in 2011 This Year's Maximum Arctic Sea Ice Extent Ties For Lowest Ever On Satellite Record

The buzz around Broadway smash Hamilton isn’t dying down anytime soon. After releasing the cast recording and being awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant, show creator Lin-Manuel Miranda announced Thursday that he would begin working on the next Hamilton-related project: The Hamilton Mixtape. He announced the news on Twitter and said that the collection would feature remixes, covers and “inspired bys.” Atlantic Records confirmed to EW that the project was in the works and that more info would be available soon. So the show is done. Cast album is out. Now we begin planning The Hamilton Mixtape. Remixes & Covers & Inspired bys. FOR REAL. GET READY. — Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) October 1, 2015 I was originally trying to get the mixtape done with Atlantic before we opened, but that's like performing surgery while having a baby. — Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) October 1, 2015 & then there's the cut third, rap battle, that none of you have heard, where Ham, Mad & Jeff go IN on slavery. Might just release my demo. — Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) October 1, 2015 The mixtape doesn’t have a timeline just yet, according to Atlantic, but Miranda said, “This is all for early next year.”

Internationally, Disney is experiencing a nice run, with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales crossing $100M in China and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 set to pass $800M worldwide today. The news comes as Pirates chalked up another $39.4M on Tuesday to bring its total now to $365.7M For Pirates, the strong performance in China was buoyed by the Dragon Boat Festival, which kicked off on Sunday and run through Tuesday. Meanwhile, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 was released May 5 in the States to a $146.5M three-day and already has earned $342.7M domestically. When you add the $454.7M from international markets, the second film in the Marvel franchise has earned $797.4M through Tuesday. In passing the $800M milestone, it becomes Marvel Studios’ fifth release to do so. Marvel now has 15 No. 1 box office debuts. Last weekend, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 surpassed the total domestic, international and worldwide grosses of its 2014 predecessor, Guardians of the Galaxy. The first installment grossed $333.17 domestically after opening to $94.3M. Internationally, it topped out at $440.1M for a global haul of $773.3M. The fifth Pirates of the Caribbean film opened over the Memorial Day weekend in the U.S. and now has a domestic gross of $85.3M. It’s international total gross is $280.4M. Critics buried Dead Men Tell No Tales stateside, though the audiences are still coming out. The Johnny Depp-Jerry Bruckheimer collaboration posted a $67.9M debut in China, which was good enough to push the entire franchise past the $4B worldwide mark. In China, that opening also marked the third highest three-day for any Disney title, only behind Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Age of Ultron. Dead Men Tell No Tales has already exceeded the entire runs for At World’s End and On Stranger Tides there. IMAX opened the film on 1,088 overseas screens this session — with roughly 400 of them in China. Disney concentrated on China and marketed the film heavily, even hosting the first world premiere of a Hollywood film in Mainland China. The high-profile event was held at its Shanghai Disney Resort on May 11, 15 days ahead of release, and the Chinese swarmed in to get a look at Depp. (All of the previous films in the Pirates franchise were shown at the Beijing Film Festival in April.)

I woke up the first time before dawn and felt around the edge of my sleeping bag for my hiking boots. I shook out my glasses and phone to check the time: 4:20 a.m. A canopy of stars was spread overhead. The notched fin of the Elder Range cut a dark silhouette against the speckled depths. I watched the sky until I saw a meteor's cold streak and then fell back to sleep. The next time I woke up, it was 6:03. First light was on its way but hadn't yet arrived: the constellations were still clear. Fifteen minutes later, dawn had rinsed them all away, leaving the sky pale and flat. A butcher-bird sang and was answered by another behind the camp. Color seeped into the foreground, which before had been rendered in grays. At 6:30, the rocky face of the Elder Range caught the sky's reflection and glowed pink, as if it were the source of all light. Finally, after an hour of watching the day arrive, I saw the first direct rays of sun hit the mountains, and the notched ridge blazed orange, a visual cymbal clash. Jesse Chehak It was the start of another day of bushwalking at Arkaba, a 60,000-acre private nature conservancy at the edge of South Australia's outback. A small group of guests and I, led by a Zimbabwean guide named Paul Bester, had begun our walking safari two days earlier in the adjacent Flinders Ranges National Park. That first morning we had traversed Wilpena Pound, a natural amphitheater formed by 500 million years of erosion, or by two giant sleeping snakes, depending on whether you consult geologists or Aboriginal Adnyamathanha storytellers. After lunch we'd crossed onto Arkaba land, and for the rest of the walk we had been alone on the property, further isolated by the lack of cellular communication and electricity. As we followed streambeds lined with seemingly immortal river red gums and climbed broken hills on the way to the Elder Range, my sense of time slowed from the frantic speed of the Internet to the pace of an unhurried walk. By the third morning, when I lay in my bedroll and watched the sun rise, I could tell that my patience, the ability to sit unbothered by the urgencies of daily life, had been renewed by the raw Australian landscape. I felt recomposed. I had come to this part of the outback, 250 miles north of Adelaide, to witness not just the dramatic splendor of the landscape but also the transformation of Arkaba from a 19th-century sheep station into a 21st-century model of ecological tourism. On my stopover in Sydney, I met Charles Carlow, the head of Wild Bush Luxury, which owns Arkaba. He explained how the property is working to rid its land of invasive species, to reintroduce native flora and fauna, and to create an intimate connection between visitors and their surroundings so that they leave with a deeper understanding of the ecological stakes. "Most Australians have no idea that we have the greatest rate of mammal extinction in the world," he told me over lunch. "It's not something they think about. Australia is highly urbanized—similar to the U.S.—and the divide between the city and the bush becomes greater all the time." Carlow got interested in conservation-based tourism as a result of a trip to Kenya when he was 12 years old, and he modeled the Arkaba Walk, a three-day trek between remote camps, on the traditional African safari. The Arkaba Walk is subtler. Much of the appeal is that this, as Carlow pointed out, is some of the most accessible outback in the country. And some of the most beautiful. Jesse Chehak "For us, Arkaba isn't about the accommodations, but what we do with the outdoors," he said. "You're not paying for spa amenities but for the privilege of sharing sixty thousand acres with only ten other people. It's very special—very Australian." Many of the highlights called for a naturalist's magnifying glass rather than a telephoto lens: spotting dingo tracks in an area where they supposedly had been exterminated; learning to identify Salvation Jane, a pretty wildflower that is also a rampantly invasive weed; watching a column of ants bridge a spring-fed trickle by linking their nearweightless bodies into a living pontoon. Such signs and wonders required Bester's sharp eye and thoughtful explanations. The Arkaba Walk was like a semester-long introduction to Australian ecology spread over the course of 27 rambling miles. At the heart of Arkaba is the property's intensive efforts to undo the ecological damage caused since sheep farmers settled the area in 1851. When Wild Bush Luxury bought Arkaba, the property's "low country had been grazed to buggery," Carlow told me. He initiated a conservation plan to phase out grazing by 2013, and today many parts of the property are "in relatively good nick," he said, despite ongoing pressure from feral goats. A fence that separates Arkaba from its neighbor clearly demonstrated the results: there was significantly more vegetation on the ungrazed land. As a result, the local population of kangaroos and emus has boomed, and Arkaba's guides also report sightings of the yellow-footed rock wallaby, something of a mascot for the conservancy. The species was once hunted for pelts, and more recently its survival has been threatened to near-extinction by predation and habitat loss. "We now have two colonies," Carlow said. "That didn't exist two years ago." But removing sheep was the easy part. Arkaba's ongoing conservation efforts focus on the more pernicious threat of foxes and feral cats. Their impact on wildlife and birdlife has been profound. Jesse Chehak "The cats and foxes nailed a lot of small marsupials and small mammals before anyone knew what was happening," Carlow said. As much as 10 percent of Australia's endemic mammal species have gone extinct since colonization, he added, and some areas of the country have lost 75 percent of their small mammals and marsupials in the past 10 years, leaving many of these species now in collapse. In this sense, Arkaba represents a microcosm of a global ecological calamity—the damage done by exotic species. The American landscape is a catalogue of noxious weeds and invasive pests that have disrupted native ecosystems: Japanese kudzu in the South, African tamarisk in the Southwest, Amazonian water hyacinth and Burmese pythons spreading through the Everglades, Russian zebra mussels choking the Great Lakes, Asian carp invading the Mississippi River system, and European brown rats everywhere. The impact of invasive species is particularly acute on islands. In Hawaii, bird populations have crashed since the introduction of rodents and voracious tree snakes. On a much larger scale, New Zealand's struggle to eradicate exotic species has risen to the level of a national emergency, and victory is declared on the poignantly small scale of a few dozen square miles at a time. A successful case study is the tiny, subantarctic Campbell Island, where the government removed cattle and sheep before successfully eradicating rats in 2001, leading to the recovery of seabird populations and other endemic species that were on the brink of extinction. In the far South Atlantic, the government of the Falkland Islands launched the world's largest successful crusade against rats on South Georgia Island, a 1,450-square-mile bird sanctuary; the next step was to eliminate reindeer introduced by Norwegian whalers for meat over a century ago. Australia is also an island ecosystem, though it's an exceptionally large one. Its fragile ecology has been reshaped by some 130 invasive species that have arrived since colonial settlement. And while Arkaba's conservation work represents a mere speck on the continent, it nonetheless provides an example of how an intense conservation push can begin to mitigate the damage done by out-of-control pests. Jesse Chehak "We can't presume nature will take care of itself," said Arkaba's chief conservationist, Brendon Bevan. "We've affected nature, and only we can rectify it." All of this I learned by degrees during my visit, starting with the first night's dinner at the Homestead, a 19th-century stone farmhouse converted into comfortable if not extravagant lodgings. I drove five hours up from Adelaide and arrived in time to meet Bester and Bevan over a glass of Riesling from the nearby Clare Valley. The other guests had already arrived: a retired couple in their late sixties from New Zealand, a high-powered pair of Sydney professionals, and a single woman in her thirties who was originally from Adelaide but now lives in Los Angeles. Bevan and Bester left us after drinks around the bonfire, and we sat down for a homey meat-and-potatoes dinner alfresco. The next morning we set out for the national park, half an hour away. Arkaba staffers would ferry our bags between camps, which were glamping-style accommodations with bucket showers, and cook our meals. The semiarid landscape reminded me somewhat of Utah's red-rock country—dry gulches, rusty bluffs, scattered scrub trees, and tufty grass. It was late August, nearly the start of the antipodean spring, and I was surprised by the cool weather and relatively verdant vegetation. I'd been expecting a Mad Max dustscape. Bester explained that summer heat parches the ground every year and that the entire region is subject to lengthy droughts and periodic wildfires. The wet-season growth I saw was what originally attracted settlers to the region, but it was only deceptively lush. Unaware of Australia's drought cycle, herders overstocked the land with up to 100 sheep per square mile, destroying native plant communities and leading to catastrophic stock losses when the rains failed. Invasive weeds followed in the flocks' wake. Creek beds were hardest hit, and Bevan's wife, Kat, describes the thick stands of exotics along Arkaba Creek—some 30 species including ward's weed, soursob, nettle-leaved goosefoot, and African boxthorn—as a "hectic catastrophe." The aggressive spread of Salvation Jane across former native grasslands gave rise to its other nickname, Patterson's Curse, named after the hapless settler who imported seeds in the 1880s to plant an ornamental flower that would leap the garden fence and run amok. We arrived at the national park, donned our daypacks, and headed up a creek drainage toward Wilpena Pound. The path led through a magnificent riparian forest of river red gums, a blue-green-leafed eucalyptus that can live up to 1,000 years. The trees, some of them seven feet in diameter, shed their bark to reveal trunks that gleam dully like old silver. Jesse Chehak The Pound is a 25,000-acre flat-bottomed bowl ringed by mountains—Wilpena derives from an Aboriginal description of a cupped hand. Although less well known to foreigners than Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef, to South Australians it is an iconic feature of the Flinders Ranges, a series of ancient mountains named for explorer Matthew Flinders, who circumnavigated Australia in 1802. After European settlers brought sheep to the Pound, the Australian government completed a 3,500-mile "dog fence" in 1885 to exclude dingoes from the southeast part of the continent. Shepherds killed hundreds of dingoes, possums, and kangaroos. Foxes, introduced for sport, and feral cats decimated the yellow-footed rock wallabies, along with other uniquely Australian species like bilbies and bettongs. In 1899, homesteaders planted wheat in the Pound's near-sterile ground, more rock than dirt, but drought soon made folly of their efforts. The launch of Operation Bounceback 23 years ago, a government initiative to rid the park of pest species, has helped the rock wallabies recover. We paused for lunch under a huge coolibah tree, another native eucalypt, and the couple from New Zealand sang a few lines of "Waltzing Matilda," a "bush ballad" or folk song that is Australia's unofficial national anthem: "Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong / Under the shade of a coolibah tree." In the distance, we could see the park's three commonest macropods—the red kangaroo, the western gray kangaroo, and the common wallaroo or euro—and I was reminded of Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater, an enclosed sanctuary for threatened species. "There's water and fresh veg, so why would you move?" Bester said, to explain the seasonal density of wildlife in the Pound. "But in the summer they'll move up to fifty miles per day." That afternoon, Bester was delighted when we spotted a fresh dingo track—evidence that the dog fence hadn't been entirely successful—but as we descended onto Arkaba land via Bridle Gap, we saw less-welcome animals. Thirty or so feral goats moved across a ridge. "That's a problem," Bester said. He explained that the goats compete aggressively with native grazers for vegetation, and that they monopolize springs, effectively driving the shy rock wallabies away from their only water source. Arkaba controls goat populations by rounding them up for sale or by aerial culling. That night we made camp at Black's Gap, in a cluster of open-sided huts facing the hills. The next morning, we set out along the Heysen Trail, a hiking route named for Hans Heysen, a German-born Australian painter. His early-20th-century landscapes based on his travels through the Flinders Ranges helped establish a national iconography of arid hills and gnarled gum trees aflutter with roseate cockatoos. It was the exact landscape that surrounded us. As we made our way down a dry wash, the color of the stones underfoot perfectly matched the river red gum heartwood we burned in the morning's campfire. Bester suddenly held up a hand to stop us and pointed to the lapidary sparkle of a mulga parrot, so much brighter than the Australian ringneck parrot we'd seen in camp earlier. Jesse Chehak "Very special," he said. "That's one of those species people come from around the world to see. That was awesome." Arkaba's progressive conservation efforts face challenges in this deeply conservative part of the country. Bester gave us an example when he pointed out the nest of a wedge-tailed eagle, one of the world's largest raptors. They were once shot as vermin, but their numbers have rebounded, thanks in part to the overabundance of nonnative rabbits—one benefit of an introduced pest. Today the nest was empty, but Bester spotted a pair of "wedgies" aloft on thermals overhead, their seven-foot wingspans like dark lint on the featureless blue. It reminded him of a conversation he'd overheard in a local pub, where an old rancher said he'd just seen two wedgetails feeding on a roadkill kangaroo. "He said, ‘If I'da had my rifle, I woulda shot them both,' " Bester recalled, shaking his head. "That mentality still exists." At lunch in Madge's Gully, a narrow smooth-rock canyon, Bester pointed out a small seep dampening the sand. Since Arkaba removed the windmillfed stock troughs, natural springs were starting to reemerge after 80 years of pumping. The kangaroos and wallabies would need the water come summer. That afternoon, we climbed for hours to the crest of the Red Range, then descended into camp at the base of the Elder Range. Tired from the walk and relaxed from the Barossa Valley Shiraz, I turned in early and awoke before dawn seven hours later. On the last morning, we set out to the sound of parrots, red-capped robins, and yellow-throated mynah birds, but the highlight of the day was provided, oddly enough, by the ubiquitous cypress pines. A faint breeze stirred and caused the male trees to release their pollen, ejaculating clouds of copious fertility. Suddenly an entire hillside was going off, and the slanting morning light turned pollen into gold dust. The sight made us giddy, and we gasped "ooh!" and "aah!" like spectators before fireworks. Jesse Chehak For the rest of the walk back to Arkaba Homestead, my mind drifted into romantic musings on "untrammeled nature" and "eternal natural cycles"—that sort of typical outdoorsy endorphin high. But the sight of a dozen large rabbit warrens, goat-browsed bullock bush, and the "hectic catastrophe" of invasive weeds along Arkaba Creek near the Homestead imposed a necessary corrective. Arkaba's concerted and expensive conservation efforts prove that the beautiful property, though isolated, is by no means pristine. Indeed, Arkaba called into question the very idea that any corner of Australia could be considered untouched. A radical theory of restoration biology takes the term rewilding and argues for restoring ecosystems to a state of pre-civilization integrity. But what would that even mean in Australia? Of course European settlers changed the landscape, but then so did Aborigines, who arrived on the continent some 60,000 years ago. Their hunting may have contributed to the extinction of numerous species of giant kangaroos and other grazing megafauna, and they introduced dogs (the ancestors of today's dingoes) and the practice of large-scale burning, in part to improve hunting habitats. Man himself is arguably the most pervasive exotic species in Australia, and the most destructive. The same holds true everywhere in the world, a fact that invalidates the utopian conservation ideal that we can simply stand back and let the earth return to some prior, Edenic state. Arkaba proves that conservation is not a passive stance— letting nature run its course—but a permanent land-management activity. Arkaba's conservation requires an ongoing, annual investment of money and manpower, just as surely as the grazing it replaced. Bevan drove this point home the next day, when he took me to track a radio-collared feral cat, part of a study of the movements and habits of this hugely destructive predator. He's eliminated 173 cats from Arkaba in five years, and he wants to know how many more remain. Probably a lot. Wildlife biologists estimate that Australia's feral cats will each kill about a dozen reptiles, birds, small marsupials, and mammals a day, for a combined loss across the continent of 70 million to 80 million native animals every day. "We're headed toward a precipice at a great rate," Bevan remarked, as he pulled out his radar tracking equipment. This is the story of the goat versus the rock wallaby, he said. The cat versus the bilby. Bevan was not a pessimist, though. No conservationist can afford to be. Instead, he focused on the positive impact of Arkaba's other eradication efforts. For example, there's been a spike in echidnas since fox populations were suppressed by the aerial distribution of poisoned bait. Bevan tracked the collared cat to a hollow river red gum, which he compared to an "apartment block for life," a habitat utilized by all sorts of native species, from birds of prey and common brush-tailed possums to witchetty grubs. He explained that the trees are remarkably tough and have evolved to survive extended drought and to recover from deep wounds. He focused my attention on the hollow where the cat was denned and how the tree's cambium, or growth layer, had started to "re-sheath," or heal over the gap. Such a recovery, Bevan mused, suggested a degree of resilience that an optimist might metaphorically apply to Arkaba's overall mission. "When something is that far gone and looks shot to hell, it can still come back," he said. "Good conditions continuing, it will look grand again." The Details: What to Do in Toda'y's Arkaba, Australia Getting There From Adelaide, rent a car for the five-hour drive to Arkaba through the Clare Valley wine region. Or, Port Augusta is a 75-minute drive from the property and has weekday flights from Adelaide. Charter flights and private drivers can also be arranged through Arkaba. Bushwalking Arkaba offers a one-night stay at the historic Homestead and a three-day trek through Australia’s southern outback with stays at luxury camps along the way. Meals are served family-style and accompanied by wines from the region. The walk is about 27 gorgeous, easy-to-moderate miles (about 10 per day) with guests’ luggage ferried by jeep. arkabawalk.com; from $1,568 per person.

WINTER: ’tis the season of reduced friction. Depending on where you are, you might be anticipating the first icy days of the year’s coldest season, or already be well attuned to its attendant dangers. Ice plus incaution, we all know, equals slips, slides, broken bones and mangled cars and bicycles. Not your problem, you might think, if you are basking on Bondi beach or sunning yourself in your Florida bolt-hole. You would be wrong. Even in Australia, where ice tends to be confined to the beer cooler, slips on low-friction surfaces such as tiled bathroom floors or oil-slicked filling station forecourts result in a dozen deaths, tens of thousands of injuries and an estimated AU$ 1 billion in lost productivity each year. That’s a picture comparable to those in the US and the UK. “Slip resistance is a global problem,” says Richard Bowman, a slip consultant at Intertile Research in Melbourne. That’s why, in safety laboratories around the world, fearless researchers are having our accidents for us, slipping and sliding their way, they hope, towards a better understanding of the perils of reduced friction. They do not have it easy. Friction might be everywhere – except where it is suddenly absent – but it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to get to grips with. Even supercomputers capable of calculating what goes on inside stars or modelling the most complex characteristics of the atomic world slip up on friction’s intricacies. “Friction is not a material property, it’s a system response,” explains Roland Larsson of Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. The amount of friction between two surfaces …

10 Points about the Day of ‘Arafah The day of ‘Arafah is the most important day for a Haji. Whilst only a select few of the Ummah are chosen by Allah Ta’ala to physically be on the plains of ‘Arafat on the 9th of Dhul Hijjah, there are several virtues and deeds mentioned regarding the day of ‘Arafah which apply to those afar as well. Hereunder are ten of them. The Virtue of the Day 1. The day of ‘Arafah is one of the best days of the year, Sayyidna Anas (radiyallahu ‘anhu) says: “The day of ‘Arafah equals 10 000 days in virtue”! (At-Targheeb, vol. 2 pg.200 and Lataiful Ma’arif, pg.460) 2. “On the day of Arafah, Allah frees even those who are not physically in Arafah. Therefore the next day is Eid for all” (Ibn Rajab -rahimahullah in Lataiful Ma’arif, pg.482) 3. The Day of ‘Arafah has also been labelled as “Yawmul Eid” by Sayyiduna ‘Umar (radiyallahu ‘anhu) as it’s the day in which Allah Ta’ala announced the perfection of Islam. (Sahih Bukhari) Deeds for this Day 4. DO on the Day of ‘Arafah: 1. Fast 2. Recite kalimah shahadah a lot 3. Excessive Du’a 4. Sadaqah 5. DON’T: 1. Persist on Sin (i.e, make tawbah -repent- from all sins) 2. Be arrogant These 2 types of people are deprived on this blessed day. (Ibn Rajab -rahimahullah- in Lataiful Ma’arif, pg.494) 6. Zikr on the Day of ‘Arafah Rasulullah (sallallahu ‘alayhi wasallam) would recite the following abundantly on the day of Arafah: Lailaha illallahu wahdahu lasharika lahu lahul mulku walahul hamdu biyadihil khayru wahuwa ‘ala kuli shayin qadir (Musnad Ahmad; see Majma’uz Zawaid, vol.3 pg.252) كان أكثر دعاء النبي عليه السلام يوم عرفة “لاإلٰه إلا الله وحده لا شريك له، له الملك وله الحمد بيده الخير وهو على كل شئ قدير“ –أحمد والترمذي 7. Sayyiduna ‘Ali’s (radiyallahu ‘anhu) dua on the Day of ‘Arafah Allahumma a’tiq raqabati minanar wa awsi’li minar rizqil halal, wasrif ‘anni fasaqatil jinni wal ins Translation: O Allah! Free me from the fire, increase my lawful sustenance, and keep away the transgressive Jin and humans from me. (Ibn Abi Dunya, see Lataiful Ma’arif, pg.494) :دعاء سيدنا علي رضي الله عنه يوم عرفة اللهم أعتق رقبتي من النار، وأَوسِعْ لِيْ مِنَ الرّزقِ الحلال، وَاصْرِفْ عني فَسَقة الجن والإنس –ابن أبي الدنيا 8. “Fasting on the day of Arafah will expiate the sins of the past and future year.” (Sahih Muslim) 9. Rasulullah (sallallahu ‘alayhi wasallam) said: “He who protects his ears, eyes and tongue on this day (Day of ‘Arafah) will be forgiven” (Musnad Ahmad with a reliable chain, Majma’uz Zawaid, vol.3 pg.251) Shaytan’s Humiliation 10. The day of ‘Arafah is the day when Shaytan is most humiliated (due to Allah’s extensive forgiveness) (Muwatta Imam Malik, Musnad Ahmad and Ibn Majah, Hadith: 3013) Conclusion All of the above will have real significance to us if we implement it and not just share it. May Allah Ta’ala grant us all the tawfiq (ability) to practice on all the above and may He bless us with repeated opportunities of physically being on the plains of ‘Arafat. Amin. Download the PDF poster here 15/12/2012

Baltimore's liquor board is reforming the way it does business — cutting staff, adding supervision and imposing new work rules — after a state audit revealed a lax work ethic and spotty enforcement, its chairman told lawmakers Tuesday. "We're changing everything," Stephan Fogleman, chairman of the Baltimore City Board of Liquor License Commissioners, said at a hearing in Annapolis. A recent audit uncovered widespread problems with the liquor board, a hybrid state-city agency criticized by current and former workers as a vestige of political patronage. Auditors found that two workers who were expected to conduct more than 800 inspections of liquor establishments each year instead completed only 41. The board's antiquated paper processing system was so mismanaged that workers resorted to makeshift arrangements. "One of the inspectors told an auditor that he kept the records in his trunk because that way it wouldn't get lost," Fogleman told the General Assembly's Joint Audit Committee. "Obviously, we can't go on like this." The audit found that the board had no written policies on how employees should do their work, did not review employee performance, failed to have paperwork showing it responded to many citizen complaints and inconsistently meted out punishment to violators of liquor laws. "This audit and these layoffs have definitely sent a message to everyone in this agency, especially the inspectors," Fogleman said during the first public discussion of the audit released in April. Since the audit came out, the liquor board has laid off four of its 14 full-time inspectors and asked the city to help computerize its records, officials said. Inspectors have been given heftier workloads and are no longer allowed to work from home. A "work group" of state lawmakers, city representatives and some of Gov. Martin O'Malley's staff has been convened to make sure the problems at the liquor board are resolved. Legislators asked for further proof that the problems are getting resolved. "The issues are on the table," Del. Talmadge Branch, a Baltimore Democrat, said after the hearing. "It's evident with all the findings that action needs to be taken." Fogleman called the retirement of the board's veteran executive secretary Samuel T. Daniels Jr., a political appointee, "a new change at the top" and assured lawmakers that "with that retirement, we had a change in philosophy." But Daniels, who left the liquor board in June after a 26-year career with the agency, said in an interview that political meddling interfered with the board's work and it was a challenge to coax inspectors to do as they were asked. "Much of the insolence at the liquor board had come from state elected officials," Daniels said, adding that the audit's revelations will allow reforms that had been difficult to adopt in the past. "There is a new attitude, and that attitude is that the politicians have backed away and now allow the agency to function the way it always should have," Daniels said. "Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant." Timothy R. Brooks, director of performance audits for the state's Office of Legislative Audits, said a city audit in 2007 found many of the same problems his staff uncovered this time. Then as now, he said, leaders of the liquor board acknowledged the problems and vowed to fix them. "Simply agreeing will not resolve these issues," Brooks said. Fogleman, who was recommended for his post by city senators and appointed by O'Malley, blamed much of the dysfunction on the fact that until 1999 the agency's employees were all political appointees. And because the agency is a joint state and city entity, Fogleman said, "previous administrations" effectively answered to no one. "The problem was there was a lack of clarity," said Sen. Verna Jones-Rodwell, a Baltimore Democrat and chair of the city's Senate delegation. "The previous staff had taken the ambiguousness of the situation and manipulated it so that they could not be held accountable." While the liquor board is a state agency, all of its employees and operations are paid by the city. City officials said Tuesday that they joined the work group to resolve problems revealed in audit, not to take over its operations. "It is important that the liquor board functions at its optimal efficiency to serve the small-business owners of Baltimore," said Travis Tazelaar, a spokesman for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. Residents who have challenged the liquor board — and complained to state lawmakers — were concerned that the committee did not receive greater assurances Tuesday that problems would be resolved. Kristine J. Dunkerton, director of the Community Law Center, said her group has been watching the liquor board closely for years. "When the audit came out, we thought, 'Hallelujah, this validates everything we've been saying.'" But in the months since the audit's release, Dunkerton said, she witnessed few changes. In response, the Community Law Center started a blog tracking the liquor board's decisions. Victor Corbin watched the hearing and said afterward he was surprised lawmakers didn't ask more questions about how the situation arose or whether all workers who erred faced punishment. "What disciplinary actions were taken?" Corbin said. "In the private sector, falsifying records would get you fired." ecox@baltsun.com luke.broadwater@baltsun.com

http://ceoworld.biz/ceo/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Mark-Zuckerberg.jpg When we last left the story about the upstate New York man who is claiming he owns 84% of Facebook (Paul Ceglia), we had concluded that the digital "contract" Ceglia had produced was probably a fake. We had also noted that Ceglia needed to answer three questions before we were inclined to believe him: 1. Where was the payment trail? Ceglia had only produced a $1,000 check stub, which only appeared to cover a single payment for contract development work on a Ceglia company called StreetFax. There was no evidence that a second payment for $1,000 for 50% of "The Face Book" had been made. 3. Where was the original paper-based contract and when would a judge and Facebook be able to examine it? 2. Why had Ceglia waited 7 years to file the claim? Ceglia has since answered the last question, explaining that he only remembered the contract when he stumbled over it in his files last fall when the cops arrested him for grand larceny in connection with his wood-pellet business (Ceglia denies the charges). We find that answer unconvincing, if amusing, because Facebook gained fame relatively quickly back in 2004 and 2005, and we suspect Ceglia would have remember the contract earlier if it were real. Paul Ceglia Classmates.com http://www.classmates.com/directory/public/memberprofile/list.htm?regId=8685615405 So far, there's no word on the status of the paper-based contract. Facebook has deemed the digital version a fake and pointed to several inconsistencies between the first and second pages of the contract to bolster this case. Paper-based contracts are harder to fake than digital ones, so checking the original will help answer the "forgery" charge. So that leaves the paper trail. When he filed his claim, Ceglia produced a check stub showing a $1,000 payment to Mark Zuckerberg. This appeared to satisfy one of two payments in the digital contract. It did not specify which of the two projects in the contract it was referring to (StreetFax, which appears to have been a real project, or "The Face Book," which Facebook says is the fabricated part of the contract. If Ceglia really had a contract with Mark Zuckberberg for $1,000 to buy half of "The Face Book," there ought to be a payment trail. And the absence of one suggested that the whole claim was a fake. But now, according to the Wellsville Daily's John Anderson, who has been on the story from the beginning, Ceglia has produced an actual cancelled check to Mark Zuckerberg for $3,000. Is this new check persuasive evidence of a payment trail for "The Face Book" project, which according to the contract Ceglia purchased a 50% stake in for $1,000? No. There are no marks on the cancelled check (a cashier's check) that tie it to "The Face Book." There are also no marks that tie it to StreetFax, however, so Ceglia will presumably say that the $3,000 covered both the payment for "The Face Book" AND additional work-for-hire contract work on StreetFax. Bottom line, the check does help Ceglia's case modestly in that it shows he paid more money to Mark Zuckerberg for something. But Mark's story has always been that he did contract work for Ceglia, and this check could have just been for the contract work. In short, there's nothing that proves (or suggests) that part of this $3,000 was to be used for a 50% ownership in "The Face Book." Wellsville Daily For more coverage of this case from the Wellsville Daily, see these stories by John Anderson: Here is the latest on the case moving: http://www.wellsvilledaily.com/features/x1652684681/Facebook-back-to-Belmont Here are two stories on the owning of Facebook: http://www.wellsvilledaily.com/features/x109282307/Facebook-does-not-have-a-like-button-for-Ceglia http://www.wellsvilledaily.com/highlight/x1693152058/Ceglias-Facebook-civil-suit-gaining-steam-in-court-and-with-the-media

Zaza Pachulia did not hold back in 1-on-5 pickup game against the Warriors' kids Curious where the Warriors and their kids vacationed last offseason? Click ahead to find out. Zaza Pachulia doesn't go easy on the opposition, regardless of age. Curious where the Warriors and their kids vacationed last offseason? Click ahead to find out. Zaza Pachulia doesn't go easy on the opposition, regardless of age. Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 23 Caption Close Zaza Pachulia did not hold back in 1-on-5 pickup game against the Warriors' kids 1 / 23 Back to Gallery Zaza Pachulia takes no prisoners when it comes to pickup basketball games — even against eight-year-olds. Mercury News reporter Anthony Slater caught the Warriors big man in an adorable scene Saturday when five Warriors kids decided to challenge Pachulia on the court. The five little ones, including the twin sons of Matt Barnes, give chase, but Pachulia doesn't go easy on the tots. Zaza is absolutely ruthless. Locking down the Barnes twins and some other Warriors kids, then hit em with the cross, split and J pic.twitter.com/VQVsLnLig7 — Anthony Slater (@anthonyVslater) April 29, 2017 In one run of play, he rejects a kid taking a very ambitious long-range shot, crosses over two more, and then makes an easy jumper. Kudos to the kids, who seem completely unfazed by the gigantic man towering over them. MORE: Warriors eagerly await next opponent We'll forgive you for being jealous of these elementary schoolers, who are going to grow up with the coolest "take your kid to work day" anecdotes ever.

This story is part of our feature on independent Japanese studio Platinum Games. Check out the rest of our stories here. It's safe to call Hideki Kamiya the whimsical mad genius of Platinum Games. When we first begin talking he breezily answers my questions, cool and collected. His glasses look like an accessory pulled straight out of a JRPG--tinted lenses, wildly colored frames. It's the perfect look for a creative schemer like Kamiya. "I got into games the way that everybody gets a job in Japan: by applying for a whole bunch of jobs," Kamiya recounts of his younger years. "When I was a junior in college, I started doing the job hunt thing, which was just sending out my resume and my CV to all of these different companies. I really wanted to work in games so I applied to all the major studios: Sega, Nintendo, Konami, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Taito like all the big game companies. I also applied to some safe choices back [in Matsumoto] just in case. Luckily I was able to get a job at a game company. My 'safe choice' job would have been at an interior design company in my hometown." Sitting beside Kamiya and translating is Jean-Pierre Kellams. Kellams, too, is dressing like a video game hero: a cycling shirt (Kellams loves cycling) and glasses without ear hooks that seem held on his face by magic. Kellams recounts his own entry into the Japanese video game industry: knowing he wanted to live and work in Japan, he joined JET, a program in which foreigners teach English in Japan. After serving a year in JET, and already living in Japan, Kellams networked until he found himself at Platinum Games beside Kamiya. They're a fitting team--both creatively and style-wise. In interviews since Scalebound's unveiling, Kamiya has consistently referred to the title as his "dream game." "If you think about the Famicom [the NES], a lot of those games were really simple and easy to pick up and play," Kamiya explains. "But when I got into high school I bought a PC, and PC was the first time that I really played a deep RPG. Those deep games have really complex customization mechanics and complex stories and backgrounds. It was something that was really appealing to me and over the course of time I wanted to make a fantasy game. "Also, wanting to make a game like that... there’s not really many opportunities for that," he explains. "I really wanted to make a fantasy game that had dragons in it because when you think about all of those really old cool fantasy games, the ones that had huge monsters and dragons were the coolest ones. It was kind of coming together of all those inspirations that I had when I was younger." Like Yasuhisa Taura with Nier: Automata, this is Kamiya and Kellams' first crack at a title with the core role-playing game structure. This also marks Kamiya's first game without more stylized art: The Wonderful 101 was cartoonish, and Bayonetta always had an anime-esque flair to it. But with Scalebound, Kamiya is aiming for realism with the graphics, with characters that appear distinctly human. Tackling both of these at once is a welcome for Kamiya, who speaks about engaging in new projects with a distinct eagerness. The biggest difference, and the biggest challenge, is in working with Microsoft. "We're working with a foreign publisher for the first time," Kamiya explains. "If you think about the games that I made, first they were all at Capcom and then one with Sega and then with Nintendo, so I’ve always worked with Japanese publishers. They have the same game design culture about them. They’re very loose about how they make video games. They’re not super rigid or structured at any point, really, in the project with regards to schedule and quality along the way--not until you get to the end. Then basically everybody hopes that it all comes together. If it does, then everybody is happy, and if it doesn’t, everybody is not happy. "Whereas with Microsoft, being from a totally different design and engineering culture than those Japanese publishers, it’s very much about a structured development style with lots of very structured gates with regards to quality and schedule. Everything is controlled and made in a way that’s very structured. Learning how to work within that structure, after I basically only made games in a very unstructured environment up until this point, has been one of the most challenging parts of the project." After speaking with Kamiya, Atsushi Inaba told me that the pitch for Scalebound came before the deal with Microsoft, although the Redmond-based software giant had approached them in the past about working with Platinum Games on an exclusive project. "Essentially, we came up for the idea for Scalebound and we pitched them the idea. But before that, they had always come to us and said, 'Hey, how can we work together?,'" Inaba says. "So over a long period of time, they asked, 'Do you have anything that might fit for us?' And when the idea for Scalebound came around and we polished it up and showed it to them, it fit for them. Our stick-to-it-ness in that respect is also what drove that project forward." But when I asked Kamiya about how his team feels about working on Scalebound, tackling a new genre and a different art style, his answer wasn't what I expected. He explained that during a project, no one is as gung-ho as you'd expect. "It’s difficult because it’s not like when you’re making a game everybody is like, 'Oh yeah this is awesome and super excited about it,'" he says. "It’s too difficult and too long a process for people to react that way. Nobody has ever really reacted that way when we’ve been making one of these things, anyway." You need a javascript enabled browser to watch videos. Tap To Unmute Scalebound Dragons and Combat Gameplay Demo - Gamescom 2015 Want us to remember this setting for all your devices? Sign up or Sign in now! Please use a html5 video capable browser to watch videos. This video has an invalid file format. HTML5 Auto HD High Low Sorry, but you can't access this content! Please enter your date of birth to view this video By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy enter Kamiya and Kellams recounted a story from Okami's development, back in 2005. Kamiya posted the design document for the title on the company's internal intranet, where everyone at Clover Studio could read everything about the game. Kamiya said there was, "literally no feedback." Nothing good, nothing bad. No comment from his peers. Just silence. Feedback remained nonexistent months into the project, even as it started to come together and parts were finished. "Then finally we got to the point where you could play through the entire game, and it was still very rough and [executive producer Atsushi] Inaba-san walked over to me and he said, 'Hey, you know the story for this game is really good, man,'" Kamiya says. His tone is playful as he laughs as he continues. "I was like, 'Did you just come over here to bullshit me because you know that the game is really bad right now?' I thought, he’s just trying to make me feel better. When you calm down and think about it, obviously, he actually meant it, and that’s why he came over." At first, one might assume no one dared criticize the project out of fear of getting on Kamiya's bad side. But the more he talks about his disappointment in the lack of feedback, the more it sounds like perhaps his team preferred to let him lead completely and deal with the stress of larger decisions. "...For better or worse this game is just filled with challenges for us." "That’s the level of no reaction to things that I get. It’s not super surprising," he says. "I was telling him that from my perspective, like on a producer side, for better or worse this game is just filled with challenges for us. You’re asking the question at the point of the game where everybody is working hard, so it’s really hard for us to step back and say, 'Oh yeah I’m really super happy.' We’re way too deep into it to have any kind of introspection on it." Based on this tepid feedback loop, Kellams notes that the biggest challenge for the team right now is knowing when it's time to panic. "It’s really difficult," he says. "Going back to [Kamiya-san's] story about feedback issue. There was a point on Bayonetta where he asked the team whether they thought Bayonetta was going to be fun, and only three people on the entire team raised their hand and said they thought Bayonetta was going to be a fun game. You’re making something that’s never existed. You’re creating an entire world. There are no sounds inside your box. Every sound that plays in a game, every blade of grass that you’re stepping on, every movement of everything has to be made. You need somebody who’s got that idea in their head and you need to trust that that idea is strong enough to survive all the different things that get shot at it." Kamiya adds that this kind of panic-timer is even more heightened when working on a new, original property. There are no prequels, no longstanding series to build upon like with Resident Evil or Devil May Cry. It's all new, and figuring out what those new moving parts are and how to make them work takes up the biggest chunk of manpower. Scalebound's dragon, specifically, poses the biggest hurdle. "The amount of decision making that you have to make and the amount of decisions that you don’t know yet because other decisions haven’t been made yet is pretty monumental." "The dragon is a totally new idea," he says. "You’re fighting with an AI, how should the dragon be engaged in battle? How should we grow the dragon alongside you? Where is the focus for these things or that thing? None of that has a blueprint for us. It’s not that we can hit copy on the machine and get another one of these. We have to make the machine. In making that machine everything is a challenge because all of those parts have to fit together. The amount of decision making that you have to make and the amount of decisions that you don’t know yet because other decisions haven’t been made yet is pretty monumental. "From the experience in making original games, everything and anything is a challenge at this point," he adds. "We’re not at the point where we’ve got a full beast that’s all put together that we can look at and be like, 'Yeah, this is what we got.' We got tons of parts that are starting to come together and become playable in a way that makes sense for us so that everything that we’re working on is challenging." I ask Kamiya what he thinks makes a good action game. As one of the best known and most successful action game designers, what advice can he share with developer hopefuls? Kamiya says it's a difficult question to answer, because to compartmentalize and explain away what makes a good action game goes against his desire to keep his games intuitive and player driven. "Hideo Kojima or [Masahiro] Sakurai or other guys that I personally know--those are guys who plan out their games in detail and have a very logical structured approach to how they want to make them," he explains. "If the player does this, the enemy should do this, then the player should be doing this after that. They have it all figured out before they go after it. "For myself, I just want very intuitive things, like, I want the player to control to feel really good and if I attack someone, I want to be able to dodge at the last second. I think about all these different things that I want to do and then when we start building all those things out, then I start thinking about the things that I want to have done to me. Then we start building the enemies out after that, and then all of that stuff comes together in a very intuitive way."

Three Years On, It Appears Snowden's Leaks Have Damaged The NSA So Badly It's Healthier Than Ever from the like-pruning-a-bush-with-a-bunch-of-microphones-hidden-inside-of-it dept Every time the anniversary of the first Snowden leak rolls around, everyone reassesses the damage... or lack thereof. Did Snowden actually make a dent in the surveillance apparatus or did he do little more than hand out cheat sheets to terrorists? As more time passes, even Snowden's harshest critics are warming up to the idea that his leaks did more good than harm. Former attorney general Eric Holder, to name one such critic, believes Snowden "performed a public service" by leaking surveillance documents. Of course, this is the sort of thing one can safely say when no longer in the position of having to choose between prosecuting Snowden or dropping the bogus espionage charges. Over at Lawfare -- a site whose writers are almost universally critical of Snowden -- one contributor (a former DoD lawyer) sees Snowden's leaks as beneficial. Jack Goldsmith's take on the NSA leak fallout finds that Snowden's actions actually made the NSA a better agency -- not just in terms of transparency but in terms of capabilities. Snowden forced the intelligence community out of its suboptimal and unsustainable obsession with secrecy... Snowden made it realize that, in the words of former NSA Director Michael Hayden, "although the public cannot be briefed on everything, there has to be enough out there so that the majority of the population believe what they are doing is acceptable." [...] Forced transparency meant that the intelligence community had to justify itself before the American people for the first time ever—about what it did in the domestic arena and abroad, about the legality of and accountability for its actions, and about its importance to U.S. national security. Goldsmith points out that the transparency the NSA definitely didn't want ended up being good for it. As he sees it, the agency "had a story to tell" about its national security efforts and Snowden's leaks sort of freed it to tell its side of the story. He also says the NSA's narrative about its "lawful" programs being practically smothered by oversight has held up. As proof of this, he offers up quotes from PCLOB (Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board) members who found the NSA's Section 702 collection to have "played a key role" in disrupting terrorist activity. However, Goldsmith does gloss over the PCLOB's other key finding: that the bulk collection under Section 215 was not only unconstitutional, but worthless. Goldsmith also says Snowden's revelations have led to better control of NSA surveillance programs. But even though he rearranges his sentences a bit to push forward with this claim, he still arrives at a contradictory conclusion. Another criticism of the NSA was that its aggressive collection processes abroad did not consider the rights and interests of foreign individuals and firms. The main response was Presidential Policy Directive 28, which imposed restraints on collection abroad in the interests of non-U.S. citizens. PPD 28 does not have sharp teeth and, while it has reportedly been a pain to implement, will not likely have a material impact on U.S. collection practices. Like many post-Snowden reforms, it imposes process and oversight constraints and forces NSA to be more prudent in its collection practices. Somehow, this directive is simultaneously toothless and constraining. Hmm. But his overall point remains accurate, if somewhat unfortunate. The NSA did have to become more transparent, but considering it was starting from total darkness, it's easy to oversell its occasional translucence. In addition, reform efforts resulting from the leaks may have given the NSA additional collection powers. The bulk telephone metadata program was legally and on the merits the most controversial program that Snowden revealed, and the one that the NSA seemed least interested in preserving. The USA Freedom Act made some important reforms to this program—most notably, by replacing NSA collection and storage of the metadata with carrier storage of the data and by requiring more limited NSA querying of the data pursuant to court approval. And yet the NSA has ended up in a stronger position as a result. It gets access "a greater volume of call records" than before, according to the NSA general counsel, and probably at a lower cost to itself, since it no longer needs to store and organize the massive quantities of data. On the other hand, there's no denying Snowden's leaks played a significant role in the revival of end-to-end encryption and other privacy/security efforts. This does appear to be more of a law enforcement "problem" than an intelligence one at this point, but without Snowden, it's hard to believe everyone from Apple to Facebook would be engaged in securing the world's communications. Also undeniable is the fact that there has been no spike in terrorist activity or any meaningful disruption in the NSA's surveillance apparatus. The NSA first responded as though Snowden were a rogue magician giving away the industry's secrets. Now, it's calmed down. It's not any happier about Snowden's disappearance and his subsequent leakage, but it could be in much worse shape than it is three years down the road. The NSA is still very much in the business of aggressive signals intelligence around the globe. Its domestic legal authorities are sounder. Its value is more apparent to the American public. It is much more adept at public diplomacy. And its central and expanding role going forward—not just for signals intelligence collection, but for cybersecurity and offensive cyber operations—are secure. While it's unlikely the NSA is throwing parties in Snowden's honor every June 6th, it can't be displeased with the outcome. It appears to have been more embarrassed than damaged -- and it may not like the additional scrutiny and skepticism that greets it every move -- but it's still pretty much intact after three years of "damaging" leaks. Filed Under: ed snowden, jack goldsmith, nsa, reforms, surveillance

Why is Hamburg so cool? So I have been traveling around Germany for quite a while now, visiting different cities and areas and enjoying my time. Visiting Hamburg is incredible every time and there are a lot of reasons why and hopefully these will help you to consider this amazing city before it’s hipster brother Berlin (which is cool in its own way). 1. The harbour 2. The river – Elbe and Alster are just beautiful anytime around the year where you can chill for bit and enjoy the city from a more relaxed point of view. Take a lunch and a blanket or just sit on your jacket and watch the city flow by. 3. The city itself is so divers that you can literally walk from the old town with their impressive buildings (like the town hall) to the graffiti decorated, hippie meets hipster central of Sternschanze. 4. From there it is a jump the to red light district St. Pauli which is a mix of amazing concerts, pubs and of course some red-light stuff – a german version of Pigalle in Paris. Next there is the Speicherstadt which to this day is one of my favorite places in the world even though I have travelled across the globe, the Hafencity (with the Elbphilharmonie and the impressive harbour) and just in case you might not have enough I haven’t even mentioned Ottensen and Altona which have their own quirky charm. 5. Food: If you have read some of my articles you know I am obsessed with good food and here I have all the options I would care for, from Steaks at the Bullerei, classic cuisine at Tschebull or a foodie fiesta at Tarantella. You can and should have it all. 6. Sights: Enough…for a thousand pictures – not gonna list them (there are literally a thousand pages about museums and churches) 7. People: Everywhere I went people were welcoming, friendly and just having a good time. Must be the ocean breeze. 8. The ocean: Yup, Hamburg even got access to the ocean. Including boat trips, ferry rides and what not. Why not take the train to Sylt (definitely on my list) and chill at the beach, or take a boat ride to Helgoland (the only island in the nordic sea) 9. Concerts, Partys, Theatres and everything your heart desires with a laid back crowd. 10. Parks, BBQ and Hangouts – Depending where you go in Hamburg – from the favorite Stadt Park to the Elbe Beach for a BBQ or just your favorite tiny square of greenery there is always an option to escape the city without leaving. As always …. Bon Voyage. Ps: Here is a good link for sights in case you are too lazy to search 😉 Sights to see

Share. So this is why he's known as the Merc with a Mouth. So this is why he's known as the Merc with a Mouth. Deadpool breaks the fourth-wall like he breaks faces: violently and unapologetically. It’s the most striking aspect of the first game to star the Merc with a Mouth as its lead character. Until now he’s always appeared in supporting roles, gently mocking video game conventions. In Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds, for instance, he could dismantle the health bar suspended above his head and use it as a weapon to beat his opponent with. So far he’s only toyed with such tropes. But now, finally pushed front and centre stage, Deadpool is able to take on some of those trite conventions. His sardonic swagger is present right from the game’s amusing menu screen. Suddenly, Deadpool’s masked face appears alongside the standard options to start a new game or load an existing one. He’s really close, his distinctive eyes blinking, pressing against the screen. He moves back a few steps, and starts to tap the glass of your television set, before asking, “Hey, got any girls in there?” Exit Theatre Mode He knows he's in a video game, and is acutely aware of the gender breakdown that his game will potentially attract. And that’s exactly how it’s being described – it’s Deadpool’s game. Even Sean Miller (the game’s actual director) presents it as Wade Wilson's own creation. Deadpool knows that you’re sat there with a controller in your hands. All we’ve seen of the game so far has been to some footage in the Comic Con announcement trailer. Today at Gamescom I got to see an early demo of a level in the game. It was still very much a work in progress – some animations still needed fine tuning and the HUD wasn’t finalised – but it already looked good and surprisingly polished. “ Deadpool knows that you’re sat there with a controller in your hands. The mission set-up is quite generic, but you get the feeling that’s an intentional decision. The level's opening cutscene finds Deadpool in his unhygienic apartment, draped in an armchair, scratching his crotch with a gun. He’s accepted a mission to assassinate a corrupt media mogul, whose television channel produces such quality programming as “Jump the Shark”, in which ‘celebrities’ must literally jump over a tank of water containing a ravenous great white shark. So far, so knowing, and this extends to the gameplay itself. The mission starts with Deadpool in a sewer beneath mogul’s high-rise building. It’s a basically a tutorial level, presenting Deadpool with an irresistible opportunity to directly address you, the player. He tells you to press ‘A’ to jump. And when presented with the right combination of platforms, he wearily suggests the novel idea of ‘wall jumping’. He never shuts up. He’s a medically diagnosed psychotic, and has multiple voices rattling around his head. You hear them interacting constantly, vying for his attention. Miller describes it as having “the three stooges in your head”. “ Players will be presented with the choice either to reattach severed limbs or wait for them to regrow. As always, it’s hard to really know how good the combat is without going hands-on with the game. But it relies heavily on using the character’s trademark arsenal of swords and guns, as well as giving players the option to equip more irregular weapons like sledgehammers. From this demo it wasn't really clear how his superhuman abilities would come into play. Like Wolverine, Deadpool possesses an accelerated healing factor. It’s promised that in the final game Deadpool will slowly fall apart as he sustains damage, similar to the protagonist in Konami's Neverdead. Players will be presented with the choice either to reattach severed limbs or wait for them to regrow. You can imagine the former as a way to quickly restore health, though this wasn’t confirmed. His ability to teleport has yet to be mentioned, too. Probably the strongest aspect of the demo I saw was Deadpool’s extensive knowledge of popular culture and the game’s intertextual playfulness. He struts while humming Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal as he breaks into the building of his intended target. He quotes Star Trek (“Make it so number one”) and Star Wars (“I’ve got a bad feeling about this”) within seconds of each other. The best allusion, however, belonged to the menu screen. Select a new game, and you hear something very familiar slowly fade in – the distinctive percussion of the Terminator theme tune starts to thump, as Deadpool is lowered down, presumably into the game, and as he is about to disappear offscreen, he raises his arm and gives a thumbs up. It’s a touching and wry tribute to the noble T-800. Given the game’s fondness for allusion, the decision to cast Nolan North makes perfect sense. Not only has he played the character before but his vocal ubiquity in video games – he’s the voice of Nathan Drake, Desmond in Assassin’s Creed, and so many others – fits perfectly with the game’s metafictional aspirations. The game looks like a lot of fun but ultimately the writing will have to be pitch-perfect to make Deadpool a success. If it strays too frequently, becoming more crass than clever, it could easily fall into the trap of becoming the kind of game it’s attempting to parody. Daniel is IGN's UK Staff Writer. You can be part of the world's worst cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.

A new Washington Post poll has Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by one point in Texas (Photo: MGN Online) VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) — With Labor Day behind them, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are pushing ahead in top presidential battlegrounds in the South, including Texas. According to a new state-by-state poll conducted by the Washington Post and Survey Monkey, Clinton leads Trump by one point in Texas in a two-way race. When Gary Johnson and Dr. Jill Stein are figured into the polling, Clinton and Trump are locked in a virtual tie. Trump, the Republican nominee, is set to campaign in Virginia and North Carolina on Tuesday, two critical states in his path to the presidency. Clinton, the Democrat, is campaigning in Florida in search of an advantage in the nation's largest swing state. A Clinton victory in Florida would make it virtually impossible for Trump to overcome her advantage in the race for 270 electoral votes. The day before in swing state Ohio, Trump softened his stance on immigration while Clinton blasted Russia for suspected tampering in the U.S. electoral process. In a rare news conference aboard her new campaign plane, Clinton said she is concerned about "credible reports about Russian government interference in our elections." "We are going to have to take those threats and attacks seriously," Clinton told reporters traveling with her from Ohio to Illinois. Clinton's comments follow reports that the Russian government may have been involved in the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails just days before the party's national convention. The emails, later revealed by WikiLeaks, showed some DNC officials favoring Clinton over her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders — who has since endorsed Clinton for president. She said Russian President Vladimir Putin appears "quite satisfied with himself" and said Trump "has generally parroted what is a Putin-Kremlin line." Meanwhile, Trump extended a rare invitation to journalists to accompany him on his private plane from Cleveland to Youngstown, Ohio. The billionaire businessman appeared to shy away from his hard-line vow to block "amnesty" for immigrants in the country illegally. Any immigrants who want full citizenship must return to their countries of origin and get in line, he told reporters — but he would not rule out a pathway to legal status for the millions living in the U.S. illegally, as he did in a long-awaited policy speech last week. "We're going to make that decision into the future," Trump said. Clinton powered through a coughing fit at a Labor Day festival at a Cleveland park, sharply criticizing Trump's recent trip to Mexico as "an embarrassing international incident." Unwilling to allow Trump to modify his immigration stances, she said his address later that night in Arizona amounted to a "doubling down on his absurd plan to send a deportation force to round up 16 million people." "He can try to fool voters into thinking somehow he's not as harsh and inhumane as he seems, but it's too late," Clinton said. The former secretary of state flatly said "No," when asked in an ABC News interview whether she'd be willing to accept the Mexican president's invitation to visit the country, as Trump did last week. "I'm going to continue to focus on what we're doing to create jobs here at home," Clinton said. Trump, meanwhile, addressed his proposed border wall plan in an interview with ABC's Good Morning America. Trump said the Mexican president violated some "ground rules" by admitting that the two did actually discuss payment of his proposed border wall between the two countries, but added, "that's ok." At the joint press conference with President Enrique Pena Nieto last week, Trump told reporters that payment of his proposed border wall was not discussed. Pena Nieto later tweeted that it was addressed and he "made it clear" to Trump that Mexico would not pay. He added that had Clinton gone to Mexico, the trip would have been "a total failure." Earlier in the day, Trump attacked Clinton's energy level, noting she hasn't followed his aggressive traveling schedule and questioning whether she had the stamina to help bring jobs back to America. "She doesn't have the energy to bring 'em back. You need energy, man," Trump told reporters. He added, "She didn't have the energy to go to Louisiana. And she didn't have the energy to go to Mexico." Clinton's 25-minute question-and-answer session was her first extensive availability with reporters since early December. Beyond Russia, she answered questions about the ongoing controversy surrounding her use of a private email server while secretary of state, which Trump has used to cast doubt over her ability to protect classified information. "I take classification seriously," she said. After a yearlong investigation, the FBI recommended against prosecution in July, and the Justice Department then closed the case. FBI Director James Comey said that while Clinton and her aides had been "extremely careless" in dealing with sensitive materials, there was no evidence they intentionally mishandled classified information. While Labor Day has traditionally been the kickoff to the fall campaign, both Clinton and Trump have been locked in an intense back-and-forth throughout the summer. The start of full-fledged campaigning opens a pivotal month, culminating in the first presidential debate Sept. 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Polls show Trump trailing Clinton in a series of must-win battleground states, meaning the debates could be his best chance at reorienting the race. Trump told reporters he does plan to take part in all three presidential debates, joking that only a "hurricane" or "natural disaster" would prevent him from attending. Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Software developed by professors and graduate students from the University of California at Berkeley? That will never fly in the semiconductor industry, right? Maybe they said that about SPICE, four decades ago. The jury is still out on RISC-V (pronounced risk-five) the modular, open-source instruction set architecture created in this decade by Cal professors and students, yet the ISA is gaining the support of heavyweight companies in computers and software. Krste Asanovic, a UC Berkeley professor who also serves as chairman of the RISC-V Foundation, made a presentation on the ISA in a “Sky Talk” (as in “blue sky”) at the 53rd annual Design Automation Conference in Austin, Texas. ISA functions as the interface between computer hardware and software. “Most important interfaces are not open source,” Asanovic noted. The most widely used are the x86 architecture created and maintained by Intel, and the architectures developed by ARM Holdings. Intel has jealously guarded its x86 architecture for decades. Although it once struck a licensing agreement with Advanced Micro Devices allowing AMD to serve as a second-source supplier of x86-compatible microprocessors, the companies later engaged in a protracted legal battle over what AMD could do under that license before more recently reaching a legal settlement and cross-licensing agreement. AMD’s licensing deal with a Chinese semiconductor company threatens to heat up more contention between the longtime rivals, however. Asanovic joked that the shortest unit of time is not the moment between a traffic light turning green in New York City and the cab driver behind the first vehicle blowing the horn; it’s someone announcing that they have created an open-source, ARM-compatible core and receiving a “cease and desist” letter from a law firm representing ARM. Setting out in 2010 to develop an open-source ISA as a summer project with Berkeley colleagues, Asanovic said a three-month project extended over four years, reaching a frozen base user specification in 2014. During those four years, the RISC-V team was astounded to get inquiries from the world, asking why the spec was being changed in classes at the Cal campus. This added an impetus to freeze the basic ISA code. “It took a lot of work to make it this simple,” Asanovic noted. The RISC-V Foundation was formed as a not-for-profit organization that could handle trademarking the ISA and provide a structure for worldwide use of the architecture. Corporate members of the foundation include BAE Systems, Google, Hewlett Packard Labs, IBM, Microsemi, Nvidia, Oracle, Rambus, and Western Digital. SiFive, a startup founded by the original developers of RISC-V, is a founding member of the foundation, with a “Platinum” level of support. A recent report by Rambus and the Global Semiconductor Alliance hailed RISC-V as “the ‘Linux’ of microprocessors.” Asanovic concluded his DAC talk saying, “Free and open architecture – and it’s good!”

Citizens, Activists and Leaders Rally and Roll Up to the White House with 51 foot “Joint” on Saturday, April 2 at 2 p.m. Mass Consumption of Cannabis to Occur at 4:20 p.m. On Saturday, April 2 at 2 p.m., DCMJ — the organization that played a critical role in passing Ballot Initiative 71, which legalized marijuana in our nation’s capital — along with leaders, activists, advocacy groups and citizens will gather along Pennsylvania Avenue directly north of the White House to demand that President Obama use his authority to reschedule cannabis now. Why on April 2? According to the organizers, the Obama Administration has been a big ZERO on cannabis reform, so DCMJ is rescheduling and actively removing the “ZERO” from “4/20.” DCMJ has officially requested that President Obama reclassify cannabis as a less harmful substance multiple times since he has taken office in January 2009. However, no action has been taken to reschedule cannabis to date. Meanwhile, the placement of cannabis in the same category as drugs like heroin — which kills thousands of Americans each each year — remains not only irresponsible, unjust and unfitting, but also makes a continued mockery of the Controlled Substances Act. On Saturday, April 2 at 4:20 p.m. in response to the Obama Administration’s lack of action on descheduling cannabis, Americans will gather at The White House to demand immediate action is taken. Event participants will also help to carry a 51 foot “joint” at what is being called the “Emergency National Mobilization to Reschedule Cannabis.” DCMJ officials said they are still willing to call off this mass-consumption of cannabis should President Obama agree to a responsible and ethical dialogue at a Cannabis Summit, which would bring together leaders from a broad spectrum of industries to openly discuss more effective drug policies, drug classifications and approaches to the failed “War on Drugs” passed down and inherited by the Obama Administration. “While President Obama may have inherited failed drug policies, he also has an obligation to address these failures in a meaningful and responsible way,” said Adam Eidinger, founder of DCMJ. “As we approach the twilight of his administration, we are calling on President Obama to take immediate action before it is too late. "President Obama's overall apathy on the issue only enables countless men of color and others to be needlessly incarnated, medical research to be placed on hold for no good reason and the classification of cannabis as a Schedule I drug to carelessly continue," Eidinger said. "The real crime here is the President's inaction and frankly, the American people deserve -- and thought they elected -- better. These injustices must stop now before more lives are ruined and the immoral imprisonment for cannabis-related crimes continues.” WHO: Speakers from DCMJ, cannabis advocacy groups, industry activists, civic leaders WHAT: Emergency Mobilization to Reschedule Cannabis Demonstration, including 51 foot Joint WHEN: Saturday, April 2 at 2 p.m. **Note: At 4:20 p.m. there will be a mass consumption of cannabis. WHERE: Along Pennsylvania Ave. located directly north of the White House between 15th and 17th Streets, Washington, D.C. WHAT YOU CAN DO: • Join mass mobilization on 4/2 along Pennsylvania Ave. located directly north of the White House between 15th and 17th Streets, Washington, D.C. • Click "Going" and invite your friends on DCMJ Facebook page • Tweet with the hashtag #Reschedule420 • Call The White House 202-456-1111 and tell President Obama to deschedule cannabis • Forward the news to your friends • Volunteer with DCMJ on 4/2 to help things run smoothly

Sexing Up Science Won’t Solve a Dearth of STEM Majors According to a survey, nearly 90% of 16- and 17-year-olds have no interest in a STEM (science/technology/engineering/math) career. The climate is crashing, the NSA is tracking our porn, and the 99% haven’t gotten a raise in decades, but the party organ of America’s ruling class is truly, awfully worried about our imminent STEMlessness. A lot. “The number of students who want to pursue engineering or computer science jobs is actually falling, precipitously, at just the moment when the need for those workers is soaring,” writes The Editorial Board of The New York Times, which is composed of editors no one has heard of, yet whose opinions we are all supposed to care about. “Within five years, there will be 2.4 million STEM job openings,” write The Editors. Who, in the future, will program the great fleets of killer drones? Who will pilot them? It would suck to lose that business to the Chinese. Whenever the question of Why No One Wants to Study Engineering comes up, the media always comes back with the same answer: conning convincing kids that STEM stuff isn’t boring. “Most schools continue to teach math and science in an off-putting way that appeals only to the most fervent students,” the Times editors complain. Sex up the sciences — that’s the ticket! Texas Instruments (they’re still around?) has hired neuroscientist/”Big Bang Theory” actress Mayim Bialik as a “STEM education brand ambassador” to sing the praises of partial differential equations using framing that the Kids of Today/Worker Bees of Tomorrow can relate to. “Who doesn’t know something about zombies or superheroes?” asks Bialik. “These cultural archetypes can do more than just entertain. Zombies, it turns out, can teach real science and mathematical concepts like exponential growth curves and the intricacies of human anatomy and anatomical degradation. Superheroes can prompt a variety of questions that draw on physics, such as: How does one actually travel faster than the speed of light?” Is it me, or does this seem a little…forced? Hey, I’m as geeky as they come. When an engineer who designed famous roller coasters gave a talk at my Ohio high school, I was enthralled. (My classmates, not so much.) But I still didn’t want to study engineering — and it wasn’t because science is boring. I loved math, chemistry and physics in high school. I studied years ahead. I got perfect grades and tested so well that Columbia’s School of Engineering offered me a full scholarship and a well-paid teachers assistant job. Still, I didn’t want to go. Not because math and science bored me — to the contrary. I dreaded it because I knew engineering school would probably be a sucky experience and that a career in the sciences would be depressing. Not that my parents cared what I wanted. They bullied me into going anyway because (a) Columbia gave me the most financial aid of the schools I applied to, and (b) something “practical” like engineering guarantees a steady well-paid job after graduation. (Ha.) So off I went. Guess what? Engineering school was a sucky experience. My experience at Columbia highlights reasons — aside from the alleged tedium of math and science — that most young people aren’t interested in the STEM professions: When you study math and science, your classmates are boring. At Columbia the engineering majors were politically disengaged, careerist, nose-to-the-grindstone types you’d never find working over the world’s problems at an overnight BS session — much less checking out a punk concert. They were academically smart and deadly dull. After graduation, people similar in personality to your fellow students become your colleagues. Engineering isn’t boring. Engineers are. Working with boring engineers is a bummer. are boring. At Columbia the engineering majors were politically disengaged, careerist, nose-to-the-grindstone types you’d never find working over the world’s problems at an overnight BS session — much less checking out a punk concert. They were academically smart and deadly dull. After graduation, people similar in personality to your fellow students become your colleagues. Engineering isn’t boring. Engineers are. Working with boring engineers is a bummer. STEM majors get much lower grades than liberal arts majors. Tougher grading causes lower GPAs, so dropout and expulsion rates are also much higher: three out of four liberal art majors get a degree, only one out of four STEM majors. During freshman orientation, Columbia’s dean of students told us that 75% of us would drop out or get expelled. I wondered why I was there. (After three years, I was expelled with a 2.4 GPA. Which I worked hard for.) Why take out massive student loans for a one-in-four chance at a degree? Though some studies deny the difference, 60% of freshman engineering students are gone, dropped out or transferred to the liberal arts, by the end of their freshman year. These kids aren’t stupid or lazy — they were smart and studious enough to get admitted in the first place. Low social status. Guys don’t make passes at girls who wear safety glasses; girls suddenly remember something they forgot in the ladies room when you tell them you’re an electrical engineer. Because (see above) engineers are boring . Also: in America’s anti-intellectual culture, it’s not cool or hip or prestigious to be a scientist. . Also: in America’s anti-intellectual culture, it’s not cool or hip or prestigious to be a scientist. STEM employment is sporadic (they say “cyclical”). What’s the point of playing it safe when it’s not, well, safe? The STEM major you pick as a freshman may easily be obsolete by the time you hit the senior year job fair. Even if not, it’s extremely unlikely your chosen scientific field will provide steady employment for years to come. Currently, as the Powers That Be say they need STEMmers, unemployment is sky high among STEM professionals. As of 2009, nearly 9% of electrical engineers were jobless. Oh, and it turns out that STEM majors actually don’t earn more than their liberal arts counterparts. “Indeed, science and engineering careers in the U.S. appear to be relatively unattractive” compared with other career paths, Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which funds basic scientific, economic and civic research, testified to Congress in 2007. High-school students know what’s up. They hear from older siblings how hard it is to graduate from engineering school. They watch their friends’ parents lose their jobs from supposedly “safe” STEM outfits. They’re not going to change their minds until reality improves. Some fixes: De-ghettoize STEM majors within colleges and universities. Require STEM majors to take lots of liberal arts classes — it’s not like a math major shouldn’t study Spanish literature — and require liberal arts majors to take more math and science. Mix up the student bodies. Think about someone like Steve Jobs, whose design sense came from his love of art and calligraphy. The divide between English and physics majors is artificial and outdated. Crosspollinate. Put an end to the grading disparity between STEM majors and liberal arts. It’s unfair and it’s stupid. At Harvard, the average grade is an “A-“, and why not? The average Harvard student is intelligent and hardworking — and so is the average Columbia engineering student. Harvard’s softer grading regime hasn’t cost the school any reputation points. If America wants STEM majors from America, it ought to stop importing them from overseas. “When the companies say they can’t hire anyone [for STEM jobs], they mean that they can’t hire anyone at the wage they want to pay,” Jennifer Hunt, a Rutgers University labor economist, said in 2012. So they outsource STEM jobs overseas and game the work visa program to import cheaper foreign scientists. “Tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit,” reports the Columbia Journalism Review . Until STEM unemployment among Americans is 0%, Congress ought to get rid of the visa program. . Until STEM unemployment among Americans is 0%, Congress ought to get rid of the visa program. Even cultural perceptions can be changed. If President Obama and other members of the political class are serious about promoting STEM careers, they could start featuring our best mathematicians and chemists at events like the State of the Union Address rather than the usual parade of military veterans. The Soviet Union pimped its scientific minds big time; kids who admired these intellectual heroes followed in their footsteps. Math and science aren’t boring. But asking people to dedicate their lives to careers that won’t pay off is dumb. (Support independent journalism and political commentary. Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.) COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

Abstract: Italy has not, so far, faced the same level of jihadi terrorist threat as European countries like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Belgium. This is attributable to a variety of factors, including the fact that Italy does not have as acute a radicalization problem, has seen lower foreign fighter flows to Syria, and has not been as active in the anti-Islamic State coalition. There are limits, however, to this Italian exceptionalism, and there are signs that it is rapidly diminishing. Italy has seen jihadi activity on its soil for decades, including the emergence in recent years of a number of clusters recruiting for and plotting attacks on behalf of the Islamic State. With societal tensions growing because of unprecedented, continued migrant flows from North Africa, the emergence of a second generation of Muslim immigrants that may be more vulnerable to the siren call of Islamist extremism than their parents, and pockets of urban areas starting to resemble the banlieues of France, the threat to Italy from jihadi terrorism is likely to grow more acute. Unlike France, United Kingdom, and Germany, Italy has not, so far, suffered any major jihadi terrorist attacks. The problem of Islamist violent extremism is not as acute in Italy as in these countries, at least according to the leading indicator of the number of foreign fighters who have traveled to Syria and Iraq. Despite the rebranding of the Islamic State’s propaganda magazine as Rumiyah (Rome) in September 2016 and the group’s belief that Islamic armies will conquer the city near the end-of-times, Italy has been subject to far fewer threats from the group. This article assesses the case for Italian exceptionalism when it comes to the global jihadi threat by drawing on a survey by the author of hundreds of Italian Muslims, interviews with Italian counterterrorism officials, and a review of open source information on recent terrorism cases. It argues that while the threat picture and degree of radicalization is not as acute as in some other European countries, the threat is nonetheless longstanding, serious, and growing. Italy is grappling with considerable societal challenges, which could lead to greater security challenges in the future. Demographics Italy has a significantly smaller Muslim population (roughly two million) than France, Germany, or the United Kingdom.1 And although the Muslim population is nearly twice the size of Belgium, the numbers in per capita terms are significantly lower.2 a The size of the Muslim community in Italy in both absolute and per capita terms is about the same as Spain, which has seen about the same number of foreign fighters leave for Syria.3 Aside from Rome, Italian Muslims mostly reside in the north, with almost 30% in Lombardy alone. Although a second generation is emerging, the majority of Muslims in Italy are first-generation, male immigrants from North Africa who have come to Italy seeking work. Although many Muslims are low-income, the majority of Italian Muslims, unlike many of their French counterparts, do not live in ghettoized “inner-city” areas afflicted by poverty, crime, and extremist Islamist proselytization.4 While there are worrying signs that Italy is heading in this direction, there are no areas in which the situation has grown as serious as the French banlieuesb like Saint-Denis or the Molenbeek district of Brussels or the Sparkhill district of Birmingham.c Even though it is hard to quantify and compare levels of such a subjective concept as “integration,” and more research is needed, factors that have contributed to a sense of alienation in some other European countries appear somewhat less present in Italy. In other European countries with much larger second- and third-generation Muslim populations, the children and grandchildren of immigrants tend to have higher expectations than those who first immigrated, but a lack of economic opportunities and discrimination has meant these expectations have often gone unmet, creating a sense of frustration and alienation with mainstream society.5 In contrast, the still largely first-generation Italian Muslim population is still in the process of establishing their position and livelihood and therefore may be less vulnerable to the issues of alienation, identity crisis, and lack of purpose that can make individuals susceptible to radicalization. A majority say they look at the country favorably. According to a survey by the author, 81% of surveyed Italian Muslims claimed to love Italy and its culture.6 d Among the representative sample of Italian Muslims surveyed by the author, unemployment rates amounted to 8%,7 which is less than the country’s 12% overall rate.8 By contrast, British Muslims experience the highest levels of unemployment out of all religious and ethnic groups (12.8% vs. 5.4% of the general population).9 And in contrast to Switzerland and Germany, the Italian state and the representatives of the Muslim community are about to finalize an entente that recognizes Islam as an official religion, granting Muslims valuable social and legal rights.10 Islamist Radicalization According to Italian counterterrorism officials, radicalization is not as significant a problem in Italy as in some other European countries. There are fewer dangerous Islamist extremists on Italian soil in absolute terms than in France, Germany, or Belgium as well as fewer Islamist extremists as a proportion of the Muslim population than those countries.11 There is also substantial anecdotal evidence that some other countries have a more serious radicalization problem. Unlike the reportedly significant numbers in France who refused to observe a moment of silence for the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attack,12 Italian Muslims have been virtually unanimous in their condemnation of violence and terrorism in the name of Islam.13 Italy has also, so far, been relatively immune to overt displays of Islamist extremism. Italian cities have never experienced the unofficial establishment of sharia patrols by local Muslims14 nor have they dealt with Islamist extremists burning American and Israeli flags in front of their respective embassies.15 A significantly smaller number of foreign fighters have departed from Italy as compared to the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, and Germany. In Italy, 122 individuals have left to join the Islamic State and other jihadi groups,16 a number comparable to the foreign fighter number for Spain.17 By contrast, around 450 have departed from Belgium,18 1,300 from France, 850 from the United Kingdom,19 and over 900 from Germany.20 While Italy has does not have as acute a radicalization problem as France, for example, there are limits to Italian exceptionalism. According to data collected by the author, it is not uncommon to find attitudes associated with violent extremism in Italy’s Muslim community. Out of 440 subjects surveyed by the author between November 2015 and August 2016, 24% (105/440) stated violence in the defense of Islam is justifiable, 10% (44/440) endorsed al-Qa`ida, 13% (57/440) supported the Islamic State, and almost 30% (131/440) agreed with the duty to punish whomever insults Islam and its sacred tenets.21 As emerged in 200 follow-up interviews, the main reasons for accepting violence centered on the notion of a religious duty to defend oppressed fellow Muslims. “[Imagine] you are a Syrian citizen. Who is going to protect you? Assad? Putin? The West? No, only other true Muslims who are obliged to come protect you if you are in danger,” one North African worker in Reggio Emilia told the author.22e For this reason, a Senegalese vendor in Naples described al-Qa`ida and the Islamic State as “the only defenders of oppressed people in Syria and the Middle East.”23 “If it weren’t for them,” said a Somali immigrant in Florence referring to the Islamic State, “there would be much more blood in the area.”24 Interestingly, statistical analysis by the author revealed that in the Italian case, discrimination and outrage at Western foreign policy was not a driving factor in radicalization.25 f This finding may be a reflection of the fact that Italy has played a much lower-profile role in the anti-Islamic State coalition than some other Western countries. Although Italy has provided training and logistical assistance to Peshmerga units in Erbil,26 Iraqi police in Mosul,27 and anti-Islamic State forces in the Libyan city of Misrata,28 it has never been involved in active airstrikes or direct military confrontation. By contrast, there was a powerful correlation between religiously framed violence and endorsement of an Islamic government. Fifty percent of the subjects who agreed that theocratic rule was better than democracy justified violence in defense of Islam, compared to 15% of those who did not agree with such rule.29 There was also a strong correlation between endorsing violence and belief in the duty to punish offenders of Islam. Eighty percent of those who agreed with such a stance also endorsed violence in the name of God, compared to only 15% in support of violence among those who disagreed with punishing offenders. This suggests that the view that insulting the Prophet Mohammad is unacceptable was a key premise for justifying violence in the name of God.30 The fact that there have been relatively few Islamist terrorist plots and attacks in Italy despite the prevalence of such attitudes are a reminder that it is not possible to draw a straight line between attitudes associated with violent extremism and actual acts of Islamist terrorism. Nevertheless, they provide the context for the current threat environment, which could be negatively transformed in the future by a variety of factors, including greater prioritization of targeting Italy by Islamist terrorist groups like the Islamic State or societal changes in Italy that could harden these sentiments. Jihadi Activity in Italy While Italy has largely escaped the scourge of Islamist terrorism, there has been longstanding jihadi activity on Italian soil. As illustrated in a report by Centro Militare di Studi Strategici, which is linked to the Italian Ministry of Defense, there has been a significant jihadi presence in Italy for two decades.31 The country has served as a harbor for members of the GSPC,32 Jamat-Islamiyya,33 the Algerian GIA,34 Ansar al-Islam,35 and al-Qa`ida.36 “Hamza the Libyan,” Usama bin Ladin’s messenger responsible for establishing al-Qa`ida’s network in Europe, resided in Milan, for example.37 From Italy, terrorist cells linked to al-Qa`ida have orchestrated, facilitated, or backed attacks in Casablanca,38 Madrid,39 Baghdad,40 and Peshawar.41 Terrorists and sympathizers have engaged in fundraising activities,42 petty crimes,43 counterfeiting documents,44 arms45 and drugs trafficking,46 and the facilitation of illegal immigration.47 Since 2001, radical proselytization has been detected in 108 mosques, and 11 have been linked to terrorist activities.48 In addition to the 122 fighters who have joined the Islamic State or other jihadi groups in Syria and Iraq, Italy had already exported 29 combatants to Iraq during the Iraqi insurgency after the U.S. invasion in 2003, some of them responsible for suicide operations that resulted in dozens of casualties.49 Italy has seen more than 20 jihadi plots and attacks since 9/11. Very few of the plots were at an advanced stage, and none of the attacks caused fatalities.50 Among these, the country experienced six minor, unsuccessful attacks by individuals with no contacts in terrorist groups in Milan, Agrigento, Brescia, and Modena that featured no injuries or casualties. The only partially successful attack occurred in 2009 in Milan at the Santa Barbara Carabinieri Station when Mohammed Game attempted to detonate a rudimental device, but only he and a guard were ultimately injured.51 Of the thwarted plots since 2001, the most well-known schemes included the 2001 al-Qa`ida-inspired failed chemical attack on the U.S. Embassy in Rome, which featured a plan to release cyanide concealed in tomato cans into the building’s vent system;52 the 2005 GSPC-inspired plot to crash a ship filled with explosives in Naples’ port;53 the 2006 plot by a cell associated with al-Qa`ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) to strike Bologna’s Dome and Milan’s subway;54 the 2012 Islamic State in Iraq-inspired plot by Mohammed Jarmoune to target Milan’s Jewish Synagogue;55 the 2016 Islamic State-inspired plan by Moutaharrik Abderrahim to carry out a suicide bombing operation at the Vatican;56 the 2016 plot by two Afghan citizens allegedly linked to al-Qa`ida and the Islamic State to attack the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus in Rome;57 and the 2017 Islamic State-inspired alleged plan to attack Venice’s famous Rialto Bridge.58 Except for the 2007 Ponte Felcino case in which investigators confiscated chemical substances allegedly meant for chemical warfare,g since 2001 no weapons or explosive devices were found in any of the Islamist terrorism plots thwarted by authorities.59 The thwarted plots were mostly aspirational and not far advanced in their planning largely because legal preventive measures in Italy grant officials the right to execute environmental monitoring (e.g. wiretapping) and intervene at early stages of presumed criminal activities. In addition to the jihadi activity detailed above, there have been hundreds of arrests and deportations linked to terrorism investigations since 2001.60 Italian Foreign Fighters Before the recent wave of departures to Syria and Iraq, a few dozen foreign fighters had left Italy for theaters of jihad in the Balkans in the 1990s and in Iraq following the breakout of the war in 2003.h During these first two waves, aspiring combatants gravitated to a mosque network (principally in Milan) and displayed preexisting ties with international actors. By contrast, Italian foreign fighters joining the Islamic State have not necessarily been frequent mosque-goers. Their radicalization process mostly occurred online, and their ties with international actors were established through virtual communities. Overall, social marginalization does not seem to be a notable driver of foreign fighter mobilization, as most fighters have been employed and at least outwardly integrated.61 Unlike in the past, Italian converts62 and women have been among the departees.63 Attracted by the caliphate’s lure of a perfect Islamic society, several entire families have decided to join the Islamic State from Italy, too.64 In addition to Giuliano Delnevo, the first Italian foreign fighter to perish in Syria, the two most renowned combatants are Anas el-Abboubi and Maria Giulia Sergio. Born in Morocco in 1992, el-Abboubi grew up in a small mountain town near Brescia. His family was integrated and respected in the local community, and Anas aspired to become a famous rapper. After radicalizing online, he created the Italian branch of Sharia4Italy, establishing contacts with other Western and international jihadis.65 Anas was arrested in June 2013 for plotting attacks against Brescia’s Goito military base, its train station, and one of the town’s bridges.66 Released from prison for lack of evidence, Anas then left for Syria in July 2013,67 where he is still believed to be fighting.68 Another prominent Italian foreign fighter in Syria is Maria Giulia Sergio (Fatima), a convert from the Naples area residing in Milan who became radicalized online through Skype conversations with Haik Bushra, a female university student in Bologna.69 Fatima, who was 27 at the time, became obsessed with going to Syria and married Aldo Kobuzi, an Albanian wannabe fighter, at the Treviglio mosque on September 17, 2014.70 On September 21, the two traveled to Istanbul, reached the Syrian border at Gaziantep on the following day, and are presumed to have entered Syria on October 2, 2014.71 Once in the country, Fatima gained attention for her enraged remarks and threats to Italy. “Here we behead unbelievers … Jihad for Allah’s sake is a mandatory duty and who cannot come here [must wage] Jihad in daarakufr [the land of misbelief, that is] killing the infidels!”72 Target Rumiyah Despite these plots, there have been relatively few conspiracies to attack targets in Italy. As Lorenzo Vidino’s research has revealed, the key explanation for this is that al-Qa`ida and its affiliates mainly used Italy as a logistical platform.73 Terrorist cells that gravitated to the mosque network (especially in Milan) were hierarchically organized and had physical links with other international actors. Underground recruitment was carefully planned and selective. Further, while plots to strike Italy existed, terrorist cells mostly gathered intelligence and resources destined for terrorist operations perpetrated abroad. The Italian public began to grow concerned over the threat of jihadi terrorism in the wake of the Islamic State’s deadly attacks in Europe. The Islamic State has made direct threats to Italy more frequently than other jihadi terrorist organizations now or in the past. It is true that in 2002 and 2003 bin Ladin himself threatened retaliation against U.S. allies, including Italy in the list of the mentioned countries.74 While the Islamic State has threatened countries like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom more prolifically, it is nevertheless ironic that the group has repeatedly threatened Italy at a time when Rome’s involvement in the Middle East has been marginal. Italy has not been conducting active airstrikes like the United Kingdom and France nor has the country flown reconnaissance sorties as Germany has. One explanation for why Italy is mentioned so many times as a target in Islamic State propaganda is that “Rome” or “Rumiyah” has been used by the group as a catch-all term for Western Christendom. While not all these threats are designed to explicitly single out Italy, they serve to heighten the threat to the country. The Islamic State has been animated by a prophecy attributed to the Prophet Mohammed that predicts the conquest of Rome by Islamic armies near the end of time.i And in this context, threats against the home of Christianity serve an additional function of energizing and motivating its hardline support base around the world. The growing number of Islamic State attacks on Christians around the world and past plots targeting the Vatican suggest the Eternal City will continue to be a target. Rome has been mentioned several times by the leaders of the Islamic State. In July 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi released an audiotape telling followers “you will conquer Rome and own the world, if Allah wills.”75 In September of that year, after the United States launched air strikes in Syria, then Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani stated in an audiotape, “With Allah’s permission, we will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah, the Exalted. This is His promise to us.”76 In the same vein, in February 2015, the Islamic State released a video of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Copts on a Libyan beach. One of the fighters warned on camera, “We are here, south of Rome. Soon we will conquer Rome with God’s will.”77 Such warnings were undoubtedly also designed to pressure Italy not to deepen its involvement in Libya. Italy has so far only been involved in logistical support to recognized anti-Islamic State forces.78 In 2015, a video featuring executions and beheadings was specially subtitled in Italian and stated, “You have declared war on me with the misbelieving alliance … the more you will fight, the more you will suffer.”79 One of the most explicit threats was made in April 2016 when an English-speaking fighter, featured in an Islamic State video showing footage of previous attacks, stated, “If it was Paris yesterday, and today Brussels, only Allah knows where it will be tomorrow. Maybe it will be in London or Berlin or Rome.”80 Pro-Islamic State Clusters in Italy Whereas extremist networks in Italy in the decade before 9/11 were composed to a significant degree of jihadis who were radicalized before they moved to Italy, they have become increasingly populated by individuals radicalized inside Italy.81 As a series of articles in this publication has illustrated, throughout Europe clusters of extremists that have congregated around charismatic radical preachers have played an outsized role in recruiting individuals to travel to join the Islamic State or encouraging them to carry out terrorist activity in its name. This is true of Italy, even though the available evidence suggests these clusters are smaller and more localized than those that centered on extremist proselytizers such as Khalid al-Zerkani in Brussels,82 Abu Walaa in northwest Germany,83 and Anjem Choudary in London.84 Several small clusters of extremists have been detected in Lombardy and Veneto, making these regions arguably the epicenter of pro-Islamic State activity in Italy. One influential radicalizer was Musa Cerantonio, an Australian imam of Italian origin who preached in Brescia and Bergamo in August 2012.85 He hit the headlines in the summer of 2014 when he posted a picture of himself waving the Islamic State flag in front of San Peter Dome, stating, “Allah willing, we will destroy the Vatican.”86 He was eventually arrested on charges of terrorism in the Philippines.87 Another radical preacher was Bilal Bosnic, a Bosnian linked to the Islamic State who previously toured northern Italy to recruit combatants for the Syrian front. Bosnic preached in mosques in the cities of Pordenone, Cremona, and Bergamo in July 2011. Particularly important were his remarks from a 2014 interview confirming both the presence of Italian foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq and the caliphate’s interest in Italy’s recruiting and ideological potential.88 Imam Bosnic was eventually arrested in Bosnia in September 2014 on charges of being an Islamic State recruiter.89 Bosnic’s efforts in northern Italy helped establish a small cluster supportive of the Islamic State in Veneto. Through the help of one of his acolytes, Ajhan Veapi, Bosnic reportedly indoctrinated and recruited Ismar Mesinovic and Minifer Karameleski, two Balkan workers residing in the town of Belluno in Veneto.90 Officials later ascertained this cluster of extremists was linked to actors in Macedonia, namely Saban Asanoski and Adisen Mauslijoski, who traveled with the Belluno group to Syria. After reaching Syria in December 2013, Mesinovic was killed while fighting, and Karameleski is still presumed to be there.91j Similarly, although investigations are still in progress, authorities are assessing potential ties between Bosnic’s network and an alleged Balkan terrorist cell that was dismantled in Venice in March 2017. This newer cluster was composed of four Kosovar citizens, all employed and residing in Venice’s historic center. According to prosecutors, upon the return of Fisnik Bekaj—one of the cell’s members who is believed to have fought for the Islamic State92—from Syria in 2016, the group began to “self-train” by consulting Islamic State content online and expressed a desire to pledge allegiance to the group. Investigators believe the cell aspired to launch attacks in Venice because in one intercepted conversation they mentioned the attaining of paradise by bombing the Rialto Bridge.93 An Islamic State-linked cell, which was dismantled in Venice in March 2017, discussed attacking the city’s Rialto Bridge (pictured here), according to Italian investigators. (Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images) Italian authorities have detected more recruitment activity for the Islamic State in Lombardy than any other region. The provincial capital Milan has long been a center of jihadi activity with one garage-turned-mosque—the Islamic Cultural Institute—being labeled “the main al Qaeda station house in Europe used to facilitate the movement of weapons, men and money across the world” by the United States Treasury Department shortly after 9/11.94 k Despite the dismantling of al-Qa`ida-linked cells in the years that followed, the region has supplied in more recent times the Islamic State with more than one-third of all Italian foreign fighters.95 Although they are not believed to still be active,96 there were four clusters in Lombardy linked to jihadi groups, including the Islamic State in Syria, which caused Italian security services particular concern. One was the Cologno Monzese cluster, which was formed by a dozen Syrian citizens who radicalized following the breakout of the Syrian civil war. After engaging in acts of intimidation against Christian Syrians in Italy, at least five members of the group departed to join forces with the Free Syrian Army in 2012 and then with Jabhat al-Nusra in 2013,97 forming the “Suleiman Battalion.”98 While the group’s leader was filmed executing prisoners in Syria, those who remained in Italy have been accused of recruiting fighters.99 Another was the Inzago cluster, which gravitated around female Italian convert Fatima, her husband Kobuzi, and their two extended families. After converting herself and her family to Islam in 2008, Fatima left for Syria with her husband in 2014. During her stay in the caliphate, she has been allegedly trained to manage weapons and has fiercely pressured her family to move to Syria.100 Indeed, from Milan and from Grosseto, Tuscany, Fatima’s and Aldo’s families were allegedly preparing their departure for the Middle East when they were arrested in July 2015.101 A third was the Varese-Lecco cluster, which was composed of five Moroccan citizens and one female Italian convert. After radicalizing, Alice Brignoli and her husband, Mohamed Koraichi, entered Syria with their three children. Their friends and relatives Abderahhim Moutaharrik (a former kickboxing champion); his wife, Salma Bencharki; Koraichi’s sister Wafa; and Abderrahmane Khachia, brother of Ousamma Khachia who died in 2015 in Iraq,l were apprehended before they could take action. In April 2016, Moutaharrik was instructed through an audio message sent via Whatsapp by an Islamic State “sheikh” to strike Italy.m As authorities demonstrated, he was planning to target the Vatican.102 Moutaharrik was arrested in April 2016 and was sentenced to six years in prison in February 2017.103 This appears to be the first case known to Italian authorities in which the Islamic State has attempted to direct an attack in Italy over encryption apps. Finally, the Brescia cluster was made up of four Kosovar citizens, whose leading figure was allegedly Samet Ishmiti, a former laborer from Brescia who radicalized online in 2011.104 Even though it is not clear whether the group had real intentions to attack Italy, photos showed its members holding weapons while stating, “Francis will be the last Pope.” What concerned authorities most were the cluster’s proven, direct, personal ties with Lavdrim Muhaxheri,105 aka “The Balkans’ Butcher,” one of the Islamic State’s most brutal commanders and leader of the Balkan brigade in Syria.106 n Even though these clusters were mostly geared toward recruiting foreign fighters to join jihadi efforts in Syria and Iraq, some of their members did plan to bring terror to Italy. Others plotting terrorist attacks in the Lombardy region appear to have been radicalized online instead of being part of Islamic State-linked networks. One example was a pair of alleged terrorist plotters arrested in Brescia in July 2015. Italian investigators believe Briki Lassaad, a Tunisian extremist, and the Pakistani Muhammed Waqas were planning to attack a U.S. military base located in Ghedi and other targets in Italy, including the police. What particularly concerned Italian authorities was the fact that the duo had stable jobs and were seemingly well integrated into Italian society.o In 2016, the two were sentenced to six years in prison on charges of terrorism.107 The Threat Trajectory Italy does not at this time face the same scale of threat as some other European countries like France, Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom. As outlined, this reality is likely due to a variety of factors, including a lower degree of radicalization inside the Muslim community, less anger among Italian Muslims over the country’s foreign policy, and the fact that notwithstanding the repeated mentions of Rumiyah in Islamic State propaganda, Italy is not a priority target of international terrorist groups. Just as may have been the case with al-Qa`ida in the years before and after 9/11, it is possible that one factor making Italy a lower priority target is that jihadis continue to see it as a useful logistical hub. Furthermore, the governmental powers granted by Article 270 of the penal code may have indeed discouraged aspiring jihadis. Seizure of assets, mobility and occupational restrictions, and direct expulsions from Italy may, in fact, prove to be effective preventive measures, particularly if aspiring jihadis are first-generation immigrants seeking better conditions for their families. There are a number of indicators, however, suggesting the threat could grow worse. Although racism and perceived inequality have not been significant drivers in relation to support for Islamist violence in Italy, 51% of Muslims in Italy questioned by this author did feel discriminated against. Likewise, 64% stated they have no voice, and 82% believed there is a media war to discredit Islam.108 Such attitudes provide opportunities for radical proselytizers. Furthermore, Italy’s economy has still not recovered from the 2008 economic crisis, and it now finds itself overwhelmed with managing the humanitarian crisis, which in 2016 alone brought almost 200,000 migrants to its shores.109 Resentment against the new arrivals and fears over terrorism has seen a sharp rise in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments. Most worryingly, there are signs the experiences faced by the Italian Muslim community is moving in the direction of France. Italian cities that host large Muslim communities are starting to see the ghettoization of Muslim immigrants in certain neighborhoods. Examples include Via Padova in Milan, Torpignattara in Rome, and Machera in Turin, which, increasingly afflicted by high unemployment, crime, and poverty, could turn into something comparable to the French banlieues. As the children of a first generation of immigrants who came to Italy to work come of age, there is concern second-generation Italian Muslims might also suffer from the identity crisis and feeling of alienation that have afflicted their counterparts in countries like France and the United Kingdom. In an increasingly polarized society, extreme Islamist ideology might offer a sense of meaning and purpose sought by those who feel victimized and frustrated. In these circumstances, there is concern jihadi terrorist groups will attempt to worsen societal tensions by launching terrorist attacks in Italy. Given the surge in migrant flows to Italy from Libya, there is concern the Islamic State could infiltrate operatives into Italy amongst the larger refugee flows from the Middle East and North Africa. In 2016, 171,000 irregular migrants arrived in Italy from Libya and North Africa.110 One of those who came back was Ben Nasr Mehdi, a Tunisian explosive expert linked to al-Qa`ida,111 who had been previously incarcerated after being convicted of terrorism offences in Italy and deported to Tunisia. In October 2015, Mehdi attempted to reenter Italy by sea from Libya with fake credentials seeking political asylum, but was discovered and deported back to Tunisia.112 Italian security services suspect Mehdi is a key figure for facilitating jihadis’ journeys towards Syria and Iraq.113 While thus far only about 17 foreign fighters who fought in Syria and Iraq have returned to Italy,114 the case of Mehdi highlighted concern that Italian or other foreign fighters migrating to Europe from Syria, Iraq or Libya, as pressure mounts on the Islamic State, might launch attacks in Italy. There is also concern that irregular migrants arriving in Italy might be vulnerable to the message of radical proselytizers inside Italy, because of unmet expectations and unstable circumstances within rescue centers. A case in point is Anis Amri, who carried out the December 2016 Berlin truck attack. Amri was radicalized in prison in Sicily after arriving there as a young asylum seeker and being jailed for starting a fire at his refugee shelter.115 Aware that prisons can serve as venues for radicalization, Italian authorities are currently monitoring 400 detainees presumed at risk of radicalization.116 It is also likely the clusters linked to the Islamic State will try to capitalize off the growing jihadi footprint in the Balkans to expand in Italy. As outlined in this piece, several recent counter-terrorism operations in Italy have centered on Balkan nationals living in Italy. As is well recognized jihadi networks operate across national borders, complicating the task of European security and police services. Italian investigators are increasingly seeing linkages between radicals in Italy and other European countries, notably Germany.p Al-Qa`ida remains part of the threat picture in Italy,117 as the dismantling of two cells in Puglia and Sardinia demonstrated.q In short, Italy faces a complex, growing, and multi-generational threat from jihadi terrorism. While Italian security agencies have so far been successful at breaking up plots, they may be put under significant strain in the future. CTC Michele Groppi is a Ph.D. student at King’s College London focusing on international relations and defense and security studies, with a major emphasis on Islamist radicalization in Europe and Italy. Follow @groppi_michele Substantive Notes [a] Although one might intuitively expect that lower proportions of Muslim citizens would reduce the general population’s “fear of the other” and favor processes of integration, perception of Muslims in mainstream Italian culture ranks amongst the most negative in Europe, in spite of their relative minor per capita presence compared to some other E.U. countries. According to a 2016 Pew survey, almost 70% of surveyed Italians saw Muslims negatively. Such results are consistent with data collected by the author between July and December 2016, which confirmed Italian non-Muslims’ negative views of fellow Muslim citizens and their overwhelmingly shared fear (70%) that acts of jihadi terrorism will occur in Italy as well. For more, see Richard Wike, Bruce Stokes, and Katie Simmons, “Europeans Fear Wave of Refugees Will Mean More Terrorism, Fewer Jobs,” Pew Research Center, July 11, 2016. The statistical data on the Italian Muslim community and Italian non-Muslim responses in this essay is taken from the author’s Ph.D. dissertation at King’s College London, Defence Studies Programme. The dissertation will be completed soon and will be entitled “Islamist radicalization in Italy: Myth or Nightmare?” [b] The term banlieues in French literally means suburbs. But in France, the term has come to also mean poor immigrant areas, with inner-city dynamics, on the peripheries of many of the country’s cities and towns. [c] This observation is based on published accounts of the challenges facing these areas. The author is not aware of any parts of Italy facing the same degree of challenges. [d] Echoing similar remarks from Milan, Rome, and Naples, a Moroccan worker in Turin thanked Allah for “being in Italy and not in France. There [France], women cannot wear the veil, they have to undress if they go to the beach, Muslims are discriminated against, are poor, and the French government does not give a damn about them. Here, we can work, have a family, and be Muslim. For this, we love Italy.” Author interview, Muslim resident of Turin, May 2016. [e] Along the same lines, two barbers in Milan and a Pakistani family man in Naples, respectively, explained the sentiment as such: “There are lots of crazy people out there. If you decide to provoke them, it’s your own risk because you know by now how bad insulting the Prophet is;” “Just like in your family, you have to discipline your children and punish them if they persevere in their mistakes; you have to do the same here. If you decide to write offensive caricatures [about Mohammad], and I tell you that insults me once, twice, three times, four times, etc., then maybe, if I slap you, you stop.” Author interview, anonymous barbers in Milan, February 2016; author interview, anonymous Pakistani worker in Naples, May 2016. [f] Although 73% of surveyed Muslims agreed with the statement that Western foreign policy toward Islamic countries is and has been unjust and frustrating, the variable the author labeled “outrage at Western foreign policy” in the regression models could not be statistically associated to support for Islamist-framed violence. That is, resenting Western foreign policy was not a significant factor in shaping attitude on endorsing violence in defense of faith, punishment of those who insult Islam, and support for al-Qa`ida and the Islamic State. [g] An al-Qa`ida-inspired cell gravitating around the local mosque was dismantled in Ponte Felcino, close to Perugia. At the time, investigators believed that the group, headed by the Moroccan imam Mostapha el-Korchi, was engaged in terrorist training (i.e. weapons use, one-on-one physical fighting, assembly of rudimental devices, etc.). The targets and the logistics of potential attacks remain unclear, but officials stated they averted imminent attacks allegedly meant to strike Morocco or Italy. For more, see “Al Qaeda: a Perugia una ‘scuola del terrore,’” Repubblica, July 21, 2007, and “A casa dell’imam l’occorrente per ordigni,” Corriere della Sera, July 22, 2007. [h] A negligible number (only around a dozen fighters) left for Afghanistan to wage jihad against the Soviets. Around 30 fighters left for Iraq after the break of the 2003 war, and 122 subjects joined the Islamic State. This trend shows a progression in the involvement of Italian fighters in the global jihadi movement recruiting combatants for international theaters of jihad. Author interview, Claudio Galzerano, director of the International Anti-Terrorism Department in Italy’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, April 2017. [i] Prophecies related to the conquest of Rome are mentioned in various hadith. See, for example, https://sunnah.com/muslim/54/50. [j] The whereabouts of the other two fighters remain unclear. [k] One imam at the mosque in the 1990s, Anwar Shabaan, a member of the Egyptian group Gamma Islamiya went on to lead the Mujahideen Brigade in Bosnia during the civil war there. Lorenzo Vidino, “The Evolution of Jihadism in Italy: Rise in Homegrown Radicals,” CTC Sentinel 6:11 (2013). [l] His affiliation to any specific group remains unclear. [m] The investigating judge in the case described the sheikh as a “very important person in the terrorist organization.” Bartolini, “Reclutatori Isis, combattenti e aspiranti kamikaze: il grande romanzo nero del jihad è in Lombardia;” Giovanna Trinchella, “Terrorismo, le intercettazioni – ‘Caro fratello, ti mando il poema bomba’. Nel mirino l’ambasciata di Israele a Roma,” Fatto Quotidiano, April 28, 2016; Luigi Ferrarella, “Esplora il significato del termine: Isis, così dava ordini lo sceicco: ‘Non venire in Siria, fatti esplodere lì,’” Corriere della Sera, April 29, 2016. [n] The Balkan Brigade is an alleged battalion within the Islamic State that is mainly composed of foreign fighters from the Balkans. Nicknamed the “Balkans’ Butcher,” Lavdrim Muhaxheri became the battalion’s top commander due to his brutality executing prisoners. He is now believed to have returned to Kosovo with the intent to bring war on European soil. For more, see Marco Pacini, “Il ritorno del boia nei Balcani,” Espresso, December 26, 2016. [o] Their desire to launch attacks was shown by comments on their Twitter accounts. “We are in your streets. We are everywhere. We are focalizing our targets, waiting for the X hour.” For more, see “Terrorismo, due arresti a Brescia. Gli investigatori: ‘Volevano colpire base militare di Ghedi,’” Repubblica, July 22, 2015. [p] One example was the 2015 arrest of Abdul Rahman Nauroz, a Kurd-Iraqi citizen residing in Merano, close to Bolzano, on charges of being an Islamic State recruiter. Investigations later revealed that while benefiting from asylum status in Bolzano, Nauroz had allegedly established contacts with radical figures in France, Norway, and Germany. His contacts in Cologne and those in Turkey allegedly allowed him to facilitate foreign fighters’ arrival to Syria. Another example was Nadir Benchorfi, who was arrested December 2016 before he could allegedly target a large shopping mall in Lombardy and was linked to a cell composed of 25 German foreign fighters he allegedly previously met when living in Germany. Finally, there was Berlin truck attacker Anis Amri, who was shot dead in Sesto San Giovanni close to Milan after attacking the German capital. In April 2017, Italian police announced they had helped German authorities break up a terrorist cell in Berlin linked to Amri. Two members of the cell—Lutumba Nkanga, 27, from Congo, and Soufiane Amri (not a family relation to the truck attacker), 22, from Morocco—were arrested in late December 2016 while transiting through Italy. Nkanga is still in custody, while Soufiane Amri was deported to Germany. For more, see Jimmy Milanese, “Quei legami tra la cellula jihadista di Merano e gli attentatori di Parigi,” Giornale, November 27, 2015; Bartolini, “Reclutatori Isis, combattenti e aspiranti kamikaze: il grande romanzo nero del jihad e’ in Lombardia;” “Terrorismo, contatti con Amri Un arresto e un espulso in Italia,” Corriere della Sera, April 28, 2017; “Terrorismo, un arresto e un’espulsione a Brindisi: ‘Militanti dell’Isis, avevano contatti con Berlino e con Anis Amri,’” Fatto Quotidiano, April 28, 2017; and “Italy claims to break up Berlin terror cell linked to Christmas market attacker,” The Local Deutschland, April 28, 2017. [q] In 2015, a cell linked to al-Qa`ida members in Pakistan and Afghanistan was dismantled in Olbia, Sardinia. From the Italian island, the cell’s members allegedly orchestrated the 2009 Peshawar attack and may have planned to target tourists and pilgrims at the Vatican in 2010. For more, see “Terrorismo islamico, scoperta cellula di Al Qaeda a Olbia,” Nuova Sardegna, April 24, 2015. In 2013, an al-Qa`ida-linked network was discovered in Puglia, in the small city of Andria. With ties to international actors, the cell was engaged in fundraising, recruiting, and the planning of attacks against local targets. In 2016, three people linked to international al-Qa`ida operatives and presumed to be preparing for attacks in Italy were arrested in Bari and Milan. The other two members of the cell had already left for Afghanistan. These cases illustrate that al-Qa`ida-aligned jihadis now have a presence in Italy beyond the group’s historical network in Milan. “Terrorismo, volevano colpire il Circo Massimo e il Colosseo: fermati tre jihadisti tra Bari e Milano;” Elisabetta Povoledo, “Terrorist Cell May Have Sought to Attack the Vatican, Italian Officials Say,” New York Times, April 24, 2015. Citations [1] Conrad Hackett, “5 Facts About the Muslim Population In Europe,” Pew Research Center, July 19, 2016. [2] Ibid. [3] Francesca Schianchi, “Dall’Italia sono partiti 110 foreign fighter per combattere con l’Isis,” Stampa, January 6, 2017; Vasco Cotovio and Chandrika Narayan, “Spain arrests 7 suspected of sending guns, bomb materials to ISIS,” CNN, February 7, 2016. [4] Michele Groppi, “Il Ritratto del Jihadista lumbard,” Limes: Chi ha paura del Califfo, May Issue (2015): pp. 191-200; Michele Groppi, “Dossier sulla comunità islamica italiana: indice di radicalizzazione,” Centro Militare di Studi Strategiciation. [5] For more information on second-generation Muslims in Europe and issues of identity crisis and radicalization, see Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Olivier Roy, “Islamic Terrorist Radicalisation in Europe,” European Islam: Challenges for society and public policy (2007): pp. 52-60; Samir Amghar, Amel Boubekeur, and Michael Emerson (eds.), European Islam: Challenges for Society and Public Policy (Brussels: Centre for European Policy Studies, 2007), pp. 55-56; Farhad Khosrokhavar, “Radicalization through religion,” (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2013), pp. 1-8; Paul Cruickshank, “Al Qaeda: the current threat,” (Pocket Issue, 2008): pp. 61-62; Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008): pp. 68-69; and Robert Leiken, “Europe’s Angry Muslims,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2005. [6] Groppi, “Islamist radicalization in Italy: Myth or Nightmare?” [7] Ibid. [8] Raffaele Ricciardi, “Disoccupazione stabile al 12% dicembre, risale quella giovanile: oltre il 40%,” Repubblica, January 31, 2017. [9] “Employment Opportunities for Muslims in the UK,” Women and Equalities Committee, U.K. Parliament, August 11, 2016. [10] “Swiss Against Recognizing Islam As An Official Religion,” Swiss Info, November 7, 2016; Alexander Gorlach, “Why Islam Gets Second-Class Status in Germany,” New York Times, December 15, 2016; “Islam, firmato Patto con associazioni di musulmani. Viminale: ‘Verso l’intesa,'” Repubblica, February 1, 2017. [11] Author interview, Claudio Galzerano, director of the International Anti-Terrorism Department in Italy’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, April 2017. [12] John Henley, “France Must Reach Out to Its Disillusioned Young Muslims, Says Director of the Class,” Guardian, January 17, 2015. [13] Goffredo Buccini, “L’Imam di Firenze: ‘Anche i terroristi nell’album di famiglia dell’Islam,” Corriere della Sera, January 13, 2017; “Attentati a Parigi, a Roma e Milano manifestazioni dei musulmani contro Isis con slogan #notinmyname. ‘E’ un dovere condannare violenza e terrorismo,’” Fatto Quotidiano, November 21, 2015; “Terrorismo, musulmani in piazza a Milano contro l’Is: ‘La violenza non ci appartiene,’” Repubblica, November 19, 2015. [14] “Locals Concerned as ‘Sharia Police’ Patrol Streets of German City,” Deutsche Welle, September 5, 2014. [15] “Protesters Burn Flags Outside US embassy in London,” Telegraph, September 14, 2012. [16] Ibid. [17] Vasco Cotovio and Chandrika Narayan, “Spain arrests 7 suspected of sending guns, bomb materials to ISIS,” CNN, February 7, 2016. [18] Pieter Van Ostayen, “Belgian Radical Networks and the Road to the Brussels Attacks,” CTC Sentinel 9:6 (2016). [19] Jean-Charles Brisard, “Stats Minint 10/02 #djihad #Syrie #Irak 2288 français/résidents: 695 sur place,+200 retours, 173 transits, 980 velléités de départ, 240 tués,” Twitter, February 12, 2017. “Who are Britain’s Jihadists?” BBC, February 22, 2017. [20] Daniel H. Heinke, “German Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq: The Updated Data and Its Implications,” CTC Sentinel 10:3 (2017). [21] Groppi, “Islamist radicalization in Italy: Myth or Nightmare?” [22] Author interview, anonymous North African workers in Reggio Emilia, June 2016. [23] Author interview, anonymous Senegalese worker in Naples, May 2016. [24] Author interview, anonymous Somali immigrant in Florence, June 2016. [25] Groppi, “Islamist Radicalization in Italy: Myth or Nightmare?” [26] Francesco Semprini, “Tra i soldati in Iraq: ‘Così addestriamo i peshmerga,’” Stampa, October 30, 2015. [27] Gianpaolo Cadalanu, “Così l’Italia addestra le forze irachene che si preparano alla battaglia di Mosul,” Repubblica, May 10, 2016. [28] “Libia, l’Italia invia un contingente di 300 uomini. E con gli alleati condanna attacchi ai pozzi,” Repubblica, September 12, 2016. [29] Groppi, “Islamist Radicalization in Italy: Myth or Nightmare?” [30] Ibid. [31] Michele Groppi, “Dossier sulla comunità islamica italiana: indice di radicalizzazione,” Centro Militare di Studi Strategici, pp. 96-158. [32] “Milano: arrestati sospetti terroristi islamici,” Corriere della Sera, June 6, 2007. [33] Biagio Marsiglia, “Un centro di preghiera che fa paura,” Corriere della Sera, October 9, 2009. [34] Antonio Corbo, “Napoli crocevia di terroristi,” Repubblica, July 13, 2005. [35] “Milano, arrestati 4 uomini: ‘Sono legati ad Al Qaeda,’” Repubblica, April 1, 2003. [36] Ibid. [37] Giusi Fasano, “Al Qaeda voleva colpire a Bologna,” Corriere della Sera, June 6, 2002. [38] “Varese, arrestato l’Imam della moschea,” Corriere della Sera, August 18, 2008. [39] “Stragi di Madrid, arresti a Milano,” Repubblica, June 8, 2004. [40] Giulio Meotti, “Italian Jihad,” Foglio, February 26, 2009. [41] “Strage di Peshawar organizzata a Olbia,” Repubblica, October 28, 2015. [42] “Finanziamenti ai terroristi islamici: 5 arresti in Italia, Francia e Gran Bretagna,” Giornale, May 12, 2010. [43] Lorenzo Vidino, “The Buccinasco Pentiti: A Unique Case of Radicalization,” Terrorism and Political Violence 23:3 (2011): pp. 398-418. [44] Lorenzo Vidino, “Islam, Islamism, and Jihadism in Italy,” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology 7 (2008). [45] “Traffico d’armi verso l’Iran, 7 arresti,” Corriere della Sera, March 3, 2010. [46] Armando Spataro, “La magistratura italiana di fronte al terrorismo interno ed internazionale dagli anni di piombo alla war on terror- Dati sulle sentenze di condanna pronunciate in Italia successivamente all’11 settembre 2001, per reati di terrorismo internazionale o per reati collegati al terrorismo internazionale,” In Aldo Celentano, La Magistratura (2008), Fratelli Begliomini: Roma pp. 20-55. [47] “Terrorismo, arrestati a Milano 6 fiancheggiatori di Al Qaeda,” Repubblica, June 24, 2003. [48] Groppi, “Dossier sulla comunità islamica italiana: indice di radicalizzazione.” [49] Ibid. [50] Ibid. [51] “Kamikaze si fa esplodere contro caserma, due feriti. I soldati evitano la strage,” Giorno, October 12, 2009. [52] “Smantellata cellula del terrorismo islamico,” Repubblica, April 5, 2001. [53] “Il Viminale espelle un terrorista ‘Progettò una nave-bomba,’” Repubblica, December 19, 2010. [54] “Preparavano attentati al metro. Ordinanze per 5 magrebini,” Corriere della Sera, June 4, 2009. [55] “Progettava attentato alla sinagoga di Milano, arrestato per terrorismo marocchino 20enne,” Corriere della Sera, March 15, 2012. [56] Emilio Randacio, “Terrorismo, 6 arresti in Lombardia. I pm: ‘Tra gli obiettivi Vaticano e ambasciata Israele a Roma,” Repubblica, April 28, 2016; Alessandra Benignetti, “Moutaharrik, chiesti 6 anni e mezzo per il pugile dell’Isis che voleva colpire il Vaticano,” Giornale, February 6, 2017. [57] “Terrorismo, volevano colpire il Circo Massimo e il Colosseo: fermati tre jihadisti tra Bari e Milano,” Messaggero, May 10, 2016. [58] “‘Metti una bomba a Rialto e guadagni subito il paradiso.’ Venezia, sgominata cellula jihadista,” Corriere della Sera, March 30, 2017. [59] Author interview, Claudio Galzerano, April 2017. [60] Ibid.; Groppi, “Dossier sulla comunità islamica italiana: indice di radicalizzazione.” [61] Lorenzo Vidino, Home-Grown Jihadism in Italy: Birth, Development and Radicalization Dynamics (Milan: Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale, 2014). [62] Virginia Piccolillo, “Giovani e convertiti, chi sono i 50 italiani dell’Isis,” Corriere della Sera, August 25, 2014. [63] “Ma i foreign fighters sono più di 100. Tra loro anche ragazze insospettabili,” Tempo, September 21, 2015. [64] Alessandro Bartolini, “Da Lecco alla Siria, famiglia si converte all’Isis e sparisce: ‘Dicevano che erano pronti a morire in nome di Allah,’” Fatto Quotidiano, March 17, 2016; “Terrorismo, ‘soldato’ dell’Isis parte da Bresso con la famiglia per l’Iraq,” Giorno, November 18, 2016. [65] Gian Micalessin, “La guerra santa di Al Italy il ‘bresciano,’” Giornale, June 21, 2014. [66] “Terrorismo, preso un ventenne marocchino: ‘Era pronto per fare un attentato a Brescia,’” Repubblica, June 12, 2013. [67] Marta Serafini, “Chi è Anas el Abboubi, il rapper bresciano citato nei leaks di Isis,” Corriere della Sera, March 11, 2016. [68] Groppi, “Il Ritratto del Jihadista lumbard.” [69] Fausto Biloslavo, “Califfato, dieci indagati in Italia nel mirino il clan di lady Jihad,” Giornale, July 1, 2015. [70] “Chi e’ Maria Giulia Sergio alias Fatima: l’italiana convertita all’Islam sostenitrice dell’ISIS,” Rai News, July 1, 2015. [71] Ibid. [72] Paolo Biondani, “Maria Giulia, la jihadista reclutava in Italia. Le intercettazioni con i genitori e la sorella,” Espresso, July 1, 2015. [73] Vidino, “Islam, Islamism, and Jihadism in Italy;” Lorenzo Vidino, “The Evolution of Jihadism in Italy: Rise in Homegrown Radicals,” CTC Sentinel 6:11 (2013); Vidino, Home-Grown Jihadism in Italy. Birth, Development and Radicalization Dynamics. [74] “Bin Laden torna a minacciare su Al Jazira,” Corriere della Sera, November 13, 2002; “Bin Laden, minacce agli USA e anche all’Italia,” Corriere della Sera, October 18, 2003. [75] “Islamic State Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Encourages Emigration, Worldwide Action,” SITE Intelligence Group, July 1, 2014. [76] “IS Spokesman Rallies Fighters Against U.S.-Led Coalition, Threatens Enemy and Calls Individual Muslims to Launch Attacks,” SITE Intelligence Group, September 21, 2014. [77] Leone Grotti, “‘Presto arriveremo a Roma.’ Tutte le volte che l’Isis ha minacciato l’Italia,” Tempi, June 30, 2016; Adam Taylor, “The Islamic State threatens to come to Rome; Italians respond with travel advice,” Washington Post, February 20, 2015. [78] Francesco Grignetti, “Raid Usa in Libia, sostegno dell’Italia, ma non ci sara’ alcun invio di militari,” Secolo XIX, August 2, 2016. [79] Giordano Stabile, “Nuove minacce all’Italia in un video dell’ISIS,” Stampa, April 14, 2015. [80] “Islamic State hints at attacks in London, Berlin and Rome,” Reuters, April 5, 2016. [81] Vidino, “The Evolution of Jihadism in Italy: Rise in Homegrown Radicals.” [82] Pieter Van Ostaeyen, “Belgian Radical Networks and the Road to the Brussels Attacks,” CTC Sentinel 9:6 (2016). [83] Georg Heil, “The Berlin Attack and the Abu Walaa Islamic State Recruitment Network,” CTC Sentinel 10:2 (2017). [84] Raffaello Pantucci, “Al Muhajiroun’s European Recruitment Pipeline,” CTC Sentinel 8:8 (2015); Jamie Grierson, Vikram Dodd, and Jason Rodrigues, “Anjem Choudary convicted of supporting Islamic State,” Guardian, August 16, 2016. [85] Armando Di Landro, “L’imam jihadista italo-australiano. Sermoni anche a Bergamo e Brescia,” Corriere della Sera, January 20, 2015. [86] Ibid. [87] Ibid. [88] Giuliano Foschini, “Bilal Bosnic: ‘Ci sono italiani nell’Isis, conquisteremo il Vaticano,’” Repubblica, August 28, 2014. [89] Giuliano Foschini, “Bosnia, arrestato Bosnic: ‘Reclutava in Italia per conto dell’Is,’” Repubblica, September 5, 2014. [90] “Il viaggio degli jihadisti dal Veneto al campo di addestramento dell’Isis,” Corriere della Sera, March 28, 2016. [91] Ibid. [92] Fabio Tonacci, “Terrorismo, sgominata cellula jihadista a Venezia: ‘Bomba a Rialto e guadagni il Paradiso,’” Repubblica, March 30, 2017; author interview, Claudio Galzerano, April 2017. [93] “‘Metti una bomba a Rialto e guadagni subito il paradiso.’ Venezia, sgominata cellula jihadista.” [94] Vidino, “The Evolution of Jihadism in Italy: Rise in Homegrown Radicals;” David S. Hilzenrath and John Mintz, “More Assets on Hold in Anti-Terror Effort; 39 Parties Added to List of Al Qaeda Supporters,” Washington Post, October 13, 2001. [95] Alessandro Bartolini, “Reclutatori Isis, combattenti e aspiranti kamikaze: il grande romanzo nero del jihad è in Lombardia,” Fatto Quotidiano, January 4, 2017. [96] Author interview, Claudio Galzerano, April 2017. [97] “Sei siriani accusati di terrorismo internazionale,” Sole 24 Ore, January 29, 2015. [98] Paolo Biondani, “Da Milano alla jihad in Siria: scoperta una rete di terroristi,” Espresso, January 28, 2015. [99] Ibid. [100] Alessandro Bartolini, “Terrorismo, la vita parallela nell’Isis di Maria Giulia ‘Fatima’ e della sua famiglia,” Fatto Quotidiano, November 16, 2016. [101] “Foreign Fighters: pronti a partire per la Siria, arrestata la famiglia di Fatima,” Giorno, July 1, 2015. [102] Luca Romano, “I volti dell’Isis in Lombardia e Piemonte,” Giornale, April 28, 2016. [103] Emilio Randacio, “Terrorismo, condannato a 6 anni a Milano il pugile dell’Isis: ‘Preparava un attentato a Milano,’” Repubblica, February 14, 2017. [104] Giacomo Talignani, “Terrorismo Brescia, chi è Samet Ishmiti la mente del gruppo dei presunti terroristi kossovari,” Huffington Post, December 1, 2015. [105] “Terrorismo, 4 arresti tra Brescia e Kosovo: ‘Legami accertati con Jihad in Siria,’” Fatto Quotidiano, December 1, 2015. [106] Bartolini, “Reclutatori Isis, combattenti e aspiranti kamikaze: il grande romanzo nero del jihad è in Lombardia.” [107] “Terroristi arrestati a Brescia, Waqas e Briki condannati a 6 anni,” Giorno, May 25, 2016. [108] Groppi, “Islamist Radicalization in Italy: Myth or Nightmare?” [109] “Migranti, record di sbarchi nel 2016,” Sole 24 Ore, January 6, 2017. [110] Patrick Kingsley, “2016 Sets New Record For Asylum Seeker Reaching Italy By Boat,” Guardian, November 28, 2016. [111] “Terrorismo islamico, confermate condanne e assoluzioni,” Resto del Carlino, July 16, 2011. [112] Daniele Scalea, “A proposito dei terroristi sui barconi,” Huffington Post, August 19, 2016. [113] Francesco Viviano, “Lampedusa, su un barcone terrorista di ritorno,” Repubblica, November 8, 2015. [114] Marta Serafini, “Isis, sono 17 i foreign fighters già rientrati in Italia,” Corriere della Sera, January 5, 2017. [115] Felice Cavallaro, “Attacco a Berlino, Amri si è radicalizzato in Sicilia,” Corriere della Sera, December 22, 2016. [116] Cristina Nadotti, “Jihadisti d’Italia, tutti i numeri e le operazioni anti-terrorismo,” Repubblica, March 30, 2017. [117] Mary Habeck, “Al Qaeda: Alive and Kicking,” Foreign Policy “Shadow Government” Blog, May 8, 2012.

Gunman Clive is finally playable on Gameboy! If you felt the HD Collection was a bit too high resolution here's the version for you! Some time ago I started aching to do a bit of coding for retro consoles, and after releasing Gunman Clive HD Collection for Wii U and struggling to get started on a new project I thought I'd take a little time off to play around with some Gameboy code. So I started working on a little GB port of Gunman Clive. I've always felt that it's basically a gameboy game at it's core. I emersed myself completely in the world of 8-bit assembler code, 4 color tiles and monochromatic screens, and I enjoyed myself tremendously. But it ended up taking a lot more time and going a lot slower and than I anticipated. After over a month of intense development I finally have a presentable Demo. It includes the full Stage 1 of Gunman Clive 1 with all the gameplay features intact. There's a few more things I'd like to do with it but I don't know if I can justify spending any more time on it. So here it is, the first and probably final version: Gunman Clive Gameboy Edition ROM Works on every Gameboy model, or any decent emulator. Runs at 60 fps with (almost) no slowdown. 1 fully playable level Near identical gameplay to the original Rom Size: 64 KB Gunman Clive Gameboy Edition was made using GBDK in a mix of C and assembler code. Other tools used include (along with some more common ones): DefleMask, Gameboy Tile Designer/Map Builder, GraphicsGale. Huge thanks to the creators of these tools

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices on Wednesday expressed doubt about whether the Obama administration had the authority to issue a regulation aimed at encouraging efficiency in the electricity market by having electrical grid operators pay users to reduce consumption at peak times. Dual electricity meters are seen outside of computer science professor Christa Lopes' home in Irvine, California January 26, 2015. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson The court heard oral arguments in an appeal filed by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission seeking to reverse a May 2014 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that threw out the rule. The case pits the government’s energy regulator against power companies that are fighting a regulation that promises to cut into their profits. The regulation concerns what FERC calls “demand response,” which is when, in an attempt to manage demand for electricity, regional electrical grid operators agree to pay electricity users to cut consumption at peak times. It is aimed at improving grid reliability, lowering costs and encouraging clean energy. The rule remains in effect while the case continues. The nine-member court could be divided 4-4, with conservative Justice Samuel Alito recusing himself from the case. An even split would uphold the lower-court ruling. Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts said he was concerned about the federal government exercising too much authority over retail electricity markets, traditionally overseen by states. “You have to have some sort of limiting principle, otherwise FERC can do whatever it wants,” Roberts said. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who often casts the deciding vote in close decisions, asked questions indicating he could favor a narrower ruling against the government that would allow FERC to rewrite the regulation rather than ruling that FERC has no authority to issue one. The court’s liberal justices were more supportive of FERC. Justice Elena Kagan said it would be an “odd result” if the court does not allow the agency to regulate on the issue because Congress made clear in the 2005 Energy Policy Act that “it wanted FERC to lower barriers to demand response.” The Electric Power Supply Association, PPL Corp and other trade groups that challenged the regulation would lose out if the regulation is upheld because it is likely to reduce demand for electricity generation. The Electric Power Supply Association’s members include Exelon Corp and Dynegy Inc. Utility group Edison Electric Institute, which represents such companies as Entergy Corp and Southern Company, also challenged the rule. Some utilities and companies that support the regulation backed the government’s appeal. A ruling is due by the end of June.

Will we see a return to form for the Nashville Predators’ goalie Pekka Rinne this year? This season will mark a return for a player, who may be considered one of today’s elite goaltenders in the NHL. When on his game, Rinne has shown he is difficult to beat. The Finnish goaltender came into the league in the 2005-2006 season. Coincidentally, that was the same year New York Ranger’s prized goaltender, Henrik Lundqvist, made his debut. They both share some other common facts. Both goalies were late round draft picks (Rinne drafted in the eighth round and Lundqvist in the seventh round of the NHL Entry Draft). Both goalies have been nominated for the Vezina Trophy multiple times for the best goaltender in a hockey season (Rinne twice and Lundqvist five times). In 2012, Lundqvist received the award over Los Angeles King’s goaltender Jonathan Quick and, yes, Pekka Rinne. Another similarity is their style of goaltending. Both utilize the butterfly style, where a player drops to their knees and uses the knee pads on the ice to block shots. Though, Rinne has not put up the consistent numbers as Lundqvist has, his presence on the ice is just as important. Both the Predators and Rangers depend heavily on their backstops. They are the “be all, end all” of the teams’ success. Unfortunately last year, the 31-year old goaltender was hampered by a bizarre injury. After undergoing surgery on his left hip during the offseason in May 2013, it became infected. He contracted e. coli to the area, which further sidetracked the two time Vezina finalist to NHL action. After intense rehabilitation and two games under his belt with the Predator’s AHL affiliate, Milwaukee Admirals, Rinne finally returned to Bridgestone Arena against the Pittsburgh Penguins in the second half of the 2013-2014 season. Despite giving up three goals in a losing effort, he was back on the ice where he belonged. Later that year, he participated in the IIHF (International Ice Hockey Federation) World Championships. He played for his native country Finland and took the silver medal in the tournament, losing to Team Russia. Despite the defeat, Rinne was named Most Valuable Player of the tournament with three shutouts. During his absence, the Nashville Predators experienced a regression in their play, most notably the goaltending position. The team went through four different goaltenders, including former Edmonton Oiler’s starting goalie Devon Dubnyk, who was traded for in January 2014 and is no longer with the team. The most successful replacement last season was Carter Hutton. In Rinne’s absence, he played in 40 games, going 20-11-4 with a goal against average of 2.62 and one shutout. Despite having a winning record, it was not enough to overcome as the Predators missed the postseason for the second time in five seasons. “… just getting him back playing is a great boost because you know the type of player that he is, the type of person he is and what he can mean to our hockey team, not only this year but the next year and the following years.”-then-Nashville Predator’s head coach Barry Trotz, the Hockey News, March 2014. Now that Pekka Rinne is healthy from all indications, the future should be bright in Nashville, once again. A return to the playoffs will be their focus this upcoming season. Led by team captain and all-star Shea Weber, the team should make some “noise” in the Western Conference. Defensemen like Roman Josi and their potential superstar Seth Jones will help pave the way to the team’s success. Also, the Predators added offensive talent James Neal via trade with the Pittsburgh Penguins. He should provide an offensive spark with Mike Fisher and budding star Craig Smith. However, with Rinne in the fold, the Predators will have more confidence on the back end and make team’s strategize around the 6’5 goaltender. For Pekka Rinne and the Nashville Predators, they will look to bounce back and regain their playoff form. On a personal level, Rinne will be working hard to regain the form that made him one of the league’s best goaltenders.

Partially Applied Functions in C There are some functions in the standard C library that takes a function pointer to be used as a callback later on. Examples include atexit() and signal(). However, these functions can’t receive an arbitrary pointer (which could hold some important program state) in addition to the function pointer, so you’re left with pesky global variables: /* You have: */ atexit ( foo ); /* foo() will have to fetch program state from globals */ /* Instead of: */ static struct program_state state ; atexit ( foo , & state ); /* foo() now have a pointer to program state */ Turns out that there’s a workaround, but it involves some black magic. I believe the overall mechanism to be quite interesting, however I do not recommend its usage. Not only because the implementation wastes a whole memory page for a callback, but also because I don’t want to encourage people to perpetuate this kind of take-pointer-to-function-without-argument nonsense. I’ll try to explain how this contraption works by showing the smaller parts first. I’ll begin with the template function. The idea is to have a function whose code can be patched up later – however that code turns out to be generated by the compiler: #define PARAMETER_CONSTANT 0xFEEDBEEF #define FUNCTION_CONSTANT 0xABAD1DEA static void partial_template_function ( void ) { (( void ( * )( void * )) FUNCTION_CONSTANT )(( void * ) PARAMETER_CONSTANT ); } The funky-looking cast basically says “call a function pointer at FUNCTION_CONSTANT with a pointer pointing to PARAMETER_CONSTANT”. Of course, if you call this code as is, the program will most likely crash. The idea is that this generates this code (IA32 assembly): 0f00deba < partial_template_function >: 0: 55 push %ebp 1: 89 e5 mov %esp,%ebp 3: 83 ec 18 sub $0x18,%esp 6: c7 04 24 ef be ed fe movl $0xfeedbeef,(%esp) d: b8 ea 1d ad ab mov $0xabad1dea,%eax 12: ff d0 call *%eax 14: c9 leave 15: c3 ret Even if you don’t know assembly, if you squint a little bit, you can clearly see the magic constants defined in the C code above. By writing a trivial function to patch these magic values to something useful (such as a real function or some real pointer argument): static bool patch_pointer ( void * code_addr , size_t code_len , void * look_for , void * patch_with ) { unsigned char * code = code_addr ; intptr_t look = ( intptr_t ) look_for ; do { if ( * (( intptr_t * ) code ) == look ) { union { unsigned char octet [ sizeof ( void * )]; void * ptr ; } patch ; patch . ptr = patch_with ; code [ 0 ] = patch . octet [ 0 ]; code [ 1 ] = patch . octet [ 1 ]; code [ 2 ] = patch . octet [ 2 ]; code [ 3 ] = patch . octet [ 3 ]; return true ; } code ++ ; } while ( code_len -- ); return false ; } And using it to patch the pointers in a page allocated with mmap() (comments and error recovery have been ommitted for brevity; full source code is linked below): struct Partial * partial_new ( void ( * func )( void * data ), void * data ) { struct Partial * t ; if ( ! func ) return NULL ; t = calloc ( 1 , sizeof ( * t )); /* partial_template_function must be declared just before partial_new * so that caller_len is calculated correctly */ t -> caller_len = ( size_t )(( intptr_t ) partial_new - ( intptr_t ) partial_template_function ); t -> caller = mmap ( 0 , t -> caller_len , PROT_WRITE | PROT_READ , MAP_PRIVATE | MAP_ANONYMOUS , - 1 , 0 ); memcpy ( t -> caller , partial_template_function , t -> caller_len ); patch_pointer ( t -> caller , t -> caller_len , ( void * ) FUNCTION_CONSTANT , func ); patch_pointer ( t -> caller , t -> caller_len , ( void * ) PARAMETER_CONSTANT , data ); mprotect ( t -> caller , t -> caller_len , PROT_EXEC | PROT_READ ); return t ; } The end result will be a function that can be called without arguments – which will magically call another function with a given parameter: static void test ( void * data ) { printf ( "Test called with data=%p " , data ); } int main ( void ) { struct Partial * p ; p = partial_new ( test , ( void * ) 0x12341337 ); atexit ( partial_to_function ( p )); return 0 ; } Which, when executed, will print: [leandro@navi /tmp]$ ./a.out Test called with data=0x12341337 So there you have it, partially applied functions in C. Useful? Hardly. Interesting? I think so. Fun? Yup. If you’d like to try, the full source code, with comments and error recovery is available in this gist.

Tesla earlier today began pushing out version 7.1 of its software to Model S and Model X owners and, suffice it to say, it’s a doozy of a software update. While we’ll get to the full changelog shortly, we first wanted to highlight a feature called Summon which enables users to park their cars without having to be inside it. Conversely, it also lets Tesla owners summon their cars that already happen to be parked. DON’T MISS: This crazy thin 6mm paper camera can take photos and video, all for just $28 A video of this feature in action can be seen below. You might consider this akin to autostart, albeit on steroids. The release notes for Summon, which is in Beta, indicates that the feature works up to a distance of 39 feet, meaning that a “Model S will move up to 39 feet or until the sensors detect an obstacle, at which point parking is considered complete and Autopark will shift the car to Park.” Naturally, Tesla advises that the Summon feature should only be used on flat surfaces and on private property. Other improvements found in the 7.1 software update include Autosteer improvements to help keep Tesla vehicles in their current lane when passing highway exits and even in situations when lane markings are faded. One notable change to Tesla’s Autopilot software is that it’s more safety-oriented, which is to say that Autosteer is now “restricted on residential roads and roads without a center divider.” This change of course stems from Tesla Model S owners pushing their Autopilot software to the limit and uploading harrowing videos of their experiments to YouTube. As a result, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the following during a November conference call: “There’s been some fairly crazy videos on YouTube… this is not good. And we will be putting some additional constraints on when autopilot can be activated to minimize the possibility of people doing crazy things with it.” Furthermore, the software update now allows Tesla vehicles to park itself into parking spots “that are perpendicular to the curb.” Other enhancements include enhanced autopilot visualization so that the car’s instrument panel can digitally depict multiple vehicles around the front of the car, along with the ability to indicate the type of vehicle, whether it be a car, truck or motorcycle. Other improvements include improved collision detection, automatic speed adjustments if you’re on cruise control and exiting a highway, the ability to have your garage door open and close automatically when you leave and after you arrive, more granular control over the unlocking system, auto-brightness enhancements, more detailed information about Supercharger availability, improved trip planning, and more. The full release notes to the software update can be viewed here courtesy of Tesla Motors Club.

Former NFL player and scout Bucky Brooks knows the ins and outs of this league, providing keen insight in his notebook. The topics of this edition include: -- Why Brett Hundley can lead the Packers to the playoffs. -- The driving force behind Andy Dalton's rebirth. But first, a look at why the Colts should seriously consider trading their most valuable asset ... * * * * * If the Indianapolis Colts are serious about building a title contender, they should trade away Andrew Luck in the coming offseason. I know franchise quarterbacks don't come along every year, but the Colts are in the perfect position to parlay their big chip into a king's ransom that would better position the team to annually compete for the Lombardi Trophy. Before you @ me suggesting that my commentary here is merely outlandish click bait, I want you to fully hear me out while I explain why the Colts would be better off without No. 12 rocking the horseshoe in 2018 and beyond. Despite leading Indianapolis to three playoff appearances and a 43-27 record as a starter over the past five seasons, Luck shouldn't be viewed as an untouchable commodity by the team. The former No. 1 overall pick isn't one of the elites at the position and certainly hasn't played like the next coming of John Elway. He hasn't played a full season since 2014 and sports a 10-12 record as a starter since the beginning of 2015. That's not to suggest he is a bust or a colossal underachiever, but Luck definitely hasn't played to the narrative that's been attached to his name. He is a sub-60-percent passer with a penchant for turnovers. Say what you want about me being harsh, but the numbers don't lie. In his NFL career, Luck sports a 59.2 percent completion rate, a 132:68 touchdown-to-interception ratio and an 87.3 passer rating. Those numbers aren't awful, but they're on par with a group of QBs that might surprise you, given all the hype Luck has received ... Andy Dalton: 62.9 percent completion rate, 149:87 TD-to-INT ratio, 89.0 passer rating, 58-38-2 record. Alex Smith: 62.3 percent completion rate; 172:91 TD-to-INT ratio, 87.1 passer rating, 84-58-1 record. Sam Bradford: 62.5 percent completion rate; 101:57 TD-to-INT ratio, 85.1 passer, 34-45-1 record. Now, I'm not saying those guys are comparable as pure football specimens, but their collective production puts them in the same class. Thus, you could make a reasonable argument that Luck is merely a top-15 quarterback at this point. That brings me back to why the Colts should consider moving on from Luck. Although I make the argument that No. 12 is B/B+ quarterback, the rest of the football world still views him as the transcendent star who was expected to take the league by storm. Luck will still command a hefty sum despite concerns about his injury history, including his current recovery from a torn labrum that just hit a snag. Barring more calamitous rehab setbacks, quarterback-needy teams will offer up a bushel of picks for the opportunity to build around a three-time Pro Bowl selectee with a 40-touchdown season on his resume. "A lot of it depends on his health, but he would command at least two first-round picks in a normal exchange," a former NFL general manager told me. "I wouldn't make the move if I'm the Colts because I think it's hard to find guys like him, but he definitely could bring a number of top picks from desperate teams at the top of the draft." That last point is exactly why the Colts must entertain the possibility of trading away Luck -- to fortify a roster that has huge voids at several marquee positions. The haul that Luck could bring back to the Colts could match the epic Herschel Walker trade that helped the 1990s Dallas Cowboys build a mini-dynasty that netted the team three Super Bowl rings. Don't believe me? Just think about what the then-St. Louis Rams were able to land for Robert Griffin III in that blockbuster pre-draft deal. The Rams landed three first-round picks and a second-round selection for an unknown commodity at quarterback. That's more than enough ammunition to fortify a roster, particularly if the team builder knows how to evaluate talent and put together a team, right? Think of it this way ... The Colts have a short-term starter already in place: Jacoby Brissett, who is also playing on a cheap rookie deal. Not to mention, the 2018 quarterback class could feature a few potential franchise quarterback prospects who could grow into legitimate stars after sitting on the bench for a few seasons. With the team able to land a few more blue-chip prospects with multiple first-round picks in consecutive years, the Colts could be a legitimate juggernaut from a raw talent perspective by the 2019 season. "I hear what you're saying and that plan is sellable to ownership," an NFC scout told me. "But it's hard to move on from a franchise guy for an unknown prospect. I would be more inclined to trade Brissett and see what I could get for him. Maybe he could be my Jimmy Garoppolo trade piece down the line." While I certainly understand the skepticism associated with trading away a quarterback viewed as a "franchise guy" by the outside world, I believe this plan makes more sense than trading away Brissett for a lone first- or second-round pick. The Colts are more than one player away from being a viable contender, so they must load up the grocery basket with quality players to have a chance at vaulting back to the top of the AFC. So, who could be a possible trade partner? I'd point to the Cleveland Browns as obvious targets, due to their desperation at the QB position and draft capital. The Browns have two 2018 first-round picks and a pair of second-round picks on the docket. Plus, they have almost $63 million in salary cap space at this time, according to spotrac.com. Thus, the Browns could absorb Luck's hefty contract ($24.59 million annual average through 2021) without it wrecking their salary cap. Considering their willingness to take on a bloated contract from a quarterback who couldn't play this past offseason, I can't imagine the Browns bypassing a chance to add a household name at the position. The San Francisco 49ers would also qualify as possible suitors, based on their salary cap space (currently more than $62 million, according to spotrac.com) and their obvious need at the position. With Luck's Stanford ties also adding to the intrigue, the potential to make a deal is certainly there. In the end, the Colts must decide if their QB1 has more value as a franchise player or a trade chip in a quarterback-needy market where he could command enough draft capital to reverse the fortunes of a team that's heading nowhere at the moment. PACKERS WITHOUT RODGERS: Brett Hundley can lead a playoff push R-E-L-A-X! Not to steal a line from Aaron Rodgers, but Green Bay Packers fans should chill out because their team is in good hands with Brett Hundley stepping in as QB1 with Rodgers sidelined by a broken collarbone. Now, I'm not suggesting the third-year pro is poised to play at an MVP level as a first-time starter, but he is more than capable of leading the Packers into the playoffs. And I think he'll begin to show this in Sunday's home game against the Saints. Hundley exhibits enough of the core characteristics to function as a winning quarterback under Mike McCarthy. From his ample frame (6-foot-3, 226 pounds) to his explosive athleticism to his outstanding arm talent and football IQ, the ex-UCLA standout has made tremendous progress since entering the league as a fifth-round pick. Although preseason success should always be taken with a grain of salt, it's not irrelevant. Hundley's play during the exhibition season suggests that he can perform at a B+ (or higher) level while guiding the Packers' offense. And that's a testament to Green Bay's developmental system, given what I thought about Hundley as a prospect coming out of college. Looking back at my notes on Hundley before 2015 NFL Draft, I questioned his pocket poise, judgment and deep-ball accuracy. He appeared a little indecisive with the ball under duress and his hesitancy frequently led to sacks (as evidenced by his 125 sacks in three collegiate seasons). Although I loved his athleticism and playmaking potential inside and outside of the pocket, my concerns about his ability to consistently "connect the dots" as a rhythm passer prevented me from affixing a big grade next to his name. While I thought Hundley was a much better player than the 147th pick in the draft, I believed he needed some time and seasoning to develop into a potential NFL starter. He needed to become a more efficient and effective passer from the pocket, while improving awareness and anticipation against pressure. Studying the All-22 Coaches Film from the past three preseasons, Hundley has improved tremendously as a playmaker from the pocket. He has been more decisive and accurate as a passer, while exhibiting outstanding touch, timing and ball placement. From a numbers perspective, Hundley's 66.2 completion rate and 10:2 touchdown-to-interception ratio in nine preseason games accurately depict his overall effectiveness guiding the Packers' 2s in glorified scrimmages. Again, the intensity of preseason football is a lot different than regular-season action, but you can certainly make some solid assessments on Hundley's potential by studying his exhibition outings. After examining how Green Bay performed with Hundley on the field, I believe you will see the team use a variety of quick-rhythm routes from spread and empty formations. While the bulk of those throws will be "catch, rock and fire" tosses (slants, hitches and sticks), he will also work the outer edges of the field on hinges and stop routes. With the Packers intent on using empty formations from a variety of personnel packages, the team can eliminate some of the exotic pre-snap disguises that confuse young quarterbacks in the pocket. McCarthy will also take advantage of Hundley's athleticism by putting him in motion via an assortment of bootlegs and movement passes following play-action fakes. By using run action and quarterback movement, the play caller can beef up his young field general's completion rate with some easy half-field reads featuring receivers available at every level (short, intermediate and deep) within his sight lines. From a personnel standpoint, the Packers probably will stay with the same rotation, using a variety of "11" (1 RB, 1 TE and 3 WR) and "12" (1 RB, 2 TE and 2 WR) groupings as their primary sets. But the team could lean more on Aaron Jones at running back -- instead of Ty Montgomery -- to give Hundley a little more pop in the running game. Jones is averaging a healthy 4.8 yards per carry, as opposed to Montgomery's 3.2. If the rookie back can steady the ground game with a more consistent effort, the Packers can alleviate the pressure on Hundley to throw the ball 30-plus times as the driving force of the offense. One element that might change is the Packers' use of the no-huddle offense. Rodgers loved playing at a breakneck pace, and his ability to call the game from the line of scrimmage prevented opponents from substituting defenders to match up with the Packers' personnel. In addition, Rodgers' savviness operating an up-tempo offense frequently led to Green Bay generating explosive plays on "freebies" due to neutral-zone infractions or illegal-substitution penalties. Without the veteran controlling the game from the line of scrimmage, the Packers could lose one of their sneaky scoring tactics in the short term. Overall, though, I don't expect Green Bay's offense to grind to a screeching halt with the young quarterback at the controls. Hundley has spent three seasons honing his craft behind Rodgers, and McCarthy has a long track record of elevating the play of his quarterbacks. Although I don't expect the third-year pro to shatter the record book as a passer or fill up the highlight reels as a spectacular playmaker, I believe he will chalk up enough Ws to keep the Packers in the mix as a playoff contender. Remember, McCarthy found a way to win games with a pair of ho-hum quarterbacks (Matt Flynn, Scott Tolzien and Seneca Wallace) filling the QB1 role in Rodgers' last extended absence in 2013, so I'm not worried about the Packers falling by the wayside with a more athletic and talented signal caller stepping in this time around. ANDY DALTON'S REVIVAL: The power of the play caller The NFL will always be known as a quarterback-driven league, but I'm beginning to realize coaching matters far more at that position than at any other spot on the field. Look no further than Andy Dalton's dramatic turnaround in Cincinnati (2-3) as proof that the right play caller can help a QB1 go from good to great in this league. Before you look at me sideways for insinuating that the Bengals' starting quarterback is among the elites, I'm simply saying the three-time Pro Bowler looks like an MVP candidate since Bill Lazor replaced Ken Zampese as the team's play caller in mid-September. Since Week 3, Dalton has the NFL's third-highest passer rating (116.1), along with a 73.1 percent completion rate and a 7:2 TD-to-INT ratio. He's averaged 275.3 passing yards per game during that span and looked nothing like the shaky QB who struggled to string together completions (54.5 percent completion rate) or put points on the board (0:4 TD-to-INT ratio) during the first two weeks of the season. Most importantly, the Bengals' offense has surged over the past three games, averaging 25.0 points and 2.7 offensive touchdowns -- compared to 4.5 points and zero offensive touchdowns during the first two weeks of the season. Those numbers are eerily similar to the production posted by the unit in 2015, when the Hue Jackson-led offense averaged 26.2 ppg with Dalton playing the best ball of his career from the pocket. In case you forgot, the Bengals' QB1 completed 66.1 percent of his passes during that season with a 25:7 touchdown-to-interception ratio and a lofty 106.2 passer rating. He garnered serious consideration for the league's MVP award before breaking his thumb while attempting to make a tackle (off a pick) in Week 14. With Dalton and the Bengals' offense suddenly playing at a high level, I wanted to take a deep dive into this sudden about-face. How does a simple change in play caller lead to such a dramatic turnaround in performance? "It's all about the quarterback," an NFL head coach told me. "The coordinator should build the plan around the quarterback's strengths and what he's comfortable doing. If he doesn't like a particular play or he can get a good feel for it, you should throw it out. "Since he is the only player with the ball on every play, you have to build the offense and call the game with him in mind." This is clearly what the Bengals have done since Lazor took the reins. He has simplified the plan to help Dalton play without hesitation. "I think Andy's playing very decisively," Lazor told reporters last week, via Cincinnati.com, while the Bengals were on a bye. "We -- all of us, including him, including AJ McCarron and all the people -- we've just tried to make sure we're on the same page. When this play gets called, this is what we're thinking. Can't guarantee that it's going to work out. ... But as long as he knows when this play gets called, this is the purpose." Studying the All-22 Coaches Film, it is apparent Cincinnati has streamlined the offense to allow Dalton to play fast and free in the pocket. The recent game plans under Lazor have featured more quick-rhythm throws designed to get the ball out of the QB's hands quickly. Whether it's the play-action slants (RPOs) or quick isolation routes to the perimeter, the Bengals' passing game features far more layups and quicks than before. These routes are not only high-percentage tosses, but they are similar to the throws Dalton routinely made as a spread-offense director at TCU. Thus, he is comfortable and confident executing these plays, which leads to more decisive play from the veteran. "As long as he keeps in mind, This is the intent of the play, and tries to stay true to that and manages the other options that might come up if they leave somebody one-on-one, then he'll play decisively," Lazor told reporters last week. "I think that's the biggest thing." The Bengals' new offensive coordinator is well-versed in the spread after spending time with Chip Kelly in Philadelphia, and his success with other spread quarterbacks (see Nick Foles and Ryan Tannehill) has certainly helped him understand the nuances of the quick-rhythm game. Looking at the Next Gen Stats data from the past three games, it's not a coincidence that 65.9 percent of his passing attempts (61 of 93) have been thrown at or within 10 yards of the line of scrimmage. With an 85.2 percent completion rate on those tosses (and 485 passing yards compiled on layups), the Bengals have become more efficient and productive in the passing game. Not to mention, the increased emphasis on short throws has helped Dalton, as he averaged 2.51 seconds snap-to-throw on his pass attempt over the past three games, according to Pro Football Focus. With the Bengals emphasizing more "catch, rock and fire" throws in their game plans, Dalton has been able to get into a groove as a passer and playmaker. The team's decision to feature A.J. Green more prominently in the plan has also helped the QB1 rediscover his magic. The perennial Pro Bowler has seen his targets, receptions per game, receiving yards per game and receiving touchdowns improve over the past month. He has averaged 11 targets, 7.3 receptions and 121 receiving yards since Week 3, which is well above the marks that he posted during the first two weeks (9.0 targets, 5.0 receptions and 70.5 receiving yards). Studying the tape, Cincy has helped Green get loose by deploying him in the slot more often. He excels at running vertical routes from that alignment; opponents haven't been able to keep him from running past defenders when he lines up near the hash. "The Bengals have been using Green on vertical routes from the slot position for years," a former NFL defensive coordinator told me. "When he lines up in the slot, he is running down the seam or to the corner. That's what he does, but few teams have found a way to stop it." As one of only two players averaging over 100 receiving yards per game this season (Antonio Brown's at 116.7; Green, 100.8), Green's re-emergence has helped Dalton become a more potent playmaker from the pocket. This is exactly what Lazor promised when he assumed play-calling duties after Cincinnati's 0-2 start. "No. 1 priority is our best players and who we want to get the ball to," Lazor told the assembled media at the time. "Then, it's what are the things that we do well? Then, what are our opponent's weaknesses and how do we attack them? "Hopefully you only have great calls on game day. You want the quarterback to trust that you've got an answer for him every play." Follow Bucky Brooks on Twitter @BuckyBrooks.

Okay Written by: WildArm "I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you." ― Friedrich Nietzsche {break} "Come on, baby girl. I gotcha..." I nearly slid on the pool of blood that was forming beneath my feet from the doctor whose neck had recently been introduced to his own scalpel. Such a little thing, I realized as I picked up her weightless body, her arm dangling delicately to my waist. Such a little thing, like Sarah once was. I couldn't help but think of that girl from a life long ago, the one with the toothless smile whose eyes would light up at the very sight of me. That was all she had wanted from me long, long ago. Time. She had just wanted my time; I was too busy to give it to her. The run through the many corridors within the hospital nearly gave me vertigo, but I had to press on, if not for me, then for the girl who was in my arms. Ellie, open your eyes, sweet girl, I thought, hoping the girl would come to and show me a sign that she was all right. I almost expected to be shot in the back during the long hallway leading to the elevator, but I guess things just don't work out like in the movies, the ones where the heroes sacrificed their lives to save the company they kept or they'd show a magic bullet wound that shocked the viewers. Shots were fired, flashlights shined brilliantly, but the elevator door shut as easily as it had opened. And I was unharmed. I allowed myself a moment to breathe; fire filled my lungs, and the uncertainty of what awaited me on the parking garage level did not give me much reprieve. Once the elevator reached its destination, I quickly hit the emergency "stop" button and casually walked out, realizing that I had orchestrated my great escape. That is, until I heard a gun cock in my direction. A single shooter in the darkness of the parking garage, lining me in her sights, anger and sadness in her eyes. I had never called her friend, but there was certainly a level of admiration I had had for her before this adventure began. "You can't save her," she said, advancing upon me, handgun still raised. "Even if you get her out of here, then what? How long before she's torn to pieces by a pack of clickers? That is if she hasn't been raped and murdered first." I realigned myself, shuffling Ellie closer to my shoulders and stared down the leader of the Fireflies, Marlene, the same woman who had corrupted my brother, Tommy, to join her cause so long ago. "That ain't for you to decide," I snarled. "It's what she'd want," Marlene tried to assure me. "And you know it." I took the moment to look at Ellie; if anyone saw her sleeping, they'd swear she was an angel. An angel with the mouth of ten thousand sailors, that is. How could the world be set right if this girl ceased to exist? How could my world be set right if I let her go, only to fall prey to a surgeon's knife? Wasn't I allowed to be selfish, too? "Look..." Marlene began, raising her handgun into the air, a gesture of peace. Or stupidity. "You can still do the right thing here," she nodded, walking ever closer to me and Ellie. "She won't feel anything." I took a deep breath as Marlene continued walking, her handgun still in the air. She kept nodding all the while, as if to assure me that I would be doing the right thing by handing Ellie over. And in most people's eyes, it would be. Sacrifice the few to save the many. Isn't that some bullshit someone said before the world went to hell? What would Tess do in this situation? What choice would she make if I had been the one to die in the capital building instead of her? You can't think like that anymore, I had told myself countless times. Tess' dead, and she isn't coming back. Like Sarah. My answer became clear then; save the few, and fuck the many. Like Tess once said, 'We're shitty people. It's been that way for a long time.' One round discharged from my handgun, catching Marlene in the stomach. She clutched at the wound blossoming along her midsection before she crumpled to the floor. I exhaled that long breath I had taken, and looked over to my left and saw a jeep with its headlights shining directly toward the elevator door. Marlene's ride, I presume? I opened the rear driver's side door and delicately placed Ellie on the seat. As I shut the door and walked to the driver's seat door, I paused and turned back to Marlene, my handgun still in hand. "Wait!" she pleaded, her hand extended towards me. "Let me go. Please." She looked so pitiful then; the leader of the Fireflies, who had sent hundreds of men and women to their deaths in favor of her cause, was pleading for her own life. How many others had pleaded and were rewarded with death? "You'd just come after her," I said simply, expelling a round from the handgun that found its target in her right eye socket, the exit wound escaping through the back of her head, brain matter spilling heavily onto the concrete floor. Marlene had this look of surprise on her face that will forever be etched into my mind: mouth agape, hands balled into fists, the look of agony painted upon her. I spit on the ground and rummaged through her pockets, relieving her of the jeep's ignition key and her handgun. Some hours later, on the way back to Tommy's, Ellie came to, much to my relief. "What the hell am I wearing?" was the first thing she asked. It was good to have her back. "Just take it easy...drugs are still wearing off." "What happened?" I hesitated. Just what would I actually tell her? I had come up with a million stories during the drive, unsure as to what I had wanted to tell her. What could I say that she would actually believe? So I started with the truth. "We found the Fireflies." Then came the lies. "Turns out, there's a whole lot more like you, Ellie. People that are immune. It's dozens, actually. Ain't done a damn bit of good neither. They've actually st- They stopped looking for a cure. I'm taking us home. I'm sorry." A deep silence came from the back seat; all I could hear was Ellie's faint breathing. Looking at my rear view, I could have sworn I started to see her eyes beginning to glass. Nah, I thought, the girl's a tough one. It'll take a lot more than that to get her to tear up. When we reached the exit for Jackson City, I was not overly surprised to see that the highway had given way. I brought the jeep to a stop and exited the vehicle to survey my surroundings. Times like these were interesting: the view was overlooking many mountains where greenery flourished. It was almost as if there wasn't any turmoil in the world, as if the world hadn't ended. But then again, it wasn't really over, was it? "Looks like we're walking," I said to Ellie, who was using her finger to draw an outline of her bite wound. She looked up at me with those big, sad green eyes and nodded; she hadn't been the same since I had told her of the Fireflies earlier. "Should be a straight shot through here," I said, leading her to a barbed wire fence. "Alright," she said weakly. "Actually kinda pretty, ain't it?" I asked, referring to the view, hoping I would get a reaction similar to when Ellie and I first saw the giraffes in Utah. "Yeah," she replied simply. "Now watch your head going through," I advised, stretching the barbed wire fence wide enough for her to get through, Ellie doing the same for me when she reached the other side. She was a good partner to have, just as good as the times I had with Tess, and if she continues down this path, she'd make for a better survivor than the both of us ever hoped to be. "Oh, feeling my age now," I joked as I emerged through the other side, hoping I would get a smile or a slight reaction from her. I didn't. The silence was beginning to kill me. Irony took me by surprise: for the longest time, I had wanted Ellie to keep her trap shut and keep moving forward. She had always wanted to talk about something. Now I find myself receiving the same cold shoulder I had no doubt given to her many times before. Bring up Sarah; she always wants to talk about Sarah. As we began running through the woods, I began to speak about my daughter, something that felt like a million daggers slashing at flesh at the mere mention of her name. "Don't think I ever told you, but Sarah and I used to take hikes like this. I think, ah... I think the two of you would've been good friends. Think you really woulda liked her. I know she woulda liked you." "I bet I would have," Ellie replied. A simple response, but better than nothing. As we climbed a small dip in the earth, my gaze fell upon a town in the distance. Tommy's town. "Wow. Look down there," I pointed, a grin escaping me. Tommy had really come into his own since we had gone our separate ways; I was proud of him. "Just a little further now." "Hey, wait," Ellie says softly. I turn to face her, furrowing my brow. Why did she look so upset? "Back in Boston - back when I was bitten, I wasn't alone. My best friend was there, and she got bit, too. We didn't know what to do. So...she says, 'Let's just wait it out. You know, we can be all poetic and lose our minds together.' I'm still waiting for my turn." Survivor's guilt; we've all been through it. "Ellie-" "Her name was Riley and she was the first to die. And then it was Tess. And then Sam." "None of that is on you," I assured her. People made choices in life, and sometimes, those choices got you killed. Life is a giant gamble; you never know when the house is gonna win. And the house always wins. "No, you don't understand." "I struggled for a long time with survivin'." I thought of Sarah, how my baby girl was shot in the stomach, the same way I had shot Marlene and countless others before her. I remembered my baby girl squealing in pain as my hands were caked in her blood. "And you..." I touched the watch Sarah gave me for my birthday, the day that had recognized my coming in the world, which was also the day she left it. "No matter what, you keep finding something to fight for. Now, I know that's not what you want to hear right now, but it's-" "Swear to me," she says forcefully, cutting me off. "Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true." I took a deep breath, shifting ever slightly. My body language was betraying me; the girl wasn't stupid. "I swear." She knows. She knows, you idiot. She knows. For a moment, she stares at me with her glassy emerald eyes, looking down to the ground and nodding her head. "Okay," she replied, waiting for me to assume point once again. She knows, you idiot, I thought, shaking my head. The girl isn't stupid. {break} A/N: Hey, all. Was just inspired by the ending to write a small novelization of its events; I hope I did it justice. I absolutely love the ending to The Last of Us. I know many people are on the fence about it, but as I put myself in Joel's shoes, I know I would've done the same thing. Fundamentally, most humans are selfish. I certainly would have taken the selfish way out, even though it condemned many others. Kinda crappy of me, but I have to be honest about it. Thought it was powerful that the ending was simple and straight to the point, with no dramatic revelation. What makes it even more interesting is that the audience should know that Ellie knows Joel is lying to her. Any feedback is welcomed! Thank you for taking the time to read this! God Bless. - Wild

It’s right before the test when I start to get nervous. Like, my heart starts pounding, which is strange because we’ve been talking about this test for the last 30 minutes and I felt just fine. We’re in the N3rd Street offices of Biomeme, a venture-backed startup that’s developing a smartphone diagnostics lab. Drexel is one early adopter (it’s piloting the device with a test for STDs), but more recently, the company has focused on becoming a platform for tests that check for mutations in specific genes. It’s one step toward its vision of a fully realized DIY health movement. It takes under an hour (five minutes to prep the sample and about 45 minutes for the Biomeme device to work its magic), you can fit all the gear you need for the test in your pocket and you can do it, with a little instruction, by yourself. The test is going to tell me if I have a mutation in my MTHFR gene. Mutations in that gene have been linked to diseases like colon cancer, vascular disease and dementia, though Biomeme cofounder Jesse vanWestrienen makes it clear that “your genome doesn’t determine who you are.” In other words, there are other factors at play, like diet, exercise. Biology is complex. Despite those words of assurance, I’m still nervous. I’ll be honest: it wasn’t so much about discovering my test results but discovering them in the presence of others, like the three Biomeme cofounders who were walking us through the process and Technical.ly Editor-in-Chief Zack Seward, who was also playing lab rat. (He filed a radio story for WHYY about it.) Luckily, I had to run to a lunch meeting after we took the test. No problem, the founders say, the Biomeme app can text me the results. Advertisement If you wanted to get this test in the traditional sense, you’d have to go to the doctor and give a blood sample. With Biomeme, you swish some fluid around your mouth and then use a pipette to transfer it between a few color-coded vials. Once that’s done, you stick three little vials in the top of the Biomeme device, which looks like an iPod dock, and press “Begin experiment.” For the next 45 minutes, the device photocopies the specific part of your DNA it needs to test, then the iPhone’s camera and the Biomeme app analyze it. That’s when I book it out of Biomeme’s office to make my meeting, but not before cofounder Max Perelman says, “Wait, don’t you want your genome?” And hands me the little vial that I had dropped fluid into. The Biomeme staff is used to playing guinea pig: the founders have all taken the MTHFR test, and they’ve also purchased ancestry-focused genetic test 23andMe for each of the company’s 10 staffers. vanWestrienen said that he and Biomeme’s life scientist Maria Chacon-Heszele will help the team interpret their results. The company is currently selling the Biomeme device and kits to researchers and developers who want to create their own genetic tests. They envision Biomeme as the platform for these types of tests, like the App Store is a platform for mobile apps. Pricing is on a case-by-case basis, Perelman said. Developers can get in touch here. Concerning the Food and Drug Administration, which had famously cracked down on 23andMe, Biomeme would only need to get FDA approval if it makes diagnostic claims about the tests, Perelman said, and right now, the tests are for “entertainment, educational and research use only.” After my lunch meeting, I pull out my phone. A dumb joke from my editor, and, as promised, the test results: I don’t have the mutation. I also have my genome in my pocket. All in all, a pretty good day. You can try the test at Biomeme’s headquarters (20 N. 3rd St.) at next month’s First Friday event (April 3). It costs $20. Biomeme will also be offering it at New York Tech Day later in April. Or at a bar near you? @Perelmax: Just chillin' at White Dog Cafe doing DNA tests pic.twitter.com/OULpfeVthr — Max Perelman (@Perelmax) March 18, 2015 -30-

Often, websites seem to exist primarily to put something into a database in order to pull it out later. While other database methods, such as NoSQL, have gained popularity in recent years, data for many websites still resides in the traditional SQL database. This data often consists of valuable personal information such as credit card numbers and other personal information of interest to identity thieves and criminals. Hackers therefore always look to get this data. One of the most common targets of these attacks is the SQL databases that lie behind many web applications through a process of SQL Injection. An injection attack works by getting the application to pass untrusted input on to the interpreter. Recently, 40,000 customer records being taken from Bell Canada are a result of an SQL Injection attack. In late 2013, hackers stole over $100,000 from a California based ISP using SQL injection. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) chose the injection attack as the number one application security risk in their 2013 top ten, based on its prevalence and the risk to the attacked web systems. Unfortunately, it also held the number one position in the previous report from 2010. So what is an SQL Injection attack? In this tutorial I'll discuss how they work and what you can do to protect your application from these attacks. What Is an Injection Attack? Any interpreted system behind a web server can be the target of an injection attack. The most common targets are the SQL database servers behind many websites. SQL injection doesn't directly result from weaknesses in the database, but uses openings in the application to allow the attacker to execute statements of the attacker's choice on the server. An SQL injection attack gets the database to share more information than the application is designed to provide. Let's look at an SQL database call that you could write in ASP.NET. What's wrong with this code? Perhaps nothing. The issue is that id string we're using. Where does that value come from? If we're generating it internally or from a trusted source, then this code might work without problems. However, if we're getting the value from a user and using without modification, we've just opened ourselves up to SQL injection. Let's take a common case where we're getting the parameter to look up as part of the URL. Take the URL http://www.example.com/user/details?id=123 . In ASP.NET using C# we can get that passed value using this code: This code combined with the call above leaves us open to an attack. If the user passes a user id such as 123 as expected, everything works fine. However, nothing we've done here ensures this is the case. Let's say the attacker attempts to access the URL http://www.example.com/user/details?id=0; SELECT * FROM userdata . Instead of just passing a value as expected, we've given a value and then added a semicolon, which terminates an SQL statement. It then adds a second SQL statement that the attacker would like to run. In this case it would return all records in the userdata table. Depending on the rest of the code in our page, it might return an error or perhaps display every record in the database to the attacker. Even an error can be used with carefully constructed queries to build a view of the database. Worse, imagine the attacker goes to a URL of http://www.example.com/user/details?id=0; DROP TABLE userdata . Now all of your users are lost. In this example, the attacker can run any code they want on the database server. If the account the database calls run under has full control of the database, a too common scenario, then dropping tables and deleting records makes an easy way to bring down a site. Even if the attacker can only read and write data in the database, then puling data is only a matter of patience and care. Take a simple database named "Products" consisting of three columns. The first column holds the product id, the second holds the product name, and the third holds the product's price. For our normal query we'll attempt to find every product containing widget in the name. The SQL to do this in the same pattern we've show would look like this: A typical website to access this would look like http://www.example.com/product?search=widget . Here the web page will simply cycle through each returned record and display it on the screen. In this case we see our widget product. Let's change our query to http://www.example.com/product?search=widget' OR 1=1;-- and execute the same query. see something more. In fact we'll see every record in the table. We've tricked the interpreter into running SQL code of our choice. The resulting SQL executed will be: The result will be two statements: By adding the 1=1 , which is always true, the where clause will be true for every row in the table and the resulting query will return every row. The -- at the start of the second statement turns the rest of the SQL statement into a comment which prevents the error message we'd otherwise see. Changes to the display cannot prevent this statement. A patient attacker can use even nothing more than the fact a value is returned or not and carefully constructed queries to slowly map out your database and possibly retrieve data even if they only see an error message. There are tools such as sqlmap to automate the process. Mitigating SQL Injection You prevent SQL injection by preventing untrusted input from getting to the SQL database or other interpreter. Any input from outside the system should be considered untrusted. Even data from other partner systems must be considered untrusted as you have no way to guarantee the other system does not suffer from security problems that would allow insertion of arbitrary data then passed on to your application. Going back to our earlier example, if we know that the id parameter should always be an integer, we can attempt to convert it to an integer and show an error if this fails. An ASP.NET MVC application would do this using code similar to this: This will attempt to convert the string to an integer. If the conversion fails, the code redirects to an action that will display an invalid message. This can be prevented if we're looking for an integer parameter. It wouldn't help if we're expecting text such as in the earlier product search. The preferred technique in this case is to use regular expressions or string replacements to allow only needed characters in the passed value. This can be done by whitelisting, the process of removing any characters other than a specified set, or blacklisting, the process of removing an members of a specified set from the string. Whitelisting is more reliable since you specify only allowed characters. To remove anything other than letters and numbers in a string we can use code such as: You will need to evaluate any input respectively. Some database queries might need more specialized attention. Take characters that can be meaningful in an SQL command but also could be a valid character in a database call. For example the single quote character ' is used to start and finish a string in SQL, but could also be part of a person's name such as O'Conner. In this case replacing the single quote ' with consecutive single quotes '' can eliminate the problem. Stored Procedures Stored procedures are often seen as the fix for this problem and they can be part of the solution. However a poorly written stored procedure will not save you. Take this stored procedure that includes code similar to what we've already seen to build a query: The string concatenation here is the problem. Let's try a simple attempt where we attempt to set an always true condition to show all rows in the table and pass in the same `widget' OR 1=1;--`` as the query we saw earlier. The result is also the same: If untrusted data is passed in, we have the same result as if the call were created in our code. That the string concatenation takes place inside a stored procedure instead of in our code provides no protection. Parameterization The next piece of the puzzle to protect from injection attacks comes in using parameterization. Building SQL queries by concatenating strings and then passing the finished code doesn't give the database any idea of what part of the string is a parameter and what is part of the command. We can help protect against attacks by creating SQL calls in a way that keeps statements and values distinct. We can rewrite the stored procedure shown earlier to use parameters and produce a safer call. Instead of concatenating the % characters that represent wildcards, we'll create a new string adding these characters and then pass this new string as a parameter to the SQL statement. The new stored procedure looks like this: Executing this stored procedure with just the word widget works as expected. And if we pass with our parameter widget'' OR 1=1;-- results in nothing being returned showing we're no longer vulnerable to this attack. Parameterization doesn't require stored procedures. You can also take advantage of it with queries built within code. Here's a short segment in C# to connect and run a query against Microsoft SQL server using a parameter. Least Privilege Up to this point, I've shown how to mitigate database attacks. Another important layer of defense, minimizes the damage causes in case the attacker gets past the other defenses. The concept of least privilege gives that a module of code which, in this case our database calls, should only have access to the information and resources needed for its purposes. When a database command runs, it does so under the rights of a user account. We gain security by giving the account the database calls run under only the rights to do things it normally needs to do. If the calls from a database should only be reading data from a table, then only give the account select rights to the table and not insert or delete. If there are specific tables it does need to update, say an orders table, then give it insert and update to that table, but not other table such as one containing user information. Canceling orders can be handled through a separate account used only on the page doing that task. This would prevent the deletion of an order from the table elsewhere more difficult. Using a separate database account for the administrative functions of the site, with the necessary greater rights than the one the public uses can do much to prevent damage from a user finding an open injection attack. This won't prevent all attacks. It would do nothing to prevent returning extra results such as the earlier example showing the entire contents of a table. It would prevent attacks from updating or deleting data. Conclusion SQL injection is the most dangerous attack, especially when taking into account how vulnerable websites are to it and how much potential this type of attack has at causing a lot of damage. Here I've described SQL injection attacks and demonstrated the damage one can do. Fortunately it's not that difficult to protect your web projects from this vulnerability by following a few simple rules. Never trust any outside data brought into your application. It should be validated against a whitelist of valid inputs before being processed any further. This can mean ensuring that an integer parameter is actually an integer or a date is a valid date value. Also validate text to only include the characters the parameter would need. For a text search you can often allow only letters and numbers and filter out punctuation that could be problematic such as the equals sign or a semicolon. Use parameterization and avoid string concatenation when creating SQL calls. Stored procedures are not a panacea as they can be vulnerable too if simple string concatenation is used. Parameterization avoids many of the problems of string concatenation. The code accessing the database should be run with the least privileges needed to complete the tasks needed. In few circumstances should the database calls used by the web application need to make changes to the database structure such as dropping or altering tables. You can add an extra layer of protection by running separate parts of the website under different accounts. The database account used for normal user actions likely has no reason to modify the table containing the roles or rights of users. Running the administrative parts of the site under a more privileged account and the end user section under a less privileged one can do much to mitigate the chances of code that slips through from causing other issues.

I read Andrew Keatts’ “North Park Presents a Big Test for the City’s Climate Action Plan” story and wanted to write to say I’m excited about the increased density that the North Park Community Plan update provides. I do own a UPS Store in the neighborhood, but I also live in North Park and my enthusiasm isn’t financially driven. In denser communities, we’ll have a greater variety of small businesses so that we don’t have to go very far to get the things we want and need. Instead of driving to downtown, Mission Valley or Kearny Mesa, more of the things we want could be purchased in North Park. And given the size of North Park and how flat it is, these businesses would be just a bike ride or walk away. Increased density also means that we can have more frequent and varied public transportation options, so that when we need to go downtown or other places, it’s more likely that there will be a bus or trolley that can quickly take us there. It’s hard to justify increasing the frequency of a bus in a low-density neighborhood where there are fewer potential users. The increased density will also change the feel of the neighborhood, and in my opinion, for the better. I love the energy of dense communities like Little Italy and East Village and I’m excited that many people see North Park as an ideal candidate for this kind of growth. Dennis Stein is a business owner and resident of North Park. Stein’s commentary has been edited for style and clarity. See anything in there we should fact check? Tell us what to check out here

IT IS a quiet morning on the outskirts of Mumbai, the air still mild. Dusty streets are dappled with sunlight, a stray dog rummages through some rubbish, the shutters are lifted on a few tiny shops. A man pushes a cart bearing a pyramid of oranges. And a delivery boy named Anil is already racing along his route on a motor bike borrowed from his uncle, his delivery backpack as large as he is. He has been up for hours, planning his route and carefully filling his bag with the packages to be dropped off first stacked near the top. Anil enters a block of flats, squeezes his backpack into a narrow lift and delivers a shirt to a 21-year-old taxi driver. In a neighbouring tower he hands a smartphone case to a 16-year-old who uses several apps to do the shopping for his family. A short ride away, a 78-year-old grandmother is a particularly pleased customer—with help from her grandson, she has bought some clay pickling jars that she couldn’t find elsewhere and some high-quality saris at a knock-down price. For Anil, it is gruelling work. But he is betting that e-commerce in India has nowhere to go but up, and he wants to ride up with it. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. In the next 15 years India will see more people come online than any other country. Last year e-commerce sales were about $16 billion; by 2020, according to Morgan Stanley, a bank, the online retail market could be more than seven times larger. Such sales are expected to grow faster in India than in any other market. This has attracted a flood of investment in e-commerce firms, the impact of which may go far beyond just displacing offline retail. India’s small businesses have limited access to loans; most of its consumers do not have credit cards, or for that matter credit. The e-commerce companies are investing in logistics, helping merchants borrow and giving consumers new tools to pay for goods. Amit Agarwal, who runs Amazon.in, holds out the hope that “We could actually be a catalyst to transform India: how India buys, how India sells, and even transform lives.” The jewel in the crown Amazon wants to make India its second-biggest market, after America. For the time being, though, with just 12% of the market, it lags behind the home-grown successes, Flipkart (45%) and Snapdeal (26%). All three, as well as some smaller competitors, are spending at a blistering rate. As global markets dip and Silicon Valley unicorns stumble, the international funding that makes this possible may dry up. Doubts about the sustainability of the companies’ present plans were underlined when, on February 26th, one of Morgan Stanley’s mutual funds marked down the value of its stake in Flipkart by 27%. If the prospect of changing India a billion deliveries at a time is a beguiling one, it is not for the faint-hearted. India’s visionaries keep their spirits up by remembering the example of China. Chinese e-commerce grew by nearly 600% between 2010 and 2014, making the country the biggest e-commerce market in the world today. It managed this largely through the growth of indigenous companies: mighty Amazon merely nips at the heels of home-grown giants Alibaba and JD.com; eBay has all but left the stage. And in the process China’s top e-commerce firms came to offer an astonishing range of services. Alibaba, founded by Jack Ma in 1999 and now valued at $184 billion, provides the best illustration. To calm anxieties about buying online Alibaba created Alipay, which holds a shopper’s payment in escrow until he receives his order. The tool has evolved into a financial-services company, Ant Financial, which last year serviced more than 400m Alipay accounts and made over 2m loans to small businesses and entrepreneurs. To provide Chinese consumers with access to foreign goods the firm’s services include not just online listings but marketing, shipping and help with customs. Alibaba is now building service centres in remote areas where shoppers can order, pick up and sell goods, as well as pay their bills. It is a further step in its attempts not merely to benefit from the growth in Chinese consumption, but to shape and accelerate it. The degree to which it has succeeded suggests that the earlier an e-commerce company arrives in a country’s development, the wider its role might be. India is in many ways a tougher market for e-commerce than China. Its population is poorer and its infrastructure worse. But its prospects look remarkable. Income per person, which in 2014 was $1,570, could be twice that by 2025. Two-thirds of Indians are younger than 35, and their phones give a huge number of them access to the internet. In December 2014 smartphones accounted for one in five Indian mobiles, according to Goldman Sachs. Just six months later, they accounted for one in four (see chart 1). Morgan Stanley expects internet penetration to rise from 32% in 2015 to 59% in 2020. By 2030, India is projected to be a one-billion-person digital market. The prospect of a second market growing to a near-Chinese size attracts those who made a packet the first time round. Bob van Dijk, the chief executive of Naspers, a South African firm that backed JD.com and Tencent, China’s largest social-media company, says he looks for countries with big populations, rising smartphone use and few retail chains. India, where malls, supermarkets and branded chains, or what analysts call “organised retail”, account for just 10% or so of the total market, fits the bill perfectly. The middlemen Naspers owns a 17% stake in Flipkart; other JD.com investors, including Tiger Global Management, in New York, and DST Global, a Russian fund, have also backed the company. Japan’s SoftBank, a big investor in Alibaba, has backed Snapdeal since 2013, and Alibaba itself followed suit last August. Meanwhile Alibaba’s Ant Financial owns a 20% stake in India’s Paytm, which began as a mobile-wallet company and now competes with Snapdeal and Flipkart as an online marketplace. The three firms have a combined valuation of almost $25 billion. In contrast to those investors trying to recapitulate their Chinese success, Amazon is seeking to make up for its failure. Reduced last year to the ignominy of having to open a shop on Alibaba’s Tmall site, Jeff Bezos is determined that this time, with more experience and in a more open market, things will be different. When Flipkart was founded, in 2007, Amazon was obviously its model. The company began as a bookseller; the two engineers who started it, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (not related), had worked for Amazon. Mr Bezos, though, is of the opinion that if anyone if going to be the Amazon of India, it should be Amazon. In 2014, shortly after Flipkart announced a $1 billion round of funding, Mr Bezos donned Indian clothes in Bangalore, hopped aboard a rainbow-coloured truck and handed Mr Agarwal a $2 billion cheque. A firm which earned over $100 billion in 2015 and has shareholders content to see more or less nothing by way of profits can afford such largesse. Neither Flipkart, Amazon, nor any of the other big competitors are following the retail strategy that led to Amazon’s success in the West. Indian regulations bar foreign-backed e-commerce firms from owning inventory, and so acting as a straightforward retailer is not an option. As a result India’s top e-commerce companies look much more like Alibaba. Flipkart has become a marketplace where sellers offer everything from mobile phones to washing machines to handbags. Snapdeal, Amazon and Paytm run marketplaces too. The firms compete feverishly on price, offering discounts that chomp away their own margins. In the long term, they must differentiate themselves by honing services for sellers and shoppers alike, and offering a better, broader range of products to more Indians than would have them otherwise. The first step to that goal is to boost the number of sellers on the company’s platform—it is the sellers, after all, who pay commissions and shipping fees. So companies offer a range of services to lure businesses to their sites. Flipkart’s programmes range from teaching sellers how to manage peak sales during diwali to advising fashion brands on trends and production. In February Amazon announced a travelling studio-on-wheels, offering training, photography and other services to help shop-owners come online. But the most important help they offer is in easing access to credit. Small businesses, given their scarce financial statements and limited credit history, have long had trouble obtaining loans from India’s banks. They often rely on expensive loans from neighbours or family. The e-commerce companies have strong incentives to make them better offers—and because they have access to online-sales data they are in a privileged position from which to help lenders judge credit risk. Take Sumit Agarwal (no relation to Amazon’s Mr Agarwal), a young entrepreneur who started an online shoe business in 2011. In his warehouse in New Delhi workers pack and scan shipments among towers of shoeboxes. The early days were uncertain; his family’s reaction when the firm started, he says, was “What the hell is this guy doing?” Now it is easier for such entrepreneurs to find the capital with which to grow. When Mr Agarwal logs into his seller’s account on Amazon.in his screen offers a column of short-term loans, their rates calculated using data from his transactions. Other e-commerce firms have similar schemes. In January Snapdeal announced that the State Bank of India would approve loans of up to $37,000 instantly if it liked the look of the data that Snapdeal provided on the borrower. Once a site has sellers, the second challenge is to help consumers buy their wares. Anil carries a clunky credit-card reader with him on his rounds, but most people pay cash. The e-commerce sites want to change that. Paytm lets customers add money to a digital wallet that can then be used to shop online, top up a mobile phone, lend money to a friend, pay a bill or use a service such as an Uber taxi. It has 120m digital-wallet accounts, nearly six times India’s number of credit cards. Snapdeal bought its own mobile payments company in April. Amazon purchased an online-payments service in February. A fine balance If a consumer does buy a product, the next task is delivering it. Delivery itself is nothing new. Indians have long been able to have a delivery boy from the local kirana—the cornershops that dominate Indian retail—bring them a stick of butter. But being able to deliver on a larger scale is a challenge. The country’s mail service, India Post, is ill-equipped to wait while a shopper tries on a kurta and ponders returning it. So newcomers are building networks. But India’s traffic is hellish and its addresses vague. A startup named Delhivery has hired more than 15,000 staff, from developers to executives poached from Facebook and posh consultancies. Its headquarters in Gurgaon are so packed that engineers spill onto an outdoor porch, tapping their keyboards furiously. Delhivery, which works with a number of e-commerce firms, is using machine learning to subdivide India’s postcodes, the better to map idiosyncratic descriptions. “We’ll know the house with the yellow door next to the temple,” says Sandeep Barasia, the managing director. The company moves goods to 700 or so small distribution centres overnight to avoid congested main roads during business hours. Thousands of delivery boys then dash to and from the distribution centres throughout the day, bearing more than 20 kilos on their bikes. E-commerce companies are devising their own solutions, too. Some investments, such as warehouses, are straightforward. Others are less so. Flipkart last year began using Mumbai’s famous network of dabbawallas, or lunch-delivery men, to drop off packages when they picked up customers’ lunch tins. Amazon has a pilot programme that lets customers order groceries online and have them delivered from the nearest kirana. Together, e-commerce firms say, these experiments could create a new truly national marketplace. Neelkanth Mishra of Credit Suisse, a bank, points out that road construction, electrification and mobile phones have stoked big increases in rural wages, and thus demand for goods (see chart 2). Flipkart says that about half its sales come from outside India’s big cities. Snapdeal claims more than 60%. It recently launched seven regional-language versions of its website. As they build out their markets the firms trumpet their assistance to small businesses. “Some of the big sellers on Amazon only had a shop in a corner of Bangalore; they were happy selling to five kilometres around each shop,” declares Amazon’s Mr Agarwal. “Now they are shipping orders to Kashmir and eastern India.” Amazon is helping more than 6,000 Indian businesses export, as well. Snapdeal’s Kunal Bahl is equally expansive: “Our ambition is to be a great social, economic and geographic equaliser for the small businesses of India as they scale up.” All these bold plans are clouded by two obstinate facts. First, spending on discounts, marketing campaigns and new hires means none of the companies has yet made money. Visit any firm’s lobby and you will meet herds of job applicants. Delivery boys like Anil are in hot demand—a top performer in his branch, he earns about 14,000 rupees ($200) each month. Amazon is, predictably, outspending its competitors. Last year its sales were two-thirds the size of its losses. Mr Agarwal is not bothered by a lack of profit. “The priority is growth,” he explains. Ankit Nagori, Flipkart’s chief business officer, says that the most important metrics for his company are not margins but the number of new customers, how often they shop, how much they buy and the speed of delivery. “If you solve for these four things,” he contends, “then the top line and bottom line will fall in place.” A billion deliveries more The second problem is regulatory. Forbidding foreign-backed firms from owning inventory has costs. Companies have limited control over the quality of products on their sites, points out Morgan Stanley’s Parag Gupta, and they can do little to streamline the country’s fragmented supply chain. Flipkart has become a tangle of interlinked entities, including a holding company in Singapore, in an attempt to obey India’s rules while maximising profits. India’s government may nonetheless come under protectionist pressure. Traditional retailers allege that the online marketplaces flout rules against foreign direct investment. Facebook’s recently scuttled plan to offer Indians free internet services, including its own, sparked a furore over the risks of “digital colonialism”. Offline retailers are watching all this intently. Kiranas are relatively protected, thanks to meagre tax bills and limited carrying costs (they store little). Big shops and malls are another story (see chart 3). “What is remarkable for me is that in a very short time, e-commerce has become half of what the organised market is,” says Abheek Singhi of the Boston Consulting Group. “Two years down the line, three years down the line, the e-commerce market could be larger.” Big foreign retailers—such as Ikea, a Swedish furniture company, which after years of kerfuffle may finally be opening an Indian store—cannot sell directly online. Matters are simpler for Indian retailers, but their course remains cloudy. Reliance Industries, a conglomerate with over 1m square metres of shop floor, is planning its own e-commerce venture. Future Group, which pioneered hypermarkets in the country, is outfitting small shop-owners and entrepreneurs with digital catalogues so that consumers can order Future Group products in places where there will never be a store. However the firm has scaled back some of its more ambitious plans for e-commerce. “The more sales you do, the more money you lose,” muses Kishore Biyani, Future Group’s founder. “You need to have continuous funding and someone to back you.” For the time being, the big companies in the sector are having those needs met. “You have at least three, potentially four large players with deep enough pockets,” says Mr Singhi. “It’s going to play out at a very high cost.” Companies like Alibaba and Amazon see that cost as worth paying in part because, just as they applied what they learned in China to India, so they will use their Indian experience in the next markets they move into. Alibaba, not content to back Paytm and Snapdeal, is also courting Indian businesses directly. In December it said it would help Indian firms with financing and logistics so they might use Alibaba’s platforms to export to China and beyond. Eventually, Mr Ma likes to say, any consumer should be able to buy from any seller, anywhere in the world. The more of those purchases go through one of his firms, the better. And everywhere these giants go, home-grown entrepreneurs will be hoping that their local acumen will give them an edge and looking for overseas investors to back them. Many of them will fail: India does not yet offer an example of how to make a profit, and it may be a long time before it does. But as long as some of these efforts survive, they will serve to speed progress, and innovation, in developing markets. As Amazon’s Mr Agarwal says, “If millions of small, medium enterprises out there, manufacturers and retailers, can...sell their product anywhere in the world—that’s transformational.”

Ever since Hideo Kojima’s ambitious demo, P.T. (2014), got cancelled there has been a slew of similar games announced, all looking to carry its torch. Some of them have since been cancelled, while others are still ostensibly in the throes of development, with rare updates on how things are going. However, an eight-person team based in the Czech Republic were recently able to get their P.T.-inspired game through Steam Greenlight. The Naked Game—yes, you read that right, and no, it’s not an 18+ game—is a first-person psychological horror game with puzzle elements. The game follows the story of a mysterious Japanese girl, called Mia Aiko, who decides to leave her family and go to Europe in a desperate attempt to forget her past and live a better life. “naked in her situation, not only physically, but also mentally” Things don’t go quite according to plan for Aiko. She gets kidnapped by someone who is trying to make people rethink their lives, with each room they are forced to work through representing an issue in the “consumer society.” The game itself doesn’t delve too much into what these issues might be as most of them are left deliberately open for each player’s interpretation. As for the name, The Naked Game, the team believes it fits the setting and the kidnapper’s ideology. But if you’re looking for something less metaphorical, it’s also a fact that there are a lot of naked mannequins located throughout the game’s levels. According to the studio, “they can help you to understand [the psychopath’s] thoughts more,” with the name referring to the “fact that Mia is really naked in her situation, not only physically, but also mentally.” The game is said to adapt to your style of play, mostly through featuring dynamic post-processing, which changes “many values like color spectrum, saturation, hue, contrast and so on.” It will be about two-to-six hours long to play, depending on how good you are with puzzles and how much you want to explore and roam the creepy environments. With the game currently in its beta phase, it is expected to release some time later this year, with plans to release on Linux and Mac as well as Windows. You can find out more about The Naked Game on its Steam Greenlight page.

The Bury Your Gays trope came to a forefront this past television season when a multitude of LGBTQ characters were killed off shows including “The Walking Dead,” “Empire” and most notably, “The 100.” Javier Grillo-Marxuach — who wrote the highly controversial episode of the CW show that killed off Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey), after she had sex with Clarke (Eliza Taylor) — spoke on a panel Saturday morning at the ATX Television Festival in Austin, Texas, to address the trope, which is defined as killing off a gay character to further the story of a straight one. Along with writers and producers from “Shameless,” “Faking It” and “The Originals,” Grillo-Marxuach discussed the progress of the TV industry in regards to the inclusion of LGBTQ characters, but first, he tackled the elephant in the room. “I think the failure was to recognize the cultural impact that would have on the context of the show,” Grillo-Marxuach said. Addressing the social media outcry, he noted that rather than pointing fingers, the bigger issue at hand is the discussion that resulted from the “Clexa” controversy. Related ‘The 100’ Showrunner Apologizes for Controversial Character Death ‘Empire’ Showrunner Ilene Chaiken Responds to TV’s Lesbian Death Trope “The systemic failure to recognize it as an event of the magnitude that it had [outside the show] is the real subject of discussion here,” Grillo-Marxuach said. “When there’s a bigger issue involved of perhaps if we knew, why did we still go through with it? I think that’s a big issue.” Coming to his defense, “Faking It” creator Carter Covington applauded Grillo-Marxuach and “The 100” writers for putting Lexa and Clarke’s relationship on TV in the first place. “I feel like I have one of the gayest shows on TV so I’ve earned the right to speak to this,” Covington said with a laugh. “I think what’s getting lost in ‘The 100’ is that there was an amazing relationship…and that the death of one of these characters caused this huge ripple…This is storytelling, and I think ‘The 100’…is being assaulted and in the end, I think they’re giving fans this amazing chance to meet each other online and on Twitter. There’s so much good the ‘The 100’ is doing for the community.” Grillo-Marxuach chimed in further on the Twitter barrage — which included fans pleading him to sign The Lexa Pledge, though he explained “I won’t make promises I can’t keep” — and he commended fans for being so vocal and creating a place of social activism. “When the thing with ‘The 100’ happened and all the rage and fury came down on Twitter, the thing I was reminded of is when Caitlyn Jenner was on ESPN she said, give me your rage, I can take it,” the writer/producer said, referencing Jenner’s acceptance speech at the ESPY awards last year. “I am grateful for the tidal wave that came down on me,” Grillo-Marxuach said, adding, “For the exposure and understanding that I received that people are willing to share stories and sometimes the rage, but also other emotions that come with it…the activism that goes on online is humongously important.” Panelist Carina MacKenzie, writer on “The Originals,” also applauded the loud Twitter noise, saying, “This conversation wouldn’t be happening without fans on social media. I’m really glad that this conversation is happening at all, and that’s because of the fans on a show that’s a tiny little show on a tiny little network that has now changed the way we talk about television.” While the panel largely commended viewers for sharing their passion on social media, Covington did admit that he’s received many “really hurtful” messages (“I got accused of queer-baiting,” he said). He warned the room of the poor impact that can result from such negativity online. “I’m trying to put out what I think is the most positive messages out to the community I’ve ever seen on TV,” Covington said. “I really wish we could change the conversation and become a glass half full fandom…I just wish the conversation was more of gratitude so that people could be rewarded, and you’re going to get so many more LGBTQ characters…I’m really worried that it’s going to have the opposite effect of what fans want.” As simply put by Grillo-Marxuach, “The same pen that created those relationships is the one that created the outcome that we see today.”

Sharod Lamor "Roddy" White (born November 2, 1981) is a former American football wide receiver who played his entire professional career with the Atlanta Falcons. He played college football at UAB, and was drafted by the Falcons in the first round of the 2005 NFL Draft. Early years [ edit ] White attended James Island High School in Charleston, South Carolina, and was a four-sport letterman and standout in football, baseball, soccer, and wrestling.[1] In football, he was a two-time All-Lowcountry honoree, a two-time All-State honoree, and was also listed as one of the top receivers in the nation on Rivals.com. In wrestling, he was a two-time state champion often pinning his opponent in a move that was coined the "Shanaz".[2] College career [ edit ] White attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he was a standout wide receiver for the UAB Blazers football team. He caught 163 passes for 3,112 yards and 26 touchdowns in four seasons.[3] He played under head coach Watson Brown while at UAB.[4] 2001 season [ edit ] As a freshman, White recorded meaningful statistics in six games. On October 13, against the Cincinnati Bearcats, he recorded his first collegiate touchdown.[5] On December 12, against the Pitt Panthers, he had a season-high four receptions for 75 yards.[6] Overall, in his freshman season, he recorded 14 receptions for 236 yards and two touchdowns in his freshman season.[7] 2002 season [ edit ] As a sophomore, White saw an expanded role in the Blazers offense. On October 12, against Houston, he recorded four receptions for 94 yards and a touchdown.[8] In the next game against Tulane, he recorded five receptions for 66 yards and another touchdown.[9] On November 16, he had a career-day against East Carolina with eight receptions for 159 yards and a touchdown.[10] Overall, in his sophomore season, he recorded 39 receptions for 580 yards and three touchdowns.[11] 2003 season [ edit ] As a junior, White continued his productive college career with the Blazers. On September 4, against Southern Miss, he recorded 10 receptions for 111 yards.[12] On October 11, against Cincinnati, he had a breakout day with four receptions for 171 yards and two touchdowns.[13] In the last three games of the season, he posted great results: 147 yards and two touchdowns against Tulane,[14] 121 yards and a touchdown against South Florida,[15] and 54 yards and a touchdown against Houston.[16] Overall, in his junior season, he recorded 39 receptions for 844 yards and seven touchdowns.[17] 2004 season [ edit ] As a senior, White had his best collegiate season statistically. On September 25, against Memphis, he had eight receptions for 177 yards and three touchdowns.[18] On October 9, against Mississippi State, he had seven receptions for 123 yards and two touchdowns.[19] He had career day against Tulane on October 23, with 10 receptions for 253 yards and a touchdown, and it was his fifth straight game with a touchdown score.[20] On November 13, against Houston, he had eight receptions for 153 yards and two touchdowns.[21] On November 27, against Southern Miss, he had four receptions for 132 yards and a touchdown.[22] White helped lead UAB to their first bowl game in school history. In the 2004 Hawaii Bowl, White caught six passes for 113 yards and a touchdown in the 59-40 loss to the Hawaii Warriors.[23] He finished his senior season with 71 receptions for 1,452 yards and 14 scores.[24][25] Statistics [ edit ] Year School Class Pos Games Rec Yds Avg TD 2001 UAB Freshman WR 9 14 236 16.9 2 2002 UAB Sophomore WR 12 39 580 14.9 3 2003 UAB Junior WR 12 39 844 21.6 7 2004 UAB Senior WR 12 71 1,452 20.5 14 Career 45 163 3,112 19.1 26 Professional career [ edit ] Pre-draft measurables Ht Wt Arm length Hand size 40-yard dash 10-yd split 20-yd split 20-ss 3-cone Vert jump Broad BP 6 ft 1 1⁄ 4 in (1.86 m) 207 lb (94 kg) 31 5⁄ 8 in (0.80 m) 9 5⁄ 8 in (0.24 m) 4.45 s 4.01 s 7.12 s 41 in (1.04 m) 10 ft 6 in (3.20 m) 18 reps Measurables were taken from the NFL Combine.[26][27] Atlanta Falcons [ edit ] 2005 season [ edit ] Although a high ankle sprain caused him to remain on the sidelines for much of the preseason, he recovered by Week 2 and was put on the team's roster. In Week 4 against the Minnesota Vikings, he was inserted in the lineup as the No. 3 receiver. During the course of the game, he recorded 64 yards on 5 catches.[28] However, during the rest of the season, his performance was generally spotty. He made a fantastic leaping catch over three defenders on a trick play against the New Orleans Saints during Week 14 for a 54-yard touchdown, but dropped a crucial touchdown catch the next week against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.[29][30] In spite of this, he still had 108 yards receiving in that game, the second-highest receiving total put up by a rookie wide receiver in 2005, only surpassed by Jacksonville Jaguars receiver Matt Jones (117 yards vs. Baltimore). White ranked fifth among all rookie wide receivers in 2005.[31] 2006 season [ edit ] In the 2006 season, White appeared in all 16 games and started five. His performance in his second season increased in comparison to his rookie season. He had his best game of the season against the Dallas Cowboys where he had three receptions for 104 yards.[32] He recorded 30 receptions for 505 yards in his second season.[33] 2007 season [ edit ] On September 23, against the Carolina Panthers, White had seven receptions for 127 yards and a touchdown.[34] A few weeks later, against the New Orleans Saints, he had eight receptions for 110 yards and a touchdown.[35] On November 22, against the Indianapolis Colts, he had six receptions for 104 yards and a touchdown.[36] In the next game, against the St. Louis Rams, he had 10 receptions for a season-high 146 yards and a touchdown.[37] In the penultimate game of his third season, he had 12 receptions for 141 yards against the Arizona Cardinals.[38] In a game against the New Orleans Saints, White showed his support for fellow Falcon Michael Vick by wearing a T-shirt that said "Free Mike Vick" and pulling up his jersey after scoring a touchdown. Earlier that day, Vick was sentenced to 23 months in jail on dogfighting charges.[39] White was fined $10,000 by the league for his actions.[40] White became the first Falcon wide receiver since Terance Mathis in 1999 to reach 1,000 single-season receiving yards on December 23, 2007.[41] He also finished tied for eighth among all NFL wide receivers in receiving yards in 2007 with 1,202 yards. He had six receiving touchdowns.[42] 2008 season [ edit ] On September 21, 2008, in Week 3, he put together his first solid performance of the season with five receptions for 119 yards and a touchdown against the Kansas City Chiefs.[43] On October 5, he had eight receptions for 132 yards and a touchdown in Week 5 against the Green Bay Packers.[44] He followed that up the next week, he had nine receptions for 112 yards and a touchdown against the Chicago Bears.[45] He continued his hot streak the next week when he had eight receptions for 113 yards and two touchdowns against the Philadelphia Eagles.[46] On November 16, in Week 11, he had five receptions for 102 yards against the Denver Broncos.[47] Two weeks later, on November 30, he had another great game with six receptions for 112 yards against the San Diego Chargers.[48] On December 7, in Week 14, he had with best performance of the season with 10 receptions for 164 yards against the New Orleans Saints.[49] He finished up the season on December 28 with three receptions for 48 yards and a touchdown against the St. Louis Rams in the Week 17 finale.[50] White and the Falcons made the playoffs in the 2008 season and met the Arizona Cardinals in the Wild Card Round. The Falcons fell by a score of 30–24 as White had 11 receptions for 84 yards and a touchdown.[51] White's 2008 season was an improvement over the previous year, finishing fourth in the NFL in receiving yards (3rd in the NFC). He finished the year with 1,382 receiving yards (career high and team record), 88 receptions (career high), and 7 touchdowns (career high).[52] He broke Alfred Jenkins's team record of 1,358 receiving yards, which stood since 1981.[53] On December 16, 2008, White was named to the 2009 Pro Bowl along with fellow Falcons running back Michael Turner.[54][55] White had one reception for 26 yards and one rush for seven yards in the 2009 Pro Bowl.[56] 2009 season [ edit ] On July 31, 2009, White began a holdout, boycotting the 2009 training camp in an attempt at an early contract extension. On August 8, he signed a six-year, $48 million contract extension with $18.6 million guaranteed and $28 million over the first three years of the deal. The extension makes him the 5th highest paid wide receiver in the league, behind Arizona's Larry Fitzgerald, Carolina's Steve Smith, Chicago's Brandon Marshall, and Houston's Andre Johnson.[57] In Week 2, on September 20, he had six receptions for 53 yards and his first touchdown of the season against the Carolina Panthers.[58] On October 11, White set the Falcons franchise record for single-game receiving yards in a game against the San Francisco 49ers. He had 8 receptions for a career-high 210 yards as well as 2 touchdowns, one of which was for 90 yards.[59] This record has been broken by Julio Jones, who received an astounding 300+ yards against the Carolina Panthers in a game during the 2016-2017 season.[60] On November 2, in Week 8, he broke 100 receiving yards again with four receptions for 108 yards and a touchdown against the New Orleans Saints.[61] Over a month later, on December 6, he had nine receptions for 104 yards and a touchdown against the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 13.[62] The next week, he had eight receptions for 139 yards and two touchdowns against the Buffalo Bills.[63] He closed out the regular season on January 3, 2010 with six receptions for 66 yards and a touchdown against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.[64] White finished the 2009 season with 85 receptions, 1,153 yards, and a career-high 11 touchdowns.[65] He became only the second Falcon player to record three straight 1,000 yard seasons. On January 26, 2010, White was selected to his second consecutive Pro Bowl. Roddy White at Falcons training camp in 2015 White led all receivers in the 2010 Pro Bowl in catches with eight for 84 yards.[66] 2010 season [ edit ] In the first game of the 2010 season, White had a career-high 13 receptions for 111 yards against the Pittsburgh Steelers.[67] Two games later, he had five receptions for 69 yards and his first touchdown of the season against the New Orleans Saints.[68] The next week, he had seven receptions for 104 yards against the San Francisco 49ers.[69] For the third straight week, he put up a solid performance with five receptions for 101 yards and a touchdown against the Cleveland Browns.[70] On October 24, he had 11 receptions for 201 yards and two touchdowns against the Cincinnati Bengals. His performance against the Bengals was his second-career game with at least 200 receiving yards.[71] On November 11, in Week 10, he had 12 receptions for 138 yards and two touchdowns against the Baltimore Ravens.[72] White and the Falcons made the playoffs in the 2010 season. In the Divisional Round, they fell to the Green Bay Packers 48–21 despite White having six receptions for 57 yards and a touchdown.[73] In 2010, White led the NFL in receptions with 115 and the NFC in receiving yards with 1,389.[74] He also had 10 touchdowns for the year.[75] White led the NFC Pro Bowl team with 69 yards.[76] 2011 season [ edit ] Roddy White during the 2011 season White started off the 2011 season with eight receptions for 61 yards against the Chicago Bears on September 11.[77] The next week, he had a quiet day with three receptions for 23 yards and his first touchdown of the season against the Philadelphia Eagles.[78] On September 25, in Week 3, he had nine receptions for 140 against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.[79] A few weeks later, in Week 11, on November 20, he had seven receptions for 147 yards against the Tennessee Titans.[80] The next week, he had another great day with had 10 receptions for 120 yards and a touchdown against the Minnesota Vikings.[81] The Vikings game started a stretch for White with four straight games with a touchdown. On December 4, he had four receptions for 51 yards and a touchdowns against the Houston Texans.[82] On December 11, he had seven receptions for 84 yards and a touchdown against the Carolina Panthers.[83] The streak continued on December 15, 2011, when he had 10 receptions for 135 yards and two touchdowns against the Jacksonville Jaguars in Week 15.[84] On December 26, he had 11 receptions for 127 yards and against the New Orleans Saints.[85] He closed out the 2011 regular season with 69 yards against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on New Year's Day.[86] In the 2011 season, White started in all 16 games. He recorded 100 receptions for 1,296 yards and eight touchdowns.[87] On January 11, 2012 White was added to the NFC Pro Bowl Roster replacing Lions WR Calvin Johnson due to a sore Achilles tendon.[88] In 2011, White broke the Falcons all-time receiving yards record.[89] 2012 season [ edit ] In the 2012 season, White appeared in all 16 games and started 15. On September 9, 2012, in the season opener, he had six receptions for 87 yards against the Kansas City Chiefs.[90] The next week, he had eight receptions for 102 yards and his first touchdown of the season against the Denver Broncos.[91] On September 30, he had eight receptions for 169 yards and two touchdowns against the Carolina Panthers.[92] On November 4, he had the first of three straight weeks with 100+ receiving yards with seven receptions for 118 yards against the Dallas Cowboys.[93] On November 11, he had seven receptions for 114 yards against the New Orleans Saints.[94] On November 18, he continued the streak with eight receptions for 123 yards and against the Arizona Cardinals.[95] He picked it back up in Week 14, with nine receptions for 117 yards and a touchdown against the Carolina Panthers.[96] On December 22, in Week 15, he had eight receptions for 153 yards and two touchdowns against the Detroit Lions.[97] He closed out his 2012 regular season on December 30 with had five receptions for 42 yards against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.[98] White and the Falcons made the playoffs in the 2012 season. In the Divisional Round against the Seattle Seahawks, he had five receptions for 76 yards and a touchdown as the Falcons won 30–28.[99] In the NFC Championship against the San Francisco 49ers, he had seven receptions for 100 yards as the Falcons fell 28–24.[100] The loss was White's final playoff game of his career. Overall, he recorded 92 receptions for 1,351 yards and seven touchdowns.[101] 2013 season [ edit ] During the 2013 season, White was dealing with an ankle injury and a hamstring injury, which caused him to get off to a very slow start. Over the first five games of the season, he only recorded 14 receptions for 129 yards combined.[102] In Week 7, White missed the first game in his nine-year NFL career ending his streak of playing in 133 straight games.[103] On November 17, he had three receptions for 36 yards and his first touchdown of the season against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.[104] On December 1, he had with 10 receptions for a season-high 143 yards against the Buffalo Bills.[105] On December 23, he had 12 receptions for 141 yards and a touchdown against the San Francisco 49ers.[106] On December 29, he closed out his regular season with eight receptions for 91 yards and a touchdown against the Carolina Panthers.[107] 2014 season [ edit ] On July 24, 2014, White signed a contract extension worth $30 million over four years.[108] In the season opener on September 7, he had five receptions for 72 yards and a touchdown against the New Orleans Saints.[109] On October 19, in Week 7, he had nine receptions for 100 yards and a touchdown against the Baltimore Ravens.[110] On November 16, he had eight receptions for 75 yards and a touchdown against the Carolina Panthers.[111] He joined the 10,000-yard receiving club in the game.[112] On December 28, he closed out his regular season with eight receptions for 104 yards against the Carolina Panthers.[113] 2015 season [ edit ] In the 2015 season, White started in all 16 games in what was his final NFL season. In the season opener on September 14 on Monday Night Football, he had four receptions for 84 yards against the Philadelphia Eagles.[114] On October 15, he had three receptions for 23 yards and a touchdown against the New Orleans Saints.[115] The touchdown against the Saints was the last of White's NFL career. After that game, he broke 50 yards receiving only twice. On January 3, 2016, in the final game of his NFL career, he had a reception for 10 yards against the New Orleans Saints.[116] He had 43 receptions for 506 yards and one touchdown.[117] His yardage and reception totals were his fewest since his second season in the NFL in 2006.[118] On March 2, 2016, White was released by the Falcons.[119] Retirement [ edit ] After not playing at all in the 2016 season, White officially announced his retirement from the NFL on April 14, 2017.[120] On June 12, 2017, White retired as an Atlanta Falcon.[121] On June 24, 2017, White and Michael Vick were both honored by the Falcons with a retirement ceremony.[122] White currently coaches wide receivers at Johns Creek High School in Johns Creek, Georgia.[123] Career statistics [ edit ] Falcons franchise records [ edit ] Most receiving yards in a half (185) Most career receiving yards (10,863) [124] Most receptions in a playoff game (11) Most seasons with 1,000 yards (6) Most receiving touchdowns in a career (63) Most receptions in a career (808) Most career starts for a wide receiver (149) Most games played as a wide receiver (171) Personal life [ edit ] White is the father of five children.[125] His half-brother, Tyrone Moore Jr., was shot dead outside the Lake House Club nightclub in James Island, South Carolina on May 18, 2014.[126] Controversy [ edit ] In 2007, White was fined $10,000 by the NFL for displaying a shirt in support of Michael Vick who was at the time serving a prison sentence for a criminal conviction related to dog fighting.[127] At the conclusion of the 2013 George Zimmerman trial, White was upset with the verdict of not guilty, and he posted several controversial statements on Twitter, including "Fucking Zimmerman got away with murder today wow what kind of world do we live in". He received the most backlash for the following tweet: "All them jurors should go home tonight and kill themselves for letting a grown man get away with killing a kid". After a few hours, he complained that "people on Twitter want me to get in trouble for a tweet", but he apologized the next day.[128][129] In 2014, White was criticized for reneging on a public bet he tweeted regarding a Duke win in the 2014 NCAA basketball championship. White had promised season tickets, front row at the 50-yard line. When White lost the bet, he offered a ticket to a Bears game instead.[127][130][131][132][133] White later upheld his end of the deal and more, including two Super Bowl tickets stating, "We have talked about it for days while people were just speculating. And being a father, you have to be responsible for your actions."[134] See also [ edit ]

dogstile suggests: Why not just make massive fines for companies who are obviously suing on a case that would never win. Or better yet, if the little guy fights and wins, the losing company has to pay all their legal fees. The second point is called loser pays and is a popular idea. (Le_Lisra can feel smug that most western countries use this system outside of the U.S.) I don't know enough to comment on it beyond that. But taking the first point: Who would decide if someone was "obviously suing on a case that would never win"? To make that kind of determination, you'd need a judge. And a jury. And lawyers so that both sides could make their case... And "massive fines" is a tricky notion. What's massive for a ten person company is peanuts for a hundred person company. And a massive fine for a hundred person company would be a rounding error for a thousand person company. And how do you calculate how "big" a company is, anyway? Some companies employ a ton of people. Some are just a few people who employ a lot of contractors. I am reminded of a very wise saying: "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong." - H. L. Mencken Thankfully, we don't need to muck about with the court system or change any laws to fix this. The solution to this problem is easily explained and costs nothing to implement. Several people pointed it out in the comments last week. The solution is this: "Don't go into business with people who have dealt poorly with their other business partners." I can't imagine what would possess anyone to sign a deal with Activision, knowing what is publicly known about the company now. Even if the deal seems nice and the Activision people seem friendly and Bobby Kotick has your company over for a barbecue and shakes hands with your team and you meet his cute kids. When you are signing a contract with someone far out of your financial weight class, the paper is only as reliable as the character of the guy who hands you the pen. I don't know Bobby Kotick personally. I don't know the particulars of any of the cases that Activsion had against former Infinity Ward employees, current Infinity Ward employees, No Doubt, Double Fine, Genius Products, Greg Hastings, or any of the other cases we didn't hear about because they never went public. I can't say for certain that Activision is the bad guy. Maybe they're just a victim of extraordinarily bad luck and worse PR. But a lot of former Activision business partners are very unhappy with how they were treated. As the president of a development studio, I know I wouldn't bet on his word with the jobs of all my friends and everything we've built. Activision is like a guy who has had his last five spouses die under "mysterious circumstances". Maybe he's a murderer and maybe he's just had bad luck, but at this point only an idiot would marry him and find out. Gamers are angry that there's no way to punish Activision. But this is the punishment that Activision should have to endure: Smart and talented people should simply refuse to do business with them out of fear of finding themselves in Greg Hasting's shoes. Character matters. Don't do business with people you can't trust. This advice will never change, no matter what business you're in. Shamus Young is the guy behind Twenty Sided, DM of the Rings, and Stolen Pixels, Shamus Plays, and Spoiler Warning. He's never run any business ever and you should probably not rely on him for business advice. Use your head.

Rolf Harris once starred in a 20-minute no to child abuse video, produced in 1985 titled Kids Can Say No! Copyright owner: Rolf Harris Video. BY THE time Rolf Harris’s educational program alerting kids to the dangers and prevention of child sexual abuse was released, he had already indecently assaulted three of the four young women he was convicted of abusing — one aged as young as seven. Developed in 1985 and bought by educational parties, libraries and the police force across Europe, the UK and Australia, Kids Can Say No! is a 20-minute video aimed at “preventing child abuse”, according to its back cover. The video was to have been shown at the trial of the entertainer with prosecutors, who had found it on Youtube, keen to highlight the irony of the message he had delivered on the footage. But it was ruled irrelevant to proceedings and not entered as evidence. In the footage, Harris sings along with the children about their rights over their body. There is also an acted out scenario in which a school friend goes to the house to visit another but only their father is there who then abuses them. The film ends with a sing-a-long by Harris and the children who are joined by two police officers who stand behind the Australian entertainer for the chorus. Harris appeared alongside a number of children to “teach them the basis of yes feelings and no feelings and what to do”, confirmed Jessica Skippon, whose UK-based company, Skippon Video, was responsible for distributing the film. GUILTY: Rolf Harris abused young girls for years MORE: What the jury wasn’t told about Rolf Harris MORE: Harris brought down by his letters and cards to victims According to Mrs Skippon, the video “was fairly widely distributed at the time”. And now the words of the entertainer, who presented the program, have come back to haunt him. “There are bad secrets,” Harris says in the video. “If you’re really scared they’re going to hurt you, tell them anything just to get yourself away safely,” he advises the children. “Afterwards, remember they want you to keep a bad secret, a secret that could hurt other children.” Overnight, the Australian entertainer was found guilty in Southwark Crown Court in London of 12 charges of indecent assault of four young girls at various times between 1968 and 1986. By the time children were watching the educational program in the safety of their schools, Harris would have committed nine of the 12 sexual offences outlined against him. A number of confronting scenarios are portrayed in the footage, including “big boys” inviting a group of young children to their “special club” and a father running his daughter a bubble bath so they can play a “secret game”. “Isn’t it good to be alive on a day like today?” Harris says, as he attempts to explain the difference between the right and wrong scenarios to the young children, aged between seven and eight. “Breathe that air, you feel it all over your skin. It’s good, isn’t it?” “It’s the sort of feeling when you want to give someone a hug, or one of those little pats that make you feel good. It’s that sort of touching I was to talk about today because it helps you understand the sort of touching that doesn’t make you feel too good.” Between 1968 and 1970, Harris touched a seven- or eight-year-old girl and in 1975 he assaulted a second girl. Seven charges of indecent assault relate to a third victim, a 13-year-old school friend of his daughter, Bindi, during a holiday to Australia via Hawaii in 1978. According to the victim, she stepped out of a hotel shower wrapped in a towel and was met by Harris, who hugged her, then spat on his fingers before digitally penetrating her. Harris later conceded he’d had eight sexual encounters with the woman, including oral sex in a laneway, his daughter’s house and on a motorway en route to London, but not until she was the legal age, 18. He would have been 53 at the time. The remaining three charges relate to a fourth victim, aged 14, in 1986 just a year after the release of Kids Can Say No !. It was found the 84-year-old entertainer molested one victim as she sat on his lap at a pub bench, another while signing her an autograph because he had no free hands, and another after he squatted on all fours and barked like a dog. He also tongue kissed an 11-year-old girl who had been staying with Harris and his wife, Alwen, in the couple’s home. In the video, Harris advised the children to “tell your parents or an adult you trust, like your teacher or a school nurse. “The best way to be safe is to tell enough other people. You want to blow a whistle that everyone can hear. You have a right to feel safe.” Yet, the entertainer spent two decades indecently assaulting young women. On the third day of cross examination, prosecutor Sasha Wass put it to the court that Harris found touching children particularly attractive because they didn’t judge him like an adult would. She pointed out five “common themes” between the incidents: the assaults all took place in public; sexually assaulting them through a friendly gesture like a hug; trapping his victim so they were unable to move or protest; ensuring others were present during the assault and maintaining ignorance of the assault immediately after. Harris maintained his innocence throughout the trial. - with Charles Miranda

Russia’s Gazprom may have leveraged its dominant position by obtaining unrelated commitments on pipelines from its customers, as a condition of supplying gas to Bulgaria and Poland, says Margrethe Vestager. Margrethe Vestager is the EU’s Commissioner for Competition. She spoke to EURACTIV’s Georgi Gotev and Sarantis Michalopoulos. Why are there still EU countries with energy monopolies, and how does this affect energy cost? We all benefit from competitive energy market conditions, because utilities try to become more efficient than their rivals, by keeping costs down and offering better services. Many different factors affect the price of energy, but typically prices are lower in countries that have competitive energy markets. EU law aims to remove obstacles to competition in energy markets. The department of the European Commission I lead enforces these rules throughout the EU. In some EU countries, competition conditions are not good yet, and we need to work on that. However, we can only create the conditions for competition, not competition itself. That is the task of competitors. What is the main challenge for the European Commission regarding Greece’s electricity market? Competition in Greek electricity markets is very limited. This affects generation and wholesale supply, and also the supply that reaches end consumers, which is virtually a monopoly. This is bad news for consumers and for the economy. Clearly, there is a need to strengthen competition. The Commission reached this conclusion in a 2008 decision, which concluded that PPC had quasi-exclusive access to lignite – the cheapest fuel in Greece – and called on Greece to extend access to competitors too. That decision is currently before the EU courts. In general, it is important for competition that Greece has the right regulatory framework and a strong and independent regulator. Last year, the Commission informed Bulgarian Energy Holding (BEH) that the territorial restrictions on resale contained in BEH’s electricity supply contracts for the unregulated Bulgarian wholesale electricity market may breach EU antitrust rules. In a separate investigation, the Commission is investigating whether BEH’s gas supply subsidiary, Bulgargaz, and its gas infrastructure subsidiary, Bulgartransgaz, might be hindering competitors from accessing key gas infrastructure, in breach of EU antitrust rules. What is the status of these procedures? In both cases we informed the companies of the objections raised against them and we are following our procedures – strictly, as we always do – before taking the next steps. Our objections in the electricity case were sent to BEH in August 2014. Currently, we are analysing the replies we have received. In the gas case, the Commission sent its objections to BEH, Bulgargaz and Bulgartransgaz in March 2015. All three companies now have the right to reply in writing and to request an oral hearing. In June 2014, the Bulgarian energy regulator asked the Commission to investigate if renewable energy producers in Bulgaria are receiving excessive state aid. What is happening following this request? The Commission received the concerns from the Energy Regulator that the support levels were set too high in the Bulgarian renewable support scheme. As the Bulgarian authorities did not notify the scheme, the Commission is currently collecting all the information it needs to assess whether the Bulgarian support scheme is in line with state aid rules. Having said this, I would like to emphasise that the Commission supports the promotion of renewable energy generation and their integration in the market. However, we must ensure that such promotion does not result in overcompensation and undue negative effects on European energy markets. Bulgaria has also sent a complaint to the Commission concerning possible unlawful state aid to two US-owned thermal power plants. In this case, Bulgaria’s Energy Regulator had concerns that the long-term agreements for the purchase of electricity from two power plants were concluded at too high prices, which could be against state aid rules. We have contacted Bulgarian authorities to receive more information about the contracts. The contracts were concluded a long time ago, and we understand they are being renegotiated. We have not reached any conclusion yet if state aid is involved. If it is, the Commission will make sure that the aid is compatible with the internal market and does not lead to undue distortions. Anything else you would like to say regarding cases involving Bulgaria? Bulgaria is one of the EU countries concerned by the Commission’s investigation of Gazprom’s possible abuse of dominance in the gas supply sector. Gazprom received a Statement of Objections expressing our concerns in April 2015. The preliminary view is that Gazprom is implementing a strategy to partition several markets in Central and Eastern Europe by preventing its customers from reselling the gas cross-border. This has allowed Gazprom to charge unfair prices in certain member states, including Bulgaria. Gazprom may also have leveraged its dominant position by obtaining unrelated commitments on pipelines from its customers as a condition to supply gas to Bulgaria and Poland. Recently, the Minister of Energy of Azerbaijan, Natig Aliyev, expressed concerns about the European Commission’s delay to decide if the deal with DESFA is compatible with EU law. Will the deal go ahead? The Commission opened an in-depth investigation in November 2014 to see whether the proposed acquisition of DESFA by SOCAR impedes competition on the Greek gas market. The deadline for the Commission to make a decision between the DESFA and SOCAR was suspended on 21 January, and has not been restarted yet. As part of our process, we have sent questions to SOCAR, and we are waiting for the company send us complete and full replies. This means that it is premature to speculate on the final outcome of the review at this stage.

Surveillance video shows the moment a Philadelphia police officer was struck by a hit-and-run driver early Thursday morning in Manayunk.Police have identified the officer as 55-year-old Joseph Cain Jr., a 5th District Sergeant and 26-year veteran of the department.Twenty-one-year-old Colin Murphy has been arrested and is facing multiple charges, including aggravated assault while DUI, criminal mischief, DUI and related offenses.It happened early Thursday in the 4100 block of Main Street near Shurs Lane just before 1 a.m.In the upper right-hand corner of the video, Sgt. Cain can be seen standing at the driver's side window of a police cruiser during a traffic stop.Then, without warning, a 2008 Toyota Rav-4 travelling southbound hits the sergeant and vanishes from view.Sgt. Cain was thrown 15 feet, and the impact knocked him out of his shoes."There's nothing more graphic than that optic of seeing his shoes on the ground. That scared me when I saw it," said Commissioner Richard Ross.Commissioner Richard Ross visited Sgt. Cain at Einstein Medical Center Thursday morning. The 26-year veteran of the force suffered a broken collarbone, broken ribs, internal bruising and other injuries."He's OK considering. He's in pain. He took a significant strike and he is fortunate to be alive, and he said as much to me this morning in the hospital," said Ross.Police say Murphy fled the scene. A Good Samaritan spotted his banged up Rav-4 about a mile from the accident in Roxborough. Responding officers arrested him without further incident."Thankfully, as I am told, a tow truck driver actually assisted us with that. He saw the car, he probably had a scanner, and he's the one that alerted another police officer so we are thankful to him," said Ross.Sgt. Cain is expected to remain in the hospital for couple more days, but likely will make a full recovery.

The European Court of Justice' | John Thys/AFP via Getty Images Top court rules EU countries not required to give humanitarian visas The European Court of Justice deferred to national governments in decision over whether to issue visas to asylum seekers. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that "member states are not required, under EU law, to grant a humanitarian visa" to people who intend to apply for asylum once they enter the country, it announced Tuesday. The decision relates to the case of an Orthodox Christian couple from Aleppo, Syria, who applied for a Belgian visa in October from Lebanon. The Belgian Foreigners' Office refused the application, claiming the couple planned to stay in Belgium beyond the visa’s 90-day limit. When the couple appealed, the Belgian Asylum and Immigration Board referred the case to the EU’s top court. In its decision, the ECJ deferred to national governments' judgment on the issue, writing: "No measure has been adopted, to date, by the EU legislature with regard to the issuing by member states of long-term visas and residence permits to third-country nationals on humanitarian grounds." The Syrian family's application, therefore, falls "solely within the scope of national law." The court's decision contradicted ECJ Advocate General Paolo Mengozzi's opinion that member countries “must issue a visa” in cases where refusing one would place someone's life in danger or subjected them "to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment," though the opinion was not binding. Belgium's Secretary of State for Migration Theo Francken celebrated the ruling, tweeting: "Yesss! [We] won!" Francken had supported the initial decision to deny the Syrian couple's visa application. “If we allow people to come to Belgium with a visa to apply for asylum, the whole system will collapse,” he said in October last year.

The Liberal Democrat membership surge is about to take the party to a landmark 100,000 members – thanks to a staggering 12,500 joining since Theresa May announced the snap General Election last Tuesday. Reaching six figures makes the party bigger than it has been since the mid-1990s and puts it on course to reach its highest membership ever within days. The biggest the party has been since its formation is 101,768 in 1994. It means that more than 50,000 members have joined since last year’s European referendum and more than 67,500 since the 2015 General Election. Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron pledged to build the party to 100,000 members by the end of the parliament as a key pledge during his 2015 leadership campaign – but at that point everyone expected the end of the parliament to be 2020. Tim Farron commented:

Let it never be said that the National Security Agency (NSA) can't detect a threat when it sees one, no matter how clandestine. For its eagle-eyed security staff were able, on April 8 this year, to determine that when two men without security clearance tried to gain entry into its Fort Meade headquarters in a Ford Mustang, they warranted further investigation. Lo and behold, the stash of drugs and weaponry they uncovered in the pair's vehicle was alarming. That's according to a court filing that's redolent of Hunter S. Thompson fiction (published below), in which it's claimed one of the two arrested, Zoilo Gaerlan, was asked to provide his driving license after they were taken aside; turned out it was a suspended license. Then, when an officer removed Gaerlan's cap, two bags of methamphetamine fell out, the government claimed in its complaint. It continued: after being told his vehicle would be searched, Gaerlan admitted he had a shotgun in the trunk. Upon a search of the 2014 Mustang, the police claimed to have found, amongst other items: more methamphetamine, a Saiga 12-gauge shotgun, a Smith & Wesson model CTG.38 caliber revolver, a fake gun and a hand grenade. On finding the latter, NSA police officers evacuated the area and called in a bomb squad. Fortunately, the grenade was found to be inert. Whilst Gaerlan told police he owned the shotgun, the other man in the car, Benjie Montalban, said he owned the revolver-style handgun and the fake weapon, according to the filing. Montalban told police he was a methamphetamine user and that Gaerlan was his dealer, adding that both men had been smoking the narcotic from a pipe that was also in the car, read the affidavit. Four iPhones were also retrieved from the vehicle, alongside a Samsung and a One Quest Que phone, a search warrant revealed. That search warrant has not yet been executed, according to court dockets. Given the problems the government has had with opening cellphones of late - in particular, the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone - the police may not yet have found a way of analyzing the data on Gaerlan's and Montalban's devices. Gaerlan is charged on three counts: transporting a handgun in a vehicle, possession of a controlled substance and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. Montalban is not charged with the latter, but is charged on the other two counts. The NSA declined to comment, as did Montalban's lawyer. Gaerlan's representation and the Department of Justice had not responded to requests. UPDATE Zoilo Gaerlan pled guilty on November 2 and was sentenced to 54 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release.

New Delhi: Aam Aadmi Party on Tuesday condemned the government's approval of an ordinance to protect convicted MPs and MLAs from facing immediate disqualification, saying it exposes the intentions of the political class which has "stooped" to a new low to save the corrupt. "The Cabinet passed an ordinance undoing the order of Supreme Court on convicted MPs and MLAs today. The passing of this ordinance is not only a severe blow to democracy, but also exposes the intentions of the political class which has stooped to a new low to protect the corrupt," the party said in a statement. The Union Cabinet approved the Ordinance to protect convicted MPs and MLAs from facing immediate disqualification which in effect, negating a Supreme Court order. "AAP condemns the ordinance that has reversed the order of apex court which had debarred tainted politicians from contesting polls," it said, adding the people of the country were somewhat relieved when the apex court had ordered that no tainted politicians would contest elections. According to data available with Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), there are 161 (30 percent) MPs in Lok Sabha who have a tainted track record, and 78 of them have serious charges against them. In Delhi Assembly, there are around 32 (46 percent) MLAs with criminal cases, of which eight MLAs have serious cases against them. Congress and BJP had fielded 19 candidates each in the last assembly elections with criminal charges against them. "The ordinance that has been passed today by the Cabinet has only betrayed the people again. On the other hand, the silence of Opposition parties, only proves that all parties are together in this decision," the statement said. Meanwhile, the party announced the names of two candidates for Rajender Nagar and Madipur assembly constituencies. The party has fielded Vijender Garg, a former Congressman, as its candidate for Rajender Nagar constituency while Girish Soni would contest from Madipur. So far, the party as announced a total of 56 candidates for the upcoming Delhi Assembly elections. PTI Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.

Exterior of Swedish Royal Palace Gardens at Swedish Royal Palace Drottningholm Palace has been the home of the Swedish royal family since 1981. It is one of the most well-preserved royal castles built during the 1600‘s It is a very fine example of all European architecture from the period and is on the UNESCO world heritage list. It is the permanent residence of King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia, the 73-year-old daughter of a German businessman and a Brazilian woman. They were married 40 years ago and currently reside together in the southern wing of the palace. King Carl & Queen Sylvia King Carl & Queen Sylvia Wedding Portrait Queen Silvia is Sweden’s longest serving queen. And over the years has come to know the royal palace very well. Recently she said that it is haunted. She describes the ghosts as “small friends”and very friendly, but she often feels as if she is never completely alone in the palace. She also says that it’s can be very exciting and not scary at all. The royal family has recently participated in a documentary film about the palace and are known to encourage visitors to “Come and feel it for yourself, go around here when it is dark. It’s very exciting. Imagine what they could tell?” Would you spend the night at the haunted Swedish Royal Palace knowing it’s haunted? Advertisements

Maurizio Arrivabene says Ferrari is not given up on the title race, arguing his team's lack of results is largely down to bad luck. Ferrari's lead over Red Bull for second place in the constructors' championship has been cut to just nine points following a disappointing result at the British Grand Prix. The Italian team has been beaten on track by Red Bull at the last two rounds, but Arrivabene says gearbox penalties for Sebastian Vettel and a tyre failure while he was leading the race in Austria mean the championship standings are also a reflection of Ferrari's bad luck. "At this stage of the season if I say we are going to give up, it's not correct," he said. "We need to be focussed. "In terms of problems, bad luck and everything we have had already, we are at the top in terms of points. But I hope that these kind of points go down and we start to get better. "But to say we give up, not at all." Despite pressure from Red Bull, Arrivabene says he still sees Ferrari as a rival for Mercedes rather than a team struggling to hold on to second in the constructors'. "I think the fact that Red Bull has performed very well is good for Formula One, it's good for the competition, for the show. I still think that our target is Mercedes and not Red Bull."

The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms: with Observations on Their Habits by Charles Darwin London: John Murray (1881) Jelly-Fish, Star-Fish, and Sea-Urchins: Being a Research on Primitive Nervous Systems by George John Romanes London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co. (1885) Mental Evolution in Animals by George John Romanes London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co. (1883) In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel Norton, 528 pp., $19.95 (paper) What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pp., $14.00 (paper) The Foundations of Ethology by Konrad Lorenz Springer (1981) Behavior of the Lower Organisms by Herbert Spencer Jennings Columbia University Press (1906) Cephalopod Behaviour by Roger T. Hanlon and John B. Messenger Cambridge University Press, 256 pp., $79.00 (paper) An Introduction to Nervous Systems by Ralph J. Greenspan Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 172 pp.,$46.00 (paper) Charles Darwin’s last book, published in 1881, was a study of the humble earthworm. His main theme—expressed in the title, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms—was the immense power of worms, in vast numbers and over millions of years, to till the soil and change the face of the earth. But his opening chapters are devoted more simply to the “habits” of worms. Worms can distinguish between light and dark, and they generally stay underground, safe from predators, during daylight hours. They have no ears, but if they are deaf to aerial vibration, they are exceedingly sensitive to vibrations conducted through the earth, as might be generated by the footsteps of approaching animals. All of these sensations, Darwin noted, are transmitted to collections of nerve cells (he called them “the cerebral ganglia”) in the worm’s head. “When a worm is suddenly illuminated,” Darwin wrote, it “dashes like a rabbit into its burrow.” He noted that he was “at first led to look at the action as a reflex one,” but then observed that this behavior could be modified—for instance, when a worm was otherwise engaged, it showed no withdrawal with sudden exposure to light. For Darwin, the ability to modulate responses indicated “the presence of a mind of some kind.” He also wrote of the “mental qualities” of worms in relation to their plugging up their burrows, noting that “if worms are able to judge…having drawn an object close to the mouths of their burrows, how best to drag it in, they must acquire some notion of its general shape.” This moved him to argue that worms “deserve to be called intelligent, for they then act in nearly the same manner as a man under similar circumstances.” As a boy, I played with the earthworms in our garden (and later used them in research projects), but my true love was for the seashore, and especially tidal pools, for we nearly always took our summer holidays at the seaside. This early, lyrical feeling for the beauty of simple sea creatures became more scientific under the influence of a biology teacher at school and our annual visits with him to the Marine Station at Millport in southwest Scotland, where we could investigate the immense range of invertebrate animals on the seashores of Cumbrae. I was so excited by these Millport visits that I thought I would like to become a marine biologist myself. If Darwin’s book on earthworms was a favorite of mine, so too was George John Romanes’s 1885 book Jelly-Fish, Star-Fish, and Sea-Urchins: Being a Research on Primitive Nervous…

The Native Council of Nova Scotia says a new system for validating the identity of Mi'kmaq hunters in the province is discriminatory. The Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi'kmaq Chiefs and the Nova Scotia government have agreed that Mi'kmaq can only use status cards from one of the 13 bands as proof of Aboriginal hunting rights. The assembly requested the change after receiving complaints that some hunters were using questionable ID. But Roger Hunka, speaking on behalf of the native council, says the new system excludes off-reserve Mi'kmaq completely. The native council represents about 25,000 Mi'kmaq who are non-status or live off-reserve. 'Odd approach' "It's a very odd approach to making a situation out of something that was working very well, because a few individuals don't like to see other persons who are not necessarily living on a reserve exercising their Aboriginal rights," said Hunka, who was formerly the executive director of the native council, but who is now with the Maritime Aboriginal People's Council. Hunka says Premier Stephen McNeil, who is also the minister responsible for the Office of Aboriginal Affairs, should never have agreed to such a system, which violates Mi'kmaq treaty rights to hunt. The non-native moose hunt opens on Sept. 25, but the Mi'kmaq have the right to hunt at any time. (Parks Canada) Hunka says the native council issues its own IDs to members, which have been accepted by provincial officials in the past. He's not sure what to expect if members are asked for ID during this fall's hunt. Checkpoints Enforcement officers with the Department of Environment held checkpoints over two weeks in August at various entry points to Hunters Mountain in Cape Breton. The department says all Mi'kmaq hunters showed Mi'kmaq status cards. Hunka says the issue is on the agenda for the native council's annual general assembly this weekend in Liverpool.

The Three Main Rules If any of the following rules are broken more than once by a single member, it will result in consequences. Don’t be purposefully malicious in any way The purpose of this rule is simple. To provide a happy and enjoyable environment not only in the Star Citizen universe, but also in and around the community. This cannot be achieved when somebody is being rude, childish or malicious. If somebody acted in such a way in your home you would certainly kick them out, and at INGAL we will do the same. Do not seek attention by causing drama The only attention-seeking that is allowed in INGAL is when a member needs help, or a member of the Executive Committee is making and announcement. If you ever see somebody doing this, do not vent your anger publicly, bring it to the attention of a member of the DEC and they will take care of the issue. Real life comes first At INGAL, we understand the importance of the problems that may occur to our members outside of the organisation and the game. Most of our members will have jobs, school or even families. INGAL will never ask you to put your role in the organisation or Star Citizen before your real life if you ever have to take a prolonged break from battle, please let an Elite member/high ranking member know so we can approve your absence. Official Policy Concerning Multi-Org Statuses Intergalactic Industries will allow members to be a part of multiple organizations so long as they follow the protocol for doing so. If you have any questions, feel free to contact anyone in leadership via the forums. All leadership positions in INGAL (DEC’s and CEO’s) must be primary members of INGAL. Org tags must be visible at all times (signatures are not necessary but highly recommended). To display your DEC membership in affiliate Organizations it must be approved individually. It is necessary for all members to be primary members of INGAL and organisation status must not be set as affiliate or redacted. Members may join club style orgs, but the Board of Directors reserve the right to black-list any organisation, or prohibit membership completely if it would pose any risk to Intergalactic Industries. Members are strictly forbidden be associated with a pirate Organization. Anyone caught doing so will be immediately removed from INGAL Any attempt to hide or redact your organisation status on the RSI website from the INGAL Board of Directors or the general public will result in the termination (in every sense) of such members, even if the organisation they are affiliated and/or thier membership is not an infringement of the Multi-Org Policy. Voice Communication Rules and Ettiquete Members are expected to use the INGAL Discord Communication Server whilst playing Star Citizen. The sever is always online, and can be used by anyone Any Elite members and the highest-rank Division Executives can set up their own channels to be used by other members, however the intention of the server must be clearly stated. These channels will be moderated and can be deleted at any time. Groups do not have to travel together. The servers are just there for any team communication. Members must have a functional microphone when on the mumble server(s) with no exceptions Push to talk (PTT) will be used at all times while playing. Likewise, PTT is required if you are playing in a loud environment or you wish to keep some communication private. We strongly encourage the use of a headset, as it helps members keep environmental noise to acceptable level. All INGAL members are welcome to join any channel at any time. General Rules and Ettiquette. Members will treat each other with respect, will make contributions to the community; members are expected to actively participate in the community. This includes logging into the forums and mumble at least once per month Members will encourage fellowship between other members wherever possible Members will follow and listen to the requests made by the chain of command whenever and wherever possible. Members are also expected to learn and follow any additional procedures that are specific to playing Star Citizen. Membership is not guaranteed or permanent, thus it can be invalidated at any time. INGAL’s Age Policy Intergalactic Industries has a policy concerning the age at which people may join. The majority of our members are older, and the organisation has a mature atmosphere, which means anyone aged 15+ will be accepted into the organisation. Anyone below aged 12 will not be accepted under any circumstances. However, there are exceptions and any age related rules will be highlighted below. As already pointed out, INGAL will primarily accept players who are aged fifteen years or older. However, any applicant younger than fifteen years old will be reviewed on a individual basis to establish their level of maturity, and so whether they are mature enough to be accepted into INGAL. As a general rule, we allow members of a family to join the organisation. In terms of our Comms servers, the majority of the rooms are age restricted, however we do cater for those not fitting of such restrictions. We have rooms that do not have such restriction, and perceive a more child-friendly environment. Such rooms are still active and will not hinder your interaction with other members. INGAL’s Policy Concerning Employee Complaints. We feel that every member of our organisation should have the right to complain. Whilst we believe that nobody should need to complain about anyone/anything, if you feel the need to file a complaint, you can contact us on our website.

California hip-hop group Cypress Hill is known for many things, including the nasally stylings of lead vocalist B-Real and its annual and self-explanatory Smokeout Music Festival event. But a wacky new science experiment involving neural control and a Longfin Inshore squid is bringing new meaning to the group's hit 1993 crossover track "Insane in the Brain," or in this case, the membrane. Backyard Brains, a group of neuroscience-obsessed educators and innovators, posted a video of its latest mad scientist experiment, in which members stimulate a squid's ultra-sensitive pigment cells in time to the hit song. According to The Verge, the brainy team was inspired by a paper published in the Royal Society journal , in which researchers studied the neural control of tuneable skin iridescence in the ancient cephalopods. Using an iPhone and a suction electrode, the team jerry-rigged a device that sent audio, in the form of electrical signals, pulsing into the squid's dorsal fin. As the voltage changed, so did the pigment cells. Joe Hanson, the mind behind science blog It's Okay To Be Smart, explained: "When an audio signal is converted to an electric signal, basically what happens inside a microphone, that electric voltage can be applied to tissues." A squid's pigment cells, or chromatophores, have tiny muscles that contract to expose the pigment underneath. In nature, the cells of the squid adjust their pigmentation to dramatically and rapidly absorb or reflect light, according to Discovery News. The innovative music video created as a result of the experiment records the amazing kaleidoscope effect of the musically induced cell contractions, at an 8x magnification rate.

Vice President Joe Biden might have stirred the pot about his ambitions after the Obama administration packs up shop, saying that he might run in 2020 against President-elect Donald Trump. He would be approaching 78 years of age by the time the next presidential race comes around; a stinging reminder that the Democratic Party’s talent pool has dried up thanks to neglecting state and local elections. Republicans, on the other hand, have been dominating these contests. While 2020 talk is far off, Republicans can cross off Biden from the list of contenders (via Roll Call): Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Wednesday he does not intend to run for president 2020, two days after declining to rule it out. “I have no intention of running,” Biden told reporters outside the Senate floor Wednesday evening. Vice President Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) are probably the only candidates with wide name recognition who could successfully reach into the working class communities that voted heavily for Donald Trump. Again, it’s early; a lot can happen in four years. For now, Donald Trump has saved almost 1,000 jobs in Indiana via the deal with Carrier. SoftBank, a Japanese company, has promised to invest $50 billion in the U.S. and create 50,000 jobs. That’s two victories under his belt before he has even taken office. On the administrative front, Trump has picked Linda McMahon to head the Small Business Administration, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency, and Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Security. The Trump administration is coming along nicely.

DETROIT -- The Detroit Tigers have upset some Roman Catholics who are unhappy that the club's home opener is scheduled during holy hours on Good Friday. Traditional Christian belief says Jesus hung on the cross from noon to 3 p.m. on Good Friday. All 30 American and National League teams play April 10, but the Tigers' 1:05 p.m. game against the Texas Rangers is the only one during those hours. "It's sort of an insult for Catholics," said Michael Ochab, a 47-year-old Tigers fan. He said he'll miss his first opener in 20 years this year to attend services at St. Florian Catholic Church in Hamtramck. "I'm still hoping the Tigers will change the time." Tigers spokesman Ron Colangelo said Major League Baseball has a "monumental task" putting together a season's schedule. Detroit's climate makes a night game unrealistic this time of year, Colangelo told the Detroit Free Press. "Fans have come to know that our home opener is always a day game," he said. The Rev. Ed Vilkauskas of downtown Detroit's St. Mary's Catholic Church said the game at nearby Comerica Park will keep people from services. "Nobody is saying baseball isn't big, but Good Friday is really big," Vilkauskas told The Detroit News. "It's 2,000 years old."

NOFX's Fat Mike Published Jun 26, 2011 Truly a man who needs no introduction, NOFX frontman Fat Mike is a living legend in the modern era of punk. Proving that you don't need to overdose on drugs and die early or give up entirely in your old age, the 44-year-old born Michael Burkett continues to push himself hard in his music and other business endeavours without sacrificing his unabashedly punk lifestyle. While he loudly chewed his lunch into the phone, we caught up with Fat Mike about NOFX's upcoming Canadian tour, some new releases and what it's like to be a middle aged punk.Working on bullshit. Getting ready for Punk Rock Bowling.Well the only shows that are getting moved to bigger places are cities we've never played before so we weren't sure where to book them. We haven't played London and St. John's in Newfoundland. We haven't played London in over ten years and we've never played Newfoundland so you start at a small club and move it up. Other than that we're playing the normal sized venues, so I don't think it's a big deal. Canada is one of our best markets but it's no better than Germany or Japan or the States or England or Australia.No, you've just gotta fly from Toronto to Winnipeg. Once you do that you're okay.Songs. I don't know, I change our set list every time we come to a city. I change our set list every night. I have no idea. I eat dinner, I drink a lot and then I get the computer put in front of me. Our tour manager Ken says "Okay this is what you played last time we played in this city" and then I change it.No but we know about 90.There's a golf club that I'm a member of, it's called the MGA. The Mediocre Golf Association. It started in the Bay Area and it's just a bunch of punk rockers that play golf maybe once every six weeks. We have big cheques, I have a big cheque on my wall. I won one of the tournaments. It's a big cheque but it's only for $1.36. Now there's chapters all over North America. There's a Quebec chapter, and we're missing the tournament here in San Francisco so we're gonna play in the Montreal one. Me and Kent are gonna play.People don't watch. That's weird. None of us are good. If you break 80 during a tournament you get disqualified.Fuck, it's sweet! It's awesome.Well they better be respectful! It's a thousand dollar deposit. It behooves you to take care of stuff. It's renting out about twice a month every month.Black people. Mostly black people. Mostly we're getting rabbis. No, not really. Punk rockers! Actually punk kids can't afford it, it's for middle aged punkers. Punks with decent jobs. Five hundred bucks a night with a three-night minimum. But you know, it fucking sleeps ten people. It's got a fucking nine hole putting green and a fucking cave hot tub and a water slide and a beer machine and a fucking museum in there, you know? It's a cool house. You go there with nine of your friends. It's $2500 for the whole week. You go there with 10 people and that's $250 for the week, that's nothing! We have to charge a lot because you don't want people staying one night and fucking wrecking the place.Well you can get houses in Vegas for practically nothing and I live in San Francisco where it's foggy and kinda shitty all year long so I wanted a place that was an hour away where I can take my daughter and have a vacation. But I thought, you know what? I'm never here, I'm gonna make this the coolest punk house ever. I put up 2000 of my oldest flyers and turned it into a totally cool place.Nope. Vegas is the only city it would work in.Yeah. Our crowds are older. Kids still like us but I don't think people have to defend themselves for liking NOFX. I mean, half the kids that listen to us don't even understand our lyrics probably. I mean, I did graduate college. I'm not writing fucking lyrics that the Red Hot Chilli Peppers would write. I've always thought we've written music for adults. Not when I was 16. You know what's coming out later this year, which should be interesting, is we're going to release our first EP that was never released.NOFX have an eight-song seven-inch that was so bad we decided not to release it.Because it's funny now. It's bad musically. Fucking terrible.It's called theEP. I'm not sure when it will be out but it will be out. I think it's going to come in a seven-inch box set but we'll see. I found it at Fat Wreck Chords. I found the original quarter inch tape. We transferred it to DAT and they were like "holy shit, this is terrible." I go "I know, that's why we never released it because it's terrible." And everyone at Fat Wreck Chords goes "Come on, we've gotta release it." So it's going to be an eight-song seven-inch and only one of the songs has ever been heard before. You'll hear. It's pretty fucking terrible. It's cool, it was recorded in 1984, so it's kind of cool. It'll come out sometime this year.We have a hardcore record. We've been trying to put this out forever but it's actually coming soon now. We have the test pressings actually at Fat Wreck Chords. We did ten cover songs of hardcore songs.You have to figure it out because we don't list them.Nope.I'll tell you what happened. Nothing happened. We talked about it and then we never did anything about it. We discussed it. Damian asked me if I'd want to do it and I said sure, but then there's the part about actually having to do it. That didn't happen so much.Wow you're trying to get a bunch of good shit from me aren't you! I made a small comment on Twitter I think. But, you know, what is there to say? He lost his cool on stage. He punched an audience member. I don't think it's horrible because he punched a girl. I think it's horrible because he punched someone who's smaller and weaker than him. If he punched a 6'5" girl I wouldn't have a problem with it. If he punched a 6'5" fucking wrestler girl, it's still not cool, but you know. I heard earlier in the night he called her a whore and then she started throwing ice at him. So he was just being kind of a dick the whole night. He was fucking bitching that I wasn't there. He was telling the crowd "our label president isn't even here, why should I be here?" It's like, dude, why the fuck would I be there? I live in California. My band's not playing, your band is playing. I should fucking fly out from California and watch you play? Fuck you! I'm not really a label president. I'm a fucking punk rocker in a punk band and I happen to own a record label that I go to a few hours a week. It's not my fucking purpose in life.I don't talk to him. I've got nothing to say to that fucking dude. The thing is, I didn't talk to him before. I haven't talked to Ben Weasel in ten years. It's funny, that guy from the Queers said, "How come you don't back your friends?" But I haven't talked to that fucking guy in ten years! He told Fat Wreck Chords, when we had to do a deal, he said, "I'd like all business matters to be run through my manager." So it's pretty clear he doesn't want to talk to us, why should we talk to him?It's a good record! He's a weirdo. I've always been a Screeching Weasel fan. They asked us to put out a new record. Sure, why the hell not? We used to put out their old records. As far as business goes, we've always had a good relationship with them. We sold a bunch of their records, we paid them, they were always happy with us, so they wanted to come back because we were the only label that never screwed them over. It was all fine and good, but I'm definitely not friends with Ben Weasel. In fact, I went to see them in L.A. and I went there early to say hi before the show, and they wouldn't let us backstage. They wouldn't let us fucking backstage because they were praying or whatever. They needed alone time before the show. So I don't know. Oh, I'm mistaken. After the show he did say hi for a few minutes, and that was the first time I talked to him in ten years.No. Definitely no. The thing is, when we got them for the new record we also bought all their old records. So we may be putting out their old records still, but I have no interest in doing anything with them now.Yeah, I feel like that every day, that I've run out of ideas, but somehow I manage to come up with new ideas. I have been working on other shit.[laughs] Today I woke up and drove my daughter to school at 7:30. Came back, had some tea. I'm working on a project with my girlfriend. We're writing a story for something together. I worked on that for an hour, then I did an interview and had this other interview. After this interview I go to Fat Wreck Chords because we're making some t-shirts and we have a meeting about our hardcore seven-inch. But I only go to work for maybe two or three hours a week. After that I'm going to the salon to dye my hair because I have a tour starting soon. Tonight I pick up my daughter at 5:30 from piano class and we're going bowling because we need to practice for Punk Rock Bowling.Yeah. And I also produce too. I've been helping the Cobra Skulls out a bit with their record. I'm producing Old Man Markley later this year.To be done? Fuck, we have way too much fun to be done dude. I always looked at it like when Bad Religion quits we still have another three or four years because that's how much older than us they are. The thing is, you don't just quit. Jack Nicholson doesn't quit acting. You don't quit when everything's good and fun. What are you supposed to do, stay at home? We're travelling the world with our best friends having the time of our lives. It's not like it gets old, it keeps getting more fun.It's not like that. Bands start and if they're good they do okay for a while and then people get bored of them and they quit because things aren't as good as they used to be. It took us eight years before anyone liked us, and kids do not have the attention spans that we used to have, and they don't have the fucking work ethic either. They want everything to happen. Bands want to get big. "Hey we're gonna start a band to get big." And if it doesn't happen they fucking quit because they're not lifers. The eight years no one liked us we kept doing it because we're alcoholics and we just did it because it was fun. We're punk rockers. Nowadays they don't think about it like that. They think about making it, they don't think about doing it because they love it.Well yeah, but it's not going to be fun for me if we can't afford a bus. If I have to fucking drive across Canada in a van, I'm not going to do it. But, you know, in some places our crowds aren't as big as they used to be and in some places they're bigger. The ebbs and flows of that, that's fine. But I still think we put out decent records and we're still popular in most places we go in the world. Last time we played in Rio, there were only 1,800 people. The time before that there were 5,000. But it's like, who cares, it's still 1,800 people! It's still awesome. But you know, if it gets down to 100 people then there's a problem.I was gonna say something about how I made the list of the biggest meltdowns. (http://exclaim.ca/News/listing_em_off_10_insane_onstage_meltdowns) Just so your readers know, I had that planned for a month and I did do a secret performance of that a few days before that. I played in front of seven people in San Francisco. So I knew exactly what I was doing. There was no meltdown. It was pure performance. That's what I was doing.No, it's all true stories. But Vanessa, my publicist at Fat Wreck Chords, was like "can you do something at SXSW? Can you play acoustic?" I said okay. I was just thinking about it and I decided I didn't want to just play acoustic songs, I wanted to do something memorable. So I went up there and told the most horrific stories of my life. They weren't all the most horrific, some of them were kind of funny. But I told some of the most horrific and some shocking stories. But they're all true.Yeah. It was just friends of mine. I said I'm going to do this and I want to do the whole show in front of some people and see if I can do it and how it works. After that show they were just as shocked as the people at SXSW. They were like "no fucking shit! Really?" Even people that were close to me, they knew some of those stories but they didn't know all of the stories.

Visitors touch the names inscribed at the South Pool of the 9/11 Memorial at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York. | AP Photo House plans to vote to allow 9/11 lawsuits against Saudi Arabia The House will vote this week on a controversial bill allowing the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia in U.S. courts, a Republican leadership source said Wednesday. The legislation, approved unanimously by the Senate in May, is expected to clear the House on Friday, just two days before 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Story Continued Below President Barack Obama is likely to veto the measure, known as the "Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act," or JASTA. A potential veto override would not occur until an expected lame-duck session after Election Day. Opponents of the measure say foreign governments view the legislation as an effort to undermine their sovereignty immunity, and they add it could seriously damage the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia. White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters in April that "it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which the president would sign the bill as it's currently drafted." "We understand and sympathize with the motivation behind the JASTA legislation," a White House official said. "The proposed remedy, however, would enact broad changes in long-standing international law regarding sovereign immunity that, if applied globally, could have serious implications for U.S. interests. We believe there needs to be more careful consideration of the potential unintended consequences of its enactment before the House considers the legislation." Saudi Arabia has mounted a public and private lobbying effort to derail the bill, but has fallen short. The move by House Republicans comes as supporters of the bill, including families of 9/11 victims, this week ramped up pressure on leaders to advance the bill. The Saudi government, which has a large number of American lobbyists on its payroll, has mounted an aggressive campaign to defeat the legislation. Supporters, however, say they want closure from the attacks and were planning Capitol Hill office visits to make their case.

Blackberry frozen yogurt with blueberries makes for the best summer treat! Can be made vegan with coconut yogurt. When I planned out our 2 year traveling route I wanted to make sure we followed the warm weather for as long as possible. Sure, a snowy white Christmas is romantic and picturesque but let’s face it usually it’s just cold, rainy and windy instead. And as much as I always want to fantasize and imagine myself sitting on a windowsill watching the snowflakes float on by this never really happens – and I’ve never had a solid window to enjoy a winter wonderland from. So why not head south during the cold winter months? Perfect idea if you ask me. I properly celebrated the winter holidays last year by having my Christmas tree up from Nov to March and having paper snowflakes on the wall all year round. I’m ready for New Years on the beach this year! MY LATEST VIDEOS MY LATEST VIDEOS We started our trip in Japan in mid September, which was actually surprisingly hotter than expected. From there we headed to South Korea and are currently in China – continuing to head south through South East Asia over the next couple of months. The best thing about this plan, other than the warmth, is that it’s always ice cream season. What better way to treat yourself after an active day of sightseeing or hiking than a cool and refreshing fruity (or chocolatety – if that’s your thing) ice cream? And now that I’m out walking 6-8 hours every day I don’t even feel a bit guilty about the added calories. Back in DC, I used to make my own ice cream and fro-yo and that was always more delicious than the store bought version, but for now, I’ll take what I can get with the street stands – no blackberry frozen yogurt in sight here! For all you ice cream lovers back at home with your ice cream makers, I highly urge you to try this. This blackberry frozen yogurt is fruity, refreshing and less fatty than your standard store bought ice cream. Let me know what you think of this blackberry frozen yogurt in the comments below! Are you an ice cream or fro yo lover? Also if you’re looking for a vegan alternative, use coconut yogurt instead of regular! 5 from 1 vote Print Blueberry and Blackberry Frozen Yogurt Prep Time 10 mins Cook Time 15 mins Total Time 25 mins A home made fruity frozen yogurt with blackberries and blueberries. Delicious and healthier than store bought ice cream. Blackberry frozen yogurt for the win! Course: Dessert Cuisine: American Servings : 4 Calories : 225 kcal Author : Vicky Ingredients 1 cup Greek yogurt 1/2 cup blueberries 1/2 cup blackberries 1/2 cup sugar 1 teaspoon lemon zest 1 tablespoon lemon juice 3/4 cup milk 1/4 cup heavy cream 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract Instructions Add berries, lemon zest, and sugar to a small saucepan. Cook over medium-low heat 10-15 minutes. Refrigerate mixture for 1 hour. Add lemon juice to the mix and whisk. Add remaining ingredients and mix until smooth. Churn in ice cream maker for 30 minutes. Nutrition Facts Blueberry and Blackberry Frozen Yogurt Amount Per Serving Calories 225 Calories from Fat 63 % Daily Value* Total Fat 7g 11% Saturated Fat 4g 20% Cholesterol 27mg 9% Sodium 44mg 2% Potassium 185mg 5% Total Carbohydrates 34g 11% Dietary Fiber 1g 4% Sugars 31g Protein 7g 14% Vitamin A 6.6% Vitamin C 9.3% Calcium 12.2% Iron 0.9% * Percent Daily Values are based on a 2000 calorie diet.

The former Brazilian president Lula da Silva has been taken into custody for questioning as part of a probe by police into claims of bribery and money laundering. It is an aggression against the law ... unjustifiable Investigators are looking into allegations that Lula benefited from illegal kickbacks at the state oil company Petrobras which financed campaigns and expenses for his ruling Workers Party. Outside the former president’s home there were scuffles as supporters protested against the police action. Lula denies any wrongdoing and a foundation he formed has described his detention as an “aggression against the rule of law” and “unjustifiable”. Lawmakers and some business executives have also been caught up in the investigation. Police say they carried out 33 search warrants and 11 detention warrants on Friday in ‘Operation Carwash’, including in the hometown of the former president. Brazil's markets are rallying as Lula's detention by police signals Rousseff's days in office may be numbered https://t.co/tgqgvOQr0h — Quartz (@qz) March 4, 2016 Brazil's largest scandal rattles palace gates as police raid home of former President Lula https://t.co/6Pd4iUE2xkpic.twitter.com/UGVATOLRxy — Fusion (@ThisIsFusion) March 4, 2016 Police keeping rowdy crowd out of Federal Police station at CGH airport, where Lula is detained. pic.twitter.com/FnotvFRVjA — John Lyons (@LyonsBrazil) March 4, 2016 Our profile of the team of prosecutors who cracked open this corruption scandal, now at Lula's door.https://t.co/oxDlOYYpTC — Will Connors (@wconnors) March 4, 2016 Lula's detention in Brazil means that Rousseff's days may be numbered. https://t.co/rMISjdIKRI — Steve LeVine (@stevelevine) March 4, 2016

A two-mile stretch of Southern California coastline has been renamed “Whale Beach” by the operator of a whale-watching business who’s reporting an unusually high number of gray whale moms and calves stopping to rest and play in the area’s tranquil coves. Donna Kalez, general manager of Dana Wharf Whale Watching, says that during the past few weeks her captains have logged more than 40 sightings of gray whale cow-calf pairs in the shallow coves of Laguna Beach. That’s well above average, Kalez says, but what’s really unusual are the number of close encounters with swimmers. With unseasonably warm weather, more people are visiting the beach, and when whales emerge just a few yards from the sand, many can’t resist swimming out for a more personal experience–which is a rare opportunity and sounds like fun, but it’s not in the best interest of public safety. “This only happens for one month, from April into May,” Kalez said. “But usually at this time of year it’s too cold for people to go swimming with them, and there are not many people t the beach.” Kalez on Friday emailed local media outlets, announcing that gray whale cow-calf pairs “are making the beaches of Laguna Beach a playground.” She included the image atop this post, which also is posted on the company Facebook page under a caption that reads, “We are calling this Whale Beach.” The photo was taken from aboard the 95-foot Dana Pride. Captain Tom White reported to Kalez: “The whales are actually loving the people in the water. It’s amazing, they are going over to them.” But this was just one of many instances. Swimmers also have pursued the whales, while wearing snorkeling gear and GoPro cameras, and Kalez’s captains have reported some cases in which swimmers have spooked the mothers. Also, in some cases, swimmers have been kept out of the water by lifeguards. Spooking whales, or altering their behavior in any way, is a violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, punishable by fines and/or jail time. Plus, said NOAA marine mammal specialist Monica DeAngelis, it’s dangerous for swimmers to approach powerful, unpredictable cetaceans that can measure to 50 feet and weigh 40 tons. “From my perspective we wouldn’t want to encourage people getting in the water, especially with a mom and calf,” DeAngelis said. “Gray whales were nicknamed devil fish mainly because of the reactions mothers had when whalers came in and went after the babies. “Snorkelers aren’t whalers, but I’m using it as an example that they are wild and unpredictable, especially with a baby in tow. Best to admire at a distance. If they do approach, stay calm and do not pursue.” About 24,000 Pacific gray whales are migrating from Baja California nursing grounds to Arctic home waters. Most have already passed Southern California. Bringing up the rear, as usual, are the mothers and calves. Captain Frank Brennan of Dana Wharf said that the cow-calf pairs that are entering the coves appear to be in a playful mood among themselves, “but they don’t want to be bothered.” Brennan said that the whale pairs turn right toward the coast after passing the Dana Point headland, and settle mostly into coves with rocky cliffs. But most of the encounters involving swimmers have occurred at Aliso Beach, which is sandy and popular with swimmers. This is where the photo opportunities are best, for those aboard boats and on the beach–and in some cases, in the ocean. Lasting memories, for sure, but the whales have a long journey ahead of them, and as they get farther up the California coast they must deal with predatory killer whales, which like to feed on gray whale babies. Perhaps this is why cow-calf pairs are hugging the coast and resting in coves, and perhaps this is the best reason of all for swimmers to leave them alone. –Pete Thomas –Photos are courtesy of Dana Wharf Whale Watching

Otakar Leminger was a little-known Czechoslovakian chemist who worked for years in industry and lived on the banks of the Elbe River in Ústí north of Prague. When he retired in the early 1970s he published a paper entitled “A Contribution to the Chemistry of Alkoxylated Phenethylamines” in which he describes the synthesis of several novel phenethylamines which he tested on himself to determine activity. (1) allylescaline, 3,5-dimethoxy-4-allyloxy-phenethylamine (2) proscaline, 3,5-dimethoxy-4-n-propoxy-phenethylamine (3) escaline, 3,5-dimethoxy-4-ethoxy-phenethylamine (4) MAPEA, 3-methoxy-4-allyloxy-phenethylamine (5) MEPEA, 3-methoxy-4-ethoxy-phenethylamine We can classify the compounds he discussed into two groups depending on the number of ring substitutions. Allylescaline, proscaline, and escaline have three while MAPEA and MEPEA have two. Generally phenethylamines with two ring substitutions are not active, but Leminger had found some exceptions. This knowledge might have been lost to time if not for the fact that Stanislov Wistupkin brought the paper to the attention of Alexander Shulgin. [MAPEA and MEPEA are some] of the few phenethylamines with only two substituents that show even a hint of central activity. And there is an interesting story attached. I got a call out of absolutely nowhere, from a Stanislov Wistupkin, that he had discovered a number of new psychedelic drugs which he would like to share with me. They were simple phenethylamines, one with an ethoxy group at the 4-position, and one with an allyloxy group there. Both, he said, were mood elevators active between 100 and 300 milligrams. One of them was a material called MEPEA, and the other one was 3-methoxy-4-allyloxyphenethylamine, or MAPEA. When I did meet him in person, he gave me a most remarkable publication which had been authored some ten years earlier, by a person named Leminger, now dead. It was all in Czech, but quite unmistakably, right there on the third page, were the structures of MEPEA and MAPEA, and the statement that they were active at between 100 and 300 milligrams. – Alexander Shulgin MAPEA and MEPEA are only mildly active and interesting mostly in the sense that they appear to be the exception to the rule that phenethylamines with two ring substitutions are inactive. Leminger also created several mescaline variants with three ring substitutions by modifying the methoxy group at the 4 position and replacing it with an allyloxy, propoxy, or ethoxy group. The resulting compounds allylescaline, proscaline, and escaline were then tested on himself and found to be much more potent and intriguing. Physiological effects of the compounds were examined only approximately on my body. The sulphate salts of MEPEA and MAPEA in doses 0.1-0.3 g were mild mood-elevators and were also cough calming agents. Allylescaline, proscaline, and escaline were much more active. Qualitatively there wasn’t a big difference among them and quantitatively their effect decreased: allylescaline was more potent than proscaline, and proscaline more potent than escaline. As an example the allylescaline experience is described: “One hour after a 20 mg dose of allylescaline: perhaps slight vertigo, light drunkeness and pleasant excitation with locomotion need was observed. Eye perceptions were pricked up, colours seemed to be more warm and objects more plastic. Surroundings were much more interesting than usual. Colourful hallucinations were observed in the dark. Moreover, a calming effect to the breathing system and some kind of constriction of the digestive system was observed. Sleep at night was restless with megalomaniacal fantasies. Even 12 h after administration the effects were present. More serious studies of physiological activity are in contemplation.” – Otakar Leminger Leminger was the first to synthesize and consume allylescaline, the most potent of the mescaline derivatives explored. He was able to identify active phenethyamines with only two ring substitutions, a notoriously unproductive class of compounds. Did he conduct additional experimentation and screening beyond that detailed in this paper? No other publications by Leminger relating to psychedelic compounds are known. Might there be other treasures that he had discovered, and never published? Was young Wistupkin a student of his? Are there unrecognized notes of Otakar Leminger sitting in some farm house attic in Northern Czechoslovakia? I extend my heartfelt salute to an almost unknown explorer in the psychedelic drug area. – Alexander Shulgin Otakar Leminger, A Contribution to the Chemistry of Alkoxylated Phenethylamines – Part 2. Chemicky Prumysl 22, 553 (1972). Alexander Shulgin, #2 Allylescaline. Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved, Transform Press (1991). Alexander Shulgin, #123 MEPEA. Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved, Transform Press (1991). Related Posts:

With the help of a protein, researchers now have a more precise way to see brain activity — right down to what's going on in a single cell, in living brains. A team of researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland has found a protein that binds to calcium particles in the brain and changes color from green to red as the brain cells become active. The protein is called CaMPARI, for "calcium modulated photoactivatable ratiometric integrator.) Calcium ions carry electric charges in the nervous system, so their presence shows whether a given neuron is firing. Researchers have been trying to find ways to track exactly which neurons are active in a living brain, but the search has been difficult. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is one way to show brain activity — it is based on the idea that blood flow in the brain corresponds with activity. But the resolution of the images made by fMRI is crude, with each illuminated pixel representing thousands of cells. In addition, blood flow is not always perfectly matched to brain activity; it takes some time for blood vessels to react to a change in brain activity, so the images do not show neural activity in real time. Another method, which is aimed at letting researchers see the activity of individual cells, involves genes called immediate early genes (IEGs) that code for proteins that are only present when neurons are active. Researchers have found that they can teach an animal a task, and then look inside the animal's brain to see which of these proteins are present. However, it takes time for the cells to make the proteins, so the researchers still aren't able to see exactly when individual cells are active, said Eric Schreiter, a senior scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute who led the new research. [6 Foods That Are Good For Your Brain] A third method involves using molecules that bind to calcium that light up when neurons are active, but the problem there is that you have to have a microscope trained on the part of the brain you want. The animal also has to be restrained so its behavior is less natural. In contrast, the CaMPARI protein in the new research binds to calcium and reacts immediately to neural activity, on the scale of milliseconds. Researchers can shine a violet light on the animal to get the protein to glow, so it's possible to observe living animals' brains in action. Further, scientists could use the CaMPARI protein to see exactly which neurons are active in an animal 5 seconds into a given activity, and then at 10 seconds, and so on. The researchers conducted experiments using the CaMPARI protein in zebrafish, fruit flies and mice, according to the report. To get the CaMPARI protein into the animals' brain cells, the scientists used an engineered virus that produced the protein once it had "infected" the cells. (The virus did not make the animals sick.) In one experiment, the team put zebrafish in water of differing temperatures and turbulence. In another, they exposed fruit flies to different smells, and in another, the mice were shown a movie. In each case, the research team lit up the animals' brains with violet light at certain times. The CaMPARI glowed either green or red, depending on how active the neurons were. For the flies and zebrafish, the researchers only needed to bathe the animals in light, as their brain cases are thin and relatively transparent. To see the activity of the mice brains, the researchers had to cut a window into the skull of each animal. Schreiter said other researchers had done work on proteins that bind to specific elements in neural cells, and from there, it was a short logical leap to find a protein that binds to calcium. The researchers noted that this protein can't be used to study the human brain, because it requires a virus to be delivered and there isn't any accepted way to do that in humans yet. But still, the method is a powerful tool, said Jerry Chen, a fellow at the Brain Research Institute at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, who was not involved in the study. The new report expands the repertoire of methods for brain scientists, he said. "This allows us to now identify neurons whose activity relates to a single experience, and then go back and study those individual neurons more closely to understand how memory or [ideas] are encoded," Chensaid.

On the heels of its acquisition by Axiomatic, Team Liquid has signed its first non-endemic sponsor, Monster Energy. The energy drink maker is working with the team and its players just as it does with extreme athletes around the world. Team Liquid’s director of operations, Mike Milanov, told [a]listdaily that the energy drink category is very important to Team Liquid because these companies are sponsoring events and teams around the world. “We wanted to find a partner that worked well with our writing staff and video content creators,” Milanov said. “Monster cares about winning and supporting our players directly, and giving them tools to win. What they do with extreme games and what they do with sponsoring the most prestigious athletes worldwide is impressive. That brand is on your wish list if you’re a pro sports organization.” Team Liquid, which is owned by Steve Arhancet and Victor Goossens, began conversations with Matt Simpson, the director of eSports and gaming at Monster back in March at the energy drink’s LA headquarters. “What’s cool about Monster is that when they came into eSports they sponsored Alliance, Envyus, Fnatic and Evil Geniuses and they’ve never let go of those teams or partnerships,” Milanov said. “Knowing that history was attractive to us. We liked how they were running their eSports division.” Team Liquid and Monster had multiple meetings around the world at eSports events in London, Malmo and Germany. Monster is also a major sponsor of DreamHack. Milanov said these meetings allowed the brand to learn about Team Liquid’s team and infrastructure. In addition to providing players with product, Monster has also spent some one-on-one time with players to promote across social media or provide video resources when a new player comes onto the roster. “Monster is close partners with Razer, which is another company we’ve been with for a long time—seven years next year,” said Milanov. “They also do work with HTC, which is one of our partners. Monster integrates well with our existing partners and this deal also opens up cross-promotional opportunities.” Milanov said that since Monster attends every single eSports event, they’re always around to help out the team, even when they lose like at the recent IEM Oakland event. “Despite the team not progressing to the arena stage, Matt Simpson still wants to take the team out to dinner and forge that relationship,” Milanov said. “Any time we have a boot camp in Holland or LA or NY or Korea, he’ll always ask how we’re preparing for the event or check to see if there are video opportunities and stories they need to tell. Monster has contractors all over the world—they send professional photographers and do a lot of written articles and cool recap and highlight videos.” Additionally, the energy drink maker has Team Liquid team profiles and social media integration on MonsterEnergy.com. Milanov said this is the team’s first non-endemic partnership, but certainly not the last. Axiomatic has been working closely with Team Liquid to expand the brand. “They care about the brand deeply at Axiomatic,” explained Milanov. “One of the ways [of expanding the brand] is attracting non-endemic business. There’s a wishlist of things we’d love to get from the partnership. They have great relationships from Mandalay Entertainment and the Golden State Warriors, for example. Our goal is to do some of the first non-endemic partnerships with a Nike or adidas or do something with airlines or credit cards like the traditional MLB, NBA or NFL deals. We’re looking at those and we’ve been working with our investors to map out what our new level of strategic partnerships look like.” Team Liquid has no plans to alienate its current partners. Milanov said the team is in this for the long haul, having worked with Alienware for six years and HyperX and HTC for three years. “We’re never going to drop those companies because they’ve brought us to where we are today,” Milanov said. “We’re looking to add new non-endemics.” Learn everything you need to know to invest in today’s fastest-growing media channel—Competitive Gaming and eSports on 2.16.17 in Los Angeles. Go to alistsummit.com for more info.

Attorney-General George Brandis fights order to reconsider giving Mark Dreyfus access to diary Updated Federal Attorney-General George Brandis is appealing against a tribunal decision forcing him to reconsider handing over his electronic diary to his Opposition counterpart. The ABC understands lawyers for Senator Brandis contacted shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus' office on Tuesday afternoon, informing them of their intent to take the matter to the Federal Court. Key points Brandis to appeal diary handover request in Federal Court Dreyfus requested diaries to see who Brandis was meeting in lead-up to key policy decisions Dreyfus says fight against diary release waste of public money In December, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal found Senator Brandis's office had been wrong in rejecting a freedom of information (FOI) request from Mr Dreyfus for a print-out of the Attorney-General's weekly electronic diary for dates between September 2013 and early 2014. Mr Dreyfus wished to examine who Senator Brandis was meeting in the lead-up to key policy decisions in his portfolio. Senator Brandis's chief of staff, who was in charge of considering the original FOI application, rejected the request on the basis it would substantially interfere with the Attorney-General's ministerial function. It was argued Senator Brandis would have to sit down with his staff and personally inspect each diary entry before giving it approval to be released. Justice Jayne Jagot found no practical reason for refusing the FOI request. She said she was not satisfied by arguments that releasing the diary would result in security concerns, as it could indicate "regular movements or arrangements" the Attorney-General keeps. Her ruling did not mean the diary would have to be handed over immediately, rather Senator Brandis's office would need to reconsider the application. Australians are entitled to see what cabinet ministers are doing to fill their days. Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus The matter was likely to be drawn out further, with an appeal of the tribunal decision to the Federal Court in coming months. A spokeswoman for Senator Brandis told the ABC the Attorney-General had instructed the appeal be lodged. "The AAT has made findings which have wide-ranging implications for the FOI system," she said. "Accordingly, it is in the public interest that there be judicial clarification of how the FOI system operates. "As the matter is now before the Court, it would not be appropriate to comment further." Mr Dreyfus said the fight against releasing the diary was "an extraordinary waste of public money". He told the ABC that Senator Brandis was trying to set an "appalling precedent" by blocking access to the diary. "His colleague Julie Bishop, the Foreign Minister, has had no difficulty in releasing a month of her diary — immediately, on request," Mr Dreyfus said. "This is a basic proposition about accountability and transparency in Government. "Australians are entitled to see what cabinet ministers are doing to fill their days. "I'm wanting to know, on behalf of Australians, what it is that this Attorney-General does." Topics: federal-government, government-and-politics, australia First posted

Bill O’Reilly may not approve of Jennifer Aniston’s “destructive” attitude towards parenting or Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber’s irresponsible behavior, but he knows they’re good for ratings and WOULD have them on his show! No one can accuse Bill O’Reilly of looking a gift horse in the mouth. Although he’s bashed Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian AND Justin Bieber recently, the O’Reilly Factor host tells us he’s more than happy to have said public offenders on his talk show! “We would gladly welcome them all on the show,” a Fox spokesperson tells HollywoodLife.com exclusively when we asked if he’d have the three celebrities as guests. We have to say, we’re a little shocked! After all, this is the same guy who called Jen, 41, “destructive to society” and said she was “diminishing the role of the dad” after she said that single ladies no longer need a man to get pregnant and can use a sperm donor instead – which is the premise behind her new movie, The Switch. Of Kim and Justin’s fun and frolicking Elle magazine photo shoot, Bill admonished, ” If a 16-year-old girl was pictured with a 29-year-old man in any of that, he’d be in big trouble.” Both Kim and Jennifer have vaguely spoken out about the host’s comments, Kim saying on Lopez Tonight August 24 that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion”; Jen called him the anti “Prince Charming” in a statement. Laura Schreffler & Russ Weakland

By Deanna Spingola On February 17, 1950, James Paul Warburg confidently declared to the United States Senate: “We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent.” […] A world government is a world without borders, national sovereignty, constitutions, privacy, autonomy, individual liberties, religious freedoms, private property, the right to bear arms, the rights of marriage and family and a dramatic population reduction (two thirds). A world government establishes a slave/master environment wherein the state controls everything. Unfortunately, in the United States, the Establishment’s goal of a One World Order is reaching fruition through complacent consent and subversive conquest. America, a Constitutional Republic, is plunging into the satanical One World Order facilitated by the calculated placement of unscrupulous individuals deeply dedicated to the goals of the secret societies they belong to. America, formerly the home of the brave and the free, is currently the home of the people who merely think they are free. None are more enslaved and manipulated than those who mistakenly view themselves as free, therefore rendering them exceptionally vulnerable. […] “The philosophy which has dominated the Western world since the mid 19th century can be reduced to one tenet—ultimate peace comes only through conflict… It proposes that a clash between ideologies (thesis and antithesis) is a normal historical phenomenon which always results in compromise (synthesis) that advances civilization to a higher level of order. “Conflict, in other words, is good, and peace is not necessarily desirable (or profitable).” […] Several current crises receiving media attention definitely demand serious scrutiny. Trust me; the government already has the perfect solution for each problem. Crisis #1: Deliberate destabilization is occurring: well financed demonstrations donning foreign flags, government fines of small business, chaos, high crime rates, eradicated contagious diseases returning, bankrupt hospitals, high welfare burdens, lost American wages, and overcrowded schools are emotionally eviscerating Americans. Minutemen marches and justified activities are ineffective against the floodgate of the Mexican masses. Public demand is high as we witness the seemingly impotent government (thesis) apathetic to the voter’s wishes while their usually supportive squad of talk radio show shills and the Fox News faction posture as a very effective opposition (antithesis) purportedly embracing the average citizen’s viewpoint against the government. Solution or synthesis: The completely orchestrated invasion by invitation is essentially the well planned stealthy strategic function of combining the countries of Canada, the United States and Mexico according to the treacherous treaty signed on March 23, 2005, by the top political leaders of the United States, Mexico and Canada: Bush, Fox and Martin. […] And like spectators at a tennis match, the populace is so totally distracted by the contrived contentious confrontations that we do not perceive the motives of the entire conflict charade. Government creates a crisis for which the public demands a solution. That solution instigates the changes that the government initially wanted but which the people would have been unwilling to accept. It is Order out of Chaos! Worldwide chaos will lead to worldwide solutions which will establish the One World Order. For security, “voters” (people who actually think they have a voice) will settle for the compromise legislation that we were unwilling to accept originally. To prove our legality, we will be amenable to an implanted ID chip. We won’t complain too loudly about the incarceration of illegals in those FEMA Concentration Camps. This will make it easier for the government to imprison dissenters, whistle-blowers and patriots. What they can do to one person, they can do to multitudes. Crisis #2: Members of the government-friendly mass media are apparently attempting to provoke public alarm by castigating watchdog journalists who allegedly leak information which might affect our “national security.” […] Gagging the press is censorship – typical only in a tyrannical government. Freedom of speech is always lost gradually – unfortunately with the consent of a propagandized frightened populace willing to give up their freedoms for a measure of security. “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” – Harry S. Truman Solution or synthesis: Full ramifications of the legislation already in place will unfold, which the unwitting populace will readily accept, with the next contrived crisis or pandemic – the 2007 Intelligence Authorization Act spells total control from just about every major bureaucratic agency. […] The “war of terror” is significantly defined as global, the ominous foreshadowing of “perpetual war for perpetual peace”. Anti-war advocates will be classified as unpatriotic or worse – probably depicted as traitors via a daily “2-minute hate session.” “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Obviously, there are other crises, orchestrated oppositions, for which Americans are and will demand solutions – premeditated plans that bring us closer to the One World Order. People are demanding a solution to the gas prices which affect every aspect of American life. It isn’t just about gas availability for summer vacations. Petitions against profanity from friends and family are wending their way through the Internet asking for a government solution. Hey people, police yourself and your children – turn the television off – read a book! Don’t hand the job of parenting to Big Brother! If they can eliminate profanity, they can eliminate anything – religion, etc. Criminal activity, hyped in the news and exacerbated by numerous CSI style shows, creates the perception of pervasive crime which promotes a general feeling of fear and vulnerability. Some Chicago churches are compensating individuals for turning in their guns. Is this a faith-based initiative – churches collecting guns appears very benign compared to confiscation by uniformed government agents. Gun control is a major step! Only criminals and the government (excuse the redundancy) will have guns – now that is the scariest scenario. “Our main agenda is to have all guns banned of course. We must use whatever means possible. It doesn’t matter if you have to distort facts or even lie. Our task of creating a socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist us have been totally disarmed.” –Sarah Brady, 1994 […] President Kennedy said of Freemasonry: “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.” President John F. Kennedy— address to newspaper publishers, April 27, 1961 Most of these groups or societies embrace One World Order goals; they include but are not limited to: The Illuminati, Club of Rome, the Bilderbergs, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), also known as The Chatham House Study Group founded 1919 in Great Britain and its sinister sister the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) founded 1921 in America. […] Full Article: http://www.newswithviews.com/Spingola/deanna41.htm ALSO READ: Multiculturalism – A Dividing Force 45 Declared Communist Goals N.W.O. For The U.S. ***** Young Children Targeted By Police State Fingerprinting U.K. Children ***** A Nation Of Cowards Feminist Dupes Feminism Has Communist/Marxist Roots Radical Feminists Are Useful Idiots 42.358431 -71.059773 Advertisements

Michael Epps says he is considering his options for the 2018 season after sampling TCR-spec machinery for the first time, but would prefer to remain on the BTCC grid for a third straight year. Epps finished 18th in the BTCC standings this year with Team HARD, taking a best finish of fifth in the final race of the year at the wheel of a Volkswagen CC. The 25-year-old has since tested Brisky Racing’s Volkswagen Golf TCR car at Snetterton, but insisted that his preferred option would be a third year in the BTCC – despite some reservations about regulations changes that have been introduced by the series for 2018. “My heart lies with the BTCC,” he said. “It’s been a great couple years of racing despite struggling for results at points. It’s the most popular series in the UK, it has practically unbeatable exposure and coverage. It’s a dream come true to be part of and is full of awesome fans, drama and excitement. “I worry that some of the new rules introduced within the BTCC may exaggerate some problems. The field is very close and there is always going to be inevitable contact. It’s obviously a hard job being a steward in this series and raising the penalty stakes is going to make decisions more difficult and more likely to be protested against. “I respect their ideas and it could settle things down, we will see, but it also raises the risk of having your championship badly affected in the stewards room and that is always a bit of a put off for drivers and teams. Political stories of bans and result changes don’t do much good for anyone. “I want to continue in BTCC, but whatever I do I need to get up the front end. The last two years have been challenging, I’ve had some great results at points but I need a stronger package around me in 2018 and that’s what I’m currently working towards.” Should Epps be unable to secure a deal to continue in the BTCC, he admitted that the new TCR UK series could be an option if the commercial package was right for his sponsors. “Testing the car at Snetterton, it was just as good overall to drive for me as a BTCC car; it’s a different kind of the same thing really,” he said. “Maybe it’s a bit easier to drive and car setup is simpler. It felt sophisticated, modern, very well put together, and to me seems just as quick on track. “The Golf sounded great to me. There’s a certain buzz about driving a BTCC car that maybe it lacks, but the difference in budget would soon sort my view on that. Commercial coverage is what will matter to some drivers and teams and that takes time.”

BALTIMORE (RNS) Southern Baptists prayed Wednesday (June 11) that the Supreme Court would rule in favor of the Green family, the evangelical owners of the Hobby Lobby craft chain that challenged the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. “God, we ask for a favorable, favorable ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States for the cause of religious liberty,” prayed the Rev. Ronnie Floyd, incoming president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Historians said the prayer from the podium during the SBC’s annual meeting about a pending court decision was noteworthy, though Southern Baptists have preached and issued statements for years on current events. “I think it’s unusual for it to happen at a convention event,” said Bill Sumners, director of the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives. Randall Balmer, chair of the religion department at Dartmouth College, said it was striking that the convention would be “blatant about a judicial matter.” “I suppose to some degree they feel as though they’re reeling from the various same-sex marriage rulings and trying to regain their momentum” in court decisions, he said. Steve and Jackie Green, who attend a Southern Baptist church in Oklahoma, were honored during the Baptists’ annual meeting and given a standing ovation. They have been heralded by conservative Christians for challenging the mandate that they believe would require them to cover abortion-inducing drugs as part of their employee insurance plans. “This is an award for demonstrating a steadfast commitment to religious liberty by your unwillingness to separate your faith from the daily operation of your business,” said Russell Moore, president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, before handing the award to the Greens. The ERLC also honored Saeed Abedini, an Iranian-American pastor who has been imprisoned under brutal conditions in Tehran for his house church work. His award was accepted by his wife, Naghmeh Abedini, who has worked for his release. Floyd prayed that Abedini would be freed. “We pray for his release,” Floyd said in his petition. “We ask you again — in the name of Jesus, let him go!” Moore was questioned by a couple of delegates who were concerned about his joining other evangelicals in supporting comprehensive immigration reform. The ERLC president responded that he does not support “blanket amnesty” but supports a just alternative to the current situation that has divided families and prompted fears of deportation. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks “When we’re talking about immigration reform, we’re talking about justice, about rule of law and we’re talking about compassion for those who are in a very vulnerable situation in our country right now,” Moore said. As the Southern Baptist meeting concluded Wednesday, representatives of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests passed out fliers outside urging the denomination to take stronger steps to safeguard children from abuse and prevent cover-ups of clergy sexual offenders. Roger “Sing” Oldham, spokesman for the SBC’s Executive Committee, said Southern Baptists are regularly reminded that they are responsible for reporting child abuse accusations to local authorities. “The Southern Baptist Convention remains clear and unambiguous in its condemnation of sex abuse of any kind and views molestation of innocent children as particularly heinous,” he said. KRE/MG END BANKS

Cara Maria, Camila, and Tori. Cara and Camila are on a completely different Challenge career stage than Tori. They have been on the show for almost decade while Tori is barely debuting. It’s a bit fair to say that Tori and Camila each had high expectations to begin their careers. Cara Maria’s debut show was the Challenge. As part of the second Fresh Meat season, Cara Maria dazzled the other newbies by beating all the other females in the Fresh Meat combine, and more impressively showed her strength by being one of only two females to even do a pull up. Laurel did 2, Cara did 6. She was the first pick of the Fresh Meat 2 draft, her partner being the great Darrell Taylor. How did she do? Fell flat on her face. Her and Darrell lost the first elimination of the season. A bit embarrassing to be part of Darrell’s first ever Challenge loss on the premiere episode. Before coming on the Challenge, Tori went on Are You The One Second Chances. It was an Amazing Race type show that was a bit similar to the early days of the Challenge. The show was built around two AYTO stars: Tori and Devin. These two got all the way to the final and finished first (Devin) and second (Tori) respectively with their partners. Devin won the show, but what was clear from the show was that Tori was going to be a powerhouse on the Challenge. She was consistently outperforming males in the physical aspect of the competition, on top of her already charismatic personality. It has translated well as she made the final on her first Challenge. Tori could become the first AYTO winner. Camila’s story is completely different. Almost like a foreign pitching prospect from the Dominican, Camila was dropped into the show after the weird spin-off Spring Break Challenge. She stayed for another ten seasons. She proved to be a good competitor from the start, winning multiple eliminations and getting a Challenge win on her third season. Since then, she has gotten in the best physical shape of her life while maintaining her career as a racist and scam artist. Cara had to work hard to get here, she made her life the Challenge and made exponential jumps to the point where she is now, a top ten all time female competitor. Tori has come in like a fireball, ready to become the next elite or maybe something even more. Camila is the ultimate hate-watch, people are waiting to watch her lose, which makes the possibility of her winning feel terrible. What winning would mean for Cara: She has compiled some of the most impressive Challenge stats of all time. She’s known for her twelve elimination wins (most of any female ever), but this is going to be her record tying fifth final, the most of any female challenger (Paula and Sarah also made 5). Cara has finished second in three finals and won the other. At this point we know that Cara is winning or finishing in second, third is not option. A win would consolidate her spot as a top five all time female competitor, and a loss would put her on the outside looking in. The good news for Cara Maria, is that five people have run a fifth final before (Bananas, Kenny, CT, Sarah, Paula), and they’ve all won that final. History is in her favor. What winning would mean for Camila: This is Camila’s fourth final and second in a row. She lost last season to Ashley. Her loss was mostly due to Cory, but her treatment of male partners did not assist her in any form. A win would make her a two time winner who has nine elimination wins and the title of the only person to ever beat Laurel. It must be noted that she is a terrible person. What winning would mean for Tori: MTV put an article out talking about how Tori is having maybe the best rookie season all time. It’s not true, her season is arguably in the top ten, though its not the best. However, a win would definitely change the narrative. In an individual game where you had to compete and are forced to play a social/political game, Tori being able to escape the Redemption House and win against two veterans in a final would give her total Challenge validation. That would truly be the best rookie season ever.

A new study examining the rising use of road salt over the last 50 years points out how it has impacted water quality and wildlife in streams. Road salt running off pavement and into waterways has long been recognized as a downside of attempting to make wintertime driving safer. A new study by the U.S. Geological Survey documents how big that downside has become. Agency officials looked back at road salt records from 30 sites, including Milwaukee, suburban Chicago and warmer locations, going back as far as 1960 and found a substantial increase in road salt usage. Middleton-based hydrologist Steve Corsi said in some regions studied, there was more snow and ice, but he also said in some cases, people are just applying more salt to the same area. "You know in one driveway for instance, maybe someone applied more salt than they did back in the '90s," he said. "Nowadays ... because they want it to be a cleaner surface." Much of the salt is finding its way into streams and rivers. The USGS report shows that 29 percent of the sites studied exceeded U.S. Environmental Protection Agency water toxicity standards for chloride by an average of more than 100 days per year from 2006 to 2011. Corsi said some of the highest salt concentrations happen when stream flows are low and road crews dump a lot of salt on relatively little snow and ice. "So, the concentration is higher than when a lot of rainfall comes in to dilute the salt," he said. Corsi said high salt concentrations are usually bad news for creatures in the water. 'That indicates there's a strong possibility of some degree of toxicity to aquatic organisms in the stream, and that can mean insects or fish or a variety of organisms," he said. Corsi also said that in nearly half the streams studied, chloride concentrations were also up during the summer. He added that's partly because some salt first went into nearby groundwater and then eventually flowed to the banks of the streams. Corsi said his study emphasizes the need to consider de-icing efforts that minimize use of road salt and yet keep drivers safe. The study is published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Essence Festival will welcome Diana Ross, John Legend, Mary J. Blige, Solange, Erykah Badu and many more will it returns to the Mercedes-Benz Superdome from June 30 to July 2. 2017 will mark the first time that Ross has performed at Essence. The legendary singer and actress is best known for her time fronting beloved Motown girl group The Supremes, as well as a series solo hits in the ’70 and ’80s and roles in films like Lady Sings The Blues and The Wiz. She last took the stage in New Orleans in 2013, when she sold out the Saenger Theatre with a costume and hits-filled show. Other artists on the Essence bill include Chaka Khan, India Arie, Doug E Fresh, Lalah Hathaway, Shaggy, Moses, Sir the Baptist, Lizzo and Jazmine Sullivan, plus local heros like Master P and Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue. Interestingly, Charlie Wilson’s name is nowhere to be found on the initial Essence lineup. The R&B singer has performed at the event every since 2009, so his absence would mark notable change for the annual gathering. That could change in the near future, as festival organizers plan to announce more acts in the coming weeks. The complete initial lineup can for Essence Festival 2017 can be found here. Tickets will go on sale Friday, December 16.

The Legislature is on course to approve a spending plan that inflicts another round of cuts on Oregon schools, and hardly anyone is complaining about it. Maybe Oregon schools have been sliding toward mediocrity or worse for so long that no one expects anything different. Maybe people assumed that with Democrats in charge in Salem, the teachers� union would have the muscle to ensure favorable treatment for schools in the budget process. Maybe everyone thought that even if the legislative session began with proposals for low levels of school funding, more money would be allocated in the end. But it�s time to shake off defeatism, complacency and false hopes. The 2015 Legislature must not fund schools at a level that brings a shorter school year, more crowded classrooms and leaner programs � but that�s what will happen unless Oregonians demand a change of course. Before he resigned, Gov. John Kitzhaber proposed $6.9 billion in state funding for schools during the 2015-17 period, up less than 4 percent from the current biennium. The governor sought larger increase for early education programs intended to help children arrive at kindergarten ready to learn. Gov. Kate Brown told The Register-Guard�s editorial board last week that she supports that order of priorities. Oregon needs stronger early education programs � but not at the expense of the public school system. The co-chairmen of the Legislature�s Joint Ways and Means Committee responded with a proposed school spending figure of $7.235 billion, which sounds like a big step up from the current level and the amount proposed by Kitzhaber. But comparisons between this biennium and the next one must account for a new factor: In 2015-17, all school districts will be required to offer full-day kindergarten, which is the equivalent of adding 28,000 new students to the state�s public school system. As superintendents around the state began applying the $7.235 billion figure to their districts, nearly all came to the same conclusion: They would be receiving less money per student from the state than they do now. In Lane County, the per-student reductions range from $24 in the McKenzie School District to $229 in the Lowell School District. In the Bethel, Eugene and Springfield districts the reductions per student would be $136, $95 and $99, respectively. The aggregate impact on all 16 Lane County districts would be $5.6 million. These reductions would reverse the modest progress of recent years. In 2003-05, public schools accounted for 44.8 percent of state spending. By 2009-11, when the Great Recession hit with full force, schools received 38.8 percent of the state budget. The figure climbed to 39.7 percent in the current biennium, but a $7.235 billion allocation would push it back down to 39.1 percent in 2015-17. Since 2003-05, state spending on schools has grown 35.3 percent, while total state spending has climbed 52.7 percent. Oregonians have seen the results: The country�s second-lowest high school graduation rate, and the nation�s second-highest student-teacher ratio. A school calendar that is among the nation�s shortest, providing the cumulative equivalent of a full school year less time in the classroom than the national average. Per-student spending that is 88 percent of the national average, and Oregon ranks 46th in per-student spending as a percentage of the state�s wealth. A $7.235 billion allocation would make those numbers worse. Counselors, nurses, physical education teachers and courses in art and music are already scarce or non-existent in Oregon schools. Another round of cuts would result in layoffs, larger class sizes, furlough days or all three in most school districts. The Oakridge School District recently restored elementary school music and high school wood shop, but might have to cut them again. The Junction City School District would have to look at reductions in after-school programs, middle-school counseling and career and technical education. Legislators will say they�re doing the best they can � the cost of all state services is on the rise, demand for many services is up, and gains in revenue flowing from a recovering economy are likely to be constrained by the need to return $350 million to taxpayers next year as a result of Oregon�s kicker law. Those are all realities that must be faced. But Oregon must also face the reality that nearly all other states � rich and poor, Republican and Democratic, northern and southern � seem to have found ways to support their public school systems at higher levels. The mismatch between Oregon�s rhetoric, with its vow to ensure that all students graduate from high school by 2025, and its performance is becoming an embarrassment. Oregonians should not shrug their shoulders at the prospect of another two years of drift and decline in their public school system. It�s not enough to understand that the state�s prosperity and quality of life depend upon strong schools. It�s necessary to insist that legislators act on that understanding, and address this threat to Oregon�s future.

The first thing I did when I opened my tear-puffed eyes on November 9th was to delete all the dating apps off my phone. I wouldn't need those anymore in this new world. I'd never be able to focus on anything again that wasn't the constant swirl of horror and despair I now felt. How could I think about dating or even just getting laid when we were absolutely all going to die? Here, months deep into the Trump administration, I haven't died yet, but I've still never been less horny. I'm single, so it's easy enough to just completely forget I ever had a sex drive at all, until I look at a calendar and realize it's been three months since I've even settled down for an evening with PornHub. Being constantly on alert and overwhelmed by the world around me has made me dead below the waist—and I'm not alone. Around the country, the Trump administration has been terrible for our sex drives. "My sex drive has tanked," said Vivica*, 32, who is in a partnered relationship but has only had sex three times since the election. She feels like her sex drive has had the brakes put on it by "a fear of lack of control over my body, my identity, and pregnancy. As a queer person, my identity is under threat from this administration. As a person with a uterus, I fear an unwanted pregnancy. As a femme-identifying person who lives in a conservative state, I fear lack of control over my body." Ellen, 34, has felt that fear in the form of sexual assault. Her libido dropped after the notorious "grab 'em by the pussy" comments from Trump, and the thought of having a man accused multiple times of sexual assault in the Oval Office keeps her from being able to enjoy sex like she used to. "I noticed that during sex, I would accidentally think about it—it would be like 'don't think of an elephant,' you know, I'd be like 'don't think about how Trump is a [alleged] rapist' and then I would," Ellen said. "I'd think about him and all the men like him who would see my body as something to take, something they deserve, even if it's disgusting to them." "I'd think about him and all the men like him who would see my body as something to take, something they deserve, even if it's disgusting to them." Ellen has also felt more aware of how her personal views could make her a target for the kind of men she's afraid of. "I know I'm too old and fat for Trump and his ilk, but sexual assault is so often about power and shame, and I'm the kind of mouthy feminist who men want to teach a lesson. That scares me." Ellen and her husband's sexual relationship has suffered because of the constant drive of the news cycle. While both of them were politically aware before the election, the daily or even hourly refresh of new bad news and new groups whose rights are being threatened keeps them glued to Twitter—"the fresh horrors device" as Ellen and her husband call it. After a day keeping up with reality, they find themselves too tired or stressed out for sex. "Overall I think there's a kind of miasma of anxiety floating around, where even when we don't realize it, we're keyed up and distracted," Ellen said. "It's hard to truly exist in one place, which is what good romantic sex is all about, for me. I like to be able to forget myself and my anxieties and my self-consciousness and enjoy the moment." Karin, 26, works at a nursery and has also felt the weight of the news on her sex drive. "I feel like my whole day gets sucked away spending all my emotional energy on worrying about the infants and families in my care, what will happen if their services get cut, will we all get killed in a nuclear war anyway?" she said. She, like Ellen, also suffers from information overload. "[I'm] constantly refreshing news apps and Twitter and being sickened and terrified by something new and awful every half hour. Then I get home to my husband. It's fair to say that I'm not even remotely in the mood at that point, and neither is he." While Karin and her husband are still having sex, it no longer has the spark it once did. "When we do have sex we usually plan it out in advance, like 'Hey, wanna have sex tomorrow since you don't have to work early the next morning?'" she said. "We tend to follow through with those plans, but it isn't exactly a passionate thing like it used to be. Once we get going it's fine, but things used to happen a lot more organically before the election." Trump-based sexual anxiety has not just struck the partnered of the world, but single people as well. Fatimah, 35, is single, has never had sex and has no interest in having it, but enjoys consuming sexual materials—romance novels, erotic fiction, and porn—and regularly masturbates. But the new regime has cratered her interests in these previously fun solo pursuits. "I went from a pretty okay porn habit to 'Sex? I don't know her.'" she said. "It feels like just one more thing this administration and Agent Orange has taken away from me along with my peace of mind." "I went from a pretty okay porn habit to 'Sex? I don't know her.'" But not everyone has been tormented by Trump enough to even lose interest in porn. For some, like Maggie, 36, the world's stresses have driven her to read and write more pornographic fiction as a form of release. "It just seemed... essential and necessary to build time for joy, to just pick the most self-indulgent possible thing and roll around in it," she said. "If it was harmless and made me happy, why not? What possible reason could I have for denying myself a respite from anxiety and dread?" Celebrating sex in fictional worlds had its benefit in the real world for Maggie. "One side-effect of massively upping my overall porn interaction is that I spend more time thinking about sex," she said. "And for me personally, that means I also spend more time in a headspace where I'm interested in having sex." Maggie still describes herself as anxious and afraid of today's political climate, but her choice of escapism has lead her to have more and less inhibited sex. What's there to lose in being a little kinky when the world is on fire? These different responses to global anxiety are entirely normal, according to NYC-based therapist Abigail Zackin. "Some people are psychologically organized that sex is the furthest thing from their minds during a crisis because they're too busy regulating their emotions through other means, either internal or external, but some people's go-to coping tool is sex and sexual pleasure." Richard, 26, has felt a sort of liberation and release from shame in the face of so many people in power now emboldened to speak and take action against his way of life. "I'm a gay man in a long-term relationship in the conservative part of my state," he said. "I've pretty much come to terms with the fact that most of my elected officials and fellow constituents don't like me, even as a concept. While the thought of our current administration makes my skin crawl, why should I be self-conscious about my horny feelings when literally everything else on a national level is terrible?" When everything is terrible and the national fear level is high, for some, like Violet, 27, sex serves as a release valve on the horrors of the world. "Basically my sex drive has been kicked into overdrive since the election," she said. "My partner and I tend to use sex—and talking about sex, and sexting each other, and making sexy art—to get our minds off of our various anxieties." And in the world that feels confusing and illogical, sex can make sense. "It's a situation where you can be entirely in control—or entirely out of control—while still spending quality time with someone you care about and trust. And it makes people feel good! It gives you a chance to breathe candid emotions into others that the trappings of casual society are ill-equipped to express." And for some queer people, sex is a way of affirming their existence. Ryan, 34, is trans, and for him, sex "is a nice way to feel something good and personal that no one's about to take away from me. I know this administration doesn't give a fuck about my rights or personal safety. So much feels out of my control right now, but what I know I can do for myself is get myself off and feel release or relaxation or just something intense. And maybe it's a bit of a psychic middle finger to people who would be (or publicly pretend to be) shocked or disapproving of what queer/trans/poly people do in the bedroom." What's there to lose in being a little kinky when the world is on fire? "There's a big difference between sex as a means of physical pleasure and sex as a means of forming or strengthening our relational bonds," says Zackin. "Sometimes we need to soothe ourselves and sometimes we need someone else to soothe us. Both are valid and necessary parts of the sexual experience and one is not more important than the other by any means, but I think a big difference here would be that the former provides immediate cessation of pain and the latter provides a sense of hope." Violet, who is genderqueer, finds this kind of hope through sex in a nation that is ever more trying to legislate her existence and that of those she loves. "My life expectancy right now is totally uncertain, but inside I feel like a fountain of love that can't stop flowing," she said. "It sounds stupid, but I want to make sure I can share as much of that as I can before I go—platonically, romantically, physically, whatever." "If I die because some rich white folks can't stand that I exist," Violet said, "I want to make sure the people close to me in my life know how important they are to me." For many of us in the post-Trump world, expressing that love—even self-love—through sex isn't possible yet. But four years isn't forever, and there is some spark of hope in the world that yes, we will be horny again.

Bernie Sanders’ platform of social programs brought a packed arena to its feet in thunderous cheers Friday. The longest and loudest cheers greeted his promises of universal healthcare, free college tuition and a higher minimum wage, proposals he acknowledged many critics have told him were impossible and couldn’t be accomplished. To them, he said, the question was, “Why not?” “The answer is that too many people have been crushed intellectually and emotionally and they’ve given up,” Sanders said. “They say we can’t do it. What this campaign is saying, we can create the nation we want to become.” Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to Belleville News-Democrat Sanders said that 100 years ago, women didn’t have the right to vote, to go to certain schools or do the jobs they wanted to do. And 40 years ago, the idea of a black man elected president would be “radical” as well. “If we were in this room 10 years ago, which is no time at all in history, if somebody jumped up and said that gay marriage would be made legal in all 50 states, the guy next to him would have said, ‘What are you smoking?’” Sanders said. “What happened is that the gay community and their straight allies… said in this country, people should have the right to love whomever they want, regardless of gender.” Now, Sanders said, talking to young people about gay marriage brings shrugs. “What’s the issue?” he said. “That’s a revolutionary change.” That’s how change comes about, Sanders said. “If millions of students and young people stand up and demand it, it will happen,” he said. Sanders went after his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, highlighting their differences on trade policies and her acceptance of corporate donations from Wall Street. Sanders also pointed out that he voted against the Iraq War in 2002, calling it “the worst foreign policy disaster in the history of America,” and his opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act, which he said Clinton supported. “We are doing something fairly radical for American politics: We are telling the truth,” Sanders said. “Truth is not always pleasant.” Among those unpleasant truths, Sanders said, is what he termed a “corrupt campaign finance system” that allows billionaires to buy elections. “Democracy is not about the Koch brothers and a handful of billionaires spending $900 million in this campaign cycle. That is more money than either the Democratic or Republican parties is spending,” Sanders told the crowd. “When you have a situation where one family is spending more money than either of the major political parties, that’s not democracy. That is oligarchy, and we’re going to change that.” The crowd seemed to agree, rising with deafening cheers each time. The Vadalabene Center was filled to the rafters, with more people watching from observation windows on the upper level of the building. Sanders advocated public funding of elections rather than the donation model, and said as president, any Supreme Court nominee he would consider must be in favor of overturning the Citizens United decision. “I want everybody to be able to run for any office without begging wealthy people for campaign financing,” he said. However, he also pointed out that the United States has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the world. He advocates universal voter registration: “If you are 18 and a citizen of this country, you are registered to vote, end of discussion,” he said. Among other issues: ▪ Some of the loudest cheers came for Sanders’ support of universal healthcare. “I believe healthcare is a right of all people,” he said, advocating a “Medicare for all” healthcare system. ▪ Minimum wage increases: Sanders called the current minimum wage “a starvation wage.” Instead, he said the real welfare is going to people like the Walton family, which owns Walmart. He said they pay their employees so little that they end up on Medicaid, food stamps and in subsidized housing. “The major welfare abuser… is not a poor mother, it is the wealthiest family in this country,” Sanders said. “I say to the Waltons, who are worth $60 billion: Get off welfare, pay your workers a living wage.” The major welfare abuser… is not a poor mother, it is the wealthiest family in this country. I say to the Waltons, who are worth $60 billion: Get off welfare, pay your workers a living wage. Bernie Sanders, Democratic presidential candidate Sanders advocates raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, as well as expanding Social Security. “A great nation is not judged by the number of millionaires and billionaires; it is judged by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable,” he said. “A moral people does not turn its back on those folks who raised us and built this country.” ▪ Free public universities: Students cheered long and loud as Sanders advocated a public education system that begins with elementary and high school, but continues on through university. “In 2016, when talking about public education, we cannot just talk about first through 12th grade; the world has changed,” he said. “In order to compete in the global economy, we need the best-educated workforce in the world. It’s kind of a no-brainer.” Sanders said while this concept has been dismissed by critics as “radical,” there are many countries that have offered free college for years. “It’s free because they understand that the future of their countries depends on young people getting the best education they can,” he said. In 2016, when talking about public education, we cannot just talk about first through 12th grade; the world has changed. In order to compete in the global economy, we need the best-educated workforce in the world. It’s kind of a no-brainer. Bernie Sanders, Democratic presidential candidate How to pay for it? Sanders proposes a tax on Wall Street speculation, stating that Wall Street caused the recession and helped the redistribution of wealth flow from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent, before the federal government bailout. “If we could bail out the crooks on Wall Street, it is now time for Wall Street to help the middle class,” Sanders said. ▪ Incarceration and criminal justice: Sanders said that the United States has more people in jail than any other country on earth, including China, which has four times the U.S. population. “Here is a not so radical idea: How about investing in jobs and education for our young people, not more jails and incarceration,” Sanders said. He said that marijuana is currently listed alongside heroin as a Schedule 1 narcotic. “You can argue the pluses and minuses of marijuana, but it ain’t heroin,” he said. Instead, Sanders advocated treating substance abuse and addiction as a health care issue, not as a criminal justice issue. “We need to significantly expand our capabilities to treat substance and drug addiction,” he said. Sanders said police departments need to be demilitarized and should be as diverse as the communities they serve. “Police departments should not look like occupying armies,” he said. Meanwhile, he said, judges should be given more discretion in dealing with drug offenses, and greater access to education will help people released from jail to find new opportunities so they do not reoffend and end up back in prison. ▪ Racial justice: Sanders advocates a path toward citizenship for undocumented immigrants who he said are “tired of living in the shadows.” He also addressed the issue of unarmed black people shot by police officers. “The vast majority of police officers are honest, hardworking and have a very, very difficult job,” he said. “But when an officer breaks the law.. that officer must be held accountable.” Meanwhile, Native Americans deserve help fighting poverty, suicide, substance abuse and a high school dropout rate of 50 percent, Sanders said. “I don’t have to explain to anybody here that the way our country from day one has treated Native Americans is obscene,” he said. “For those people who were here first, we owe them respect and dignity.” ▪ On the environment, Sanders said the U.S. needs to envisage an energy system based on efficiency and sustainable energy sources. “Climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, it is already wreaking havoc and don’t let anybody tell you differently,” Sanders said. “We have got to have the guts to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and tell them their short-term profits are not more important than the future of this planet.” Sanders faces Clinton on March 15 in the Illinois primary election. On the issue of his electability, Sanders said that “polls don’t really matter,” but that in several recent polls, both he and Clinton can defeat Republican candidate Donald Trump, though he generally wins by a wider margin. “We will defeat Trump because in America, people understand that bringing our people together is better than Trump’s divisiveness,” Sanders said. “The sense of community… knowing we are not alone, but we are here to help each other.” Calling Trump “selfish,” Sanders said Americans understand what is taught in nearly every religion: “Love trumps hatred.” Other speakers included SIUE students and Bruce Franks, a St. Louis business owner and activist who is a candidate in the 78th district for the Missouri state legislature. “When you rebuild, you start from the bottom, not from the top,” Franks said. “Sen. Sanders knows that the violence in our community should not be the norm… (Sanders) has been making the impossible possible for a long time, so why stop now? We the people are the machine, the people who walk and fight until the end. Don’t ask us why we support Sen. Sanders; ask America why not?” We the people are the machine, the people who walk and fight until the end. Don’t ask us why we support Sen. Sanders; ask America why not? Bruce Franks, Missouri candidate The gym at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville holds 4,700 people, according to fire chief Rick Welle, who said they would hold attendance at that amount. There were reportedly at least another 1,000 people waiting outside, as lines to enter the Vadalabene Center stretched around the building and down the walking trails of SIUE. On his way out, however, Sanders stopped to give a five-minute version of his speech at the doors of the center to those who never made it into the hall.

Under the instructions of French Jewish interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, the Paris prosecutor office has initiated an investigation into famous French comedian Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala for mocking the faked beheading of James Foley by the notorious ISIS, a US-Israeli Project to demonize Muslims and Islam. I have to give credit to Dieudonne for not making fun of the beheading of the second journalist Steven Sotloff an Israeli spy, otherwise Obama could have sent a few Marines to eliminate him. In the controversial video, entitled ‘Foley That Was’ (watch edited version below) Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala said that decapitation “symbolizes before anything progress, access to civilisation” that appeared on the You Tube last month. Thanks to the powerful French Jewish Lobby CRIF, Dieudonne is banned to perform alive in France, Britain and Canada. The CIRF’s hatred of Israel’s critics have created several odd couples, such as, Dieudonne, an Afro-French and French White socialist icon, Alain Soral. You will never hear from the Jew York Times, The Washington Post or CNN that the ISIS thugs also beheaded a Lebanese Christian Kayed Ghadada, who was kidnapped from northeastern town of Ersal last week. Advertisements

Talk Show Host AISHA TYLER Got Taken To The CLEANERS . . . Has To Pay Her UNEMPLOYED EX-HUSBAND $31K A Month . . . In 'HUSBAND SUPPORT'!!! THE TALK host Aisha Tyler's husband Jeff Tietjens just got a NICE COME UP. A judge has ordered Aisha to pay him monthly "husband support" payments to compensate him for what he's done in the marriage. The couple has no children and to the best of our knowledge, Jeff has been unemployed for years. Here's how TMZ is reporting it: "The Talk" host and "Archer" actress has been ordered to pay her ex-husband $31,250 per month in spousal support over the next four years, plus an additional $500k. Do the math ... that's $2 million for Jeff. The two will split everything else. Tietjens gets half the money they made from selling their house. He gets the 2012 Lexus and she gets the 2013 Tesla. Aisha also keeps her companies -- BTDO Media and Hot Machine. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website

Ministry of Environment and Climate Change tells restaurants to dispose of products Restaurants in the UAE have been told to throw out Japanese-made Kikkoman soy sauce due the brand having alcohol in some of its products. The UAE Ministry of Environment and Climate Change said "several samples of the product with different production dates violated the rules", a news release read. "The decision came based on the results of tests conducted by specialised accredited laboratories, which confirmed that several samples of the product with different production dates violated the rules", the ministry added. #Ministry_of_Climate_Change_and_Environment warns of Japanese Soy Sauce ‘Kikkoman’ due to alcohol content.#wamnews pic.twitter.com/c26V9TrAtM — WAM News / English (@WAMNEWS_ENG) August 8, 2017 The sale of alcohol is controlled in the UAE and only available from special licensed outlets and licensed hotels and bars, sold under certain conditions. Officials said Kikkoman sauce that was specifically produced in Japan was being targeted, suggesting that was the type that contains alcohol. The food manufacturer has production plants and offices in the US, Netherlands, China, Canada, Singapore and Taiwan. The ministry did not elaborate. Kikkoman sauce is a naturally brewed product like wine or beer. According to the company's website, it is made from soybeans, wheat, salt and water. During the fermentation process, the wheat starches are broken down to sugars and part of the sugar is changed into alcohol. "The alcohol adds to the aroma and overall flavour of our soy sauce," the company stated on its website. This product contains approximately 1.5 per cent - 2 per cent alcohol by volume. _________ Read more UAE bans import of fruit and vegetables from Middle Eastern neighbours Eggs and poultry from Belgium banned amid avian flu fears _________ Chefs and Japanese restaurants said they were surprised at the move and were not aware the sauce contained alcohol. Andre Raspin is the manager of Prax’s Restaurant in Dubai's Barsha Heights and has been serving Kikkomen to customers in Dubai for 15 years. “This is a big surprise as Kikkomen is the best soy sauce on the market,” he said. “It is very strange. Now it is known this has an alcohol content, what affect will that have on its import into the UAE? “The Government is very strict on its laws and regulations, as we know with Halal meat, so it is surprising this has only been discovered now. “We don’t use it in cooking, but we have big bottles and offer it to our customers in small containers.” _________ Read more Illegal catches of banned fish to be donated to needy during Ramadan Owners confused over new ban on dog breeds _________ Prax’s has a centralised kitchen that prepares a huge variety of sauces off site. “We will wait for further direction from the management," said, adding that he would likely have to find a cheaper Chinese alternative. Yannick, who is head chef at Sushi Counter in Dubai Media City, said regular Kikkomen soy sauce has already been replaced by the restaurants own recipe. “We have used Kikkomen, but now my superiors have said to not use it anymore,” he said on Tuesday evening, just hours after the ban was announced. “We have our own brand of soy sauce now. I had no idea this had an alcohol content. “On the tables we use our own sauce that has been approved by the municipality in Dubai.”

RBTH presents a selection of views from leading Russian media on international events, featuring coverage of the APEC summit currently taking place in Beijing, as well as a report on ongoing talks on Iran’s nuclear program and the possibility of lifting sanctions against Tehran. Nezavisimaya Gazeta The Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily gives an account of President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the APEC summit, currently taking place in Beijing. The paper points out that the two countries have confirmed their intention to expand cooperation irrespective of the changes that are taking place in the world. The two leaders oversaw the signing of nearly two dozen agreements, primarily in the gas sector. In particular, a memorandum on gas supplies to China along the western route was signed, as well as a memorandum between Gazprom and the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation and an agreement on cooperation between Sberbank and the China Export & Credit Insurance Corporation. Commenting on the significance of the gas deal, Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller said that in the medium term, Russian gas supplies to China may exceed those to Europe, Nezavisimaya Gazeta adds. According to a leading research fellow with the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of the Far East, Alexander Larin, “Russia’s partnership with China is developing in special circumstances.” On the one hand, Russia is having to wage a war of sanctions with the West, which is leading it to largely refocus its attention on the East. On the other hand, China has considerably stepped up its efforts to expand and deepen integration processes in the Asia-Pacific region, prompted by the U.S. bid to restrain it. Moskovsky Komsomolets Meanwhile, the Moskovsky Komsomolets daily points out that Barack Obama, having missed the previous two APEC summits in Vladivostok and in Bali, this time has decided to “kill two birds with one visit.” Firstly, to demonstrate to partners that the U.S. has no intention of giving up its leadership in the Pacific region, and secondly, to have a showdown with China, which is aspiring to this leadership, the paper writes. Given the number of mutual complaints that have accumulated between the two countries, the Sino-American dialogue is unlikely to be easy, MK adds. The paper also points out that the APEC summit marked Vladimir Putin’s fifth meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this year. The Russian delegation arrived in Beijing with new proposals in the energy sphere. Citing Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller, the paper explains that the proposals concern the so-called western route for gas supplies, from already developed gas fields in Yamal via the Altai into China’s northwestern provinces. The new agreements are important for the Kremlin, which wants to show to Europe that it has a distribution market for its gas that may not be in demand there for political reasons, MK adds. Kommersant The Kommersant daily gives an update on the ongoing talks on the Iranian nuclear program. Citing a Russian diplomatic source, the paper says that “all the technical details of a deal have in effect been agreed” but one key issue remains unresolved, that of a procedure for lifting the sanctions that were imposed against Tehran by the U.S and UN Security Council. According to the paper, this procedure may be linked to reports by the IAEA, which last week accused the Iranian leadership of unwillingness to answer some of the questions addressed to it. Iran was the main topic discussed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Nov. 8 on the sidelines of preparations for the APEC summit in Beijing. According to a Russian diplomatic source, the meeting was requested by the American side. “For domestic political reasons, it is important for the U.S. presidential administration to reach a breakthrough on the Iranian issue, so they are pushing the others to resolve the matter by Nov. 24. However, the other members of the P5+1 group (the U.S., Russia, China, the UK, and France, plus Germany) are not set on a particular date, thinking it more important to reach a mutually acceptable long-lasting deal. Having said that, they too intend to do everything possible to meet the set deadline,” the Kommersant source said. All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

Image A label from a personalized wine. Viniv caters to clients who are willing to commit the time, travel and expense — and break a Bordeaux taboo. Mr. Bolger offers customers three grape varietals from 13 different vineyards, allowing them to mix a cabernet sauvignon from Pauillac with a merlot from Pomerol. For the wine establishment of Bordeaux, blending grapes from different appellations is the vintner’s equivalent of fantasy football, or eugenics. “I recently had an older farmer who refused to sell me his vines,” Mr. Bolger said. But he also said rejections were rare because Viniv wines are not commercially sold; they are savored by their creators. “This isn’t a gimmick,” Mr. Bolger said. “It’s a real and entirely different way of producing fine wine.” And make a splash. “I think it’s fun at dinner parties to pour my own wine for friends instead of something banal,” Mr. Boucraut explained. Many clients say they go there not just to make wine, but to enter a sophisticated world closed to ordinary tourists. Image A label from a personalized wine. In the spring, the vineyards around Pauillac are lined with wild poppies. Wisteria twists over the walls of stately chateaus and medieval churches. The bistros serve oysters from Arcachon Bay. And Mr. Bolger organizes tastings and private meals at neighboring chateaus, including even Chateau Petrus, which for ordinary tourists is harder to visit than Norad. Château Lynch-Bages also provides private tours, tailored to V.I.P. customers. “It’s very intimate, not a typical tour where they give you a thimble of wine and a canned speech,” said Hank Werronen, 73, a retired health care executive and entrepreneur in Arlington, Va. He discovered Viniv after winning a trip to Bordeaux at an American Heart Association benefit auction. “I’m not just making a wine, I’m making a memory,” he said. He blended one barrel in 2015 with the 2014 vintage, then in 2016 recruited friends to share the cost of five more barrels with the 2015 vintage. “It’s the engagement that is so rewarding,” Mr. Werronen said. “You develop deeply personal relationships with the winemakers of Château Lynch-Bages: It’s a family business.”

Over the course of the Mike Duffy Senate spending scandal, the Conservatives have made different statements about the issues. Here are some of the contradictions that have emerged through the courtroom testimony and evidence: The issue: The existence of documents related to an expense repayment deal struck between the Prime Minister's Office and Duffy. Then: "Our understanding is there is no document," then-foreign affairs minister John Baird said on May 21. "In fact, no one in the government knows about any legal agreement with respect to this payment," Baird added a day later. Now: Emails filed as court exhibits show that there was extensive documentation exchanged, including one draft entitled "scenario for repayment." There were also messages shared back and forth between the PMO lawyer and Duffy's lawyer. A communications spokesman in Harper's office was copied on many of the emails. The issue: Duffy repaying his own expenses. Then: Duffy made public statements in February and April 2013 that he would repay, or had repaid, his Senate expenses. "It's become a major distraction, so my wife and I discussed it and we decided that in order to turn the page to put all of this behind us, we are going to voluntarily pay back my living expenses related to the house we have in Ottawa," he told the CBC. Nigel Wright, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, will be cross-examined Thursday at Mike Duffy's fraud and breach of trust trial. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press) Now: Emails show that several people inside the PMO knew full well that Duffy was not going to be on the hook for the expenses and that this was kept deliberately quiet. At one point when he refused to answer reporters' questions on whether he had actually repaid, PMO staff became frustrated and coached him to say he had. The issue: The Senate internal economy committee's handling of their probe into Duffy's expenses. Then: Former committee chairman Sen. David Tkachuk told Maclean's magazine in 2013 that he had not been told by the PMO to "whitewash" a report on Duffy. "There was no indication that and no expectation that we would treat him any differently than the way he was treated," Tkachuk said. Now: Wright's testimony and email evidence shows that the Conservative senators on the committee received direct advice from the PMO on drafting the report on Duffy. And Wright says it was Tkachuk's idea to see if an independent audit of Duffy could be called off if the senator quietly repaid his expenses.

SLEEPOVERS are supposed to be good, clean fun. But for one 11-year-old an overnight party last week turned into a disturbing, confusing nightmare after he was exposed to a bombardment of hardcore porn on mobile devices. "The night he had to endure makes me sick to my stomach," said mum Karen, after her son Ben was shown explicit videos and images by two other primary school children. "I am devastated at the loss of his innocence and I would like this to be a warning to other parents." The concerned mother contacted The Sunday Mail after an investigation in last weekend's paper revealed the increasing trend for young children to access pornography on their smartphones. Karen said one of the boys took her son's phone and accessed extreme pornography freely over the household wi-fi, while the other looked up more explicit material on his own iPad and showed it to the group. "They knew exactly where to go and exactly what to look for," she said. The experience left Ben shaken and confused. "He was such an innocent naive little boy and it all changed in one night," she said. "Ben wasn't titillated by it, he was quite disgusted, he was upset, he was embarrassed and he was ashamed." Karen said the experience had made her more vigilant about her child's internet use, and less likely to allow him to go to sleepovers or other events away from home. Bravehearts founder Hetty Johnston said that it was time for all parents to wake up to the dangers exposed by such easy access to illicit material. She said research showed that children who regularly visited porn sites were at higher risk of sexually offending and there was an increased chance they would be preyed on by internet pedophiles. "This is a highly alarming situation and is a growing trend that must be responded to urgently," Ms Johnston said. "More and more of our clients are children harming other children mostly due to their own exposure to sexualised behaviours or imagery." As voting continues on The Sunday Mail's online poll "Should the Government put a blanket ban on internet porn?" most readers have said "no". A spokesman for the Premier Campbell Newman said: "The Newman Government is concerned about the increasing potential of underage people accessing internet porn. "Our Government is committed to working closely with the Queensland Police Service on these issues. Parents need to be responsible for monitoring their child's internet use and ultimately the issue of internet security is a Federal Government concern." Ms Johnston said children often imitated what they had seen and studies suggested that exposure to pornography could prompt kids to act out sexually against younger, more vulnerable children. "However experts still differ over the link between pornography and sexual offending," she said. Originally published as Boy bombarded with porn on sleepover

The former head of Hamilton's police officer union is running for the NDP in Niagara West-Glanbrook. Mike Thomas will carry the orange banner in the Nov. 17 byelection in a riding formerly held by Conservative leader Tim Hudak. Thomas is the former head of the Hamilton Police Association. The Binbrook resident was also a Hamilton police officer for 35 years. He currently works as a security specialist at Hydro One, which the NDP have fought against privatizing. NDP leader Andrea Horwath said in a media release that Thomas's run is a chance for the party to make in-roads in the riding. "I know that Mike will work hard to show people that the NDP is different," Horwath said. "We have a real plan for the future." Campaign priorities, the party says, include opposing the sale of Hydro One, increasing hospital funding and lowering hydro rates. "Patrick Brown isn't the answer for the people of Niagara-West Glanbrook," she said. "This riding has been represented by the Conservative party for decades and people here are ready for a change." Thomas will run against 19-year-old Sam Oosterhoff, who will run for the Progressive Conservatives. The Brock University student pulled at upset Saturday night when he beat out former MP Rick Dykstra, regional councillor Tony Quirk and local journalist Mike Williscraft. Hamilton lawyer Vicky Ringuette is running for the Liberals in the riding. Donna Cridland of Wainfleet is running for the Green party.

Optimizing things in the USSR As a data scientist, a big part of my job involves picking metrics to optimize and thinking about how to do things as efficiently as possible. With these types of questions on my mind, I recently discovered a totally fascinating book about about economic problems in the USSR and the team of data-driven economists and computer scientists who wanted to solve them. The book is called Red Plenty. It’s actually written as a novel, weirdly, but it nevertheless presents an accurate economic history of the USSR. It draws heavily on an earlier book from 1973 called Planning Problems in the USSR, which I also picked up. As I read these books, I couldn’t help but notice some parallels with planning in any modern organization. In what will be familiar to any data scientist today, the second book even includes a quote from a researcher who complained that 90% of his time was spent cleaning the data, and only 10% of his time was spent doing actual modeling! Beyond all the interesting parallels to modern data science and operations research, these books helped me understand a lot of interesting things I previously knew very little about, such as linear programming, price equilibria, and Soviet history. This blog post is about I learned, and ends with some surprising-to-me speculation about whether the technical challenges that the brought down the Soviet Union would be as much of a problem in the future. Balance sheets and manual calculation: Kind of a trainwreck The main task in the centrally planned Soviet economy was to allocate resources so that a desired assortment of goods and services was produced. Every year, certain target outputs for each good were established. Armed with estimates of the available input resources, central administrators used balance sheets to set plans for every factory, specifying exactly how much input commodities each factory would receive, and how much output it should produce. Up through the 1960s, this was always done by manual calculation. Since there were hundreds of thousands of commodities, and since the supply chains had many dependency steps, it was impossible to compute the full balance sheets for the economy. The administrators therefore decided to make some simplifying assumptions. As a result of these these simplifying assumptions, resource allocation became a bit of a trainwreck. Below are a few of the simplifications and their consequences. Dimensionality reduction by removing variables. Because there were too many commodities to track, administrators often limited their analysis to the 10,000 most important commodities in the economy. But when the production of those commodities were planned, there was often a hidden shortage of commodities whose output was not planned centrally but which were used as inputs to one of the 10,000 planned products. Factories that depended on those commodities often sat idle for months as they waited for the shortages to end. Because there were too many commodities to track, administrators often limited their analysis to the 10,000 most important commodities in the economy. But when the production of those commodities were planned, there was often a hidden shortage of commodities whose output was not planned centrally but which were used as inputs to one of the 10,000 planned products. Factories that depended on those commodities often sat idle for months as they waited for the shortages to end. Dimensionality reduction by aggregation. Apparently, steel tubes can come in thousands of different types. They can come in different lengths, different shapes, and different compositions. To reduce the dimensionality of the problem, administrators would often track the total tonnage of a few broad classes of steel tubes in the models, rather than using a more detailed classification scheme. While their models successfully balanced the tonnage of tubes for the broad categories (the output in tons of tube-producing factories matched the input requirements in tons of tube-consuming factories), there were constant surpluses of some specific types of tubes, and shortages of other specific types of tubes. In particular, since tonnage was used as a metric, tube-producing factories were overly incentivized to make easy-to-produce thick tubes. As a result, thin tubes were always in short supply. Apparently, steel tubes can come in thousands of different types. They can come in different lengths, different shapes, and different compositions. To reduce the dimensionality of the problem, administrators would often track the total tonnage of a few broad classes of steel tubes in the models, rather than using a more detailed classification scheme. While their models successfully balanced the tonnage of tubes for the broad categories (the output in tons of tube-producing factories matched the input requirements in tons of tube-consuming factories), there were constant surpluses of some specific types of tubes, and shortages of other specific types of tubes. In particular, since tonnage was used as a metric, tube-producing factories were overly incentivized to make easy-to-produce thick tubes. As a result, thin tubes were always in short supply. Propagating adjustments only a few degrees back. Let’s say that during balance calculations, the administrators realized they needed to bump up the target output of one commodity. If they did that, it was also necessary to bump up the output targets of commodities that were input into the target commodity. But if they did that, they also needed to bump up the output targets of commodities that fed into those commodities, and so on! This involved a crazy amount of extra hand calculations every time they needed make an adjustment. To simplify things, the administrators typically made adjustments to the first-order suppliers, without making the necessary adjustments to the suppliers of the suppliers. This of course led to critical shortages of input commodities, which again led to idle factories. Even if the administrators could get the accounting correct, which they couldn’t, their attempts to allocate resources would still be far from optimal. In the steel industry, for example, some factories were better at producing some types of tubes whereas others were better at producing other types of tubes. Since there were thousands of different factories and tube types, it was non-trivial to decide how to best distribute resources and output requirements, and it was not immediately obvious which factories should be expanded and which should be closed down. Supply chain optimizations In the late 1960’s, a group of economists and computer scientists known as the “optimal planners” began to push for a better way of doing things. The group argued that a technique called linear programming, invented by Leonid Kantorovich, could optimally solve the problems with the supply chain. At a minimum, since the process could be computerized, it would be possible to perform more detailed calculations than could be done by hand, with less dimensionality reduction. But more importantly, linear programming allowed you to optimize arbitrary objective functions given certain constraints. In the case of the supply chain, it showed you how to efficiently allocate resources, identifying efficient factories that should get more input commodities, and inefficient factories that should be shut down. The optimal planners had some success here. For example, in the steel industry, about 60,000 consumers requested 10,000 different types of products from 500 producers. The producers were not equally efficient in their production. Some producers were efficient for some types of steel products, but less efficient for other types of steel products. Given the total amount of each product requested, and given the constraints of how much each factory can produce, the goal was decide how much each factory should produce of each type of product. If we simplify the problem by just asking how much each factory should produce without considering how the products will be distributed to the consuming factories, this becomes a straightforward application of the Optimal Assignment Problem, a well-studied example in linear programming. If we additionally want to optimize distribution, taking into account the distance-dependent costs of shipments from one factory to another, the problem becomes more complicated but is still doable. The problem becomes similar to the Transportation Problem, another well-studied example in linear programming, but in this case generalized to multiple commodities instead of just one. By introducing linear programming, the optimal planners were modestly successful at improving the efficiency of some industries, but their effect was limited. First, political considerations prevented many of the recommendations surfaced by the model from being implemented. Cement factories that were known to be too inefficient or too far away from consumers were allowed to remain open even though the optimal solution recommended that they be closed. Second, since the planners were only allowed to work in certain narrow parts of the economy, they never had an opportunity to propagate their recommendations back in the supply chain, although one could imagine extending the models to do so. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the value of each commodity was set by old-school administrators in an unprincipled way, and so the optimal planners were forced to optimize objective functions that didn’t even make sense. Ideas about optimizing the entire economy While the optimal planners were able to improve the efficiency of a few industries, they had more ambitious plans. They believed they could use linear programming to optimize the entire economy and outperform capitalist societies. Doing so involved more than just scaling out the supply chain optimizations adopted by certain industries. It involved shadow prices and interest rates, and a few other things I’ll admit I don’t totally understand. But while I don’t really understand the implementation, I feel like the broader goal of the planners is easier to understand and explain: Basically, in a completely free market, at least under certain assumptions, prices are supposed to converge to what’s called a General Equilibrium. The equilibrium prices have a some nice properties. They balance aggregate supply and demand, so that no commodities are in shortage or surplus. They are also Pareto efficient, which means that nobody in the economy can be made better off without making someone else worse off. The optimal planners thought that they could do better. In particular, they pointed to two problems with capitalism: First, prices in a capitalist society were determined by individual agents using trial and error to guess the best price. Surely these agents, who had imperfect information, were not picking the exactly optimal prices. In contrast, a central planner using optimal computerized methods could pick prices that hit the equilibrium more exactly. Second, and more importantly, capitalism targeted an objective function that — while Pareto efficient — was not socially optimal. Because of huge differences in wealth, some people were able to obtain far more goods and services than other people. The optimal planners proposed using linear programming to optimize an objective function that would be more socially optimal. For example, it could aim to distribute goods more equitably. It could prioritize certain socially valuable goods (e.g. books) over socially destructive goods (e.g. alcohol). It could prioritize sectors that provide benefits over longer time horizons (e.g. heavy industry). And it could include constraints to ensure full employment. What happened None of this ever really happened. The ambitious ideas of the optimal planners were never adopted, and by the 1970s it was clear that living standards in the USSR were falling further behind those of the West. Perhaps things would have been better if the optimal planners got their way, but it seems like the consensus is that their plans would have failed even if they were implemented. Below are some of the main problems that would have been encountered. Computational complexity. As described in a wonderful blog post by Cosma Shalizi, the number of calculations needed to solve a linear programming problem is: , where is the number of products, is the number of constraints, and is how much error you are willing to tolerate. Since the number of products, , was in the millions, and since the complexity was proportional to , it would have been practically impossible for the Soviets to compute a solution to their planning problem with sufficient detail (although see below). Any attempt to reduce the dimensionality would lead to the same perverse incentives and shortages that bedeviled earlier systems driven by hand calculations. As described in a wonderful blog post by Cosma Shalizi, the number of calculations needed to solve a linear programming problem is: , where is the number of products, is the number of constraints, and is how much error you are willing to tolerate. Since the number of products, , was in the millions, and since the complexity was proportional to , it would have been practically impossible for the Soviets to compute a solution to their planning problem with sufficient detail (although see below). Any attempt to reduce the dimensionality would lead to the same perverse incentives and shortages that bedeviled earlier systems driven by hand calculations. Data quality. The optimal planners thought that optimal computer methods could find prices that more exactly approximated equilibrium than could be done in a market economy, where fallible human actors guessed at prices by trial and error. The reality, however, would have been the exact opposite. Individual actors in a market economy understand their local needs and constraints pretty well, whereas central planners have basically no idea what’s going on. For example, central planners don’t have good information on when a factory fails to receive a shipment and they don’t have an accurate sense for how much more efficient some devices are than others. Even worse, in order to obtain more resources, factory managers in the USSR routinely lied to the central planners about their production capabilities. The situation became so bad that, according to one of the deep state secrets of the USSR, central planners preferred to use the CIA’s analyses of certain Russian commodities rather than reports from local Party bosses! This is especially crazy if you consider that the CIA described its own data as being of “debilitatingly” poor quality. The optimal planners thought that optimal computer methods could find prices that more exactly approximated equilibrium than could be done in a market economy, where fallible human actors guessed at prices by trial and error. The reality, however, would have been the exact opposite. Individual actors in a market economy understand their local needs and constraints pretty well, whereas central planners have basically no idea what’s going on. For example, central planners don’t have good information on when a factory fails to receive a shipment and they don’t have an accurate sense for how much more efficient some devices are than others. Even worse, in order to obtain more resources, factory managers in the USSR routinely lied to the central planners about their production capabilities. The situation became so bad that, according to one of the deep state secrets of the USSR, central planners preferred to use the CIA’s analyses of certain Russian commodities rather than reports from local Party bosses! This is especially crazy if you consider that the CIA described its own data as being of “debilitatingly” poor quality. Nonlinearities. The optimal planners assumed linearity, such that the cost for a factory producing its 1000th widget was assumed to be the same as the cost for producing its first widget. In the real world, this is obviously false, as there are increasing returns to scale. It’s possible to model increasing returns to scale, but it becomes harder to solve computationally. The optimal planners assumed linearity, such that the cost for a factory producing its 1000th widget was assumed to be the same as the cost for producing its first widget. In the real world, this is obviously false, as there are increasing returns to scale. It’s possible to model increasing returns to scale, but it becomes harder to solve computationally. Choosing an objective function. Choosing what the society should value is really a political problem, and Cosma Shalizi does a very nice job describing why it would be so hard to come to agreement. Choosing what the society should value is really a political problem, and Cosma Shalizi does a very nice job describing why it would be so hard to come to agreement. Incentives for innovation. The central planners couldn’t determine resource allocation for products that didn’t exist yet, and more importantly neither they nor the factories had much incentive to invent new products. That’s why the Soviet Union remained so focused on the steel/coal/cement economy while Western nations shifted their focus to plastics and microelectronics. The central planners couldn’t determine resource allocation for products that didn’t exist yet, and more importantly neither they nor the factories had much incentive to invent new products. That’s why the Soviet Union remained so focused on the steel/coal/cement economy while Western nations shifted their focus to plastics and microelectronics. Political resistance. As described in a previous example, the model-based recommendations to shut down certain factories were ignored for political reasons. It is likely that many recommendations for the broader economy would have been ignored as well. For example, if a computer recommended that the price of heating oil should be doubled in the winter, how many politicians would let that happen? Could this work in the future? Had the optimal planners’ ideas been adopted at the time, they would have failed. But what about the future? In a hundred years, could we have the technical capability to pull off a totally planned economy? I did some poking around the internet and found, somewhat to my surprise, that the answer is actually… maybe. It turns out that two of the most serious problems with central planning could have technological solutions that may seem far-fetched but are perhaps not impossible: Let’s start with computational complexity. As described above and in Cosma Shalizi’s post, the number of steps required to solve a linear programming problem with products and constraints is proportional to . The USSR had about 12 million types of goods. If you cross them over about 1000 possible locations, that gives you 12 billion variables, which according to Cosma would correspond to an optimization problem that would take a thousand years to solve on a modern desktop computer. However, if Moore’s Law holds up, it would be possible in 100 years to solve this problem reasonably quickly. It’s also worth pointing out that the economy’s input-output matrix is sparse, since not every product depends on every other product as input. It may be possible that someone might develop a faster algorithm that leverages this sparsity, although Cosma is somewhat skeptical that this could happen. [In an earlier version of this post, I discussed a sparsity-based proposal that supposedly brought things down to complexity. This was apparently a red herring that doesn’t actually solve the optimization problem.] As described earlier, the second serious issue with a centrally planned economy was data quality: Central planners’ knowledge about the input requirements and output capabilities of individual factories was simply not as good as the people actually working in the factory. While this was certainly the case in the Soviet Union, one can’t help but wonder about technological improvements in supply chain management. Imagine if every product had a GPS device to track its location, with other sensors and cameras to determine product quality. Already Amazon is moving in that direction for pretty much all consumer goods, and one could imagine a world where demand could be measured with the Internet of Things. Whether a government would be able to harness this data as competently as Amazon is doubtful, and it’s obviously worth asking whether we would ever want a government to be using that type of data. But from a technical point of view it’s interesting to think about how the data quality issues that destroyed the USSR could be much less serious in the future. All that being said, it’s still unclear to me how an objective function could be chosen in way that would democratically satisfy people, how innovation could be incentivized, or how political freedoms could be preserved. In terms of freedom, things were obviously not-so-hot in the Soviet Union. If you’d like to read more about this, you should definitely check out Red Plenty. It was one of the weirdest and most interesting books I have read. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

I just pushed some stuff to github that you may find useful if you're either a git user, a vim user, or (best of all) both. git-multidiff For git users, there's git-multidiff , which works kind of like git difftool , except that it invokes your tool of choice once on the entire set of files, instead of once for each pair. This is handy if you have a diff tool that'll let you view multiple diffs simultaneously. Full installation instructions are in a comment at the top of the file, but it basically consists of putting git-multidiff and _git-multidiff-helper in your path and adding an entry to your .gitconfig . Note that it requires Python (I've tested it with 2.7.2). tab-multi-diff.vim Speaking of “diff tools that'll let you view multiple diffs simultaneously”, that's what tab-multi-diff.vim is for. It lets you do a “vimdiff” on multiple pairs of files, with each pair in a separate tab. To install it, just save tab-multi-diff.vim in your vim plugins directory (typically ~/.vim/plugin/ ). To use it, you can invoke vim (or gvim) with a command like: gvim -c 'silent call TabMultiDiff()' old-foo foo old-bar bar Thats obviously kind of long, so you probably want to wrap it in a shell script. My script for doing this is vd (which also depends on v ). Note that that it imposes some of my personal preferences, so you may only want to use it as a starting point. Using Them Together To use git-multidiff and tab-multi-diff.vim together I have the following in my .gitconfig : [multidiff] tool = vd -f

The integrity of our circulatory system is maintained by critically balancing the tendency to leak, with that to clot. In an intracerebral hemorrhage, blood leaks into the brain, and then forms a massive clot. Treatment with drugs is a precarious path because those that break down clots can also make any residual leak worse. A minimally invasive way to get to the problem mechanically, rather than chemically is now being developed by a group of researchers at Vanderbilt University. With a steerable robotic device that is introduced to the brain much like an arthroscopic probe, the researchers can navigate around critical structures to get to the clot, and then suction it out. The issues involved in getting inside the brain to treat vascular pathology, or even a tumor, are much the same as those for accessing the brain for electrical stimulation. We have discussed some solutions previously for reaching deep brain structures either transnasally, or perhaps through the ventricular system, but surgeons have been slow to adopt such techniques for things other than pituitary surgery. The Vanderbilt team, which had previously developed a steerable transnasal probe for removing pituitary tumors themselves, realized that their device could be repurposed for clot removal. The researchers call their instrument an active cannula, and it is basically a series of nested tubes with different curvatures. By rotating, extending and retracting the tubes, the tip of the probe can be controlled as it is introduced to the brain under the guidance of CT. To look at the device, it does not appear all too complex, and if I may be forgiven, perhaps even a little bulky. With a diameter of 50 thousandths of an, inch there is likely room for further miniaturization, and addition of other tools. The team would like to add ultrasound imaging, perhaps using a probe-mounted sound source much like that commonly used to generate a transesophageal echocardiogram of the heart. There are many ways to steer catheters, but the best method depends on the application at hand. A modern catheter may have several concentric bores and side channels of different sizes depending on the tooling to be used inside. Fiber optic illuminators, cameras, drug delivery, suction, heating, radiofrequency ablation and various steering apparatus all have their own special mechanical requirements. For now, most of these tools are integral to the catheter, but increasingly, we are seeing end-effector tools that are deposited inside the tissue and given a chance to work independently. Stents, balloons, magnetically guided drug delivery vessels, and radiation emitters or absorbers comprise the modern medical arsenal which critically depends on precise delivery. The researchers are also developing computer models of how brain tissue deforms when it is pushed upon. Not only should it be expected that white matter would behave differently from grey matter, but we might expect that white matter has isotropic properties that would depend on the directions of the axons within it. Having a white-matter connectome for the individual prior to surgery would permit the least damaging access trajectories to be considered beforehand. Adding vibrating elements, slight heating, or enzymatic release capability to the tip might even allow the probe to safely displace whole axon fields and pass through them like a caper through spaghetti. The device has already been tested on brain phantoms that the researchers constructed to mimic the gross material properties of the brain, and hopefully it will be made available to surgeons for the treatment of this very widespread condition. Now Read: Injectable, wireless LEDs help researchers understand brain activity

The Rochester Americans announced today the details of the Frozen Frontier presented by Rochester Area Honda Dealers, an outdoor hockey festival taking place at Frontier Field this December 13-22. It was also announced that the Lake Erie Monsters will be the Amerks’ opponent in their regular-season outdoor game at Frontier Field on Friday, Dec. 13. “This will be an exciting week for the city of Rochester, the state of New York and, of course, the game of hockey,” said Ted Black, president of the Rochester Americans. “With more than 10 teams coming from all corners of the state -– and from all levels of the game -– to play hockey, this will be a tremendous event to showcase the exceptional hockey teams we have in this region. More importantly, it will be a fun and different way to experience hockey. Whether you’re a player or a fan watching your favorite team, these games will be the games you’ll never forget being a part of.” Rochester’s opponent for the game, the Lake Erie Monsters, are based in Cleveland, Ohio, a city with a rich history in the American Hockey League and a long-standing rival of the Amerks. The Cleveland Barons were an original AHL franchise and went on to win nine Calder Cup championships. The Amerks and Barons twice met in the Calder Cup Finals, with Cleveland winning in 1957 and Rochester taking home the Cup in 1966. The current incarnation of professional hockey in Cleveland, the Lake Erie Monsters have been members of the AHL since 2007. SCHEDULE OF EVENTS: • Friday, December 13 (7:00 p.m.): Rochester Americans vs. Lake Erie Monsters • Saturday, December 14 (12:00 p.m.): RIT Tigers (women) vs. Clarkson Golden Knights • Saturday, December 14 (7:00 p.m.): RIT Tigers (men) vs. Niagara Purple Eagles • Sunday, December 15 (1:00 p.m.): Sabres/Amerks Alumni Game • Saturday, December 21: Section V Rivalry Day – matchups TBA • Sunday, December 22: Section V Rivalry Day – matchups TBA Tickets for all Frozen Frontier events will go on sale Saturday, Sept. 21, at the Frontier Field box office. Tickets will not be available for purchase at the Blue Cross Arena. Following Sept. 21, tickets for all Frozen Frontier events will also be sold at all area Wegmans locations and online at Tickets.com. Both Amerks and Rochester Red Wings season tickets holders will have the opportunity to purchase tickets prior to the general public. Season seat holders for both clubs will be mailed order forms in the coming days with all ticketing information. Tickets for all Frozen Frontier events will be split into three different price levels: 200 level, 100 level and Limited View. Ticket prices for the Amerks game are as follows: $15 (Limited View), $25 (100 level) and $35 (200 level). All information regarding the Frozen Frontier, including ticketing, merchandise, food & beverage, sponsorship and much more, is now available by visiting www.frozenfrontier2013.com.

In the context of a recent outbreak of deadly meningitis among gay men in New York City -- at least 22 cases since 2010 with seven fatalities -- there is growing talk of associations and misunderstandings about how the disease spreads. As Duran went on to say, though, importantly, "Please don't call this a gay disease." Bacterial meningitis is indeed no more a "gay disease" than the flu would be if there happened to be an outbreak in a gay community. The two spread in the same basic ways -- meningitis infection comes in through your nose and mouth -- except that the flu is more contagious, so it would rapidly break out of an identified community. Nothing about being gay makes one inherently more or less prone to meningitis; likewise nor does being straight lower risks. The bacteria spreads from respiratory secretions, kissing, sharing food, and generally being in very close contact with someone who has it. Just because some high profile stories are getting media attention and calling us to note the relatively high number of cases among gay men in recent years, it's important to emphasize that it happens everywhere to everyone. There have been five deaths from cases tracked to Tijuana this year already, for example, in addition to one 18-year-old woman who had to have all of her limbs amputated. The symptoms are usually vague at the start: fever, headache, poor appetite, nausea, sore throat, etc. Roughly 12 to 15 hours later, things can start to look more unique: neck stiffness, sensitivity to light -- kids especially can get leg pain, cold hands and feet, and changes in skin color. 42 to 70 percent will then develop a classic rash that's associated with Neisseria meningitidis, the bacteria that killed the aforementioned people. By 24 hours, we can see unconsciousness, delirium, or seizures. But even that timeline is hazy, and there are case reports where people go from initial symptoms to death within hours. That's terrifying, I know. How do you know when to take vague cold-like symptoms seriously? Well, first thing to note, there is a vaccine. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is setting up vaccination clinics around Los Angeles right now, though apparently they are already running out of vaccines. And again the fact that it's the AIDS Healthcare Foundation does not mean meningitis spreads like HIV. AIDS Healthcare Foundation's meningitis vaccination clinics in Los Angeles Neisseria meningitidis vaccination is generally recommended for all adolescents, college freshmen living in dorms, military recruits, people traveling to places where infection is common, and people without functioning spleens. But as with anything like this, ask your doctor about it. People who were in close contact with someone diagnosed with Neisseria meningitidis will be treated with antibiotics regardless of symptoms. People who have been someplace where they have reason to believe they could have been exposed, like at the White Party or the Equinox on Sunset Boulevard on April 6, should keep an especially low threshold for getting the above symptoms checked out. At the moment that threshold happens to be lower within New York and southern California's the gay communities, but that is the extent of any association between sexual orientation and this disease.

Next year Minnesotans will decide on whether to approve a constitutional amendment codifying the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, and in effort to promote the ban Archbishop John Nienstedt today released a prayer for the cause of mobilizing fellow Catholics to “defend” the so-called divine “plan for marriage.” Verbatim from the Archdiocese of Saint Paul & Minneapolis website, the prayer reads: Heavenly Father, Through the powerful intercession of the Holy Family, grant to this local Church the many graces we need to foster, strengthen, and support faith-filled, holy marriages and holy families. May the vocation of married life, a true calling to share in your own divine and creative life, be recognized by all believers as a source of blessing and joy, and a revelation of your own divine goodness. Grant to us all the gift of courage to proclaim and defend your plan for marriage, which is the union of one man and one woman in a lifelong, exclusive relationship of loving trust, compassion, and generosity, open to the conception of children. We make our prayer through Jesus Christ, who is Lord forever and ever. Amen. In case we were to be in any doubt this prayer should be a motivational one, it is prefaced by a statement from the Archbishop, the first paragraph of which reads: The current struggle to defend and define marriage within our civil constitution demands a three-fold approach. We must educate our fellow citizens on the meaning and good of marriage. We must actively and resolutely promote widespread participation among our fellow believers in the support of a marriage amendment. And most importantly, we must pray and offer sacrifice for the success of all endeavors that seek to protect and promote marriage. This continues for another few paragraphs but the general gist is this is not merely an Archbishop addressing an article of faith, but by Nienstedt’s own admission — “We must actively and resolutely promote widespread participation among our fellow believers in the support of a marriage amendment” — it is a call for political action that is wholly unpalatable and deeply questionable. It behooves us to recall that Minnesota already has a statutory ban on same-sex marriage. The urgency of the Archbishop’s position is, then, quite overblown. It is not, however, that surprising. Earlier this year the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis issued a call to appoint special committees to “spearhead” a local level effort in support of the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. To be sure it is entirely reasonable that those representing a religion should be allowed a voice, but for a religious leader to mobilize believers into codifying discrimination into a civil constitution on grounds of that faith alone shows us a will to control wider society that is profoundly troubling. Related Reading: School District Mulling Change to Sexual Orientation Policy MN Independence Party Against Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment MN Gay Marriage Ban Statistical Underdog? Image used under the Creative Commons Attribution License with thanks to Xerones.

The 24th Japan Movie Critics Awards announced its list of winners on Saturday. The winners honored films from the 2014 calendar year. Toei Animation and Seiji Mizushima's Expelled from Paradise film won the Best Animation of the Year Award. Additionally, Hiromasa Yonebayashi won the Best Animation Directors Award for directing When Marnie Was There. Planner and producer Michihiko Umezawa and producer Shuji Abe won the Animation Lifetime Achievement Award. For the first time this year the ceremony handed out a Best Voice Actor Award and a Special Award within the animation category. Kouichi Yamadera won the Best Voice Actor Award, and Production I.G's Giovanni's Island film won the Special Award for "displaying the true essence of hand-drawn animation." Previous winners of Best Animation of the Year include: The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Wolf Children, and the Detective Conan series. Previous winners of the Best Animation Directors Awards include Isao Takahata and Hideaki Anno. Previous Animation Lifetime Achievement Award winners include: editor Toshihiko Kojima, sound engineer Katsumi Ito, Studio Pierrot founder Yuji Nunokawa, color design artist Michiyo Yasuda, editor Masashi Furukawa, and Toei Animation. Japan started hosting the awards in 1992 after seeing many other countries host similar awards. Before 2010 the awards did not include animation-specific categories. Frequent Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi won the Best Movie Music Artist Award in 2009. Source: animeanime.biz

Since my knowledge of White House operations is culled specifically from Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing, I imagine this is what’s happening in the White House right now: The real-life Josh Lyman just burst through the door of the real-life C.J. Cregg to reveal the news just posted by New York Magazine. “C.J. Cregg” then bursts through the door of the real-life Leo McGarry, who then interrupts President Obama’s meeting with the joint chiefs to say, “We have a problem.” If you haven’t yet clicked that link to NY Mag, here’s the deal: 2012 Internet sensation Psy — the South Korean musician behind the year’s fourth best video, “Gangham Style” — is supposed to perform this Sunday at the National Building Museum’s Christmas in Washington concert. President Obama is scheduled to be in attendance. The problem? Busan Harps magazine just googled up some old song lyrics by Psy, and found this contained within his 2004 collaboration with N.E.X.T. entitled, “Dear American”: Kill those fucking Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives Kill those fucking Yankees who ordered them to torture Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers Kill them all slowly and painfully A bit of context: The song was released after an Iraqi terrorist group captured and beheaded a South Korean translator in revenge for the country’s support of the U.S. war in Iraq. Either way, I don’t think Psy and Obama will do the dance horse together come Sunday. Update: Psy has issued a statement in response to today’s news.

We've learned a lot about the upcoming iPhone 8 thanks to HomePod firmware that Apple accidentally released to the public, and the latest detail highlights what we can expect from the front and rear cameras in the device.Uncovered by Brazilian site iHelp BR , code within the firmware seems to hint at front and rear cameras capable of recording video in 4K at 60 frames per second.Currently, the rear camera in the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus is able to capture 4K video at 30 frames per second, while the front-facing camera is limited to 1080p recording. Though these specifications are mentioned, it's not yet entirely clear if this is functionality that we can expect to see in the iPhone 8, but the improved frame rate could be useful for the augmented reality applications coming in iOS 11.From leaks earlier this week, we've also learned that the front and rear facing cameras may also gain "SmartCamera" features able to detect different types of scenes, photo conditions, and photography subjects.The HomePod firmware has provided a wealth of information about the iPhone, and in addition to these camera changes, it's also confirmed infrared facial recognition , the general shape of the iPhone 8, and features like a split sensor bar and tap to wake.