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1c6b188c-33ed-475a-b3fa-6e255be45fd9 | 2019-08-26T07:32:26+00:00 | 2019-01-09 | 1 | http://en.ce.cn/National/big-news/201901/09/t20190109_31215606.shtml | The National Cultural Heritage Administration will work out a plan to better protect cultural relics and speed up the creation of a safety oversight platform in 2019.
Stressing the importance of such protection, Liu Yuzhu, head of the administration, said lax enforcement is a prominent problem that endangers cultural relics, at a meeting attended by cultural heritage administrators nationwide.
The administration noted that local authorities in some provinces failed to make clear the limits of protection areas for cultural relics and construction control zones.
"This has brought great difficulties to the rectification of illegal behavior. As a result, a number of illegal construction projects that destroy cultural relics and surrounding features have been carried out," Liu said.
Liu ordered continued remote sensing monitoring of unmovable cultural relics, cracking down on cultural relics-related crimes, actions to close security loopholes, and stronger technical support for cultural relic protection. | 175 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027331228.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20190826064622-20190826090622-00123.warc.gz | 0.925569 |
761cca3a-7d58-4e86-9569-71b9bf9b9967 | 2017-08-24T08:46:49+00:00 | 2017-05-12 | 1 | http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/12/cheniere-circles-china-after-trade-deal-portends-gas-export-boost-update.html | A new U.S.-China trade plan could be a boon for companies looking to export U.S. natural gas, and is already lifting Cheniere Energy Inc., the early mover in the nascent industry.
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Shares of the Texas-based company, the only one to date to export liquefied natural gas from the lower 48 states, were up 3.2% in late trading Friday following overnight news of the trade plan. Cheniere's shares are up more than 40% over the past year.
Cheniere and others planning to export the natural gas that has become abundant in the U.S. because of shale drilling are hoping the trade plan represents a blessing from the Chinese government to open one of the world's fastest-growing import markets. China has thus far eschewed long-term supply deals with the U.S.
"The Chinese have had concerns about the U.S. honoring long-term contracts with a Chinese counterparty, so we're really pleased with the language that came out," Cheniere Chief Executive Jack Fusco said in an interview. "My aim is to try to finance our next round of growth and I would love to do it with a Chinese counterparty."
Cheniere has a first-mover advantage, owning the only operational export terminal on the U.S. Gulf Coast, and thus far has sent nine spot cargoes to China. But more than 30 others, including Exxon Mobil Co. and Tellurian Inc., are constructing or await regulatory approval for the billion-dollar export terminal facilities, which chill gas to a liquid state, making it more efficient to export.
U.S. exporters face competition from other gas-rich nations closer to China, and the preliminary 10-point bilateral trade plan, released by both governments Thursday, provided few concrete changes to boost gas trade. Still, Cheniere and its competitors believe a symbolic statement of support from Beijing will carry weight with the country's state-controlled energy companies, which handle most of China's gas imports.
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Cheniere has had talks with Chinese counterparties as part of its ongoing efforts to attract new customers in Asia, according to Cheniere spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder. Exporters prefer long-term deals, which are usually guaranteed, take-or-pay contracts for terms ranging from 10 to 20 years that help finance costly infrastructure projects.
China's gas imports have soared as the country attempts to wean itself off coal as part of an aggressive five-year plan to increase air quality. China imported more than 28 million tons of liquid gas in 2016, a 33% increase from the previous year, and is now the world's third-largest importer.
China has so far sourced relatively small amounts of liquid gas from the U.S., instead relying on countries such as Qatar, Australia and Malaysia for its supplies. According to a 2015 report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, China sourced 34% of its liquid gas imports from Qatar and 19% from Australia. State-owned China National Petroleum Corp. also signed a 30-year, $400 billion contract in 2014 with Russia's Gazprom to build a pipeline and supply gas from fields in Siberia.
But changing market dynamics could make U.S. gas more attractive. The Australian government has imposed export restrictions, effective in July, which would force producers to boost domestic supply there before exporting, following a sharp increase in domestic prices. Uncertainty also hangs over the Siberian pipeline as Russia has been unable to settle on a route, delaying the project.
Meanwhile, U.S. gas prices are at historic lows. Chinese imports have averaged around $8.25 per million British thermal unit, according to Chinese customs data. The explosion of U.S. fracking activity has driven American gas prices down to around $3 per mmBtu -- a situation that is widely expected to persist given enormous reserves. Cheniere has said it can supply liquid gas to Asia from $7.5 to $8.5 per mmBtu from proposed expansion facilities, after factoring transportation costs.
The recently expanded Panama Canal has also significantly shortened the trip from the U.S. Gulf to China. Eight of the nine cargoes shipped from Cheniere's Sabine Pass Terminal in Louisiana passed through the Panama Canal, shaving as much as two weeks off traditional routes around the Horn of Africa or through the Suez Canal.
Not everyone is convinced Chinese importers will rush to sign up for long- term contracts with U.S. suppliers following Thursday's announcement.
"I might even argue that Chinese likely prefer being able to receive U.S. LNG without having long-term supply commitments as Chinese importers have multiple supplier countries to choose from," said Jane Nakano, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Mr. Fusco concedes there are competitive challenges, particularly from China's neighbors who send gas via pipe, but believes an abundance of U.S. gas and Cheniere's business model make it competitive. He noted Cheniere allows customers to redirect unwanted cargoes and facilitates the transfer, unlike other liquid gas suppliers in Australia and other countries.
"I don't think you can ignore China and we're going to be extremely competitive there," Mr. Fusco said.
Write to Christopher M. Matthews at [email protected]
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 12, 2017 16:29 ET (20:29 GMT) | 1,133 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886133447.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20170824082227-20170824102227-00460.warc.gz | 0.955971 |
b0d4dcd1-52cc-41fe-91c5-c70107d45ddb | 2016-07-30T23:19:32+00:00 | 2014-04-01 | 1 | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26830505 | Japan whaling ban welcomed in Australia and New Zealand
- 1 April 2014
- From the section Asia
A UN court ruling that the Japanese government must halt its whaling programme in the Antarctic has been welcomed in Australia and New Zealand.
The International Court of Justice ruled that the programme was not for scientific research as Japan claimed.
Supporters of the ban say they are "delighted". Japan said it would comply with the judgement, but was "deeply disappointed".
Australia brought the case to the court in 2010. Wellington supported its case.
Announcing the judgement on Monday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said that Japan had killed around 3,600 minke whales since 2005 under its Antarctic whaling programme, known as JARPA II.
While JARPA II could broadly be characterised as "scientific research", the scientific output from the programme was limited, and Japan had not sufficiently justified the whaling quotas it had set, the ICJ said.
During the court case, Australia argued that Japan's programme was commercial whaling in disguise, but Tokyo said the suit was an attempt to impose Australia's cultural norms on Japan.
Following the ruling, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said he was "delighted by the result", while former environment minister Peter Garrett said the ruling vindicated the then government's decision to take the case to court.
The 2010 court ruling was first brought by Mr Rudd's Labor government.
Australia's Attorney-General George Brandis welcomed the decision and said he thought relations between Australia and Japan would not suffer as a result.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott is due in Japan later this month for trade talks.
The ruling was also welcomed in New Zealand, which supported Australia's case at the ICJ.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said he expected Japan to abide by the "decisive" court ruling.
Japan had "always acknowledged the international rule of law", Mr Key told 3News on Tuesday.
Anti-whaling activist group Sea Shepherd said: "We've been saying for 10 years that this is an illegal whale hunt and the court has proven that case."
On Tuesday, Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters that Tokyo would consider its response "after carefully examining the contents of the ruling".
"We want to accept this from a position that respects the international legal order," he said.
Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters that whale meat was "an important source of food, and the government's position to use it based on scientific facts has not changed".
Japan can continue whaling if it revises its scientific programme, or withdraws from the International Whaling Commission.
Japan is a signatory to a 1986 moratorium on whaling, but had continued whaling under provisions that allowed for scientific research.
Norway and Iceland rejected the provision and continued commercial whaling.
The moratorium also excludes subsistence whaling among indigenous groups, although catch limits are set. | 614 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469258943369.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723072903-00296-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.973735 |
5d16b724-a56e-454d-b24c-35f240ab80f6 | 2016-07-26T02:49:33+00:00 | 2012-07-23 | 1 | http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20120723/53116-self-publishing-goes-big-time.html | If it wasn’t clear before that self-publishing is transforming the book industry, Pearson’s $116 million acquisition of self-publishing vendor Author Solutions Inc. should wipe away any lingering uncertainty. The purchase of Author Solutions—which has 1,600 employees, has published 150,000 authors, nearly 200,000 titles and reported just under $100 million in revenues last year—and its integration into Penguin operations marks a new era for the self-publishing category going forward.
In the wake of Penguin’s launch last year of Book Country, a writer’s community and self-publishing startup, and now the acquisition of one of the largest self-publishing ventures in the world, Pearson has marked the self-publishing sector as a critical new corporate publishing service—even at a corporate bastion of old-school editorial selectivity. In a conference call from Author Solutions headquarters in Bloomington, Ind., Penguin CEO John Makinson and ASI CEO Kevin Weiss hailed the acquisition as the “mainstreaming” of self-publishing and outlined a plan to “ develop a global strategy and quickly identify new opportunities,” according to Makinson.
Pearson’s acquisition was particularly notable in a new era of free or mostly free e-book self-publishing services like Lulu.com, Amazon Kindle Direct, B&N’s PubIt, Smashwords, and others, and Weiss was quick to emphasize that “we compete with free options more than ever and we’re not seeing any cannibalization.” Weiss said, “Every writer has different needs,” and Makinson agreed, noting that self-publishing is “causing more people to think about writing as a career. There’s a new category of professional author that will be more attracted to the Author Solutions model rather than the free model.”
Makinson and Weiss outlined plans to integrate Author Solutions into Penguin’s publishing operations—while carefully delineating the editorial differences between it and the self-publishing units—combining ASI’s skills at data gathering, consumer analytics, online marketing, and user-generated content with Penguin’s proven expertise in editorial, distribution, sales, and global reach.
In a separate phone call with PW, Makinson emphasized that Book Country “will retain its identity and continue to develop as it had before the acquisition, but this is also an opportunity to take the advantages offered by Author Solutions and use them to strengthen it.” Makinson was quick to point to Author Solutions’ expertise in data analysis—processing digital feedback from hundreds of thousands of authors, books, and consumers to improve publisher decisions and services—noting that “it’s not just data but how the data is interpreted to add value.”
Asked if the acquisition marked the advent of a new trade book publishing business model that will now include highly scalable self-publishing services, Weiss laughed and said, “Selfishly, yes,” pointing to Authors Solutions’ “white label” services. Through contracts with six publishers, Author Solutions’ white label imprints allow client/publishers to offer their own branded self-publishing services. “We have advanced systems and can run multiple imprints for disparate publishers, keep them segregated from each other, and service publishers as though we were their employees,” Weiss said. The white label program has been one of Author Solutions’ fastest-growing businesses, and Weiss said he doesn’t expect other publishers to be turned off to the option just because Author Solutions is now part of Penguin. “We think more publishers will want to get into this business,” he said. | 777 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257824570.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071024-00231-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.952215 |
54e44d13-8fdc-44b7-bc4a-07c5adebc52a | 2020-10-23T21:24:27+00:00 | 2020-01-30 | 1 | https://www.iot-nn.com/2020/01/30/gothenburg-boosts-sustainable-public-transport-push-with-e-bus-roll-out/ | More than 150 electric buses will be introduced in the region covering Gothenburg, Mölndal and Partille, where 180 million trips are made by bus each year.
A fleet of electric buses has begun operating in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, and its region covering Mölndal and Partille.
The 157 electric buses from Volvo represent the largest single order of its kind in Europe. Bus operator Transdev Sweden was awarded the contract to operate the service from public transport company Västtrafik, which expects to have electrified all city traffic in Västra Götaland by 2030.
Swiss power and automation group ABB is providing the charging infrastructure solutions with 19 new high-power electric chargers scheduled to be installed during the second half of 2020. Another two stations are planned for the future.
The new electrified lines will see a total of 220 electric buses in service by the end of the year. With room for 150 passengers and an 88 per cent reduction in CO2 when transitioning to electricity, the new buses combine high passenger capacity with low environmental footprint.
“We have created a common holistic transport solution that will make public transport in Gothenburg quieter and emission-free.”
According to Västtrafik, the landmark announcement marks an important step towards achieving a sustainable public transport solution for the 180 million trips made by bus in the region each year.
“Volvo Buses is a leader in electromobility and solutions for sustainable public transport. Together with ABB and our partners, we have created a common holistic transport solution that will make public transport in Gothenburg quieter and emission-free”, said Håkan Agnevall, president, Volvo Buses.
“The solution shows that electric buses are not only something for the future, but already today provide cities with public transport that is sustainable and financially viable.”
ABB will supply a complete solution that includes both the charging stations and all grid connection hardware via ABB’s cable distribution cabinets.
The buses in Gothenburg, Mölndal and Partille will be charged by ABB’s 450kW high power Panto Down chargers. The modular electric bus charging solution offers high-power charging via an automated rooftop connection. Buses will be recharged in three- to six minutes at charging stations along the routes
“The sustainable transformation of bus traffic in Gothenburg is an example of how ABB is pursuing its Mission to Zero, with the goal to develop innovations that will contribute to a zero-emission future,” added Frank Muehlon, head of ABB’s global business for e-mobility infrastructure solutions.
“We have the products and solutions to deliver electricity from generation to the point of consumption in a safe, smart and sustainable way.”
Gothenburg was named joint winner of the EU’s 2020 European Capital of Smart Tourism competition last year, alongside Málaga. They were recognised for their “exemplary achievements” across all four categories of the competition, including sustainability and digitalisation. | 652 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107865665.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20201023204939-20201023234939-00286.warc.gz | 0.933087 |
4a9c32db-f234-4eec-8a17-865ef58d2742 | 2013-06-19T18:58:01+00:00 | 2010-05-18 | 1 | http://ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2010/100518.htm | Scientists Release Biocontrol for Waterhyacinth
May 18, 2010
A new insect that will help control the
invasive weed waterhyacinth has been released by
Agricultural Research Service (ARS)
scientists and cooperators.
Waterhyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) is a free-floating aquatic plant
native to South America that has infested freshwater ecosystems from North
Carolina to California but is especially problematic in the southeastern United
States. The plant is a real menace, affecting water traffic, water quality,
infrastructure for pumping and hydroelectric operations, water use and
biodiversity. Other problems include fish kills due to low oxygen levels and
increases in populations of vectors of human and animal diseases.
Center, both with the agency's
Plant Research Laboratory (IPRL) in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., worked closely
with scientists at the ARS
American Biological Control Laboratory (SABCL) in Hurlingham, Argentina, to
find and test Megamelus scutellaris, a new biocontrol for waterhyacinth.
M. scutellaris is a small planthopper native to South America whose
nymphs and adults feed on the sap of waterhyacinth. Nymphs are active and
readily hop, even off the surface of the water. The insect's population
increases rapidly, which will enable it to quickly impact the waterhyacinth
Herbicides are the primary method for reducing waterhyacinth, but their use
directly interferes with the biocontrol agents currently deployed against this
weed. The scientists believe M. scutellaris may integrate better with
existing herbicide programs because of its mobility, which should improve its
survival in such highly managed systems.
The researchers collected adults of M. scutellaris from Argentina in
April 2006 and brought them to the quarantine facility in Ft. Lauderdale where
extensive host-range studies were conducted. They found that the planthopper is
highly host-specific and does not pose a threat to native or economically
Tipping and Center will join representatives from the
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation
Commission, which provided more than $300,000 in financial support for the
project, and the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers at an event celebrating the insect's release today
at the Edgefield Regional Stormwater Treatment Facility owned by the
St. Johns River Water Management District
near Palatka, Fla.
ARS is the principal intramural scientific research agency of the
U.S. Department of | 552 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.900546 |
c58a3cbb-974d-449c-be3e-3433b4e73029 | 2022-05-20T11:45:35+00:00 | 2022-04-15 | 0 | http://www.soneba.de/2022/04/15/our-very-own-lord-summarized-the-complete/ | But more distressing than simply their lack of change is actually the brand new simple fact that no one is actually amazed from it . It actually was since if folks just questioned one to their heart carry out are withered and you will bad year after year, several years after several years. Not one person seemed bothered by the position. It wasn’t an enthusiastic anomaly you to definitely caused direct-scratches bewilderment. No chapel professionals were entitled for the. No disaster conferences happened in order to probe new strange matter-of this person just who implemented the brand new church’s general recommendations to possess religious existence but was nontransformed. dos
But really God abhors so it. “Love God and love anyone,” he states. The greater number of sins, the newest more substantial sins, was transgressions facing like. Grudges, gossip, slander – talking about done in lead defiance to help you Jesus’ important command. And they practices is tolerated throughout the day – even certainly Christians. We really do not find them weird; we would view it strange when they abruptly disappeared.
God confides in us to help you first visit the individual you to definitely-on-that. Second, look at the people rapidly. Jesus counseled that, if someone else is actually worshiping Goodness and you can remembers that she or he have upset a pal, the proper answer is to get rid of immediately and you can wade immediately to the upset individual. This will likely grate up against religious folks who declare that God must be all of our first consideration. It is a fact you to definitely Goodness should be the top interest. However, the connection with Jesus is the best gauged of the the people relationship than because of the spiritual routine. Although we usually do not guarantee that this new upset sister will accept us, the audience is compelled to build all of the effort “as far as it all depends to the” you (Romans ).
Amazingly, in both cases, Jesus’ pointers will be to do the effort. When you have complete something wrong, you decide to go and come up with they best. An individual more features wronged your, you continue to grab the 1st step. Larry Calvin says:
With people terms and conditions Goodness managed to get clear that correct interpersonal matchmaking are more important than just proper routine
Today wait only a moment. If your friend enjoys anything facing your, you go to him? If in case you really have some thing up against your buddy, visit your? Who’s got you gonna him in both cases, if or not you really have something facing him, or you discover he has got one thing facing your. When i first made one to advancement, I remember convinced: That isn’t reasonable! Then i noticed that God is not inquiring us to perform anything that he’s got not already over. You see, Goodness is the initiator in the Goodness-individual relationship. 3
Jesus is not asking me to do anything the guy has never modeled for us. The guy threw in the towel eden in the future down-to-earth http://hookupfornight.com/lesbian-hookup-apps, end up being a slave and pass away to repair the busted reference to the daddy. From inside the Jesus Christ, God requires new step. Whenever we reach observe extremely important everyone is to help you God, we’ll worth the community Christ’s death makes possible. We’re going to worth it adequate to make the step when you look at the resolving relational malfunctions.
Productive management do not forget about argument. They would they through an environment in which men and women are designed to sort out relational rubbing on the a-one-on-that foundation. Just immediately following eg perform have failed is others allowed to enter into the new conflict, after which only for the reason for causing reconciliation. Problems can not be averted, however they will be managed. And you can a wise commander tend to place in himself otherwise by herself to help you discovering how exactly to carry out that.
God’s Cosmic Argument
While the participants may be undetectable, i are now living in the fresh new framework out-of a beneficial titanic battle in which the opponent off white and you may dark participate with the souls of men and women. Scripture ensures united states you to definitely even though this hidden conflict try real, it is quite brief; Goodness himself will bring background to a point of which that it cosmic conflict might possibly be in the long run resolved. New Apostle John details a stunning emblematic description of final input of King out of leaders and you may Lord away from lords within the the new products of history: | 978 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662531779.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20220520093441-20220520123441-00226.warc.gz | 0.958755 |
4df9783e-f7dd-4f26-8ed9-e0cff25edb2e | 2019-08-23T11:37:10+00:00 | 2019-08-23 | 0 | https://sourceanimation.wordpress.com/tag/2d-model-sheet-design/ | This is our show reel for the 2D animation. There are various types of animation styles can be used for the 2D animation productions. Depending upon the target audience we can choose the correct style for the project.
This 6 minute film was aimed to create awareness about ‘saving our planet and it’s natural habitat’. This 2D digital (FLASH) film was produced for a direct client in United Kingdom. We were given basic idea about the characters, script and voice over’s, rest of the assets like characters, expressions, background layouts, animation, direction, VFX and SFX was done at our studios (www.sourceofindia.com). | 141 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027318375.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20190823104239-20190823130239-00497.warc.gz | 0.911904 |
32085b0b-2a09-4bcf-aa89-71513ad3111c | 2022-05-19T14:52:25+00:00 | 2022-05-19 | 0 | https://www.friendhood.net/signs-that-your-friend-is-addicted-to-drugs-alcohol/ | You never want to see your friends fall or have trouble, but it is wise to understand the warning signs of addiction. If you think your friend is having trouble handling his/her load in life, you’ll want to know if your friend needs help.
Take some time now to learn a little about eh warning signs of drug/alcohol addiction. If you can see the signs, maybe you can help your friend before it is too late.
Behavioral signs of addiction
If you are really concerned that your friend is having trouble with addiction, you may notice these behavioral signs.
- Your friend may be having trouble maintaining relationships with family, lovers, and even you.
- You may find that your friend is facing unusual legal trouble.
- If your friend begins to extend a much lower level of performance at their job.
- You find that your friend is grossly neglecting their adult responsibilities.
- Addiction often manifests in social withdrawal.
- Your friend may also start involving themselves in excessively risky behaviors.
- Drug addiction may cause your friend to exhibit unusual mood shifts.
Though these signs and symptoms don’t always mean that a person is on drugs or alcohol, they are often a good marker for an issue.
Physical signs of addiction
If you’re concerned that your friend is having addiction issues with drugs or alcohol, it’s helpful to understand some of the physical signs and symptoms of addiction.
- Your friend is either sleeping too little or too much.
- Your friend always has red or watery eyes with large or super small pupils.
- Poor coordination can be a red flag for alcohol use.
- Slurred or labored speech could be a sign of a few different addiction issues.
- A sudden drop in personal hygiene could mean something’s up.
- A drastic shift in weight is a tell-tale sign of addiction.
- You may also want to pay attention to the tone and complexion of your friend.
Ultimately, addiction will leave its physical marker on the user. If you educate yourself on the physical effects of the drug you suspect your friend is having trouble with, you may uncover a bit more.
Understand common effects
Knowing specifics regarding some of the common offenders of addiction will help you to more easily identify when (or if) your friend is having trouble.
- Opioids – Heroin, OxyContin, hydrocodone, Vicodin, Percocet, and more. Small pupils, loss of appetite, lots of sleep, puking, coughing, sweating. You may also find needle marks on their arms.
- Stimulants – Methamphetamine, cocaine, crack, and others. Stimulants will cause increased energy, weight loss, dry mouth, and increased talkativity.
- Depressants – Prescription drugs, alcohol, benzos, barbiturates, and tranquilizers. Depressants will cause excessive sleepiness, slurred speech, trouble concentrating, and other expressions similar to being drunk.
- Inhalants – Household chemicals, air duster, glues, and other aerosols. Inhalants can cause a person to have vision problems, mood swings, memory issues, nausea, bloody nose, and more. | 670 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662529538.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20220519141152-20220519171152-00022.warc.gz | 0.918908 |
52464b3b-b89b-47d6-9575-f0e2c07caa41 | 2013-06-20T02:00:30+00:00 | 2013-06-19 | 0 | http://weather.gc.ca/marine/iceConditions_e.html?mapID=15&siteID=14100&stationID=WSF | Southwestern Shore: Ice Conditions
Ice ForecastsIssued 10:00 AM EDT 10 May 2013 Forecasts have ended for the season.
Iceberg BulletinIssued 11:00 AM EDT 19 June 2013
Iceberg LimitIceberg limit at 0000 UTC estimated from Newfoundland near 4715N
5250W to 4740N 5000W to 5015N 4800W to 5145N 4800W to 6000N 5930W.
Western iceberg limit at 0000 UTC estimated from Quebec near 5045N
5900W to Newfoundland near 5020N 5735W.
Iceberg CountNo confirmed icebergs.
- Date modified: | 132 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.89841 |
0e2594c3-0fc7-435e-b113-25626903cef5 | 2022-05-24T08:34:12+00:00 | 2021-08-31 | 1 | https://www.sava-ad.com/post/opinion-why-the-critics-are-tuning-out-the-cognition-data | Opinion: Why the Critics are Tuning Out the Cognition Data
Critics are Ignoring our Need for an Effective Alzheimer’s Drug
Humanity is currently being ravaged by a 100% fatal epidemic that kills 1 in 6 Americans and is likely a factor in 1 in 3. This disease slowly destroys the mind of those infected, turning patients from loving and caring relatives into something capable of only blank stares as death nears. Many argue that the inevitable fatality is ultimately a blessing for both the inflicted as well as their remaining loved ones and caregivers.
Finding a truly meaningful treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease (“AD”) has proven a daunting task. Historically, no clinical trial in the United States has been able to maintain (let alone improve) patient cognition after a year of treatment. As billions of dollars and decades of research into the failed “Amyloid Hypothesis” have failed to discover a treatment that meaningfully slows AD, academic institutions and agile small pharmaceutical companies have begun exploring new treatments under new hypotheses generally overlooked by the major pharmaceutical companies.
Market is Not Paying Attention to SAVA’s breakthrough Data
In a groundbreaking development, one such small company, Cassava Sciences (“SAVA”), has reported phase 2 clinical trial of a new drug Simufilam results where patient cognition scores were not only maintained, but in fact continuously improved in each interim data reported at 6, 9, and 12 months. Although ongoing trials (including a phase 3 trial now recruiting) will provide further data, the current results themselves are revolutionary to the treatment of AD. Simufilam is taken orally and has shown zero serious side effects across early and phase 2 trials. In contrast to the ease, safety, and effectiveness of Simufilam, treatments targeting the failed Amyloid Hypothesis generally require at least monthly infusions, have serious side effects including inter-cerebral hemorrhaging/edema, and simply don’t work to stop or meaningfully improve decline.
Simufilam’s mechanism of action (link 1, link 2, link 3) is fundamentally different than current approaches. Rather than simply seeking to remove as much amyloid as possible from the brain, Simufilam interacts with a scaffolding protein (filamin A or “FLNA”) to normalize the pathological misfolding of amyloid and tau. The identification and selection of this compound and mechanism of action was a natural progression for SAVA, as the company had previously been working with altering FLNA as a treatment for pain and inflammation before realizing it’s potential as a treatment for AD.
The natural rapid rise of the SAVA stock coupled with the prior history of almost total failure in clinical trials for AD has attracted investors who focus on betting against companies (“shorting” or “being short”). Some of these investors seek active roles in driving negative sentiment openly or anonymously to collapse a company’s stock price and increase the profit from their short bet. One technique used by short investors is to submit petitions to the FDA arguing to halt clinical trials through Citizens Petitions (“CPs”) generally due to alleged safety concerns. The infamous Martin Shkreli was a pioneer in using misleading CPs to both profit from a short bet against the company when the market reacts to the CP and to weaken a company for a hostile takeover.
The Latest Update on Short’s Antics
In August this year, a CP was filed anonymously seeking to halt the upcoming phase 3 trial of Simufilam in spite of the near perfect safety profile based on deeply dishonest allegations (later resulting in a review by the Journal of Neuroscience finding the allegations lacked merit). This CP initially was claimed to come from a whistleblower, but shortly after the inevitable collapse of the SAVA stock, the lawyers filing the CP acknowledged their client was an entity who held short positions on SAVA. In addition, many other consultants, analysts, or other personalities on social media have made misleading attacks on SAVA or Simufilam while either acknowledging short positions or refusing to demonstrate a lack of financial ties to those with short positions. After the Journal of Neuroscience found zero evidence of manipulation in the original, uncropped Western blots, some of these online personalities are once again making statements (like the ones below) about SAVA and the Journal of Neuroscience that are repugnant.
Public Support amongst AD Families and Investors
This website (www.sava-ad.com) is the collective work of a number specialists (including neurologists and other MDs, Neuroscientists and other PhD academics, and statisticians) to illustrate through objective data and information the groundbreaking nature of Simufilam’s clinical trial data as well as the severity of the dishonesty coming from those that who wish for Simufilam to fail for profit. It is our profound belief that by discussing the facts and data rationally and fully and considering the allegations on the merits, an objective reader will agree there is exciting potential for Simufilam that must be proven out through trials before the FDA.
While we are generally investors in SAVA ranging from large to small, we share a commonality in that we have come to the research in Simufilam because of the way AD and the lack of treatment for it has touched our lives and we have lost parents and spouses to this disease. Some of us have identified significant genetic likelihoods in ourselves or loved ones. For these reasons, our motivations in analyzing and providing context on the existing data and claim by short investors is not simply financial. We believe Simufilam is the first and only real hope, based on U.S. clinical trials, for a disease modifying treatment to AD. We are saddened that short investors would seek to stop further trials, simply for temporary financial gain, while a vulnerable patient population is experiencing such a devastating and widespread terminal disease. Shame on them for putting profits before people. Shame on them for making wild allegations casting doubt on the integrity on SAVA.
The Cognition Data – Judge for Yourself
ADAS-Cog is the cognitive test used for SAVA’s trial. It is considered the “gold standard” test for evaluating AD drugs and how all AD drugs are ultimately evaluated. One reason is that it's essentially an IQ/memory test, not an opinion survey, and therefore more objective. Compared to other cognitive tests such as MMSE, the ADAS-Cog is more sensitive and much longer (45 minutes to complete).
· 1. Word Recall Task
· 2. Naming Objects and Fingers
· 3. Following Commands
· 4. Constructional Praxis
· 5. Ideational Praxis
· 6. Orientation
· 7. Word Recognition Task
· 8. Remembering Test Directions
· 9. Spoken Language
· 10. Comprehension
· 11. Word-Finding Difficulty
It is based on 70 points, with a higher score implying more errors (worse cognition). 8 of the 11 parts are clearly objective. The other 3 appear to require some subjective judgment to score, but there are clear guidelines in how they are scored. Let’s get into some detail.
Dimensions 1-4, 6-7, and 11 (i.e., seven out of eleven of all dimensions in ADAS-Cog) offer very little room for random error, subjectivity, or rater bias (in favor of or against the patient's cognition). The reason is that the questions for these dimensions not only seek to essentially assess cognitive ability / IQ, but also come with clear right-or-wrong answers.
For example, consider dimension #1, Word Recall. For this, "A list of 10 words is read by the subject, and then the subject is asked to verbally recall as many of the words as possible. Three trials of reading and recalling are performed...Mean number of words not recalled across the three trials; scoring range is 0 to 10." So, the test administrator does not use his subjective judgment at all; instead, the patient either remembers each of the 10 words or not.
Another example, consider dimension #6, Orientation, where "The subject is asked the date, month, year, day of the week, season, time of day, place, and person...The number of correct responses; scoring range is 0 to 8." The patient either correctly knows where he's at or not; no subjective judgment involved here again.
Take a look at the other dimensions that have clear right-or-wrong answers (i.e., 2, 3, 4, 7, and 11).
Now, how much weight / importance is given to these seven dimensions with little or no room for any subjectivity? Remember that ADAS-Cog is scored by summing up all error points (e.g., 0 to 10 for dimension #1, Word Recall). So, across the seven dimensions, the total number of available errors a patient can show is 49 (about 70% of all errors available).
What about the other dimensions? #5 and 8-10 (which together constitute 30% of all errors available)? These may not have clear right-or-wrong answers, however ADAS-Cog test administrators receive training to mitigate inter-rater subjectivity. For dimension #5, Ideational Praxis, "The subject is asked to pretend to send a letter to themselves: fold letter, put letter in envelope, seal envelope, address envelope, and put a stamp on the envelope...Scored from 0 to 5 based on difficulty of performing the five components." So, if the patient adequately finishes all letter-sending tasks mentioned, then they'd get a 0 (no error). But if the patient struggles with one or more of the five steps, then per each step the test administrator would have to use some judgment for how much struggle / difficulty warrants an assignment of an error point. As the reader can see, this is straightforward to score.
For dimensions #8-10, the administrator has a 10 minute open-ended conversation with the patient, and at the end, the administrator rates the patient from 0-5 per quality of the patient's speech, how well the patient understands what the administrator is saying, and how much difficulty the patient has in finding desired words, respectively. So again, if the patient speaks like a normal person like you and me, they'd get a 0 for each of the three dimensions (#8-10). But if the patient shows some signs of struggle, then per dimension the test administrator would have to use some judgment for how many error points to assign.
How do these tests reduce subjectivity? In psychometrics, researchers very often deal with such performance or ability based questions that do not readily offer clear right or wrong response options--and instead rely on judgment of the rater. To mitigate this common issue, for decades researchers have developed rater training techniques to help get all the raters form a consensus on what type or degree of behavior corresponds to roughly what score. The more you can get them to see things on the same page (rather than each rater using their own unique/idiosyncratic standards), the greater the reliability and validity of the measurement tool.
As these clinical test sites specialize in research trials in AD drugs (also performing studies for SAVA’s competitors, it’s what they professionally do yet QCM only attacks SAVA's data), they would have a close familiarity for the ADAS-Cog. By definition these physician’s test-judging style would form the gold standard. SAVA does not have involvement with how the sites are run; SAVA requests that the sites use adas-cog per cognitive measurement and then the sites take it from there.
Of course, in the presence of such ambiguity and its two competing explanations (i.e., 30% of the available errors are largely subjective versus they are ultimately not subjective because of consensus-forming measures especially rater training), we can argue or speculate all day how the 30% of the errors are empirically implemented. But then we don't have to because there is empirical evidence available on this matter. Specifically, by performing a subset analysis, one can more precisely identify which dimensions in a measurement tool better captures the phenomenon at hand (in other words, which dimensions are more sensitive at detecting changes in the phenomenon).
So, for ADAS-Cog, which of the 11 dimensions are better at (sensitive enough at) picking up changes in cognition? If you look at the same article posted above, the authors describe a previous study (Ihl et al., 2012) where they sought to empirically identify "the collection of ADAS-Cog-11 [dimensions] with the most potential for detecting a treatment response." These dimensions were: Ideational Praxis, Remembering Test Instructions, Language, Comprehension of Spoken Language, and Word Finding Difficulty. As you can see, dimensions #5 and 8-10 (which constitute the 30% of total errors) are all included in this subset! So, based on actual empirical evidence, even dimensions #5 and 8-10 are *in practice* largely objective and valid, rather than a largely subjective subset.
Of note, Phase 3 will use ADAS-Cog12 which adds Delayed Recall section. This makes it more sensitive for mild cognitive impairment. Simufilam will target this larger group of people (15 million patients in US) to expand its market to the drug’s full potential.
It can be argued that due to the open label nature of the Phase 2b trial, physicians can still score certain sections favorably for SAVA. However, the math should this is unlikely to make up for the large 8.2-9.2 point difference between the 12 month data and placebo (from previous trials). In addition, open label trials of other AD drugs using the ADAS-Cog do not show these same results (discussed in future article). Unlike with Simufilam, those patients in trials of other AD medications all declined from 6 months onward in both open label and placebo-controlled trials.
The shorts have not done their due diligence (DD) on SAVA’s cognition data. Had they done so, they would not have shorted SAVA. But if they have done their DD on SAVA, I find it hard to believe they sleep well at night while holding a short position.
This is not medical advice. This is not investment advice. This is just my opinion. | 3,029 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662570051.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20220524075341-20220524105341-00202.warc.gz | 0.94024 |
d87c4661-2bab-4c47-ad9d-1793d060fcbe | 2019-08-19T03:38:49+00:00 | 2015-04-30 | 0 | http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/140661-Yooka-Laylee-Banjo-Kazooie-Spiritual-Successors-Revealed | Playtonic games have revealed the bat-and-chameleon duo of "Yooka-Laylee" for their Banjo-Kazooie spiritual successor.
Earlier in the year, a bunch of ex-Rare devs announced that they had started up their own studio (Playtonic games) and would be running a Kickstarter for a spiritual successor to fan favorite Banjo-Kazooie. Now, as Microsoft owns the rights to Banjo and his feathered friend, Playtonic had to make up some new characters. Today, together with IGN, the developer is introducing "Yooka-Laylee", who will be the stars of the upcoming title.
Check out the reveal video to the right, which shows the bat-and-chameleon due in action.
Yooka the chameleon and Laylee the bat were dreamed up by Steve Mayles, the ex-Rare character designer who brought us Banjo-Kazooie, as well as all of the modern members of the Donkey Kong family. This kind of on-the-nose design is akin to what we saw with Mighty No. 9, and shows us how developers can... creatively, get around copyright issues.
The two characters will have to use their unique abilities in-tandem to get through the game's levels, much like the original Banjo-Kazooie. Yooka, for example, can use his sticky tongue like a grappling hook, while Laylee can pick up her partner and fly for a short period of time.
Playtonic is launching a Kickstarter for the project on May 1st, with all backers able to pick up a full copy for $15 USD. If successfully funded, the game will release on Windows, Mac, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Wii U.
Source: Playtonic Games | 382 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027314641.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20190819032136-20190819054136-00370.warc.gz | 0.961575 |
e2d79da1-32e5-4325-8156-990ef03df66a | 2015-03-29T23:00:04+00:00 | 2009-11-17 | 0 | https://nebraska.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1017624 | Latest Team Rankings
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November 17, 2009
Notebook: Ingram may need big SEC title game to satisfy critics
TUSCALOOSA _ It goes without saying that a lot will be resting on next month's SEC Championship Game in Atlanta, where the University of Alabama will face Florida on Dec. 5 with a likely invitation to the Bowl Championship Series title game at stake.
However, that may only be the beginning.
Numerous individual honors could be on the line as well, including the Heisman Trophy and other national player of the year honors, and not just because of the potential showdown between sophomore running back Mark Ingram and Florida senior quarterback Tim Tebow.
It'll be Ingram's make-or-break chance to win over his critics because of one important statistic he has almost no control over. Although Alabama has faced numerous that ranked high in rushing defense when they played, most of have dropped off since. Consequently the Tide hasn't faced a team currently ranked in the top 40 nationally.
Here's each opponent's current rank and average rushing yards allowed, followed by where they would be without having played Alabama.
Virginia Tech 65th, 147.5; 53rd, 134.1
Florida International 117th, 238.5; 117th, 234.11
North Texas 102nd, 190.3; 101st 182.6
Arkansas 47th, 132.7; 47th, 132.6
Kentucky 98th, 177.6; 94th, 174.7;
Ole Miss 47th, 1327; 40th, 125.2
South Carolina 62nd, 145.09; 50th, 133.2
Tennessee 60th, 143.1; 60th, 143.9
LSU 41st, 126.9; 38th, 121.4
Mississippi State 79th, 157.9; 65th 147.4
As for future opponents, Auburn ranks 91st at 169.73, but Florida is 10th at 94.30, statistically making the Gators the top rushing defense the Tide will face before balloting is completed.
However, those numbers may be a bit of an aberration because rushing numbers in the Southeastern Conference are up while Alabama's statistic have essentially stayed constant.
In other words, blame the dynamic offenses, especially the spread formation that Florida, Auburn and Mississippi State use to run more.
Last year, the average SEC team accumulated 147.09 rushing yards per game, with Alabama (No. 2), Ole Miss (4), Tennessee (12), Florida (15) and LSU (17) all in the top 20 in rushing defense, and Georgia 27th.
This year, the average rushing performance is up to 176.64 yards. As a result, only Alabama (again second) and Florida (10) are in the top 30, with Georgia next at 34th.
Yet in total defense six SEC teams are ranked nationally in the top 25 in total defense (2. Florida, No. 3 Alabama, No. 20 South Carolina, No. 21 LSU, No. 23 Ole Miss, and No. 25 Tennessee), and four teams are in the top 25 in scoring defense (No. 1 Florida, No. 2 Alabama, No. 10 LSU, and No. 12 Ole Miss), with South Carolina in 26th.
"You still have to earn your yards when you go out there," Ingram said. "I guess it's more of how people are spreading the ball a little bit more, it's not just always just someone running the ball, pounding. There's a whole bunch of different types of offenses. There are people that use five wide, or four wide receivers.
"It's just different each week."
The team practiced outside Tuesday, but those limited to exercise bikes remained inside.
Junior running back Terry Grant (muscle strain) did not practice, but senior linebacker Eryk Anders, who aggravated a sprained ankle originally sustained against South Carolina, was back in his usual crimson jersey.
"I'll be good for Saturday," he said.
Walter Camp semifinalists
A student the other day did the Heisman pose in front of Ingram (funny, but a little weird he said) only that's not the only major award he's up for.
Tuesday both he and junior linebacker Rolando McClain were named on the 15 "Players to Watch" for the Walter Camp Foundation's player of the year award.
Alabama and Texas were the only schools to have more than one player listed, and McClain was the lone linebacker.
The other semifinalists are Stanford running back Toby Gearhart, Cincinnati wide receiver Mardy Gilyard, TCU defensive lineman Jerry Hughes, Houston quarterback Case Keenum, Pittsburgh running back Dion Lewis, Texas quarterback Colt McCoy, Boise State quarterback Kellen Moore, Oregon State running back Jacquizz Rodgers, Texas wide receiver Jordan Shipley, Clemson receiver/kick returner C.J. Spiller, Nebraska defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh, Notre Dame wide receiver Golden Tate and Tebow.
"It's been an exciting college football season with many teams and players still in the hunt for national recognition," Walter Camp Foundation president Alphonse Paolillo, Jr. said in a release. "We've identified some outstanding players and we know the final weeks of the regular season should be even more thrilling."
The Heisman Trophy, Maxwell Award and Walter Camp are considered the three major national player of the year awards, and an Alabama player has never won any of them.
Although it used to be fairly common for someone to win all three awards the same season, it hasn't occurred since 1999 with Wisconsin running back Ron Dayne. That ended a 33-year span in which 19 times one player took home the hardware trifecta.
Last year, Sam Bradford of Oklahoma won the Heisman, Tebow the Maxwell and Colt McCoy of Texas the Walter Camp.
"I try and not pay attention to it," Ingram said of the Heisman hype. "People keep bring it up all the time and I hear it all through my day.
"I let everyone else doing the talking and try and stay focuses on the task at hand."
Finalists for the Bronko Nagusrki Award for defensive player of the year will be announced Wednesday or Thursday. McClain is expected to be named a Butkus Award (linebacker of the year) finalist Thursday.
Awards list rundown
Heisman Trophy: Finalists announced Dec. 9.
Maxwell Award (outstanding player): Mark Ingram, semifinalist. Finalists announced Nov. 23.
Walter Camp Award (Player of the year): Ingram, McClain semifinalists. Finalists announced Dec. 2.
Butkus Award (linebacker): McClain, semifinalist. Finalists announced Thursday.
Outland Trophy (interior lineman): Terrence Cody and Mike Johnson on watch list. Finalists announced Nov. 23.
Bednarik Award (defensive player): Cody and McClain, semifinalists. Finalists announced Nov. 23.
Doak Walker Award (running back): Ingram, semifinalist. Finalists named Nov. 23.
Jim Thorpe Award (defensive back): Javier Arenas, semifinalist. Finalists announced Nov. 23.
Lou Groza Award (kicker): Leigh Tiffin, semifinalist. Finalists announced Nov. 23.
Bronko Nagusrki Award (defensive player): Finalists announced Wednesday or Thursday. Arenas, Cody and McClain are all on the watch list.
Rotary Lombard Award (lineman): Cody finalist. Winner announced Dec. 9.
Ted Hendricks Award (defensive end): Midseason watch list announced in mid-November. No Alabama players were on the preseason watch list.
Lott Trophy (defensive impact player): McClain semifinalist. Finalists announced Nov. 24.
Rimington Trophy (center): Finalists announced Nov. 23.
Eddie Robinson Award (coach): Finalists announced Dec. 9.
George Munger Award (coach): Nick Saban, semifinalist. Finalists announced Nov. 23.
Broyles Award (assistant coach): Finalists announced Nov. 30.
Alabama players are no longer in the running for the Davey O'Brien Award (quarterback), Unitas Golden Arm (senior quarterback), Fred Biletnikoff Award (wide receiver), John Mackey Award (tight end), Ray Guy Award (punter), or Walter Campbell Trophy (scholar-athlete, formerly known as the Draddy Trophy). | 1,802 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131298755.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172138-00166-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.941541 |
a80f2d1a-85ea-45c1-966f-c93c495b5730 | 2015-03-29T22:37:19+00:00 | 2012-02-03 | 0 | http://www.cartographersguild.com/archive/index.php/t-15522.html?s=5a4f790938e7abfdff12cbb127bef815 | View Full Version : A little sloop...
08-09-2011, 05:15 PM
So; I have been playing with GIMP a little more and here is a little sloop I drew over the Week-End... It gave me the opportunity to play with shadows and light elements...
11-22-2011, 07:16 PM
This looks great, but I have a question. It looks like you put stairs up to the helm, but shouldn't there then be a room for the captain under that area? Or did you intend for it to be a part of the storage area? I'd love this if it had the captain's quarters there.
12-02-2011, 11:24 PM
A sloop typically has no raised deck aft.
Remove the stair, move the helm forward a little and convert the aft 'deck' to a captain's cabin with a simple roof.
As a 17th Century ship type, cannon on the main deck would be appropriate.
02-03-2012, 06:51 AM
Thanks for the kind words and advices...
Yeah, initially, the idea came from a campaign. I was attending my players to travel between island and just give it "they find a ship and island hop" in my script.
Of course, as is typical with players, they spent the better part of two hours looking for exactly the right ship. Small, fast and nimble to escape troubles with a "trustworthy yet discrete captain". Then they went on to argue the price...
By the end, the ship and crew had taken a bit of a personality and I decided to re-use it later and make them a plan...
One of the reason I didn't put a proper captain's cabin is that I had originally improvised that the captain was sleeping in a tent raised at the aft, but yeah, it's probably a good idea to add a cabin now...
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.2 Copyright © 2015 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. | 426 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131298755.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172138-00152-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.970554 |
1ae659df-ea5a-4a7d-aef8-78d809ffca60 | 2015-04-01T01:07:37+00:00 | 2013-06-30 | 1 | http://www.bostonfed.org/WorkingCities/cities/somerville.htm | Somerville received a $100,000 seed award for its Pocket Change: Creating a Somerville that Works for All Initiative, which aims to reduce high unemployment among low-income youth. The model will blend micro-jobs, soft skill training, internships, and hard skill training into a seamless system to build work experience and information about job candidates. These opportunities will be publicized and coordinated via a mobile or online application that will also track participant progress and feedback from participating employers. The initiative is being led by the City of Somerville, in partnership with
several cross-sector task forces.
The Pocket Change Initiative provides participating youth with an opportunity for job progression based on performance. The initiative aims to reduce unemployment for low-income youth in Somerville by 10 percent over 10 years, and is planned and implemented under the guidance of both employers and youth from Somerville’s community. The initiative is a pilot for the citywide “Jobs Trust” proposed by Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone, which will create a permanent system for funding job training through linkage funds from developers of large commercial spaces.
Bent Electrical Contractors, Cambridge Health Alliance, Century Bank, Greentown Labs, Massachusetts Workforce Alliance (MWA),
Somerville Center for Adult Learning Experiences,
Somerville Chamber of Commerce, Taza Chocolate,
The Career Place (TCP), The Holiday Inn – Somerville,
The Somerville Community Corporation (SCC), Tufts University,
and Wedgewood-Crane & Connolly
Learn about Somerville
At roughly the same time, two external factors boosted the efforts of city officials and residents to spur Somerville's resurgence: 1) the subway line extension from Harvard Square through Somerville to the Fresh Pond area, and 2) rapid increases in Harvard Square real estate prices. The city has also benefited from proximity to Harvard University and Tufts University. Although the city has faced challenges such as assimilating its high percentage of foreign-born residents and making aging infrastructure compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, Somerville has tackled numerous obstacles with innovative initiatives.
Census data show that Somerville experienced rapid population growth during the 50-year period between 1880 and 1930 when it went from 24,933 to a peak of 103,908. The 2010 census put the population at 75,754. Somerville has the greatest density of any city in New England.
|Persons under 18 years||12.1%||21.7%|
|Persons 65 years and over||9.1%||13.8%|
|American Indian and Alaska Native||0.3%||0.3%|
|Black or African-American alone||6.8%||6.6%|
|Hispanic or Latino||10.6%||9.6%|
|Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander||<0.1%||0.0%|
|Two or more races||3.6%||2.6%|
|White alone (not Hispanic or Latino)||69.1%||76.1%|
More than one-half of Somerville adults have at least a bachelor's degree (52%), and nearly a quarter of households have incomes of $100,000 or more. Nevertheless, the city's median income ($59,000) is substantially lower than the 2011 state median household income ($62,859)—or the median income for Massachusetts smaller cities ($71,522). The city's over-65 population declined by more than 2,000 people (nearly 25%) over the past decade.
"Three-fourths of the meat-packing of the Commonwealth is carried on in the six packing-houses of the city. In the order of their importance, other leading industries are: slaughtering, bakery products, confectionary, foundry and machine-shop products, beverages, structural iron and steel, printing, automobile assembling, coffee-roasting, furniture making, and household and photographic equipment.
Because of its definitely residential character, self-rule is prized in Somerville. It is this love for self-government that gives the city its vigor and its virility."
According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey five-year estimates for 2007-2011, 26.0% of Somerville residents are foreign born, compared with 14.7% statewide .
Although high compared with the state, the percentage of foreign-born residents is dropping. It went down 11.9% between 2000 and 2011. Also, the percentage of people who speak English less than “very well” dropped from 16.8% to 12.7%, a drop of 24.4% between 2000 and 2011. The American Community Survey also shows that:
According to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, as of June 2013, Somerville’s unemployment rate was 5.4%, compared with 7.4% statewide. Nearly 30% of Somerville’s working residents commute to jobs in Boston, and just over 20% work in Cambridge. Clark University researchers found that Somerville’s five largest employers are:
There are a number of promising economic and community development initiatives that are either in the works or recently completed: | 1,087 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131302428.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172142-00243-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.925626 |
f92e6613-2c28-418e-b3d8-46ee9883f8a4 | 2022-05-29T02:20:59+00:00 | 2020-10-01 | 1 | https://apmma.net/ufc-leon-edwards-hits-back-at-jorge-masvidal-and-nate-diaz/ | UFC: Leon Edwards Hits Back At Jorge Masvidal And Nate Diaz
Leon Edwards is currently 10-2 in the UFC and riding an eight fight win streak. In his last fight, he defeated the former lightweight champion Rafael dos Anjos in July of 2019, where he won via unanimous decision at UFC San Antonio. Since then, the 29-year-old can’t seem to catch a break in terms of getting any closer to a title shot, let alone a fight with a big name.
Although Edwards as been campaigning for a fight with Jorge Masvidal ever since the infamous ‘three piece and a soda’ altercation at UFC London, the British fighter has found himself in a state of MMA purgatory. After the backstage scuffle, ‘Gamebred’ has found himself in high profile fights. Including the BMF bout with Nate Diaz at UFC 244, and a failed attempt at the welterweight title against Kamaru Usman at UFC 251.
Masvidal vs Diaz 2?
After Masvidal failed to capture the gold, many labeled Edwards as a possible next opponent, considering the history between the two and their position in the UFC welterweight rankings. However, after reports came out that the promotion is pursuing a rematch for the BMF belt with Diaz, the Birmingham fighter voiced his frustrations while speaking with Submission Radio (transcribed by MMA Fighting).
“Yeah, I think that’s the annoying part,” Edwards admitted. “Cause the UFC wants the fight, like, especially the Jorge fight. I know he went to the UFC and he said he won’t fight me unless I got the title or whatever. But I believe he needs to fight someone in the top five to get to a title, which he’s not doing. So, it’s frustrating, cause the UFC wants it, I want it, but the other guys, they’re saying no cause I’m a hard fight and they don’t want to lose. So, I don’t know.”
Edwards went on to continue voicing his displeasure with Masvidal for pursuing a rematch with Diaz, stating that the first bout wasn’t even competitive.
“I think me and him is a big fight,” Edwards stated. “I don’t know. The first fight when he fought Diaz, he basically battered him for the three rounds that they were in the fight. So, I don’t understand where the selling point is. I just don’t understand it. He went out there, he battered Diaz and that’s it. Move on. It’s a weird situation. But let them do their thing and fair play to them.”
In response to Edwards’ comments, ‘The Stockton Slugger’ took to social media to hit back at the Brit. Which prompted ‘Rocky’ to fire back.
“He Doesn’t Want None Of The Smoke With Me”
Because Edwards has found himself no closer to a big fight with Masvidal, he has given up on campaigning for the bout inside the Octagon, stating instead that it is now “on site” when he next sees the BMF.
“He’s come out and said he doesn’t want none of the smoke with me, he’ll only fight me for that world title. So, I’m kind of over it now,” Edwards said. “He doesn’t want to fight. So, when I see him, we’ll be on site fighting, and he knows what it is when we see each other. It is what it is. You cannot force a man into a fight, right? If he says he don’t want to fight, you can’t. Nothing you can do to force him into it. I want it, the UFC want it. He keeps saying he doesn’t want it. So, what more can I do?”
“I Will Be The Champion”
‘Rocky’ still has yet to find himself a viable option for a next opponent, made even more difficult because of the global coronavirus pandemic, which has seen him unable to travel to the US. Edwards maintains however, that he deserves a big fight that will get him closer to capturing UFC gold.
“I feel I deserve one of these top five guys, if not a big name in the sport,” Edwards said. “So, yeah, I’ve been on the UFC now since March, trying to get a name in and trying to get a fight in, but it’s always, it was hard for me during lockdown. Everyone else in the top 15 are based in the US. I’m the only one in the top 15 that’s based in the UK. So, it’s way easier for the UFC to match them guys up, cause they’re based in the States, and I couldn’t travel cause of visa issues, and obviously you couldn’t get into America from the UK. So, it’s been frustrating and it’s been annoying. But my time will come and I will be the champion and I truly believe that, you know what I mean, so it’s all good.”
When do you think we will see Leon Edwards face in the Octagon next? | 1,158 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652663035797.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20220529011010-20220529041010-00412.warc.gz | 0.97019 |
2baeab95-607a-44ae-bff0-de18dd3ffb79 | 2022-05-25T20:41:36+00:00 | 2022-05-25 | 1 | https://ppp.my.id/biden-admin-to-rescind-trump-conscience-rule-for-health-workers.html | “As state politicians continue to strip people of their sexual and reproductive rights and freedoms, it’s imperative that the Biden-Harris administration revoke this discriminatory policy and help ensure people can access the health care and information they need when they need it,” said Jacqueline Ayers, the senior vice president of policy, organizing and campaigns for Planned Parenthood, which was part of a lawsuit against the Trump administration rule in 2019. “We look forward to seeing the details of the new rule and are excited about this step forward.”
The so-called conscience rule, unveiled in 2018 and finalized in 2019, was blocked by federal courts after dozens of states, cities and advocacy groups sued, and has never been implemented.
Had it gone forward, it would have allowed doctors, nurses, medical students, pharmacists and other health workers to refuse to provide abortions, contraception, gender affirming care, HIV and STD services, vasectomies or any procedure to which they object.
Rescinding the rule is seen by progressive advocates as a key part of dismantling the Trump administration’s legacy on reproductive rights, which Democrats promised to do once they took control of Washington. Last year, Biden moved to undo anti-abortion restrictions on the Title X family planning program and foreign aid, and many groups have pushed for the “conscience” rule to be next.
“There is so much to unravel,” said Leila Abolfazli, the director of federal reproductive rights at the National Women’s Law Center, which sued the Trump administration over the rule in 2019. “I’m encouraged that they have been working through all these pieces.”
The planned rescission is currently under review at the Office of Management and Budget, which is often the final step before a proposed regulation goes public.
Many progressive groups that have called for the rule change say they’re reserving judgment until they see whether the Biden administration will completely undo the Trump administration rule or leave some aspects in place.
“We look forward to seeing the proposed rule’s text to ensure that the federal government safeguards patients’ need for high-quality health care,” said Audrey Sandusky, the spokesperson for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. Still, she added, “This action will go a long way toward strengthening patient access to high-quality health care and protecting the integrity of key HHS programs, including the Title X family planning program.” | 515 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662593428.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20220525182604-20220525212604-00410.warc.gz | 0.957401 |
a8ef5bd5-9976-47b4-97dc-7a290f560d63 | 2018-08-15T09:31:01+00:00 | 2018-05-01 | 1 | https://tamebay.com/2018/05/amazon-out-of-fashion-with-trendy-shoppers-but-voice-is-in.html | Amazon out of fashion with trendy shoppers, but voice is in
Amazon is gaining ground in fashion retail, but only a quarter of fashion-conscious shoppers consider it trendy enough to buy clothes from. They do, however, like stores as a way to check things out before buying online and are poised to use voice too.
So finds a study of the preferences and purchase behaviours in store and online of 1000 US shoppers by Astound Commerce. In its study, “A Window into the Fashion Shopper’s World,” the majority of shoppers say that they do make fashion purchases at Amazon for convenience, but only one in four rank Amazon as highly fashionable. Over half of respondents make Amazon purchases for low price and delivery speed, but only 26% care to browse Amazon’s private label fashion products.
Instead, shoppers like to use online and in-store to research and make purchases, with 77% of millennials sying store quality made them consider a purchase,and digital retailers are expanding beyond URLs. 48 % of shoppers visit new storefronts that initially launched online, such as Warby Parker and Fabletics, while 49% frequent inventory showrooms like Bonobos, which does not offer the ability to take products home.
They are also showing an interest in voice as a way to shop, with the fledgling channel set to overtake desktop spending, says the report. 73% of shoppers use their smartphones to shop, but mobile isn’t the only platform getting bigger. In fact, 47% of consumers use voice technology to browse products, and 37% plan to use it to make fashion purchases.
“If we understand how consumers shop, we can adjust to their needs. Technology offers a massive opportunity for retailers to optimize the customer experience, but without a detailed understanding of their target market preferences, it can be difficult to decide where to invest time and resources. Providing a seamless shopping experience across every channel is an expectation among fashion shoppers, and is key to maintaining an edge over the competition, and more importantly, Amazon.”
– Igor Gorin, CEO of Astound Commerce | 428 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221210040.24/warc/CC-MAIN-20180815083101-20180815103101-00133.warc.gz | 0.953442 |
5a4c8f91-0bc0-4553-ac15-5b775e90e460 | 2022-05-28T03:13:40+00:00 | 2021-06-01 | 1 | https://www.bruegel.org/2021/06/uk-banks-in-international-markets/ | UK banks in international markets
Implications of UK-euro area divergence in regulation and supervisory practice
The original paper is available on the European Parliament’s webpage, as part of in depth analysis requested by the ECON committee. Copyright remains with the European Parliament at all times.
The UK enters the post-Brexit period with a regulatory framework that is closely aligned with that of the UK, and stronger in some areas. This paper highlights that the changes in regulatory strategy and the institutional framework that have been announced by the UK will make its bank regulation more responsive, and greater use of proportionality the sector will become more competitive. Competition for EU banks in international markets will intensify, though not due to an erosion of regulatory standards.
This analysis was produced for the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON). | 173 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652663012542.85/warc/CC-MAIN-20220528031224-20220528061224-00027.warc.gz | 0.941345 |
7e973748-be0b-4ef2-ae20-ef1ebc4822da | 2015-03-26T19:18:50+00:00 | 2014-12-31 | 0 | http://forum.russellstreetreport.com/entry.php?141-Jets-vs-Patriots&goto=next | The Air Coryell works and has worked for us up until this year when we no longer had the personnel to make sure it worked without a hitch. Joe is the perfect guy for that style of offense. He's not overly mobile, he has a huge arm and up until this season we had the RB horses to make the important play actions worth a damn. Every offensive coordinator is, 'married' to a system. What would you like to see us start running here? A system more tailored to a QB like Brady or Peyton where they throw quick three second passes and have their receivers go for 2304023432 yards a clip? How much better do you think that will fair? The receivers we have right now make their money being faster than the defenders opposite them; it's easy to outrun the DBs with longer developing routes and more difficult when it's a quick slant (see Torrey or Jacoby on the slants they do get; YAC rarely occur there). Joe has also shown that he has a tendency to lock onto a guy; that's not going to help that style of offense either.
Brady and Peyton have made their money spreading that rock like nobody's business and having the almost immeasurable football IQ to do so with precision timing and expediency. I'm not knocking Joe but merely pointing out that his skillset is much different than those two. I mean Hell, if someone smarter than I am (the rest of this board) says they think Joe could run something like that without resorting to the muddle huddle all game I'd be all for bringing in the oft mentioned, 'young, hotshot, hungry OC who's going to take our offensive game to the limits!,'.
The Steelers run the Erhardt-Perkins system just like the Patriots. Do they look anything alike? No. The reason is that the EP system is flexible in its design. Its the route concepts that get receivers open. You run a lot out of it and thus PAP is a very successful result.
The only team that runs the Air Coryell well is the Saints, and that's only b/c Drew Brees is the most accurate deep ball passer in the league. I'm a big Joe Homer, but facts are facts, Joe can't sniff Drew's jock when it comes to deep ball accuracy.
You're right every coordinator is likely married to either the Air Coryell, Erhardt-Perkins, or the West Coast (only NFL team not running one of these schemes is the Eagles which is a true spread). I like the EP scheme b/c of its flexible in its design where you can throw deep out of it. And you won't have DBs able to bracket Torrey deep like they do in the AC, b/c they will have to respect the shorter routes. Ok, we absolutely do need to get better route runners to run the EP, but I contend if we don't get better route runners, period, no scheme will work. Our fast but shitty route runners in the AC didn't work this year.
Do you want a new scheme and to start all over again with new terminology, and having to teach wrs to run option routes all day, or is it better to get Norv or someone else try THEIR version of the air coryell? The latter makes more sense to me. | 686 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131292567.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172132-00003-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.976585 |
b830a039-7154-4915-ba7d-a78d1b3d7697 | 2017-08-22T16:39:42+00:00 | 2016-12-15 | 1 | https://www.jollofnews.com/2016/12/15/gambia-barrow-extends-olive-branch-to-jammeh/ | (JollofNews) – Gambia’s President-elect Adama Barrow has extended an olive branch to incumbent Yahya Jammeh, telling Newsweek that he will not prosecute the outgoing leader.
In an interview with Newsweek, Barrow says he is happy for Jammeh to remain in Gambia once he relinquishes power, despite allegations by members of the president-elect’s coalition that Jammeh could attempt a coup.
Barrow, 51, triumphed in the tiny West African country’s presidential election on December 1. Jammeh, who has ruled Gambia for 22 years, initially accepted the result, but on Friday performed a U-turn and called for a fresh election, citing “serious and unacceptable abnormalities” in the vote.
A delegation of four West African heads of state, led by Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, visited the country on Tuesday but failed to convince Jammeh to concede. The former army officer’s party submitted an appeal against the election result to Gambia’s Supreme Court, which has not sat in over a year. Gambia’s military also seized control of the electoral commission’s offices on Tuesday.
Speaking via telephone from Banjul, Barrow says that Jammeh’s petition is an “act of desperation” motivated by “selfish interests.” But he maintained that the outgoing president—whose tenure has been littered with allegations of human rights abuses—could remain in his home country without fear of prosecution after handing over power.
“We conducted the election on principle, not on personal things. I’m sure if we can reconcile…I see no reason why Gambians cannot do the same,” says Barrow.
Fatoumata Jallow-Tambajang, a senior member of the seven-party coalition headed up by Barrow, told The Guardian on December 7 that Jammeh would be prosecuted for alleged abuses committed during his tenure within a year of Barrow’s government taking office. Jammeh’s mandate expires on January 18.
Jallow-Tambajang also said that Jammeh had “bunkers and treasure” at his farm in Kanilai near the Senegalese border, and was capable of launching an “insurgency” against the government-elect.
But Barrow says that the outgoing president is welcome to remain in Gambia. He points out that Gambia’s first post-independence president, Sir Dawda Jawara, has continued to live in the country after being overthrown in a military coup by Jammeh in 1994.
“I think he [Jammeh] can also stay in this country. He belongs here and he’s a citizen of this nation. He has been [leading] Gambia for 22 years and I think he has the spirit of Gambia,” says Barrow.
Jammeh’s petition to the Supreme Court means that the country’s immediate future remains unclear. The outgoing president would have to appoint several judges to the Supreme Court in order to hear the petition, an idea rejected by the government-elect and the Gambian Bar Association, which represents all lawyers in the country.
Leaders of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) are holding a meeting on Saturday, at which a resolution on the situation is expected. ECOWAS President Marcel de Souza told Radio France Internationale that a military intervention in Gambia was “conceivable” if Jammeh refused to step down, but Barrow says he does not think such action will be necessary.
“We are in a very strong position,” he says. “The statements from international bodies, the U.N. and America, make it very clear, and in Gambia, the institutions are giving us very strong support…that will convince him to step down peacefully.”
The U.S. State Department condemned Jammeh’s rejection of the election result as “an egregious attempt” to stay in power. The U.N. envoy for West Africa, Mohammed Ibn Chambas, told Reuters that Jammeh would be “strongly sanctioned” if he attempted to remain in power beyond the end of his mandate.
A property developer who studied
in the U.K., Barrow has little political experience and was relatively unknown before the election. Seven opposition parties chose him as a coalition presidential candidate in September after various leading opposition figures—including Ousainou Darboe, the leader of the United Democratic Party to which Barrow belongs—were imprisoned earlier in 2016.
Barrow invigorated Gambians on the campaign trail, promising to overturn some of Jammeh’s key decisions—such as starting the withdrawal of Gambia from the International Criminal Court, and pledging to reform the country’s economy.
The lack of economic opportunities in the country has seen thousands of Gambians illegally attempting to migrate to Europe; despite its population of just 2 million, Gambia has been the fifth biggest contributor of migrants entering Italy in 2016, according to the International Organization of Migration.
While admitting that he fears for his security, Barrow says he has received messages of congratulations from across the world—including the U.S., European Union, Russia and China—and he is sure that this support will see Gambia through the current period of uncertainty.
“The international community has made itself very clear on this issue and that has put my coalition in a very strong position,” he says. “Believe me, I am the next president of Gambia.” | 1,191 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886112533.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20170822162608-20170822182608-00565.warc.gz | 0.968595 |
7edc2124-b087-4821-bd74-172e3566a8c6 | 2013-05-24T15:59:20+00:00 | 2012-02-02 | 1 | http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/glencore-and-xstrata-in-talks-for-80-billion-deal/ | 6:11 a.m. | Updated
LONDON — Glencore International, the biggest commodities trading company in the world, has approached the mining company Xstrata about a takeover, a long-anticipated deal that would create a company with a market value of about $80 billion.
The move, announced by Xstrata on Thursday, has been on the radar of deal makers for a while. Glencore, which already holds a 34 percent stake in Xstrata, raised $10 billion last year through an initial public offering, saying it planned to use the cash in part to expand through acquisitions.
A deal may also jump-start a new round of consolidation in the mining sector as companies look to take advantage of continued demand for metals and minerals from growing economies like China and Brazil.
A combined $71 billion of takeover deals were announced in the mining sector during the first half of 2011, the latest figures available. That represents a 2 percent increase over the same period in 2010, according to the consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“The combined business of Glencore and Xstrata would be greater than the sum of its parts,” said Charles Cooper, a mining analyst at Oriel Securities in London. “Any deal would put the new company in the same category as the major players like Rio Tinto or BHP Billiton.”
In a statement to the London Stock Exchange, Xstrata said it was holding talks with Glencore on an “all share merger of equals which may or may not lead to an offer being made by Glencore for Xstrata.”
Xstrata said its statement was “with the agreement of Glencore.” Simon Buerk, a spokesman for Glencore, declined to comment on the talks. In a statement, the company said it “notes” Xstrata’s announcement, and added that “there can be no certainty that any offer will be made.”
In morning trading in London on Thursday, Xstrata’s share price increased 9.1 percent, while stock in Glencore rose 4.8 percent.
Under new British takeover rules, Glencore has until the beginning of March to secure a deal, which would help to diversify its business from low-margin metals marketing and trading. The company, based in Baar, Switzerland, had a pretax profit margin of 4 percent last year, compared with Xstrata’s margin of 34 percent, according to Mr. Cooper of Oriel Securities.
Based on last year’s results, Oriel Securities estimates the combined company would make roughly 40 percent of its pretax earnings from its copper operations, and 30 percent from its coal business. That would give the company greater diversification than other large mining companies including Rio Tinto, which relies on its iron ore unit for 70 percent of pretax profit.
“Xstrata already sells its products through Glencore’s trading arm, so a combination of the two companies would offer significant benefits to both sides,” Mr. Cooper added.
Much will depend on whether Glencore is willing to pay a premium for control of Xstrata. Glencore’s stock price values it at roughly $45 billion, while Xstrata’s market capitalization values it at approximately $50 billion. As Glencore already owns a large stake in Xstrata, the combined company would have a market value of $80 billion.
The proposed takeover would bring together two businesses that were split about a decade ago. In 2002, Xstrata became a publicly listed company after it acquired the Australian and South African coal assets of Glencore. The deal laid the foundation for Xstrata’s current global coal business.
Xstrata ranks fourth among the world’s mining and metals companies, with operations in 20 countries and more than 70,000 employees. The company, which has headquarters in Zug, Switzerland, and corporate offices in London, had net profit of $2.9 billion on revenue of $16.8 billion in the first half of 2011.
Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Linklaters declined to comment. Representatives from Nomura and Goldman Sachs were not immediately available for comment.
After years of relying on government spending to supercharge growth, China is planning to shift gears so that the private sector and market forces play a larger role in its economy.
The nominees, Kara Stein and Michael Piwowar, are familiar with the Wall Street regulatory agency’s business through their work.
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board said the firm found a fraud risk in nine audits in 2009 but did not sufficiently follow up on the risk.
A proposal for cleaning up lead contamination from small car-battery recyclers in poor countries.
Refining Canada’s petroleum-soaked oil sands produces petroleum coke, and the question of what to do with it has found at least one answer in Detroit, where a large coke pile covers an entire city block.
A blistering heat wave in north and western India has caused widespread electricity cuts and led residents to protest and even attack power company officials and property.
A new product, Twitter Amplify, will help brands match advertisements with Twitter commentary by viewers.
And not caring what Elton John says about any of it.
President Obama asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to scrutinize Justice Department investigations and said he was “troubled” that such inquiries could hinder reporters.
A federal judge’s ruling could halt the resale of digital music as well as other digital good like e-books.
A world-renowned physicist meets a gorgeous model online. They plan their perfect life together. But first, she asks, would he be so kind as to deliver a special package to her?
The Winklevoss brothers have moved on from their battle with Mark Zuckerberg and are more active than ever.
Thirteen insurers had been chosen to sell policies through the insurance marketplace — or exchange — being created under the law.
A reader asks whether white-coat hypertension — the tendency to develop high blood pressure at the sight of a doctor’s garb — is common and dangerous.
Nearly 23 years after the Americans With Disabilities Act went into effect, patients with disabilities continue to receive inadequate medical care — and many cannot even get a doctor’s appointment.
Procter & Gamble said on Thursday that its chief executive, Robert A. McDonald, had resigned. | Four executives of SAC Capital Advisors have received subpoenas to testify before a grand jury. | In a push to soften financial regulations, bank lobbyists are helping lawmakers draft legislation. | Congressional concern over SoftBank’s bid for Sprint Nextel is growing.
Sign up for the DealBook Newsletter, delivered every morning and afternoon, and receive breaking news alerts throughout the day. | 1,427 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.960234 |
03da9eaf-e935-4873-b448-d402e3608a86 | 2015-04-01T06:32:11+00:00 | 2011-02-15 | 1 | http://www.voanews.com/content/skyrocketing-food-prices-push-millions-into-extreme-poverty-116302039/157458.html | A farmer reaps wheat in Pakistan, where prices for the crop have jumped 16 percent since June 2010.
The head of the World Bank says a sharp rise in food prices has pushed 44 million people into extreme poverty. World Bank President Robert Zoellick is calling on the Group of 20 leading and emerging economies to put food first on its agenda.
The World Bank's latest food price index is just three percent below its 2008 peak. Wheat and maize prices have gone up about 75 percent since last June. According to report, wheat increased 54 percent in Kyrgyzstan, 45 percent in Bangladesh, 37 percent in Tajikistan, 33 percent in Mongolia, 31 percent in Sri Lanka, 19 percent in Afghanistan and 16 percent in both Sudan and Pakistan.
According to Zoellick, high and volatile food prices are a key challenge in the developing world, where the most vulnerable people spend more than half their income on food.
"Even before these latest price hikes, there were already more than 900 million people going hungry each day," he says. "Now, with an estimated 44 million more people living in extreme poverty, it shows this year is shaping up to be a very tough year for the chronically malnourished."
This year is not as bad as 2008, when prices hit record highs. That's because grain stocks are somewhat larger, maize harvests in Africa were good, and rice prices have not risen as much as other grains. But Zoellick says the upcoming growing season will be especially important.
"We already are in stress points in a number of markets. If this trend continues, if we don't get a relief on the weather side, then I foresee conditions getting worse. And, mistaken policy actions such as export bans and other types of price controls will just exacerbate the problem."
Drought in the Black Sea region cut Russia's wheat harvest by a third in 2010. A subsequent ban on wheat exports drove prices up.
Last summer, Russia banned wheat exports after a major drought. Rice export bans were blamed for worsening price spikes in 2007 and 2008 that led to some food riots.
Speaking ahead of this week's G-20 finance ministers meeting in Paris, Zoellick discourages export bans and called for a global code of conduct that would at least exempt humanitarian shipments from restrictions.
He believes high and unstable prices are likely to be a long-term trend, in part because of the rising demand for biofuels and the growing appetite for meat in developing countries.
"What we're now seeing is a trend punctuated by some great volatility," says Zoellick, "and the poor and vulnerable have got no cushion when the prices spike."
To help offset the problem, he's calling for global action to provide better safety nets for pregnant women and young children and to improve developing-world farmers' access to better seeds, fertilizer and markets. | 586 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131303502.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172143-00063-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.960874 |
44576fe6-b440-4cf5-8067-45b339fccb11 | 2019-08-23T01:41:35+00:00 | 2019-08-23 | 0 | https://books.apple.com/us/book/abram-to-abraham/id1320361668 | Abram to Abraham explores the Abraham saga (11:27-22:24) through a literary lens, following the legendary figure of Abraham as he navigates the arduous odyssey to nationhood. Rather than overlook the textual discrepancies, repetitions and contradictions long noted by diachronic scholars, this study tackles them directly, demonstrating how many problems of the ancient text in fact hold the key to deeper understanding of the narrative and its objectives. Therefore, the book frequently notes the classic division of the text according to primary sources, but offers an alternative, more harmonious reading based on the assumption that the narrative forms a single, intentionally designed unit.
The narrative’s artistic design is especially evident in its arrangement of the two halves of the story around the protagonists’ change of name. The stories of Abram and Sarai in the first half of the cycle (11:27-16:16) are parallel to the stories of Abraham and Sarah in the second half (18:1-22:24). A close reading of this transformation in the biblical narrative illuminates the moral and theological values championed by the figure of Abraham as luminary, soldier, family man, and loyal subject of God. | 244 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027317688.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20190822235908-20190823021908-00295.warc.gz | 0.925468 |
9e58b568-c1a3-44bb-a993-bc82a96136ed | 2013-05-24T16:04:10+00:00 | 2012-09-30 | 0 | http://erratasec.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/there-was-no-georgia-cyber-war.html | Georgia looms large in "cyber-war" rhetoric because people believe they have a smoking gun in the way that "the cyberattackers appear to have had advance notice of the invasion and the benefit of some close cooperation from a state organ". But that's not really what happened. The conflict didn't start with a surprise attack by Russia. Instead, the attack by Russia was the result of escalating tensions over weeks, and was in direct response to the Georgian invasion of the province a day prior. Both the cyber-attacks and military attacks happened at roughly the same time because both were in reaction to the same events.
Russian hacktivists are involved in all of Russia's conflicts, bot internal and external. This leads to an "Occam's Razor" situation. We know that Russian hackers would DDoS and deface Georgian websites anyway. We have the forum posts pointing to this. When the Russian people get upset, they launch DDoS from their personal machines, and from the botnets run by the criminal gangs. Russian hackitivism explains the attack, adding "government direction" is superfluous.
Moreover, the other evidence points to hacktivists rather than military strategists. The attacks had no military value. Hackers went after high profile sites. Sure, they impacted Georgia infrastructure, but that was only a side effect. When those sites were taken out of country, the DDoS attacks followed, instead of continuing to hit Georgia infrastructure.
The situation is a lot like the paranoid conspiracy theories in the Muslim world that America must've been behind the "Innocence of Islam" film. It's because they can't conceive of things like that happening without state sponsorship. This stupidity is exploited by those who want to cause riots. In much the same way, those who wish to fan the flames of cyberwar exploit the sentiment that DDoS/defacements must be directed by a nation state.
When I bring this up, people demand that I present evidence to the contrary, as if it's up to me to prove that the Russian government wasn't involved. That's like demanding evidence that there are no UFOs. I'm not trying to prove that the Russian government wasn't involved, I'm simply pointing out that there is no evidence to their involvement. We know such cyber attacks come with all major conflicts, but attribution of those attacks is still speculation. Indeed, I would be unsurprised to find out that Russian government was involved -- I'm just saying that no evidence of this has yet been published.
Cyberwar is a serious thing. Sadly, most people pounding the drums of cyberwar are the non-serious type. How they approach the Georgia DDoS attacks is a good litmus test for their seriousness.
Update: The Statfor article on the event is a good example of how this nonsense works. It starts with the text: Russia's offensive against Georgia began not with tanks or fighter jets, but in cyberspace. ...Georgian government and media Web sites began to crash the night of Aug. 7 -- well before Russian troops emerged ... in the breakaway republic of South Ossetia the following morning
What this article leaves out is how Georgia had invaded South Ossetia on August 7, and how the cyber attacks were in response to that invasion (as well as in retaliation to Georgian hackers attacking Russian sites), and not a prelude to surprise attack. Likewise, the Statfor article points out that the website of the Georgia President had been DDoSed on July 20. This ignores the fact that the conflict had already heated up, with South Ossetia separatists having shelled Georgian forces on June 14, and that Russian jets had been overflying South Ossetia on July 9. The point is: these cyberattacks didn't happen in a vacuum, but where most likely the normal hacktivist response to events in the news.
Update: Some wikipedia references:
Some "analysis" of the Georgia cyber attacks: | 806 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.962163 |
7e86f859-cbd9-410e-a3e1-cc4e1b9e5bfe | 2013-05-23T05:01:03+00:00 | 2012-07-30 | 1 | http://www.downtoearthnw.com/blogs/down-earth/2012/jul/30/5-barriers-tiny-house-movement/ | For now, the tiny house movement is a tiny niche but in this economy, we've seen a growing number of Americans choosing to scale down. Ryan Mitchell from the Tiny Life lists the Top 5 Biggest Barriers To The Tiny House Movement. Here's an excerpt:
One of the largest hurdles for people wanting to live in a Tiny House is access to land. Land is expensive, in growing short supply and people want a balance of having land and being close to city or town centers where they can access services, entertainment and employment. These things are often in conflict with each other. The closer to the city center, the smaller and more expensive the lots. To have a Tiny House, you don’t need much land for the actual house, but you do need enough to be able to obscure the house from prying eyes in order to fly under the radar of code enforcement and curmudgeons.
Read more HERE. | 189 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.952397 |
40fa008c-20fd-4a57-980c-b6c525390e73 | 2022-05-21T07:09:10+00:00 | 2021-07-01 | 0 | https://chamberlaindentalhealth.com/dental-treatment/does-medi-cal-pay-for-dentures.html | Adult Dental Benefit Full Restoration Effective January 1, 2018. … Restored benefits will include, for example: Laboratory processed crowns, posterior root canal therapy, periodontal services, and partial dentures, including denture adjustments, repairs, and relines.
Does Denti-Cal cover dentures?
Denti-Cal will only provide up to $1800 in covered services per year. Some services are not counted towards the cap, such as dentures, extractions, and emergency services. … Your Denti-Cal provider cannot charge you for services that are covered by Denti-Cal.
What does Medi-Cal cover?
Medi-Cal covers most medically necessary care. This includes doctor and dentist appointments, prescription drugs, vision care, family planning, mental health care, and drug or alcohol treatment. Medi-Cal also covers transportation to these services.
Does Medi-Cal cover dental implants 2021?
Excluded Services Veneers, implants, tooth whitening and adult orthodontics are excluded in all plans.
Does Medi-Cal cover implants?
Dental implants are usually considered to be cosmetic procedures that are not essential to the health and well-being of covered individuals. These elective procedures are usually denied for coverage by Medicaid.
How often can you get dentures on medical card?
If you have a medical card you are entitled to an upper and lower denture every five years.
What type of dentures are the best?
In terms of stability, snap-in dentures are the best. These dentures securely snap into place with the aid of anchors on existing teeth or dental implants. These dentures are suitable for a patient without any teeth, but who has enough bone tissue to support an implant.
What’s the difference between Covered California and Medi-Cal?
Medi-Cal offers low-cost or free health coverage to eligible Californian residents with limited income. Covered California is the state’s health insurance marketplace where Californians can shop for health plans and access financial assistance if they qualify for it.
What does Medi-Cal cover for seniors?
What does Medi-Cal cover?
|Adult day health services||Hospice care|
|Ambulance services||Hospital and nursing home care|
|Dental care||Medical equipment|
|Doctor visits||Prescription drugs (if you don’t have Medicare)|
|Eyeglasses||Prosthetic/ orthopedic devices|
How much money can you have in the bank and still qualify for Medi-Cal?
You may have up to $2,000 in assets as an individual or $3,000 in assets as a couple. Some of your personal assets are not considered when determining whether you qualify for Medi-Cal coverage.
Do I have Denti Cal if I have Medi-Cal?
Once you have met your SOC, Medi-Cal will pay the rest of your covered medical and dental bills for that month. For example, if your SOC is $50 and your medical bills for services covered by Medi-Cal for that month are $500, you must pay $50.
Does Delta Dental cover implants?
Delta Dental covers 100% of routine and preventive diagnostic procedures, 80% of basic procedures like fillings, root canals, and extractions, and 50% of major procedures like bridges and implants.
Does Medicaid cover dental for adults 2021?
We are excited to announce that starting July 1, 2021, adults receiving full Medicaid benefits are eligible for comprehensive dental care, giving them access to more services and provider choices through DentaQuest.
Does insurance cover dental implants?
Basic dental insurance policies don’t typically cover a dental implant procedure. You’ll need to look into cosmetic dental procedure coverage, which covers a portion of dental implants. Your dental implant insurance coverage could be 50% of the cost, meaning your insurance covers half of the procedure.
Does health insurance cover dental bone graft?
Bone grafts can be expensive for some people, but they can be covered by dental or medical insurance. … Although people usually do not receive dental coverage for implants, they may receive partial coverage for a bone graft “if it is deemed to be medically necessary” (“Dental Bone Graft Cost”). | 902 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662538646.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20220521045616-20220521075616-00407.warc.gz | 0.934939 |
ac182881-d2e7-42e7-81d4-b246eed5f834 | 2017-08-21T13:48:12+00:00 | 2013-06-01 | 0 | http://www.kilkennypeople.ie/news/kilkenny-news/52867/Concern-for-future-of-mayor-s.html | The idea of the Mayor of Kilkenny City not living anywhere near Kilkenny City may become an entirely plausible one from next year onwards, but what implications will that have – and does it really matter at all?
With the reforms proposed by the boundary committee due to come into play for next year’s local elections, the goalposts have shifted significantly for both politicians and voters. The changes will see the end of the borough council, and two large new areas stretching from one side of the county to the other, termed the ‘municipal district’.
The new areas are called ‘Kilkenny City East’ and Kilkenny City West’, but extending as far as The Rower on one side, and Coolaghmore on the other, the term ‘city’ appears to be a somewhat loose one.
The mayor’s office was established in the 16th Century, and has been elected by the councillors directly representing the city district. With that area now substantially expanded, what does it mean for the future of the mayoralty?
“I would sincerely hope that the mayoralty would continue,” says current mayor, Sean O’ hArgain.
“I would hope the new municipal district will continue to elect a mayor, will continue to have the right, for instance, to grant the freedom of the city as we’ll do in two weeks time, and have the right to make by-laws that govern the city, and to meet monthly and discuss the business of the city. How that works with councillors that don’t live in the city is going to be very diffiult to figure out.”
This week’s meeting of Kilkenny Borough Council was the final one to be chaired by Cllr O’ hArgain. The 404th Mayor of Kilkenny, he will be succeeded next month by the final city mayor to be elected by our borough council.
But does it really matter if the city mayor is from Callan or living out in Graignamanagh? Both councillors Joe Reidy (FF) and Malcolm Noonan (Green Party) have contended that the office will be rendered largely redundant, superceded by the authority of the county council cathaoirleach under whose jurisdiction the ‘municipality’ will now fall.
“The mayoralty will become non-existent,” said Cllr Noonan, at Monday night’s meeting of the borough council.
“The incoming Mayor is now effectively going to be the last Mayor of Kilkenny.”
With the position becoming a largely ceremonial one in recent times, do we even need a city mayor?
“I think we certainly do need a mayor,” says Mayor O’ hArgain.
“I think there’s huge respect for the mayoralty, both within the city and with dignitaries and people visiting from other areas. The vast majority of towns and cities you go to in other countries have a mayor, and I think it’s a fundamental part of town and local government to have that.
“But I think that the mayor and the members should have far more power, and the unelected officials should have far less powers. I also think there should be a far greater role for ordinary citizens in how they interact with the council.” | 708 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886108709.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20170821133645-20170821153645-00666.warc.gz | 0.966787 |
c1fb87c0-848a-4c1c-9d3d-2c2a743fc44c | 2016-07-25T08:04:47+00:00 | 2010-08-08 | 1 | http://paulsnewsline.blogspot.com/2010/08/mirro-aluminum-company-manitowoc.html | Link to August 8 Herald-Times-Reporter editorial, "Take that first step".
Looming over a working-class neighborhood
Excerpt: Everyone — except perhaps those who vandalize it — agrees the former Mirro building in Manitowoc needs to come down.
The behemoth has been sitting idle since Newell Rubbermaid left town in 2003, and it's turned into a 900,000-square-foot eyesore. Many of its windows are broken and it's a fire hazard.
A few half-hearted attempts have been made to revamp portions of the building into usable space, but they've all fallen by the wayside. The building needs to come down — period.
That's why it is encouraging that the Manitowoc City Council voted on Monday to expand an existing tax increment finance district to include the building. Such a move would make it possible to set aside tax money from the TIF to help pay the estimated $6 million cost of razing the building should the city be forced to acquire it, which seems likely.
"Displaced Manitowoc, Wis., Steelworkers Are Part of Manufacturing's Downturn", by Joel Dresang. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, January 18, 2004.
The wood floor creaks in the empty union hall where Gary G. Miller sorts through the names of members of Steelworkers Local 6499, workers who were among the 900 whose jobs left here when Mirro closed its cookware plant last year.
Miller, the union's president, considers the fates of his co-workers. Many remain unemployed, he says. Some have taken retirement. Some, like him, are using government assistance to go to school. Some have found jobs, including a few, he says, at Wal-Mart.
"People frown on that," Miller says, because some people blame Wal-Mart for pushing Newell Rubbermaid, Mirro's parent, to move manufacturing to cheaper countries. "But hey, you got to do what you got to do."
Some of the steelworkers are unaccounted for. Miller hasn't heard what has become of them. Some have had their phones disconnected.
The displaced Mirro workers are unwitting players in a historic decline in manufacturing work. Federal estimates for December show the United States lost manufacturing jobs for 41 months in a row. U.S. factory employment has fallen each of the last five years, the first time that has happened since at least 1939 -- as far back as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks.
When state data are reported Thursday, they're likely to show that Wisconsin, which relies on manufacturing employment more than any other state but Indiana, will have lost factory jobs for the fourth year straight.
Nationwide, 2.9 million manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the past five years, exceeding the decline in the early 1980s. Wisconsin manufacturing is down nearly 80,000 jobs.
Ask where that work has gone and economists talk about improved productivity, diminished demand and increased output from lower-cost countries. Ask where the workers have gone and the response gets more involved. Among the answers:
State labor economists say that Wisconsin averaged about 174,000 unemployed people a month in 2003. That's up from a usual range of 90,000 to 100,000 a month. The difference is pretty close to the number of manufacturing jobs missing, says Terry Ludeman, chief labor economist with the Department of Workforce Development.
Between 40,000 and 45,000 Wisconsin workers retire each year. Manufacturing accounts for about one-fifth of all the jobs in the state, suggesting that 8,000 to 9,000 factory workers could be retiring a year. It's probably higher than that, though, thanks to early retirement packages and because factory workers tend to be older.
Older, more established workers are less likely to move for jobs. A survey of 504 dislocated Mirro workers by Lakeshore Technical College in Cleveland, Wis., found 73 percent unwilling to relocate for work. Only 15 percent said they'd be willing to commute more than 35 miles.
While goods-producing jobs have fallen, service-providing jobs have grown. Those who work with displaced workers say the ones who get jobs right away mostly take pay cuts and many times settle for work that tides them over until they can retire or that provides them health insurance. "The biggest, biggest problem we've had to deal with is benefits, the loss of health insurance and how expensive it is," says Sandy Destree, who assists former Mirro workers for the state Job Service.
Last year, almost 120,000 Wisconsin workers from all industries qualified for dislocated worker services, ranging from job counseling to training benefits. Wisconsin spent $43.6 million in federal funds on such services. Of those eligible, 18 percent used the services, and 73 percent of them got new jobs at about 74 percent of their previous wages. State officials don't know how many former factory workers received dislocated worker benefits, but manufacturing accounts for about 60 percent of the mass layoff notices in Wisconsin.
Trouble finding work
At Manitowoc's Job Center, behind the new Wal-Mart, oldies music plays in the waiting room. A young man scowls. A woman sighs as she reads through some paperwork. A preschool girl pages through a magazine, cheerfully singing her ABCs.
Times have changed since Destree helped set up the dislocated worker program here 21 years ago. She remembers the rampant factory closings of the early 1980s. Then, Destree says, the emphasis was putting workers back in jobs as quickly as possible, which wasn't as hard to do.
"I think in the past, we were always able to absorb," she says. "We had so much manufacturing in the northeast corner of the state. If one company went down, another picked those workers back up."
Now, few manufacturers are hiring. The workers losing their jobs tend to be older. And the factories are more automated, requiring more technical know-how. A few years ago, even as local employers spoke of labor shortages, discharged factory workers had trouble finding work, Destree says. Many of those who landed employment have since been unemployed again.
Miller, the union president, has the meaty hands of a man raised on manual labor. He grew up dairy farming. After high school, he worked at a sauerkraut factory with his mother until he moved to Manitowoc to work at Mirro with his sisters' husbands.
He bounced around Mirro for more than three decades as production shifted and plants closed. He wound up as a hot mill operator in the rolling mill, preparing sheets of aluminum to be shaped into pots and pans.
Miller and his wife have set aside their severance pay and plan to live on their unemployment benefits as long as they can. They've warned their sons, ages 20 and 16, that they have to cut back on cable TV service, eating out and traveling to visit relatives up north.
After 34 years at Mirro, Judith Helke couldn't see going back to school. So when she heard about an opening at Kohler Co., she chased after it.
"When you get the rug pulled out from under you and you're 56 years old, you don't look a gift horse in the mouth," Helke says. Kohler has been training her on the job since November to run computerized machinery.
Her pay and benefits will be comparable to what she left at Mirro, she says, and her commute is only three miles more.
"I guess it sucks, but I consider myself extremely, extremely fortunate to get hired at Kohler," Helke says. "Everywhere I turn, people are losing their jobs."
A lime-colored sign in an unattended guardhouse at the vast, abandoned Mirro complex says, "Koenig & Vits is now accepting applications for future employment."
In an upstairs office at the site, partially closed off from the smell of cutting oil and the whir of exhaust fans, Bob Fuller recounts how it took him 10 months to find another job after Mirro eliminated his position as manager of engineering.
At 59, Fuller suspects employers scrutinized his age but not his qualifications. Eventually, he ended up with a decent job in Milwaukee -- but at a 30 percent pay cut and the added expenses of commuting.
Keith Hinz, a senior engineer who's 44 and had 20 years with Mirro, took a temporary assignment with a local manufacturer and then sold cars for five months.
"I have not taken one day of unemployment in my life," Hinz says.
Both men know professionals and managers who still aren't working two years after Mirro discharged them. Others have relocated for lower positions and less pay. Others have gone back to school to get out of manufacturing.
Fuller and Hinz now work at Koenig & Vits, a local start-up named for two entrepreneurs who founded the precursor to Mirro.
With a $1 million loan from the Wisconsin Department of Commerce, local investors have bought the 160-acre Mirro campus, complete with equipment, and are negotiating for additional financing. The hope is to become a contract manufacturer with more than 300 employees by 2006.
Jim Ross, a former Mirro manager who's president of Koenig & Vits, says the new company is committed to employing Manitowoc County residents and building on the work ethic and experience of generations of Mirro workers.
Lacking cash so far, the company has been offering stock as compensation to its 40 workers, Ross says.
"We're all teammates," Ross says. "We're all going to survive together."
Back at the Job Center, Destree shares in the optimism.
"We may come back looking different, but I think we'll come back," says Destree, who has watched the coming and going of jobs here for two decades. "We've recovered before. I'm sure we'll recover again."
All photos by Retiring Guy. Taken Sunday, May 16, 2010. | 2,063 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257824217.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071024-00174-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.977373 |
5311c782-1bfb-4578-8fd8-9ea98cf34b7c | 2017-08-17T01:57:36+00:00 | 2015-09-04 | 1 | http://www.australianmanufacturing.com.au/31642/toyota-to-invest-50m-in-intelligent-car-project-with-mit-and-stanford-video | Toyota is investing $50 million with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to create two new artificial intelligence research centres dedicated to robot-assisted driving and inventing new ways to help people and goods move around.
Gill Pratt, a prominent American roboticist, who left his position at the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon, has been hired by Toyota to direct the effort.
“We’re here today to mark the beginning of an unprecedented commitment. We will initially focus on the acceleration of intelligent vehicle technology, with the immediate goal of helping eliminate traffic casualties and the ultimate goal of helping improve quality of life through enhanced mobility and robotics. This partnership, led by Dr Pratt, is a great opportunity to work with two leading research teams from two top universities. I am very excited about what this new venture means for Toyota, and I look forward to more announcements in the future,” said Kiyotaka Ise, TMC Senior Managing Officer and Chief Officer, R&D Group.
“This bold collaboration will address extremely complex mobility challenges using ground breaking artificial intelligence research. I’m thrilled to be a part of the synergies and talent-sharing of Toyota, MIT, and Stanford. Key program areas will be addressed by the two university campuses and Toyota, with combined research targeted at improving the ability of intelligent vehicle technologies to recognise objects around the vehicle in diverse environments, provide elevated judgment of surrounding conditions, and safely collaborate with vehicle occupants, other vehicles, and pedestrians. The joint research will also look at applications of the same technology to human-interactive robotics and information service,” said Dr Pratt.
Electrical engineering and computer science Professor Daniela Rus will lead the research at MIT, while Fei-Fei Li, Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, will be spearheading the effort there.
“Our team will collaborate with Stanford and Toyota to develop advanced architectures that allow cars to better perceive and navigate their surroundings in order to make safe driving decisions. These efforts will play a major role in helping reduce traffic casualties, and potentially even helping us develop a vehicle incapable of getting into a collision,” said Professor Rus.
“Building on Stanford’s expertise with computer vision, machine learning, large-scale data analysis and human-computer interaction, our team will work to help intelligent vehicles recognise objects in the road, predict behaviors of things and people, and make safe and smart driving decisions under diverse conditions,” said Professor Li.
The Japanese automaker said that the financial commitment will be made over the next five years.
Click here to check out the video of the official announcement. | 543 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886102819.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20170817013033-20170817033033-00685.warc.gz | 0.933392 |
e560a8cc-a2ae-4b31-bc58-2aa04e746062 | 2017-08-18T04:10:27+00:00 | 2017-06-13 | 1 | http://in.reuters.com/article/us-senegal-saudi-iran-insight-idINKBN1880JY | DAKAR (Reuters) - In an upmarket suburb of Senegal's seaside capital, a branch of Iran's Al-Mustafa University teaches Senegalese students Shi'ite Muslim theology, among other subjects. The branch director is Iranian and a portrait of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hangs on his office wall.
The teaching includes Iranian culture and history, Islamic science and Iran's mother tongue, Farsi; students receive free food and financial help. The university is a Shi'ite outpost in a country where Sufism, a more relaxed, mystical and apolitical form of Sunni Islam, is the norm.
Two miles away, the Islamic Preaching Association for Youth (APIJ) teaches the strand of Islam that predominates in Iran's great religious, political and military rival, Saudi Arabia.
The APIJ funnels cash from donors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai and Kuwait to mosques run by Salafists - conservative Sunni Muslims who are sworn enemies of Iran. The APIJ's shelves are stacked with Salafist theology texts adorned with gold-leaf Arabic inscriptions - texts its imams use to preach in some 200 mosques across Senegal.
The two institutions embody a contest for influence in Senegal, and more widely in Africa, between Iran-backed Shi'ites and Saudi-funded Sunnis. It's one strand of a broad power struggle in which each side is spending millions of dollars to win converts. At stake is huge political influence, on a resource-rich continent that has often served as the theater for rivalries between world powers.
Interviews with teachers and converts on both sides shed light on the depth of the divide and the ways both sides try to gain an edge.
The Iranian director of Dakar's branch of Al-Mustafa makes no secret of his concerns over his Saudi rivals. "The Salafists came to Africa to destroy ... Islam," said Chiekh Abbas Motaghedi in February.
Up the road, in the APIJ building, the Salafists show equal passion.
"We cannot accept the Iranian influence in Senegal, and we'll do everything to fight it," said Chiekh Ibrahima Niang, the imam, sitting legs crossed in a silky white robe. "We need to show the world that Shi'ism is wrong."
But for Senegal, either influence would be a disruption. It's a society that has always leaned towards political moderation, thanks largely to a tradition of tolerance espoused by its Sufi orders or "brotherhoods."
"Where the brotherhoods are weak, as in eastern Senegal, is where the threat of radicalisation is highest," said Bakary Sambe, director of the Dakar-based Timbuktu Institute and a coordinator for the Observatory on Religious Radicalism and Conflicts in Africa.
Iran has often been a destabilizing influence: In 2010, an Iranian arms shipment was intercepted in the Nigerian port of Lagos which Senegal suspected were destined for rebels in its southern Casamance region. Dakar briefly cut ties with Tehran over it.
Salafism is the more troubling strand, Sufis say: It is largely free of political interference, but has shared cause with violence that Senegal has so far escaped.
"Salafists in Senegal are cousins of those making jihad in Mali," Ahmed Khalifa Niasse, son of a deceased powerful Sufi Imam and vocal critic of Gulf Arab religious influence, told Reuters at his palace in Dakar.
"They see themselves as soldiers of God purifying Islam."
Salafists vehemently deny that link. "Salafism has nothing to do with terrorism," says Niang. "Yes, there are people who want to use force to impose the Salafist way, but we are very much against them. We are against violence."
Iran's supreme leader Khamenei supervises the activities of Al-Mustafa, which is based in the Iranian city of Qom and has branches in 50 countries. Thousands of students from across Africa receive enough Iranian money to enable them and their families to visit Qom while finishing their studies, said the son of a cleric based there who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Al-Mustafa in Dakar receives 150 students a year and gives them free tuition, a stipend and breakfast, its director of studies Chiekh Adrame Wane told Reuters. Graduates repay the generosity by promoting Iran online or in books, said a professor based in Qom. In countries like Somalia, Iran pays for weddings and home furniture, including a TV and a fridge, if both couples are Shi'ite or newly converted to Shi'ism.
Al-Mustafa is now Iran's main tool for promoting Shi'ism, said the professor, who also declined to be named. Its aim is "to train people to be loyal to the Islamic Republic and the Supreme Leader."
A top official at Al-Mustafa in Qom, also declining to be named, gave a different view. "Our goal is purely cultural and educational. We want to promote higher education in Africa," he said.
"Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey and many other countries have built their religious schools in Africa. Alongside them, there are many American and British Christian schools, and even Hindu schools. So there is a rivalry in Africa and if we do not establish our presence there, we would fall behind."
Two senior Al-Mustafa officials said students and teachers at Al-Mustafa are routinely vetted by the Ministry of Intelligence or the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Reuters was unable to independently verify this.
Motaghedi, the Al-Mustafa director in Dakar, said the university had no involvement with the intelligence services or Iranian politics. "We're a private university ... Our only mission is to teach, nothing else," he said, adding that Khameni was merely a patron and adopting Shi'ism was not a requirement for study.
In the 2016 Iranian budget, Al-Mustafa received 2,390 billion rials ($74 million). But the university receives more funding from the office of the Supreme Leader and other conglomerates under his command, one official said. Neither Motaghedi nor Wane would comment on financial flows to the Dakar branch.
At the APIJ in Dakar, Imam Niang extolled the virtues of Sunni Islam. "Salafism ... has a simple message," he said as he scanned an ornate Koran through reading glasses. "To be a good Muslim, you must follow the practices of the Prophet Mohammed."
Niang went to Koranic schools from age 6 until 27 and later studied in Saudi Arabia. Immediately after he returned in 1989, he and fellow conservatives set up the APIJ in Senegal. Since then, hundreds of modest mint-green and sky-blue mosques financed by the APIJ have sprung up in suburbs of Dakar and fishing villages across the country.
A success for the Salafists was when they gradually took over worship at the main mosque at Dakar's Anta Diop University in the 1990s.
Imam Ismaila Ndiaye, coodinator of Senegal's Salafist movements and preacher at the university, said his strand of Sunni Islam offered an alternative to Sufism, asserting that Senegal's secular state and liberal values were imposed on it by French colonizers. But he said Salafist mosques were not turning Senegalese youth towards jihad.
"If the Catholics can finance projects in Senegal aimed at evangelizing at people, then why shouldn't Saudi Arabia do the same thing?" he said.
He said Gulf businessmen had committed only small sums to Sunni movements in Senegal – $20 million in total over several decades – but a steady stream of funds continues to what he identified as three main pillars of Salafism: the APIJ, al Falah, which was founded in 1975, and a movement on outskirts of Dakar led by firebrand cleric Ahmed Lo, who spent 17 years in Saudi Arabia.
Judging who is winning the contest for influence is tricky. Imam Sherif Mballo, secretary general of the League of AhlulBayt, a pan-African Shi'ite movement founded last August, says there are between 30,000 and 50,000 Shi'ites in Senegal, where the population is 15 million.
Mballo converted to Shi'ism after watching the Iranian revolution on TV, then worked with the Iranian embassy for 25 years, making several visits to Iran. But when it came to establishing his own pro-Iran Shi'ite group, after an initial injection from an Iranian businessman - he declined to say how much - he said he received nothing more.
There are no reliable figures on the numbers of Salafists in Senegal, said the Timbuktu Institute's Sambe. However, he said Salafists control several hugely popular mosques.
Peter Pham, Africa director of the Atlantic Council in Washington, said traditional Senegalese Sufi brotherhoods have more in common with the conservative Sunni strand prevalent in Saudi Arabia than they do with Shi'ites, because Sufism is already part of the Sunni religion.
Some Senegalese find the Sufi traditions of their ancestors old hat and stifling. The opportunity to adopt other versions of Islam is liberating.
Maths teacher Souleymane Sall, 38, converted to Salafism while at school. He liked the pure focus on the prophet's acts, and he was weary with what he saw as the lack of intellectual rigour in the Sufi faith he grew up with.
But after university, a friend lent him a book on Shi'ism and, after doing more research, he started to suspect a lot of bad things the Salafists were saying about it were false.
"Eventually, I concluded that Shi'ism was the right path for me," he told Reuters. "At least for the moment."
Cocks reported from Dakar, Sharafedin from Dubai; Edited by Sara Ledwith and Richard Woods
The views expressed in this article are not those of Reuters News. | 2,080 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886104560.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20170818024629-20170818044629-00340.warc.gz | 0.969562 |
13480bf0-0594-4b7e-884f-f7da59aad9b8 | 2017-08-17T01:57:03+00:00 | 2016-09-30 | 1 | http://douglasgroup.net/pet-food-company-ma-fueled-by-specialty-trends/ | Deb Douglas was recently asked to contribute her expert insights on pet food trends in today’s M&A market on petfoodindustry.com. Her article, below, will also be published in the November issue of Petfood Industry Magazine.
Pet food companies focusing on specialty trends continue to provide market growth opportunities.
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is naturally a “hot topic” in pet food supply. The past five years have shown a flood of transactions—in some cases, for amazingly strong pricing. The fact is that M&A is still holding steady with aggressive activity today. In the US in particular, pet spending is at an all-time high. Total dollars spent and pricing “per unit” continue to rise. However, trade publications and rumors are starting to suggest that, sometime soon, that velocity may diminish.
Mid-size pet food companies and a ‘recession-proof’ industry
For middle-market US companies, we don’t believe that is true. The industry carries a powerful mystique as being one of the few spots in the marketplace that seems to have proven “recession-proof.” That makes it an attractive focus for investors. Additionally, US manufacturing for food products is easier for US access and delivery, and is considered superior and safer than distant deliveries from offshore.
Multiples for mid-size pet food companies historically were average to high, relative to other business segments. The average multiple for a US manufacturer in a middle-size range (US$10 million to US$200 million in sales) might provide sales pricing of around 5–7 x EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation allowances). At the same time, the growing and healthy pet food company might fetch more like a 5.5-6 multiple at the lower edge of the range, up to as much as an 8-9 multiple on the higher end of the range—and even more for the perfect company that gets the fiercest acquisition competition. (We have specific experience with two transactions in 2015, one of which brought 8x EBITDA in pricing and another more than 11x.) Markets continue to be excellent for the leading performers.
Pet food spending clearly remains “hot,” with 2015 pet food spending reaching US$29 billion in the US—a 22.5% increase over 2014. Early indicators are that 2016 trends are continuing the climb.
In spite of this recent history, however, there is word in various publications that the powerful pricing and voracious appetites of buyers must surely be due to subside. Admittedly, it is rare for any industry subset to continue to grow at double-digit paces for more than four or five years in succession. However, for a pet food company of today with a bit of focus in the trending areas going forward, we predict that you may not see any downturn in likely buyer appetites for several more years.
How to sustain industry growth via current and upcoming trends
Companies that focus on healthy and natural pet food trends are clear likely winners. US pet owners have the time and money to insist on higher-quality care. Most pet owners are not first-timers. They have seen and enjoyed dogs in lifelong friendships, often for three to five doggie lifetimes during one human history. They learn more about care and nutrition with each pet generation, and the slightly older owners (the baby boomer-aged consumers) have the means to insist on higher-level care.
High-protein, low-grain or grain-free products have increasing scientific support, also winning consumer loyalties. Pet owners regard their pets, more than ever before, as family members. They seek quality of life and extended life span for their animals today. Higher cost may often be perceived as “well worth it.” Additionally, healthy pet “supplements” have seen impressive growth in the past few years. Once again, this trend is consistent with the focus on supporting quality of life and longevity for our four-legged friends.
Products with new or emerging focus on potential health benefits may be perceived by consumers as worth chasing, even with more limited or difficult to access availability in the marketplace. Twenty years ago, pet owners had a greater tendency to seek the longer-established name brands as a sign of reliability in food for their pets. Today, specialty subsets in retail for focused (often health-oriented) pet products have grown tremendously. Although more difficult for consumers to access, total dollars spent in this venue continue to fare well.
The trends at recent SuperZoo shows alone tell some of the story. The number of exhibitors in the “natural” section increased in 2015 by 30.7% over the prior year. The exhibitor count in “meds/supplements” was up 16.7%. Focus on perceived health benefits for pets continues to climb.
M&A markets for pet products are superb today. Multiples are truly at a record high for growing pet food providers. Companies with a steady eye towards favoring the preferred healthy orientation in new product development have the potential to create greater value today than ever before in history. | 1,064 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886102819.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20170817013033-20170817033033-00691.warc.gz | 0.968428 |
e30d3b98-f567-4f53-ad84-22b204665fa1 | 2017-08-23T09:52:04+00:00 | 2015-01-01 | 0 | http://gerrie-thefriendlyghost.blogspot.com/2015_01_01_archive.html | As an in between posting on a rainy day (it is) and somewhat outside the general interest of this Blog today I share my research on this delicate washed pen and ink drawing by Juliana Wilhelmina Bause (1768-1837) I've recently discovered.
She is mostly remembered by a series of highly regarded copper plate engravings and although described in textbooks and lexicons, I’ve not been able to find them in the Internet. My guess Juliana choose the island designed and constructed in the newly commissioned English gardens (no longer existing) of her husbands city-palace in Leipzig. Anyway, what follows is what I was able to find about the artist on a rainy day, her family, life and her circles in Leipzig.
Park, greenhouses and plan of Löhrs gardens.
Her father Johann Heinrich Bause (Halle 03-01-1738 – 05-01-1814 Leipzig) was an important and highly regarded German copper engraver and professor in the Leipzig Academy.
He was the son of Christian Gotlieb Bause (Halle 1696-1745) and Sophia Elisabeth Dryander (Halle 1705-1761). He is best known for his portraits of writers, poets, nobility and kings often after original paintings by painter to the Royal Court Anton Graff (1736-1813) (above, Bause by Graff) whom he’d met while working in Augsburg in 1759 with engraver Johann Jacob Haid (1704-1767) (below)
Bause always followed closely Graffs original paintings and although he was mainly self-taught and self-instructed took Johann Georg Wille (1715-1808), a royal to the king engraver working in Paris, as his example following his instructions transmitted through their correspondence (works by Wille below).
A printed catalogue of Bause's work appeared in Leipzig in 1786. He married in 1763 Henriette Charlotte Brünner (1742-1818) and they had two very beautiful and talented daughters. Friederike Charlotte (1766-1785), a pianist and musical talent, sadly died at the age of 21. Carl Philip Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) thought highly of her piano and glass harmonica playing skills and so did (Johann Wolfgang von) Goethe (1749-1832) who was a friend of the Bause family and wrote about her extremely good looks.
Sisters Friederike and Juliana Bause.
Her younger sister, the talented Juliana Wilhelmina Bause (1768-1837) married banker Karl Eberhard Löhr (1763-1813) and like her father she became an engraver and painter but only for her own amusement. Known and highly valued are the 8 landscape etchings by her hand after Kobell (prob. Franz 1749-1822), Johann Sebastian Bach Jr. 1748-1778, his father Carl Emanuel Bach and his grandfather Johann Sebastian Sr. ) and Both (prob. Andries Dirksz. 1608-1650) published in 1791.
|Johann Sebastian Bach Jr.|
Recently widowed and forced to leave her house in 1813, ordered by French General Jean Toussaint Arrighi Casanova (1778-1853), a relative of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821). Casanova fought in the battle of Leipzig (16/19 october 1813, the “Völkerschlacht”) where the armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden clashed and Napoleon and the French (with Polish, Italian and German) armies were defeated.
Taking care of her father she moved with him to Weimar where he died a year later leaving her his vast collections of engravings. His last work was a s portrait of his son in law Karl Eberhard Löhr.
Karl Eberhard Löhr was the son of banker Eberhard Heinrich Löhr (1725-1798) in Leipzig who’d made a fortune during the 7 year war (1756-1763).
With this newly gained wealth in 1771 he had transformed a swampy marsh, inherited from his wife’s Rahel Charlotte Barthel’s (1739-1803) father, just outside the old city into lustrous English gardens, a pond, huge greenhouses and an island: “Löhrs Garten” later “Keils Garten”, a Promenade (“Tröndlring”) and a Palace as his house. Rich as a royal Karl Eberhard had build a huge collection of paintings.
Karl-Eberhard and Juliana's daughter Juliane Henriette Löhr married Johann Georg Keil (1781-1857) a poet, scolar and intellectual who managed the estate, bequest and immense collections of his wifes’ two grand-fathers. They returned to the house in 1830 but the family sold it in 1889 when it was transformed in Hotel Fürstenhaus, existing to this day.
All pictures borrowed freely from the internet for friendly, educational and non commercial use only. | 1,124 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886118195.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20170823094122-20170823114122-00101.warc.gz | 0.954509 |
18268d04-8836-4130-ac28-8ea5885c7f82 | 2020-10-26T02:02:39+00:00 | 2020-10-26 | 0 | https://mindthegap.pubpub.org/pub/47c55bz4/release/2 | Across the 52 projects that we have catalogued here, there is great variation across a number of different axes. The following subsections provide some possibilities for subdividing the landscape along some of the more obvious lines.
Some projects we catalogued are straightforwardly oriented to journal publishing. Some (especially given the Mellon Foundation’s recent funding moves1 2) are oriented to monographs and books. But a substantial number occupy a space in between—agnostic with regard to journals or books, and sometimes reaching for new forms altogether.
Several projects we catalogued are designed around a central hosting model where there is considerable value in how the project host supports the software centrally; a prime example is Fulcrum, developed and hosted by the University of Michigan Library and Press. Other projects, like OJS, are designed around a distributed model where anyone can download and deploy the software. An increasing number of projects seem to anticipate a hybrid position in which any number of third-party hosting/integration partners will take care of deployment (and effectively become partners in the operational life of the software). None of these projects, by virtue of their open-source licenses, are strictly constrained to one or other deployment model; our observations here are about how the development is unfolding currently.
As might be expected, we were able to catalogue a wealth of new projects, and a smaller number of older, more established projects. OJS is the longest-running project we catalogued, established in 2002. Some other notable projects are the bibliography manager Zotero (est. 2006), the French journal platform Lodel (est. 2006), the conversion tool Pandoc (est. 2007), the authoring tool Omeka (est. 2008), the annotation platform Hypothes.is (est. 2011), and the Math typesetting system MathJax (est. 2011). By contrast, fully half of our catalogue has emerged since 2015, with more than a dozen of these projects having their first release since 2018.
This, again, makes comparison difficult. Brand new, bursting-with-promise projects simply aren’t directly comparable to those that have weathered time, competition, and the ongoing demands of users. Conversely, longevity tells a story of fitness, but is difficult to make generalizations. A ‘graveyard’ of old and abandoned projects does not really exist, as Github only emerged as a common platform for software development projects in around 2012 - 2013. Projects older than that, even if the source code is still available, are not easily findable.
Very few of the projects we catalogued even do the same things. Some are attempts to create end-to-end functionality for an entire publishing process; an example is the Libero suite from eLife. Others offer very specific functionality, but may be usable in concert with other components; the best example here is Hypothes.is, which does one thing—annotation—very well and can be integrated in a variety of contexts.
To help visualize the functional scope of various development agendas, we propose a hypothetical publishing workflow that covers a number of stages in order to show how various projects address different functional areas. But we must emphasize one serious caveat: even though different projects may address the same workflow stages in this diagram, they most likely do so differently, with different boundaries and different goals. Our focus here is with software development priorities, rather than “features” per se. We thus offer the following diagram for illustrative—but not comparative—purposes:
The projects we catalogued also differ in development features, languages and frameworks, and licenses. Some are well supported by external funding, some struggle to maintain financial support, some (including some important projects) are effectively unfunded. We offer the following summary data, again for illustrative purposes:
License: Seventeen projects are released under the MIT License; seven under the GPL v3, seven under the GPLv2, and seven using a BSD license. The remainder use AGPL, Apache, or ECL licenses. Comparing these numbers with a 2018 report by Ayala Goldstein 2018, the proportions here are close to the proportions for Github as a whole.3
Funding: About a dozen of the projects we catalogued claim multiple funding agencies; this unsurprisingly tends to correlate with the age of the project. Another dozen projects appear to have no funding at all—apart from the developers’ time on the project. At least fourteen of the projects have received funding from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation.
It would be easier to examine publishing software if we all weren’t simultaneously in the midst of reinventing publishing itself. If publishing functions and the scope definition of journal or monograph publishing were stable over time, it would be more straightforward to judge software offerings against a functional standard. But, at the same time that we are re-building publishing infrastructure (in both open-source and proprietary contexts), we are broadly at work redefining publishing itself, as well as the forms and genres that define scholarly communications.
Journal publishing, while the most transformed by a three-decade shift to online distribution, at least sees some stability in its essential forms. A great deal of the innovation in journal publishing is concerned with the drive to scale and production efficiency, leaving the basic form of the article alone (there are of course exceptions, as in eLife’s Reproducible Document Stack and similar data-rich, interactive formats).4
Book publishing is another story, where a key source of innovation comes from the desire to produce and publish interactive scholarly works that have comparable size and significance to a traditional book, but share little with them production-wise. The latter shift has been identified and encouraged by the Mellon Foundation in recent years.5
At the same time, the affordances of web publishing have spawned a host of publication formats and platforms that are web native—neither journal nor book—that proceed less from a sense of traditional forms than a sense of what can be done, quickly and elegantly, online.
These trends complicate our landscape analysis. Some of the projects we catalogued seek very straightforwardly to model existing publishing practices while extending their efficiency or flexibility through digital media. OJS is perhaps the original case, aiming to pave the way to a fluid, open-access ecosystem. Its original design principles sought to embody existing best practices in journal publishing. OJS was not designed to be disruptive; rather its goal was to allow journal publishers to move their existing operations into an online, indexed environment.
An example of modeling existing publishing practices in book production is Editoria, developed by the Coko Foundation, the University of California Press, and a community of other interested academic publishers. Editoria is an editorial and production system for scholarly monographs designed to provide a web-based, collaborative platform with much more output flexibility than traditional proprietary tools offer. Editoria’s aspiration to be a drop-in replacement for existing tools makes it an ambitious development effort, but perhaps a necessary one if uptake in traditional university press operations is the goal.
While tools like OJS and Editoria serve established publication models, many of the tools we catalogued seek to break new ground and open up new possibilities in scholarly communication. MIT’s PubPub provides a full-featured platform for research teams to communicate with colleagues and the wider world; PubPub could be used to publish traditional scholarly works (journals, books), but it opens up a faster, more reader-centric modality that isn’ neatly contained by current publication norms. The University of Minnesota Press and CUNY’s Manifold Scholarship can hold scholarly monographs within it, but the point of the tool is to facilitate and capture the ongoing discourse around a book, rather than just the book’s content. Well-established tools like Omeka and Scalar exist to break new ground with the integration of multiple media and non-linear content organization.
Special-purpose components—from web-based word processors (Wax, Texture, and FidusWriter) to typographic toolkits (Hyphenopoly, KaTeX) and annotation and reference systems (Hypothes.is, Zotero)—often are agnostic to the publishing formats or genres they can serve, with the exception of assuming the Web as a common platform. It is worth noting that we also include contemporary examples of print production tools (Paged.js, Vivliostyle).
The software projects surveyed here represent a variety of approaches to contemporary problems, and as such provide a rich snapshot of contemporary thinking about publishing and software strategies. While the vast majority of these projects are web-based in one way or another, they vary greatly in their priorities and the bids they make to exist in a much larger ecosystem. The following are some significant trends we noted:
Most of the software we surveyed involves representation of text: for authoring and editing purposes and for display and publication. XML is central, in one way or another, to almost all of the projects. But what does that mean, exactly? Two dominant approaches to XML are evident: the first, employing the JATS XML schema for rich semantic markup and robust in-document metadata, seems to be a popular choice with projects focused on journal publishing workflows. The Texture editor from the Substance Consortium (including eLife and PKP) provides an excellent open-source, JATS-based authoring and editing platform which can then be incorporated into other tools. ELife’s Libero Producer is designed around Texture, building a JATS-native6 editing interface right into the core of eLife’s platform. OJS, which for most of its history has eschewed dealing with the text directly (opting to move .doc and .pdf files through its review workflow), now allows Texture integration as an option, and PKP seems enthusiastic about Texture’s development and future. Janeway, designed for the Open Library of the Humanities platform, is also based on JATS and seems poised to adopt Texture as well. This is a potentially important moment for JATS XML. While a ‘standard,’ JATS has not enjoyed actual standardized practice, because JATS-based workflows are typically buried in proprietary toolchains owned by corporate publishers. The emergence of an open, common editing tool for JATS is a welcome development for XML-based publishing ambitions.
The second major current of XML development is the use of web-native HTML as the basis for content and workflow. Owing to the ubiquity of this format and the wealth of readily available tools and standard ways of working, many of the projects we surveyed have opted for an HTML-first approach. This is true of journal-friendly projects like PubPub and Vega, but is especially the case with the more book-oriented projects such as Fulcrum, Manifold, Editoria, Pressbooks, and Scalar. In an HTML-based workflow, rendering in the browser comes more or less for free, and the associated EPUB standard (which includes HTML as its core text representation) provides a handy distribution or import/export format. More interestingly, authoring and editing tools for HTML are by now in their third or fourth generation, and sophisticated software is not hard to come by. An emerging open-source toolkit, ProseMirror has already seen significant uptake on the web (major news sites like New YorkTimes and The Guardian have reportedly built editorial tools around ProseMirror) owing to features like collaborative editing. ProseMirros is found in PubPub, Coko’s Wax editor (part of Editoria), and the science-oriented FidusWriter. There seems to be increasing interest in ProseMirror as an adaptable foundation for building specialized HTML editing environments.7
A third alternative, which puts markdown before markup, is seen in some production systems such as ElectricBook and Getty’s Quire. The markdown approach relies on a simplest-possible authoring environment (in a text editor) and up-converting to HTML or other XML formats. Markdown is also a straightforward import format for tools like Manifold, PubPub, and Pandoc. ProseMirror seems able to work as easily with markdown as with HTML, so the apparent distinctiveness of a markdown-based workflow may fade over time.
LaTeX deserves a mention here. One of the original OSS publishing tools (LaTeX, and TeX especially, predate the term “open-source” by many years), LaTeX is still alive and well in scientific publishing. Its support for equations and formulae remains hard to beat, despite efforts to move LaTeX’s features into more modern environments. In our survey, LaTeX appears in only a few cases. We examined here one contemporary platform, Tectonic, which seems to be an easily adoptable typesetting tool. We considered including Overleaf, the leading commercial LaTeX-based production system, as their codebase is open-source and accessible on Github, but we ultimately decided to remove it as it seems to have no substantial interest beyond Overleaf’s own application. LaTeX also appears in a few web-typography tools aimed at math typesetting: KaTeX from the Khan Academy, and MathJax, both of which aim to provide a browser-native math typesetting system that does what LaTeX does, and indeed can speak LaTeX.
Despite the maturing contexts of XML in publishing, it appears to be a largely unchallenged fact that “authors will write in Word.” Word processor documents, despite the advent of XML file formats over the past decade, are just not structured documents, because the scope of possibilities that an author can express in a tool like Word is not constrained by any schema. Further, the vast legacy of online publishing has been the proliferation of PDF files—again, not a structured content format. So any publishing system that attempts to leverage structured content while allowing content to come from unstructured sources must have a strategy for ingesting these source documents and making sense of them.
This problem is as old as XML—indeed as old as SGML—and toolchains to solve the problem as numerous as the grasses; it appears that people continue to build these today. The emergence of XML-based word-processor file formats at least has made parsing a bit more straightforward, allowing XSLT to be used to at least take the original document apart. In our landscape survey, we have catalogued at least half a dozen projects dedicated to import and conversion, and at least as many larger projects have ingest tools built into them.
The traditional way to convert legacy documents is to parse them—either via XSLT or some other way of reading the native file format, and then attempting to make reasonable guesses about what the formatting means: the big, boldfaced line at the beginning of an article is likely the title, for instance. If the original document was formatted using named paragraph- or character styles, so much the better. Some of these parsing tools are mature and can handle a good many variations. Pandoc, for instance, is a robust conversion utility that has been in development for over a decade, with support for dozens of input and export formats. It is usable as a tool on its own, but it is also incorporated as a library or a component in several of the tools in our survey.
A traditional strategy for managing conversion from legacy formats is to constrain the scope of possibilities. Building a conversion tool around documents that consistently look like journal articles is easier than building a general-purpose converter. PKP’s Open Typesetting Stack8; has been designed using this approach, as is OpenEdition’s Lodel. Open Typesetting Stack is composed of a series of tools that are designed to take apart journal articles: front matter, body text, bibliographic references, and so on.
A newer approach altogether is to forgo parsing the internals of a file and instead pay attention to the visual and presentational characteristics of a PDF. Grobid, a machine-learning tool trained on a corpus of many thousands of journal articles, exemplifies this strategy. The latest versions of PKP’s Open Typesetting Stack include Grobid in its arsenal. Machine-learning tools improve over time and over larger datasets, so it seems likely that this approach will become common, if not dominant, in large-scale conversion and ingest of journal articles. Grobid —like several other tools (including le-tex Transpect, Lodel)—uses the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) extremely rich and flexible descriptive XML tagset as an intermediate conversion target before normalizing to JATS XML for publication purposes.
Scholarly publishing is typically characterized by formal editorial review processes, including blind peer review. Modeling and capturing these formal review stages in software is a hallmark of scholarly publishing applications. OJS first established a formal model for peer review workflow nearly twenty years ago, designed around a hierarchy of editorial authority, explicit hand-offs from stage to stage, and a series of automated email reminders keeping every member of the process on task. OJS’s fine-grained, formal peer review has clearly stood the test of time (the model was made more modular in OJS 3), but developers and aspirants have been re-thinking and re-building editorial and review workflows ever since. The most recent generation of publishing software carries on this tradition, and re-designing workflow management is a feature in most of the projects we examined.
Some approaches aim to make submission and review simpler. PubPub, for instance, aims to make collaborative reviews easy and intuitive. Vega takes a similar approach, establishing a new conceptual vocabulary around the review model. Manifold brings robust commenting and annotation to its review process, perhaps more in the spirit of ‘open review.’ Ubiquity Press, while relying on OJS as the core of their journal-publishing platform, have made customizations for article review and have built an entirely different system, Rua, for managing book editorial processes.
The Coko Foundation and its partners have taken a somewhat different approach by building a layered and modular framework for workflows. Coko’s PubSweet framework exposes a set of components for integration. Specific applications—like eLife’s Libero Reviewer or Hindawi’s Phenom—configure these to the specific business/editorial needs of their publishers. EuropePMC and Wormbase’s micropublications framework also manage submissions this way. On the book-publishing side, Editoria is also built on top of the PubSweet framework, as is the BookSprints platform. As such there are at least six different workflow applications based on the PubSweet workflow system, and Coko’s promise is that many more are possible.
Whatever the specifics of workflow management in various contexts, it would appear that many people still see this as a problem that needs a solution—or indeed more solutions. It may be the case that workflow modeling is something that resists being solved once and for all. In an interview, one of the PKP team quipped that once some of the newer projects have been around for as long as OJS has—and if they are to serve a diverse user base—their simple workflows will need to evolve to serve those diverse needs. The many attempts to address workflow models in the current catalogue seems to support this view.
Many of the projects in this survey also seek to push the envelope, to expand the possibilities of digital scholarly publishing. These range from infrastructural innovation to blue-sky revolutionary thinking—like dokie.li’s decentralized, distributed authoring/publishing project, which is part of a rethink of the entire World-Wide Web from a linked-data perspective. Most projects we surveyed are a little more conventional, but many break new ground in thinking about how scholarly communications actually happens.
The University of Michigan’s Fulcrum project, for instance, makes a significant structural change in how we think about infrastructure. Fulcrum does not take great strides with user interface, but by building a robust, media-friendly ebook platform on top of the Samvera repository, developing robust metadata linkages between books and media objects, and integrating a set of modular tools for displaying and embedding these, Fulcrum has potentially emerged as a major new platform for digital book distribution, one that several other publishers seem to find attractive. Fulcrum potentially changes the ecosystem for scholarly ebooks, making media rich content workable and discoverable, at scale.
The University of Minnesota & CUNY Graduate Centre’s Manifold Scholarship also elegantly integrates a set of good ideas, while pushing out the post-production scope for book-length works. Manifold aspires to gather the discourse around a book—review, commentary, annotation, and even social media discourse—and collect it within the book itself. The result is that books expand over time as they gather their surrounding discourse. Manifold was initially designed as a monograph publication tool but has already found applications in open educational resources and in critical digital editions, owing to its reader-focused feature set.
MIT’s Knowledge Futures Group offers PubPub, a scholarly publishing tool that hosts journals, books, reports, and related content types, but seems poised to gain a devoted audience by making it incredibly easy for a research lab or team of like-minded scholars to collaboratively develop and publish media-rich content on an ongoing basis. It is early yet to tell if PubPub will evolve into a research-publishing platform or a turn-key publishing alternative. Vega, designed by Cheryl Ball after many years of publishing the Kairos journal, aims to bring multi-media authoring and collaboration into the centre of scholarly discourse. Vega has been long anticipated by those inspired by the promise of its model; it appeared in alpha release in early 2019.
Omeka has been in development for more than a decade already, but it, as well as ANVC’s Scalar, and Washington State University’s Mukurtu pushes on the boundaries of what a book might be in a natively digital mode. Omeka, Scalar, and Mukurtu have all been focused on scholars and researchers first, as opposed to presses, but the wealth of content and projects published on these systems already (including the Ravenspace project from the University of British Columbia and University of Washington Presses, which draws in ways on all three) means that these platforms are part of the discourse around the nature of the book in an online context. Stanford University Press’s embrace of Scalar-based projects is evidence that this platform is being taken seriously by traditional publishers.
An emerging genre of writing tools—exemplified by Jupyter Notebooks, RStudio’s Shiny, and the Stencila project (part of eLife’s Reproducible Document Stack initiative)—integrates written documentation with live code and data in a publishable interactive environment. A researcher can write an article, incorporate a dataset, and feature live code snippets and data visualizations in the body of the article. Shared or published online, a reader can then interact with the data or the code directly, effectively bringing into play a richer way of constructing and communicating a scholarly or scientific argument. Shared between two researchers, these tools are clever enough; all three projects are pushing towards much broader scale publication of interactive documents.
Two well-established projects—the Hypothes.is annotation system and the Zotero reference management software—plus one newer one, the Rebus Foundation’s Ink platform for research-based reading—deserve mention here too. These are not publishing tools per se, but they serve critical parts of the publishing and scholarly ecosystem. Hypothes.is, while not being the only approach to annotation represented here, has established a standard approach to web annotation that now appears to be essential. Zotero, which as a networked platform is much more than the personal reference manager most people use it for, is the primary open-source platform for large-scale bibliography handling. Both Hypothes.is and Zotero should, at this point in time, be judged in terms of their integration with other applications in the publishing and scholarship ecosystem; certainly no one should be developing in this space without considering the contributions already made by these tools. Which brings us to the Rebus Foundation’s Ink project: funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, Ink is an experiment in developing a better integrated environment for scholarly reading, reference and document management, and annotation. Ink’s development is made with tools like Hypothes.is and Zotero already established; if it comes to fruition, it should shift the thinking around what happens to scholarly publications when they reach readers, an aspect somewhat under-developed currently.
Waters, Donald., “The Monograph Is Dead! Long Live the Monograph!”‚ presented at the Jisc-CNI Leadership Conference, July 2, 2018. https://www.slideshare.net/JISC/the-monograph-is-dead-long-live-the-monograph
Maxwell, John W., Alessandra Bordini, and Katie Shamash. “Reassembling Scholarly Communications: An Evaluation of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation‚” Monograph Initiative (Final Report, May 2016).‚ Journal of Electronic Publishing 20, no. 1 (2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0020.101
Goldstein, Ayala., “Top 10 Open Source Licenses in 2018: Trends and Predictions.‚” Whitesource, December 13, 2018. https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/top-open-source-licenses-trends-and-predictions
See: Jupyter Notebooks; Shiny; Stencila.
Waters, "Long Live the Monograph!"
Texture's XML file format is .dar, which is an encapsulated collection of XML content (compliant with a Texture-specific JATS subset) and its related assets, plus a manifest file listing the contents. See https://github.com/substance/dar
See, for commentary, Triglav, Jure., “Open Source Collaborative Text Editors.,” A Case for Spaceships (blog), May 7, 2019. https://juretriglav.si/open-source-collaborative-text-editors/
PKP's Open Typesetting Stack is based in part on Martin Eve's now-dormant meTypeset conversion tool. Both are unfortunately misnamed, as they aren't typesetting tools at all. | 5,517 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107890108.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20201026002022-20201026032022-00011.warc.gz | 0.936491 |
44201b9a-353d-4567-8b7f-e2213d0b8abf | 2022-05-16T12:51:47+00:00 | 2020-01-01 | 0 | https://docs.collab.net/teamforge200/security-faqs.html | What are the implications of deprecating TLS protocol versions 1.0 and 1.1?
In addition to security vulnerabilities, TLS protocol versions 1.0 and 1.1 do not support modern cryptographic algorithms. The software industry (including popular browsers such as Chrome, FireFox and so on) is set to deprecate the TLS protocol versions 1.0 and 1.1 by March 2020 and so is TeamForge. Customers are therefore advised to upgrade your sites to be able to negotiate with TLS 1.2 connections. Upgrade your clients to the latest version in case you face any SSL handshake issues while connecting to TeamForge.
With this move to deprecate TLS protocol versions 1.0 and 1.1, we must fix the
SSLCipherSuite options in the
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file and restart the Apache server.
Do this where you have Apache running. For example, TeamForge application server and Subversion servers have Apache.
SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3 -TLSv1 -TLSv1.1 SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
You can also have this fixed permanently by setting up the
site-options.conf tokens for TeamForge 18.1 and later.
SSL_PROTOCOL= all -SSLv3 -TLSv1 -TLSv1.1 SSL_CIPHER_SUITE=ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 teamforge provision
What are the security features available in TeamForge?
TeamForge is equipped with a number of security features, which include:
- SELinux Support
- SSL Support
- Site option tokens to enforce password control policies
- Automatic password creation and encryption
- Password obfuscation
- Prevention of cross-site scripting
- Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Path Based Permissions (PBP)
- Size restriction for document uploads
- Document safe download mode
- Incorrect login attempts-account lock feature
- SCM_DEFAULT_SHARED_SECRET to allow SCM Integrations to securely communicate with TeamForge
- Support for OAuth/LDAP/SAML
- Restrict domains for CSRF, Prohibit harmful file uploads
After switching to ADS authentication, why did the Create button disappear from the user admin section?
When using external authentication such as LDAP, creating users from within the application is disabled. All users must be created via LDAP.
See login-config.xml for more information.
Can I block project data from public search engines?
Yes, edit the robots.txt file to specify the pages or directories that should not be indexed by search engines.
If your site has some content that you may not want to be publicly searched for, or if some search engine hits are causing the site to slow down, you can make this change.
Only one robots.txt file can be created for a site. This file can contain a list of url patterns that should not be indexed, against the web crawler name.
The default robots.txt is available in the SITE_DIR/var folder. The robots.txt file is accessible without logging into CollabNet TeamForge, via the
domain/robots.txt URL. You can update and commit the robots.txt file into the branding root directory, and the system then places the file in the
How can I enforce strong passwords?
You can configure the application to reject passwords that do not meet your security criteria.
To enforce password requirements, place the following lines in
system.password.min-length=5 password.requiresNumber=true password.requiresNonAlphaNum=true password.requiresMixedCase=true
Once these lines are in place, restart TeamForge for them to take effect. The above example would require a password of at least 5 characters that must include at least one (1) mixed case letter, at least one (1) number, and at least one non-alphabetic character, e.g. Us3r!
How do I configure Subversion to authenticate against multiple LDAP domains?
For some configurations, a Subversion server may need to be authenticated against multiple LDAP domains. This is possible by modifying the Apache configuration.
This is now possible due to the mod_authn_alias module for Apache. The external link for the module contains multiple usage scenarios. You will need to confirm that your Apache has been compiled with the module enabled. (This is the case for CollabNet Subversion binary packages since 1.5.4). If it is compiled as a module, make sure it is enabled via the LoadModule directive in your Apache configuration.
Example for configuration usage for authentication against three LDAP servers :
<AuthnProviderAlias ldap ldap-US> AuthLDAPBindDN cn=ldapuser,o=company AuthLDAPBindPassword password AuthLDAPURL ldap://ldap-us.company.local/ou=Developers,o=company?sub?(objectClass=*) </AuthnProviderAlias> <AuthnProviderAlias ldap ldap-EU> AuthLDAPBindDN cn=ldapuser,o=company AuthLDAPBindPassword password AuthLDAPURL ldap://ldap-EU.company.local/ou=Developers,o=company?sub?(objectClass=*) </AuthnProviderAlias> <AuthnProviderAlias ldap ldap-IN> AuthLDAPBindDN cn=ldapuser,o=company AuthLDAPBindPassword password AuthLDAPURL ldap://ldap-in.company.local/ou=Developers,o=company?sub?(objectClass=*) </AuthnProviderAlias> <Location /svn> DAV svn SVNParentPath /opt/subversion/repos AuthType Basic AuthName "Subversion Repository" AuthBasicProvider ldap-US ldap-EU ldap-IN AuthzLDAPAuthoritative off Require valid-user </Location>
How do I authenticate multiple LDAP via Apache?
If you need to add multiple OU= values in the LDAP url you must have separate LDAP urls and utilize AuthnProviderAlias to check both LDAP searches.
Use the following AuthnProviderAlias to check LDAP searches.
LoadModule authn_alias_module modules/mod_authn_alias.so <AuthnProviderAlias ldap ldap-alias1> AuthLDAPBindDN cn=youruser,o=ctx AuthLDAPBindPassword yourpassword AuthLDAPURL ldap://ldap.host/o=ctx </AuthnProviderAlias> <AuthnProviderAlias ldap ldap-other-alias> AuthLDAPBindDN cn=yourotheruser,o=dev AuthLDAPBindPassword yourotherpassword AuthLDAPURL ldap://other.ldap.host/o=dev?cn </AuthnProviderAlias> Alias /secure /webpages/secure <Directory /webpages/secure> Order deny,allow Allow from all AuthBasicProvider ldap-other-alias ldap-alias1 AuthType Basic AuthName LDAP_Protected_Place AuthzLDAPAuthoritative off Require valid-user </Directory>
How does TeamForge authenticate CVS users?
CVS is treated as a special case when managed by a TeamForge site. It is not authenticated in the same way as SOAP API clients.
CVS relies on the Linux operating system to provide access and security. This includes permissions on individual repositories and access to the server itself. To add users, change passwords, create repositories, etc., the TeamForge integration simply changes the appropriate settings in the Linux operating system.
Users access CVS via an encrypted SSH session. To support this, TeamForge creates accounts on the Linux server that hosts the CVS repository. A typical CVS repository is created in the /cvsroot directory and is owned by root, with a group assigned by TeamForge. To gain access to a repository, TeamForge will add a user to the appropriate system group.
When TeamForge detects that a user’s password has changed, it changes the password for that user on the Linux server too.
Users also have the option to use SSH keys or Kerberos tickets.
When a user is added to the Linux server, the login shell is cvssh, which limits their activities to CVS commands.
Password Changes under Internal Authentication
To set the password for the user at the operating system level, TeamForge needs to have the clear-text version of the users password. The only time TeamForge has this is when the user uses the Change Password form in the Web UI. This is because the database-stored version, as an MD5 Password Hash, is a one-way encryption and can’t be decrypted.
On a successful password update, TeamForge makes a SOAP call to the integration server that manages CVS. For this reason, the integration server must be SSL-enabled.
Password Changes under External Authentication
When a password change happens in an external authentication system, TeamForge does not immediately know that the password has changed. TeamForge needs a way to detect that the password has changed.
To accomplish this it keeps a copy of the last password the user successfully logged in with as an MD5 Password Hash in the same database table and field that it normally uses for Internal Authentication.
Now that TeamForge has a reference point, it still needs a clear-text copy of the password to make the change at the Linux operating system level. The only time this is available is when the user logs into TeamForge via the Web UI or SOAP API. So upon a successful login TeamForge compares the password to the encrypted one. If it is different it tells the Linux operating system to change the users password and then saves it in the database (as an MD5 Password hash).
Until the user logs into TeamForge, the CVS server will still have and accept the old password. There is no CVS server-side way to trigger a password update, unless an alternative method is used, such as LDAP or Kerberos.
Because users use SSH to access a TeamForge-managed CVS server, it is possible to configure SSH to accept other authentication features such as SSH keys and Kerberos tickets. It is even possible to disable the use of passwords and require the use of other alternative methods.
TeamForge supports SSH Keys natively. The user uploads their public key into their profile under “My Settings” in the TeamForge Web UI. The key will automatically be copied to each CVS server that TeamForge manages.
If TeamForge is using External Authentication and the method is Kerberos, then SSH can be configured to use the same Kerberos server. This allows users to use Kerberos tickets for CVS operations.
Linux supports LDAP as an authentication source. If TeamForge is using External Authentication and the source is LDAP, then SSH can also use that same source. When you do this, passwords and user account status are observed in real time instead of as a mirror of TeamForge.
Can the users be forced to change their passwords at first login?
Yes, as a site administrator you can configure the CollabNet TeamForge site options to force the users to change their passwords at first login.
REQUIRE_USER_PASSWORD_CHANGE attribute as
true in the
site-options.conf file enforces password change on first login into CollabNet TeamForge.
Does TeamForge work with LDAP?
Yes, you can have your TeamForge installation authenticate against an LDAP server.
This is handy when users want to use a variety of different resources without having to maintain credentials for each one separately.
CollabNet TeamForge is a JBoss2 based application and relies on the JBoss JAAS service for user authentication. This enables a TeamForge site to authenticate users internally or externally.
Internal User Authentication
Out of the box, TeamForge relies on its local database to manage user accounts. This includes username, password, full name, email address and a variety of other meta data values. Passwords are stored in the database using the standard MD5 Password hashing algorithm1. The database is only accessible by the application itself and a user with root access to the physical server. While running in this default configuration users are allowed to change their passwords in TeamForge, and any user with site administration privileges can create and approve new user accounts.
External User Authentication
The JAAS service comes with several standard providers that allow TeamForge to be integrated with services such as LDAP, Active Directory and Kerberos. The JAAS service allows more than one source to be configured in the event several sources are needed.
To ensure that you are not locked out of your site, the site administrator account is always validated by TeamForge, not by LDAP.
LDAP accounts must conform to the TeamForge rules for user names and passwords. For example:
If a password is used in LDAP that is shorter than the minimum allowable password length in TeamForge, you cannot create the user in TeamForge.
A user name that starts with a special character, such as an underscore, will not be accepted by TeamForge, even if it is valid in LDAP.
(For detailed TeamForge user name and password rules, see Create a New User Account).
How is life different for the user under external authentication?
When you turn external integration on, every user account (except the site administrator account) must have a matching LDAP entry to log in. This may require changing some existing accounts to match their corresponding LDAP records. (Accounts created after LDAP is in place are validated with the LDAP server when they are created, so you don’t have to worry about this.)
Every login attempt (Web UI and SOAP access) is passed to the external provider. This means that any changes to the user status in the external system take effect immediately. Users who have already logged in and have valid sessions are not affected.
When TeamForge is using internal authentication, a site administrator can change a user’s password. This is disabled for external authentication.
Under external authentication, passwords can’t be changed in the TeamForge web UI. Users have to use the interface provided by the third-party authentication source to change their password. Such password changes are available immediately to TeamForge for the next login attempt.
Site administrators can no longer create user accounts. The end user must create their own account by logging into TeamForge just like a user who already has an account. At that point TeamForge detects that a new account needs to be created and presents the new user with a registration form, which requests the user’s password n the external authentication system. On submit, TeamForge verifies the user account with the external system, and only if the username/password is verified does TeamForge create the new account.
Once a new user has created their account, TeamForge can optionally be configured to put every new account in a pending status so that a site administrator can approve the new account. By default, new users will have immediate access to the system.
LDAP for Source Control
LDAP is integrated into your TeamForge source control services.
For Subversion, the integration server queries TeamForge as needed.
CVS authentication is not managed directly by LDAP, but each TeamForge user’s SCM password is synchronized automatically with the user’s LDAP password upon logging into TeamForge.
What can go wrong?
When TeamForge is configured to authenticate against an LDAP server and the LDAP server is down, all TeamForge authentication is disabled until the LDAP server is restored.
If a user does not exist on the LDAP server, or is deleted from the server, that user cannot log into TeamForge.
Why do I get the “Invalid command ‘AuthLDAPAuthoritative’” error when I try to set LDAP for SVN users?
The invalid command
AuthLDAPAuthoritative error may occur if you need to upgrade Apache from version 2.0 to 2.2.
CollabNet Subversion 1.5 is bundled with the latest version of Apache (currently 2.2.x). It includes the module mod_authnz_ldap and does not include mod_auth_ldap. Hence compatibility issues arise due to missing directives. Upgrade your Apache version to 2.2 if you get the following error when trying to install CollabNet SVN:
bash-3.00# /etc/init.d/collabnet_subversion start Starting CollabNet Subversion: Syntax error on line 29 of /etc/opt/CollabNet_Subversion/conf/collabnet_subversion_httpd.conf: Invalid command 'AuthLDAPAuthoritative', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration FAILED
How does TeamForge handle multiple redundant LDAP servers?
When configuring LDAP authentication for a TeamForge instance, there may be a business need for using multiple LDAP servers.
Follow the guidelines below for configuring.
The additional LDAP servers can be added to the
java.naming.provider.url option in
login-config.xml: <module-option name="java.naming.provider.url"> ldap://primary/ ldap://secondary/</module-option>
Once the primary and secondary servers have been defined, they will be consulted in order of definition for every authentication request. First the primary, and if the primary fails, then the secondary. This prevents specifying multiple servers for round-robin handling of authentication, but it can still be used for redundancy needs.
What user activities are tracked?
In case of a data security compromise, a record of who is performing what activities will help resolve some of the security issues.
Typically web servers log every page (or URL) being accessed, including the IP address of the user, date and time of access, etc. These logs are very useful in tracking the source of any security violations that may occur.
CollabNet TeamForge auditing tools are a powerful way to track unwanted and/or unauthorized changes within the system.
J2EE Architecture and Security
CollabNet TeamForge is a J2EE application that employs three-tier architecture to provide a secure environment for mission-critical data.
In a multi-tier architecture, access to each tier is restricted to the tier above it, effectively securing the tiers behind the firewall. For example, while clients (users accessing the system through a web) access the web server, they neither have access to the application and backend servers nor are they aware of their existence.
Similarly, the web server itself does not have access to the backend servers (database, SCM, mail etc.)
Exceptions to this rule include:
Direct client access provided to the SCM servers. SCM servers are accessed across the firewall typically through SSH protocol (for CVS), or HTTP or HTTPS (for Subversion). SCM server data is also accessible in a view only mode through the web interface.
Clients must have access to the mail server for posting messages to mailing lists.
Mail server must have access to deliver messages across the firewall.
Clients can also access the SOAP APIs through the web server. The web server in turn forwards SOAP requests to the application server for processing.
With self signed certificates in place, what is the recommended protocol (SSH or HTTPS) to use while cloning a Git repository from a TeamForge Git server running on RHEL/CentOS?
When using a self-signed certificate on a Teamforge Git server, you cannot clone a repository using the standard git client on RHEL/CentOS.
In RHEL/CentOS, the Linux certificates used by git and other tools are stored in the
/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca- bundle.trust.crt file. This file is managed by the RPM package system. If a certificate is added to the ca-bundle.trust.crt file, Trusted Root Certification Authority updates are not installed automatically which in turn leaves the system vulnerable to potential attacks.
An alternative way for adding trusted certificates is available at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9072376/configure-git-to-accept-a-particular-self-signed-server-certificate-for-a-partic. However, it appears that some tools do not read files outside of the main bundle.
Therefore, it is recommended to use SSH protocol while cloning a git repository from a TeamForge Git server running on RHEL/CentOS.
Do I have to use the password provided by administrator always?
No, you don’t have to use the password provided by administrator beyond your first login into CollabNet TeamForge.
The site administrator may have provided you with a user name and password after creating your user account in CollabNet TeamForge. When you login using those credentials, you might be asked to change your password for security reasons. At this time, you can set a password of your choice. | 4,831 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662510117.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20220516104933-20220516134933-00422.warc.gz | 0.832646 |
5a557ea2-83ab-49fa-be8b-f537ce7681e7 | 2016-07-31T09:38:35+00:00 | 2016-07-31 | 0 | http://motortrendcertified.com/?tgt=cons | All Motor Trend Certified Vehicles undergo a COMPREHENSIVE inspection by a Motor Trend Certified Technician.
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Anything that doesn’t meet Motor Trend Certified national standards is repaired or replaced to ensure confidence in your Motor Trend Certified Vehicle.
You don’t have to fear unexpected repair costs. These benefits make your vehicle a pleasure to own and drive.
Motor Trend certifies any make and model vehicle as long as it meets Motor Trend national standards.
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With Motor Trend® Certified Vehicles, two of the biggest automotive brands, Motor Trend and EasyCare, guarantee that you will drive away from the dealership confident - and stay confident - in your pre-owned vehicle. Motor Trend certifies any make and model vehicle as long as it meets Motor Trend national standards.
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Never get locked out again! Now most keys have been engineered to protect against theft. This means that the cost of replacing a key could be literally hundreds of dollars. EasyCare™ KeyCare not only protects you against the expense of lost or stolen keys, but can eliminate the hassles of an already stressful situation. | 391 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257828314.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071028-00102-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.934363 |
8d610caa-3651-4ce7-af7d-e4f33a014488 | 2016-07-24T21:31:57+00:00 | 2012-11-10 | 0 | https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2012/11/10/the-many-lives-anna-karenina/QRQVW5Pv57FhEpW5UUiHDO/story.html | Glamour, adultery, and sex never get old. Neither do love triangles, the sturdiest of all plot devices. That helps to explain why the passionate heroine of Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina” — published in Russia 134 years ago — has seduced so many film directors, composers, choreographers, dancers, actors, even fashion designers. Willful and wealthy, vivacious and aristocratic, Anna combines sex appeal with maternal devotion, against an exotically snowy backdrop of doomed czarist opulence.
Bearded seer Tolstoy could never have guessed that one day Banana Republic would launch an Anna Karenina clothing collection. Or that Oprah Winfrey would select the novel for her television book club.
Even the raging moralist Tolstoy (1828-1910) was won over by Anna’s charms. He considered her behavior — she abandons her son for her lover — sinful, but Tolstoy still made Anna increasingly sympathetic in five succeeding drafts. Tolstoy, of course, had plenty of issues around fidelity and suffered acute guilt over his own adulterous sexual urges. In the end, he made Anna vastly more appealing than the two men who destroy her: a cold bureaucrat husband and an opportunistic cavalry officer. Tolstoy does punish Anna, of course. Badly. But not before making us all fall in love with her, too.
“Anna Karenina” has inspired operas, ballets, musicals, radio plays, and nearly 30 films and television series. The first film adaptation appeared in Russia just four years after Tolstoy’s death. A year later, Fox Film Corporation shot the first American “Anna,” starring Danish actress Betty Nansen. It flopped, along with Nansen’s film career. But in 1927, the Swedish vamp Greta Garbo proved that Anna could make it on the silver screen. Surely it helped that Garbo’s real-life boyfriend John Gilbert took the role of Anna’s lover Vronsky. Together they generated enough “Heat” (that was the film’s original title, later changed to “Love”) to make the story work. Worried that Tolstoy’s ending (spoiler alert: she throws herself under a train) would be a bummer, cautious MGM executives supplied an alternative happy one reuniting the lovers after the hateful husband’s death. Theaters could choose which one to show; most went for happy ever after.
Garbo reprised the role of Anna for MGM in a 1935 sound film that returned to Tolstoy’s title. This time, Fredric March played Vronsky, although velvet-voiced Basil Rathbone acted him right off the screen as Karenin, Anna’s chilly and aloof spouse. By this time Garbo was already associated with Russian roles, such as the temperamental ballerina Grusinskaya (“I vant to be alone!”) in “Grand Hotel” (1932). For Hollywood casting directors, accents were fairly interchangeable, and Garbo’s Swedish accent sounded plenty Russian — in English, at least. Most of the cast members speak in upper-class British, since Hollywood producers believed that imitating hoity-toity British manners bestowed the aura of Russian aristocratic life.
In adapting Tolstoy’s novel, director Clarence Brown and his screenwriters struggled to overcome the new limitations imposed by the prudish censorship enforced by the Production Code Administration (PCA). Legendary producer David Selznick complained to the PCA, “I don’t know how love scenes can be played, particularly in a story of this kind, without physical contact.” Indeed. The battle with the censors cast a pall over the filming, and marred the underheated finished product. Onscreen together, Garbo and March seem like strangers.
But languid Garbo, her eyelashes fluttering under luxurious fur hats, her lovely hands swathed in muffs, rescues the film. Her impetuous Anna is mystical, fatalistic, moody, and flirtatious. A keening musical score compiled from Tchaikovsky’s greatest hits yanks at the heartstrings.
Nine years after starring as Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” Vivien Leigh took a stab at Anna in a high-toned 1948 production adapted by a team of writers that included French playwright Jean Anouilh. Gloomy and talky, this black-and-white version feels confined and cerebral, without the biological and physical force that propels Tolstoy’s novel. Leigh misses the playfulness and sparkle in Anna’s character. And the crucial train scenes use a toy model belonging in a cartoon.
In 1967, USSR’s Mosfilm Studios released a lavishly expensive, epic “Anna Karenina” shot on location in Russia that finally supplied the dynamic authenticity lacking in earlier versions. Veteran Alexander Zarkhi directed, in lush color with close attention to period detail. Enchanting Tatiana Samoilova, famous for her starring role in the classic 1957 war film “The Cranes Are Flying,” glows as Anna, with exotic looks and trembling vulnerability. This version (currently unavailable) would be better known if the 1968 Cannes International Film Festival where it was to be screened had not been canceled due to student riots in France.
The first American “Anna Karenina” shot in Russia was directed by Bernard Rose in 1997, with Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean displaying plenty of white flesh in the seduction scene. Helen McCrory starred as Anna in a critically acclaimed drawing-room style series released for television by PBS and Channel Four in Britain in 2001. The less said about some other versions — like a 1985 TV movie featuring Jacqueline Bisset as Anna and Christopher Reeve as Vronsky — the better. Even Anna had better taste than to fall for Superman.Harlow Robinson can be
reached at harlo@ | 1,282 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257824146.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071024-00136-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.946219 |
8624e253-3a45-4463-9cae-c9be2587161f | 2022-05-18T22:21:05+00:00 | 2018-12-31 | 0 | https://diyhorseownership.com/2018-goals-review/ | Because of our impending move, my 2018 goals were a bit sparse and honestly I’ve not done the best job of achieving them. However, looking back at the post did remind me about some things I need to work on again in 2019.
✔ Read More
I set my GoodReads goal at 75, but I hoped to read 125+ books in 2018. I made it to 130, which is generally a success, but the quantity wasn’t the whole point. I wrote in my goal post “the total number of books isn’t really my goal though; I just want to spend more time reading real books instead of wasting time online.” I was really good about that before the move, but after the move I was so busy that sitting down with a book seemed like too much and I would decide to just look at Instagram for a “few minutes.” I need to get back on this goal in 2019.
✘ Nilla Soundness
“It’d be cool if we could make it to 2019 without any more injuries.” Well, that was a big, fat fail. She re-injured herself in January of 2018, had until August off and was declared 100% healed and ready to return to work then. She did well with rehab work before the snow put a halt to all riding. She turned up with swelling in the suspensory area again a few weeks ago. My best guess is she slipped on the ice. We’ll see what she looks like in the spring.
✔ Figure out what to do with Levi
“Hopefully by the end of the year either I’ll have found a way to enjoy him or found someone else to enjoy him.”
I think this was mostly a success. We went through another period where I seriously contemplated selling him. He can be the biggest *sshole sometimes. But when he’s good, he’s so freaking good. We’ll see what 2019 brings.
✔ Stop buying shit
“I’m not going to set a budget because I’m not eliminating buying things I do need – like a dressage saddle so I can stop doing dressage in my 20 year old close contact that doesn’t fit me. However, I need to stop buying crap I don’t need, like more saddle pads or new breeches. If something breaks and I need a new thing, I’m free to go ahead, but no more buying stuff just for fun.”
I’d actually say I did a pretty good job of this. While I certainly bought stuff this year, I got a lot better about not buying random stuff just because I wanted to. I bought almost no saddle pads. I also made an effort to buy quality items that will last instead of endless replacements for cheap crap. | 600 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662522556.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20220518215138-20220519005138-00008.warc.gz | 0.981109 |
5208b6cb-18c8-4a5e-9260-67b46066bf5a | 2020-10-26T01:09:50+00:00 | 2010-07-20 | 1 | https://www.astrologycom.com/moonwobble.html | Moon over Stonehenge
The Moon Wobble
destructive cosmic phenomenon affects us all
The regular triggers for terrestrial disasters, whether natural (earthquakes; tidal waves; eruptions etc) or manmade (wars; terrorism; crashes, etc) seem to be the eclipses and the Moon Wobble. Rob Tillett, one of the founders of Astrology on the Web, explores the meaning of this major cosmic phenomenon. If you thought Mercury retrograde was a problem, compare the Moon Wobble!
In addition to the planets, asteroids, comets and moons that revolve in our solar system, astrology considers the effects of two "Shadow Planets" called the Moon's Nodes, the Dragon's Head and Tail. These nodes are not real rocks, like the Moon, Mars or Venus, but sensitive points that mark the movement by declination of the Moon from the southern celestial hemisphere to the northern (the North Node) and vice versa (the South Node), where the path of the Moon around the Earth sweeps across the ecliptic, intersecting the apparent path of the Sun. The nodes form an axis, so the South Node is always directly opposite the North Node in a stately cosmic quadrille. Nevertheless, the Moon's Nodes are vitally important in terms of the destinies of all who dwell on Planet Earth. See The Moon's Nodes for more on this.
I was originally prompted to write the first edition of this article because of the devastation wrought by the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province of China which killed thousands, the horrors of Cyclone Nargis in Burma (Myanmar) which slaughtered tens of thousands and left millions homeless, deadly tornados in the USA, bombings in the Middle East and so on. There were a number of astrological pointers, including the stations of Saturn and Jupiter, the two Great Chronocrators, with Neptune and Mercury about to turn retrograde, but the significant trigger might well have been the stressful square aspect of the Sun to the Moon's Nodes on May 13, 2008. This phenomenon is known as a Moon Wobble.
Rescuers at work in 2010 Haiti Earthquake
There have been further major disasters associated with Moon Wobbles already this year, 2010, as there are every year, including the widespread earthquakes and flooding associated with the Wobble before the New Moon Solar Eclipse in Capricorn on January 15, 2010, and of Saturn turning retrograde opposing retrograde Mars on Jan 13.
The most striking so far in the current cycle have been the horror weather in the US, Europe and Australia, a series of minor earthquakes, then a catastrophic quake which has shattered Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, in the Caribbean, on Jan 12. This occurred just one day after the peak of the Moon Wobble. It's significant that a Lunar Eclipse occurred on New Year's Eve exactly conjunct Haiti's natal Sun in the 11th degree of Capricorn. The Moon Wobble (the exact conjunction of the Sun with the North Node) occurred on Jan 11 in the 22nd degree of Cap. The Earthquake occurred the next day, with the Sun and Venus tightly conjunct the North Node, transiting Pluto exactly conjunct Haiti's natal Mars, and transiting Mars retrograde exactly conjunct Haiti's natal South Node. Interestingly, the earthquake Moon is exactly conjunct the Galactic Core, a profoundly potent cosmic location, again first discovered in the 1930's. It's notable that Haiti is currently undergoing a Saturn Return, with earthquake Saturn stationary about to turn retrograde (Jan 13) in tight conjunction with Haiti's natal Saturn. And to top it off, a Solar Eclipse will occur on Jan 15.
So the moon-wobble and the eclipse cycle is not the only weakening factor, as other aspects have to be considered. But when these aspects coalesce—and there is a Moon Wobble—you can bet that the trigger will be the moon-wobble. Geo-scientists did warn months before that Haiti was on an unstable fault-line, but had they paid attention to the eclipse and moon-wobble cycle, the people could have taken precautions.
Since that time there have been a number of heavy disasters, notably flooding with loss of life and massive dislocation in spots across the world, not all related to this phenomenon. However, as the next one approaches on July 4, the pace is hotting up. You can see the list of moon-wobble associated disasters for yourself in the table at the end of this article.
Carl Payne Tobey
Moon Wobbles were discovered in the 1930's, when research by astrologer Carl Payne Tobey (1902-1980), the original editor of Astrology Magazine, revealed that disasters occur in cycles associated with the conjunction (0°), opposition (180°) and square (90°) from the Sun to the Moon's Node. These powerful contacts occur when the Sun and the Node are in the same sign, or the opposing sign, or when the Sun is in a square aspect to the nodal axis.
Carl Payne Tobey
They are especially potent when the New Moon or Full Moon are square to the Nodes. On October 18, 2009, we saw the New Moon in Libra forming a partile square to the Nodes, emphasising the potency of the aspect, for the Sun and Moon are both precisely square the nodal axis at the New Moon.
As he discovered after a painstaking examination of a large number of major disasters, many of the most serious and traumatic catastrophes involving fire, bad weather and loss of life occur in association with eclipses, when the Sun and Moon are conjunct the Moon's Nodes, especially when other unfortunate planetary aspects coincide. However, not all of these evils are exclusively linked with eclipses, for many are associated with the Sun forming a T-square to the nodal axis, i.e. when the Sun is in a 90° aspect to the nodes.
Storm over Volcano in Iceland 2010 (Marco Fulle)
This he called a "Moon Wobble", because in fact it is when the Moon is "wobbling" in its path by declination. So when the Sun forms an aspect to the nodes of 0°, 90°, or 180°, we experience a significant likelihood of massive environmental damage with much loss of life and property.
These Moon Wobbles occur every 86.5 days on average, with an orb of approximately 5 degrees (days) on either side of the precise date, when the Sun forms either the T-square with the nodal axis, or the conjunction with the North or South Nodes. Tobey notes that when the Sun squares the Nodes, judgement is notoriously poor and unstable, especially for people under stress or in leadership positions. Some astrologers hold that the two weeks before the partile aspect are problematic, with the week following the aspect also being notable in terms of disasters, but my view is that we can allow 10 or more days on either side of the peak aspect, as shown in the table.
Moon Wobble Patterns
The Sun takes a year to complete one revolution of the Zodiac, usually making four or five contacts with the Lunar Nodes in the process. For example,
during the current Capricorn/Cancer nodal transit, which commenced in July/August 2009, the Sun in Libra reaches the Square aspect with the Nodes on at the New Moon of October 18, 2009, and again on September 30, 2010.Sun/Node Alignments
When the Sun is in Libra on Oct 18, 2009, the New Moon makes a square (90°) aspect to the Nodes. This is a truly powerful aspect.
When the Sun is in Capricorn in January 2010, we will see the conjuction of Sun and North Node (an opposition to the South Node) on January 11, associated with a Solar Eclipse in Capricorn on Jan 15.
When the Sun is in Aries square to the Nodes on Apr 6, 2010, it precedes the New Moon on April 14, so will not be as strong as the Libra '09 alignment [or so I thought, but if we look at the effects, I was too optimistic!]
When the Sun is in Cancer, in July 2010, we will have a conjunction with the South Node (opposition to the North Node, as the nodes are always an axis) on July 4, associated with a Lunar Eclipse on June 26 and Solar Eclipse on July 11.
When the Sun is in Libra, in September 2010, it squares the nodes on September 30 associated with a New Moon on October 7.
When the Sun is in Capricorn, in December 2010 we see a conjunction with the North Node on December 24, associated with a Lunar Eclipse on Dec. 21.
The Lunar Nodes move through each sign of the Zodiac in a little over eighteen months, so for a Moon Wobble to occur in the same sign and configuration with the Nodes it takes around 19 years. Each Moon Wobble pattern is thus unique until repeated some 19 years later.
Man picks through debris of 2009 Samoa Tsunami
As Jim D'Amato points out, ancient astrologers associated the beginnings and ends of wars, major battles, mine explosions and animal stampedes with eclipses, both solar and lunar. These two types of eclipses generally happen about two weeks apart every six months and really make a notable splash once every two years. Tobey found that disasters happened about every three months; he correlated them as well to the geometric and mathematical square to the possible eclipse points, the Moon's Nodes. This is a clear indication of the stress and tension in the collective consciousness denoted by subliminal patterns marked by the interaction of the Sun and Moon when associated with the Moon's Nodes. Plato is reputed to have had the phrase "Let no-one enter who is ignorant of geometry" (ageômetrètos midèis eisitô) inscribed above the door to his Academy. This motto is more subtle than you might think!
During these Moon Wobble periods, time and space seem to be more unstable, almost as if the fabric of the heavens has somehow weakened. People die – sometimes in great numbers – through dramatic releases of energy, especially explosions, fires, mass murders, earthquakes, floods and transportation accidents. For this reason, it makes sense to keep track of the Moon Wobble phenomena and to note where they fall in your own chart.
Moon Wobble Periods
Even though Tobey gave it an orb of 5 degrees (days), the effects of the Moon Wobble tend to appear some 10 days before the partile (exact) configuration, the peak date, and cease pretty much around 10 days after the peak date, especially when associated with major planetary aspects involving the outer planets. That makes a sensitive period of up to 20 days, four or five times a year, regular as clockwork. I'd say this is due to the wide orb of the Sun (17°), which moves on average slightly over one degree per day through the zodiac.
Crushed Cars in 2008 Sichuan Earthquake
Needless to say, disasters are not the exclusive province of Moon Wobbles (the massive 8.8 Mg earthquake in Chile on Feb 28, 2010 was not associated with a moon-wobble, although it was with the potent Full Moon in Aquarius that has been the trigger for widespread major weather disasters during March 2010), but they are disaster-prone phases, especially when associated with problematic planetary aspects, or with major retrograde periods. These phases bring suppressed tensions to the surface, both in human beings and in natural scenarios, often with catastrophic results. The effects on individuals depends on where the aspect falls in their charts, but by and large these phases are warnings to be appropriately prepared and not to undertake major decisions, as reality is clouded during these periods. It's worth ordering a forecast from us that will explain the potential effects of the Moon Wobble phases for the year ahead on your own life.
Some notable example of disasters that occurred during the Moon Wobble phase will drive home the point. There is a very long list of them, far too many to list, although since October 2009 I have covered more, especially the manmade nasties, such as bombings and the like. Disasters occur not only in the lead up to malefic aspects around an eclipse or Moon wobble, but also as the affected degrees are subsequently activated. See Ian Thurnwald's detailed analysis of the aftermath of the massive Solar Eclipse in Aug 99 for examples of this.
The location of disasters indicated tends to follow the path of the preceding eclipse, as this has already been sensitised, the cosmic fabric having been weakened, so to speak (see, for example, the January 2009 eclipse and the July 2009 eclipse; more detail with links can be seen on our Eclipse pages). So given the vast sums involved in researching and predicting storms, earthquakes, tsunamis and the like, not to mention the horrendous costs of cleaning up, it might be worth the authorities investing in some astrological research and qualified staff. This would be worth much much more than the cost.
|Moon Wobbles 2008|
||Relevant Aspects & Associated Disasters
|• Solar Eclipse Feb 7
• Lunar Eclipse Feb 21
||• Mars opp Pluto:
• Feb. 3, Congo: 45 killed and about 450 injured after two strong earthquakes, of 6.0 and 5.0 Magnitude.
• Feb. 5-6, U.S.A..: 55 killed and hundreds injured after violent tornadoes rip through southern United States.
• Feb. 7, U.S.A.: explosion at sugar refinery near Savannah, Georgia kills 14 and injures many more.
• Feb. 21, Venezuela: Passenger plane crashes into mountain in Sierra La Culata National Park killing all 46 aboard.
|• Taurus Sun sq Nodes
||• May 2, Burma: Cyclone Nargis, when hundreds of thousands were killed or displaced
• May 12, China: Sichuan Earthquake killed nearly 100,000, leaving 4.5 million homeless.
• May 13, India: 80 people killed in serial bomb blasts in Jaipur.
|• Solar Eclipse Aug 1
||• Mars opp Uranus:
• July 24 Japan: 90 injured & thousands of homes lose power in a 6.8 Magnitude earthquake near Iwate.
• July 26 India: 57 killed in Ahmedabad after 18-odd synchronised bombs went off in less than 2 hours.
• July 27 S.E. Europe: major flooding in Ukraine and Romania kills 18 causing $300 million in damages.
• Aug 1 Pakistan: avalanche on K2, world's second-highest mountain, kills 11 climbers, injures others.
• Aug 4, India: 150 die as landslide rumours cause stampede in Hindu Goddess fest. at Naina Devi temple.
• Aug 5, N. California: 9 firefighters die in helicopter crash/burn in Shasta-Trinity Nat. Forest. Cause unknown.
• Lunar Eclipse Aug 16
• Mars sq Pluto:
• Aug 10, Canada: explosions at gas facility force thousands in Toronto to evacuate. Some injured, 1 dies.
• Aug 20, Spain: 153 die as passenger plane skids & bursts into flames during takeoff in Madrid.
• Aug 23, U.S.A.: 12 die & thousands of properties flooded as trop. storm Fay makes landfall 4 times in Fl. and Ga.
|• Scorpio Sun squ Nodes
• Mars sq Neptune; Saturn opp Uranus:
• Oct. 29, Pakistan: 6.4 Magnitude quake hits S.W. Pakistan, kills 170 & wrecks 15,000 homes.
• Oct. 30, India: explosions in Assam kill 55 and wound over 200.
• Nov 7, Haiti: 90 students die & over a hundred injured in school collapse in Port-au-Prince.
• Nov 9, Sea of Japan: 20 die and 21 injured in Russian submarine fault.
|Moon Wobbles 2009|
||Relevant Aspects & Associated Disasters
|• Solar Eclipse Jan 26
||• Venus opp Saturn:
• Jan. 24, France & Spain: 15 die & a million homes without power as 100 mph winds hit; worst storm since 1999.
• Jan. 26, Turkey: avalanche slams 17 Turkish hikers on Mt Zigana, dragging them 1,640 ft, killing 10.
• Jan. 27-28, S.W. U.S.A.: 23 die in severe storms. Schools close; a million homes left without electricity.
|• Lunar Eclipse Feb 9
||• Saturn opp Uranus; Mars sesquisq Saturn; Mars semisq Uranus :
• Feb. 9, Australia: over 160 die when arsonists start about 400 wildfires—some of the worst in Australia's history.
• Feb. 10, U.S.A.: cluster of tornadoes rip through Oklahoma, killing 8 and injuring over a dozen.
• Feb. 12, U.S.A.: 50 passengers and crew die as flight from Newark crashes near Buffalo, killing 1 on the ground.
|• Taurus Sun sq Nodes
• April 6, Italy: earthquake Magnitude 6.3 kills 200, injuring 1,000. Town of L'Aquila is the epicentre.
• For a list of other disasters, fires, earthquakes etc: Natural Disasters News for April 2009.
|• Lunar Eclipse, Jul 7
• Mars sq Neptune; Mars sq Jupiter:
• June 30, Italy: freight train derails and crashes into small town, killing 12, injuring 50. LNG container explodes.
• June 30, Indian Ocean: Yemeni Jet hits ocean trying to land at Comoros. 152 killed; 1 survivor, a 14-year-old girl.
• July 6, China: ethnic riots in Urumqi between Muslim Uighurs & Han Chinese & the police kill 156.
• July 15, Iran: Caspian Airlines plane crashes en route to Yerevan, Armenia, killing all 168 passengers.
• For a list of other disasters, fires, earthquakes etc: Natural Disasters News for July 2009.
|• Solar Eclipse, Jul 22
• Mars sq Neptune; Mars sq Jupiter:
• July, India: massive flooding in India kills scores and leaves hundreds of thousands homeless.
• July 24, Iran: 16 die as Aria Air flight skids off the runway, catching fire in Mashhad, Iran.
• For a list of other disasters, fires, earthquakes etc: Natural Disasters News for August 2009.
|• Lunar Eclipse, Aug 6
• Mars sq Pluto:
• August 7, Philippines: 22 tourists on Mount Pinatubo trapped and killed in heavy rain, flooding & landslides.
• August 8, New York: helicopter and plane collide over Hudson River, killing all 9 on the private plane.
• August 10, Taiwan: Typhoon Morakot causes mudslide burying schools, homes, killing 600.
• For a list of other disasters, fires, earthquakes etc: Natural Disasters News for August 2009.
|• Libra Sun sq Nodes
• Merc opp Uranus; Sun sq Pluto; Saturn contra Uranus; Merc sq Pluto; Mars conj SN:
• Sep 28, Philippines: 90 die in and around Manila in flooding caused by Tropical Storm Ketsana
• Sep 29, Samoa: hundreds die, thousands left homeless in tsunami caused by Magnitude 8.0 undersea quake
• Sep 30, Indonesia: thousands die, buildings destroyed in Mg. 7.6 quake near Padang, Sumatra. Massive aftershocks.
• Oct 1, Indonesia: further death and destruction in Mg. 6.6 quake near Bengkulu, Sumatra.
• Oct 2, Tonga: further deadly quakes in the region, including Mg. 6.1 near Hihifo, as undersea volcano erupts.
• Oct 5, India: millions affected, hundreds dead in worst flood on record across Central India.
• Oct 7, Thailand: 40 injured, 4 killed in terrorist bomb attacks in South Thailand.
• Oct 8, Indonesia: asteroid explodes over Bone, Sulawesi, with 2 to 3 times the force of Hiroshima & Nagasaki atom bombs.
• Oct 9, Philippines: 160 killed as torrential rains cause mudslides. (Since Sep 26 over 450 killed due to storms.)
• Oct 9, Afghanistan: suicide bomber blows up Indian embassy in Kabul; kills 17 & injures many more
• Oct 10, Pakistan: climax of weeklong violence, attack on Pak GHQ Rawalpindi; 11 soldiers & 4 Taliban die, many wounded.
• Oct 10, Nigeria: over 70 killed as fuel tanker flips & explodes in Anambra.
• Oct 10, Haiti: UN plane crashes killing 11 on border of Dominican Republic, 45 km from Port-au-Prince
• Oct 11, Cambodia: 17 killed after river ferry capsizes on a tributary of the Mekong.
• Oct 12, Pakistan: car bomb in Shangla marketplace kills 41. Pakistani jets bomb Taliban camps kill 17.
• Oct 13, Nepal: 4,000 families displaced; 152,000 affected, 62 die; houses, crops destroyed in W. Nepal floods, landslides.
• Oct 15, Pakistan: coordinated series of terror attacks focusing mainly on Lahore kill 39. Pakistani jets bomb Taliban, kill 60.
• Oct 16, Iraq: 12 killed, 70 injured by suicide bomber in Sunni mosque at Tal Afar, near Mosul.
• Oct 18, India: At least 33 killed in Tamil Nadu as explosion sets fire to firecracker warehouse.
• Oct 18, Mexico: Hurricane Rick, massive cat. 5 storm produces 180mph winds & 50' waves; heading for Baja California.
• Oct 19, Austria: Hailstorms decimate wild animals; thousands killed; hunting banned;$100 million damage to crops, property.
• Oct 19, Thailand: Remotely detonated motorcycle bomb injures 24 in marketplace at Yala. Muslim separatists blamed.
• Oct 21, Pakistan: 4 die, 18 wounded in twin blasts at International Islamic University, Islamabad. Taliban claim responsibility.
• Oct 21, Yemen: Dozens killed as Saudi forces clash with Houthi rebels in North Yemen.
• Oct 21, India: At least 21 die & 20 injured when trains collide near Agra, en route to Delhi.
• Oct 22, Hindu Kush: Strong earthquake (mg 6.2) in towering Hindu Kush mountains shakes eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan.
• Oct 22, New Zealand: Windows 7 unleashed at midnight on fearful world...
• Oct 23, Pakistan: Terror blasts rock Peshawar, Islamabad, Mohmand (nr Ghalnai); at least 21 killed, many injured.
• Oct 25, Afghanistan: 2 chopper crashes in South & West of country kill 14 US soldiers, injure 26 (14 Afghan, 12 US).
• Oct 25, Iraq: Coordinated suicide bomb blasts in Baghdad kill 155, injure 500. Al-Qaeda blamed.
• Oct 28, Pakistan: Massive car bomb kills 91, injures 200 in Peshawar market. Taliban deny responsibility.
• Oct 28, Afghanistan: Suicide attack on UN quarters in Kabul kills 8. Taliban say this is the first of many to disrupt election.
• Oct 30, USA: San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridge failure scares commuters as 5000 pounds of iron falls on traffic.
• For a list of other disasters, fires, earthquakes etc: Natural Disasters News for October 2009.
|• Lunar Eclipse Dec 31
• Saturn sq Pluto; Merc retro; Mars retro:
• Dec 17, UK; Europe: Blizzards in East UK and West Europe. Airports closed, vast traffic jams.
• Dec 18, UK; Europe: Eurostar trains stuck in Channel Tunnel for days due to bad weather.
• Dec 18, Malawi: Mg 6.4 quake kills 4, displaces 32,000; 3,000 children under 5 affected.
• Dec 21, USA: Powerful snowstorms bury East Coast
• Dec 21, Montserrat: Soufrière Hills volcano on Caribbean island Montserrat erupts spewing vast plumes of ash.
• Dec 18–23, W. Europe: 55,000 travellers trips cancelled or jammed in snowbound trains. Airports closed; flights out.
• Dec 22, Fiji: Cyclone Mick creates havoc across Fiji, costs millions, damages schools, kills 4.
• Dec 24–31, UK; Europe: Avalanches, traffic accidents kill several. Airports, ferries, trains cancelled; celebrations disrupted.
• Dec 26, West Africa: Widespread fires cause destruction
• Dec 28, Philippines: Mayon Volcano erupts 500 km SE of Manila causing 48,000 to flee homes.
• Dec 28, Montserrat: Soufrière Hills volcano on Caribbean island erupts again.
• Dec 28, Colombia: 60,000 affected; wide material losses after 48 hrs heavy rain NW Colombia.
• Dec 28, Argentina: 3,000 displaced by floods 100km north of Buenos Aires
• Dec 28, Peru: Floods and landslides affect thousands
• Dec 29, Mexico: Mg.5.8 quake in Baja California rocks U.S.-Mex border region, felt 100 miles west in San Diego.
• Dec 29, Australia: Floods destroy property, threaten lives in NSW and Qld (E. Coast), fires ravage WA (W. Coast).
• Dec 30, West Australia: Wildfires destroy 40 homes, scorch 33,000 acres of land north of Perth.
• Dec 31, USA: Disaster area declared in Kansas due to storms.
• Dec 31, Afghanistan: Suicide bomber kills 7 CIA operatives, wounds 4 at US Base near Pakistan border.
• Dec 31, Afghanistan: Roadside bomb kills 5 Canadians, injures 5 near Kandahar.
• Dec 31, Finland: Gunman kills 4, injures others in shopping mall at Espoo, near Helsinki. Gunman & girlfriend suicide
• For a list of other disasters, fires, earthquakes etc: Natural Disasters News for December 2009.
|Moon Wobbles 2010|
||Relevant Aspects & Associated Disasters
|• Solar Eclipse Jan 15
• retro Merc/Pluto squ retro Saturn; Chiron conj Neptune; retro Mars at avatar; Jupiter enters Pisces:
• Jan. 1, Brazil: 60 die, many injured as hillside collapses, destroying houses at resort near Rio.
• Jan. 2, Colombia: Galeras volcano erupts. Red Cross says 8,000 need to be evacuated.
• Jan. 2, Congo DR: Volcano Mt Nyamuragira erupts 25 km from Goma (pop. 600,000). Lava threatens people, chimps.
• Jan. 2, Pakistan: 75 killed, scores injured by Taliban suicide bomber at volleyball match in NW Frontier province.
• Jan. 3, Tajikistan: 20,000 left homeless as Mg.5.3 quake strikes Pamir Mountains near Afghan border.
• Jan. 3, Australia: Massive flooding in northern NSW hits hundreds of farms. 1,200 evacuated. Stock losses.
• Jan. 3, Philippines: Mg. 5.3 quake hits Mindanao Island 102km SE of Davao.
• Jan. 3, Mexico: 2 more earthquakes (Mg.3.1 & 4.0) strike Baja California; felt in San Diego.
• Jan. 3, Solomon Is.: Mg. 6.3 quake 100km SSE of Gizo, then aftershock Mg. 7.2 an hour later in same area.
• Jan. 4, USA: Mg. 4.1 quake shakes Cedar City Utah; Mg 4.1 quake shakes Redway, NW of Sacramento California.
• Jan. 5, USA: Bad weather freezes Eastern States from Florida up. Major crop damage. Has been serious since solstice.
• Jan. 5, Costa Rica: 11,000 ft Turrialba volcano (last active 19th C) erupts, spewing ash and steam. Families evacuate.
• Jan. 6, USA: Frigid weather hits mid-west. Blizzards, snowdrifts, chill factor of –52 reported Nebraska, N. Dakota.
• Jan. 6, UK: England freezes: traffic accidents, transport delays, animal deaths; sea freezes in Dorset; 10,000 schools shut.
• Jan. 6, Sthn Ocean: Sea Shepherd protest boat Ady Gil hit by Jap. whaler Shonan Maru 2. International incident feared.
• Jan. 7, Sudan: Ethnic clashes kill 140, wound 90 in S. Wunchuei region. 30,000 cattle stolen. Civil war threatens.
• Jan. 7, N. Europe: Big freeze kills; Eurostar stranded in Channel Tunnel. Flights disrupted UK, France, Ireland, Netherlands.
• Jan. 7, Germany: At least 9 homeless men have frozen to death.
• Jan. 7, Sweden: Temp. in central Sweden plunges to –40°C, coldest weather in 25 years.
• Jan. 8, Southern Ocean: Damaged protest boat Ady Gil lost at sea under tow. Furore hots up calls for govt action
• Jan. 8, Angola: 3 killed, 9 injured in rebel ambush of bus carrying Togo International football team in northern province.
• Jan. 9, USA: Mg 6.5 quake shakes N. California. Power out for 25,000 at Eureka, jumble of debris.
• Jan. 11, USA: Mg 4.3 quake rocks Banning Ca, 80 miles east of L.A. preceded by several smaller quakes, the largest Mg 3.2
• Jan. 12, Haiti: Mg 7.0 quake shatters Port-au-Price. Thousands die; tens of thousands of homes lost; worst quake ever in Haiti.
• Jan. 12, New Guinea: 40 die, 8 injured when 2 buses collide on the Highlands Hwy, 100km from provincial capital Lae.
• Jan. 13, Guatemala: Mg 6.0 quake 60 miles SE of Guatemala City on Pacific coast near El Salvador. No casualties reported.
• Jan. 14, Afghanistan: Suicide bomber kills 20 in busy marketplace town of Dihrawud, in central Uruzgan province.
• Jan. 15, Venezuela: Mg 5.6 quake near coastal town Carupano. No casualties reported.
• Jan. 16, Argentina: Mg 6.1 quake 220 miles SE of Ushuaia, between Argentina and Antarctica. No casualties reported.
• Jan. 17, China: Mg 3.4 quake & mudslides in SW Guizhou province kill 7, injure 9.
• Jan. 18, Cayman Islands: Mg 5.8 quake struck 40 miles from George Town. No casualties reported.
• Jan. 18, Egypt: Torrential storms, floods on Red Sea coast & Sinai kill 7, many missing. Hundreds of homes destroyed.
• Jan. 18, Ecuador: Tungurahua volcano erupts 180 km south of Quito, spewing ashes and lava. Evacuations, no casualties.
• Jan. 18, Afghanistan: Taliban attack Kabul in major assault. Suicide bombers & gunmen occupy buildings, battle security forces.
• Jan. 19, USA: Lone gunman kills 8, downs police helicopter, near Appomattox, Virginia.
• Jan. 19, Japan: JAL, Asia's largest airline, files for bankruptcy protection, owing $25bn. Will cut 15,700 jobs.
• Jan. 20, Haiti: Mg 6.1 aftershock shakes Port-au-Prince after 8 days of chaos, many smaller shocks.
• Jan. 20, USA: Hundreds in fire-ravaged areas ordered to evacuate across California as powerful storm batters region.
• Jan. 21, USA: Rain, snow, tornados pulverise S. California in 5th day of extreme weather. Power outages. Mudslides threaten.
• For a list of other disasters, fires, earthquakes etc: Natural Disasters News for January 2010.
|• Aries Sun sq Nodes
• Pluto turns reto; retro Merc trine retro Pluto; Saturn retrogrades into Virgo; Saturn opposes Uranus:
• Feb. 27–Mar. 25: Massive Earthquakes and bad weather have struck worldwide so far this month, notably the 8.8 Mg quake near Concepcion in Chile on Feb 27, which killed some 500 people and wrecked thousands of homes. However, these are not associated with the moon-wobble phenomenon, although the quake chart had Saturn conjunct MC, with nodes rising right on the ascendant/descendant axis almost to the minute. Chile's natal chart was heavily afflicted, with natal Moon in the nodal degree, as well as quake Moon in the nodal degree. Chile's chart has its own nodes rising conjunct the ascendant to within a degree. This was one of the worst quakes ever recorded. Too much info for this section, but I hope to do an article outlining the cosmic factors and protections that reduced the evils to a manageable situation, unlike in Haiti, where the gods took their toll in full.
• Mar. 26, Chile: Mg 6.2 quake strikes northern Chile near Copiapo, 380 miles north of the capital of Santiago. No casualties
• Mar. 26, USA: Mg 3.4 undersea quake strikes Channel Islands off Sth California near San Miguel Island. Largest of 4 quakes in Channel Islands & Santa Monica Bay in past week.
• Mar. 28, China: 153 miners trapped by flood & collapse in Wangjialing coalmine, Shanxi province. Number killed unknown.
• Mar. 29, USA: Strong low system over Ohio Valley continues violent storm activity into Mid-Atlantic. Injuries; houses damaged.
• Mar. 29, Bahamas: Tornado kills 3, injures 4 at Freeport, western Grand Bahama. Trees uprooted; hotel windows blasted.
• Mar. 29, Russia: 2 female suicide bombers hit Moscow subway, killing 40 people and injuring 90. Islamist rebels blamed
• Mar. 29, Korea: S. Korean 1,200-ton corvette Cheonan sunk by suspected N. Korean torpedo. 40 sailors killed.
• Mar. 30, USA: Record-breaking rainstorms flood Eastern Coast from Miami to New York. Storm surges warned.
• Mar. 31, USA: Flooding on scale rarely seen in New England forces hundreds from homes, washing out bridges & highways from Maine to Connecticut. Rhode Island hardest hit by worst floods in 200 years.
• Mar. 31, Iceland: Volcano under Eyjafjallajokull glacier in south Iceland forms new craters spewing lava; began erupting 10 days ago, forcing hundreds to evacuate; flights diverted.
• Mar. 31, Russia: 2 suicide bombers kill 12 near Dagestan/Chechnya border. Russian govt. battles Islamist insurgency in Nth Caucasus.
• Apr. 1, Mexico: Dozens of gunmen in coordinated attacks target 2 army garrisons in northern Mexico; firefights kill 18 attackers.
• Apr. 2, Iraq: Gunmen in Iraqi military uniforms raid homes in Sunni village south of Baghdad, kill 25, execution-style, including 5 women.
• Apr. 2, Pakistan: Govt planes bomb insurgents, kill 18 in Orakzai, in NW province.
• Apr. 3, Australia: Chinese coal-carrier Shen Neng 1 aground on pristine Douglas Shoals, Great Barrier Reef east of Great Keppel Is., Queensland. Breakup & oil-spill threatens.
• Apr. 3, Russia: Pres. Lech Kaczynski & many of Poland's highest military & civilian leaders die as presidential jet crashlands in thick fog in W. Russia, killing 96. Poland declares week of national mourning.
• Apr. 4, Mexico: Mg 7.2 quake 19 miles SE of Mexicali, on US/Mex border; biggest in region in 18 years. Major damage, 2 killed in Calexico 1000 aftershocks & "triggered" quakes on both sides of border.
• Apr. 5, Worldwide: Sharp gust of solar wind carrying charged particles hits Earth's magnetosphere at approx 0800 UT, sparking strongest geomagnetic storm in 4 years.
• Apr. 5, USA: Swarm of small quakes at a Mount Redoubt volcano 100 miles SW of Anchorage, Alaska, threatens eruption.
• Apr. 5, Pakistan: Taliban suicide bombers kill 8 at US Consulate in Peshawar; earlier suicide attack kills 41 in NW Province.
• Apr. 5, USA: Explosion rocks coalmine in Montcoal, W. Virginia; kills 12 & traps at least 10 thousands of feet underground in worst U.S. mine disaster since 2006.
• Apr. 5, Brazil: Worst rains in Rio's history bring floods, mudslides, kill over 100; 300,000 homeless.
• Apr. 6, Indonesia: Mg 7.8 quake at 5:15 AM 125 miles northwest of Sibolga in Sumatra. Tsunami warnings later withdrawn.
• Apr. 6, Iraq: Wave of terror bomb attacks kill 100, wound 160 in Baghdad & across country.
• Apr. 6, India: 73 police killed as 700 Maoist guerrillas in Chhattisgarh (East Central India) ambush 120 personnel with bombs & gunfire.
• Apr. 7, Kyrgyzstan: 100 killed, 400 wounded in as police open fire on thousands of protesters at Bishkek.
• Apr. 8, Brazil: Mudlsides bury 200 in worst rains in Brazil, destroying homes in Niteroi near Rio.
• Apr. 9, Pakistan: Pak troops kill 54 insurgents in airstrikes in Orakzai. Scores of militants slain in recent days in NW province nr Afghan border.
• Apr. 10, USA: Mg 4.5 quake rattles San Diego in swarm of seismic activity, after Mg 7.2 quake on Mexican border last week.
• Apr. 11, Solomon Is: Mg 7.1 quake hit south-west of Kira Kira island in the South Pacific, about 130 miles south-east of the capital Honiara.
• Apr. 11, Thailand: Tourists warned after worst political violence in two decades kills 21, injures 874 in Islamic uprising in South Thailand.
• Apr. 11, Ireland: IRA dissidents detonate bomb outside British spy HQ in Northern Ireland, protesting new local Justice dept. 50 evacuated.
• Apr. 11, Italy: Landslide derails train in Northern Italy, kills 9, injures 28. Cascade of rocks, debris slam into train near Austrian border.
• Apr. 12, USA: Mg 4.0 quake strikes off Humboldt County, northern California. No immediate reports of injuries or damage.
• Apr. 12, Spain: Mg 6.2 quake strikes near Granada 320 km south of Madrid, but is deep underground, so little damage expected.
• Apr. 13, Peru: Huge glacier breaks off, plunges into lake in Andes near Carhuaz, 200 miles north of Lima; 23-metre tsunami destroys town.
• Apr. 14, India: Cyclone in West Bengal and Bihar kills 68, destroys 60,000 homes in North Dinajpur district, about 600 km north of Kolkata.
• Apr. 14, China: Mg 7.1 quake kills 1100, injures 10,000, destroys villages in Qinghai province, near Tibet. Series of massive quakes in quick succession flatten buildings, bury thousands.
• Apr. 14, Iceland: Volcano under ice in South erupts again. 800 evacuated. Smoke disrupts UK air traffic. Thousands stranded as flights grounded.
• Apr. 15, Myanmar (Burma): Ethnic rebel bombs hit Yangon (former capital aka Rangoon) kill 9, injure many more at New Year celebration.
• Apr. 15, Europe: Deadly volcanic ash from Iceland grounds flights to & from UK & Europe. Travel delays across globe as flights cancelled.
• For a list of other disasters, fires, earthquakes etc: Natural Disasters News for April 2010
|• Lunar Eclipse Jun 26
• Merc sq Mars; Jupiter & Uranus to Aries; Merc opp Pluto; Merc sq Jupiter; Sun opp Pluto; Moon conj Pluto:
• Apr. 20–Jun. 16: Since the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill on April 20, which remains an ongoing environmental and economic catastrophe, there have been a very large number of natural and manmade disasters, too many to list, with the worst being floods and landslides in China, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, US, Brazil, Australia, deadly cold in South America etc. These are not directly associated with the Moon Wobble, but with other infrequent problematic developments in the cosmos, such as the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus with the malefic fixed star Scheat at the Aries Point, combined with the impending Cardinal Grand Cross that also features Saturn in Libra, Pluto in Capricorn, Nodes in Cancer/Capricorn and other nasties leading up to the Cardinal Climax on July 31, 2010. This current eclipse cycle is associated with this Cardinal Cross and subsequent Climax.
• Jun. 21, China: Huge floods in South kill at least 175, displacing 800,000. Many injured & missing; vast crop & property destruction.
• Jun. 21, Congo: 60 killed, 450 injured in rail accident 60 km from Pointe-Noire, Congo's second city, main commercial centre & port.
• Jun. 22, Brazil: Severe flooding decimates towns in Northeast, killing at least 41 & leaving over 120,000 homeless.
• Jun. 22, Turkey: 5 killed, 12 wounded in Kurdish rebel bombing of bus in Istanbul.
• Jun. 23, Canada: Thousands flee offices as mg 5.5 quake hits capital Ottawa, shaking Toronto & Montreal. Felt in New York. No casualties.
• Jun. 23, USA: Obama dismisses Gen. McChrystal from role in Afghanistan due to insubordination. Gen. Petraeus takes command.
• Jun. 23, Spain: 12 killed, 14 injured in rail accident at Castelldefels, south of Barcelona.
• Jun. 24, Australia: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd overthrown in "palace coup" by his deputy, Julia Gillard and treasurer Wayne Swan.
• Jun. 25, China: Deathtoll from floods in South climbs to 377. Millions displaced, hundreds missing; $11 billion in damages so far.
• Jun. 25, Bangladesh: Lancet documents "largest mass poisoning in history" as 77 million in Bangladesh exposed to toxic levels of arsenic.
• Jun. 26, India: 23 killed, 25 injured as bus collides with truck in Bihar, east of country.
• Jun. 27, Mexico: 9 killed in attack by gunmen on rehab centre in Gomez Palacio, north of country. Drug cartel suspected.
• Jun. 28, China: 100 buried in landslide at Dazhai, Guizhou prov. Rains & floods kill hundreds, displace millions this month in S. China.
• Jun. 28, Senegal: 11 killed in terrace collapse in Matam in north of country, while watching Senegal-South Korea football match on TV. Many injured.
• Jun. 29, Iraq: 8 killed including Iraq Army general in series of bomb attacks by militants.
• Jun. 29, India: 26 police killed in Maoist Naxalite rebel attack in central Chhattisgarh. Follows death of hundreds from attacks in April, May.
|• Solar Eclipse Jul 11
• Mars conj Saturn; Mars/Saturn opp Uranus/Jupiter; Jupiter sq Pluto; Mars sext Sun/Moon:
• Jun. 30, Mexico: 6 killed, severe flooding as Hurricane Alex lashes Gulf Coast. Monterrey flooded, 12 tonne statue Virgin of Guadalupe topples. Alex also kills 2 in Guatemala & 2 in El Salvador.
• Jul. 1, Turkey: 17 killed in Kurdish rebel attack on military base in SE Turkey.
• Jul. 1, Pakistan: 41 killed, 174 wounded in suicide terrorist attack on Sufi shrine in Lahore.
• Jul. 1, Japan: Toyota recalls 270,000 vehicles over engine fault. Follows 8 million recalled earlier this year over accelerator fault.
• Jul. 1, Mexico: 21 killed in battle 12 miles south of Mex/US border between rival groups associated with drugs & people-trafficking. Police arrest 9.
• Jul. 3, Congo: At least 220 die in fuel tanker accident in Sange, near Rwandan border, east of country. Scores injured as village burns.
• Jul. 3, South Korea: 12 die, 12 injured as bus plunges from bridge near Incheon International Airport, 70km west of Seoul.
• Jul. 4, Philippines: 15 killed, 48 injured in runaway bus crash on central island Cebu. Driver smashes into wall to avoid bystanders.
• Jul. 4, Red Sea: Pirates hijack oil tanker MT Motivator with crew of 18 Filipinos, near strait between Red Sea & Gulf of Aden.
• Jul. 5, Afghanistan: 64 militants & drug traffickers killed in Helmand province. 16 tonnes drugs seized + weapons, explosives, suicide vests.
• Jul. 5, Thailand: Govt extends state of emergency in 19 provinces, including capital Bangkok, in fears of renewed violence.
• Jul. 5, Romania: 10 (possibly 11) killed, 3 injured, in military training bi-plane crash close to Tuzla airport, just after take-off.
• Jul. 6, Egypt: Disgruntled bus driver kills 6, wounds 16 near Cairo with automatic weapon. He was depressed, say reports.
• Jul. 7, Iraq: Bomb attacks kill 50, wound 100 Shia pilgrims converging on shrine in northern Baghdad, say police.
• Jul. 9, Pakistan: Suicide motorcycle bomber kills 102, wounds 115 in Yakaghund village in Mohmand tribal region, bordering Afghanistan.
• Jul. 9, Afghanistan: Gunmen kill 11 wound 3 in ambush of Pak bus carrying Shia tribesmen on detour to avoid danger.
• Jul. 10, Spain: 1.1 million demonstrators march in Barcelona to claim Catalan autonomy, as Spain is gripped with World Cup fever.
• Jul. 11, Colombia: 12 rebels killed in midnight commando raid on FARC guerilla base, remote Tolima Mountains. 10 soldiers die in other battles.
• Jul. 11, Uganda: 64 killed, 65 injured in twin blasts in capital Kampala. Rugby club & restaurant bombed as fans watch World Cup final.
• Jul. 12, Haiti: 1700 displaced, some injured as electrical storm hits Corail-Cesselesse refugee camp north of Port-au-Prince.
• Jul. 13, Russia: 233 drown, scores die from heat in past week. Many drown taking swim after too much vodka. Worst drought in 100 years; 19 regions declare state of emergency. Roads melting; crops shrivelling.
• Jul. 13, Philippines: 68 killed, 84 missing in Typhoon Conson, north of Manila. Manila blacked out; 3 vessels sink including LPG tanker.
• Jul. 13, Japan: 2 killed, 3 injured in severe storms & landslide near Hiroshima.
• Jul. 13, China: 41 die in rain-triggered landslides in Western China; over 100 killed by flooding this month so far.
• Jul. 13, Germany: 3 killed, 11 injured in tornados & extreme weather; heavy rain & winds unroof houses.
• Jul. 14, Iran: 30 killed, 100 wounded in twin suicide blasts at Grand Mosque in SE city, Zahedan. Wahabi extremists blamed.
• Jul. 15, Chile: 2 strong quakes, Mg 5.3 (Tirua) & Mg 6.5 (300 miles S. of Santiago). Thousands flee in pre-dawn hours.
• Jul. 17, Vietnam: 600 homes damaged, 43 boats destroyed, 17 missing as Typhoon Conson strikes.
• Jul. 17, Pakistan: 18 Shia die in convoy ambush in Kurran tribal region near Afghan border. Sunni militants blamed.
• Jul. 17, Puerto Rico: Mosquito-borne Dengue Fever epidemic kills dozens, sickens thousands across entire Caribbean. Hospitals overloaded. Authorities fear increase as rainy season advances. US secure so far.
• Jul. 18, China: At least 38 miners killed in 3 separate accidents in dangerous coal mines. Lax safety blamed.
• Jul. 18, Mexico: Pre-dawn gun attack on birthday party in Torreon kills 17, injures 10. Drug runners suspected.
• Jul. 18, Argentina: 9 die in cold snap; more die in Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay & Uruguay. Patagonia temp: –14°C. Snow in Buenos Aires.
• Jul. 19, India: At least 40 killed, 100 injured as passenger train ploughs into another at Sainthia station, W. Bengal.
• Jul. 20, China: Flood update – 701 killed, 347 missing, 645,000 houses lost, 131 million people affected; 7 million hectares crops destroyed; $21 billion direct damage.
|• Libra Sun sq Nodes
• Full Moon in Aries; Saturn sq nodes; Jupiter conj Uranus; Mercury sq Pluto; Venus conj Mars:
I have not had time to update this sequence yet. In any case, I'll be scaling it back to truly major events, as I think the point has been made. However, I notice that the University of Nevada in Reno has just gained a $12.2 MILLION dollar grant to expand its earthquake lab. Perhaps they could incorporate the Moon's Nodes into their calculations? Or send a couple of mill in this direction and I'll do it for them. :)
|• Lunar Eclipse Dec 21
||• Mars sq Saturn; Mars conj Pluto:
What is the point of this table? Astrology is not all about prediction. It is also about research: honing our knowledge so we can make predictions about the future with more accuracy. That's how science works. Astrology is a spiritual science, but it also can be applied to mundane events in the world. This type of tabulation gives us a clue to the application of aspects and planetary alignments, in order to warn of future social and environmental problems before they happen. Astrology combined with relevant scientific observations can be a very valuable pointer and locator of natural and manmade disasters. The word "disaster" indeed means "ill-starred" in its original sense.
[This is the end of the article. Check back regularly for updates.] | 10,722 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107890108.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20201026002022-20201026032022-00015.warc.gz | 0.866774 |
f46ff388-fe7b-4063-b4d6-390e6b652d2d | 2018-08-21T23:24:10+00:00 | 2018-08-14 | 1 | http://www.nationnews.com/nationnews/news/183891/inniss-stay-york | Donville Inniss (FILE)
Former Minister of Industry and International Business Donville Inniss has to wear a GPS monitoring device (eletronic ankle bracelet) so authorities know his whereabouts at all times.
Furthermore, he has been ordered by a United States court to stay in New York until his next court date.
In addition, the former minister has surrendered his Barbados passport and must also report to pre-trial officials from the Eastern District of New York before his next court appearance, the NATION has been informed.
That date with destiny will be on August 23, at which time Inniss will be arraigned and allowed to enter an official plea.
Inniss, 52, who was arraigned on money laundering charges in Florida on Monday, will head to a courthouse in the Eastern District of New York later this month. The hearing will be before US District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto at the Eastern District’s courthouse in the borough of Brooklyn. (BA)
Please read the full story in the Midweek Nation, or in the eNATION edition. | 222 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221219197.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20180821230258-20180822010258-00096.warc.gz | 0.969502 |
f027b750-f46c-4b84-b192-a9f21ef107d8 | 2016-07-24T20:25:07+00:00 | 2014-06-25 | 1 | http://boston.edgemedianetwork.com/news/national/News/161380/utah_to_appeal_gay_marriage_case_to_supreme_court_ | Utah to Appeal Gay Marriage Case to Supreme Court
Utah's attorney general plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court a ruling Wednesday that found states must allow gay couples to marry.
Republican Sean Reyes' office said in a statement Wednesday it will file a petition to have the country's highest court review the decision by a three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.
The office also left open the possibility of requesting a review from the full panel of judges at the 10th Circuit.
The attorney general's office says even though the 10th Circuit ruling went against Utah, the state is pleased that it moves the important issue one step closer to the Supreme Court. | 146 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257824146.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071024-00137-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.966395 |
2fed330a-1c2b-4cd8-a1f3-ef57109f3f30 | 2013-05-18T07:13:27+00:00 | 2013-05-18 | 0 | http://www.craftsman.com/craftsman-universal-receiver-315mhz/p-00953757000P?prdNo=11 | Specifications & Dimensions
|Warranties & Coverage:|
|Warranty Detail Link:||craftsman warranty|
|Dimensions and Weight:|
|Item Weight (lbs.):||0.56 lbs.|
Ratings & Reviews
This Universal Receiver from Craftsman upgrades most brands - including Genie®, Stanley®, Chamberlain®, Sears Craftsman® and others - to work with new 315MHz products like the Craftsman EntryEase Fingerprint Keyless Entry. The receiver easily plugs into an electrical outlet inside the garage and accepts a special private-coded signal from the Craftsman EntryEase Fingerprint Keypad (#53555), Keyless Entry Pad (#53754) and all Craftsman black button remote controls.
- Upgrades most brands, including Genie®, Stanley®, Chamberlain®, Craftsman®, and others
- Receiver accepts a special, private-coded signal from the remote control (not included), and operates the garage door opener
- Receiver plugs into a standard outlet, and wires easily to the garage door opener powerhead
- Receiver is compatible with Craftsman garage door opener remote controls with black buttons, or if the remote control has a 315 logo
- Not for use with garage door operators manufactured prior to 1993
- Available for Gift Wrap
Added on February 16, 2009
Overall, others give this:
Colorado Springs, CO
fairly simply to install on existing opening. ours was an 80s or 90s craftsman opener. simply wire on with the others. it did make it a bit hard to fit on with the old button. the downside is that you have to use an outlet. since i didnt have one in a good place for the button, i had to keep the other one wired up. it is nice now - both doors are on the same remotes! should be easy to work with any opener, in spite of the fact that one of the "highly qualified" sears employess basically told me that they were lying about it being universal.
fairly simply to install on existing opening. ours was an 80s or 90s craftsman opener. simply wire on with the others. it did make it a bit hard to fit on with the old button. the downside is that you have to use an outlet. since i didnt have one in a good place for the button, i had to keep the other one wired up.
it is nice now - both doors are on the same remotes!
should be easy to work with any opener, in spite of the fact that one of the "highly qualified" sears employess basically told me that they were lying about it being universal.
Only recently the receiver of our rather elderly garage door opening system had died. We purchased this new 315 MHZ Craftsman Universal Receiver on 10/17/09. Since we had no electrical outlet near the garage door, my husband installed one. This job actually took the longest. Once we plugged the receiver into the newly installed outlet, we programmed it. Voila, it worked immediately. Each of the three black button remote controls we had also purchased needed to be programmed individually. They too functioned right away. Keep in mind that only the black button remote controls work with this receiver. The receiver packaging shows in front two paper stars: Blue and yellow. When purchasing the compatible remote control, make sure its packaging shows the same color stars. The instruction sheet seemed a bit confusing at first. It should be a bit more detailed with larger drawings. After reading the instructions several times, we got the "drift." - I only have three questions: Will the receiver and our three remotes have to be reprogrammed once the electricity goes out? Or does the receiver and remotes remember the original programming? Or what happens when sombody unplugs the receiver by mistake?
, Bay Area
I bought this reciever hoping to bring my new house's older craftman garage door opener into the 21st century. Unfortunatly the original remotes are long gone and are no longer avalible. I already had a spare Chamberlin 373LM three button opener from my previous house and was hoping they would be compatible as they are both on 315 MHz. As there is no outlet near the door to the house I decided to connect the new and old openers in parallel. Once the connections were made I followed the directions and had the reciever progremmed in a few seconds. The range is very good, I can reliably open the door several houses down the street. The only quibble I have with the reciever is that the wires and programming can only be performed by removing the front panel of the reciever. This is done by using a small screwdriver which can easily damage or break the plastic of the reciever is not done with great care. With the wires in place the panel also does not fit quite right. Still given the way it is installed up and out of the way in my system it is not a great problem for me.
- Qualifying Orders $59 + SHIP FREE Offer ends 10-Jul-2013 See details.
- Use your Sears Card and Save! Extra 5% off Tool items Sold By Sears when you use your Sears Card. Offer ends 31-Dec-2013 See details.
- Online Only! Extra 10% off select tools Sold by Sears. Valid thru 5/18/13. Offer ends 18-May-2013 See details. | 1,117 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.957992 |
ae0e9b38-6e8e-4f4d-a598-ed7c95f6170c | 2016-07-26T03:15:57+00:00 | 2013-09-19 | 1 | http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/09/19/Texas-appeals-court-overturns-conviction-of-former-House-leader-DeLay/UPI-71331379608362/ | AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 19 (UPI) -- Prosecutors say they will seek a review of an appeals court decision overturning the money-laundering conviction of former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
The 3rd Texas Court of Appeals formally acquitted the Texas Republican of all charges, finding prosecutors used "legally insufficient" evidence to convict him in 2010 of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors accused DeLay of attempting to influence the 2002 election in Texas by funneling corporate money to candidates through his political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority.
He had been sentenced to three years in prison, but had been free pending the results of his appeal.
The appellate court rejected the state's contention the election law violations occurred when DeLay and others tried to swap "soft money for hard money" in transferring funds from an account used for general expenses to one used to contribute to candidates' campaigns, the Houston Chronicle reported.
"However, the state fails to explain how the funds already in the bank account resulted from the subsequent money-swap agreement," said Justice Melissa Goodwin, writing for the majority. "Further, to support this argument, the state disregards the distinction between soft and hard money accounts as irrelevant."
The court said "maintaining separate, segregated bank accounts for soft and hard money is recognized and accepted as legitimate."
Justice David Gaultney concurred in the ruling, writing, "the fundamental problem with the state's case was its failure to prove proceeds of criminal activity."
Chief Justice J. Woodfin Jones dissented.
The Travis County District Attorney's Office issued a statement saying prosecutors "strongly disagree with the opinion of Judges (Melissa) Goodwin and (David) Gaultney that the evidence was insufficient."
"We are concerned and disappointed that two judges substituted their assessment of the facts for that of 12 jurors who personally heard the testimony of over 40 witnesses over the course of several weeks and found that the evidence was sufficient and proved DeLay's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt," the statement said. "We are preparing a response to this opinion and will ask the full Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to review the ruling."
DeLay was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1978 and to the U.S. Congress in 1984. He was elected majority leader in 2002. | 479 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257824570.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071024-00228-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.967101 |
4536cb2a-95e0-4b49-8750-22944ed98f3b | 2018-08-15T11:43:51+00:00 | 2018-08-15 | 0 | https://affinitymedicalclinic.ca/ | Calgary is a multi-cultural city and to better serve our patients, we provide health care in multiple languages including English, Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu & Arabic.
We provide you with the choice of either female or male doctors.
Life doesn't always go as planned. We always welcome Walk-ins for such unexpected events with short waiting times. However, appointments are the preferred method for follow-ups and many other non-urgent visits to the clinic.
"Amazing doctor. He always makes sure all concerns are addressed. There is never a rush to get you in and out. Very happy to have him as our family Doctor. He is the best doctor I had in last 23 years. Staff is very professional and friendly. I would highly recommend his clinic."
"We loved meeting him today, very personable, with kids especially. He was very thorough, met and exceeded our expectation regarding diagnosis and recommendations for our 2.5y. Would love to have him as our family doctor. Recommend him!"
"She is such a fantastic doctor. Dr. Alhur was very kind, professional and knowledgeable. Since I had just moved to Calgary, I had been looking for a new family doctor and my children agree that Dr. Alhur is a great choice for us. I definitely recommend going to her."
"A great doctor!" My previous doctor recently retired so I was on the look out for a new one. A friend suggested Dr. Victor so I decided to try him. My experience has been great with him "
“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” | 332 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221210058.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20180815102653-20180815122653-00404.warc.gz | 0.989244 |
85fee377-aefa-4aab-88ca-cd9b91ccc93e | 2017-08-20T07:46:04+00:00 | 2016-01-29 | 0 | http://boj.com/tags/Sharing%20Economy | Published: January 29, 2016, 2:00 pm
There's no question; the sharing economy, where users are able to rent what they have, be it skills, a room, or a car through the Internet, has disrupted the traditional economy in the Western world.
So why should businesses embrace the sharing economy, rather than fight against it?
The Sharing Economy Has Always Been With Us
When I was growing up, I inherited a food mill from my grandmother. My first, informal, experience with the sharing economy was when a friend posted on Facebook asking if anyone had a food mill she could borrow; she wanted to try her (Read more... | 133 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886106358.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20170820073631-20170820093631-00161.warc.gz | 0.973165 |
807d7a5d-480f-4612-9e05-5cfbf65f946f | 2016-07-27T21:09:11+00:00 | 2006-06-01 | 1 | http://nextbigfuture.com/2006/06/thorium-reactors-for-earth-and-moon.html | Thanks to Futurepundit for his article on this
The amount of energy per kg of thorium is huge: 11 million kW-hr per kg.
Besides having a lot of thorium on earth, a lot of thorium deposits have been detected on the moon Map of thorium lunar deposits Initially any lunar reactor would just bring thorium and other material from earth and get its mining and industrial production processes set up.
Wikipedia is less optimistic about thorium as a nuclear fuel
World nuclear associations view of Thorium reactors
Here is an article that calculates how much thorium it would take to power the world.
Here is an introduction to the thorium fuel cycle
A Thorium nuclear reactor will eliminate weapons grade plutonium and other radiative waste as part of the power-generation process. A uranium-fuelled reactor might generate a tonne of high-level waste that stays toxic for tens of thousands of years. A reactor fuelled only by thorium will generate a fraction of this amount. And it would stay radioactive for only 500 years - after which it would be as manageable as coal ash. The main drawback to thorium is that it's not vigorously fissile, and it needs a source of neutrons to kick off the reaction.
The main stumbling block until now has been how to provide thorium fuel with enough neutrons to keep the reaction going, and do so in an efficient and economical way.
In recent years two new technologies have been developed to do just this.
One company that has already begun developing thorium-fuelled nuclear power is Thorium Power, based just outside Washington DC. The way Thorium Power gets around the sub-criticality of thorium is to create mixed fuels using a combination of enriched uranium, plutonium and thorium.
At the centre of the fuel rod is the 'seed' for the reaction, which contains plutonium.
Wrapped around the core is the 'blanket', which is made from a mixture of uranium and thorium. The seed then provides the necessary neutrons to the blanket to kick-start the thorium fuel cycle. Meanwhile, the plutonium and uranium are also undergoing fission.
The primary benefit of Thorium Power's system is that it can be used in existing nuclear plants with slight modification, such as Russian VVER-1000 reactors. Seth Grae, president and chief executive of Thorium Power, and his team are actively working with the Russians to develop a commercial product by the end of this decade. They already have thorium fuel running in the IR-8 research reactor at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow.
"In the first quarter of 2008, we expect to have lead test assemblies in a full-size commercial nuclear power plant in Russia," said Grae.
AN ALTERNATIVE DESIGN does away with the requirements for uranium or plutonium altogether, and relies on thorium as its primary fuel source. This design, which was originally dubbed an Energy Amplifier but has more recently been named an Accelerator Driven System (ADS), was proposed by Italian Nobel physics laureate Carlos Rubbia, a former director of one of the world's leading nuclear physics labs, CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
An ADS reactor is sub-critical, which means it needs help to get the thorium to react. To do this, a particle accelerator fires protons at a lead target. When struck by high-energy protons the lead, called a spallation target, releases neutrons that collide with nuclei in the thorium fuel, which begins the fuel cycle that ends in the fission of U-233.
A nuclear reactor that requires a particle beam to keep it running might seem a bit strange. But on the contrary, this is one of the ADS design's most attractive features. If the particle beam is switched off, it is impossible for the fuel to enter a chain reaction and cause a meltdown. Instead, the rate of fission will immediately begin to slow and the fuel will eventually cool down and die out. According to Sydney's Hashemi-Nezhad, a sub-critical reactor such as this has clear safety benefits over uranium reactors. "It has zero chance of a Chernobyl-type accident," he said.
Another major advantage of this design is that it only requires thorium as fuel.
Hashemi-Nezhad also says thorium is a highly abundant resource "550 times more abundant in nature than uranium-235".
CERN recently released a detailed report covering the financial viability of the ADS design for power generation, and found it to be at least three times cheaper than coal and 4.8 times cheaper than natural gas. Any nuclear reactor will have a high establishment cost, but CERN stresses that a long-life reactor will be highly competitive compared to fossil and renewable energy fuels.
Another approach is a Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor | 1,002 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257827079.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071027-00035-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.948519 |
52a794c5-873c-4922-8ad1-358c0a19cb87 | 2013-05-20T02:33:27+00:00 | 2012-10-15 | 1 | http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/15/us-amazon-texasins-chips-idUSBRE89E09P20121015 | - Taxes on some wealthy French top 100 pct of income: paper
- North Korea fires short-range missiles for two days in a row |
- Shooting death of gay man rocks New York's cradle of gay rights
- Israel warns against Russian arms supply to Syria
- Female hostage died from police bullet in New York standoff: official
Amazon in talks to buy Texas Instruments' mobile chip arm: paper
TEL AVIV |
TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc, the world's largest Internet retailer, is in advanced talks to buy the mobile chip business of Texas Instruments, Israeli financial newspaper Calcalist reported on Monday.
If negotiations lead to an agreement, Amazon, which makes tablets and is expected to enter the smartphone industry, would become a direct rival to Apple and Samsung Electronics, which also designs their own chips. The value of any deal will probably be billions of dollars, Calcalist said.
Texas Instruments said last month it will shift its wireless investment focus from products like smartphones to a broader market, including industrial clients such as carmakers, where it is hoping for a more profitable and stable business.
Officials at both firms were not immediately available for comment outside U.S. business hours.
Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi told Reuters she doubted whether Amazon wants to "become that intimately involved with hardware".
TI's chips are used in Amazon.com's Kindle Fire tablet. TI told investors it would continue to support its customers but its mobile application chip business, which supports features like video, will not invest in supporting its customers future roadmap for tablets and smartphones to the same degree as before.
Calcalist quoted TI spokeswoman Whitney Jodry as saying that the company refrains from commenting on rumors.
(Reporting by Tova Cohen and Tarmo Virki; Editing by Louise Heavens)
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- Digg this | 393 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.949918 |
3ac7d2e2-8297-41e0-887b-0d8f2089bd76 | 2017-08-16T23:43:45+00:00 | 2012-04-21 | 1 | https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-method-marker-alzheimer-disease-earlier.html | Use of a new drug to detect the beta-amyloid plaques in the brain that are hallmark signs of Alzheimer's disease may help doctors diagnose the disease earlier, according to research that will be presented as part of the Emerging Science program (formerly known as Late-Breaking Science) at the American Academy of Neurology's 64th Annual Meeting in New Orleans April 21 to April 28, 2012.
Currently, Alzheimer's disease can only be definitively confirmed through the detection of amyloid plaques and/or tangles in the brain during autopsy after death or with a brain tissue biopsy. The new method uses the drug florbetaben as a tracer during a PET scan of the brain to visualize amyloid plaques during life.
In order to prove that the florbetaben PET scan detects beta-amyloid in the brain, the global phase III study directly compared brain regions in the PET scan to respective brain regions after death during autopsy.
For the study, more than 200 participants nearing death (including both participants with suspected Alzheimer's disease and those without known dementia) and who were willing to donate their brain underwent MRI and florbetaben PET scan. The amount of plaque found in the 31 participants who reached autopsy was then compared to the results of the scans. A total of 186 brain regions from these donors were analyzed along with 60 brain regions from healthy volunteers. Based on these 246 brain regions the study found florbetaben to detect beta-amyloid with a sensitivity of 77 percent and a specificity of 94 percent.
Comparison of the visual assessment method proposed for florbetaben for clinical practice with the post mortem diagnosis revealed a sensitivity of 100 percent and a specificity of 92 percent. Sensitivity is the percentage of actual positives that are correctly identified as positive, and specificity is the percentage of negatives that are correctly identified.
"These results confirm that florbetaben is able to detect beta-amyloid plaques in the brain during life with great accuracy and is a suitable biomarker," said study author Marwan Sabbagh, MD, director of Banner Sun Health Research Institute in Sun City, Ariz., and a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology. "This is an easy, non-invasive way to assist an Alzheimer's diagnosis at an early stage. Also exciting is the possibility of using florbetaben as tool in future therapeutic clinical research studies where therapy goals focus on reducing levels of beta-amyloid in the brain."
Explore further: Is it Alzheimer's disease or another dementia? Marker may give more accurate diagnosis | 534 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886102757.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20170816231829-20170817011829-00408.warc.gz | 0.93302 |
fe6f052a-c1b6-4b92-9cc2-503fc8e9b537 | 2019-08-18T21:22:35+00:00 | 2019-08-18 | 0 | https://www.ebay.co.uk/c/527732604 | Jethro tull living in the past cd
Est. delivery Thu, 19 Sep - Thu, 03 Oct
Similar items to consider
"Nice condition %0a I will send the CD out in a strong jiffybag and mark fragile.Combined post available.%0a Any winning bids over £20 will be sent by signed for mail.%0a Any UK winning bids over £50 will be sent via special delivery. Please wait for the invoice.%0a Do not accept damaged items and send straight back to me.%0a If your item does not arrive in a timely manner or if you are unhappy with any part of yourctransaction please contact me.%0a I require payment within 4 days of the item being won.%0a You will not be disappointed when your item arrives.%0a Happy bidding."
ukdav_urk4birFeedback score (2182)
100% positive Feedback | 198 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027314130.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20190818205919-20190818231919-00057.warc.gz | 0.796724 |
7846d069-f529-43e3-9eeb-55500b329557 | 2018-08-14T21:49:31+00:00 | 2015-02-09 | 0 | https://www.jackbrutuspenny.com/blog/2015/2/9/riddle-me-colourful | A painted picture in your mind? Click on the title guess and find!
I'm tough and built, one thing in mind,
To push and elevate behind.
Beware the sands of time, and luck,
And muster all your gumph and pluck,
So get a bird, at least a chick.
I'm not the building, but the stick.
'Is the picture clear?'
'Not in the slightest. You need more colours!'
'Well there certainly can't be more than one colour at a time. That would be far too confusing.'
Riddle Answer A Set of Traffic Lights
and though I'm blunt, work with me joint. Cross me and get a point - a driving point for running a red light. | 157 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221209585.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20180814205439-20180814225439-00459.warc.gz | 0.932492 |
246f6df5-6c67-481f-8506-41549f713fe3 | 2016-07-24T08:41:09+00:00 | 2016-07-24 | 0 | https://ca.help.yahoo.com/kb/account?redirect=true | Prevent sign-in problems by adding your mobile phone number to your account.
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You have been redirected to this page because the page you requested was not found. | 270 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257823989.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071023-00092-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.933369 |
acf472c0-832e-4c4f-81d1-9176d5d0e06c | 2022-05-19T01:43:23+00:00 | 2022-04-06 | 1 | https://newspatrolling.com/bangalore-international-airport-and-aws-announce-new-joint-innovation-center/ | Center will advance BIAL’s digital transformation vision, and enable startup-led innovation in aviation, smart infrastructure, utilities, and mobility
Bengaluru, April 06, 2022 – Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) – operator of Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru (BLR Airport) – is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, to establish a Joint Innovation Center (JIC) that will drive the development and adoption of digital solutions in aviation. The JIC will also enable startups to accelerate innovation in aviation, smart infrastructure, utilities, and mobility by providing comprehensive program offerings and a technical platform that helps customers innovate quickly utilizing AWS technology. This is the first JIC by AWS established outside of China and its first JIC dedicated to advancing the aviation industry.
The JIC is expected to open at BLR Airport in 2022, and will focus on driving digital innovation for the airport, enhancing passenger experience, and creating positive impact for the community where the airport operates. It will help strengthen BIAL’s digital roadmap and develop custom solutions for BLR Airport using a combination of technologies including: cloud computing, Blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), analytics, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/ VR). The JIC will support BIAL’s intent to be at the forefront of technology innovation in India’s commercial aviation, and create a digitised and intuitive airport for travellers. It will focus on developing technology solutions to enhance the passenger experience across retail, dining, and entertainment at the airport, and achieving operational efficiencies for BIAL. Once implemented, these efficiencies can be scaled to other airports in India and globally.
As part of the launch of the JIC, BIAL will also deploy Startup Valley, a startup accelerator program that will offer an open innovation opportunity for startups to build and accelerate digital solutions in the aviation industry, the Airport City* and related domains. The Startup Valley will provide a structured engagement approach for startups to design, develop, and build their solutions, and test their solutions at BIAL. AWS will provide programmatic support that will match identified startups with mentorship, AWS Credits, technical training, and access to an investor pool. These joint efforts between BIAL and AWS will allow Indian startups to further develop their solutions for adoption and scale.
“We are thrilled to extend our relationship with AWS to power two of our important focus areas – strengthen our digital roadmap towards making BLR Airport the best destination airport for travellers by leveraging the power of cloud computing and digital technologies, and create an environment for startups to innovate and advance in aviation and related domains,” said Hari Marar, MD & CEO, BIAL. “The new Joint Innovation Center between BIAL and AWS will enable us to develop modular, scalable, innovative digital solutions that can benefit all stakeholders in the aviation domain and help reimagine air travel in India.”
“Modern air travel has been disrupted by the pandemic and is ripe for innovation. We are excited to strengthen our engagement with BIAL to help them explore new possibilities with digital technologies, develop enhanced experiences for travelers, and realize the vision of a digitalized and smart airport,” said Rahul Sharma, President, Public Sector – AISPL#, AWS India and South Asia. “With Startup Valley, our combined vision is to enable startups to transition successfully and faster in their experimentation, development, and scaling phases, help them commercialize their solutions, and accelerate the adoption of innovative digital solutions in the country.” | 738 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662522741.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20220519010618-20220519040618-00218.warc.gz | 0.911716 |
a361b5ce-a2b6-4e9b-9eca-759a7e2cff43 | 2017-08-17T07:01:55+00:00 | 2013-05-21 | 1 | http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2013/05/21/US-groundwater-running-dry/UPI-81191369134227/?spt=hs&or=er | WASHINGTON, May 21 (UPI) -- The depletion of groundwater from one of the largest aquifers in the United States since 2001 was faster than during the entire 20th century, the USGS finds.
The U.S. Geological Survey reviewed groundwater data from 1900 to 2008 and said the annual rate of depletion was accelerating. The Ogallala Aquifer, which covers more than 170,000 square miles in the middle of the United States, declined rapidly because of the high rate of water use for agricultural, industrial and municipal water needs.
"The depletion during the last eight years of record [2001-2008] is about 32 percent of the cumulative depletion in this aquifer during the entire 20th century," the USGS said in a statement.
The USGS said groundwater depletion has increased steadily since the 1950s but has accelerated more quickly in the last eight years.
"Because groundwater systems typically respond slowly to human actions, a long-term perspective is vital to manage this valuable resource in sustainable ways," acting USGS Director Suzette Kimball said in a statement.
The World Meteorological Organization said there was a global level of sustained drought last year. Groundwater sources are replenished in part by rainfall and other forms of precipitation. | 253 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886102967.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20170817053725-20170817073725-00244.warc.gz | 0.963084 |
5cecc633-d5e3-4236-aea9-7cea33918397 | 2019-08-20T04:22:22+00:00 | 2019-08-20 | 1 | https://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=32076568 | |“Flying Over Traffic” – Short-hop Services Multiply|
Tired of bad traffic and have money to spare? A growing cadre of venture capital–backed startups are launching services to ferry people on short-distance trips by small planes and helicopters.
Companies including Blade, Skyryse and BlackBird believe there is a growing market for short hops by air in places like the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York, so long as prices can be ratcheted down from the sky-high costs of traditional charter flights. Blade, backed by Airbus and valued at about $150 million, already runs helicopter flights in New York and Los Angeles, and plans to start flying in the Bay Area, it told a small group of customers this month.
The services are modeled after ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft, with easy-to-use apps to book trips. The companies avoid owning aircraft outright, instead positioning themselves as service providers and ticket sellers to control costs. Uber itself is exploring ways to enter the market with self-flying, electric aircraft, though the technology is believed to be years off.
Read More $ The Information | 235 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027315222.14/warc/CC-MAIN-20190820024110-20190820050110-00206.warc.gz | 0.948863 |
e5e0e79e-7339-4bf1-a6a0-de0c98c23b6d | 2015-03-29T10:37:08+00:00 | 2013-02-15 | 0 | http://www.thefashionisto.com/highland-fallwinter-2013-new-york-fashion-week/ | The Stonemaster–California rock climbers of the 1970’s serve as the inspiration of Highland’s fall/winter 2013 collection as they deliver their first presentation for New York Fashion Week. Championing the Stonemasters and their movement propelled by the desire to live free of all restraint, dreaming of higher peaks and larger risks. With the clothes on their back inspiring Highland, varied colors and fabrics come together for a laid-back reinterpretation of the decade. While purple and quartz reference nylon climbing ropes, colors such as chalk and pine represent the rocky faces of the Yosemite. Embracing the call of nature, Indian ikat fabrics juxtaposed with Mexican Thunderbird blankets color the collection with items like the sherpa coat or motorcycle jacket tying back into Highland’s structured heritage. | 163 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131298464.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172138-00221-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.890848 |
d15e3d30-baca-4f5b-ac2c-e00789712690 | 2019-08-25T22:41:42+00:00 | 2019-08-13 | 1 | https://freedom937.iheart.com/featured/koa-headlines/content/2019-08-13-air-quality-commission-to-vote-on-zero-emissions-vehicle-program-this-week/ | The Colorado Air Quality Commission could vote to adopt a zero-emission vehicle program, similar to a program already in place in California. The Zero Emission Vehicle program, or ZEV, would mandate car manufacturers to sell more electric cars in Colorado. The percentage will start at under five-percent, and then grow to eight-percent. The Colorado Auto Dealers Association says it is opposed to the plan, saying it will limit customer choices and increase the cost for new vehicles. The commission vote is scheduled for Thursday.
Content Goes Here | 108 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027330907.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20190825215958-20190826001958-00386.warc.gz | 0.928833 |
69eaab4c-776f-45d4-a746-28ccc08d4bb7 | 2018-08-20T15:45:38+00:00 | 2016-06-28 | 1 | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-36647132 | Brexit: Welsh Government urged to appoint Leave adviser
The Welsh Government should include politicians who campaigned for Brexit in its negotiations over withdrawal from the EU, according to the leader of the Welsh Conservatives.
Andrew RT Davies, a prominent Leave campaigner, said the Welsh Government had failed to reflect public opinion.
The Welsh Government said it saw "no merit" in appointing a Leave supporter to advise it in negotiations.
On Tuesday, AMs will debate the impact on Wales of the UK leaving the EU.
Prime Minister David Cameron said all the devolved governments would be involved in Brexit negotiations.
Conservative MP David Jones called for the first minister to appoint a Leave supporter to advise him on Wales' exit from the EU.
Mr Davies said, despite the expectations of many, "Wales has proven itself to be a Eurosceptic nation".
"As negotiations in relation to the UK's withdrawal from the EU continue, the Welsh Government must ensure public opinion is better reflected as part of this process."
He said the country needed "strong leadership that reflects the wishes of its people, and ensures the best deal for our country in this new era.
"That should include a role for those politicians of all parties who campaigned for a vote to leave."
In response to Mr Jones's suggestion, a Welsh Government spokesman said: "We don't see any merit in this idea.
"The Welsh Government will work through the consequences of the vote in good faith in the interests of the people of Wales."
Meanwhile Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood told BBC Wales she wanted to hold a special conference of Plaid Cymru members to decide where the party would go next and where Wales should go.
She has already proposed a new union of independent nations for the UK.
She said: "We want to keep the option open of remaining part of the European Union. We see our future as using pound sterling; we see the potential for pooling other functions, and that remains to be seen what they are.
"There's a discussion to be had between the different countries that make up the United Kingdom. We'll need to look at resources, the constitution.
"Everything has been thrown up in the air by last Thursday's vote." | 456 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221216475.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20180820140847-20180820160847-00325.warc.gz | 0.965729 |
3dca4442-d9c6-4619-8d18-c90fdb50f864 | 2016-07-29T17:50:22+00:00 | 2013-03 | 0 | http://thx4playing.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-home.html | Spark Consulting, this past summer.
My new website has been live in a dev environment since November, but it recently moved to its permanent home.
With that, it's time to retire Thanks for Playing, at least in its current incarnation.
I still blog just about every week day, only now I'm doing it over at the Spark Blog. So please come join me in my new environment to keep the association awesomesauce flowing. (Oh - and hook me up with your RSS feed here.) | 106 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257831770.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071031-00197-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.971675 |
ef66cae8-45b6-4da0-9c78-805899622e3c | 2019-08-23T04:53:22+00:00 | 2019-05-27 | 1 | https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2019/05/27/collaboration-with-china-on-brain-and-intelligence-science.html | During this year’s Shanghai Forum, University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor Dr Michael Spence and President of Fudan University Professor Xu Ningsheng signed the memorandum of understanding (MOU) to form the Brain and Intelligence Science Alliance (BISA).
“We need to work across disciplines and across oceans if our research is going to improve lives. The challenges of brain disorders, computational neuroscience and the ethics of artificial intelligence can only be addressed if we get the sharpest minds working on solutions. That’s why we are working with Fudan University on this important research,” Dr Michael Spence said.
China has the world’s highest population of patients with brain disorders. More than 20 percent of the world’s patients with dementia live in China. Stroke is the leading cause of death in China, with the country accounting for roughly one third of worldwide stroke mortality.
"When it comes to brain disorders the challenges China faces over the next few decades as its population ages further are immense. Therefore research on the prevention, early diagnosis and early intervention for brain disorders is particularly urgent," said Professor Sharon Naismith, University of Sydney's lead academic on the partnership on Brain and Intelligence Science Alliance.
Fudan University hosts a global interdisciplinary research platform in brain intelligence science and technology which leverages the University’s strengths in applied mathematics, computer science, neurobiology, clinical medicine amongst others.
The establishment of BISA will facilitate deeper cooperation between the two universities in the fields of data science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. It is part of a major partnership agreement signed by the two universities where they have also agreed to make funding available on a competitive basis for joint research and education projects, to be judged by academic panels from Sydney and Fudan.
“We have lots of strong engagement across the board with Fudan and we are keen to encourage collaboration across the basic sciences, medicine, and humanities and social sciences too,” Professor Kathy Belov, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Global Engagement) at the University of Sydney. | 427 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027317847.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20190823041746-20190823063746-00162.warc.gz | 0.925812 |
4d69e5b7-31a4-4235-87bd-530510ee2bdd | 2016-07-23T15:15:24+00:00 | 2013-08-05 | 1 | http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/tooth-sensor-watches-your-mouth-13-08-05/ | A person’s mouth says a lot about them. Sounds obvious, but I’m talking less about what vocalizes and more about the way it behaves when we eat, drink, speak or even cough.
Researchers at National Taiwan University believe that monitoring such oral behavior can provide doctors with a wealth of information about a patient’s dietary habits, dental hygiene and overall health.
To test their idea, they built an accelerometer-based oral sensory system to identify how a mouth is being used based on the movement of its teeth. Placed in the mouths of eight people, a prototype system correctly recognized each person’s oral behavior up to 94 percent of the time. [Cheng-Yuan Li et al., Sensor-Embedded Teeth for Oral Activity Recognition]
The researchers now want to build a wireless version that might someday fit inside a fake tooth or attach to a pair of braces. The sensor could send you or your doctor a message when you’re not sticking to your diet or not keeping your promise to quit smoking.
Let’s hope they also build in an alarm for bad breath. That would benefit the person wearing the sensor, and everyone around them as well.
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.] | 261 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257823072.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071023-00032-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.932127 |
6585e8c0-1c97-4af8-bab1-40e235e03325 | 2019-08-23T15:13:59+00:00 | 2019-08-23 | 0 | https://www.kfma.org.uk/stallholdersbyproduce.asp?id=79 | JR's Kitchen produces gourmet ready to eat food including our pork pies, which includes three cuts of pork, herbs and spices, our pasties including our meat version containing rump steak and our vegetarian pasty with a Bombay aloo filling. Our Scotch Eggs come in four different types and include a large free range egg with a soft yolk with the following flavours of pork with fresh thyme, pork and black pudding, pork and chorizo and a vegetarian Bombay aloo version. We also produce chutneys and piccalilli, which together with our other products are all handmade. None of our products contain additives, preservatives or colourings and with our commitment to the environment, all our packaging is bio-degradeable.produces gourmet ready to eat food including our pork pies andScotch Eggs We also produce chutneys and piccalilli, which together with our other products are all handmade.Market: Knockholt
Delightful French pastries, tarts, macaroons & cakes. These are all handmade using the best ingredients and traditional French methods by Le Cordon Bleu trained Pastry Chef Dulce. For enquiries, kindly get in touch and we look forward to hearing from you! | 250 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027318894.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20190823150804-20190823172804-00384.warc.gz | 0.937479 |
d856d16a-d178-4a28-8673-2a899475c08e | 2020-10-21T09:53:33+00:00 | 2020-10-21 | 0 | https://www.watchco.com/products/ea013 | Vestal Electra Women's Stainless Analog Watch - Brown Lizard Leather Strap - Gold-Tone Dial - EA013
Vestal makes watches and other accessories designed for the musically inspired individual marketing and branding through musicians artists athletes and others immersed within music culture. Vestal's watch line spans a wide range of fashions designed to fine-tune any current fashion.
Sometimes watch designs come easy. That's the case with the Electra: a simple but effective cuff watch designed for women that like to rock. The EA011 features a brown lizard leather strap and gold-tone dial case and accents.
CASE: stainless steel caseback 25 mm
BAND: leather 35 mm wide
BUCKLE: stainless steel
CRYSTAL: solid curved mineral
MOVEMENT: standard three hands
WATER RESISTANCE: 3 ATM/30 meters
Watchco.com is an authorized Vestal dealer
Free US shipping
1-year Vestal warranty
Vestal Model EA013 | 209 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107876307.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20201021093214-20201021123214-00227.warc.gz | 0.879628 |
ee5229b5-c588-4564-b137-b1c6c0b36037 | 2020-10-27T23:18:37+00:00 | 2020-04-30 | 1 | https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/918545/why-has-shell-chosen-to-put-its-business-before-its-shareholders-918545.html | Describing Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s (LON:RDSB) first dividend cut for over 80 years as a show of strength is obviously a tough needle to thread, nonetheless, for anyone looking beyond this quarter’s payment there is perhaps something positive to take from the news.
There is little-to-no solace for those holding the oil supermajor as a utility-like dividend share.
That the payout wasn’t scrapped altogether is likely meagre relief for the portfolio-builders, retirees or pension funds that depend on Shell’s yield.
Shell is but the latest blue-chip to either cut or cancel dividends amid the current crisis, the running total for the shortfall is now close to US$35bn.
So, it is bad news for Shell in as much as it is bad news for its income-seeking shareholders.
Contra to this admittedly simple and obvious narrative, a case could be made that it was an important call for Shell’s business in the longer term.
As one of the world’s largest petroleum producing firms Shell already faced quite fundamental challenges to its status quo, even before COVID-19 decimated demand and crude prices.
For many months prior to coronavirus lockdown there was growing sense that public sentiments (and even sentiments of some capitalists) were moving away from fossil fuel and hydrocarbon businesses.
At the same time, before COVID provided the tipping point, the crude market was encumbered by structural challenges and geopolitical posturing.
By nature and by metaphor Shell is a slow turning oil tanker.
Like industry peer and London portfolio stalwart it also has had to carry a sacrosanct dividend policy.
Quite whether the COVID forced dividend-cut breaks the voodoo in the longer term, to potentially unshackle management to rebase future dividends remains uncertain.
One light dividend payment doesn’t turn Shell into a nimble and decisive small-cap overnight, but, it was clearly a choice to put the businesses before the dividend.
Whilst bad, Shell’s bottom line financials were mostly in better shape than BP’s.
A number of investor updates before Thursday’s results suggested Shell had the capacity to take on more debt and absorb the shareholder payouts for at least the remainder of this year.
Breaking an eight-decade long dividend policy sees Shell save US$2.4bn of cash immediately and potentially allows the Anglo-Dutch more ‘optionality’ going forward.
Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Nicholas Hyett, in a note, said: “While this is very unwelcome news for income investors, given that Shell is one of the largest dividend payers on the entire stock market, it may be better news for the long-term health of the business.
“The need to service a cash hungry dividend has seen future investment sacrificed and assets sold.
“Essentially both Shell and BP have been slowly digesting themselves to keep the dividend ticking over. Removing that pressure allows the group to focus on the future and also secures the future of recently announced renewable energy investments.”
European bank Berenberg, which currently retains a ‘buy’ rating for Shell, meanwhile, cautioned that the dividend decision may cap the share price.
“While it gives management breathing room and may allow a reset for a more sustainable dividend policy over time, we believe that yield was the main attraction for investors in the stock,” Berenberg analyst Henry Tarr said in a note.
“The dividend cut could, therefore, limit the recovery potential for the share price.”
As Shell is steered out of the current crisis and, some attentions again turn back to energy transition, it will be intriguing to see whether dividends remain lower for longer, or whether the oiler quickly returns to business as usual. | 804 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107894890.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20201027225224-20201028015224-00506.warc.gz | 0.935514 |
b1ea139d-f78f-4f30-a7e8-efcb6f618166 | 2019-08-24T00:35:20+00:00 | 2016-12-02 | 0 | https://www.reddeeradvocate.com/sports/red-deer-rebels-second-period-woes-continue-in-loss-to-lethbridge-hurricanes/ | Hurricanes 5 Rebels 3
LETHBRIDGE — The sixth straight WHL win for the Lethbridge Hurricanes produced the same old problems for the Red Deer Rebels.
While the Rebels captured two points on Wednesday in an effort that left a lot to be desired, the Hurricanes did no such favours in a dominant 5-3 win at the Enmax Centre in Lethbridge Friday night.
Rebels GM and head coach Brent Sutter said once again it was an inconsistent performance that caused problems for his squad.
“In the second period it was 26 minutes of not very good hockey and you can’t play that way if you are going to have success. When you play like that, you take bad penalties and it compounds things,” Sutter said. “We lose our focus, and it’s not something that you want to do as a player because when that happens, and you’re playing good teams, you get nailed for it. It was a good team we were playing and they played hard, if they’re prepared to do that for 60 minutes we’re in trouble.”
The Rebels got on the board early after a Colton Bobyk point shot was stopped before Akash Bains collected the rebound and potted his fifth goal of the season at 6:06 of the first period. The assist was Bobyk’s 100th career WHL point and extended his streak to 12 straight games with a helper. The streak is the longest in the WHL this season and the Rebels longest since Martin Erat had assists in 11, 16 years ago.
Defenceman Carson Sass scored his third of the year less than three minutes later. Rebels new addition Matthew Campese contributed his first point with an assist on the Rebels second goal.
The early lead didn’t last long, as the Hurricanes responded in a fury with four unanswered goals.
The collection of tallies marked the third straight game Rebels have given up three or more unanswered goals.
“I’ve seen it for a while now,” Sutter said. “We’re giving up way too many goals. We have to take a lot more pride in not wanting to get scored against. That’s something that this group has struggled with all year. That happens when you’re not playing hard enough, you aren’t blocking shots and you aren’t competing and you’re soft. In today’s game, there are so many good teams, you play that way you are going to get in trouble.”
Adam Musil redirected an Evan Polei shot at 13:13 of the third period for his ninth goal of the season to cut the Hurricanes lead to one. Lethbridge added an empty net goal to finish the scoring.
The Rebels have also been torched by two Hurricanes in particular, with Jordy Bellerive putting up six points in the two contests and Tyler Wong contributing seven.
The win for Lethbridge also means there is just one point separating the clubs in the Central Division standings.
The two teams will be back at it Saturday night when the Hurricanes travel to Red Deer. Puck drop is set for 7 p.m. at the Centrium and it will be the Rebels annual Tuque Toss Night and Books on the Bus.
Ice chips: Rebels added forward Matt Campese,19, to their roster on Thursday and also recalled defenceman Jacob Herauf from the midget AAA Sherwood Park Kings.
Campese was playing with the West Kelowna Warriors of Junior A BCHL, after being released by the Kamloops Blazers in late September. The five-foot-10, 180-pound forward played one game as a 16-year-old with the Victoria Royals and 14 games the following season before being dealt to the Blazers. In 93 career games in the WHL, Campese had 10 goals and 16 points. In his short stint this season in West Kelowna, the forward had 17 points in 15 games.
Herauf, 16, was with the Rebels in training camp and to start the season before he was sent back to midget AAA. He has played nine games with Red Deer this season and has one assist.
Fifteen-year-old goalie Byron Fancy, a Lethbridge product dressed as the Rebels backup goalie on Friday night. He was the Rebels second round pick in the WHL Bantam Draft in 2016. | 922 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027319155.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20190823235136-20190824021136-00144.warc.gz | 0.973469 |
69bd32f7-d88c-4b2e-8473-3c1b7240ab73 | 2022-05-18T22:28:37+00:00 | 2021-05-05 | 1 | https://nowliberty.com/just-in-facebook-make-the-final-announcement-on-trump/ | The Facebook oversight board has upheld the blacklisting of former President Donald Trump’s accounts for now, giving Facebook another six months to announce whether it will be removing the suspension or deleting Trump’s pages.
The Daily Mail reports that Facebook’s oversight board, also known as the “Supreme Court” of Facebook, has voted to temporarily uphold the ban on former President Trump’s accounts on the platform. The board has reportedly told Facebook that it needs additional six months to decide whether former President Trump is suspended temporarily or permanently.
The board stated in its announcement that it was upholding the suspension for now but also criticized Facebook for violating its own rules by not providing Trump with an end date for the suspension as it does for its other users.
The board stated that Facebook cannot “make up the rules as it goes along,” by banning some users for a limited amount of time and others indefinitely. The board stated:
The Board has upheld Facebook’s decision on January 7, 2021, to restrict then-President Donald Trump’s access to posting content on his Facebook page and Instagram account.
However, it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension.
Facebook’s normal penalties include removing the violating content, imposing a time-bound period of suspension, or permanently disabling the page and account.
The Board insists that Facebook review this matter to determine and justify a proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform. Facebook must complete its review of this matter within six months of the date of this decision.
The Board also made policy recommendations for Facebook to implement in developing clear, necessary, and proportionate policies that promote public safety and respect freedom of expression.
This is the first time Facebook has ever blocked a world leader from using its platform. Trump was also banned from Twitter during the week of the Capitol riots.
Twitter CFO Ned Segal commented on the Facebook Oversight Board’s decision and whether it would affect Trump’s account on Twitter, stating: “Well, there has been no changes to anything we have shared in the past around the former president’s account. When you step back and think about our policies, we want to work hard to be consistent, to be transparent so people know exactly what to expect from us.”
“We don’t have an oversight board like that. Our team is accountable for the decisions that we make,” Segal added. “There is no changes to anything we have talked about in the past.”
The Facebook Oversight Board is an independent body that rules on Facebook’s decision’s and Facebook cannot overrule the board, but does pay the salaries of the board. | 578 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662522556.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20220518215138-20220519005138-00026.warc.gz | 0.966384 |
b7f859b3-1ba1-486c-8de2-f82a247e1470 | 2017-08-19T06:15:26+00:00 | 2015-09-07 | 1 | http://www.thestar.co.uk/business/decision-due-on-doncaster-lidl-store-plan-1-7425096 | Plans to build a Lidl supermarket in Thorne look set to go ahead despite opposition from the nearby Sainsbury’s.
Doncaster Council’s planning committee meets tomorrow to consider plans
for a site near the now-demolished water tower on Field Road.
Documents due to go before councillors at the meeting reveal rival firm Sainsbury , who have a store on King Street, lodged an objection the scheme.
The rival chain objected because the site had previously been lined up in official planning maps as being used for housing.
But the report states time has moved on and the site has not come forward for development for housing since its allocation in 1998, despite two economic booms as well as a recession and despite having had a planning permission for housing.
It says: “It is not considered that the loss of this land for retail purposes will jeopardise the council’s housing strategy.
“Whilst the site will result in a loss of housing land within a low flood risk area, the proposal will create jobs, enhance the local economy and increase consumer choice within the town. Overall 15 full time and 25 part time jobs are to be created.”
The planned store would have 1,876 square metres of floor space and 97 car parking spaces are proposed.
In all there were four letters of objection send in, highlighting concerns including traffic congestion, which is already an issue in the area, and road safety. There were six letters in favour, with points made including that competition between stores was good for the consumer.
Recommending the scheme gets planning permission, the report states: “It would bring a vacant underused site back into use, offer linked trip opportunities due to its proximity to the Thorne town centre, create new jobs in a deprived area, improve the setting and appearance of the area at a key gateway into the town centre and assist in clawing back trade from out of centre locations.There is an identified need for a new food store in this location. Thorne currently lacks convenience food provision and this scheme would help meet the day to day needs of residents.”
Meanwhile, Lidl have now filed a full planning application to the council for a store in Bentley, which would take the site of the Rostholme Club, which would be demolished as part of the proposals. The application has been validated, so consultation can start. | 492 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886105304.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20170819051034-20170819071034-00250.warc.gz | 0.972262 |
c22fc0ab-64c6-433e-b446-bb0ecc815690 | 2013-06-20T08:50:58+00:00 | 2013-03-14 | 1 | http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Iran+year+away+from+having+nuclear+weapon+Obama+says/8103672/story.html | Iran is about a year away from developing a nuclear weapon and the United States remains committed to doing everything in its power to prevent that from happening, U.S. President Barack Obama said in an exclusive interview that aired Thursday on Israeli TV.
Just days before he is to arrive in Israel for his first presidential visit, Obama told Israel's Channel 2 TV that while he still prefers diplomacy over force, a nuclear Iran is a "red line" and all options remain on the table to stop it.
"Right now, we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon, but obviously we don't want to cut it too close," he said. "So when I'm consulting with Bibi (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) as I have over the last several years on this issue, my message to him will be the same as before: 'If we can resolve it diplomatically, that is a more lasting solution. But if not I continue to keep all options on the table."'
The timeline for action against Iran has been one of the most fraught disputes in an already tense relationship between Obama and Netanyahu. Israel has repeatedly threatened to act militarily should Iran appear to be on the verge of obtaining a bomb, while the U.S. has pushed for more time to allow diplomacy and economic sanctions to run their course.
Obama's forecast gives more time than that of Netanyahu, who has signalled that the coming months present a point of no return in dealing with Iran.
The American president nonetheless took a stern tone toward Iran in the half-hour-long interview.
"What I have also said is that there is a window, not an infinite period of time, but a window of time where we can resolve this diplomatically and it is in all of our interests" to do this, he said. "They (Iran) are not yet at the point, I think, where they have made a fundamental decision to get right with the international community ... I do think they are recognizing that there is a severe cost to continue on the path they are on and that there is another door open."
Israel considers a nuclear-armed Iran to be an existential threat, citing Iranian denials of the Holocaust, its calls for Israel's destruction, its development of missiles capable of striking the Jewish state and its support for hostile Arab militant groups. Tehran says its nuclear program is peaceful and designed to produce energy and medical isotopes, a claim that Israel and many Western countries reject.
Obama said that a nuclear Iran would also be "dangerous for the world. It would be dangerous for U.S. national security interests."
In the interview, Obama also spoke about his relationship with Netanyahu - claiming it is not as tense as reported - and encouraged Israelis and Palestinians to resume peace talks. | 572 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.97275 |
65c0e19c-aa47-4feb-80e4-5a45fd0b9c8d | 2020-10-19T21:19:30+00:00 | 2019-10 | 1 | https://tellymix.co.uk/reality-tv/293427-apprentice-winners-where-now-2019.html | Ahead of The Apprentice 2019 this week we take a look back at the previous winners.
Like most reality shows, there's been quite the variation in the successes of winners from The Apprentice, from business flops to mutli-million pound companies.
During the show's first six series it was a job up for grabs and while few of the winners still work with Lord Sugar himself, he's very much in contact with most of them, as well as plenty of the other candidates from the previous ten-plus years worth of series.
Since 2011 the candidates have been competing for an investment from Lord Sugar in their business with over £2 million having been injected into new companies that Lord Sugar says are all doing very well.
But just who won The Apprentice last year and what are the past winners get up since leaving?
Who won The Apprentice last year?
After a tense final boardroom, Lord Sugar named Sian Gabbidon the winner of The Apprentice 2018.
Lord Sugar picked Sian to be his business partner. She received a £250,000 business investment and 50/50 partnership with the multi-millionaire business mogul.
Sian showcased her new premium swimwear business, Sian Marie, which has since expanded to add more clothing lines to its range.
But what about the rest? Here's what the other winners of The Apprentice got up in the years after their victories, starting right back at Series 1...
Having won the first ever series some nine years ago now, Tim went on to work with Lord Sugar for two years working in Health and Beauty. He's stayed in touch with the boss since, but Tim went it alone with his Bright Ideas Trust in 2007. The project earned him an MBE in 2012 for services to enterprise culture. In 2016, he started new marketing business Marketing Runners.
Michelle was the first female winner of the show back in 2006, however she was the first to get out early, not fulfilling her one year contract with Lord Sugar. Now Michelle works as a 'motivational speaker', as well as making regular appearances on the telly.
Simon has been by far the most successful of the apprentice winners when it comes to working with Lord Sugar. Hired in 2007, Simon worked alongside the boss for three years before leaving for his own company, which now owns a portfolio of proprieties including housing, restaurants and art galleries.
After controversially winning the 2008 series, Lee McQueen went on to found a recruitment company alongside Lord Sugar's son, Simon Sugar. In 2010 he set up the Raw Talent Academy to teach skills to Sales people .
Restaurateur Yasmina won the 2009 series but never spent more than a year working for Lord Sugar, taking maternity leave for her first baby shortly after being hired.
After returning to work, Yasmina quit her job and instead accepted an offer from Dragons Den star James Caan, working for his private equity firm Hamilton Bradshaw.
She's since become the creative director at the Start-Up Loans Company, offering funding to thousands of new companies with £320 million of committed funding as of 2015.
Stella resigned from her job at Lord Sugar's firm after less than a year, claiming that she was simply an "overpaid lackey". The winner of the 2010 series went on to sue Lord Sugar for constructive dismissal, a case which proved unsuccessful when it went before an employment tribunal.
Stella has since launched CrowdBox TV, a Sky TV channel dedicating to promoting Crowdfunding projects.
Tom was the first winner of the show's new prize, a £250,000 investment. The inventor worked hard to get his work – which includes his curved nail style file – into shops. With Lord Sugar's help, the product is now stocked in a range of stores and has seen an array of spin-offs including nail clippers. Thomas has gone on to release further inventions including diagnostics equipment and ethical goods.
Ricky Martin launched his own recruitment services company Hyper Recruitment Solutions in 2012. With Lord Sugar's help, the new company posted a profit after the first financial year last April.
Dr Leah Totton
Leah's cosmetic surgery business plan proved quite controversial, but eventually won Lord Sugar over in 2013's closely fought finale with Luisa Zissman. Leah's central London cosmetic clinic Dr. Leah opened in 2014, offering non invasive treatments. In 2016, Leah opened a second clinic in Essex.
Mark launched his Climb Online SEO business in the Spring of last year after winning 2014's run. The company was already making a profit as of April 2015.
Lord Alan Sugar is no longer in business with The Apprentice 2015 winner Joseph Valente. Sugar 'hired' Valente during the eleventh series of the BBC contest, choosing him over rival finalist Vana Koutsomitis.
The tycoon invested the £250,000 prize in Valente's boiler company ImpraGas. However in 2017 it was revealed that he has split from the business, with Valente buying back his 50% stake. They remain on good terms, with Sugar promising he will continue to offer support to his former protégé.
It was Alana Spencer who won The Apprentice 2016, securing a £250,000 investment for her bakery business. Following the final she put her business plan into action with Lord Sugar's help. Her Ridiculously Rich brand sells its homemade cakes and chocolates online, at events and via sales reps.
In 2019, it was revealed that Alana had purchased Lord Sugar's shares of the business leaving her as the sole owner.
"I will follow Alana’s progress with much affection," Lord Sugar said.
Alana added: "The knowledge and advice gained from Lord Sugar and his team in the early stages of the business has been invaluable."
Sarah Lynn and James White
There was a surprise when it came to who won The Apprentice 2017. In a shock twist, when faced with the decision between the two candidates, Lord Sugar decided it was a dead heat, and picked both to be his business Sarah Lynn and James White partners.
Both winners received a £250,000 business investment and 50/50 partnership with the multi-millionaire business mogul.
Sarah launched her sweet confectionery company Sweets in the City, now stocked by the likes of Harrods and Selfridges, while James and Lord Sugar currently work on his Right Time Recruitment his IT recruitment service.
The Apprentice 2019 continues Wednesday nights on BBC One. | 1,332 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107866404.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20201019203523-20201019233523-00562.warc.gz | 0.978055 |
47bbdc03-793c-4eb9-bbca-90573fa8d641 | 2016-07-24T08:52:38+00:00 | 2014-03-16 | 1 | http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/victoria/death-with-dignity-reform-20140315-34udp.html | Victorians will be able to instruct their doctors to not give them life-prolonging treatment for possible future illnesses, under a state government push to allow people to die with dignity.
As a condition of hospital funding, patients will now be encouraged to create ''advance care plans'' setting out the kind of medical care they would want in the event of illnesses such as dementia, cancer or brain damage.
The directives would give people a greater say on how they want to die - before they lose their decision-making capacity - and provide clinicians with guidance to implement their patients' wishes.
''It's about providing the support for people to make decisions they believe are important,'' said Health Minister David Davis. ''This is about their own steps, and to make choices ahead of time, where they could say: well this is a point where I would want certain treatment refused, or I want them continued. Either is relevant.''
At present, about 7 per cent of Australians are believed to have an advance care plan, but in Victoria, any refusal of treatment can apply only to a current illness, not a possible future problem. The government's strategy, to be announced on Sunday, will take into account future conditions, and will also be tied to hospital funding to ensure such plans are embedded into clinical practice.
For instance, a patient would be able to give their doctor a written instruction that, in the event of rapidly deteriorating health, they would accept intravenous antibiotics but would not want resuscitation, or a transfer to intensive care.
They could also use the advance care plan to appoint a substitute decision-maker. Euthanasia or assisted suicide, however, will remain illegal.
While the move stops short of Victorian Law Reform Commission recommendations to make instructional directives enshrined in law, many have welcomed the strategy as an important shift in clinical practice.
‘‘We think it’s a very positive development, as it’s very important for people to be having conversations about end-of-life care,’’ said John Chesterman, policy manager for the Office of the Public Advocate.
Barwon Health intensive care specialist Charlie Corke said it was impossible for doctors and family members to make good treatment decisions for patients unless their concerns and wishes were clearly understood.
‘‘It is difficult to think rationally in a crisis. Serious disease may impair clear thinking, and quite often people who are very sick are unconscious, so cannot say anything at all. It is vital that we all plan before a medical crisis, when there is no pressure and plenty of time,’’ he said.
While some health services, such as the Austin Hospital, already provide advance care planning, the government has been under growing pressure to create greater clarity around their practical effects.
Associate Professor Bill Silvester, director of the Austin Hospital’s Respecting Patient Choices program, said there had been many cases of doctors giving patients treatment they may not have wanted because the patient had lost their ability to decide for themselves.
The new strategy would allow people to be better protected in future, he said, and train doctors and nurses to talk to patients while they still had the capacity to work out what they wanted.
He said advance care planning through the Respecting Patient Choices program had also reduced the number of patients who may have otherwise sought euthanasia.
‘‘The reason people look at [euthanasia] is because they don’t trust that their voice will be heard. This policy is going to be a great step forward for us to deliver a better quality of care to patients at their end of life,’’ Professor Silvester said. | 756 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257823989.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071023-00082-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.969762 |
218c33d9-8f5c-4880-8f9e-fcc6c2b10eb7 | 2015-03-27T05:16:59+00:00 | 2014-01-14 | 1 | http://www.witneygazette.co.uk/uk_national_news/10927176.Whole_life_terms__wholly_justified_/?ref=nt | Whole-life jail terms are "wholly justified in the most heinous cases", the Government has said, as it furthers negotiations with European human rights judges over a controversial ruling against the so-called "life means life" sentences.
Whole-life tariffs were deemed a breach of human rights following a successful appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) by murderers Jeremy Bamber, Douglas Vinter and Peter Moore.
Ministers have sent an initial response to the Council of Europe, which oversees the ECHR, to confirm it is considering what steps are necessary as a result of the judgment.
But the Ministry of Justice added the Government intends to argue whole-life tariffs should remain available to courts when a number of key cases are brought before the Court of Appeal later this month.
April Jones murderer Mark Bridger, Lee Newell, who murdered child killer Subhan Anwar in prison, and murderer and rapist Matthew Thomas have been listed to challenge their whole-life terms on January 24.
As part of the same hearing, the panel of five judges will also consider the case of triple killer Ian McLoughlin, whose life sentence with a determinate tariff of 40 years was referred to the Court of Appeal by the Attorney General for being too lenient.
In each case, the central legal issue is the nature of the sentencing scheme for whole life orders and the compatibility of such an order with the European Convention on Human Rights.
A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said: "The Government has today responded to the Council of Europe, noting the Court's judgment.
"We are clear that this raises important issues, on which Parliament and the public has strong views, and that our response should not be rushed.
"The Government remains firmly of the view that whole life tariffs are wholly justified in the most heinous cases, and that they should continue to be available to the courts.
"We will be strenuously arguing in the Court of Appeal that a judge can and must impose a whole life order in cases such as these."
Some 52 criminals are serving whole-life sentences including Ian Brady, the Moors murderer and serial killer Rosemary West.
Last year's appeal by Bamber, Vinter and Moore ruled that their whole life sentences amounted to ''inhuman and degrading treatment''.
Whole-lifers should be entitled to a review of their sentence 25 years into their term at the very latest, the Grand Chamber of the Strasbourg-based court said.
The ruling by 17 judges from across Europe sparked further outrage among critics of the court - despite reassurances that the decision did not amount to grounds for imminent release.
The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, will be on the panel of judges to consider the test cases at the Court of Appeal later this month.
Bridger kidnapped five-year-old April before sexually abusing her, murdering her and disposing of her body.
The former slaughterhouse worker was given a whole-life sentence by trial judge Mr Justice Griffith Williams after he was convicted by a jury at Mold Crown Court.
Newell, 44, is challenging a whole-life sentence imposed last September at Warwick Crown Court.
He was convicted alongside Gary Smith for the February 2013 murder of convicted child killer Anwar in his cell at Long Lartin Prison, Worcestershire.
Newell was already serving a life sentence for a previous murder committed in 1988.
Convicted rapist Thomas was told "life means life" after murdering a newlywed bride and then kidnapping and raping a second woman.
Thomas, then 43, from Luton, pleaded guilty to the murder of Colette Magee in Luton in November 2013.
He also admitted two counts of rape, one of indecent assault and one count of kidnap of the second woman.
Another one of the test cases concerns triple killer McLoughlin, 55, who was jailed for life at the Old Bailey last October for stabbing a man on his first day-release from prison after 21 years in custody.
When sentencing McLoughlin, the trial judge imposed a 40-year tariff, saying he could not pass a whole-life term because of the European court ruling.
McLoughlin - who had killed twice before - stabbed Graham Buck, 66, as he came to the aid of a neighbour in Little Gaddesden, Hertfordshire, last July.
Attorney General Dominic Grieve referred his case to the appeal court because he regards McLoughlin's sentence with the 40-year minimum term as "unduly lenient". | 929 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131295084.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172135-00254-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.966207 |
14cd84da-eee0-433b-ba70-3d323a842afe | 2020-10-25T16:11:50+00:00 | 2019-05-14 | 1 | https://factualcast.com/2019/05/14/more-venezuelan-lawmakers-accused-of-treason/ | Venezuela’s Supreme Court has accused four opposition members of parliament of treason and conspiracy, days after making similar accusations against 10 other lawmakers.
They all supported opposition leader Juan Guaidó in a failed effort to spark a military rebellion against President Nicolás Maduro in April.
Last week, one lawmaker was arrested and several took refuge in embassies.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, security forces blocked off the parliament building.
Members of the Sebin intelligence service, national police and military prevented lawmakers from attending a session at the opposition-controlled National Assembly in the capital, Caracas.
Lawmakers were scheduled to discuss the Supreme Court’s decision to annul the parliamentary immunity of several of their colleagues and the arrest of Edgar Zambrano, the assembly’s vice-president.
The security forces said they were investigating a possible explosive device inside the building, according to lawmakers.
“This is all part of a show to prevent the National Assembly from functioning,” lawmaker Juan Pablo Guanipa told Reuters news agency. “This is a dictatorship that goes after dissidents, and we’re fighting for a political change.”
Mr Guaidó, who has previously accused Mr Maduro of tying to close the National Assembly, said on Twitter: “They’re trying to hold the legislative power hostage while the dictator entrenches himself alone in a palace where he shouldn’t be.”
President Maduro has intensified a crackdown on the opposition since their failed uprising on 30 April.
The four lawmakers accused were Carlos Paparoni, Miguel Pizarro, Franco Casella and Winston Flores. Mr Pizarro and Mr Flores called the accusations “illegitimate”.
The National Assembly has been stripped of its powers since Mr Maduro’s ruling Socialist Party lost control of it in 2016. He then set up the National Constituent Assembly, controlled by loyalists.
Last week, three opposition lawmakers took shelter in foreign embassies after losing their congressional immunity. Meanwhile, there has been no word from Mr Zambrano since his dramatic arrest last Wednesday.
Mr Guaidó, who is the head of the National Assembly, declared himself interim president in January and has been recognised by more than 50 nations, including the US and most in Latin America. President Maduro retains the support of the military’s top ranks and of allies including Russia, China and Turkey.
In a separate development, human rights group Amnesty International said it believed Venezuelan authorities committed crimes against humanity in their crackdown on anti-government protests in January.
The group urged the International Criminal Court and the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the allegations.
“[T]here is a systematic policy of repression against opponents or those perceived to be opponents simply because they are protesting, for which Nicolás Maduro’s government must be held accountable before the international justice system,” Amnesty’s Americas director Erika Guevara-Rosas said in a statement. | 612 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107889574.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20201025154704-20201025184704-00176.warc.gz | 0.956625 |
1ad8a979-030d-4489-a845-79a9089baee8 | 2015-03-30T11:09:46+00:00 | 2008-08-01 | 0 | http://www.carsurvey.org/reviews-by-region/uk_and_ireland/lamborghini/murcielago/ | Lamborghini Murcielago Reviews from UK and Ireland
2004 Lamborghini Murcielago 6.2 V12
The bull is finally tamed
One heated cup holder fails to heat, hardly a problem and I don't really need it.
Passenger side air vent does not shut off fully. Again not really a problem, but can be annoying for the passenger.
This is the easiest Lamborghini to drive to date. The steering is light and precise, too light really the car feels almost twitchy. I sneezed on the motorway when bringing her home and I had changed lanes! Build quality is now very good. Nothing has fallen off, shaken off, split, cracked or teared yet. My diablo's mirror fell out bringing that home! Well done Audi for making a supercar into a usable car. Still not as practical as a Porsche 911 series, but then again I use a Mercedes as a daily car and the Murc is just a toy really. You will see me and the car at supercar sunday this year if I can make it. I will be doing ride outs in the car for charity so come and donate to the kids hospital and have the ride of your life too!
Would you buy another car from this manufacturer? Yes
Review Date: 6th January, 2005
11th Jan 2005, 08:29
Cor, is everyone as impressed by this bloke as I am?
12th Mar 2006, 16:31
As the old saying goes: smoke 'em if you got 'em. Hey, if I had a Lambo I might never find a reason to be unhappy again.
Though I probably would.
29th Nov 2006, 14:37
The best advice that I can give to a super-car driver is 'Drive it like it's stolen!'
1st Aug 2008, 19:18
+100000000000000000000000000000 to this bloke indeed.
Nice gentleman, super-car driver...
2003 Lamborghini Murcielago
Hardly a bargain, in fact a long way from it, but owners are aware of this at the point of purchase
Nothing major has gone wrong with this car - but to be honest I am probably not going to drive a high enough mileage in it for anything major to develop.
The rear spoiler remained in the up position in the first week, but this was very quickly fixed by the dealer.
As they say here in the UK - it does what it says on the tin!
There is no question that the Murcielago is quick and that it handles superbly. However, I am slightly worried that the clutch is fragile as it feels too light for nearly 600bhp. Therefore it becomes easy to stall as you tend to creep forward on engine revs only letting the clutch out without using any gas in an effort to save the clutch!
It would take a complete fool to lose control of this car as it sticks to the road like a barnacle!
The major drawback of ownership in Europe is the width of the car, you have to seriously think about where exactly you are going to drive it as it would be very easy to get it stuck in some medieval town or country road. Certainly meeting traffic coming towards you on narrow roads is heart-stopping.
It is essentially like owning a piece of art - it looks absolutely stunning from any angle and drives with passion. Many high performance cars separate the driver from the engine and you don't really feel you're driving something special unless you check the speedo - the Lamborghini is an event to drive at any speed.
Would you buy another car from this manufacturer? Don't Know
Review Date: 29th September, 2003
14th Oct 2003, 18:49
There are seven (7) reviews on Murcielago's already. The odds are that most if not ALL of these are fake. This review at least sounds semi plausible though it gives little detail which can confirm ownership.
How do we separate the wheat from the Chaff? At least if it sounds fake, you know that you can disregard it.
Please don't post fake reviews unless it is witty and obvious. | 861 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131299261.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172139-00253-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.962616 |
ddb88470-a8c4-41dd-b613-4340f96e24fd | 2022-05-24T23:54:48+00:00 | 2019-12-01 | 1 | https://www.nmis.scot/whats-happening/news/planning-permission-submitted/ | A planning application has been submitted for the development of the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland (NMIS) situated at the centre of the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation District Scotland (AMIDS) in Renfrewshire.
NMIS is a £65 million, industry-led international centre of manufacturing expertise led by Scottish Government in partnership with its enterprise and skills agencies, University of Strathclyde and Renfrewshire Council. Operated by Strathclyde, as a national facility for Scotland,
it is where research, industry and the public sector work together to transform skills, productivity and innovation to attract investment and make Scotland a global leader in advanced manufacturing.
The new, energy carbon neutral, facility next to Glasgow Airport will include a skills academy, a fully digitalised factory of the future and collaboration hub for manufacturers of all sizes and from all sectors to work together with research partners and the public sector to innovate and grow their businesses.
NMIS also includes two specialist technology centres: Lightweight Manufacturing Centre which was opened earlier this year by the First Minister and Strathclyde’s Advanced Forming Research Centre; the only High Value Manufacturing Catapult centre in Scotland.
The application will now be considered by Renfrewshire Council.
Economy Secretary Derek Mackay said:
Manufacturing is crucial to our economy and is a sector we want to see flourish in Scotland.This is a notable milestone for the NMIS facility and given the importance of responding to the global climate emergency, I am particularly pleased the facility will be energy carbon neutral and it is great that the facility will lead by example and demonstrate what is possible.
NMIS will deliver benefits for businesses across Scotland well before the building is complete including through the existing capability available at the Lightweight Manufacturing Centre which adds to the wider support available from our enterprise agencies to help companies improve their productivity.
Strathclyde’s Principal, Professor Sir Jim McDonald, said:
It is great news that the plans for NMIS are progressing so quickly. Scotland has a vibrant manufacturing sector which is well placed for further innovation and growth. To achieve its fullest potential, it needs advanced facilities, resources and equipment, for use by highly qualified and skilled staff; NMIS will offer all of this. At Strathclyde – and across Scotland’s world-class universities - we have the drive, expertise and track record to support this highly collaborative venture and, with the NMIS partners, support the transformation of Scottish manufacturing.”
NMIS and the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre, in which Strathclyde is lead research partner, will be the anchor institutions in the advanced manufacturing district. The district is benefitting from a £39 million investment to provide the enabling infrastructure, funded through the Glasgow City Region City Deal. It is also home to the NMIS specialist technology centres.
Glasgow-based HLM Architects is leading the NMIS design team, which also includes Waterman Civil & Structural Engineers, Davie + McCulloch Building Services Engineers and Robinson Low Francis LLP Cost Mangers. HLM will also be providing landscape architecture and interior design services, while Turner and Townsend have been appointed as Project Managers under Strathclyde’s Framework Agreement.
Ross Barrett, Associate HLM, said:
The new NMIS facility is a hugely exciting project and we are really pleased to be working with all partners to respond to the ambitions for this centre. Our thoughtful design creates an innovative, flexible and collaborative environment where knowledge and creativity can be shared. Inspired by the materiality and colours of the Scottish landscape, this bold sustainable building sets out to create a unique character and identity for NMIS which will inspire and attract industry partners and academics alike. | 762 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662577757.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20220524233716-20220525023716-00213.warc.gz | 0.942595 |
26c0646f-3861-4288-9b0d-d93ab7bf5fc9 | 2018-08-20T16:08:37+00:00 | 2018-08-20 | 0 | https://www.freethesaurus.com/makes+the+acquaintance | Trixie also makes the acquaintance
of Dex (Mulroney), a raffish ladies' man who quickly works his way into her heart.
After meeting a garrulous talking bug named Ted, Fone Bone makes the acquaintance
of two humans, the beautiful Thorn (our heroine) and her grandmother, Grandma Ben.
By apparent chance, he also makes the acquaintance
of a hairdresser who shows signs of the wounds of Christ - the Stigmata.
Photo: Tom Everett Scott plays a tourist who makes the acquaintance
of a scary young woman (Julie Delpy) in Disney's ``An American Werewolf in Paris.
Morgan makes the acquaintance
of Allen Porter, a former counselor to President Eisenhower, who met him through Seamas Concannon, an eccentric Irish fellow passenger who teaches at Beresford and can gulp down double martinis before breakfast. | 184 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221216718.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20180820160510-20180820180510-00600.warc.gz | 0.924194 |
75fed5ad-0386-4a80-8c58-8ee775ebf7b7 | 2015-03-29T17:20:50+00:00 | 2013-11-01 | 1 | http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/11/is-geothermal-the-only-baseload-power-replacement-that-makes-sense?cmpid=rss | WASHINGTON, D.C. -- There are no plans for new coal plants to be built in the United States. This opens doors for the geothermal industry possibly more than ever before in U.S. history. In an Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecast to 2018, coal was one of the top-cost commissioning technology options; geothermal was one of the lowest.
The Geysers field in northern California has been producing reliable geothermal power for over 50 years. Photo courtesy of the Geothermal Education Office
As the nation carefully and in as timely a manner possible considers proposed and existing greenhouse gas emissions regulations, public awareness of health and environmental costs, and mindful economics, coal development is becoming a thing of the past, and the future balance of the power grid is at stake — but answers are available. Geothermal energy is a renewable source of electricity that has the same important baseload qualities coal now provides for over two thirds of the electric power generation in the U.S. at a fraction of the cost.
“Baseload is always better,” according to Domenic Falcone, President, Domenic J. Falcone Associates, Inc. Falcone is also a member of the Geothermal Energy Association’s Board of Directors. “[I]t assures a steady revenue stream which is much better for financing.”For a nation that’s thinking to the long term, geo plants are:
Falcone says of geothermal’s flow options: “By being able to load follow, geothermal can be reduced during low need time and increased without much effort. There is no need to store power that cannot be used. The price of power can be kept lower than other renewables since more of it is sold than the intermittent power sources like wind and solar.”
Falcone adds, “There are now efforts to marry solar with geothermal so that extra power can be produced during sunny peak hours.
“There is no need to invest in fossil fuel to create heat in order to generate power, so the environment is better off.”But today’s solicitations for renewable energy in Western states tend to ignore these unique benefits of geothermal power. Additional long-term analysis shows geothermal plants are:
Let’s look at that last point. Geothermal plants should last for hundreds of years, assuming they are managed properly. Coal plants have an estimated 40-year life span, and almost all of them in the U.S. were built over 30 years ago. Replacement of coal has already begun, and in the not-too-distant future, each of the existing facilities around the country will need to retire. Because of changing economic and regulatory environments, an estimated 59–77 GW of current coal consumption will be off line by 2016.
The graph “Capacity by Generating Unit Vintage” shows coal plants constructed in California in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s that are all approaching retirement and will need renewable energy replacements since 33 percent of the state’s power must come from renewables by 2020.
These constitute California in-state coal generation of 1,580 GWh in 2012 that will need a flexible, renewable baseload power source replacement. Beyond that, nearly a third of the Imperial Irrigation District (IID)’s electricity comes from New Mexico coal plants; those facilities will also need to be phased out as they age.
IID recently announced it plans to support 1,700 MW of new geothermal energy as part of the Salton Sea Restoration & Renewable Energy Initiative.
SB 123 in Nevada, passed in June of 2013, mandates 300 MW of coal-fired electric generating capacity in the state be retired by December 31, 2014. The wealth of geothermal resources in this state and the favorable disposition toward these power plants make them a likely contender to provide the needed replacement power.
California and Nevada are taking steps in the right direction that other states may follow. Montana and Wyoming also have vast geothermal resources and will be ready for development if or when the need is recognized; at present the abundant supply of coal in these states makes this something to look at in the longer term. (Wyoming produced 40 percent of all coal mined in the U.S. in 2011).
Some of the best opportunities for expanding baseload geothermal energy in the U.S. are in “the Imperial Valley, New Mexico, and Utah, with further expansion in Nevada,” notes Falcone. In those same states, he adds, there are also many current wells ready for production-level stimulation.
The Geothermal Energy Association reaches out to the public and policy makers who haven't considered geo power as the U.S. looks to replace its aging coal plant infrastructure in the U.S. West and beyond. It is an economical, tried-and-true technology that is constantly improving and evolving, and it is the renewable substitute for coal-powered generation.
Outside the U.S., Falcone notes that Mexico is opening up its geothermal opportunities to non-Mexican investors and that Costa Rica is doing great geothermal work. Honduras, he says, is in high need of power, and he mentions countries on the African Rift: Kenya, Uganda, and Djibouti. “They all have tremendous demand,” he concludes.
Learn more about "The Values of Geothermal Energy" in a 2013 report by the Geothermal Energy Association. | 1,136 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131298660.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172138-00034-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.952881 |
d3c66333-d6aa-43fe-b1a1-befd2ebae941 | 2022-05-25T23:49:00+00:00 | 2022-05-25 | 0 | https://menuchaclassrooms.com/products/gears-gears-gears-%C2%AE-build-bloom | Gears! Gears! Gears!® Build & Bloom
Mix, match and create your own beautiful, spinning flower garden! Set of 117 includes: colorful gears, flowers, butterflies, bees, ladybugs, wiggly stems, and more! Parts are all interchangeable, allowing for endless combinations and designs. Let your imagination blossom!
- Learning Styles: Visual, Tactile
- Skill Development: Counting, Sorting, Matching, Patterning, Problem solving, Cause & effect, Critical thinking, Sequential thought, Spatial relationships, Creativity, Fine motor skills, Eye-hand coordination, Visual processing, Color identification
Format: Default Title
Guided Reading Level: | 187 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662594414.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20220525213545-20220526003545-00611.warc.gz | 0.721207 |
0862ed6d-23df-4029-a750-ce95bf23abc6 | 2022-05-24T23:52:04+00:00 | 2022-05-24 | 0 | https://artistryinglass.on.ca/yellow-brown-56r014-lead-free-by-reusche-paints.html?category_id=232 | Location & Currency
The order subtotal is less than the minimum allowed value (CA$25)
Reusche Yellow Brown #56R014, Semi Gloss Translucent to Opaque, Fusible, 87 - 96 coe.1 oz. bottle.Lead Free.Firing Temperature: 1150º - 1400º F.
© 2001 - 2022 Artistry In Glass. All rights reserved.
HOURS: Mondays - Fridays 10am - 2pm
Powered by X-Cart | 119 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662577757.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20220524233716-20220525023716-00227.warc.gz | 0.693672 |
400446b8-c90a-4740-a424-afb14de40d79 | 2016-07-23T15:14:19+00:00 | 2009-07-01 | 1 | http://thebulletin.org/russias-new-arms-development | We don't know at this point what the next U.S.-Russian arms control agreement will look like, but everyone in the international community expects it to be a step toward significantly reducing the world's two largest nuclear arsenals. The levels set in the Moscow Treaty, which Washington and Moscow signed in May 2002, commit them to reducing the number of operationally deployed nuclear warheads on each side to no more than 1,700-2,200 warheads by 2012. One would expect that a post-Moscow Treaty agreement will bring much lower numbers.
Optimists suggest that each country could go to as low as 500 operationally deployed warheads. I think this would be difficult--in part because it would require further bending of the already lax counting rules for "operationally deployed warheads." A number such as 1,500 warheads would be easier to reach. The main problem with a 1,500-warhead level is that it's too close to the Moscow Treaty limit for the reduction to count as a dramatic disarmament step. Most likely then we'll end up with something in between, with 1,000-1,200 warheads representing a good bet.
If all of Russia's currently scheduled defense programs materialize, Moscow will find itself in a situation where its strategic nuclear arsenal will start growing."
While getting there will require skillful, difficult negotiations between the U.S. and Russian delegations, the hardest conversations will take place at home with the countries' respective military-industrial complexes. This is particularly so for Russia, where the political leadership already has given its defense industry and military a free hand in shaping Moscow's national security policy. Specifically, recent promises and commitments that Moscow has made regarding the future buildup of its strategic forces put Russia on a trajectory that's incompatible with substantial nuclear reductions. More directly, if all of the currently scheduled programs materialize, Russia will find itself in a situation where its strategic arsenal will start growing.
In fact, it already is growing--although that growth is masked by the dramatic reduction of old missiles with multiple warheads. But these missiles will be around for some time; it appears that the current plan is to keep old Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) around until about 2021, which is when the last SS-18 missile will turn 30 years old. I hope that if the United States and Russia agree on dramatic reductions in the near future, these missiles could be eliminated sooner--after all, they're old. But getting rid of the new Russian missiles, submarines, and bombers that are being built today will be much more difficult, presenting a potentially serious obstacle to cutting the number of nuclear warheads in Russia's arsenal much below 1,500.
In particular, two major new strategic systems are currently under development: (1) the Topol-M, or SS-27, ICBM; and (2) the Project 955 Borey submarine with Bulava missiles. In addition, Russia has resumed production of Tu-160 strategic bombers. None of these three programs have been large in terms of deployment, but even small numbers add up over time.
With Topol-M, the Strategic Rocket Forces have added about six new missiles a year for about a decade. In total, there are 65 missiles deployed today, each carrying a single warhead. The current plan is to continue deployment at about the same rate throughout the next few years, bringing the number of deployed missiles to 110-120 by 2015. The program, however, will undergo a major change in December when new Topol-M missiles will be equipped with multiple warheads. (This missile configuration is known as RS-24.) Assuming that the missiles will carry three warheads, Topol-Ms would then account for about 210 warheads, and the entire ICBM force would have about 800 warheads by 2015. As older missiles retire and the deployment of new Topol-Ms continue, the missile force would shrink to about 400 warheads, all deployed on new Topol-M missiles--although they won't be so new by that time.
Development of the sea-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), Bulava, has run into some serious problems, but Russia seems determined to continue the program, with the first Borey submarine scheduled to be deployed in either 2010 or 2011. Two more submarines are under construction, and the plan is to build eight of these ships in all. In the meantime, the Russian Navy will rely on six older Delta IV submarines. Assuming that the navy would maintain a fleet of eight submarines--both old and new--the total number of warheads on its SLBMs will stay at 600-700 over the next decade.
Finally, the number of Tu-160 bombers is expected to double in the next decade, with 30 aircraft expected to be in service by 2025-2030. It's reasonable to assume that older bombers will retire to keep the total number of bomber-carried nuclear weapons at the level of 400-500, which is slightly less than Russia has today.
Taken together, all of this means that Russia is planning to have about 1,400-1,600 nuclear warheads in its strategic force for some time. And this could be a conservative estimate. For example, there's a possibility that the multiple-warhead version of the Topol-M missile will carry more than three warheads. There's also persistent talk about developing a new multiple-warhead missile that would be deployed alongside Topol-Ms. If this were to occur, the number of warheads in the Russian arsenal would be pushed even higher. More importantly, most of these warheads would be deployed on relatively new systems that could stay in service for many years. And if history is any guide, liquidating them would be a contentious domestic issue.
Nothing, of course, is set in stone. Plans can be changed. After all, the point of having arms reductions is to cut back on weapon development programs. But it would be much harder to do this once these programs gain a momentum--making a new U.S.-Russian disarmament agreement much more urgent. | 1,229 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257823072.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071023-00047-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.965223 |
25b79e22-b686-43e9-bd9f-d1b788941e6a | 2013-06-19T14:25:55+00:00 | 2011-09-15 | 1 | http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/15/australian-passports-now-offer-gender-option-x-for-intersex-people/ | In a move the Australian government hopes will help remove discrimination against intersex or transgender people, the country's passports will now offer three options: male, female and indeterminate, the government said Thursday.
"This initiative is in line with the Australian Government’s commitment to remove discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or sex and gender identity," according to the Australian Passport Office. "The policy removes unnecessary obstacles to recording a person’s preferred gender in their passport."
Those who do not identify themselves as male or female will no longer be required to check off the "M" or "F" box under gender, but instead will have the option of checking "X," according to the new passport rules.
“This amendment makes life easier and significantly reduces the administrative burden for sex and gender diverse people who want a passport that reflects their gender and physical appearance," Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said.
The office said birth certificates or citizen certificates won't need to be altered in order to have a new passport issued. And those who identify themselves as transgender will be able to choose their preferred gender so long as it is supported by a statement from a doctor.
"Sex reassignment surgery is not a prerequisite to issue a passport in a new gender," according to the Australian Passport Office. "A letter from a medical practitioner certifying that the person has had, or is receiving, appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition to a new gender, or that they are intersex and do not identify with the sex assigned to them at birth, is acceptable."
In the past, Australian citizens had to choose either male or female, and were able to make changes to their gender on the documents only if they had sex reassignment surgery. The United States made a similar change in 2010 that dropped the surgery requisite for transgender people. The United Kingdom also allows people to check a gender other than their gender at birth. In Canada, you can make a change only if you have had sex reassignment surgery. In New Zealand the decision is made by a family court ruling.
Australia's Attorney General Robert McClelland said he hoped the change in policy will alleviate some of the frustrations for intersex and transgender people.
"Most people take for granted the ability to travel freely and without fear of discrimination,” McClelland said in a statement. "This measure will extend the same freedoms to sex and gender diverse Australians. While it’s expected this change will only affect a handful of Australians, it’s an important step in removing discrimination for sex and gender diverse people." | 525 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.958528 |
7d298007-3379-4425-8be1-3c3e00a9751f | 2015-03-27T05:13:41+00:00 | 2011-06-30 | 0 | http://polymerclayetc.com/?m=201106 | Carole, Ellyn, Charlene, Sydney, Tyra, Marty, Terri, Vicky, Pat, Karen
It was a hot day in Central Florida, but we had enough fun to make up for it. This was a great group of woman who created some fabulous work. I’m always inspired by the diversity of the pieces. Even though we all start at the same place we end up with such different creations, it’s a joy to witness.
Most of these shape were created with Barbara McGuire’s Antique Door Plate stamps. You can purchase them from me, just leave a comment on this post if you’re interested.
Here are the works of art in the order of the stairs ….. pendants first.
Carole wanted a blue surround and made quick work of putting together blue canes for her soulful girl. Love her eyes.
Ellyn and I are on the same wave length, I love mermaids and this one is going to be such fun to wear.
Charlene freehanded this cool ribbon cat and step away from the rest of the group with a gold surround for her face. Charlene is President of the Orlando Area Polymer Clay Guild that sponsors the Fandango retreat. You should think about attending next year.
Okay, so Sydney just kept adding until hers is now too big to wear and is going to grace the front of a journal. A mixture of canes and ink and markers, can you tell which is which? Can’t wait to see the finished piece. Sydney is involved in the Florida Gulf coast Polymer Clay Guild, if you live in that area you should check it out.
Tyra created her own drawing of this interesting mythical character and we were all impressed. Lots of wonderful detail.
Marty kept saying she couldn’t draw and didn’t like her pendant at first, but by the end of the class she walked out with it around her neck. I think she was mistaken about the drawing part.
Marty is owner of Beads, F.O.B., Inc. in Sarasota. If you’re over that way stop in and tell her and Karen I said hi.
I don’t have a pendant picture for Terri. Terri, if you have a picture send it to me….. please.
Vicky created these fabulous faces on her own shapes. I just love the colors and her imagination. Vicky has a website with more of her beautiful work displayed.
Pat outlined her face in red, a great accent against the black. Fun! Love those lips.
Now Karen’s face is right up my alley too. It’s strange and funky, and yes very cool, I love that.
Terri created this sweet girl and used her imagination to cover a mistake in coloring. I know she’s going to love wearing this bracelet.
Carole combined the pen and ink with a hair cane to come up with this unique bracelet. There is three different faces, it’s really cool.
Ellyn has three faces on her bracelet as well. I love the softness of this face and the coloring of the hair. She emailed me the next day saying she wore it home and it made her smile. YES!!! that’s my goal, so mission accomplished.
Ellyn works at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, check out what they have to offer.
Not everyone finished their bracelets in class but will finished them at home I hope. Send me pictures everyone.
Thanks to Sydney for taking pictures of everyone work, I had to borrow some of hers. She also has an album she created. Take a look. | 773 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131295084.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172135-00269-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.966018 |
ecf1c3b8-9408-49f6-8baf-5f95751269b3 | 2022-05-26T13:48:32+00:00 | 2022-02-28 | 1 | https://www.instrategy.com/macro-matters/tag/employment/ | Non-Farm Payrolls remain on a positive run with a further 678k jobs (mkt 400k) added during February, from a revised 481k in Jan. Private sector jobs growth came in at 654k (mkt 378k). Manufacturing payrolls added 36k (mkt 23k) jobs while government gained 24k from an upwardly revised 33k last month. Average monthly revision over the past 12-months now stand at +79.6k. There was also good news on the participation rate too which moved up to 62.3% from 62.2%. Unemployment resumed its downward course at 3.8% from 4.0% although U-6 edged back to 7.2% from 7.1%. Full-time work continues to drive the recovery, with the household survey actually reporting a small decline in part-time employment.
Following the surprise contraction in January ADP on Wednesday (-301k), expectations for Non-Farm Payrolls had been pared back. So the strong is clearly a positive shock with headline NFP +467k (mkt 150k) from an upwardly revised 311k in December. Private sector jobs growth came in at 444k (mkt 150k). Manufacturing payrolls added 13k (mkt 25k) jobs while government gained 23k from an upwardly revised gain of 7k last month. The patterns of strong upward revisions continue and the average monthly revision over the past 12-months now stand at +111k, the highest we’ve seen so far in this recovery.
Another weaker than expected headline non-farm payrolls number, with the report stating 199k new jobs were created during the month versus the 400k median guess. Private sector jobs growth came in at 211k (mkt 365k). Manufacturing payrolls added 26k (mkt 35k) jobs while government lost another 12k, their fifth consecutive decline. The revisions however remain upward, with 156k added in October and November compared to the initial release and the average revision over the past year hitting 79.3k. There was better news on the participation rate, which was revised up to 61.9% and held steady in December. That underpinned the further decline in the unemployment rate, U3 falling to 3.9% from 4.2% and U6 to 7.3% from 7.7%. The average work week was stable at 34.7hrs, which is another positive, full-time employment growing while part-time dipped again.
October has delivered a more robust payrolls report, non-farm employment rising 531k (mkt 450k) while private sector jobs growth hit 604k (mkt 400k). Manufacturing payrolls were particularly strong, with a 60k gain while government jobs dropped for a third consecutive month, -73k. The revisions were also strong (September revised up from 194k to 312k and August was also revised higher. The average monthly revision is now running at 68k for the past 12-months.
We’ve seen a further deceleration in the pace of employment growth, the September non-farm payrolls report showing just 194k jobs were created in the month, down from an upwardly revised 366k in August and well below the consensus guess of 500k. Despite the glut of job openings there was a further decline in the participation rate too, down 0.1% pts to 61.6%, which is unchanged from a year ago. That contributed to another steep fall in the unemployment rate, U3 down to 4.8% from 5.2% and U6 to 8.5% from 8.8%.
Labour market growth slowed a little more than expected in August, amid some disruption to the services recovery from the Delta strain. But there were still +235k jobs added (mkt +750k) and we saw upward revisions to prior months, so the net impact was still positive, leading to a further decline in the unemployment rate to 5.2% from 5.4% and the U6 rate dropped down to 8.8% from 9.2%. The participation unchanged at 61.7%. Govt payrolls shrank a little after recent strong gains (-8k) but manufacturing continued to grow (+37k). Weekly hours were 34.7 from a downward pay revised 34.7, which by itself remains elevated from its pre-pandemic range.
Another month of strong payroll gain, the headline number showing a net gain of 943k jobs (mkt 870k) while revisions also shifted upward (a net 146k added for the past three months). 703k of the July gain came from private payrolls (mkt 700k). Manufacturing added 27k jobs and government 240k, accounting for all of the surprise. Labour participation edged up to 61.7% which left the unemployment rate at 5.7% (down from 5.9% but above the 5.4% median guess). Prime age participation (25-54) saw a further surge, for both male and female workers. This is a positive trend and reinforces our lack of concern for labour scarcity. It’s important to contrast this with the post-GFC period where prime participation continued to fall after the initial crisis.
Strong payroll gains with some additional impetus from upward revisions. Overall the economy added 850k jobs in June (mkt 700k) up from 583k in May (revised from 559k), of which 662k came from private payrolls (mkt 600k). Manufacturing added 28k jobs and government 188k. Labour participation unchanged at 61.6% and the unemployment rate actually ticked up to 5.9%, as job gains were netted off with an increase in the labour force. Note prime age participation (25-54) increased for both male and female workers. This is positive and should dampen worries about labour scarcity.
While the US added 559k jobs in May according to the non-farm payrolls report, this marked another downside surprise for the series where the median estimate was up at 650k. There was a modest upward revision to the April numbers (278k vs. 266k initially reported) but that doesn’t move the needle. Private payrolls growth came in at 492k while manufacturing payrolls added 23k job and government 67k. The unemployment rate dropped to 5.8% from 6.1% but this was aided by a decline in participation (61.6% from 61.7%).
The headline non-farm payrolls jobs figure surprised on the downside in April, with 266k jobs created versus the median forecast of 978k. And the March figure was also revised downward by 146k. Obviously, it was private payrolls that disappointed (+218k vs. 893k survey) while manufacturing jobs contracted slightly (-18k). Government couldn’t make up for that but did offer a +48k contribution. The unemployment rate actually ticked back to 6.1%, a result of the 0.2% pt improvement in participation and the work week ticked up again.
February Non-farm payrolls recorded a 379k gain, comfortably exceeding the +182k median forecast. This leaves the 3m average at +80k. Private sector payrolls were significantly better than the headline print at +465k, manufacturing added +21k jobs while government dropped -86k. The surprise might have been even higher were it not for the weather events in Texas, which was behind the 939k people not at work due to the weather (Feb average is 385k). The unemployment rate ticked down to 6.2% and participation was unchanged at 61.4% despite this. The workweek did drop though, to 34.6, although this is from a rather elevated 34.9.
December Non-farm payrolls recorded a -140k drop, quite a bit below the markets +71k guess. This takes the 3m average down to +283k. Private sector payrolls were a little better than the headline print at -95k, helped by manufacturing which added +38k jobs while the decline in government moderated to -45k. That was still the fourth consecutive decline but is largely census related. Despite the headline miss revisions were very positive, +91k in November alone
November Non-farm payrolls number came in at +245k (mkt +469k), bringing the 3m average down to +5227k. Private sector payrolls were a little better again at +344k but there is a sequential slowdown happening there too. Manufacturing payrolls grew by 27k while we saw another month of government job losses, -99k, the third consecutive drop. Revisions overall were down a bit, Oct NFP revised down to 610k vs. the 638k initially reported.
September non-farm payrolls number came in under expectations at +661k (mkt +850k). But the private payrolls number bettered at +877k vs. 850k mkt, while manufacturing payrolls also beat (+66k vs. +35k est) with a loss of 216k on the government side explaining the headline miss. There was a sizable upward revision to the jobs gained in August too.
ADP reporting a further strong month of job gains (or jobs recovery) with the749k increase and net 53k upward revision to August quite a bit ahead of expectations, although consensus estimates should be taken with more of a pinch of salt than usual given the variables in play. It was mid-sized firms that drove the increase, alongside small businesses. There was actually a deceleration in job creation at larger firms, although they still added workers.
The disruption from the Coronavirus continues to impact the data with the employment numbers for May showing a significant deviation from expectations and the near 2mn loss reported in the May ADP report. Indeed, based on the preliminary numbers the economy added 2.51mn jobs over the month, which compares to the 20.69mn jobs lost in April. Methodological problems are again in evidence ...
Bleak payrolls report. While the median survey was always going to be a short in the dark, the -701k decline in jobs was significantly more troubling than the mkts -100k guess. That’s the worst number since March 2009, a period of losses that saw five consecutive payrolls figures below the -700k mark starting from November 2008. Looking at the past fortnights jobless claims figures the April number and revisions to this release will paint an even bleaker picture of the labour market. In the household survey nearly 2.987mn jobs were recorded lost.
ADP reported fewer than expected job losses for March, with a modest -24k drop (mkt -150k), which compares to the 3.3mn jump in initial jobless claims last week. Partly this is due to the survey dates (it tallies responses up to the 12th of the month). So we will see catch up next month. Prior month was revised down to 179k from 183k.
The rapid and devastating effect of Covid-19 on the labour market is unprecedented based on this week’s jobless claims. Initial claims in week ending came in at 3,283k which looks like a data error rather than an actual real data point. But real it is, and further increases look likely in the coming weeks as the economic stop continues to push people out of employment.
Tracking the strong ADP release on Wednesday, the January non-farm payrolls report also comfortably beat expectations. Weather has helped a bit last couple of months, with seasonal disruptions lower than normal, but that doesn’t detract from the underlying strength of the labour market. | 2,428 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662606992.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20220526131456-20220526161456-00627.warc.gz | 0.960426 |
bd75e655-5609-41e4-93d3-7a9eb3065b04 | 2015-03-31T20:42:28+00:00 | 2012-11-25 | 0 | http://www.bookbrat98.com/2012/11/a-wrinkle-in-time.html | Sunday, November 25, 2012
A Wrinkle in Time
Age range: 12 & up
Content: No relationship content, no sexual content, no cursing, mild violence
Genre: Children's Science Fiction Fantasy
Publisher: Square Fish
Where to get it: Barnes & Noble or Amazon or Target
Summary: One stormy night, there's a strange visitor to the Murry house who persuades Meg, her little brother Charles Wallace, and their friend, Calvin O'Keefe to accompany her on a dangerous adventure that threatens their lives and the fragility of our universe.
Opinions: This book was first published in 1962. I adore these books that were published a while ago, but are still selling today. It shows how strong someone's writing can be.
I'm going to give you a tip to reading this book. First, don't think. I know that sounds weird, but just don't think while you're reading. The more you think about it, the less it makes sense. I find it to be that way with most science fiction fantasy books.
Anyway, I really love this book. I especially like that this is a children's book, so there's no weird teenagery stuff messing with the story. It's about, you know, kids. I don't really know how old the main character, Meg is. Calvin is fourteen, I believe, and Charles Wallace is five.
The story plays with the laws of time and other universes. I would attempt to explain it to you, but I'm not good at explanations. But it was nice to kind of learn about science (even though it's magical and made-up) without a textbook. Especially since I despise textbook science.
I really like the character, Meg in this story. She's easy to relate to. She's not "pretty." She has braces, eyeglasses, and poofy hair. I have two of those three things (brace-face!). Considering how many hours I spend reading books and staring at my computer, I doubt I'm far from needing eyeglasses. Meg also has no friends until she meets Calvin and spends a lot of time with her family. And everyone knows, I'm terrible at making and managing friends. I prefer fictional characters, mostly.
In a nutshell, this is just a nice quick read with funny and relateable characters. I think my favorite part is the adorable appreciation letter on the first few pages. It's so cute. I love it. I don't know if this book is a movie or not. I'm sure it is though.
I'm really relieved that I finished all my posts for this month surprisingly earlier than I expected. I meant to finish this book a couple days ago, but didn't because I went Black Friday shopping. I didn't even buy anything though, I just walked around. Also, I think I'm the only person on this earth that doesn't like going into Bath & Body works. That place gives me a headache from all the smelly smells. Okay, enough rambling. I'll see you next month. Byesies. | 639 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131301015.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172141-00117-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.976082 |
03b93093-6cab-4d97-895d-24c00a21d546 | 2017-08-17T06:19:47+00:00 | 2017-08-17 | 0 | http://www.the-house.com/rd1co911bw10zz-ride-snowboard-bindings.html | The Contraband combines Ride''s revolutionary V-Strap single ratchet technology and lightweight chassis to provide the performance you need with the quickness of a "one-touch" in and out. Now featuring the new Wedgie 2.5 fixed position footbed for advanced freestyle riders seeking that boost of ollie pop. With added comfort and prime flex, put this bomber binder to the test.
2017 The House. All Rights Reserved
Enjoy our secure cart | 97 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886102967.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20170817053725-20170817073725-00247.warc.gz | 0.877534 |
a3f25638-344d-454e-8df8-d88bbe36dd66 | 2017-08-19T07:56:30+00:00 | 2017-01-17 | 0 | https://ca.reuters.com/article/lifestyleNews/idCAKBN1490AU | BEIJING (Reuters) - A Beijing driver calls a radio station in a panic. The smog is so thick he's just shot through five red lights because he couldn't see properly and wants to know what to do.
"It's fine, the smog is so bad nobody could see your license plate," the host reassures him, in a joke circulating on Chinese social media sites.
As large parts of northern China suffer under thick air pollution, Chinese people are taking to the internet with gallows humor to cope with the thick blanket of smog.
Restrictions on daily life, like implementing an odd-even license plate system to halve the number of cars on the road, have been a particular focus.
In another joke, U.S. President Barack Obama angrily throws an intelligence report on the table, wanting to know what sort of advanced weapons system could cause Beijing to vanish from satellite surveillance.
He asks a collection of superheroes, including Iron Man, Batman and the Hulk, what to do and who can go there, but they all hang their heads in shame.
"Optimus Prime can do it! He doesn't need to breathe," pipes up Wolverine, recommending the robot who can turn into a truck in the Hollywood movie Transformers, which is wildly popular in China.
But Optimus Prime quietly answers: "My license plate is restricted today", referring to the odd-even system.
While most jokes could not be judged politically sensitive, a few offer indirect criticism of perceived government inaction.
One joke lists ways to deal with the pollution.
"Individual therapy: put a mask on. Family therapy: buy health insurance. If you have money and the time: go on holiday. If you've no class: emigrate. National therapy: wait for the wind."
Reporting by Gao Liangping and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Paul Tait | 384 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886105326.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20170819070335-20170819090335-00548.warc.gz | 0.947811 |
3e21f5d3-df8a-4b51-9a75-b38b1a9e07b2 | 2022-05-27T06:51:18+00:00 | 2022-03-12 | 1 | https://reviewtwist.com/9-bold-predictions-as-the-action-is-set-to-begin/ | The NFL year 2022 is just days away from beginning.
Monday marks the opening of the “legal manipulation window,” in which NFL teams and free-agent player representatives can negotiate new deals. Then on Wednesday afternoon those players can sign contracts.
If last week is any indication, free agency is shaping up to feature a lot of back-and-forth intrigue and record-setting contracts.
Here are nine predictions for how things will play out during this start of the league year and free agency.
FREE NFL AGENCY: Ranking of the top 22 players available as the market prepares to open
BUYER BEWARE: 10 NFL Free Agents That Might Be Way Overrated
more trades to come
Last week, Russell Wilson and Carson Wentz were given fresh starts via trade, and then Khalil Mack was shipped from Chicago to Los Angeles, followed by Amari Cooper from Dallas to Cleveland. Look for more changes and deals in the league next week. Obviously, a trade for Deshaun Watson should follow, and another quarterback, Jimmy Garoppolo, could also be traded shortly. But it’s not just passers-by who could be changing direction. The way teams operate is changing, and teams are finding more creative ways to manipulate the cap, so it’s not that hard to deal with dead money in some cases.
Brandon Scherff charges
After back-to-back seasons with the franchise tag in Washington, the former No. 5 overall pick (2015) is expected to draw a lot of attention on the open market and make a lot of money, likely at the level of five-year-olds. , $80 million deal the Kansas City Chiefs gave offensive guard Joe Thuney last year. The Cincinnati Bengals and New York Jets are among the teams expected to go after Scherff.
Lots of money for Charvarius Ward
A year after signing a one-year, $3.38 million deal to return to the Kansas City Chiefs, Ward is expected to capitalize on a growth season in a big way. The 25-year-old cornerback is expected to have many suitors, including the Chicago Bears, whose general manager Ryan Poles previously served as the Chiefs’ director of player personnel. Ward could end up landing a deal that could pay him around $19 million per year, some league insiders predict.
Chargers aggressive approach
Los Angeles made a big splash last week by trading for Mack. Now, look for the Chargers to continue to charge into free agency as they try to close the gap between them and the Chiefs. Defense is expected to be among LA’s top priorities, with one of its top targets expected to be cornerback JC Jackson, who recorded 44 tackles, eight interceptions and 23 interrupted passes last season for the New England Patriots. They could also look at Bobby Wagner, whom the Seahawks just released to save money against the salary cap.
Outings for the Rams
The newly crowned Super Bowl champions have 19 players on expiring contracts, including linebacker Von Miller, cornerback Darious Williams, running back Sony Michel, guard Austin Corbett and wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. However, the Rams They don’t seem to be big spenders. in free agency because they’re in poor shape against the salary cap. Finding money to give Aaron Donald another massive contract instead means controlling most of the Rams’ energies and resources. As a result, some within the league are predicting an exodus of some of the most recognizable faces, including Miller, who some believe is seeking a contract that will pay him approximately $16 million per year.
Joe Burrow had a breakout year in 2021 when he returned from season-ending knee surgery as a rookie to lead Cincinnati to the Super Bowl. However, he was still sacked a league-high 51 times during the regular season and an additional 19 times in the postseason. The Bengals know they have to do better to protect their franchise quarterback, and now they’re expected to invest in their offensive line this free agency. Scherff, Terron Armstead and Laken Tomlinson could draw interest from Cincinnati.
Busy shopping for the Jets
The pressure is on in New York as general manager Joe Douglas enters his fourth season. The Jets know they need to beef up Zach Wilson’s offensive line and give him more weapons as well. The Jets also need defensive playmakers.
Robust paydays are coming for recipients
With Mike Williams signing a three-year extension that will pay him $20 million per year, and Davante Adams and Chris Godwin set to earn roughly $20 million a year in franchise tags from Green Bay and Tampa, respectively, wide receivers are lining up to be handsomely compensated. Allen Robinson and JuJu Smith-Schuster could be among the next.
Another push from the Bucs
Tom Brady’s investment in retirement quickly turned things around for Tampa Bay. There were rumors that the Bucs could join Watson’s draft, but now they have their quarterback situation resolved and Super Bowl aspirations renewed. However, there is work to be done. Chris Godwin is set to return on the franchise tag, but veterans Jason Pierre-Paul, Ndamukong Suh, Rob Gronkowski, Leonard Fournette and others are set to hit free agency. They will now likely spend the next two days maneuvering to create enough room to reload for one more push to a Super Bowl.
Follow USA TODAY Sports’ Mike Jones on Twitter @ByMikeJones.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: NFL Free Agency: 9 Bold Predictions as Teams Prepare to Spend | 1,148 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662636717.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20220527050925-20220527080925-00618.warc.gz | 0.963515 |
a7e749f4-d389-41f2-a19e-941c31f45c61 | 2016-07-23T21:14:16+00:00 | 2014-10-31 | 1 | https://www.rt.com/news/201747-merkel-uk-exit-eu-immigration/ | ‘Point of no return’: Merkel warns UK could exit EU over immigration policy – report
The UK is nearing a “point of no return,” as British Prime Minister David Cameron attempts to renegotiate the terms of the country’s EU membership targeting the freedom of movement, Merkel reportedly said.
This was Merkel’s first hint that the UK’s exit from the union is a possibility, according to German media.
Cameron earlier said he wants to renegotiate the country’s EU membership before going through with a referendum on the subject, with the European principle of freedom of movement “at the very heart of my renegotiation strategy for Europe.”
Merkel has stressed that her support for UK membership could be reversed, if Cameron pursues migration reform.
Cameron has extended the EU laws “to their limits,” trying to turn away unemployed migrants and seeking deportation of those unable to make ends meet after three months, according to the report.
However, the UK’s Minister for Finance was not worried about the German Chancellor’s comments.
"I think it's a little bit thin," George Osborne said of the report in Der Spiegel, saying conversations with the German government had shown Berlin understood British public disquiet about unemployed EU migrants claiming welfare benefits. "The British public want this addressed. We are going to do this in a calm, rational way," he told the BBC.
A spokesman for Merkel, Steffen Seibert said that Germany isn't considering "hypothetical" scenarios and wants Britain to remain an "active and committed" European Union member but is insisting the principle of free movement of workers within the bloc isn't negotiable. He added that Berlin shares an interest in fighting "possible abuse" of free movement of labor but the overall principle mustn't be questioned, which was reported by AP.
Earlier in October, the former European Commission (EC) president Jose Manuel Barroso stated that freedom of movement is an essential principle of the EU, and any plan by Britain to cap the number of migrants through the limitation of national insurance numbers would be illegal under EU law.
UK’s anti-immigration policies
With next year’s general election on the horizon, British politicians are talking tougher on the issue of migrant workers. It will be the first election since the anti-immigration Independence Party (UKIP) emerged as a serious political player.
The latest opinion poll revealed that support for UKIP has reached a record high following Brussels’ recent effort to levy a mammoth £1.7 billion ($2.7 billion) extra charge on Britain. Cameron has been forced to adjust his policies to win back public support.
Cameron announced plans to reduce the number of low skilled migrant workers coming to the UK from other EU countries by limiting the number of national insurance numbers given to them.
In the recent policy shift, he said EU migrants could now only claim benefits for a maximum of three months, down from six.
These legislative changes, which apply to child tax credit, child benefits and job seeker’s allowance, will be implemented in November.
Cameron is likely to make a speech on immigration policies before Christmas, according to media reports.
Meanwhile, the EC says it endorses the principle of free movement within the EU, where citizens have the right to work and live in all member states. | 700 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257823670.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071023-00040-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.963055 |
707d77dd-6aee-496d-8758-257758e9a4ee | 2017-08-19T01:49:31+00:00 | 2013-11-20 | 1 | https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Trends/Japan-Inc-snubs-staff-in-spending-plans | Japan Inc. snubs staff in spending plans
TOKYO (Nikkei) -- Flush with cash and reluctant to share it with employees, Japanese largest corporations are bullish about capital spending.
A large number of major listed Japanese companies are poised to increase their spending on capital investments, research and development, and mergers and acquisitions to achieve higher growth, a Nikkei survey found.
Many of these companies expect better earnings next year. It remains to be seen whether their spending plans will help drive the growth of Japanese economy amid higher expectations for an end to deflation. "Abenomics," the name given to the set of government policies to resuscitate the economy, has proved a boon for Japan Inc.
The Nikkei asked chief financial officers from 300 major listed companies from late October to mid-November. It received answers from 241 companies. Finance companies and Japan's 10 regional utilities were not included in the survey.
Publicly traded companies that end the fiscal year in March have record cash reserves of about 70 trillion yen combined. Focus at these businesses has turned to how they can tap their reservoir of this capital.
Companies were asked to name their two spending priorities. Improving production facilities and increasing efficiency was the priority among 53% of respondents.
Toshiba, for example, plans to increase capital spending on semiconductor chips, mainly NAND flash memory, for the first time in three years. Demand for chips is rising because of the growing popularity of smartphones. The company in August began expanding its Yokkaichi plant in Japan's central Mie Prefecture. It has also invested in micro-fabrication technology. Toshiba will likely spend about 170 billion yen ($1.66 billion) on semiconductor-related facilities this fiscal year, up 80% from a year earlier. Tokyo Gas, meanwhile, is spending on pipelines and building a liquefied natural gas station in Hitachi City, Ibaraki Prefecture, northeast of Tokyo.
The second largest group of the respondents -- 34% -- said they would spend on R&D, while 26% said they would use cash reserves for M&As. Fuji Heavy Industries plans to spend 60 billion yen on R&D this fiscal year, a 20% increase from 2012. It plans to develop environmental and safety technologies. Housing facility and building material maker Lixil Group announced in September that it will acquire German sanitary and bathroom fittings maker Grohe.
Other companies will spend money on revenue growth. Respondents that said they would use capital for dividend payouts or share buybacks, stood at 25%.
Bad news for the government, which is urging companies to share their wealth with employees. Regarding pay increases, 7% of respondents said they would spend cash reserves to raise salaries. Some companies, including precision motor maker Nidec, have announced pay raises. On the whole, however, major companies remain cautious about upping wages.
Investments for growth have been spurred by improving market conditions. The survey showed that three quarters of the companies now find it easier to raise funds in the market. Of them, 63 companies said they want to raise more capital or have done so.
About half of respondents said they expected next April's increase in consumption tax hike from 5% to 8% to be detrimental to their earnings. Those who said it would have a negative impact cited reaction to a rush of demand among consumers before the sales tax hike as the biggest reason, followed by a drop in personal spending and a slowdown in the domestic economy.
The government plans to then raise tax to 10% in October 2015. Three-quarters of those surveyed said the government should go ahead with the hike as planned. Only seven companies said the government should not do so.
The survey also found that many companies have a positive outlook for fiscal 2014. Some 56% said their net profit forecast would improve, far surpassing the 6% that said it would deteriorate. And 53 companies -- more than 20% -- expect double-digit growth in profits next year. Eight forecast growth of more than 30%. The optimism, points to a continued corporate recovery in fiscal 2014.
About 50% of the respondents said they expect the earnings environment to improve or slightly improve in the next six months. They cited a boost to domestic revenue as the biggest reason, followed by cost cutting and growth in Asian markets. Only 10% of the companies surveyed cited the weak yen as the reason, showing corporate profits are expanding for reasons other than the Japanese currency's recent weakness.
Sanitary products and diaper maker Unicharm has seen brisk sales of low-priced paper diapers in Asian countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam. The company thinks that a slowdown in emerging economies will have little impact on its sales. "We expect to achieve an increase in sales and profits next fiscal year and beyond," said Unicharm President Takahisa Takahara. "We hope to reach 1 trillion yen in sales in three years."
Leading construction company Shimizu has seen orders grow on the back of Japan's economic recovery. "Construction for orders received this fiscal year will begin in earnest next fiscal year and beyond," said Seikichi Kurosawa, executive vice president of Shimizu. "Then, we will see an improvement in profitability."
The survey also found that 39% of the respondents believe their stocks are undervalued. This suggests a disparity between the views of the CFOs and the assessment of the market. Japanese stocks have soared in the past one year, and yet these large listed companies believe that their stocks still have room to go up on the back of their profitability. | 1,139 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886105291.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20170819012514-20170819032514-00705.warc.gz | 0.970183 |
d32bf14c-200a-4f43-8406-c5746e49809f | 2022-05-23T08:42:32+00:00 | 2022-05-23 | 1 | https://www.notice.com.ng/buhari-should-remove-emefiele-if-he-fails-to-resign-8211-gov-akeredolu-2023 | Buhari should remove Emefiele if he fails to resign – Gov. Akeredolu - 2023
Governor Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State has demanded that Godwin Emefiele should resign as the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN.
Akeredolu said this while describing the news of Emefiele's purchase of Declaration of Intent and Nomination Forms to contest for the office of the President as shocking.
He asked that President Muhammadu Buhari should remove Emefiele as the CBN Governor if he fails to resign, warning that such act, if unchecked, timeously, portends great danger to the fragile economy of Nigeria.
Part of the statement read: "Rumors had been rife on the subterranean partisan activities linked to him through these shadowy characters in the recent weeks. Pictures of branded vehicles, ostensibly purchased for electioneering campaigns, were also posted on social media.
"The audacious moves by those who claimed to be supporting this interest have been unsettling.This latest news confirms that the Governor may indeed be interested in immersing himself in the murky waters of politics like any other Nigerian with partisan interests.
"Consequently, we admonish Mr Emefiele to leave the office, immediately, for him to pursue his interest. He cannot combine partisan politics with the very delicate assignment of his office.
"Should he refuse to quit, it becomes incumbent on the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces to remove him forthwith. This is a joke taken too far."
Akeredolu stressed that although Emefiele enjoys a constitutionally protected right to belong to any group or association just as any Nigerian, "The combined effect of the Public Service Rules, CBN Act and the 1999 Constitution, as amended, exposes not only the oddity inherent in this brash exercise of presumed right to associate. It also confirms the illegality of the act should he proceed to submit the forms while occupying the seat as Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria."
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NOTE: User comments in this section are, as the name implies, provided by users of this website. The question.ng team is not responsible for, nor do they endorse, any of the information provided here. | 527 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662556725.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20220523071517-20220523101517-00617.warc.gz | 0.946006 |
fee7c318-0024-4324-ba1a-abaadacff319 | 2022-05-17T03:47:34+00:00 | 2022-05-17 | 0 | https://www.property-investors.co.uk/samuel-leeds-interviewed-by-talk-show-queen-trisha-goddard/ | Samuel Leeds interviewed by talk show queen Trisha Goddard!
The inspirational story of how Property Investors founder Samuel Leeds repaid his former teacher for always believing in him has been broadcast to audiences across the UK and USA.
The presenter, who made her name on the ITV morning talk show Trisha, said it was a story that needed to be told. A video of the star interviewing Samuel was also screened on social media platforms including talkRADIO’s YouTube channel.
During the show the multi-millionaire property entrepreneur said he never forgot the way Deborah Hey-Smith always had faith in him even though he was constantly in trouble at school.
When she was made redundant years later, he became her teacher, empowering her to become a successful property investor who now enjoys a healthy passive income.
And that certainly impressed the celebrity host who was also ‘wowed’ by Samuel’s alternative views on education.
Samuel described how he suffered from Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and even sat on a special needs desk at school.
He told the talk show queen that as a pupil he was bereft of hope and had low expectations.
“I was often getting detention and one time I got suspended from the school for a week. It wasn’t for anything really malicious or really bad. It was because I was so bored. I just did not like school at all.”
But Mrs Hey-Smith was one of the only teachers at the Emmanuel School in Walsall who he felt encouraged and understood him.
“She seemed to see something that the others didn’t. For a start she seemed to actually like me. You kind of know if someone doesn’t like you – kids aren’t stupid. If they just talk about you in the staff room and roll their eyes you almost live up to that. With Mrs Hey-Smith I used to always be really good in her class because I thought, well she likes me and I don’t want her to stop liking me.”
He also revealed that it was Mrs Hey-Smith who enabled him to believe he could have an exciting future.
“She used to tell me I was going to be so successful and that she was excited for me. I thought it was really weird, but I wanted to live up to the belief that she had in me, even though I didn’t have that belief in myself at the time.”
Asked if she had been right in predicting a bright future for him, Samuel replied:
“Well, success is subjective, but I’ve been very successful in business, and I’ve gone on to become a multi-millionaire. I’ve got a very large property portfolio. I restore buildings, I build houses from scratch and I’ve got a castle that I own – a Grade II listed building. I’m also happily married with three absolutely beautiful children, so I think she probably was right!”
Trisha was bowled over by his response.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, so how did you get from that kid who couldn’t sit still and had dyslexia and ADHD – because this is a powerful message for any other kid who’s been labelled with those things or been told they have conditions. How did you get from that to where you are now?”
Samuel replied that when he was at school, he believed there were just two options. You could either go down the academic route and go to university or do something practical with your hands such as being a builder. He said he even thought of becoming a dustbin man because he was hardworking, fit and enjoyed being outside.
“‘What I didn’t realise was there was a third route which was entrepreneurship. I think a lot of schools don’t teach kids about money, about finance, about being a business owner. When I left school at 16, I read a book by Robert Kiyosaki, who I actually know now. It was called Rich Dad, Poor Dad and that book was all about money, and it was about passive income and real estate.
“I just thought, you know what, I failed in school, but why don’t I just pursue this path?”
He started attending business events and learning about property and investments. Over time, he became a letting agent and an estate agent. He bought his first house as a teenager and from then on just started accumulating properties.
“When they went up in value, I refinanced them and bought more. I pulled investors in, and I just got really good at it.”
Samuel stressed that part of his mission today is to impress on youngsters that it is possible for them to become business owners and investors.
He told Trisha about his charity in Africa and how he is in the process of building schools in Uganda in liaison with education officials there.
“I’ve said I’ll pay for the buildings as long as you let me have an input in the school curriculum.”
Trisha was amazed that all this had started with the belief Mrs Hey-Smith had in him becoming a success.
They kept in touch after he left school, and he felt shocked to see how little income she had compared to him.
“I didn’t realise that teachers weren’t paid that well…I was buying nice houses, going on nice holidays and she couldn’t afford to do that a lot. I thought that it wasn’t really fair that she was struggling to keep up with a mortgage.”
When Mrs Hey-Smith, 64, lost her job, she called Samuel, explaining that she was disappointed with her pension and asked if he could help.
“I became Mrs Hey-Smith’s teacher in business, and I helped her get on the investment ladder. Now she owns a string of properties and gets paid as a full-time property investor. She’s come out to Africa with me to help with my charity work in Zambia and Uganda, and we’re really good friends. She is now financially independent.”
Trisha, who was recently interviewed herself by Piers Morgan as part of his Life Stories TV series, said she loved the way Samuel had repaid Mrs Hey-Smith.
“Oh Samuel, gosh did we need to hear that story today. I love that. I love how it comes full circle. I so passionately believe we funnel too many children into university, into higher education.
“I think there’s a lot of them who don’t need to be there, who buckle under the stress and have all sorts of mental health situations because basically that’s not where their heart lies.”
Trisha believes Samuel’s backstory could be extremely powerful for any young person who might feel they are at a crossroads in life. She asked what his advice would be to young people who do not want to go to university and do not know where they are going in life.
“Well, I think it’s important to know that there is another way and that is to be an entrepreneur, to be a business owner,” he said.
“You go to school to learn how to get good grades so that you can then get into university, so that then ultimately you can get a job. And the reason for a job is to make money. But you can skip the job part and you can go straight into just studying money and learn how to make money.
“There are certain kids that I see today, who stand out a mile because I can relate to them. They are doing things like paper rounds and washing cars. If you’ve got an entrepreneurial spirit to make money, I would say maybe consider going down the business route because there is a third way.
“Just because you might not be good in school doesn’t mean that you won’t be successful in life!”
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Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/OfficialSamu… | 1,888 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662515501.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20220517031843-20220517061843-00412.warc.gz | 0.986449 |
26a99931-99b1-40ea-9b28-e314788b4489 | 2016-07-25T14:07:44+00:00 | 2014-01-16 | 1 | http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/01/16/You-Can-No-Longer-Take-Your-Company-Court | In 2006, the nationwide home-building company D. R. Horton, began requiring all new employees – and any existing employees who wanted to keep their jobs – to sign an agreement saying that they agreed to “voluntarily waive all rights to trial in court before a judge or jury on all claims” between the employee and the company. They would submit, instead, to binding arbitration.
Not only did employees who signed the agreement waive their right to participate in a class action lawsuit, they also waived their right to participate in class-based arbitration. The National Labor Relations Board in 2012 ruled that the agreement was illegal, but last month the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans overturned that ruling.
The ruling has some labor lawyers concerned that if the appeals court ruling is upheld, clauses barring class action lawsuits and class arbitrations could quickly become standard elements in most employment contracts, effectively barring many non-unionized workers from a tool that has historically been used to vindicate workers’ rights.
Catherine K. Ruckelshaus, general counsel and program director for the National Employment Law Project, said that because of under-funding of agencies that enforce labor laws, class action “has been pretty much the only game in town” for workers looking for relief from abusive employers. “If you can’t aggregate the claims, there is very little pressure on the employer,” said Ruckelshaus.
In recent years class actions have been used successfully to challenge the practice of making employees work “off the clock” at major retailers and to require that overtime pay be given to workers illegally classified as exempt from overtime requirements.
There are several arguments in favor of allowing contracts that mandate arbitration. It’s usually cheaper and faster than going through the court system, and to be sure, businesses are often subjected to frivolous lawsuits in the guise of class actions.
“Almost any worker or employee is not going to feel empowered to say ‘No, I’m not going to sign that’ if it’s presented as a condition to getting or keeping a job,” she said. “It’s an incredible assault on our right to our day in court.”
“That is why the case is so important,” said Craig Becker, who served as an NLRB board member under a recess appointment until the end of 2011, and voted in favor of the agency’s ruling in the Horton case.
Becker, now general counsel to the AFL-CIO, said the ability of workers to pool resources in order to act against perceived unfair practices is “a mechanism that most people take for granted.”
Mandatory arbitration clauses are not new, and are not unique to employment contracts. They are a common feature of credit card contracts and other financial agreements. (And are currently being examined by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.) They have also, for example, historically been a part of employment contracts for executive-level and other high-ranking employees in the financial services industry.
But their increasing use in low-wage employees’ contracts, along with the bar to class action, are relatively recent developments, which have attracted the attention not just of the courts, but of lawmakers.
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) have sponsored a bill, the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2013, which would bar companies from requiring employees and consumers to consent to binding arbitration prior to a dispute arising. Consent to binding arbitration would still be allowed after a dispute has arisen.
In a statement provided to the Fiscal Times, Franken said, “Mandatory arbitration puts consumers and workers at a huge disadvantage, limiting their access to meaningful legal recourse and preventing them from banding together with others who experienced the same injustices. My Arbitration Fairness Act would restore critical rights to workers and consumers who have been wronged.”
The future of the arbitration clause in employment contracts in the wake of the Horton decision is unclear – a single ruling in a federal appeals court, said a former NLRB member, is unlikely to convince businesses that their use is now unchallengeable.
“The key take-away from this case is that the issue is not dead, said Ron Meisburg, former general counsel of the NLRB and, for a time, a board member under a recess appointment.
“The Board is very likely to continue to enforce the law and maintain that these kind of clauses are unlawful,” continued Meisburg, who is now a partner and co-head of the Labor-Management Relations Practice Group at the Proskauer law firm in Washington, DC. “So for the time being, maintaining these contract clauses puts companies at risk of NLRB prosecution and an adverse decision.”
A number of other cases, however, including two that are working their way through the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, have many labor attorneys convinced that the Supreme Court is likely to weigh in on the issue in the near future.
Follow Rob Garver on Twitter @rrgarver
Top Reads from The Fiscal Times: | 1,072 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257824230.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071024-00174-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | 0.970549 |
1f3dcab6-0a31-4f29-9a92-a302485f7d77 | 2020-10-29T17:14:59+00:00 | 2010-02-08 | 0 | https://www.cnbc.com/2010/02/08/is-it-time-for-the-fed-to-raise-rates.html | The U.S. economy expanded at an annual rate of nearly 6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, and jobless claims are dropping. So is it time for the Fed to start raising rates? Share your opinion in our poll below.
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Data also provided by | 147 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107904834.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20201029154446-20201029184446-00419.warc.gz | 0.928088 |
1a329e86-abf5-4b39-afb5-156af33e3429 | 2018-08-17T06:14:15+00:00 | 2018-02-14 | 1 | https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/israel-pm-netanyahu-may-be-charged-with-bribery-for-accepting-cigars-gifts-118021400046_1.html | A decision to press formal charges against the veteran premier now rests with the attorney general's office, which is expected to take weeks or months to decide how to proceed.
Netanyahu, prime minister for nearly 12 years, addressed the nation as news of the recommendations broke, proclaiming his innocence and pledging to continue to lead the country.
"Over the years, I have been the subject of at least 15 enquiries and investigations," Netanyahu said in the televised address.
"Some have ended with thunderous police recommendations like those of tonight. All of those attempts resulted in nothing, and this time again they will come to nothing."
A prime minister who is facing such police recommendations or who has been formally charged with offences is not obliged to resign.
Police said in a statement they were recommending his indictment on bribery, fraud and breach of public trust.
They have also been probing allegations that Netanyahu sought a secret deal for favourable coverage with the publisher of top-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot.
The 68-year-old right-wing premier has been questioned seven times by police over the allegations and has called the investigation an attempt by political opponents to force him from office.
Last week, Netanyahu lashed out at police in a rare attack as indications grew that detectives were preparing to recommend his indictment, questioning their ability to act fairly.
While an indictment alone would not legally oblige Netanyahu to resign, he would likely face mounting pressure to do so. He would be legally forced to step down if convicted and with all appeals exhausted.
Parliament, however, could also enact a special procedure against him before his case is exhausted if he is found to be guilty of moral turpitude. | 343 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221211719.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20180817045508-20180817065508-00585.warc.gz | 0.983483 |
df782cb4-1aa2-4006-8798-b84e2af68310 | 2017-08-24T06:38:47+00:00 | 2017-08-24 | 0 | http://gigharborfamilycounselors.com/contact-form.asp?CategoryViewed=Clinical~Services | Contact Family Center For Behavioral Health
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6d60d739-f938-4adf-b266-60ad39e169fb | 2022-05-29T01:49:31+00:00 | 2022-05-29 | 0 | https://press.cavotec.com/blog_posts/tag/recharge | The information on this page is intended for journalists, press and media. Click YES to get to the newsroom. If you click NO you will come back to Mynewsdesk.com.
Cavotec is a leading cleantech company that designs and delivers connection and electrification solutions that enable the decarbonisation of ports and industrial applications. Backed by more than 40 years of experience, we provide systems that ensure safe, efficient and sustainable operations for a wide variety of customers and applications worldwide. | 103 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652663035797.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20220529011010-20220529041010-00409.warc.gz | 0.90752 |
adb68824-4684-465b-9cef-82fd67818a73 | 2019-08-21T10:17:18+00:00 | 2019-04-21 | 1 | https://www.nomoneydownmortgagepros.com/federal-interest-rate-over-time/ | Us Bank Fha Rates US Bank Home Mortgage Review | Ratings, Costs & More – U.S. Bank’s mortgage products come in many different forms, making it an excellent place to shop for a home loan. The bank offers fixed rate and adjustable rate options, as well as a full line of conventional and government loan products for a wide range of term lengths (10- and 20-year terms in addition to the typical 15- and 30-year options.)Interest Rate For A Loan Fixed Rate Mortgage Calculator 30 Fixed Mortgage rate chart average 30 Year Fixed Mortgage Rates – Average 30 year fixed mortgage rates. report Date current interest rate change Prior Year. CHART TIPS: Tooltip Text: Mouse over any series or point. Zoom: Click and drag area to zoom.How to pay a lower rate without refinancing – You stay silent, grieving that you can’t take advantage of the low interest rates for mortgages.. You grumble when you read news stories like this one from the Associated Press on April 18: “Average U.Us Interest Rates History Chart effective federal funds rate (fred:fedfunds) – Historical Data. – I believe that interest rates will go and surpass 3.5% by 2019. At that point it'll.. FEDFUNDS: US Economic Growth: charting the GDP+GDI average. dime 103.APR is the interest rate on your loan plus all fees, calculated on an annual basis and expressed as a percentage. APR makes it easier to compare rates from multiple lenders.
The current federal funds rate remained at 2.5 percent when the Federal open market committee met on March 21, 2019. This benchmark rate is an indicator of the economy’s health. The Federal Reserve signaled it would keep rates at 2.5 percent through 2021.. The rate is critical in determining the U.S. economic outlook.
United States Fed Funds Rate | 2019 | Data | Chart | Calendar. – Interest Rate in the United States averaged 5.67 percent from 1971 until 2019, reaching an all time high of 20 percent in March of 1980 and a record low of 0.25 percent in December of 2008. In the United States, the authority to set interest rates is divided between the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve (Board) and the Federal Open.
target range for the fed funds rate to 2.25% – 2.50%. Therefore, the United States Prime Rate is now 5.50%, effective tomorrow (December 20, 2018.) The next FOMC meeting and decision on short-term interest rates will be on June 19, 2019. –
Federal funds rate – Wikipedia – In the United States, the federal funds rate is the interest rate at which depository institutions (banks and credit unions) lend reserve balances to other depository institutions overnight, on an uncollateralized basis. Reserve balances are amounts held at the Federal Reserve to maintain depository institutions’ reserve requirements.
As you can see here, the Federal Funds rate and the Prime Rate track along with each other very closely.. Short- and mid-term ARMs, such as the 5/1 ARM shown above, are also affected by trends in short-term interest rates. As a lenders’ cost of obtaining funds to lend changes, some of those reductions or increases are passed to borrowers in the form of lower (or higher) starting rates.
The Fed – H.15 – Selected Interest Rates (Daily) – April. – The Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington DC. Footnotes. 1. As of March 1, 2016, the daily effective federal funds rate (EFFR) is a volume-weighted median of transaction-level data collected from depository institutions in the Report of Selected Money Market Rates (FR 2420).
Fed interest rate announcement: Federal Reserve keeps rates. – Trump has been urging the Fed to lower rates in order to boost the economy. slowly than the Fed would like over the long term.. while at the same time keeping interest rates low. Our Federal.
Ratings methodology. What’s included? The federal funds rate is the primary tool that the Federal Open Market Committee uses to influence interest rates and the economy.
30 Year Fha Loan Rates These are a few of the substantial benefits of taking out a 15-year mortgage compared with a 30-year FHA loan. Lower interest rates. real offers from the LendingTree show that people shopping for the best loans can expect to save around 25 basis points (.25%) on their mortgage rate by taking out a 15-year FHA loan. Over the life of the loan. | 938 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027315865.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20190821085942-20190821111942-00387.warc.gz | 0.930258 |
bd6d598e-b3c9-4fd2-ba1e-27531c1f7ae2 | 2019-08-18T18:16:15+00:00 | 2013-02-16 | 1 | https://www.rt.com/news/iceland-online-pornography-ban-201/ | Iceland weighing ban on Internet pornography
Proponents of the ban claim that pornography has damaging effects on children and women. Icelandic Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson, the author of the proposed ban, said he believes it will help stop youth from viewing Internet pornography.
"We have to be able to discuss a ban on violent pornography, which we all agree has a very harmful effects on young people and can have a clear link to incidences of violent crime," Interior Minister Jonasson said.
The ban would block access to pornographic websites in Iceland, and make it impossible to use Icelandic credit cards on X-rated sites. Iceland has already passed a law that forbids the printing and distribution of pornography; the law excludes the Internet, however.
Experts have argued that there is domestic support for such a ban: "We have many experts from educationalists to the police and those who work with children behind this, that this has become much broader than party politics," political adviser Halla Gunnarsdottir told the Daily Mail.
“At the moment, we are looking at the best technical ways to achieve this,” Gunnarsdottir said. “But surely if we can send a man to the Moon, we must be able to tackle porn on the Internet.”
At such a scale and magnitude, Iceland’s online pornography censorship scheme would be the first of its kind for any European nation, Professor Gail Dines told the Telegraph: "It is looking at pornography from a new position – from the perspective of the harm it does to the women who appear in it and as a violation of their civil rights."
However, opponents of the ban have argued that such censorship is unfeasible.
"When you have a group of people who have the job of monitoring the network traffic and deciding what would be allowed and what won’t be increases the risk of non-pornography sites to be added to the list and blocked off,” explained Prostur Jonasson of Iceland’s Association of Digital Freedom.
The UK is the only other European country that has tried to implement a similar ban. It proposed blocking access to all pornography websites this past December, but UK ministers rejected the idea over a lack of public support.
Iceland is known for its pro-women policies, which may credit to country’s openly lesbian Prime Minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir.
In 2010, the country implemented a highly controversial ban on all strip clubs, arguing that they are harmful to women. The Scandinavian country also launched a consultation process in 2010 to investigate the effects of Internet pornography on women and children.
The study concluded that viewing violent online pornography increased the intensity of sex attacks, and that if children were exposed to such content at an early age, they displayed similar signs of trauma as those who had actually been abused, the Daily Mail reported. | 594 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027313987.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20190818165510-20190818191510-00162.warc.gz | 0.962896 |
2ea4bf9a-2ffe-415a-96cc-a9dda25217b7 | 2018-08-14T15:21:26+00:00 | 2018-08-14 | 0 | https://www.pangolinplugins.com/support/return-hardware/ | Returning hardware to Pangolin
If you are returning your hardware (QM2000, Flashback, etc.) to Pangolin, please follow these important shipping recommendations. (If you don’t, then you or the shipper may have to pay for a replacement if the hardware is damaged or lost.)
If you are returning a board-level product, such as QM2000 or Flashback, always put the board in a pink, black or silvered anti-static bag or wrap. Do not use clear plastic bags or wraps; these will generate static which may damage the board. If you don’t have anti-static bags, wrap the board in a sheet of aluminum foil.
Ship the product in a box. Do not ship it in a padded bag; this does not provide enough protection.
Cushion the product inside the box. Shippers generally recommend at least two inches (five cm) cushioning on all sides, using foam “peanuts” or bubble wrap. We have seen a number of repairs/returns get damaged from improper packaging. When this happens, very often extra repair charges are levied.
We strongly recommend that you use a well-known shipping company such as FedEx, DHL or UPS, and use their “Large box”. FedEx, DHL and UPS have fast-track arrangements with customs agencies.
If the product is tied to a BEYOND or LD2000 system, insure the shipment for $1500 USD or the price you paid for the product. If the product is tied to QuickShow, insure the shipment for $500 USD or the price you paid for the product.
Put your address (business card) and a printout of the return form inside the box. If the outer documents are lost, the shipper can look inside to contact you.
If you are outside the EU, declare the product for “Temporary Export”. On the customs and shipping documents, note that the “product is being returned to the authorized service center for repair”. This helps avoid unnecessary charges after the repair, when the product re-enters your country.
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Company: Pangolin Repair Center, Collimated
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NOTE: If you need to put a name on the shipping documents, address the package to “Francesco van Loon” at Pangolin. Before sending your hardware back to Pangolin for repair, please fill out the following form below. The data will be emailed to Pangolin. This lets us prepare for the product’s arrival. After you click the “Submit” button, you’ll go to a page that summarizes the information you are e-mailing. Please print two copies of the confirmation page. Keep one copy for your records, and include the other when shipping your product.
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Note that the form does not ask for your shipping address. Please be sure that your return address is on or inside the package, so we know where to return the product!
Hardware Return Form
An asterisk (*) indicates data is required. If you are sending more than one piece of hardware, please fill out one form for each piece. | 704 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221209165.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20180814150733-20180814170733-00601.warc.gz | 0.884894 |
8a7a635f-f3e9-41fa-8879-c33f9747a878 | 2018-08-20T16:21:49+00:00 | 2018-08-20 | 0 | https://eisit.uk/technical-design-and-managed-services/ | We can help you manage and develop a secure and resilient network infrastructure for your school.
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c5fbec34-f09f-476a-8706-a6f315492dc5 | 2022-05-25T00:32:37+00:00 | 2020-03-30 | 0 | https://vintagetoyscars.us/nice-early-1910-s-20-s-bing-tin-litho-garage-with-two-wind-up-cars-set-2.htm | NICE EARLY 1910's/20's BING TIN LITHO GARAGE with TWO WIND UP CARS SET. SHOWS SOME WEAR AND SOILING.MAYBE SOME DINGS OR DENTS. BOTH CARS DO NOT WORK WORK. GARAGE MEASURES ABOUT 6-1/2" X 8".
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a7c10fe4-415a-4d93-8478-593bf4214fb4 | 2019-08-26T08:05:30+00:00 | 2017-00-00 | 0 | https://www.instantassignmenthelp.com/agricultural-economics | 1785 Downloads 5 Pages 1231 Words
Table 1Price of grape wines in past years
Figure 1Wine grape price in Australia
(Source: Riverina wine grapes marketing board, 2017)
Weak economic condition of USA and UK: Weak economic condition of the USA and UK market heavily affect the wine grape price in the Australia. It must be noted that USA and UK are the nations that are heavily affected by the economic crisis (Australian wine, 2017). Due to economic crisis business conditions become uncertain and business firms start curtailing their workforce and due to this reason unemployment rate get increased in the both nations. Due to elevation in the unemployment rate people spending power get reduced and this affects the demand of the grapevine in the UK and USA. Due to less demand and high supply price of the grape wine fall sharply in the both market and profitability of the business firms decline sharply. It must be noted that USA cover 27% market share of total exports of gape wine that happened from the Australia market. Apart from this, 35% market share of grape wine is covered by the UK market. Both markets declined and due to this reason and due to increase in supply price of grapevine declined.
Unstable agriculture condition: Unstable agriculture production is one of the other reason due to which price of grapevine keeps of fluctuating consistently in the market. It can be observed that due to change in climatic conditions production also get changed and due to variation in supply of grapes price of same also fluctuate in the market.
Oversupply of product: Oversupply of the product in the market is the one of the main reason due to which price of grapevine decline in the market consistently. It must be noted that there must be equality in the demand and supply of the product (Oog, D., 2017). If demand is less and supply is high then in that case price of the commodity decline and due to this reason reduction is observed in the price of grapevine.
Change in taste: Change in the taste is the one of the basic reason due to which price of grapevine declined in the Australia and traders earn less profit in their business. It must be noted that there are different variety of the grapevines in the market and with passage of time people preference also get changed. Due to this reason demand of grape wine also get affected in the market and this is the reason due to which less demand and elevation in supply price of grape wine reduced sharply in past few years. Thus, it can be said that change in taste, oversupply of product, unstable agriculture conditions and weak economic condition are the one of the main reason due to which grape wine price reduced in past decade.
Weather conditions- It has been seen that most of commodities are internationally traded that majorly include agriculture products. Therefore, the production of these goods are highly depends on the weather conditions of a country. It can be said that there is a sudden happen of changes in the climatic condition of a any country. It involves that there is rainfall are inadequate or draughts are might impact on the agriculture products availability all over the world market. Thus, there is an causes of scarcity and commodity of agriculture prices are to be pushed northwards.
Economic and political conditions- There is an on another international factor that may highly impact on the agriculture products is only due to economic and political condition of any country. It will impact where these agricultural commodities are produce as well as consumed (Lenzen and et, al., 2012). Therefore, there is an example of Iraq in which there is a Gulf war that are majorly producer of oil. Thus, the prices of oil are changes or fluctuating frequently. Moreover, the condition of economic of country is might weak for that major reason it will minimize the spending or purchasing of customers. Thus, it will leads into the fallen into demand of buyers and there will be fluctuation of prices.
Government policies- The another international factors is that changes in the government policy it is due to impact of import or export cost to the purchaser or seller which have a great impact on the prices of agriculture commodity. For instance, the government of UK increasing the price of import of edible oil that will proportionally impact on the price that is increase and vice versa.
The above factor may impact on the demand and supply if there is any changes in the price of agriculture commodities are describe below-
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There is shortage of commodity products due to scarcity of agriculture products raw material. In that particular situation, it will directly of equally impact on the demand and supply of the agriculture commodities (Johnson,2013). The producer of product are not willing to supply the agricultural products in these events. It will increase in the price of mention product so, the consumer will purchase at higher prices and it will also impact on the demand that will be reduce from the previous particular time period.
It can be explained from the above figure is that the price of change in the agriculture is that it will be increase that directly shift the supply. The price of increase will directly shift the demand of the particular agriculture products that will be inelastic.
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It’s time to turn to our experts for assignment writing service. | 1,161 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027331228.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20190826064622-20190826090622-00148.warc.gz | 0.952093 |
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