Four years ago this month I returned from Iraq, which was sort of my last big mission as a military psychologist before "becoming a civilian." As a psychologist I was interested in trauma and suicide long before my deployment, but there's something very different about listening to a Soldier tell the story of his buddy's death while he's still lying in a hospital bed having fragments of metal removed from his leg as compared to hearing the same story in your clinic in the U.S. two years after the fact. It was also in Iraq that I first stood over the body of someone who had died by suicide, feeling a mixture of helplessness, grief and anger; an experience that had, for me as a suicidologist, been merely an intellectualized concept. Four years ago, psychiatric disorders and suicide became personal to me.
Suicide is the fatal outcome of psychological injury. I should stress, however, that not all psychological injuries sustained by military personnel and veterans occur during deployments. For many of the service members and veterans I've worked with, the psychological injuries occurred during childhood at the hands of an abusive or demeaning parent; for others it was sustained within the context of a recent breakup or a financial crisis. Indeed, more than half of service members who die by suicide never deployed or saw combat. The good news is that we have very effective treatments for the full range of psychological injuries that lead to suicide. The bad news is that very few service members or veterans will receive them.
Clinic-based mental health services have been expanded dramatically for service members and veterans over the past decade across both the public and private sectors. Mental health treatment is arguably more accessible and affordable for service members and veterans now more than ever, due in large part to community mental health professionals and agencies offering free or significantly reduced-cost services. Although admirable, these efforts are not enough, and too many psychological injuries remain untreated.
One of the primary problems is that the expansion of mental health services has largely occurred in traditional, clinic-based settings that are unlikely to be accessed by most service members and veterans due to pervasive mental health stigma. Only a very small proportion of real time Location system who die by suicide (16%) visited a mental health care professional within the month preceding their deaths. Despite our decades-long battle with mental health stigma among service members and veterans, we have yet to see much success, primarily because we have failed to consider the issue of mental health treatment and stigma from within the context of the military culture. In the military, we value strength, mental toughness, elitism and self-sufficiency, but the culture of mental health is deficiency-oriented and values emotional vulnerability, which contradicts the core identity of many service members and veterans. We mental health professionals need to adopt a multicultural approach to working with service members and veterans, and to change how we deliver our services to better fit with military cultural norms, instead of asking service members and veterans to abandon their identities and conform to our standards.
From my perspective as a mental health professional, an even bigger tragedy is the realization that when service members and veterans do overcome mental health stigma and access care, they are still unlikely to receive the best treatments available. This is not a DOD or a VA problem; this is a problem of our mental health care system as a whole in the US, which continues to perpetuate the myth that all psychological treatments are equally effective, and that any treatment is better than no treatment. What we actually know, however, based on decades of research, is that trauma victims who receive prolonged exposure (PE) or cognitive processing therapy (CPT) for PTSD are three to four times more likely to experience full remission from PTSD. These better outcomes occur regardless of the trauma, whether rape, violent assault or combat. Early findings further suggest that PE and CPT reduce suicidal ideation among military personnel with PTSD. And just within the past month, preliminary data presented at the American Psychological Association's annual convention indicate that brief cognitive behavioral therapy (BCBT) for suicidal military personnel contributes to a 50% reduction in suicide attempts and significant reductions in PTSD symptoms as compared to traditional mental health care approaches. In short, some treatments work better than others, and are more effective at helping service members and veterans.
For many of us, the service members and veterans who are suffering from these psychological injuries are family members and friends. And some of them are dying from their injuries. Improved access to mental health care without improved quality of care will do little to prevent suicide among service members and veterans. As mental health professionals we must therefore commit ourselves individually and collectively to learning and using these better treatments that we know can help service members and veterans live lives that are worth living. It's okay for us to change.
But what I've learned along the way is that a joint honours student needs double the passion, patience and perseverance required to study a single honours degree.One of the first hurdles you have to overcome is logistics. Working with two academic departments can result in clashing deadlines, twice the staff to get to know and double the feedback sessions.
Rafe Hallett, director of induction in history at the University of Leeds, says: "The first six months of study can be a struggle, as the joint honours student adapts to the demands of two communities and two discourses of knowledge."They can sometimes feel stuck in limbo between two 'homes' and feel envious of the apparent simplicity of single honours students' timetables, contexts and communities."
Hayley Reid, a classics and English student from the University of Leeds, found dividing her time and attention between two schools was more trouble than it was worth: "It was one of the biggest mistakes I've made at university."Reid feels she doesn't properly belong to either of her departments: "I've chosen to focus more on the English side of things, but my parent school is classics. I feel like I'm floating in some sort of subject limbo where I'm neither an English student nor a classics student."
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Showing posts with label ordeal or a nightmare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ordeal or a nightmare. Show all posts
Monday, September 2, 2013
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Is MLK dream reality?
When he boarded a Greyhound bus on his way to Princeton University, Glennon Threatt promised himself he'd never come back here. As a young black man, he saw no chance to fulfill his dreams in a city burdened by the ghosts of its segregated past.Helen Shores Lee left Birmingham years earlier, making the same pledge not to return. A daughter of a prominent civil rights lawyer, she wanted to escape a city tarnished by Jim Crow laws — the "white" and "colored" fountains, the segregated bus seating, the daily indignities she rebelled against as a child.
Both changed their minds. They returned from their self-imposed exile and built successful careers — he as an assistant federal public defender, she as a judge — in a Birmingham transformed by a revolution a half century ago.This week, as the nation marks the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, there may be no better place than Birmingham to measure the progress that followed the civil rights leader's historic call for racial and economic equality.
This city, after all, is hallowed ground in civil rights history. It was here where children marching for equal rights were jailed, where protesters were attacked by snarling police dogs and battered by high-pressure fire hoses. And it was here where four little girls in their Sunday finest were killed when dynamite planted by Ku Klux Klan members ripped through their church in an unspeakable act of evil.
That was the Birmingham of the past. The city that King condemned for its "ugly record of Hands free access." The city where he wrote his impassioned "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," declaring the "moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." The city where the movement came together, found its voice and set the stage for landmark civil rights legislation.
The Birmingham of the present is a far different place. The airport is named after a fearless civil rights champion, the late Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. The city's website features a 'Fifty Years Forward' campaign, forthrightly displaying photos of shameful events in 1963. There are black judges and professors in places where segregation once reigned. And black mayors have occupied City Hall since 1979, in part because many white residents migrated to the suburbs, a familiar pattern in urban America.
So has King's dream of equality been realized here and has Birmingham moved beyond its troubled past?For many, the answer is yes, the city has changed in ways that once seemed unthinkable — and yet, there's also a sense Birmingham still has a long way to go.The legal and social barriers that barred black people from schools and jobs fell long ago, but economic disparity persists.
Blacks and whites work together and dine side by side in restaurants during the day, but usually don't mingle after 5 p.m.Racial slurs are rare, but suspicions and tensions remain."I don't think any of us would deny that there have been significant changes in Birmingham," Shores Lee says. King would be proud, she adds, but "he would say there's a lot more work to be done. I think he would tell us our task is not finished."
Amid the flowers and soothing fountain in Kelly Ingram Park, there are stark reminders of the ugly clashes. It was in this area, now known as the Civil Rights District, where the scenes of police brutality were captured in photos and TV footage that helped galvanize public opinion around the nation on behalf of demonstrators.
Today, the park has statues commemorating King and other leaders. There's a sculpture of a young protester, his arms stretched back, as a policeman grabs him with one hand and holds a lunging German shepherd in the other. (An Associated Press photographer had captured a similar image.) There are other sculptures of water cannons, more dogs, and a boy and a girl standing impassively with the words "I Ain't Afraid of your Jail" at the base.
To those who grew up here, these works are not just artistic renderings but reminders of the bravery of friends and neighbors."It's kind of like being in the movie 'The Sixth Sense' — everywhere you go you see ghosts," Threatt says of the statues. "It's probably like a person who served in World War II going back to Normandy. It's a place where something very, very real, very poignant happened to people that you knew."
Threatt was just 7 when King announced his vision of a colorblind society before hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the Washington Mall. Not long afterward, Threatt was one of three black gifted students enrolled in a white elementary school. He was spat on, beat up, called the N-word.
"I like him," he says. "I don't think he's a racist. He was a kid caught up in a social situation like I was. .... You've got to get over that in order to survive in the South. ... Otherwise you just wallow in self-pity and hatred and you don't move forward."
Threatt graduated from Princeton, then Howard University Law School, worked in Denver and Washington, D.C., but returned to Birmingham in 1997. Both he and the city had changed, he says, with Birmingham becoming more progressive. He joined an established law firm — something that would have been unimaginable 50 years earlier.
Threatt had been inspired, in part, to be a lawyer by Arthur Shores, a Sunday school teacher at his church and a pioneering civil rights attorney who fought to desegregate the University of Alabama. Shores' home was bombed twice in 1963, two weeks apart. His neighborhood was nicknamed "Dynamite Hill" for the series of bombings intended to intimidate blacks.
Shores' daughter, Helen, grew up resisting the segregation laws, once drinking from a "white" fountain — a defiant act that resulted in a whipping when she got home. At 12, she aimed a Colt .45 at some white men driving by her family's house, spewing racial obscenities. Her father, she says, slapped her arm, the bullet discharged into the air and he quickly grabbed the gun.
She left Birmingham for 13 years, returned in 1971, later switched careers and in 2003 became a judge, only to confront lingering remnants of racism.In her early years on the bench, she recalls, a few lawyers pointedly refused to stand as is custom when a judge enters a courtroom. And, she says, she occasionally sees lawyers who are disrespectful of their minority clients.
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Both changed their minds. They returned from their self-imposed exile and built successful careers — he as an assistant federal public defender, she as a judge — in a Birmingham transformed by a revolution a half century ago.This week, as the nation marks the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, there may be no better place than Birmingham to measure the progress that followed the civil rights leader's historic call for racial and economic equality.
This city, after all, is hallowed ground in civil rights history. It was here where children marching for equal rights were jailed, where protesters were attacked by snarling police dogs and battered by high-pressure fire hoses. And it was here where four little girls in their Sunday finest were killed when dynamite planted by Ku Klux Klan members ripped through their church in an unspeakable act of evil.
That was the Birmingham of the past. The city that King condemned for its "ugly record of Hands free access." The city where he wrote his impassioned "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," declaring the "moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." The city where the movement came together, found its voice and set the stage for landmark civil rights legislation.
The Birmingham of the present is a far different place. The airport is named after a fearless civil rights champion, the late Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. The city's website features a 'Fifty Years Forward' campaign, forthrightly displaying photos of shameful events in 1963. There are black judges and professors in places where segregation once reigned. And black mayors have occupied City Hall since 1979, in part because many white residents migrated to the suburbs, a familiar pattern in urban America.
So has King's dream of equality been realized here and has Birmingham moved beyond its troubled past?For many, the answer is yes, the city has changed in ways that once seemed unthinkable — and yet, there's also a sense Birmingham still has a long way to go.The legal and social barriers that barred black people from schools and jobs fell long ago, but economic disparity persists.
Blacks and whites work together and dine side by side in restaurants during the day, but usually don't mingle after 5 p.m.Racial slurs are rare, but suspicions and tensions remain."I don't think any of us would deny that there have been significant changes in Birmingham," Shores Lee says. King would be proud, she adds, but "he would say there's a lot more work to be done. I think he would tell us our task is not finished."
Amid the flowers and soothing fountain in Kelly Ingram Park, there are stark reminders of the ugly clashes. It was in this area, now known as the Civil Rights District, where the scenes of police brutality were captured in photos and TV footage that helped galvanize public opinion around the nation on behalf of demonstrators.
Today, the park has statues commemorating King and other leaders. There's a sculpture of a young protester, his arms stretched back, as a policeman grabs him with one hand and holds a lunging German shepherd in the other. (An Associated Press photographer had captured a similar image.) There are other sculptures of water cannons, more dogs, and a boy and a girl standing impassively with the words "I Ain't Afraid of your Jail" at the base.
To those who grew up here, these works are not just artistic renderings but reminders of the bravery of friends and neighbors."It's kind of like being in the movie 'The Sixth Sense' — everywhere you go you see ghosts," Threatt says of the statues. "It's probably like a person who served in World War II going back to Normandy. It's a place where something very, very real, very poignant happened to people that you knew."
Threatt was just 7 when King announced his vision of a colorblind society before hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the Washington Mall. Not long afterward, Threatt was one of three black gifted students enrolled in a white elementary school. He was spat on, beat up, called the N-word.
"I like him," he says. "I don't think he's a racist. He was a kid caught up in a social situation like I was. .... You've got to get over that in order to survive in the South. ... Otherwise you just wallow in self-pity and hatred and you don't move forward."
Threatt graduated from Princeton, then Howard University Law School, worked in Denver and Washington, D.C., but returned to Birmingham in 1997. Both he and the city had changed, he says, with Birmingham becoming more progressive. He joined an established law firm — something that would have been unimaginable 50 years earlier.
Threatt had been inspired, in part, to be a lawyer by Arthur Shores, a Sunday school teacher at his church and a pioneering civil rights attorney who fought to desegregate the University of Alabama. Shores' home was bombed twice in 1963, two weeks apart. His neighborhood was nicknamed "Dynamite Hill" for the series of bombings intended to intimidate blacks.
Shores' daughter, Helen, grew up resisting the segregation laws, once drinking from a "white" fountain — a defiant act that resulted in a whipping when she got home. At 12, she aimed a Colt .45 at some white men driving by her family's house, spewing racial obscenities. Her father, she says, slapped her arm, the bullet discharged into the air and he quickly grabbed the gun.
She left Birmingham for 13 years, returned in 1971, later switched careers and in 2003 became a judge, only to confront lingering remnants of racism.In her early years on the bench, she recalls, a few lawyers pointedly refused to stand as is custom when a judge enters a courtroom. And, she says, she occasionally sees lawyers who are disrespectful of their minority clients.
Read the full products at www.ecived.com/en/!
Monday, August 26, 2013
Navalny shakes up Moscow mayor campaign
A motley gaggle of hipsters, mothers with children and two babushkas with hair dyed bright red gather to listen to something they haven't heard in over a decade: a stump speech for Moscow mayor.Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption blogger who has become the best known face of Russia's protest movement, is trying to take his following offline and into the street, waging a traditional campaign of hand-shaking and leaflet drives to win voters outside his base of the young and web-savvy.
Navalny has little hope of defeating incumbent Sergei Sobyanin _ but polls show his star is rising. And if he gets a big chunk of the real time Location system, the Kremlin will face pressure to show leniency over his five-year prison sentence, and the grassroots protest movement that fizzled out after Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency last year may gain new wind.
Sobyanin, meanwhile, is playing the regal incumbent: Throughout the campaign, the Kremlin-backed politician has been all but invisible, allowing the constant drone of jackhammers or whiff of fresh paint that are signs of a Moscow makeover to remind voters of who's in charge _ and who can pull the purse-strings.
Navalny is the one who has been soaking up attention, and generating buzz. On a recent August day, the opposition leader stood on stage in a sprawling Moscow park dotted with enormous space shuttles and other scraps of Soviet-era glory, and attempted to connect with an audience he rarely reaches through Twitter: the feared and revered babushka contingency."We know that (in Soviet times) our oil money was spent on enormous factories, industry, railroads, roads, science, health care, rockets," he boomed, riffing on a nostalgia felt by many older Russians, who saw their hopes dashed and savings depleted under post-Soviet political reforms.
"But can you name a single major business that's been built in this country in the past 10 years? I can't!"The old ladies sitting in the first row chuckled and shook their heads.On Sunday, police briefly detained Navalny after he left the stage of a campaign event, and released him a short time later. The detention was part of a series of public signals to Navalny, who was given a verbal warning about various alleged campaign violations by the Moscow electoral committee last week.
Polling data on the race is spotty and inconsistent, but the trends are clear: The number of Muscovites ready to vote for Navalny on Sept. 8 has breached 10 percent and may even be moving toward 20 percent. Meanwhile, Sobyanin's ratings _ while still above the 50 percent that would allow him to avoid a run-off _ are slipping by the week. There are four other party-backed candidates in the race, none projected to snag more than 5 percent.
Alexei Grazhdankin, deputy director of the independent Levada polling center, said that Sobyanin's voter base was clearly no longer growing, and that there's now a small chance there will be a second round.Last month, Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison on embezzlement charges, but was released the day after his conviction in what many have described as an effort to legitimize the mayoral race and ensure that Sobyanin _ who was appointed as mayor and is seen as a possible successor to Putin _ is regarded as an elected politician with widespread support.
Such legitimacy is considered important because Putin's forces are at their weakest in his seat of power: Moscow. When Putin won back the presidency last year, after ruling for a term in the lesser role of prime minister, he won only 47 percent of the capital's rtls, compared to 64 percent nationwide. That may also be a reason why, although there's no doubt that Sobyanin is the Kremlin's man, he is running as an independent and has avoided public appearances with the president.
Masha Lipman at the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow said that Navalny had already achieved something: cast doubt over the inevitability of Putin's power."One of his greatest achievements is ... adding an element of risk and uncertainty," she said. "Putin built a political system in this country that is risk averse, it's a political monopoly."
Rather than the issues _ immigration, traffic, high cost of living _ it's a contrast in political style that lies at the heart of the mayoral campaign. In the Levada Center poll, 48 percent of respondents said they would vote for a mayor with "experience," whereas 47 percent said that personal qualities, such as "openness and determination," were crucial.
Navalny, a sharp-tongued 37-year-old lawyer, has plenty of the latter. He has waged an intensive campaign with nearly $1.5 million in funds raised online, meeting with hundreds of voters every day and mobilizing enthusiastic young volunteers to help hand out leaflets in the street and on the metro.
His team has also unleashed a flurry of new online projects. From a GPS mapping system that shows how many supporters live in each apartment block to an application that helps users spread pro-Navalny information on Russia's biggest social networks, the campaign has been keen to lock down his natural base of young voters, many of whom often don't make it to the polls.
"Currently the polls are assuming that those who haven't yet figured out who to vote for will vote the same way as those who have," Leonid Volkov, Navalny's campaign manager, told The Associated Press. "The fight is for the 30 percent of voters who haven't decided yet."Andrei Tvertnev, an unemployed 25-year-old former soldier who was lingering in the crowd around Navalny, is one of those yet to make up his mind.
Tvertnev wasn't keen on Sobyanin, saying that the changes he's brought to the city "could have been done much faster." At the same time, he remained skeptical about Navalny."Do I vote for a bureaucrat who made some changes, or a different person who promises even more changes?" he asked. "I think I'll only make up my mind on the day of the elections."
Sobyanin, who made his name as the governor of the oil-rich Siberian province of Tyumen, makes up for his lack of charisma and enthusiasm with what talks in Russian politics: experience, access and the money that comes with it.Despite his almost invisible candidacy, Sobyanin is genuinely well-liked for the changes he's brought to Moscow. He has poured a yearly budget of approximately $54 billion into the city's parks and cultural institutions, although other promises to tackle traffic and parking have been lagging or limited in scope.
As if to shore up his reputation as a fixer-upper, the city, which usually hits a sleepy summer lull in August, has been converted into an enormous construction site _ with sidewalks torn up and facades repainted."There's little doubt that before elections, the government becomes very affectionate and thoughtful," Levada's Grazhdankin said about the city's makeover.
While Sobyanin, who was appointed to the mayor's office, is eager to prove himself as a legitimately elected politician, the tactics used against Navalny _ from accusations that he receives foreign funding abroad to refusals by media outlets to play his campaign ads _ show that he still sees Navalny as a threat.
Even if Navalny's eventual vote tally is relatively low, he may end up having an outsized impact on the Russian political scene."If he gets 10 to 12 percent, they can say, look at your opposition leader, he was only able to get this tiny fraction of the vote," said Lipman. "But those people who are investing their emotions, time and money into this campaign, that experience won't go away."
Oleg Bogomolov, a 42-year-old human resources manager who was at Navalny's headquarters to volunteer for the first time, said he didn't truly believe Navalny could win."But I think the more people who know about him, the greater his chances of being set free," he said. "If they put him behind bars again (after the election), there will be even more people in the streets."
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
Navalny has little hope of defeating incumbent Sergei Sobyanin _ but polls show his star is rising. And if he gets a big chunk of the real time Location system, the Kremlin will face pressure to show leniency over his five-year prison sentence, and the grassroots protest movement that fizzled out after Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency last year may gain new wind.
Sobyanin, meanwhile, is playing the regal incumbent: Throughout the campaign, the Kremlin-backed politician has been all but invisible, allowing the constant drone of jackhammers or whiff of fresh paint that are signs of a Moscow makeover to remind voters of who's in charge _ and who can pull the purse-strings.
Navalny is the one who has been soaking up attention, and generating buzz. On a recent August day, the opposition leader stood on stage in a sprawling Moscow park dotted with enormous space shuttles and other scraps of Soviet-era glory, and attempted to connect with an audience he rarely reaches through Twitter: the feared and revered babushka contingency."We know that (in Soviet times) our oil money was spent on enormous factories, industry, railroads, roads, science, health care, rockets," he boomed, riffing on a nostalgia felt by many older Russians, who saw their hopes dashed and savings depleted under post-Soviet political reforms.
"But can you name a single major business that's been built in this country in the past 10 years? I can't!"The old ladies sitting in the first row chuckled and shook their heads.On Sunday, police briefly detained Navalny after he left the stage of a campaign event, and released him a short time later. The detention was part of a series of public signals to Navalny, who was given a verbal warning about various alleged campaign violations by the Moscow electoral committee last week.
Polling data on the race is spotty and inconsistent, but the trends are clear: The number of Muscovites ready to vote for Navalny on Sept. 8 has breached 10 percent and may even be moving toward 20 percent. Meanwhile, Sobyanin's ratings _ while still above the 50 percent that would allow him to avoid a run-off _ are slipping by the week. There are four other party-backed candidates in the race, none projected to snag more than 5 percent.
Alexei Grazhdankin, deputy director of the independent Levada polling center, said that Sobyanin's voter base was clearly no longer growing, and that there's now a small chance there will be a second round.Last month, Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison on embezzlement charges, but was released the day after his conviction in what many have described as an effort to legitimize the mayoral race and ensure that Sobyanin _ who was appointed as mayor and is seen as a possible successor to Putin _ is regarded as an elected politician with widespread support.
Such legitimacy is considered important because Putin's forces are at their weakest in his seat of power: Moscow. When Putin won back the presidency last year, after ruling for a term in the lesser role of prime minister, he won only 47 percent of the capital's rtls, compared to 64 percent nationwide. That may also be a reason why, although there's no doubt that Sobyanin is the Kremlin's man, he is running as an independent and has avoided public appearances with the president.
Masha Lipman at the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow said that Navalny had already achieved something: cast doubt over the inevitability of Putin's power."One of his greatest achievements is ... adding an element of risk and uncertainty," she said. "Putin built a political system in this country that is risk averse, it's a political monopoly."
Rather than the issues _ immigration, traffic, high cost of living _ it's a contrast in political style that lies at the heart of the mayoral campaign. In the Levada Center poll, 48 percent of respondents said they would vote for a mayor with "experience," whereas 47 percent said that personal qualities, such as "openness and determination," were crucial.
Navalny, a sharp-tongued 37-year-old lawyer, has plenty of the latter. He has waged an intensive campaign with nearly $1.5 million in funds raised online, meeting with hundreds of voters every day and mobilizing enthusiastic young volunteers to help hand out leaflets in the street and on the metro.
His team has also unleashed a flurry of new online projects. From a GPS mapping system that shows how many supporters live in each apartment block to an application that helps users spread pro-Navalny information on Russia's biggest social networks, the campaign has been keen to lock down his natural base of young voters, many of whom often don't make it to the polls.
"Currently the polls are assuming that those who haven't yet figured out who to vote for will vote the same way as those who have," Leonid Volkov, Navalny's campaign manager, told The Associated Press. "The fight is for the 30 percent of voters who haven't decided yet."Andrei Tvertnev, an unemployed 25-year-old former soldier who was lingering in the crowd around Navalny, is one of those yet to make up his mind.
Tvertnev wasn't keen on Sobyanin, saying that the changes he's brought to the city "could have been done much faster." At the same time, he remained skeptical about Navalny."Do I vote for a bureaucrat who made some changes, or a different person who promises even more changes?" he asked. "I think I'll only make up my mind on the day of the elections."
Sobyanin, who made his name as the governor of the oil-rich Siberian province of Tyumen, makes up for his lack of charisma and enthusiasm with what talks in Russian politics: experience, access and the money that comes with it.Despite his almost invisible candidacy, Sobyanin is genuinely well-liked for the changes he's brought to Moscow. He has poured a yearly budget of approximately $54 billion into the city's parks and cultural institutions, although other promises to tackle traffic and parking have been lagging or limited in scope.
As if to shore up his reputation as a fixer-upper, the city, which usually hits a sleepy summer lull in August, has been converted into an enormous construction site _ with sidewalks torn up and facades repainted."There's little doubt that before elections, the government becomes very affectionate and thoughtful," Levada's Grazhdankin said about the city's makeover.
While Sobyanin, who was appointed to the mayor's office, is eager to prove himself as a legitimately elected politician, the tactics used against Navalny _ from accusations that he receives foreign funding abroad to refusals by media outlets to play his campaign ads _ show that he still sees Navalny as a threat.
Even if Navalny's eventual vote tally is relatively low, he may end up having an outsized impact on the Russian political scene."If he gets 10 to 12 percent, they can say, look at your opposition leader, he was only able to get this tiny fraction of the vote," said Lipman. "But those people who are investing their emotions, time and money into this campaign, that experience won't go away."
Oleg Bogomolov, a 42-year-old human resources manager who was at Navalny's headquarters to volunteer for the first time, said he didn't truly believe Navalny could win."But I think the more people who know about him, the greater his chances of being set free," he said. "If they put him behind bars again (after the election), there will be even more people in the streets."
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Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Immigration Minister and Shadow debate asylum policy
In July, Attorney General Eric Holder filed a lawsuit, arguing that the state should be required to undergo some form of preclearance with districting plans. A month before, the United States Supreme Court had struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, meaning that the Texas redistricting plan was no longer subject to federal preclearance requirements.
In his lawsuit, Holder called on a judge to review the districting proposal, and cited "evidence of intentional racial discrimination that was presented" in another lawsuit, Texas v. Holder in 2012. The 2012 ruling denied the state preclearance to enact a potential voter identification law, and Holder used the suit as a springboard for suggesting that similar federal approval would again be necessary.
In response to the most recent case, Abbott denied that redistricting practices were racially motivated, but revealed that political interests were very much at work.
"In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party's electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats," read a court brief filed by Abbott.
Abbott also qualified the tactics, noting that partisan districting decisions are still constitutional, despite "incidental effects on minority voters." The brief cites Hunt v. Cromartie, a South Carolina case in which it was decided that "[a] jurisdiction may engage in constitutional political gerrymandering, even if it so happens that the most loyal Democrats happen to be black Democrats and even if the State were conscious of that fact."
Partisan gerrymandering, while legal, is an often frowned upon. Before John Paul Stevens' 2010 retirement, the then-Supreme Court justice criticized the Indoor Positioning System, asserting that it is "very, very harmful to the community at large."
Gentlemen, welcome to the program. We know that both your parties support offshore processing, Nauru and PNG as partners in that, mandatory detention, a regional solution involving our neighbours, particularly Indonesia, a humanitarian refugee intake, the use of Navy and Customs to respond to boats. Given all that common ground, what do each of you consider to be the single biggest point of difference in your policy approach - Tony Burke?
My focus is on implementation, and I think it's fair to say the greatest frustration that I've found have been the attempts from the Opposition to claim that the arrangements with Papua New Guinea will not be appropriately implemented. The entire policy and framework depends on the extent to which people will test our resolve because that determines how many people end up being affected by it. Now, we will have whatever capacity is required, but the more there is a discussion here implying that we won't implement it, the more people will put their lives at risk at the high seas.
Our focus has always been on deterrence, deterrence first. Now that obviously includes turning boats back where it's safe to do so, but it's a deterrence model that goes all the way up the chain and bringing all of that for implementation purposes under a single command and making sure that you have the ability to respond to issues as they arise because this is a daily struggle. The other key difference is form, indoor Tracking. Our form is we've got this done before. Our record shows that we have and the proven resolve and commitment and consistency. We've always believed in these policies. The Government has had every point in the compass on this debate.
No, we in fact brought an excision bill for the Australian mainland into the Parliament and the Labor Party opposed it. The only change we made was to bring children out of held detention. Now there were just over 50 people who were children in held detention at that time and we successfully did that. Now the big difference between us and the Government is - I have no doubt about the minister's earnest intention to get children out of held detention; his predecessor once removed held the same intention, but he failed miserably 'cause boats kept turning up with children on them. And so, no, we weren't winding it back. It was the Labor Party and Kevin Rudd who got rid of the border protection measures that worked under John Howard and 50,000 people have turned up since at a cost of $9 billion.
Factually inaccurate what he said about the final term of the Howard Government. I don't want to spend the whole night on the history, but I can't let Scott get away with claiming that children out of detention was the only thing that happened in that final term. The vast majority of people on temporary protection visas who were told they'd never be given permanent visas were given them. All but two of the people who were on Naura who'd been told they would never be settled in Australia were settled in Australia. To claim that those things never happened is just dishonest.
Well, effectively what you've got is you can - if you go back over, say, the last seven days or something like that to the first seven days of the policy, you find a significant tapering down. Now depending on how many days you go, you'll get a different percentage, between 40 per cent and 20 per cent. But it only tells part of the story because you've effectively got backfilling. People who would have got on boats had the policy not been in place, not getting on at all and refusing to get on, while people smugglers offering cut-price deals, desperately trying to backfill. They are steadily running out of the number of customers 'cause the product has been taken from them.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
In his lawsuit, Holder called on a judge to review the districting proposal, and cited "evidence of intentional racial discrimination that was presented" in another lawsuit, Texas v. Holder in 2012. The 2012 ruling denied the state preclearance to enact a potential voter identification law, and Holder used the suit as a springboard for suggesting that similar federal approval would again be necessary.
In response to the most recent case, Abbott denied that redistricting practices were racially motivated, but revealed that political interests were very much at work.
"In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party's electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats," read a court brief filed by Abbott.
Abbott also qualified the tactics, noting that partisan districting decisions are still constitutional, despite "incidental effects on minority voters." The brief cites Hunt v. Cromartie, a South Carolina case in which it was decided that "[a] jurisdiction may engage in constitutional political gerrymandering, even if it so happens that the most loyal Democrats happen to be black Democrats and even if the State were conscious of that fact."
Partisan gerrymandering, while legal, is an often frowned upon. Before John Paul Stevens' 2010 retirement, the then-Supreme Court justice criticized the Indoor Positioning System, asserting that it is "very, very harmful to the community at large."
Gentlemen, welcome to the program. We know that both your parties support offshore processing, Nauru and PNG as partners in that, mandatory detention, a regional solution involving our neighbours, particularly Indonesia, a humanitarian refugee intake, the use of Navy and Customs to respond to boats. Given all that common ground, what do each of you consider to be the single biggest point of difference in your policy approach - Tony Burke?
My focus is on implementation, and I think it's fair to say the greatest frustration that I've found have been the attempts from the Opposition to claim that the arrangements with Papua New Guinea will not be appropriately implemented. The entire policy and framework depends on the extent to which people will test our resolve because that determines how many people end up being affected by it. Now, we will have whatever capacity is required, but the more there is a discussion here implying that we won't implement it, the more people will put their lives at risk at the high seas.
Our focus has always been on deterrence, deterrence first. Now that obviously includes turning boats back where it's safe to do so, but it's a deterrence model that goes all the way up the chain and bringing all of that for implementation purposes under a single command and making sure that you have the ability to respond to issues as they arise because this is a daily struggle. The other key difference is form, indoor Tracking. Our form is we've got this done before. Our record shows that we have and the proven resolve and commitment and consistency. We've always believed in these policies. The Government has had every point in the compass on this debate.
No, we in fact brought an excision bill for the Australian mainland into the Parliament and the Labor Party opposed it. The only change we made was to bring children out of held detention. Now there were just over 50 people who were children in held detention at that time and we successfully did that. Now the big difference between us and the Government is - I have no doubt about the minister's earnest intention to get children out of held detention; his predecessor once removed held the same intention, but he failed miserably 'cause boats kept turning up with children on them. And so, no, we weren't winding it back. It was the Labor Party and Kevin Rudd who got rid of the border protection measures that worked under John Howard and 50,000 people have turned up since at a cost of $9 billion.
Factually inaccurate what he said about the final term of the Howard Government. I don't want to spend the whole night on the history, but I can't let Scott get away with claiming that children out of detention was the only thing that happened in that final term. The vast majority of people on temporary protection visas who were told they'd never be given permanent visas were given them. All but two of the people who were on Naura who'd been told they would never be settled in Australia were settled in Australia. To claim that those things never happened is just dishonest.
Well, effectively what you've got is you can - if you go back over, say, the last seven days or something like that to the first seven days of the policy, you find a significant tapering down. Now depending on how many days you go, you'll get a different percentage, between 40 per cent and 20 per cent. But it only tells part of the story because you've effectively got backfilling. People who would have got on boats had the policy not been in place, not getting on at all and refusing to get on, while people smugglers offering cut-price deals, desperately trying to backfill. They are steadily running out of the number of customers 'cause the product has been taken from them.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Monday, August 12, 2013
The Pink Slip
America’s pastime has taken a lot of hits over the years—of the wrong kind, we hate to admit, not the type that boosts players’ averages into the Hall of Fame echelon. Ryan Braun, the Milwaukee Brewers slugger and winner of the National League’s Most Valuable Player award in 2011, finally came clean—he had run out of excuses—and in the process dirtied his reputation for good. He made a fool out of his team owner, Mark Attanasio, and Doug Melvin, the team’s general manager, who signed Braun to an eight-year contract that was the richest in Milwaukee’s history, and most tragically for the game, his legion of fans.
Braun violated the league’s anti-doping policy. His name showed up in a sweeping investigation of Biogenesis, an anti-aging clinic in Florida that baseball officials claim distributed illegal performance-enhancing drugs. His lies finally caught up with him, and he’s been suspended for the rest of the rtls. He tried to make his fans think he was as pure as driven snow. Just like another artificially pumped-up player named Alexander Rodriguez, whose time is up. When hypocrites fall hard, it’s never a pretty sight. Braun, yer out!
When was the last time Fox News “journalist” Geraldo Rivera actually made news? We can’t remember either, but tweeting a seminude photo of himself clad only in a bath towel has to be another low in a downward spiraling career that they never teach you in Columbia J-School. On the plus side, he didn’t look too flabby for a guy who just turned 70 on July 4 but the other side of the story is his apparent Anthony Weiner plagiarism. Let the New York City mayoral candidate be judged by the voters—and his private behavior by his wife. Rivera’s grab for attention is just cheesy. Is he trolling for a new bride? He’s on his fifth marriage now—still three more to go to catch up to Larry King, who apparently set the bar high for these cable guys. Rivera, next time you take a shower, keep it to yourself.
Maybe it’s not her fault that bleached blonde Aaryn Gries has an egregious spelling of her first name; she can blame her parents for that. But she has to take full responsibility for her outrageous behavior on the CBS reality show “Big Brother” that puts a new shiny face on white supremacy and racism. Her guilt-free expression of intolerance and her selfish expectation of privilege make her the candidate we’d like to banish forever, let alone eliminate from the program. But we know there are millions out there who feel just like her, they’re just not as willing to parade their prejudices in public before the television audience. The benefit of all this attention, scripted or not, is that it gives the lie to the conservatives’ contention that racism in America is a thing of the past. On the contrary, it’s alive and well—in prime time.
Hempstead school district’s summer reading list this year was so stupid it became a national joke because it was filled with errors. It didn’t echo President George W. Bush’s famous malapropism, “Is our children learning?,” but then he was only running for president. The school district’s assignment was to educate its students over the summer. On the list, “The Great Gatsby” became “The Great Gypsy,” Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones” became “The Lovely Bone,” and George Ornell, rather than George Orwell, was credited as the author of “Animal Farm.”
The lowly employee who put the list together has not been named, just reportedly “disciplined,” but we say the blame should go straight to the top. Superintendent Susan Johnson makes about $265,000 and is eligible for about $40,000 in annual performance bonuses. She was fired from the district in 2005 for wasteful spending; the district has gone through seven superintendents in the last eight years. Has anybody learned anything since then? Clearly Johnson should renew her library card—and spend all her free time reading the books on this list. Her kind of bureaucratic incompetence hurts the kids who count on her academic leadership.
What Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, did to the punk-rock band Pussy Riot was outrageous enough. By their courageous acts, the all-women collective has shown how little regard Putin has for free speech in his country and how screwed up Russia’s Orthodox Church is. To prove their point, the women staged a protest song , appropriately called “Holy Shit,” from the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. They were arrested for desecration and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred or indoor Tracking.” All they destroyed was Putin’s reputation.
The church had been blown up in the 1930s and later turned into a swimming pool, but recently, thanks to a restoration reportedly paid for by organized crime, there’s a huge parking lot underneath it, and its banqueting halls are available for $10,000 a day. After the crackdown, which garnered international attention, three of the women remain behind bars. Amnesty International has called them prisoners of conscience. If Putin ever wants to put his ugly KGB past behind him, he should let them go with an apology and a promise that he’ll respect free expression.
But he seems to be willfully moving in the wrong direction. While attention has been on Edward Snowden, the American in Moscow seeking asylum, Putin has declared war on homosexuals, signing a bill on July 3 that bans adoption of Russian-born children not only to gay couples but also to any couple or single parent living in any country where marriage equality exists, as gay rights activist Harvey Fierstein, an internationally renowned actor and playwright, recently described it in the New York Times. Putin has also signed a law that allows Russia’s cops to arrest tourists and foreigners they suspect of being gay, lesbian or “pro-gay” (which sounds like a “thought crime” out of “1984”) and detain them for up to 14 days. And let’s not forget that Russia is supposed to host the 2014 Winter Olympics. Perhaps an international boycott is in order. We say “nyet” to Putin. And he should keep his shirt on in public. Who does he think he is—Anthony Weiner?
There were many contenders for this ignominious distinction, but Tennessee’s Rep. Stephen Fincher is the smug face of conservative Republican hypocrisy, hands down. The Congressman has gotten millions of dollars in farm subsidies but blithely voted to cut food stamps to the bone last month. Twenty-two percent of the people in his own district reportedly rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka SNAP).
But he joined his colleagues in stripping this essential program from the agriculture bill—a measure that had routinely passed in previous years with bipartisan support, because it paired aid for the big farm owners with assistance for the needy people in cities, suburbs and rural areas around the country. You know, wherever there are Americans who can’t afford to put food on their table. But as Fincher calls them, citing the Bible: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” He, of course, rakes in $3.5 million in farm subsidies for growing nothing. Having any American go hungry in a country as rich as ours is a sin. Fincher, get stuffed.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Braun violated the league’s anti-doping policy. His name showed up in a sweeping investigation of Biogenesis, an anti-aging clinic in Florida that baseball officials claim distributed illegal performance-enhancing drugs. His lies finally caught up with him, and he’s been suspended for the rest of the rtls. He tried to make his fans think he was as pure as driven snow. Just like another artificially pumped-up player named Alexander Rodriguez, whose time is up. When hypocrites fall hard, it’s never a pretty sight. Braun, yer out!
When was the last time Fox News “journalist” Geraldo Rivera actually made news? We can’t remember either, but tweeting a seminude photo of himself clad only in a bath towel has to be another low in a downward spiraling career that they never teach you in Columbia J-School. On the plus side, he didn’t look too flabby for a guy who just turned 70 on July 4 but the other side of the story is his apparent Anthony Weiner plagiarism. Let the New York City mayoral candidate be judged by the voters—and his private behavior by his wife. Rivera’s grab for attention is just cheesy. Is he trolling for a new bride? He’s on his fifth marriage now—still three more to go to catch up to Larry King, who apparently set the bar high for these cable guys. Rivera, next time you take a shower, keep it to yourself.
Maybe it’s not her fault that bleached blonde Aaryn Gries has an egregious spelling of her first name; she can blame her parents for that. But she has to take full responsibility for her outrageous behavior on the CBS reality show “Big Brother” that puts a new shiny face on white supremacy and racism. Her guilt-free expression of intolerance and her selfish expectation of privilege make her the candidate we’d like to banish forever, let alone eliminate from the program. But we know there are millions out there who feel just like her, they’re just not as willing to parade their prejudices in public before the television audience. The benefit of all this attention, scripted or not, is that it gives the lie to the conservatives’ contention that racism in America is a thing of the past. On the contrary, it’s alive and well—in prime time.
Hempstead school district’s summer reading list this year was so stupid it became a national joke because it was filled with errors. It didn’t echo President George W. Bush’s famous malapropism, “Is our children learning?,” but then he was only running for president. The school district’s assignment was to educate its students over the summer. On the list, “The Great Gatsby” became “The Great Gypsy,” Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones” became “The Lovely Bone,” and George Ornell, rather than George Orwell, was credited as the author of “Animal Farm.”
The lowly employee who put the list together has not been named, just reportedly “disciplined,” but we say the blame should go straight to the top. Superintendent Susan Johnson makes about $265,000 and is eligible for about $40,000 in annual performance bonuses. She was fired from the district in 2005 for wasteful spending; the district has gone through seven superintendents in the last eight years. Has anybody learned anything since then? Clearly Johnson should renew her library card—and spend all her free time reading the books on this list. Her kind of bureaucratic incompetence hurts the kids who count on her academic leadership.
What Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, did to the punk-rock band Pussy Riot was outrageous enough. By their courageous acts, the all-women collective has shown how little regard Putin has for free speech in his country and how screwed up Russia’s Orthodox Church is. To prove their point, the women staged a protest song , appropriately called “Holy Shit,” from the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. They were arrested for desecration and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred or indoor Tracking.” All they destroyed was Putin’s reputation.
The church had been blown up in the 1930s and later turned into a swimming pool, but recently, thanks to a restoration reportedly paid for by organized crime, there’s a huge parking lot underneath it, and its banqueting halls are available for $10,000 a day. After the crackdown, which garnered international attention, three of the women remain behind bars. Amnesty International has called them prisoners of conscience. If Putin ever wants to put his ugly KGB past behind him, he should let them go with an apology and a promise that he’ll respect free expression.
But he seems to be willfully moving in the wrong direction. While attention has been on Edward Snowden, the American in Moscow seeking asylum, Putin has declared war on homosexuals, signing a bill on July 3 that bans adoption of Russian-born children not only to gay couples but also to any couple or single parent living in any country where marriage equality exists, as gay rights activist Harvey Fierstein, an internationally renowned actor and playwright, recently described it in the New York Times. Putin has also signed a law that allows Russia’s cops to arrest tourists and foreigners they suspect of being gay, lesbian or “pro-gay” (which sounds like a “thought crime” out of “1984”) and detain them for up to 14 days. And let’s not forget that Russia is supposed to host the 2014 Winter Olympics. Perhaps an international boycott is in order. We say “nyet” to Putin. And he should keep his shirt on in public. Who does he think he is—Anthony Weiner?
There were many contenders for this ignominious distinction, but Tennessee’s Rep. Stephen Fincher is the smug face of conservative Republican hypocrisy, hands down. The Congressman has gotten millions of dollars in farm subsidies but blithely voted to cut food stamps to the bone last month. Twenty-two percent of the people in his own district reportedly rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka SNAP).
But he joined his colleagues in stripping this essential program from the agriculture bill—a measure that had routinely passed in previous years with bipartisan support, because it paired aid for the big farm owners with assistance for the needy people in cities, suburbs and rural areas around the country. You know, wherever there are Americans who can’t afford to put food on their table. But as Fincher calls them, citing the Bible: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” He, of course, rakes in $3.5 million in farm subsidies for growing nothing. Having any American go hungry in a country as rich as ours is a sin. Fincher, get stuffed.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Bradley Manning facing up to 136 years
Bradley Manning's possible prison sentence could hinge on the damage his leaks caused the U.S. government and his motives for releasing the sensitive material.His fate rests with a judge who will begin hearing arguments Wednesday at Fort Meade, near Baltimore, in the sentencing phase of his court-martial -- a phase CBS News correspondent David Martin says could take weeks.
Manning faces up to 136 years in prison, though his attorneys have asked the military judge to merge two of his espionage convictions and two of his theft convictions. If Army Col. Denise Lind agrees to do so, he would face up to 116 years in prison.The former intelligence analyst was convicted of 20 of 22 charges for sending hundreds of thousands of government and diplomatic secrets to WikiLeaks, but he was found not guilty of aiding the enemy, which alone could have meant life in prison without rtls.
Military prosecutors said they would call as many as 20 witnesses for the sentencing phase. The government said as many as half of the prosecution witnesses would testify about classified matters in closed court. They include experts on counterintelligence, strategic planning and terrorism.The judge prohibited both sides from presenting evidence during trial about any actual damage the leaks caused to national security and troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, but lawyers will be allowed to bring that up at sentencing.
The judge did not give any reasons for her verdict from the bench, but said she would release detailed written findings. She did not say when.The release of diplomatic cables, warzone logs and videos embarrassed the U.S. and its allies, but it was unclear how much damage it caused to national security beyond that.
U.S. officials warned of dire consequences in the days immediately after the first disclosures in July 2010, but a Pentagon review later suggested those fears might have been overblown.As for his motives, Manning testified during a pre-trial hearing that he leaked the material to expose U.S military "bloodlust" and diplomatic deceitfulness, but did not believe his actions would harm the country. He didn't testify during his trial.
Lisa Windsor, a retired Army colonel and former judge advocate, said the punishment phase would focus on Manning's motive and the harm that was done by the leak."You're balancing that to determine what would be an appropriate sentence. I think it's likely that he's going to be in jail for a very long time," said Windsor, now in private practice in Washington.
Lind deliberated 16 hours before reaching her verdict in a case involving the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. military history, committed, Martin points out, by a young army private working as a low level intelligence analyst in Baghdad more than three years ago.
The advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said the verdict was a chilling warning to whistleblowers "against whom the Obama administration has been waging an unprecedented offensive" and said it threatens the future of investigative journalism because intimidated sources might fall quiet.However, another advocate of less government secrecy, Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists, questioned whether the implications will be so dire, given the extraordinary nature of the Manning case.
"This was a massive hemorrhage of government records, and it's not too surprising that it elicited a strong reaction from the government," Aftergood said."Most journalists are not in the business of publishing classified documents, they're in the business of reporting the Indoor Positioning System, which is not the same thing," he said. "This is not good news for journalism, but it's not the end of the world, either."
"It is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism," he told reporters at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, which is sheltering him. "This has never been a fair trial."Federal authorities are looking into whether Assange can be prosecuted. He has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex-crimes allegations.
Manning pleaded guilty earlier this year to lesser offenses that could have brought him 20 years behind bars, yet the government continued to pursue all but one of the original, more serious charges.Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, welcomed Tuesday's verdict.
"Bradley Manning endangered the security of the United States and the lives of his own comrades in uniform when he intentionally disclosed vast amounts of classified data," the Republican congressman said. "His conviction should stand as an example to those who are tempted to violate a sacred public trust in pursuit of notoriety, fame, or their own political agenda."
Manning acknowledged giving WikiLeaks more than 700,000 battlefield reports and diplomatic cables, and video of a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack that killed civilians in Iraq, including a Reuters news photographer and his driver. Prosecutors branded him an anarchist and traitor. The defense portrayed the Crescent, Oklahoma, native as a "young, naive but good-intentioned" figure.
The material WikiLeaks began publishing in 2010 documented complaints of abuses against Iraqi detainees, a U.S. tally of civilian deaths in Iraq, and America's weak support for the government of Tunisia - a disclosure that Manning supporters said helped trigger the Middle Eastern pro-democracy uprisings known as the Arab Spring.
To prove aiding the enemy, prosecutors had to show Manning had "actual knowledge" the material he leaked would be seen by al-Qaeda and that he had "general evil intent." They presented evidence the material fell into the hands of the terrorist group and its former leader, Osama bin Laden, but struggled to prove their assertion that Manning was an anarchist computer hacker and attention-seeking traitor.
The WikiLeaks case is by far the most voluminous release of classified material in U.S. history. Manning's supporters included Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, whose sensational leak of 7,000 pages of documents in the early 1970s exposed U.S. government lies about the Vietnam War.
Manning faces up to 136 years in prison, though his attorneys have asked the military judge to merge two of his espionage convictions and two of his theft convictions. If Army Col. Denise Lind agrees to do so, he would face up to 116 years in prison.The former intelligence analyst was convicted of 20 of 22 charges for sending hundreds of thousands of government and diplomatic secrets to WikiLeaks, but he was found not guilty of aiding the enemy, which alone could have meant life in prison without rtls.
Military prosecutors said they would call as many as 20 witnesses for the sentencing phase. The government said as many as half of the prosecution witnesses would testify about classified matters in closed court. They include experts on counterintelligence, strategic planning and terrorism.The judge prohibited both sides from presenting evidence during trial about any actual damage the leaks caused to national security and troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, but lawyers will be allowed to bring that up at sentencing.
The judge did not give any reasons for her verdict from the bench, but said she would release detailed written findings. She did not say when.The release of diplomatic cables, warzone logs and videos embarrassed the U.S. and its allies, but it was unclear how much damage it caused to national security beyond that.
U.S. officials warned of dire consequences in the days immediately after the first disclosures in July 2010, but a Pentagon review later suggested those fears might have been overblown.As for his motives, Manning testified during a pre-trial hearing that he leaked the material to expose U.S military "bloodlust" and diplomatic deceitfulness, but did not believe his actions would harm the country. He didn't testify during his trial.
Lisa Windsor, a retired Army colonel and former judge advocate, said the punishment phase would focus on Manning's motive and the harm that was done by the leak."You're balancing that to determine what would be an appropriate sentence. I think it's likely that he's going to be in jail for a very long time," said Windsor, now in private practice in Washington.
Lind deliberated 16 hours before reaching her verdict in a case involving the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. military history, committed, Martin points out, by a young army private working as a low level intelligence analyst in Baghdad more than three years ago.
The advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said the verdict was a chilling warning to whistleblowers "against whom the Obama administration has been waging an unprecedented offensive" and said it threatens the future of investigative journalism because intimidated sources might fall quiet.However, another advocate of less government secrecy, Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists, questioned whether the implications will be so dire, given the extraordinary nature of the Manning case.
"This was a massive hemorrhage of government records, and it's not too surprising that it elicited a strong reaction from the government," Aftergood said."Most journalists are not in the business of publishing classified documents, they're in the business of reporting the Indoor Positioning System, which is not the same thing," he said. "This is not good news for journalism, but it's not the end of the world, either."
"It is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism," he told reporters at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, which is sheltering him. "This has never been a fair trial."Federal authorities are looking into whether Assange can be prosecuted. He has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex-crimes allegations.
Manning pleaded guilty earlier this year to lesser offenses that could have brought him 20 years behind bars, yet the government continued to pursue all but one of the original, more serious charges.Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, welcomed Tuesday's verdict.
"Bradley Manning endangered the security of the United States and the lives of his own comrades in uniform when he intentionally disclosed vast amounts of classified data," the Republican congressman said. "His conviction should stand as an example to those who are tempted to violate a sacred public trust in pursuit of notoriety, fame, or their own political agenda."
Manning acknowledged giving WikiLeaks more than 700,000 battlefield reports and diplomatic cables, and video of a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack that killed civilians in Iraq, including a Reuters news photographer and his driver. Prosecutors branded him an anarchist and traitor. The defense portrayed the Crescent, Oklahoma, native as a "young, naive but good-intentioned" figure.
The material WikiLeaks began publishing in 2010 documented complaints of abuses against Iraqi detainees, a U.S. tally of civilian deaths in Iraq, and America's weak support for the government of Tunisia - a disclosure that Manning supporters said helped trigger the Middle Eastern pro-democracy uprisings known as the Arab Spring.
To prove aiding the enemy, prosecutors had to show Manning had "actual knowledge" the material he leaked would be seen by al-Qaeda and that he had "general evil intent." They presented evidence the material fell into the hands of the terrorist group and its former leader, Osama bin Laden, but struggled to prove their assertion that Manning was an anarchist computer hacker and attention-seeking traitor.
The WikiLeaks case is by far the most voluminous release of classified material in U.S. history. Manning's supporters included Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, whose sensational leak of 7,000 pages of documents in the early 1970s exposed U.S. government lies about the Vietnam War.
Monday, July 29, 2013
Monogamy May Have Evolved to Prevent Infanticide
“Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other,” Katharine Hepburn once said. “Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.” Despite the famed actress’s remarks, human males and females do have a strong tendency to live together in monogamous pairs, albeit for highly varied periods of time and degrees of fidelity. Just how such behavior arose has been the topic of much debate among researchers. A new study comes to a startling conclusion: Among primates, including perhaps humans, monogamy evolved because it protected infants from being killed by rival males.
Living in pairs, what researchers call social monogamy, has repeatedly evolved among animals, although in widely varying proportions among different groups. Thus, about 90% of bird species are socially monogamous, probably because incubating eggs and feeding hatchlings is a full-time job that requires both parents. But in mammals, females carry the babies inside their bodies and are solely responsible for providing milk to young infants—and only about 5% of species are socially monogamous. That leaves most mammalian males free to run around and impregnate other indoor Tracking. Primates, however, seem to be a special case: About 27% of primate species are socially monogamous; and recent studies by Christopher Opie, an anthropologist at University College London, and his colleagues have concluded that social monogamy arose relatively late in primate evolution, only about 16 million years ago. (The earliest primates date back to about 55 million years.)
But why did social monogamy arise at all among mammals, including primates, given the many reproductive advantages to males having access to as many females as possible? Scientists have proposed three major hypotheses: Monogamy provides more effective parental care for infants, as in birds; it prevents females from mating with rival males, especially in species where females are widely spaced and cannot all be easily monopolized by one male; or it protects against the risk of infanticide, which is very high among some primate species, including chimpanzees and gorillas, and is often explained by the desire of a rival male to quickly return a mother to a fertile state so that he can sire his own offspring. Some researchers think that a combination of all three factors, and perhaps still others, provide the best explanation for monogamy.
Resolving this debate is important, researchers say, especially for understanding the evolution of human mating behavior. Although humans aren’t completely monogamous, “the emergence of pair-bonding in humans was a major evolutionary transition, which dramatically altered the evolutionary trajectory of our species,” says Sergey Gavrilets, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Many researchers think that we could not have evolved our large brains without joint parental care during the extended period of helplessness required for infant brains to grow to their full size. “Understanding the forces that drove that transition can help us better understand the causes of human uniqueness,” Gavrilets adds.
Opie and his colleagues set about testing the three leading hypotheses in primates using a powerful method called Bayesian statistics. The team used previously published genetic and behavioral data from 230 primate species, representing nearly all known species such as Old and New World monkeys, lemurs, and apes, employing strict criteria to ensure that the data were reliable. For example, the team concluded that a particular species engaged in infanticide only if at least 20 publications reported the killing of infants through direct observation or as the only possible explanation. The Bayesian approach allowed the researchers to map information about primate behavior onto an evolutionary tree of the entire animal group, and thus analyze the order in which traits such as social monogamy, infanticide, and other behaviors arose over time.
As the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there was a strong correlation in time between all three hypotheses—parental care, female range, and infanticide by males—and the rise of social monogamy in the roughly 60 primate species that live in pairs. However, among the three explanations, only infanticide actually preceded social monogamy in time and thus could be a driving evolutionary force, the team concludes; the other two behaviors occurred afterward and were the consequences of social monogamy and not the causes. “Our analyses clearly show that infanticide is the trigger for monogamy in primates,” and likely was the trigger in humans, too, Opie says.
Why is the incidence of social monogamy in primates, 27%, so much higher than the 5% in mammals as a whole? Opie and his colleagues, who include University of Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar—a proponent of the idea that the complex social groups typical of primates led to bigger brains—have an answer. Because the infants of primates with large brains, especially apes and humans, are helpless for longer periods of time than other mammals, they are much more vulnerable to infanticide, and thus need more protection.
Nevertheless, the reaction to the study has been mixed. “I found the paper quite convincing,” says Carel van Schaik, a primatologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who had earlier argued for the infanticide hypothesis. “The results are very solid” for all primates. But van Schaik says that he “would be very careful to conclude from this paper that infanticide risk was also the main factor underlying human monogamy,” in part because humans are not fully monogamous, as shown by studies of cultures around the world. “The current monogamy is socially imposed.”
Phyllis Lee, a psychologist at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom, agrees. “At best we engage in forms of serial monogamy,” she says, pointing out that more than 60% of “traditional societies” allow men to have more than one wife. Lee adds that infanticide is a feature of many primate species that are not monogamous, “so monogamy is not the only evolutionary solution to infanticide.”
Indeed, a paper to be published this week in Science looks at monogamy across all mammals and comes to a very different conclusion. Zoologists Tim Clutton-Brock and Dieter Lukas of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom analyzed monogamy among 2545 nonhuman mammal species. In contrast to Opie’s conclusion in primates, they find in this larger sample that social monogamy arose among species where females were widely spaced and males could not monopolize several of them at once; infanticide did not seem to be a driver for monogamy among all mammals. Opie counters that wide spacing among females doesn’t apply to highly social, group-living primates, so that humans, and perhaps all primates, may be unusual among mammals. If so, he says, looking at mammals across the board might mask the special features of primate evolution.
All the same, Petr Komers, an ecologist at the University of Calgary in Canada and leading proponent of the female range hypothesis for social monogamy, says he finds the authors’ conclusions that infanticide was “the only possible driver to monogamy a bit surprising.” Komers’s own studies, like Clutton-Brock’s, found that among mammals, the highest correlation was between social monogamy and species whose females stayed put in limited ranges. “Monogamy does evolve in species where infanticide is unlikely,” Komers notes, such as in ungulates, or hoofed mammals. Thus no one factor is the “silver bullet” driving monogamy, Komers says, and researchers should be looking for an interplay of multiple explanations.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Living in pairs, what researchers call social monogamy, has repeatedly evolved among animals, although in widely varying proportions among different groups. Thus, about 90% of bird species are socially monogamous, probably because incubating eggs and feeding hatchlings is a full-time job that requires both parents. But in mammals, females carry the babies inside their bodies and are solely responsible for providing milk to young infants—and only about 5% of species are socially monogamous. That leaves most mammalian males free to run around and impregnate other indoor Tracking. Primates, however, seem to be a special case: About 27% of primate species are socially monogamous; and recent studies by Christopher Opie, an anthropologist at University College London, and his colleagues have concluded that social monogamy arose relatively late in primate evolution, only about 16 million years ago. (The earliest primates date back to about 55 million years.)
But why did social monogamy arise at all among mammals, including primates, given the many reproductive advantages to males having access to as many females as possible? Scientists have proposed three major hypotheses: Monogamy provides more effective parental care for infants, as in birds; it prevents females from mating with rival males, especially in species where females are widely spaced and cannot all be easily monopolized by one male; or it protects against the risk of infanticide, which is very high among some primate species, including chimpanzees and gorillas, and is often explained by the desire of a rival male to quickly return a mother to a fertile state so that he can sire his own offspring. Some researchers think that a combination of all three factors, and perhaps still others, provide the best explanation for monogamy.
Resolving this debate is important, researchers say, especially for understanding the evolution of human mating behavior. Although humans aren’t completely monogamous, “the emergence of pair-bonding in humans was a major evolutionary transition, which dramatically altered the evolutionary trajectory of our species,” says Sergey Gavrilets, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Many researchers think that we could not have evolved our large brains without joint parental care during the extended period of helplessness required for infant brains to grow to their full size. “Understanding the forces that drove that transition can help us better understand the causes of human uniqueness,” Gavrilets adds.
Opie and his colleagues set about testing the three leading hypotheses in primates using a powerful method called Bayesian statistics. The team used previously published genetic and behavioral data from 230 primate species, representing nearly all known species such as Old and New World monkeys, lemurs, and apes, employing strict criteria to ensure that the data were reliable. For example, the team concluded that a particular species engaged in infanticide only if at least 20 publications reported the killing of infants through direct observation or as the only possible explanation. The Bayesian approach allowed the researchers to map information about primate behavior onto an evolutionary tree of the entire animal group, and thus analyze the order in which traits such as social monogamy, infanticide, and other behaviors arose over time.
As the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there was a strong correlation in time between all three hypotheses—parental care, female range, and infanticide by males—and the rise of social monogamy in the roughly 60 primate species that live in pairs. However, among the three explanations, only infanticide actually preceded social monogamy in time and thus could be a driving evolutionary force, the team concludes; the other two behaviors occurred afterward and were the consequences of social monogamy and not the causes. “Our analyses clearly show that infanticide is the trigger for monogamy in primates,” and likely was the trigger in humans, too, Opie says.
Why is the incidence of social monogamy in primates, 27%, so much higher than the 5% in mammals as a whole? Opie and his colleagues, who include University of Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar—a proponent of the idea that the complex social groups typical of primates led to bigger brains—have an answer. Because the infants of primates with large brains, especially apes and humans, are helpless for longer periods of time than other mammals, they are much more vulnerable to infanticide, and thus need more protection.
Nevertheless, the reaction to the study has been mixed. “I found the paper quite convincing,” says Carel van Schaik, a primatologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who had earlier argued for the infanticide hypothesis. “The results are very solid” for all primates. But van Schaik says that he “would be very careful to conclude from this paper that infanticide risk was also the main factor underlying human monogamy,” in part because humans are not fully monogamous, as shown by studies of cultures around the world. “The current monogamy is socially imposed.”
Phyllis Lee, a psychologist at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom, agrees. “At best we engage in forms of serial monogamy,” she says, pointing out that more than 60% of “traditional societies” allow men to have more than one wife. Lee adds that infanticide is a feature of many primate species that are not monogamous, “so monogamy is not the only evolutionary solution to infanticide.”
Indeed, a paper to be published this week in Science looks at monogamy across all mammals and comes to a very different conclusion. Zoologists Tim Clutton-Brock and Dieter Lukas of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom analyzed monogamy among 2545 nonhuman mammal species. In contrast to Opie’s conclusion in primates, they find in this larger sample that social monogamy arose among species where females were widely spaced and males could not monopolize several of them at once; infanticide did not seem to be a driver for monogamy among all mammals. Opie counters that wide spacing among females doesn’t apply to highly social, group-living primates, so that humans, and perhaps all primates, may be unusual among mammals. If so, he says, looking at mammals across the board might mask the special features of primate evolution.
All the same, Petr Komers, an ecologist at the University of Calgary in Canada and leading proponent of the female range hypothesis for social monogamy, says he finds the authors’ conclusions that infanticide was “the only possible driver to monogamy a bit surprising.” Komers’s own studies, like Clutton-Brock’s, found that among mammals, the highest correlation was between social monogamy and species whose females stayed put in limited ranges. “Monogamy does evolve in species where infanticide is unlikely,” Komers notes, such as in ungulates, or hoofed mammals. Thus no one factor is the “silver bullet” driving monogamy, Komers says, and researchers should be looking for an interplay of multiple explanations.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
3D Printing And The Future Of Prosthetics
The latest development in prosthetic limbs didn’t begin in a hospital or a university lab. Instead, it started with a runaway table saw, a special effects artist and a 5-year-old.
When carpenter Richard Van As lost control of his table saw, it cost him two of the fingers on his right hand. As he recuperated, he searched for a replacement that would allow him to get back to work, only to discover that prosthetic fingers cost up to $10,000 per finger, an unaffordable amount for the Johannesburg, South Africa carpenter. Faced with the prohibitive cost of existing options, Van As crafted his own replacement finger from odds and ends around his shop. It worked — barely — and he continued searching for an affordable alternative.
Then he saw a video featuring Ivan Owen, a Bellingham, Wash., special effects artist who specializes in hands. In the video, Owen demonstrated a recent creation: a large puppet hand that used steel cables as tendons, allowing him to move the hand’s digits with ease. Van As contacted Owen immediately.Over the following months, Van As and Owen collaborated on possible designs for prosthetic fingers, trading ideas and fabricating prototypes. Soon thereafter, Owen flew to South Africa to visit Van As in person. While the two were hard at work, they received a call that would alter the course of their mission entirely.
It came from the mother of 5-year-old Liam Dippenaar. Liam suffers from Amniotic Band Syndrome, a condition causing him to be born without fingers on his right hand. Like Van As, Liam’s parents found the cost of prosthetics prohibitive, especially since he would outgrow them almost immediately. His mother had heard of their work, and hoped they might be able to help her son.
Days later, the pair fitted Liam with his first prosthetic hand. It was a crude thing, milled from aluminum, but it worked. Its fingers clenched and released with the motion of his rtls. Describing Liam’s first experiment with his new hand, Owen told NPR: ”You could see the light bulbs go off and he looked up and said, ‘It copies me.’ It was really an incredible moment.”
That moment made the pair consider the impact that an affordable prosthetic hand could have on the lives of thousands of people around the world. But the production process was still too difficult, too unrefined. That’s when Owen hit upon the idea of using 3D printing.Van As and Owen contacted MakerBot, a Brooklyn-based manufacturer of 3D printers. Upon learning about the pair’s mission, MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis promptly donated two MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printers, sending one to Washington and the other to South Africa.
The MakerBots enabled the duo to decrease production time for their prototypes from weeks to less than half an hour. ”The impact that utilizing the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer had was incredible,” Owen recently told Space Daily. “It dramatically increased the speed at which we could prototype and try out ideas. It gave us the ability to both hold physical copies of the exact same thing, even though we were separated by 10,000 miles.”
With the MakerBots, Van As and Owen were able to create an inexpensive and accessible alternative to existing prosthetics. They dubbed the product “Robohand.”Functionally, the 3D-printed Robohand is similar to the version originally given to Liam Dippenaar. What’s different — even revolutionary — is the Robohand’s cost. With Van As and Owen’s designs and access to a 3D printer, a fully functioning Robohand can be produced for around $150.
This unprecedented level of affordability and accessibility are key tenets of the duo’s mission. They’ve published their designs — completely free and without any patent restrictions — on MakerBot’s Thingiverse, an online hub for 3D printing enthusiasts, where its been downloaded more than 3,500 times in just a few months. Van As himself has fitted more than 100 children with Robohands. None of them were asked to pay, even for materials.Robohand isn’t the only prosthetic being developed with 3D printing technology. Artificial limbs, replacement craniums, and 3D-printed faces have made an appearance in the last year alone. Even a duck got a 3D-printed foot.
This marriage of open source design and 3D printing points to a brighter future for those in need of prosthetic limbs. Van As and Owen are eager to see their designs shared, modified, and improved upon by users around the world. Soon, those in need may be able to design and produce their own prosthetics without leaving their living rooms.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/.
When carpenter Richard Van As lost control of his table saw, it cost him two of the fingers on his right hand. As he recuperated, he searched for a replacement that would allow him to get back to work, only to discover that prosthetic fingers cost up to $10,000 per finger, an unaffordable amount for the Johannesburg, South Africa carpenter. Faced with the prohibitive cost of existing options, Van As crafted his own replacement finger from odds and ends around his shop. It worked — barely — and he continued searching for an affordable alternative.
Then he saw a video featuring Ivan Owen, a Bellingham, Wash., special effects artist who specializes in hands. In the video, Owen demonstrated a recent creation: a large puppet hand that used steel cables as tendons, allowing him to move the hand’s digits with ease. Van As contacted Owen immediately.Over the following months, Van As and Owen collaborated on possible designs for prosthetic fingers, trading ideas and fabricating prototypes. Soon thereafter, Owen flew to South Africa to visit Van As in person. While the two were hard at work, they received a call that would alter the course of their mission entirely.
It came from the mother of 5-year-old Liam Dippenaar. Liam suffers from Amniotic Band Syndrome, a condition causing him to be born without fingers on his right hand. Like Van As, Liam’s parents found the cost of prosthetics prohibitive, especially since he would outgrow them almost immediately. His mother had heard of their work, and hoped they might be able to help her son.
Days later, the pair fitted Liam with his first prosthetic hand. It was a crude thing, milled from aluminum, but it worked. Its fingers clenched and released with the motion of his rtls. Describing Liam’s first experiment with his new hand, Owen told NPR: ”You could see the light bulbs go off and he looked up and said, ‘It copies me.’ It was really an incredible moment.”
That moment made the pair consider the impact that an affordable prosthetic hand could have on the lives of thousands of people around the world. But the production process was still too difficult, too unrefined. That’s when Owen hit upon the idea of using 3D printing.Van As and Owen contacted MakerBot, a Brooklyn-based manufacturer of 3D printers. Upon learning about the pair’s mission, MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis promptly donated two MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printers, sending one to Washington and the other to South Africa.
The MakerBots enabled the duo to decrease production time for their prototypes from weeks to less than half an hour. ”The impact that utilizing the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer had was incredible,” Owen recently told Space Daily. “It dramatically increased the speed at which we could prototype and try out ideas. It gave us the ability to both hold physical copies of the exact same thing, even though we were separated by 10,000 miles.”
With the MakerBots, Van As and Owen were able to create an inexpensive and accessible alternative to existing prosthetics. They dubbed the product “Robohand.”Functionally, the 3D-printed Robohand is similar to the version originally given to Liam Dippenaar. What’s different — even revolutionary — is the Robohand’s cost. With Van As and Owen’s designs and access to a 3D printer, a fully functioning Robohand can be produced for around $150.
This unprecedented level of affordability and accessibility are key tenets of the duo’s mission. They’ve published their designs — completely free and without any patent restrictions — on MakerBot’s Thingiverse, an online hub for 3D printing enthusiasts, where its been downloaded more than 3,500 times in just a few months. Van As himself has fitted more than 100 children with Robohands. None of them were asked to pay, even for materials.Robohand isn’t the only prosthetic being developed with 3D printing technology. Artificial limbs, replacement craniums, and 3D-printed faces have made an appearance in the last year alone. Even a duck got a 3D-printed foot.
This marriage of open source design and 3D printing points to a brighter future for those in need of prosthetic limbs. Van As and Owen are eager to see their designs shared, modified, and improved upon by users around the world. Soon, those in need may be able to design and produce their own prosthetics without leaving their living rooms.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/.
Monday, July 22, 2013
A Bright Ray of Hope for Bradley Manning
Many people have worried about the fate of Bradley Manning, a lone soldier who informed the world of war crimes being committed by the War Machine that has devoured the American republic and turned its ravaging, profit-reaping fury on the world. As we all know, Manning is now in the iron grip of that Machine, facing the prospect of life in prison for his truth-telling, having already endured a long incarceration marked by episodes of relentless psychological torture. Many people quite reasonably dread what awaits Manning when the Military Court hands down its inevitable verdict against him.
But wait -- perhaps all is not lost after all. In the long dark night of our military imperium, a shaft of light, of hope, has suddenly appeared. And it comes from -- of all places -- the very pinnacle of the military justice system that is bearing down on Manning: the Court of Appeal of the Armed Forces of the United States.
For it turns out that if a military prisoner has faced the least mistreatment during incarceration, even a temporary abuse of due process, then all charges against him will be dropped and he can walk free. And since Manning has manifestly faced any number of abuses of due process and egregious mistreatment, then we can be supremely confident that the military Court of Appeal -- which enshrined this Solomonic principle in a recent case -- will act with perfect consistency and release Bradley Manning in good time, whatever the eventual outcome of his current trial.
Hutchins did was lead his team on a night raid against a private home in the Iraqi town of Hamdania. All he and his team did was break into the house, grab an innocent retired policeman named Hashim Ibrahim Awad, drag him down the road to the site of a IED attack, tie him up, shoot him dead in cold blood, then dump his body in the IED hole, remove the plastic restraints, and leave a stolen AK-47 rifle next to the corpse to pretend Awad was a terrorist who had been killed in a firefight. That's all Hutchins did. Oh yes, that, and have his men shoot Awad repeatedly in the face, in the hope of obliterating his identity. But family members recognized the body and demanded justice from their American military occupiers.
Then came the real crime, the misdeed that would later lead the Court of Appeals of the Armed Forces of the United States to carry out its humanitarian intervention and indoor Tracking. As AP reports, Hutchins was arrested by the military brass and held "in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer for seven days during his 2006 interrogation in Iraq." Thus Hutchins -- who was facing a term of 11 whole years for kidnapping an innocent man, shooting him in the face then covering up the crime -- was released from custody last month by the Court of Appeals, which cited the six-day spell in solitary as the basis for overturning his conviction.
Who knew that the American military justice system was so fiercely adherent to due process that it would even let a killer go free on a "technicality," like a bunch of wimpy ACLU lawyers? Who knew they would act with such exemplary exactitude in applying letter of the law down to the last jot and tittle? Yet this is the principle they have firmly established with their ruling on Hutchins: the failure to safeguard a military prisoner's full panoply of legal rights in every respect must result in the overturning of any subsequent verdict against that prisoner, and his release from captivity.
I think we can all rest easier knowing that this principle will now be guiding the decisions of the U.S. military justice system from now on. For surely it will be applied universally, not only to Bradley Manning but also to, say, the captives in Guantanamo Bay, who are subject to the same military justice system. Surely, it cannot be that this strict adherence to the legal niceties will only be applied in cases where an American soldier has brutally murdered some worthless towelhead in some piece-of-sh*t foreign hellhole we had to invade for some reason or another a long time ago, so who cares anyway.
No, surely, that cannot be. For as our recent history clearly shows, the operators of our War Machine always adhere strictly and consistently to the highest and most noble principles, applying them to all equally, the great and the low, without fear or favor, or the slightest hypocrisy.
Additional research also indicates that social disengagement and loneliness are often considered to be routinely associated with physical limitations causing us to become even more isolated. I recently wrote a blog about the benefits of livable communities and making sure there are activities available that don't require getting in a car and therefore enhance the opportunities for mature adults to be socially connected regardless of your current health status.
Unfortunately, staying socially connected isn't as easy as just scheduling time. Even if you happen to have a lot of flexibility, your friends or family may not. So that said, schedule ahead and stick to a social calendar just like you would a work schedule. It takes a time investment to be social, but the rewards are immense.
Hobbies can be very enriching and relaxing. Being with other people who share your enthusiasm for gardening or antique cars is one of life's simple pleasures. Having trouble finding like-minded folks in your area? Ask around at your local community center. You can also try online forums for your hobby or post a meet-up in your area.
In addition, taking time to volunteer, exercise or get involved in a new field will open doors to socializing. My father has always been a gym enthusiast and in addition to his intense weight training workouts, he has a close-knit group at his health club that he sees on a regular basis. Working at a food co-op or animal shelter would be ideal for those looking for a regular activity that offers a tremendous opportunity to interact with others. In the case of the animal shelter, extensive studies have indicated that exposing older adults to animals reduces their sense of loneliness considerably.
During your 30 Bonus Years, it's an ideal time to get involved in a cause that you've always wanted to spend more time doing. Getting more hands-on and involved with an organization you may have financially supported over the years is great for your spirits. Immersing yourself in a cause can also re-define your purpose in life and connect you with people that are from a younger (or older) generation.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that technology does help keep older adults socially connected, especially if you live in a remote area. The key is to treat social media -- or discussion forums -- in a similar manner as if you're having a conversation. Don't just be a passive observer. Use private messaging, post your thoughts and start discussion threads -- get involved in the rapport.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
But wait -- perhaps all is not lost after all. In the long dark night of our military imperium, a shaft of light, of hope, has suddenly appeared. And it comes from -- of all places -- the very pinnacle of the military justice system that is bearing down on Manning: the Court of Appeal of the Armed Forces of the United States.
For it turns out that if a military prisoner has faced the least mistreatment during incarceration, even a temporary abuse of due process, then all charges against him will be dropped and he can walk free. And since Manning has manifestly faced any number of abuses of due process and egregious mistreatment, then we can be supremely confident that the military Court of Appeal -- which enshrined this Solomonic principle in a recent case -- will act with perfect consistency and release Bradley Manning in good time, whatever the eventual outcome of his current trial.
Hutchins did was lead his team on a night raid against a private home in the Iraqi town of Hamdania. All he and his team did was break into the house, grab an innocent retired policeman named Hashim Ibrahim Awad, drag him down the road to the site of a IED attack, tie him up, shoot him dead in cold blood, then dump his body in the IED hole, remove the plastic restraints, and leave a stolen AK-47 rifle next to the corpse to pretend Awad was a terrorist who had been killed in a firefight. That's all Hutchins did. Oh yes, that, and have his men shoot Awad repeatedly in the face, in the hope of obliterating his identity. But family members recognized the body and demanded justice from their American military occupiers.
Then came the real crime, the misdeed that would later lead the Court of Appeals of the Armed Forces of the United States to carry out its humanitarian intervention and indoor Tracking. As AP reports, Hutchins was arrested by the military brass and held "in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer for seven days during his 2006 interrogation in Iraq." Thus Hutchins -- who was facing a term of 11 whole years for kidnapping an innocent man, shooting him in the face then covering up the crime -- was released from custody last month by the Court of Appeals, which cited the six-day spell in solitary as the basis for overturning his conviction.
Who knew that the American military justice system was so fiercely adherent to due process that it would even let a killer go free on a "technicality," like a bunch of wimpy ACLU lawyers? Who knew they would act with such exemplary exactitude in applying letter of the law down to the last jot and tittle? Yet this is the principle they have firmly established with their ruling on Hutchins: the failure to safeguard a military prisoner's full panoply of legal rights in every respect must result in the overturning of any subsequent verdict against that prisoner, and his release from captivity.
I think we can all rest easier knowing that this principle will now be guiding the decisions of the U.S. military justice system from now on. For surely it will be applied universally, not only to Bradley Manning but also to, say, the captives in Guantanamo Bay, who are subject to the same military justice system. Surely, it cannot be that this strict adherence to the legal niceties will only be applied in cases where an American soldier has brutally murdered some worthless towelhead in some piece-of-sh*t foreign hellhole we had to invade for some reason or another a long time ago, so who cares anyway.
No, surely, that cannot be. For as our recent history clearly shows, the operators of our War Machine always adhere strictly and consistently to the highest and most noble principles, applying them to all equally, the great and the low, without fear or favor, or the slightest hypocrisy.
Additional research also indicates that social disengagement and loneliness are often considered to be routinely associated with physical limitations causing us to become even more isolated. I recently wrote a blog about the benefits of livable communities and making sure there are activities available that don't require getting in a car and therefore enhance the opportunities for mature adults to be socially connected regardless of your current health status.
Unfortunately, staying socially connected isn't as easy as just scheduling time. Even if you happen to have a lot of flexibility, your friends or family may not. So that said, schedule ahead and stick to a social calendar just like you would a work schedule. It takes a time investment to be social, but the rewards are immense.
Hobbies can be very enriching and relaxing. Being with other people who share your enthusiasm for gardening or antique cars is one of life's simple pleasures. Having trouble finding like-minded folks in your area? Ask around at your local community center. You can also try online forums for your hobby or post a meet-up in your area.
In addition, taking time to volunteer, exercise or get involved in a new field will open doors to socializing. My father has always been a gym enthusiast and in addition to his intense weight training workouts, he has a close-knit group at his health club that he sees on a regular basis. Working at a food co-op or animal shelter would be ideal for those looking for a regular activity that offers a tremendous opportunity to interact with others. In the case of the animal shelter, extensive studies have indicated that exposing older adults to animals reduces their sense of loneliness considerably.
During your 30 Bonus Years, it's an ideal time to get involved in a cause that you've always wanted to spend more time doing. Getting more hands-on and involved with an organization you may have financially supported over the years is great for your spirits. Immersing yourself in a cause can also re-define your purpose in life and connect you with people that are from a younger (or older) generation.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that technology does help keep older adults socially connected, especially if you live in a remote area. The key is to treat social media -- or discussion forums -- in a similar manner as if you're having a conversation. Don't just be a passive observer. Use private messaging, post your thoughts and start discussion threads -- get involved in the rapport.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Shipyard Handling Solutions from J D Neuhaus
With nearly 270 years of hoisting technology experience, the J D Neuhaus company have pioneered many substantial innovations in the field of air powered handling equipment and are now acknowledged as global market leaders utilising this technology. Their impressive range of hoists, covering lift capacities from 250kg up to a full 100 tonnes, are used worldwide within many heavy-industry applications including shipbuilding and offshore, covering newbuild, refits and repair as well as dismantling. Typical shipyard external applications include the installation and disassembly of rudder blades, shafts and propellers, while internal work includes heavy components for the engine room drive equipment as well as drive shafts and other general fitting out or installation work.
Compared with electrically operated hoists, the JDN air powered equipment offers a wider range of operations that can be safely undertaken in outdoor damp, dirty or even hazardous area locations as well as indoor operation in dusty or potentially explosive atmospheres. Typical performance advantages include easy installation with rtls, low-maintenance compact designs combining reduced weights and easy handling with 100% duty rating toughness. Operating air pressures range from 4 to 6 bar with lube-free performance ensuring non-pollution of the environment as exhaust air is oil-free. A range of optional pendant controllers are available to provide sensitive, infinitely variable speed controls for the safe and precise positioning of suspended loads. General insensitivity to dust, humidity and temperatures ranging from -20°C to +70°C helps to ensure an unlimited duty-cycle performance capacity.
The Profi Ti represents the major range of hoists in the JDN range. This covers a total of 19 products covering load capacities from 250kg up to an impressive 100 tonnes per unit. These hoists all incorporate a top suspension hook mounting so that multiple hoists can be utilised for single load handling, where oblique hoisting typically required for ship rudder or propeller mount/dismount operations can be accommodated (compliance with special safety precautions will also apply). These rugged products can also be used for horizontal pulling. Where horizontal movements of suspended loads up to 20 tonnes need to be accommodated, then the Profi Ti hoists can be mounted on trolley units for operation on overhead support rails even incorporating curves. The trolley horizontal movements can be achieved by manual, reel chain or fully motor operated, while anti-climb and anti-drop features are also incorporated. These are particularly suited for ship engine room operations where an optional low headroom trolley mount can also be made available.
These high performance, low-headroom products can be used with confidence in all areas where safety is a priority. They combine strength, reliability and speed with virtual silence of operation plus high speed lift and lower functions. For units up to 20 tonnes capacity an integrated emergency stop switch is incorporated into the main air supply. For all hoists over 1 tonne capacity, overload protection is provided as standard. Controlled load lowering in the event of total power loss can also be provided. The products are compact and based upon a modern design which minimises protruding parts which could be susceptible to damage. They offer fail-safe starting with a low maintenance vane motor. A planetary gearbox incorporates long-life grease lubrication while gears are manufactured from tempered or hardened high-grade steel. Load chains and hooks are also high tempered with a breaking strength of 5 x the nominal loads. An Ex classification according to EC Directive on Hazardous locations 94/9/EEC is provided as standard to levels Ex II 2 GD IIA T4 / II 3 GD IIB T4, or with increased spark protection to Ex II 2 GD IIC T4.
For general lighter duty lift operations, the JDN Mini series hoists can be ideally utilised. With load capacities of 125, 250, 500 and 980kg, these handy, flexible products are universally deployable as a general tool for shipyard operations. Their compact, lightweight construction ensures easy operation, while the products provide the same degree of performance, reliability, durability and safety as the heavier duty Profi range. A Mini Manipulator version allows loads to be lifted, manually traversed and positioned using only one hand, and an explosion rating Ex II 3 GD IIA T4 is ensured.
Other marine related products that can be supplied include hoists for underwater operation which have successfully been deployed for the removal, repair and eventual replacement of a damaged 50 tonne rudder on a fully loaded bulk cargo vessel while moored off the coast of Venezuela, a project that was featured on the National Geographic Channel's 'World's Toughest Fixes' programme. Other specialised equipment include hydraulically powered hoists designed for operation at extreme temperatures down to -45°C.
But then the Galaxy NX's initial negative is that it feels somewhat alien in the hand on account of its physical size and lack of many physical controls. The fusion of a smartphone-derived operating system merged with an interchangeable lens system does make sense, but the omission of physical buttons means almost everything runs through the power of the touchscreen. And that means taking the camera away from the eye and out of both hands more than a typical DSLR or compact system camera (CSC) user might otherwise. It's a different prospect, and one that took us a while to adapt to.
There is one exception to the touchscreen control - a large thumbwheel atop the camera that doubles up as a button to toggle between key settings, or when held down it dives into full Android OS complete with apps, Google Play and the like. It's certainly a useful control mechanism but we found it to be finicky - defaulting to adjust the shooting mode rather than the settings and without resounding clarity as to which settings were in play for adjustment.
After extended use the Galaxy NX's controls start to take; it forges into something more familiar, yet something entirely new. Before long we were fixed into our more typical way of shooting - aperture priority mode selected, thumbwheel used to stop up or down - but snapping away was a combination of tapping the touchscreen for compact-camera-like focus, along with using the included electronic viewfinder as we would with a DSLR or similar all-in CSC.
There are significant benefits to the Android operating system too - not least connectivity and sharing which, again, we'll address in more detail later - that quickly come into play. Simple things come to mind: press and drag on an image in playback while zoomed in to get a close-up look of the important parts at absolute size - which saves the faff with lots of buttons and directional-pad controls. Everything operates through the touchscreen, the gallery is far more organised than any other camera we've seen and apps loaded into the 16GB of internal storage can directly load up images to work with.
Click on their website www.ecived.com.
Compared with electrically operated hoists, the JDN air powered equipment offers a wider range of operations that can be safely undertaken in outdoor damp, dirty or even hazardous area locations as well as indoor operation in dusty or potentially explosive atmospheres. Typical performance advantages include easy installation with rtls, low-maintenance compact designs combining reduced weights and easy handling with 100% duty rating toughness. Operating air pressures range from 4 to 6 bar with lube-free performance ensuring non-pollution of the environment as exhaust air is oil-free. A range of optional pendant controllers are available to provide sensitive, infinitely variable speed controls for the safe and precise positioning of suspended loads. General insensitivity to dust, humidity and temperatures ranging from -20°C to +70°C helps to ensure an unlimited duty-cycle performance capacity.
The Profi Ti represents the major range of hoists in the JDN range. This covers a total of 19 products covering load capacities from 250kg up to an impressive 100 tonnes per unit. These hoists all incorporate a top suspension hook mounting so that multiple hoists can be utilised for single load handling, where oblique hoisting typically required for ship rudder or propeller mount/dismount operations can be accommodated (compliance with special safety precautions will also apply). These rugged products can also be used for horizontal pulling. Where horizontal movements of suspended loads up to 20 tonnes need to be accommodated, then the Profi Ti hoists can be mounted on trolley units for operation on overhead support rails even incorporating curves. The trolley horizontal movements can be achieved by manual, reel chain or fully motor operated, while anti-climb and anti-drop features are also incorporated. These are particularly suited for ship engine room operations where an optional low headroom trolley mount can also be made available.
These high performance, low-headroom products can be used with confidence in all areas where safety is a priority. They combine strength, reliability and speed with virtual silence of operation plus high speed lift and lower functions. For units up to 20 tonnes capacity an integrated emergency stop switch is incorporated into the main air supply. For all hoists over 1 tonne capacity, overload protection is provided as standard. Controlled load lowering in the event of total power loss can also be provided. The products are compact and based upon a modern design which minimises protruding parts which could be susceptible to damage. They offer fail-safe starting with a low maintenance vane motor. A planetary gearbox incorporates long-life grease lubrication while gears are manufactured from tempered or hardened high-grade steel. Load chains and hooks are also high tempered with a breaking strength of 5 x the nominal loads. An Ex classification according to EC Directive on Hazardous locations 94/9/EEC is provided as standard to levels Ex II 2 GD IIA T4 / II 3 GD IIB T4, or with increased spark protection to Ex II 2 GD IIC T4.
For general lighter duty lift operations, the JDN Mini series hoists can be ideally utilised. With load capacities of 125, 250, 500 and 980kg, these handy, flexible products are universally deployable as a general tool for shipyard operations. Their compact, lightweight construction ensures easy operation, while the products provide the same degree of performance, reliability, durability and safety as the heavier duty Profi range. A Mini Manipulator version allows loads to be lifted, manually traversed and positioned using only one hand, and an explosion rating Ex II 3 GD IIA T4 is ensured.
Other marine related products that can be supplied include hoists for underwater operation which have successfully been deployed for the removal, repair and eventual replacement of a damaged 50 tonne rudder on a fully loaded bulk cargo vessel while moored off the coast of Venezuela, a project that was featured on the National Geographic Channel's 'World's Toughest Fixes' programme. Other specialised equipment include hydraulically powered hoists designed for operation at extreme temperatures down to -45°C.
But then the Galaxy NX's initial negative is that it feels somewhat alien in the hand on account of its physical size and lack of many physical controls. The fusion of a smartphone-derived operating system merged with an interchangeable lens system does make sense, but the omission of physical buttons means almost everything runs through the power of the touchscreen. And that means taking the camera away from the eye and out of both hands more than a typical DSLR or compact system camera (CSC) user might otherwise. It's a different prospect, and one that took us a while to adapt to.
There is one exception to the touchscreen control - a large thumbwheel atop the camera that doubles up as a button to toggle between key settings, or when held down it dives into full Android OS complete with apps, Google Play and the like. It's certainly a useful control mechanism but we found it to be finicky - defaulting to adjust the shooting mode rather than the settings and without resounding clarity as to which settings were in play for adjustment.
After extended use the Galaxy NX's controls start to take; it forges into something more familiar, yet something entirely new. Before long we were fixed into our more typical way of shooting - aperture priority mode selected, thumbwheel used to stop up or down - but snapping away was a combination of tapping the touchscreen for compact-camera-like focus, along with using the included electronic viewfinder as we would with a DSLR or similar all-in CSC.
There are significant benefits to the Android operating system too - not least connectivity and sharing which, again, we'll address in more detail later - that quickly come into play. Simple things come to mind: press and drag on an image in playback while zoomed in to get a close-up look of the important parts at absolute size - which saves the faff with lots of buttons and directional-pad controls. Everything operates through the touchscreen, the gallery is far more organised than any other camera we've seen and apps loaded into the 16GB of internal storage can directly load up images to work with.
Click on their website www.ecived.com.
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Sauk County family raises fish
Chris Meuiner said he is definitely a farmer with long days of hard work raising crops and livestock, but he has figured out how to do it without getting his hands in the dirt.
Chris and his parents, Donna and Norbert Meuiner, and an uncle, John Ringsdorf, operate KP Simply Fresh, a five-year-old aquaponics business near North Freedom in Sauk County. The family pioneered the first aquaponics system of its kind in Wisconsin five years ago and will be one of nearly a dozen fish farms in the state to hold open houses for the public July 20 for Wisconsin Aquaculture Day.
Aquaponics is a two-part system where fish — in this case tilapia — are raised in tanks. Nutrient-rich water from the tanks is pumped to 12- to 15-inch-deep grow beds with rafts of lettuce floating on top. Lettuce roots dangle into the water, drawing up nutrients for the plants before it is pumped clean back to the fish tanks.
Fish are not new to the Meuiners. Donna ran a tropical fish business in Milwaukee until their family of four children started growing and they moved out of the city.They shifted into game machines and supplied parlors all over the state. As gaming started to drop off in recent years, Norbert said he was looking for a new enterprise.“Now we thought, we like the rtls, why not go back into it? But around here we couldn’t raise enough fish to make a living,” he said.
They watched a TV show about aquaponics and liked the idea.Four people run the whole business. Donna plants, tends, harvests, packages, markets and delivers lettuce to nearby schools, hospitals, nursing homes, grocery stores, farmers markets and a growing number of restaurants.“I always say the best part of the whole scenario is that I also take the checks to the bank, and we eat lettuce every day,” she said, laughing.Lettuce grows to maturity in five to six weeks under a greenhouse cover and floating in 72-degree water.
“The advantage is when it’s 20 degrees out there’s not much going in the farming fields, but we’re still growing lettuce every day and pushing between 800 and 1,000 heads a week,” Chris said.They hope to boost production to 1,400 to 1,700 heads a week with the expansion.Donna markets the 20-or-so varieties of lettuce as chemical-free but not organic.
“There are chemicals that are allowed in organic farming that would kill my fish, so we don’t even use that,” she said. “If we have an issue, we use all biological controls, which simply means that I release lady bugs every other week, and they take care of whatever problem I have.”
There are no chemicals or growth hormones at the fish end of it either, because they would harm the plants. About 1,800 to 2,000 fish are kept in the system to support lettuce production.They are brought in as fingerlings and distributed among other tanks as they grow. Fish are harvested at about 2 pounds and shipped to an outside processor.
“We can sell every pound of fish that we can get, but we don’t always have fish available, because we need the nutrients from the fish to get the lettuce,” Norbert said. “The lettuce is our moneymaker. We lose money on every fish that we sell, but we don’t have to buy fertilizer.”
The expansion has been physically draining, Norbert said. The original setup had fish and grow beds in the same greenhouse. The expansion separated the two. Using no outside help, the family dismantled all the fish tanks, water supply and electrical and moved it to a different building. Four more grow beds were installed in the greenhouse.
Chris said the family knew they were getting into a labor-intensive business, but it wasn’t much different from the long days they had worked before.“It’s farming. It’s not celebrity, it’s not millions of dollars, and you’re married to your company,” he said.The plan is to grow the business enough to be able to hire employees to do the repetitive work and keep the family on the management side. The infrastructure of the expansion is in place and will be planted as soon as markets for additional lettuce can be found.
Between 300 and 400 visitors are expected to tour the business for Aquaculture Day July 20. Chris said the message he wants them to take home is that a combined food system like theirs is viable.“This is the farming of the future. Stuff like this is how we are going to feed the planet,” he said. “Right now we are harvesting between 800 and 1,000 heads of lettuce a week in a little 5,000 square feet of beds down there. It’s more to open people’s eyes to see what we can do.”
That’s particularly true in places like the Washington, D.C., area where service members, retirees and family members can choose from an array of top-notch civilian facilities to get their medical care, Army Col. Chuck Callahan told American Forces Press Service.
But with a gleaming 1.3-million-square-foot facility and a strategy centered on taking care of patients and their families, Callahan has set out to attract more of the 164,000 military health care beneficiaries in the region that currently use TRICARE to seek their care at Fort Belvoir.
“Because Fort Belvoir Community Hospital is not the only game in town, we must compete with civilian facilities who also want to care for our patients,” Callahan said. “My opinion is that the way to do that is to build a system that people want to come to.”
The new hospital stands in stark contrast to the 1950s-era DeWitt Army Community Hospital it replaced. Built in compliance with the congressionally mandated 2005 Base Realignment and Closure reorganization plan, the new hospital is part of a sweeping plan to improve the efficiency of military health care in the Washington, D.C., area.
Read the full story at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
Chris and his parents, Donna and Norbert Meuiner, and an uncle, John Ringsdorf, operate KP Simply Fresh, a five-year-old aquaponics business near North Freedom in Sauk County. The family pioneered the first aquaponics system of its kind in Wisconsin five years ago and will be one of nearly a dozen fish farms in the state to hold open houses for the public July 20 for Wisconsin Aquaculture Day.
Aquaponics is a two-part system where fish — in this case tilapia — are raised in tanks. Nutrient-rich water from the tanks is pumped to 12- to 15-inch-deep grow beds with rafts of lettuce floating on top. Lettuce roots dangle into the water, drawing up nutrients for the plants before it is pumped clean back to the fish tanks.
Fish are not new to the Meuiners. Donna ran a tropical fish business in Milwaukee until their family of four children started growing and they moved out of the city.They shifted into game machines and supplied parlors all over the state. As gaming started to drop off in recent years, Norbert said he was looking for a new enterprise.“Now we thought, we like the rtls, why not go back into it? But around here we couldn’t raise enough fish to make a living,” he said.
They watched a TV show about aquaponics and liked the idea.Four people run the whole business. Donna plants, tends, harvests, packages, markets and delivers lettuce to nearby schools, hospitals, nursing homes, grocery stores, farmers markets and a growing number of restaurants.“I always say the best part of the whole scenario is that I also take the checks to the bank, and we eat lettuce every day,” she said, laughing.Lettuce grows to maturity in five to six weeks under a greenhouse cover and floating in 72-degree water.
“The advantage is when it’s 20 degrees out there’s not much going in the farming fields, but we’re still growing lettuce every day and pushing between 800 and 1,000 heads a week,” Chris said.They hope to boost production to 1,400 to 1,700 heads a week with the expansion.Donna markets the 20-or-so varieties of lettuce as chemical-free but not organic.
“There are chemicals that are allowed in organic farming that would kill my fish, so we don’t even use that,” she said. “If we have an issue, we use all biological controls, which simply means that I release lady bugs every other week, and they take care of whatever problem I have.”
There are no chemicals or growth hormones at the fish end of it either, because they would harm the plants. About 1,800 to 2,000 fish are kept in the system to support lettuce production.They are brought in as fingerlings and distributed among other tanks as they grow. Fish are harvested at about 2 pounds and shipped to an outside processor.
“We can sell every pound of fish that we can get, but we don’t always have fish available, because we need the nutrients from the fish to get the lettuce,” Norbert said. “The lettuce is our moneymaker. We lose money on every fish that we sell, but we don’t have to buy fertilizer.”
The expansion has been physically draining, Norbert said. The original setup had fish and grow beds in the same greenhouse. The expansion separated the two. Using no outside help, the family dismantled all the fish tanks, water supply and electrical and moved it to a different building. Four more grow beds were installed in the greenhouse.
Chris said the family knew they were getting into a labor-intensive business, but it wasn’t much different from the long days they had worked before.“It’s farming. It’s not celebrity, it’s not millions of dollars, and you’re married to your company,” he said.The plan is to grow the business enough to be able to hire employees to do the repetitive work and keep the family on the management side. The infrastructure of the expansion is in place and will be planted as soon as markets for additional lettuce can be found.
Between 300 and 400 visitors are expected to tour the business for Aquaculture Day July 20. Chris said the message he wants them to take home is that a combined food system like theirs is viable.“This is the farming of the future. Stuff like this is how we are going to feed the planet,” he said. “Right now we are harvesting between 800 and 1,000 heads of lettuce a week in a little 5,000 square feet of beds down there. It’s more to open people’s eyes to see what we can do.”
That’s particularly true in places like the Washington, D.C., area where service members, retirees and family members can choose from an array of top-notch civilian facilities to get their medical care, Army Col. Chuck Callahan told American Forces Press Service.
But with a gleaming 1.3-million-square-foot facility and a strategy centered on taking care of patients and their families, Callahan has set out to attract more of the 164,000 military health care beneficiaries in the region that currently use TRICARE to seek their care at Fort Belvoir.
“Because Fort Belvoir Community Hospital is not the only game in town, we must compete with civilian facilities who also want to care for our patients,” Callahan said. “My opinion is that the way to do that is to build a system that people want to come to.”
The new hospital stands in stark contrast to the 1950s-era DeWitt Army Community Hospital it replaced. Built in compliance with the congressionally mandated 2005 Base Realignment and Closure reorganization plan, the new hospital is part of a sweeping plan to improve the efficiency of military health care in the Washington, D.C., area.
Read the full story at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Shells smash into Aleppo prison as rebels, regime clash
Shells smashed into a central prison in the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo, killing some prisoners, a rights group said Sunday, part of a long battle for control of the ancient city.The explosions killed six prisoners, said the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which communicates with a network of activists on the ground. The explosives hit on Friday night, the Observatory said. It was not clear who fired the shells.
With government forces stepping up offensives, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood called on the U.S. and Europe to send arms."Providing the Free Syrian Army and the revolutionary rebels with appropriate arms is more urgent now than at any time in the past," the movement wrote on social media sites. "We feel cheated and disappointed because the U.S. and Europe have backed out from arming the FSA," it said.
Last month the U.S. decided in principle to provide some weapons to rebel forces, though Western countries are concerned they might land in the hands of extremist Sunni Muslims fighting with the rebels.The forces include an al-Qaida-linked group which has been fighting for weeks to seize control of the prison in Aleppo, besieging it. The Observatory estimated some 120 prisoners have died in the jail since April from fighting, illness and rtls.
Syria's state run news agency SANA said "a number" of rebels were killed in the shelling but did not give an exact number.Aleppo, Syria's largest city, is near the border with Turkey. Many of its ancient monuments and its marketplace, once a magnet for tourists, have been destroyed in fighting.Rebels and government forces also clashed near the Shiite towns of Nubul and Zahra in Aleppo province, the Observatory and pro-rebel activists reported. The towns have been besieged since at least May by hard-line Sunni rebels seeking to dislodge their enemies.
The Observatory said fighting killed three regime troops, including one foreigner, code for a fighter from the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah.Rebels claim that Assad's forces and Hezbollah fighters are in the two towns. A hard-line Sunni brigade warned last week it would punish Shiites for harbouring the forces, suggesting the towns' populations of some 40,000 Shiites could be targeted.
The fighting underscores the growing sectarian nature of the two-year uprising against Assad's regime. It began as peaceful protests but turned into an armed rebellion after a brutal government crackdown. It has since taken on regional dimensions, with Hezbollah fighters joining Assad's forces. Foreign Sunni fighters have joined predominantly Sunni Syrian rebels who are formed in bands ranging from secular to hard-line Islamists.
At home, Assad draws support largely from Syria's minorities, including fellow Alawites -- followers of an offshoot of Shiite Islam -- as well as Christians, Shiites and Sunnis who fear the hard-line rebels.In recent weeks, Assad's forces, bolstered by Hezbollah fighters, have pushed back to seize rebel-held areas in several parts of Syria.
In the central Syrian city of Homs, Assad's forces fired mortar shells from a stronghold of buildings on the edge of the rebel-held area of Khaldiyeh, trying to flush out fighters, said two activists.Explosions could be heard as they spoke via Skype.The shells were exploding in the densely-built area surrounding the 13th-century mosque of Khalid Ibn al-Walid, famous for its nine domes and two minarets, said a Homs-based activist identified as Nedal. He said parts of the wall surrounding the historic complex were blown away. Other parts were damaged in previous rounds of fighting.Khaldiyeh-based activist Abu Bilal said fighters were low on weapons. He said the international community, despite promises to arm rebels, had left them hanging in Homs.
"They have sold Homs to the enemy," he complained.The U.N. warns the some 4,500 residents in besieged, rebel-held areas of Homs face a humanitarian catastrophe. On Friday, the divided U.N. Security Council failed to approve a statement calling on the Syrian government to allow immediate access to trapped civilians there. Russia, Syria's closest ally, demanded that the statement should also call for immediate access to the towns of Nubul and Zahra.
Private ownership of firearms, as guaranteed by the Second Amendment, creates an interesting dichotomy for American citizens and the recent blitzkrieg of anti-gun legislation has only served to heighten the resolve of the two diametrically opposed camps.
I don’t mean to oversimplify a complex issue, but here is how it generally breaks down: gun advocates proclaim that in the hands of responsible, law-abiding citizens, firearms are used every day for recreation, competition, to protect lives, homes, and personal property, as well as secure and safeguard personal liberties.
Individuals opposed to firearms, I believe, envision and portray guns primarily as agents of death and destruction, and as such, the number and types of firearms, ammunition, and magazines possessed by individual citizens should be strictly controlled and monitored by the federal government.
At present, U.S stock trading data offered by China's portals and vertical financial websites are usually delayed by 15 minutes or are operated with BATS (Better Alternative Trading System), a small-sized e-trading platform based in the U.S. that only offers real-time data for a limited number of stocks sold on US exchanges. The lack of real-time data has put Chinese investors at a disadvantage when trading on the primary exchanges in the U.S. At a time when traders buy and sell stocks very quickly based on the latest news, delayed information could no longer satisfy Chinese investors' demands.
Currently, investment in U.S stocks is heating up, but none of the financial institutions in China have been able to provide free real-time U.S exchange quotes to Chinese investors. "We are elated to place real-time market data in the hands of tens of millions of investors in China," said Brian Hyndman, Senior Vice President, NASDAQ OMX Global Data Products, "With NASDAQ Last Sale, Tencent subscribers have instant access to the best-priced stock quotes and last sale data in all U.S.-listed securities, enabling them to be better informed when making trading decisions."
Tencent Portfolio, as the only authorized mobile application approved by NASDAQ, can now provide free access to real-time updates of U.S stock-trading information on both the iPhone and Android platforms. Tencent is a fast-moving company and today's announcement is expected to ignite a reshuffling of the industry. Tencent Portfolio will not only stand out from competing stock applications, but will also stimulate the industry to pay close attention to offering real-time equity data services.
The Vice President of Tencent Mobile Media Product Huang Hai said, "The real-time quote service offered by Tencent Portfolio will cover all stocks listed in the U.S. exchanges. Following the rollout of free real-time data for the Hong Kong exchanges, we are now doing the same for the U.S. Tencent Portfolio aims to provide a free service to investors that includes the latest and most precise stock quotes so they can accurately grasp the investment opportunity."
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
With government forces stepping up offensives, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood called on the U.S. and Europe to send arms."Providing the Free Syrian Army and the revolutionary rebels with appropriate arms is more urgent now than at any time in the past," the movement wrote on social media sites. "We feel cheated and disappointed because the U.S. and Europe have backed out from arming the FSA," it said.
Last month the U.S. decided in principle to provide some weapons to rebel forces, though Western countries are concerned they might land in the hands of extremist Sunni Muslims fighting with the rebels.The forces include an al-Qaida-linked group which has been fighting for weeks to seize control of the prison in Aleppo, besieging it. The Observatory estimated some 120 prisoners have died in the jail since April from fighting, illness and rtls.
Syria's state run news agency SANA said "a number" of rebels were killed in the shelling but did not give an exact number.Aleppo, Syria's largest city, is near the border with Turkey. Many of its ancient monuments and its marketplace, once a magnet for tourists, have been destroyed in fighting.Rebels and government forces also clashed near the Shiite towns of Nubul and Zahra in Aleppo province, the Observatory and pro-rebel activists reported. The towns have been besieged since at least May by hard-line Sunni rebels seeking to dislodge their enemies.
The Observatory said fighting killed three regime troops, including one foreigner, code for a fighter from the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah.Rebels claim that Assad's forces and Hezbollah fighters are in the two towns. A hard-line Sunni brigade warned last week it would punish Shiites for harbouring the forces, suggesting the towns' populations of some 40,000 Shiites could be targeted.
The fighting underscores the growing sectarian nature of the two-year uprising against Assad's regime. It began as peaceful protests but turned into an armed rebellion after a brutal government crackdown. It has since taken on regional dimensions, with Hezbollah fighters joining Assad's forces. Foreign Sunni fighters have joined predominantly Sunni Syrian rebels who are formed in bands ranging from secular to hard-line Islamists.
At home, Assad draws support largely from Syria's minorities, including fellow Alawites -- followers of an offshoot of Shiite Islam -- as well as Christians, Shiites and Sunnis who fear the hard-line rebels.In recent weeks, Assad's forces, bolstered by Hezbollah fighters, have pushed back to seize rebel-held areas in several parts of Syria.
In the central Syrian city of Homs, Assad's forces fired mortar shells from a stronghold of buildings on the edge of the rebel-held area of Khaldiyeh, trying to flush out fighters, said two activists.Explosions could be heard as they spoke via Skype.The shells were exploding in the densely-built area surrounding the 13th-century mosque of Khalid Ibn al-Walid, famous for its nine domes and two minarets, said a Homs-based activist identified as Nedal. He said parts of the wall surrounding the historic complex were blown away. Other parts were damaged in previous rounds of fighting.Khaldiyeh-based activist Abu Bilal said fighters were low on weapons. He said the international community, despite promises to arm rebels, had left them hanging in Homs.
"They have sold Homs to the enemy," he complained.The U.N. warns the some 4,500 residents in besieged, rebel-held areas of Homs face a humanitarian catastrophe. On Friday, the divided U.N. Security Council failed to approve a statement calling on the Syrian government to allow immediate access to trapped civilians there. Russia, Syria's closest ally, demanded that the statement should also call for immediate access to the towns of Nubul and Zahra.
Private ownership of firearms, as guaranteed by the Second Amendment, creates an interesting dichotomy for American citizens and the recent blitzkrieg of anti-gun legislation has only served to heighten the resolve of the two diametrically opposed camps.
I don’t mean to oversimplify a complex issue, but here is how it generally breaks down: gun advocates proclaim that in the hands of responsible, law-abiding citizens, firearms are used every day for recreation, competition, to protect lives, homes, and personal property, as well as secure and safeguard personal liberties.
Individuals opposed to firearms, I believe, envision and portray guns primarily as agents of death and destruction, and as such, the number and types of firearms, ammunition, and magazines possessed by individual citizens should be strictly controlled and monitored by the federal government.
At present, U.S stock trading data offered by China's portals and vertical financial websites are usually delayed by 15 minutes or are operated with BATS (Better Alternative Trading System), a small-sized e-trading platform based in the U.S. that only offers real-time data for a limited number of stocks sold on US exchanges. The lack of real-time data has put Chinese investors at a disadvantage when trading on the primary exchanges in the U.S. At a time when traders buy and sell stocks very quickly based on the latest news, delayed information could no longer satisfy Chinese investors' demands.
Currently, investment in U.S stocks is heating up, but none of the financial institutions in China have been able to provide free real-time U.S exchange quotes to Chinese investors. "We are elated to place real-time market data in the hands of tens of millions of investors in China," said Brian Hyndman, Senior Vice President, NASDAQ OMX Global Data Products, "With NASDAQ Last Sale, Tencent subscribers have instant access to the best-priced stock quotes and last sale data in all U.S.-listed securities, enabling them to be better informed when making trading decisions."
Tencent Portfolio, as the only authorized mobile application approved by NASDAQ, can now provide free access to real-time updates of U.S stock-trading information on both the iPhone and Android platforms. Tencent is a fast-moving company and today's announcement is expected to ignite a reshuffling of the industry. Tencent Portfolio will not only stand out from competing stock applications, but will also stimulate the industry to pay close attention to offering real-time equity data services.
The Vice President of Tencent Mobile Media Product Huang Hai said, "The real-time quote service offered by Tencent Portfolio will cover all stocks listed in the U.S. exchanges. Following the rollout of free real-time data for the Hong Kong exchanges, we are now doing the same for the U.S. Tencent Portfolio aims to provide a free service to investors that includes the latest and most precise stock quotes so they can accurately grasp the investment opportunity."
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Video shows suspect stealing Riverdale police car
Police have released the dash-cam footage of the man who wriggled out of his cuffs in the back seat of a police cruiser, maneuvered into the front seat, stole the car and led officers on a two-county chase.
Riverdale police were called the morning of June 15 to Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Store, 4978 S. 1050 West, on reports of a male and female who were possibly intoxicated. When they arrived and found the pair stumbling around, appearing to be high on drugs, they handcuffed Gordon Graham, 35, and placed him in the back of a police cruiser while they searched his vehicle.
After Graham complained of heat, an officer opened the sliding window separating the back and front seats.That’s when Graham seized his opportunity. As the dash-cam footage shows, Graham gets his hands in front of him by working his hands underneath his body and sliding his legs through his arms. Pausing every so often to check that the coast is clear, he then somehow works his hands free from the cuffs.
Near the end of the video, Graham dives head first through the sliding window. Within 30 seconds, he drives away, just as officers saw that he had slipped into the driver’s seat.
As Graham drives off, another angle in the rtls, he narrowly misses hitting an officer, who lunges out of the way of the vehicle at the last moment. The video ends as Graham takes the car over a steep berm and onto the road.Graham lost the police, who had to scramble to get into another police car, but was later spotted in the Clinton-Roy area, where he’d abandoned the police cruiser. After a roughly two-hour search, police finally caught and arrested him.
“I thought I would have to sell a kidney.” That’s how Dean Hawkins describes the sense of trepidation he had when he approached his bank, NatWest, for ￡120,000 to purchase new premises for his CCTV business, Vistec Systems. He was shocked when the application went through “without a hitch”. “It was quite easy – a couple of phone calls, some forms and a meeting.”
He believes Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns NatWest, when it says it has ￡20bn ready to lend to small firms, but can’t find the demand. “There is an assumption among business owners that you won’t get bank funding, but my attitude is, don’t ask, don’t get. I think the media have blown up the 'banks aren’t lending’ thing.”
He admits that his long track record with the bank – he’s been with them for 20 years – helped, and younger businesses might have a harder time securing credit. The key, he says, is “transparency” and keeping the lines of communication open with the bank even when “you don’t need anything”. “I’ve told others about my experience so hopefully more people will try making applications.”
Many business owners will recognise Tim Ewington’s experience of talking to the bank about a new facility. “We did look at securing [a conventional loan] but we quickly ended up where we are – invoice discounting,” says Ewington, who is co-founder of Shortlist Media, which publishes and distributes free weekly lifestyle magazines.
This form of finance, which sees cash advanced against unpaid invoices, is becoming increasingly popular among banks as an alternative to the humble overdraft. It provides banks with security against companies’ debtor books, so the loans don’t have a negative impact on a lender’s capital position, unlike an overdraft, which is unsecured.
For those with slow-paying customers, it can be a useful way of quickly getting your hands on your cash. Ewington is happy with the facility, but he says he’s sceptical about the ability of companies like his to access more significant chunks of bank
debt to finance ambitious expansion plans. “A lot of my friends run small businesses, too, and banks are not being generous to say the least. They’re very careful – which is why they prefer to offer invoice discounting, because it’s safe for them.” When Rupert Lee-Browne, chief executive of Caxton FX, wanted to raise money to hire staff and upgrade IT at his foreign exchange firm, he was offered bank funding. But it fell woefully short of what he felt his business needed.
He politely declined the offer and instead turned to an unusual source for the funds: his own customers. At the end of 2011, he secured ￡3.9m by offering a retail bond which pays an interest rate of 7.25pc. He saw it as a “great way to sidestep the banks”.
“Banks are lending money, but not enough, particularly to fast-growing businesses,” he said at the time. Has his view changed? “Banks will only lend a certain amount to certain customers – they are very restricted because of regulatory pressures.
“They want to lend money that is risk-free, so they don’t have to use their own capital to back the loan.” That means security demands on entrepreneurs. “I’m not prepared to give a personal guarantee to the bank. The bond was an effective way of raising money without any one organisation having a lien over the future of the company.”
Click on their website http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Riverdale police were called the morning of June 15 to Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Store, 4978 S. 1050 West, on reports of a male and female who were possibly intoxicated. When they arrived and found the pair stumbling around, appearing to be high on drugs, they handcuffed Gordon Graham, 35, and placed him in the back of a police cruiser while they searched his vehicle.
After Graham complained of heat, an officer opened the sliding window separating the back and front seats.That’s when Graham seized his opportunity. As the dash-cam footage shows, Graham gets his hands in front of him by working his hands underneath his body and sliding his legs through his arms. Pausing every so often to check that the coast is clear, he then somehow works his hands free from the cuffs.
Near the end of the video, Graham dives head first through the sliding window. Within 30 seconds, he drives away, just as officers saw that he had slipped into the driver’s seat.
As Graham drives off, another angle in the rtls, he narrowly misses hitting an officer, who lunges out of the way of the vehicle at the last moment. The video ends as Graham takes the car over a steep berm and onto the road.Graham lost the police, who had to scramble to get into another police car, but was later spotted in the Clinton-Roy area, where he’d abandoned the police cruiser. After a roughly two-hour search, police finally caught and arrested him.
“I thought I would have to sell a kidney.” That’s how Dean Hawkins describes the sense of trepidation he had when he approached his bank, NatWest, for ￡120,000 to purchase new premises for his CCTV business, Vistec Systems. He was shocked when the application went through “without a hitch”. “It was quite easy – a couple of phone calls, some forms and a meeting.”
He believes Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns NatWest, when it says it has ￡20bn ready to lend to small firms, but can’t find the demand. “There is an assumption among business owners that you won’t get bank funding, but my attitude is, don’t ask, don’t get. I think the media have blown up the 'banks aren’t lending’ thing.”
He admits that his long track record with the bank – he’s been with them for 20 years – helped, and younger businesses might have a harder time securing credit. The key, he says, is “transparency” and keeping the lines of communication open with the bank even when “you don’t need anything”. “I’ve told others about my experience so hopefully more people will try making applications.”
Many business owners will recognise Tim Ewington’s experience of talking to the bank about a new facility. “We did look at securing [a conventional loan] but we quickly ended up where we are – invoice discounting,” says Ewington, who is co-founder of Shortlist Media, which publishes and distributes free weekly lifestyle magazines.
This form of finance, which sees cash advanced against unpaid invoices, is becoming increasingly popular among banks as an alternative to the humble overdraft. It provides banks with security against companies’ debtor books, so the loans don’t have a negative impact on a lender’s capital position, unlike an overdraft, which is unsecured.
For those with slow-paying customers, it can be a useful way of quickly getting your hands on your cash. Ewington is happy with the facility, but he says he’s sceptical about the ability of companies like his to access more significant chunks of bank
debt to finance ambitious expansion plans. “A lot of my friends run small businesses, too, and banks are not being generous to say the least. They’re very careful – which is why they prefer to offer invoice discounting, because it’s safe for them.” When Rupert Lee-Browne, chief executive of Caxton FX, wanted to raise money to hire staff and upgrade IT at his foreign exchange firm, he was offered bank funding. But it fell woefully short of what he felt his business needed.
He politely declined the offer and instead turned to an unusual source for the funds: his own customers. At the end of 2011, he secured ￡3.9m by offering a retail bond which pays an interest rate of 7.25pc. He saw it as a “great way to sidestep the banks”.
“Banks are lending money, but not enough, particularly to fast-growing businesses,” he said at the time. Has his view changed? “Banks will only lend a certain amount to certain customers – they are very restricted because of regulatory pressures.
“They want to lend money that is risk-free, so they don’t have to use their own capital to back the loan.” That means security demands on entrepreneurs. “I’m not prepared to give a personal guarantee to the bank. The bond was an effective way of raising money without any one organisation having a lien over the future of the company.”
Click on their website http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Price-cut Battle Means an End to Shaw's Rewards Card
As of Friday, June 28, you need one less card on your keychain.The company that owns Shaw’s and Star Market got rid of its Reward Card program citing the desire to maintain lower prices for all customers rather than only those who show their cards at the register. The change seems to be a trend in the supermarket business, where several growing chains, such as Roche Bros. and Market Basket do not offer the cards.The change is sparking some criticism from customers, who are concerned that the change will mean higher prices on grocery store staples.
Patch readers offered a range of opinions on the subject:Karen Anderson Coates said she likes the change, "My key ring is so full!"But Ted Monaghan said he thinks the change is just a bait and switch. "I think my grocery bill will rise."
Shari Thelen Marquis said she was always concerned about the data collected each time she used the card. "I always felt that they were tracking what I buy with the cards so they can sell the data to marketers."Others said the change won't affect their shopping habits. "Smart," Julie Gilman said. "But I'll still be shopping at Market Basket!"
"I like not having cards all the time but I don't think the prices will drop enough if at all. I've been waiting for gas prices to drop for years,"Lori Wiggy Dorley Jones said.
Perhaps ironically, when the reward program was rolled out in 2000 consumer advocates criticized the company for tracking purchases by customers’ names. Customers have gotten used to the cards however, as more retailers from pharmacies to auto parts stores began issuing the cards.
The company says it will also lower prices on thousands of items in all of its 169 locations.“All of our customers deserve to get the lowest price on their groceries without needing to carry a Rewards Card with Indoor Positioning System,” Shane Sampson, president of Shaw’s and Star Market said in a press release. “Our goal is to provide our customers with an experience that is simple, easy and focused directly on them. Every customer who walks through our door deserves our best – from service to foods to pricing—and these lower prices are what our customers can expect from us every time they visit one of our stores.”
The company is calling the move “Card Free Savings,” which is part of a new marketing campaign to reinvigorate the brand, and includes redesigning the circular and in-store signage. “Our new marketing campaign highlights that there is a renewed commitment to quality and service at Shaw’s and Star Market.
Company spokesman Steve Sylven said eliminating the cards is “in our customers’ best interest” while offering “the same, best prices to everyone.”Tracking individual shopping habits is no longer as critical as it once was, Sylven said. What’s important is neighborhood trends, what items sell in what areas. He added that the chain is not changing suppliers and the quality of products will still be the same.
“These lower prices are not a short-term promotion, or a sales price that will change with the next circular release,” Sylven said. “These are lower prices that customers can expect from us every time they visit. I should also point out that we will still be offering great promotions and sales items each week on top of the lower prices.”The switch isn’t necessarily in response to particular grocery retailers; rather it’s a response to competition from all grocery retailers.
“Competition helps us stay sharp and, ultimately, is good for customers. We are committed to running great stores and providing an exceptional shopping experience by focusing our efforts on what customers want – impeccable customer service, shelves full of a variety of fresh products and competitive prices,” Sylven said.
With prospects of comprehensive immigration reform dependent on the House of Representatives moving a bill, advocates of reform have scattered across the country to put pressure on lawmakers. The results have been mixed, local news reports suggests.
Organizing for Action, the nonprofit policy advocacy arm formed to push President Barack Obama's agenda, gathered only eight people to rally outside of the Merillville office of Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.) on Monday to push the congressman to support reform. The congressman was not actually in his office at the time.
Visclosky has opposed a pathway to citizenship in the past and voted against the DREAM Act in 2010, according to Project Vote Smart, making him a prime Democratic target for OFA. Visclosky's office could not be reached for comment about the representative's current stance on immigration reform.
OFA started its immigration campaign a few months ago with the promise that it could place substantial grassroots pressure behind reform. The nonprofit group has an estimated 13 million-member email list — including scores of potential on-the-ground volunteers.
After the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill on June 27 by a margin of 68-32, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) indicated that the House would apply some breaks to process. Rather than up the Senate bill, Boehner pledged to pass a House measure. Boehner also said that he will invoke the Hastert Rule, which requires the majority of the majority to support a bill before it comes up for a vote in the House.
And so, the challenge now facing reform advocates is getting Republican-run House to act. And the tactic most often used is to put enough pressure on lawmakers back home.
Other groups also took Monday to hold rallies and protests surrounding immigration reform while members returned to their districts for the weeklong July recess. Two progressive groups in Colorado rallied at the office of Rep. Scott Tipton (R-Colo.) to show their support for a pathway to citizenship.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
Patch readers offered a range of opinions on the subject:Karen Anderson Coates said she likes the change, "My key ring is so full!"But Ted Monaghan said he thinks the change is just a bait and switch. "I think my grocery bill will rise."
Shari Thelen Marquis said she was always concerned about the data collected each time she used the card. "I always felt that they were tracking what I buy with the cards so they can sell the data to marketers."Others said the change won't affect their shopping habits. "Smart," Julie Gilman said. "But I'll still be shopping at Market Basket!"
"I like not having cards all the time but I don't think the prices will drop enough if at all. I've been waiting for gas prices to drop for years,"Lori Wiggy Dorley Jones said.
Perhaps ironically, when the reward program was rolled out in 2000 consumer advocates criticized the company for tracking purchases by customers’ names. Customers have gotten used to the cards however, as more retailers from pharmacies to auto parts stores began issuing the cards.
The company says it will also lower prices on thousands of items in all of its 169 locations.“All of our customers deserve to get the lowest price on their groceries without needing to carry a Rewards Card with Indoor Positioning System,” Shane Sampson, president of Shaw’s and Star Market said in a press release. “Our goal is to provide our customers with an experience that is simple, easy and focused directly on them. Every customer who walks through our door deserves our best – from service to foods to pricing—and these lower prices are what our customers can expect from us every time they visit one of our stores.”
The company is calling the move “Card Free Savings,” which is part of a new marketing campaign to reinvigorate the brand, and includes redesigning the circular and in-store signage. “Our new marketing campaign highlights that there is a renewed commitment to quality and service at Shaw’s and Star Market.
Company spokesman Steve Sylven said eliminating the cards is “in our customers’ best interest” while offering “the same, best prices to everyone.”Tracking individual shopping habits is no longer as critical as it once was, Sylven said. What’s important is neighborhood trends, what items sell in what areas. He added that the chain is not changing suppliers and the quality of products will still be the same.
“These lower prices are not a short-term promotion, or a sales price that will change with the next circular release,” Sylven said. “These are lower prices that customers can expect from us every time they visit. I should also point out that we will still be offering great promotions and sales items each week on top of the lower prices.”The switch isn’t necessarily in response to particular grocery retailers; rather it’s a response to competition from all grocery retailers.
“Competition helps us stay sharp and, ultimately, is good for customers. We are committed to running great stores and providing an exceptional shopping experience by focusing our efforts on what customers want – impeccable customer service, shelves full of a variety of fresh products and competitive prices,” Sylven said.
With prospects of comprehensive immigration reform dependent on the House of Representatives moving a bill, advocates of reform have scattered across the country to put pressure on lawmakers. The results have been mixed, local news reports suggests.
Organizing for Action, the nonprofit policy advocacy arm formed to push President Barack Obama's agenda, gathered only eight people to rally outside of the Merillville office of Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.) on Monday to push the congressman to support reform. The congressman was not actually in his office at the time.
Visclosky has opposed a pathway to citizenship in the past and voted against the DREAM Act in 2010, according to Project Vote Smart, making him a prime Democratic target for OFA. Visclosky's office could not be reached for comment about the representative's current stance on immigration reform.
OFA started its immigration campaign a few months ago with the promise that it could place substantial grassroots pressure behind reform. The nonprofit group has an estimated 13 million-member email list — including scores of potential on-the-ground volunteers.
After the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill on June 27 by a margin of 68-32, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) indicated that the House would apply some breaks to process. Rather than up the Senate bill, Boehner pledged to pass a House measure. Boehner also said that he will invoke the Hastert Rule, which requires the majority of the majority to support a bill before it comes up for a vote in the House.
And so, the challenge now facing reform advocates is getting Republican-run House to act. And the tactic most often used is to put enough pressure on lawmakers back home.
Other groups also took Monday to hold rallies and protests surrounding immigration reform while members returned to their districts for the weeklong July recess. Two progressive groups in Colorado rallied at the office of Rep. Scott Tipton (R-Colo.) to show their support for a pathway to citizenship.
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Niagara Falls State Park gets major makeover
“This is such an historic time at Niagara Falls State Park,” Harvey said. “We have not seen an infusion of capital and a wholesale approach to the look and feel of this park in a generation. And now our nation’s oldest state park is going from shabby to shining. We could not be more grateful to Gov. Cuomo for his support of our parks, to our state legislators for their unwavering commitment to parks, to the staff that steward this park, and to the local contractors that performed this work. It is just tremendous.”
The first phase of the multi-year plan features a $1.8 million restoration at Three Sisters Islands that includes a new trolley shelter, expanded parking area, new pedestrian walkways and overlooks, enhanced landscaping, as well as new railings. Luna Island received a $1.1 million overhaul, including new pedestrian walkways, overlook improvements, enhanced landscaping as well as new benches, light posts and railings. The Cave of the Winds saw a $1.7 million renovation of the tunnel that leads visitors to the gorge as well as the installation of new high-speed elevators.
The event also included a groundbreaking for a $4.3 million project to revitalize Prospect Point. The work at this popular viewing area will take place in phases so as to always provide access for visitors to the view, and will include landscape restoration, new railings, benches, light fixtures and walkway surfaces. The first phase, which is the point itself, will finish in October and then move to the lower grove trails to the north and south of the points with work ending in that area by August 2014. Construction will not affect any of the attractions at Niagara Falls State Park.
The improvements revealed today are outlined in a comprehensive landscape improvement plan developed in 2012 to restore the most heavily used areas of Niagara Falls State Park, including its primary viewing points, walking trails, historic buildings and plantings. All landscape improvement projects will be consistent with the design principles utilized by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in his original vision for the park.
These projects represent a multi-year, $25 million commitment to revitalizing Niagara Falls State Park, the nation’s oldest state park. Funding for the Niagara Falls park revitalization initiative will come primarily from money from the Niagara River Greenway fund, courtesy of the New York Power Authority, under commitments made in 2005 as part of a relicensing process for the Niagara Power Project hydroelectric dam. State Parks will continue to consult with the Niagara River Greenway Commission on the projects.
“The New York Power Authority is proud of the role we’re playing in revitalizing Niagara Falls State Park, and helping to preserve this crown jewel of the state park system,” said NYPA Trustee Terrance P. Flynn, a Western New Yorker. “The priority that Gov. Cuomo set for rejuvenating and upgrading the park led to our providing a lump-sum payment of $25 million from annual funding set aside for Greenway improvements under the relicensing of our Niagara Hydroelectric Power Plant. It is greatly rewarding to see the significant recreational benefits that have resulted from that funding.”
“The Niagara Falls State Park draws millions of visitors each year to our area, and these restorations will now match the beauty of the parks to that of the falls,” State Sen. George Maziarz said. “Upgrades to this park have been needed for a number of years, and the improvements at Three Sisters Islands are only the start. I am pleased that the constructions jobs created for the improvements were filled by a Niagara County company, and I applaud Gov. Cuomo and Commissioner Harvey for their continued commitment to Niagara Falls State Park.”
“I am pleased that we are using this funding to enhance the quality and aesthetic beauty of our parks. State parks are an important aspect of the region’s tourism industry, which is a major local job creator,” said Assemblyman John Ceretto. “Moving forward, I would like to see even greater cooperation between state and local officials, especially when determining the design and implementation of our parks in order to stay true to the prolific vision of Frederick L Olmsted.”
City of Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster said, “The core of Olmsted’s genius was his ability to balance the values of aesthetics and the natural environment with the practical requirements of accommodating large numbers of visitors. These improvements, in a modern expression of classic Olmsted principles, seek to create a more attractive visitor experience in a way that is sensitive to historical and environmental values. Paving has given way to green space, invasive plants have been replaced by native species, and access has been improved in ways that protect the landscape from being ‘loved to death’ by visitors. Thanks to Gov. Cuomo and Commissioner Harvey for all the great work done so far, recognizing that, in many ways, this is only the beginning of a project that will transform the park’s appeal today while protecting it for generations into the future.”
Thomas Herrera-Mishler, CEO and president at Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, said, “These projects help to preserve and enhance the historic landscape at Niagara Falls State Park, a legacy built on the genius of Frederick Law Olmsted, who originally campaigned to create this park and designed it to provide free access to one of the world’s natural wonders. He foresaw the growth of tourism at Niagara Falls, and these improvements respect the spirit of his design principals as they accommodate numbers of visitors that would have astounded even Mr. Olmsted’s imagination. Visitors will have the opportunity to enjoy the falls in a naturalistic landscape that is safe and attractive. I am grateful for the state of New York’s increased stewardship of this globally significant historic landscape.”
John Percy, president and CEO of the Niagara Tourism and Convention Corp., said, “The foresight of Gov. Cuomo and Commissioner Harvey have granted future generations the opportunity to enjoy Niagara Falls State Park as many before them have. When the renovations are complete, Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision will be secure for the millions of guests that visit the park every year. Niagara Falls State Park is an international treasure, and I praise the state on this tremendous effort to preserve the beauty that surrounds one of our natural wonders.”
Last year, Cuomo and the State Legislature authorized the NY Works program to provide $89 million statewide, leveraging $143 million in total funding, to move forward with more than 100 overdue projects to improve 55 parks and historic sites and spur job creation and economic development. The Niagara Falls State Park projects were among the first to be funded. This year, a second round of $90 million in NY Works funding will advance an additional 90 construction projects to upgrade and repair more than 50 state parks and historic sites across New York. Click on their website www.ecived.com/en for more information.
The first phase of the multi-year plan features a $1.8 million restoration at Three Sisters Islands that includes a new trolley shelter, expanded parking area, new pedestrian walkways and overlooks, enhanced landscaping, as well as new railings. Luna Island received a $1.1 million overhaul, including new pedestrian walkways, overlook improvements, enhanced landscaping as well as new benches, light posts and railings. The Cave of the Winds saw a $1.7 million renovation of the tunnel that leads visitors to the gorge as well as the installation of new high-speed elevators.
The event also included a groundbreaking for a $4.3 million project to revitalize Prospect Point. The work at this popular viewing area will take place in phases so as to always provide access for visitors to the view, and will include landscape restoration, new railings, benches, light fixtures and walkway surfaces. The first phase, which is the point itself, will finish in October and then move to the lower grove trails to the north and south of the points with work ending in that area by August 2014. Construction will not affect any of the attractions at Niagara Falls State Park.
The improvements revealed today are outlined in a comprehensive landscape improvement plan developed in 2012 to restore the most heavily used areas of Niagara Falls State Park, including its primary viewing points, walking trails, historic buildings and plantings. All landscape improvement projects will be consistent with the design principles utilized by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in his original vision for the park.
These projects represent a multi-year, $25 million commitment to revitalizing Niagara Falls State Park, the nation’s oldest state park. Funding for the Niagara Falls park revitalization initiative will come primarily from money from the Niagara River Greenway fund, courtesy of the New York Power Authority, under commitments made in 2005 as part of a relicensing process for the Niagara Power Project hydroelectric dam. State Parks will continue to consult with the Niagara River Greenway Commission on the projects.
“The New York Power Authority is proud of the role we’re playing in revitalizing Niagara Falls State Park, and helping to preserve this crown jewel of the state park system,” said NYPA Trustee Terrance P. Flynn, a Western New Yorker. “The priority that Gov. Cuomo set for rejuvenating and upgrading the park led to our providing a lump-sum payment of $25 million from annual funding set aside for Greenway improvements under the relicensing of our Niagara Hydroelectric Power Plant. It is greatly rewarding to see the significant recreational benefits that have resulted from that funding.”
“The Niagara Falls State Park draws millions of visitors each year to our area, and these restorations will now match the beauty of the parks to that of the falls,” State Sen. George Maziarz said. “Upgrades to this park have been needed for a number of years, and the improvements at Three Sisters Islands are only the start. I am pleased that the constructions jobs created for the improvements were filled by a Niagara County company, and I applaud Gov. Cuomo and Commissioner Harvey for their continued commitment to Niagara Falls State Park.”
“I am pleased that we are using this funding to enhance the quality and aesthetic beauty of our parks. State parks are an important aspect of the region’s tourism industry, which is a major local job creator,” said Assemblyman John Ceretto. “Moving forward, I would like to see even greater cooperation between state and local officials, especially when determining the design and implementation of our parks in order to stay true to the prolific vision of Frederick L Olmsted.”
City of Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster said, “The core of Olmsted’s genius was his ability to balance the values of aesthetics and the natural environment with the practical requirements of accommodating large numbers of visitors. These improvements, in a modern expression of classic Olmsted principles, seek to create a more attractive visitor experience in a way that is sensitive to historical and environmental values. Paving has given way to green space, invasive plants have been replaced by native species, and access has been improved in ways that protect the landscape from being ‘loved to death’ by visitors. Thanks to Gov. Cuomo and Commissioner Harvey for all the great work done so far, recognizing that, in many ways, this is only the beginning of a project that will transform the park’s appeal today while protecting it for generations into the future.”
Thomas Herrera-Mishler, CEO and president at Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, said, “These projects help to preserve and enhance the historic landscape at Niagara Falls State Park, a legacy built on the genius of Frederick Law Olmsted, who originally campaigned to create this park and designed it to provide free access to one of the world’s natural wonders. He foresaw the growth of tourism at Niagara Falls, and these improvements respect the spirit of his design principals as they accommodate numbers of visitors that would have astounded even Mr. Olmsted’s imagination. Visitors will have the opportunity to enjoy the falls in a naturalistic landscape that is safe and attractive. I am grateful for the state of New York’s increased stewardship of this globally significant historic landscape.”
John Percy, president and CEO of the Niagara Tourism and Convention Corp., said, “The foresight of Gov. Cuomo and Commissioner Harvey have granted future generations the opportunity to enjoy Niagara Falls State Park as many before them have. When the renovations are complete, Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision will be secure for the millions of guests that visit the park every year. Niagara Falls State Park is an international treasure, and I praise the state on this tremendous effort to preserve the beauty that surrounds one of our natural wonders.”
Last year, Cuomo and the State Legislature authorized the NY Works program to provide $89 million statewide, leveraging $143 million in total funding, to move forward with more than 100 overdue projects to improve 55 parks and historic sites and spur job creation and economic development. The Niagara Falls State Park projects were among the first to be funded. This year, a second round of $90 million in NY Works funding will advance an additional 90 construction projects to upgrade and repair more than 50 state parks and historic sites across New York. Click on their website www.ecived.com/en for more information.
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