Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has thrown the lever to populism, calling for tighter restrictions on the sale of Australian land to foreign individuals and state-owned enterprises and admitting he feels ''anxious'' about foreign ownership.
The shift came as Mr Rudd and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott faced off at the third and final leaders debate of the 2013 campaign. Both leaders were noticeably tired but managed to present a more civil atmosphere than at previous encounters, even if the questioning from voters took on a harsher edge.
An exit poll of the hand-picked audience of 100 undecided voters scored the debate as a comfortable win for Mr Rudd with 45 votes, to Mr Abbott on 38. Nineteen remained undecided.Other questions dealt with Mr Abbott's gold-plated Paid Parental Leave scheme with Mr Rudd hammering the super-generous provisions as Hands free access, and at least one questioner agreeing.
Small businessman Ian, told Mr Abbott: ''I just think, that a fork-lift driver from Mount Druitt should not be paying his taxes so a pretty little lady lawyer on the North Shore on 180 grand a year can have a kid,'' he said. Mr Abbott countered by saying that big business funded the scheme, via a levy, not taxpayers.
Declaring himself ''old-fashioned'' when it comes to allowing access foreign access to Australian land, Mr Rudd said he was ''not quite as free market as Tony [Abbott] on this stuff.'' He said he was far more in favour of joint venture approaches to access foreign capital to ensure Australian land stayed in Australian hands.Mr Abbott said a Coalition government would lower the scrutiny threshold to ensure the Foreign Investment Review Board examined acquisition proposals above ''about $15 million'' - down from more than $220 million currently.
Mr Rudd's shift appeared to come without prior consultation. It came as the trailing Mr Rudd was also forced to defend his sustained internal campaign against Julia Gillard through this year. He claimed he did ''absolutely the right thing'' by replacing her.''I can say that through all of that I believe I was doing absolutely the right thing by the party and by the country,'' he replied to the questioner, Amanda.
Mr Abbott declared he would not close any Medicare Locals. The definitive guarantee appeared to be improvised after he had pointedly left open the possibility of closures less than a week ago when he said: ''Now, can I say that absolutely no Medicare Local will close? I'm not going to say that.''
Police Chief Bill Blair has for quite some time been on the record as urging broader deployment of Tasers as an option less harmful than guns. Yet in an interview with the Star last week, the chief was careful to qualify his support of Tasers for front-line cops.
“It’s not risk-free. When they first brought them out, they made it sound like it was as safe as Tylenol. There’s a risk associated to its use. It’s what we call a less-lethal-force option. That’s a good thing — if you can do it. But you should always try to resolve these things using the least amount of force possible.’’
It’s all after-the-fact speculation, of course. Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack has claimed Forcillo called for a Taser to be brought before he fired his weapon nine times. Why he didn’t wait will no doubt be a matter explored at trial.
What is clear, from the numerous studies conducted, is that a Taser — like any other weapon — is dangerous in the wrong hands, no less when those are an officer’s hands. Many civil rights groups deplore the thing. These are the same people often most vocal in their condemnation of police shootings, particularly when the victims suffer from mental illness.
Amnesty International, for one, claims there have been more than 500 deaths due to Tasers since 2001. One of them was Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, zapped five times by RCMP officers in the Vancouver airport in 2007. That disturbing event triggered an exhaustive inquiry that delivered a slew of recommendations about when conductive energy weapons should be deployed — most crucially, only when there’s a danger the suspect will cause bodily harm, which still leaves it hopelessly discretionary. The Vancouver Tasering, also captured on video that the RCMP originally claimed didn’t exist, was deemed a homicide, with the officers acting too quickly.
The weapons gadgetry available to law enforcement is only as good as the decision-making, the judgment, of those invested with the authority to use it. And that judgment will not necessarily be sufficiently honed by a few days of training on stun guns. Indeed, there’s ample evidence showing that officers reach for the Taser more frequently, too frequently, than they would reach for a sidearm, in circumstances that don’t warrant use of force.
They defuse with a fuse because they’ve got this handy new toy that emits an electrical current via wires and barbs which disrupts voluntary control of muscles — electro-muscular disruption technology, as described by the manufacturer, Taser International. Around the world, some 17,000 law enforcement and military agencies in more than 100 countries use Tasers now. In some jurisdictions, corrections officers use them to subdue prisoners as well. Little wonder Taser stock surged more than 30 percent in the last two weeks alone, though the spike is also attributable to police demand for the company’s merchandizing of wearable video cameras, tucked into a patrol cop’s vest, for the purpose of documenting incidents with the public.
It’s unclear where Toronto Police Services will get the money to pay for equipping all front-line officers with Tasers — which could cost up to $10 million. One suggestion is that cops pay for it out-of-pocket, which is unreasonable.
The Ontario government maintains its shift on Tasers was not influenced by Sammy Yatin’s death and certainly appears to have been in the works before that shooting. More likely, the Ministry was reacting to an inquest earlier this year in Midhurst — the first where use of a Taser was a “contributing factor’’ in the death, officially caused by cardiac arrhythmia due to a state of excited delirium. In that 2010 case, OPP responding to an assault complaint came upon Aron Firman, a 27-year-old schizophrenic who was Tased when he made a movement toward one of the officers. The SIU cleared the officer of any wrongdoing. But the inquest jury heard immensely contradictory evidence about what happened.
Specific cases can be used to buttress both the pro- and anti-Taser constituencies. Earlier this month, a suicidal woman holding a knife near the railroad tracks in Burlington was subdued by a Taser and taken to hospital under provisions of the Mental Health Act. A life may have been saved.
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2013年8月28日星期三
Thousands pack commemorate 1963 march
Fifty years to the day after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a large crowd streamed onto the National Mall and listened as civil rights leaders urged them - sometimes defiantly - to keep fighting for equal rights and justice.
Civil rights leader and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young urged thousands who had returned to the spot to "Pray on, stay on and fight on."
Through on-and-off rain showers that were occasionally heavy, marchers making their way to the Mall waved banners that read, "The new Jim Crow must go" and "50 years later still fighting to vote," sang traditional protest songs and chanted, "Education is our right - education is our fight!"
The 1963 march focused on what Young called "the triple evils of racism, war and poverty," but he said King's speech focused mostly on poverty. "He said that the Constitution was a promissory note to which all of us would fall heir, but that when men and women of color presented their check at the Bank of Justice, it came back marked 'insufficient funds.' "
"Fifty years later," Young concluded, "we're still here trying to cash that bad check. Fifty years later, we're still dealing with all kinds of problems, and so we're not here to claim any victory - we're to simply say that the struggle continues."
Wednesday's march started about 9:10 a.m.Banners and T-shirts and chants focused on the Trayvon Martin verdict and on protecting the Voting Rights Act. Other banners focused on gun control, mass incarceration of African-Americans and equal access to education. Marchers of all ages and races walked the route together, some singing songs such as "We Shall Not Be Moved."
Reginald Gilluno, 39, stood next to a portrait of King made of melted crayons and makeup so that people who are visually impaired could feel the power of the portrait. His mother, Oni Gilluno, 57, was 8 years old in 1963 and acknowledges that much has changed since the first march. But she believes there is still a lot of underlying racism. "A Caucasian person just doesn't get it."
Robin McNair, a teacher at Dupont Park Adventist School in D.C., says she and fellow teachers brought 50 students to the indoor Tracking. "We want them to experience history and be a part of it. Fifty years from now, they will be able to look back and remember this day and say they were there."
Alonza Lawrence, 57, a pastor at the Moore Street Missionary Baptist Church in Richmond, Va., said he drove to Washington Wednesday morning with his sister, Roberta Walker, from Richmond. "I was 7 at the time of the original march. I wanted to be part of the celebration this time. There are so many issues to protest: voting rights, racism, ageism, sexism - many of the 'isms.' The goal of this country is to become a place where all people are treated equally and have a fair chance. We have made strides, but have a long way to go. It's definitely not a level playing field."
James Carter, 62, a retired educator from Hershey, Pa., said he left home at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday with a friend and his local pastor. "I wanted to be part of the march this time. I was too young - 12 - to go in '63."
Carter said the dream of equal rights "has been realized for some, but there appears to be a concerted effort to diminish the dream. It's important to let them know that we won't stand for it. Dr. King wanted a complete America and we don't have that now."
He's concerned about a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating a key part of the Voting Rights Act, passed a year after the original march. "The court took away clauses that allowed the (Justice Department) to address injustice," he says. "Look at North Carolina and Texas, which passed repressive laws (soon after) the Supreme Court decision. To say that everything is OK now is far from the truth."
Wednesday's commemoration culminates a week's worth of events marking the 1963 march, which was organized by civil rights and labor groups. Wednesday's event will feature afternoon speeches by President Obama and former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
Farmer was there because jailers in nearby Iberville Parish had run out of space. About 500 people had rallied in Plaquemine for access to the ballot, and about half that number had been arrested, including the national director of CORE himself.
"The tear gas and the electric cattle prods of Plaquemine, Louisiana, like the fire hoses and dogs of Birmingham, are giving to the world a tired and ugly message of terror and brutality and hate," Farmer wrote from Donaldsonville. "Theirs is a message of pitiful hopelessness from little and unimaginative men to a world that fears for its life. It is not they to whom the world is listening today. It is to America's Negroes."
Lolis Edward Elie, an attorney who represented CORE in its Louisiana protests, said the struggle in Plaquemine was real and that the racist oppression in the town and surrounding parish was immense. Even so, Elie said, Farmer's arrest was part of CORE's strategy, meant not only to highlight how different CORE was from its enemies, but also how different CORE was from its allies.
But sacrificing oneself and one's own personal freedom for the larger good was CORE's modus operandi. Farmer says in his jailhouse letter that he couldn't walk around free while others who had protested in Plaquemine were confined.
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a gathering of hundreds of thousands of individuals, but more significantly, the march was a gathering of six important civil rights groups, three predominantly white religious organizations and organized labor. The civil rights groups had similar goals but different methods and often attracted different pools of people for its members.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation's premier civil rights organization, was arguably the most conservative, eschewing direct confrontation in favor of dispassionate courtroom battles. The National Urban League was similar in style with a greater emphasis on increasing black employment. The Negro American Labor Council shared the emphasis on employment. Its leader, A. Philip Randolph - who put together the 1963 event with deputy director Bayard Rustin - had been wanting to march on Washington for more than twenty years. But the 1941 march Randolph planned to press for anti-lynching legislation and desegregation of the military never got off the ground.
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Civil rights leader and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young urged thousands who had returned to the spot to "Pray on, stay on and fight on."
Through on-and-off rain showers that were occasionally heavy, marchers making their way to the Mall waved banners that read, "The new Jim Crow must go" and "50 years later still fighting to vote," sang traditional protest songs and chanted, "Education is our right - education is our fight!"
The 1963 march focused on what Young called "the triple evils of racism, war and poverty," but he said King's speech focused mostly on poverty. "He said that the Constitution was a promissory note to which all of us would fall heir, but that when men and women of color presented their check at the Bank of Justice, it came back marked 'insufficient funds.' "
"Fifty years later," Young concluded, "we're still here trying to cash that bad check. Fifty years later, we're still dealing with all kinds of problems, and so we're not here to claim any victory - we're to simply say that the struggle continues."
Wednesday's march started about 9:10 a.m.Banners and T-shirts and chants focused on the Trayvon Martin verdict and on protecting the Voting Rights Act. Other banners focused on gun control, mass incarceration of African-Americans and equal access to education. Marchers of all ages and races walked the route together, some singing songs such as "We Shall Not Be Moved."
Reginald Gilluno, 39, stood next to a portrait of King made of melted crayons and makeup so that people who are visually impaired could feel the power of the portrait. His mother, Oni Gilluno, 57, was 8 years old in 1963 and acknowledges that much has changed since the first march. But she believes there is still a lot of underlying racism. "A Caucasian person just doesn't get it."
Robin McNair, a teacher at Dupont Park Adventist School in D.C., says she and fellow teachers brought 50 students to the indoor Tracking. "We want them to experience history and be a part of it. Fifty years from now, they will be able to look back and remember this day and say they were there."
Alonza Lawrence, 57, a pastor at the Moore Street Missionary Baptist Church in Richmond, Va., said he drove to Washington Wednesday morning with his sister, Roberta Walker, from Richmond. "I was 7 at the time of the original march. I wanted to be part of the celebration this time. There are so many issues to protest: voting rights, racism, ageism, sexism - many of the 'isms.' The goal of this country is to become a place where all people are treated equally and have a fair chance. We have made strides, but have a long way to go. It's definitely not a level playing field."
James Carter, 62, a retired educator from Hershey, Pa., said he left home at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday with a friend and his local pastor. "I wanted to be part of the march this time. I was too young - 12 - to go in '63."
Carter said the dream of equal rights "has been realized for some, but there appears to be a concerted effort to diminish the dream. It's important to let them know that we won't stand for it. Dr. King wanted a complete America and we don't have that now."
He's concerned about a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating a key part of the Voting Rights Act, passed a year after the original march. "The court took away clauses that allowed the (Justice Department) to address injustice," he says. "Look at North Carolina and Texas, which passed repressive laws (soon after) the Supreme Court decision. To say that everything is OK now is far from the truth."
Wednesday's commemoration culminates a week's worth of events marking the 1963 march, which was organized by civil rights and labor groups. Wednesday's event will feature afternoon speeches by President Obama and former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
Farmer was there because jailers in nearby Iberville Parish had run out of space. About 500 people had rallied in Plaquemine for access to the ballot, and about half that number had been arrested, including the national director of CORE himself.
"The tear gas and the electric cattle prods of Plaquemine, Louisiana, like the fire hoses and dogs of Birmingham, are giving to the world a tired and ugly message of terror and brutality and hate," Farmer wrote from Donaldsonville. "Theirs is a message of pitiful hopelessness from little and unimaginative men to a world that fears for its life. It is not they to whom the world is listening today. It is to America's Negroes."
Lolis Edward Elie, an attorney who represented CORE in its Louisiana protests, said the struggle in Plaquemine was real and that the racist oppression in the town and surrounding parish was immense. Even so, Elie said, Farmer's arrest was part of CORE's strategy, meant not only to highlight how different CORE was from its enemies, but also how different CORE was from its allies.
But sacrificing oneself and one's own personal freedom for the larger good was CORE's modus operandi. Farmer says in his jailhouse letter that he couldn't walk around free while others who had protested in Plaquemine were confined.
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a gathering of hundreds of thousands of individuals, but more significantly, the march was a gathering of six important civil rights groups, three predominantly white religious organizations and organized labor. The civil rights groups had similar goals but different methods and often attracted different pools of people for its members.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation's premier civil rights organization, was arguably the most conservative, eschewing direct confrontation in favor of dispassionate courtroom battles. The National Urban League was similar in style with a greater emphasis on increasing black employment. The Negro American Labor Council shared the emphasis on employment. Its leader, A. Philip Randolph - who put together the 1963 event with deputy director Bayard Rustin - had been wanting to march on Washington for more than twenty years. But the 1941 march Randolph planned to press for anti-lynching legislation and desegregation of the military never got off the ground.
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2013年8月26日星期一
Claims processors received bonuses
While veterans waited longer than ever in recent years for their wartime disability compensation, the Department of Veterans Affairs gave its workers millions of dollars in bonuses for “excellent” performances that effectively encouraged them to avoid claims that needed extra work to document veterans’ injuries, a News21 investigation has found.
In 2011, a year in which the claims backlog ballooned by 155 percent, more than two-thirds of claims processors shared $5.5 million in bonuses, according to salary data from the Office of Personnel Management.
The more complex claims were often set aside by workers so they could keep their jobs, meet performance standards, or, in some cases, collect extra pay, said VA claims processors and rtls. Those claims now make up much of VA’s widely scrutinized disability claims backlog, defined by the agency as claims pending more than 125 days.
“At the beginning of the month … I’d try to work my really easy stuff so I could get my numbers up,” said Renee Cotter, a union steward for the local Reno, Nev. American Federation of Government Employees.
Now, claims workers said, they fear the VA’s aggressive new push to finish all one-year-old claims by Oct. 1 — and eliminate the entire backlog by 2015 — could continue the emphasis of quantity over quality in claims processing that has often led to mistakes. VA workers have processed 1 million claims a year for three years in a row.
Beth McCoy, the assistant deputy undersecretary for field operations for the Veterans Benefits Administration, said bonuses for claims processors were justified because, even though the number of backlogged claims was rising, workers were processing more claims than ever before.
“There are many, many employees who are exceeding their minimum standards and they deserve to recognized for that,” she said.She also said the VBA is improving quality even as it processes more claims.
But documents show that a board of veterans judges found in 2012 that almost three out of four appealed claims — which determine how much money veterans receive for their disabilities — were either wrong or based on incomplete information. When veterans choose to appeal a claim decision, it can add several years to their wait, records show.
But the VA’s plan to process the oldest claims did not address the quarter-million veterans in its appeals process as of July. Approximately 14,000 veterans had an appeal pending for more than two years as of November 2012.The VA has promised to lower wait times and improve accuracy by scanning the piles of paper claims into an electronic system for processing with new software, but the expensive transition has been beset with problems.
The workload for VA claims workers also has doubled in the last five years. This included new claims from a quarter-million Vietnam veterans in 2010, when the VA expanded added B-cell leukemias, Parkinson’s disease and ischemic heart disease to the growing list of health conditions that veterans could claim as a result of the toxic chemical, Agent Orange. In addition, more than 830,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans returning home had filed claims as of March 2013, according to VBA data.
In an attempt to encourage more productivity, the VA changed a claims processor’s performance criteria between 2010 and 2012 to discourage spending time gathering additional documents that could prove complicated claims, according to written performance requirements for real time Location system.
McCoy said she heard from employees in the field that they felt performance standards were not fair. “Things are changing very quickly and we’re struggling a little bit to keep up with the pace of change as we update our performance standards,” she said.
A processor must gather medical and military records for each disability and give veterans disability ratings based on the severity of injury, which then determines their monthly check from the government.
Claims for multiple injuries require significant time to gather documentation. Other claims, for post-traumatic stress disorder, military sexual trauma or traumatic brain injury can require just as much effort because they can be more difficult to prove than physical injuries.
In April 2010, the VA stopped giving performance credit for “supplemental development,” which included tasks such as calling and sending follow-up letters to veterans, follow-up requests for military documents and medical records.
The change was meant to encourage processors to finish claims. But a complex disability claim could take all day, while a claim for one or two injuries could be completed much faster, said David Bump, a national representative for the AFGE and former claims processor at the Milwaukee regional office.
“I think after a couple of years of seeing things piling up, they realized that that didn’t work,” said Bump, part of the VBA’s bargaining committee that has met three times in 10 months to discuss changing the performance standards.Claims workers can be fired or demoted for not meeting standards in Automated Standardized Performance Elements Nationwide, or ASPEN, the VA’s system of awarding a specific number of points daily for each task an employee performs.
Annual performance evaluations for all claims workers include the elements of “productivity,” “quality” and “customer service.” While “quality” is measured by a random sampling of an employee’s claims and “customer service” is measured by the number of complaints against the employee, “productivity” is judged by ASPEN points, the average work credits the employee must earn per day.
ASPEN points could translate into financial awards at the end of each year if a worker earns an “excellent” or “outstanding” performance.
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In 2011, a year in which the claims backlog ballooned by 155 percent, more than two-thirds of claims processors shared $5.5 million in bonuses, according to salary data from the Office of Personnel Management.
The more complex claims were often set aside by workers so they could keep their jobs, meet performance standards, or, in some cases, collect extra pay, said VA claims processors and rtls. Those claims now make up much of VA’s widely scrutinized disability claims backlog, defined by the agency as claims pending more than 125 days.
“At the beginning of the month … I’d try to work my really easy stuff so I could get my numbers up,” said Renee Cotter, a union steward for the local Reno, Nev. American Federation of Government Employees.
Now, claims workers said, they fear the VA’s aggressive new push to finish all one-year-old claims by Oct. 1 — and eliminate the entire backlog by 2015 — could continue the emphasis of quantity over quality in claims processing that has often led to mistakes. VA workers have processed 1 million claims a year for three years in a row.
Beth McCoy, the assistant deputy undersecretary for field operations for the Veterans Benefits Administration, said bonuses for claims processors were justified because, even though the number of backlogged claims was rising, workers were processing more claims than ever before.
“There are many, many employees who are exceeding their minimum standards and they deserve to recognized for that,” she said.She also said the VBA is improving quality even as it processes more claims.
But documents show that a board of veterans judges found in 2012 that almost three out of four appealed claims — which determine how much money veterans receive for their disabilities — were either wrong or based on incomplete information. When veterans choose to appeal a claim decision, it can add several years to their wait, records show.
But the VA’s plan to process the oldest claims did not address the quarter-million veterans in its appeals process as of July. Approximately 14,000 veterans had an appeal pending for more than two years as of November 2012.The VA has promised to lower wait times and improve accuracy by scanning the piles of paper claims into an electronic system for processing with new software, but the expensive transition has been beset with problems.
The workload for VA claims workers also has doubled in the last five years. This included new claims from a quarter-million Vietnam veterans in 2010, when the VA expanded added B-cell leukemias, Parkinson’s disease and ischemic heart disease to the growing list of health conditions that veterans could claim as a result of the toxic chemical, Agent Orange. In addition, more than 830,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans returning home had filed claims as of March 2013, according to VBA data.
In an attempt to encourage more productivity, the VA changed a claims processor’s performance criteria between 2010 and 2012 to discourage spending time gathering additional documents that could prove complicated claims, according to written performance requirements for real time Location system.
McCoy said she heard from employees in the field that they felt performance standards were not fair. “Things are changing very quickly and we’re struggling a little bit to keep up with the pace of change as we update our performance standards,” she said.
A processor must gather medical and military records for each disability and give veterans disability ratings based on the severity of injury, which then determines their monthly check from the government.
Claims for multiple injuries require significant time to gather documentation. Other claims, for post-traumatic stress disorder, military sexual trauma or traumatic brain injury can require just as much effort because they can be more difficult to prove than physical injuries.
In April 2010, the VA stopped giving performance credit for “supplemental development,” which included tasks such as calling and sending follow-up letters to veterans, follow-up requests for military documents and medical records.
The change was meant to encourage processors to finish claims. But a complex disability claim could take all day, while a claim for one or two injuries could be completed much faster, said David Bump, a national representative for the AFGE and former claims processor at the Milwaukee regional office.
“I think after a couple of years of seeing things piling up, they realized that that didn’t work,” said Bump, part of the VBA’s bargaining committee that has met three times in 10 months to discuss changing the performance standards.Claims workers can be fired or demoted for not meeting standards in Automated Standardized Performance Elements Nationwide, or ASPEN, the VA’s system of awarding a specific number of points daily for each task an employee performs.
Annual performance evaluations for all claims workers include the elements of “productivity,” “quality” and “customer service.” While “quality” is measured by a random sampling of an employee’s claims and “customer service” is measured by the number of complaints against the employee, “productivity” is judged by ASPEN points, the average work credits the employee must earn per day.
ASPEN points could translate into financial awards at the end of each year if a worker earns an “excellent” or “outstanding” performance.
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Chemical Weapons Used In Syria
Kerry said in a press conference that the number of victims of the attack on Wednesday, the reported symptoms and the accounts of humanitarian organizations strongly indicate that chemical weapons were used in Syria.Kerry added that the U.S. believes the regime of president Bashar al-Assad is responsible for the attack, and that the Syrian government's decision to grant U.N. investigators access to the site of the attack came "too late to be credible."
Syrian opposition forces said last Wednesday that hundreds of people were killed near Damascus in an alleged chemical weapons attack. The international medical organization Doctors Without Borders announced on Saturday they had counted at least 355 deaths in the suburb of Ghouta.U.N. investigators inspected the site of the alleged chemical attack on Monday, despite being targeted by snipers earlier that day. Reuters reports that the investigators met with survivors and took samples on the site.
Secretary of State John Kerry declared Monday that there was "undeniable" evidence of a large-scale chemical weapons attack in Syria, toughening the Obama administration's criticism of Bashar Assad's regime and outlining a justification for possible U.S. military action.
Kerry, speaking to reporters at the State Department, said last week's attack was a "moral obscenity" that "should shock the conscience" of the world. Officials said there was very little doubt that the attack was perpetrated by the Syrian government.
"The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of Indoor Positioning System and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity. By any standard, it is inexcusable and – despite the excuses and equivocations that some have manufactured – it is undeniable," said Kerry, the highest-ranking U.S. official to confirm the attack in the Damascus suburbs that activists say killed hundreds of people.
"This international norm cannot be violated without consequences," he added.Officials said President Barack Obama has not decided how to respond to the use of deadly gases, a move the White House said last year would cross a "red line." But the U.S., along with allies in Europe, appeared to be laying the groundwork for the most aggressive response since Syria's civil war began more than two years ago.
The international community appeared to be considering a response that would punish Assad for deploying deadly gases, not sweeping actions aimed at ousting Assad or strengthening rebel forces. The focus of the internal debate underscores the scant international appetite for a large-scale deployment of forces in Syria and the limited number of other options that could significantly change the trajectory of the conflict.
"There is not a military solution to that conflict," White House spokesman Jay Carney saidThe Obama administration was moving ahead even as a United Nations team already on the ground in Syria collected evidence from last week's attack. The U.S. said Syria's delay in giving the inspectors access rendered their investigation meaningless and officials said the administration had its own intelligence confirming chemical weapons use.
"What is before us today is real and it is compelling," Kerry said. "Our understanding of what has already happened in Syria is grounded in facts."The U.S. assessment is based in part on the number of reported victims, the symptoms of those injured or killed and indoor Tracking. Administration officials said the U.S. had additional intelligence confirming chemical weapons use and planned to make it public in the coming days.
Syrian President Bashar Assad has denied launching a chemical attack. The U.N. team came under sniper fire Monday as it traveled to the site of the Aug. 21 attack.It's unclear whether Obama would seek authority from the U.N. or Congress before using force. The president has spoken frequently about his preference for taking military action only with international backing, but it is likely Russia and China would block U.S. efforts to authorize action through the U.N. Security Council.
Kerry on Monday made several veiled warnings to Russia, which has propped up Assad's regime, blocked action against Syria at the U.N., and disputed evidence of the government's chemical weapons use."Anyone who can claim that an attack of this staggering scale can be contrived or fabricated needs to check their conscience and their own moral compass," he said.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, who also cut short his vacation because of the attack, spoke Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin to outline the evidence of chemical weapons use by Assad's regime.Cameron's office also said the British government would decide on Tuesday whether the timetable for the international response means it will be necessary to recall lawmakers to Parliament before their scheduled return next week. That decision could offer the clearest indication of how quickly the U.S. and allies plan to respond.
More than 100,000 people have died in clashes between forces loyal to Assad and rebels trying to oust him from power over the past two and a half years. While Obama has repeatedly called for Assad to leave power, he has resisted calls for a robust U.S. intervention, and has largely limited American assistance to humanitarian aid. The president said last year that chemical weapons use would cross a "red line" and would likely change his calculus in deciding on a U.S. response.
Last week's attack in the Damascus suburbs is a challenge to Obama's credibility. He took little action after Assad used chemical weapons on a small scale earlier this year and risks signaling to countries like Iran that his administration does not follow through on its warnings.
Syrian activists say the Aug. 21 attack killed hundreds; the group Doctors Without Borders put the death toll at 355 people.The president did not speak publicly Monday about the chemical weapons attack, leaving Kerry as his administration's most prominent spokesman. Carney said the president would speak about his decision after settling on a response.
Obama pressed on with an array of events unrelated to Syria, including a Medal of Honor ceremony for an Afghan war veteran.The president has ruled out putting American troops on the ground in Syria and officials say they also are not considering setting up a unilateral no-fly zone.
Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the most likely option appeared to be the U.S. and NATO partners deploying airstrikes against Syrian missile sites, aircraft and other infrastructure that may be used to deploy chemical weapons.
"I think that would be punishing and a deterrent to their future use," Schiff said in an interview, adding that the approach would carry "less risk of drawing us in further, or spreading the conflict."It's unlikely that the U.S. would launch a strike against Syria while the United Nations team is still in the country. The administration may also try to time any strike around Obama's travel schedule – he's due to hold meetings in Sweden and Russia next week – in order to avoid having the commander in chief abroad when the U.S. launches military action.
An Obama decision to attack Syria could present an eerie parallel to a U.S. military campaign against Iraq in 1998 that was ordered by President Bill Clinton.
After then-dictator Saddam Hussein refused to let U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraqi sites, the U.S. and Great Britain unleashed a 70-hour barrage of hundreds of cruise missiles, bombs and rockets on Baghdad and elsewhere in the country. The assault aimed to prevent Iraq from building the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons it was prohibited from having under U.N. resolutions after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
But the Iraqi leader himself was unharmed, and taunted the U.S. and Britain by declaring victory afterward.U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday countered the U.S. claim that the investigation at the site of last week's attack was too little, too late."Despite the passage of a number of days, the secretary-general is confident that the team will be able to obtain and analyze evidence relevant for its investigation of the August 21 incident," U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said in New York.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
Syrian opposition forces said last Wednesday that hundreds of people were killed near Damascus in an alleged chemical weapons attack. The international medical organization Doctors Without Borders announced on Saturday they had counted at least 355 deaths in the suburb of Ghouta.U.N. investigators inspected the site of the alleged chemical attack on Monday, despite being targeted by snipers earlier that day. Reuters reports that the investigators met with survivors and took samples on the site.
Secretary of State John Kerry declared Monday that there was "undeniable" evidence of a large-scale chemical weapons attack in Syria, toughening the Obama administration's criticism of Bashar Assad's regime and outlining a justification for possible U.S. military action.
Kerry, speaking to reporters at the State Department, said last week's attack was a "moral obscenity" that "should shock the conscience" of the world. Officials said there was very little doubt that the attack was perpetrated by the Syrian government.
"The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of Indoor Positioning System and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity. By any standard, it is inexcusable and – despite the excuses and equivocations that some have manufactured – it is undeniable," said Kerry, the highest-ranking U.S. official to confirm the attack in the Damascus suburbs that activists say killed hundreds of people.
"This international norm cannot be violated without consequences," he added.Officials said President Barack Obama has not decided how to respond to the use of deadly gases, a move the White House said last year would cross a "red line." But the U.S., along with allies in Europe, appeared to be laying the groundwork for the most aggressive response since Syria's civil war began more than two years ago.
The international community appeared to be considering a response that would punish Assad for deploying deadly gases, not sweeping actions aimed at ousting Assad or strengthening rebel forces. The focus of the internal debate underscores the scant international appetite for a large-scale deployment of forces in Syria and the limited number of other options that could significantly change the trajectory of the conflict.
"There is not a military solution to that conflict," White House spokesman Jay Carney saidThe Obama administration was moving ahead even as a United Nations team already on the ground in Syria collected evidence from last week's attack. The U.S. said Syria's delay in giving the inspectors access rendered their investigation meaningless and officials said the administration had its own intelligence confirming chemical weapons use.
"What is before us today is real and it is compelling," Kerry said. "Our understanding of what has already happened in Syria is grounded in facts."The U.S. assessment is based in part on the number of reported victims, the symptoms of those injured or killed and indoor Tracking. Administration officials said the U.S. had additional intelligence confirming chemical weapons use and planned to make it public in the coming days.
Syrian President Bashar Assad has denied launching a chemical attack. The U.N. team came under sniper fire Monday as it traveled to the site of the Aug. 21 attack.It's unclear whether Obama would seek authority from the U.N. or Congress before using force. The president has spoken frequently about his preference for taking military action only with international backing, but it is likely Russia and China would block U.S. efforts to authorize action through the U.N. Security Council.
Kerry on Monday made several veiled warnings to Russia, which has propped up Assad's regime, blocked action against Syria at the U.N., and disputed evidence of the government's chemical weapons use."Anyone who can claim that an attack of this staggering scale can be contrived or fabricated needs to check their conscience and their own moral compass," he said.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, who also cut short his vacation because of the attack, spoke Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin to outline the evidence of chemical weapons use by Assad's regime.Cameron's office also said the British government would decide on Tuesday whether the timetable for the international response means it will be necessary to recall lawmakers to Parliament before their scheduled return next week. That decision could offer the clearest indication of how quickly the U.S. and allies plan to respond.
More than 100,000 people have died in clashes between forces loyal to Assad and rebels trying to oust him from power over the past two and a half years. While Obama has repeatedly called for Assad to leave power, he has resisted calls for a robust U.S. intervention, and has largely limited American assistance to humanitarian aid. The president said last year that chemical weapons use would cross a "red line" and would likely change his calculus in deciding on a U.S. response.
Last week's attack in the Damascus suburbs is a challenge to Obama's credibility. He took little action after Assad used chemical weapons on a small scale earlier this year and risks signaling to countries like Iran that his administration does not follow through on its warnings.
Syrian activists say the Aug. 21 attack killed hundreds; the group Doctors Without Borders put the death toll at 355 people.The president did not speak publicly Monday about the chemical weapons attack, leaving Kerry as his administration's most prominent spokesman. Carney said the president would speak about his decision after settling on a response.
Obama pressed on with an array of events unrelated to Syria, including a Medal of Honor ceremony for an Afghan war veteran.The president has ruled out putting American troops on the ground in Syria and officials say they also are not considering setting up a unilateral no-fly zone.
Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the most likely option appeared to be the U.S. and NATO partners deploying airstrikes against Syrian missile sites, aircraft and other infrastructure that may be used to deploy chemical weapons.
"I think that would be punishing and a deterrent to their future use," Schiff said in an interview, adding that the approach would carry "less risk of drawing us in further, or spreading the conflict."It's unlikely that the U.S. would launch a strike against Syria while the United Nations team is still in the country. The administration may also try to time any strike around Obama's travel schedule – he's due to hold meetings in Sweden and Russia next week – in order to avoid having the commander in chief abroad when the U.S. launches military action.
An Obama decision to attack Syria could present an eerie parallel to a U.S. military campaign against Iraq in 1998 that was ordered by President Bill Clinton.
After then-dictator Saddam Hussein refused to let U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraqi sites, the U.S. and Great Britain unleashed a 70-hour barrage of hundreds of cruise missiles, bombs and rockets on Baghdad and elsewhere in the country. The assault aimed to prevent Iraq from building the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons it was prohibited from having under U.N. resolutions after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
But the Iraqi leader himself was unharmed, and taunted the U.S. and Britain by declaring victory afterward.U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday countered the U.S. claim that the investigation at the site of last week's attack was too little, too late."Despite the passage of a number of days, the secretary-general is confident that the team will be able to obtain and analyze evidence relevant for its investigation of the August 21 incident," U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said in New York.
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2013年8月19日星期一
Tech-savvy pastor with Illinois ties
Standing in a security line at O'Hare International Airport seven years ago, the Rev. Bobby Gruenewald wished he had a Bible in his pocket to pass the time. Then the tech-savvy pastor raised in central Illinois had a thought: Wouldn't it be grand if anyone could have their favorite version of the Bible within reach anywhere at any time?
"Could we be at one of these moments in history where technology, if we leverage it correctly, could transform how we engage in the Bible?" Gruenewald, 37, recalls thinking that day. "Drawing from the story of the real time Location system, for centuries, that really changed our access to the Bible. It's probably something today we easily take for granted, but it came through invention."
Represented by the simple icon of a Bible with a bookmark, the app offers audio versions for listeners, navigation tools to look up passages, social media capability to share verses on Facebook and Twitter, and private or public platforms to store or share notes. The app is free and generates no revenue for the church. It simply aims to fulfill the Christian mission of spreading God's word, Gruenewald said.
But Gruenewald's idea required more than technical expertise. It has taken nearly $20 million from donors, 30 paid staff and 500 volunteers worldwide to get off the ground.
It also needed cooperation from publishers to grant access to the hundreds of translations of the Christian Bible available on YouVersion's menu, including ones popular with evangelical Christians, Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, and Messianic Jews, who blend evangelical Christian theology with Jewish rituals.
Tyndale House Publishers was one of the first companies to grant access. It took 90 scholars commissioned by the Carol Stream company seven years to develop the New Living Translation, which is now the world's third-most popular biblical translation. Company officials said they weren't eager to give away their work.
But when Gruenewald shared his vision of making the Bible more accessible to people on the go, the west suburban publishing house reconsidered. It signed a two-year trial agreement in 2008 to license the translation for free. It has since renewed that agreement twice after discovering that popularity has soared.
"We found that when people read the New Living Translation they are able to experience it personally and it speaks to their heart," said Jeffrey Smith, the New Living Translation brand director for Tyndale House. "We know that, for many, they'll adopt it as their translation of choice, then follow through and purchase other resources from us. … When something is so successful like this, it's the hand of God."
But when Gruenewald shared his vision of making the Bible more accessible to people on the go, the west suburban publishing house reconsidered. It signed a two-year trial agreement in 2008 to license the translation for free. It has since renewed that agreement twice after discovering that popularity has soared.
"We found that when people read the New Living Translation they are able to experience it personally and it speaks to their heart," said Jeffrey Smith, the New Living Translation brand director for rtls. "We know that, for many, they'll adopt it as their translation of choice, then follow through and purchase other resources from us. … When something is so successful like this, it's the hand of God."
Gruenewald was an unlikely dot.com entrepreneur. Growing up in Decatur, dubbed the "Soybean Capital of the World" because of the presence of agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, he followed his high school sweetheart (now wife) to Oklahoma's Southern Nazarene University to study finance in 1994.
When an outside company offered to build a website for the car dealership where he worked on the side, Gruenewald proposed doing it for a fraction of the price. He studied the HTML codes during his winter break in Decatur and designed the site in his dorm room.
Gruenewald created a site that helped the dealer peddle auto parts. Sales eventually grew to $100,000 a month and the dealer offered to invest in Gruenewald's talents. In 2001, after a series of successful Web ventures, Gruenewald and his wife joined what would later become LifeChurch.tv, in Edmond, Okla., where "the best technology was air conditioning" and where "my passion for the church eclipsed my passion for business," he said.
YouVersion didn't see instant success, he said. Its full potential didn't emerge until mobile devices began to catch on. In fact, the church was on the brink of shutting down the endeavor when Apple introduced its App Store for the iPhone in 2008. YouVersion became one of the first 200 apps available, enabling Gruenewald's concept to take off and help other churches grow as well.
One of those churches, the six-campus Park Community Church in Chicago, encourages worshippers to download YouVersion Bible plans so they can access the scripture passages at the core of Sunday services and refer to the pastors' notes as they follow a sermon.
Read the full products at www.ecived.com/en/!
"Could we be at one of these moments in history where technology, if we leverage it correctly, could transform how we engage in the Bible?" Gruenewald, 37, recalls thinking that day. "Drawing from the story of the real time Location system, for centuries, that really changed our access to the Bible. It's probably something today we easily take for granted, but it came through invention."
Represented by the simple icon of a Bible with a bookmark, the app offers audio versions for listeners, navigation tools to look up passages, social media capability to share verses on Facebook and Twitter, and private or public platforms to store or share notes. The app is free and generates no revenue for the church. It simply aims to fulfill the Christian mission of spreading God's word, Gruenewald said.
But Gruenewald's idea required more than technical expertise. It has taken nearly $20 million from donors, 30 paid staff and 500 volunteers worldwide to get off the ground.
It also needed cooperation from publishers to grant access to the hundreds of translations of the Christian Bible available on YouVersion's menu, including ones popular with evangelical Christians, Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, and Messianic Jews, who blend evangelical Christian theology with Jewish rituals.
Tyndale House Publishers was one of the first companies to grant access. It took 90 scholars commissioned by the Carol Stream company seven years to develop the New Living Translation, which is now the world's third-most popular biblical translation. Company officials said they weren't eager to give away their work.
But when Gruenewald shared his vision of making the Bible more accessible to people on the go, the west suburban publishing house reconsidered. It signed a two-year trial agreement in 2008 to license the translation for free. It has since renewed that agreement twice after discovering that popularity has soared.
"We found that when people read the New Living Translation they are able to experience it personally and it speaks to their heart," said Jeffrey Smith, the New Living Translation brand director for Tyndale House. "We know that, for many, they'll adopt it as their translation of choice, then follow through and purchase other resources from us. … When something is so successful like this, it's the hand of God."
But when Gruenewald shared his vision of making the Bible more accessible to people on the go, the west suburban publishing house reconsidered. It signed a two-year trial agreement in 2008 to license the translation for free. It has since renewed that agreement twice after discovering that popularity has soared.
"We found that when people read the New Living Translation they are able to experience it personally and it speaks to their heart," said Jeffrey Smith, the New Living Translation brand director for rtls. "We know that, for many, they'll adopt it as their translation of choice, then follow through and purchase other resources from us. … When something is so successful like this, it's the hand of God."
Gruenewald was an unlikely dot.com entrepreneur. Growing up in Decatur, dubbed the "Soybean Capital of the World" because of the presence of agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, he followed his high school sweetheart (now wife) to Oklahoma's Southern Nazarene University to study finance in 1994.
When an outside company offered to build a website for the car dealership where he worked on the side, Gruenewald proposed doing it for a fraction of the price. He studied the HTML codes during his winter break in Decatur and designed the site in his dorm room.
Gruenewald created a site that helped the dealer peddle auto parts. Sales eventually grew to $100,000 a month and the dealer offered to invest in Gruenewald's talents. In 2001, after a series of successful Web ventures, Gruenewald and his wife joined what would later become LifeChurch.tv, in Edmond, Okla., where "the best technology was air conditioning" and where "my passion for the church eclipsed my passion for business," he said.
YouVersion didn't see instant success, he said. Its full potential didn't emerge until mobile devices began to catch on. In fact, the church was on the brink of shutting down the endeavor when Apple introduced its App Store for the iPhone in 2008. YouVersion became one of the first 200 apps available, enabling Gruenewald's concept to take off and help other churches grow as well.
One of those churches, the six-campus Park Community Church in Chicago, encourages worshippers to download YouVersion Bible plans so they can access the scripture passages at the core of Sunday services and refer to the pastors' notes as they follow a sermon.
Read the full products at www.ecived.com/en/!
Eat what you sow and sell the surplus
Could global food security be achieved by growing tomatoes up a wall and pumpkins on a rooftop? It sounds unlikely, but food security isn't just about full stomachs. Adequate nutrition is also crucial, and helping women in particular to run productive home gardens could save millions of lives in developing countries.
Research published by The Lancet just ahead of the Nutrition for Growth summit in June revealed that malnutrition kills 3.1 million children annually, and caused stunting in 165 million in 2011. Micronutrients such as vitamin A, iron and zinc are essential, particularly in the first few years of life, and it is women who tend to be responsible for feeding families.
But women also have unequal access to land and, according to the FAO, receive only 5% of agricultural extension services globally. This is why some development agencies are putting the tools for good nutrition into women's hands, helping them make better use of one space they can control: their homestead garden.
In 2009, Care International launched an EU-funded Food Security for the Ultra-Poor project targeting 55,000 women in the north-east of Bangladesh, which included training in homestead gardening."The training showed the women how to use the small space available around their homestead," says Sekhar Bhattacharjee, FSUP team leader.
"It demonstrated the use of trellises to grow vegetables, growing vegetables in plastic bags on the ground, and how to use the roofs of homes to grow vegetables. The women received training in summer and winter vegetable cultivation, and were given vegetable seed packets to begin their own gardens."
The crops grown as part of the project include cucumber, gourds, red amaranth, spinach, papaya, indoor Tracking, tomatoes, and beans, and they're grown both around homesteads and in shared community gardens. The harvests may not be huge, but they provide a year-round supply of nutrients to communities who would otherwise rely heavily on rice alone.
Homestead gardens have not only increased access to vegetable and fruits, but have also provided participating women with income from selling surplus produce. A sample of 1,614 families taking part in FSUP showed that between December 2012 and March 2013, households produced an average of 53kg of vegetables and fruits, consuming on average 36kg and selling on average 18kg.
The impact of this income is just as important as what is eaten directly, says Larissa Pelham, food security adviser at Care International UK."I can't emphasise enough the importance of getting money into women's hands," she says. "Suddenly they can make choices in how they spend for the household. This has a phenomenal impact, and research has shown that when women have control over household resources, they are likely to spend it on the wellbeing of the household overall."
This is backed up by findings from Helen Keller International's homestead food production programme which launched in Bangladesh in the early 1990s and has since expanded to Nepal, Cambodia and the Philippines. HKI works with local NGOs and extension workers to establish Village Model Farms (VMFs) in villages, which serve as training and support hubs for women to learn to manage their own homestead gardens.
"They identify a farmer, preferably female, who has adequate land for a model farm, and that farmer will get training and inputs," says Victoria Quinn, HKI's senior vice president of programmes."Other women then come there around once a month in groups of 20, and the village model farmer who has been trained will share their knowledge with those other mothers and provide them with seedlings so they can go and do it themselves."
In a study of its programmes between 2003-2007, HKI found that in Cambodia, 92% of households engaging in homestead food production spent the income earned from garden products on buying more food for the household. In Bangladesh, the figure was 70%. However, having more food – even a good variety – doesn't automatically translate into better nutritional outcomes on its own.
"You have to improve not just food production but practices too," says Quinn. "You have to provide access to healthcare and hygiene training, because if children are sick it will just come out the other end."Care found evidence for this through another project – Shouhardo – which bundled training in home gardens with support in maternal health, nutrition, immunisation and financial services to women. This package of interventions reduced the incidence of child stunting from 56.1% to 40.4% in less than four years.
"The gardens have an important role in dietary diversity, but you need a range of other things going with it," says Pelham. "You need to teach women and families about sanitation, health and Hands free access. Without that, the gardens are not a silver bullet."Meanwhile, climate change is also an increasingly pressing issue for women engaging in homestead gardening, just as in other forms of agriculture. Flooding in Bangladesh is becoming more unpredictable and severe, and the 2009 cyclone there increased soil salinity in more than a third of home gardens but also showed resilience in certain crops, according to Lalita Bhattacharjee, a nutritionist with the FAO in Bangladesh.
"These included Indian spinach, sweet pumpkin, and okra. Kang kong, or water spinach, also flourishes naturally in waterways and requires little care, making it resilient to the effects of climate change. There's a need for awareness and knowledge among those households who are reliant on home gardens for their food and income. Women farmers should be given training on key salinity coping practices such as mulching with rice straw to increase retention of water in the soil."
Home gardens have thrived in Bangladesh and other parts of Asia, and HKI is also actively promoting them in sub-Saharan Africa now. Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, is to convince more policymakers that what women grow in their gardens can actually make such a difference.
"I think a lot more work has to be done in advocating that this is a really important part of the solution to food insecurity and undernutrition in these countries," says Quinn.
"Fruits and vegetables and small animal husbandary gets short shrift in ministries of agriculture, so we need to promote the fact that you can produce a lot of highly nutritious crops this way that will help address the chronic problem of undernutrition."
Read the full products at www.ecived.com/en/!
Research published by The Lancet just ahead of the Nutrition for Growth summit in June revealed that malnutrition kills 3.1 million children annually, and caused stunting in 165 million in 2011. Micronutrients such as vitamin A, iron and zinc are essential, particularly in the first few years of life, and it is women who tend to be responsible for feeding families.
But women also have unequal access to land and, according to the FAO, receive only 5% of agricultural extension services globally. This is why some development agencies are putting the tools for good nutrition into women's hands, helping them make better use of one space they can control: their homestead garden.
In 2009, Care International launched an EU-funded Food Security for the Ultra-Poor project targeting 55,000 women in the north-east of Bangladesh, which included training in homestead gardening."The training showed the women how to use the small space available around their homestead," says Sekhar Bhattacharjee, FSUP team leader.
"It demonstrated the use of trellises to grow vegetables, growing vegetables in plastic bags on the ground, and how to use the roofs of homes to grow vegetables. The women received training in summer and winter vegetable cultivation, and were given vegetable seed packets to begin their own gardens."
The crops grown as part of the project include cucumber, gourds, red amaranth, spinach, papaya, indoor Tracking, tomatoes, and beans, and they're grown both around homesteads and in shared community gardens. The harvests may not be huge, but they provide a year-round supply of nutrients to communities who would otherwise rely heavily on rice alone.
Homestead gardens have not only increased access to vegetable and fruits, but have also provided participating women with income from selling surplus produce. A sample of 1,614 families taking part in FSUP showed that between December 2012 and March 2013, households produced an average of 53kg of vegetables and fruits, consuming on average 36kg and selling on average 18kg.
The impact of this income is just as important as what is eaten directly, says Larissa Pelham, food security adviser at Care International UK."I can't emphasise enough the importance of getting money into women's hands," she says. "Suddenly they can make choices in how they spend for the household. This has a phenomenal impact, and research has shown that when women have control over household resources, they are likely to spend it on the wellbeing of the household overall."
This is backed up by findings from Helen Keller International's homestead food production programme which launched in Bangladesh in the early 1990s and has since expanded to Nepal, Cambodia and the Philippines. HKI works with local NGOs and extension workers to establish Village Model Farms (VMFs) in villages, which serve as training and support hubs for women to learn to manage their own homestead gardens.
"They identify a farmer, preferably female, who has adequate land for a model farm, and that farmer will get training and inputs," says Victoria Quinn, HKI's senior vice president of programmes."Other women then come there around once a month in groups of 20, and the village model farmer who has been trained will share their knowledge with those other mothers and provide them with seedlings so they can go and do it themselves."
In a study of its programmes between 2003-2007, HKI found that in Cambodia, 92% of households engaging in homestead food production spent the income earned from garden products on buying more food for the household. In Bangladesh, the figure was 70%. However, having more food – even a good variety – doesn't automatically translate into better nutritional outcomes on its own.
"You have to improve not just food production but practices too," says Quinn. "You have to provide access to healthcare and hygiene training, because if children are sick it will just come out the other end."Care found evidence for this through another project – Shouhardo – which bundled training in home gardens with support in maternal health, nutrition, immunisation and financial services to women. This package of interventions reduced the incidence of child stunting from 56.1% to 40.4% in less than four years.
"The gardens have an important role in dietary diversity, but you need a range of other things going with it," says Pelham. "You need to teach women and families about sanitation, health and Hands free access. Without that, the gardens are not a silver bullet."Meanwhile, climate change is also an increasingly pressing issue for women engaging in homestead gardening, just as in other forms of agriculture. Flooding in Bangladesh is becoming more unpredictable and severe, and the 2009 cyclone there increased soil salinity in more than a third of home gardens but also showed resilience in certain crops, according to Lalita Bhattacharjee, a nutritionist with the FAO in Bangladesh.
"These included Indian spinach, sweet pumpkin, and okra. Kang kong, or water spinach, also flourishes naturally in waterways and requires little care, making it resilient to the effects of climate change. There's a need for awareness and knowledge among those households who are reliant on home gardens for their food and income. Women farmers should be given training on key salinity coping practices such as mulching with rice straw to increase retention of water in the soil."
Home gardens have thrived in Bangladesh and other parts of Asia, and HKI is also actively promoting them in sub-Saharan Africa now. Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, is to convince more policymakers that what women grow in their gardens can actually make such a difference.
"I think a lot more work has to be done in advocating that this is a really important part of the solution to food insecurity and undernutrition in these countries," says Quinn.
"Fruits and vegetables and small animal husbandary gets short shrift in ministries of agriculture, so we need to promote the fact that you can produce a lot of highly nutritious crops this way that will help address the chronic problem of undernutrition."
Read the full products at www.ecived.com/en/!
2013年8月14日星期三
The need for speed
No matter who wins the election on September 7, Australia's telecommunications networks will receive a long-overdue multibillion-dollar facelift funded by the federal government.
Australia has never topped global broadband rankings for speed and value. The OCED ranks us 25th in the world for fibre connections in its latest communications outlook report and Australia still has more dial-up internet connections than any other country in the OECD, apart from New Zealand.
While policy wonks and politicians claim broadband remains one area where the major parties offer voters a real choice, there are more similarities than many realise.There are differences - real time Location system, construction efforts, and using the Telstra copper network - but not as many as Labor politicians have been claiming during this campaign.
For example, Communications Minister Anthony Albanese claims towns will be ''divided by broadband'' and that ''planned [broadband] construction … will be cancelled''. While NBN Co under a Coalition government might change fibre-to-the-home installations to fibre-to-the-node in years to come, the Coalition no longer plans to halt construction and sell off the network like it did in 2010.
Earlier this year the Liberal Party adopted the very un-Liberal policy of publicly funding a government-managed and operated broadband network. This is because it can't unscramble Labor's omelet, and partly because it recognised votes were lost in 2010 when its broadband policy seemed to lack vision and did nothing to improve broadband speeds.
''It certainly was one of the things that affected us, definitely,'' says one Coalition frontbencher. ''Tony's [Abbott's] 7.30 Report interview was pretty bad. And the press conference with Andrew Robb and [former opposition communications spokesman] Tony Smith where they unveiled our policy was a debacle.''
The new broadband policy ''makes the best of a bad situation'' and the ''vast majority'' of Coalition members support it, he adds.The opposition's current communications spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull, convinced Tony Abbott the party needed a better policy. It turns out that policy will cost $30 billion, but at least the party can argue against accusations of being troglodytes.
Turnbull says his plan can be delivered sooner and at less cost with ''everyone in the nation'' getting access to minimum speed of 25 megabits per second [Mbps] by 2016 and 100 Mbps to the majority by 2020.
Turnbull says he still believes the best model is private sector upgrades done with ''judicious levels of government subsidy to make sure uncommercial areas are dealt with''. However, he has to live with the facts on the ground and work out how to complete the network that has been started.
''The gap between the parties' [policies] would be regarded outside Australia as being relatively modest … what I have got to do … is completely depoliticise this thing,'' he says in an interview with Fairfax Media. ''Our job is to open all the books, rtls, lay it all out and say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, this is where we are. This is the business you own. This is the position you're in. Here are our options for sorting it out.'''
Turnbull's policy adopts Labor's plan to raise tens of billions of dollars through government bonds, which keeps the project off the budget, and spend that money building networks that are available to all service providers at the same prices. Both aim to separate Telstra so its retail operations cannot benefit from it also owning infrastructure and evenutally privatising NBN Co to recoup costs.
The Coalition's regional communications spokesman, Luke Hartsuyker, says both broadband policies are ''very very similar'' for the 7 per cent of Australia's population in regional areas that have been told to expect a fixed wireless or satellite connection.
''We will maximise the value of the assets that we inherit. We will not be junking the work that has been done on ideological grounds,'' he says.Albanese says the differences between Labor's NBN and the ''Coalition's lemon of an alternative couldn't be more stark''. He pointed to faster speeds, guaranteed upload speeds, free fibre installations and universal pricing.
''The Coalition's alternative relies on last century's copper, will be obsolete before it is finished, forces homes and businesses to pay as much as $5000 to connect directly to fibre, will result in regional Australians paying more for broadband than people living in the cities, and costs only 3 per cent less in terms of government investment than Labor's vastly superior NBN.''
There is certainty in Labor's policy that is missing in the Coalition's, partly because Turnbull wants to initiate three reviews if he becomes minister that could change his current rollout plans. Labor's NBN Co charges the same wholesale prices around the country, whereas the Coalition wants a regulated price cap that allows lower prices in viable areas. While Telstra's is settled under Labor's plan, the regulations surrounding NBN Co have stalled over concerns about cost and pricing into the future.
NBN Co has now grown to 1620 employees and spends about $1 billion a year in operating costs, including payments to Telstra. It had commitments worth $3.9 billion at the end of last financial year. The latest financial information has not been released by Albanese, even though guidelines for all government business enterprises, including Australia Post and Medibank Private, recommend corporate plans be submitted by July 31.
NBN Co has 33,000 households connected to its fibre, and 36,000 with fixed wireless or satellite connections, for a total of about 70,000. About 130,000 households have been ''passed'' by fibre, which means they can connect to the NBN, although apartment blocks remain a logistical nightmare. About 30 per cent of users are paying for the fastest speeds possible and downloading more than average households.
Fibre construction has started at 1.15 million more premises and Labor argues not all of these houses can be completed under the Coalition's plan, which expects just 2.8 million premises to be connected directly to fibre, including premises with degraded copper and 1.6 million future houses in new estates.
NBN Co announced in March it was three months behind schedule, but has not said if it expects to catch up by July 2014 when its target is to have 551,000 premises connected.Recently NBN Co has been criticised for contractors working with asbestos, claims of cost overruns and construction delays. Some of these issues are beyond NBN Co's control and not its responsibility - such as asbestos in Telstra's pits. The cost-overrun stories are based on unsourced industry figures claiming current contracts are too stingy and should be at least $5 billion more generous.
But there is genuine concern about the lack of skilled technicians available, exacerbated by government policies requiring NBN to install fibre in new housing estates. Estates are springing up around mines and regional towns, so NBN contractors are stretched across all states and working in remote places.
The lack of centralised training and registration in Australia's telecommunications industry that has led to under-skilled subcontractors working for Telstra and NBN Co and a high level of rework, according to Kevin Fothergill, training consultant at industry peak body CITT and TITAB.
''We have all the national training programs developed where competencies have been specified for all the various skill levels,'' he says. ''All the core material is in place. What is not in place is a viable telecommunications group training model and industry plan to have people trained and able to be deployed on a needs basis.''
It now appears the tenders for NBN construction work underpriced the cost of subcontractors. Most of the work has ended up in the hands of mega-companies such as Lend Lease, Downer EDI and Leightons that can afford to absorb losses or cross-subsidise from other projects.
This election, voters are being asked to choose between technology options and who they believe can better manage NBN Co, which is ultimately owned by the communications minister and the minister for finance.The obvious difference between the two policies is the choice between a direct-fibre connection into households or a fibre-boosted copper connection. Each choice comes with different construction costs and time frames. At the moment, voters can only rely on estimates produced by consultants and NBN Co, or the estimates produced by Turnbull's office.
Fibre into the home can already deliver download speeds of up to 100Mbps with upload speeds of up to 40Mbps and can be upgraded in the future. A fibre-to-the-node rollout by BT Group in the UK is advertising download speeds of up to 76Mbps and upload speeds of up to 17Mbps.
Senior research engineer at the Australian National University's College of Engineering and Computer Science, Bob Edwards, says speed is the main difference for consumers. He says there is little evidence that research labs around the world are working on applications that expect households to have speeds of 100Mbps or more.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Australia has never topped global broadband rankings for speed and value. The OCED ranks us 25th in the world for fibre connections in its latest communications outlook report and Australia still has more dial-up internet connections than any other country in the OECD, apart from New Zealand.
While policy wonks and politicians claim broadband remains one area where the major parties offer voters a real choice, there are more similarities than many realise.There are differences - real time Location system, construction efforts, and using the Telstra copper network - but not as many as Labor politicians have been claiming during this campaign.
For example, Communications Minister Anthony Albanese claims towns will be ''divided by broadband'' and that ''planned [broadband] construction … will be cancelled''. While NBN Co under a Coalition government might change fibre-to-the-home installations to fibre-to-the-node in years to come, the Coalition no longer plans to halt construction and sell off the network like it did in 2010.
Earlier this year the Liberal Party adopted the very un-Liberal policy of publicly funding a government-managed and operated broadband network. This is because it can't unscramble Labor's omelet, and partly because it recognised votes were lost in 2010 when its broadband policy seemed to lack vision and did nothing to improve broadband speeds.
''It certainly was one of the things that affected us, definitely,'' says one Coalition frontbencher. ''Tony's [Abbott's] 7.30 Report interview was pretty bad. And the press conference with Andrew Robb and [former opposition communications spokesman] Tony Smith where they unveiled our policy was a debacle.''
The new broadband policy ''makes the best of a bad situation'' and the ''vast majority'' of Coalition members support it, he adds.The opposition's current communications spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull, convinced Tony Abbott the party needed a better policy. It turns out that policy will cost $30 billion, but at least the party can argue against accusations of being troglodytes.
Turnbull says his plan can be delivered sooner and at less cost with ''everyone in the nation'' getting access to minimum speed of 25 megabits per second [Mbps] by 2016 and 100 Mbps to the majority by 2020.
Turnbull says he still believes the best model is private sector upgrades done with ''judicious levels of government subsidy to make sure uncommercial areas are dealt with''. However, he has to live with the facts on the ground and work out how to complete the network that has been started.
''The gap between the parties' [policies] would be regarded outside Australia as being relatively modest … what I have got to do … is completely depoliticise this thing,'' he says in an interview with Fairfax Media. ''Our job is to open all the books, rtls, lay it all out and say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, this is where we are. This is the business you own. This is the position you're in. Here are our options for sorting it out.'''
Turnbull's policy adopts Labor's plan to raise tens of billions of dollars through government bonds, which keeps the project off the budget, and spend that money building networks that are available to all service providers at the same prices. Both aim to separate Telstra so its retail operations cannot benefit from it also owning infrastructure and evenutally privatising NBN Co to recoup costs.
The Coalition's regional communications spokesman, Luke Hartsuyker, says both broadband policies are ''very very similar'' for the 7 per cent of Australia's population in regional areas that have been told to expect a fixed wireless or satellite connection.
''We will maximise the value of the assets that we inherit. We will not be junking the work that has been done on ideological grounds,'' he says.Albanese says the differences between Labor's NBN and the ''Coalition's lemon of an alternative couldn't be more stark''. He pointed to faster speeds, guaranteed upload speeds, free fibre installations and universal pricing.
''The Coalition's alternative relies on last century's copper, will be obsolete before it is finished, forces homes and businesses to pay as much as $5000 to connect directly to fibre, will result in regional Australians paying more for broadband than people living in the cities, and costs only 3 per cent less in terms of government investment than Labor's vastly superior NBN.''
There is certainty in Labor's policy that is missing in the Coalition's, partly because Turnbull wants to initiate three reviews if he becomes minister that could change his current rollout plans. Labor's NBN Co charges the same wholesale prices around the country, whereas the Coalition wants a regulated price cap that allows lower prices in viable areas. While Telstra's is settled under Labor's plan, the regulations surrounding NBN Co have stalled over concerns about cost and pricing into the future.
NBN Co has now grown to 1620 employees and spends about $1 billion a year in operating costs, including payments to Telstra. It had commitments worth $3.9 billion at the end of last financial year. The latest financial information has not been released by Albanese, even though guidelines for all government business enterprises, including Australia Post and Medibank Private, recommend corporate plans be submitted by July 31.
NBN Co has 33,000 households connected to its fibre, and 36,000 with fixed wireless or satellite connections, for a total of about 70,000. About 130,000 households have been ''passed'' by fibre, which means they can connect to the NBN, although apartment blocks remain a logistical nightmare. About 30 per cent of users are paying for the fastest speeds possible and downloading more than average households.
Fibre construction has started at 1.15 million more premises and Labor argues not all of these houses can be completed under the Coalition's plan, which expects just 2.8 million premises to be connected directly to fibre, including premises with degraded copper and 1.6 million future houses in new estates.
NBN Co announced in March it was three months behind schedule, but has not said if it expects to catch up by July 2014 when its target is to have 551,000 premises connected.Recently NBN Co has been criticised for contractors working with asbestos, claims of cost overruns and construction delays. Some of these issues are beyond NBN Co's control and not its responsibility - such as asbestos in Telstra's pits. The cost-overrun stories are based on unsourced industry figures claiming current contracts are too stingy and should be at least $5 billion more generous.
But there is genuine concern about the lack of skilled technicians available, exacerbated by government policies requiring NBN to install fibre in new housing estates. Estates are springing up around mines and regional towns, so NBN contractors are stretched across all states and working in remote places.
The lack of centralised training and registration in Australia's telecommunications industry that has led to under-skilled subcontractors working for Telstra and NBN Co and a high level of rework, according to Kevin Fothergill, training consultant at industry peak body CITT and TITAB.
''We have all the national training programs developed where competencies have been specified for all the various skill levels,'' he says. ''All the core material is in place. What is not in place is a viable telecommunications group training model and industry plan to have people trained and able to be deployed on a needs basis.''
It now appears the tenders for NBN construction work underpriced the cost of subcontractors. Most of the work has ended up in the hands of mega-companies such as Lend Lease, Downer EDI and Leightons that can afford to absorb losses or cross-subsidise from other projects.
This election, voters are being asked to choose between technology options and who they believe can better manage NBN Co, which is ultimately owned by the communications minister and the minister for finance.The obvious difference between the two policies is the choice between a direct-fibre connection into households or a fibre-boosted copper connection. Each choice comes with different construction costs and time frames. At the moment, voters can only rely on estimates produced by consultants and NBN Co, or the estimates produced by Turnbull's office.
Fibre into the home can already deliver download speeds of up to 100Mbps with upload speeds of up to 40Mbps and can be upgraded in the future. A fibre-to-the-node rollout by BT Group in the UK is advertising download speeds of up to 76Mbps and upload speeds of up to 17Mbps.
Senior research engineer at the Australian National University's College of Engineering and Computer Science, Bob Edwards, says speed is the main difference for consumers. He says there is little evidence that research labs around the world are working on applications that expect households to have speeds of 100Mbps or more.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
'Asian immigrant' comment not meant
My comment about Usman Khawaja, on the last day of the fourth Test at Riverside, seems to have stirred a storm: “He (Khawaja) could well be replaced in the Oval Test by Phil Hughes and Australia's experiment with their Asian immigrant population will be shelved.”
For those who think this is a racist comment and have taken umbrage at it, I warmly applaud both the sentiments and the strength of those feelings.If I may explain, however, it is an observation I made without any intent to disparage Khawaja, but as an attempt to portray the unique position in which he finds himself as the first Muslim to represent Australia – and, broadly speaking, the first non-white since Sam Morris in the nineteenth century.
The main Asian cricketers of recent times to have represented England are Monty Panesar, Samit Patel and Ravi Bopara.From what I have seen, they have been marginal players in the Test and limited-overs teams. Furthermore, I found it strange and indoor Tracking that Panesar and Patel came to be seen as figures of fun, while Bopara was involved in controversy during the Champions Trophy after simply fulfilling his role within the England team.
In the same way, Khawaja has appeared to me to be a marginal figure in the Australian team, from what I saw on his Test debut against England in Sydney, and the tour match against Somerset, and in this Test series to date.In his revealing book about Australian domestic cricket, Ed Cowan wrote of Khawaja: “He has become a master of controlling his emotions … This rare quality will hold him in great stead for an undoubtedly stellar Test career.”
But the star has not reached anything like the ascendancy: Khawaja played six Tests in 2011 and has been a reserve batsman since.
Establishing himself as a Test batsman has been difficult. Khawaja has spoken of how often he gets stopped by security at Australian airports, simply for being non-white; and, ironically, he is a qualified pilot himself as well as a well-known cricketer.
In the field he is not an automatic pick. Hughes keeps the position of third slip, even though he does not hang on to every chance there, and is therefore close to the Clarke-Haddin heartbeat of the team; Cowan has made himself useful at short-leg. But Khawaja drifts around on the fringes.
Hence the value of Cowan's insight about Khawaja controlling his emotions. Can he become a regular Test batsman without feeling free to express more of his emotions? Or will he only be known as the first Muslim to break down a barrier, and it will be a future member of Australia's Asian community who becomes their first established cricketer?”
Khawaja has not seemed entirely at ease and at home. Darren Lehmann did not exonerate him from Australia's collapse in their second innings at Durham, as he exonerated David Warner and Chris Rogers.
It looks as though Khawaja might be dropped from the Oval Test, as he is now averaging 25 after nine Tests.If he is dropped, he will be no more than the prototype – and I think that is a waste of Hands free access. If he had not been dropped so soon after his innings of 65 in the Johannesburg Test that enabled Australia to beat South Africa in a fine run-chase; if he had been given a consistent run at number four, rather than at numbers six and three; if he had felt more at home … who knows?
Personally I think if he had appeared 10 years on from now, from what I have seen of his qualities, he might have become Australia's first Asian captain.This is my position on Khawaja. To clarify further my attitude to racial integration in cricket, please read on.Five years ago, as editor of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, I was able to start a competition called the Wisden City Cup.
Angus Fraser, as director of cricket at Middlesex, kindly co-founded it. He had joined Middlesex in the 1980s when the county had five Afro-Caribbean cricketers, and it was the most successful decade in their history, but at the time we started the WCC, Owais Shah was Middlesex's only non-white player.
After four years I managed to extend the WCC to Leicester, Luton and London South/Surrey. It is a competition for inner-city cricketers, aged 16 to 22, who do not play in premier or major leagues and who do not have access to decent grounds and pitches.
We did not take any details of the racial background of these players. But of the more than 200 players who participated last year, my impression was that at least two-thirds were of south Asian origin.Before the start of this season, knowing that my hands would be full this summer with the Ashes, and wishing to expand to eight cities, I asked the ECB to take on this competition, and they have generously done so.
It has now evolved into the Lord's Taverners City Cup in association with the ECB, MCC and Wisden. Our two original administrators, Phil Knappett and Sadhna Patel, are working under the auspices of the ECB's head of non-first-class cricket, Paul Bedford, while I take a back seat.
The involvement of MCC is crucial because, for the last two years, they have taken the most promising player in our competition and given him a contract as a MCC Young Cricketer.Diyapan Paul is believed to be the first British Bangladeshi to get a full-time contract as a cricketer in this country.
He proved so good that his contract was renewed for a second season, but injury has made him defer it until next year. In the meantime Zain Shahzad is reported to have been the MCC Young Cricketer's best bowler this season.So now we have the first national inter-city competition for inner-city cricketers there has ever been in this country.
Quarter-finals are coming to somewhere that may be near you: Manchester v Bradford at Burnley CC, Birmingham v Wolverhampton at Walsall CC, Luton v Leicester at Wardown Park, and London North/Middlesex v London South/Surrey at Spencer's CC.
It has been immensely gratifying to see inner-city players appreciating the opportunity to play on decent pitches, having grown up playing on council-owned park pitches where a bouncer is likely to shoot along the ground. It cost me a lot of time and money – and it was very worthwhile.
Australia's Asian population is now said to be 10 per cent of the total. Although I have not examined their system closely, I would have thought from this distance that more could have been done to help and encourage them.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
For those who think this is a racist comment and have taken umbrage at it, I warmly applaud both the sentiments and the strength of those feelings.If I may explain, however, it is an observation I made without any intent to disparage Khawaja, but as an attempt to portray the unique position in which he finds himself as the first Muslim to represent Australia – and, broadly speaking, the first non-white since Sam Morris in the nineteenth century.
The main Asian cricketers of recent times to have represented England are Monty Panesar, Samit Patel and Ravi Bopara.From what I have seen, they have been marginal players in the Test and limited-overs teams. Furthermore, I found it strange and indoor Tracking that Panesar and Patel came to be seen as figures of fun, while Bopara was involved in controversy during the Champions Trophy after simply fulfilling his role within the England team.
In the same way, Khawaja has appeared to me to be a marginal figure in the Australian team, from what I saw on his Test debut against England in Sydney, and the tour match against Somerset, and in this Test series to date.In his revealing book about Australian domestic cricket, Ed Cowan wrote of Khawaja: “He has become a master of controlling his emotions … This rare quality will hold him in great stead for an undoubtedly stellar Test career.”
But the star has not reached anything like the ascendancy: Khawaja played six Tests in 2011 and has been a reserve batsman since.
Establishing himself as a Test batsman has been difficult. Khawaja has spoken of how often he gets stopped by security at Australian airports, simply for being non-white; and, ironically, he is a qualified pilot himself as well as a well-known cricketer.
In the field he is not an automatic pick. Hughes keeps the position of third slip, even though he does not hang on to every chance there, and is therefore close to the Clarke-Haddin heartbeat of the team; Cowan has made himself useful at short-leg. But Khawaja drifts around on the fringes.
Hence the value of Cowan's insight about Khawaja controlling his emotions. Can he become a regular Test batsman without feeling free to express more of his emotions? Or will he only be known as the first Muslim to break down a barrier, and it will be a future member of Australia's Asian community who becomes their first established cricketer?”
Khawaja has not seemed entirely at ease and at home. Darren Lehmann did not exonerate him from Australia's collapse in their second innings at Durham, as he exonerated David Warner and Chris Rogers.
It looks as though Khawaja might be dropped from the Oval Test, as he is now averaging 25 after nine Tests.If he is dropped, he will be no more than the prototype – and I think that is a waste of Hands free access. If he had not been dropped so soon after his innings of 65 in the Johannesburg Test that enabled Australia to beat South Africa in a fine run-chase; if he had been given a consistent run at number four, rather than at numbers six and three; if he had felt more at home … who knows?
Personally I think if he had appeared 10 years on from now, from what I have seen of his qualities, he might have become Australia's first Asian captain.This is my position on Khawaja. To clarify further my attitude to racial integration in cricket, please read on.Five years ago, as editor of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, I was able to start a competition called the Wisden City Cup.
Angus Fraser, as director of cricket at Middlesex, kindly co-founded it. He had joined Middlesex in the 1980s when the county had five Afro-Caribbean cricketers, and it was the most successful decade in their history, but at the time we started the WCC, Owais Shah was Middlesex's only non-white player.
After four years I managed to extend the WCC to Leicester, Luton and London South/Surrey. It is a competition for inner-city cricketers, aged 16 to 22, who do not play in premier or major leagues and who do not have access to decent grounds and pitches.
We did not take any details of the racial background of these players. But of the more than 200 players who participated last year, my impression was that at least two-thirds were of south Asian origin.Before the start of this season, knowing that my hands would be full this summer with the Ashes, and wishing to expand to eight cities, I asked the ECB to take on this competition, and they have generously done so.
It has now evolved into the Lord's Taverners City Cup in association with the ECB, MCC and Wisden. Our two original administrators, Phil Knappett and Sadhna Patel, are working under the auspices of the ECB's head of non-first-class cricket, Paul Bedford, while I take a back seat.
The involvement of MCC is crucial because, for the last two years, they have taken the most promising player in our competition and given him a contract as a MCC Young Cricketer.Diyapan Paul is believed to be the first British Bangladeshi to get a full-time contract as a cricketer in this country.
He proved so good that his contract was renewed for a second season, but injury has made him defer it until next year. In the meantime Zain Shahzad is reported to have been the MCC Young Cricketer's best bowler this season.So now we have the first national inter-city competition for inner-city cricketers there has ever been in this country.
Quarter-finals are coming to somewhere that may be near you: Manchester v Bradford at Burnley CC, Birmingham v Wolverhampton at Walsall CC, Luton v Leicester at Wardown Park, and London North/Middlesex v London South/Surrey at Spencer's CC.
It has been immensely gratifying to see inner-city players appreciating the opportunity to play on decent pitches, having grown up playing on council-owned park pitches where a bouncer is likely to shoot along the ground. It cost me a lot of time and money – and it was very worthwhile.
Australia's Asian population is now said to be 10 per cent of the total. Although I have not examined their system closely, I would have thought from this distance that more could have been done to help and encourage them.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
2013年8月12日星期一
Hidden iPad features that could improve your life
Some features on the iPad are straight forward – a touch screen is, after all, designed to be easy to use.More adventurous users have, however, discovered some hidden features that are perhaps not so obvious and have shared them.
Here we provide give you a quick tour of the best hidden features of the iPad and show just what it can do.Buried under general settings is an innocuous little switch that turns on multitasking gestures. This allows you to use several fingers at once to control the iPad.Pinching four or five fingers across the screen will return you to the Home Screen of the iPad from any App.Swiping four or five figures upwards will reveal the multitasking bar, showing which Apps are currently running. Swiping down again will hide it.
Swipe those digits to the left or right will allow you to change Apps at flicking speed. This feature sits in the accessibility folder under general settings. when turned on, double tap on the screen with three fingers to zoom into a spot.To navigate around while indoor Tracking, drag three fingers around the screen.And if things still are not magnified enough, then double tap again while zoomed in with three fingers before dragging them up or down. This will zoom you right in and out of the action.
A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO I walked into a bookshop in a shopping mall in central Istanbul. As I browsed the shelves I was unaware that the day marked the 110th anniversary of the birth of George Orwell. Though Orwell is one of my favorite English authors, my mind was occupied by quite a different fact — namely, that since buying a tablet computer in December last year, the amount of money I have spent on printed books has decreased dramatically. With this decrease followed a decrease in the pleasure I took from purchasing them. In the good, old, and expensive days of literary shopping I would choose books from the shelves, walk to the counter, pay in cash, and head to a coffee shop with my purchases — the favorite ritual of my teenage years. I would open the first book’s cover, accompanied by a cigarette and a cup of strong Turkish coffee. These would always be very physical experiences: I remember the crinkling pages, the waft of the smoke, the oils of the coffee. Afterward my hands smelled of nicotine; my mind hungered for more books.
Lately, however, this ritual has all but disappeared from my life. My reading materials have been thoroughly digitized. I have lost touch with both the printed book and the banknote. In the long chronicle of my reading habits I am currently living through the age of the .EPUB file and the plastic card. It is a chilly period, I must admit, a dark age, and at times it makes me yearn for the good old days of my undergraduate life. In those not-so-distant days I didn’t need to calculate or economize. I didn’t have to pay the rent; as for my insurance premiums, they were taken care of by my parents. Thanks to them I could spend all my money on books and cigarettes, giving little thought to the price I paid for them.
Next month, Manitoba's courts will initiate a formal policy regarding courtroom use of electronic devices. Tweeting and blogging from all levels of Manitoba courts by official media and lawyers will be expressly permitted as of Sept. 1. The general public, however, must either turn off, or disable transmission from, smartphones and tablet computers in court.
Who can transmit what from the courtroom in the age of social media is a vexed issue. The new policy tries to strike a balance between the public's right to know and ensuring witnesses and parties in hearings and trials are treated fairly.
The policy doesn't completely foreclose members of the public from tweeting or blogging. Anyone can request permission from the judge to use an electronic device. Overall, the policy is commendably flexible. It also gives the judge the discretion to allow, or prohibit, use of an electronic device by anyone - media, lawyers or public - where he or she thinks it appropriate.
Twitter works well as a bulletin service. In the hands of accredited journalists, it provides play-by-play of rtls. However, tweets from members of the public often stray from unfiltered coverage of proceedings.
Particularly pernicious are tweets that comment on a witness's or accused's physical appearance or clothing. Equally prejudicial are tweets that veer into speculation about a witness's veracity, based on his or her demeanour on the stand. But most problematic of all are tweets that venture into opinion. Saying something apt and perceptive about a trial can rarely be done in Twitter's maximum 140-characters format. Saying something stupid or wrong, however, takes few words.
An inaccurate or unfair tweet can do a lot of damage. Once launched into cyberspace, it's out there for good. Corrections, or even counter-tweets, can be posted, but by then often the harm's been done and the message can be re-posted in blogs, Internet chat rooms and other social media.
Witnesses can view these prejudicial postings, and it can influence their testimony in court. Worse yet, jurors with smartphones or tablet computers are liable to access inadmissible evidence or irrelevant reports. Cases are supposed to be decided on the basis of evidence heard within the four walls of the courtroom, not missives from cyberspace.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Here we provide give you a quick tour of the best hidden features of the iPad and show just what it can do.Buried under general settings is an innocuous little switch that turns on multitasking gestures. This allows you to use several fingers at once to control the iPad.Pinching four or five fingers across the screen will return you to the Home Screen of the iPad from any App.Swiping four or five figures upwards will reveal the multitasking bar, showing which Apps are currently running. Swiping down again will hide it.
Swipe those digits to the left or right will allow you to change Apps at flicking speed. This feature sits in the accessibility folder under general settings. when turned on, double tap on the screen with three fingers to zoom into a spot.To navigate around while indoor Tracking, drag three fingers around the screen.And if things still are not magnified enough, then double tap again while zoomed in with three fingers before dragging them up or down. This will zoom you right in and out of the action.
A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO I walked into a bookshop in a shopping mall in central Istanbul. As I browsed the shelves I was unaware that the day marked the 110th anniversary of the birth of George Orwell. Though Orwell is one of my favorite English authors, my mind was occupied by quite a different fact — namely, that since buying a tablet computer in December last year, the amount of money I have spent on printed books has decreased dramatically. With this decrease followed a decrease in the pleasure I took from purchasing them. In the good, old, and expensive days of literary shopping I would choose books from the shelves, walk to the counter, pay in cash, and head to a coffee shop with my purchases — the favorite ritual of my teenage years. I would open the first book’s cover, accompanied by a cigarette and a cup of strong Turkish coffee. These would always be very physical experiences: I remember the crinkling pages, the waft of the smoke, the oils of the coffee. Afterward my hands smelled of nicotine; my mind hungered for more books.
Lately, however, this ritual has all but disappeared from my life. My reading materials have been thoroughly digitized. I have lost touch with both the printed book and the banknote. In the long chronicle of my reading habits I am currently living through the age of the .EPUB file and the plastic card. It is a chilly period, I must admit, a dark age, and at times it makes me yearn for the good old days of my undergraduate life. In those not-so-distant days I didn’t need to calculate or economize. I didn’t have to pay the rent; as for my insurance premiums, they were taken care of by my parents. Thanks to them I could spend all my money on books and cigarettes, giving little thought to the price I paid for them.
Next month, Manitoba's courts will initiate a formal policy regarding courtroom use of electronic devices. Tweeting and blogging from all levels of Manitoba courts by official media and lawyers will be expressly permitted as of Sept. 1. The general public, however, must either turn off, or disable transmission from, smartphones and tablet computers in court.
Who can transmit what from the courtroom in the age of social media is a vexed issue. The new policy tries to strike a balance between the public's right to know and ensuring witnesses and parties in hearings and trials are treated fairly.
The policy doesn't completely foreclose members of the public from tweeting or blogging. Anyone can request permission from the judge to use an electronic device. Overall, the policy is commendably flexible. It also gives the judge the discretion to allow, or prohibit, use of an electronic device by anyone - media, lawyers or public - where he or she thinks it appropriate.
Twitter works well as a bulletin service. In the hands of accredited journalists, it provides play-by-play of rtls. However, tweets from members of the public often stray from unfiltered coverage of proceedings.
Particularly pernicious are tweets that comment on a witness's or accused's physical appearance or clothing. Equally prejudicial are tweets that veer into speculation about a witness's veracity, based on his or her demeanour on the stand. But most problematic of all are tweets that venture into opinion. Saying something apt and perceptive about a trial can rarely be done in Twitter's maximum 140-characters format. Saying something stupid or wrong, however, takes few words.
An inaccurate or unfair tweet can do a lot of damage. Once launched into cyberspace, it's out there for good. Corrections, or even counter-tweets, can be posted, but by then often the harm's been done and the message can be re-posted in blogs, Internet chat rooms and other social media.
Witnesses can view these prejudicial postings, and it can influence their testimony in court. Worse yet, jurors with smartphones or tablet computers are liable to access inadmissible evidence or irrelevant reports. Cases are supposed to be decided on the basis of evidence heard within the four walls of the courtroom, not missives from cyberspace.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
DIY biohackers play with bacteria
You don't need a professional-grade lab or a science degree to mess around with microorganisms. A small group of New York-based biotechnology enthusiasts have created their own community biology lab called Genspace, and it's a place where anyone who's even remotely interested in life sciences can go and get their feet wet with biotechnology.
DIY biologists mainly work from home on their own little cultured experiments. For the most part, this underground biohacking scene regularly communicates through the Web on the DIYbio forums to ask for advice and equipment, as well as to set up in-person meetups. But a growing number of biohacking spaces, such as Genspace and Biocurious in the San Francisco Bay Area, give biohackers proper laboratories to work on their projects.
Genspace, located on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, is the first and only community biolab in New York City. The lab is on the 7th floor of an old bank building: Once you step off the Hands free access, turn left, and you’ll stumble into a scene that looks like your middle school's science department, except it’s all grown up.
The main work room is a little grungy, between the mess of works-in-progress spread all over the table, the painted brick walls, and the exposed pipes hanging overhead. Beyond this room, however, is a small lab that’s a completely different scene.
Step into the lab, and the whole place seems brighter and cleaner—and more sterile. Boxes of gloves are scattered about. A lab coat hangs on a stool. Test tubes and other pieces of lab equipment litter the stainless steel countertops. A stack of petri dishes fester with microscopic life that comes in every color of the rainbow from violet to red.
Meanwhile, the scent of chicken broth hangs in the air—it's just about the closest I can come to describing the smell and appearance of warm bacteria-culturing medium. The whole place just screams, "hey, I'm a lab."
The organization's official mission is to promote citizen science and to make biotechnology more readily accessible to the masses. Since it first opened in 2010, Genspace has invited science enthusiasts from all sorts of different professions to play in its biotech wonderland.
Some of Genspace's members and supporters are biologists as you might expect, while others are writers, artists, roboticists, and computer programmers. Regardless of the background they hail from, contributors of all stripes are welcome here.
“Now we have artists [as members] too who are asking, what can we do with [biotech]? What can we design with it? How can we use this as a new palate?" Genspace Co-founder and Vice President Daniel Grushkin told TechHive. "[This is] in addition to people who are trying to innovate with it in terms of coming up with new medicine and coming up with new devices that will test water to make sure it’s pure. Then you have other people who want to make a painting out of it.”
What drives someone to biohack? Curiosity. Many of those I met at Genspace just heard about the place, and on a free night decided to stop by to see what DIY biology is all about. For some, it’s just one night of rtls, but for others, it sticks with them—sort of like a virus—and snowballs into a full-on hobby.
Andres Bastian, a 3D printer mechanics expert at MakerBot, says he was “interested in biological engineering for a long time," and that the relative maturity of biohacking was a big draw for him.
"The biological toolset has been something that’s been optimized and honed for a long time. It’s one of the most efficient toolsets, [and it] seems like it can be applied to anything from energy medicine for treating diseases,” Bastian said.
“I was like, I want to bioengineer a living organism into something cool and novel," Grushkin recalled. "I was watching these undergrads and literally they have [only] a summer to figure out their project and finish it, and they’re basically building an entire bug. If a group of undergrads can do it why can't I? So the reason I got involved is because I wanted to know how to do that.”
Smitten, Grushkin took to the online biohacking forums and met others interested in the topic. Soon after, he met with a group from the DIYbio forums at his Park Slope home.
The group started with small experiments like extracting DNA from strawberries, and moved on to more advanced projects from there. Eventually, it graduated to creating its first genetic transformation by injecting a membrane with green fluorescent protein (GFP) into E. coli to make it glow in the dark.
“[It] was kind of cool and actually controversial because it was the first time someone had done genetic engineering outside of your standard lab,” said Grushkin. The group officially incorporated as Genspace in 2009, and held its initial meetings at NYC Resistor. Genspace officially opened its own space in December 2010.
DIY biologists mainly work from home on their own little cultured experiments. For the most part, this underground biohacking scene regularly communicates through the Web on the DIYbio forums to ask for advice and equipment, as well as to set up in-person meetups. But a growing number of biohacking spaces, such as Genspace and Biocurious in the San Francisco Bay Area, give biohackers proper laboratories to work on their projects.
Genspace, located on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, is the first and only community biolab in New York City. The lab is on the 7th floor of an old bank building: Once you step off the Hands free access, turn left, and you’ll stumble into a scene that looks like your middle school's science department, except it’s all grown up.
The main work room is a little grungy, between the mess of works-in-progress spread all over the table, the painted brick walls, and the exposed pipes hanging overhead. Beyond this room, however, is a small lab that’s a completely different scene.
Step into the lab, and the whole place seems brighter and cleaner—and more sterile. Boxes of gloves are scattered about. A lab coat hangs on a stool. Test tubes and other pieces of lab equipment litter the stainless steel countertops. A stack of petri dishes fester with microscopic life that comes in every color of the rainbow from violet to red.
Meanwhile, the scent of chicken broth hangs in the air—it's just about the closest I can come to describing the smell and appearance of warm bacteria-culturing medium. The whole place just screams, "hey, I'm a lab."
The organization's official mission is to promote citizen science and to make biotechnology more readily accessible to the masses. Since it first opened in 2010, Genspace has invited science enthusiasts from all sorts of different professions to play in its biotech wonderland.
Some of Genspace's members and supporters are biologists as you might expect, while others are writers, artists, roboticists, and computer programmers. Regardless of the background they hail from, contributors of all stripes are welcome here.
“Now we have artists [as members] too who are asking, what can we do with [biotech]? What can we design with it? How can we use this as a new palate?" Genspace Co-founder and Vice President Daniel Grushkin told TechHive. "[This is] in addition to people who are trying to innovate with it in terms of coming up with new medicine and coming up with new devices that will test water to make sure it’s pure. Then you have other people who want to make a painting out of it.”
What drives someone to biohack? Curiosity. Many of those I met at Genspace just heard about the place, and on a free night decided to stop by to see what DIY biology is all about. For some, it’s just one night of rtls, but for others, it sticks with them—sort of like a virus—and snowballs into a full-on hobby.
Andres Bastian, a 3D printer mechanics expert at MakerBot, says he was “interested in biological engineering for a long time," and that the relative maturity of biohacking was a big draw for him.
"The biological toolset has been something that’s been optimized and honed for a long time. It’s one of the most efficient toolsets, [and it] seems like it can be applied to anything from energy medicine for treating diseases,” Bastian said.
“I was like, I want to bioengineer a living organism into something cool and novel," Grushkin recalled. "I was watching these undergrads and literally they have [only] a summer to figure out their project and finish it, and they’re basically building an entire bug. If a group of undergrads can do it why can't I? So the reason I got involved is because I wanted to know how to do that.”
Smitten, Grushkin took to the online biohacking forums and met others interested in the topic. Soon after, he met with a group from the DIYbio forums at his Park Slope home.
The group started with small experiments like extracting DNA from strawberries, and moved on to more advanced projects from there. Eventually, it graduated to creating its first genetic transformation by injecting a membrane with green fluorescent protein (GFP) into E. coli to make it glow in the dark.
“[It] was kind of cool and actually controversial because it was the first time someone had done genetic engineering outside of your standard lab,” said Grushkin. The group officially incorporated as Genspace in 2009, and held its initial meetings at NYC Resistor. Genspace officially opened its own space in December 2010.
2013年8月7日星期三
Closing Fannie and Freddie
They could not have picked a more fitting location than Phoenix, Arizona, for President Obama to announce on Tuesday his plans for revitalizing the housing market, which has risen out of its ashes like the mythical bird of legend.
“This was part of ground zero for the housing bubble bursting.” The president recalled Phoenix’s plight as one of the worst hit markets during the housing crisis.Owing to that crisis, home owners all across America have endured a long and steady 5.5-year erosion of property values from their peak in July 2006 to their bottom in January 2012, according to the Case–Shiller home price index of the 20 largest American cities.
Finally, for some 18 months now, property values have been on the mend. “Today, our housing market is beginning to heal,” the president encouraged. Yet he acknowledged there is still more that needs to be done. “We've got to build on this progress. We're not where we need to be.”Home ownership at 65% is the lowest it has been since 1997, with rapidly rising interest rates prohibiting many from buying.
Hence, Obama’s plans are for mortgage reform, aimed at making sure the housing recovery does not stall. But is this really going to help?Perhaps the greatest single reform measure Obama has been advocating is the “winding-down” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises whose purpose is to buy mortgages from banks and other Hands free access, package them together into funds or securities, and sell them on the open market to investors. This takes mortgages off the hands of banks and lenders, freeing their capital so that they may keep offering mortgages to more and more home-buyers.
With some $12 trillion worth of mortgages owned or backed by the two enterprises before the housing crisis, they were considered too big to fail, encouraging them into riskier and riskier practices as they approved mortgages to buyers who could not afford them. When the housing market collapsed in 2008, the “implied” government backing of Fannie’s and Freddie’s securities cost taxpayers dearly, estimated at over $187 billion.
Now Obama wants them out of the picture, with mortgages insured and guaranteed by private investors, not public taxpayers. “Private capital should take a bigger role in the mortgage market,” the president stressed. “I know that sounds confusing to folks who call me a socialist,” he quickly jabbed, seeing as it was a fellow Democrat – President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – who initiated the structure during the Great Depression of the 1930s to help home owners keep their homes.
While both parties agree with the concept, experts are cautioning against moving too quickly, as it could send shocks through the mortgage market.“The leading ideas would reduce the government involvement in housing finance,” Jaret Seiberg, a senior policy analyst at Guggenheim Securities, explains to Reuters. And removing the government’s backing “would mean higher rates for consumers,” he warns.
The president’s other reforms outlined in Tuesday’s speech seem to already be anticipating those higher costs facing borrowers as the government slowly slides itself out of the picture. After all, if the private market is going to shoulder more of the risk, it’s going to demand more compensation, which could hurt home buyers through higher rates and fees.
For this reason, Obama called on lawmakers to help home buyers by preserving access to the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and to help existing owners refinance at today’s lower rates by waiving closing costs. And for those who cannot afford homeownership, the president called for supporting low rental housing to help fight homelessness.
Obama also wants Congress to authorize the revitalization of the most depressed, run-down neighborhoods around the nation, tearing down abandoned structures and building up vacant lots. Not only would these projects improve property values in those hardest hit areas, but they would also create jobs for thousands of unemployed.
If some questioned Obama’s ideological leaning with his rejection of Fannie and Freddie in favor of placing the mortgage business more squarely on private investors’ shoulders, all of these other reforms from low-rate refinancing to slum rehabilitation should dispel any notion that he has forgotten which party he leads.
The president’s other reforms outlined in Tuesday’s speech seem to already be anticipating those higher costs facing borrowers as the government slowly slides itself out of the picture. After all, if the private market is going to shoulder more of the risk, it’s going to demand more compensation, which could hurt home buyers through higher rates and Indoor Positioning System.
For this reason, Obama called on lawmakers to help home buyers by preserving access to the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and to help existing owners refinance at today’s lower rates by waiving closing costs. And for those who cannot afford homeownership, the president called for supporting low rental housing to help fight homelessness.
Obama also wants Congress to authorize the revitalization of the most depressed, run-down neighborhoods around the nation, tearing down abandoned structures and building up vacant lots. Not only would these projects improve property values in those hardest hit areas, but they would also create jobs for thousands of unemployed.
If some questioned Obama’s ideological leaning with his rejection of Fannie and Freddie in favor of placing the mortgage business more squarely on private investors’ shoulders, all of these other reforms from low-rate refinancing to slum rehabilitation should dispel any notion that he has forgotten which party he leads.
The president’s other reforms outlined in Tuesday’s speech seem to already be anticipating those higher costs facing borrowers as the government slowly slides itself out of the picture. After all, if the private market is going to shoulder more of the risk, it’s going to demand more compensation, which could hurt home buyers through higher rates and fees.
For this reason, Obama called on lawmakers to help home buyers by preserving access to the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and to help existing owners refinance at today’s lower rates by waiving closing costs. And for those who cannot afford homeownership, the president called for supporting low rental housing to help fight homelessness.
Obama also wants Congress to authorize the revitalization of the most depressed, run-down neighborhoods around the nation, tearing down abandoned structures and building up vacant lots. Not only would these projects improve property values in those hardest hit areas, but they would also create jobs for thousands of unemployed.
If some questioned Obama’s ideological leaning with his rejection of Fannie and Freddie in favor of placing the mortgage business more squarely on private investors’ shoulders, all of these other reforms from low-rate refinancing to slum rehabilitation should dispel any notion that he has forgotten which party he leads.
Read the full products at www.ecived.com/en/.
“This was part of ground zero for the housing bubble bursting.” The president recalled Phoenix’s plight as one of the worst hit markets during the housing crisis.Owing to that crisis, home owners all across America have endured a long and steady 5.5-year erosion of property values from their peak in July 2006 to their bottom in January 2012, according to the Case–Shiller home price index of the 20 largest American cities.
Finally, for some 18 months now, property values have been on the mend. “Today, our housing market is beginning to heal,” the president encouraged. Yet he acknowledged there is still more that needs to be done. “We've got to build on this progress. We're not where we need to be.”Home ownership at 65% is the lowest it has been since 1997, with rapidly rising interest rates prohibiting many from buying.
Hence, Obama’s plans are for mortgage reform, aimed at making sure the housing recovery does not stall. But is this really going to help?Perhaps the greatest single reform measure Obama has been advocating is the “winding-down” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises whose purpose is to buy mortgages from banks and other Hands free access, package them together into funds or securities, and sell them on the open market to investors. This takes mortgages off the hands of banks and lenders, freeing their capital so that they may keep offering mortgages to more and more home-buyers.
With some $12 trillion worth of mortgages owned or backed by the two enterprises before the housing crisis, they were considered too big to fail, encouraging them into riskier and riskier practices as they approved mortgages to buyers who could not afford them. When the housing market collapsed in 2008, the “implied” government backing of Fannie’s and Freddie’s securities cost taxpayers dearly, estimated at over $187 billion.
Now Obama wants them out of the picture, with mortgages insured and guaranteed by private investors, not public taxpayers. “Private capital should take a bigger role in the mortgage market,” the president stressed. “I know that sounds confusing to folks who call me a socialist,” he quickly jabbed, seeing as it was a fellow Democrat – President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – who initiated the structure during the Great Depression of the 1930s to help home owners keep their homes.
While both parties agree with the concept, experts are cautioning against moving too quickly, as it could send shocks through the mortgage market.“The leading ideas would reduce the government involvement in housing finance,” Jaret Seiberg, a senior policy analyst at Guggenheim Securities, explains to Reuters. And removing the government’s backing “would mean higher rates for consumers,” he warns.
The president’s other reforms outlined in Tuesday’s speech seem to already be anticipating those higher costs facing borrowers as the government slowly slides itself out of the picture. After all, if the private market is going to shoulder more of the risk, it’s going to demand more compensation, which could hurt home buyers through higher rates and fees.
For this reason, Obama called on lawmakers to help home buyers by preserving access to the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and to help existing owners refinance at today’s lower rates by waiving closing costs. And for those who cannot afford homeownership, the president called for supporting low rental housing to help fight homelessness.
Obama also wants Congress to authorize the revitalization of the most depressed, run-down neighborhoods around the nation, tearing down abandoned structures and building up vacant lots. Not only would these projects improve property values in those hardest hit areas, but they would also create jobs for thousands of unemployed.
If some questioned Obama’s ideological leaning with his rejection of Fannie and Freddie in favor of placing the mortgage business more squarely on private investors’ shoulders, all of these other reforms from low-rate refinancing to slum rehabilitation should dispel any notion that he has forgotten which party he leads.
The president’s other reforms outlined in Tuesday’s speech seem to already be anticipating those higher costs facing borrowers as the government slowly slides itself out of the picture. After all, if the private market is going to shoulder more of the risk, it’s going to demand more compensation, which could hurt home buyers through higher rates and Indoor Positioning System.
For this reason, Obama called on lawmakers to help home buyers by preserving access to the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and to help existing owners refinance at today’s lower rates by waiving closing costs. And for those who cannot afford homeownership, the president called for supporting low rental housing to help fight homelessness.
Obama also wants Congress to authorize the revitalization of the most depressed, run-down neighborhoods around the nation, tearing down abandoned structures and building up vacant lots. Not only would these projects improve property values in those hardest hit areas, but they would also create jobs for thousands of unemployed.
If some questioned Obama’s ideological leaning with his rejection of Fannie and Freddie in favor of placing the mortgage business more squarely on private investors’ shoulders, all of these other reforms from low-rate refinancing to slum rehabilitation should dispel any notion that he has forgotten which party he leads.
The president’s other reforms outlined in Tuesday’s speech seem to already be anticipating those higher costs facing borrowers as the government slowly slides itself out of the picture. After all, if the private market is going to shoulder more of the risk, it’s going to demand more compensation, which could hurt home buyers through higher rates and fees.
For this reason, Obama called on lawmakers to help home buyers by preserving access to the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and to help existing owners refinance at today’s lower rates by waiving closing costs. And for those who cannot afford homeownership, the president called for supporting low rental housing to help fight homelessness.
Obama also wants Congress to authorize the revitalization of the most depressed, run-down neighborhoods around the nation, tearing down abandoned structures and building up vacant lots. Not only would these projects improve property values in those hardest hit areas, but they would also create jobs for thousands of unemployed.
If some questioned Obama’s ideological leaning with his rejection of Fannie and Freddie in favor of placing the mortgage business more squarely on private investors’ shoulders, all of these other reforms from low-rate refinancing to slum rehabilitation should dispel any notion that he has forgotten which party he leads.
Read the full products at www.ecived.com/en/.
Google Chrome ‘hack’ is an open invitation
If you have three minutes alone with a Google Chrome user’s computer, you can access all their passwords—Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, whatever—then quickly cover your tracks.
It’s not a hack, per se. It’s a little-known feature designed to help users remember passwords and avoid the hassle of constantly hitting those “forgot your password?” buttons.In just four clicks, you can find yourself face-to-face with a list of each password they’ve let Chrome save. Jot them down and close a window, and you’ll be gone in 60 seconds with the user’s keys. I won’t provide explicit instructions, but if you’re curious, you won’t have any trouble finding them.
Any intruder can then spy on a target’s accounts in secret or hijack them from the comfort of their own rtls, changing the target’s passwords and doing damage of all sorts until the target contacts security departments, proves their identity and wrests back control.
You can’t disable the function, but you can delete all saved passwords and instruct Chrome not to save passwords in the future. This will mean entering your passwords every time you log into a site, so even users who know how to do this won’t likely bother. The whole thing is being described by security experts and by the tech press as a major security flaw, but the engineers at Google say they’re just keeping it real.
“We don’t want to provide users with a false sense of security,” wrote Chrome developer head Justin Schuh on Hacker News. His point is that if you allow someone access to your machine, they can get their hands on anything. Obscuring saved passwords behind some “master password” would do little to stop a malicious guest. If you have social media accounts open, they could mess directly with settings. They could install malware or spyware, recording your keystrokes. They could type “password” into your Spotlight search bar and see what comes up in old Word documents. Google doesn’t want to close your window with cardboard when your front door may be wide open. Google wants you to be vigilant!
It’s a strange ideological stand. The truth is, most of us don’t worry that malicious hackers with malware on USB keys will get hold of our computers. The hackers we really need to worry about are our parents, kids, spouses and friends. As with many crimes, the privacy invasions that happen most and hurt the most are perpetrated by people we know and trust.
I’m not saying Russian fraudsters and NSA spooks don’t matter. Outside threats to our privacy are destructive in minor and major ways, creating everything from pesky banking hassles to existential threats to free societies. But let’s pause to recognize the vast damage done, largely unreported, by our loved ones.
You might not call it “hacking,” but every time a suspicious dude glances at an incoming text on his GF’s phone, every time a mom can’t resist a peek at her daughter’s open Facebook page, every time surfing histories are checked for porn sites, or old emails are searched for an ex’s name, life-changing consequences are possible. Our GPS whereabouts or smartphone metadata might not mean much or matter much to the government bots that are probably tracking them. But those who know us best know what our data means. A stop at a certain street corner might mean a donut we weren’t supposed to eat or a rendezvous we weren’t supposed to have.
Google makes tools, and tools should serve the interest of their users. I lock my bike, not because I think bike locks are infallible, but because an unlocked bike is an invitation to steal. By placing our passwords four clicks away, Google is inviting us to hack each other.
Over the past decade, our ever-evolving Web site has allowed us to add more and unique content for our readers (and the ability to reach more of them), while becoming a daily source of information related to “what’s happening at the Jersey shore.” Today, there’s no “Whoot! Route” section, but there is “South Jersey Nightlife,” which lists all of the nightlife options in the Atlantic City area in print and indoor Tracking. Today, we have a blog (“Atlantic City Central”), timely videos, digital photo galleries and new sections in the paper to keep up with the chameleon-like ways the region has changed — while not forgetting that the simple things, such as the beach, Boardwalk and Atlantic Ocean, are still three of the biggest reasons visitors come to the resort.?
Forty years of producing a newspaper (and now a Web site) with comprehensive entertainment listings, celebrity interviews, compelling local history articles and an ever-changing dining guide — as well as photos, movie reviews, the latest concert updates, etc. — is something to be proud of, especially in this age of the disappearing print product. But ever since Philadelphia-based Review Publishing purchased the Whoot! and changed its name to Atlantic City Weekly back in 2000, there has been little to make an argument that the good old AC Weekly (which some still call the Whoot!) was outdated. Sure, our readers now include hundreds of thousands of visitors to our Web site, Facebook page and other social media and digital outlets, but the need for a go-to resource for entertainment in an entertainment town — which you can hold in your hands and flip through at your leisure — will always be needed in a tourism-driven destination like ours.?
In celebration of our 40th anniversary, over the next several months you will be reading about and hearing about special plans for the occasion. In this week’s cover story, we offer 40 things we love about the Atlantic City region. Some of them date back to the Whoot! days; some of them precede the first publication of the paper on June 19, 1974; and others are new and exciting changes in entertainment offerings over the past couple decades or so. ?
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
It’s not a hack, per se. It’s a little-known feature designed to help users remember passwords and avoid the hassle of constantly hitting those “forgot your password?” buttons.In just four clicks, you can find yourself face-to-face with a list of each password they’ve let Chrome save. Jot them down and close a window, and you’ll be gone in 60 seconds with the user’s keys. I won’t provide explicit instructions, but if you’re curious, you won’t have any trouble finding them.
Any intruder can then spy on a target’s accounts in secret or hijack them from the comfort of their own rtls, changing the target’s passwords and doing damage of all sorts until the target contacts security departments, proves their identity and wrests back control.
You can’t disable the function, but you can delete all saved passwords and instruct Chrome not to save passwords in the future. This will mean entering your passwords every time you log into a site, so even users who know how to do this won’t likely bother. The whole thing is being described by security experts and by the tech press as a major security flaw, but the engineers at Google say they’re just keeping it real.
“We don’t want to provide users with a false sense of security,” wrote Chrome developer head Justin Schuh on Hacker News. His point is that if you allow someone access to your machine, they can get their hands on anything. Obscuring saved passwords behind some “master password” would do little to stop a malicious guest. If you have social media accounts open, they could mess directly with settings. They could install malware or spyware, recording your keystrokes. They could type “password” into your Spotlight search bar and see what comes up in old Word documents. Google doesn’t want to close your window with cardboard when your front door may be wide open. Google wants you to be vigilant!
It’s a strange ideological stand. The truth is, most of us don’t worry that malicious hackers with malware on USB keys will get hold of our computers. The hackers we really need to worry about are our parents, kids, spouses and friends. As with many crimes, the privacy invasions that happen most and hurt the most are perpetrated by people we know and trust.
I’m not saying Russian fraudsters and NSA spooks don’t matter. Outside threats to our privacy are destructive in minor and major ways, creating everything from pesky banking hassles to existential threats to free societies. But let’s pause to recognize the vast damage done, largely unreported, by our loved ones.
You might not call it “hacking,” but every time a suspicious dude glances at an incoming text on his GF’s phone, every time a mom can’t resist a peek at her daughter’s open Facebook page, every time surfing histories are checked for porn sites, or old emails are searched for an ex’s name, life-changing consequences are possible. Our GPS whereabouts or smartphone metadata might not mean much or matter much to the government bots that are probably tracking them. But those who know us best know what our data means. A stop at a certain street corner might mean a donut we weren’t supposed to eat or a rendezvous we weren’t supposed to have.
Google makes tools, and tools should serve the interest of their users. I lock my bike, not because I think bike locks are infallible, but because an unlocked bike is an invitation to steal. By placing our passwords four clicks away, Google is inviting us to hack each other.
Over the past decade, our ever-evolving Web site has allowed us to add more and unique content for our readers (and the ability to reach more of them), while becoming a daily source of information related to “what’s happening at the Jersey shore.” Today, there’s no “Whoot! Route” section, but there is “South Jersey Nightlife,” which lists all of the nightlife options in the Atlantic City area in print and indoor Tracking. Today, we have a blog (“Atlantic City Central”), timely videos, digital photo galleries and new sections in the paper to keep up with the chameleon-like ways the region has changed — while not forgetting that the simple things, such as the beach, Boardwalk and Atlantic Ocean, are still three of the biggest reasons visitors come to the resort.?
Forty years of producing a newspaper (and now a Web site) with comprehensive entertainment listings, celebrity interviews, compelling local history articles and an ever-changing dining guide — as well as photos, movie reviews, the latest concert updates, etc. — is something to be proud of, especially in this age of the disappearing print product. But ever since Philadelphia-based Review Publishing purchased the Whoot! and changed its name to Atlantic City Weekly back in 2000, there has been little to make an argument that the good old AC Weekly (which some still call the Whoot!) was outdated. Sure, our readers now include hundreds of thousands of visitors to our Web site, Facebook page and other social media and digital outlets, but the need for a go-to resource for entertainment in an entertainment town — which you can hold in your hands and flip through at your leisure — will always be needed in a tourism-driven destination like ours.?
In celebration of our 40th anniversary, over the next several months you will be reading about and hearing about special plans for the occasion. In this week’s cover story, we offer 40 things we love about the Atlantic City region. Some of them date back to the Whoot! days; some of them precede the first publication of the paper on June 19, 1974; and others are new and exciting changes in entertainment offerings over the past couple decades or so. ?
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
2013年8月5日星期一
As low-wage sector goes
You might have missed this, if you didn't happen to hit the right fast-food drive-through on the right day in July, but your neighborhood burger-flippers and assorted labor activists staged one-day strikes in cities across the country.
They called for the right to unionize and for a raise in the minimum wage — to $15 an hour.That's right: They want to double the federal minimum wage. Hey, why not swing for the fences?But before you sputter at the chutzpah of this demand, consider the point made by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer in a provocative op-ed for Bloomberg:
"If the minimum wage had simply tracked U.S. productivity gains since 1968, it would be $21.72 an hour — three times what it is now."Hanauer, who also supports a $15 wage floor, is clearly mixed up. We in America are not supposed to look at this issue from the point of view of the rtls. We're consumers first and foremost, right?
What's supposed to matter is how much doubling the wage would add to the price of your Big Mac or Whopper.Yes, prices would rise, but by how much is currently something of an Internet parlor game.The Huffington Post touted and subsequently disowned an estimate that McDonald's would have to hike prices by 17 percent to maintain current levels of profitability.
An editor for the Columbia Journalism Review picked this apart and instead surmised the price hikes would have to be more in the range of 25 percent, while an industry think tank pegged them at up to 35 percent.So maybe you don't care if the Dollar Menu becomes the Dollar-Thirty-Five Menu. Have you paused to consider that by raising the wage, you would throw thousands of fry cooks out of work? That McDonald's and its franchisees would close stores or introduce more automation to bolster profits. This could raise the unemployment rate.
Could it?Because if you consult actual research, there's no clear consensus on what raising the minimum wage does to employment. Some economists argue that the effect is usually positive, while others say it has no effect or a slightly negative one.There is good reason to believe that raising the minimum wage during a period of Indoor Positioning System, like our own, would stimulate the economy. And that is exactly what we need now.
Moreover, raising the pay of low-wage earners will get them off of the public assistance rolls. Restaurant servers rely on food stamps at nearly double the rate of the general population and are at three times the poverty rate of the general population.America's real job creators are its consumers and their wealth was decimated when the real estate bubble collapsed.
Middle-class jobs are increasingly being replaced by low-wage ones.Putting more cash into average workers' hands allows them to spend more, which puts others back to work.As the low-wage sector goes, so goes the nation. That's the message every middle-class American should be getting.A major challenge for this country in the coming decades — perhaps the central challenge — will be ensuring that the vast majority of its residents have access to work that affords a decent standard of living.
Fifteen bucks an hour too pie-in-the-sky for you? OK, try $11.Economists consider that hourly wage the cutoff for poverty level for a family of four.So you get why people are protesting.And you get why the fast-food industry has an incredibly high turnover rate, 75 percent rate annually. The pay stinks. You can't live a decent life on it. The national median pay for cashiers, cooks and the crew in the industry is $8.94.
The people bagging the burritos and taking those frozen patties from the walk-in are not out of line to insist on higher pay. This is one of the fastest growing sectors of employment.And increasingly, its workers are adults, many with families.The Colonel and Ronald McDonald are not the only villains in this piece, not even the major ones.
For three decades, economic policy in this country has consistently undercut the interest of wage-earning Americans in favor of corporate managers and Wall Street. As this worthy class off-shored jobs, raided pension funds and reserved profits for themselves alone, the courts, Congress, state legislators and the mainstream press could be counted on to endorse their actions as the natural workings of the free market.
Labor unions, meanwhile, were variously dismissed as misguided or outmoded or downright pernicious enemies of the market.Well, now the middle class finds itself in the crosshairs, too. Many who once thought their college degrees and white-collar resumes were a meal ticket for life are discovering what life is like for the economically precarious.
Is $15 an hour absurd?Would raising the wage floor to that level do more good than harm to the low-wage half of our nation? I can't say with any certainty, and I don't know that anybody can.All I know for sure is that working people need a raise, and there's damn little chance they'll get it without a fight.
They called for the right to unionize and for a raise in the minimum wage — to $15 an hour.That's right: They want to double the federal minimum wage. Hey, why not swing for the fences?But before you sputter at the chutzpah of this demand, consider the point made by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer in a provocative op-ed for Bloomberg:
"If the minimum wage had simply tracked U.S. productivity gains since 1968, it would be $21.72 an hour — three times what it is now."Hanauer, who also supports a $15 wage floor, is clearly mixed up. We in America are not supposed to look at this issue from the point of view of the rtls. We're consumers first and foremost, right?
What's supposed to matter is how much doubling the wage would add to the price of your Big Mac or Whopper.Yes, prices would rise, but by how much is currently something of an Internet parlor game.The Huffington Post touted and subsequently disowned an estimate that McDonald's would have to hike prices by 17 percent to maintain current levels of profitability.
An editor for the Columbia Journalism Review picked this apart and instead surmised the price hikes would have to be more in the range of 25 percent, while an industry think tank pegged them at up to 35 percent.So maybe you don't care if the Dollar Menu becomes the Dollar-Thirty-Five Menu. Have you paused to consider that by raising the wage, you would throw thousands of fry cooks out of work? That McDonald's and its franchisees would close stores or introduce more automation to bolster profits. This could raise the unemployment rate.
Could it?Because if you consult actual research, there's no clear consensus on what raising the minimum wage does to employment. Some economists argue that the effect is usually positive, while others say it has no effect or a slightly negative one.There is good reason to believe that raising the minimum wage during a period of Indoor Positioning System, like our own, would stimulate the economy. And that is exactly what we need now.
Moreover, raising the pay of low-wage earners will get them off of the public assistance rolls. Restaurant servers rely on food stamps at nearly double the rate of the general population and are at three times the poverty rate of the general population.America's real job creators are its consumers and their wealth was decimated when the real estate bubble collapsed.
Middle-class jobs are increasingly being replaced by low-wage ones.Putting more cash into average workers' hands allows them to spend more, which puts others back to work.As the low-wage sector goes, so goes the nation. That's the message every middle-class American should be getting.A major challenge for this country in the coming decades — perhaps the central challenge — will be ensuring that the vast majority of its residents have access to work that affords a decent standard of living.
Fifteen bucks an hour too pie-in-the-sky for you? OK, try $11.Economists consider that hourly wage the cutoff for poverty level for a family of four.So you get why people are protesting.And you get why the fast-food industry has an incredibly high turnover rate, 75 percent rate annually. The pay stinks. You can't live a decent life on it. The national median pay for cashiers, cooks and the crew in the industry is $8.94.
The people bagging the burritos and taking those frozen patties from the walk-in are not out of line to insist on higher pay. This is one of the fastest growing sectors of employment.And increasingly, its workers are adults, many with families.The Colonel and Ronald McDonald are not the only villains in this piece, not even the major ones.
For three decades, economic policy in this country has consistently undercut the interest of wage-earning Americans in favor of corporate managers and Wall Street. As this worthy class off-shored jobs, raided pension funds and reserved profits for themselves alone, the courts, Congress, state legislators and the mainstream press could be counted on to endorse their actions as the natural workings of the free market.
Labor unions, meanwhile, were variously dismissed as misguided or outmoded or downright pernicious enemies of the market.Well, now the middle class finds itself in the crosshairs, too. Many who once thought their college degrees and white-collar resumes were a meal ticket for life are discovering what life is like for the economically precarious.
Is $15 an hour absurd?Would raising the wage floor to that level do more good than harm to the low-wage half of our nation? I can't say with any certainty, and I don't know that anybody can.All I know for sure is that working people need a raise, and there's damn little chance they'll get it without a fight.
New Pandora Ads Brain-Wash Listeners
A long-time user of Pandora’s personalized music service, I entered some sort of Pandora Twilight Zone this weekend when my music stream was twice interrupted by disingenuous – and disturbing – corporate-sponsored ads.
Just like the tobacco industry execs testified to Congress in 1994 that they didn’t believe nicotine was addictive, today the natural gas industry and health insurance companies are the wolves in sheep’s clothing. One Pandora-aired ad praised the safety of fracking, suggesting that its opponents were ill-educated, while another ad pretended that children will suffer as a result of Obamacare.
The first ad snuck up on me while I was relaxing in the bath on Saturday afternoon. A woman and mother living in Colorado shares how her education at the hands of natural gas drillers led her to know for certain that fracking chemicals are safe – “safe for the land, the water, and the indoor Tracking.” So she had no hesitation about ceding her land to drilling. How convenient for Shell Oil, which is featured in the ad that was paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.
Among its many fallacies and unanswered questions, the ad’s most obvious oversight is that the wildfire-prone American West is not a good area to be depleting of the millions of gallons of water needed for one frack job.
Thus, Western communities, firefighters, and farmers that already face water restrictions and shortages due to drought are now expected to compete against fracking companies for the world’s most precious resource. Hey, did anyone pay attention to the raging Arizona wildfire that took down 19 firefighters? The West will literally go up in smoke if it is depleted of its water, while continually baking under rising So after spending Saturday thinking this “smart people love fracking” ad was a Pandora anomaly, last night I heard from someone posing as a doctor who told an almost storybook fantasy about Obamacare.
She said Obamacare means the government will knock down her exam room door and insert itself in the medical decisions regarding the young child on her table. She imagines that she’ll have to close her office doors under the threat of Obamacare, which will leave sad little “Bobby,” or whatever his name was, with no one to cure his illness.
Back up. Interfering with private medical decisions…and causing practices to close? While that doesn’t sound like Obamacare, it does sound a lot like what’s happening on the anti-abortion front, with its mandatory vaginal probes and closing of clinics in places like North Carolina.
The commercial is a laughably thin veil for the motives of insurance companies, which aren’t happy with health care regulations that require them to offer “Bobby” and his family free preventative health services, and his mom free birth control – or a free breastpump if she chooses to have another child. If someone in his family has diabetes, they’ll get free blood sugar testing equipment as well.
Not to mention Bobby and his family can’t be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition – or because a catastrophic illness or injury causes them to reach an annual or real time Location system. (It wasn’t too long ago that an insurance company could say: “Sorry, that’s too expensive, while there might be something to save you, we have decided it’s time for you to die.”temperatures.
Fracking also releases gases that contribute to climate change. Not to mention the more than 2,000 leaks and spills that happened at fracking operations in just Colorado in only five years. Perhaps none of this speaks to the dangers of drilling rock for gas more than knowing that doctors are required to sign a “confidentiality pledge” called “Form 35” in Colorado before they can access information about fracking chemicals that could be responsible for their patients’ health conditions.
In the vein of hidden dangers, drilling companies have had court records sealed in cases where they settled with people who fell ill as a result of fracking chemical exposure.Not that the tech industry hasn’t tried. Indeed, since at least the release of WebTV some 17 years ago, the tech industry has attempted to revolutionize television.
Yet, despite the efforts of heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, Apple and Netflix — as well as numerous startups and smaller companies such as TiVo and Sling — the vast majority of TV viewing is still done the same way it was 15 or 20 years ago — by tuning in to a traditional channel on a pay-television service and watching a broadcast in real time.“It’s not obvious that most consumers want the main job of the TV set to be changed,” said Dan Cryan, research director for digital media at the research firm IHS. “The TV experience isn’t really that broken.”
Silicon Valley isn’t giving up. Google’s new $35 device, the Chromecast, promises to allow consumers to easily and cheaply view on their big-screen TVs some of the videos they watch on their smartphones and tablets.
Meanwhile, Intel is developing a box that could replace consumers’ pay-TV services and Internet-connected living-room devices by offering access to both live broadcasts and Internet content. And Apple reportedly has been working for years on a device that the late Steve Jobs himself promised would radically change the way we watch television.
For its part, Google may have a hit on its hands. On Thursday, just one day after announcing the Chromecast, the company canceled a promotional offer that included three months of free access to Netflix’s streaming service, citing “overwhelming demand.”
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Just like the tobacco industry execs testified to Congress in 1994 that they didn’t believe nicotine was addictive, today the natural gas industry and health insurance companies are the wolves in sheep’s clothing. One Pandora-aired ad praised the safety of fracking, suggesting that its opponents were ill-educated, while another ad pretended that children will suffer as a result of Obamacare.
The first ad snuck up on me while I was relaxing in the bath on Saturday afternoon. A woman and mother living in Colorado shares how her education at the hands of natural gas drillers led her to know for certain that fracking chemicals are safe – “safe for the land, the water, and the indoor Tracking.” So she had no hesitation about ceding her land to drilling. How convenient for Shell Oil, which is featured in the ad that was paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.
Among its many fallacies and unanswered questions, the ad’s most obvious oversight is that the wildfire-prone American West is not a good area to be depleting of the millions of gallons of water needed for one frack job.
Thus, Western communities, firefighters, and farmers that already face water restrictions and shortages due to drought are now expected to compete against fracking companies for the world’s most precious resource. Hey, did anyone pay attention to the raging Arizona wildfire that took down 19 firefighters? The West will literally go up in smoke if it is depleted of its water, while continually baking under rising So after spending Saturday thinking this “smart people love fracking” ad was a Pandora anomaly, last night I heard from someone posing as a doctor who told an almost storybook fantasy about Obamacare.
She said Obamacare means the government will knock down her exam room door and insert itself in the medical decisions regarding the young child on her table. She imagines that she’ll have to close her office doors under the threat of Obamacare, which will leave sad little “Bobby,” or whatever his name was, with no one to cure his illness.
Back up. Interfering with private medical decisions…and causing practices to close? While that doesn’t sound like Obamacare, it does sound a lot like what’s happening on the anti-abortion front, with its mandatory vaginal probes and closing of clinics in places like North Carolina.
The commercial is a laughably thin veil for the motives of insurance companies, which aren’t happy with health care regulations that require them to offer “Bobby” and his family free preventative health services, and his mom free birth control – or a free breastpump if she chooses to have another child. If someone in his family has diabetes, they’ll get free blood sugar testing equipment as well.
Not to mention Bobby and his family can’t be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition – or because a catastrophic illness or injury causes them to reach an annual or real time Location system. (It wasn’t too long ago that an insurance company could say: “Sorry, that’s too expensive, while there might be something to save you, we have decided it’s time for you to die.”temperatures.
Fracking also releases gases that contribute to climate change. Not to mention the more than 2,000 leaks and spills that happened at fracking operations in just Colorado in only five years. Perhaps none of this speaks to the dangers of drilling rock for gas more than knowing that doctors are required to sign a “confidentiality pledge” called “Form 35” in Colorado before they can access information about fracking chemicals that could be responsible for their patients’ health conditions.
In the vein of hidden dangers, drilling companies have had court records sealed in cases where they settled with people who fell ill as a result of fracking chemical exposure.Not that the tech industry hasn’t tried. Indeed, since at least the release of WebTV some 17 years ago, the tech industry has attempted to revolutionize television.
Yet, despite the efforts of heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, Apple and Netflix — as well as numerous startups and smaller companies such as TiVo and Sling — the vast majority of TV viewing is still done the same way it was 15 or 20 years ago — by tuning in to a traditional channel on a pay-television service and watching a broadcast in real time.“It’s not obvious that most consumers want the main job of the TV set to be changed,” said Dan Cryan, research director for digital media at the research firm IHS. “The TV experience isn’t really that broken.”
Silicon Valley isn’t giving up. Google’s new $35 device, the Chromecast, promises to allow consumers to easily and cheaply view on their big-screen TVs some of the videos they watch on their smartphones and tablets.
Meanwhile, Intel is developing a box that could replace consumers’ pay-TV services and Internet-connected living-room devices by offering access to both live broadcasts and Internet content. And Apple reportedly has been working for years on a device that the late Steve Jobs himself promised would radically change the way we watch television.
For its part, Google may have a hit on its hands. On Thursday, just one day after announcing the Chromecast, the company canceled a promotional offer that included three months of free access to Netflix’s streaming service, citing “overwhelming demand.”
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
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