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Laurent Gbagbo, whose refusal to step down as president of Ivory Coast plunged the country into violence, has been captured in Abidjan and is in the custody of opposition forces. News of his detention came after a column of more than 30 French armoured vehicles closed in on his residence in the city and amid initial reports that he had been seized by French special forces. But both the French government and military insist that Gbagbo was taken by troops loyal to Alasanne Ouattara, who won last year's presidential election.
Gbagbo's spokesman, Ahoua Don Mello, told Reuters: "President Laurent Gbagbo came out of his bunker and surrendered to the French without resistance." While the details of the capture remain unclear, it is possible that the French and UN soldiers attacked the building, surrounded it and then waited for Outtara's forces to go in, as France may not have the mandate or legal basis to make the arrest. Gbagbo's detention followed missile strikes on his compound by ONUCI, the UN force in Ivory Coast, which partially destroyed the building. One western diplomat in Abidjan said that keeping Gbagbo at the hotel could prove to be a security risk.
"I think they'll put him on a chopper as soon as possible but nowhere in Abidjan is safe," said the diplomat. "There are legal problems about taking him abroad." Celebratory gunfire has been heard on the streets of the city and there are reports that Ouattara's camp is preparing to parade Gbagbo on television to prove his capture.
Besieged Ivorian leader Laurent Gbagbo has been detained in the main city Abidjan and delivered to the headquarters of his elected successor. He reportedly surrendered to Alassane Ouattara's forces after French tanks advanced on his residence. Mr Gbagbo had been refusing to cede power to Mr Ouattara after losing November's presidential election. France said pro-Ouattara troops had detained him, but an aide to Mr Gbagbo said it was French special forces.
Mr Gbagbo was then taken to the city's Golf Hotel, where Mr Ouattara has his headquarters. UN peacekeepers accused pro-Gbagbo forces of endangering the civilian population and had asked French troops in Ivory Coast to act against the defiant leader's heavy weapons. Ivory Coast's permanent representative to the UN, Youssoufou Bamba, said Mr Gbagbo would stand trial.
In London, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said that if charges were brought, Mr Gbagbo should be tried in an orderly manner. Forces loyal to Mr Ouattara launched an offensive from their stronghold in the north at the end of March, after months of political deadlock during which Mr Gbagbo refused to recognise his rival's election victory. AFP added that eyewitnesses had seen pro-Ouattara forces entering the presidential compound while French and UN armoured vehicles stood on a road leading to the complex.


text:
Human Rights@UC Davis
Eleanor: The UC Davis Human Rights Studies Program Blog on Human Rights Teaching and Research
Posts Tagged 'Humanitarianism'
Why the targeting of children in Syria?
I've been away from the Eleanor Blog for some time as I had both a heavy human rights teaching load (Human Rights; Genocide) as well as organizing the Human Rights and the Humanities Week. Which also included a remarkable lecture by the Mideast Director of Human Rights Watch, Sarah Leah Whitson. The week was a great success and the study and teaching of human rights has really begun to blossom at UC Davis, like our redbud and ceanothus plants.
I am coming back to the blog, in part because of real sense of resignation over the turn of events in Syria and in particular the attacks on children. The depravity encompassed by the assault on Syria's children is a shocking new low, even for the régime in Damascus. 384 have been killed – around 10% of the total casualties and thousands have been rounded up and tortured.
A child protester in Beirut
Broadly, it strikes me that this round has to go to House of Assad. The last two weeks' attack on Hama and Idlib had the feel of "mopping up" operations and weren't characterized by the slower escalation that took place in Homs. The Syrian régime senses that it can act with impunity and as long as it doesn't escalate beyond light artillery and tanks, can pretty much do what it wants.
Even though the EC placed additional sanctions on the Syrian super-elite, including Asma, Bashar's wife, the US has toned-down its rhetoric to delink humanitarian assistance from régime change. This is being done for Russia's benefit and may lead to some form of real humanitarian help. On the other hand, this public change in rhetoric (the Annan Plan) has given the régime additional space to maneuver.
Human Rights Watch's reporting on the rebel Free Syrian Army's (FSA) war crimes, that of the Vatican on ethnic cleansing in Homs and other sources are undermining international support for the FSA and other Syrian rebel forces. Without a reliable non-Assad partner, régime change seems less attractive than "régime reform." I think that what this also means is that the urban middle-class coalition supporting Assad will continue to do so even though the sanctions will begin to really hurt. For Arab Christians, Armenians and the urban middle-class elite this is an existential problem.
The recent meeting of the Friends of the Syrian People in Istanbul where aid was pledged to the rebels notwithstanding, I don't see the régime being dislodged anytime soon and rather repression will continue and mount.
However, the international human rights community has begun to call attention to the fact that children are targeted for torture and abuse by the régime to an unprecedented degree. I think it's worth exploring why the Syrian secret police has adopted this tactic.
First some facts: Human Rights Watch and the UN have both documented widespread detention, torture, and killing of Syrian children.
Human Rights Watch quotes one Hossam, age 13 who was held for three days in a military detention facility in Tel Kalkh:
Every so often they would open our cell door and yell at us and beat us. They said, "You pigs, you want freedom?" They interrogated me by myself. They asked, "Who is your god?" And I said, "Allah." Then they electrocuted me on my stomach, with a prod. I fell unconscious. When they interrogated me the second time, they beat me and electrocuted me again. The third time they had some pliers, and they pulled out my toenail. They said, "Remember this saying, always keep it in mind: We take both kids and adults, and we kill them both." I started to cry, and they returned me to the cell.
HRW tells us that Hossam and his family are now refugees in Lebanon.
But what these reports tell us is that the attacks on children are systematic. There is a rhyme and reason to this horror.
This has in large part to do with the role of children in Syrian and Middle Eastern society more generally, as well as the specific position of youth in the Arab uprisings.
We forget this in the West, but children are not just offspring you take care of for 18 years and then they're out the door. They are your future, especially among the urban lower-middle class and rural people of Syria. They are an investment – a biological 401k. There is little or no safety net and your children will care for and comfort you in your old age.
Children are targeted because of their inherent value to adults. Protecting your children is also a point of honor; taking and torturing them undermines the very stability and integrity of the home.
Reports also indicate that children are being subjected to rape. This is calculated to demoralize and discipline the régime's opponents, and to suppress the participation in demonstrations and activism by girls, in particular.
Young people – 13, 14, 15 year olds have been at the forefront of the revolutions in the Middle East. Youth has been the vanguard of these movements, in part because of their ability to master social media, and also they know that they have the most to gain from change. I think the Syrian régime also knows that it is involved in a generational struggle for control of the region.
Breaking young people now is a key element of that struggle for the future.
Tags: children, Humanitarianism, Keith David Watenpaugh, Naming and Shaming, Syria, torture
Posted in Human Rights and the Arab Spring | Comments Off on Why the targeting of children in Syria?
As America leaves Iraq, Human Rights questions remain – women, religious minorities at high risk
The Iraq War ended yesterday. At least it did for the US military. American diplomatic and intelligence personnel and support military contractors are still there in Iraq, and number in the thousands. But America's war in Iraq has stopped and taking its place is a clumsy and confusing set of policies and programs to try to conserve American interests and influence there after the loss of so many lives and so much money.
As we leave Iraq, we should not forget that it was the site of terrible rights abuses committed by US personnel (Haditha, Abu Ghuraib, FOB Tiger). Iraqis didn't have to learn how to torture from Americans, they had plenty instruction in that during the rule of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. But as the torture and rape of Iraqi prisoners in Iraqi detention facilities and black sites has now become routine one wonders how much less bad it could be now had the US been more committed to human rights in the first years of the occupation?
But other question about Iraq's human rights situation remain – especially as much of the early ex-post facto justification for the war turned on the liberation of the Iraqi people from a truly heinous and barbaric régime, that of Saddam Hussein and the ruling Baath Party. It's the height of historical revisionism to argue that the war was a human rights intervention, but the US occupation did create space for the emergence of Iraqi civil society, a vibrant and independent media and even governmental structures charged with the protection and promotion of human rights. That said, in the period since 2006 and the Iraqi civil war, the human rights environment in Iraq has deteriorated sharply.
Human rights failures have been the most pronounced in Iraq, as one might expect, in the protection of the country's most vulnerable: children, widows, as well as marginalized ethnic and religious minorities. And while these groups are often the victims of abuse in other times and places, the central truth of the Iraq War and its aftermath is how it has produced such vast numbers of vulnerable people: 1.3 million refugees, 2 million internally displaced peoples and 500,000 new poor, living in shanty towns without water or proper sanitation. The Red Cross has estimated, for example, that between 1 and 3 million Iraqi households are headed by women, and the numbers of parentless children is similarly large.
But a more systemic problem faces women in Iraq, in that the kind of Iraqi state that has emerged after the war is one that is deeply committed to imposing a religious orthodoxy on society, and in fact wants to reverse any sort of secular gains by women and minorities that occurred in the pre-war period. This has meant not just increasing restrictions of women's participation in public life, education and commerce. But it has also contributed to violence against women, in particular "honor killing," a broader social acceptance of domestic abuse and abandonment of prohibitions of child marriage. For Iraqi women the last 8 years have seen their rights in society and even their right to live diminish exponentially.
But perhaps the greatest human rights failure in Iraq is the collapse of state protection for religious minorities. This is both a "security" problem, but also a problem of state will. The case of the Sabian Mandaeans is perhaps the worst. The Mandaeans are an Aramaic-speaking community of monotheists who predate Christianity and Islam in Iraq and live(d) in the major cities, but in particular near Basra in the south. In 2003 there were between 50,000 and 60,000 Mandaeans living in Iraq, now there are perhaps 4,000. Mandaeans have face systematic persecution by religious extremists and have had to flee Iraq. Similar attacks have taken place against Iraq's Christians and heterodox groups like the Shabaak and Yezidis. Within a generation, most non-Muslims in Iraq will have emigrated, and with them a link to Iraq's diverse and multi-ethnic past.
Mandaean Refugee Boy in Jordan
A photo from the remarkable work of Jiro Ose "Living in the Shadows: Iraqi Refugees"
As Iraqi politics begins to resemble less democracy and more a rehabilitated Arab authoritarianism, as press freedom evaporates and conservative Shiite political Islam dictates social and cultural norms, the nascent human rights régime in Iraq will be strangled.
Perhaps the only thing we have left to give the Iraqi people is integrating clearly concerns about Human Rights into the new bilateral "partnership" between the US and Iraq.
See: HRW's Iraq at the Crossroads
Human Rights Organizations in Iraq
Tags: al-Qaeda, Honor Killing, Humanitarianism, Iraq, Keith David Watenpaugh, Minority Rights
Posted in Human Rights and 9/11, Human Rights and Law, Human Rights and the Arab Sprin, Humanitarianism, Posts by K.D. Watenpaugh, War | Comments Off on As America leaves Iraq, Human Rights questions remain – women, religious minorities at high risk
Andrea Dooley on the 3rd Annual International Genocide Conference at Sac State
Negationism, Freedom of Speech and Genocide Ideology Laws in Rwanda
Andrea Dooley
The recent 3rd Annual International Genocide Conference held at Sacramento State University took as its theme "Negationism, Revisionism, Survivor's Testimonies, Eyewitness Accounts, Justice and Memory" and included a broad and ambitious conference agenda with a plenary session on November 3 that was focused on the good governance and reconciliation efforts of post genocide Rwanda. The session titled "Rwanda Governance and Socio-economic Development" included members of an economic, reconciliation and justice delegation from Rwanda and a broadcast of a keynote address to be delivered via Skype by Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
The plenary speakers presented economic indicators, statistics and other data models demonstrating Rwandans economic growth and move toward democratic governance that, they argued was evidence of a positive atmosphere of reconciliation, unity and justice in Rwanda spearheaded by the strong leadership of President Kagame. In almost every case, speakers argued that what they presented were facts not ideology and those who would criticize or challenge these facts were "deniers." (Denier is the specific term used by several of the panel speakers.) Indeed, one speaker was adamant that those who would challenge the facts as presented by the panel were in fact supporting an ideology that was aimed at destabilizing the current Kagame government and had roots in the genocide ideologies of the past. In the end Kagame did not speak live or take questions. Rather he spoke via a pre recorded YouTube video; the substance of which urged academics to base their judgments of Rwanda on facts and not on ideology and to combat those who would criticize or deny the strides Rwanda has made since the genocide.
It became clear once the panel session came to an end why each speaker was so concerned with positioning their presentations as facts while those who were questioning those facts were motivated by ideology. Outside in the hall a small group of protestors had gathered passing out leaflets that raised objections about the Rwandan delegation's visit to the campus and the Kagame administration's claims to good governance and social unity. The leaflets produced by a coalition of organizations including INGA Association, the Congolese Community of Northern California and the African Great Lakes Coalition who are calling for a thorough review of the actions of the Kagame government with respect to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The leaflet highlighted a leaked 2010 UN report that accuses the administration of human rights violations in Eastern Congo. When the report surfaced the Kagame administration argued that the report was politically motivated, malicious, irresponsible and the charges were patently false. In response, the Kagame administration threatened to withdraw the Rwanda contingent from UN Peacekeeping forces in the Sudan region of Darfur. (In fact in UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon flew to Rwanda to meet with President Kagame to urge him to allow Rwandan troops to remain a part of the larger UN peacekeeping forces.) The final UN report took a more cautious tone and the Rwandan government was allowed to include a detailed response to the allegations in the report—allegations that they categorically reject.
But I was struck by the use of the word deniers to describe the activities of the protestors outside the conference venue. Understanding how that word has crept into discussions of economic growth, programs to foster good governance and industrial expansion in the post conflict Rwanda has as much to do with how post-conflict nations and its leaders go about creating a stable, economically viable and unified country as it does with genocide ideology laws enacted by the Kagame administration said to be necessary in order to prevent future violence.
Law N°18/2008 passed into law in Rwanda on October 2008 is deceptively brief. One sentence describes its aim as " preventing and punishing the crime of genocide ideology." And article 2 of the law defines genocide ideology as "an aggregate of thoughts characterized by conduct, speeches, documents and other acts aiming at exterminating or inciting others to exterminate people…" Proponents argue that this is a straightforward genocide prevention law deemed necessary in the wake of the violence of the 1994. The law includes penalties with steep fines and prison terms ranging from 10 years to life for crimes that are described as follows:
"…any behavior manifested by facts aimed at dehumanizing a person or a group of persons with the same characteristics in the following manner:
1° threatening, intimidating, degrading through defamatory speeches, documents or actions which aim at propounding wickedness or inciting hatred;
2° marginalizing, laughing at one's misfortune, defaming, mocking, boasting, despising, degrading, creating confusion aiming at negating the genocide which occurred, stirring up ill feelings, taking revenge, altering testimony or evidence for the genocide which occurred;
3° killing, planning to kill or attempting to kill someone for purposes of furthering genocide ideology.
Critics of the law including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have argued that the law is far too vague and can be interpreted and applied in uneven ways including silencing opposition to the current administration and curtailing free speech in the country. Many are concerned that phrases like "actions which aim at propounding of wickedness" and "laughing at one's misfortune," could be used by one or another party in a dispute that has little or nothing to do with hate speech and incitement to genocide. More troubling though is the charge that the Kagame administration has used Law N° 18/2008 to squash opposition parties and criticism of administration policies. In fact a report by Amnesty International titled "Unsafe to Speak: Restrictions on Freedom of Speech in Rwanda" is concerned that the vagueness of the laws allows for all kinds of interpretations that could be used to close newspapers and other media outlets and provide a legal avenue for the detention of journalists and other administration critics.
In the case of media outlets and the incitement to genocide, a precedent had been set by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2003. In December of that year, an indictment by the ICTR was handed down for 3 individuals, Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, Hassan Ngeze, each man accused of, among other things, crimes against humanity and incitement to genocide. Each defendant was either the head of a media outlet (newspaper or radio) and/or a journalist who were accused of having direct influence on the violent events in the spring and summer of 1994. Programs, articles and editorials called for the elimination of the Tutsi facilitated through a well organized and community coordinated mass killing. That the trial of journalist was taking place at all had, at the time, drawn great attention to issues of the media's role in state sponsored violence and would redraw the ethical boundaries of journalism in the international arena. Those ethical boundaries were tested when, after the passing of Law N°8/2008, several Rwandan news papers where closed and some opposition leaders were arrested.
To be sure, concerns over the provocative nature of hate speech and the role of the media in the Rwandan genocide is a real issue. And the Kagame administration has argued for tougher laws to combat hate speech and other tactics used to incite violence and destabilize the country. By many of the United Nations standards and other markers of success as presented by the plenary speakers at the Sacramento State Conference, Rwanda has achieved a more stable national economy, doubled the household income, provided universal healthcare and seen a rise in primary and secondary education completion. The speakers argue this is all made possible by a push toward good democratic governance, strategies for unity and reconciliation and appropriately applied justice. Kagame has maintained that those who have been detained or incarcerated under the statues of the Law N° 18/2008 are using similar language and tactics to those who perpetrated the genocide of 1994 and must be silenced in order to protect against further violence and foster a stable and unified Rwanda. When accused of over-stepping his bounds and incarcerating opposition leaders and using the genocide ideology laws to silence critics, Kagame, in an interview with CNN's Christine Amanpour, maintained that the accusations were false, malicious and an "insult to history" raising the stakes even higher by making national unity and "history" itself the focus of debate rather than freedom of speech, opposition to Kagame's policies or the uneven enforcement of the genocide ideology law.
But whether you believe that the actions of the Kagame government are justified by a greater need for stability and move toward economic independence or have stretched the interpretation of Law N° 18/2008 to the further their own agenda or something in between; the debate over the freedom of speech in the aftermath of this kind of conflict continues. The final speaker of the plenary session at the Sacramento State Conference, Dr John Stanfield, Director of the Intercultural Philanthropic Studies Program at Indiana University, contended that there are crucial actions for any country seeking reconciliation and justice after violent conflict namely: maintaining respect for civil society, implementing checks and balances on social relationships with government, understanding the role of critical journalism including fostering a strong academic presence (the Rwandan constitution requires that two members of the academy be members of parliament) and open avenues for freedom of speech. But the questions remain: What is the nature of free speech in the aftermath of this kind of violence? What is the line between active and productive criticism and hate speech? How does a post-conflict society foster a civil society and account for difference? And, How do nations provide both security and transparency and maintain order without violating the international human rights of their citizens and the sovereignty of their global neighbors?
Full List of panels and sessions of the Sacramento State Genocide Conference 2011
http://www.csus.edu/ethn/Genocide%20Conference%202011/GenoConf.stm
Full text of Law N°18/2008:
http://www.amategeko.net/display_rubrique.php?ActDo=ShowArt&Information_ID=2396&Parent_ID=30701065&type=public&Langue_ID=An&rubID=30701071#30701071
Kagame CNN interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WED8dYiBvcE
UN Mapping Report about the DRC: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Countries/AfricaRegion/Pages/RDCProjetMapping.aspx
Rwanda's Response to the UN DRC report:
http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/ZR/DRC_Report_Comments_Rwanda.pdf
http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE69002U20101001
http://www.rnw.nl/africa/article/rwanda-un-congo-report-insult-history
UN Secretary Ban's trip to Rwanda:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11229201
ITCR verdict:
http://web.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/
Tags: genocide, Humanitarianism, Minority Rights
Posted in Genocide, Human Rights and the Holocaust, War | Comments Off on Andrea Dooley on the 3rd Annual International Genocide Conference at Sac State
Some thoughts on the humanitarian challenges of the coming civil war in Syria
Sunday, October 23rd, 2011
Sitting with Gilbert Achcar and several of my UC Davis Jewish Studies and Middle East Studies colleagues in a local café after a talk on his book The Arabs and the Holocaust, the conversation turned to Syria.
Achcar's conclusion, which I share (as does the UN) is that Syria is on the road to civil war. Indeed, I would argue that parts of Syria, in particular the cities of Homs, Hama and Idlib and their hinterlands are already in a state of civil war. Those cities have been placed under siege, death squads roam them in broad daylight rounding up and "disappearing" civilians and uniformed security forces fight running gun battles with bands of defectors who are often just defending their neighborhoods.
Still protestors take to the streets each Friday like they have since last March and each Friday dozens are killed. Over 3000 so far, including some 190 children. This persistent courage in the face of unrestrained brutality inspires not just heart rendering awe, but also confirms how resilient the Syria opposition is. This resiliency will force the Syrian régime to increase its use of organized violence and at some point the largely peaceful resistance will itself become violent, perhaps in a battle for the city of Homs.
The longer the conflict continues the more "international" it will also become. This isn't in the sense of Libya, where Western forces sided with the Libyan TNC. There appears to be none of the international will to intervene in Syria that there was in Libya and various sanctions régimes have been blunted at the UN by Russian and Chinese opposition. Instead the international component of the civil war in Syria will be regional, with Iran extending support to the régime with help from Iraq and Lebanon's Hizbollah and Saudi Arabia and Turkey providing assistance to the opposition, which is not coincidently dominated by Sunni Muslims, as well as help from Iraqi Kurdistan for Syria's vast Kurdish population. Arms, money and military and cyberwar expertise are flowing into Syria from all sides.
With the coming of civil war in Syria, it is important to begin to anticipate what kinds of humanitarian challenges will arise and how the international community could mobilize to meet them. The Syria Civil War will resemble that of Iraq between 2006-2008 and Lebanon 1975-1990. It makes sense to draw some lessons from the humanitarian experience of those conflicts. What follows are some very preliminary thoughts and observations.
1) Like Iraq and Lebanon, very little distinction will be made between combatants and non-combatants.
This fact will have critical implications for refugee flows, the creation of IDPs, the safety of civilians in situ, and refugees in transit across international borders. The Iraqi experience shows how quickly large numbers of IDPs can result from civil conflict, especially if this civil conflict is accompanied by forms of ethnic cleansing. The kind of ethnic cleansing that accompanied the civil war in Iraq, in particular in Baghdad, is unlikely in Syria.
Still minor refugee flows out of Syria over the last few months give some indication of where major flows will go: from northwestern Syria into the Turkish province of Hatay and from central Syria into northern Lebanon. In both of these cases people moving probably have relatives on the other side of the border. Currently the UNHCR is providing assistance to about 3200 Syrians who have fled to Wadi Khalid, which is just across the border from Homs. I'm also certain that three to four times this number of Syrians has already crossed into Lebanon, but those refugees have not registered with the UN. Recent cross border raids by Syrian forces into Lebanon to seize deserters and opposition figures confirms that Syrian refugees in Lebanon are not safe. Lebanon is in no position to oppose these incursions even if there were political will in Beirut to do so.
Syrian Refugees in Lebanon, October 2011
Attacks on Kurds in Syria's Mesopotamia will force Kurds into Iraqi Kurdistan where the problem will be less political will to assist, but rather logistical support. Indeed Iraqi Kurdistan could provide a very useful staging ground for refugee assistance.
The Turkish border is more militarized and the Turkish military more able to provided needed protection. A possible option looking forward is the creation of a humanitarian corridor into Turkey through the Orontes River Valley, which would allow safe passage out of Homs, Hama and Idlib. There are a host of other political problems with direct Turkish intervention in Syria, not the least of which are fears of Ankara's Neo-Ottomanist designs on the Levant. Nevertheless, any meaningful international commitment to the safety of Syrian refugees will require humanitarian intervention in Syria.
2) Like Iraq and Lebanon, violence will have political and sectarian dimensions.
Rightly or wrongly the régime of Bashar al-Assad is associated with the entirety of the Alawite minority in Syria. The security apparatus and military elite in Syria is dominated by Alawites. There will be ethnic reprisals in the civil war. The most vulnerable populations, however, as was the case in Iraq, are the urban and rural Christian minorities. A possible example of the shape of things to come came last week when a bomb exploded in the Armenian Orthodox Church in the Damascus's old city. It is unlikely that this bomb was set by régime opponents. What is probably the case is that it was planted by state security forces as a message to the city's Armenians that were they to support the opposition that they would face further attacks and/or that they would no longer be protected by the state from extremist violence. Christians are disproportionately represented in Iraq's refugee diaspora and it is likely that this would reoccur in Syria. What this speaks to though is that where mass violence is probable, genocide is possible.
The West ignores the possibility of genocide in Syria at the peril of any humanitarian credibility it has achieved with successes in Libya.
Along the same lines, Syria remains one of the primary locations for refugees from Iraq – some 1.3 million with several thousand active asylum seekers. Stepped up efforts to resettle and return these refugees would help reduce the possibility that this extremely vulnerable group would become victims of another conflict.
Syria's problems and years of misery are just beginning.
Tags: genocide, Humanitarianism, Minority Rights, Syria
Posted in Human Rights and the Arab Spring, Human Rights and the Holocaust, Humanitarianism, Peace and Human Rights, War | Comments Off on Some thoughts on the humanitarian challenges of the coming civil war in Syria
Nansen at 150 and the origins of the Modern Refugee Régime
Thanks to my colleague Inger Marie Okenhaug, I was reminded that Monday was the 150th anniversary of the birth of the leading interwar professional humanitarian, Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930).
Fridtjof Nansen
She told me that the Norwegians are commemorating Nansen by focusing primarily on his exploits as a Polar explorer. But Nansen also played a critical role in the creation of the interwar refugee régime.
At the end of World War One Nansen been charged by the League of Nations to oversee the repatriation of prisoners of war, primarily in Eastern Europe. While in the East, he was among the first Western humanitarians to grasp the full extent of the emerging Russian refugee crisis. War, revolution and food shortages had displaced 1.5 million subjects of the former Russian Empire – Russians, Poles, Lats, Ukrainians, Muslims, Jews and Caucasian Armenians, as well as so-called white émigrés. With war's end and the redrawing of boundaries, the Soviet Government passed legislation denaturalizing large portions of that displaced population, producing, thereby a large and heterogeneous mass in various forms of statelessness. In particular it was the case of some 120,000 Russian refugees in Istanbul that first indicated to Nansen the gravity of the situation.
Armenians had also been displaced by genocide and Turkish policies denying them the right of return to their homeland or denaturalizing those living outside the borders of the newly constituted state. Not counting those Armenians who had immigrated to the United States or who were living in the Soviet Republic of Armenia, the numbers of Armenians in this situation was approximately 340,000, as estimated by the League, with roughly half, living in refuges camps, orphanages or shantytowns near the big cities of the Levant.
For Nansen this refugee crisis was not just about feeding and protecting refugees, it was also a problem of international law and legal standing. These refugees had no state to protect their interests or rights.
The international management of the refugee issue was the impetus behind the establishment of the Office of the High Commissioner, which eventually became the Nansen International Office for Refugees, among whose earliest acts was the creation of a League-administered travel document called the Nansen Passport, first for displaced subjects of the Russian Empire in July 1922 and then Ottoman Armenians in May 1924. 54 States agreed to recognize those travel documents issued to Russians, and 38 would later also acknowledged those held by Armenians. Within months of beginning the process, League officials encountered eligibility issues and questions and further moved to define the "refugee."
In a larger sense, this meant that in a narrow widow of activity, the League had accepted responsibility to act as a virtual state for refugee Armenians. In retrospect, that act provided a modicum of dignity in the sense suggested by Nansen in his Nobel lecture, but also a way for Armenians to participate effectively in economic (though not political) structures with relative ease. It allowed them to regain some control over their own lives, letting them connect to the "market" with some social and legal guarantees. Onnig Isbenjian's story, as told by his Nansen Passport and its visa stamps shows, Armenians from the Ottoman Empire could make a successful transition to Western Europe, France, in particular which faced labor shortages after the war, or in his case to the United States, where his descendants still live.
Interior of Onnig Isbendjian's Nansen Passport issued in Belgium in 1928 and used for travel via Great Britain to the United States. Note the Nansen Stamp in the lower left quadrant. Source: Zohrab Center Digital collection.
And while it remains unclear if Nansen and others understood the passport as a human rights instrument, he clearly linked it to the core human rights concept of "dignity."
As he noted in his 1922 Nobel Laureate lecture: ) delivered by that year's Nobel laureate lecture. Entitled, "The Suffering People of Europe," the lecture encapsulates the Polar explorer-turned-humanitarian's naked disgust with how the wake of the Great War had produced unprecedented levels of suffering. In the speech he issued a humanitarian challenge which was also a précis for the programs in which he was involved: "This [humanitarianism] is not the struggle for power, but a single and terrible accusation against those who still do not want to see, a single great prayer for a drop of mercy to give men a chance to live."
Tags: Fridtjof Nansen, Humanitarianism, League of Nations
Posted in History of Human Rights, Human Rights and Law, Humanitarianism, Posts by K.D. Watenpaugh | Comments Off on Nansen at 150 and the origins of the Modern Refugee Régime
Turkey's Minorities – Between Human and Group Rights – Vestiges of the League of Nations
In a footnote to the previous post on the role of human rights in the history of the League of Nations, over the last week the government of Turkey has agreed to return property seized during the last 80 years from Christian and Jewish foundations to head off losing in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Turkish human rights lawyers had brought suit against Turkey on behalf of various Christian and Jewish foundations that had had their property seized (orphanages, churches, hospitals, schools, &c.) by successive Turkish governments. The lawyers argued that this was a violation of their minority rights as outlined in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which recognized the Republic of Turkey and ended the foreign occupation of Anatolia. The Turkish government had lost cases like this before and Prime Minister Erdogan is a cagey politician who understands that the multi-billion Euros this settlement (which only returns a fraction of the properties expropriated from non-Muslims) entails is a small price to pay for further integration of Turkey into Europe.
The Greek Orthodox Halki Theological School in Istanbul (closed in 1971).
For me what is interesting about this case is how 1920s-style "minority rights" have been transformed into "human rights." This constitutes a move from merely recognizing the specific and conditional rights of non-Muslims to own property through collective foundations to a general statement of their human rights.
"Minority rights" in this sense are group and not individual rights, something that contrasts with the fact that human rights are often understood as being borne by the individual. There are vestiges of group-rights thought and practice in contemporary human rights thinking – the best example of the blending of group and individual rights is seen in the common understanding of the crime of genocide: the crime is a series of human rights violations (child transfer, rape, murder) that is cumulatively a crime against a people (genos) or even nation, in the old-fashioned sense.
What this case also highlights is how nation-states in the 1920s and 1930s could pick and choose what constituted a minority. According to the Treaty of Lausanne, minority for the new Republic of Turkey meant only non-Muslims and this has been Turkish government dogma since. In the treaty no ethnonyms were employed to define who or what the minorities were. This silence or even erasure is critical to understanding Turkish (anti)ethnic politics over the last century and how this ideology remains a serious challenge to the promotion of human rights in that country.
Certainly, years of discrimination and brutality against Turkey's non-Muslims – 130,000 Armenians, Greek Orthodox, Assyro-Chaldeans, Catholics and Protestants and 25,000 Sephardic Jews — are a potent symbol of the problematic nature these politics.
But a much more important issue is the reality that Turkey's Muslim population is ethnically diverse. Of a population of nearly 70 million, non-Turks make up 20 million. These are Kurds, Laz, Arabs, descendents of Muslim immigrants from the Balkans and the Caucasus; not counted are the perhaps 1,000,000 grand- and great-grand-children of Armenian women and girls enslaved during the Armenian Genocide who had children by Muslim men.
These minorities, who often represent, like the Kurds, majorities in parts of Turkey, have no official recognition and indeed, the Turkish state doesn't produce any demographic data on ethnicity in Turkey. Enforcing the homogenization of a country that diverse has been at the root of some of Turkey's worst human rights abuses in the past – from press censorship to extra-judicial killing.
Anneannem: Anlatı (Istanbul, 2004); English trans., My Grandmother (London, Verso: 2008).
Carole Fink. Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
And Aimee Genell's review
Pablo de Azcárate, League of Nations and National Minorities: an Experiment (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1945)
Tags: Armenian Genocide, European Court of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, Keith David Watenpaugh, League of Nations, Minority Rights, Turkey
Posted in History of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, Posts by K.D. Watenpaugh | Comments Off on Turkey's Minorities – Between Human and Group Rights – Vestiges of the League of Nations
The League of Nations and the Question of Human Rights
Now back in Davis.
I have just returned from the first major international conference on the League of Nations in over 30 years. Held at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, the conference, entitled, "Towards a New History of the League of Nations," brought together scholars from around the world to deliver papers on various aspects of the history of the League. Unlike the previous conference – and reflecting a broader generational change in how historians approach transnational institutions and movements – the papers did more than look at how the League failed to prevent World War II and instead examined topics including its work in public health programs, economic agreements, the trafficking of women and children, and its humanitarian projects around the world.
I was part of a panel on humanitarianism and I presented some of my research on the League's humanitarian work on behalf of the post-Genocide Armenian community in the Middle East. This work is drawn from a book I am writing, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, which will be published by the University of California Press.
The Armenians had faced genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during the war, and had been promised a state in the series of treaties at its end, the borders of which were determined by Woodrow Wilson. These promises were abandoned in the face of the rise of the modern Republic of Turkey and the Soviet Union and Armenians were left stateless and scattered in refugee camps, orphanages and shantytowns throughout the Middle East.
Wilsonian Armenian
I placed this statelessness and dispossession in the context of the League's ongoing commitment to the Armenian Nation — a nation without a state — and what it did to help that nation survive.
The paper was also part of a larger discussion going on at the conference and throughout the field on the history of human rights in the 20th Century spurred, in part, by Samuel Moyn's recent book The Last Utopia. Moyn, emphasizes that human rights as a full-blown ideology in which the rights of individuals exist in a space beyond the state instead of within its legal and moral interstices is of recent origins, the late 1970s in particular and has since the end of the Cold War moved from a political struggle to an ideal and even utopian project considered as beyond politics. Moyn is not without his detractors.
Where then to place the League's various humanitarian projects, its concern for the "rights of minorities" and its commitment to women and children all of which seem to embody a human rights-based or at least informed reaction to prevailing and historic incidents of inhumanity? This is especially so as in retrospect, these projects appear to have laid the groundwork for contemporary elements of modern human rights law and action, especially for refugees.
I argued:
Where it is correct to conclude that modern humanitarianism and human rights share conceptions of humanity, it may be too much to assert that they are branches of the same tree. Interwar modern humanitarianism sought to addressed the root causes of human suffering; as defined in the moment, human suffering was not necessarily conceptualized as a rights violation, but rather was constituted more often on other bases. And while contemporary human rights theory includes the possibility that the violation of human rights is a form of suffering, the interwar understanding of why certain categories of people should or should not receive international humanitarian assistance often had very little to do with their human rights per se, and instead usually had more to do with their ethnicity, religion, citizenship and utility to states and ideologies. This conclusion does not exclude the fact that individuals and groups within the working environment of the field of humanitarianism were engaged in forms of struggle, political and otherwise on behalf of universalizing individual rights and limiting the sovereignty of states; and, that these thinkers and activists have discernible roles in the content of the debate that carried over in the post-WWII era and contributed to the broader formal iteration of human rights idealism. Indeed, it is critical to understand how both individual thinkers and elements of the institution —frustrated with the scope of interwar humanitarianism and the multifaceted failures of a haphazard system of group rights that emphasized membership in national communities —shaped later human rights discourse. Yet most importantly, any history of interwar League of Nations' humanitarianism cannot lose sight of the fact that in theory and practice, it neither challenged nationalism nor colonialism, but rather was articulated with both and often worked to extend the reach of each.
But my view contrasts with the observations made during the conference by the British scholar of International Relations, Barbara Metzger, who has looked at many of the same archives and sources I have and has concluded something slightly different: Namely that the humanitarian work of the League was framed by human rights in practice. I think what is important in her work and what needs to be explored further by human rights historians is how international organizations like the League in working on behalf of refugees, displaced people, trafficked women and children were implementing the practical foundations of the work of human rights. A too narrow focus on the ideological underpinnings of that work ultimately misses the point that after WWI, the international community had, in a very meaningful way, adopted practices (imperfectly and incompletely implemented) that insisted upon the universality of a core of human entitlements-cum-rights that among other things, people not suffer during war, arbitrarily lose their citizenship or be sold across borders.
These kinds of debates and discussions help make human rights history an interesting and important new field.
For some more contrasting views on human rights and the League see:
Jan Herman Burgers, "The Road to San Francisco: The Revival of the Human Rights Idea in the Twentieth Century," Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Nov., 1992), 447-477, 451-454.
Mark Mazower "The The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950," The Historical Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 379-398
Tags: Armenian Genocide, Humanitarianism, Keith David Watenpaugh, League of Nations, Samuel Moyn
Posted in History of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, Posts by K.D. Watenpaugh | Comments Off on The League of Nations and the Question of Human Rights
Human Rights Initiative-International House Davis-Davis Community Human Rights Lectures 2014-2015
4th Annual UC Davis Human Rights Symposium
Eleanor – the HRI Blog
Some thoughts on the Battle for Aleppo
3rd Annual Spring Human Rights Symposium – May 8, 2013 Student Community Center – 10:00 am-Noon
Human Rights @ UC Davis
Human Rights Minor
DHI
The Contours of Algorithmic Life conference is sponsored by the Mellon Research Initiative in Digital Cultures
at the University of California, Davis.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Edmund Burke Academy students will give it all they've got Saturday night for two good causes. Spartan Rock Café kicks off at 5 p.m. with silent and live auctions. According to organizer Kristy Smith, students in each grade have collaborated to provide a special item which will go to the highest bidder at a live auction with auctioneer Lester Post. The talent show begins at 6 p.m. and will feature 18 students. Proceeds from both auctions and the show will go toward the school's new concession stand and to support a team of students and staff on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic this summer. The group has volunteered to work with missionaries John and Donna Bearden, formerly of Waynesboro, doing construction and faith ministry in poverty stricken villages. Tickets to the Spartan Rock Café are $5 at the door. Pictured from last year's fundraiser are Addie McClellan, Will Dasher and Zaylie Baker.


The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 is the world's first compact system camera to feature 4K video shooting. It can record video in the MOV, MP4, AVCHD Progressive and AVCHD formats, with 4K recording in MOV/MP4 and Full HD video with ultra-high bitrate at 200 Mbps (ALL-Intra) or 100 Mbps (IPB), plus VFR (Variable Frame Rate) video such as 96 FPS or 4x speed. Successor to the DMC-GH3 model, the splashproof and dustproof GH4 features an improved 16.05-megapixel Live MOS sensor and Venus Engine processor, built-in Wi-Fi and NFC connectivity, enhanced 0.07 second contrast-detect autofocus system with 49 focus points, 1/8000th top shutter speed, 1/250th second flash sync speed, 1,728-zone metering system, 2,359K-dot OLED electronic viewfinder, 3-inch 1,040K-dot swivelling and tilting OLED screen, touchscreen control system with touch-based functions like Touch AF/AE and Touch Shutter, Optical Image Stabilisation to help combat camera-shake, ISO range of 100-25600, completely silent electronic shutter, faster 12fps burst shooting and a Supersonic Wave Filter to remove unwanted dust. Panasonic is also introducing a specialist Interface Unit, DMW-YAGH, exclusively for professional/industrial workflow with the GH4 that enables more powerful video transmission. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 is available in black and costs £1299.99 / $1699.99 body only, £1749.99 in a kit with the 14-140mm lens, or £2499.99 / $3,299.99 body only with the DMW-YAGHE interface unit.
In terms of its external design, the new Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 is virtually unchanged from the previous GH3 model, the main changes being a new lockable shooting mode dial and the addition of a time-lapse mode to the continuous shooting dial. Measuring 132.9 x 93.4 x 83.9mm and weighing 480g body only, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 is marginally larger and heavier than the GH3, again using a magnesium alloy frame. The Panasonic GH4 goes against the trend of making cameras ever smaller, instead being big enough to make it easier to handle for those with average to large sized hands.
On the front of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 is a small focus-assist and self-timer indicator lamp, lens release button, metal lens mount, flash sync socket and a sculpted, rubberised hand-grip. The majority of the GH4's exterior is matt black plastic, with the right-hand and left-hand edges helpfully finished in a more tactile rubberised coating. The DMC-GH4 continues the usual Panasonic approach of being extremely well-built, with a high quality metal chassis, lens mount and tripod socket that's in-line with the centre of the lens mount, plus an extended shutter release life of 200,000 shots.
The GH4 ships either body only or with the 14-140mm kit lens, which we reviewed it with. We'd also like to see a kit with the faster 12-35mm lens. While the body of the GH4 is comparable in size and weight to mid-range DSLR cameras, the lenses are where Panasonic have really shrunk the overall system. Given the 10x focal length on offer, the 14-140mm optic is relatively small and light, although it is almost as heavy as the GH4. The optional DMW-BGGH4 battery grip allows the Panasonic DMC-GH4 to shoot in excess of 1000 shots. There are three dedicated buttons for exposure, ISO and WB on the top of the camera, plus the shutter release button and dual front / rear control dials. The battery grip shares the same splash / dustproof design as the GH4 body.
The 14-140mm kit lens does extend a long way when zoomed to its maximum telephoto setting, making it a little conspicuous, but that's a small price to pay for such an overall compact package. The real downside from a specification point of view are the relatively slow maximum apertures of f/3.5-5.6, which limits the GH4's use in low-light conditions and makes it more difficult to effectively blur the background to help emphasise the main subject. If money is less of an issue, we'd probably opt for the excellent Lumix G X 12-35mm f/2.8 lens instead, although the 14-140mm is very well suited to video work if you want an all-in-one lens.
Unlike a conventional DSLR camera which uses a phase detection auto-focus system, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 employs a 49-point Contrast AF system, similar to that commonly used by compact cameras. The GH4 still has one of the fastest AF systems of any interchangeable lens camera, though, be that a compact system camera or a DSLR, with a claimed speed of just 0.07 seconds when used with certain lenses thanks to the inclusion of DFD (Depth from Defocus) technology, which further shortens the time to set focus. This is incredibly quick, and there were also almost no occasions when the GH4 failed to lock onto the subject, especially when using the centre AF point, resulting in a very quick and importantly reliable AF system. There are a wide range of AF modes on offer, including multiple-area AF with up to 49 focus areas, 1-area AF with a selectable focus area, Face/Eye Detection, AF Tracking, Custom Multi and Pinpoint AF. As it's name suggests, the new Custom Multi mode allows you to configure the AF points from a wide range of options and patterns, and you can even save up to three customised choices. The GH4 also has a useful Quick AF function that begins focusing as soon as you point the camera.
As with all Panasonic compact system cameras, optical image stabilisation is supplied via the lens, rather than being built-in to the camera body. On the 14-140mm lens it can be turned on and off via the Power O.I.S switch on the lens barrel, with two different modes accessible through the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4's menu system. When enabled, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 automatically compensates for camera shake, which is a slight blurring of the image that typically occurs at slow shutter speeds when the camera is hand held. Mode 1 is on all the time including during image composition, while Mode 2 only compensates for up and down movements, which in turn allows you to pan the camera.
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 has a multi-aspect 17.20 megapixel sensor that provides 16.05 effective megapixels. This is both to accommodate the movie recording functionality, and also to offer four different aspect ratios for still photos (4:3, 3:2 and 16:9 and 1:1 square modes) without affecting the angle-of-view by cropping or interpolation.
Found on top of the Panasonic DMC-GH4 are the burst mode/bracketing/self-timer/time-lapse dial, external flash hotshoe, stereo microphones, built-in pop-up flash, lockable shooting mode dial surrounded by the on/off switch, shutter release button, front control dial, white balance, ISO and exposure compensation buttons, and a customisable Fn1 button. There's also a tiny LED to indicate if wi-fi is on or off. The GH4 has both a traditional mechanical shutter and a silent electronic shutter, which as well as not spooking your subject ensures that your subject is completely sharp by avoiding pixel shifting. The Delay Shutter option helps to remove the effect of hand-shake by releasing the shutter after a specified time (8, 4, 2 or 1 seconds).
The traditional shooting mode dial lets you choose from the different exposure modes. The usual selection of Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, and Manual are available for the more experienced photographers. The more beginner-friendly Scene modes are also accessed via this dial. Additionally there are 3 custom modes, marked C1, C2 and C3, which allow you to configure your favourite settings and quickly access them, Intelligent Auto and a range of Scene modes for less experienced users, and the Creative Movie mode which provides access to all of the camera's extensive range of video options. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4's Creative Controls, denoted by an artist's palette on the shooting mode dial, now offers 22 different options. There are also some 6 different customisable Photo Styles in the Main Menu which still allow full control of the camera's settings.
In practice the Intelligent Auto Mode system works very well, with the GH4 seamlessly choosing the most appropriate combination of settings for the current situation. The 5 available scene modes are Portrait, Landscape, Macro, Night Portrait and Night Scenery, so obviously not all situations are covered by Intelligent Auto Mode, but it does work for the majority of the time. It makes it possible for the less experienced photographer to easily take well-exposed, sharp pictures of people, scenery and close-ups by simply pointing and shooting the camera.
The Fn1 button, which as with the other four Function buttons on the rear of the camera and the two soft Function buttons on the touchscreen, can be configured to activate one of 38 settings, allowing the camera to truly be customised to suit your way of working (there are "only" 10 options available for the Fn4 button). The row of white balance, ISO and exposure compensation buttons make it extremely easy to access the camera's key exposure controls, while the dual control dials makes it easy to use the fully Manual shooting mode.
The red Motion Picture button on the rear, as you'd expect, allows you to start recording a movie with a single push of a button and then stop recording by pressing the same button, regardless of which shooting mode is currently selected. This is a lot more intuitive than having to select the movie mode then press the shutter button, as on some cameras, although you can still start/stop movie recording via the GH4's shutter button if you wish.
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 has a plethora of movie options ranging from 4K to VGA, making it the most full-featured interchangeable lens camera on the market in terms of video. Take a look at the Specifications page for the full range of options. It principally offers 4,096 x 2,160/25p/24p, 3,840 x 2,160/30p/25p/24p @ 100Mbps (IPB), and 1080/60p/50p @ 200 Mbps (All I) options, with MP4 (AAC), MP4 (LPCM), MOV and AVCHD formats supported. The GH4 is one of the few cameras that isn't geographically limited, as you can choose from both NTSC and PAL settings, so you get the full range of frame rates regardless of where you bought the camera. It's capable of recording continuously for an unlimited time or for 29 min 59 sec in PAL mode. The SMPTE-compliant Time Code makes it easy to synchronize multiple video footage or sound source in your post-production workflow.
The Variable Frame Rate option allows you to set the video frame rate from 2fps to 96fps or 4x speed while recording Full HD video. Available for both JPEG photos and movies, the EX Tele Conversion option extends the zoom by 2x for still images and 2.4x / 3.6x / 4.8x in video recording. This extends the 14-140mm lens from 10x to 24x for 1080p movies, 10x to 36x for 720p, and 10x to 48x for VGA. The DMC-GH4 can also take a 12 megapixel photo in the 16:9 ratio whilst recording a movie, and you can save a specific frame of a movie as a still image during playback.
The Creative Movie shooting mode, accessed via the mode dial on top of the GH4, allows you to set the shutter speed, aperture or both settings manually during recording (a Program option is also available). Changing the shutter speed is especially suitable for shooting fast-moving subjects, whilst the ability to control the aperture is convenient when there are several subjects at different distances. In practice this system works well, allowing some really creative effects, but there are a couple of drawbacks. Firstly the operating sound of the control dials is very audible in the movie, so you'll need to edit the soundtrack later to remove it or use the Silent Operation mode which operates the zoom, aperture, shutter speed, exposure compensation, ISO sensitivity and mic level adjustments via the touch-screen. Secondly, you can't set the shutter speed to below 1/25th second, ruling out more creative slow shutter-speed effects.
The Panasonic GH4's Intelligent Auto mode also works in movies as well as for still photos. Simply select the iA icon on the mode dial and press the movie record button on the rear. The Intelligent Scene Selector automatically determines the most suitable Scene mode from five options - Portrait, Scenery, Low Light and Close-up or Normal modes. Face Detection automatically detects a face in the frame and adjusts the focus, exposure, contrast, and skin complexion. Intelligent Exposure continually checks the ambient light level and adjusts the exposure setting as conditions change to prevent blown highlights and blocked shadows. The Optical Image Stabilizer helps prevent blurring from hand-shake when using a compatible lens.
Dolby-quality stereo sound is recorded during video capture via the internal mics on top of the camera, which is a big improvement on the rather muffled noises recorded by most digital cameras, helped by the wind cut function which blocks out most of the noise from background wind. You can also add an optional external stereo microphone (DMW-MS2) to enhance the sound further. In MP4 and MOV formats, high quality sound can be recorded in LPCM (Linear Pulse Code Modulation) or AAC, and you can select system frequencies between 59.94Hz (23.98Hz) / 50.00Hz / 24.00Hz. The HDMI port allows you to connect the GH4 to a high-def TV set or external recorder during video recording and pass through an uncompressed feed.
The Wi-Fi function lets you use your smartphone to change the camera settings (focus setting, exposure compensation, ISO, WB and Photo Styles) and even fire the shutter button remotely (including interval video recordings), while the auto transfer function automatically backs up your photos onto a tablet. You can also use GPS data from your smartphone to record the shooting location onto your images. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 also has a time lapse function in which you can set the time interval and the number of images to take (now selectable via the continuous shooting dial), plus a multi-exposure option that lets you combine up to four exposures in a single frame. The DMC-GH4 is also one of a growing number of compact system cameras to feature NFC (Near Field Communication) technology (the same technology that's used for mobile payments), which allows you to connect it to a compatible internet enabled device or another NFC-enabled camera by simply tapping them together.
The rear of the Lumix DMC-GH4 is dominated by the large 3 inch OLED screen with 100% scene coverage. The rotating, free-angle monitor, which is hinged on the left side of the camera (looking from the rear), can be flipped out and twisted through 270 degrees. You can use the screen as a waist-level viewfinder, holding the camera overhead, and even for turning the GH4 on yourself for arm-length self-portraits. There's also the added benefit of folding the screen away against the camera body to protect it when stored in a camera bag, preventing it from becoming marked or scratched.
The 1036K pixel, high-resolution screen coped admirably with the majority of lighting conditions, even being nice to use in low-light. The Auto Power LCD function automatically detects the current lighting conditions and boosts the LCD backlighting by up to 40% when shooting outdoors in bright sunshine, helping to keep the screen visible. The handy level gauge indicates the two directions of horizontal lean and front/rear tilt. The high-res, free-angle OLED screen is much more than just a novelty - it's a lot more versatile than the usual combination of optical viewfinder and fixed LCD, providing new angles of view and enhancing your overall creativity.
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 inherits the GH3's clever touchscreen interface. Panasonic have wisely restricted the amount of things that you can do by interacting with the screen, and indeed you can still operate everything on the camera without having to push and prod the LCD at all. You would be missing out on a lot of genuinely useful functionality, though, which really improves the overall shooting experience. A clever feature called Touchpad AF allows you to move the focus point area with your finger on the LCD while you're looking through the EVF.
The most immediately noticeable function is the ability to use the 1-area AF mode to focus on your main subject simply by touching it on the LCD. If the subject then moves, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 cleverly follows it around the screen using the the AF tracking function. If the subject exits the frame entirely, simply recompose and tap it again to start focusing. Impressive stuff that makes focusing on off-center subjects fast and intuitive. It is a little too easy to accidentally press the screen and set the focus point to the wrong area for the current subject, but a simple tap in the middle of the LCD will center the AF point (or you can turn this feature off altogether). The size of the AF point itself can also be changed via an interactive onscreen slider.
When Intelligent Auto is switched on, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 changes the scene mode used when you touch the subject, for example selecting portrait mode if you touch a face and macro mode if you touch a close-up flower. If you prefer to manually focus rather than use the snappy AF, you can magnify any part of the subject by 1x, 5x or 10x by simply dragging the image around the screen. The final touchscreen ability from an image composition point of view is the ability to release the shutter, with a small icon on the right hand screen enabling this functionality, and then a single on-screen tap all that's required to take the picture.
All of the menu options can now be changed via the touchscreen interface, including the Main menu system. You can also control image playback by touching the screen, with the ability to tap a thumbnail to see the full-size version, scroll through your images by dragging them from side to side, and magnifying them up to 16x.
Instead of the bulky optical viewfinder of a conventional DSLR, the Panasonic DMC-GH4 has a smaller electronic viewfinder. The improved OLED unit has a large 1.34x (0.67x on 35mm equiv.) magnification, 100% field of view, 1000:1 contrast ratio and 2,359K dot equivalent resolution, resulting in a very usable display that won't leave you cursing. The EVF (and also the main LCD screen) operates at a native rate of 60fps, twice the usual speed, which helps make it flicker-free.
As the EVF is reading the same signal from the image sensor as the rear LCD screen, it can also display similar information - for example, you can view and operate the GH4's Quick Menu, giving quick access to all the key camera settings while it's held up to your eye. The icing on the viewing cake is the clever built-in eye sensor, which automatically switches on the viewfinder when you look into it, then switches it off and turns on the LCD monitor when you look away. The electronic viewfinder on the GH4 is the equal of and in many areas better than a DSLR's optical viewfinder, particularly those found on entry-level models which are typically dim and offer limited scene coverage. The truest testament to the GH4 is that we mostly used it by holding it up to eye-level, something that we wouldn't do unless the EVF was of sufficient quality.
On the rear of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4, from left to right, is a Playback button, an LVF button for manually switching between the two viewing methods (useful if you turn the eye sensor off) which can also be configured as the Fn5 button, conveniently located AF/AE Lock button which is surrounded by the AF Type switch, the one-touch Movie record button and the rear control dial. This is used for, amongst other things, changing the aperture and shutter speed by turning from left to right and back again.
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 has a traditional 4-way navigation pad system with a circular scroll wheel and Menu/Set button in the centre. Unlike other G-series cameras, the four directions on the d-pad don't have a specific function, other than to move through and select options, playback images etc. The circular scroll wheel can also accomplish many of the same things, although we found it a little too soft and recessed into the camera body to be used precisely.
The main menu system on the DMC-GH4 is straight-forward to use and is accessed by pressing the Menu/Set button in the middle of the navigation pad. There are five main menus, Record, Motion Picture, Custom, Setup, and Playback. Most of the camera's main options, such as white balance, image quality, auto-focus mode and ISO speed, are accessed here, so the Record menu has 32 options spread over 7 screens, the Motion Picture menu has 29 options over 6 screens, and the Setup menu has 32 options over 6 screens. As an indication of how configurable the GH4 is, the Custom menu has 41 different options, allowing you fine-tune this camera to suit your way of working.
The Panasonic Lumix GH4's Intelligent Resolution mode makes a standard image look like a higher resolution one by processing the contour areas, texture areas and smooth areas individually. There are three available strengths - low, standard and high - and an Extended option which increase the zoom range. Despite all the clever behind-the-scenes processing, it's fairly easy to tell which image was taken with Intelligent Resolution turned on and which one with it turned off due to unwanted artifacts appearing, particularly if viewing onscreen at 100% magnification. While the difference isn't quite so apparent on a print up to A3 in size, we're not convinced enough to recommend regularly using it.
Intelligent Dynamic adjusts the exposure setting to record more detail in the highlights and shadows, with three strengths available - low, standard and high. It's actually very effective for high-contrast scenes when the camera tends to blow-out the highlights and block-up the shadows. The HDR feature achieves the still fashionable high dynamic range look, although there's only an On or Off setting with no scope to tone down the effect. You can see some examples for the Intelligent Resolution, Intelligent Dynamic and HDR modes on the Image Quality page.
The start-up time from turning the Lumix DMC-GH4 on to being ready to take a photo is impressively quick at around 1 second. It takes about 1 second to store a JPEG image, allowing you to keep shooting as they are being recorded onto the memory card - there is a barely perceptible LCD blackout between each image. Storing a single RAW image takes around 2 seconds, but thankfully it doesn't lock up the camera in any way - you can use the menu system or shoot another image while the first file is being written to memory. The Panasonic Lumix GH4 has an excellent Burst mode which enables you to take 12 frames per second with the focus and exposure locked at the first frame or 7.5fps with AF tracking for up to 100 JPEG images at the highest image quality or 40 RAW files. There's also faster 40fps and 20fps modes which take advantage of the camera's electronic shutter, but only record 4-megapixel JPEG images.
Once you have captured a photo, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 has a good range of options when it comes to playing, reviewing and managing your images. You can instantly scroll through the images that you have taken, view thumbnails (up to 30 onscreen at the same time and in a Calendar view), zoom in and out up to 16x magnification, view slideshows, delete, protect, trim, resize, copy and rotate an image. You can also select favourite images, change an image's aspect ratio, add a sound clip to an image, delete Face Recognition data, and set the print order. The Display button toggles detailed settings information about each picture on and off, such as the ISO rating and aperture / shutter speed, and there is a small brightness histogram available during shooting and RGBY histogram during playback.
On the bottom of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 is a metal tripod socket, importantly in-line with the middle of the lens barrel, and the battery compartment, and on the right side is the Remote port and SD/SDHC/SDXC memory card slot. On the left is the Remote/Mic socket for use with the optional remote shutter release or 3.5mm external microphone, and three connection ports, including a port for external headphones (again 3.5mm in size), HDMI port for connecting the GH4 to a HD television or monitor and an AV Out/Digital port.


text:
When Can California Trustees Use Trust Funds to Hire Lawyers?
By Jeffrey S. Galvin
Many family member trustees are uncertain about whether and to what extent they can use trust assets to obtain legal representation. For example, when two parents choose their daughter, upon their incapacity or death, to administer their trust as the successor trustee, the daughter may be unsure whether she can use trust money to hire a lawyer to help her deal with demands and complaints from her brother.
In this post, we'll review basic principles of California law with respect to when a trustee can pay a lawyer at the trust's expense. Spoiler alert: it may be best to take the Buick and leave the Rolls at home.
Yes, a Trustee Can Hire a Lawyer, But the Expense May Be Disallowed
Trustees have fiduciary duties to beneficiaries to prudently manage and administer trust assets per the terms of the trust instrument and applicable law. Trust administration situations can be complex and most trustees benefit from obtaining legal advice from a knowledgeable attorney. Such advice reduces the possibility of trustee missteps and personal liability down the road.
The good news is that the California Probate Code and most trust instruments authorize the trustee to hire and pay attorneys to advise the trustee about trust administration.
Probate Code section 16247 empowers trustees to hire attorneys, accountants and other agents to advise and assist the trustee in the performance of administrative duties. Section 16243 authorizes trustees to pay "reasonable compensation" to such agents. Most trust instruments include a specific authorization to hire legal counsel amongst the trustee's enumerated powers.
A California trustee, however, does not have a blank check to pay lawyers. Probate Code section 16202 provides that a trustee's exercise of a power remains subject to that trustee's fiduciary duties, including the duty of loyalty to the beneficiaries.
Trustees generally have a duty to provide a detailed accounting to beneficiaries, including an itemization of legal expenses. Beneficiaries may ask a court to review such expenses and the trustee may be required to reimburse the trust to the extent the expenses are deemed inappropriate.
A Trustee Is Not Entitled to a "Rolls Royce" Defense When a "Buick" Will Do
Any California trustee embarking on litigation should consider the principles set forth in Donahue v. Donahue (2010) 182 Cal.App.4th 259, a leading California case on a trustee's expenditure of assets in litigation.
In this case, beneficiary Michelle Donahue faulted her brother-in-law Patrick Donahue for the way he had administered the trust when he was trustee. She claimed Patrick imprudently sold approximately 40 percent of the trust's interest in a private real estate investment trust for below fair market value, thereby losing about $20 million in potential appreciation. Patrick prevailed in the litigation and the court approved his accounting.
The issue on appeal was not whether Patrick was entitled to reimbursement from the trust for his successful defense of Michelle's action, but whether the $5 million in legal expenses awarded by the trial court was excessive. The court noted that eight attorneys from three major law firms comprised the former trustee's legal team, with four to five of those attorneys simultaneously appearing at the 14-day bench trial.
The appellate court found that the trial court had not adequately scrutinized the trustee's claimed legal expenses, observing that probate judges "have a special responsibility to ensure that fee awards are reasonable, given their supervisory responsibilities over trusts."
According to the Donahue court, "[l]ong-established principles of trust law impose a double-barreled reasonableness requirement: the fee award must be reasonable in amount and reasonably necessary to the conduct of the litigation, but it also must be reasonable and appropriate for the benefit of the trust." Hence, the "underlying principle which guides the court in allowing costs and attorneys' fees incidental to litigation out of a trust estate is that such litigation is a benefit and service to the trust."
The trial court's terse ruling was deficient because it did not explain how the trustee's fee request met the governing standards. The brevity of the ruling thwarted meaningful appellate review and also raised the concern the trial court used an overly deferential approach, the proverbial rubber stamp, to the fee request.
Patrick offered a "bet the farm" rationale to justify the high legal expense in that the beneficiaries were seeking many millions from him. Yet such a "spare-no-expense strategy calls for close scrutiny on questions of reasonableness, proportionality and trust benefit." The court observed that "Patrick's defense by so many top-flight lawyers may have benefitted Patrick, but was it also reasonable and beneficial to the trust? Did Patrick demand a Rolls Royce defense when a prudent trustee could have arrived at the same destination in a Buick, Chrysler or Taurus?"
Thus, before spending large amounts of trust fund in litigation, and as the dispute evolves, the trustee should consider the scrutiny that might be applied to the expenditures under Donahue. The trustee could win the underlying litigation but be surcharged (declared personally responsible for) for payments to lawyers that are deemed excessive.
Defense of Contested Trust Amendments
As noted in a prior post on Doolittle v. Exchange Bank (2015) 241 Cal.App.4th 529, a trustee should not defend a contested trust amendment unless the trust instrument expressly authorizes such defense, as such litigation is not considered of benefit and service to the trust.
Seeking Direction from the Court May Avoid a Surcharge
When it's unclear whether legal expenses are appropriately chargeable to a trust, the trustee may seek direction from the court under Probate Code section 17200.
For example, the trustee may be uncertain about whether to pursue a claim to recover trust property. If beneficiary consent is not readily obtainable, the trustee may file a petition asking the court to approve the trustee's proposal to litigate or not litigate. If the court approves litigation, then the trustee will still need to make prudent spending decisions, but at least the choice to embark on the litigation will be validated on the front end.
Confidentiality Concerns
As discussed in a prior post, a trustee who uses trust funds to hire counsel should be aware that, under California law, the attorney-client privilege generally follows the office of the trustee, not the incumbent of that office. Hence, if the trustee resigns or is removed, the successor trustee will hold the prior trustee's attorney-client privilege and be able to obtain and review communications between the prior trustee and counsel. Such communications potentially could be detrimental to the prior trustee's position.
In a recently-updated ethics guide for trusts and estates counsel, published by the Executive Committee of the Trusts and Estates Section of the California Lawyers Association, the authors write that the lawyer "should advise a fiduciary client that the privilege belongs to the fiduciary office, not the individual, and that confidential lawyer-client communications on trust matters may be discovered by successor fiduciaries."
A trustee who wants to ensure that attorney-client communications remain confidential might hire counsel at the trustee's personal expense and in the trustee's personal capacity. In that event, the attorney-client communications may remain privileged even if the trustee leaves office.
Trustees can and should hire lawyers to advise them regarding trust administration. At the same time, a trustee's entitlement to write checks on a trust's account to pay counsel is subject to beneficiary review and objection, and a probate judge's eventual scrutiny. As they navigate the shoals of trust administration, trustees should ask their lawyers to advise them as to whether they are entering dangerously shallow waters in terms of a court's potential disallowance of their legal expenses.
Jeffrey Galvin is an attorney with Downey Brand LLP, based in Sacramento. He litigates trust and estate cases in Northern California, including disputes involving trust and probate administration, contests of trusts and wills, and financial elder abuse claims.
Trust on Trial
Downey Brand LLP


I love hanging out at the gothic disco! It's dark, but there are so many flashing light and people with bright neon hair, that you can always see where your girls are, who you're dancing with, and when the DJ is about to put on your favorite song! Play Gothic Disco game online. Played 32 times.
Here are some more Gothic Disco related games in girl games category.


text:
'I came out in tears': Professional violinist performs for abused shelter dogs to calm them
By Austin Williams
Professional violinist performs for abused shelter dogs to calm them
Violinist Martin Agee has performed with some pretty big names like Madonna and Metallica, but nothing compares to the performance that he gives every few weeks to the shelter dogs at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals' adoption center (ASPCA) in New York City.
NEW YORK - Violinist Martin Agee has performed with some pretty big names like Madonna and Metallica, but nothing compares to the performance that he gives every few weeks to the shelter dogs at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals' (ASPCA) in New York City.
Agee has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a classically trained violinist playing for more than 30 years with notable ensembles including the New York Chamber Symphony, American Symphony Orchestra and many others, according to his website.
Recently, his passion has been performing for the ASPCA's Animal Recovery Center. The center deals with dogs rescued from abused environments who need help reintegrating with humans.
Many years ago, Agee adopted an ex-racing greyhound named Melody who became family, eventually passing away and leaving a hole that, for Agee, was hard to cope with.
"It was just a very difficult loss for me to get over, and it was really 10 years, and I wanted to reconnect with animals, and so at the suggestion of a friend, I went online and filled out an application with the ASPCA to become a volunteer," recalled Agee.
One of the jobs he said he looked into was an adoptions counselor, responsible for trying to match a new potential owner with a dog or cat in need of a forever home.
Agee said when he filled out the application to become a volunteer, he jokingly suggested he play violin for the dogs in the shelter after being asked about his profession as a classically trained musician.
He quickly became familiar with the shelter's Animal Recovery Center (ARC), which helps rehabilitate and re-socialize traumatized animals from situations of severe neglect or any other abusive environment that may require special medical care for the animal to get comfortable with human interaction again.
The shelter says that many of the dogs come in through the organization's partnership with the NYPD as well as the ASPCA's Humane Law Enforcement and Community Engagement programs.
Martin Agee photographed playing violin for one of the shelter's dogs. (ASPCA)
The ASPCA describes ARC as a place where the animals often have varying severities of behavior issues and interactions between the dogs and people like Martin are crucial exposure to people other than just staff to help build trust with humans again.
Agee said it was important to keep the dogs comfortable and most importantly not trigger them, which sudden moves or loud noises were sure to do.
"I spoke to the volunteer department and I said, 'Well, what would you think about me bringing my violin in and playing for them?'"
He said shelter officials immediately jumped on the idea and so did the dogs.
Agee recalled that on the first day he performed for the animals the reaction to the music was immediate and positive.
"I would walk into a vestibule with three or four kennels and there would be just chaos going on and the dogs are barking, and jumping on the glass, and as soon as I would start playing I would get an immediate reaction," said Agee.
He added that usually within a minute or two all of them are sitting and listening, with the occasional hound joining in to sing along with the music.
Agee said he tries to get to the shelter to play for the animals a couple times a week, or at least once a week, saying he tries to fit the performances in his schedule whenever he can.
While he said some of the animals enter the shelters in conditions that are sometimes hard to look at, he knows they are in good hands at the shelter and that they rejoice at the sight of Agee and his violin.
"Socialization techniques like storytelling and the musical contributions that Martin provides can increase an animal's chance of adoption by decreasing stress and making them comfortable with new sights, sounds, and people," says Matt Bershadker, President and CEO of the ASPCA
"It's been so rewarding for me from day one," said Agee. "The first time I went in I came out in tears, it was just so emotional to see."
Agee added that while recorded music has been used before as a therapeutic tool for the animals, nothing can replace the live performance — something the dogs certainly agree with.


text:
Q: Can we find an equation to calculate the average distance between two random points in a circle? If we know the average distances between two points in a circle diameter 1 and the fact that all the circles are proportional to each other (pi is used as a constant), then is possible to find an equation to calculate it? Is it's so, then how would it be?
I have no idea how to approach, could we use it as pi or something like that?
Hope you can help me.

A: This is called disk line picking. For demonstration, let's use the unit circle. Essentially, to ensure a uniform distribution, we choose $x_i = \sqrt{r_i}\cos(\theta_i)$ and $y_i = \sqrt{r_i}\sin(\theta_i)$, and then we can calculate the integral $$\frac{\int_0^{2\pi}\int_0^1\int_0^{2\pi}\int_0^1 \sqrt{r_1+r_2-2\sqrt{r_1r_2}\cos(\theta_1-\theta_2)}\,\mathrm{d}r_1\,\mathrm{d}\theta_1\,\mathrm{d}r_2\,\mathrm{d}\theta_2}{\int_0^{2\pi}\int_0^1\int_0^{2\pi}\int_0^1 \mathrm{d}r_1\,\mathrm{d}\theta_1\,\mathrm{d}r_2\,\mathrm{d}\theta_2}$$
Edit: The transformation we choose is sort of explained on this page about disk point picking. Basically, if you uniformly randomly pick an $r\in (0, 1]$ and a $\theta\in [0, 2\pi)$, you'll get equal concentrations of points in each annulus, which you don't want (because an annulus further from the center will have the same number of points on average as the one closer to the center, even though the further one has a greater area). To control for this, we use the transformation described above, since annular area scales with $r^2$. We can calculate this explicitly by ensuring that $\mathrm{d}A = \mathrm{d}x\wedge \mathrm{d}y$ is constant in $r$. For $x = r\cos(\theta)$, $y = r\sin(\theta)$, we get $\mathrm{d}A = r\,\mathrm{d}r\,\mathrm{d}\theta$, but for $x = \sqrt{r}\cos(\theta)$, $y = \sqrt{r}\sin(\theta)$, we get $\mathrm{d}A = \frac{1}{2}\,\mathrm{d}r\,\mathrm{d}\theta$.

A: This problem (as well as a more general one for a compact convex set) has been solved in the paper "The average distance between two points" by B. Burgstaller and F. Pillichshammer.
The answer for two random points in the interior of a unit circle is:
$$
\mbox{ the average distance } = {128\over45\pi}.
$$
(See Example 2 on p.5 in the paper.) If the radius is $r$, the answer is $\displaystyle{128r\over45\pi}$.
As expected, this is less than $\displaystyle{4r\over\pi}$ (the answer for two random circumference points).
Back to the specific question
Suppose we know that, for a circle of diameter $=1$, the average distance between two random points is $a$; then for diameter $d$ the average distance is $da$.
Likewise, if $a$ is the average distance for a unit circle (with radius $1$),
then for radius $r$ the answer is $ra$.
(All circles are similar; so the answer can be obtained by changing the unit of measurement.)

A: Let $r$ be the radius of the circle. We will solve the problem for two random points on the circumference (the boundary of the circle).
If the two random points are separated by a random arc with central angle $x$, then the random distance $h=h(x)$ between the points is
$$
h(x) = 2r\sin{x\over2}
$$
and the average distance is
$$
\bar h = {1\over\pi} \int_0^\pi 2r\sin{x\over2}\,dx = {4r\over\pi}.
$$

A: If the circle is a ball in $\Bbb R^3$ \begin{equation}
P_3 (r) = \frac{3 r^{2}}{R^3} - \frac{9 r^{3}}{4 R^4} + \frac{3 r^{5}}{16 R^6}
\end{equation}
From this question,
Distances between randomly distributed points in a ball
which refers to an article for general formulas.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


What is the next objection to God? Well, you are to analyze prayer. This is based on prayer studies. The writer starts with the fact that God never answers prayer.
To say God rarely answers prayer is one thing. To say God always answers prayer would be another. How could it be determined that God never answers prayer? In order to do that, you would have to know that there is no God capable of answering prayer in order to explain away all supposed answered prayers. In other words, you would have to beg the question.
The author also thinks that such cases prove everything Jesus said about prayer to be false. I refer the reader to what I wrote in the last article in this series.
Also, I find much more convincing cases that are specific, like the following one Mike Licona used in his debate with Stephen Patterson concerning a friend of his.
In June of 1987, he's riding down a highway when he gets in a horrible automobile accident that places him in the hospital for 21 days in a coma. The 21st day in the hospital is the 4th of July. At 4:00 in the afternoon, his church is somewhere at a park having a 4th of July picnic when they stop and pray for Lloyd. Guess what happens at 4:00 with Lloyd? He comes out of his coma. Guess what else happens - there are a number of other people in the same room with Lloyd who were in a coma for 1-6 months. They all came out of their coma as well. That is a miracle.
How do we know this? Because it's extremely unlikely by natural causes, and second it occurs in a context that's charged with religious significance.
Our author has to conclude that this was not a miracle, it was just a coincidence. There are several more stories out there like this one, but they all have to be just chance. He has assumed his conclusion from the get-go.
Hence, I do not find proof #2 convincing.


Things break, that's how life works. Unfortunately, when your helmet breaks they'll probably kick you off the ice. Fear not, Howies Helmet Repair Kit has you covered. Containing all the necessary components for on the fly repairs, this kit will have you back on the ice in no time.
This kit contains a small screwdriver and 21 assorted helmet compatible screws.


Everyone knows Objective-C is very verbose. Some people like it because it can be easier to understand when you know what the five parameters in a particular method actually mean. Many people dislike it though, as it takes a long time to type things out.
For a long time I kind of just went along with #1 - I never found it a deal breaker since I type at a pretty quick rate (typing tests put me at 130+ WPM) but obviously there's no point in giving myself RSI when I don't need to!
So, macros! A feature of an age long past. Just kidding. They have their place, but I just don't think it's here. I've seen developers use macros for common functions such as [NSString stringWithFormat:] or [UIColor colorWithRed:green:blue:alpha:], replacing them with something like FORMAT() or COLOR(r, g, b, a).
Fair enough, you cut down a few characters. If you're doing it a lot, you've saved yourself some time there!
If I were to join a project down the line and see files filled with this sort of thing I'd bang my head on the desk. How is the developer supposed to know what each macro does? FORMAT and COLOR are awful names, and when you start making them longer, the gain you had before begins to disappear - you may as well use Xcode's autocompletion.
Which brings me to my solution: code snippets. They've been around for a long time in Xcode, but don't get nearly as much attention as they should do.
Write a bit of code, highlight, drag-and-drop to the code snippet window, and a new snippet is added.
Take out any absolute values you may have entered, and replace with <# parameter #> with parameter being what you want to be shown to the developer that uses the snippet.
Set the "completion scope" of the snippet - usually this will just be function or method, but it depends on your snippet.
Set the "completion shortcut". This is what you, the developer, will begin typing to get Xcode's auto-completion to work for your snippet.
So as an example, I created a snippet for stringWithFormat that has swf as the completion shortcut. The snippet is only on my Xcode environment - no other developer knows any different, all they see is the full stringWithFormat method being called.
I'm not discounting macros entirely - I just think for this particular case, code snippets are the way to go. Of course, this is entirely subjective, and some developers would prefer to use macros. If you are one of these developers, and you're on a team, please consult other developers on this.


text:
Q: Read BLOB from Oracle Database in Node.js I am trying to read a BLOB data type from Oracle using a nodejs from npm package called oracledb and this is my select statement, it hold picture in it:
select media from test_data

I have tried using a few solution but it doesn't work.
Here is my response from the res.json:
{
        "MEDIA": {
            "_readableState": {
                "objectMode": false,
                "highWaterMark": 16384,
                "buffer": {
                    "head": null,
                    "tail": null,
                    "length": 0
                },
                "length": 0,
                "pipes": [],
                "flowing": null,
                "ended": false,
                "endEmitted": false,
                .....

    },

How do I get the hex value of it?

A: You are seeing an instance of the node-oracledb Lob class which you can stream from.
However, it can be easiest to get a Buffer directly.  Do this by setting oracledb.fetchAsBuffer, for example:
oracledb.fetchAsBuffer = [ oracledb.BLOB ];

const result = await connection.execute(`SELECT b FROM mylobs WHERE id = 2`);

if (result.rows.length === 0)
  console.error("No results");
else {
  const blob = result.rows[0][0];
  console.log(blob.toString());  // assuming printable characters
}

Refer to the documentation Simple LOB Queries and PL/SQL OUT Binds.