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Chapman homers, drives in 5 as A's beat Mariners 9-2
NE Sports
Brewers in thick of playoff race as they host Pirates
Pro Sports Media 10 months ago 39 Views
MILWAUKEE — Gio Gonzalez made a strong first impression on his new teammates.
Acquired by Milwaukee on Aug. 31 from Washington, where he'd gone 7-11 with a 4.57 ERA, Gonzalez returned to the mound after a 10-day rest and allowed a run while striking out seven over 6 2/3 innings as the Brewers wrapped up a three-game sweep of the Giants.
Now, as the Brewers find themselves on the heels of the Cubs in the National League Central Division race and three games up on the Cardinals for the top NL wild-card spot, Gonzalez will get a chance to build off that outing when Milwaukee opens a three-game series with the Pirates on Friday night at Miller Park.
More Brewers coverage
"It was great to contribute to the guys," Gonzalez said. "They've been doing fantastic. The pitching staff here has been unbelievable. The bullpen has been amazing. So, for me, it's nice to finally participate in something.
"That was a step in the right direction. Just take this and move forward with it. It's a positive note. I want to help the team out in any way possible. I'm just happy I finally did something for the Brewers, and just happy to be a part of what they've been doing."
Gonzalez's performance has helped stabilize a pitching staff that was among the league's worst during August.
Milwaukee's pitchers posted a combined 5.33 ERA for the month but have lowered that mark to 2.69 since the start of September, the best among NL teams.
The starting rotation lowered its collective ERA from 4.87 last month to 2.87 in September, putting Milwaukee third in the NL while the Brewers' relief corps went from a league-worst 5.99 ERA mark to first with an ERA of 2.47.
As a result, the Brewers find themselves right back in the thick of the NL Central division race. They trailed the Cubs by five games on Labor Day but won seven of nine since, including four of six against Chicago to get back into the race.
"We're playing good baseball; getting contributions from a lot of guys," said Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell, whose team has won seven straight series. "But, most importantly, we're pitching well. And we've pitched well for a nice stretch here."
The Pirates have pitched well, too. They're third in the NL with a 3.51 ERA since the All-Star break while their rotation leads the National League with a 2.75 mark for the month of September
"This hasn't caught us off guard," Pirates manager Clint Hurdle said. "They've been building together, growing together. It started in spring training."
Jameson Taillon and Trevor Williams have led Pittsburgh's starting group but Chris Archer, acquired from Tampa at the trade deadline, has started to settle in after an unimpressive first few turns with his new team. He takes the ball Friday.
The right-hander went 1-2 with a 6.45 in his fist five starts for Pittsburgh. That stretched ended with a frustrating performance at Milwaukee on Aug. 26, when he gave up six runs on seven hits while striking out five in four innings.
Since then, he's allowed a total of four runs in his last two starts, going six innings in each outing, with 11 strikeouts and four walks.
He credits the recent turnaround to putting more trust in catcher Francisco Cervelli.
"We both have done things a certain way and we've both been very successful," Archer told the Pittsburgh Press-Gazette. "So for me, it was like, blending what I know and what he sees in the moment and just trusting that. Obviously I looked at the back of his baseball card, and he's done some special things, worked with some special pitchers. But actually watching how he goes about his business, how educated he is on the opposition, the in-game adjustments that I see him making, then it makes the trust way easier."
Pittsburgh snapped a two-game slide Wednesday at St. Louis but has won six of its last eight contests and has been a thorn in Milwaukee's side this season, taking nine of 13 meetings, including a five-game sweep heading into the All-Star break.
The Brewers took two of three from the Pirates when the teams met late last month at Miller Park.
Source: Fox Sports
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Bonzo interview
The first Kiss show
Black Star Riders' Ricky Warwick: 10 records that changed by life
By Fraser Lewry
As Black Star Riders prepare to release their fourth album, Another State Of Grace, frontman Ricky Warwick reveals the records that inspired him
(Image credit: Robert John)
In a career that's seen him front The Almighty, Thin Lizzy and Black Star Riders - and go it alone as a solo acoustic act - there's a constant thread that runs throughout Ricky Warwick's work: it's all about the song.
"A lot of people don't listen to the song," he says. "They don't listen to what the melody is doing, or what the drummer is doing, or what the bass player is doing, or what the melody is doing."
"You know, you've got to listen to the song," he continues. "That's what it's all about. Take The Boys Are Back In Town. Sure, it has that instantly recognisable guitar hook. But the lyrics and melody are stunning. It's the whole package, and that's what you need."
It's an approach informed by the records that Ricky heard growing up in East Belfast, records that packed a punch but always – always – had a tune. And it's an approach that still informs the music he makes today with Black Star Riders.
Black Star Riders' Another State Of Grace is out on Friday (opens in new tab).
Stiff Little Fingers - Inflammable Material
"They were from Belfast, and they sang about Belfast. I'd never seen or heard anything like them, and that album was just mind-blowing. I put that thing on, and the anger and the vitriol were there in Jake Burns' voice, yet they had great songs.
"So much power. So much energy. That album had a lot to do with me picking up a guitar. And he's still got it in abundance."
Thin Lizzy - Do Anything You Want To
"Inflammable Material and Black Rose were the first two albums I owned, and they were both definitive, game-changing albums for me. I played Black Rose to death because it's just such an amazing album. The songs are so good.
"Do Anything You Want To really spoke to me. It's such a great mantra, and I have the first verse tattooed on my leg. That's how important that song is to me. Like Phil said, just be who you are. Don't take any shit. Live your life. Don't stop chasing your dreams. As a 13-year old kid that spoke to me, and it still does."
MC5 - Kick Out The Jams
"You discover punk and then you work back, and you discover the Stooges and the Sonics, and then suddenly there's the MC5. And it's 1969 or 1970, well before punk, and I was like, 'no way!'
"And then you see the video footage. Wayne Kramer is like James Brown! I just fell in love with the power, the attitude, the mandate, the two fingers up to the fucking establishment. The gang mentality just spoke to me."
Motorhead - No Sleep 'til Hammersmith
"It's Motorhead. If somebody doesn't like Motorhead I would seriously question if you'd want to hang out with that person! [laughs]
"Motorhead were a phenomenon. A unique band and a unique sound, with a frontman who ticked ticks all the boxes for being a rock'n'roll star. Ace Of Spades is the one song everybody knows and is probably made my favourite, but Bomber from No Sleep 'til Hammersmith is a fantastic song. I love the levels of energy. Love the feel of it. Just a great song."
Curtis Mayfield - Sweet Exorcist
"Curtis Mayfield had a big influence on me, his band and his voice. Lyrically, him and Gil Gil Scott-Heron were a be a big influence my lyric writing, with the poetry in the way they wrote. A phenomenal entertainer, and a soulful, beautiful voice."
Free - Fire And Water
"My sister was a big Free fan, and I was blown away seeing them on Top Of The Pops and by All Right Now and Fire And Water and Mr Big. Simon Kirke's playing on Mr Big: that groove, and that feel, and that sound. It's so simple, so stripped down. It's very much drums, bass, guitar, vocals, and that's it. But it sounds huge.
"They're such phenomenal players and musicians, but the songs! The songs are so fucking good. And Paul Kossoff is such an underrated guitar player. He's the king of off understatement. What some guys do in ten notes he can play in one."
The Rolling Stones - Goats Head Soup
"It's hard to choose my favourite Stones album, and it could be either Goats Head Soup or Sticky Fingers. But I think I prefer the songs on this one, and Dancing With Mr D is a favourite of mine."
Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska
"I could have picked 10 Bruce Springsteen albums. When I started doing the solo acoustic stuff it was a huge leap of faith for me because I'd never done it before. I'd always been that guy with a wall of Marshalls behind them, hiding behind the band and the volume. The thought of playing acoustic solo was terrifying, and this album helped me get through it.
"The beauty of the songs. The stripped-down songs. One man and his guitar. The beauty and the delivery of it. It really taught me a lot. Not just about performing as a solo artist, but how to write with just one voice and one guitar in mind. It was pivotal when I started doing this all stuff. It was a game changer."
Van Morrison - His Band And The Street Choir
"Van is the man. And he's from East Belfast boy, which is where I'm from. I was brought up on Van Morrison, and his music was always on in the house. He was a a huge influence, and when he's in the mood there's no one better.
"He's from Northern Island, and he sings about Belfast, yet he's so soulful it sounds like he came straight outta Philadelphia. I love that."
Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison
"Again, I grew up with Johnny Cash. My dad played him all the time. I would always hear him at the weekend when my dad had his friends over and they'd be playing cards. I got to be the DJ, and I'd get to put Johnny Cash on.
"I was fascinated by this guy. Who was he? Why did he look like that? Why was he so sinister-looking? Why was his voice so deep? Why are these songs so amazing? Why do they resonate with me? What do I know about American and what he's singing about?
"And that's where the seeds were sown. As I grew older I found out more about the great man, and I just love his music."
Fraser Lewry
Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 37 years in music industry, online for 24. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.
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Hand-painted with watercolor card featuring a tree branch and chimes with "Thank You" in brown script. Hand-Painted Weddings logo is on the back of the card. Blank inside for personal message. Coordinates with the Hand-Painted Weddings Backyard Charm Invitation.


I first met "doom-slayer" Julian L. Simon at the University of Illinois in the spring of 1980—at just the time when the environmental doomsday industry had reached the height of its influence and everyone knew the earth was headed to hell in a hand basket. We could see the signs right before our very eyes. We had just lived through a decade of gasoline lines, Arab oil embargoes, severe food shortages in the Third World, nuclear accidents, and raging global inflation. Almost daily the media were reporting some new imminent eco-catastrophe: nuclear winter, ozone depletion, acid rain, species extinction, and the death of the forests and oceans.
The Carter administration published in 1980 its multiagency assessment of the earth's future, titled Global 2000. Its famous doom-and-gloom forecast that "the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically… . and the world's people will be poorer in many ways than they are today" received headlines across the nation. Malthusianism was now the official position of the U.S. government.
It was all so damned depressing. And, thanks to iconoclast Julian Simon, we now know that it was all so wrong.
It was back in the midst of that aura of gloom that by chance I enrolled in Simon's undergraduate economics course at the University of Illinois. After the first week of the course, I was convinced that his multitude of critics were right. He must be a madman. How could anyone believe the outlandish claims he was making? That population growth was not a problem; that natural resources were becoming more abundant; that the condition of the environment was improving. That the incomes of the world's population were rising. Simon made all of those bold proclamations and more in his masterpiece The Ultimate Resource, published in 1980. I read the book over and over—three times, in fact—and I came to the humbling realization that everything I had been taught since the first grade about population and environmental issues had been dead wrong.
The weight of the facts that Simon brought to bear against the doomsayers was simply so overpoweringly compelling that I, like so many others, became a Julian Simon fanatic. Julian was the person who brought me to Washington in 1982 to work as his research assistant as he finished his next great book (coedited with the late futurist Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute) titled The Resourceful Earth: A Response to Global 2000.
Simon's central premise was that people are the ultimate resource. "Human beings," he wrote, "are not just more mouths to feed, but are productive and inventive minds that help find creative solutions to man's problems, thus leaving us better off over the long run." As Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute explained in his brilliant tribute to Simon in the Wall Street Journal, "Simon's central point was that natural resources are not finite in any serious way; they are created by the intellect of man, an always renewable resource." Julian often wondered why most governmental economic and social statistics treat people as if they are liabilities not assets. "Every time a calf is born," he observed, "the per capita GDP of a nation rises. Every time a human baby is born, the per capita GDP falls." Go figure!
The two trends that Simon believed best captured the long-term improvement in the human condition over the past 200 years were the increase in life expectancy and the decline in infant mortality (see figures). Those trends, Simon maintained, were the ultimate sign of man's victory over death.
To this day I remain convinced that the endless ad hominem attacks were a result of the fact that—try as they would—Simon's critics never once succeeded in puncturing holes in his data or his theories. What ultimately vindicated his theories was that the doomsayers' predictions of global famine, $100 a barrel oil, nuclear winter, catastrophic depletion of the ozone layer, falling living standards, and so on were all discredited by events. For example, the year 2000 is almost upon us, and we can now see that the direction in which virtually every trend of human welfare has moved has been precisely the opposite of that predicted by Global 2000. By now Simon and Kahn's contrarian conclusions in The Resourceful Earth look amazingly prescient.
The ultimate embarrassment for the Malthusians was when Paul Ehrlich bet Simon $1,000 in 1980 that five resources (of Ehrlich's choosing) would be more expensive in 10 years. Ehrlich lost: 10 years later every one of the resources had declined in price by an average of 40 percent.
We at the Cato Institute published three of Julian Simon's books and dozens of his articles and studies. We were always drawn to his celebration of the individual. Simon believed that human progress depended not only on creative and ingenious minds but also on free institutions. He often marveled that the only place on earth where life expectancy actually fell in the 20th century was in the Soviet Union and other East European nations during the tyranny of communism. Many of his most ardent critics were government activists who believe that the only conceivable solution to impending eco-catastrophe is ever more stringent governmental edicts: coercive population stabilization policies, gas rationing, wage and price controls, mandatory recycling, and so on.
Julian had an ebullient spirit, but from time to time he would complain to me that his writings never received the full recognition they deserved from academics. That was probably true, but I always reminded him that his work had had a more profound impact on the policy debate in Washington than that of any random selection of 100 of his academic peers combined.
Two weeks before Julian died, I was driving through central Iowa and was surprised and delighted to find gasoline selling for 89 cents a gallon. I hadn't seen gas prices that low since before the OPEC embargo in the early 1970s. I instantly thought of Julian. It was one of those little real-world events that confirm that he was right all along.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 1998 edition of Cato Policy Report.


Book Review: "South Asian Christian Diaspora"
A review of South Asian Christian Diaspora edited by Knut Jacobsen and Selva Raj.
Cornille, Catherine (2010) "Book Review: "South Asian Christian Diaspora"," Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies: Vol. 23, Article 19.


Well good morning. Looks like things are turning around. At lest for a bit, probably till the tide comes in. But Cer'veja isn't going to be around for that!
Original plan still in effect. Queenie of the Almier is not going to take this defeat well. She'll probably send an even bigger force when she hears about this. Best no one is there.
I don't know if Mask Troll so much believes Veja's deflection as he is willing to be thankful for their salvation and keep mum.
Speaking of mum, Tirea seems to be taking the aftermath of battle better than I though she would. She's either of a hardier stock, or the shock hasn't hit her just yet. If it's the latter, then realization is going to be a bee once the adrenaline wears off.
So the week I drew this I actually used a similar lie tactic on my Dad when I was helping my mom with a surprise for him.
So her phone rings and it's him. I answer give a answer for why I'm there, swap to a topic to chat with him about, then give reason for needing to hang up.
After my mom just says. "You are way to good at that."
So does that work as well on a troll as it did on my dad? I guess we'll find out.


text:
A View from India: Love, Faith and Conversions
With the romanticized temper of the 100 days of Narendra Modi government over, the anti-Muslim tone is heard throughout India; in fact, this constitutes a major strand in the bond by which the Hindutva forces feel united after the triumphant majority to the Indian parliament, says one analyst.
By Mushirul Hasan | Via The Hindu
Members of Dalit community at a gathering demanding land reforms in India. (Photo by ActionAid India – Campaigns, Creative Commons License)
"If a modern Diogenes were to hunt out for Indians with his lantern," wrote Syed Abdullah Brelvi, editor of the once renowned Bombay Chronicle, "he would be sure to come across fervid Hindus, bigoted Muslims and fanatical souls deeply engrossed with the problem of tirelessly finding out how unjustly their own particular community was being treated, and we would have to ask in sorrow: 'Where are the Indians!'" Today, this observation is as relevant as it was in 1926. Last week the noted jurist, Fali S. Nariman, reminded us of the diminishing value of tolerance in society. He was the speaker at the annual lecture organised by the National Commission for Minorities in New Delhi.
If one wishes to get an idea of the bitterness animating Hindus and Muslims in Uttar Pradesh or Maharashtra, there is no better way than to access the polemical literature, or to scrutinize what is taught to students in schools and colleges. One must not expect in them any comprehensive views of the significance of our composite culture, but they are a startling revelation of the suspicion tinged with hatred for the religious minorities. Yet, there is nothing in the comments of our "secular" leadership that expresses the profound moral distress into which these developments threw Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Sections of the westernised intelligentsia deplore; but the same sections execute a volte face and condone the bellicose speeches of the Togadias and the Avaidyanaths. Such is the level of opportunism that they have become impervious to criticism or argument.
Mr. Rajnath Singh, the Home Minister, does, it is true, shake his head over the religious rhetoric around "Love-jihad," but the concentrated venom of the Hindutva forces is echoed time and time again. With the romanticized temper of the 100 days of the Modi government over, the anti-Muslim tone is heard throughout; in fact, this constitutes a major strand in the bond by which the Hindutva forces feel united after the triumphant majority to the Lok Sabha. Indeed, there is a school of thought in our country, nowadays, vocal, animated by the consciousness of having a significant message to pass, according to which forced conversions have been an important part of the great Islamic enterprise in the subcontinent. It could not be thwarted then, but it must be stopped under the present "Hindu" dispensation.
The fact of the matter is that conversion has been a contentious and emotive issue between the followers of different religions. It came about in different circumstances, in different ways, and with different outcomes. B.R. Ambedkar became one of only two social leaders in Maharashtra who resorted to conversion as a form of protest against the iniquities of the Hindu caste society, the other being Pandita Ramabai Saraswati.
Passage of conversion
The converts for their part changed their religion through various means and for a variety of reasons. Some accepted their new religion after studying for a long time; others were inspired to do so by the shuddhi sabhas or the tanzim bodies. Historians have been debating this, with diametrically opposed arguments suited to each other's particular case. The politicians and the journalists deal mostly in generalities, but not Mahatma Gandhi whose world view was based on compromise, equilibrium, and tolerance. What dominates his work is this conception, or let me rather say, this state of mind. He shared the ideal, so characteristically Gandhian, of swaraj through spiritual enlightenment and a pluralist way of life. Let me, therefore confine myself to his views which bring out the main points with admirable lucidity.
To begin with, Gandhi eschewed the demonization of the medieval Indian rulers for their proselytizing fervor. Instead, he desired to raise the standing of Muslims in the eyes of Hindus and to foster a greater understanding of Christians by Hindus. He downplayed injuries to his co-religionists, and emphasized, instead, the sufferings of Muslims at each other's hands as well as from outside enemies such as Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali. He wanted readers to appreciate Islam's fine qualities, and delivered a long panegyric so gushing that it would make a present-day writer blush.
Between adopting and enticing
Gandhi recognized political and religious diversities, borrowed ideas from Islam and Muslim thinkers, and reiterated his belief that houses need not be walled on all sides and windows need not be stuffed. He kept the requirements in balance, a goal that meshed well with his own style and ideals. He portrayed Islam as a religion of peace in the same sense as Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, and established that neither the strict conditions for jihad could be fulfilled nor the charge of conversion by force be substantiated against Muslims as a body. Even after years of heated debates and polemical controversies, he did not find a single passage in condoning forced conversion; "real conversion proceeded from the heart and a heart conversion was impossible without an intelligent grasp of one's faith and of that recommended by adoption." According to him, Islam spread by the prayerful love of an unbroken line of saints and faqirs; the life of the Prophet was itself a refutation of compulsion in religion.
This is very fine as far as it goes. But it did not mean that Gandhi approved of conversion. Henry Whitehead, Gandhi's host in Madras in February 1916, remarked: "He represents in rather an extreme form the modern reaction against western influences and western civilization in India, and naturally he is opposed to all proselytizing on the part of the missionary." He was angry and hurt to find Christian bodies vying with Muslims and Sikhs in trying to add to their numbers, and complained that the missionaries were engaged in weaning ignorant people away from the religion of their forefathers. They engaged in such activities not because the untouchables were suddenly awakened by spiritual hunger, but because the missionaries exploited their backwardness and offered visions of "liberation." "It is one thing to preach one's religion to whomsoever may chose to adopt it, another to entice the masses," Gandhi told an American missionary in December 1939.
Widely as the leaders of the freedom struggle differed among themselves in their interpretation of conversion, Gandhi brought out certain aspects and meanings that seemed to point to his own particular moral code. He did not reject conversion, but disapproved of the change of religion by force or inducements. This is a fairly balanced position. Therefore, Gandhi's heart repelled against the Mahars being converted to Buddhism, or his son's conversion to Islam.
Most people agree with Gandhi that religion isn't like a house of cards or a cloak to be changed at will. Moreover, no society, Indian or European, can alter its religious identity simply because it has a sword at its neck. At least, attempts have been made to question, as the historian Richard Eaton does, the Religion of the Sword thesis, to explain the growth of Islam in India.
In today's context, proselytization is no more than an isolated activity of the Christian missionaries or the Tablighi Jamaat, a quiescent body. Even if it is not, it should be avoided in the interest of communal harmony. Adding a hundred or two hundred Muslims or Hindus to the faith brings no strength or solace to any community.
Widening the gulf
My point is this: The spirit animating the "love-jihad" campaign is to oppose the liberal and secular tendencies in society. At first sight this kind of belligerence seems almost incompatible with the Prime Minister's development goals, but his faithful adherents justify their high-handedness by inventing an issue almost every other day to widen the Hindu-Muslim gulf. With their images of fear and persecution, they present Hinduism as closed and self-contained. They represent Muslims as bad, in spite of the Hindus.
The shadow of the extremists has intensified religious consciousness in a number of States. There is little safety in the towns of western Uttar Pradesh, few rights, no public opinion. Sadly, simple souls among Dalits have been led astray. They are blind to the fact that they were being used in preparation of the State Assembly elections.
One can understand the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-Bharatiya Janata Party (RSS-BJP) exultation when the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was overthrown and Mr Narendra Modi's government formed. But quite a few ominous developments have taken place since then. Fortunately, the founding fathers of the Constitution advanced the highest claims for pluralism, describing it as the essence of Indian culture and civilization. Again, the electorate may now be out of tune with the secularism, but it is nonetheless wedded to preserving the idea of "Unity in Diversity." This fact in itself is worthy of inclusion in our school and college curriculum, especially in the BJP-ruled States.
If the BJP leadership believes that the past is not worth returning to, it must provide an effective lead in curbing the violent instincts of its storm troopers. Otherwise, it will run into trouble. For our generation, this kind of reasoning has a familiar ring. The BJP has its own prophets who know it as well.
Fortunately, Mr. Nariman sorrowed, but he did not despair in his speech at the National Commission for Minorities in Delhi. I salute his courage. The unshaken ardor of such eminent men and women lends strength to our Republic.
Mushirul Hasan was formerly Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia and Director-General of the National Archives of India.
This article first appeared in The Hindu. Click here to go to the original.
Ahmad Shah Abdali BJP Christian Dalits Gandhi Gandhian Hindu-Muslim gulf Hindutva India Indian Muslims Jawaharlal Nehru Lok Sabha love-jihad Nadir Shah Narendra Modi Rajnath Singh Sikhs Syed Abdullah Brelvi 2014-09-17
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The Looming Climate-security Crisis in South Asia
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Understanding Religions in South Asia – Hinduism
South Asia is not only the home of an amazing variety of different religions and cults, it is also the birthplace of religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism to name just the largest. Arriving from abroad, Islam, Zoroastrianism and Christianity have contributed an independent South Asian variety to the original belief system.


text:
Третий путь — небольшая центристская палестинская политическая партия, активная в Палестинской национальной администрации (ПНА). Основана 16 декабря 2005 года лидерами партии Салямом Фаядом и Ханан Ашрауи.

На выборах в Палестинский законодательный совет в январе 2006 года она получила 2,41 % голосов избирателей и получила 2 из 132 мест в Совете.

Партия позиционирует себя как альтернативу двухпартийной системы ХАМАС и ФАТХ.

15 июня 2007 года председатель Палестинской национальной администрации Махмуд Аббас назначил Саляма Файяда новым премьер-министром правительства ПНА после захвата Хамасом сектора Газа.

Политические партии Государства Палестина
Политические партии, основанные в 2005 году
Центристские партии

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About 200 people gathered in a subterranean auditorium on the University of Tokyo's Hongo campus earlier this month to hear from one of the world's most well-known fugitives.
Edward Snowden spoke via video linkup from Russia, where he was granted asylum after revealing the U.S. National Security Agency's controversial mass surveillance programs three years ago.
Snowden declined to answer that question himself, saying he had entrusted a group of journalists with the job of releasing newsworthy information from the trove of classified data he leaked. But he added that, from his experiences working at U.S. intelligence facilities in Japan and the United States, there is at the very least a high degree of information-sharing between the two sides.
Other speakers at the event, which took place on June 4, had their own insights into Snowden's question. They included Daisuke Igeta, a lawyer who helped challenge the legality of blanket police profiling of Japan's Islamic population.
The lawsuit centered on a leak of 114 police files six years ago that revealed police had collected information about tens of thousands of Muslims across the country — their names, photos, home and work addresses, their relationships, the mosque they attend — in the lead-up to the 2008 G-8 summit in Hokkaido.
Igeta and a team of lawyers argued that police had violated their clients' constitutionally protected rights to privacy, equal treatment and religious freedom.
The Tokyo District Court ruled in January 2014 that the 17 Muslim plaintiffs were entitled to ¥90 million in compensation because the data leak violated their privacy. It said the police's gathering of information on the plaintiffs was "necessary and inevitable" to protect the public from international terrorism, but declined to rule on the allegations of blanket profiling.
After appeals at the district and high court levels, the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit on May 31. The justices agreed with the lower court rulings that the 17 Muslim plaintiffs were entitled to ¥90 million in compensation for the data leak, but they again sidestepped the question of broader police profiling and surveillance.
The plaintiffs were from Algeria, Iran, Tunisia and Morocco, as well as Japan. One of them told The Japan Times that he first noticed he was being followed by law enforcement in the early 2000s. He said he was happy to cooperate with the officers whenever they contacted him. Then one day, they asked that he report on other members of his mosque, and he refused.
"We finally concluded that the legal governance of this country is not independent," said the plaintiff, who asked that his name be withheld to avoid further harm to his reputation, which was severely damaged after he was identified as a potential terrorist in the 2010 leak. "It's completely affected by the politics. It's obvious that the government wants surveillance towards everyone.
The surveillance continues to this day, he said, including with plainclothes police stationed outside his local mosque every Friday.
Both the Metropolitan Police Department and the National Police Agency declined to comment on the Supreme Court case or the allegations of indiscriminate profiling and surveillance of Muslims.
The police have made few statements about the lawsuit. A representative from the National Police Agency said at a 2014 human rights committee hearing on the matter at the United Nations that they couldn't provide details on counterterrorism "information-gathering activities," but that police were following the letter of the law.
Others have defended the discriminatory surveillance measures. Naofumi Miyasaka, a professor at the National Defense Academy of Japan, described the data leak as a major failure in the country's counterterrorism efforts because it disrupted the network of trusted informants the police had been relying on.
The legal saga unfolded as two similar court challenges played out in the United States. They came about after The Associated Press revealed in 2011 that the New York Police Department had also been surveilling Muslim communities in and around New York City and New Jersey.
The NYPD dissolved the controversial surveillance program in 2014 but the court proceedings rolled on. One of the lawsuits is still before the courts. Among those to offer support to the plaintiffs in that case is a group of descendants of Japanese-Americans who were sent to internment camps on U.S. soil in the 1940s.
"The treatment of the Muslim community by the Department has parallels to the treatment of Japanese-Americans by the federal government during World War II," they said in an amicus brief.
A settlement was reached in the other NYPD case in January. Under the deal, the police agreed to "new safeguards to protect against bias-based and unjustified investigations of Muslim and other minority communities," as the American Civil Liberties Union put it.
One of the many pieces of information about the secretive police program that came to light during the course of the court proceedings was that, in six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, NYPD detectives had produced no leads.
Igeta claims that U.S. authorities helped set up Japan's own Muslim surveillance program. He and the other lawyers representing the 17 Muslim plaintiffs planned to translate and submit documents from the U.S. lawsuits to the Supreme Court to bolster their case, but the decision to throw out the case came down months earlier than they expected.
Hiroshi Miyashita, a law professor at Chuo University and an expert on privacy issues who also spoke at the Tokyo symposium, said he wasn't surprised the Supreme Court did not strike down police monitoring of Muslims in Japan.
But the lawsuit is significant for another reason, he said: It's one of the first major court decisions in which the government actions in question were shielded by a contentious piece of legislation.
That legislation, which came into force in 2014, threatens jail time for bureaucrats who leak — or journalists who seek out — information the government deems secret.
Proponents say the law is designed to help tighten the government's control over sensitive information so that Japan is better able to share intelligence with the United States, its closest ally. Critics say the definition of what constitutes a state secret is too vague, leaving room to keep broad swaths of information out of public view, and that it threatens press freedom.


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Q: Youtube iFrame 'player' object's methods aren't accessible, what could be the reason? As you can see in the image, on printing the player object in console it shows all the methods but when I print keys separately, they aren't accessible. This is to show that player object's methods are not working. What should I do?
var player = {};

function onYouTubeIframeAPIReady1(v) {
   player = new YT.Player('player', {
   height: '390',
   width: '640',
   events: {
      //'onReady': onPlayerReady,
      'onStateChange': onPlayerStateChange
      },
      origin: "http://localhost",
   });
   if (player.D == 'player'){
      makePlaylist(v);      //This is to make sure that the player object has been created.
   }
}

function makePlaylist(videos){
   console.log('makePlaylist', videos, player);
   for (x in player){
      console.log(x);
   }
   player.loadVideoById(videos);
   player.playVideo();
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


set up the A records for the dedicated IP of the hamradiostop.com account. I did this 2 days ago so it should be good.
input the dedicated IP in to the main site.
input n2rga.com for the addon site n2rga.hamradiostop.com in the domain mapping setup for that site.
I moved the SUNRISE line up and then down same problem.
I tried pinging your main domain and I got the IP address.
But when I tried pinging a random subdomain I got an "unknown host" response.
So obviously your subdomains have not been properly configured, or there's a propagation issue.
Could you please doublecheck your A records both from your registar & your cPanel?
looks fine to me no?
Should I create a Ticket for my Host?
Perhaps then you need to do the same in your domain registar's panel?
I'm attaching a screenshot of my terminal with the pings I just did for reference.
thank you for looking into this so fast.
I managed to get this item fixed up real quick when HamRadioDude let me know of the issue and he gave me a copy of this ticket which the ticket was of great assistance figuring this out with all the info within and your responses.
As always your clients can count on you to get their issues resolved in no time!


She yearns to find her anonymous rescuer. Unfortunately, her health and intellect prevent it. Both repel suitors and cause Annette to doubt God's existence, at least until He answers her prayers in an unusual way. . . .
With this being Janine Mendenhall's first novel, I was not sure what to expect. However, I was hooked after reading the first few pages. This is a delightful and sweet love story that leaves the reader with a little taste of Jane Austen. I absolutely loved it.
While the story was sweet, the main characters were not without their struggles. The main character Annette struggled with health problems and an assault by the man her mother insists that she marry. However, experiences have left her fearful and doubtful of God's plan in all this. Also, the other main character, Peter is not without his struggles either. As they both enter one another's life, the reader is taken on their journey with them as they overcome struggles and fall in love with one another. This book was not only entertaining from the start but it was also filled with much Godly wisdom that left me encouraged at the end. This is a must read and I am looking forward to the second book in this series.
I was given a copy of this book from Litfuse Publicity in exchange for my review.
Janine Mendenhall teaches teens English, of all things! Sometimes she sleeps, but most nights she reads, writes, or watches movies like Pride and Prejudice and claims she's researching her next book. Splickety Love and Splickety Prime have published her flash fiction. She and her husband, Tom, live in North Carolina where they and their two golden retrievers help gratify the needs of their five children and two cats.
Will Annette's search for love and acceptance replace the loss and hurt in her heart? Find out in Janine Mendenhall's book one, Starving Hearts, of the Triangular Trade Trilogy. Since her assault, Miss Annette Chetwynd has been plagued by nightmares and worries about an arranged marriage. But she yearns to find her anonymous rescuer. Unfortunately, her health and intellect prevent it. Both repel suitors and cause Annette to doubt God's existence, at least until He answers her prayers in an unusual way. . . .
Join in the search for love and acceptance with Janine and Starving Hearts by entering to win the Delightful Heart Gift Pack Giveaway.
Enter today by clicking the icon below, but hurry! The giveaway ends on September 12. The winner will be announced September 13 on Janine's blog.
In Service Tails: More Stories of Man's Best Hero, prolific author Ace Collins introduces us to leaders whose entire lives are wrapped in the banner of service. Their stories are remarkable snapshots of the value of vision and teamwork, as well as devotion to duty and unconditional love and acceptance—stretching the way we see both canine and human potential. Their training was intense, their loyalty unquestioned and each step of the way they constantly adapt to better serve those they lead. These unforgettable dogs are more than heroes; they are models from which we can learn how to love and serve unconditionally.
"Service Tails" by Ace Collins is a heartwarming book filled with stories that will inspire and teach you more about service dogs who are true heroes to so many. As a person with a disability, I have always been familiar with service dogs even though I have never had one myself. It was such a joy to read this and not only learn more about the history of service dogs but to also to learn the stories of so many who have benefited from their service over the years. These stories were the encouragement my soul needed during this season. If you haven't done so already pick up a copy or two of this book to read and share with friends. You will laugh, cry, and be encouraged.
I was given a copy of this book by Litfuse Publicity in exchange for my review.
Ace Collins defines himself as a storyteller. He has authored more than sixty books that have sold more than 2.5 million copies. His catalog includes novels, biographies, children's works as well as books on history, culture and faith. He has also been the featured speaker at the National Archives Distinguished Lecture Series, hosted a network television special and does college basketball play-by-play. Ace lives in Arkansas.
Fall in love with these remarkable service dogs and their stories of courage, faith, and loyalty in Ace Collins' new book, Service Tails. Their training was intense, their loyalty unquestioned and each step of the way they constantly adapt to better serve those they lead. These unforgettable dogs are more than heroes; they are models from which we can learn how to love and serve unconditionally.
But when next-door neighbor Nicholas Cooper returns to Nantucket, he brings the past with him. Once her brother's best friend and Lynette's first crush, Nick seems to hidingthings from her. Lynette wonders what he knows about the day her mother died and hopes he might help her remember the things she can't.
"The Things We Knew" is a a beautiful story of family, redemption, faith, and forgiveness. This is the first book I have read by Catherine West, but it certainly won't be the last. Filled with some heavy subjects, the book is about a family dealing with real issues life brings their way and reuniting with one another. West pulls the reader in from page one and takes you on a journey filled with a depth that pulls at the heart strings throughout the book, and finds you relating and feeling like you are a part of this family. I highly recommend this read and I hope that West decides to write a sequel because I want to spend more time with these folks.
I was given this book by Litfuse Publicity Group in exchange for my review.
Catherine West writes stories of hope and healing from her island home in Bermuda. When she's not at the computer working on her next story, you can find her taking her Border collie for long walks on the beach or tending to her roses and orchids. She and her husband have two grown children.
The day Robert came to Galveston to fulfill his promise to a dying man and look after his widow. He didn't expect to find love in the unlikeliest of places.
promise to his comrade Phillip Markham. If anything happened to Phillip, Robert would look after his beloved wife, Miranda. She was his life, his world, his everything.
The Loyal Heart is a story set in the post Civil War Period in Galveston Texas. It focused on the friendship and comradeship of soldiers who were imprisoned together, and later the love story and life of a widow following the war. This is the first book in a new series by Gray and I look forward to reading and learning more about these characters in future books. This is a must read, and is a perfect read for the end of summer and early fall.
I was given this book by Litfuse Publicity in exchange for my review.
When Stephanie tracks the runaway mutt to a campground, she meets Rhett Hastings—a man also on the run from a different life and a costly mistake. Rhett agrees to help Stephanie search for the missing dog . . . thus launching a surprising string of adventures and misadventures.
Fetching Sweetness is another great read from Dana Mentink. The storyline and characters are so love able and I was cheering them on until the very end. If you are a lover of animals, a good book,humor, and a twist of romance — then this book is for you. Also, this book is the perfect read to close out the summer with so be sure to add it to your list. I am already looking forward to reading the next book in this series!
Phoebe Von Bergen, the daughter of a German count, is excited to visit America for the first time while her father purchases sapphires in Helena, Montana. Little does she know, however, that her father's intentions—both for her and the gemstones—are not what she thinks.
Ian Harper, a lapidary working in Helena, finds the dignified young woman staying at the Broadwater Hotel more than a little intriguing. Yet the more he gets to know her, the more he realizes that her family story is based on a lie—a lie she has no knowledge of. And Ian believes he knows the only path that will lead her to freedom.
Meeting Ian has changed everything for Phoebe, and she begins to consider staying in America, regardless of her father's plans. But she may not be prepared for the unexpected danger that results when her family's deception begins to unravel.
Tracie Peterson is one of my favorite authors and she never fails to disappoint. I enjoy all of her books. While "A Beauty Refined" is the second book in the Sapphire Brides Series, they can be read as stand alones. I am immediately intrigued by Phoebe's story, and once she travels to America and Ian comes into her life, I want her to discover the truth and live in that freedom. I am also a fan of her and Ian's relationship and I am rooting for them throughout the book. Tracie does a fantastic job of telling this story, and allows the reader to feel like they are really getting to know the characters. There is just enough mystery to keep you turning the pages and enough romance to warm your heart. If you haven't done so already add this entire series to your must read list. You will never regret reading a novel from Tracie. I am already looking forward to her next book.
I was given this book by Litfuse Publicity and Netgalley in exchange for my review.
Also, there is a live Facebook party and giveaway tonight so be sure to head over to Facebook to meet and chat with Tracie. All details for that can be found here. Don't miss out!
Little does Phoebe know that her father's plans—for the sapphires and his daughter—are not what they seem. If you love historical fiction, romance, and adventure, don't miss Tracie Peterson's A Beauty Refined. When Phoebe meets Ian, everything changes. Yet the more he gets to know her, the more he realizes that her family story is based on a lie—a lie she has no knowledge of. And Ian believes he knows the only path that will lead her to freedom.
Travel back in time in Kelli Stuart's new novel, Like a River from Its Course, as the city of Kiev is bombed in Hitler's blitzkrieg across the Soviet Union. This sweeping historical saga takes the reader on a captivating journey into the little-known history of Ukraine's tragedies through the eyes of four compelling characters who experience the same story from different perspectives. Based on true stories gathered from fifteen years of research and interviews with Ukrainian World War II survivors, Like a River From Its Course is a story of love, war, heartache, forgiveness, and redemption.
Celebrate the release of Like a River from Its Course with Kelli by entering to win a Kindle Fire Prize Pack.
Enter today by clicking the icon below, but hurry! The giveaway ends on July 18th. The winner will be announced July 19th on Kelli's blog.


Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission offers a lot of job opportunities for the young and talented candidates to fill the available vacancies under various kinds of services. This is the right time for you to make use of this wonderful opportunity to start your career in the government sector. You should choose the right designation which suits your eligibility before applying for it. The department of TNPSC releases the annual planner for every year which notifies about the tnpsc group 1, group 1A, group 1B, combined civil service exam I and II, group IV, group VI, group VII and various exams. In this article, we are providing the TNPSC annual planner for the year 2019 . Through this, you can easily come to know about the list of exams available for the entire year. Preparing for exams can be stressful and time- consuming, but if you have a detailed study about the exam, then it will be very easy to crack it at the first attempt. This article will help you to have a clear picture about the upcoming exams and also about the number of vacancies, last date for application, and date of examination. Check it thoroughly and apply for the posts for which you are eligible for.
Tnpscexamsguide provides you the annual planner for the year 2019. Check with the below table for the already notified posts and for to be notified posts.
1 ASSISTANT PUBLIC PROSECUTOR GRADE – II 03.10.2018 05.01.2019 F.N.
T.N. FORENSIC SCIENCE DEPARTMENT 28.09.2018 05.01.2019 F.N. & A.N.
3 ASSISTANT JAILOR IN PRISON DEPARTMENT 08.10.2018 06.01.2019 F.N. & A.N.
4 LECTURER IN STATISTICS 12.10.2018 12.01.2019 F.N. & A.N.
6 JUNIOR INSPECTOR OF CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETIES 23.10.2018 27.01.2019 F.N.
7 DRAUGHTSMAN GRADE-III IN TOWN & COUNTRY PLANNING 30.10.2018 03.02.2019 F.N & A.N.
8 EXECUTIVE OFFICER GRADE-III IN HR & CE DEPARTMENT 02.11.2018 16.02.2019 F.N & A.N.
9 EXECUTIVE OFFICER GRADE-IV IN HR & CE DEPARTMENT 02.11.2018 17.02.2019 F.N & A.N.
10 LIBRARIAN IN VARIOUS DEPARTMENTS IN VARIOUS SERVICES / INDUSTRIES & COMMERCE, AGRICULTURE, PUBLIC LIBRARIES, AND LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY SECRETARIAT 14.11.2018 23.02.2019 F.N. & A.N.
11 LIBRARIAN IN ARCHAEOLOGY IN ARCHAEOLOGY DEPARTMENT IN GENERAL SUBORDINATE SERVICE 16.11.2018 24.02.2019 F.N. & A.N.
12 PRINCIPAL, I.T.I. & ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF TRAINING IN T.N. EMPLOYMENT & TRAINING SERVICE & ASSISTANT ENGINEER (INDUSTRIES) IN T.N. INDUSTRIES SUBORDINATE SERVICE 26.11.2018 02.03.2019 F.N & A.N.
13 DISTRICT EDUCATIONAL OFFICER IN T.N. SCHOOL EDUCATIONAL SERVICE 10.12.2018 02.03.2019 F.N.
14 COST ASSISTANT IN T.N. MINISTERIAL SUBORDINATE SERVICE 04.12.2018 02.03.2019 F.N & A.N.
15 STOREKEEPER IN T.N. FORENSIC SCIENCE SUBORDINATE SERVICE 19.12.2018 24.03.2019 F.N. & A.N.
16 INSPECTOR OF SALT IN T.N. INDUSTRIES SUBORDINATE SERVICE 19.12.2018 24.03.2019 F.N. & A.N.
17 ASSISTANT AGRICULTURAL OFFICER IN T.N. AGRICULTURAL SUBORDINATE SERVICE 27.12.2018 07.04.2019 F.N. & A.N.
18 ASSISTANT SYSTEM ENGINEER & ASSISTANT SYSTEM ANALYST IN T.N. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SERVICE 22.01.2019 07.04.2019 F.N. & A.N.
19 JUNIOR TECHNICAL ASSISTANT / SENIOR TECHNICAL ASSISTANT IN T.N. HANDLOOMS AND TEXTILES SUBORDINATE SERVICE 07.01.2019 20.04.2019 F.N. & A.N.
20 HOSTEL SUPERINTENDENT IN T.N. EMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING SUBORDINATE SERVICE 02.01.2019 27.04.2018 F.N. & A.N.
21 SUB-INSPECTOR OF FISHERIES IN T.N. FISHERIES SUBORDINATE SERVICE 10.01.2019 04.05.2019 F.N. & A.N.
Shortfall vacancies 28.01.2019 05.05.2019 F.N. & A.N.
Shortfall vacancies 24.01.2019 19.05.2019 F.N. & A.N.


White flowers are the symbol of peace, love and affection. So, making the floral bouquet of white carnation can be the wonderful gift for your dear one. Here is the perfect Winter fresh flower bouquet which is full of 10 white carnations to present or your lovable person to make her happy.


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Politics of Union
Germany: Parliament Votes to Allow Same-Sex Marriage
On June 30, 2017, the German Bundestag (parliament) adopted an amendment to the Civil Code that allows same-sex couples to enter into marriages.
The amendment was passed with 393 to 226 votes and four abstentions in a roll-call vote in which parliamentarians were allowed to vote against party lines. (Gesetzentwurf des Bundesrates, Entwurf eines Gesetzes zur Einführung des Rechts auf Eheschließung für Personen gleichen Geschlechts [Draft Act Submitted by the Bundesrat, Draft Act to Allow Persons of the Same Sex to Get Married] (Draft Act) (Nov. 11, 2015), DEUTSCHER BUNDESTAG: DRUCKSACHEN UND PROTOKOLLE [BT-Drs.] 18/6665, Deutscher Bundestag website; Majority in Bundestag Vote for "Marriage for All" (June 30, 2017), Deutscher Bundestag website (in German).)
The legislation adds a new paragraph to section 1353 of the German Civil Code that will state: "a marriage is entered into by two people of a different or the same sex for life." (German Civil Code, Jan. 2, 2002, as amended, § 1353, BUNDESGESETZBLATT [BGBl.] [FEDERAL LAW GAZETTE] I at 42, 2909; corrected at 2003 BGBl. I at 738, GERMAN LAWS ONLINE.) Same-sex couples that are currently in a registered life partnership may convert their life partnership into a marriage. No new life partnerships may be registered after the amendment of the Civil Code enters into force. (Draft Act, art. 2.)
The Bundesrat, the constitutional body through which the German states participate in the legislative process, will debate the amendment in its session on July 7, 2017. Approval by the Bundesrat is very likely, as the initiative for the amendment of the law originated there. (Bundesrat, Nachtrag zur Tagesordnung der 959. Sitzung des Bundesrates am Freitag, dem 7. Juli 2017, 9.30 Uhr [Addition to the Agenda of the 959th Session of the Bundesrat on Friday, July 7, 2017, 9:30 a.m.] (June 30, 2017), at 3, Bundesrat website.) The act will enter into force once the Federal President has signed it and it is published in the Federal Law Gazette. (Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Basic Law) (May 23, 1949), BGBl. I at 1, as amended, art. 82, GERMAN LAWS ONLINE (unofficial English translation).)
Possible Legal Challenges Against the Amendment
Read more via LIbrary of Congress
Tagged: Germany, marriage equality
Newer PostTanzania steps up fight against queer rights
Older PostCzech Republic: Gays, lesbians launching campaign for marriage


Life in Death – God's Grace ~ God's Glory!
Meghan ~ Thank you for your comments and encouragement.
Our culture has lost the true sense of life.
Francis, this is a beautiful article.
Brenda, Thank you for staying in touch, and for your encouragement.
Pingback: SELF-DESTRUCTION ~ Part 2 | God's Grace ~ God's Glory!


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Lazada Gets New Boost From Alibaba – US$2B Funding And New CEO To Help Fuel SEA Growth
Alibaba Group will invest a further US$2 billion into Singapore-based e-commerce company Lazada as part of its effort to accelerate the region's e-commerce development.
This move brings Alibaba's total investment in Lazada to US$4 billion.
In 2016, Alibaba acquired control of Lazada with an investment of US$1 billion and boosted its stake to 83 per cent last year with an additional investment of another US$1 billion.
The company did not disclose how its stake will change with the latest investment, but it's safe to say that Alibaba is gearing up for an intense battle in South East Asia, following Amazon's launch in Singapore and Shopee's recent expansion to win consumers.
"The investment underscores Alibaba's confidence in the future success of Lazada's business and the growth prospect of the Southeast Asian market, a region that is a key part of Alibaba's global growth strategy," said Alibaba in a statement.
This Chinese e-commerce giant has reported double-digit revenue growth annually since 2013, and has started offering curated selections of goods from its own Taobao platform to Lazada users.
Last April, Ant Financial also acquired Lazada payment affiliate helloPay Group, rebranding it under its own Alipay brand.
Lucy Peng To Take Over As CEO
Image Credit: BloombergQuint
In line with this fresh funding, Lucy Peng – one of Alibaba's 18 co-founders and current chairman of Lazada – will assume the additional role of chief executive officer (CEO) of Lazada.
Peng is also a senior partner at Alibaba and executive chair at Ant Financial, the payments affiliate of Alibaba.
Meanwhile, Lazada founder Max Bittner – who has served as CEO since 2012 – will take on the role of senior advisor to Alibaba to assist in the transition and future international growth strategy.
According to Peng, South East Asia is a hotspot for growth and exciting opportunities.
"With a young population, high mobile penetration and just three per cent of the region's retail sales currently conducted online, we feel very confident to double down on South East Asia," she said.
"Lazada is well-positioned for the next phase of development and of Internet-enabled commerce in this region."
Launched in 2012 and headquartered in Singapore, Lazada is the leading online shopping and selling destination in Southeast Asia, with presence in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
The platform now has over 145,000 local and international sellers, as well as 3,000 brands.
Featured Image Credit: Lazada
Now That Jack Ma Owns 83% Of Lazada, Alibaba Is On Its Way To Rule Southeast Asia's E-Commerce
Categories: News Reader, Online Shopper, Singaporean


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Book review – The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next
Fire can be considered one of our oldest tools, long used to shape whole landscapes. But our burning of fossil fuels presents a clear break from what has come before. Riffing on the concept of the Anthropocene, environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne calls ours the Pyrocene: an age of fire. Drawing on a long career writing about and working with fire, The Pyrocene is a short book that overflows with interesting ideas.
The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, written by Stephen J. Pyne, published by the University of California Press in September 2021 (hardback, 204 pages)
Pyne is one of the few people who can reasonably call himself a fire historian. Now a Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, he was a firefighter in the Grand Canyon for 15 years and has written some 35 books, most of them on fire and its history. He coined the term Pyrocene in a 2015 essay in Aeon, not so much to propose a new geological epoch, but more as a shorthand to organise his thinking on the long history of humans and fire. He calls the current book "an interpretive essay, or argued analogy, not a monograph" (p. 163). In other words, this is a book of ideas rather than data. For more data, he refers readers to Fire: A Brief History and Fire on Earth, while this thought-provoking book gives free rein to his ideas. Three of these stood out for me.
First, Pyne discerns three types of fire. First-fire is the oldest, its history stretching back some 420 million years. The study of fossil charcoal shows that lightning sparked fires as soon as plants developed on land. Second-fire was wielded by our hominin ancestors. It has long been considered our first tool, allowing us to cook our food which resulted in lasting morphological changes. Pyne argues it could also be considered our first domesticate. Unlike a tool, "it could not be put on a shelf and ignored until it was next needed. Once kindled, it had to be tended" (p. 60). This is the fire that indigenous people, whether Native Americans or Aboriginal Australians, used for millennia to shape the landscapes they inhabited. Third-fire is the much more recent burning of fossil fuels that powered us through the Industrial Revolution into today's global capitalist economy.
Second is just how influential the switch to fossil fuels has been. In an example of inspired writing, Pyne calls it the pyric transition, a move from burning living landscapes to burning lithic landscapes. And there are some notable differences between the two. While second-fire "could exist without humans while humans could not exist without fire", third-fire reversed that: "people could exist without it, but it could not flourish without people" (p. 5). More importantly, "living landscapes had ecological boundaries and internal checks and balances" (p. 85). Weather, seasons, and the cycle of plant growth meant that we "could coax and cajole only so much [fuel] out of a landscape". Being mined rather than grown, "lithic landscapes knew no such boundaries […] their fires did not recycle carbon but transferred it across deep time" (p. 86). That last statement refers to the fact that most of the world's coal reserves were laid down during the Carboniferous under circumstances that will never reoccur: after the evolution of the first trees but before the evolution of microbes and fungi capable of digesting wood fibres. There they lay undisturbed for some 300 million years. The fossilised remains of a 50-million-year period of plant growth contain more than enough carbon to overwhelm today's ecological sinks, with anthropogenic climate change as a result.
"Third-fire is the much more recent burning of fossil fuels […] Pyne calls it the pyric transition, a move from burning living landscapes to burning lithic landscapes."
Third were the various ramifications of this pyric transition. Naked flame disappeared from our daily lives, as "industrial transformation […] stuffed it in machines" (p. 126). Once a central theme in philosophy and intellectual enquiry, now "its study [was] dispersed among disciplines. Combustion went to oxidation chemistry; heat, to mechanical engineering; light, to electromagnetism" (p. 88). In the countryside, farmers wanted the ecological benefits of fire without the actual fire. Nutrients were provided by artificial fertilizers rather than burned vegetation; weeds and pests were removed by tractors and chemicals rather than fire and smoke. Whereas "an integrative process like fire does a score of things, none of them maximized" (p. 97), the goal of industrial agriculture became to select and mimic only those fire processes that would maximize productivity, making farms more like factories. Wildfires were suppressed at all costs by relying, ironically, on petrol-powered machines such as fire engines, pumps, helicopters, and bulldozers—in a sense fighting fire with fire. This disastrous policy allowed kindling to build up over decades, resulting in ever-fiercer conflagrations. Only after the birth of fire ecology as a subject of study in the 1950s did our thinking slowly change and prescribed burns become an acceptable management tool. Pyne favours incorporating traditional ecological knowledge in future solutions. Cautiously, he concludes that "fire isn't ecological pixie dust that sprinkled willy-nilly over the landscape will magically restore or make everything right. But it can help bring what exists into a working whole" (p. 143).
The concept of the Pyrocene is very powerful. Nevertheless, I have some minor niggles with this book. The reader will have to do some sieving to get at the interesting ideas. Though the chapter titles suggest a clear narrative, I found the book slightly lacking in structure. I had to disentangle the many ideas Pyne throws out to explain why I thought this was an interesting read while writing this review. One tangent is a chapter on the history of the Pleistocene and the discovery of the ice ages. He argues that the Pyrocene is of a similar magnitude to the Pleistocene ice ages. Some impacts are similar (e.g. sea-level changes, mass extinctions, permafrost freezing and now thawing), though, as he admits, "all analogies collapse eventually, and some can quickly veer into the absurd" (p. 119). Whereas ice is a substance that moves at, well, a glacial pace, fire is a reaction that devours living matter and "more resembles a fast herbivory than a wind or ice storm" (p. 14). Similarly, Pyne's analogy between the pyric transition and humanity's current demographic transition feels forced. His bold proposal to leave fossil fuels in the ground—and burn them in a distant future to ward off the next ice age—is not further developed here and veers into the realm of maverick geoengineering.
"Wildfires were suppressed at all costs by relying, ironically, on petrol-powered machines […] in a sense fighting fire with fire."
As with the Anthropocene, the question of when the Pyrocene started naturally arises. Pyne proposes both a long and a short version. In the former, "the narrative of humanity's career as keeper of the planetary flame is continuous and unbroken". In the latter, "the pivot to fossil biomass marks a phase change in kind, not just quantity". The latter also avoids lumping "all the more or less judicious uses of fire in living landscapes with the global rupture sparked by burning lithic landscapes" and does not "condemn all of humanity when only a small fraction was responsible for unleashing the combustion cascade that has washed over the planet" (p. 146). Remarkably, Pyne prefers the long interpretation, which seems at odds with both the nature of his pyric transition and with the book's flap text announcing that the "ancient relationships between humans and fire broke down when people began to burn fossil biomass".
I might be mistaken, but I think both criticisms stem from a common root. Pyne's biography, especially his Furniss Lecture, mentions how his career, through both happenstance and choice, has largely unfolded in "extraordinary isolation" and how he has had no "students, research assistants, or colleagues". As he kept writing about fire history, the intellectual edifice he constructed has grown, each book making "harder the cost of entry […] for someone else". The Pyrocene has no acknowledgements section, though his Author's Note thanks a few people. Without wanting to psychoanalyse Pyne, nor wishing to downplay his extraordinary body of work, intellectual ideas do not grow in a vacuum and academic peers can provide useful sounding boards.
Overall, The Pyrocene is a pleasantly brief book. Pyne is an inspired author who mints novel terms and employs creative writing to make his point. His argument that we have transitioned into a fire age is thought-provoking and worth reading.
The Pyrocene
Pyne's Fire (2nd edition)
Scott et al.'s Fire on Earth
Scott's Burning Planet
Wrangham's Catching Fire
Boyd's Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest (2nd edition)
Pyne's The Still-Burning Bush
Malm's Fossil Capital
Pirani's Burning Up
McGhee, Jr.'s Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction
Roberts's Jungle
McGranahan & Wonkka's Ecology of Fire-Dependent Ecosystems
Weir & Scasta's Global Application of Prescribed Fire
Steffensen's Fire Country
Struzik's Dark Days at Noon
Pyne & Pyne's The Last Lost World
Mazur's Ice Ages
Morton's The Planet Remade
Zalasiewicz et al.'s The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit
Posted in environmental history and tagged agriculture, Amazon Basin, Antarctica, Anthropocene Epoch, Australia, Australian Aboriginals, book review, Camp fire (California), carbon, carbon dioxide, charcoal, Charles Lyell, climate change, combustion, controlled burning, cooking, environmental history, environmental policies, extinction, fallow, fire, fire age, fire ecology, fire management, fire regimes, fire suppression, food, fossil fuels, fusain, glaciation, global warming, greenhouse effect, greenhouse gases, Holocene Epoch, hominins, ice ages, industrial agriculture, Industrial Revolution, interglacials, lightning, lithic landscapes, Little Ice Age, Louis Agassiz, mass extinctions, megafauna, Milankovitch cycles, oxygen, Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), Paradise fire (California), permafrost, Pleistocene Epoch, Pliocene Epoch, prescribed burning, pyric transition, Pyrocene epoch, pyrocumulus clouds, slash-and-burn agriculture, smoke, swidden agriculture, the Enlightenment, traditional knowledge, University of California Press, vegetation, wildfire on May 9, 2022 by inquisitivebiologist. Leave a comment
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Meet Our Illustrators
We are proud to represent award-winning and up-and-coming artists from all over the world. Whether they are working hard on their own books or creating illustrations for others work, we are in constant awe of their imaginations and talent.
It is our pleasure to introduce you to a few of them.
Sandra G. Anderson
If you asked Sandra G. Anderson what she does, she'd be tempted to tell you that she wrestles alligators in the everglades and trains them to do tricks, but she does something even more exciting: she creates children's picture books!
She writes, she draws—she's the whole enchilada! Her illustrations are rendered digitally, in addition to ink and watercolor, bringing the page alive with engaging character designs, vibrant colors and a dash of whimsy. Pair those with her quirky (and sometimes alligator-filled) stories and it's pure magic.
At this point in her adventure, Sandra is living in beautiful northern California with her husband and two daughters along with their pets, Gloria the Gecko and Cupcake the Snake.
Twitter: @MrsAnderson1267
Instagram: @sandra.illustrates
Website: www.sandraandersonillustration.com
Represented by Lynnette Novak.
Bryan Ballinger
Bryan graduated from the Columbus College of Art and Design with a degree in Illustration. He also has a master's degree in Writing for Children from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. After moving to Seattle and doing freelance work for companies such as Nintendo Power magazine, he started working at Microsoft as an illustrator. He was lead illustrator for the first version of the award-winning Encarta CD-ROM encyclopedia as well as the Explorapedia children's encyclopedia series. Bryan was the 3D Design Lead for 5 years at Big Idea Productions, the producers of the VeggieTales children's videos. Bryan was also a professor of Digital Media Arts at Huntington University in Indiana for 16 years. Bryan does illustration for children's books, websites, games, videos, ads, etc. He also does large and small scale murals, 3d toy design and fine art photography. Bryan is the author and illustrator of Animal Gas, a quirky scratch and sniff children's picture book. You can see more of Bryan's work at www.breadwig.com.
Website: www.breadwig.com
Illustrations: https://www.breadwig.com/portfolio/2d-illustration/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/breadwigram
Twitter: www.twitter.com/breadwig
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/breadwigillustration/
Thornton Blease
Thornton Blease wants to live in a world where horses, dragons, and mermaids roam free, and everyone can reach their fullest potential.
As a teen, Thornton has won 26 gold keys and three National titles from Scholastic's Teen Art and Writing Awards and has been published in Scholastic's Teens' Best Writing. As a young adult, he is a judge for the same awards.
He has a BA from Sarah Lawrence and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from The New School.
Conferences allow him to travel the country to hone his craft and encourage children, especially those with (dis)abilities to read and write. Thornton is a proud and active member of the SCBWI. 12X12 and GLVWG. He has also attended the competitive Southampton Children's Literature Conference, VCFA Writing for Young Peoples Retreat and Highlights.
Thornton has been published in Scholastic's Teens' Best Writing, The Underground, River of Words, Rewriting the Past Anthology, and CSA Journals.
Growing up in rural Stewartsville, NJ, Thornton jokes about being born in an animal hospital/shelter. Not quite. But he has learned about love, devotion, sorrow, and cruelty from his experiences at the clinic. He lives with his rescue cats, dogs, horse, and donkeys.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thornton.blease
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThorntonBlease
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thornton-blease-28504744/
Website: http://kidartistry-thornton-w-blease.com/
Represented by Joyce Sweeney.
Jason Chatfield
Jason Chatfield is Australia's most widely syndicated cartoonist, producing the iconic comic strip Ginger Meggs which is syndicated daily in over 30 countries through Andrews McMeel Syndication. Ginger Meggs has been running since 1921, making it one of the longest-running comic strips in history, and celebrates its 100th year this year.
Based in New York, Chatfield is the current President of the National Cartoonists' Society (Est. 1946) and is a past President of the Australian Cartoonists Association (Est. 1924). His cartoons appear regularly in The New Yorker, Wired, Esquire, Variety and MAD Magazine along with other international publications.
His work has been exhibited in France, the UK, Australia, and all over the United States.
He has been illustrated several books published through Harper Collins, Penguin Random House and Scribe Media.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Chatfield
Twitter: @jason_chatfield
Facebook: @jasonchatfieldcartoonist
Instagram: @jasonchatfield
Represented by Nicole Resciniti.
Sunny J. Choi
"Sunny" Joung Sun Choi is a children's book illustrator currently living in San Francisco. She was born, raised and studied Oriental painting in Korea. While she was exhibiting and teaching in college in Korea, she had a chance to illustrate children's books and fell in love with it. She came to San Francisco to study children's book illustration at the Academy of Art University, and graduated with an MFA in Illustration. Sunny has been a member of Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) since 2008.
Her two sons are her biggest inspiration and she currently lives with a furry daughter named Lily.
Website: sunnyjchoi.com
Instagram: @sunnyjchoi_art
Diana Ting Delosh
Diana Ting Delosh is an illustrator/writer. Diana contracted the art bug at the age of two when she nibbled her way through her first box of crayons and she is still happily doodling away. Her art is a combination of traditional techniques and some digital magic. She loves drawing animals both dressed and naked and anything nature and kid friendly.
Diana is a member of the SCBWI, 12x12 and is the co-president of CBIG, a New York City area Children's Book Illustrators Group. Her whimsical illustrations have appeared on greeting cards, educational and children's books. She received the Highlights High Five Pewter Plate for Puzzle Poem of the Year in 2008 and the SCBWI Magazine Merit Honor Award for Illustration in 2002.
Currently, She lives with her husband in a sleepy suburb, that's not too long a train ride away from NYC. Where you may find her working on her craft in her studio. Diana believes in always evolving creatively as both an illustrator and a writer. No rest for the creative.
Website: https://dianadelosh.com
Twitter and Instagram handles: @dtdelosh
Tamara DeStefano
Creatively speaking, Tamara DeStefano is a jack of many trades. She began writing early in life, winning numerous illustrated poetry and short story contests.
An accomplished artist, along with illustrating her own picture books, Tamara uses her vivid imagination, and an addiction to digital art to create memorable characters and dynamic settings for other children's book authors and graphic novelists. Her style is always bright, often quirky and explosively colorful.
Tamara lives in Georgia with her two dogs, too many 2.5 reading glasses to count and an over abundance of imagination!
She'd love a little gentle stalking!
You can follow her on Instagram @tamaradestefanoart
and check out her newest artwork and books at tamaradestefanoart.com.
Represented by Nicole Resciniti and Jennifer Wills.
Sunny Duran
Sunny Duran is an illustrator of children's books, mother of four kids and keeper of two cats. She grew up in the woods of Northern Michigan along the shores of Lake Superior where she spent many summers freezing in the chilly waters. She currently lives in Maryland where it's much warmer and everything seems to have Old Bay seasoning on it. She spends her days doodling on her ipad with a cup of cold coffee by her side and a cat on her lap. Creating fun and quirky characters for children's books and middle grade. She's an active member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. She is also the co-host of the Illo Chat podcast. Where she talks about her journey in children's book illustration.
Website/portfolio: https://www.sunnyduran.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sunnyduranillustration/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SunnyDuranIllo
Melissa Escobar
Melissa Escobar graduated from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, California, with an MFA degree in illustration, focusing on children's books. She has illustrated four educational paint-by-number books for children who are blind. She is now working on writing and illustrating her own stories. She is an active member of SCBWI, was a PBChat mentee in PBChat 2019 and a judge for PBParty in 2021. At any given time, she has at least three dragon, unicorn and dragonfly story ideas happily gamboling in her imagination. Her favorite color is blue, she loves 80's music and adorable animals. When not working on her projects, she enjoys life in the Bay Area with her husband.
Twitter: @mescobarart
Instagram: @melissaescobarart
Website: http://www.melissaescobarart.com
Blog: http://www.melissaescobarart.com/blog
Angelica Friera
Angelica Friera is a Dubai-based Filipino illustrator and animator. They graduated from SAE Institute with a degree in character animation, but they've been writing and drawing for as long as they could remember— creating different characters and stories from whatever inspires them. Whenever they're not doing that, they would be playing video games, listening to music, or thinking about petting dogs!
Portfolio: https://www.angelicafriera.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/qqnge
ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/qqnge
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelicafriera/
Annie Hobbs
California raised, Annie lives submerged in a world of adventure, a splash of ocean, and a sprinkle of pixie dust.
Starting with extensive doodle studies in the margin spaces of math assignments, Annie holds a BFA in Illustration and a Certification in Bio-Medical Illustration. For the last few years, she has been pursuing a freelance career alongside the dream of being published in the Children's Illustration market.
In 2015, Annie was brought in by the Disney Parks & Resorts to work in the prestigious Disneyana Gallery, where she worked as a Character Sketch artist before transferring to Disneyland's Ink & Paint Department. Honing her skills within the park landed her a role of a lifetime with the Walt Disney Animation Studios, where she now spends her days in Walt's original Ink & Paint Department in Burbank inking and painting traditional animation cels.
Annie has produced character & licensed artwork for The Walt Disney Company, Disney Parks & Resorts, Walt Disney Imagineering, Pixar, Tim Burton, and Lucasfilm.
When not doodling in her home studio, Annie is most likely squishing the face of her adorable King Charles Cavalier, Lotus, eating vegan snacks, and binge-watching other artists on YouTube.
Website: www.anniemcbethillustration.com
Instagram: @anniemcbeth
Twitter: @anniemcbeth
Facebook: @theanniemcbeth
TikTok: @anniehobbs
Sharon Lane Holm
Sharon Lane Holm is the writer and illustrator of wonderfully whimsical and sweet yet silly and quirky children's books. Partnered with her beautifully, bold art to create happy, feel good, silly stories.
In conjunction with the CT Parent Teacher Organization, Sharon created and implemented a successful literacy/illustration program for elementary school children in New Fairfield, CT.
She recently relocated back home to Florida with her husband and their revolving door of rescue animals. Amongst the sun, surf, and sand she creates her own magical, imaginary and quirky world.
Sharon is a firm believer that glitter does go with everything.
Website: https://www.sharonholm.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sharon_lane_holm/
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/SharonLaneHolm
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/SharonHolm
FaceBookBusiness: https://www.facebook.com/sharonlaneholm
Jessica Lemmon
My name is Jessica Lemmon and I'm a multi-published bestselling author of 40+ novels, but I went to college to study art! In fact, I have a graphic design degree gathering dust in a very impressive frame.
I'm also the creator of Lemmony, an adorable lem(m)on character who encourages us to love ourselves and others. I enjoy illustrating digitally, as well as on actual real paper made from trees and colored by markers filled with alcohol. (Not the drinking kind.)
My art portfolio can be found HERE.
You can learn more about my romance novels at JessicaLemmon.com.
Dea Lenihan
Dea Lenihan is an author/illustrator who studied painting, illustration, and drawing at Rutgers University and Montclair State University. She also studied with Bob Budiansky, an artist most known for his work on the Marvel Transformers comics.
She has designed best-selling coloring books for adults. The first book she illustrated, The Open Pillow, was featured for a Special Storytime Weekend at The Eric Carle Museum of Storytime Art. Her second illustrated picture book, American Pie, written by Lynne Marie, is coming Spring 2022 from Spork/Dancing Flamingo Press.
She lives on the coast of New Jersey where she collects vintage writing instruments and ghost stories. She can usually be found drawing with Buddy the conure on her shoulder.
Twitter: www.twitter.com/dealenihan
Instagram: www.instagram.com/dealenihan
Facebook: www.facebook.com/dea.lenihan.7
Website: www.dealenihan.com
Kidlit Portfolio: www.dealenihan.com.portfolio/html
Represented by Elisa Houot.
Catarina Oliverira
Catarina Oliveira is an illustrator living in West Vancouver, Canada, who started her career as a graphic designer but decided her love of children's books was too strong to ignore. After moving to Canada in 2016, she started working full time as a freelancer, illustrating sweet and colorful characters and their stories, first for magazines and then for books. She has been published in both Europe and North America.
She lives with her husband and one resilient plant, loves hiking, cooking and setting off on long travels around the world. She continues working every day on improving her drawing and narrative skills, usually by sketching on her iPad and using the color pink. When she's not working, you can find her petting all the dogs at the park or making paper collages.
Website: catarinaoliveirastudio.com
Twitter: coliveirastudio
Instagram: catarinaoliveirastudio
Aixa Perez-Prado
Aixa Pérez-Prado is a native of Argentina who immigrated to the United States as a small child. She is a writer, illustrator, translator and professor at Florida International University with a PhD in Social Science and Education. Aixa has lived in Argentina, the U.S., Costa Rica, Morocco and Brazil, and draws inspiration for her stories and illustrations from these diverse locations. Aixa has published two academic books on teaching through critical and creative thinking strategies and created the cover art for both texts. Her current passion is writing and illustrating picture books aimed at giving diverse children a chance to see their multilayered identities represented through stories that resonate with heart and humor. Aixa writes in both Spanish and English and enjoys mixing languages in her prose. Similarly, she loves illustrating by employing different techniques in a whimsical style including watercolor, acrylic, ink, and digital. She especially enjoys combining all of these elements through collage. Aixa has been a finalist in several writing and illustration contests including two honorable mentions in Florida SCBWI's Rising Kite Contest, and is the KidLit 411 banner illustrator for November 2021. Aixa is represented by Joyce Sweeney.
Website: aixaperezprado.com
Twitter: @professoraixa
Instagram: aixasdoodlesandbooks
Greg Preslicka
Greg Preslicka is an illustrator, author and… Well, he's not sure. Most of his life has been spent as a graphic designer and illustrator creating artwork for cereal boxes, kid's activity books, and games. In an effort to get out from behind a computer, he started painting murals. Ten years later, he's painted nearly 100 murals in community centers, schools, and libraries. On a whim, he and his wife recently entered the world of toy and game inventing after pulling a game out of the closet that he had made for their son. They now have six games licensed and in stores.
Some of his favorite times spent with his five children were reading books. They challenged each other to write and illustrate stories, as well as invent characters. Over the years, Greg has written and illustrated many books for them. He's excited to now be able to share some of his ideas and stories.
Website: https://gregpreslicka.myportfolio.com
Twitter: @GregPreslicka
Instagram: @gregpreslicka
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greg.preslicka/
Kyle Reardon
Kyle Reardon absolutely has to tell stories. He's been writing and drawing his entire life and even went so far as to get a degree in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. A lover of all things spooky, Kyle particularly loves writing stories about little monsters and drawing the worlds they live in. He currently lives in beautiful, historic Alexandria, Virginia, which he's pretty sure is haunted by SOMETHING. Maybe it'll let him write a story about it!
Website: www.kylereardonart.com
Instagram: @Kylereardonillustration
Twitter: @kylereardon
R.G. Spaulding
Ramya G. Spaulding (R.G. Spaulding) is an Indian-American author-illustrator. She loves to draw and frequently got into trouble as a kid for daydreaming too much. She spent most of her lunchtime at the school library, escaping into different worlds of the stories she read. Before she was an author-illustrator, she used to be an engineer because she also loved math and science. She feels extremely privileged to be making up stories with words and pictures. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. She wants to make sure all children can see themselves in the books they read. You can find out more about her by visiting https://rgspaulding.com/.
Twitter and Instagram: @RGSpaulding
Morgan Trinkle
My name is Morgan Trinkle, I'm a self-taught artist born in Norton, Virginia, and raised in the hills of Eastern, Kentucky. As a small-town girl, I am drawn to anything outdoors, such as beaches, hiking trails, state parks, and nature drives. I am also a collector of sorts, including teddy bears, books, and makeup. As a little girl, you could always find me with my face in a sketchbook filling the pages with rainbow hues and aimless doodles. The first time I picked up a children's book I was engulfed in the creative world that was embedded in it's pages. As I've grown, it's become my passion to give children this same feeling and hopefully one day engulf their beautiful minds in the world that I will illustrate.
https://m.facebook.com/morganlaraytrinkle/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/artbymorgantrinkle?igshid=ozfwazjz4k4u
https://twitter.com/Morgan_Trinkle
Andrea Tripke
Andrea Tripke is a German born children's book writer and illustrator. In 2003, she moved to the United States and has lived in Michigan, California, Ohio, Alabama and Florida. Her adventurous lifestyle paved the path for a somewhat different career and opened her up to follow the lifelong dream of becoming a professional artist. Andrea got a degree in fine arts, majoring in illustration, from the Columbus College of Art and Design.
She made her debut as a picture book illustrator published by Ripple Grove Press. Excited by working in the children's book industry and the thought of leaving a footprint behind through her books, she got hooked. She wanted to do more, and while working on a project, Andrea became inspired with the idea to write and illustrate her own stories.
Growing up ecologically aware, Andrea often but not always includes environmental problems in her otherwise fictional and mostly humorous picture book stories.
She lives with her husband, daughter and very stubborn Lhasa Apso Frankie in Melbourne, Florida. Andrea loves the sun and beaches, and might stay there forever… But then, you never know.
https://andreatripke.com
https://www.facebook.com/AndreaTripkeIllustration
https://twitter.com/AndreaTripke
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-tripke-82700114/
https://www.instagram.com/andreatripke/
SCBWI:
https://www.scbwi.org/illustrator-gallery/illustrator-detail/?illustrator_id=80726&savedSearch=xKOTW3Gml4kvpzhOY6xm9EpmXrPq9NSN
https://www.pinterest.com/andreatripke/
Represented by Joyce Sweeney and Marisa Cleveland.
Michele Ziemke
Michele Ziemke is an author, artist, and optimist. She won her students' hearts with hugs and humor for over 25 years. She was recognized as an educational visionary in the creation of the Great Lakes Performing and Visual Arts Academy, and honoured with the new Michele Ziemke Student Art Gallery! Her degree in Art Education and a Masters in Educational Administration are from Bowling Green State University. Retired, Michele brings that same heart and humor to her picture books. She is also passionate about interior design, tailoring, theater, and chocolate covered peanuts.
Michele is an active member of SCBWI and Julie Hedland's 12x12 Challenge. Proud finalist of the #PBParty and #Fall Writing Frenzy competition in 2019 & 2020. Michele resides in Northern Ohio, and Manitoulin Island in Canada with her husband and fluffy labradoodle, while sprinkling her time among twelve grandchildren!
MicheleZiemke.com
Twitter and Instagram:
@ZiemkeMichele


The 56th series of Marvel Minimates is here, and it's based on the latest entry in the cinematic world of Marvel superheroes: The Amazing Spider-Man 2! This week, when you pick up the latest issues of your favorite comic book titles at the local comic shop, you can also pick up four different two-packs of Marvel Minimates featuring Spider-Man and his big-screen friends and foes! Check out the gallery, and read all about them! First up, Spider-Man battles a grinning Green Goblin using his webline and megaphone accessories. Then a Battle-Damaged Spider-Man dons a fireman's helmet to take on a metallic Electro, with lightning attachments and an energy base. Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy pair up in the third two-pack, with a Spider-Man mask, backpack and phone, and the final, two-pack gives us Electro's boss Alistair Smythe and a pre-Rhino Aleksei Sytsevich with a briefcase, machine gun and an alternate pantsless pair of legs. These four two-packs are exclusively available at comic shops and specialty stores, although Toys "R" Us and toysrus.com will receive slightly different versions of the two Spider-Man sets – one with a serious-faced Green Goblin and one with a translucent Electro. Toys "R" Us will also have their own exclusive two-pack, featuring a "Flashback" version of Spider-Man and a pre-accident Max Dillon with briefcase and newspaper.
Check out the pictures, then go find your local comic shop at comicshoplocator.com!