text:
From William Morris
by Michael Lane
Numbers are pages from On Art and Socialism (1947), a collection of Morris's writings edited by none other than Orage's old collaborator and the discoverer of Douglas, Holbrook Jackson.
No doubt many of you, like me, [have wandered] through the galleries of the admirable museum of South Kensington, and, like me, have been filled with wonder and gratitude at the beauty which has been born from the brain of man. Now, consider, I pray you, what these wonderful works are. . . . Well, these things are just the common household goods of those past days (48). When a man turned the wheel, or threw the shuttle, or hammered the iron, he was expected to make something more than a water-pot, a cloth, or a knife: he was expected to make a work of art also; . . . this is what I have called Architecture: the turning of necessary articles of daily use into works of art (266).
I must ask you to extend the word art beyond those matters which are consciously works of art, to take in not only painting and sculpture, and architecture, but the shapes and colours of household goods, nay, even the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds; in a word, to extend it to the aspect of all the externals of our life. For I must ask you to believe that every one of the things that goes to make up the surroundings among which we live must be either beautiful or ugly, [either a] burden to the maker of it to make, or a pleasure (132f.). The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life, in elevating them by art (93).
In times past these handicrafts were done on a small, almost a domestic scale by knots of workmen who mostly belonged to organized gilds, and were taught their work soundly, however limited their education was in other respects. There was little division of labour among them; the grades between master and man were not many; a man knew his work from end to end, and felt responsible for every stage of its progress. Such work was necessarily slow to do and expensive to buy; neither was it always finished to the nail; but it was always intelligent work; there was a man's mind in it always, and abundant tokens of human hopes and fears (121).
It was this system, which had not learned the lesson that man is made for commerce, but supposed in its simplicity that commerce was made for man, which produced the art of the Middle Ages, wherein the harmonious co-operation of free intelligence was carried to the furthest point which has yet been attained, and which alone of all art can claim to be called Free. The effect of this freedom, and the widespread or rather universal sense of beauty to which it gave birth, became obvious enough in the outburst of the expression of splendid and copious genius which marks the Italian Renaissance (142).
The unit of the art [is] this house, this church, this town-hall, built and ornamented by the harmonious efforts of a free people; by no possibility could one man do it, however gifted he might be: . . something of his genius must be in the other members of the great body that raises the complete work: millions on millions of strokes of hammer and chisel, of the gouge, of the brush, of the shuttle, are embodied in that work of art, and in every one of them is either intelligence to help the master, or stupidity to foil him hopelessly (233).
Now think of any kind of manufacture which you are conversant with, and note how differently it is done nowadays (121). There is no sympathy between the designer and the man who carries out the design (163). Almost certainly the workmen are collected in huge factories, in which labour is divided and subdivided. . . . Not only is he not asked to put his individuality into his share of the work, but he is not allowed to. He is but part of a machine, and has but one unvarying set of tasks to do; and when he has once learned these, the more regularly and with the less thought he does them, the more valuable he is. The work turned out by this system is speedily done, and cheap to buy. No wonder, considering the marvellous perfection of the organization of labour that turns it out, and the energy with which it is carried through. Also, it has a certain high finish, and what I should call shop-counter look, quite peculiar to the wares of this century; but it is of necessity utterly unintelligent, and has no sign of humanity on it; not even so much as to show weariness here and there, which would imply that one part of it was pleasanter to do than another (121f.).
[As for] ornament, you must pay specially for it, and the workman is compelled to produce ornament, as he is to produce other wares. He is compelled to pretend happiness in his work, so that the beauty produced by man's hand, which was once a solace in his labour, has now become an extra burden to him, and ornament is now but one of the follies of useless toil, and perhaps not the least irksome of its fetters (188). You want a ewer and basin, say: you go into a shop and buy one. . . . Well, you look at several, and one interests you about as much as another—that is, not at all; and at last in mere weariness you say, "Well, that will do"; and you have your crockery with a scrawl of fern leaves and convolvulus over it which is its "ornament." The said ornament gives you no pleasure, still less any idea; it only gives you an impression (a mighty dull one) of bedroom. The ewer also has some perverse stupidity about its handle which also says bedroom, and adds respectable. . . . That ornament, that special form which the ineptitude of the fern scrawl and the idiocy of the handle has taken, has sold so many dozen or gross more of that toilet set than of others, and that is what it is put there for, not to amuse you; you know it is not art, but you don't know that it is trade finish. . . . If, as the saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue, so this degraded piece of trade finish is the homage which commerce pays to art (238). If such work were otherwise [than] ugly and despicable to look at one's sense of justice would be shocked; for the labour which went into the making of it was thankless and unpleasurable (122)
Some few months ago I read in a paper the report of a speech made to the assembled workpeople of a famous firm. . . . Towards the end of it I came across a sentence, which set me a-thinking so hard, that I forgot all that had gone before. . . . I turned the intrusive sentence over again in my mind: "No man would work unless he hoped by working to earn leisure": and I saw that this was another way of putting it: first, all the work of the world is done against the grain: second, what a man does in his "leisure" is not work. . . . So to explain this puzzle, I fell to thinking of the one life of which I knew something—my own to wit—and out tumbled the bottom of the theory. For I tried to think what would happen to me if I were forbidden ordinary daily work; and I knew that I should die of despair and weariness, unless I could straightway take to something else which I could make my daily work; . . . and as for my leisure: well I had to confess that part of it I do indeed spend as a dog does—in contemplation, let us say; and like it well enough: but part of it also I spend in work: which work gives me just as much pleasure as my bread-earning work (263f.).
Art is man's expression of his joy in labour (139). Our epoch has invented machines which would have appeared wild dreams to the men of past ages, and of those machines we have as yet made no use. . . . In a true society these miracles of ingenuity would be for the first time used for minimizing the amount of time spent in unattractive labour (191). If we were to were to wake up some morning now, under our present system, and find it "easy to live," that system would force us to set to work at once and make it hard to live; we should call that "developing our resources," or some such fine name. The multiplication of labour has become a necessity for us, and as long as that goes on no ingenuity in the invention of machines will be of any real use to us (183).


text:
02/01/2012 Sports
Devils win county wrestling title
Liberty High School's wrestling squad recently breezed to a county championship in the Pickens County Duals, earning the county title for the sixth consecutive year. The Devils have now taken first in the county meet in nine of the last 13 years. The team beat Daniel 75-4, Easley 60-16 and Pickens 40-24. David Strickland won a bronze medal for the Devils, while Nikki Weidman, Tristan Oglesby, Dakota Stewart, Nathan Gilstrap and Jimmy Knott earned silver medals. Garrett Whitmire, Mitchell Johnston, Darian Painter, Javy Taylor, Matt Uselman, Tanner Chambers and Dolan Holder all took gold medals in the event. The Liberty squad is led by coach Dale Burrell, who recently got his 200th career win.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Keystone Corporation has provided high quality industrial metal finishing and metal plating since 1928. You can depend on our extensive experience in a wide range of processes to ensure professional results and on-time delivery for all your plating needs. We are ISO-compliant and can certify to all applicable commercial, automotive, aerospace, and military specifications.
Our precious metals plating division regularly and safely handles the tiniest most delicate parts. You can trust us with your work, whether big or small.
Please consider us for all of your finishing needs. To send us a quote request, please click here.


text:
<?php

namespace FOS\UserBundle\Command;

use FOS\UserBundle\Util\UserManipulator;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Attribute\AsCommand;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Output\OutputInterface;

/**
 * @author Antoine Hérault <antoine.herault@gmail.com>
 * @author Lenar Lõhmus <lenar@city.ee>
 *
 * @internal
 *
 * @final
 */
#[AsCommand(name: 'fos:user:demote', description: 'Demote a user by removing a role')]
class DemoteUserCommand extends RoleCommand
{
    // BC with Symfony <5.3
    protected static $defaultName = 'fos:user:demote';

    /**
     * {@inheritdoc}
     */
    protected function configure()
    {
        parent::configure();

        $this
            // BC with Symfony <5.3
            ->setName('fos:user:demote')
            ->setDescription('Demote a user by removing a role')
            ->setHelp(<<<'EOT'
The <info>fos:user:demote</info> command demotes a user by removing a role

  <info>php %command.full_name% matthieu ROLE_CUSTOM</info>
  <info>php %command.full_name% --super matthieu</info>
EOT
            );
    }

    /**
     * {@inheritdoc}
     */
    protected function executeRoleCommand(UserManipulator $manipulator, OutputInterface $output, $username, $super, $role)
    {
        if ($super) {
            $manipulator->demote($username);
            $output->writeln(sprintf('User "%s" has been demoted as a simple user. This change will not apply until the user logs out and back in again.', $username));
        } else {
            if ($manipulator->removeRole($username, $role)) {
                $output->writeln(sprintf('Role "%s" has been removed from user "%s". This change will not apply until the user logs out and back in again.', $role, $username));
            } else {
                $output->writeln(sprintf('User "%s" didn\'t have "%s" role.', $username, $role));
            }
        }
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Russian military
The International Massmedia Agency
Train Kiev – Berdyansk change the schedule
August 30, 2017 IMMEconomics
In the first decade of September, the train No. 228 Kiev – Berdyansk will run more often.
"Ukrzaliznytsya" appointed daily running of this train, not even days, as was planned, the press service of the Ministry. In General, the train will make five additional flights: 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 September.
In Kiev at the train station there is free Wi-Fi
Train No. 228 departs from Kiev at 19:07 and arrives in Berdyansk at 10:10. The reverse departure at 17:35 and arriving in Kiev at 10:07.
Recall, "Ukrzaliznytsya" has launched an application for the purchase of tickets for iOS.
The mayor of Ankara has linked the earthquake with a conspiracy against Turkey
Advice for budding entrepreneurs: how to fix credit history
FBI documents: how to recruit Russian spies
The population is shrinking: the state statistics has counted the Ukrainians
Over the past 3 years Ukraine has made remarkable progress in reforms – the Minister of great Britain
In Ukraine will punish the debtors for communal under the new rules
In Russia pointed to the preconditions for a Palace revolution in the Kremlin
In the European Parliament promised to put pressure on the EU for bezveza for Ukraine
The budget for 2018 will be in Parliament on time.
Ukraine could not develop according to the scenario of Poland: an explanation from Lech Walesa
Country (Ukraine): the European Union has closed its project in Ukraine
Street chanting "go away," Lukashenko said, the country will not give up (Belarus news, Belarus)
The Sun (UK): scientists find signs Covid-19 eight years ago
Hamshahri (Iran), Putin, armed with a vaccine "Satellite V", riding a bear went to war with covid-19
Science and Technology Daily (China): as the sport annually saves millions of people from premature death
Theme: Level | © 2021 The International Massmedia Agency. All Rights Reserved.


text:
No Blood
By Robert Rient, translated from the Polish by Frank Garrett.
Originally appeared in Gazeta Wyborcza: Duży Format [Large Format], September 11, 2014.
He made the decision on the way to school to cut off his penis. Immediately after prayers. The night before, God saw him masturbate. Any enjoyment was quickly snatched away by a sense of guilt that lasted until he begged forgiveness. He avoided that conversation, a conversation with his Father in heaven, though it was only with Him that he could talk about anything. Sometimes he would let himself masturbate for three days, and only then would he kneel by the bed or in the woods under birch trees and beg forgiveness until he felt he had apologized enough. With head bent low, because that's how you talk to Jehovah. It took a long time. After talking, he felt clean and determined to never again masturbate. The longest he endured was six weeks. "If, then, your hand or your foot is making you stumble, cut it off and throw it away from you; it is finer for you to enter into life maimed or lame than to be thrown with two hands or two feet into the everlasting fire. Also, if your eye is making you stumble, tear it out and throw it away from you"—the words of Jesus as written by the Apostle Matthew. His penis offended him. The decision was made. That evening he locked himself in the bathroom with a knife, holding it at the base of his penis. He lightly dragged the blade; it hurt. A red trickle of blood. He was unable to repeat the movement. That was the beginning of his struggle, but even then he felt that the day would come when he would have to kill Luke Zamilski. He didn't know, however, that there was going to be a resurrection.
The Truth was brought to them by his great-grandfather returning from Argentina. He had been a missionary and scholar of the Holy Scriptures. In 1931 the currently accepted name "Jehovah's Witnesses" was adopted. Three years later in Berlin, on October 7, 1934, Adolf Hitler said, "I will eradicate this vermin from Germany." Purple triangles were reserved for them in the concentration camps. The history of the religious movement began in 1870 in the United States. Currently, the number of followers around the world is eight million, of which approximately 125,000 live in Poland. The biweekly Watchtower is simultaneously published in 212 languages and has an average circulation of 45,944,000 copies, making it the magazine with the highest circulation in the world. Activities of the Witnesses are restricted by law or banned in many Islamic countries (including Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Maldives, Syria), communist countries (China, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam), in Buddhist Bhutan, as well as in Singapore.
His father was the only elder in town—a position comparable to a parish priest in the Catholic Church. When he was nineteen, he was summoned to compulsory military service; he refused. A public defense attorney was appointed to him as well as to the nine others in court that day; he refused. He got three years, but left after two and a half. "Thinking about you, that's one subject that'll never be exhausted," he wrote from prison to his future wife, whom he met at the pioneer center before his prison term. Young people packed their backpacks and tents, went to remote villages, and every day they would go from house to house preaching the Good News. Occasionally someone reported them to the police, at times sicced a dog on them. There were arrests. After a brief exchange of views, the majority of people closed their doors with disgust, as it is today. But they fell in love for good. For young Jehovah's Witnesses pioneer centers are an opportunity to meet a partner. Because of their so-called heresy, marriages to the Worldly or philistines are risky and frowned upon in the congregation. They can pull you away from the Truth or otherwise create disciplinary problems when children are involved.
She was the daughter of the circuit overseer, which is the equivalent of a Catholic bishop. Her brother was also imprisoned for refusing military service. She was born into a family of Jehovah's Witnesses, just like her father and her son Luke. In 1974, Poland announced an amnesty, and the convicted were released from prison. Next year they will celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary.
Luke was born on the first day of the last month of 1980. His older brother wanted him to be a girl, Martha, or at least a dog. They lived in an old house that used to belong to Germans when this was Germany. His mom sewed clothes, his dad painted cars. Besides the family of four, there was a cow, some chickens, a greenhouse with lettuce, tomatoes. In the attic, an illegal religious printing press operated. Few people were privy to this. The printers lived on the top floor and would leave at night. When visitors came over, the printing press had to be shut down and remain still, because the wooden beams betrayed every movement. Sometimes it took a few hours. During unannounced visits, a member of the household pressed a buzzer, which informed those upstairs of a work break. The printed literature found its way to the congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses, where it was studied during weekly meetings. Their religion was called a feline faith. The whole town knew who was walking the streets with a Watchtower in hand. In his congregation there were no more than fifty. They called each other brothers and sisters. In kindergarten he had to write a card for his grandma, but there wasn't enough time because he counted more than eight of them in the congregation, not to mention the two who had given birth to his parents. The congregation greeted each other by offering their hands; he sometimes liked to arrive right before the meeting started, when he'd have to go up to those fifty hands and shake all of them.
A Burnt House
There was a day when everything burned. And this is his first clear memory. He remembers that they sat him in a chair and covered him with quilts. There had to have been about twenty. And before his eyes, the flames rose higher and higher, engulfing the house. It got hot. Dad was throwing clothes out the living room window; Mama was standing outside. All of a sudden, she began to throw them back because they hadn't yet been folded, because you don't throw clothes out the window at night. A few hours earlier he and his brother, laughing out loud, had pressed sauerkraut in a metal washtub with their bare feet. He had barely fallen asleep when the house caught fire. He threw off his blankets and started running. After a few hundred yards, his brother caught up with him, took him to the front of the house, sat him in an armchair, and covered him with quilts. After half an hour the fire department arrived; by then, there wasn't much left to put out. Afterwards, they drifted from friend to friend. They got housed in an educational center. Some spiritual sister from abroad would send packages with hand-me-downs until his dad built a new house next to where the fire was. Luke locked his most precious possessions in a black briefcase; he kept it under the bed. In case of a fire, he would have something to save besides himself. Unlike before. To this day, he keeps it full.
On May 12, 1989, Jehovah's Witnesses in Poland were officially registered; their publishing and related proselytizing became legal. Luke's parents gave the plot next to their house, where the city's first Kingdom Hall stood, to the organization. Volunteers came from all over Poland to build it. All the material was purchased with voluntary donations.
Robert's Poem
In elementary school, he quickly learned that he was different. He neither offered nor accepted candy when someone in class celebrated a birthday. In art class he didn't draw the Polish flag. In music class he didn't sing carols. In school assembly he didn't stand during the national anthem. In language class he refused to learn the ancient Polish hymn "Mother of God." The only holiday they celebrated was the fourteenth day of Nisan, the first month of the Jewish calendar (in late March or early April)—the Memorial of Jesus's Death. During the hour-long lecture, they were reminded of the events from two thousand years ago, the Last Supper, and the killing of Jesus. Christmas wasn't even on the radar. Sometimes people came meowing after him. When religion bled over from church to school, he was the only one from the entire class who sat in the front of the room waiting forty-five minutes until it was time to head to history class. When he returned home, he liked to shut himself in his room; he listened to music, danced or looked out the window at the charred remains of the house that burned down, which no one had ever touched in all this time. When he was eleven, he wrote a poem in a notebook with a gray cover and signed it Robert Rientowski. Because Luke was not permitted to write anything. Writing was an occupation for those of the World. Luke's life was no longer the only one. It was possible to share every rejection with Robert, who spoke out all the more often. This was how a few hundred second-rate poems and short stories were created, and later, several volumes of journals, which he hasn't yet stopped writing to this day.
Satan Already Knows
When he was fourteen, he decided that he wanted to be baptized. This decision is always voluntary and preceded by meetings with congregation elders who verify the understanding and the motivation of Jehovah's future servant. The only congregation elders were his father and grandfather. They met every couple of days. He tried to impress them with his knowledge and on occasion wound up feeling tremendous shame. Examinations of faith are difficult. In the end, he was baptized by complete immersion in water at the city stadium in Walbrzych along with several hundred other followers. Congratulations and flowers. From now on, he was responsible for his own salvation. From now on, Satan knew of his existence and would put him to the test. "If the world hates you, you know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were part of the world, the world would be fond of what is its own. Now because you are no part of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, on this account the world hates you. Bear in mind the word I said to you, a slave is not greater than his master. If they have persecuted me, they will persecute you also…"
A Suit and a Bible
In high school it was supposed to be different. He hung out with the loudest guys in class. For a while he fit in. Some vodka in an abandoned car, cigarettes. And then back home. Three meetings a week, along with a suit and a Bible. Feelings of guilt for being accepted, belonging, for sin. And as punishment: loneliness. He wasn't truthful in either world, yet all he ever really sought had been the truth. He studied a little too well, sometimes doing homework for someone else. He could even copy the handwriting. He felt popular. After his freshman year, he went to the pioneer center for two weeks. In the middle of the woods, tents, outdoor cooking gear, at night a campfire, long conversations. He fell in love with these people; he fell in love with God. He didn't go back home but instead packed the dirty clothes in his backpack and went to another camp. Every day starting out for field service, that is, preaching work. Evening meals together. Singing. Sleeping in a hay barn with others like him, with whom he shared a common language.
Sixty hours spent walking from house to house. Someone threatened him with a knife. It was a good story to tell about later. In the end, he gained a sense of how it had been for the Apostles. With the same backpack he went to a third camp. He sent his parents a postcard of the mountains from Zakopane. They had three days off, so they hiked the Eagle's Path and slept in stone huts. He had never been happier. The emptiness disappeared. He asked God for forgiveness for everything, and He forgave him. "My kingdom is no part of this world."
The Worldly
Armageddon's coming. There was little time, and you had to warn everyone living in the World, in "Babylon the Great." Nothing was more important than spreading the Word. Eternal life waited for those chosen by Jehovah. The faithful who had died would be resurrected, and the multitude of the Worldly would be obliterated. They had to be told. "For he will give his own angels a command concerning you, to guard you in all your ways. Upon their hands they will carry you, that you may not strike your foot against any stone. Upon the young lion and the cobra you will tread; you will trample down the maned young lion and the big snake. Because on me he has set his affection, I shall also provide him with escape." The present wasn't important; life in the organization meant life for the future, for life everlasting. Jehovah's Witnesses do not serve in the military, do not participate in elections, do not hold important public posts, shun any commitment that would distract them from the Truth, regardless of whether it's sports, culture, or business. What's more, involvement in the life of the congregation deprived one of any free time. Three meetings, and out to do fieldwork, sowing the seeds of the Word. "Moreover, just as it occurred in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of man: they were eating, they were drinking, men were marrying, women were being given in marriage, until that day when Noah entered into the ark, and the flood arrived and destroyed them all. Likewise, just as it occurred in the days of Lot: they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, they were building. But on the day that Lot came out of Sodom it rained fire and sulphur from heaven and destroyed them all. The same way it will be on that day when the Son of man is to be revealed… Whoever seeks to keep his soul safe for himself will lose it, but whoever loses it will preserve it alive. I tell you, in that night two will be in one bed; the one will be taken along, but the other will be abandoned." In high school—as recommended—his social life ended with the last bell. He was looking for the happiness that he had found high up in the mountains surrounded by others like him. But the World was getting in his way. He understood that he couldn't fit in, but he wanted to fit in. And he understood that their rejection was proof, but he was ashamed when they pointed at him. When everyone in class bragged about the presents they received, he lied and said that he got presents throughout the year. For just once he wanted to be able to feel how it would feel to celebrate a birthday.
A Regular Pioneer
He preached more and more, and he finally became an auxiliary pioneer by devoting sixty hours every month to walking from house to house. After a few months he became the first regular pioneer in his congregation, at which point he had to devote up to ninety hours every month to teaching the Word. The cities' streets, their block apartment buildings with their cage-like entrances and houses are carefully divided among the evangelists. Each person is responsible for his or her own share, taking notes about each visit on a sketched-out map of the area. Should someone accept a magazine, return visits to the home must be made; when a home is closed up, you should show up again; if someone isn't interested, you should encourage further conversation; and if that doesn't work, visit again after a long time. Jehovah's Witnesses learn how to do all this during their weekly Theocratic Ministry School. During that time skits take place when someone pretends to be a disinterested Catholic or Buddhist. A second person playing the Jehovah's Witness has to persuade him to talk. The aim is to start a Bible study. Such a course lasts at least half a year and sometimes ends with the baptism of the interested. The easiest to attract are the lonely, the sick, and those devoid of hope—in the organization they receive a new family and new dreams, including that of eternal life. A well functioning self-help system in which they can count on "brothers" and "sisters" sometimes attracts those pretending to be interested in the religion. Some believe that followers receive dollars from America. No such thing ever happens, but one can always get a warm meal, help weeding the garden or mending a fence, especially when you're a recluse or elderly. In November 2013 when a typhoon in the Philippines destroyed many followers' houses, fundraisers were organized, temporary accommodations, and groups of young people from all over the world helped to repair and rebuild the damaged properties. This kind of support is the norm for Jehovah's Witnesses.
He preached more and more. At the beginning of his junior year he transferred to a new high school where he could study advanced economics. He had assemblies on the weekend every two weeks. The teacher asked how many F's he had at the end of the previous school year. None. D's? None. Everyone looked at him. C's? None. Why is that? Once again he didn't fit in, but now he knew that it was further proof of a life in the Truth. He would have two months to earn course credit in Russian and typing for the previous two years. He caught up with the material and gained some time that he allotted to preaching. He decided to limit watching TV, and in the end he gave it up altogether. If in the upcoming year he devotes a thousand hours to his religious studies, he will be invited to the pioneer school and receive a handbook that he won't be able to share with ordinary preachers or his own family. He managed to do it. A little more than ten people from the entire region attended lectures and discussion every day. In the evenings he recorded letters to himself on a tape recorder, in which he would ask himself to always remember God, to sin no more, and to never again masturbate. He returned home and began to also teach his close friends, his parents, brother, cousins. None of them had ever participated in a pioneer school. He judged their efforts as lacking; he didn't understand how they could watch television when Armageddon could come at any minute. He felt superior. "He that has greater affection for father or mother than for me is not worthy of me; and he that has greater affection for son or daughter than for me is not worthy of me." More and more often he was standing behind a lectern at the weekly meetings; he was invited to the nationwide assembly where he would tell about his experiences.
From time to time an ad appeared in the newspaper: "I hire Jehovah's Witnesses." It was common knowledge that they don't steal, they don't cheat, and they have respect for life. Though some considered that an exaggeration. Life was sacred, and blood was sacred; transfusions were not allowed. He carried with pride in his wallet a "No Blood" card that declared that he refuses accepting blood even in a life-threatening situation. He saw the future before him. Becoming a ministerial servant, then an elder like his dad, then a circuit overseer or missionary and leaving to preach overseas, in the East. He had the good fortune to be a man: he could lead meetings, assemblies, lectures; he could lead prayers. He could advance. As the neck supports the head, so too does a woman support a man; she could preach, she had other "privileges" besides, like weekly arranging for the cleaning duties of the Kingdom Hall. "Let a woman learn in silence with full submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach, or to exercise authority over a man, but to be in silence."
The Shame
Yet the more he committed and the closer he got to God, the less there was of Luke. Moments of happiness in the community of believers were interspersed with periods of loneliness. And at that time a yearning for a life without fear made itself felt. A longing for something carefree, ordinary and very now, without expectation. Without shame. Armageddon wasn't coming. God didn't strike dead all those who mocked him, those who slammed the door in his face. There was this time he was preaching in one of the city's block apartments; he read the name of his Polish teacher on the door. He rang, though he would've rather run away. For an instant he wanted to pray that she wouldn't answer. Someone looked through the peephole; it had to be her; she lived alone. When she didn't open the door, he left gratefully. He felt ashamed walking the city where he grew up. A suit, tie, a bag heavy with Bible, magazines and books, his notes about the houses he visited. He avoided the eyes of his former friends from elementary school. The shame subsided only when he closed himself in his room and Robert would begin to write.
Photograph by Magda Kuc
He spent time at the next pioneer center with a group of similarly inspired kids. They bought beer in the evening, when everyone else had gone to bed; they talked for a long time. They loved God—it was obvious and already proven—so they could talk about how great the dread is when you're living in the World. And loneliness. Each of them thought with hope about death. In the kitchen, with a knife, he sliced his skin. Later he repeated this procedure a few times. He stifled a scream from his insides. Just his skin hurt—it hurt inaudibly—but it took away the loneliness. When it would no longer cut through skin, he took to using it as a butter knife. If you're a Jehovah's Witness, it was recommended that you shouldn't go to a psychologist. Since someone of the World wouldn't understand his problems and would only try to pull him away from the Truth.
When he graduated, there were two paths before him: to stay with his congregation and study Polish, or to move almost two hundred miles away to Poznan, to his dream of studying education. He left even though they had warned him that it was a trick by Satan, that his studies would steal away precious time. He was afraid to admit it, but he knew that they were right. He knew also that he had to get away from what was familiar if he was ever going to be free. He dreamed of freedom even if the punishment for it was death at Armageddon. More and more he liked the residual effects of his decision. He liked the flavors, the dancing, the trips. He liked how they praised and appreciated him, how someone would gaze at him. Away from the hope for eternal life, away from all those colorful pictures from the Watchtowers, he liked more and more what was happening now. He lived with distant family members but soon moved to student housing. He was assigned to preach at the train station in the evening with other Witnesses because in Poznan almost all the streets were already allocated. Those who wanted could evangelize anywhere there were people; this was called "unofficial service." He confided in a friend from class; the news quickly spread that Luke was going to the station with Watchtowers. He decided that it was the last time. Someplace beneath the skin where he had sliced, he knew that the Truth had to connect to happiness, that waiting itself isn't happiness. Even if you're waiting for Paradise. He went to meetings less often. The elders of the congregation came to him; they warned that he was straying down the path of demons and Satan. They prayed for him; they prayed with him. He was left with a faith that was dying. To stop waiting when he had waited his whole life was like jumping from a speeding train.
Freedom came, but with it, fear. Those who leave the Truth are worse than those of the World. He knew that his family would turn their back on him, that his "brothers" and "sisters" wouldn't say "hello" to him if they met him on the street. The disfellowshipped have such a status from the organization. Their religion provided security and boundaries. He knew how to dress himself and what the purpose of life consisted of; he knew which words you shouldn't use and what happens after death. Every month, he would lose another conviction, another person. He lost his foundation. He felt it physically in his body as if he had been hurled again and again from his bed, only there was no floor; it left him sinking and sinking. The demons didn't come, but maybe that's exactly what they were.
He had a double major, and even for a while, a triple. He worked, he tried drugs, got to know more and more people, built friendships. But the entire time he kept waiting for something to fill the void. He went to his classes, did his training. He began therapy. At that time, he met with his spiritual "brother," a high-ranking supervisor of the organization's development in Poland. They went for a walk. At one point his "brother" picked up a big rock and showed Luke how the worms fled from the sunlight. "These are the people that surround you," his "brother" told him. "The people of the World." He felt disgusted and angry because over the last few years he had found people of the World he could count on. Now he thinks that friendship is maybe the only thing in life that has worked out for him. Fear took the place of shame; it was next to him the whole time. The framework of his convictions, his thoughts, habits, the words he used to describe the world had been breaking apart for years. He was constantly waiting for punishment. And if it didn't arrive soon, he would begin meting it out himself. It was enough for him to confess his love to make him turn on his heels and flee, although he wanted love as much as he had once wanted the Truth, all the while knowing that he didn't deserve it. One morning he decided to kill himself. Once the thought had became clear, the emptiness disappeared. Once again he knew his purpose and meaning. And that was a good feeling; it covered up everything.
It was a Sunday and all the pharmacies near his apartment were closed. At a gas station he bought several packets of aspirin; he had sleeping pills at home. He wrote three letters, because even then he didn't know that suicides don't write such long letters. He swallowed the tablets and washed them down with alcohol. He lived alone in the attic. He left the door open because he wanted someone to find him before there would be nobody left to be found. And his cousin did come. Later he organized his first birthday party. It lasted three days.
In the end, he found the courage to leave the organization. He wrote a letter. "My decision to leave this religion, which I consider false, believing in God all the time, is a deliberate choice. I'm including some of the reasons that have led me to make this decision—they are, in my opinion and according to my understanding, fruits that bear witness of the whole tree: using human interpretation as if it were commandments from God Himself; discrimination of women; tolerance of violence against children (despite recent interpretations of the words "rod of discipline," leniency toward hitting children in Kingdom Halls as well as at assemblies persists); valuing hierarchy and power above love and charity." His two-page letter ended with these words, "Please read aloud the contents of this letter and the news of my disassociation from the organization of Jehovah's Witnesses during announcements (I remain aware, however, that my request may be denied, since encouraging followers to think for themselves threatens to topple the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses)." From that time he officially ceased to be a Jehovah's Witness. He was a nobody. And that hurt like the loss of his legs. Phantom pains lasted for years. At the funeral of his beloved grandmother he and a group of cousins who had left their religion stood on one side; on the other side, those who he had spent a lot of years with, on trips, at meetings. Those he used to be close to. After the ceremony he approached his favorite cousin with his hand extended. She just looked at him. She didn't offer her hand. All she said was, "You know the rules." He tried his aunt next; he had been close to her not so very long ago. She turned on her heels. He did succeed with his parents in spite of what the organization taught. Their sons were always the most important things to them, and only after them, God. Even during the time when Luke had put God above them and everything else. They never repaid him in kind.
He threw himself into psychology, he completed his own therapy in a range of schools; he got the highest endorsement from the Polish Psychological Association. Over the years, he became a follower of a new religion called "I-message." He changed the narrative with which he described and understood the world, though the mechanism remained the same. He required from his close friends and family conversations about their feelings, expressing himself solely in the first person singular. He expected their understanding and to not be the only one giving it. Once again he knew how to live, how to talk, what to do to be happy. That's one of the reasons for the breakup of his six-year relationship, for the collapse of his first independently built home. With time psychology changed from a new religion into a practical and non-invasive tool for coping with his problems, for understanding the world of fragments. Later the time came to check out other religions. He went to church for a while, then to a Buddhist community; he became interested in Judaism. Different scenery with the same instruments of coercion, the same lack of truth with an absolute belief in the monopoly of that truth. The same madness of its followers.
Rient
More than two years ago I set up a new e-mail account. First name: Robert; last name: Rient. I asked my coworkers, friends, and family to call me Robert; my family and friends are still getting used to it. They ask why. Because Luke died, I answer. I started to write and to conduct interviews with people I admired. I looked for the truth in the stories of Nosowska, Mysliwski, Tochman, Fangor, Glinska, Raczek, Konopka, Rojek, Lipnicka—singers, writers, journalists, directors, painters, people who had achieved success, sold millions of records, or had been nominated for an Oscar. I titled my first novel It Was About Love. I know well this place within me, hungry and restless. I just moved for the twenty-first time. All the time I have inside myself the features of a fanatic who hurls himself into an unknown world. Sometimes it ravages him and casts him aside; sometimes it's only a sightseeing trip. But if there's a kernel of truth, I have to completely dive in. My close friends and family call me radical, extreme. Now I like it, this reliable form of blind honesty, though sometimes it turns out that it's only blindness. I no longer believe; I no longer believe in anything. Because I can't. And less and less I want to believe. I think so, for the moment. Because there's no truth. Or it's that I still don't know how to stop looking.
"No Blood" is taken from Rient's book Witness, which appeared in May 2015. The translator would like to acknowledge the valuable help provided by Scott Cheshire (author of High as the Horses' Bridles), Jola Zandecki, and Marek Miller.
Photograph by Joanna Woźniak
Robert Rient is a journalist and a psychologist recommended by the Polish Psychological Association. His work has appeared in Polish publications such as Charaktery [Characters], Coaching, Przekrój [Cross Section], Sekrety Nauki [Secrets of Science], Sens [Sense], among others. His novel It Was About Love came out in 2013. Witness was published in Poland in May 2015 and will be the basis of a new film directed by Borys Lankosz.
Frank Garrett holds a PhD in philosophy and literary theory. He trained as a translator at the Center for Translation Studies (University of Texas at Dallas) and at Philipps-Universität Marburg after earning advanced certification in Polish philology from the Catholic University of Lublin. 3:AM Magazine has previously published his critical reportage Augury of Ashes and Projections on a Wall. Outpost19 will publish his translation of Robert Rient's Witness in late 2016.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday, November 1st, 2016.


Welcome to Stay Xtra Hotel in Kista / Akalla Stay Xtra Hotel is a modern and comfortable accommodation for business as well as leisure travelers to Kistamässan, Kista Science City or Kista Industrial area . The hotel is located in Kista / Akalla and within walking distance to the Kista mall with its large selection of shops, restaurants and cinemas. Also nearby is the Kistamässan that is most conveniently located exhibition and events center.


text:
Cybersecurity In-Depth
A Murderers' Row of Poisoning Attacks
Poisoning can be used against network infrastructure and applications. Understanding how DNS cache poisoning, machine learning model poisoning, and other attacks work can help you prepare the proper antidote.
Senior Analyst, Omdia
(image by: zzzdim, via Adobe Stock)
"Garbage in, garbage out," is a concept as old as computing. Results can be no better than the data used as input, and that is as true for network and application infrastructure as for enterprise applications. Attackers take advantage of this by intentionally providing bad information to components and infrastructure in a process called "poisoning."
Poisoning can be used against a number of vulnerable points in the application and network infrastructure. This article will look at four: Two network attack points, one application, and one that can have an impact on either.
Both of the network attack points, DNS and ARP table, deal with addresses. In particular, they are part of the multistep process by which hardware components are reachable by software, firmware, and other hardware.
A third attack point, a cache, can hit either network or application infrastructure. Because DNS and ARP entries can be cached, those caches can be attacked as part of an attack on those services. Web addresses are also cached, and a web cache poisoning attack can be quite insidious.
Finally, new application building methods bring new attack vectors — and machine learning "model poisoning" is a very real threat for a growing array of applications in different parts of enterprise IT.
With so many opportunities for cyber-arsenic to stain lacy connections that bind modern networks and servers into a useful infrastructure, the question for many IT security professionals is where first to turn their attention.
DNS Poisoning
There are a number of levels in the hierarchy that supports DNS resolution. When a user types a URL into their browser window, the first step is a check to see whether the address for that URL is stored in the computer's cache. The next check is to see whether the local router has stored the address.
If it's not in either of those, then the next step is the recursive server identified in the computer's network settings. (Some companies have their own recursive DNS, practically all ISPs do, and there are a number of public recursive DNS servers available for organizations and individuals to use, like Google, Cloudflare, Quad9, and OpenDNS.) If the recursive DNS server doesn't have the requested name stored, it sends a request to its nearest root server, which points the inquiring recursive server to a top-level domain name server, which sends the request finally on to the final step of its journey at an authoritative server, where name/address pairs are made.
There are vulnerabilities at several stages in this resolution chain. In April, Cisco Talos released information on the Sea Turtle campaign that hijacked and redirected traffic from more than 40 government and enterprise organizations. This campaign was noteworthy because it was the first known instance of a group successfully poisoning data all the way to the name server level, leaving only root DNS servers secure (for now).
The multiple steps show why caching is so important for performance across the Internet. Attackers can enter bad data — "poisoned" data — into the local system's cache in any of several ways. The most direct way is to alter the cache via malware that rewrites the data in the cached database. Another method is to intercept a request and respond as though the bogus server is authoritative. In any case, the result is a visit to an illicit, malicious server with no warning to the victim.
ARP Poisoning
Just as DNS ties a name (the URL) to an IP address, address resolution protocol (ARP) ties a physical address (the media access control, or MAC address) of a particular network interface to an IP address. ARP resolution results are stored in a file. And when a device receives an ARP response, it puts it into a cache — whether it requested that response, or not.
If bogus ARP responses are sent to a system, they'll be cached and used for transaction routing. One of the results can be an attacker's computer that receives all the traffic intended for a legitimate system on the network.
ARP poisoning can be used against both network infrastructure devices like routers and endpoints like laptops; all it takes is an ARP request response to the victim's IP address and the poison is in place. Ettercap is a popular tool for ARP poisoning attacks, especially those that result in a man-in-the-middle campaign.
And since ARP is one of many Internet protocols that has trust baked in, there's no mechanism for verifying the true source of the response, the accuracy of the data in the response, or the pure heart of the sender.
In addition to bringing evil hardware into the trusted circle of the network ARP poisoning can be used to mask the true sender of malicious data — the "Smurf attack" version of a DDoS attack uses just such a technique to keep the defensive team guessing about where all those wicked packets are coming from.
Because ARP poisoning attacks are tailored to a particular victim, they tend not to be big, "loud" attacks that become known in the business community. But when security professionals are learning their craft, and when those professionals gather to discuss their business, ARP poisoning is almost always on the agenda.
Web Cache Attack
Everyone knows that the idea behind caching is to store frequently requested data where it can be retrieved as quickly as possible. Cache poisoning is when a nefarious system makes a request to the cache that causes the cache to grab and store terrible, horrible, no-good data which it will then serve to innocent systems which ask for information. This is the sort of attack detailed by James Kettle, head of research at PortSwigger Web Security, in the exploit he detailed at Black Hat 2018.
In most cases, the bad information chain starts with a carefully crafted HTTP request. These requests can take advantage of websites that employ programming that, for example, includes the address of specific resources, like images, in the URL.
Attackers will use software known as "cache busters" to rapidly find vulnerable URLs. And what will the attacker do once a vulnerability is found? One popular option is to poison the cache with a URL that includes a link to a third-party website — one that contains malware. When an unwitting visitor requests a particular asset — say, a particular image — the poisoned response delivers the image with a side-order of malware.
Model Poisoning
This last form of poisoning is the most recent to rear its malicious head. Model poisoning takes advantage of the fact that artificial intelligence and machine learning systems aren't "born" fully formed: they have to be trained on, and given a model of their world against which to judge new input. If an attacker can manipulate the model, they can manipulate the system's results.
There have been some famous examples of model poisoning in trivial applications, from tricksters teaching a Microsoft AI to be racist to researchers feeding image recognition systems images that force it to wrong conclusions.
According to a paper published by the IEEE in 2018, "Such poisoning attacks have been practically demonstrated in worm signature generation, spam filters, DoS attack detection, PDF malware classification, handwritten digit recognition, and sentiment analysis." These poisoning attacks are most easily launched when machine learning systems are building their models based on data from the real world. In these cases, an attacker who understands what the system is attempting to do can manipulate the data it learns from, in effect teaching it a warped view of the world.
There will be more opportunities for model poisoning as machine learning and AI systems become more common in enterprise IT. Building substantial models before the intelligent system is released "into the wild" and maintaining human monitoring in supervised learning scenarios are two techniques currently used as data scientists teach their AIs well.
As long as data is part of a system, the opportunity to manipulate that data will exist — and security teams will be forced to deal with protecting their systems and cleaning up the messes that result from successful poisoning.
The Beginner's Guide to Denial-of-Service Attacks
Security Pros' Painless Guide to Machine Intelligence, AI, ML & DL
Cybercrime: AI's Growing Threat
Why Businesses Fail to Address DNS Security Exposures
Website Attack Attempts Rose by 69% in 2018
This free, all-day online conference offers a look at the latest tools, strategies, and best practices for protecting your organization's most sensitive data. Click for more information and, to register, here.
EdgeVulnerabilities/Threats Cloud


About Us:-Cognizant(NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, dedicated to helping the world's leading companies build stronger businesses. Headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey (U.S.), Cognizant combines a passion for client satisfaction, technology innovation, deep industry and business process expertise, and a global, collaborative workforce that embodies the future of work.
• Understand, interpret and clarify functional requirements as well as technical requirements and requirement standards for the project.
• Study assigned functional specifications.
• analyze and identify impact of specifications.
• raise queries and seek resolution from different stakeholders.
• Provide required support to develop the proof of concept.
• Develop coding (business layer coding, interface development, service development, creation of stored procedures etc) as required in the project.
• Raise clarifications / issues / concerns regarding work output to the lead on time.
• seek review from peer / Senior Developer periodically.
• rework on the code based on code review / defects raised in unit testing or any other relevant testing phases.
• participate in code peer review, as required.
• Highlight any potential risks to the Leads and seek inputs to resolve issues identified.
• support integration of components, as required.
• Update traceability matrix for the work package developed.
• provide support on process audit activities.
• Adhere to process and tools (usage of cognizant 20, awareness of Quality Management System).
• follow the SCM policies set for project.
• Testing: Write unit test cases for the specific unit.
• seek review from peer / Senior Developer for the test cases written.
• Execute the test cases.
• Capture and fix defects as and when found, and retest the areas during testing and warranty phase.
• Review work to ensure adherence to SCM policies set for project.
• Follow up on integration of the component developed with the application.
• Understand and execute automation tools for testing.
• Rework on the code based on review comments from code review / defects raised in unit testing, peer testing, SIT, UAT testing or any other relevant testing phases.
• Provide ideas for process optimization or valueadds that can be provided and share them with the relevant stakeholders.
• adhere to process and tools (usage of cognizant 20, awareness of Quality Management System, IDE etc).


text:
Waste disposal in B.C.: another burning question
Why incinerators may be better than landfills as a solution for non-recyclable waste
By Nelson Bennett | July 24, 2019
Metro Vancouver's waste-to-energy incinerator in Burnaby burns 250,000 tonnes of waste each year | Submitted
In 2013, the Philippine government told Canada to take back its garbage. An Ontario company called Chronic Inc. had sent more than a tonne of plastic waste to the Philippines for recycling, but it turned out to be contaminated with soiled diapers and other municipal garbage.
Six years, $1.2 million and one reputational black eye later, 1,500 tonnes of Canadian trash arrived by container ship in Vancouver at the end of June and is now being vaporized at the Metro Vancouver waste-to-energy incinerator in Burnaby.
It represents a small proportion of the 250,000 tonnes of waste the incinerator burns each year.
Incineration, which produces carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, may not be the ideal way of dealing with waste, but it may be better than the alternative.
Batteries, plastics and other non-biodegradable trash can sit in a landfill for centuries. It takes batteries about 100 years and plastics hundreds of years to decompose.
Organics decompose quicker and release methane gas, not to mention a toxic soup – leachate – that can contaminate groundwater. Landfills can produce methane and leachate for decades. Incineration, on the other hand, not only disposes of garbage instantly, but also can produce valuable commodities, like electricity and metals, which would otherwise have to be generated through processes that have their own greenhouse gas footprint.
In Metro Vancouver's case, the Burnaby incinerator has cogeneration, with heat driving steam turbines to produce electricity – enough to power 16,000 homes.
It recovers 6,000 tonnes of metals like steel, iron and copper that would otherwise sit unused indefinitely in a landfill.
The incinerator also produces 42,000 tonnes of ash that can be used as an aggregate.
The preference, of course, would be to eliminate waste altogether. But that could take decades to achieve.
B.C. has already made significant strides in waste diversion. The amount of waste that Metro Vancouver either incinerates or landfills is lower than the national average.
Metro Vancouver has a 63% diversion rate, which shows how much of the waste produced in Metro Vancouver gets recycled.
The national average for waste diversion is 26.5%, said Paul Henderson, general manager of solid waste services for Metro Vancouver. Although B.C. has a fairly robust recycling program, there are still some items that are not recycled: shoes and clothing, for example.
The 27% of waste not recycled – about 920,000 tonnes per year – is either landfilled or incinerated.
About 600,000 tonnes of that goes into a regional landfill in Delta, and 250,000 tonnes is incinerated. About 40,000 to 60,000 tonnes goes to landfills in Washington and Oregon.
Some non-recyclable waste – such as construction waste and non-recyclable plastics – is now being burned, displacing fossil fuels, at the Richmond Lafarge Canada Inc. (TSX:LAF) cement plant.
The Burnaby incinerator produces 120,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Whether it is better or worse, from a greenhouse gas perspective, to burn waste or put it in a landfill depends on how much organic waste goes into a landfill and how much methane can be captured from it.
"I think, when you look at options around waste management, you have to look at the range of issues related to each," Henderson said.
"In a landfill you have a combination of things. One is that you have the conversion (methane and CO2 production) over a long period of time, so you have the landfill gas being generated over many years."
The Ecofiscal Commission estimates that 20% of Canada's methane emissions come from landfills.
In Metro Vancouver's case, it has reduced the amount of household organic food waste going to landfills through a curbside collection system. Some of it goes to a composter in Delta, and some goes to a new bioenergy plant in Surrey, where the organics are turned into renewable natural gas.
But getting full diversion for food waste is a difficult task, so some still ends up in landfills, where it can generate methane, as well as CO2, for decades.
Some of the methane is captured for use as renewable natural gas, but there will always be some that isn't captured and will leak into the atmosphere. The problem with methane – apart from the fact it has a higher global warming potential than CO2 – is that it's hard to measure.
"You have the landfill gas being generated over many years, compared to a waste-to-energy facility where you have instantaneous generation," Henderson said. "With landfills it's more challenging to precisely measure the amount of methane emissions from the facilities."
See related story: Canada needs to trim is wasteline


Lesley Gore - The Golden Hits Of Lesley Gore LP vinyl record for sale. This is a nice record to add to any Leslie Gore collection!
Leslie Gore the golden hits of collectible vinyl lp record album for sale. Buy the golden hits of, used vinyl record from Leslie Gore.


text:
Robert L. Rikard	December 3, 2021
Blantyre, Malawi – As Africa grapples with the potential threat of the new variant of COVID-19, Omicron, only 27% of healthcare workers are fully vaccinated against the virus, according to a WHO statement.
This compares to more than 80% of healthcare workers in high-income countries, the WHO said.
In many African countries, acceptance of vaccines among healthcare workers is extremely low, with only a fifth of healthcare workers in Egypt agreeing to be stung for example, according to a SciDev.Net article.
"What we need is to find ways to address their fears and concerns, to address the reasons for their reluctance," Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa, said at the meeting. of a press conference on November 25.
While vaccine supply constraints affected the continent at the start of the campaign, there was an improvement in funding and logistics, leading to the arrival of more doses.
"We are at a point where the opportunities to access the vaccine are multiplying. We care about our health workers and we want you to be protected because we need you," Moeti said.
She said scaling up immunization is even more urgent now that Africa faces the risk of the fourth wave of the virus, following the outbreak of the new Omicron variant.
"Africa is already suffering from [a] shortage of health workers, and one unnecessary COVID-19 infection among health workers is one too many, "Moeti said.
"The vaccine is the best defense."
Richard Mihigo, program area manager for immunization and vaccine development at the WHO Regional Office for Africa, said countries where vaccine is little used among health workers are Cameroon, Republic of Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.
Get the latest African news straight to your inbox
However, he said African countries such as Botswana, Cape Verde, Kenya, Lesotho and Rwanda have high levels of vaccine acceptance among health workers.
Apetsianyi Yawa, coordinator of the technical working group for the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines in Togo, said her country had achieved 93% uptake of the vaccine among health workers, and attributed the success to intense social mobilization.
"We trained the media to help us disseminate correct information. We had a team of communications experts whose task was to track down disinformation and rumors on social media and demystify them with correct information," he said. she declared.
Yawa added that the high-level involvement of national authorities and professional associations, upstream planning and periodic monitoring of efforts have also contributed to the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines among health workers and the general population. .
This article was produced by the English Sub-Saharan Africa office of SciDev.Net
Why just Africa? Health Experts Question Canada That Sets The Continent With COVID Travel Rules - National
Youth unemployment crisis in South Africa: the clock ...
No panic for Omicron – South African Minister of Health


SAN DIEGO – Authorities say an Anaheim cabdriver has been sentenced to six years in prison, becoming the last of four Somali immigrants to be sentenced for funneling thousands of dollars to a terrorist organization in their native country.
A statement from the U.S. attorney in San Diego says Ahmed Nasiri Taalil Mohamud on Friday received the lightest sentence of the four co-conspirators convicted by a jury 11 months ago of raising and sending nearly $11,000 to al-Shabab, a militia group linked to al-Qaida.
The other three defendants, a cabdriver, an imam and the owner of a money-transfer business, all Somali immigrants living in the U.S., received between 10 and 18 years in prison.
The case was built on hundreds of phone calls the government secretly recorded.


The role of infectious disease in human history is well known, but its importance in ecology has been neglected until relatively recently. Disease ecology involves using ecological principles and concepts to understand and manage infectious diseases, in humans, other animals and plants. It is strongly based on mathematical theory and modelling approaches. The most important concept is R0, the number of secondary cases per primary case when disease is rare. If it is greater than one, infection will increase in the population, but if it can be driven below one, disease can be eliminated. Most infectious agents affect more than one host species, and most host species harbour several species of parasite. Understanding the community context of infectious disease is, therefore, essential. Human‐induced changes, such as habitat destruction and fragmentation and climate change, can be expected to have major effects on the impact of infectious disease in natural ecosystems.
Parasites and pathogens are important factors in understanding the evolution and ecology of organisms, but their importance is often not recognised.
The basic reproductive number R0 (the number of secondary cases per primary case when disease is rare) is the single most important concept in understanding the ecology of disease.
If R0 > 1, the disease can increase in the host population, but if R0 < 1, disease cannot establish.
Microparasites, such as viruses, bacteria, and protozoans, can often be modelled by dividing the host population into susceptible, infected and resistant classes. For macroparasites such as worms, however, it is essential to consider the level of infection and recognise that a few hosts usually harbour most of the total parasite population.
Most parasite species infect more than one host species, and most hosts harbour several parasite species. It is essential to consider interactions between parasites within hosts and the effect of differing susceptibility of multiple host taxa.
Environmental changes produced by humans, such as climate change and habitat destruction, have major impacts on parasites and their effect on host populations.
Figure 1. Compartmental SIR models for infectious diseases. This is a description of a simple model in which transmission is density‐dependent, the pathogen affects only survival (and not fecundity), the pathogen is the only constraint on host population growth and there is no exposed but not yet infectious stage. The model can be modified to relax these assumptions. Hosts are divided into susceptible (S) infected (I) and resistant (R) compartments. Hosts in all compartments have a per capita birth rate a, and a death rate independent of disease b. In infected hosts, the disease increases the death rate by α. Infection occurs in a density‐dependent manner, with a per capita infection rate of susceptible hosts of βI. Infected hosts recover at a rate γ, and resistant hosts lose resistance at a rate ν. (a) The model represented as a flow diagram. (b) An example of an epidemic generated from these equations (a = 0.06, b = 0.04, β = 0.1, ν = 0.02, α = 0.5, γ = 0.5). S and R are scaled on the left axis, and I is scaled on the right axis. The time units are arbitrary.
Figure 2. Counts of frog captures at El Copé, Panama before and after arrival of the amphibian chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Frogs were sampled along four permanent transects, with counts shown as the number of captures per kilometre of stream per person. Counts of diurnal frogs from a number of species were recorded. The fungus was first detected at the site in late September 2004, and reached an overall prevalence of more than 50% by October 2004, with 47 species infected. The line shown is a segmented regression, with the point at which the slope changed estimated from the data as occurring in early September 2004. Source: Data from Lips et al. .
Figure 3. Effect of temperature on malaria transmission. (a) Thermal performance curves for the components of vector biology contributing to R0 (Anopheles spp. mosquitos and Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasites). (b) Overall effect of temperature on R0. The blue line shows the estimate calculated taking into account the nonlinearities shown in (a), in contrast to the previous estimate in red, which was derived using linear relationships between traits and temperatures. The points represent observed data. It is important to note that the calculated R0 represents an upper boundary to the potential malaria transmission: actual transmission rates may be constrained by factors other than temperature, and therefore fall below the theoretical line. Reproduced with permission from Mordecai et al. . © John Wiley and Sons.
Anderson RM and May RM (1978) Regulation and stability of host–parasite interactions. I. Regulatory processes. Journal of Animal Ecology 47: 219–247.
Anderson RM and May RM (1979) Population biology of infectious diseases. Part I. Nature 280: 361–367.
Anderson RM and May RM (1981) The population dynamics of microparasites and their invertebrate hosts. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 291: 451–524.
Anderson RM and May RM (1982) Coevolution of hosts and parasites. Parasitology 85: 411–426.
Anderson RM and May RM (1991) Infectious Diseases of Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Antonovics J, Wilson AJ, Forbes MR, et al. (2017) The evolution of transmission mode. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B‐Biological Sciences 372: 12.
Becker MH, Walke JB, Cikanek S, et al. (2015) Composition of symbiotic bacteria predicts survival in Panamanian golden frogs infected with a lethal fungus. Proceedings of the Royal Society B‐Biological Sciences 282.
Bernoulli D (1760) Essai d'une nouvelle analyse de la mortalite, causee par la petite Varole, et des advantages de l'Inoculation pour la prevenir, pp. 1–45. Paris: Memoires de mathematique et de physique, tires des registres de l'Academie Royale des Sciences.
Caminade C, Kovats S, Rocklov J, et al. (2014) Impact of climate change on global malaria distribution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 111: 3286–3291.
Civitello DJ, Cohen J, Fatima H, et al. (2015) Biodiversity inhibits parasites: broad evidence for the dilution effect. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 112: 8667–8671.
Dobson AP and Carper ER (1996) Infectious diseases and human population history. Bioscience 46: 115–126.
Faust CL, McCallum HI, Bloomfield LSP, et al. (2018) Pathogen spillover during land conversion. Ecology Letters 21: 471–483.
Foster KR, Schluter J, Coyte KZ and Rakoff‐Nahoum S (2017) The evolution of the host microbiome as an ecosystem on a leash. Nature 548: 43–51.
Grenfell BT and Bolker BM (1998) Cities and villages: infection hierarchies in a measles metapopulation. Ecology Letters 1: 63–70.
Johnson PTJ, Ostfeld RS and Keesing F (2015) Frontiers in research on biodiversity and disease. Ecology Letters 18: 1119–1133.
Krediet CJ, Ritchie KB, Paul VJ and Teplitski M (2013) Coral‐associated micro‐organisms and their roles in promoting coral health and thwarting diseases. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280.
Lafferty KD and Kuris AM (2002) Trophic strategies, animal diversity and body size. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 17: 507–513.
Lips KR, Brem F, Brenes R, et al. (2006) Emerging infectious disease and the loss of biodiversity in a Neotropical amphibian community. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 103: 3165–3170.
Lloyd‐Smith JO, George D, Pepin KM, et al. (2009) Epidemic dynamics at the human–animal interface. Science 326: 1362–1367.
Manlove KR, Walker JG, Craft ME, et al. (2016) "One Health" or Three? publication silos among the one health disciplines. PLoS Biology 14: e1002448.
May RM and Anderson RM (1978) Regulation and stability of host–parasite interactions. II. Destabilizing processes. Journal of Animal Ecology 47: 249–267.
May RM and Anderson RM (1979) Population biology of infectious diseases. Part II. Nature 280: 455–461.
May RM and Anderson RM (1990) Parasite–host coevolution. Parasitology 100: S89–S101.
McCallum H (2012) Disease and the dynamics of extinction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367: 2828–2839.
McCallum H, Barlow ND and Hone J (2001) How should transmission be modelled? Trends in Ecology and Evolution 16: 295–300.
Mordecai EA, Paaijmans KP, Johnson LR, et al. (2013) Optimal temperature for malaria transmission is dramatically lower than previously predicted. Ecology Letters 16: 22–30.
O'Hanlon SJ, Rieux A, Farrer RA, et al. (2018) Recent Asian origin of chytrid fungi causing global amphibian declines. Science 360: 621.
Pecl GT, Araujo MB, Bell JD, et al. (2017) Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: impacts on ecosystems and human well‐being. Science 355: eaai9214.
Plowright RK, Parrish CR, McCallum H, et al. (2017) Pathways to zoonotic spillover. Nature Reviews Microbiology 15: 502–510.
Randolph SE and Dobson ADM (2012) Pangloss revisited: a critique of the dilution effect and the biodiversity‐buffers‐disease paradigm. Parasitology 139: 847–863.
Warner RE (1968) The role of introduced diseases in the extinction of the endemic Hawaiian avifauna. Condor 70: 101–120.
Whitmee S et al. (2015) Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch: report of The Rockefeller Foundation‐Lancet Commission on planetary health. The Lancet 386: 1973–2028.
Aguirre AA, Ostfeld RS and Daszak P (eds) (2012) New Directions in Conservation Medicine: Applied Cases of Ecological Health. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keeling MJ and Rohani P (2008) Modeling Infectious Diseases in Humans and Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ostfeld RS, Keesing F and Eviner VT (eds) (2008) Infectious Disease Ecology: The Effects of Ecosystems on Disease and of Disease on Ecosystems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


Everybody Loves Raymond premiered on CBS on September 13, 1996. This series is about a man named Raymond and his family. Raymond is married to Debra and they have three children. They live across the street from Raymond's parent and brother. Ray's mother is a bit overbearing and she and Debra do not always get along. Ray's father and brother are used to his monther and ignore her when they think she has gone too far. Ray's brother is a police officer, but he still lives at home. He believes everybody loves Raymond and not himself, thereby giving the show its name.


text:
Malatesta Law Office Home
Contact Malatesta Law Office
Career Service Appeals
Who may File an Appeal With the Public Employee Relations Commission?
In filing a career service appeal, it is important to first determine whether you are an employee who has the right to bring a career service appeal. The Commission may only review actions taken against persons who have permanent status in a career service position. Thus, if you are an employee in a position classified as "select exempt", "senior management", or "other personnel services" (OPS), you do not have a right to appeal to the Commission. If you were dismissed during your probationary period in a career service position to which you were promoted from another career service position in which you held permanent career service status, you may appeal that dismissal.
An employee of an employer other than the State of Florida, such as a contractor providing services to a state agency, does not have career service appeal rights. Employees of the state university system and community colleges may not file career service appeals.
Step 1: Notice Prior to Formal Discipline
"A career service employee who has satisfactorily completed at least a 1-year probationary period in his or her current position and who is subject to a suspension, reduction in pay, demotion, involuntary transfer of more than 50 miles by highway, or dismissal shall receive written notice of such action at least 10 days prior to the date such action is to be taken." 110.227 (5)(a).
This is a very important step towards protecting yourself. This is the portion of the investigation and decision-making during which you should seek to provide favorable information directly to your employer in order to attempt to mitigate the extent of the disciplinary action taking by the agency and help collect information through discovery to support a potential Career Service Appeal.
In extreme circumstances, however notice is unnecessary.
Step 2: Employee Must File a Notice of Appeal
Written notice of any such appeal shall be filed by the employee with the commission within 21 calendar days after the date on which the notice of suspension, reduction in pay, demotion, involuntary transfer of more than 50 miles by highway, or dismissal is received by the employee. 110.227 (6)
Do not delay in filling an appeal. Even if you are still in the process of investigating the facts, retaining counsel, or handling other personal issues, there is no excuse to delay filling the appeal. I recommend filling the notice of appeal the same day you receive formal notice of disciplinary action from the Agency.
Step 3: Appointment of Hearing Officer
No employee action required.
Step 4: Notice of Scheduling the Hearing Order
Typically, your hearing will be scheduled to be conducted on an agreed upon date with the agency via telephone at a location near you. This means that a hearing officer in Tallahassee be be calling in to a meeting room designated by PERC where all parties and witnesses will be present in person. The pre-hearing order will set out the deadlines and timelines important to trying your appeal.
Step 5: The Parties File a Pre-Hearing Statement and Get Witness Subpoenas
There is a not a significant amount of discovery to be conducted as a lot of the information is made available in the pre-disciplinary investigation and notice process. However, it is important to subpoena witnesses to support your positon. Parties will also have to provide any evidence in advance of the hearing as delineated within the pre-hearing order.
Step 6: The Hearing is Held
Be there with your witnesses and evidence and be prepared to professionally represent yourself before the hearing officer.
Step 7: The Parties File Post-Hearing Argument and Proposed Findings of Fact Within About Seven Calendar Days of the Hearing (Deadline is set at Hearing) Step 8: The Hearing Officer Issues a Recommended Order and Submits the Case to the Commission Step 9: The Parties File Exceptions to the Hearing Officer's Recommended Order Within Fifteen Calendar Days of the Date of the Recommended Order. Oral Argument may Also be Held, if Requested by the Parties and Approved by the Commission Step 10: The Commission Reviews the Record and Issues a Final Order Within Forty-Five Days From the Date of the Hearing if no Exceptions are Filed, or Within Forty-Five Days of any Exceptions Filed or Oral Argument Held Do I Need an Attorney?
If your case has merit, then you may feel as though you will win on the strength of your case alone and don't need counsel. Obviously, the strength of your case was insufficient to avoid this disciplinary action. I offer a free consultation to all public employees facing disciplinary action.
Age and Disability Discrimination
Discrimination Litigation
HCBS Providers
Venice Office
871 Venetia Bay Blvd Suite 235
We serve the following localities: Charlotte County including Englewood, Port Charlotte, and Punta Gorda; DeSoto County including Arcadia; Hillsborough County including Brandon, Riverview, Sun City Center, Tampa, Temple Terrace, and University; Lee County including Bonita Springs, Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Lehigh Acres, and North Fort Myers; Manatee County including Bradenton and Palmetto; Pinellas County including Clearwater and St. Petersburg; and Sarasota County including Sarasota.
Sarasota/Manatee:
Tampa/St. Petersburg:
Fort Myers/Port Charlotte:
Orlando/Daytona/Palm Bay:
(407) 505-6747 Fort Lauderdale/Miami:
Career Service Appeals | Sarasota Whistleblower Lawyer Malatesta Law Office
Copyright © 2021, Malatesta Law Office


The title phrase is something my dad would say when he'd greet someone he hadn't seen in a while – though that "while" could've been as little as a day or two!
Our working title is What's Up With MIddle School: An Essential Handbook for Parents of Middle Schoolers, and it should be out by this time next year. While the book addresses a wide variety of topics from middle schoolers' self-centeredness to how to get them to do chores, there's one main theme we keep coming back to: relationship.
Despite how it may feel, your children need you more during the middle school years than almost any other time in their lives. Though it seems like they're pushing you away – even avoiding you at times – they need to know you will love them no matter what. So stick your head inside the bubble, give quick hugs (even if they're one-armed and from the side), and communicate your love and support in any way you can.
Middle school turmoil lasts only a few years, but your relationship with your son or daughter will be a part of the rest of both of your lives. Protect it with all you've got!


World-class workforce management tool gains resource budgeting functionality: Free-of-charge Teleopti WFM Forecasts now includes Budgets module!
The free forecasting offering of Teleopti has been available for workforce management forecasting in the contact centre, back-office and retail markets for almost two years, and has been a huge success with more than 2000 downloads from customers world-wide. Customers of all levels of complexity have been enjoying the easy-to-use forecasting wizard that makes data validation and seasonality and trend analysis quick and painless, for inbound as well as all types of multimedia and email. The ability to work with months as well as weeks and days, and to easily add campaigns or follow-up forecasting accuracy all in one screen has been very appreciated by customers.