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The Bonfire of China's Vanities
By Pankaj Mishra
One cold afternoon last fall I met Yu Hua at the state-run Friendship Hotel in Beijing. Cheerfully, he described to me the incipient international fame of his most recent novel, "Brothers," one of China's biggest-selling literary works. He had just returned from Hong Kong, where the novel was short-listed for the Man Asian Prize; he was leaving soon for Paris to receive an award for the book, which had just been translated into French. With the breezy insouciance that unbroken success creates, Yu then began to recount a somewhat irreverent memory of Mao Zedong's death.
Though nearly 50, Yu, who wears his hair short and spiky, looks relatively young. He speaks in emphatic bursts, his face often flushing red, and he is quick to laugh. It was, in fact, his boisterous laugh that almost got him into trouble on the morning of the solemn announcement of Mao's death. Responding to orders that blared out from loudspeakers, he assembled with hundreds of other students in the main hall of his small-town high school. "Funereal music was played, and then we had to hear the long list of titles that preceded Mao's name, 'Chairman,' 'Beloved Leader,' 'Great helmsman . . . ,' " Yu recalled. "Everyone loved Chairman Mao, of course, so when his name was finally announced, everyone burst into tears. I started crying, too, but one person crying is a sad sight; more than a thousand people crying together, the sound echoing, turns into a funny spectacle, so I began to laugh. My body shook with my effort to control my laughter while I bent over the chair in front of me. The class leader later told me, admiringly, 'Yu Hua, you were crying so fervently!' "
He paused, and then jumped 13 years to a memory of another momentous — and more traumatic — event in China's modern history. In the spring of 1989, when tens of thousands of protesters filled Tiananmen Square, Yu was living in Beijing, partaking of the cultural excitement and political hopefulness of post-Mao China. Already a major figure in the city's artistic avant garde, Yu biked every day to Tiananmen Square to express solidarity with the student protesters.
As Yu described the widespread civilian support for the students, a note of passion entered his voice, and the menu he had elegantly snagged off a passing waiter lay open and unread in his lap. "The word 'people' was much used in the Cultural Revolution," he said. "It is a very loaded term in China, it is used a lot, but until the mass protests in 1989 I did not realize what the word meant."
His voice grew louder as he recalled the bloody suppression and aftermath of the protests. I became nervous. Yu, a short, thickset man with bulging eyes, could easily pass unnoticed in a crowd of Chinese peasants and workers, but he does not exactly strive for self-effacement. We were sitting in the corner of the hotel lobby, partly concealed by a large pillar and surrounded by a thick fog of cigarette smoke. Yu, a restless chain smoker, insists on ignoring China's new ban on smoking in public places.
The hotel was full that day of young executives from nearby I.T. offices, any one of whom might have recognized Yu, who is frequently mentioned as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though official repression of the memory of Tiananmen has ensured that few young Chinese know much about the struggles for democracy waged in the 1980s, cybersavvy youth of the kind we were surrounded by are still likely to take a sternly nationalistic line with a Chinese writer or intellectual criticizing the events of June 1989 to a foreigner. Indeed, as Yu spoke, a trendily dressed young woman looked up from the glowing screen of her laptop to squint at him.
Yu seemed totally oblivious to potential eavesdroppers. His face was red as he came to end of his memory of 1989. Turning to me, he said: "Sorry to take off like that. But this was a big turning point for all of us. After June 1989 people in China lost interest in politics. In 1992 Deng Xiaoping made his famous 'Southern Tour,' calling for faster market reforms, and the economy started to take off. The ideals of nation and socialism began to look empty. People became focused on making money.
"I, too, began to enjoy the fruits of capitalism," he added, and laughed.
Yu was only partly joking. For someone who started out in China's brief moment of counterculture in the 1980s as a writer of bleak, experimental and defiantly unsalable stories, Yu has gone on to receive an ample share of the fruits of capitalism. Published in two parts in 2005 and 2006, "Brothers," which traces the fortunes of two stepbrothers from the Cultural Revolution to China's no-less-frenzied Consumer Revolution, has sold more than a million copies in China, not counting the probably higher sales of innumerable pirated editions.
The novel, which will be published in an English translation later this month, may also prove to be China's first successful export of literary fiction. Certainly, foreign readers will find in its sprawling, rambunctious narrative some of China's most frenetic transformations and garish contradictions. "Brothers" strikes its characteristic tone with the very first scene, as Li Guang, a business tycoon, sits on his gold-plated toilet, dreaming of space travel even as he mourns the loss of all earthly relations. Li made his money from various entrepreneurial ventures, including hosting a beauty pageant for virgins and selling scrap metal and knockoff designer suits. A quick flashback to his small-town childhood shows him ogling the bottoms of women defecating in a public toilet. Similarly grotesque images proliferate over the next 600 pages as Yu describes, first, the extended trauma of the Cultural Revolution, during which Li and his stepbrother Song Gang witness Red Guards torturing Song Gang's father to death, and then the moral wasteland of capitalist China, in which Song Gang is forced to surgically enlarge one of his breasts in order to sell breast-enlargement gels.
The reasons for the novel's commercial success seem clear. It invokes the widely experienced violence and suffering of the Cultural Revolution while also drawing on another resonant theme in China: the outlandish lifestyles of the rich and famous, especially nouveau-riche entrepreneurs like Li. Li represents the country's new cultural icons, whose large appetites for money, women and cars keep the innumerable Chinese bloggers and Internet chat rooms transfixed with both admiration and revulsion.
Other writers have dealt with the Cultural Revolution and the counter-revolutions of post-Mao China — the wealthy entrepreneur inChi Li's "Coming and Going," one of the country's most successful novels and TV series of the last decade, also provoked much fascinated ambivalence among middle-class Chinese and the many millions more aspiring to be. But Yu brings to his potent mix of market-tested subjects the ambition, energy and flair of a born provocateur. He seems less interested in representing modern-day China through mimetic realism than in evoking it through a bawdy semi-fantastical narrative, in which human bodies are frequently and gruesomely violated in recurring scenes of debauchery, brutality and death.
Credit...Han Lei
Yu's provocations may have succeeded better than he hoped; enraged critics have made "Brothers" one of China's most controversial novels in recent years. Yu, who is one of the very few literary writers to have flourished in the new China, always seemed a bit suspect to puritanical critics. But "Brothers" has aroused a special malice among many readers, both online and in print, who accuse Yu of caring more for profit margins than for literature. When the second part of the novel came out in 2006, a famous literary critic at Beijing University, who championed Yu's short fiction in the 1980s, told me that the former avant-gardist had learned how to work China's new marketplace and "make money." Other reviewers doubted Yu's grasp of the details of Chinese life. Online forums debated with special vigor whether it would have been possible for a man in a small Chinese town in the early 1960s to spy on women's bottoms in a public toilet and then, in the process, slip and drown in a cesspool.
Last year an anthology of criticism titled "Pulling Yu Hua's Teeth" charged the author of "Brothers" with several crimes: selling out to the very forces of commercialism and vulgarity anatomized in his novel; promoting a negative image of China and Chinese writers to the West; sinking into "a world of filth, chaos, stench and blackness, without the slightest scrap of dignity"; being a carpetbagging peasant who gives himself literary airs.
"Good people are not rewarded," one critic writes, "the kind do not die a good death, scoundrels take the upper hand, love proves false, only money is praised, but there is nothing behind money but lasciviousness and ugliness." Opening the teeth-pulling operation with an article claiming that Yu's writing consists of four bad teeth — a black tooth, a yellow tooth, a false tooth and a carious tooth — the book systematically excavates Yu's dentures over four parts, ending with a conclusion titled "It's Not the Toothache but the Pain That Kills You."
Yu betrayed no signs of postoperative stress when I asked him recently about the reaction to his book. He dismissed "Pulling Yu Hua's Teeth" as "sensationalism" and robustly rejected the accusation that he performs for a Western audience. "My books are more popular in China than anywhere else," he said. "If they weren't, these critics would have a point."
When I first met Yu one evening in Shanghai in 2006, he confidently described to me his vision of "Brothers" as a social and moral critique of China's evolution. Yet he was suffering from a version of postpublication angst common among authors — the cankerous feeling that his work, and its vision of China lurching between political authoritarianism, extreme poverty, consumerist excess and moral depravity, was not being taken seriously enough. High sales and popular acclaim had not taken the sting out of the venomous reviews. But almost three years of a sustained critical assault on "Brothers" seems to have hardened Yu. He now sees the attacks in sociological rather than literary terms, as exposing a fault line between generations, and his detractors as typical of China's new nationalists — people too young to have any memory of their country's previous traumas but obsessed with boosting China's image as a rising power vis-à-vis the West.
"The main reason that the book was attacked is because it exposes the dark side of China," he told me when we met again in Beijing. "A highly respected critic in Fudan University, Chen Sihe, pointed this out. 'Look at the critics who are attacking this book,' he said, 'They are all young. Older critics have a more ambiguous take.' "
Yu added, "Younger writers don't like to see books that reveal the dark side of China; they live very comfortable lives; they don't believe in the dark side of China; they are not even aware of the hundreds of millions of people still living in extreme poverty."
Yu himself seems to have rarely turned away from the dark side of things. He first became known in the late 1980s as a writer of surreal short fiction whose raw violence — in one story, a 4-year-old strangles his cousin, a baby, in order to "enjoy the explosive crying"; in another, a young girl is hacked to pieces — brashly defied the hygienic pieties of socialist realism to which China's state-supported writers were expected to conform.
Yu switched to melodramatic realism in 1992 in his novel "To Live." This atrocity-rich tale of a forbearing peasant whose son dies after a blood transfusion to save a party official was turned into an internationally successful film by Zhang Yimou, China's most prominent director. It won the Grand Prix at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. Both "To Live," and his next novel, "Chronicle of a Blood Merchant"(1995), in which a peasant traffics in his own blood to supplement his meager income, remained resolutely focused on the tragic aspects of China's modern history. But it was not until Yu traveled to the West that he began to think about a broader fictional canvas that would depict China's chaotic present as well as its past. In 1995 he went abroad for the first time, to the French seaside town St. Malo, for a literary festival. "The foreign journalists there," he recalled, "would often ask me about the Cultural Revolution, and it occurred to me what a barbarous and bizarre experience China had had."
Almost miraculously, "Brothers," which contains graphic descriptions of the violence of the Cultural Revolution, including the suicide of a man who hammers a nail into his skull, managed to escape Chinese censors. Yu said he profited from his experience with Zhang Yimou, who cannily altered the story of "To Live" in order to make the film version palatable to Chinese authorities: among other things, Zhang made the son's death seem like a tragic accident. "As he made the changes I became very impressed by how well Zhang Yimou seemed to understand the Chinese Communist Party. But the film still got banned. After that, I stopped caring about what the censors would think."
It was his publishers rather than the state censors who wanted cuts in "Brothers." But they relented after Yu threatened to withdraw his book. "They knew," he said, "that the book would sell; they are willing to take more risks with the censors because they are not state-supported anymore and have to fend for themselves in the marketplace." For Yu the publication of his novel is a sign of slow but steady progress in China. "Ten years ago, 'Brothers' could not have been published," he said. "It may take another 10 years for a movie to be made out of it."
We were sitting with Yu's wife, Chen Hong, a poet who now devotes most of her time to looking after their son, in the living room of the apartment they rent in West Beijing. We were surrounded by the marks of a temporary existence: new Ikea-style furniture, mismatched curtains, piled-up books and a general air of neglect. Yu explained that he and his wife were waiting for their son to finish school before moving to Hangzhou in his ancestral province, Zhejiang. He didn't like Beijing; it was too big and impersonal. The neighboring apartments, for instance, housed "hair salons," often a front, in China, for brothels, with bright neon lights. "I tell my friends we live in a red-light district," he joked, and his wife, a woman with a delicate pale face and loose long hair, broke into a melodious laugh.
Photograph by Gueorgui Pinkhassov/magnumphotos.com
One room in Yu's austere apartment is reserved for surfing the Internet, which is probably the most revealing window on modern China. But Yu said he spends more time in his study, another stark room with a laptop computer on a clean desk. He added that he didn't need to rely on the Internet; he had personally experienced the weird mutations of China's consumer culture described in the novel. He remembers turning on the television in the 1990s to find nothing but beauty pageants: every town in China seemed to host them.
He disputes the charge that the details in the novel are far-fetched; reality can be equally, sometimes even more, gruesome in China. "After the book was published, an academic friend wrote to me to say that his father had also killed himself by hammering a nail into his skull," he said. "Three readers said that their father's corpse had to be mutilated in order to fit into the coffin. A New York Times journalist who interviewed me in 2006 thought that businesses offering hymen reconstruction was extremely unlikely; he then discovered that they existed all over China."
When I asked Yu if he had ever contemplated breast-enlargement, like Song Gang in "Brothers," he and his wife laughed. But both grew somber as Yu recalled his childhood, no less infected by the grotesque for being relatively untouched by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Born in 1960, Yu grew up in a small town called Haiyan in Zhejiang province (a breeding ground of many Chinese artists and intellectuals including Lu Xun, the pioneer of modern Chinese literature). Despite the Cultural Revolution, Yu recalled, life was generally monotonous — except when a criminal was to be executed, when "the whole town would become as lively as festival time." Yu remembers the executions as the "most thrilling scenes of my childhood, seeing the criminal kneeling on the ground, a soldier aiming a rifle at the back of his head and firing."
His father was a doctor — but this makes him sound grander than he was, for he worked, Yu said, wearing a bloodstained smock in one small room and lived with his family across the road. Their home also faced a public toilet, where nurses often dumped tumors, and the local mortuary. "On hot summer days, it was cool inside the mortuary," Yu recalled, "and since the corpses were deposited only at night, I often took a nap there. Sleeping at night in our home, we would be woken by the sound of people crying."
Yu now attributes the relentless bleakness of his early fiction to his childhood exposure to brutality and death. "I was unable to steer my writing away from bloodshed and violence," he said, "Writing during the day, I'd have one character killing another, characters dying in pools of blood. At night, asleep, I would dream that I was about to be killed by someone else."
Yu never went to college. "My entire education was encompassed by the Cultural Revolution," he said. "I went to school in 1966 and came out in 1976, so I never received a proper education." Then, like many "barefoot doctors" in China in the late 1970s, Yu underwent only some very basic training before he became a dentist.
He claims he became a writer because he hated his job: "the inside of a mouth is one of the ugliest spectacles in the world." In the early '80s he was living in a small town between Shanghai and Hangzhou. From his window he often observed workers of the local Cultural Bureau, the Chinese state's salaried writers and artists, loafing in the streets. "We were all very poor in those days," Yu recalled. "The difference was that you could work hard to be poor as a dentist, or you could do nothing and still be poor as a worker in the Cultural Bureau. I decided I wanted to be as idle as the workers in the Cultural Bureau and become a writer."
Yu wrote a short story and sent it off to a literary magazine in Beijing. An enthusiastic phone call from its editor soon put him on the path to paid idleness at the Cultural Bureau. Yu seems to have relished manipulating the Communist system to his own ends. "I was deliberately late on the first day at the bureau office," he told me. "Later I would only go once a week, and then finally only once a month to collect my salary."
In 1993 the royalties from "To Live" enabled Yu to leave his job altogether. "My friends," he recalled, "say I have enjoyed the best of both ideologies: first receiving a writer's stipend under socialism and now royalties in the free-market regime."
Though Yu's account of his beginnings as a writer is lighthearted, from the first his works of fiction provoked serious critical attention. Published in such major literary magazines as Zhongshan, Shouhuo and Shanghai Wenyi, his stories, with their surreal violence and cruelty, seemed to deftly summarize China's history; their metafictional devices also spoke of a formal ambition rare among Chinese writers. As early as 1991 the critic Henry Zhao predicted that Yu was "destined to occupy a long page in Chinese literature."
Remarkably, Yu seems to have had as little apprenticeship in writing as he had in dentistry. Books were hard to come by during the Cultural Revolution, or they would circulate in mutilated form, like the torn copy of a novel by Guy de Maupassant, which Yu read the middle of ("I remember it had a lot of sex," he said) without knowing its title or author. His formative reading experience was provided by the big character posters of the Cultural Revolution, in which people denounced their neighbors with violent inventiveness. "I remember," Yu said, "walking home from school and reading each poster as I walked along. I was not so much interested in the revolutionary slogans as in the stories."
He had never cared much for Chinese writers; only later did he come to appreciate Lu Xun's resolve to diagnose Chinese society and culture through literature. Like many of his peers recoiling from socialist realism, Yu was drawn to the icons of Western high modernism whose work began to appear in translation in China in the 1980s, in particular Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Borges. The delicate fictions of the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata were also a great early influence. "Kawabata taught me the importance of detail," Yu recalled. "I would buy two copies of his novels whenever I saw them. One to read and the other to keep in pristine condition on my shelf."
So why did he abandon avant-garde experimentalism? Yu says he discovered that his characters had their own lives, which he could not control. By the early 1990s, when almost all major works of international fiction were being translated into Chinese, he was also reading more widely, particularly novels by V. S. Naipaul and Toni Morrison. But there seem to have been extraliterary reasons, too, for the general retreat from aesthetic radicalism among Yu's generation. The critic Chen Xiaoming, who teaches at Beijing University, once told me that by 1992, as China's economy hectically expanded and the state began to withdraw its cultural subsidies, publishers were increasingly forced to sink or swim in the marketplace. In the new era of mass culture, which TV dramas and popular music dominated, there were fewer takers for avant-garde fiction, and its practitioners had to improvise or face irrelevance.
This sounds true: Su Tong, one of the more famous avant-gardists in the 1980s, turned to writing historical romances. In an apparent concession to his commercial times, Yu scripted an episode for a TV show titled "China Models." "It was for the money," he jokingly admitted to me. But he also claims that he was led to a more populist aesthetic by a new idea of his social responsibility as a writer. As he sees it, boldly experimental writing of the kind he and other writers produced in the 1980s was a rejection of the official orthodoxy of Mao's notion that literature ought to serve the Communist regime's political ends. "We wanted to say," Yu told me, "that writing is not in the service of anything other than itself."
Yu claims that he was forced to reconsider his stance of aesthetic autonomy after the events of June 4, 1989, and reconfigure his notion of the relationship between writer and society, especially as he confronted the problems created by China's breakneck modernization in the 1990s. This meant embracing the old Chinese model of the writer as social critic and a pared-down style of cinematic brevity and much earthy humor. It meant, too, writing about China's large but invisible majority in the age of globalization: peasants and workers in villages and small towns.
Yu now looks back wryly on his reputation as a militant advocate of l'art pour l'art. He said he had recently been persuaded to conduct a public conversation with Alain Robbe-Grillet during the latter's visit to Beijing. He didn't think much of the high priest of the nouveau roman, to whom he was often and inaccurately compared in the past. "He was just an old codger," Yu said and laughed.
EExpressing a preference for engagé over ivory-tower literature is unlikely to endear Yu to left-leaning readers in China. "If the right-wingers," Yu said, "hate 'Brothers' for its depiction of capitalism in China, the left dislikes it for its depiction of the Cultural Revolution."
I put this to Wang Hui, the most prominent of intellectuals described as part of China's New Left, which maintains that many of China's peasants and workers have yet to reap the benefits of the newly globalized economy. Wang is an old friend of Yu's and wrote a foreword to a collection of his essays. (It was Wang who first encouraged Yu to begin writing essays in the late 1990s, publishing them in Dushu, the magazine he edited until 2007.) Yu told me that, broadly, he shared the New Left's criticism of Chinese-style capitalism, its tendency to create wealth in the cities while bypassing the countryside. Wang, however, seemed reluctant to wholeheartedly endorse "Brothers."
"The first part reproduces the conventional 'grand narrative' of the Cultural Revolution as a time of unrelieved suffering and betrayal," he told me. "I actually find the second part more interesting, because the author is no longer in control of his narrative. But, you know, we are old friends, and we haven't really discussed this book." As he said this, Wang put an arm around Yu. We were at a restaurant in West Beijing that serves the cuisine of Zhejiang, Yu's native province. I had traveled to it in a taxi with Yu and noticed a strain of writerly competitiveness in his terse responses to my questions about contemporary Chinese novelists: he read mostly Mo Yan, Wang Anyi and Su Tong. No, he didn't much read young Chinese writers or the Chinese Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, who lives in a suburb of Paris. Ma Jian, the author of the blackly satirical novel "Beijing Coma," who lives in self-imposed exile in London, is barely known in China. He was more interested in foreign authors; he had recently read Ian McEwan's novel "On Chesil Beach" and also introduced a collection of the British novelist's stories in Chinese translation.
Yu spoke warmly, though, of Wang, whom he first met in Beijing in the 1980s and who is one of the very few people he sees frequently. At the restaurant they sat together, presenting a study in contrasts: Wang, unfailingly thoughtful, and Yu, as jaunty as ever. Yet they radiated an easy mutual regard, built upon the shared experience of the tumultuous late 1980s in Beijing and amusement at how significantly things had changed in their own lives since they were provincial students during the Cultural Revolution. Wang seemed to cherish the mischievous — what he called the "jokemaking" — side of Yu.
They had just returned from a trip to Nepal, where they went whitewater rafting together. Yu chortled as he recalled his attempts to hold on to his boat amid the swirling waters. "It's very dangerous," he said, "very dangerous." But he grew visibly aggrieved when I asked him if he followed the Olympic Games in Beijing. The organizers promised to sell tickets online on a first-come-first-served basis, and he tried to buy them as soon as they were made available. But he wasn't able to get the best seats for the basketball matches and then found empty rows in the stadium whose neatness hinted at early block sales to party bigwigs. "Typical Communist Party corruption," Yu bellowed, and for once I was glad for the loud Muzak playing in the restaurant.
He fell silent after this, chain-smoking in his quiet but tense manner, as Wang spoke of the Western financial crisis and its implications for China's export-oriented economy. The stock market was in a steep decline; factories on the coast were closing. The discussion seemed to bore Yu. When I remarked that President Hu Jintao's then-imminent visit with President Bush was very likely an exercise in futility, he said, "These politicians are mostly a waste of time."
He perked up only when I asked him what he thought of Zhang Yimou's contribution to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. He said he felt sympathetic to Zhang, who is often accused of selling out to Communist authorities as well as to commercial interests. "He would have reached the end of his career very quickly had he persisted in making films like 'To Live.' He had to live with the realities of Chinese society. And it is different for filmmakers. I can always publish in Taiwan if I am restricted in China. In China, too, the political atmosphere has gone back and forth from closed to open, and I have been lucky in hitting the troughs."
Later in the taxi home, sitting next to the driver, Yu spoke of a threat to artistic expression in China newer than state control. "I am really worried about the new nationalism," he said. "Anything slightly critical of China appears in foreign media, and the nationalists are swarming online, attacking it. I tell these angry youth that The New York Times doesn't criticize China as much as it criticizes America. Basically they are ignorant. They think the American media is always praising American presidents. The problem is that the younger generation hasn't lived through poverty, collectivism; it is lacking in restraint, its references are very few, the experience is so limited."
We were moving down Beijing's stately avenues, past the quasi-imperial grandeur of its postmodern architecture. Yu seemed eager to return to his sparsely furnished study and the room with the Internet. Earlier that day at his home he spoke of how his son, who has known only post-Mao China, would nevertheless witness extraordinary transformations in his own lifetime since the capitalist economy was bound to collapse. Yu barely looked out of his window as he said: "These young nationalists have no sense of ambivalence, no idea of life's ambiguities. But when times are hard, their attitude will change, become more mature, and because capitalism in this form cannot go on in China, it has to end, those hard times will come soon."


1 Making a well in the flour.
2 Breaking the eggs into the well.
3 Combining the eggs and oil, and gradually drawing in the flour.
4 Incorporating the flour into the eggs and oil to form the dough.
5 Kneading the pasta dough.
6 The fully kneaded smooth and elastic dough, ready to be rested before rolling out.
If the dough is very stiff and dry looking, then add more beaten egg, about a quarter of an egg at a time, pulsing the mixture and checking the consistency after each addition. If the dough is very soft and sticky, add about 1 tbsp flour at a time until you achieve the correct consistency.
Note The longer the pasta rests the easier it will be to roll out. It is possible to make a quick pasta that only rests for 15 minutes, but the texture will not be quite as silky. It can be rested overnight in the fridge, but needs to be transferred to a cool room temperature 20 minutes before rolling out.


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


When you first set eyes upon Helena Redrain, you might think her a fragile thing, something not crafted for this world. Her face has a fae-like cast to it, high cheekbones and large blue eyes the most notable thing at first glance. A longer look will show full lips that carry a playful, sardonic tilt to them and a strong chin that she often raises when she's feeling stubborn. She is willowy, only the slightest hint of curve to her hips, but there is a core of steel there. Every step is graceful, every footfall planned to showcase her body, enjoying the eyes that trail after her as she moves.
This woman is a chameleon, a study of contrary behavior. She doesn't like to feel out of place, so when she walks into a room she behaves like the other people there, careful to only stand on when she feels comfortable doing so.
Helena had a happy childhood, because her sister already paved the way for her. They had already gone and done things their own way, so by that time, her family was amenable for Helena to find her own path.


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Super strong, heavy silver mans ring (although we have sold to women as well), the ring is a marvelous piece of engineering design. The band is made in three sections, the soldered together so that the middle section, with the indented feet design turns around.
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In Drake Passage off the Antarctic Peninsula, marine technician Tom Sigmond assists with the launch of a float that will take readings and beam them back to researchers like University of Arizona oceanographer Joellen Russell in Tucson.
The inhospitability of the Southern Ocean means scientists know less about it than the rest of the world's oceans. Here, the N.B. Palmer approaches the McMurdo research station.
The N.B. Palmer research vessel carried scientists across the Southern Ocean as they collected data on carbon and measured ocean acidity.
The ship's crew used satellite imagery to avoid large fields of sea ice while on their mission. The use of sensor-equipped floats allows the team to gather data year-round.
Joellen Russell, associate professor of geoscience and the Thomas R. Brown Endowed Chair of Integrative Science at the University of Arizona, poses for a photo with a climate model of the sea surface temperatures created by a team she was part of, Tuesday November 21, 2017, Tucson, Ariz.
A group of scientists, including one from the UA, has new findings suggesting the Antarctica's Southern Ocean — long known to play an integral role in climate change — may not be absorbing as much pollution as previously thought.
The old belief was the Southern Ocean pulled about 13 percent of the world's carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change — out of the atmosphere, helping put the brakes on rising global temperatures.
To reach their contradictory conclusion, the team used state-of-the-art sensors to collect more data on the Southern Ocean than ever before, including during the perilous winter months that previously made the research difficult if not impossible.
Some oceanographers suspect that less CO2 is being absorbed because the westerlies — the winds that ring the southernmost continent — are tightening like a noose. As these powerful winds get more concentrated, they dig at the water, pushing it out and away.
Water from below rises to take its place, dragging up decaying muck made of carbon from deep in the ocean that can then either be released into the atmosphere in the form of CO2 or slow the rate that CO2 is absorbed by the water. Either way, it's not good.
Oceans, rivers, lakes and vegetation can moderate extreme changes in temperature. Southern Arizona has no such buffers, leaving us vulnerable as average global temperatures march upward.
"Everybody asks, 'Why are you at the UA?'" Russell said about studying the Southern Ocean from the desert. She said the research is important to Arizona and the university supports her work.
The Southern Ocean is a formidable place, especially in winter. Winds can howl at nearly 100 mph, churning waves that can surge 80 feet high. The temperature dips below freezing for prolonged periods.
"Very few people who have a sane view of the world go down there in winter," said Rik Wanninkhof, an oceanographer from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and one of the paper's co-authors.
For this reason, scientists know less about the Southern Ocean than the rest of the world's oceans. What they do know is mostly limited to surface CO2 levels in the summer, when it's safer to take measurements by ships with researchers aboard. Shipboard sensors that directly measure CO2 are the accepted scientific standard in these types of studies.
Understanding CO2 levels within the air, land and sea and how it is exchanged between the three is necessary for making more accurate future climate predictions.
To fill the gap in knowledge, Russell and her team have deployed an array of cylindrical tanks, called floats, that collect data on carbon and more in the Southern Ocean year-round. Russell leads the modeling component of this project called Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling, or SOCCOM.
The floats drift 1,000 meters below the surface. Every 10 days, they plunge a thousand meters deeper, then bob up to the surface before returning to their original depth.
For three years, 35 floats equipped with state-of-the-art sensors the size of a coffee cup have been collecting data along the way and beaming it back to the researchers, like Russell in Tucson. Within hours, the data is freely available online.
They measure ocean acidity, or pH, and other metrics to understand the biogeochemistry of the elusive ocean, but not without controversy.
Alison Gray, an oceanographer at the University of Washington, is the lead author on the study. She said there are two reasons the study may contradict what has previously been thought of about the Southern Ocean: The lack of wintertime observations at the ocean by other researchers and the fact that ocean carbon levels might vary throughout the year.
So while SOCCOM is making it possible to get more data than ever before, others question her nontraditional methods. They suggest that Gray's alarming results are derived from error.
"Whether the Southern Ocean is absorbing a large quantity of CO2 from the atmosphere is a hot topic for environmental science and global policymaking," said Taro Takahashi, a geochemist from Columbia University, in an email. He is not involved with SOCCOM.
Takahashi is not entirely convinced the measurements reported by the authors are scientifically reliable enough to support their conclusions.
The issue with the findings is that researchers are not directly measuring CO2 but rather calculating it from the measurements taken with the new sensors, he said. The standard shipboard sensors don't work at the depth the floats operate, and the traditional sensors are too large to fit on a float.
Publishing the paper has been laborious as well, Russell said.
SOCCOM is like the disruptive startup in the carbon counting industry.
"(Reviewers) kept saying, 'It's a new sensor, so if you want us to trust it, we want more time and more of them,' which is legitimate and annoying," she said.
Gray remains confident in her findings, "but we need to keep making measurements to verify our results," she said.
The team only wants to improve the models with more data so that future climate predictions can bet more accurate, Gray said.
"If the Southern Ocean is not taking up as much carbon as we believed, it could be that things are changing more rapidly," Wanninkhof said.
And that matters, even in a desert thousands of miles from the Antarctica since climate change will make extreme weather events more extreme in Arizona, he said.
Study projects sea rise could bring 10,000 more residents this century to Pima County.


Do you have doubts about taking an art class?
Does art and design class intimidate you?
Do you want to know the coverage of my watercolor painting class?
Do you want to know the coverage of other lessons?
Are you lacking confidence and hiding your desire with art and design?
Do you simply want to play with art and colors?
How about an advice on pursuing a career in fine art fields?
Do you have any customized lesson requests?
Do you need some help in your art school project?
Are you joining an art competition and want to improve your art skills and techniques, your critical thinking and creativity?
Do you need a simple counseling on your craft or art project?
Are you looking for a home decorating lessons too?
Any questions about me and my background?


text:
Some teachers hesitant to discuss controversial race issues in class
Anissa Ypon, Staff Writer
For several months, students watched newsfeeds of alleged police brutality and the resulting protests all over social media — but rarely was this topic discussed in class. Oftentimes, teachers and staff chose to refrain from sharing personal opinions about controversial issues for fear of offending particular students or subjecting themselves to having to defend their opinions.
However, many students have agreed that as tensions rose in Ferguson, they felt that the issue would have been appropriate to discuss in class if approached in a respectful manner.
"Avoiding the subject doesn't really help the matter," senior Lawrence Nguyen said. "If people don't understand what was done, we wouldn't know how to handle this situation."
Students' awareness of current events is usually limited to snippets of information on social media sites that could be highly inaccurate or biased without their knowledge. With updates that may be false or incomplete, opinions may develop through ignorance.
Teachers and staff may feel that conversing about alleged police brutality is too controversial because of students' lack of prior knowledge, the complexity of the situation itself, or the emotions it may evoke.
"These social problems happened in the past and will happen again in a different form," Bear Creek counselor Lee Vue said. "If I were a political science teacher I'd have more insight and be comfortable talking about it."
Many have said they would have welcomed the opportunity to discuss the controversial issue in class, saying that being educated on controversial issues is critical to their education.
"I think it's okay to share our opinions because it's definitely something we should be aware of," junior Mason Aguila said.
These confrontations between police and someone of the community are very relevant to students no matter how distant they may feel from the problem.
"I think teachers are afraid that they'll just fuel the fire if they talk to us about police brutality," a sophomore who asked to remain anonymous said. "I personally believe that whether this was racial discrimination or a man doing his job, students need to know we're not living in a perfect world."
While many teachers haven't found the right time to discuss such a heavy topic, some do agree that the topic is highly appropriate to discuss social issues.
"It's not my place as a teacher to make judgement," history teacher Jason Johnson said. "but it is my place as a teacher to inform students of information and teach them how to develop their own thoughts to evaluate these social and historical events."
Johnson says that the alleged police brutality has definitely been a hot topic this last year and has taken the opportunity to discuss the issue with his class. His world history students have watched video interviews, listened to commentators for both sides, and held class discussions.
"I felt it was appropriate for our history class because it relates the past to the present," sophomore Mika Shin said. "Discussing the Ferguson protests helped me gain better knowledge and Mr. Johnson's class is very open and comfortable to talk about it in detail."


This Subcommittee was re-constituted at the 28 November 2017 meeting of the Academic Board, at which draft Terms of Reference were approved. The Terms of Reference presented below are subject to discussion at the first meeting of the Subcommittee in 2018, with final approval anticipated at the 6 March 2018 meeting of the Academic Board.
The HDR Scholarships Subcommittee advises the Graduate Studies Committee about policy and procedures relating to the award of Australian Postgraduate Awards, University of Sydney Postgraduate Awards, Travelling Scholarships, Grants in Aid and other post-graduate awards, and takes decisions in accordance with the University of Sydney (Delegations Authority - Academic Functions) Rule 2016, the Student Recognition Awards Policy 2016, and resolutions of the Senate and the Academic Board relating to HDR scholarships.
c. by the Academic Board as specified in scholarship/prize conditions (e.g. travelling scholarships).
To act for the Academic Board in determining University nominations for postgraduate scholarships required by external organisations.
To oversee and monitor the effective implementation of policy and good practice relating to the award of specific postgraduate scholarships.
To provide regular reports on its activities under its terms of reference to the Graduate Studies Committee.
To consider and report on any matter referred to it by the Academic Board, the Vice-Chancellor, the Graduate Studies Committee or the Chair of the Academic Board.
On the nomination of the Chair of the Graduate Studies Committee, the Chair of the Academic Board shall biennially appoint one academic staff member from each faculty and one academic staff member to represent the University schools.
Meeting papers are available on the secure HDRSSC SharePoint site.


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Home > Banks and Insurance > Banks, Brokers, Exchanges A - D > Continental Savings of America - Specimen - San Francisco, California 1988
Continental Savings of America - Specimen - San Francisco, California 1988
Product #: newitem1336333084drbs
Beautiful specimen certificate from Continental Savings of America printed in 1988. This historic document was printed by the Security-Columbian Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of their headquarters in San Francisco. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's Chairman, and Secretary, and Treasurer and is over 28 years old.
Continental Savings of America, A Savings and Loan Association
Status:	Inactive as of 1995-04-28
Successor Bank:	California Federal Bank
Headquarters:	Continental Savings of America, A Savings and Loan Association
Established:	1977-08-29
FDIC Insurance:	1977-08-29
FDIC Cert:	#31899
Charter Class:	Savings associations, state or federal charter, supervised by the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) Total Assets:	$359,422,000
Total Deposits:	$357,025,000
1977-08-29	Institution established: Original name:Continental Savings of America, A Savings and Loan Association
1995-04-28	Failed. Acquired with government financial assistance and subsequently operated as part of California Federal Bank, A FSB (30278)
1995-06-30	Moved bank headquarters from SAN FRANCISCO, CA to LOS ANGELES, CA
1995-07-28	Acquired Pacific Heritage Bank (23319) in TORRANCE, CA as part of a government assisted transaction.
1996-10-19	Acquired First Citizens Bank (26768) in LOS ANGELES, CA
1997-01-03	Acquired First Nationwide Bank, FSB (32643) in DALLAS, TX
1998-09-11	Acquired Glendale Federal Bank, Federal Savings Bank (29199) in GLENDALE, CA
1998-12-01	Moved bank headquarters from LOS ANGELES, CA to SAN FRANCISCO, CA
2000-02-11	Changed name to California Federal Bank (30278)
2002-11-13	Merged into and subsequently operated as part of Citibank (West), FSB (57443) in SAN FRANCISCO, CA
2006-10-01	Acquired Citicorp Trust, National Association (26170) in LOS ANGELES, CA
2006-10-01	Acquired Citibank (Delaware) (24029) in NEW CASTLE, DE
2006-10-01	Acquired Citibank Texas, National Association (32623) in DALLAS, TX
2006-10-01	Acquired West, National Association (57443) in SAN FRANCISCO, CA
2006-10-01	Acquired CFSB, National Association (28251) in RESTON, VA
2006-10-01	Merged into and subsequently operated as part of Citibank, National Association (7213) in LAS VEGAS, NV
2006-10-01	Changed primary regulatory agency from OFFICE OF THRIFT SUPERVISION to COMPTROLLER OF THE CURRENCY
2006-10-01	Changed institution class to INSURED COMMERCIAL BANK, NATIONAL, MEMBER FRS
2006-10-01	Changed organization type to COMMERCIAL BANK
2006-10-01	Changed name to West, National Association (57443)
2008-11-23	Maintained operations with government open bank assistance.
2011-07-01	Moved bank headquarters from LAS VEGAS, NV to SIOUX FALLS, SD
2011-07-01	Acquired Citibank (South Dakota), N.A. (23360) in SIOUX FALLS, SD
2012-01-01	Acquired Citicorp Trust Bank, fsb (18708) in WILMINGTON, DE
About Specimens Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".
These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that has grown in popularity over the past several years.


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Experts in the dismal science of economics can argue about the timing, but the rest of us know one thing: This economy is on the mend. Still, I'm not sure that companies are falling all over themselves to hire at a rate that will get us back to pre-Great Recession levels. It seems that what I said in this blog more than four years ago still holds true: Many businesses emerging from the severe downturn have gotten leaner in order to survive.


THEME: Dead Poets [you know who you are]All the old poets are dead, all poets are dying, all young poets are getting old, all muses are sighing for new poets to be born.
It is a night for poets passed on, but this is very much a live reading. Costumes and/or masks are encouraged.


Rumour has it that the state governor is looking to renovate the building. Sadly no one knew if it was going to be turned into a heritage house or a tourist attraction. There were a few workers sleeping in one of the bedrooms. 80 years ago, that would have been the definition of luxury.


text:
Buddhist heritage in Pakistan under threat
By Yassin Musharbash, Spiegel Online, Nov 8, 2007
Swat, Pakistan -- When the Taliban destroyed two Buddhist statues in Afghanistan in the spring of 2001, there was an international outcry. But similar incidents are now occurring in northwest Pakistan, where radical Islamists recently blew up a sculpture of Buddha in broad daylight.
<< An Afghan local stands next to a rock effigy of the Buddha partly destroyed by militant Islamists. AP
The phenomenon is new and disconcerting. Even the Pakistani government describes it as "Talibanization:" Parts of the country are now in almost exactly the same situation as neighboring Afghanistan was when the Taliban were still in power there.
This is especially the case in the formerly peaceful Swat region, where a militant Islamist leader has even proclaimed an "emirate." And just as in Afghanistan, the Islamists' hatred is directed, in part, against the traces left by the ancient Buddhist civilization in the region.
Islamists inspired by the Taliban recently destroyed an important Buddhist sculpture 40 meters (131 feet) tall and about 1,300 years old in the north-western part of the Swat Valley, reports Vishaka N. Desai, the director of the US-based Asia Society.
Drills and Explosives
In her article, which appeared in the Lebanese Daily Star newspaper on Tuesday, Buddhism expert Desai reports that the Islamists were able to act without any interference from the local administration -- in broad daylight. Their first destruction attempt left the sculpture undamaged; the second damaged the Buddha's face, shoulders and feet. The culprits had used large machines to drill shafts into the historic monument. They then filled the shafts with explosives and detonated them.
Desai, who is Indian, also reports that while Pakistani newspapers criticized the desecration extensively, the international press hardly took notice of the incident. And yet it was not the first of its kind. As recently as September of this year, gunshots were fired at a rock effigy of Buddha in the same region.
In March of 2001, when the Afghan Taliban laboriously blew up two enormous Buddha statues in Bamiyan, a district in central Afghanistan, there was an international outcry. The Taliban justified the destruction by saying the sculptures were idols and "un-Islamic." Taliban leader Mullah Omar said at the time that "Muslims should be proud to destroy idols. Our destroying them was an act of praise for God."
Only the Beginning?
Now Desai is warning that other Buddhist cultural legacies in Pakistan could also be destroyed: "There are vast numbers of important Buddhist sites in Swat and other areas of northwest Pakistan," she writes. "At this point, all of them are under threat of destruction, thanks to the influential voice of the Islamist leader Mullah Fazlullah."
Mullah Maulana Fazlullah is currently the strong man in the Swat region, notwithstanding his youth: He is only 28 years old. He thinks of himself as part of the Taliban movement and accepts only one authority: Mullah Omar. He has even proclaimed an "Islamic emirate" in his area of influence, and he commands a militia estimated to comprise some 4,500 men.
But Buddhist artefacts are not the only thorn in the Islamist's side. He also emulates the Taliban's religious and moral terror in other respects. For example, he threatened members of the Christian minority in the region -- about 1,000 people -- with death if they do not convert to Islam, Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported recently. And a Christian girls' school was forced to close and only allowed to open again on condition that all the girls wear a burka.
Polio Vaccination Prevented by the Taliban
British daily The Guardian reports that the religious warriors operating under Fazlullah's control also set fire to several stores selling Indian and Western films and destroyed barber's shops that were known to shave men. Fazlullah even prevented the implementation of a polio vaccination program supported by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the New York Times reports. Fazlullah claimed the vaccinations would make men impotent.
In July, the Pakistani military felt compelled to dispatch 2,000 soldiers to the Swat region for the first time. The soldiers were sent to prevent the Pakistani Taliban from further extending their area of influence. But the soldiers behaved passively in most cases, according to the Times. Last week, reinforcements were sent, and 17 of the newly deployed soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber. The former tourist region has been considered a crisis spot ever since. When Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf suspended the constitution and imposed a state of emergency over the weekend, one of the reasons he cited was the growing threat Pakistan faces from terrorists and militant Islamists.
Desai, the director of the Asia Society, has described the changes undergone by the Swat region on the basis of her own experiences: "In 1995, I traveled through the Swat Valley to study the area's Buddhist treasures. ... As a non-Muslim, Indian woman, I was able to travel through the region without any fear and received warm support from local residents. ... Today, little more than a decade later, the atmosphere is so poisoned that neither local community leaders nor the local police came forward to protect these monuments."


text:
Welcome to the Actors Ensemble of Berkeley website!
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Auditions for An Afternoon with Julia and Fox Among the Hens
Posted in Auditions
Auditions for An Afternoon with Julia and Fox Among the Hens, Monday August 27th and Tuesday, August 28th from 7-10 p.m. at The Old Finnish Hall, 1819 10th Street in Berkeley. Non AEA/No Pay. Write This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for more information and an appointment.
Fox Among the Hens
by James Keller
directed by Martha Luehrmann
Tuesday, October 16th at 8 pm
Grand Hall of Oddfellows Lodge #270
Auditions: Monday and Tuesday
August 27th and 28th.
from 7:00pm - 10:00pm
at The Old Finnish Hall
1819 10th Street,
Berkeley, CA, 94710
Following up on our two productions in John Hinkel Park in Summer 2018, Hamlet, and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged! (the latter of which opens August 18th and closes September 3rd), Actors Ensemble is proud to organize two unique staged readings, one of which explores the world of a pioneer in both architecture and feminism, and the other which explores issues contemporary to us today, but in the form of a fable.
Staged Readings are performed on stage with blocking, but with the script in hand (if necessary), minimal props and costumes, and no set. For An Afternoon with Julia there will be rehearsals in the chapel on Saturday and Sunday afternoons from 1:30 to 4:00 pm on September 22nd and 23rd, and a third rehearsal TBD. For A Fox Among the Hens there will likewise be 3 rehearsals TBD.
For the auditions you will read from sides we will provide. If you are new to theater, don't be intimidated - we will guide you through the process! If for some reason you cannot make the audition dates, do not hesitate to write to us - we may be able to make alternate arrangements.
Write This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for an audition appointment. We will schedule 2-3 actors in 15 minute blocks, please come 15 minutes or so before your scheduled audition time, and bring a copy of your headshot and resume, and your schedule/conflicts up through October 21st, 2018. You can audition for either or both plays using the same audition slot. Non-AEA/no pay. Actors Ensemble does cast cross-gender and cross-type on occasion (and especially for staged readings).
More info always at our website www.aeofberkeley.org
Questions? This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Join our Facebook Group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/67180033800
Follow us on Twitter: @ActorsEnsmblBer
Below we provide some information on the plays:
An Afternoon with Julia is an adaptation of the earlier full-length play "Arches, Balance, and Light", both by Mary Spletter. Produced in assocation with Mountain View Cemetery. Performances are Saturday and Sunday, September 29th and 30th at 2 p.m. in the chapel of Mountain View Cemetery. To be followed by an optional 15-minute docent-led walk to Julia's final resting place.
This captivating historic fictionalized play visits famed Bay Area architect Julia Morgan. As her life comes to its final chapter, she enters her imagination to determine whether she should have done anything differently. Should she have had a family? Did she give up too much for too little? The play provides the likely answers and follows the hurdles she overcame to achieve her dream.
Julia Morgan -- Famous architect female over 45
Young Julia -- Julia Morgan at age 25-35
Marguerite (Duval) Blanchet -- possible daughter of Julia Morgan female 25-40
Victor Duval -- Fictitious Assistant Director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris male 30 something
Cedric Richard -- Fictitious Director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts male 30-60. Also plays Porter at boat harbor.
Fox Among the Hens, by James Keller, directed by Martha Luehrmann. One night only, Tuesday October 16th at 8 p.m. in the Grand Hall of Oddfellows Lodge #270, 2288 Fulton St, Berkeley, CA 94704. Admission is free of charge. There will be 3 rehearsals before the production, schedule TBD depending on the actors cast and the final schedule of performances.
A farmyard is ruled by an arrogant rooster named Trumpet, who bears a striking resemblance to the current primary occupant of the White House. A fox arrives and quietly works at reducing the hen population. A girl learns to say goodbye. A fable for our times.
Moustache-And-Cake: An itinerant fox
Trumpet: A rooster… Trump-like
Marina: A girl of about 9 years old
Mrs. Short & Long: A hen and a gossip
Widow Black: A hen and a gossip
Mrs. Brownfeather: A flighty hen
Mrs. Chickory: Another hen
Hannibal: A dog, war veteran
Pompey: A cat, war veteran
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Actors Ensemble of Berkeley is delighted to acknowledge the Berkeley Civic Arts Program and Civic Arts Commission's support in the form of a grant of $8,000.00 awarded in 2017. Also, a thank you to Theatre Bay Area for a grant of $2,500.00.
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Actors Ensemble of Berkeley - P.O. Box 663 - Berkeley - California - 94701 ¦ Our Answering Service: (510) 649-5999 ¦


THE great Australian tradition of scavenging from hard rubbish left on suburban nature strips has been given the all-clear after a brush with police.
Officers have all but scrapped their plan to charge a pensioner with theft after he took a vacuum cleaner from a hard-rubbish collection.
It seems it was all a big misunderstanding.
Police said Trevor Flood, 58, was acting suspiciously when they arrested him about 12.15am yesterday in Chirnside Park.
Police initially told Mr Flood he would be charged on summons with theft, which outraged Shire of Yarra Ranges residents and Herald Sun online readers.
Supt Jeff Forti said only when Mr Flood was taken to the Mooroolbark police station did he explain the vacuum cleaner was from a hard rubbish collection.
"As it has turned out today, we do believe that the property was from a hard rubbish collection and, as a result of that, even though a brief of evidence will be submitted, it is unlikely that we will be prosecuting him," Supt Forti said.
"If he had offered that at the time, it may not have gone any further."
Supt Forti went on to give scavengers the green light to raid hard rubbish piles.
He said the idea that hard rubbish on nature strips was the property of a council or a council contractor was a "fallacy" and "urban myth".
"If the owner puts the property out the front and says, 'I don't care who takes it, it's not mine, I don't want it any more' - whoever takes it, there is no theft involved."
Supt Forti said he encouraged scavengers to knock on people's doors as a courtesy.
Mr Flood's troubles began when he spotted the vacuum cleaner in Kimberley Drive while taking his dog to an all-night vet.
A woman at the family business in Lilydale, who said she was Mr Flood's sister, said he was upset about the incident.
"He said usually if he goes and picks something up, something he needs, people are out the front and they say, 'You are welcome to take it'," she said.
Another sister said the situation was "a bit silly".
Kimberley Drive residents were happy for scavengers to take their hard rubbish.
Cameron Pretty, 23, a fitter and turner, said he had no problem with scavenging as long as items weren't strewn across the street.
Tree removalist Daniel said he supported scavenging because it reduced landfill.
"Someone getting arrested for picking up something - it's not stealing. It's just an item that has been disregarded," he said.
Shire of Yarra Ranges Deputy Mayor Len Cox said there was no local law to prohibit people taking items put out for hard waste collection.


Ammo cost comparison by caliber The Depot. … they will be useful to many especially new shooters; you gun guru's already know the deal.
Feb 6, 2014 … However, when I search for ammo by price, lowest to highest on Cheaper Than Dirt! … Usually, the cheapest ammo is a full metal jacket practice round. … For .22 LR, I've been able to shoot CCI through rifles and handguns with few malfunctions. … Armscor is my go-to brand of ammunition for any caliber.


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De A391 is een autosnelweg in Frankrijk. Het is de verbindingsweg met de A39 en heeft het nummer afrit 7. Vanaf deze afrit loopt de weg het binnenland van de Jura in, naar het plaatsje Poligny. Er zijn plannen om de snelweg door te trekken naar Besançon.

Autosnelweg in Frankrijk
Weg in Jura (departement)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


For a year in 2011/2012, I had one of the best years of my life as a Rotary Scholarship student in Georgia, USA. There were 50 of us from all over the world and one weekend while we were in a rented cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains we began to talk about a reunion. "What if we all met up, one year from now at the Roskilde Music Festival in Denmark?". Challenge accepted.
Before the festival though, my friend Becky and I decided to hop around Denmark and Sweden for a few weeks (after I spent a few days in Norway). I had just got my first full frame camera (a Nikon D600) and I was eager to use it. Looking back on these photos, I've realised how much I've learnt and improved in the last 3 years - but I still wanted to finally share these images.
Not in any particular order; there are photos below from Oslo, Copenhagen, Grensted, Aarhus, Stockholm and Upsalla.


How can I watch live sports TV on my Android smartphone?
Just go to this link yesjar.com , then scroll down for mobiile tv links and you will find thousands of TV links for free there. Just click any of the link and it will start..no need of any extra softwares. you can also find many tv shows stored there..its mostly asian based website.
Also check out livefootballtvs for all football streams. livetv.ru has all games on in various languages.
If you use Vodafone carrier or Airtel,you can try the app personalized for these carriers.
I've not watched the video, but a google revealed http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCEQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DSew39uuQLKs&ei=MXV1UPr0IOqG0AXR1ICIAg&usg=AFQjCNF9wtMkLbnfUVh_qvQ0PWgaI01_Mw&sig2=kJQU1wkAWDLNADbUGAJsiQ this link. Take a look, it might work. And if there are any regional restrictions, you can use proxies to fool sites into thinking you're from another country. I think there's article about it on here actually.


Cole Matthews knelt defiantly in the bow of the aluminum skiff as he faced forward into a cold September wind. Worn steel handcuffs bit at his wrists each time the small craft slapped into another wave. Overhead, a gray-matted sky hung like a bad omen. Cole strained at the cuffs even though he had agreed to wear them until he was freed on the island to begin his banishment. Agreeing to spend a whole year alone in Southeast Alaska had been his only way of avoiding a jail cell in Minneapolis.


text:
package org.springframework.security.test.context.support;

import org.junit.Before;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import org.mockito.Mock;
import org.mockito.junit.MockitoJUnitRunner;

import static org.assertj.core.api.Assertions.assertThat;
import static org.assertj.core.api.Assertions.assertThatIllegalArgumentException;
import static org.assertj.core.api.Assertions.assertThatIllegalStateException;
import static org.mockito.BDDMockito.given;

@RunWith(MockitoJUnitRunner.class)
public class WithMockUserSecurityContextFactoryTests {

	@Mock
	private WithMockUser withUser;

	private WithMockUserSecurityContextFactory factory;

	@Before
	public void setup() {
		this.factory = new WithMockUserSecurityContextFactory();
	}

	@Test
	public void usernameNull() {
		assertThatIllegalArgumentException().isThrownBy(() -> this.factory.createSecurityContext(this.withUser));
	}

	@Test
	public void valueDefaultsUsername() {
		given(this.withUser.value()).willReturn("valueUser");
		given(this.withUser.password()).willReturn("password");
		given(this.withUser.roles()).willReturn(new String[] { "USER" });
		given(this.withUser.authorities()).willReturn(new String[] {});
		assertThat(this.factory.createSecurityContext(this.withUser).getAuthentication().getName())
				.isEqualTo(this.withUser.value());
	}

	@Test
	public void usernamePrioritizedOverValue() {
		given(this.withUser.username()).willReturn("customUser");
		given(this.withUser.password()).willReturn("password");
		given(this.withUser.roles()).willReturn(new String[] { "USER" });
		given(this.withUser.authorities()).willReturn(new String[] {});
		assertThat(this.factory.createSecurityContext(this.withUser).getAuthentication().getName())
				.isEqualTo(this.withUser.username());
	}

	@Test
	public void rolesWorks() {
		given(this.withUser.value()).willReturn("valueUser");
		given(this.withUser.password()).willReturn("password");
		given(this.withUser.roles()).willReturn(new String[] { "USER", "CUSTOM" });
		given(this.withUser.authorities()).willReturn(new String[] {});
		assertThat(this.factory.createSecurityContext(this.withUser).getAuthentication().getAuthorities())
				.extracting("authority").containsOnly("ROLE_USER", "ROLE_CUSTOM");
	}

	@Test
	public void authoritiesWorks() {
		given(this.withUser.value()).willReturn("valueUser");
		given(this.withUser.password()).willReturn("password");
		given(this.withUser.roles()).willReturn(new String[] { "USER" });
		given(this.withUser.authorities()).willReturn(new String[] { "USER", "CUSTOM" });
		assertThat(this.factory.createSecurityContext(this.withUser).getAuthentication().getAuthorities())
				.extracting("authority").containsOnly("USER", "CUSTOM");
	}

	@Test
	public void authoritiesAndRolesInvalid() {
		given(this.withUser.value()).willReturn("valueUser");
		given(this.withUser.roles()).willReturn(new String[] { "CUSTOM" });
		given(this.withUser.authorities()).willReturn(new String[] { "USER", "CUSTOM" });
		assertThatIllegalStateException().isThrownBy(() -> this.factory.createSecurityContext(this.withUser));
	}

	@Test
	public void rolesWithRolePrefixFails() {
		given(this.withUser.value()).willReturn("valueUser");
		given(this.withUser.roles()).willReturn(new String[] { "ROLE_FAIL" });
		given(this.withUser.authorities()).willReturn(new String[] {});
		assertThatIllegalArgumentException().isThrownBy(() -> this.factory.createSecurityContext(this.withUser));
	}

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Stephenson Ceramic Tile is a licensed and insured company that is proud to serve the Florida region doing Bathroom Remodeling and Renovations. It is our goal to provide a high quality product from concept to completion all while maintaining a high standard of customer satisfaction.
Stephenson Ceramic Tile is a locally owned and operated general contracting company. We specialize in a variety of home remodeling services including home improvement, room additions, bathroom remodeling, and basement finishing.
Treeline Contracting Gen Contr provides professional quality workmanship with competitive prices.
At Treeline Contracting Gen Contr we have toilets with streamlined designs with water saving dual flush, sinks over mount, under mount, vessel, stainless steel with modern designs. We also have vanities complete with matching mirrors, faucets and some with cabinets and shelves compliment the room. .
We are the best bathroom remodeling company in Naples.
Ehlers Contracting Service Inc is the best place to go when looking for a Naples bathroom remodeling company.
Our company has always been a synonym for high quality bathroom remodeling services in Naples.
At Ehlers Contracting Service Inc, we take care and pride in your products, down to the very last detail. A great bathroom is just days away.


While some of us are open to change, most of us shy away from it.
We love our comfort zone and once we get into it we refuse to leave. This is because it helps us feel safe. This is probably why many people refuse to leave their jobs even though they know they can do better. However, we live in a world of numerous opportunities and tremendous potential. We do not need to stick to the same job or anything else for that matter for long. Whether you are forced into a change or whether you think it is time to find yourself again, the thought of reinvention should not scare you.
We have compiled 4 strategies that will help you with this and once you are through with them you won't feel intimidated.
It is sad and sometimes outrageous but there are many people who look down upon certain jobs. They may think it is "below them" to do that job. If you walk through life with that mindset, a part of you will remain ignorant forever. No job is unimportant or small. When an opportunity comes your way, you should see how it could help you grow. Every job teaches something.
People with entrepreneurial mindsets need 3 skills: sales, management, finance. All these aspects are very important in any business and if you can polish these skills you will be able to do a number of things effortlessly. You will actually be surprised to know that many entrepreneurs lack either basic finance skills or basic management skills. Do not follow suit.
What skills do you have? Think about your professional as well as your personal skills. Are you regular and dependable? Are you accountable? These are the main skills to focus on because most employers want these skills. If you don't have these skills, it is time to start working on them.
If you think none of the jobs available for you are good for you, you should go ahead and create your own jobs! Hint: Work at a startup and your skills will definitely be put to use. After that you may get started on your own!
These 4 steps will enable you to have a broader perspective, making it easier to embrace change, and unlock numerous opportunities.
In this fast paced world you have to embrace change but you should never look at it as a burden or something you'd rather avoid. Change is in and you should keep yourself open to reinvention so that you grow and ultimately emerge as a successful entrepreneur. No matter what job you take up, it will teach you a lot.


text:
O evento florete individual feminino do Campeonato Mundial de Esgrima de 2018 foi disputado nos dias 20 e 23 de julho.

Medalhistas
A italiana Alice Volpi conquistou o ouro ao superar a francesa Ysaora Thibus. O pódio foi completado pela italiana Arianna Errigo e pela tunisiana Inès Boubakri, ambas foram eliminadas nas semifinais.

Resultados

Fase final

Fase classificatória

Primeira chave

Segunda chave

Terceira chave

Quarta chave

Ligações externas

Florete individual feminino


text:
HomeBusiness NewsPound to euro price: Sterling plummets as Europe closes borders over mutant Covid strain
Pound to euro price: Sterling plummets as Europe closes borders over mutant Covid strain
Boris Johnson will hold an emergency meeting later today after countries made the decision to shut their borders to Britain following the emergence of a super-infectious strain of COVID-19. The Prime Minister has been warned of "significant disruption" around the Channel ports in Kent – with freight from Europe via France being blocked.
Severe travel restrictions have also been imposed on Britons hoping to travel to a number of European destinations, including Germany, The Netherlands and Ireland.
The shock news has unsettled investors with Sterling on course for its worst performance in almost three months.
As of 8am this morning, the Pound was down 1.8 percent against the US dollar and 1.3 percent versus the euro.
Sterling was being exchanged at £1-$1.3277 compared to £1-$1.3510 at the previous close.
Meanwhile, against Europe's single currency, Sterling was trading at 0.9171 pounds compared to 0.9057 pounds at the previous close.
The London Stock Exchange has also taken a huge hit this morning with more than £33billion wiped off the value of shares.
The FTSE 100 opened at 6529.18 - down more than two percent over fears of the new strain of the virus and the increased threat of a no deal Brexit on December 31.
Rodrigo Catril, National Australia Bank's senior currency strategist in Sydney, said: "The lockdown news and the stalemate on Brexit is keeping the market nervous
"Dollar strength is largely being driven by the move lower in the pound."
This is a breaking story...more to follow


The 70125 is a high-speed 2K x 9 Dual-Port Static RAM designed to be used as a "SLAVE" Dual-Port together with the 70121 "MASTER" in 18-bit-or-more word width systems. Using the IDT MASTER/SLAVE Dual-Port RAM approach in 18-bit-or-wider memory system applications results in full-speed, error-free operation without the need for additional discrete logic. An automatic power-down feature, controlled by CE, permits the on-chip circuitry of each port to enter a very low standby power mode.


text:
Forum:Fallout faction overhaul project debate
Forums: Index > Wiki discussion > Fallout faction overhaul project debate
Well, I think there are some small problems with this project. I edit the page, but this is only temporary (a way to pause), and I wanted to have a debate on this before having a final page.
Many gameplay information resides in these pages under the section "Interactions with the player character", which gives quickly indications and help the player - but before my temporary edit, the guidelines doesn't mention them, so he is free to stay or be deleted by the goodwill of participants.
Although I favor the background at the expense of gameplay, I find it a shame to remove so much information, accurate and well written by many people. Some people look on these pages for give an indication and not to read the history or other background information.
All projects involving the characters have such section, I don't see why the "Fallout faction overhaul project" would not have? In addition, it can sometimes separate the different interaction when the faction concerned appeared in several games (like the Crimson Caravan). And truly, I don't see make a page only for gameplay and another only for background, each for all factions.
Another unique section of the Capital Wasteland Brotherhood of Steel - named "Similarities and inconsistencies with other Fallout games", is also not mentioned in the guidelines. I think it's interesting to keep it for see consistencies and inconsistencies compared to the Fallout background.
Brotherhood of Steel pages also have section named "Members" and "Rank system" - I think it would be better to keep them under the "military" section specifically for Brotherhood type factions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Itachou (talk • contribs). Please sign your posts with ~~~~!
I want to know who decided how the layout should be and when and where it was voted for? 19:46, June 1, 2011 (UTC)
From what I know, the Project Leader(s) start the page and provides the guidelines (layout, Infobox etc.) as he desires, but after, nothing has been ever decide if it's well or not, or if they are things to be changed. Itachou [~talk~] 20:55, June 1, 2011 (UTC)
I've gotta agree with Itachou here, I think that the "interactions" part should be included, but maybe writtenin a more professional manner. Hugs Scar: "Say 'ello to my little friend!" 21:40, June 1, 2011 (UTC)
The "similarities and inconsistencies" stuff you mentioned really belongs in "Behind the scenes" in my opinion - it's what the section is there for. -- Porter21 (talk) 08:17, June 2, 2011 (UTC)
I think we should keep gameplay stuff to a minimum. "Interactions with the player character" is particularly problematic because you don't interact with entire factions, you interact with their members, and they can be put on character pages. Imagine doing an interactions section for, for example, NCR. "Rank" can be covered under the "Military" section, "Members" is redundant to the members field in the infobox.
Just for posterity, this discussion was born from the following exchange: [1][2][3][4][5].
Other than that, I've not got much to add yet, other than maybe that we should be using Caesar's Legion as a benchmark. --Lugiatm (talk · contribs) 11:00, June 2, 2011 (UTC)
Agree for the "similarities and inconsistencies" and for the Caesar's Legion page, it's overall the most complete page in the project. For "Interactions with the player character", the faction page talk about the entire faction, so I think we should globalize all information without given too much detail - like talk to him for this quest, talk to her for that etc. (particularly NCR), Crimson Caravan appears to be a good example of what should be the section (accurate and given without much detail - know that you can become a King in the Kings page is an rare information on the page and yet interesting). Most of faction pages already possesses this section, simply changed and re-write to be suitable. When there are too many members, I think your idea to put the categories member in the infobox is good. Itachou [~talk~] 13:47, June 2, 2011 (UTC)
I think we should keep gameplay stuff to a minimum. - What!!! this is a gaming wiki and gameplay has as equal right to be included as the lore does. We are not here to sell the games or tell a story, but to document it including the game play. 20:24, June 2, 2011 (UTC)
Did you read my reasoning? The gameplay information should go because you don't interact with the faction, but its characters, and there is a section for that on the characters' pages. For example, in Itachou's example above, becoming a King should be documented on the King's page or on the respective quest page(s), not the faction page. If need be, it can go in the notes section, but it's not a strong enough reason on its own to add an entire section to the guidelines. And actually, this wiki was originally started to sort and document the Fallout Bible stuff, IIRC - the Vault has a long-standing policy of not including any strategy or walkthroughs outside of quest pages. --Lugiatm (talk · contribs) 21:59, June 2, 2011 (UTC)
How the wiki was started and for what purpose is completely irrelevant to what it is now and its current scope. Secondly , no walkthroughs outside of quest pages, [1] [2] you might want to check those links before such statements. Also there is a big difference between including strategy and style of play (subjective) and player interactions or game play attributes (otherwise that would not even be considered as a section under the character layout.
Now for your reasoning, that the player don't interact with the faction. You do realise that the faction is the sum of its members. So therefore by interacting with its members you are interacting with the faction. Plus the whole addition of faction reputation plays a big part in the gameplay and the progression of the story. There is also instances of interacting with the faction but not directly with its members, ie: NCR emergency radio. So frankly your reasoning is weak.
And finally, the layout guidelines for factions are not official guidelines as far as I can see. They where not voted on by the community and not added to the guidelines section of the Vault. Hence why I asked the question at the very start. 23:40, June 2, 2011 (UTC)
I think both of you have a point - while we should avoid unnecessary duplication of content, there are still certain faction-related interactions which really can't go on character pages, so I think we need to find a middleground here.
Regarding the member lists, I don't think cutting them out entirely is a good idea. Sure, for smaller factions it's redundant with the infobox but larger factions have too many members to list them all in the infobox without overloading it. This is also the reason why the infobox field is called "notable members", i.e. it's not supposed to hold an exhaustive list. Still, the redundancy argument is valid but I'd rather remove the infobox field than the article section. -- Porter21 (talk) 06:57, June 3, 2011 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://fallout.gamepedia.com/index.php?title=Forum:Fallout_faction_overhaul_project_debate&oldid=1125416"


Improved instruments are helping crime-fighters bring science and rigor to the analysis of bullets.
Shots rang out across a Phoenix apartment complex one cool desert night last December. A patrolman arrived to investigate. Cleophus Cooksey Jr., 36, answered his knock at the door — covered in blood. His mom and stepdad were dead inside. Within just days (short work for crime-solving), detectives discovered that distinct markings on the bullets from the apartment matched others from violent crime scenes across the Phoenix area. This so-called ballistic analysis tied Cooksey's guns to nine gruesome murders that had occurred over a three-week period.
The quick analysis came thanks to a new digital technique for comparing the markings on bullets. It's a long-awaited technological update that removes subjective human interpretation and — once widely adopted — could revolutionize solving violent crimes.
Forensic scientists around the world currently rely on a roughly 100-year-old tool called a comparison microscope, which offers a split view to study two objects at once. The technique works for ballistics analysis because ammo metal is soft, while the metal in a gun's barrel is hard. This leaves bullets scraped, scratched and nicked as they're loaded and then fired. Two bullets with the same characteristic markings likely came from the same gun, tying weapons (and their owners) to crime scenes.
Ballistics comparison gained fame following the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929, when Al Capone's men mowed down seven rival mobsters with Tommy guns. Early forensic scientist Calvin Goddard used a comparison microscope to match crime scene bullets with guns from Capone's thugs, helping close the case in the public's mind.
For many decades after Goddard looked at those bullets close up, things changed little, with few advancements. Meanwhile, the technique became nearly universally used: American investigators now collect hundreds of thousands of cartridge cases at crime scenes every year. And even local labs can afford a comparison microscope to run analyses. Yet this analysis is still based on opinions, albeit those of experts in police crime labs.
Robert Thompson, a 30-year veteran forensic scientist who works at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), compares modern ballistics to a doctor diagnosing a patient with the flu — he can check common symptoms to reach a diagnosis. "That is still subjective," he says. Without testing, the doctor can't offer odds that his diagnosis is right.
A 2009 National Research Council report — created at the direction of Congress with authors including leading judges, medical examiners and forensic experts — found troubling problems with the way we evaluate criminal evidence overall. Major crime labs had shut down over unacceptable error rates. And in one case, a judge ruled ballistic evidence couldn't be called scientific in court. The forensic science system, they discovered, often lacked scientific rigor and uniform standards. It needed an overhaul.
Since then, NIST scientists have worked on a match-making method for the modern era. It relies on modern 3D imaging and computer analysis.
A team that includes Thompson, led by NIST forensic scientist John Song, recently revealed the start of a technique that moves the field into the 21st century. They begin by taking a 3D image of the crime scene bullet. Then they test fire the suspected gun and scan those casings, too. Each becomes a three-dimensional virtual object that lets algorithms mimic and compare surfaces.
Their big breakthrough came from an algorithm that automatically divides the bullet or casing into small sections of interest, discarding regions that aren't useful. Then the program assigns a numerical score to every match. It's designed as a universal method to augment the existing one, adding numerical precision to a system that relies on "eyeballing" the evidence.
"In every measurement there is a degree of doubt, and what we're doing is measuring [that]," says Thompson. "It's not a simple matter." The team has scanned thousands of cartridge cases to amass a dataset big enough to gauge the likelihood that more than one gun could produce identical marks on casings. Other forensic scientists are creating similar databases.
And the 3D images reveal more detail than an examiner could see under a microscope, helping find criminals and secure convictions. The technique could one day help other contact-based evidence like shoeprints and fingerprints. It also could someday create much faster ballistic comparisons, letting detectives connect violent crimes by simply scanning bullets and asking the computer to find a match — be it the gun of a potential serial killer in Phoenix, a mob boss in Chicago or just a petty crook in Anytown, USA.