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'Watchmen' episode six: 'This Extraordinary Being'
The real Hooded Justice is finally revealed, and his origin story is a doozy
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Louis Gossett Jr. as Will Reeves in 'Watchmen.' Mark Hill/HBO
By Soraya Nadia McDonald @sorayamcdonald
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." — William Faulkner, Requiem For a Nun
This Extraordinary Being, the sixth episode of Watchmen, tells the origin story of Hooded Justice, one of the Minutemen, the masked vigilantes who precede the Watchmen. In doing so, it offers both a critique and celebration of American cinema, effortlessly weaving tribute with condemnation that reaches all the way back to 1915, the year The Birth of a Nation was released.
The Birth of a Nation, of course, was director D.W. Griffith's notoriously racist film that both revolutionized the art of filmmaking with its technical innovation and served as a piece of propaganda so powerful that it resurrected a dormant Ku Klux Klan and provided the aesthetic blueprint for its real-life costuming, and justification for the group's racial terrorism.
When Griffith died in 1948, a devoted friend was so stricken that she collapsed in grief at his memorial service. So close were the two that her children referred to Griffith as "Papa." The friend was Madame Sul-Te-Wan, a black actress whose friendship with Griffith began when he hired her as a maid for the white actresses at Fine Arts Studios, which is where he shot most of The Birth of a Nation.
Angela Abar (Regina King) sees the world of her grandfather, Will Reeves, with Nostalgia, the drug that allows those who take it to re-experience the past.
Mark Hill/HBO
It's a strange, wholly American relationship, this festival of mutual admiration that took place between Sul-Te-Wan, who was an aspiring actress when they met, and Griffith, whose limited view of black people continues to reverberate through media, including, if you ask Watchmen graphic novel writer Alan Moore, comic books and their screen adaptations.
Episode six is brimming with Moore's trademark skepticism about superheroes and his ideas about how media both reflects and perpetuates an American culture of white supremacy.
This week, Moore's thoughts on the matter, which he shared in a 2017 interview with Brazilian writer Raphael Sassaki for Folha de São Paulo, resurfaced, thanks to a blog that published an English translation of it.
"Save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race," Moore told Sassaki. "I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks."
Sister Night (Regina King) begins to feel the effects of her grandfather's Nostalgia pills, which allow her to subconsciously travel through his memories.
Co-written by Cord Jefferson and showrunner Damon Lindelof, and directed by Lost alum Stephen Williams, episode six provides a story that makes sense of Moore's words, all while expanding on the show's themes of generational trauma, and the way that race complicates the ideas about power and vigilantism that Moore was exploring in the original Watchmen comic series.
It picks up with detective Angela Abar (Regina King) locked in a jail cell at the Tulsa, Oklahoma, police department. The department's interim chief, FBI special agent Laurie Blake (Jean Smart), has taken her into custody. But before anyone can subdue her, Angela swallows all of her grandfather's Nostalgia pills. Nostalgia pills allow those who take them to revisit old memories that have been harvested. Once Angela takes them, she's transported back to 1938 as her grandfather, Will Reeves (Louis Gossett Jr.), is being inducted into the New York Police Department. Could there be a more ironic name for a drug that lets black people relive the past?
Captain Metropolis (left) introduces Hooded Justice (right) as the newest member of the Minutemen, the vigilante crime-fighting unit that preceded the Watchmen.
Once it fully enters the realm of black and white, the episode becomes a gorgeously surreal exploration of the trauma we inherit without fully knowing it. Perhaps nothing, except reliving it, will get Angela to realize that her running from the past ("let Saigons be Saigons!") is a retread of the instinct that once doomed her grandfather to a life filled with rage. As Angela settles into her temporary existence as Will, she sees what he sees and feels what he feels: his anger, his fear, his frustration with his fellow officers who are white, and then with the white Minutemen who refuse to fight for his cause the way he fights for theirs, even as they see themselves as heroes and protectors of the innocent.
Though Williams includes shots of Angela in Will's NYPD uniform, the young officer is chiefly depicted by Jovan Adepo, who gives Will an uncanny sense of restraint interrupted by bouts of righteous violence. Will is a man who learns to grow accustomed to sublimating his emotions to save himself, but he still seethes with the resentment of its necessity.
Will quickly learns that "trust in the law" may be his hero, Bass Reeves' favorite saying, but it doesn't have much use coming from the mouth of a black man in real-world America. When he arrests a white man for throwing a Molotov cocktail through the window of a Jewish delicatessen, the man is freed within hours. The white officers gesture at one another with a mysterious sign. White supremacy has not just infiltrated the NYPD, Will discovers, it runs it.
A scene from American Hero Story, Watchmen's show-within-a-show, which depicts Hooded Justice (center) as a white man.
"This spook is accusing me of a horrendous crime," Will's collar tells the white precinct officers. "Who are you going to believe, me or him?"
As Angela walks the streets of 1938 New York, she's haunted by the Tulsa of 1921. Everywhere she turns, she's met by the ghost of her great-grandmother, Will's mother, playing the piano in the movie theater the day of the attack. Williams renders these ghostly images in color to distinguish them from the history into which Angela has been dropped. A police car drives away, dragging two black corpses behind it by rope. It's a stunningly original way of illustrating post-traumatic stress, but nothing quite tops Williams' use of Matrix-like visual effects incorporated into a noir-style story when Hooded Justice jumps through a window after thwarting the Klan's mesmerism plans.
Hooded Justice in a scene from Watchmen.
The story of how Will becomes Hooded Justice leaves no stone unturned. He gets his costume of black hood and noose from his white colleagues, who kidnap and lynch him to scare him out of arresting white supremacist criminals. When Hooded Justice makes the daily papers, Will meets Nelson Gardner, the blond leader of the Minutemen who fights crime as Captain Metropolis. And while Will is married to a back journalist who deifies Ida B. Wells, he's helpless when it comes to resisting his attraction to Nelson.
"Why fight alone, when you can have true companionship?" Nelson asks Will, suggestively proffering a hand.
Will's complicated relationship with Nelson helps us to imagine how Sul-Te-Wan could have been so devoted to a man as racist as Griffith, and how African Americans continually get drafted into projects that diminish their own humanity (see: America). Both Griffith and Nelson had power and access that their black friends did not, which, for Sul-Te-Wan and Will, led to relationships that were inherently fraught with compromise and compartmentalization.
Even as Nelson makes apologies for the racism of the rest of the Minutemen, he engages in it too, introducing Hooded Justice to the press while standing next to a poster of the group taking down a cartoonishly ghoulish black bank robber. When Will uncovers a racist conspiracy being enacted by his white fellow officers, Nelson dismisses it.
"So the Klan is using mind control? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?" he scoffs, leaving Will to fight white racial terrorism by himself. Nelson, Good White Man that he is, has bought into a pathology that declares black people as uniquely violent and inherently destructive. "You'll have to solve black unrest all on your own," he tells his lover, invoking the specious red herring of "black-on-black crime" before it became labeled as such.
The Klan's diabolical plan for getting black people to kill themselves and destroy their own communities by mesmerizing them with moving images may seem far-fetched, especially when Will refers to it as a "conspiracy." But as metaphor, it is an apt illustration of the points James Baldwin makes in The Devil Finds Work, and which resurface in Raoul Peck's documentary I Am Not Your Negro. The result is the same, in either instance: the destruction of a people, of history, of legacy, of truth.
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In both his book-length essay and in Peck's documentary, Baldwin argues how film can work as a mechanism of white supremacist gaslighting, not just because of the way that black and indigenous people were depicted in it, but because of the lies white people told — and continue to tell — about themselves. (Baldwin called Doris Day and Gary Cooper "two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen.")
Baldwin's assessment of the lies of The Defiant Ones (1958) could just as easily apply to Green Book (2018). The Defiant Ones starred Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as two escaped prisoners, shackled together, who must learn to cooperate if they are to survive on the lam. Wrote Baldwin:
Black men do not have the same reason to hate white men as white men have to hate blacks. The root of the white man's hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which only lives in his mind. But the root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children's way.
No black man, in such a situation, and especially knowing what Poitier conveys so vividly Noah Cullen knows, would rise to the bait proffered by this dimwitted poor white child, whose only real complaint is that he is a bona-fide mediocrity who failed to make it in the American rat-race. But many, no better than he, and many much worse, make it every day, all the way to Washington: sometimes, indeed, via Hollywood. It is a species of cowardice, grave indeed, to pretend that black men do not know this. And it is a matter of the most disastrous sentimentality to attempt to bring black men into the white American nightmare.
Liberal white audiences applauded when Sidney at the end of the film, jumped off the train in order not to abandon his white buddy. The Harlem audience was outraged.
This Extraordinary Being is illustrative of how and why Lindelof's approach to Watchmen works so well. He's called it an "extrapolation" of Moore's original comic rather than a traditional adaptation. That choice has allowed the series to embody the spirit of Moore's work while exploring a theme that's wholly absent from it: race. It's not so different from what makes a great biopic performance, in which an actor chooses to focus on the key element of the person the actor is portraying and build from there instead of recreating a person with gimmick-laden imitations.
Episode six is brimming with Moore's trademark skepticism about superheroes and his ideas about how media both reflects and perpetuates an American culture of white supremacy. Just as Bass Reeves was erased from popular culture with a white Lone Ranger played by Clayton Moore and later, Armie Hammer, so too was Hooded Justice. When the identity of Hooded Justice is finally revealed in American Hero Story — Watchmen's show-within-a-show, which the officers of the Tulsa police department follow obsessively — he's a white guy, not a black man who paints on a white mask.
Like the 1619 Project, Watchmen pushes its audience to question the passive acceptance of white objectivity, leaving it to wonder, in the words of one Wade Tillman: Is anything true?
Soraya Nadia McDonald is the senior culture critic for Andscape. She writes about pop culture, fashion, the arts and literature. She is the 2020 winner of the George Jean Nathan prize for dramatic criticism, a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism and the runner-up for the 2019 Vernon Jarrett Medal for outstanding reporting on Black life.
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It was confirmed by the GAA yesterday evening that Leitrim's third round championship clash with Laois will get underway this Saturday (July 21) at 7pm in Pairc Sean MacDiarmada.
After last Saturday's memorable three point win over Wicklow, Leitrim are in uncharted territory and will be hoping for a big home crowd to get behind the team to set up a possible meeting with the defeated Leinster Championship finalists.
The victory over Wicklow, in front of 3,346 supporters, saw Leitrim defend expertly and when chances fell their way James Glancy and Emlyn Mulligan both proved to be deadly accurate in front of the posts.
For full coverage of Leitrim's historic win over Wicklow including interviews with the management team that oversaw the breakthrough win, the players who achieved the win and one former Leitrim manager who was as happy as anyone in Pairc Sean, be sure to see tomorrow's Leitrim Observer.


Update the state based on the specified Momentum.State.
Create a Momentum.State instance. The Momentum.State instance will be passed to Momentum.updateState(State) until the momentum is depleted.
Update the state based on the specified Momentum.State. When no more momentum remains, this method should return false to stop future calls.
The Momentum.State instance is created by a call to Momentum.createState(Point, Point), and the same instance if used for the duration of the momentum. This method should modify the existing state by calling Momentum.State.setPosition(Point) and/or Momentum.State.setVelocity(Point).


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 Ла Тропикана (Баланкан), насеље у савезној држави Табаско у Мексику

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The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has confirmed that it will go to the polls in December to elect its flagbearer for the 2020 election.
This was disclosed by General Secretary of the party, Johnson Asiedu Nketia, on Thursday, August 2, 2018.
Speaking to journalists at the party's headquarters, he said the NDC has slated December 7, 2018, to elect its presidential candidate.
General Secretary of the NDC, Johnson Asiedu Nketiah. Source: Supplied.
According to him, the date is in line with what their constitution proposes, adding that aspirants can now begin their campaigns.
"We have taken note of our constitutional requirement to choose our Flagbearer, 24 months before the next elections and the constitution not having been amended yet, we can safely calculate our timelines from 7th December 2020, so that will bring us back to 7th of December 2018 for a choice to be made on who leads our party into the next general elections," Mr. Nketia said.
Former president John Dramani Mahama is the frontrunner going into the party election, however, he is set to be challenged by other NDC personalities who have declared their intentions of leading the party in 2020.
So far, five persons have confirmed that they will contest as flagbearers of the NDC.
These are Dr. Ekow Spio Garbah, a former Trades and Industry Minister under the John Mahama government; Former Vice Chancellor of the University for Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA), Prof. Joshua Alabi, and Member of Parliament for Nadowli-Kaleo, Alban Bagbin.
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Tag Archives: explaining Dickinson North Dakota
To Understand Dickinson, You Need To Realize That It Is Not Even At The Blue-Collar Level Of People
August 2, 2020 Uncategorizedexplaining Dickinson North Dakota, guide to Dickinson North Dakota, is Dickinson North Dakota a good place to live, Living in Dickinson, North Dakota, Moving to Dickinson, North Dakota, relocating to Dickinson North Dakota, understanding Dickinson North Dakota, what are people like in Dickinson North Dakota, what is Dickinson North Dakota Like, would you move to Dickinson North Dakotaname withheld
About a year ago, I realized that one of my problems in understanding people in Dickinson, North Dakota, their actions, behavior, beliefs, and habits, is that the people here aren't even at the Blue-Collar level.
White-Collar people perform work that is clerical, administrative, or managerial. I associate White-Collar people with those that went to college and work at a profession such as teachers, professors, accountants, lawyers, engineers, and doctors. These people are typically in salaried positions.
Blue-Collar people are described as performing manual labor, and are typically paid an hourly wage rate. However, I want to point out that the skilled trades that typically require vocational training or an apprenticeship such as electricians, plumbers, welders, mechanics, and heavy equipment operators are classified as Blue-Collar.
After living in Dickinson for about eight years now, I don't usually see many White-Collar people in Dickinson. At a store or restaurant in Dickinson, maybe 1 out of 15 people are White-Collar people, that's about 7% of people.
But I also noticed during the past eight years of living in Dickinson, that when I am out in public, talking to people, meeting people, dealing with people, listening to what people say, watching what they do, only about 30% of the people in Dickinson are at the Blue-Collar level.
So who do I think is at the Blue-Collar level in Dickinson? Mechanics who are able to keep their job at a car dealership service department; Plumbers and Electricians who are able to keep their job doing residential and commercial work; Welders who are able to stay steadily employed doing industrial work; Pumpers who work in the oil field; Tow truck drivers who are steadily employed and treat this as their profession. UPS and FedEx drivers who keep their jobs. Delivery drivers who are steadily employed and treat this as their profession. These types of workers make up about 30% of the people in Dickinson.
But the majority of the people in Dickinson, North Dakota are not like the White-Collar workers and the Blue-Collar workers that I described above. The majority of the people in Dickinson are what I can attempt to describe as: Alcoholics, drug addicts, social security disability recipients, drifters, loiterers, unemployed, incompetent, criminals, low-class, white-trash, hill-billy, inbred, backwards, sleazy, slobs, naer-do-wells, liars, and con-artists. Ask yourself, does this not constitute about 60% of the shoppers at WalMart in Dickinson?
In contrast, if you go to Menards in Dickinson, where people shop for tools, equipment, and building supplies in order to accomplish some useful work, build something, or do home improvement, haven't you noticed that these people aren't anywhere near as sleazy, low-class, and trashy as the people at WalMart in Dickinson? These much less sleazy people are the 7% White-Collar and the 30% Blue-Collar people that are in Dickinson.
So what, am I just picking on people in Dickinson again? No, I am trying to explain that you can't understand the behavior and actions of people in Dickinson, until you realize that about 60% of the people in Dickinson are not even at the Blue-Collar level of people.
An important result of this, is how the Police in Dickinson handle crime. When I was living in downtown Dickinson for the past three years, I experienced a great deal of theft, and attempted theft. So did my neighbors. When the Police finally did catch the person who stole my truck, to my surprise, they didn't even charge him with the theft of my truck. And, despite this thief being on parole and caught in the possession of other stolen property and drugs, he was not sent back to prison, and he only spent a couple of months in jail.
See, the Police in Dickinson can't try to catch, jail, or imprison the people in Dickinson who steal, vandalize, use illegal drugs, or sell illegal drugs, because they would be catching, jailing, and imprisoning about half of the population of Dickinson.
Another consequence of 60% of the people in Dickinson not even being at the Blue-Collar level of people, is that if you go to a restaurant, fast-food restaurant, bar, convenience store, gas station, store, or other type of business in Dickinson, you will likely be dealing with someone who is low-class, white-trash, inbred, hill-billy, sleazy, naer-do-well, drug-addict, criminal, con-artist.
Why is Dickinson like this? It's a combination of several things. The bright, talented, ambitious people who were born and grew up in Dickinson, most of them leave Dickinson after high school. The dullard, untalented, unmotivated, drug addicts stayed in Dickinson after high school.
Then, because of the oil boom, Dickinson business people and the news media gave a Worldwide shout-out to all the unemployed and low-income people of the World to come to Dickinson, North Dakota, and they did come. And they stayed.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Disasters and Mass Casualty Incidents: The Nuts and Bolts of Preparedness and Response to Protracted and Sudden Onset Emergencies
Author(s) Mauricio Lynn, Howard Lieberman, Lior Lynn, Gerd Daniel Pust, Kenneth Stahl, Daniel Dante Yeh, Tanya Zakrison
Publisher Springer
ISBN 3319973606, 978-3319973609, B07QMNLFXV
Mass Casualty events may occur as a result of natural or human-caused disasters or after an act of terrorism. The planning and response to disasters and catastrophes needs to take into consideration the distinction between progressive and sudden events. Insidious or slowly progressive disasters produce a large number of victims but over a prolonged time period, with different peaks in the severity of patients presenting to the hospital. For example, radiation events will produce a large number of victims who will present days, weeks, months, or years after exposure, depending on the dose of radiation received. The spread of a biological agent or a pandemic will produce an extremely high number of victims who will present to hospitals during days to weeks after the initial event, depending on the agent and progression of symptoms.
On the other hand, in a sudden disaster, there is an abrupt surge of victims resulting from an event such as an explosion or a chemical release. After the sarin gas attack in a Tokyo subway in 1995, a total of 5500 victims were injured and required medical attention at local hospitals immediately after the attack. The car bomb that exploded near the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, killed 213 people and simultaneously produced 4044 injured patients, many requiring medical care at local hospitals. The Madrid train bombing in March 2004 produced more than 2000 injured victims in minutes, overwhelming the city's healthcare facilities. More than 500 injured patients were treated at local hospital after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. Finally, earthquakes may produce a large number of victims in areas in which the medical facilities are partially or completely destroyed. Sudden events bring an immediate operational challenge to community healthcare systems, many of which are already operating at or above capacity.
The pre-hospital as well as hospital planning and response to sudden mass casualty incidents (SMCI's) is extremely challenging and requires a standard and protocol driven approach. Many textbooks have been published on Disaster Medicine; although they may serve as an excellent reference, they do not provide a rapid, practical approach for management of SMCI's.
The first edition of "Mass Casualty Incidents: The Nuts and Bolts of Preparedness and Response for Acute Disasters" dealt exclusively with sudden mass casualty incidents.
The second edition will expand its focus and include planning and response for insidious and protracted disasters as well.
This new book is designed to provide a practical and operational approach to planning, response and medical management of sudden as well as slow progressive events. The target audience of the second edition will be health care professionals and institutions, as well as allied organizations, which respond to disasters and mass casualty incidents.
Parts I and II are essentially the first edition of the book and consist of planning of personnel, logistic support, transport of patients and equipment and response algorithms. These 2 parts will be revised and updated and include lessons learned from major mass shootings that occurred recently in the United States and other parts of the world
Part III will describe the planning process for progressive disasters and include response algorithms and checklists.
Part IV will handle humanitarian and mental health problems commonly encountered in disaster areas.
Part V will deal with team work and communication both critical topics when handling catastrophes and mass casualty incidents.
This new book will be a comprehensive tool for healthcare professionals and managers and should perform demonstrably better in sales and downloads. It will be of value at the pre-hospital as well as the hospital level, to plan and respond to the majority of catastrophes and mass casualty incidents.


Sunday afternoon we decided to take a break and walk up to the Como Park Conservatory (along with several hundred other people with the same idea). Lilies were the dominant flower on display and while I took a good number of flower "portraits," it was the abstracts I was most drawn to . I've created my own version of a Lens Baby that has about a millimeter of depth-of-field but I enjoy the results – it's a whole new way of seeing for me.
We've survived another Minnesota winter and are all the better for it…right? With the landscape starting to come alive and our own pulses quickening with the thought of new possibilities, I thought this would be a fine time to start (actually restart) a blog. Come by often for news about art fairs, new gallery openings, and other offerings.
I spent a brief time in NE Wisconsin last week and experienced warmer weather there than I did two years ago at that same time in the Grand Canyon. The water and woods were in that transitional period – neither winter nor spring. It's easy to talk yourself into thinking there's nothing "out there" to photograph but there is, it's really just a matter of looking for it. The following are a an abstract of pine needles, a neighbor's pier, and a foray into an HDR treatment on an old boathouse at the end of the lake we were on.


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Khvol'son, Daniil Avraamovich
(1819–1911), orientalist. Daniil Khvol'son was born in Vilna. He received a traditional rabbinical education but then studied French, German, and Russian. To complement his traditional education, he moved to Riga. There, Max Lilienthal provided him with a letter of introduction to Abraham Geiger, who enabled Khvol'son to finish his studies at the University of Breslau.
In order to pursue a university career, Khvol'son converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in 1855, an act that earned him the chair of Hebrew and Syrian Studies at the University of Saint Petersburg. When he was asked why he became a Christian, he is said to have replied: "I was convinced it was better to be a professor in Saint Petersburg than a melamed in Eyshishok." Another motive may have been to better defend his Jewish coreligionists; indeed, all his life he maintained very close relations with community leaders such as Kalman Schulman and Yitsḥak Elḥanan Spektor. The latter apparently urged him to defend the Jewish people against certain allegations.
In 1857, the Russian government appointed Khvol'son to a commission investigating the blood libel and purported references in Jewish literature to the use of Christian blood for ritual purposes. In the case of the Saratov blood libel, he successfully defended Jews against such accusations. In 1877–1878, Khvol'son's defense led to the acquittal of Jews who had been accused in another ritual murder case in Kutais, Transcaucasia. A text he wrote on the blood libel was translated into German and published in 1901 under the title Die Blutanklage und sonstige mittelalterliche Beschuldigungen der Juden (The Blood Libel and Other Medieval Accusations against Jews). A similar work was published in English in 1874 under the title The Semitic Nations.
Despite his conversion, Khvol'son continued to work for the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia (OPE), serving on its executive committee with Baron Horace Gintsburg, Leon Rosenthal, Rabbi Neuman, and court physician I. Berthenson, another convert to Christianity.
In 1856, Khvol'son published Sabaeans and Sabaeism, a text that catapulted him into the ranks of experts in oriental scholarship. He taught for 25 years at the Orthodox Theological Seminary in Saint Petersburg and lectured for about the same time on the ancient Jewish language of Aramaic at the Roman Catholic Academy, while simultaneously holding a chair at the university in Saint Petersburg. His studies profoundly affected the development of Semitic studies in Russian. He wrote numerous works on the history of the East, on the history of the ancient Jewish language, and on Assyriology. For the scientific periodical Tanakhi, published for the British Biblical Society, Khvol'son also wrote a series of articles on historical themes as well as on the blood libel.
In 1882, Khvol'son published Corpus Inscriptionum Hebraicarum (Russian trans., 1884), a still-influential work in the field of Hebrew paleography. He also published a series of articles in German on philosophical and religious themes in Saint Petersburg and Leipzig. He died in Saint Petersburg.
Recueil des travaux rédigés en mémoire du jubilé scientifique de Daniel Chwolson (Berlin, 1899).
Christoph Gassenschmidt


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Europol Arrests 15 in Massive Cryptocurrency Scam Crackdown: $1 Million Seized
On November 13, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) announced that it had successfully cracked down on a criminal network engaged in online scams through call centers. The network was spread all around Europe.
According to Europol, the operation was carried out on January 11, 2023, following an investigation that began in June 2022 at the request of the German authorities. In conjunction with the national authorities of the other countries, Europol conducted raids in 22 different locations between Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Serbia. This resulted in the arrest of 15 individuals, 14 of whom were in Serbia and one in Germany.
Europol Seizes $1 Million In Cryptocurrencies In Physical Wallets
In addition to the arrests, authorities also seized 3 physical wallets containing approximately $1 million in cryptocurrencies and about €50,000 in cash. They also seized 3 vehicles, electronic equipment, backups with important information, and other documents. The investigation is still ongoing as it is believed that the criminal network has more call centers than were raided.
According to Europol, the criminal network conducted a cryptocurrency pyramid scheme through which they lured victims by offering "apparently exceptional" cryptocurrency investments with the promise of large and guaranteed profits. The network was able to capture hundreds of millions of euros with the operations of just 4 call centers. Many victims, however, chose not to report to law enforcement agencies, making it difficult to quantify the damages.
The modus operandi of the fraudsters was to initially request small sums of money, typically in the three-digit range, to gain the trust of their victims. Once a more intimate relationship was established, they convinced the victims to make transfers of higher amounts each time until the fraudsters had enough to cease communications. According to Europol, the criminal network stole at least $2 million from unsuspecting individuals in Germany.
The Use of Cryptocurrencies in Criminal Activities
As reported by Europol, the agency is working hand in hand with several international authorities to "stay ahead of those who abuse crypto-assets to commit crimes and launder money."
However, Europol noted that although cryptocurrencies have become attractive to criminals due to their privacy and decentralization features, their use in criminal activities represents a tiny fraction when compared to criminal activities that involved fiat money:
The use of cryptocurrencies for illicit activities seems to comprise only a small part of the overall cryptocurrency economy, and it appears to be comparatively smaller than the amount of illicit funds involved in traditional finance
Governments worldwide are starting to pay more attention to how cryptocurrencies are used in criminal activities. One example of this is the United States government, which has taken action against certain cryptocurrency platforms that have been found to facilitate criminal activity. The most obvious case is the cryptocurrency mixer "Tornado Cash," which was sanctioned by the US government due to its use by criminals to obfuscate their transactions, but other centralized exchanges have also had to deal with the authorities for similar reasons.
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of the nations concerning which Jehovah said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go among them, neither shall they come among you; for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods: Solomon clave unto these in love.
For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods; and his heart was not perfect with Jehovah his God, as was the heart of David his father.
and had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go after other gods: but he kept not that which Jehovah commanded.
Howbeit I will not rend away all the kingdom; but I will give one tribe to thy son, for David my servant's sake, and for Jerusalem's sake which I have chosen.
And Jehovah raised up an adversary unto Solomon, Hadad the Edomite: he was of the king's seed in Edom.
And the sister of Tahpenes bare him Genubath his son, whom Tahpenes weaned in Pharaoh's house; and Genubath was in Pharaoh's house among the sons of Pharaoh.
And God raised up [another] adversary unto him, Rezon the son of Eliada, who had fled from his lord Hadadezer king of Zobah.
And he gathered men unto him, and became captain over a troop, when David slew them [of Zobah]: and they went to Damascus, and dwelt therein, and reigned in Damascus.
And he was an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon, besides the mischief that Hadad [did]: and he abhorred Israel, and reigned over Syria.
And this was the reason why he lifted up his hand against the king: Solomon built Millo, and repaired the breach of the city of David his father.
And it came to pass at that time, when Jeroboam went out of Jerusalem, that the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite found him in the way; now [Ahijah] had clad himself with a new garment; and they two were alone in the field.
because that they have forsaken me, and have worshipped Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, Chemosh the god of Moab, and Milcom the god of the children of Ammon; and they have not walked in my ways, to do that which is right in mine eyes, and [to keep] my statutes and mine ordinances, as did David his father.


How to communicate with such a life form? Is it intelligent? Will it reason? Schätzing has his protagonists raise some really interesting philosophical questions on mans attitude towards life and intelligence and finishes the book with a showdown between military and science and a cease fire between the swarm and man. Fantastic book!
Barbara Wood - "Soul flame"
Martin Sutter - "The dark side of the moon"
David Servan Schreiber - "Anticancer: A New Way Of Life"
David Servan-Schreiber - "The Instinct to Heal: Curing Stress, Anxiety, and Depression Without Drugs and Without Talk Therapy"


Begun in 1985 as an exhibition space in the Hudson Library in Highlands, The Bascom now occupies a six acre, six building campus.
The ED manages14 full time employees, 2 part time employees, and contract employees for education, development, exhibitions, marketing, and maintenance. The Bascom has enjoyed a reputation for presenting sophisticated exhibitions and offering art opportunities for all the community and is considered a community treasure. A $2MM annual budget is funded by individual and corporate donations, memberships, event rentals, grants, and fundraising events. Working with the Board, the ED is charged with continuing to increase regional and national awareness through exhibits and programs, bringing vision and leadership to the staff, increasing existing revenue streams, creating new revenue streams, and instituting successful marketing, PR, and fundraising programs to support and enhance the overall programming of The Bascom.
To be rewarded with both recognition and compensation for taking an exciting arts organization into a mature, sustainable, well funded entity that is known as a vibrant arts organization on a regional and national level.
The Bascom seeks a mission-driven executive with strong relationship building, management, and leadership skills. The ED will have a track record of progressive leadership experience and a passion for the visual arts. The ED will be a goal-oriented, accomplished leader who is passionate and committed to the Bascom's mission and values. The ED serves as the primary spokesperson for The Bascom in interactions with donors, partners, and other institutions and community leaders.
Passion for The Bascom and its mission.
Knowledge of the visual arts and art organizations.
Demonstrated ability to lead and develop a dynamic high functioning team.
Demonstrated ability to operate a complex organization.
Demonstrated ability to create, implement and monitor complex plans, and translate those plans into goals and strategies to achieve mission and vision.
Ability to work successfully with Board members and other volunteers as well as civic and business leaders in a collaborative and relationship-building capacity.
Business and financial acumen, verified through past contributions to the programmatic and fiscal stability of organizations.
Excellent verbal and written communication skills. ?A Bachelor's degree required, advanced degree desired. ?A track record of successful experience in leadership and management.


Alzheimer's disease and Down syndrome share a chromosome 21 link, which could open doors in the medical research to help victims of both, WCVB reported.
Research into this connection has become increasingly focused and has ignited a race toward establishing treatments.
People with Down syndrome are born with an extra copy of chromosome 21, which harbors the APP gene responsible for making the Alzheimer's protein, amyloid, the group Alzheimer's Research U.K. said in a blogpost.
This is believed to be a possible reason why people with Down syndrome develop Alzheimer's disease at a faster rate.
Autopsy studies have shown that by age 40, the brains of a vast majority of people with Down syndrome have significant levels of abnormal protein deposits, which are considered to be hallmarks for Alzheimer's, the Alzheimer's Association noted.
The unique property of chromosome 21 makes Alzheimer's a greater concern for people with Down syndrome, the National Down Syndrome Society said.
Dr. Brian Skotko, the director of the Down syndrome program at Massachusetts General Hospital, knows this all too well.
"It's really prevalent in our population and it's a pressing concern because right now, we have no treatments for Alzheimer's itself," he said, according to WCVB. "I think what we can learn from people with Down syndrome can help all of us."
A national clinical trial currently is testing the safety of a vaccine that could activate a patient's immune system to attack the plaques and entanglements before they build up and lead to Alzheimer's.
Allie Tarzwell, 32, has Down syndrome and will be taking part in that trial.
Her mother, Gayle Tarzwell said that the development of Alzheimer's was headed their way fast, which is why they decided to get involved in the trial.
"We just knew we had to help out. Had to be part of the solution, not just for us but for other people out there that are at risk of having Alzheimer's disease, whether they have Down syndrome or not," Gayle Tarzwell told WCVB.
Alzheimer's disease and Down syndrome share a chromosome 21 link, which could open doors in the medical research to help victims of both.


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Call of Duty and Battlefield need a World War 2 resurgence
By Edward Smith
Call of Duty 2\'s Stalingrad levels are among the series\' best Activision
Despite consistently, impressively, pushing the boundaries of what's technically possible on today's hardware, those making first-person shooters (FPS) games with a military theme have given up on writing.
Battlefield Hardline and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare are wholly divorced from war and its real life implications. They're heightened fantasy, and as much as we might like to give the benefit of the doubt - to argue that leaving war behind to plunder cop dramas or futurism for inspiration is a way to liberate these military shooters from boring, gameplay-restricting reality - it seems more to me that Hardline and Advanced Warfare are products of exasperation.
The modern setting that shooters so hungrily rushed into around 2007 brought with it a lot more pressures, a lot more responsibility, when it came to narrative. World War 2, at least in the sense of popular mythology, was a clear story of good versus evil, complete with dozens of battles and events to re-appropriate into spectacle.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, however – the modern wars – were nowhere near as defined. More than twelve years after the bombing of al-Dora, the questions which surrounded the Allied invasion of Iraq still remain: why were we there? Who were we fighting? What did we hope to achieve? And faced with these murky politics, these ill-elucidated lines between goodies and baddies, the makers of modern war shooters have given up trying to say something.
And so we have Advanced Warfare, Hardline and, later this year, Black Ops 3 – military shooters only in the superficial sense, war games which have withdrawn their stake in war, and masqueraded that defeat as a concerted effort towards making games "fun" again. If ever there was a time for World War 2 shooters to have a resurgence, this is it.
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault\'s fondly remembered D-Day landings mission. EA
When it comes to the problems currently inherent to shooting game storytelling, the Second World War is not a silver bullet. On the contrary, WW2 brings with it a set of fresh, arguably more intimidating problems.
How do you deal with something so reprehensible as Nazism in a video game? How do you make a tragedy like Stalingrad, or Market Garden, into something people want to enjoy playing? Medal of Honor and the earlier Call of Duty games laid a path, and with a great deal of research and care, the writers and designers managed to subtly imply the horror of WW2 whilst providing entertainment. But their efforts were not complete – those games were mixed results.
So simply building a typical shooter around WW2 and hoping that by proxy, just because it's Allies versus Axis, a more substantial plot will bleed through, won't work. A move away from fantasy, futurism and modernity – or at least, the hysterical kind of modernity which was until recently in vogue – will take more than simply re-skinning Delta Force into 101st Airborne.
I can understand why game-makers and especially publishers might be reticent to start shooters over, but surely the problem of how to balance historical responsibility and players' willingness to engage is more interesting to solve than which monument to next blow up.
Surely developers want something better to do than designing this year's multiplayer perks. And surely someone has noticed the sales of Call of Duty slowly dropping off, and is eager to be the first label to publish something different. WW2 would be work, and I'm resistant to the idea that it would spontaneously re-invent shooters, because that implies a lack of care towards the subject matter. But it'd an interesting problem to solve. It'd be a challenge, and I suspect game-makers enjoy those.
Call of Duty 2\'s final mission takes place in Berlin during the final days of the war. Activision
A good World War 2 game, one made with care and attention, could bring with it a lot of qualities that are absent from current shooters. Melancholia, but not forced. Violence, but not gratuitous. Factual basis, but not exploited.
Of course it's possible to create these things outside of WW2 shooter, and it's equally possible that a WW2 shooter might end up just as gross, vacuous and ugly as the latest Call of Duty. But I'd like to believe the aesthetic, the period, the history, bring with them a certain amount of gravitas.
I'd like to think that with simpler moral lines drawn, writers would be able to drill down into more interesting and nuanced facets, to find a meaningful story rather than dream up one that means nothing.
And to top it off, I think we're all bored. I think we're bored of future and lasers and jet-packs. Above all else, I think a WW2 shooter would sell.
So aside from approaching them with the same cavalier, spectacle-first attitude that seems to have led shooter design over the past eight years, I don't see why World War shooters shouldn't make a comeback. People would buy them. And they'd give game-makers what they deserve - something better to do.
For all the latest video game news follow us on Twitter @IBTGamesUK.
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Rocket League review: Car football gets the video game treatment
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Related topics : Call Of Duty Battlefield PS4 Xbox One


FRANKINCENSE – first because it was the gift most worthy of a king when the 3 wisemen brought it to Mary and Joseph to protect Jesus. Known for added support against all the heavy hitters against our bodies. Just makes good prevention sense!
NINGXIA RED – If not for the pH and sugar balances of Ningxia Red, without a doubt I would be on insulin. Also keeps the stomach in place during travel and extreme fluctuations. And with the Essential Rewards kit option, you save you about $45 over wholesale price if purchased separately. It even gets you a month supply of individual travel packs for no excuses missing a minimum daily dose.
THIEVES – Pretty much can count on this as one of everyone else's top three too! We put in gelcaps to ingest as a non-chemical antibiotic defense, and as a preventative measure when we feel the heaviness in the throat warning the immune system is compromised (and that rare sinus drainage sneaking in).
CLARADERM – I've repeated myself many times the importance of the most personal skincare. Originally created for Mary Young for her first childbirth at 54. This one's a life-changer. Enough said, yes?!
THYROMIN – So many reasons and falling asleep at night is one of them. I knew a beautiful woman who purchased this supplement by the case to gift her closest friends because she was so medically impressed with the ingredients, the iron, and her results.
BLM – Bone, Ligaments, Muscle. Again, makes sense to support with all we ask of our bodies.
MINT FACIAL SCRUB – Best facial ever was known to have this beauty on every month's Essential Rewards Autoship.
LAVENDER HAND AND BODY LOTION – Young Living's Lavender from both Provence, France and our St. Maries Farm in Idaho, it is like no other and, in fact, any other source turns me off of this multitasking oil altogether. But this is refreshingly addictive! AND the only protection we used from the sun on our Caribbean Cruises (Today, the product line includes even Sunscreen in both SPF 10 and 50)!
THIEVES COUGHDROPS – same favorite "Lozenges" and now recognized by FDA in a "Cough" dose. They were always AMAZING!!
THIEVES AROMABRIGHT TOOTHPASTE & MOUTHWASH – Dentist raves every time!
THIEVES DISHWASHER DETERGENT – Who would have thought there is better than Cascade Platinum at $19! Well, I'd be in the last one surprised to find better in Young Living! This my latest must-have!
GELCAPS – not all capsules can sustain essential oils. Don't order these AFTER you need them unless that's also your plan buying a fire extinguisher!


I know, I know, there are definitely going to be some people who disagree with me here or at the very least roll their eyes. Let me explain what I mean when I say "romance". In today's digital world, where everyone is permanently glued to screens of various sizes, be they smartphones, laptops, or tablets, the mechanical wristwatch is an anachronism. Let's face the fact that mechanical watches will never be able to compete on the accuracy front with the cheap, mass-produced quartz technology that was pioneered by Seiko in 1969. Quartz technology, incidentally, nearly destroyed the Swiss watch industry – they instantly one-upped mechanical watches in the pursuit of accuracy that had become the very raison d'être of the Swiss watch industry. Why wear an expensive mechanical watch that is fundamentally less "functional" than a cheap quartz one?
Pick up any mechanical watch and put it to your ear. Listen to the mechanical heartbeat of this device and then remove its caseback, reveling in the complexity of the intricate microcosm of gears, plates, levers, and springs. The beating of the balance wheel (thousands of times per hour) and ticking of the hands is entirely driven by mechanical energy – there is not even a modicum of electricity in the thing! There is a timeless quality here, as opposed to the planned obsolescence we observe when it comes to electronics. The basic technology driving the timekeeping organ of the watch, the lever escapement, was invented in 1755 by Thomas Mudge. Not much has changed since then.
We do not wear mechanical watches for their functional benefits. We wear them because they are art, they are tradition, and they are the purest expression of the most precious thing we have: time.
I'm not going to rush and tell you to rush out and invest every cent of your savings in vintage watches with the promise that you'll see your money double in a couple of years. In recent years, the rise of watch platforms like Hodinkee and watchuseek have transformed what used to be a rather niche hobby to a more mainstream interest. This increase in interest has led to a veritable flood of money pouring in as attested by the eye-watering auction results of the last five years. But it's not only rare Rolex and Patek Phillipe references that are steadily appreciating and have the potential to generate substantial returns. Here is an in-depth look at some of the models showcased on Vintage Portfolio. We analyze several Rolex and Omega models and calculate annual returns for the five-year period 2014-2019 based on actual book-keeping data. Just as is the case with any other collectible, condition is king! In the past, the condition of the dial was the make-or-break factor in determining the value of a vintage timepiece. As the vintage watch market has evolved, however, collectors are increasingly focusing more on (and thereby attaching a premium to) cases that retain their original finishing, full lugs, and bevels. Though it is difficult to ascertain if the current momentum in watch price appreciation will continue, well-maintained vintage pieces from classic model lines like the Submariner, Datejust, Seamaster, Speedmaster (and more) will always be in demand, especially as these pieces get older and more and more fall into disrepair.
How many times have you decided to reward yourself with a luxury watch for some life milestone or achievement, only to experience a severe case of sticker shock when you consult the prices at your AD? Luxury watches are just that – a luxury, but it must be said that many luxury watch brands (like Omega and Rolex) started off manufacturing high-quality tool watches that, though expensive, were well within the grasp of most middle-class enthusiasts. Unfortunately, those times have passed, and watch prices have rocketed into the stratosphere.
Lower price of entry: vintage watches offer the perfect gateway to enjoying high-quality movements at a more accessible price.
No depreciation hit: as is the case with cars, the second you leave a dealership with a new watch, it will lose a substantial chunk of its value. By buying used / vintage, you are buying a piece that has already seen the initial depreciation take its toll. And not only are you not losing money because of it, but you actually profit from it!
Nothing is more precious than memories. In this respect, watches can immortalize life milestones or commemorate achievements and because of that, can make for fantastic presents. One of the best ways to do this is the so-called "birth year" watch, essentially a timepiece that was sold or manufactured in the same year that someone dear to you was born. Determining the exact year a watch was manufactured or sold is an imprecise science. Quite often, the original invoices were simply discarded or have since been lost. Watch companies used to produce movement components and cases in batches and storing them before gradually using them up as watches were manufactured and sold. It's not uncommon to find a watch with a case manufactured in 1969 housing a a movement with a serial number dating it to 1968, with the first record of sale from 1970! Nonetheless, it is the thought that counts, as they say, and birth year watches make for incredibly thoughtful and personal gifts.
← NewerThe 3-Watch Omega Starter Kit for under €5.000!


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Draymond Green Close To Hiring Rich Paul As Agent
The Michigan native has won three Championships with Golden State, and Green has been widely viewed as the heart and soul of the Warriors team.
Draymond Green is close to hiring Rich Paul of Klutch Sports as his agent.
Paul is a longtime friend of James, having first started working for him in 2003 and eventually representing the National Basketball Association star when he opened his own agency in 2012. According to Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports, Green has decided to make a move and hire Rich Paul as his agent.
According to The Athletic's Marcus Thompson, the attraction to Klutch is multi-layered.
Green is scheduled to be a free agent in 2020 if he doesn't sign an extension with the Golden State Warriors this offseason.
Aside from being the agent for Draymond Green, Armstrong also serves as an agent for Derrick Rose, Bismack Biyombo, Donatas Motiejunas, JaVale McGee, Denzel Valentine, and Josh Jackson.
All the past issues can come to a halt if Durant decides to leave this summer in free agency, but if KD sticks around and the Warriors don't offer Green an extension that he likes, you can expect the Draymond Green-to-Lakers rumors to begin to heat up.
Blast in Nepals capital kills 1, injures 2
He said that a 49-year-old man was killed while two others were injured in the incident which is being probed. Subedi said that they have arrested six suspects in connection with the blast and investigation is underway.
The Lakers will be looking to bounce back from their disappointing defeat to the New Orleans Pelicans as they take on the Memphis Grizzlies.
While it's only one move, it appears that the Davis fiasco has done nothing to besmirch the brand of Klutch Sports among the NBA's elite.
Green is a three-time NBA All-Star, a member of the All-NBA Second Team in 2016, and a member of the All-NBA Third Team in 2017.
Hobbled by various injuries, Green has only played 44 games for the Golden State Warriors this season.
Green is averaging 7.2 points, 7.5 rebounds and 7.3 assists in 43 games this season for the Warriors. Early in the season, Green was involved in a public spat with teammate Kevin Durant.
Players are seeing how Rich Paul's clients are taking control of their careers, so more are signing on.
Bohemian Rhapsody Oscars: Rami Malek EMOTIONAL Best Actor acceptance speech IN FULL
Colman gave a nod to her fellow nominee, admitting she wished Close took home the big prize. I used to work as a cleaner I used to love that job.
European Union chief, British PM May to hold Brexit talks in Egypt
May had been due to go before British lawmakers on Tuesday to offer them an update on the talks with European Union leaders. It is a critical week for May, with many in the House of Commons having been expecting to vote on her deal.
Statue of Kevin Hart Holding Rainbow Flag Pops Up Near Oscars Venue
Hart's apology apparently wasn't enough for Plastic Jesus, who erected his statue on Hollywood Boulevard earlier this week. The golden statue was placed at the same intersection as "Hollow Apology", a couple blocks from the annual Oscars telecast.
Berkshire Hathaway's bottom line hit by falling stocks, Kraft Heinz
Trump often takes credit for upbeat news on the economy and stock market, sometimes tying them to his economic policies . Berkshire outperformed previous year too, up 0.4 percent compared with a 4.4 percent drop for the index.
Xiaomi Mi 9 Made Its Global Debut; Price Starts From RM 2074
Everything else we've seen for the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 is here including the ceramic design, 256GB of storage and a 6.39-inch display. Pre-orders for the Mi 9 in Spain have already been started through Authorised Mi Stores, Mi.com, Cdiscount, Darty, and Fnac.
Medellin razes Pablo Escobar's home in symbol of rebirth
City authorities had placed the Monaco building under police guard, and tourists had only been able to see it from the outside. The city plans to build a park and memorial museum to replace the abandoned building, which took 3 seconds to destroy.
Mahershala Ali Dedicates 2019 Oscars Win to His Grandmother
Ali now stars in his first leading TV role as Arkansas police detective Wayne Hays on HBO series "True Detective". Ali's birth name is Mahershalalhashbaz, which was taken from the Bible and used by the actor early in his career.
Oscars 2019: Olivia Colman wins Best Actress for The Favourite
Colman's win meant Glenn Close has extended her losing streak. "I have to thank a lot of people", Colman said, crying. This is a developing post . "And this is not how I wanted this to be", she joked, to Close's delight.
Lady Gaga Tells People Not to Give Up During Oscars Speech
Before the show, Lady Gaga wowed in an eye-catching black gown which she paired with a pair of long black gloves. The pair received a standing ovation from the crowd and hugged before exiting the stage.
Australia beat India by three wickets in a thrilling T20
And then, KL Rahul's dismissal. "We didn't let him get away and he then tried to go over mid-off that was inside the circle". Further clues will come when Langer's team and India meet in a five-match ODI series that starts in Hyderabad on Saturday.
Glenn Close Wears a Gold Cape on Oscars 2019 Red Carpet
Mr Rahman's first post was simple and to the point, in which there's just a glimpse of the Oscar invite with the details. Black Panther also won thrice : for Best Make-Up And Hairstyling, Best Production Design , and Best Original Score .
Wakanda Forever! The cast of Black Panther at the 2019 Oscars
Carter won the award tonight for Best Costume Design and it's far from the last of the Marvel Studios' nominations this evening. Two Black Panther crew members made Oscar history by becoming the first black winners in their categories.
Saudi Arabia appoints first female ambassador
Prince Khalid, a former fighter pilot, had been ambassador to Washington for less than two years. We'll see how far she gets in mending a frayed relationship between the USA and Saudi Arabia.
Sony reveals flagship Xperia 1 with 4K HDR OLED display
Like numerous flagship phones this year, the Xperia 1 runs Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 mobile platform and ships with Android 9 Pie. The Xperia L3 should be available in stores already in single SIM and dual SIM versions, although prices haven't been unveiled.
Schiff: 'Absolutely' Would Sue Trump Admin Over Mueller Report
Congress and the people of America must press for maximum disclosure of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's findings. On Sunday, Schiff suggested that anything short of Mueller's full report will not be enough to satisfy Democrats.
25 points for Leonard as Raptors beat DeRozan, Spurs
Leonard is a calm, composed playmaker with the ability to flat-out win the game, bringing energy that DeRozan simply can't match. The longest, loudest cheer came after a tribute video that ran during the first timeout.
Dustin Johnson Just Hit The Best Shot Of The Tournament
My game is right there and I am really happy with everything. "It means a lot, to get 20 wins out here is very hard ". Our final-round matchup bets start there, as this could be just what Rory needed to finally post a solid Sunday.
Police officer, terrorist killed in encounter in J&K's Kulgam
South Kashmir deputy inspector general of Police Amit Kumar and a brigadier from Rashtriya Rifles were wounded in the encounter. He was a 2011 batch KPS Officer and had been heading counter terrorism wing of J&K police in Kulgam for past 1.5 years.
Afghanistan seal series against Ireland after posting highest score in T20Is
Zazai, in his fifth T20I, became the second Afghanistan player to score a ton in this format after Mohammad Shahzad. A complete domination of Afghanistan has been shown as T20I batting records take a massive hit on Saturday.
Mauricio Pochettino: Tottenham Are No Longer A Title Contender
It is a massive opportunity lost for us. "We made some mistakes on the pitch and I made some mistakes afterwards on the pitch". I was always under control but what happened there, happened on the pitch.
Jimmie Allen and Abby Anderson Channel Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga will have her longtime manager by her side at the Oscars following her split from Christian Carino . Gaga and Christian began dating in February 2017 before confirming their engagement in October past year .
12-Year-Old Journalist Questions Officer Who Threatened To Arrest Her
In 2016, she beat out other local media outlets with a story about a homicide in her neighbourhood by interviewing residents. He also reiterated that it is a felony in Arizona to put the information of a law enforcement agent on the internet.
Curry scores 36 as Warriors hold off Kings
Nick and Priyanka Return to the Oscars Party Where They First Met
Lungi Ngidi and Anrich Nortje named in Proteas ODI squad
Rami Malek is a champion, my friends
Mauricio Pochettino says Tottenham's Premier League title hopes are now over
UK's Prince Harry and wife Meghan in Morocco on official visit
Mike Myers & Dana Carvey Had an Oscars 'Wayne's World' Reunion
Samsung Galaxy A50 & A30 live images show Infinity-U displays, multiple cameras
Jason Momoa's 2019 Oscars suit was custom-made by Karl Lagerfeld
Anne Hathaway pokes fun at her Oscars hosting gig with Instagram caption
After 3rd period rally, Reds Wings fall in OT | NHL
'Racist' Serena Williams cartoon given Australian all-clear
Lady Gaga Wins Best Original Song at Oscars 2019!
Spike Lee wins his first Oscar ever for BlacKkKlansman's screenplay
Khloe Kardashian Rips 'Bachelor' Creator for Claiming She Might Join 'The Bachelorette'


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The Fallacy of "Enforcement First"
Since the last major legalization program for unauthorized immigrants in 1986, the federal government has spent an estimated $186.8 billion on immigration enforcement. Yet during that time, the...
Enforcement Without Focus: Non-Violent Offenders Caught in the US Immigration Enforcement System
Since the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in 2003, its immigration-enforcement agencies—Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—have been...
A Decade of Rising Immigration Enforcement
With roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States, some question whether the nation's immigration laws are being seriously enforced. In truth, due to legal and policy...
Falling Through the Cracks
The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on Children Caught Up in the Child Welfare System One of the many consequences of an aggressive immigration enforcement system is the separation of children,...
Border Patrol Agents as Interpreters Along the Northern Border: Unwise Policy, Illegal Practice
Advocates along the Northern Border report a recent, sharp increase in the use of U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) agents to provide interpretation services to state and local law enforcement officers and...
Bad for Business: How Anti-Immigration Legislation Drains Budgets and Damages States' Economies
This session, state legislatures are once again considering harsh immigration-control laws. These laws are intended to make everyday life so difficult for unauthorized immigrants that they will...
From Fingerprints to DNA: Biometric Data Collection in U.S. Immigrant Communities and Beyond
The collection of biometrics—including fingerprints, DNA, and face-recognition ready photographs—is becoming more and more a part of society. Both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the...
Behind Closed Doors: An Overview of DHS Restrictions on Access to Counsel
The report describes restrictions on access to legal counsel before DHS, provides a legal landscape, and offers recommendations designed to combat DHS's harmful practices. It also addresses changes...
The Myth of "Self-Deportation"
How Behavioral Economics Reveals the Fallacies behind "Attrition through Enforcement" By Alexandra Filindra, Ph.D....
What Arizona v. United States May Mean for States with Similar Immigration Laws
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Arizona v. United States, a case addressing the legality of the Arizona immigration law known as SB 1070. According to the statement...
Board of Immigration Appeals Interpretation of Stay of Removal FOIA Request
With the end of prosecutorial discretion under the Trump administration, noncitizens living in the United States with a removal order face quick, and almost certain deportation unless they have...
Demanding Answers from ICE and CBP Regarding Their Aggressive Immigration Enforcement Tactics
The American Immigration Council filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with ICE and CBP on October 13, 2017, seeking data on enforcement actions and outcomes since January 2016. With this data, the Council will be able to assess who is being targeted for removal and what the consequences are of the current enforcement framework.
Uncovering the Government's Internal Family Separation Policies, Guidance, and Data
This lawsuit seeks to compel government agencies to produce documents regarding family separation policies.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Port of Entry Practices FOIA Lawsuit
In the year and a half since the FOIA request was filed, CBP largely failed to provide any records in response to the request. On June 11, 2018, the Council, represented by O'Melveny & Myers LLP, filed a lawsuit to compel DHS and CBP to comply with FOIA and to release additional records related to the 2016 request.
Holding CBP Accountable for Turning Away Asylum Seeker and Falsifying Paper Trail
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers all too frequently deny individuals fleeing persecution and torture their right to seek protection in the United States, issue summary removal orders against them, and then falsify documents to support their illegal actions.
Complaint Demands Investigation Into Inadequate Medical and Mental Health Care Condition in Immigration Detention Center
The American Immigration Council and the American Immigration Lawyers Association filed an administrative complaint with the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), the Office of the...
Statement for House Homeland Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security Hearing "Stopping the Daily Border Caravan: Time to Build a Policy Wall"
The American Immigration Council submitted a written statement to the House Homeland Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security for a May 22, 2018 hearing on "Stopping the Daily Border Caravan:...
Detention of Pregnant Women FOIA Request
The requests ask for policies, guidelines, or procedures followed or used by immigration enforcement regarding the treatment of pregnant individuals in custody and any system used to track and monitor pregnant detainees.
Statement for Senate Hearing "Strengthening and Reforming America's Immigration Court System"
The American Immigration Council submitted a written statement to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration for an April 18, 2018 hearing on "Strengthening and Reforming...
Fearing Coronavirus, People in ICE Custody Ask the Courts to Order Their Release
Medical experts and government officials urge people to social distance to avoid contracting the coronavirus. Yet, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to hold tens of thousands of...
US Endangers Other Countries by Deporting People With the Coronavirus
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ONE brand condoms are first to receive FDA approval for "safe and effective use" label for anal sex
In landmark shift, ONE brand condoms are first to receive FDA approval for "safe and effective use" label for anal sex
Emory University study of safer sex practices paves way for FDA clearance
Read via PR News Wire / Read in New York Times
Quick notes to start:
We've seen some media report that we designed a condom specifically for anal sex. This is not accurate. Our existing ONE Condoms and myONE fitted condoms became the first brands ever approved by the FDA for anal. Condoms have only previously been approved for vaginal sex.
Also our brand is ONE Condoms, not "One Male Condom." FDA still uses "male condom" as a term, and used that in their press release. We use "external condom" instead to be inclusive. ONE Condoms is all about being a brand for everyONE.
A historic change occurred in the condom industry this week after a 10-year process, when the FDA approved a request from Global Protection Corp. to expand the "intended use" claim of its ONE® Condoms to include anal sex. The approval applies to three different types of ONE® Condoms — standard, thin and myONE® custom-fit condoms which come in 54 different sizes. ONE® will become the first condom brand ever to be labeled for safe and effective use for anal sex.
Condoms are a class II medical device under the FDA, and therefore must meet strict regulatory and product labeling guidelines. Although many people use condoms for anal sex (and the CDC recommends it), the U.S. FDA has never allowed condom companies to include anal sex in the Indication for Use – allowing condoms to be labeled "safe and effective" only for vaginal use. This is because no data on condom safety for anal sex has been previously provided to the FDA.
A study led by Dr. Aaron Siegler at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University provides that data, and paved the way for Global Protection to submit a De Novo request to the FDA to expand the intended use claim of its ONE® and myONE® Condom brands to include anal sex.
The study from Emory University – the largest clinical trial of effectiveness of condoms for anal sex ever conducted – found that ONE® and myONE® Condoms used during anal sex failed less than 1% of the time (0.7%). On August 26th, 2021, Global Protection Corp. cited the study as the basis for its De Novo Request to the FDA to expand its intended use approvals to include anal sex. On February 23, 2022, officials from the FDA announced that it has accepted the request, enabling ONE® and myONE® to become the first condom brands with the new anal use designation.
"This landmark shift demonstrates that when researchers, advocates, and companies come together, we can create a lasting impact in public health efforts," said Davin Wedel, president and founder of Global Protection Corp, owner of the ONE® and myONE® Condom brands. "I think most people would be surprised to know that condoms are not approved for anal sex. With this new designation from the FDA, people will have more confidence using condoms for anal sex."
This study [1] was led by Dr. Aaron Siegler, an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University. Dr. Siegler is also Associate Director of the Emory Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) Prevention Sciences Core. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In collaboration with other faculty at Emory, Dr. Siegler began pursuing funding for the study ten years ago, in 2012, and partnered with Global Protection Corp. to provide the participants with ONE® and myONE® Condoms.
Participants in the study were split evenly between men who have sex with men (MSM) and men who have sex with women (MSW). All participants received ONE® latex condoms in three different styles (fitted, thin and standard) and were asked to track their sexual activity in an electronic daily diary. The results were published in Lancet's EClinicalMedicine in 2019.
"There have been over 300 condoms approved for use with vaginal sex data, and never before has a condom been approved based on anal sex data," said Dr. Siegler. "This is despite two-thirds of HIV transmission in the United States being linked to anal sex. Having condoms tested and approved for anal sex will allow users to have confidence in using condoms to prevent HIV transmission."
In the clinical trial, condoms used during anal sex failed less than 1% of the time (0.7%). Previous studies with a similar outcome measure had found condoms to have a 6% to 7% failure rate for anal sex. However, that research had substantial limitations, such as not requiring condom-compatible lubricant be used for anal sex. For vaginal sex, condoms have been previously cleared by the FDA based on a clinical failure threshold of <5.0%.
"We want people to have lots of sex – but we also want them to be empowered and informed. This recognition from the FDA highlights the substantial protection ONE Condoms provide for anal sex, which we hope enhances trust, leads to increased use, and lessens the new cases of sexually transmitted infections," said Wedel.
In fact, a previous study led by faculty at Emory University found 69% of MSM reported they would be more likely to use condoms more frequently if the condoms were FDA label-indicated for anal sex.[2]
"The clinical trial also confirmed something that we have believed but had no clinical proof - the use of lubricant makes condoms even more effective than they already are," Wedel added. "We're ecstatic to bring this information to our health educator partners, and continue to educate people about the importance of lubricant." The use of lubricant for anal sex is part of the new FDA label indication.
In the clinical study, condom failure was lower for anal sex than for vaginal sex. The researchers hypothesized this difference was driven by the much higher use of condom-compatible lubricant for acts of anal sex (98.3%) compared with vaginal sex acts (41.6%) due to study design. When the researchers controlled for the use of lubricant, they found no difference in condom failure for anal sex versus vaginal sex.
"A critical finding of the study was that failure was low when condom-compatible lubricant was used, and the use of lubricant is part of the new FDA label indication. Programs providing condoms should also be providing lubricant," said Dr. Siegler.
About ONE® & Global Protection Corp.
Launched in 2004, ONE® is a socially responsible business committed to raising sexual health awareness. As a leader in premium condoms and lubricants, ONE® brings a fresh perspective to sexual health through a fusion of advanced product design, manufacturing technology and customer participation. ONE® is fanatic about developing new technologies to upgrade its condoms, such as the proprietary Sensatex® Softer Latex, MicroRoll® Comfort Base, and TotalGlide® Full Lubrication technologies. ONE® Condoms are vegan-friendly, non-GMO, and made from natural rubber latex. The trademark round wrappers feature hundreds of designs to spark conversations. ONE® and myONE® are part of the Global Protection Corp. family of sexual health products founded by Davin Wedel with a mission to make condoms as socially acceptable as toothpaste. ONE® products are available for purchase at onecondoms.com, and select retailers such as Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens. The myONE® fitted condoms are available at myonecondoms.com.
Milla Impola, Director of Marketing and Communications
mimpola@globalprotection.com | onecondoms.com | globalprotection.com
myonecondoms.com
1) Siegler AJ, Rosenthal EM, Sullivan PS, et al. Levels of clinical condom failure for anal sex: A randomized cross-over trial. EClinicalMedicine. 2019;17:100199. Published 2019 Oct 31. doi:10.1016/j.eclinm.2019.10.012
2) Siegler AJ, Ahlschlager L, Rosenthal EM, Cecil MP, Kelley CF, Rosenberg ES, et al. Utility of a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) label indication for condoms for anal sex. Sex Health 2019.)


I just wanted to say thank you for everything on the bathroom remodel. It turned out great, everyone that came to see can't believe the excellent job you did on the flooring, the tub and vanity with redoing the drawers to get it to fit into the space provided. It was a pleasure to work with you on this project, your advice and direction on which tub to choose and all the extra's you did for me is greatly appreciated. I am a very satisfied customer and will be recommending you to others. Thank you.
There are many fine workmen and contractors in the Fox Cities Area. I'll occasionally add recommendations here based on my knowledge. For plumbing, I was recently extremely impressed with the expertise and service I received from master plumber Andy Nielsen of Performance Plumbing, LLC. They are based in Shiocton but do a lot of work in Appleton and the Fox Valley. Performance Plumbing Services can be reached at (920) 585-5370. He quickly diagnosed a problem that others had missed (or caused, frankly), and explained to me how my do-it-yourself effort to fix the problem had missed a couple of subtleties and eventually failed. He is a great educator as well as a skilled plumber. Very impressed! I learned about Andy from my favorite building expert in the Valley.
We just wanted to say thank you to Performance Plumbing and Andy for all they have done for us. They have been a very reliable company to us for many years. Andy is very knowledgeable with his products. He will make sure you get the very best fit for your home and family. It is nice knowing you have someone that you can trust that is professional and friendly too. We can always count on Performance Plumbing to help us out with any situation that comes along. We look forward to working with you for many more years to come! Thanks again!
Andy did a kitchen and bath remodel back in the spring of 2009, and we couldn't be more pleased with everything he did. The bathroom fixtures he suggested turned out to be perfect for our family and our budget. He also installed a tankless water heater that we just love, and it is working great. Everything was done right, with quality products that were recommended by Andy…not to make money but to provide the best long term results. We could not have been more happy. I highly recommend Andy and Performance Plumbing to my friends.


Today's post about the source of ideas can be found at http://magicalwords.net, the blog on writing that I share with Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, and C.E. Murphy. Please visit the site and enjoy the post.
Okay, let me start with an apology to all the Edgar Allen Poe fans out there. I actually do know that this year marks Poe's 200th birthday and not his 150th. I just had a brain-fart moment while writing Wednesday's post, and I'm sorry for that. Whatever year it is, I will be reading "The Tell-Tale Heart" tonight here at RavenCon to help commemorate Poe's birthday. If you're at the con please stop by. I'll also be reading from one of my own stories or books (not sure which yet) on Sunday morning at 10:30. Please stop by for that, too.
I've already run into Misty Massey (with whom I blog at http://Magicalwords.net ) and several other friends, and I look forward to seeing more familiar faces as the weekend goes on. I got to hear Misty's reading, which was wonderful, and I saw an Edgar Allen Poe action figure for sale, which I might just have to buy…. More as it develops!
Yet Another Post About Revising….
Today's post, "More on Revising and Editing," can be found at the SFNovelists web page. Please visit our site and enjoy the post.
So, I'm off to Richmond, Virginia tomorrow for RavenCon. I'll get to see many good friends, I'll be on a panel or three, I'll do a reading from one book or another, and since the con is honoring Edgar Allen Poe's 150th birthday this year, I'll also be doing a Friday night reading of "The Tell-Tale Heart." If you're in the area, please stop by.
I'll be posting occasionally from the road, and will have a new post up at SFNovelists tomorrow morning.
More as the weekend develops….
Today's post, Revising and Self-Editing," can be found at http://magicalwords.net, the writing-themed blog I share with fellow fantasy writers Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, and CE. Murphy. Please visit the site and enjoy today's post.
Today's post, "What Are You Waiting For?" can (finally) be found at Magical Words, the group blog I share with fellow fantasy writers Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, and C.E. Murphy. Check out the site and enjoy the post.


A great villain must have an evil lair, and what better location than an evil castle? Evil Castle Tiles will help you develop a perfect backdrop for that final boss encounter.
With Evil Castle Tiles, you can create a dark magic castle, a derelict crypt or a dungeon of torture. Unique details and decorative elements will bring each map to a new level, while the dark and rich colors will enhance the atmosphere of unease and fear.
A smooth, painterly style like the one youll find in Royal Tiles and Dungeon & Volcanoes packs.
Auto-tiles for walls, water and floors.
Decorative elements such as statues, magical paraphernalia, and caskets.
Castle staples, including heavy gates, torches, trap elements and more.


A combination of football and traditional pool designed to combine the skills required for each game whilst being simple and fun for all ages and abilities.
The playing surface consists of a 12ft by 8ft platform with 4 yellow balls, 4 red balls, a black ball and a white cueball. The game itself is similar to traditional pool only you are able to stand on the table and pot by kicking the cueball into the coloured balls.The games are short and sharp meaning there's no time wasted waiting for your next game.
The Player or team pocketing their group of object balls first in any order and then legally potting the black ball wins the game.
The balls are racked with the black ball on the black ball spot.
The opening player plays at the object balls by striking the white ball (cue ball) from any position behind or in line with the white ball spot. They must pocket a ball or cause at least one object ball to hit any side. Failure to do so will result in the balls being re-racked. The opposition player re-starts the game with ONE VISIT.
On the first occasion a player LEGALLY pockets an object ball then that ball denotes their group. Should a ball or balls of both groups the one colour group must be nominated.
If no ball is pocketed from a legal break then the players continue alternatively until such time as a ball or balls are pocketed.
If a foul break is committed any potted balls will be ignored. The oncoming player may play any ball in either group. The oncoming player need not nominate.
If the player pots the black ball from break, the balls shall be re-racked and the same player re-starts without any penalty.
If a ball or balls are pocketed legally, this entitles the player to an additional shot and this shot continues until the player either fails to pot on of his allocated balls or commits a foul.
Hitting opponent's ball before their own.
Failing to hit any ball with the cue ball.
If the cue ball hits the black before all the balls in their group have been potted.
Object ball leaves the platform. Such a ball will be replaced on the black spot, or as near to in a direct line from the black spot to the white spot. White ball leaves the platform. The white ball may be played from anywhere behind or in line with the white spot.
If a players body or clothing should touch any ball.
Playing before the ball has come to rest.
Striking the white ball more than once.
Following any foul the offending player loses their next visit to the platform. The opponent is entitled to ONE VISIT, but the white ball may be placed anywhere on the platform and be played in any direction. The player also has the option of a free ball (opponents group can be hit or potted).
If a player pockets the black ball before all of their own group have been potted.
A player going in off the black ball with the black ball also being potted.
Any other balls potted at the same time as the black.
Should any situation arise whereby a legal shot cannot be played then the game shall be re-started.
If in the opinion of the referee, neither player is allowing the game to progress the referee may order the game to be restarted.


This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2018 at 5:43 pm	and is filed under Αφίσες, Εκδηλώσεις, Ομάδες. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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