text:
Single market and standards
Access to finance for SMEs
Tools and databases
Κλείσιμο αυτού του μηνύματος
Η σελίδα αυτή δεν είναι διαθέσιμη στα ελληνικά.
Επιλέξτε άλλη γλώσσα
Automotive industry competitiveness, skills in the automotive sector, connected and automated mobility, and the European Battery Alliance.
Technical harmonisation
Technical harmonisation in the EU
International technical harmonisation
FAQ - Type approval of vehicles
Access to vehicle repair and maintenance information
Vehicle categories
Main categories of vehicles in the EU, and legislation for L and T-category vehicles.
Safety in the automotive sector
Motor vehicle safety rules, eCall, and the protection of children.
Emissions in the automotive sector
Mobile air-conditioning systems (MACs)
Reducing noise in the automotive industry
Emissions from non-road mobile machinery
Motor vehicle registration
Details about Commission's proposal for simpler car re-registration rules and current status of the proposal.
Directives and regulations on motor vehicles, their trailers, systems and components
Directives and regulations on two- and three-wheel vehicles and quadricycles
UNECE regulations
Directives and regulations on wheeled agricultural or forestry tractors
The automotive industry is crucial for Europe's prosperity. The automotive sector provides direct and indirect jobs to 13.8 million Europeans, representing 6.1% of total EU employment. 2.6 million people work in direct manufacturing of motor vehicles, representing 8.5 % of EU employment in manufacturing. The EU is among the world's biggest producers of motor vehicles and the sector represents the largest private investor in research and development (R&D). To strengthen the competitiveness of the EU automotive industry and preserve its global technological leadership, the European Commission supports global technological harmonisation and provides funding for R&D.
Public consultation on end-of-life vehicles
New rules on cleaner and safer cars start to apply across Europe
NRMM emissions - impact of the COVID-19 crisis
Why the automotive industry is important
Links to other sectors – the automotive industry has an important multiplier effect in the economy. It is important for upstream industries such as steel, chemicals, and textiles, as well as downstream industries such as ICT, repair, and mobility services
Employment - around 13.8 million people work in the EU automotive sector. Manufacturing (direct and indirect) accounts for 3.5 million jobs, sales and maintenance for 4.5 million, and transport for 5.1 million
Economy - the turnover generated by the automotive industry represents over 7 % of EU GDP
80% of the growth in the sector is expected to occur outside the EU. The EU's efforts should focus on concluding and enforcing preferential trade and investment agreements. These will make it easier for European companies to access third markets and continue benefiting from economies of scale.
What the Commission does
Global technical harmonisation – the Commission focuses on global technical harmonisation. Common technical requirements (UNECE framework) help reduce development costs and avoid duplication of administrative procedures. Harmonisation is key to strengthening the competitiveness of the EU automotive industry
Διαχειριστής του ιστότοπου: Γενική Διεύθυνση Εσωτερικής Αγοράς, Βιομηχανίας, Επιχειρηματικότητας και ΜΜΕ
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Ακολουθήστε την Ευρωπαϊκή Επιτροπή στα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης
Πόροι για εταίρους


Serge Bloch is a French illustrator, born June 18th, 1956 in Colmar ( France).
He attended the Claude Lapointe illustration studio in Ecole Superieure des Arts Decoratifs de Strasbourg, and, after his graduation he started working for the children and teens literature. In particular he has been visual chief editor of Bayard jeunesse.
He was awarded several international prizes and gold medals in recognition of his work.
His contribution to the communication world has been constant. In this field he has worked with prestigious Firms such as Hermes, Coca-Cola, RATP( Paris Mass Transportation), Publicis (Paris),Samsung, petit Bateau. The French Telecommunication Agency, La Poste issued in Automn 2010 stamps that Serge created.
His books are internationally translated and published. For his first Japanese book, Inochino Kazoekata (Chikura Shobo publishing), 2010 he has collaborated with Kundo Koyama, script writer of Departure , 2008 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.


text:
Q: JavasScript RegEx Replace Pattern in String that Looks Like An Array I have an array in string-format. With Javascript, how to replace [, ], <Tag: , and > in the least amount of code possible:
let s = "[<Tag: cats>, <Tag: dogs>, <Tag: parakeets>]"

End result should look like:
"cats, dogs, parakeets"

This seems to work, but it's pretty... not great.
s.replace(/^\[/, '').replace(/\]$/, '').replaceAll('<Tag: ', '').replaceAll('>', '')

Is there a clever way to do this with RegEx?

A: Matching <Tag:  and then capturing non-> characters looks like it'd do what you want:

const s = "[<Tag: cats>, <Tag: dogs>, <Tag: parakeets>]";
const result = s.replace(/<Tag: ([^>]+)>/g, '$1').replace(/[[\]]/g, '');
console.log(result);

Another approach, matching instead of replacing:

const s = "[<Tag: cats>, <Tag: dogs>, <Tag: parakeets>]";
const result = [...s.matchAll(/<Tag: ([^>]+)>/g)]
  .map(match => match[1])
  .join(', ');
console.log(result);

A: I would suggest matching all substrings and joining them:
const result = [...s.matchAll(/<Tag:\s*(\w+)>/g)]
    .map(
        ([, m]) => m
    )
    .join(', ');

// result: "cats, dogs, parakeets"

A: When an infinite quantifier in a lookbehind is supported, you can match all the values between <Tag:  and the > and make sure all the matches are between square brackets.
See the regex matches in this regex demo.

let s = "[<Tag: cats>, <Tag: dogs>, <Tag: parakeets>]"
const regex = /(?<=\[[^\][]*<Tag: )\w+(?=>[^\][]*\])/g;
console.log(s.match(regex).join(", "));

A: What about this? Remove the delimiters [, ], > and <Tag:  parts:

let s = "[<Tag: cats>, <Tag: dogs>, <Tag: parakeets>]";
s = s.replace(/[[\]>]|<.*? /g, "");
console.log(s);

A: Not using a regex but it does return the same result that need.
let res = ""
let s = "[<Tag: cats>, <Tag: dogs>, <Tag: parakeets>]"

for ( let i = 0; i < s.length; i++){
  let c = s[i]
  if ( c == '[' || c == ']' || c == '>')
    continue
  else if ( s.substr(i,5) == '<Tag:')
    i += 5
  else
    res += c
}
return res

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Kristaps Valters pens with TT Ankara
Kristaps Valters (190 cm) has been officially unveiled as a new addition to the roster at Turk Telekom Ankara in the Turkish TBL. The Latvian legend started the season in his native country playing for BK Barons Kvartals Riga (LBL) over seven games, making averages of 12.6 points, 2.7 rebounds, and 4.9 assists per game. Last season the point guard also played in Ankara, featuring for Aykon TED Kolejiler Ankara over thirty games of the season. During that stint he offered averages of 12.0 points, 2.9 rebounds, and 4.9 dimes per game.
Kristaps Valters is a veteran of European Basketball and has played on courts in Germany, Spain, Russia, Italy, and Greece.
PrevPreviousAustin Bragg departs Domzale
NextNick Wiggins leaves TubingenNext

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: Copy Range to Another Sheet's Next Row When a Change is Detected I am working on a VBA script that monitors a certain range ("A4:Q4") for changes as this range uses the "RTD" function and refreshes every second or so. Once it detects that one of the values in that range changes, I want it to copy that range over to a new sheet, and paste in the next available row.
I have tried to below code, but currently all it does is replace the current line in Sheet2 (the destination), it does not add it to the next available row.
Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range)

    Dim KeyCells As Range

    ' The variable KeyCells contains the cells that will
    ' cause an alert when they are changed.
    Set KeyCells = Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("A4:Q4")

    If Not Application.Intersect(KeyCells, Range(Target.Address)) _
       Is Nothing Then

        ' Display a message when one of the designated cells has been
        ' changed.
        ' Place your code here.
        ' MsgBox "Cell " & Target.Address & " has changed."

        'find next free cell in destination sheet
        Dim NextFreeCell As Range
        Set NextFreeCell = ThisWorkbook.Worksheets("Sheet2").Cells(Rows.Count, "A").End(xlUp).Offset(1)

        'copy & paste. Yes, I also want R4 to copy over
        Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("A4:R4").Copy
        NextFreeCell.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlValues, Operation:=xlNone, SkipBlanks:=False

    End If

End Sub

I effectively just want to end up with a log of all the changes into sheet2, copying the range to next available empty row as changes happen. It would be nice to have this assigned to a button where one click would start the logger and another click would stop it, rather than just automatically starting when the workbook is open, but the way it is now is ok too.
Thanks!!
UPDATE:
I've tried adapting to use this code instead, but it's still not adding a new row to Sheet2:
    Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range)

    Dim KeyCells As Range

    ' The variable KeyCells contains the cells that will
    ' cause an alert when they are changed.
    Set KeyCells = Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("A4:Q4")

    If Not Application.Intersect(KeyCells, Range(Target.Address)) _
           Is Nothing Then

    Dim NextRow As Range
    Set NextRow = Range("A" & Sheets("Sheet2").UsedRange.Rows.Count + 1)
    Sheet1.Range("A4:R4").Copy
    Sheet2.Activate
    NextRow.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlValues, Transpose:=False
    Application.CutCopyMode = False
    Set NextRow = Nothing

    End If

End Sub

It's just not offsetting properly in Sheet2! Ah!

A: You need to place your NextRow inside a With statement to ensure you get the correct row count.
Sheet1.Range("A4:R4").Copy

With Sheets("Sheet2")
Dim NextRow As Range
Set NextRow = .Range("A" &  .UsedRange.Rows.Count + 1)

    NextRow.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlValues, Transpose:=False

Application.CutCopyMode = False
End With


text:
Premiere photos
More photos from the Venice Film Festival premiere of The Informant! are from People, Socialite Life, Gossip Girls and Perfil. The caption is from People.
Matt Damon and wife Luciana (in custom Burberry) are the picture of old Hollywood glamour Monday while walking the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival premiere of Damon's latest movie, The Informant! While he looked svelte, the actor told reporters he needed to pack on 30 lbs. for the role.
Esquire cover, interviews
Matt is on the cover of the October issue of Esquire magazine. The cover is below, from Ohlalamag and the title is: Matt Damon. Why is this man smiling? The follow-up line inside the magazine reads as follows: Matt Damon: The Celebrity Shall Save You. Matt wants to rescue the third world with a smile, a bulk e-mail list, and a wad of cash. Are you rolling your eyes yet?
Matt provided an update on Bourne 4 and Green Zone to Empire online:
"Maybe, if we can figure out a good story. If you have a good fourth Bourne story, call Universal and they'll give you a bunch of money!"
Is there pressure to do another one?
"Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because even if we made a horrible movie, it would make money, and they know that. There's a huge amount of pressure."
On Green Zone, Damon and Paul Greengrass' Iraq drama, the star said, "It's great, I've seen it. They're finishing some of the effects, and it'll be ready for March. We got a $100m Iraq movie, so we'll see! I do have high hopes for it, though. I think it's really good. I know the Iraq movies haven't been particularly popular so far, but hopefully this will find an audience. It's a thriller, really, set against the canvas of Iraq in 2003."
Small photos of Matt and Lucy leaving Venice by water taxi on Tuesday are at Film Magic.
Back in New York, Matt was interviewed by Canada's Q radio show. A summary of the interview and the audio clip is at the CBC Q site. Matt discussed how The Informant! is a small $20 million movie, and they're not hoping for a home run, but maybe a single or double.
On Mark Whitacre
"He did some things that were extraordinarily brave and he wore a wire for 2½ years and uncovered this huge price-fixing scandal — this international price-fixing scandal — where these huge companies were ripping people off all over the world and he changed a lot of laws because of what he did … but at the same time he did some morally indefensible things."
He calls The Informant! reminiscent of 1970s films, because Soderbergh had a free hand in creating it. Unlike big Hollywood films with a $100-million budget US, it was made without studio interference, he said.
"We made it for $20 million US and that meant we were left alone creatively and Steven was able to do what he wanted to do," Damon said.
"I hope it finds an audience. I'm of a mind that if you have a good screenplay and a great director you'll have a good movie, and people will find a good movie."
Steven Soderbergh discussed the movie and plans for Liberace at Canada.com:
"Matt really understood what his job was," notes Soderbergh, who shot the modest $22-million project in just 37 days. "I think there were only one or two times where I had to tell him, 'Don't forget where this guy lives in his head.' He understood what world we were creating."
During a court-sentencing scene, in particular, Soderbergh remembers telling Damon this little tidbit: "I said to Matt, 'This is the Oscar acceptance-speech moment.' We realized by then that Whitacre's always happy to be the centre of attention, regardless of the circumstances."
"We should be ready for next summer," he says of the Liberace filming. "It's going to be tricky, because we have a certain amount of money for re-staging the elaborate shows. But I think Michael Douglas is going to crush it."
Readers can submit questions for Matt (and vote for which questions should be asked) at this Digg dialogg.
Matt discusses the death of Heath Ledger and how he's working fewer hours per day with a young family in this interview from a Uraguay newspaper.
Video footage from Venice is at these sites: here, Marie Claire and YouTube. More good photos from the premiere are at Jezebel.
There's a great headline and caption with a Matt link at Gawker.
Randomly, Matt and family were sighted recently on vacation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, according to this report.


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text:
Фюрстенберг () — коммуна в Германии, в земле Нижняя Саксония.

Входит в состав района Хольцминден. Подчиняется управлению Боффцен. Население составляет 1198 человек (на 31 декабря 2010 года). Занимает площадь 3,22 км². Официальный код — 03 2 55 014.

Известен, главным образом, основанной здесь в 1747 году фарфоровой мануфактурой ().

Примечания

Ссылки
 Официальная страница

Города Нижней Саксонии

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text:
Satellite Campuses
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Contact The Alestle
Edwardsville, IL (62025)
Cloudy. Low 23F. Winds light and variable..
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BREAKING: SIUE student shot during off-campus shooting, four suspects now in custody
An SIUE e-Lert stated the fourth and final suspect in a shooting of a male SIUE student that occurred Thursday night is now in custody.
BREAKING: Two suspects charged after shooting of SIUE student
BRIEF: Illinois General Assembly passes a bill that would put forth a new standard for police, criminal justice in Illinois
Extra, extra! The Alestle is hiring for Spring 2021!
BRIEF: SIUE announces new COVID Dashboard and spring procedures
BRIEF: SIUE students have limited time to meet re-entry COVID-19 testing requirements
One second makes all the difference for basketball
The Cougars suffered a narrow loss against the Omaha Mavericks on Saturday. Throughout the game, there were many points where the Cougars seem…
Through an Athlete's Eye: Soon we'll be playing through the pandemic
BRIEF: Women's basketball takes first loss of season
BRIEF: Men's basketball gains second win of season
Basketball returns: Both men's and women's teams heated up non-conference play over break.
Focus on at-home fitness remains, even as weather cools
'The look of wonder in kids' eyes:' Safe ways to meet Santa this holiday season
Students and community members attempt to keep nursing homes hopeful
CEO of MindsEye, along with several staff members, credits SIUE for success
Cougars for Changing Campus Culture wants to help students fight oppression
'It's a risky business': Local restaurants battle restrictions and winter weather
ALESTLE VIEW: Wealthy countries should not be pushing intellectual property rights on the COVID-19 vaccine
Please note: This staff editorial reflects the views of the large majority of The Alestle staff, not of each individual staff member.
OPINION: Taco Bell isn't the same without potatoes
ALESTLE VIEW: Thanksgiving "break" was more illusive than ever, serving only as a reminder of the struggles to come
OPINION: Anarchists are cool and you should be one
ALESTLE VIEW: The greatest gift of Thanksgiving would be getting rid of the holiday altogether
OPINION: Small businesses aren't immune from the ills of capitalism
Comic Book Corner: Where Do I Start
2018 has been a fantastic year for comics and it is a great time to start reading. New readers have new places to jump in and it's the easiest…
Fight night: Mayweather vs. McGregor
Discovery of first pair of orbiting supermassive black holes sets scientists' souls alight
Discovery of the smallest star yet measured breaks new earth in the world of astronomy
A 20-foot creature, with 50 teeth weighing over 1,000 pounds doesn't stand a chance against the real monster: humans
The moon rock blocks the sun: Solar eclipse to pass US Aug. 21
Senior industrial engineering major Tiana Sherman of Washington, Illinois starts the race in SIUE's human powered vehicle.
Photo courtesy of Tiana Sherman
SIUE Industrial Engineer has promising future thanks to past accomplishments
Reporter Matt Bartels
After creating a Human Powered Vehicle and racing it in Michigan back in 2019, senior Tiana Sherman looks to have a successful future ahead of her.
Sherman is an industrial engineering major from Washington, Illinois. Back in 2019, Sherman was a part of the SIUE engineering team which qualified to compete in an event held by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Schools from around the world brought their HPVs to compete.
"You go to these competitions, you travel to Michigan State, and compete against other big named schools. There is a school from Egypt that comes, there's a school from Canada. We get to compete against really well-established universities," Sherman said.
Sherman and her team placed among the best in the nation at the HPV event, finishing 11th out of the 50 teams. Sherman said she is a very competitive person and even though they didn't get first, it was exciting to be a part of the competition.
"I'm a very competitive person so it's exciting to go and compete against schools that have a lot of resources and a lot of talent, and then watch SIUE do better than a lot of them," Sherman said.
Professor Michael Denn is a mechanical engineering professor for SIUE. He said when Sherman joined the engineering team to work on the human powered vehicle, they didn't recruit her to the project. She showed up with a lot of enthusiasm and therefore joined the team. When they came back from Michigan, everyone was very impressed with her work ethic and her drive.
"She's really great for the team because she's got a real positive attitude. I think she was a large part of their success," Denn said.
According to Denn, Sherman was also a very gifted student, always getting involved in the class and asking questions.
"She is a very good student. I only had her in one class but she was quite accomplished in what she was doing and I always liked having her in my class," Denn said. "She asked a lot of questions and was really interested in understanding the material, not just knowing it on the surface."
Denn said every one of these organizations has a core group of students, around four or five, who are the ones that really make things like the HPV happen. Sherman is one of those students for SIUE.
"[Sherman] right away went into being part of those core students, she took it on and said 'I'll do it'," Denn said. "Not much earlier, she wasn't on the team and then all of the sudden she was on the team and she was sort of a central part of it."
Senior Thomas Giacobbe of Glen Carbon, Illinois has a similar experience with Sherman. He is majoring in mechanical engineering and has taken many classes with Sherman. He said he and Sherman have been good friends since their freshman year.
"We had a physics course together, and she sat in the middle of the class. She was very happy and bubbly all the time," Giacobbe said. "We found out that we had honors courses together, and she really liked to include everybody. She's very smart, and she was always at the top of the class."
In a friend group he and Sherman formed with classmates, Sherman was the one who helped everyone, Giacobbe said. They always tried working together and leaned on each other for help and advice. He said Sherman was one of the top students in the department, and she helped him throughout the classes they shared.
"She's a leader and a very talented individual, and there's no doubt in my mind that she'll be a rockstar in anything that she does," Giacobbe said.
Sherman said she recently accepted a job working at Caterpillar as a supply chain engineer. She said she will be in the division of inventory management and said she hopes to work her way up from there.
For more information on Sherman and her team's project, visit the SIUE website.
Tiana Sherman
Thomas Giacobbe
BRIEF: Grading modifications announced for Fall 2020
BREAKING: SIUE announces plans to enforce mandatory testing to start spring semester
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Amid public outrage over mishandling of money and sexual misconduct complaints in the Palo Alto Unified School District, the school board last night (Sept. 13) capped the amount of time community members can give public comment at board meetings.
The public will now be limited to a 30-minute window to comment, with a second, shorter public comment period at the end of the meeting for anyone who didn't get a chance to speak.
Other districts, including Gilroy, Berkeley and Long Beach have similar caps.
At its May 9 meeting, the board saw a whopping 37 speakers give public comment. Board member Todd Collins pointed out that the Los Altos School District limits its commenters to one minute when crunched for time.
The public will still be able to comment on agenda items with no time limit, however.
The change comes at a time when the board is under fire on two fronts. Parents were outraged to learn earlier this year that a Palo Alto High School student was allowed to return to school after he was convicted of sexual assault, and that administrators failed to launch a timely investigation into a second alleged assault by the youth in a Paly bathroom.
More recently, Superintendent Max McGee has been widely criticized after administrators failed to notify employee unions that they wished to reopen contract negotiations to rescind 3% across-the-board raises. The board had decided to cancel the raises as a budget-cutting move, but administrators failed to reopen the union contract by a March 15 deadline, meaning the raises, costing the district $4.4 million, automatically went into effect.
The board voted to change the default meeting end time from 10 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. and only allow for a one-time extension, which they reasoned would provide more clarity on the board's end time than re-extending it several times.
Board president Terry Godfrey said the board needed to build more time in for agenda items, noting that items frequently need to be postponed because the board can't get to everything in one evening.
The district will now also post a sign guiding community members on how to address the board and to encourage the community to submit comments via email.


1. Projects must be able to be completed in 12 weeks by a small team of students.
2. A device meeting the need should not be commercially available.
3. Students should interact with the individual(s) for whom they are designing. This normally means that clients will live in the Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) area.
4. Each project needs to have participation from a health care professional (e.g. OT, PT, SLP), teacher or work coach.


text:
Israeli Tank, Infantry, Air Force Attack Gaza Bt DEBKAfile & The Times of Israel
Israel's military spokesman reports that Israel responded to the murder of an Israeli civilian, Saleh Abu Tayyel, Tuesday by a Palestinian sniper with tank and infantry raids and air strikes on three terrorist targets in the Gaza Strip.
According to Israel Radio, the IAF destroyed a Hamas military training facility west of the Khan Yunis refugee camp. The report added that Hamas targets in the Gaza neighborhood of Zaytoun and the Al-Bureij camp were damaged by the IAF as well. IDF tanks also fired shells at what it said were terror targets in the Gaza neighborhoods of Zaytoun, Shuja'iyya and the al-Bureij refugee camp.
Military sources said that the airstrikes are "limited in scope" and "are not ongoing." Aside from a directive given to farmers to avoid the fields in direct proximity to the border, the IDF Home Front Command has issued no further orders to civilians in the area.
According to Palestinian sources in the Strip, two people — a 3-year-old child named Hala Sabiha and her father — were killed during the Israeli strikes, and nine were injured. The father and daughter were killed during an airstrike on a target located in the central Gaza Strip refugee camp of Deir al-Balah, according to Palestinian Ma'an News agency. No casualties were reported as a result of the strike near Khan Yunis.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri condemned the IDF strikes in Gaza, calling them a "cowardly crime." The attacks, Abu Zuhri said, did not "deter Palestinian resistance fighters from carrying out their duty." The IDF had no immediate comment on the report of Palestinian fatalities.
Shortly before the air force strikes, the Hamas leadership ordered the evacuation of all security personal from their posts in Gaza for fear of an imminent Israeli attack. "Earlier today a Gaza sniper killed an Israeli civilian by firing a single bullet at his chest," said the IDF spokesperson's office in a statement. "The individual was shot while doing maintenance along the Israel-Gaza security fence in the northern Gaza Strip. This is the first Israeli civilian killed in the vicinity of the Gaza Strip since Operation Pillar of Defense" last year.
"In response, IAF aircrafts and IDF tanks and infantry retaliated and targeted terror sites in the Gaza Strip. The sites targeted were a weapon manufacturing facility and a terror infrastructure in the southern Gaza Strip, a terror site and another terror infrastructure in the central Gaza Strip, and a concealed rocket launcher in the northern Gaza Strip. Direct hits were confirmed."
The Israeli who was killed, 22-year-old Saleh Abu Tayyel from the predominantly Bedouin city of Rahat, was working between Nahal Oz and Kfar Aza as a civilian employed by the Israeli Defense Ministry on repairs to a section of the Israel-Gaza border fence damaged in last week's storm. The fence had collapsed in three locations due to the storm.
Following the sniper attack, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stressed that Israel will not stand silent in face of any assault on its citizen population. "This is a very serious incident," Netanyahu said shortly after the attack. "Our policy has been to foil terror attempts ahead of time and respond forcefully, and that's how we will act in this case as well," he said.
"We will not allow for daily life to be disrupted in the South," said Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, "and will respond aggressively and painfully to any threat that may compromise our sovereignty and harm our citizens and soldiers. I suggest that Hamas not test our patience, and assert its authority in the region. If there will be no peace in Israel, there will be no peace in Gaza. There is no direct connection between the terrorist attacks of the past two days and the shooting at the border of the Gaza Strip, which resulted in the death of an Israeli worker, but we treat all such incidents very seriously," Ya'alon added.
Only a few hours before the killing of the Israeli civilian, the prime minister commented on the recent increase of rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, and vowed to put an end to such attacks. "We will not allow intermittent missile fire to turn into a storm," he said.
Two hours after the shooting, Gazan authorities reported that an 18-year-old Palestinian man was moderately wounded from IDF fire east of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip. The young man was reportedly evacuated to the hospital. It was not immediately clear if IDF troops were operating in the area, which is located a few kilometers from the site of the sniper shooting. The IDF deployed additional forces to the Gaza border area after the shooting.
Israeli sources say Hamas has pointedly neglected its duties under agreements reached following last year's Operation Pillar of Defense, according to which Hamas was responsible for patrolling the Gazan side of the border and preventing attacks on Israel from the Strip.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Shmuel Zakai, former head of IDF's Gaza Division, told Israel Radio shortly after the shooting that there was "clearly an escalation of terror incidents" in recent weeks. Nevertheless, he said, "Israel must continue along the delicate path that intercepts the terror activity with good intelligence and precision operations, not with a response that is overly aggressive and could lead to a further escalation in the area."
On Monday, troops fired on a Palestinian man near the northern border of the Gaza Strip. According to the IDF Spokesperson, the Palestinian was spotted placing an explosive device near the border fence. Israeli soldiers fired at his lower extremities. The 20-year-old man suffered moderate gunshot wounds to the leg and abdomen, the Palestinian Ma'an News reported.
There have reportedly been several attempts to place explosives on the border fence in the past several days. Earlier in the day Monday, Gazans fired a rocket that landed near a children's bus stop in the Ashkelon area. The IDF said it would not change plans to ease restrictions on Palestinian Christians in the West Bank and Gaza for the Christmas holiday.
In the past two months, 4 Israeli soldiers have been killed and 15 attacks conducted against security personnel and civilians, including 6 stabbings. In the course of 2013, Palestinians perpetrated a total of 150 acts of terror - an average of one every two days.
US Citizens in Israel Warned Not to Use Public Transport
By DEBKAfile and YnetNews.com
The US embassy in Tel Aviv issued an advisory to Americans Tuesday to refrain from using buses and taxis in Israel in the wake of the surge of Palestinian terror. The warning is in force for two weeks. This week, casualties were narrowly avoided when a bomb blew up on a Bat Yam bus which the driver had evacuated in the nick of time.
The embassy also ordered that US citizen employees of the embassy and their families are temporarily prohibited from using mini-bus shared taxi services (sheroots) in central Israel. The temporary prohibition is in effect for the next two weeks as the embassy will assess the security implications of the December 22 bomb attack on a public bus in Bat Yam.
"US citizens are encouraged to exercise caution and take appropriate measures to ensure their safety and security," the announcement read. US citizens should pay close attention to their surroundings and news reports, and follow the civil defense guidance provided by the Home Front Command."
The driver of Dan line 240 received a certificate of recognition from the city of Bnei Brak for his role in preventing loss of life in Sunday's bombing. "We wish that everyone should be so happy like him to save people whenever they can," the mayor said. The driver of the bus had spotted an unattended bag on board, stopped the vehicle and ordered passengers to disembark. The explosion occurred shortly after.
Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino said that he has sent out more troops to the streets due to the recent terror attacks. "The event in Bat Yam shows how the threat of terror is lingering in the background, specifically now that there are attempts to press on with negotiations."
Magen David Adom Tells Straight Man He Can't Give Blood Because He's Gay
Israel's rescue service Magen David Adom has turned down a blood donation from a man in Haifa, telling him it was because he is registered on their computers as gay. And while Dekel Hasid, 30, says there is nothing wrong with being gay, he is actually straight - and even married.
Hasid is used to giving blood on a regular basis, without any difficulties, but the decision to register him as a homosexual man means that he is placed in an at-risk group, and therefore his blood is not wanted.
"I give blood every few months, and until now there has never been a problem," Hasid told Ynet on Tuesday. "Yesterday I went to the donation center in Haifa and suddenly I was told that there was a note on the computer and (the staffer) would have to clarify the issue. She came back and told me that they couldn't take my blood. I tried to tell her that I was straight, and had never had sex with another man, but it didn't help. She refused to take my blood."
According to Magen David Adom, gay men in Israel cannot give blood. If they do decide to donate, their blood is not used to save lives, but is either disposed of or used in research. There have been several debates on this policy recently, but both the Health Ministry and MDA have decided to continue with the ban.
"There is nothing wrong with being gay, but I am straight and have never slept with a man," Hasid said. "I have been married to a woman for a decade, and have never said or written down that I have had sex with a man. I don't know what made them decide to do this, be it my walk, way of speaking or the fact that I had a gay friend with me the last time I donated blood. but they decided of their own accord to mark me down as gay."
Magen David Adom declined answer to a question on how they label the sexuality of blood donors. The director of Magen David Adom Blood Service, Prof. Ayelet Shenar, told Ynet that the questionnaire given to donors includes a list of all the groups whose members are disqualified from giving blood for transfusions, without giving a specific reason. She said that Hasid's case would be investigated.
Earlier this month, Israel's Ethiopian community was outraged when Knesset Member Pnina Tamano-Shata was refused a blood donation on the grounds she had a "special kind of Jewish-Ethiopian blood." Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told Tamano-Shata at the time that he would look into the incident.
161,000 Christians Live in Israel
Data from the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) published Tuesday in light of Christmas indicate that some 161,000 Christians are living in Israel. The data show that 79.8% of them are Christian Arabs and the rest are either Christians that immigrated with their families from the former Soviet Union, or citizens from foreign countries.
According to the report, 84% of Christian Arabs live in northern Israel, including Haifa, and 9.5% reside in the Jerusalem district. The non-Christian Arabs are scattered among various provinces in the country. Approximately 38.8% live in the Tel Aviv district and its neighboring cities, and 34.4% reside in northern Israel and in Haifa.
The Israeli cities with the largest Christian populations are Nazareth (22,400), Haifa (14,600), Jerusalem (11,900) and Shfaram (9,600). The largest communities of non-Arab Christians are concentrated in three major cities – Haifa with 3,400 Christians, Tel Aviv with 3,100 and Jerusalem with 2,900.
The percentage of children and teenagers under the age of 19 is 29.6 %, slightly lower than Jews and much lower than that of the Muslims. Conversely, 10.3% of Christians living in Israel are aged 65 and older, compared with 12.2% among Jews and 3.6% among Muslims.
The data also show that the Christian population in Israel is in no rush to get married. The median age for first marriage of Christian grooms was 28.9 – a year older than Jewish and Druze grooms, and three years older than Muslim grooms.
In contrast, the median age of Christian brides was 24.4 – a year and a half younger than Jewish brides, two year older than Druze brides and three years older than Muslim brides. A Christian woman will bear 2.2 children during her lifetime, the bureau reported. As of now, this figure is the lowest among the various religious groups in the State.
Reports over the years gathering data on education show that the Christian Arabs have the highest rates of success in matriculation exams, both in comparison to the Muslim and the Druze, and in comparison to all students in the Jewish education system.


The Free Library of Northampton Township and the Newtown Bookshop are honored to be hosting Jennifer Hansen Rolli for a Story Time and Crafts on August 29th at 7pm! Jennifer will featuring "How to Trick a Tooth Fairy" by Erin Danielle Russell and illustrated by Jennifer. She will also read "Just One More", along with meeting and greeting guests and signing her new book "How to Trick a Tooth Fairy". Free Event! Come and join the Fun!!
Erin Russell has been writing stories since she learned how to spell. When she grew up, she became co-author of the New York Times Bestselling Book Series, the Dork Diaries. She currently lives in Virginia with her husband, Jacob, and her spunky teddy bear, Stanley. When Erin's not writing or daydreaming, she likes to cook, travel, play video games, and watch cartoons.
But is she the Princess of Pranks? No!
A small girl with a passion for nature turns to her new passion for art as the seasons turn colder.
Claudia loves butterflies. Blue ones. Yellow ones. Purple ones with dots. And since she can't take them home, she paints them in all their beautiful colors.


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Hostile Environment
Circuit Magazine
For Security & Protection Specialists
You are here: Home / Archives / Hostile Environment Surveillance Operations
Hostile Environment Surveillance Operations
A look at Hostile Environment Surveillance Operations
As a result of the privatization of Iraq in 2003 and the dramatic growth of private security operations in politically unstable and hostile environments, close protection professionals are finding themselves working in increasingly diverse environments that require highly specialized skills and training. One of those specializations is Hostile Environment Surveillance Operations (HESO).
This article will discuss the primary types of hostile environment surveillance operations and their application to the layered security of the protection detail as well as the specialized training needed by operatives wishing to conduct this type of work.
Let's start by identifying what a hostile environment is. For our purposes an environment may be considered hostile because of high crime rates like Mexico and South America or due to civil unrest like in the cases of Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria, Egypt and Libya during the Arab Spring or Nigeria. Additional hostile environments include areas that are dramatically underdeveloped and lack critical infrastructure such as east Africa or India.
The primary goal of Hostile Environment Surveillance Operations (HESO) is to successfully detect and gather intelligence on hostile third party activities which pose a security threat, in aid of preventing an attack. There are four primary types of HESO's: Protective surveillance (PS), surveillance detection (SD), counter surveillance (CS) and close target reconnaissance (CTR). Each of these involves the use of the fundamental principles of physical surveillance and plays a critical role to the support of the protection detail.
Protective surveillance is the covert use of a team of highly trained and experienced operatives to form a protective ring around the principal. The protective surveillance team's (PST) primary goals are is to occupy or control areas that could be used by a hostile surveillance team (HST) to plan or assist in an attack on the principal. The PST will identify hostile surveillance, gather protective intelligence and if necessary serve as a quick reaction force (QRF) to assist defending an attack on the principal. If hostile surveillance is detected, the PST will notify the close protection team of the threat so that the principal can be discreetly removed to a safe environment. As mentioned earlier, in worst case scenarios the PST will act as a quick reaction force (QRF) which is why it is essential that all members of the PST have advanced specialized training in close protection, close quarter battle, anti ambush and anti kidnapping.
History has taught us that terrorist attacks follow a distinct process known as the Terrorist Attack Cycle which includes target selection, planning, deployment, escape and exploitation. Regardless of the type of attack there will almost always be some type of preoperational hostile surveillance conducted. The hostile surveillance is intended to assess the value of the target, security measures and vulnerabilities and escape routes. Surveillance Detection (SD) has become critical to successful hostile environment operations because it gives us the ability to prevent or defeat an attack by detecting hostile or suspicious activity early in the target selection and planning phase. The surveillance detection team (SDT) will develop a surveillance detection plan that includes identifying suitable observation points that provide optimal views of critical locations that hostile surveillance would want to observe during the planning phase. The SDT will conduct surveillance of these critical locations to identify people or vehicles that look out of place or have suspicious patterns and exhibit poor surveillance demeanor. In addition, the SDT will conduct pattern and route analysis to determine where the target is most predictable and vulnerable during travel. Surveillance detection works because it allows the HST to feel confident operating in the open because they have no idea anyone is watching them. If the intelligence collected by the SDT warrants further investigation, then an appropriate counter-surveillance (CS) operation can be designed to exploit or capture the hostile surveillance. It is critical that the SDT's role does not cross over into CS as this risks compromising future CS operations by chasing the HST into hiding.
Counter Surveillance (CS) is conducted by a third party or counter surveillance team (CST) to exploit and neutralize hostile surveillance. Essentially, counter surveillance is an operational measure taken once hostile surveillance has been identified. The CST then conducts surveillance of the HST to gather intelligence that can be used to manipulate, exploit or apprehend the hostile surveillance. Counter surveillance is normally conducted by intelligence agencies and the military but in today's global environment more and more security contractors are becoming involved in CS operations. It should be noted that some sophisticated attackers may use CS as a countermeasure against surveillance detection to increase their operational security.
Close Target Reconnaissance (CTR) is the covert collection of detailed intelligence against a target location to assist in operation planning and success. Potential CTR targets include a variety of residential and commercial structures and CTR is designed to develop tactics, techniques and procedures that identify, assess and exploit each structure's vulnerabilities. The skills here are different than the other HESO areas. CTR teams are versed in environmental and terrain analysis, tactical tracking operations, covert patrol methods, planning and risk assessment, facility vulnerability assessment, defeating active and passive security, external security threat / risk mitigation, covert entry, active and passive security sensor mitigation, human security vulnerability analysis, defeat and or exploitation. CTR is most often used in support of military, intelligence and hostage rescue operations.
Regardless of what HESO area you may wish to specialize in there is some core specialized training that all HESO operatives should have. Each HESO operative should have completed advanced level training in covert physical surveillance and have extensive experience planning and conducting a wide range of covert surveillance operations against a variety of targets. In addition, to allow the HESO operative to operate relatively safely in the hostile environment they should have specialized training in night surveillance operations, advanced operational security and planning, threat assessment, analysis and target identification, terrorist / security threat groups operating in their region, terrorist and hostile surveillance tradecraft, firearms training to include pistol, rifle, shotgun and foreign weapons of the region, advanced hostile environment close protection operations (HECPO), advanced counter ambush and counter kidnapping, detecting car bombs, VBIED's and IED's, detecting suicide bombers, tactical combat casualty care and defensive counter sniper operations.
As you can see hostile environment surveillance operations play a critical role in successful hostile environment protection operations and it's definitely not for the newbie. To be successful the operative needs extensive experience, comprehensive training and the ability to blend in to their environment.
By: Jeff Burns
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Industry News October 2020
We cast our eye over the main stories impacting the security industry. Here's what's appeared on the radar since the last issue.
We cast our eye over the main stories impacting the security industry, including, Kanye West's former bodyguard is calling the rapper a "bully" and is threatening to sue for damages after West accused him of breaking a confidentiality agreement.
Security Industry Association Announces New SIA Women in Security Scholarship Opportunity
"The SIA Women in Security Forum works to grow and retain leaders in the security industry," said Gloria Salmeron, director of human resources at Brivo and co-chair of the scholarship committee. "With the addition of this new scholarship, we look forward to helping bring opportunities for further education and advancement to as wide a spectrum of people as possible and inviting individuals to participate in the Women in Security Forum."
Insecure Smart Houses
They are only of limited relevance today, but as the technologies involved become more widespread and implemented into every facet of life they will only become more prevalent. While it sounds like the stuff of science fiction, these threats exist now and are not going to go away.
For simplicity, we'll say that a 'smart' device is anything which connects to the internet (or a network) and is not intended to be a computer interface. Intended is the key word there, as many of these devices are insecure for the simple reason that they are a computer. The problem is that it is now cheaper and easier to put a general purpose computer into a device and run some software to, for example, turn lights on and off than it is to design a single-purpose lightbulb which also connects to a network.
Turning Habitual Habits into a Positive
Being an instructor for Tony Scotti's Vehicle Dynamics Institute has forwarded the opportunity to observe how a large section of professionals interact and function from different niches of the industry. Military, transnational EP teams, US based teams, Federal LEO's or with civilians this theme shows through. Even in the larger training arena the change can be seen as more of the schools are starting to focus on classes or blocks of instruction such as client management and behavioral analysis. The discussion forms are flooded with conversations relating to how to work in a team dynamic. It doesn't matter if its a 28 day school or a three day school, they will be touching on and teaching these topics.
What is Executive Protection?
In the past, I viewed Executive Protection (EP) as persons who provided corporate level protection. This was the guy who only walked with the CEO, politician, or other important corporate executives and dignitaries. With my limited understanding, I didn't think of those who drive these same individuals as being considered Executive Protection agents as well. As an EP specialist, I now understand and have experienced some of the vast role's EP work will encompass.
Global Situation Report October, 2020
Having informed insight in today's increasingly complex international environment is more important than ever. That's why we've partnered with Stratfor, the worlds leading geopolitical intelligence platform, to bring readers regular analysis and accurate forecasting of global trends from someone you can trust.
Afghanistan armed attack Bodyguard Bodyguarding Celebrity client Close Protection Close Protection Officer Elijah Shaw Executive Executive Protection fight firearm gun Intelligence Iraq Law Enforcement Medical military News online police Prevention professional protect protection PTSD Risk Risk Assessment Risk Management Safety Security Security Incidents Security Industry Authority SIA Social Media Surveillance terror Terrorism terrorist Threat train Training VIP
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A View of Cyber Risk Security
Shield Ltd CEO, Alexandru Zamfir shares his thoughts on Cyber Security and advancements within the field.The "Edge of … >>>
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Trash rates to increase as Kimble becomes new hauler
Council agreed to sign a contract with Kimble for trash pickup services, which will see the addition of 95-gallon carts.
Trash rates to increase as Kimble becomes new hauler Council agreed to sign a contract with Kimble for trash pickup services, which will see the addition of 95-gallon carts. Check out this story on coshoctontribune.com: http://ohne.ws/1prAnJk
Eric Lagatta, Reporter Published 9:09 p.m. ET March 17, 2016
COSHOCTON - City Council members voted Thursday to move forward on a trash-hauling contract with Dover-based Kimble Companies, even after a number of residents voiced opposition to switching from current provider Waste Management of Ohio.
Although the council was scheduled to vote on a contract at Monday's regularly scheduled meeting, that vote was delayed after residents packed the chambers to complain about the higher rates and a 95-gallon receptacle that would accompany a shift to Kimble.
City officials instead hosted a public meeting Thursday night to discuss the options before proceeding to a vote.
Now that the resolution has passed, Kimble will provide trash pickup services to the city after Coshocton's contract with Waste Management expires at the end of the month.
"We're excited to be back in the city of Coshocton providing service," said Scott Walter, the director of business development at Kimble, which operates in 25 counties across Ohio.
Under the new contract, residents will see a slight increase in their monthly trash bills, specifically $2.76, City Service Director Jerry Stenner previously told the Tribune. Trash costs still will be included in residents' monthly utility bills, which include water, sewer, storm water services and debt reduction.
Rates also would have increased by $1.71 had the council gone with Waste Management's bid, Stenner said at the meeting.
That means the change in provider and increase in services is just $1.05 more a month than what Waste Management was offering to continue services as it, Kimble officials said.
Kimble also will provide customers with 95-gallon wheeled carts, although residents — specifically, senior citizens and people with physical disabilities — can request a 65-gallon cart. The carts allow for workers to use an automated truck to pick up trash.
It's a change from how residents have disposed of their trash for years. Many provide their own containers or only set out the trash bags for workers to gather manually.
"We've already had the experience of converting many communities to this cart system," Walter said. "They're very convenient and very easy to use."
Residents still have the option of using their own cans or just placing their trash bags on the curb if they dislike Kimble's receptacle, Walter said at the meeting. They would still pay the same rate as those who do opt to use Kimble's carts.
The city had requested two bids from Waste Management and Kimble: One on the basic service and also one on an automated service with wheeled totes. Both options included weekly recycling in 18-gallon bins.
Waste Management submitted the lowest of two bids to continue that service for three years with a fourth-year option. However, its bid was slightly higher than Kimble for an option that provides the carts.
Waste Management bid $14.09 a month with a fourth-year option of $14.51 per month on the basic service. Kimble bid $14.30 monthly, with a fourth-year price of $15.16 monthly.
Kimble submitted the lowest bid for the automated service at $15.14 monthly for the first three years and $16.05 monthly for the optional fourth year. Waste Management bid $15.60 and $16.07.
Council members had voted last week during a workshop to consider contracting with Kimble under the automated plan. They reasoned that having bins would reduce the chance that trash would spill out onto the streets and would prevent animals from scavenging for food.
This week, the council's housing committee recommended that members proceed with contracting with Kimble under the automated service. Although the automated service is more expensive than the basic service residents are accustomed to, city officials say the benefits outweigh the costs, as the desire is to promote a cleaner city.
"Let's look beyond this and what we're trying to do in the bigger scheme of things," Council President Cliff Biggers told residents before the vote.
Fourth Ward Councilman Brad Fuller pointed out that council members specifically asked the recycling and refuse companies to submit a bid on the automated service.
"Your council is on the right track here," he said.
Now that it is officially approved, the plan will see residents' monthly trash bills increase from $12.38 to $15.14 a month for three years. The city has the option to raise the price to $16.05 in the fourth year.
The last contract was signed in 2012, when Big "O" Refuse won on a bid that reduced the monthly bill by $3.50, according to Tribune news reports. Waste Management bought Big "O" last April, taking over the city's trash hauling services for the fourth year of that contract.
COSHOCTON TRIBUNE
Council considering new trash service
Council pushes trash rate decision to Thursday
Reporter Joe Williams contributed to this article.
elagatta@gannett.com
Twitter: @EricLagatta
Read or Share this story: http://ohne.ws/1prAnJk
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POLITICO Discovers Trump-Supporting Tejanos on the Border
Allan Wall
Earlier, 2005: Conversations With Tejanos, by Juan Mann
Politico ran an interesting article, published November 17, entitled Trump Didn't Win the Latino Vote in Texas. He Won the Tejano Vote. It's written by Jack Herrera [Tweet him] "an independent immigration reporter, an Ida B. Wells Fellow with Type Investigations and an elections correspondent at Prism."
It's an interesting article, about Trump's electoral success in three majority Hispanic border counties of Texas (Webb, Zapata and Starr).
Of all the results from the November 3 election, few drew as much attention from national political observers as what happened in a quiet county on the banks of the Rio Grande. Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Zapata County's vote in a hundred years. But it wasn't its turn from a deep-blue history that seemed to be the source of such fascination but rather that, according to the census, more than 94 percent of Zapata's population is Hispanic or Latino.
Zapata (population less than 15,000) was the only county in South Texas that flipped red, but it was by no means an anomaly: To the north, in more than 95-percent Hispanic Webb County, Republicans doubled their turnout. To the south, Starr County, which is more than 96-percent Hispanic, experienced the single biggest tilt right of any place in the country; Republicans gained by 55 percentage points compared with 2016. The results across a region that most politicos ignored in their preelection forecasts ended up helping to dash any hopes Democrats had of taking Texas.
The city of Laredo is the county seat of Webb County.
To many outsiders, these results were confounding: How could Trump, one of the most virulently anti-immigrant leaders, make inroads with so many Latinos, and along the Mexican border no less?
The rest of the article explains why.
In Zapata, however, these questions have been met with mild chuckles to outright frustration. The shift, residents and scholars of the region say, shouldn't be surprising if, instead of thinking in terms of ethnic identity, you consider the economic and cultural issues that are specific to the people who live there. Although the vast majority of people in these counties mark "Hispanic or Latino" on paper, very few long-term residents have ever used the word "Latino" to describe themselves. Ascribing Trump's success in South Texas to his campaign winning more of "the Latino vote" makes the same mistake as the Democrats did in this election: Treating Latinos as a monolith.
And the Latino population is not a monolith.
Ross Barrera, a retired U.S. Army colonel and chair of the Starr County Republican Party, put it this way: "It's the national media that uses 'Latino.' It bundles us up with Florida, Doral, Miami. But those places are different than South Texas, and South Texas is different than Los Angeles. Here, people don't say we're Mexican American. We say we're Tejanos."
Though not everyone in the Rio Grande Valley self-identifies as Tejano, the descriptor captures a distinct Latino community—culturally and politically—cultivated over centuries of both Mexican and Texan influences and geographic isolation. Nearly everyone speaks Spanish, but many regard themselves as red-blooded Americans above anything else. And exceedingly few identify as people of color. (Even while 94 percent of Zapata residents count their ethnicity as Hispanic/Latino on the census, 98 percent of the population marks their race as white.) Their Hispanicness is almost beside the point to their daily lives.
I served many years in a National Guard unit in a Texas border town. It was overwhelmingly Hispanic, and I would consider most of them as racially white. Many Guardsmen were in, or aspired to be in, the Border Patrol or Customs.
In the end, Trump's success in peeling off Latino votes in South Texas had everything to do with not talking to them as Latinos. His campaign spoke to them as Tejanos, who may be traditionally Democratic but have a set of specific concerns—among them, the oil and gas industry, gun rights and even abortion—amenable to the Republican Party's positions, and it resonated. To be sure, it didn't work with all of Texas' Latinos; Trump still lost that vote by more than double digits statewide, and Joe Biden won more of the nationwide Latino vote than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. But Trump proved that seeing specific communities as persuadable voters and offering targeted messaging to match—fear of socialism in Miami-Dade's Venezuelan and Cuban communities, for example—can be more effective than a blanket campaign that treats people as census categories. And in the end, it was enough to keep Florida and Texas in his column. If the Democratic Party's 2020 postmortem for Texas—indeed, for the whole nation—goes only as far as to try to increase their appeal to "Latinos" as an undifferentiated bloc, they're going to experience even harsher losses in the next election.
It's a rather long article, so let me just list factors listed that appear to explain why a high percentage of Tejanos in the region voted for Trump:
The importance of the oil and gas industry in the region.
Pre-Covid rise in employment.
Wariness of future Democratic shutdowns.
A general cultural conservatism.
A "Tejano ranch and small-town rural population".
A frontier legacy.
People like to hunt.
High rate of gun ownership.
"Deeply Catholic".
"Practically nonexistent" support for abortion.
"Support for law enforcement, the military and even Border Patrol is rock-solid."
"Many neither see themselves as immigrant or diverse."
What about Trump's rhetoric about illegal aliens?
While many Trump supporters in South Texas... have Mexican roots and say they can understand how the president's crude and derogatory language might seem divisive to some, few of them hear the president talking about them when he makes comments about Mexicans. "I think when people say they don't like Mexicans, to me it means a Mexican citizen, or a Mexican national, who has crossed illegally," says Barrera, the Starr County Republicans' chair. "And then again, not all Mexicans look alike. So when they say they don't like Mexicans, I don't think it means me. … It means a Mexican national who has broken the law."
Interesting point.
The article quotes Yvonne Trapp, Trump supporter, who said that "I see myself as just an American. Growing up, I never knew that Hispanics were another race, that we were brown. Everybody just put white—not that it matters. Our culture is one thing, but we were just Americans. "
She also said that "Today, the people coming over are not the kind of people who came before, like the braceros, who came to work, to educate their children, to better themselves. No, the people coming now are looking for handouts."
Leroy Cruz, who manages a car-detailing business out of his garage with a Trump flag close by, had some interesting things to say:
"Everything has been better under Trump"
"The oilfield is back up. There are more jobs, more work than ever. And yeah, I like [Trump's] attitude. I like the way he talks."
"I think people are starting to wake up and realize that the Democrats aren't good."
It's an interesting article.
One other factor that isn't explicitly pointed out is that people who live on the border are more likely to be aware of border problems. And these three counties are on the border.


Symeonidou, E., Olivari, M., Venrooij, J., Bülthoff, H., & Chuang, L. (2016). EEG oscillatory modulations (10-12 Hz) discriminate for voluntary motor control and limb movement. Poster presented at 46th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (Neuroscience 2016), San Diego, CA, USA.
Abstract: The oscillatory suppression of sensorimotor-mu power (i.e., 10-12 Hz) is a robust EEG correlate of motor control. Simply imagining voluntary limb movement can result in consistent suppression of mu-power, especially in contralateral electrode sites. This is typically exploited by neuroprostheses (e.g., BCI-controlled wheelchairs; Huang et al., 2012) that seek to restore movement to spinal-cord injury patients. In some examples, levels of mu-suppression have also been treated as an index of motor control effort (e.g., Mann et al., 1996). However, mu-suppression in contralateral sites can also be observed during passive limb movements, namely in the absence of voluntary control effort (Formaggio et al., 2013). In this study, we investigate whether patterns of oscillatory EEG activity across contralateral (C3) and ipsilateral (C4) sites discriminate for voluntary control and limb movement. In our study, EEG measurements were taken of ten participants who were required to either actively follow or resist the deflections of a control-loaded side-stick, this respectively required voluntary control in the presence and absence of limb movement. In contrast, they were also tested in conditions with passive or no limb movements, which respectively required them to simply hold on to a moving or stationary side-stick. A repeated-measures 2 x 2 x 2 ANOVA for the factors of electrode site (contralateral vs. ipsilateral), control (active vs. passive), and movement (movement vs stationary) revealed the following. To begin, there was a significant main effect of lateralized mu-suppression. Suppression of mu-power is larger in the contralateral site compared to the ipsilateral site (F(1,9)=5.10, p=0.05). More importantly, three significant interactions were found, movement x control (F(1,9)=13.1, p<0.01), electrode x movement (F(1,9)=5.78, p=0.04) and for electrode x control (F(1,9)=5.81, p=0.039). Limb movement resulted in selective mu-suppression of only the contralateral electrode. Voluntary control resulted in mu-suppression in both contralateral and ipsilateral electrodes, albeit to a lesser extent in the ipsilateral site. Overall, active resistance against side-stick deflections resulted in the largest levels of mu-suppression. The current results suggest that active voluntary resistance can result in high levels of mu-suppression that do not exhibit strong lateralization. This might go unnoticed in brain-computer-interface and experimental paradigms that estimate control effort by contrasting contralateral to ipsilateral mu-suppression.


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Originally comprising two houses, the subjects were converted and extended to hotel premises, however, are offered for sale for redevelopment back to residential use. The original building is of two storey construction fronting Main Street and has been extended to the rear to provide the current accommodation. The main extension is of two storey construction and there is a further single storey addition. To the rear of the premises is an area of ground which will provide shared car parking and gardens for the properties.
Potential to convert to two 3 bedroom houses and two 2 bedroom flats or similar configuration (subject to consent).
The Isle of Whithorn is a quaint and unspoilt harbour village situated on the Southern tip of the Machars peninsula within Dumfries & Galloway. The village and surrounding area attracts a high level of visitors with many places of interest and outdoor activities to include sailing, angling, walking, golf and cycling.
Newton Stewart is located approximately 22 miles to the North of the village, and lies on the A75 Gretna to Stranraer road route.
The extent of the subjects and the location of the village are shown on the undernoted plan.
The site extends to circa 0.16 acres or thereby.
The above areas are approximate and provided for information purposes only.
The subjects are offered for sale for development only and will not be sold for a continued licensed trade use.
Our client has had plans drawn up to convert the subjects into two 3 bed houses over ground and first floor levels within the original building and two 2 bed flats, one at ground level and one at first floor level, within the rear extension. Shared garden ground and parking will be provided to the rear. Copies of these plans are available upon request.
Enquiries in relation to any proposed redevelopment of the subjects should be undertaken directly with Dumfries & Galloway Council's Planning Department on 030 33 33 3000.
We are advised the subjects have the benefit of mains supplies of water and electricity and that drainage is connected to the public sewer.
Strictly by arrangement with the Joint Selling Agents, Messrs A B & A Matthews LLP on 01671 404100 or Messrs DM Hall on 0131 477 6000.
Offers in the region of £200,000.


text:
Missed Connection
Tegan O'Neil | March 9, 2020
Tess Smith-Roberts
Playtime Press
It took a few pages to decide where I stood on Tess Smith-Roberts' Missed Connection, but only a few. There's a rudimentary quality here that might present an obstacle for some readers, an intentional effect that masks a remarkable sense of design and composition. The book lives and breathes on the strength of pastel tones, no small feat.
This is essentially a storybook, albeit one with cuss words. It's about lonely people wandering around the city, surrounded by strangers despite their isolation. That's the crux of the problem: the protagonist for the first third of the book, Grace, is grasping for any kind of substantive connection. She sits at home and spends her time watching soap operas that fill the hours but little else. She goes out to a party, takes a ceramics class. It doesn't stick.
Eventually Grace meets Kitty. Kitty is more or less in the same boat. She can't find a job, can't find any luck with online dating. There's a page with Kitty sitting on the toilet scanning social media while asking herself "why is everything happening for everyone else?" Such a simple question to draw so much blood from the unwary reader! Is there a more modern sensation than the unique twinge of jealousy that accompanies close observation of other peoples' social media feeds? Even if you acknowledge on some level that other people's lives are just as desperate and stage managed as yours, the mere illusion that other people are actually managing to live their best lives in 2020 is enough to hurt like the twisting of a knife.
How dare they.
Grace and Kitty come together in the final third of the book. There's no friction, no "will they or won't they?" or missed connections. They meet-cute in the supermarket and agree to meet again. Sometimes it really is that simple. But the previous two sections assure us this is by no means standard operating procedure.
And that's the gut-punch waiting for the reader at the end of the book: this really is just a simple story about being lonely and depressed and finding a lover. The main conflict - the only conflict, really - is between the two protagonists and their respective loneliness. It's hard to be both hemmed in by the constant presence of other people and also bereft of anyone with whom you can ever truly relax. It leads a body to sickness from pining for peace. There's no conflict between the protagonists once they meet because that in itself is the most pure kind of fantasy imaginable to so many people in 2020: just to meet someone else you don't mind being in the same room with for an extended period of time. Someone with whom to share a lunch. Our lives are so often and so thoroughly not our own that the most banal and domestic pleasures seem at times more distant than the moon.
In 2008 Tom Spurgeon coined the term "decency fantasy" to describe a certain kind of narrative that hinges on the fantasy of pleasingly mundane domesticity. In hindsight this seems a prescient label. Stories that revolve primarily around people being reasonable and working together amicably to solve common goals seem positively transgressive in an era when almost everything else in our lives sinks further into the realm of the brittle and combative. Back in 2008 when Spurgeon coined the term low-stakes slice of life was a relatively small part of the comics ecosystem, but these kinds of stories seem to hit a nerve at this particular point in time. It's rough out here on these mean streets. People get thirsty for virtue.
Smith-Robert's pages are defined by flat planes of pleasing, hand filled color. Occasionally geometric motifs intrude, op art eruptions of tile floors across soft tones. This book made me realize that I didn't know how influential Paper Rad would be, in hindsight, but their mixture of Fort Thunder primitivism, riotous digital imagery, and a subtly classical design sense can be seen across a number of disparate artists. Missed Connection recalls some of these more combative experimental comics of the aughts, filtered through minor keys and dependent on a decidedly less aggressive palette but retaining a similar approach to narrative sequences built around collage and repetition. That we should live to see the disconsolate hybrid offspring of Kramer's Ergot and Hope Larson in one - an age of miracles.
Reviewed by Tegan O'Neil
Topics Playtime, Review, Tegan O'Neil, Tess Smith-Roberts
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text:
I went to jail for leaving my baby outside a restaurant
By Raquel Laneri
Liv (left) and Anette Sorensen in 2017. Maria Bergmann/Provided by Anette Sorensen.
Twenty years after going to jail for leaving her baby in a stroller outside a New York City restaurant, Anette Sørensen is ready to set the record straight.
Anette Sorensen in 1997.Don Halasy
In 2012, she published a novel based on the "traumatizing" experience, "A Worm in the Apple" in her native Denmark, and she has just launched a Kickstarter fund to get it translated into English.
"It's a way of getting back what I never got," said Sørensen, who feels she was treated unfairly by the city and the press and didn't get to tell her side of the story. "I would like [it] if I could just say what I think."
Reliving her experiences from May 1997 was not easy. The then-30-year-old aspiring actress had gotten pregnant while studying theater in New York City the previous year, and she had flown to the Big Apple from Copenhagen to introduce her 14-month-old, Liv, to the baby's Brooklyn-based father, a playwright named Exavier Wardlaw.
When she and Wardlaw decided to grab a drink at a Dallas BBQ in the East Village, she did what she would have done back home. She left little Liv outside sleeping in her stroller.
"I had lived in New York [during school], so, of course, I knew that I didn't see prams all over the city," said Sørensen. "But . . . I had been living in Copenhagen, I had given birth to my daughter in Copenhagen, I was raised myself in Denmark . . . That's just how you do it in Denmark."
Sørensen said it's a superior parenting style, showing what Danish people call "tillid": a deep trust that is an essential part of the culture.
"People live in fear [in the US]. Children are not allowed to play in the playground alone," said Sørensen, who now lives in Hamburg with her husband, Mike, and their two teenage children. (Liv, the baby at the center of the scandal, is now 21 years old and studying design in Copenhagen.)
"That's why it's important for me now to get [my book] into English, to show it's possible to live another way."
Sørensen claimed that she was sitting by the window at Dallas BBQ and keeping watch over Liv. Diners and servers at the restaurant told the press, including The New York Post, that the child had been crying, and that the couple had ignored the server's request to bring the baby inside, and continued drinking instead. Sørensen insisted that wasn't the case and said Liv was sleeping calmly until someone called 911 and the cops showed up.
'Of course, you should be allowed to put your child outside when you're sitting behind the window and you can see it.'
"The first time she woke up was when the officer took her out of the pram," she said.
Initially, the first two officers on the scene were going to let her leave with the baby. She went into the restaurant to quickly pay the bill, but then a third policeman arrived.
"I said, 'I'm leaving now,' and he said, 'No, you're not: You're arrested,'" she said. "It was unreal . . . I did not break any kind of law. I never, ever thought this could happen."
Several witnesses at the scene at the time reported that Sørensen and Wardlaw yelled at the police, but she said they remained fairly calm.
Officers charged both parents with child endangerment and Wardlaw with disorderly conduct.
Sørensen spent 36 hours in prison, where she said she didn't get much sympathy from the other inmates. Liv was put in foster care by the city's Administration for
Children's Services. The case made the front page of The Post.
"I didn't know where my child was," said Sørensen. "I don't think there's any greater punishment than to have your child taken away from you."
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The two were reunited four days after the arrest, but Sørensen had to stay in New York another few weeks to go to civil court and criminal court. Her brother and her best friend came from Denmark to offer support. The American press admonished her for being a negligent, selfish mother — particularly after she decided to sue the city, in 1999 and again in 2003 — while Danish news outlets rose to her defense
"For every Dane it was a nightmare because we are used to living like that," said Sørensen.
Her travails echo a more recent case. In 2015, Louise Fielden, a female cop from Britain, was arrested after leaving her sleeping 15-month-old son alone in a Manhattan hotel room for 75 minutes.
Police took the boy from her and placed him in foster care. Fielden, who was eventually cleared of criminal charges, defended her actions, saying leaving children alone for short periods of time was "normal and acceptable" in her native culture. Just this month, a judge ruled that Fielden had the right to file a $50 million civil negligence suit against the city.
"[My] case that happened 20 years ago is even more relevant today," Sørensen said.
Despite all she's been through, Sørensen said she wouldn't change her parenting approach.
"Of course, you should be allowed to put your child outside when you're sitting behind the window and you can see it," she said. In fact, when she moved to Hamburg 16 years ago with her husband, Mike, she continued that tradition with their children, Xara and Max.
"It's not as normal to [leave your children outside] in Hamburg [as it is in Scandinavia]," she said. "But, yes, I did."
Filed under books , children , east village , parenting , 11/25/17
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text:
Deloitte Consulting's Bill Briggs identifies emerging new technologies
Bill Briggs, CTO at Deloitte Consulting LLP, talks about how companies are adopting technology, and the social impact they need to keep in mind
By Angad Singh Thakur, Forbes India Staff
The 'new economy' constantly throws up a multiplicity of entrepreneurial ventures trying to solve the problems of modern India. By telling their stories I try to catch a glimpse of the entrepreneurial evolution that India is going through. I have a weakness for the gloss of novelty and chase it in all experiences, from exploring new cities and restaurants, to changing what I read.
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In its annual report titled 'Tech Trends 2016: Innovating in the Digital Era', consultancy firm Deloitte examines trends that will be synonymous with businesses as they reinvent themselves. In an interview with Forbes India, Bill Briggs, chief technology officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP, talks about the new technologies that are finding takers, and the need for companies to modernise their core. Edited excerpts:
Q. What are some of the points that stood out for you in the report?
It's the seventh year we've published this report, so we've been able to see the trending of trends. There are five major areas around which we've continued to see evolving capabilities: Digital, analytics, cloud, the core [of companies], which is often not looked at as a tech trend, and the business of IT and how it's changing. There are three topics that are new, in a way: Blockchain [distributed database technology], Internet of Things [IoT], and Augmented Reality [AR] and Virtual Reality [VR]. These apply to different parts of a company's functioning. There's also a social impact element in the report that addresses the ethics and morality of these technology adoption curves.
Q. Could we say that blockchain, IoT, and AR and VR are seeing mass adoption?
They're all seeing adoption. The adoption of blockchain, at first blush, was in financial services and crypto currency (such as bitcoin). But now we're seeing it in electronic medical records and even in government services. For example, Honduras is using blockchain in their land title registry system, which helps drive a new level of trust with the citizenry. AR and VR have been on the radar for a while. But it's always a challenge to predict whether a technology will achieve mass adoption within an 18- to 24-month window; whether it will remain as just something you can use, or whether it will reach mass adoption within that period. You need three to five good examples of companies that have really taken advantage of the technology [to qualify as a technological trend].
Q. Modernisation is a theme that you've looked at. What would it take for a company to re-imagine its core?
First of all, we're not going to modernise for technology's sake. Legacy is not a four-letter word; just because it is old, doesn't mean it's bad. We need to have a better sense of how what we have today is affecting what we do today, and, more importantly, what we need to do tomorrow; so that we really understand where we are lacking in terms of experience, customers, the products we can develop, or how responsive we can be to product changes.
Q. What implications does social impact have for companies in this environment?
The social impact that we talk about is not just about security and privacy; it is about ethics and morality, and responsibility to your employees, to society and even to humanity. What is the long-term implication of robotics and Artificial Intelligence and synthetic biology? These questions don't need to constrain what you do, but you need to be mindful of their implications. The other side of it is that you can use these technologies to do social good. The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest opportunities too.
(This story appears in the 10 June, 2016 issue of Forbes India. You can buy our tablet version from Magzter.com. To visit our Archives, click here.)
Bill Briggs
Interesting and well-balanced take on the truly disruptive technologies and how they can transform the nature of workplace, industry, and most importantly society.
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text:
Most atheists still believe the universe has ultimate meaning
Posted By Dr Angelo Bottone On 19th June 2019 @ 5:13 pm In 2019 | No Comments
You might think that atheists and agnostics do not believe in the supernatural but you would be mistaken. Many believe in phenomena such as reincarnation, astrology and karma and many more continue to believe in objective good and evil, and that the universe has meaning and purpose. In other words, a minority are thorough-going naturalists.
The findings are from an ongoing research project called "Understanding Unbelief" [1] that aims at mapping the nature and diversity of non-believers (both atheists and agnostics) across different national settings. It involves participants from six countries and three continents (Brazil, United States, Denmark, United Kingdom, China and Japan).
These countries are chosen because of their cultural differences. What does a Chinese atheist believe compared with a Danish atheist, for instance?
Around 1,100 people per country were interviewed. Interestingly, some who profess no belief in God nonetheless still describe themselves as belonging to a religion. For instance, 28% of Danish non-believers labelled themselves as Christians.
A majority of atheists and agnostics from Western countries say they were brought up in a religious tradition. This is not the case among Chinese (82%) and Japanese (70%).
It might be expected that the non-religious do not believe in supernatural phenomena like reincarnation, astrology, karma. This is not necessarily so, although the background culture has a big influence. More than half of Chinese agnostics believe in astrology, for instance.
Many non-religious also believe that there are 'underlying forces' of good and evil, that 'there exists a universal spirit or life force,' and that 'most significant life events are meant to be and happen for a reason'. Among atheists, Brazilian and Chinese are the most 'supernaturally inclined' while the Japanese are the least.
Absolute naturalists, who would deny any existence of anything at all outside nature, including ascribing meaning and purpose to the universe, are a minority among non-believers in every country surveyed.
Only about a third of the non-religious in each country regard the universe to be ultimately meaningless. In other words, a majority believe otherwise. But if there is no God, what gives the universe meaning? This is a very difficult question for atheists and agnostics to answer.
The research also found no consistent difference between the non-religious and the general population with regard to the objectivity of moral norms or of human rights.
These findings show that a sense of something beyond nature remains among the non-religious and this is channelled into different directions, according to their background culture.
We already know that there is great diversity of beliefs among the religious. This survey confirms that there is a great variety of what amounts to supernatural beliefs among the non-religious as well.
URL to article: https://ionainstitute.ie/most-atheists-still-believe-the-universe-has-ultimate-meaning/
[1] "Understanding Unbelief": https://www.stmarys.ac.uk/research/centres/benedict-xvi/docs/benedict-centre-understanding-unbelief-report.pdf


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