India fans are gathering near the residence of the Bollywood star who died in Dubai on Saturday.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2BX3ZIv
We can update Every Mint Every Time we have long network links ....
Wednesday, 28 February 2018
Jared Kushner loses access to top-level security briefings
President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser will no longer receive top-level briefings.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2FAI5ua
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2FAI5ua
Jan Kuciak murder: Slovak PM makes cash reward appeal
Posing next to a million euros in cash, Robert Fico asked for information about Jan Kuciak's murder.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2HO74L8
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2HO74L8
EU to publish first draft of Brexit treaty
It is expected to say Northern Ireland may have to follow EU single market rules to avoid a hard border.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2EX0kJ5
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2EX0kJ5
Levi Strauss to use lasers instead of people to finish jeans
The company has developed new software that works with lasers to speed up its jean-making process.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2HMVyQp
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2HMVyQp
Amazon buys 'smart' doorbell firm Ring
Ring makes doorbells that stream videos of people approaching or ringing the front door to phones.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2CNYfxf
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2CNYfxf
Jerusalem: Christianity's 'holiest site' Holy Sepulchre reopens after protest
Israel shelves tax plans that prompted Church leaders to close doors of Christianity's holiest site.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2ovc27v
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2ovc27v
BBC charity sacked six over sexual misconduct
International development charity BBC Media Action reveals six people were dismissed over 10 years.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GPTkyi
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GPTkyi
US-Mexico wall: Judge throws out legal challenge
Donald Trump's plans receive a boost from a judge he once berated for being of "Mexican heritage".
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2oCdJzj
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2oCdJzj
Why New Zealand is releasing a rabbit-killing virus
The government says the population needs controlling but animal activists say it's a cruel approach.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2EXA3yr
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2EXA3yr
Egypt's Sherine sentenced to prison over Nile joke
Two female singers are sentenced to prison: one for inciting debauchery, and one for a joke.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2HRzaFu
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2HRzaFu
Oxfam: What's gone wrong with the foreign aid sector?
After Oxfam's handling of a sex scandal in Haiti, the foreign aid sector faces tough questions.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2HTj12q
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2HTj12q
Meet the woman teaching others how to fight off sex attackers
Emily Moser was beaten up in an attempted rape. Now she teaches women self-defence.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2Coq8QH
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2Coq8QH
Police dog catches carjacker after wild chase in LA
Puskas, an eight-year-old police dog, needed jaw surgery after tackling the fugitive.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2FbZrjc
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2FbZrjc
Homeless students: Finding shelter outside the classroom
One in five students in Los Angeles face housing insecurity - so where are they living?
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GNXC9s
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GNXC9s
Anthony Wong: Hong Kong actor on looking for his father
Hong Kong actor Anthony Wong considers his mixed-race heritage - and how it has shaped him.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2HQNHRZ
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2HQNHRZ
Skins: The TV show with an A-list alumni
How one hit E4 show of the 2000's has produced the Oscar nominees of today.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GOPAwX
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GOPAwX
'I prayed to die' after FGM aged six, says victim
Hibo Wadere was a victim of female genital mutilation and talks about her experience.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2HRGnWb
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2HRGnWb
How humans echolocate 'like bats'
Blind people who use sound to navigate their environment adjust their clicks very similarly to bats, research reveals.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GQzt21
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GQzt21
Amelia Earhart's stolen car found in Los Angeles
The 1932 vehicle once belonged to the pilot who mysteriously disappeared over the Pacific Ocean
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2EZgge5
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2EZgge5
China warns parents after boy filmed peeing in lift
A video of a Chinese boy urinating in a lift prompts calls for better education in the home.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2F9xhFO
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2F9xhFO
Georgian boy runs away to the zoo, finds it closed
A lucky 10-year-old gets an annual pass to Tbilisi's zoo after travelling 130km on his own to get there.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2ormLQG
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2ormLQG
Russian TV airs video game as Syria war footage
TV news tribute to Russia's armed forces uses a clip from a computer game.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2sSGAEW
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2sSGAEW
Winter Olympics: Is window for US-N Korea peace closing?
A small window for diplomacy emerged during the "peace Olympics" in Pyeongchang, but it's closing fast.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2ou8WR8
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2ou8WR8
How France hopes to help radicals escape jihadist net
A new strategy aims to tackle the influence of violent Islamist groups - but will it stop attacks?
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2CqJvsr
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2CqJvsr
Five films compete for the best foreign language Oscar
What you need to know about the five movies competing for the best foreign language film Oscar.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GORxcL
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2GORxcL
Reality Check: Is Chinese an official language in Pakistan?
Media outlets in Pakistan said parliament had declared it to be one, but that's not quite what happened.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2EY1EeR
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2EY1EeR
'Euphoria killing' women jailed in Australia
The Briton and Australian murdered a teenager after plotting to become serial killers, a jury heard.
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2CpOcCH
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2CpOcCH
Fury over India's reporting of Sridevi death
India's news media face backlash over graphics showing Sridevi in bathrooms to illustrate how she died
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2F6KQpb
from BBC News - World http://ift.tt/2F6KQpb
The Last Families Living in Tunisia's Underground Houses
Reuters photographer Zohra Bensemra recently spent time in southern Tunisia's Djebel Dahar region, where locals have lived in underground homes for centuries. The cave houses, also known as troglodyte houses, offer protection against the extremes of summer and winter in the arid desert. A cluster of these crater-like homes can be seen in the village of Haddej on Google Maps. Most of theses cave homes can be found around Matmata, which gained fame as a filming location for Luke Skywalker’s home in the 1977 movie Star Wars. Reuters reports that fewer of these underground homes are now used, with some falling into disrepair: “In recent decades, rural depopulation has meant fewer people live in the homes, which are composed of rooms hewn into the walls of an excavated circular courtyard. The few remaining families say they are attached to the homes and the land or see no way of moving.”
from The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2ozAOTm
This Is Helen Keller’s 1932 'Modern Woman'
In 1932, Helen Keller wrote, "I am tempted to think that the perplexed businessman might discover a possible solution [to] his troubles if he would just spend a few days in his wife's kitchen. Let us see what would happen if he did."
In the article, originally published in The Atlantic, Keller ponders how the economics of industrialization helped advance women’s rights. It is excerpted and animated here.
from The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2CLEt5J
Did Human Sacrifice Help People Form Complex Societies?
In 1598, a European miner working in the Bolivian highlands stumbled across a 10-year-old Andean girl who was still alive, despite having been walled up inside a funerary tower three days earlier. Several decades had passed since the Inca Empire—the most sophisticated in the world at that time—had fallen, but its practices lived on among the Incas’ descendants in the region, including human sacrifice. The practice held on a little longer after this incident. Around 20 years later, a boy, who had escaped from local chiefs attempting to bury him alive, took refuge in a Spanish community in the Peruvian Sierra. But the tradition was incompatible with the moral outlook of the new Catholic regime, and die it did, eventually.
The question scientists are debating now is: Did our modern world spring from the beliefs of those who buried the girl alive, or from those of the miner who freed her?
To put that question another way, were human societies able to grow so large and complex because cruel practices like human sacrifice shored them up, or because human sacrifice was abandoned in favor of other forms of social glue—notably, major religions like Christianity?
Human sacrifice is defined as the ritualized, religiously motivated killing of a human being. It is no longer sanctioned by any state, but it was once practiced by societies across the globe. Chiefs and priests routinely strangled, bludgeoned, drowned, and burned their victims to death in order to please various ancestors or deities. Invariably, those ordaining the sacrifices were of higher status than their victims, prompting researchers to ask whether the violence served a social purpose—namely, keeping the lower orders in line. “Social elites used human sacrifice as a tool to instill fear and show their power,” Joseph Watts of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, says. “As far as tools go, it was a pretty bloody and dramatic one.”
Though human sacrifice is a thing of the past, Watts and others believe that understanding what motivated it is still relevant because other manifestations of extreme inequality do persist—slavery, for example. If they could identify the purpose human sacrifice served, then perhaps they could propose more-humane ways of achieving that purpose, thereby making the world a better place.
The question of the social function of human sacrifice is not new, but until recently efforts to answer it have drawn purely on anecdotal evidence. For Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, that approach is deeply flawed, because it allows researchers to cherry-pick the evidence that supports their pet theories. A better method, he says, is to pool data about large numbers of historical societies in databases, and test theories against them.
Watts and colleagues have built one such database, Pulotu, that stores information about more than 100 traditional Austronesian cultures. Whitehouse and others have developed Seshat—another database that covers more than 400 societies that existed across the globe over the last 10,000 years. “We’re trying to develop a whole new methodology that adjudicates more objectively between competing hypotheses,” says Whitehouse, “so that we end up with a more robust picture of the human past from which we can extract genuine lessons for the future.”
Over time, as societies became larger, they also tended to become less egalitarian and more hierarchical. In 2016, the Jena group reported that Pulotu data support the so-called social control theory, according to which human sacrifice stabilized societies as they became more stratified, by legitimating class distinctions and political authority. It is probably no coincidence, Watts says, that the victims were often people who posed a threat to the elites, or who had fallen out of favor with them.
The results coming out of Seshat—which have yet to be published—suggest that social control may not be the whole story, however. No society in Pulotu comprises more than a million people, while Seshat includes “mega-empires” whose subjects numbered in the tens of millions. Seshat’s founders therefore argue that it tracks social complexity closer to modern levels, and they find that, beyond around 100,000 people, human sacrifice becomes a destabilizing force. “Our suggestion is that this particularly pernicious form of inequality isn’t sustainable as societies get more complex,” says Whitehouse. “It disappears once they pass certain thresholds, because they cannot survive with that level of injustice.”
Rather than being an essential stepping stone to greater complexity, the Seshat team argues, at these thresholds human sacrifice became a parasitic practice—an attempt, often by military heroes who had transformed themselves into “god-kings,” to seize and maintain power, to the detriment of social cohesion. That’s because, whereas human sacrifice might have terrorized the members of a smaller, simpler society into obeying their self-styled leader, it could no longer do so in a large and ethnically diverse one. There, it was easier to disobey the ruler, or desert, and evade punishment—and the temptation to do so only grew stronger as societies grew larger.
According to Peter Turchin, another of Seshat’s founders, who studies cultural evolution at the University of Connecticut, this mattered because the survival of historical societies often depended on their military prowess. Those that were less united and hence weaker on the battlefield may have found themselves destroyed by, or absorbed into, militarily superior ones that had rejected human sacrifice, having found better ways of promoting social cohesion. The Spanish conquest of the Inca could be considered an example of the survival of the fittest society, in this sense.
But though sheer military might may have been the underlying cause of the disappearance of human sacrifice, the members of the victorious societies likely didn’t see it that way. They probably saw the rejection of human sacrifice as a logical extension of the golden rule, or as a religious imperative. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that societies became less violent as they became better at abstract reasoning. In other words, people spurned violence against others on the grounds that they wouldn’t want it done to them. Turchin and colleagues disagree: With staggering frequency, they argue, it was religion rather than reason that turned people away from ritualized brutality. But a different kind of religion—one that deified not a mortal god-king, but a supernatural “big god.” These were the forerunners of today’s major world religions, and those who spread them railed against human sacrifice. “They basically said, God is repelled by this,” says Turchin.
These new religions—such as Judaism and Zoroastrianism—were born roughly during the first millennium B.C., and though they have yet to prove it, the Seshat group suspects that they provided the social glue that allowed societies to reach newly intricate heights. Without these religions, the researchers think, the complexifying process would have stalled long before it produced the nation-states and multistate federations of today.
Neither the Seshat nor the Pulotu team claims to have solved the puzzle of human sacrifice, but together they feel they are building toward an answer. “The merit of these databases is that they change the nature of the conversation,” says the anthropologist Richard Sosis, also of the University of Connecticut, who studies the evolution of religion, and is not part of either team. “Now it is all about the data.”
Whitehouse thinks social evolution was driven by two opposing forces—persuasion and coercion. Persuasion might have taken the form of reassuring, nonviolent religious rituals, for example, and coercion the form of cruel diktats from a god-king. By statistically analyzing large amounts of cross-cultural data, researchers can start to explore which combinations of the two produced the most peaceful and prosperous societies in history, and then apply those lessons to the governance of modern societies. “What we can learn from the big patterns in global history is how successfully to give persuasion more of the upper hand,” Whitehouse says.
That prospect is some way off. But the big-data approach to history has already provided a fascinating glimpse into the roots of social complexity. To return to the case of the Andean girl rescued by the Spanish miner, the data suggest that the modern world sprang from belief systems like his—but that those systems might never have come to be if earlier peoples hadn’t buried children alive.
from The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2GOC8sS
Kanchi seer Jayendra, a spiritual colossus till his arrest in 2004, dies
Anointed a pontiff of the ancient Kanchi mutt when he was barely 19 years old, Sri Jayendra Saraswathi came to wield enormous say in matters affecting the Hindu religion in the country, including the Ayodhya issue.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2CrViab
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2CrViab
CBI arrests Karti Chidambaram in Chennai
The CBI this morning arrested Karti Chidambaram in Chennai in connection with the INX money laundering case. The national investigative agency has alleged that Karti Chidambaram received money from INX Media for using his influence to manipulate a tax probe against it.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2GLRJJG
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2GLRJJG
Bollywood pays their respects to Sridevi
Early Wednesday morning saw a number of fans, media personnel, Bollywood celebrities and public figures pour into the Celebration Sports Club in Lokhandwala to pay their respects to the legendary actress and offer their condolences to the family.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2CNnnV7
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2CNnnV7
Live: Sridevi to be cremated with state honours
Actor Sridevi's last rites will be performed at Vile Parle Seva Samaj crematorium in Mumbai today. Stay with us for all the updates
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2GM3gJd
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2GM3gJd
Bengaluru: ‘Psycho Shankar’ terror reign ends
The prison duty doctor examined him and advised officials to rush him to a government hospital. They shifted Shankar to Victoria Hospital in Bengaluru where doctors declared him dead around 5.10am.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2BTn1z8
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2BTn1z8
MP bypolls: Congress leads in both seats
As of mid-morning today, the Congress is leading in Kolares and Mungaoli, two key Madhya Pradesh Assembly constituencies that held bypolls on Saturday.The Congress was leading by 2,474 votes in Kolaras and 2,038 votes in Mungaoli, in the third round of counting of votes.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2BVivQF
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2BVivQF
Why today's results of 2 MP bypolls are crucial
Buoyed by winning the Chitrakoot assembly seat in Madhya Pradesh (MP) in the November 2017 bypoll, the Congress will today be eagerly looking forward to retaining two more seats for which bypolls were held last Saturday.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2Co6C6U
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2Co6C6U
B'wood legend Sridevi mourned by fans in Mumbai
Celebrities pay last respects to Bollywood’s ‘first female superstar’ Sridevi
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2GMu0t5
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2GMu0t5
Sports champions say a big thank you to TOISA
Award winners encouraged to do better after getting recognition.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2GQPjtv
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2GQPjtv
11 sick after letter opened at US military base
An envelope containing a suspicious letter was opened at a US military base near Washington, leaving 11 people including nine Marines sick. A gunnery sergeant opened the envelope received on Tuesday at Joint Base Fort Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2BVitIx
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2BVitIx
Tencent leads Rs 740cr funding in Gaana
Gaana, India's largest digital music service, competes with the likes of Saavn, backed by Tiger Global and other investors, as well as global players Apple Music, Google Music, and soon-to-be-launched Amazon Prime Music.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2BVIQ1d
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2BVIQ1d
Live: In Orissa bypoll, BJD leads BJP by 25k votes
The results of the Kolaras and Mungaoli bypolls in Madhya Pradesh and Bijepur bypoll in Odisha will be declared today. The counting is underway. Stay with TOI for the latest updates.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2t2Slsn
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2t2Slsn
Ghani offers talks with Taliban 'without condition'
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani offered recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political group, as part of a proposed political process that could lead to peace talks aimed at ending more than 16 years of war.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2GNG5yg
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2GNG5yg
European roundup: Neymar suffers fractured metatarsal in blow to PSG
- Brazil forward set to miss Champions League tie with Real Madrid
- Dortmund held by Augsburg as fans boycott Monday night match
Paris Saint-Germain have confirmed that Brazilian forward Neymar suffered a fractured metatarsal and sprained ankle in Sunday’s win over Marseille.
Neymar, who joined PSG for a world-record transfer fee last summer, looks certain to miss the second leg of his side’s Champions League last-16 tie with Real Madrid on 6 March.
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2BSt5Ib
VAR likely to be used at World Cup but not in 2018-19 Champions League
• Fifa’s Infantino says system almost certain to be deployed in Russia
• Uefa leader holds different view and believes VAR needs more time
Uefa has confirmed that video assistant referees will not be used in next season’s Champions League, on the same day Gianni Infantino said the system was almost certain to be deployed at the World Cup.
VAR, which allows match referees to review decisions on a pitchside monitor or by consulting an assistant who monitors the game on a video, has been trialled in a number of competitions over the past year, including the FA Cup.
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2ozcjWe
Pep Guardiola could face further FA sanction over yellow ribbon defiance
• Manchester City manager still wearing ribbon after charge
• Sanctions would become stiffer with each guilty verdict
Pep Guardiola could be sanctioned further for continuing to wear a yellow ribbon in defiance of Football Association rules, with Manchester City’s manager facing a potential touchline ban. On Friday the FA charged Guardiola with wearing a political message and he has until next Monday to enter a plea. This was regarding his wearing of the ribbon during City’s FA Cup defeat at Wigan Athletic on 19 February.
Yet Guardiola again wore the ribbon for the Carabao Cup victory against Arsenal on Sunday. This was City’s first game since Wigan and Guardiola could face a separate charge. City are at Arsenal on Thursday and host Chelsea on Sunday. Guardiola said after the defeat of Arsenal that he would continue to wear the ribbon in defiance of the FA.
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2HMiK15
Lizzie Durack: from economics at Harvard to Everton goalkeeper | Suzanne Wrack
Durack turned down a job at Goldman Sachs to play football and an unconventional career path has also seen her represent both Australia and England
Intellectual footballers are considered a rarity. As teams scoop primary school-age talent into their glistening academies, the lives of young players become consumed with football and education often becomes secondary at best – despite the low chances of ‘making it’.
Yet in the women’s game it is different. Because professionalism is relatively new, most of those playing football at the top level today have had to have a plan B from the off.
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2sVhy8a
How does Pep Guardiola feel about his ambassador role for Qatar World Cup? | Richard Williams
Manchester City manager’s yellow-ribbon display of political affiliation sits uncomfortably with a readiness to front for Qatar
from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2sYRZ63
As they consider the case of Pep Guardiola, who won his first medal in English football at Wembley on Sunday while semi-surreptitiously sporting a yellow ribbon in support of the jailed members of the Catalan independence movement, the leaders of the Football Association might look back at the record of their own predecessors, and in particular at the events of 1938, when they ordered the England football team to perform the Nazi salute in Berlin’s Olympic stadium.
History tells they did so under instruction from the British ambassador to Germany, Sir Nevile Henderson, who was having a difficult year. On the morning of the match, Henderson had called a meeting with two senior FA figures: the 71-year-old Charles Wreford-Brown, chairman of the international selection committee, and Stanley Rous, the association’s secretary.
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2sYRZ63
Zombified Arsenal are no longer brutally in love with idea of winning | Barney Ronay
Arsène Wenger’s side were beaten by Manchester City at Wembley – in a cup final where the losers were so instantly and unequivocally the story
from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2CIOVuE
An odd thing happened at Wembley as Manchester City’s players celebrated their EFL Cup final win at the final whistle. Turning away from the gleeful blue hordes in one half of the stadium it took a slight moment of double-take to register that the block of silent red at the other end was not flags or shirts but empty plastic seats.
Basically, the Arsenal fans had gone – a tribute to the efficient exit routes of modern stadium design but also deeply unusual in domestic cup finals, where losing supporters invariably stay to applaud a winning run to this stage.
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2CIOVuE
Unhappy fans, terrible team – Farhad Moshiri’s cash fails to revive Everton
The owner has invested lavishly in two years but the disconnect between team and supporters is glaring, fuelled by poor signings and growing disenchantment with Sam Allardyce
from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2HPv7JY
As a football fan and chartered certified accountant Farhad Moshiri is unlikely to find cause to celebrate his two‑year anniversary as Everton’s major shareholder on Tuesday. The 62‑year‑old has invested almost a quarter of a billion pounds into Goodison Park since ending Bill Kenwright’s long-running search for a financial saviour. Tentative progress on a new stadium, deeply disillusioned fans and what in many respects is the worst Everton team this century represents a meagre return for his money.
Kenwright, the Everton chairman, cited “football knowledge, financial wherewithal and true blue spirit” as principal reasons for embracing the British-Iranian billionaire when his arrival was announced on 27 February 2016. Having paid around £87.5m for a 49.9% shareholding, one that is expected to increase over time, Moshiri has loaned Everton £150m with no fixed repayment date. The loan has enabled Everton to spend significantly on players, clear £28.4m of debt, reduce annual interest charges, fund improvements to the Finch Farm training ground and their old stadium, while preparing for the new with £9.1m spent on securing the site and initial planning works at Bramley Moore dock.
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2HPv7JY
Arsenal’s decade-long capitulation and Pardew on the brink – Football Weekly
Max and the pod discuss the Carabao Cup final, Mourinho’s game-changing substitutions, goalkeeping howlers, Sol Campbell’s self-confidence and more
Rate, review, share on Apple Podcasts,Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast and Stitcher, and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.
Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Amy Lawrence and Lars Sivertsen to look back at a weekend of thrills and spills in the Carabao Cup, the Premier League and beyond.
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2CJk29o
Two goal of the season contenders in the same French football match – video
The French third division match between Lyon Duchère and Entente produced two of the goals of the season with wonder strikes for both side. Entente’s William Sea, scored a fabulous flying overhead kick while Lyon Duchère’s Matthieu Ezekian salvaged a 2-2 draw with a top-class volley from the edge of the area
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2GLpQBB
Ingolstadt score while Duisburg keeper takes a drink during game – video
Duisburg goalkeeper Mark Flekken will want to forget his side's Bundesliga 2 match with Ingolstadt after he turned his back on play to have a drink, only to turn back around and see the ball hit the back of his net. Stefan Kutschke was the grateful recipient for Ingolsdadt, but ultimately Flekken's blushes were spared as his side ran out 2-1 winners
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2EWhYNa
Wenger's search for elusive League Cup final triumph goes on – video
Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger was on the losing side again as his side were defeated by Manchester City in the Carabao Cup final on Sunday. The Frenchman has won the FA Cup seven times along with three Premier League trophies, but the League Cup and European success still eludes him
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2FyUG0O
Patrick Cutrone keeps Milan on the move as Gattuso conquers Rome | Paolo Bandini
The youngster is not elegant but he scored again as Milan’s manager showed he has the nous to win tactical battles too
Gennaro Gattuso already had our attention.
How could he not, after steering a Milan team that began 2018 in the bottom half of the table to seven wins and two draws in nine games? Under his stewardship, the Rossoneri had climbed all the way to joint-sixth, as well as progressing to the Coppa Italia semi-final and Europa League last-16.
Continue reading...from Football | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2FAEAnG
DIY ECG EKG Portable Heart Monitor
Trying to capture a trace of my very occasional heart palpitation has proven to be nearly impossible. Being keen on electronics, I thought I would make my own ECG (ElectroCardioGram) monitor.This is intended to be a fun project, not a replacement for a proper ECG. A hospital ECG will likely be a "12...By: qthurtle
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from Instructables: exploring http://ift.tt/2FByH9N
Long Stitch Archival Book
hello everyone,This tutorial will show you how to make a good quality, archival book from beginning to end. Book binding requires a lot of patience and practice, but the result is a beautiful work of art that you can give as a gift, or fill with your own drawings, notes and photos. Let’s begin! SU...By: dj_6497
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from Instructables: exploring http://ift.tt/2CLeOtR
Laser Cut Pennant
As a millennial, I am a big fan of participation ribbons. That's why, this past Christmas I designed a bunch of participation pennants for my friends and family.Way to go folks, you did a thing! What was it? Who knows!Okay, well, I designed a few different pennants and laser cut them out of acrylic ...By: switchback_sea
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from Instructables: exploring http://ift.tt/2EYxecs
How to Cook a Chopped Cheese Sandwich
Chopped Cheese Sandwich started out in the Bronx and Harlem, chopped burger with cheese melted on top with a hero roll.I couldn’t find a hero roll so please forgive me that one.It’s not the prettiest sandwich but damn it’s good! To Start Place a Pan or Your Grill Over Medium to High Heat. Add som...By: John deCaux
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PiTextReader - an Easy-to-Use Document Reader for Impaired Vision
OverviewPiTextReader allows someone with impaired vision to “read” text from envelopes, letters and other items. It snapshots an image of the item, converts to plain text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and then speaks the text using text-to-speech. The Reader is designed to be as absol...By: rgrokett
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Paper cannon
This instructable explains how to make a paper cannon with daily use objets Material To make the cannon you need :- 5 Sheets of paper- 1 Match box- 3 Plastic bottle caps- 1 Small string- 1 Wood stick- 1 Wine cork- 1 pencil- Glue- Scissors- Knife- Drill Roll the paper Cut paper sheet in half v...By: YouLab
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Easy Pottery
How to make drape bowls Materials What you need: ClayBowl Scraper ToolFern or any other item you would like to imprint on the clay Rolling pin Cutting tool Smooth the Clay Use the scraper tool to smooth out the sheet of clay. Start from the top and go all the way down to prevent any strange...By: seventhstreetstudio
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Tuesday, 27 February 2018
BLM's Alicia Garza Launches Census Project To Mobilize Black Political Power
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When nature takes over: Abandoned America overgrown
Photographer Johnny Joo has travelled the United States photographing overgrown derelict sites from fairgrounds to shopping malls.
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#BackfireTrump Will Tweet Every Gun Death At The President
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The Latest: Quake causes damage in Indonesia's Papua
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Supreme Court Denies Trump Request To Hear Dreamer Lawsuit
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Four dead after blast destroys shop and home in English city of Leicester
By Darren Staples LEICESTER, England (Reuters) - At least four people were killed and four more injured when a blast destroyed a convenience store and a home in the central English city of Leicester on Sunday, British police said. "There are four confirmed fatalities at this stage and a number of people still undergoing treatment in hospital," Leicestershire Police Superintendent Shane O’Neill said. "We believe there may be people who have not yet been accounted for and rescue efforts continue in order to locate any further casualties." He said there was no immediate indication that the explosion was linked to terrorism.
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Police in Japan Have Found a Severed Head Inside an American Tourist's Rental Apartment
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22 Poolhouse Ideas and Design Inspiration
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Russia moves to block British UN resolution to condemn Iran over Yemen arms
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Florida shooting survivor tells NRA supporters trying to discredit witnesses: 'We will outlive you'
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Monica Lewinsky: 'I'm Not Alone Anymore' Thanks To The Me Too Movement
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John Oliver announces he's running for prime minister of Italy because why the heck not
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Maxine Waters says it's time for impeachment
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Trump Egregiously Misquotes Fox News To Attack Rival
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Governors divided on path forward on school safety
The nation’s governors have shown they are as deeply conflicted as federal lawmakers on what to do about gun violence and safety in schools.
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Trump says he would have 'run in there' to stop Parkland shooting
He called the behavior of an officer who waited outside "disgusting".
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Congress returns to DC amid growing call for action on gun violence
Here’s a look at some of the existing measures lawmakers could consider.
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LA officers sentenced to 25 years each in sex assault case
The officers who assaulted women while on duty were sentenced to 25 years each.
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from ABC News: Top Stories http://ift.tt/2CLXGnv
Inmate dies in car crash after stealing work truck, authorities say
The inmate was part of a work crew in North Carolina when he stole the truck.
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from ABC News: Top Stories http://ift.tt/2CneKEF
Southwest flight makes emergency landing in Salt Lake City after engine issue
The flight landed without incident.
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Suspect caught on video hiding crack cocaine in the ceiling at police headquarters
A Nebraska man was caught on tape stashing crack at police headquarters.
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50 arrested in Houston-area cock fighting operation
Authorities seized 165 birds in the bust of the large, elaborate operation.
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California OKs autonomous car testing without backup drivers
The rules are a major step toward getting autonomous vehicles onto CA's streets.
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Supreme Court declines Trump administration's request to hear DACA case
The move stymies the Trump administration's efforts to quickly end DACA.
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WATCH: Rivers across US heartland at or above flood stage
Soaked lands caused rockslides and landslides in West Virginia and Pittsburgh.
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Stepmother of missing Kansas boy charged with endangerment
She was criminally charged with child endangerment as the search continues.
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Mexican president's US visit canceled after phone call with Trump
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto was preparing to visit the U.S. and meet with President Donald Trump until a phone call last week devolved into a testy exchange over Trump's proposed border wall, two senior administration officials confirmed to ABC News. The disagreement is the latest blow to relations between the two neighbors as the administration continues to swing between cooperation and fiery rhetoric - and the allies remain at loggerheads over a border wall. The plans for Peña Nieto to visit were in an early planning phase, according to both officials, with one saying the call was supposed to lay the groundwork for a formal invitation for a visit during which the two leaders would sign a series of agreements on "broad-based" issues like security and energy. But according to one official, Trump went off script and brought up the wall. Peña Nieto said Mexico would not support the wall, while Trump reiterated his campaign position that it would. Both sides then concluded...
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WATCH: 16 face charges in jail fight
None of the detainees' injuries were life-threatening.
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WATCH: Meet Willie, a pooch with fabulous hair that's living her best life
Willie the Yorkie is going viral on Instagram for her amazing hairdos!
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WATCH: Suspect caught on video hiding crack cocaine in the ceiling at police headquarters
A Nebraska man was caught on tape stashing crack at police headquarters.
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WATCH: Mesmerizing opal hair is the newest beauty trend on Instagram
The dye job combines 2017's mermaid hair with soft pastels to create a dreamy, multicolored look that's blowing up on social media.
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WATCH: Oscar nominees before they were stars
See how this year's biggest movie stars, from Mary J. Blige to Allison Janney, got their start in acting.
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WATCH: Rome covered in rare snowfall
Romans woke up to a blanket of snow Monday morning.
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WATCH: Driver stranded after trying to cross floodwaters
The driver exited the SUV after it became immobile by the Ohio floodwaters.
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from ABC News: Top Stories http://ift.tt/2EV8QIM
WATCH: Killer whales surround shocked kayaker
One lucky kayaker gets the thrill of his life as curious orcas suddenly surround him while he paddles in Puget Sound, Washington.
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from ABC News: Top Stories http://ift.tt/2BPjYrU
WATCH: Was Meghan Markle a writer of an anonymous, tell-all blog?
The blog, "The Working Actress," used a silhouette of an empty director's chair as a logo and had anonymous posts full of fruity language and revealing confessions.
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WATCH: A mother and daughter fighting back against an armed robbery
A mother and daughter took matters into their own hands and shot a would-be robber at their liquor store in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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Criticism for ex-deputy who didn't engage school gunman 'unfounded,' lawyer says
President Donald Trump called the former deputy a "coward."
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After Florida rampage, some owners are destroying their guns
Some gun owners destroying their firearms in protest after Florida shooting rampage that took 17 lives
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from ABC News: Top Stories http://ift.tt/2EU5ObN
Why you should worry about bank scams & loans
Punjab National Bank (PNB) , which has been in the news for the Rs 11,300 crore fraud isn’t the first bank to be scammed. Till December 21, 2017, over 25,600 banking fraud cases worth Rs 1.79 billion have been reported. And it is not just scams that banks are losing out their capital to, bad loans is another pain area. Between September 2013 and September 2017, the bad loans in the industry quadrupled from Rs 28,417 crore to over Rs 1.1 lakh crore.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2F9SPBZ
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2F9SPBZ
Girl raped by man as his sister films crime
Meerut: A 16-year-old girl was allegedly raped by a 22-year-old man as his sister filmed the act in Muzaffarnagar on Monday. An FIR for rape has been filed against the youth while his sister has been accused of abetment. Police are yet to get hold of the video. Investigating officers suspect the allegations to be a result of counter cases filed by two women against each other
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from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2FztBLf
Triumph Bonneville Speedmaster debuts at Rs 11.11L
Triumph Motorcycles on Tuesday launched its most affordable cruiser, the Bonneville Speedmaster, in India with a price tag of Rs 11.11 lakh (ex-showroom). Unlike the other cruiser motorcycles of the company, the new Speedmaster joins the Modern-Classic family along with the other Bonneville bikes.
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from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2sYru0P
Srikanth brightest among TOISA sports winners
Srikanth, Sindhu, Bumrah, Advani, Harmanpreet, Savita, Sidhu and Ankur are among the winners at the 2018 Mahindra Scorpio Times of India Awards (TOISA) powered by All-Out in Mumbai, which honoured the best performance in Indian sport in 2017.
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from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2sXffSb
Why Jordan King’s visit is significant: 10 reasons
King of Jordan Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein arrives in India for a three-day visit starting today. He will hold official talks with PM Narendra Modi on Thursday. Defence, security and investments are going to be the key areas of discussion on the bilateral agenda.
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from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2FAg2ee
Karnataka girl goes on 2-day fast, gets toilet
A Class VII girl got a toilet built at her house in Talur village of Siruguppa taluk in Ballari district after she refused to eat or drink until it was constructed.
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2Fajhva
from The Times of India http://ift.tt/2Fajhva
'Those who don't say 'Vande Mataram' are Pakistanis'
This is not the first time that Surendra Narain Singh has courted a controversy. Earlier, he said that by 2024 India would become a Hindu nation.
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The Foiled Plot to Kick Mitt Romney Out of the Republican Party
Correction: This article originally stated that the bylaws passed on Saturday by the Utah Republican Party might result in Mitt Romney being stripped of his party membership. In fact, the central committee amended the proposal before passing it in ways that exclude Romney in 2018. We regret the error.
In a Saturday-morning meeting outside of Salt Lake City, a hardline faction of conservative activists and agitators gathered to change the Utah Republican Party’s bylaws in a way that could have resulted in Senate candidate Mitt Romney being expelled from the state GOP and ejected from the ballot. They abandoned the effort at the last minute with a hastily written provision that spared the state’s most famous Republican, but could further imperil the already-dysfunctional state party.
Reached Monday afternoon for an interview, Rob Anderson, the chairman of the Utah Republican Party who opposed the measure, said he was working to ensure that no candidates are removed from the ballot this election cycle as a result of the bylaws. A representative for Romney’s campaign declined to comment.
Utah insiders said the episode is the latest sign of a beleaguered state party consumed by infighting over questions that will likely shape midterm primary races across the country this year: Who does the Republican Party belong to? How much ideological flexibility can be tolerated in its candidates? And must they be loyal to President Trump?
In Utah’s case, the dynamics at play are rooted in a fierce and ongoing power struggle over the state party’s idiosyncratic nominating process. For years, the Utah Republican Party’s nominees were selected not via regular primary elections, but at state conventions. Critics argued that this system gave disproportionate power to the hyper-engaged grassroots activists who voted for the delegates at the conventions, thus incentivizing Republican candidates to cater to a small, far-right element of the party, as opposed to rank-and-file GOP voters. (Tea Party stalwart Mike Lee famously upset veteran U.S. Senator Bob Bennett in 2010 at the convention.)
Then, in 2014, the Utah state legislature passed a new law that enabled Republican candidates to bypass the convention system altogether and get on a primary ballot by collecting signatures from supporters. The Utah Republican Party responded by suing the state, racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and plunging the organization deeper into disarray. The case is still winding its way through federal courts.
In the midst of all this chaos, Romney announced in January that he would run for Senate in Utah. Given his national profile and network of high-powered allies in Washington, many in Utah believed Romney’s election would be a boon to their state. What’s more, his overwhelming popularity among Utahns suggested he would be a shoo-in for the seat.
Ever the pragmatist, though, Romney opted not to take sides in the intra-party skirmish over the primary process, and announced that he would seek a dual path to the nomination—both gathering signatures, and appearing at the convention. If, somehow, a pro-Trump hardliner or a Lee-type Tea Partier managed to vanquish him at the convention, the thinking went, Romney would still be able to emerge as the nominee. This has happened before: In last year’s special election to replace outgoing congressman Jason Chaffetz, Provo Mayor John Curtis lost at the convention but then went on to win the primary; a year earlier, something similar happened in the gubernatorial primary.
But over the weekend, the hard-right activists who control the Utah Republican Party’s Central Committee gathered for a closed meeting to consider proposed changes to the bylaws. The original draft of the changes, reviewed by The Atlantic, would effectively have required that any candidate who pursues the signature-gathering path would “immediately” lose their membership in the party. In theory, the changes would have meant that Romney could be booted from the state party and lose his chance to appear on the ballot in November as a Republican.
But according to a Utah Republican official with knowledge of the meeting, who requested anonymity to describe private negotiations, the central committee members decided to scale back the proposed changes after realizing the severity of the backlash they would face. Apart from Romney, the new bylaws reportedly could have affected more than 50 office-seekers across the state. (The Central Committee members also tried to impose a “purity test” that would have required primary candidates to pledge complete support for the state party’s platform, but Anderson reportedly blocked its consideration at the meeting.)
“They realized they would get destroyed,” said the Republican official.
To soften the changes, they added a clause at the end stating, “in 2018, these provisions shall only apply to candidates for the first and second U.S. Congressional House Districts.” But some observers believe the last-minute effort to restrict the provision’s scope could invite its own legal challenges.
Utah Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox, who oversees the state’s elections, told me the state’s attorneys are still looking into the new bylaws and “deciding how to move forward.” Some believe the change could imperil the Utah Republicans’ status as a Qualified Political Party, possibly making it more difficult for its candidates to obtain ballot access.
Anderson, the state party chairman, told me he has no intention of trying to kick candidates off the ballot, regardless of what Central Committee members may want. “If our bylaws violate the Constitution or state law, then I’m bound to uphold the Constitution or the state law,” he said. “It is my responsibility to ensure that no candidate gets removed. I’m holding the line.”
As for Romney, two sources close to the candidate who requested anonymity to speak without the his approval, told me the campaign is more annoyed than worried about the tinkering with the bylaws.
Even if Romney had lost his ability to run as a Republican, political observers in Utah say he is popular enough to win the Senate seat as an independent, or even as a write-in candidate. “Mitt Romney’s popularity in Utah transcends party politics,” said Jason Perry, director of the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics. “Recent polls show that he wins with Republicans, unaffiliated voters, and even pulls in about one-third of Democratic voters.”
Meanwhile, Utah politicos have been left to speculate about the motivations behind the maneuvering. While most acknowledge that the battle over the nominating process is bigger than any single candidate, some Romney allies believe he was the intended target. As evidence, they point to the timing and text of a draft of the amended bylaws—with track changes included in the document—that circulated among the state’s Republicans, and left some with the impression that the language was specifically rewritten with him in mind. (That version did not include the final provision sparing Romney, which was added later.)
Suspicious Romney allies have also noted that the Saturday morning meeting where the bylaws were changed was held at the offices of Entrata, a software company helmed by a local conservative super-activist Dave Bateman, who is personally funding the state party’s lawsuit against Utah. “He does not like Mitt Romney,” said one of the Utah sources close to the candidate. (Bateman did not respond to a request for comment.)
Some in Romney’s orbit chalk up the Central Committee’s proposal to posturing from overzealous and opportunistic Trump boosters, who, despite the president’s endorsement of Romney last week, still believe they can get the White House’s attention by going after a longtime Trump foe.
But regardless of the rationale, most in Utah’s political circles seem to believe the foiled effort to target Romney with the bylaws would have done more harm to the state party—and its perception among voters and donors—than it would have to Mitt Romney.
“If Romney … is not able to run as a Republican,” said Perry, “the issue will not be whether voters are willing to vote for him, it will be how they view the Utah Republican Party.”
from The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2ot7te0
Xi's Road to Indefinite Rule Through Rule-Making
China’s Communist Party instituted term limits after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, to ensure that a future Chinese leader wouldn’t rule for life and cement the kind of cult of personality Mao had. Those term limits—up to two consecutive five-year terms—have endured through the reigns of Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao. But now, in the reign of Xi Jinping, they may be on their way out.
The party proposed Sunday a change to the constitution that would abolish term limits, essentially giving Xi the authority to rule for life. Xi, who completes his first term in office next month, emerged as China’s most powerful leader since Deng, who ushered China’s economic reforms, at the Communist Party Congress last October. The party enshrined his “thought” into its constitution, an honor previously accorded only Mao; and it did not, as is custom, reveal a successor to Xi, who under rules in effect at the time of the congress would have to step down in 2022. Xi was widely seen to have consolidated his power at the end of the congress—just how much became apparent Sunday.
If China does indeed remove term limits for Xi, he will not be the first world leader to use constitutional rules for authoritarian purposes. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and Russian President Vladimir Putin have all made similar moves. It’s a form of power grab by procedure rather than by coup. In Africa alone, 17 leaders have tried to change the constitution since 2000 in order to prolong their rule—most recently Ugandan President Yoweri Musaveni, 73, who enacted a law ending a presidential age limit of 75.
Thomas Carothers, who directs the democracy and rule-of-law program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that the use of such tactics doesn’t always go smoothly. He noted, for instance, that China’s announcement came on Sunday. The country then stifled online dissent about it. “If they proud of doing this, and it was an easy thing to do, or if there was a good rationale for it, why not do it in the full light of the day?” Carothers asked.
Jerome Cohen, a professor at NYU who is an expert in Chinese law, wrote Sunday that the proposed rule change means the Communist Party “has forgotten one of the main lessons of Mao’s long despotism.” The term limit, Cohen wrote, “reflected a widespread desire to prevent the return of one-man dictatorship.” But Xi is now tightening his hold at the peak of his powers and on the eve of his second term. And he’s doing it in a way that seems to respect rather than break the rules, with the Communist Party giving the move an official imprimatur—one that might be more palatable for the larger Chinese public, who already are said to broadly support Xi’s governing style (though, given China’ limits on freedom of expression, it is impossible to measure the true level of dissent).
Carothers said the trend Xi represents is a reversal from the 1990s, when many leaders were taking steps to become more democratic. “They went through a liberalizing phase, a rule-oriented phase, but now ... in the past 10 years, they’re pushing back against their own self-imposed limitation,” he said in an interview. “It’s a re-hardening against constitutional limitations, elections, and things like that were accepted in the 1990s.”
Take Turkey. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had served three terms as prime minister, moved into what was then the ceremonial role of the presidency in 2014. But from that perch he has wielded power not typically associated with the role, and last April set about to formalize it. Erdogan, who is widely popular and who until relatively recently was lauded as a champion of democracy and the rule of law in Turkey, organized a nationwide referendum to move Turkey from a parliamentary system to a presidential one. That would give the winner of next year’s presidential election, widely expected to be Erdogan himself, the position of head of state, with few checks on his power. Last April’s vote passed narrowly, but the victory all but ensured that Erdogan, 64, will tighten his hold on power for the foreseeable future.
Similarly in Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro has achieved a power grab impressive even by the standards of Latin American strongmen of the past—despite having accelerated the dismantling of what was once one of Latin America’s wealthiest and most stable countries. With the legislature dominated by his opposition, he opted to essentially create a new one—calling for elections last July to create a new constituent assembly that would, among other things, have the power to rewrite the constitution. Turnout was poor, but Maduro claimed victory in a vote that was widely seen as flawed.
In Putin’s case, the issue isn’t quite what the Russian leader has done to stay in power, but what he might do following next month’s election. He is virtually certain to be re-elected to another six-year term. Putin was president from 2000 to 2008 before stepping down because of term limits that forbid more than two consecutive terms in office. To get around that, he traded jobs with his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, before returning to the presidency in 2012. Putin is now 65, and by the time his next term ends, he will be in his 70s. And what then? He could, in theory, do what he previously did with Medvedev, a practice the Russians describe as “castling,” for the chess move, or he could rework the constitution so he doesn’t have to bother. He has said he won’t do the latter, but who would hold him accountable?
Carothers pointed out that while to the outside world, and indeed many Russians, Putin might seem like a strong leader, such moves are a sign not of strength, but also insecurity—of Putin’s concern about what would happen to him if he’s no longer in power.
“Once you personalize the system to such a degree that he has … you have very few protections” against allegations of corruption and other malfeasance, Carothers said. “It’s a reflection of the personalization of rule and the concentration of rule in a person so that there’s the feeling that if you’re not that person anymore, the system will not protect you.”
All these leaders have used a combination of populist politics and muscular nationalism to force through political changes that consolidate their personal positions—some are even popular. In times of growth and prosperity, as China is seeing now, the changes could be welcomed.
Carothers said the constitutional limits on authoritarian leaders “were fairly weak checks on their power.” “What we’re seeing now is greater self-confidence on the part of many authoritarian leaders,” he said. “There’s a feeling that ‘we can do this. We want to stay in power. We don’t give up power. And we have the win of history at our backs.’”
But because every economic upturn is followed by a downturn, any long-term failures will also be tied to them, as they remake their countries in their image. “Xi Jinping is susceptible to making big mistakes because there are now almost no checks or balances,” Willy Lam, an adjunct professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told The New York Times. “Essentially, he has become emperor for life.”
But even emperors have to face unpleasant realities. As Cohen, the NYU professor put it: Xi’s move will “enable him to move more boldly and increases the risk of his acting arbitrarily and perhaps mistakenly in international relations.”
“There is big risk for Xi at home since, as it becomes more obvious that China’s problems are catching up with its achievements, the government will look less impressive and the masses will begin to lose their enthusiasm and hold the great leader responsible,” he wrote. “The elite will be less surprised but less forgiving.”
from The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2EVYV5y
Why Are Corporations Finally Turning Against the NRA?
After the most recent high-school massacre in Parkland, Florida, left 17 students and teachers dead, the National Rifle Association (NRA), the nonprofit gun-rights advocacy group, was rebuked by a surprising group of liberal activists: American corporations. Pressured by Parkland high-school students and others to boycott the NRA, more than 20 companies have cut ties with the pro-gun group.
The NRA exodus includes major airlines like United, six rental-car firms including Hertz and Avis Budget Group, and MetLife, the insurance giant. These companies are not rescinding NRA donations, nor are they refusing service to NRA members. Rather, they’re ending discount programs, which companies routinely offer to groups and companies, like the NRA or the AARP. For example, United Airlines offered discounts on flights to the NRA annual meeting, and MetLife auto insurance offered a $50 benefit to members for each year of claim-free driving.
It would be easy to write off this moment by saying these companies are simply reacting to an online mob, or following each other like lemmings. But the fact that companies, rather than Congress or the courts, are shifting in response to political activism in the United States says something profound—about American tribalism, the demise of political cooperation, and the rise of a sort of liberal corporatocracy.
Why have the Parkland shootings forced corporate action in a way that previous school shootings could not? To put it another way: United and Delta both serve more than 100 million domestic passengers each year, while the NRA only has a few million members. So, why has it taken so long for these companies to distance themselves from one of America’s most controversial associations, despite 30,000 annual firearms deaths and so many mass shootings?
In this case, there has been a perfect storm of articulate student outrage and savvy online activism, merging with a rising tide of resentment against Trump and Trump-affiliated organizations. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have shown poise and passion before the camera—and laconic brilliance on Twitter—that has galvanized the gun-control movement. On social media, they have joined other activists in naming and shaming companies (“Hey @LifeLock why do you support the NRA? #NeverForget”) and even encouraging people to contact NRA-sponsoring firms. One message, with more than 33,000 retweets, sent people to an Amazon webpage where they could submit a prewritten request for the company to stop hosting the NRA’s digital-video channel, NRATV. As more companies canceled their NRA affiliations, it put additional pressure on other companies that had initially resisted doing the same. Within a 12-hour period, Delta Airlines went from defending its relationship with the NRA as “routine” to requesting that the association “remove our information from their website.”
This avalanche of companies abandoning the NRA is just the latest chapter in the gradual politicization of every square inch of the public sphere, which has compelled traditionally nonpartisan companies to take one partisan stand after another. One year ago, in the fallout over the president’s proposed travel ban, Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, left the White House advisory council. Four months later, the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, left the same forum after the president withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. When Trump refused to explicitly condemn the far-right protesters in Charlottesville, more business leaders, including Merck’s CEO, Kenneth Frazier, exited en masse from his manufacturing council.
Uber is not an immigration firm. Disney is not a climate-advocacy organization. Merck is not a civil-rights group. But under Trump, they have completed their development into activists on the issues of migration, carbon emissions, and white racism anyway. Trump’s language often forces companies to take sides in political debates, and his unpopularity makes it safe—even necessary—to side against him.
Many business leaders are getting political because they have determined that, in this environment, the noisiest position is often to remain silent in the face of national condemnation. But in politics, responding to one group of consumers invariably means angering another. Several conservative writers tweeted that they would boycott United, Hertz, and other companies that eliminated their discount policies with the NRA. “Corporations boycotting NRA should be boycotted,” the conservative commentator Mark R. Levin wrote. The choice for companies is simple and stark: Suffer the slings and arrows of liberal activism, or endure the rage and resentment of spurned conservatives. In today’s culture wars, for-profits are the new nonprofits.
One important question raised by all this is if there is a deeper force at work. Have America’s corporations shifted to the left, even as national government has moved toward the Republican Party? Or are companies just more sensitive to protests than a divided government is?
In many cases, America’s corporate community has become a quiet defender of socially liberal causes. Nearly 400 companies filed an amicus brief in 2015 urging the Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage, including Amazon, Aetna, Apple, American Airlines, American Express, and AT&T (and those are just the ones starting with the first letter of the alphabet). Hundreds of executives, many from tech companies, signed a 2017 letter urging the president to protect immigrants brought to the U.S. as children by saving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. When North Carolina passed a law against transgender-friendly bathrooms, the NCAA announced in 2016 that it would pull its college-basketball tournament from the state (and other companies withdrew their business, too).
It would be strange to call these corporations “liberal.” By and large, they support the GOP’s economic policies, which in just the last year have eased regulations and slashed corporate taxes by several trillion dollars. But on social issues, national and multinational companies have moved left of the GOP, even as many Republican figures (particularly the president) have found it useful, or at least tantalizing, to play up cultural flash points, like trans rights and undocumented labor. This has created a bizarre dynamic, where many companies feel public pressure to assert their values by rebuking Republican politics, even as many of them directly benefit from the GOP’s economic platform.
But there is something else happening: Corporations are becoming more democratic than democratic governance itself. Or, at least, they have proven to be far more responsive to political outcries and scandals than political parties. In the #MeToo movement, many corporate boards quickly dismissed their credibly accused executives, while Republicans (and some Democrats) wavered over how to punish accused officials and candidates, like Representative Patrick Meehan, the Alabama Senate contender Roy Moore, and, well, the president of the United States. In the gun debate, too, many companies moved to distance themselves from the NRA before the state of Florida or the federal government could propose or act on new legislation to limit gun violence.
National government in an age of Republican control is mostly unresponsive to liberal protests. So, many activists are focusing their ire on the business community. A corporation is a knot of products, services, and policies, and activists have seen that any one string can be grabbed, pulled, and scrutinized, until the company agrees to cut it away.
Businesses have to respond to political crises even faster than political parties do, says William Klepper, a professor of corporate leadership at the Columbia Business School. Politics is competitive, but the competition is constrained—by time (e.g., elections only happen every two, four, or six years), by geography (e.g., the gerrymandering of districts), and by partisanship, in which every issue often boils down to “the other side is worse.” Many companies cannot rely on time, geography, or negative advertising to save them. Every week is a primary for a consumer brand; the global nature of business exposes companies to more rivals; and no company can thrive by making nothing and investing exclusively in hostile marketing. “Politicians assume they can wait out the outrage, but national companies have to respond to the immediacy of demand,” Klepper told me.
Social media, and its capacity to foment outrage, has helped create this dynamic, contributing to both the virulence of partisanship and the concurrent rise of the activist corporation. Angry tweets and Facebook memes help political groups rally around anger and perceived villainy; but also, they create unavoidable choices for multinational companies that have to respond to political crises by picking a side.
American democracy is not a free market. It is, at best, a two-party duopoly, in which vilification of the opposition often passes for a party platform. As a result, many liberal activists are asking corporations to express the values that they cannot impress upon a Republican-dominated government. Corporations are no longer bystanders in the culture wars. They are on the front lines.
from The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2BONnT7
Pyeongchang 2018: Photos From the Final Week
After two weeks of competition, Norway topped the Olympic medals chart with 39 total medals, followed by Germany, Canada, and the United States. Here, a look at some of the events of the last days of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, from ski cross and bobsleigh to hockey, speed skating, the Closing Ceremony, and more.
from The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2Cp2Ry0
A Gun-Holdup Victim on Whether He Wishes He Had Been Armed
Previously in this series:
- “White Male Privilege”
- “A Case Against Gun Control”
- “The Cultural Roots of a Gun-Massacre Society”
- “A Veteran on the Need to Control Civilian Arms”
- “‘Show Us the Carnage,’ Continued”
- “Only in America”
- “Show Us the Carnage”
- “The Empty Rituals of an American Massacre”
and before that: - “Why the AR-15 Is So Lethal”
- “The Nature of the AR-15”
- “Why the AR-15 Was Never Meant to be in Civilian Hands”
- “More on the Military and Civilian History of the AR-15”
and - “The Certainty of More Shootings,” from back after the Aurora massacre
- “Two Dark American Truths from Las Vegas,” with included video.
Today, Eric Kingsbury, of San Francisco, on what he has thought, and felt, about guns after being robbed at gunpoint a year and a half ago. I should note that all the links in his dispatch are ones he added himself:
I’ve faced down a loaded gun once in my life. It was 10 PM on the night before the Fourth of July in 2016 and I was walking to the train from a friend’s house in Berkeley. Almost as soon as I walked out of my friend’s driveway, a kid ran across to the street to ask me if I had a phone. I told him I didn’t and asked that he leave me alone. That’s when he began to ask more forcefully. Within seconds I felt a hand over my mouth, as two other kids ran out from the shadows. I was completely helpless and, for the first time in my adult life, I wasn’t in control of my body or my fate.
The kid to my right showed me his gun. He told me he would, “pop a cap in you if you scream or tell anyone,” which would have been darkly funny—the sort of thing someone thinks they should say to sound hard—in almost any other circumstance. He then put the gun back in his sweatshirt pocket and pushed it up against my stomach. Meanwhile, his other two friends went to work grabbing my phone, peeling off my backpack, and checking all my pockets. Once they had everything, they let me go. It didn’t last more than 30 seconds, tops.
The aftermath of the whole situation was a bit of a blur. There was talking to the cops, a very restless night, and the conversations with all my friends and family the following morning. All of it was difficult, especially learning the truth that many of my most liberal-minded friends and family actually held quite retrograde views on race—the assailants were black, and I am white—that they felt freed to share now that something that they’d heard about so many times in the media had happened to “one of us.” But there was one question I got over and over again, one that really surprised me: Would it have been different if you had a gun?
from The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2GIU48w
Martin Luther King Jr. Mourns Trayvon Martin
For you, son,
I dreamed a childhood
unburdened by hate;
a boyhood of adventure—
skinned knees and hoops,
first loves and small rebellions;
I dreamed you whole
and growing into your own
manhood, writing its definitions
with your daily being.
I dreamed you alive, living.
For you, America’s African heir,
I dreamed a future
of open doors, of opportunity
without oppression,
of affirmation and action,
I dreamed Oprah and Obama
I dreamed Colin and Condoleezza
I dreamed doctors and dancers,
lawyers and linebackers, models,
musicians, mechanics, preachers
and professors and police, authors,
activists, astronauts, even,
all black as Jesus is.
I dreamed you dapper—
the black skin of you
polished to glow; your curls,
your kinks, your locs,
your bald, your wild,
your freshly barbered—
all beautiful.
I dreamed you wearing whatever the hell you want
and not dying for it.
For you, brother,
I dreamed a world softened
by love, free from the fear
that makes too-early ancestors of our men;
turns our boys into targets,
headlines, and ghosts.
I had a dream
that my children will one day live
in a nation where they will not be judged
by the color of their skin
but by the content of their character.
Sweet song of my sorrow.
Sweet dream, deferred.
For you, gone one, I dreamed
justice—her scales tipped
away from your extinction,
her eyes and arms unbound
and open to you
at last.
from The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2F378bB
Delta tried to find a middle ground on gun control — only to discover there wasn't one - Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times |
Delta tried to find a middle ground on gun control — only to discover there wasn't one
Los Angeles Times A Delta Airlines jet departs Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in 2008. (John Bazemore / Associated Press). It's getting harder and harder to find neutral territory in America's raging gun-control debate. Just ask Delta Air Lines, a ... Georgia Republicans Vow to Kill Airline Tax-Cut Bill After Delta Ends NRA Discount Georgia's Republican lieutenant governor threatens Delta over cutting its NRA ties Trump Disappointed That Parkland “Setback” Has Distracted from the Economy |
from Top Stories - Google News http://ift.tt/2HNV4cE
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