Superintendent James Abrams says the “no-frills” capital project is
intended to preserve the district’s investment in its infrastructure.
Improvements include a new roof and windows for the middle-high school
building, as well as upgrades for the security and
heating-and-ventilation systems. The elementary school will have its
fire alarm system and other technology upgraded.
“The community
has invested a lot of money over the years and this is preserving (the
middle-high school) for some time to come, so it’s a building that
will stand for another 50 years,” said Abrams. “One of our goals for
this is there’s no additional tax levy to fund it.”
By that time, Groton schools may look a little different.Don't make another silicone mold without these invaluable Mold Making
supplies and accessories! The district is weighing the restructuring
of schools. The sixth grade is currently housed in the middle-high
school, but the district is considering moving the grade over to the
elementary school.
On Monday, Abrams will make his
recommendation to the board of education; he says he’s leaning toward
the middle-high school option.
“This idea is a best of both
worlds,” he said. “They're getting an early exposure of the secondary
setting but they’re not thrown in and trying to learn to swim.”
With
New York State’s Annual Professional Performance Review evaluation
process soon to be implemented, the district is looking for ways to
improve efficiency and scheduling at the middle-high school building.
“We’d
still have the same number of administrators but we'd gain a little
savings,” he said. “We’ll have two principals and two associate
principals with other responsibilities. I think being deployed in that
manner we’ll have a chance to meet the requirements of APPR without
adding additional staff.”
The restructuring is part of what
Abrams hopes will be a larger transformation as the middle-high school
looks to bring more flexibility and innovation to its scheduling.
Seminar-type classes involving small groups of students, different
departments teaming together for extended blocks of time, and increased
online learning opportunities are all options the district may
consider.
“There’s a lot of ideas on the plate,” Abram said.
“Hopefully at the end of the day we have something innovative that
looks towards the future, while also sustaining ourselves.”
This
is the universe according to Llyn Foulkes, a 78-year-old Los Angeles
artist who has been angling for a fight for most of his career, whether
he's tweaking a corporation or railing against an art establishment
that has embraced him one minute and ignored him the next.
On
Sunday, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is opening the largest-ever
retrospective of Mr. Foulkes's work. The roughly 150 pieces on display
range from early paintings charred with black tar to midcareer
portraits of bloody heads to more recent works using wood, paste and
found objects in surreal montages.
Mr.Basics, technical terms and advantages and disadvantages of Laser engraver.
Foulkes, a self-described loner whose Los Angeles studio is so
solitary that he won't even listen to music while he works, said he is a
bit thrown by this moment in the spotlight: "It comes back and it
fades away and it comes back," Mr. Foulkes said of his fame. "I've
never gotten this much attention, let's put it that way. It's a bit
disconcerting."
The artist and musician, who had stardom within
reach early in his career after a solo exhibit at a trendy Los Angeles
gallery in 1961,wind turbine
can credit more than the Hammer show for his current comeback. In the
last two years, Mr. Foulkes's works have been included at the prominent
art exhibitions Documenta in Germany and the Venice Biennale.
"The
Awakening," a sad tableau of a couple in bed, sold last year to the
actor Brad Pitt.Totech Americas delivers a wide range of drycabinets
for applications spanning electronics. The work, which is featured in
the exhibition, depicts a naked woman coiled in a fetal position with
her back to the artist, who appears in a self-portrait. Mr. Foulkes
painted it in spurts over 18 years—a period that included the breakup
of his second marriage. "I worked on that painting rather than working
on the marriage, you see, and wound up getting a divorce and the
painting survived," he said.
Lately, his prices have rocketed.
Small works that sold for $5,000 or less in 2009 now fetch $25,000 to
$45,000, said Mr. Walla, and larger pieces have gone for $500,000 or
more.
Mr. Foulkes's father left home when the artist was a baby
in Yakima, Wash., leaving him to dream up father figures, like the
surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, whose works inspired him to paint. He
grew close to his first father-in-law,We offers custom Injection Mold
parts in as fast as 1 day. Ward Kimball, an animator at Disney who in
the 1970s gave him a copy of an early Mickey Mouse Club Handbook.
Though he drew pictures of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse as a
five-year-old, as an adult Mr. Foulkes believed such characters were
intended to brainwash children. By the early 1980s he was targeting
Disney in his works, using Mickey Mouse as his creepy muse.
He
has taken aim at the art world, too, publicly criticizing other artists
or airing his differences with them. On Andy Warhol, for example, he
said: "I turned my back on Warhol and I don't think he ever forgot it."
Mr. Foulkes added that he believes Warhol's famous cow wallpaper was a
comment on his own earlier works featuring cows. "He was kind of like
saying, 'I'll turn your cows into wallpaper.' To me it was a personal
thing."
2013年1月31日星期四
Man killed partner then himself
A man killed his partner in a planned attack then spent a week on
board a river cruiser on the Norfolk Broads with her daughter before
drowning himself, an inquest has heard.
The body of Annette Creegan, 49, who worked as a community nurse at the Trinity Hospice charity in Clapham Common, south-west London, was found naked, strangled and weighted down in the River Bure last September following a major police search.
The body of her partner, John Didier, 41, was found nearby and evidence suggests he drowned himself by tying dumbbells to his limbs and jumping overboard, the inquest at Norwich Coroner's Court heard.
A search was launched after a river worker alerted police on September 1 to the discovery of Ms Creegan's 13-year-old daughter alone on a boat moored near isolated Salhouse Broad. When she was interviewed, the girl said they had arrived for a holiday on the Broads on August 25 and the following day she woke to find her mother was not there.
Detective Constable Christina Stone told the inquest: "They had moored the boat at about 5.30pm on the Friday. The following day she woke up and Mr Didier told her that Annette had left.
"She had no access to a mobile telephone and no means of getting off the boat so stayed there over the following days. Six days later she woke up and there was no sign of Mr Didier and she was rescued by a passing Broads ranger."
The inquest heard Mr Didier's body was found later on September 1. He had drowned and was found immersed in water, weighted down with two 17.5kg dumbbells tied to his feet and two 15kg weights tied to his wrists, pathologist Ben Swift said.
Ms Creegan's body was found in the water nearby the following afternoon. Mr Swift said she was naked and her hands had been tied behind her knees with cable ties. She was weighted down with a 30kg dumbbell and had been strangled. The decomposed state of the body suggested she had been in the water for about a week. Bruises to her fists suggested she had tried to fight off Mr Didier but there was no evidence of sexual abuse.Totech Americas delivers a wide range of drycabinets for applications spanning electronics.Basics, technical terms and advantages and disadvantages of Laser engraver.
Detective Inspector Gary Bloomfield said a thorough investigation was carried out. Outside the inquest, he added that officers had found no evidence of any tension in the relationship and Mr Didier's motive remained unclear.
Never mind that there isn’t a road. His father, the previous khan, spent his life lobbying for a road. The new khan does the same. A road, he argues, would permit doctors, and their medicines, to easily reach them.We specializes in rapid plastic injection mould and molding of parts for prototypes and production. Then maybe all the dying would stop. Teachers too could get to them. Also traders. There could be vegetables. And then his people—the Kyrgyz nomads of remote Afghanistan—might have a legitimate chance to thrive. A road is the khan’s work. A car is his dream.
But for now, with no car and no road, the reality is a yak. The khan is holding one by a rope strung through its nose. Other yaks are standing by. It’s moving day; everything the khan owns needs to be tied to the back of a yak. This includes a dozen teapots, a cast-iron stove, a car battery, two solar panels, a yurt, and 43 blankets. His younger brother and a few others are helping. The yaks buck and kick and snort; loading them is as much wrestling as packing.
Moving is what nomads do. For the Kyrgyz of Afghanistan, it’s from two to four times a year, depending on the weather and the availability of grass for the animals. They call their homeland Bam-e Dunya, which means “roof of the world.” This might sound poetic and beautiful—it is undeniably beautiful—but it’s also an environment at the very cusp of human survivability. Their land consists of two long, glacier-carved valleys, called pamirs, stashed deep within the great mountains of Central Asia. Much of it is above 14,000 feet. The wind is furious; crops are impossible to grow.Bay State Cable Ties is a full line manufacturer of nylon cable ties and related products. The temperature can drop below freezing 340 days a year. Many Kyrgyz have never seen a tree.
The valleys are located in a strange, pincer-shaped appendage of land jutting from the northeast corner of Afghanistan. This strip,We offers custom Injection Mold parts in as fast as 1 day. often referred to as the Wakhan corridor, was a result of the 19th century’s so-called Great Game, when the British and Russian Empires fought for influence in Central Asia. The two powers created it, through a series of treaties between 1873 and 1895, as a buffer zone—a sort of geographical shock absorber—preventing tsarist Russia from touching British India. In previous centuries the area was part of the Silk Road connecting China and points west, the route of armies and explorers and missionaries. Marco Polo passed through in the late 1200s.
But communist revolutions—Russia in 1917, China in 1949—eventually sealed the borders. What was once a conduit became a cul-de-sac. Now, in the postcolonial age, the corridor is bordered by Tajikistan to the north, Pakistan to the south, and China to the east. Mainland Afghanistan, to the west, can seem so far away—the corridor is about 200 miles long—that some Kyrgyz refer to it as a foreign country. They feel locked in a distant outpost, encaged by a spiked fence of snowy peaks, lost in the swirl of history and politics and conflict.
The body of Annette Creegan, 49, who worked as a community nurse at the Trinity Hospice charity in Clapham Common, south-west London, was found naked, strangled and weighted down in the River Bure last September following a major police search.
The body of her partner, John Didier, 41, was found nearby and evidence suggests he drowned himself by tying dumbbells to his limbs and jumping overboard, the inquest at Norwich Coroner's Court heard.
A search was launched after a river worker alerted police on September 1 to the discovery of Ms Creegan's 13-year-old daughter alone on a boat moored near isolated Salhouse Broad. When she was interviewed, the girl said they had arrived for a holiday on the Broads on August 25 and the following day she woke to find her mother was not there.
Detective Constable Christina Stone told the inquest: "They had moored the boat at about 5.30pm on the Friday. The following day she woke up and Mr Didier told her that Annette had left.
"She had no access to a mobile telephone and no means of getting off the boat so stayed there over the following days. Six days later she woke up and there was no sign of Mr Didier and she was rescued by a passing Broads ranger."
The inquest heard Mr Didier's body was found later on September 1. He had drowned and was found immersed in water, weighted down with two 17.5kg dumbbells tied to his feet and two 15kg weights tied to his wrists, pathologist Ben Swift said.
Ms Creegan's body was found in the water nearby the following afternoon. Mr Swift said she was naked and her hands had been tied behind her knees with cable ties. She was weighted down with a 30kg dumbbell and had been strangled. The decomposed state of the body suggested she had been in the water for about a week. Bruises to her fists suggested she had tried to fight off Mr Didier but there was no evidence of sexual abuse.Totech Americas delivers a wide range of drycabinets for applications spanning electronics.Basics, technical terms and advantages and disadvantages of Laser engraver.
Detective Inspector Gary Bloomfield said a thorough investigation was carried out. Outside the inquest, he added that officers had found no evidence of any tension in the relationship and Mr Didier's motive remained unclear.
Never mind that there isn’t a road. His father, the previous khan, spent his life lobbying for a road. The new khan does the same. A road, he argues, would permit doctors, and their medicines, to easily reach them.We specializes in rapid plastic injection mould and molding of parts for prototypes and production. Then maybe all the dying would stop. Teachers too could get to them. Also traders. There could be vegetables. And then his people—the Kyrgyz nomads of remote Afghanistan—might have a legitimate chance to thrive. A road is the khan’s work. A car is his dream.
But for now, with no car and no road, the reality is a yak. The khan is holding one by a rope strung through its nose. Other yaks are standing by. It’s moving day; everything the khan owns needs to be tied to the back of a yak. This includes a dozen teapots, a cast-iron stove, a car battery, two solar panels, a yurt, and 43 blankets. His younger brother and a few others are helping. The yaks buck and kick and snort; loading them is as much wrestling as packing.
Moving is what nomads do. For the Kyrgyz of Afghanistan, it’s from two to four times a year, depending on the weather and the availability of grass for the animals. They call their homeland Bam-e Dunya, which means “roof of the world.” This might sound poetic and beautiful—it is undeniably beautiful—but it’s also an environment at the very cusp of human survivability. Their land consists of two long, glacier-carved valleys, called pamirs, stashed deep within the great mountains of Central Asia. Much of it is above 14,000 feet. The wind is furious; crops are impossible to grow.Bay State Cable Ties is a full line manufacturer of nylon cable ties and related products. The temperature can drop below freezing 340 days a year. Many Kyrgyz have never seen a tree.
The valleys are located in a strange, pincer-shaped appendage of land jutting from the northeast corner of Afghanistan. This strip,We offers custom Injection Mold parts in as fast as 1 day. often referred to as the Wakhan corridor, was a result of the 19th century’s so-called Great Game, when the British and Russian Empires fought for influence in Central Asia. The two powers created it, through a series of treaties between 1873 and 1895, as a buffer zone—a sort of geographical shock absorber—preventing tsarist Russia from touching British India. In previous centuries the area was part of the Silk Road connecting China and points west, the route of armies and explorers and missionaries. Marco Polo passed through in the late 1200s.
But communist revolutions—Russia in 1917, China in 1949—eventually sealed the borders. What was once a conduit became a cul-de-sac. Now, in the postcolonial age, the corridor is bordered by Tajikistan to the north, Pakistan to the south, and China to the east. Mainland Afghanistan, to the west, can seem so far away—the corridor is about 200 miles long—that some Kyrgyz refer to it as a foreign country. They feel locked in a distant outpost, encaged by a spiked fence of snowy peaks, lost in the swirl of history and politics and conflict.
Quilting outside the box
When David Small requested a transfer to northern Maine, he was
shown a map and asked to point to the city of Presque Isle to assure his
employer he understood how far from Boston he would be required to
move.
Small knew exactly where he was headed and there was no question in his mind about the suitability of the move. No, it was not Portland or Bangor he envisioned. It was Aroostook County. He had vacationed in Maine and remembered “the down-to-earth, serene people” who emphasized things that are important. Any place from Bangor south was too much like Massachusetts.
While Small holds a day job with a national retailer, his life’s work is art. “I have to create. An artist is who I am.”
Between 1990 and 2001, Small’s art took him to 70 different countries and every state in the nation except Alaska. When a life of travel no longer felt right, he set his sights on practicing art in a peaceful, friendly environment.
Small is a painter, woodworker, pen-and-ink illustrator and collage artist, but the craft that earned him international fame is quilting. During the 1990s, he was booked seven years in advance for lectures and workshops across the country and around the world. He has published three books on quilting and exhibited in galleries.
“Quilters are not just little old ladies,” he said. “Quilting is a multi-billion dollar-a-year business, just in the U.S.”
Small did not always know this.We specializes in rapid plastic injection mould and molding of parts for prototypes and production. He was introduced to quilting when he saw a quilt he wanted to buy; but the quilter would not sell. Undeterred, he resolved to make one himself. But he had never so much as sewn on a button and was in awe of anyone who could sew.
So he joined an online chat room, profiling himself as a little old lady modeled on his grandmother, afraid he would be rejected if quilters knew he was a man. The editor of a quilting magazine detected his disguise, contacted him and wrote an article about him featuring the miniature quilts he was making to teach himself how to quilt. His first work was a 20-inch-by-20-inch quilt containing 756 fabric pieces,We offers custom Injection Mold parts in as fast as 1 day. none larger than a half-inch wide.
The article, titled, “Man-made minis by David K. Small,” contained his contact information. He was overwhelmed with queries. He asked the editor how to handle all the responses. She suggested he write a book.
The editor also hired him to write a column, which appeared in 17 quilting publications under the title “FYI.” Each two-page column described a specific technique.
“Within six months I had changed my career,” he recalled. “I wrote about what I was doing.” The editor would suggest topics (“How to appliqué”) and Small would detail the process he used to accomplish the technique.
“I got an incredible amount of exposure.” Within a year he was traveling to quilt shows and serving as a spokesperson for a sewing machine company and other products. And he wrote the book, “Quilt Foundations: Sewing on the Lines,How cheaply can I build a solar power systems?” which led to two other books, “The Crazy Quilt Work Book” (expanding on a chapter in the first book) and “Artistic Quiltmaker: Thinking Outside the Box” (how to create art quilts). The woman who would not sell him the quilt that had inspired his journey into quilting wrote the foreword for his third book.
He responded to requests to lead workshops and give lectures on topics such as the artistic quilter, crazy quilts, free-motion quilting, fabric painting, embellishing techniques and landscape quilts. He created quilt-making kits, hand-painted fabrics and patterns. He sold these products and his books at quilt shows, where he also served as a judge.
“Teaching was not work. I loved teaching,” he said, describing his approach: “If I can do this, you can do this.” He never took an art class or a sewing class. He told his students, “I’m one of you. I just happen to be in front of the class.” He tried to convey that they were all artists — taking raw materials and putting them together to make something new.
He encouraged students to think outside the box, be creative, turn mistakes and imperfections into creative designs. He even gave a “judge’s choice” award to a quilt held together with staples and duct tape because he admired the attitude of someone “determined to do this no matter what.”
In time, Small realized that his busy schedule, although gratifying, was beginning to eclipse his own creative endeavors. “I wanted to be able to do what I was teaching,” he said, “so I gave myself permission to call myself an artist.”
Even though he had always been an artist, he had not originally thought art could be a career.
Now, he can simply indulge “the joy of making something, period.” He is inspired by color and texture and keeps binders full of ideas: “an endless stream of things I want to make.” He has been seen on the floor of a hotel corridor tracing the pattern of the carpet and was carefully watched by security guards at a Las Vegas hotel while he traced the pattern of the wallpaper near the entrance to the women’s restroom.
He uses the finest quality materials and equipment because he does not want his work to fade or deteriorate. And, despite high-tech options,Bay State Cable Ties is a full line manufacturer of nylon cable ties and related products. he now uses his mother’s old Singer/Kenmore sewing machine with the feed-dogs (the teeth under the needle) dropped so he is in complete control as he moves the fabric (free-motion quilting). However,Which Air purifier is right for you? he still prefers to do most of his work by hand.
“There are no instructions for doing things outside the box. That’s what excites me. I live my life outside the box. We live outside the box up here. We’re different than the rest of the U.S.
“Northern Mainers are survivors. They like to see people succeed; they encourage it. There is a strong sense of community, a sense of the whole — a joy in doing something for someone for nothing.”
Small knew exactly where he was headed and there was no question in his mind about the suitability of the move. No, it was not Portland or Bangor he envisioned. It was Aroostook County. He had vacationed in Maine and remembered “the down-to-earth, serene people” who emphasized things that are important. Any place from Bangor south was too much like Massachusetts.
While Small holds a day job with a national retailer, his life’s work is art. “I have to create. An artist is who I am.”
Between 1990 and 2001, Small’s art took him to 70 different countries and every state in the nation except Alaska. When a life of travel no longer felt right, he set his sights on practicing art in a peaceful, friendly environment.
Small is a painter, woodworker, pen-and-ink illustrator and collage artist, but the craft that earned him international fame is quilting. During the 1990s, he was booked seven years in advance for lectures and workshops across the country and around the world. He has published three books on quilting and exhibited in galleries.
“Quilters are not just little old ladies,” he said. “Quilting is a multi-billion dollar-a-year business, just in the U.S.”
Small did not always know this.We specializes in rapid plastic injection mould and molding of parts for prototypes and production. He was introduced to quilting when he saw a quilt he wanted to buy; but the quilter would not sell. Undeterred, he resolved to make one himself. But he had never so much as sewn on a button and was in awe of anyone who could sew.
So he joined an online chat room, profiling himself as a little old lady modeled on his grandmother, afraid he would be rejected if quilters knew he was a man. The editor of a quilting magazine detected his disguise, contacted him and wrote an article about him featuring the miniature quilts he was making to teach himself how to quilt. His first work was a 20-inch-by-20-inch quilt containing 756 fabric pieces,We offers custom Injection Mold parts in as fast as 1 day. none larger than a half-inch wide.
The article, titled, “Man-made minis by David K. Small,” contained his contact information. He was overwhelmed with queries. He asked the editor how to handle all the responses. She suggested he write a book.
The editor also hired him to write a column, which appeared in 17 quilting publications under the title “FYI.” Each two-page column described a specific technique.
“Within six months I had changed my career,” he recalled. “I wrote about what I was doing.” The editor would suggest topics (“How to appliqué”) and Small would detail the process he used to accomplish the technique.
“I got an incredible amount of exposure.” Within a year he was traveling to quilt shows and serving as a spokesperson for a sewing machine company and other products. And he wrote the book, “Quilt Foundations: Sewing on the Lines,How cheaply can I build a solar power systems?” which led to two other books, “The Crazy Quilt Work Book” (expanding on a chapter in the first book) and “Artistic Quiltmaker: Thinking Outside the Box” (how to create art quilts). The woman who would not sell him the quilt that had inspired his journey into quilting wrote the foreword for his third book.
He responded to requests to lead workshops and give lectures on topics such as the artistic quilter, crazy quilts, free-motion quilting, fabric painting, embellishing techniques and landscape quilts. He created quilt-making kits, hand-painted fabrics and patterns. He sold these products and his books at quilt shows, where he also served as a judge.
“Teaching was not work. I loved teaching,” he said, describing his approach: “If I can do this, you can do this.” He never took an art class or a sewing class. He told his students, “I’m one of you. I just happen to be in front of the class.” He tried to convey that they were all artists — taking raw materials and putting them together to make something new.
He encouraged students to think outside the box, be creative, turn mistakes and imperfections into creative designs. He even gave a “judge’s choice” award to a quilt held together with staples and duct tape because he admired the attitude of someone “determined to do this no matter what.”
In time, Small realized that his busy schedule, although gratifying, was beginning to eclipse his own creative endeavors. “I wanted to be able to do what I was teaching,” he said, “so I gave myself permission to call myself an artist.”
Even though he had always been an artist, he had not originally thought art could be a career.
Now, he can simply indulge “the joy of making something, period.” He is inspired by color and texture and keeps binders full of ideas: “an endless stream of things I want to make.” He has been seen on the floor of a hotel corridor tracing the pattern of the carpet and was carefully watched by security guards at a Las Vegas hotel while he traced the pattern of the wallpaper near the entrance to the women’s restroom.
He uses the finest quality materials and equipment because he does not want his work to fade or deteriorate. And, despite high-tech options,Bay State Cable Ties is a full line manufacturer of nylon cable ties and related products. he now uses his mother’s old Singer/Kenmore sewing machine with the feed-dogs (the teeth under the needle) dropped so he is in complete control as he moves the fabric (free-motion quilting). However,Which Air purifier is right for you? he still prefers to do most of his work by hand.
“There are no instructions for doing things outside the box. That’s what excites me. I live my life outside the box. We live outside the box up here. We’re different than the rest of the U.S.
“Northern Mainers are survivors. They like to see people succeed; they encourage it. There is a strong sense of community, a sense of the whole — a joy in doing something for someone for nothing.”
30 Rock Landed on Us
One of the greatest moments I've ever seen involving anything that
lasts for only 22 minutes happened on a Thursday night in the spring of
2010. James "Toofer" Spurlock (Keith Powell) bounded into Tracy
Jordan's dressing room with some urgency. On his way into work, a
stranger called him a "biggledeeboo." "Old-school racism is back," says
Tracy. James can't believe it: But the president is black. That's the
problem, Tracy says. James remains incredulous nonetheless: "Racism is
back because white people no longer feel sorry for us?" And Tracy, who
for two seasons of 30 Rock had let us believe in his buffoonery,Solar
Sister is a network of women who sell solar lamp
to communities that don't have access to electricity. offers a nugget
of insight that turns James's world upside down: "All you've ever known
is your affirmative-action job and Queen Latifah Cover Girl
commercials."
With that, James, a writer on the sketch-comedy show TGS, marches into the office of his boss, Liz Lemon, and asks whether it's true, that he does owe his employment to a racial quota. Liz demurs, then concedes. He brought the "diverse point of view" mandated by corporate policy, and his salary is paid not from the TGS budget but from a separate quota division of the network. Angered and insulted, he quits rather than stay in a job he feels he didn't earn.
We'd never seen a black character stand up for himself on such everyday human terms, only to have that moment of self-respect land him more or less where he began — as a token hire and the butt of his coworkers' jokes. His quitting and ultimate rehiring in a more important position should be a moment of triumph, but no one on 30 Rock stays triumphant for long. The show spent seven seasons as one of the best in the recent history of television. Its last episode airs tonight, at which point its jersey should be retired but its entertainment-industry lessons about how to handle identity should live on. A farce about the pragmatic limits of ambition aimed a lot of its own ambition at the comedy of race.
For nearly all of its run, 30 Rock practiced what's best called the comedy of Teflon topicality. It had story arcs, but no matter how serious the offense, the show would usually manage to reset itself by the start of the next episode. But it refused to evade race, gender, and their discontents the way dozens of its predecessors had. It wanted to know what kind of fire starts when two different types of black men — uptight Toofer and uncouth Tracy — rub each other the wrong way; when Liz's sense of propriety clashes with Jenna's runaway narcissism; when the self-made executive titan Jack Donaghy encounters a na?f like Kenneth the NBC page.
The conflicts mixed and matched, like when Tracy and Jenna pulled a "Freaky Friday" stunt in which she put on a suit and Afro and painted her face brown to prove that women were more oppressed than black men, and he tried to make the opposite point by wearing a blond wig and painting his face white. Half the comedy came from the idea of these two stupid-like-a-fox egomaniacs waging "a social experiment." Half of it came from the way they inhabited their costumes: She looked like a smudge pretending to be Nipsey Russell; he looked like what would happen if science crossbred Paris Hilton and Godzilla.
At the moment, network TV is relatively rich with farce — How I Met Your Mother, Happy Endings, The Big Bang Theory, Suburgatory. But 30 Rock operates at several orders of magnitude higher, much like the The Simpsons and Seinfeld before it. It sidesteps protecting the safe and peaceable and celebrates the mean, pathetic, and ridiculous.Which Air purifier is right for you? Not far into the first season, Jack sets Liz up on a blind date with a lesbian named Gretchen Thomas. They bond over their fear of dying in their apartments alone and undiscovered. When you're single, Liz says to Thomas,How cheaply can I build a solar power systems? "Everything's the worst." This is the rare show daring enough to bring out the best in the worst.
There's a way that network television normalizes and sanitizes the dirt of being alive. We can turn on the TV and see our ideal selves — the funnier, faster, braver, more entertaining people we wish ourselves to be. But for most of a decade the dirt of being alive was actually dirty. Norman Lear's great run of 1970s sitcoms — All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons — peeled back the surface of American idealism to invite the country to spend most of the decade with the increasingly liberal family of a bigot, with a witheringly stubborn feminist, with a black family subsisting in the Chicago projects, and with a middle-aged black couple that had earned its way to luxury. It was a progressive era, and it was short-lived.
Television in the 1980s tried to pluck the thorns from social issues palatable to a vast audience with far fewer television channels than it currently has. The landscape had been resanitized. Both Lear's contentious liberalism and the galvanizing perseverance of the Mary Tyler Moore empire were eroding. Activism and righteousness had turned to a kind of pacifism. The "temporary layoffs and easy credit rip-offs" of Good Times had morphed into the insidiously benign paternalism of Benson, Diff'rent Strokes, Webster, and Gimme a Break!, shows that represented a new strain of liberalism in which the needs and concerns of black people were more or less held in check by their proximity to the alleged privilege of whiteness. It was hard to be a poor black male complaining about the man when you were living in his penthouse. Television had lost its nerve when it came to race and social issues.
TV became overwhelmingly white, again.Compare prices and buy all brands of solar panel for home power systems and by the pallet. Mostly black shows, like 227 and Amen, were largely stressless havens, free of racial and social upheaval. That comfort continued to swell in the 1990s with shows like Living Single, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Family Matters.Most of these shows took the wrong lessons from The Cosby Show and its black-college spin-off, A Different World, the two most important shows about black life in the history of television. The former took lavish pride in blackness and the black middle class. The latter offered an absorbing survey of the many ways to be black. But each show could also be watched, respectively, as a universal half-hour about a large, loving family and as a resonant dramedy about the ups and downs of higher education. Not seeing blackness in either show meant the writing was generous enough to permit you to see past it. But that didn't mean it wasn't there. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Family Matters were more insipid shows that nonetheless managed to further normalize a black middle class, while characters like Carlton Banks and Steve Urkel followed the cool nerdiness of A Different World's Dwayne Wayne and further expanded the parameters of who else a black male could be.
But the problems of race and racism were shuttled off to cop procedurals and courtroom dramas or were being fought on nascent daytime talk shows and reality stunts like the alarming first two seasons of The Real World. 30 Rock turned a sharp corner on the depiction of those conversations. It's useful to remember that the show debuted in the fall of 2006, right before the cancellation of Aaron Sorkin's terrible Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, whose setting was a sketch comedy show that was too proud of all the positions it took to be funny. That show resulted in nearly two dozen episodes of awkward self-misunderstanding. It was like watching a horse try to ride a man.
At the time, the fear was that 30 Rock would be more lefty righteousness and politically correct self-affirmation, another gassy indulgence from an NBC star. Sorkin's show was pure Hollywood earnestness and view-from-the–Town Car platitudes. But after half a season, it was clear someone on 30 Rock rode the subway. The show enjoyed the mess of trying to get along. Its approach was Blazing Saddles to Studio 60's Crash. Liz breaks up with a geeky black business manager (Wayne Brady) because he's dull. But he swears it's because he's black. This is a man who blithely fulfilled no black stereotypes until he played the race card, which insults her sense of liberal guilt.
In one of the all-time best half-hours of television, Liz assumes that Tracy can't read. But he's actually just exploiting her white liberal guilt to get time off work. When she tells Pete (Scott Adsit) that Tracy's either illiterate or slacking, he calls her a racist. But she knows Tracy is working her white guilt, which is only to be used for "tipping and voting for Barack Obama." Part of the show's innovation was the way whiteness was as much up for discussion as blackness. Jack Donaghy doesn't see the color of his skin as a race so much as a class. He grew up Irish-Catholic in the slums of Boston, went to Princeton and Harvard Business School, and arrogantly votes Republican. He's come into his whiteness just as John Houseman in those old Smith Barney ads would have wanted him to: He's earned it.We specializes in rapid plastic injection mould and molding of parts for prototypes and production.
During Tracy and Jenna's "Freaky Friday" disaster, Jack interrupts their complaining to make the exasperated observation that white men have it hardest of all. Kenneth begins to interrupt him by saying, "As a white man … " and Jack shuts him down: "Socioeconomically speaking, you are more like an inner-city Latina." According to Jack, Kenneth, whose sole ambition was to get out of Stone Mountain and into the NBC page program, can't even afford to be white.
With that, James, a writer on the sketch-comedy show TGS, marches into the office of his boss, Liz Lemon, and asks whether it's true, that he does owe his employment to a racial quota. Liz demurs, then concedes. He brought the "diverse point of view" mandated by corporate policy, and his salary is paid not from the TGS budget but from a separate quota division of the network. Angered and insulted, he quits rather than stay in a job he feels he didn't earn.
We'd never seen a black character stand up for himself on such everyday human terms, only to have that moment of self-respect land him more or less where he began — as a token hire and the butt of his coworkers' jokes. His quitting and ultimate rehiring in a more important position should be a moment of triumph, but no one on 30 Rock stays triumphant for long. The show spent seven seasons as one of the best in the recent history of television. Its last episode airs tonight, at which point its jersey should be retired but its entertainment-industry lessons about how to handle identity should live on. A farce about the pragmatic limits of ambition aimed a lot of its own ambition at the comedy of race.
For nearly all of its run, 30 Rock practiced what's best called the comedy of Teflon topicality. It had story arcs, but no matter how serious the offense, the show would usually manage to reset itself by the start of the next episode. But it refused to evade race, gender, and their discontents the way dozens of its predecessors had. It wanted to know what kind of fire starts when two different types of black men — uptight Toofer and uncouth Tracy — rub each other the wrong way; when Liz's sense of propriety clashes with Jenna's runaway narcissism; when the self-made executive titan Jack Donaghy encounters a na?f like Kenneth the NBC page.
The conflicts mixed and matched, like when Tracy and Jenna pulled a "Freaky Friday" stunt in which she put on a suit and Afro and painted her face brown to prove that women were more oppressed than black men, and he tried to make the opposite point by wearing a blond wig and painting his face white. Half the comedy came from the idea of these two stupid-like-a-fox egomaniacs waging "a social experiment." Half of it came from the way they inhabited their costumes: She looked like a smudge pretending to be Nipsey Russell; he looked like what would happen if science crossbred Paris Hilton and Godzilla.
At the moment, network TV is relatively rich with farce — How I Met Your Mother, Happy Endings, The Big Bang Theory, Suburgatory. But 30 Rock operates at several orders of magnitude higher, much like the The Simpsons and Seinfeld before it. It sidesteps protecting the safe and peaceable and celebrates the mean, pathetic, and ridiculous.Which Air purifier is right for you? Not far into the first season, Jack sets Liz up on a blind date with a lesbian named Gretchen Thomas. They bond over their fear of dying in their apartments alone and undiscovered. When you're single, Liz says to Thomas,How cheaply can I build a solar power systems? "Everything's the worst." This is the rare show daring enough to bring out the best in the worst.
There's a way that network television normalizes and sanitizes the dirt of being alive. We can turn on the TV and see our ideal selves — the funnier, faster, braver, more entertaining people we wish ourselves to be. But for most of a decade the dirt of being alive was actually dirty. Norman Lear's great run of 1970s sitcoms — All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons — peeled back the surface of American idealism to invite the country to spend most of the decade with the increasingly liberal family of a bigot, with a witheringly stubborn feminist, with a black family subsisting in the Chicago projects, and with a middle-aged black couple that had earned its way to luxury. It was a progressive era, and it was short-lived.
Television in the 1980s tried to pluck the thorns from social issues palatable to a vast audience with far fewer television channels than it currently has. The landscape had been resanitized. Both Lear's contentious liberalism and the galvanizing perseverance of the Mary Tyler Moore empire were eroding. Activism and righteousness had turned to a kind of pacifism. The "temporary layoffs and easy credit rip-offs" of Good Times had morphed into the insidiously benign paternalism of Benson, Diff'rent Strokes, Webster, and Gimme a Break!, shows that represented a new strain of liberalism in which the needs and concerns of black people were more or less held in check by their proximity to the alleged privilege of whiteness. It was hard to be a poor black male complaining about the man when you were living in his penthouse. Television had lost its nerve when it came to race and social issues.
TV became overwhelmingly white, again.Compare prices and buy all brands of solar panel for home power systems and by the pallet. Mostly black shows, like 227 and Amen, were largely stressless havens, free of racial and social upheaval. That comfort continued to swell in the 1990s with shows like Living Single, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Family Matters.Most of these shows took the wrong lessons from The Cosby Show and its black-college spin-off, A Different World, the two most important shows about black life in the history of television. The former took lavish pride in blackness and the black middle class. The latter offered an absorbing survey of the many ways to be black. But each show could also be watched, respectively, as a universal half-hour about a large, loving family and as a resonant dramedy about the ups and downs of higher education. Not seeing blackness in either show meant the writing was generous enough to permit you to see past it. But that didn't mean it wasn't there. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Family Matters were more insipid shows that nonetheless managed to further normalize a black middle class, while characters like Carlton Banks and Steve Urkel followed the cool nerdiness of A Different World's Dwayne Wayne and further expanded the parameters of who else a black male could be.
But the problems of race and racism were shuttled off to cop procedurals and courtroom dramas or were being fought on nascent daytime talk shows and reality stunts like the alarming first two seasons of The Real World. 30 Rock turned a sharp corner on the depiction of those conversations. It's useful to remember that the show debuted in the fall of 2006, right before the cancellation of Aaron Sorkin's terrible Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, whose setting was a sketch comedy show that was too proud of all the positions it took to be funny. That show resulted in nearly two dozen episodes of awkward self-misunderstanding. It was like watching a horse try to ride a man.
At the time, the fear was that 30 Rock would be more lefty righteousness and politically correct self-affirmation, another gassy indulgence from an NBC star. Sorkin's show was pure Hollywood earnestness and view-from-the–Town Car platitudes. But after half a season, it was clear someone on 30 Rock rode the subway. The show enjoyed the mess of trying to get along. Its approach was Blazing Saddles to Studio 60's Crash. Liz breaks up with a geeky black business manager (Wayne Brady) because he's dull. But he swears it's because he's black. This is a man who blithely fulfilled no black stereotypes until he played the race card, which insults her sense of liberal guilt.
In one of the all-time best half-hours of television, Liz assumes that Tracy can't read. But he's actually just exploiting her white liberal guilt to get time off work. When she tells Pete (Scott Adsit) that Tracy's either illiterate or slacking, he calls her a racist. But she knows Tracy is working her white guilt, which is only to be used for "tipping and voting for Barack Obama." Part of the show's innovation was the way whiteness was as much up for discussion as blackness. Jack Donaghy doesn't see the color of his skin as a race so much as a class. He grew up Irish-Catholic in the slums of Boston, went to Princeton and Harvard Business School, and arrogantly votes Republican. He's come into his whiteness just as John Houseman in those old Smith Barney ads would have wanted him to: He's earned it.We specializes in rapid plastic injection mould and molding of parts for prototypes and production.
During Tracy and Jenna's "Freaky Friday" disaster, Jack interrupts their complaining to make the exasperated observation that white men have it hardest of all. Kenneth begins to interrupt him by saying, "As a white man … " and Jack shuts him down: "Socioeconomically speaking, you are more like an inner-city Latina." According to Jack, Kenneth, whose sole ambition was to get out of Stone Mountain and into the NBC page program, can't even afford to be white.
2013年1月30日星期三
Families file lawsuit against ex-pastor
An ex-Pella pastor found to have sexually exploited four of his
former parishioners now is embroiled in a wide-ranging lawsuit with
accusations that include assault, damaged reputations and harassment.
Patrick Edouard, convicted in October of pressuring women for sex after they allegedly sought his counsel, was sued two months later by two of his former victims and their husbands. The women, sisters-in-law Valerie Bandstra and Anne Bandstra, also target the former leaders of Edouard’s church, whom the women accuse of defaming them by publicly dismissing accusations of rape as mere marital infidelity.
“You are not victims,” court papers quote church elder Clarence Hettinga as repeatedly telling the Bandstras. The lawsuit later quotes Hettinga as saying, “Unless he was holding a knife to her throat, it wasn’t rape.Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers.”
Edouard, who has always insisted the sex was consensual, in his own court papers accuses the Bandstra families of smearing his reputation by harassing his family with prank pizza orders, throwing a brick through his son’s window, and creating a fake posting on Craigslist that listed his house for sale.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Roxanne Conlin contends in court documents that Edouard “is libel-proof in that his reputation, as a result of his own actions, was already so poor that plaintiffs’ statements caused no appreciable damage.”
Conlin on Tuesday said actions by Edouard and his former bosses “both were horrible and damaging to my clients, but he has been held criminally liable and the church has not been held accountable for the separate and egregious harm they caused.”
Defense attorney Angela Campbell said Edouard is intent on defending himself against continued accusations that he raped the women.
“We win the jury on the rape and they keep saying it,” Campbell said. “That’s the biggest problem.Come January 9 and chip card driving licence would be available at the click of the mouse in Uttar Pradesh. Rape and a consensual sexual relationship that they shouldn’t have had are two very different things.Did you know that custom keychain chains can be used for more than just business.”
The Rev. Doug Barnes, Edouard’s replacement at Pella’s Covenant Reformed Church, said church leaders have been told by lawyers not to address the controversy.
“I can’t speak directly to the lawsuit,” Barnes said. “What I can say is that the church was devastated by what happened, and in fact disapproves of everything that was done there. Beyond that, we trust that our God is able to use even the sins of men to bless his church in the end.”
Edouard, a once highly regarded pastor in Pella, lost his job in 2011 after a husband discovered Edouard at his home and told church officials.Compare prices and buy all brands of solar panel for home power systems and by the pallet. Iowa authorities argued in a trial last August that Edouard had spent much of 2006 through 2010 pursuing religious and vulnerable females in his congregation. Jurors were told that the pastor used a combination of flattery and concern over the women’s personal problems to force himself on them and lure them into consensual affairs.
Originally charged with eight crimes, Edouard last fall was acquitted by jurors on three felony rape charges. He was convicted of four misdemeanor violations of a law banning sex between people who provide mental health services and those who seek guidance from them, as well as a separate charge that Edouard engaged in a deceitful scheme involving the women.
The Des Moines Register’s policy is to print the names of sexual abuse victims only when they voluntarily enter public proceedings, such as by filing a lawsuit.
Court papers say Valerie Bandstra, a Des Moines attorney facing difficult family planning decisions, was sexually assaulted by Edouard in early 2006 during a meeting in the pastor’s basement. A sexual relationship continued for roughly two more years, according to the lawsuit. It was 2008, documents say, when Edouard “persuaded plaintiff Valerie to open a bank account ... (and) transfer $20,000 from that account to defendant.”
The lawsuit accuses Edouard of assault, sexual exploitation and breach of fiduciary duty. The pastor, church, church elders — Hettinga, Arnold Van Donselaar, Norman Van Mersbergen and William Hartman — as well as the nationwide governing body of Reformed Churches, are all accused of negligence, defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Court papers say Hartman told others during a meeting that “Grooming is a word made up by professionals. In reality, it is temptation. These women fell into temptation, and they sinned.” The lawsuit says Van Donselaar described Edouard in June 2011 as “more repentant than any of the women ever will be.”
Documents say the church board sent a letter to the victims and their families one month after the trial that included several statements that “we formally and officially affirm to you that we forgive you ... .”
Elizabeth Barnhill, executive director of the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault, said sexual abuse victims frequently cite the fear of not being believed as a main reason they fail to report the crime.
Barnhill described Hettinga’s alleged statement about a knife to the throat as evidence of “just a very, very fundamental lack of understanding about what constitutes a rape.”
The Bandstras’ lawsuit seeks compensation for “injuries and damages” including “mental and emotional pain and anguish, and past and future medical expenses.”
Court papers filed by Campbell, Edouard’s attorney,Other companies want a piece of that iPhone headset action stress that the former pastor never provided the women counseling and that both Bandstra women “initiated sexual activity with Edouard on numerous occasions.”
Edouard also contends that Valerie Bandstra’s marriage already was under pressure in 2010 due to Bandstra’s unrelated affair with another man.
The counterclaims accuse Valerie Bandstra of defamation, abusing court procedures and of causing the former pastor “humiliation, embarrassment and severe mental and emotional distress.”
Anne Bandstra is accused of slander for filing a false child abuse report against Edouard, while Ryan Bandstra is accused of libel for distributing a flier about the pastor. Edouard’s part of the court case seeks reimbursement for “expenses incurred in defending the criminal charges, damages affecting Edouard’s employment, reputation and livelihood; and exposure to public hatred, contempt and ridicule.”
Court documents also say Ryan and Jason Bandstra both “threatened physical harm to Edouard for his relationship with their wives.” Pella police in 2011 initiated 24-hour surveillance of Edouard’s then-home, according to the lawsuit, after Ryan Bandstra began driving by the home multiple times a day and parking across a ravine to look at the house.
According to court documents, all four Bandstras allegedly worked to inflict emotional distress on Edouard in early January 2011 by, among other things, strewing nails in the pastor’s driveway, causing the Craigslist posting and arranging for pizza deliveries.
The lawsuit claims plaintiffs “caused numerous doorbell rings at the Edouard house to harass them,” caused vulgarities to be painted on the Covenant Reformed Church and “called in false fires to cause the church to evacuate.”
Patrick Edouard, convicted in October of pressuring women for sex after they allegedly sought his counsel, was sued two months later by two of his former victims and their husbands. The women, sisters-in-law Valerie Bandstra and Anne Bandstra, also target the former leaders of Edouard’s church, whom the women accuse of defaming them by publicly dismissing accusations of rape as mere marital infidelity.
“You are not victims,” court papers quote church elder Clarence Hettinga as repeatedly telling the Bandstras. The lawsuit later quotes Hettinga as saying, “Unless he was holding a knife to her throat, it wasn’t rape.Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers.”
Edouard, who has always insisted the sex was consensual, in his own court papers accuses the Bandstra families of smearing his reputation by harassing his family with prank pizza orders, throwing a brick through his son’s window, and creating a fake posting on Craigslist that listed his house for sale.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Roxanne Conlin contends in court documents that Edouard “is libel-proof in that his reputation, as a result of his own actions, was already so poor that plaintiffs’ statements caused no appreciable damage.”
Conlin on Tuesday said actions by Edouard and his former bosses “both were horrible and damaging to my clients, but he has been held criminally liable and the church has not been held accountable for the separate and egregious harm they caused.”
Defense attorney Angela Campbell said Edouard is intent on defending himself against continued accusations that he raped the women.
“We win the jury on the rape and they keep saying it,” Campbell said. “That’s the biggest problem.Come January 9 and chip card driving licence would be available at the click of the mouse in Uttar Pradesh. Rape and a consensual sexual relationship that they shouldn’t have had are two very different things.Did you know that custom keychain chains can be used for more than just business.”
The Rev. Doug Barnes, Edouard’s replacement at Pella’s Covenant Reformed Church, said church leaders have been told by lawyers not to address the controversy.
“I can’t speak directly to the lawsuit,” Barnes said. “What I can say is that the church was devastated by what happened, and in fact disapproves of everything that was done there. Beyond that, we trust that our God is able to use even the sins of men to bless his church in the end.”
Edouard, a once highly regarded pastor in Pella, lost his job in 2011 after a husband discovered Edouard at his home and told church officials.Compare prices and buy all brands of solar panel for home power systems and by the pallet. Iowa authorities argued in a trial last August that Edouard had spent much of 2006 through 2010 pursuing religious and vulnerable females in his congregation. Jurors were told that the pastor used a combination of flattery and concern over the women’s personal problems to force himself on them and lure them into consensual affairs.
Originally charged with eight crimes, Edouard last fall was acquitted by jurors on three felony rape charges. He was convicted of four misdemeanor violations of a law banning sex between people who provide mental health services and those who seek guidance from them, as well as a separate charge that Edouard engaged in a deceitful scheme involving the women.
The Des Moines Register’s policy is to print the names of sexual abuse victims only when they voluntarily enter public proceedings, such as by filing a lawsuit.
Court papers say Valerie Bandstra, a Des Moines attorney facing difficult family planning decisions, was sexually assaulted by Edouard in early 2006 during a meeting in the pastor’s basement. A sexual relationship continued for roughly two more years, according to the lawsuit. It was 2008, documents say, when Edouard “persuaded plaintiff Valerie to open a bank account ... (and) transfer $20,000 from that account to defendant.”
The lawsuit accuses Edouard of assault, sexual exploitation and breach of fiduciary duty. The pastor, church, church elders — Hettinga, Arnold Van Donselaar, Norman Van Mersbergen and William Hartman — as well as the nationwide governing body of Reformed Churches, are all accused of negligence, defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Court papers say Hartman told others during a meeting that “Grooming is a word made up by professionals. In reality, it is temptation. These women fell into temptation, and they sinned.” The lawsuit says Van Donselaar described Edouard in June 2011 as “more repentant than any of the women ever will be.”
Documents say the church board sent a letter to the victims and their families one month after the trial that included several statements that “we formally and officially affirm to you that we forgive you ... .”
Elizabeth Barnhill, executive director of the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault, said sexual abuse victims frequently cite the fear of not being believed as a main reason they fail to report the crime.
Barnhill described Hettinga’s alleged statement about a knife to the throat as evidence of “just a very, very fundamental lack of understanding about what constitutes a rape.”
The Bandstras’ lawsuit seeks compensation for “injuries and damages” including “mental and emotional pain and anguish, and past and future medical expenses.”
Court papers filed by Campbell, Edouard’s attorney,Other companies want a piece of that iPhone headset action stress that the former pastor never provided the women counseling and that both Bandstra women “initiated sexual activity with Edouard on numerous occasions.”
Edouard also contends that Valerie Bandstra’s marriage already was under pressure in 2010 due to Bandstra’s unrelated affair with another man.
The counterclaims accuse Valerie Bandstra of defamation, abusing court procedures and of causing the former pastor “humiliation, embarrassment and severe mental and emotional distress.”
Anne Bandstra is accused of slander for filing a false child abuse report against Edouard, while Ryan Bandstra is accused of libel for distributing a flier about the pastor. Edouard’s part of the court case seeks reimbursement for “expenses incurred in defending the criminal charges, damages affecting Edouard’s employment, reputation and livelihood; and exposure to public hatred, contempt and ridicule.”
Court documents also say Ryan and Jason Bandstra both “threatened physical harm to Edouard for his relationship with their wives.” Pella police in 2011 initiated 24-hour surveillance of Edouard’s then-home, according to the lawsuit, after Ryan Bandstra began driving by the home multiple times a day and parking across a ravine to look at the house.
According to court documents, all four Bandstras allegedly worked to inflict emotional distress on Edouard in early January 2011 by, among other things, strewing nails in the pastor’s driveway, causing the Craigslist posting and arranging for pizza deliveries.
The lawsuit claims plaintiffs “caused numerous doorbell rings at the Edouard house to harass them,” caused vulgarities to be painted on the Covenant Reformed Church and “called in false fires to cause the church to evacuate.”
Fitchburg City Council considers replacing parking meters
Tired of digging for spare change to feed the meters when you want to park in and around the downtown?
The city is looking into replacing those coin-fed meters with ones that would take both coins and credit cards, thanks to a petition filed by Councilor Jeffrey Bean.Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers.
Bean said the idea came from a parking ticket he received on Main Street because he didn't have enough quarters to cover the amount of time he needed.
"If I'd had the ability to pay with a credit card, it wouldn't have been a problem, but I was limited to the change I had in my pocket," Bean said. "These days, people don't carry around as much change as they used to."
He sees the proposed investment as offering a convenience for folks needing to park in metered areas. Bean also believes it would increase revenue for the city, as people may be more apt to charge the maximum amount allowed at meters, $2 for two hours.
In Lowell, where parking meters have been slowly switched over to credit-card kiosks over the past five years, City Manager Bernie Lynch said the investment has created a positive return for the city.
Aside from the convenience they offer -- each parking space is assigned a specific number, meaning you can add more time to your space from any kiosk in the city -- the kiosks are bringing in much more revenue than the coin meters ever did, Lynch said, because they're not as easy to vandalize and regular audit reports show exactly how much money has gone into the machine through coins and cards.
"We've found the kiosks pay for themselves very quickly," Lynch said. "Our revenue has gone up dramatically over the period of time that we've been using them."
Lowell learned the hard way, Lynch said, just how important those audit reports are, as they weren't run at all from 2009 through the fall of 2011, allowing Richard Neveu, an employee with the city's contractor, to allegedly steal more than $35,000 from the kiosks.Other companies want a piece of that iPhone headset action Neveu is now being prosecuted on larceny charges, Lynch said, and the reports are now run on a daily to weekly basis.
On the enforcement side, parking attendants can use handheld devices to access with a click or two which spots are about to expire on any given street, Lynch said, so offenders are sure to be ticketed. The kiosks also allow the city to send out messages for events, such as winter parking bans, he said.
As there would be a great upfront cost to switching to a system similar to Lowell's, Fitchburg Mayor Lisa Wong said the city is unlikely to invest in new parking meters anytime soon. She was at a conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, and attended a meeting with industry experts and officials from other municipalities who have chosen a number of different options to address their metered parking.
Changing Fitchburg's meters would have to be part of a large-scale downtown-renewal plan, Wong said, for which money is currently being sought.Did you know that custom keychain chains can be used for more than just business.
In the meantime, Wong is looking into other ways to address parking in the downtown. She said a Montachusett Regional Planning Commission study shows there is plenty of parking in the area,Can you spot the answer in the fridge magnet? but perception says otherwise.
Wong said better signage for currently available options could combat that perception, and she's also exploring opportunities for valet parking, creating loading zones, and making some areas temporarily free parking.
Quickly changing technology also leaves Wong hesitant to invest a great deal of money into new meters or kiosks, because phone applications for parking could also be available.
"We want to make sure that what we do works for Fitchburg,Come January 9 and chip card driving licence would be available at the click of the mouse in Uttar Pradesh." said. "We are getting ideas and best practices from other communities, but are doing our homework right now to see what best fits us."
This led to several ￡70 fines being issued for allegedly parking longer than the two and a half hours permitted in the customer car park.
An investigation by the company revealed that it was in the wrong and it has apologised for the inconvenience caused.
“For a short period of time we had a problem with the time capture mechanism within the cameras at St Catherine’s Retail Park in Perth,” said Town and City Parking
“This led to data not being processed properly. We would like to apologise unreservedly to any customers who incorrectly received a parking charge notice during this period. We will obviously cancel these.
The city is looking into replacing those coin-fed meters with ones that would take both coins and credit cards, thanks to a petition filed by Councilor Jeffrey Bean.Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers.
Bean said the idea came from a parking ticket he received on Main Street because he didn't have enough quarters to cover the amount of time he needed.
"If I'd had the ability to pay with a credit card, it wouldn't have been a problem, but I was limited to the change I had in my pocket," Bean said. "These days, people don't carry around as much change as they used to."
He sees the proposed investment as offering a convenience for folks needing to park in metered areas. Bean also believes it would increase revenue for the city, as people may be more apt to charge the maximum amount allowed at meters, $2 for two hours.
In Lowell, where parking meters have been slowly switched over to credit-card kiosks over the past five years, City Manager Bernie Lynch said the investment has created a positive return for the city.
Aside from the convenience they offer -- each parking space is assigned a specific number, meaning you can add more time to your space from any kiosk in the city -- the kiosks are bringing in much more revenue than the coin meters ever did, Lynch said, because they're not as easy to vandalize and regular audit reports show exactly how much money has gone into the machine through coins and cards.
"We've found the kiosks pay for themselves very quickly," Lynch said. "Our revenue has gone up dramatically over the period of time that we've been using them."
Lowell learned the hard way, Lynch said, just how important those audit reports are, as they weren't run at all from 2009 through the fall of 2011, allowing Richard Neveu, an employee with the city's contractor, to allegedly steal more than $35,000 from the kiosks.Other companies want a piece of that iPhone headset action Neveu is now being prosecuted on larceny charges, Lynch said, and the reports are now run on a daily to weekly basis.
On the enforcement side, parking attendants can use handheld devices to access with a click or two which spots are about to expire on any given street, Lynch said, so offenders are sure to be ticketed. The kiosks also allow the city to send out messages for events, such as winter parking bans, he said.
As there would be a great upfront cost to switching to a system similar to Lowell's, Fitchburg Mayor Lisa Wong said the city is unlikely to invest in new parking meters anytime soon. She was at a conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, and attended a meeting with industry experts and officials from other municipalities who have chosen a number of different options to address their metered parking.
Changing Fitchburg's meters would have to be part of a large-scale downtown-renewal plan, Wong said, for which money is currently being sought.Did you know that custom keychain chains can be used for more than just business.
In the meantime, Wong is looking into other ways to address parking in the downtown. She said a Montachusett Regional Planning Commission study shows there is plenty of parking in the area,Can you spot the answer in the fridge magnet? but perception says otherwise.
Wong said better signage for currently available options could combat that perception, and she's also exploring opportunities for valet parking, creating loading zones, and making some areas temporarily free parking.
Quickly changing technology also leaves Wong hesitant to invest a great deal of money into new meters or kiosks, because phone applications for parking could also be available.
"We want to make sure that what we do works for Fitchburg,Come January 9 and chip card driving licence would be available at the click of the mouse in Uttar Pradesh." said. "We are getting ideas and best practices from other communities, but are doing our homework right now to see what best fits us."
This led to several ￡70 fines being issued for allegedly parking longer than the two and a half hours permitted in the customer car park.
An investigation by the company revealed that it was in the wrong and it has apologised for the inconvenience caused.
“For a short period of time we had a problem with the time capture mechanism within the cameras at St Catherine’s Retail Park in Perth,” said Town and City Parking
“This led to data not being processed properly. We would like to apologise unreservedly to any customers who incorrectly received a parking charge notice during this period. We will obviously cancel these.
Gauntlet thrown down to employers
In its simplest terms, that means the county’s businesses need to
have – or create – 1,000 vacancies in that time that they are willing
to give to a young worker keen to start building themselves a career.You
must not use the laser cutter without being trained.
But the foundation behind the initiative is keen to stress that those employers backing the campaign can find many other ways to help.
From work placements and work-based training to CV advice and mock interviews, Norwich For Jobs wants local businesses to get involved in any way they can to improve the prospects of an unemployed young person.
When it comes to finding a job, 18 to 24-year-olds can find it difficult for a wide variety of reasons. The most common concern – from both young people and employers – is a lack of experience of the working world and a company’s specific industry.
Posy Cuthbertson, a 21-year-old graduate living in Norwich, described it as a “Catch 22 situation”: “You need experience to get work, you need work to get experience,” she said.Online shopping for luggage tag from a great selection of Clothing.
A lack of confidence will often stand in their way and will get worse the more knock-backs they experience.
And with relatively little experience of interviews and job applications compared with their older competitors, it can be difficult to find out where they are going wrong.
According to Julia Nix, regional manager for Job Centre Plus in the East, addressing some of those problems can be done in a variety of ways with impressive success rates.
“It’s the small things, the tiny small things that can help – like a mock interview. Any support or guidance is welcome.The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product.
“From one mock interview to a full- blown job, each step helps a single person. That one mock interview could help that single person into a job later on,” she said.
The most successful type of support comes in the form of pre-employment training which, according to Mrs Nix, has an 85pc chance of leading to a job.
The training is often provided by the Job Centre and can be tailored to suit a specific job or industry. It helps address the issue of a lack of experience in a particular field and reassures employers a young person has the kind of knowledge and attitude to work they are looking for.
Work experience has a 50pc chance of leading to a job and requires absolutely no commitment from a business when they agree to give someone that opportunity.
“Sometimes it’s about the employer just realising that the talent is out there. Sometimes it gives guidance and support for an individual who can then work out what they were doing wrong – what they were saying wrong in an interview, or not putting the right thing in their CV.
“Sometimes it’s just a confidence boost that somebody has shown an interest and they no longer think they are useless.”
At City College Norwich, chief executive Dick Palmer,They manufacture custom rubber and silicone bracelet and bracelets. who like Mrs Nix is a steering group member of Norwich For Jobs, has seen the positive impact those programmes and opportunities can have.
He said: “It’s really important to understand just how the workplace operates for young people to feel confident when they go forward to an interview.
“We really do want to encourage people willing to help with CV writing, do mock interviews, a placement,Where you can create a custom lanyard from our wide selection of styles and materials. whether it’s just one day or one day a week for six months. All of those can really make a difference to young people who will find it extremely hard because the vacancies out there are few and far between and the people with experience will have a better chance.”
A couple of years ago, City College ran a project with Norwich-based Tribe PR which saw students learning to tailor their CVs and fill in an application for a fictional job.
The best candidates were invited for an interview and the prize for the student who impressed most was an internship with Tribe.
Mr Palmer said it proved hugely successful for her. “The girl, at the end of that year, got a job with another PR company. She was really clear that it was the experience leading up to that internship that made a real difference to her,” he said.
Brookfield Township trustees want residents to know there is “no more Mr. Nice Guy” when it comes to those who don’t follow township ordinances.
Leaning on the police, fire and code enforcement department heads to write more citations for everything from parking violations to building maintenance, Trustee Chairman Ron Haun said it’s a matter of preserving the township before slum areas take over.
“The bad areas are depreciating the value of other homes. We have 8,500 residents. Do you want to be down to 6,500? We already lost one business out of Masury because of the neighborhood,” he said.
He met Monday with police Chief Dan Faustino, fire Chief Keith Barrett, road Supervisor Jamie Fredenberg and code enforcement Officer James Ewing and went through a list of topics that included writing tickets for tractor-trailers that travel roads marked “No trucks” to doing more code enforcement inspections in businesses.
But the foundation behind the initiative is keen to stress that those employers backing the campaign can find many other ways to help.
From work placements and work-based training to CV advice and mock interviews, Norwich For Jobs wants local businesses to get involved in any way they can to improve the prospects of an unemployed young person.
When it comes to finding a job, 18 to 24-year-olds can find it difficult for a wide variety of reasons. The most common concern – from both young people and employers – is a lack of experience of the working world and a company’s specific industry.
Posy Cuthbertson, a 21-year-old graduate living in Norwich, described it as a “Catch 22 situation”: “You need experience to get work, you need work to get experience,” she said.Online shopping for luggage tag from a great selection of Clothing.
A lack of confidence will often stand in their way and will get worse the more knock-backs they experience.
And with relatively little experience of interviews and job applications compared with their older competitors, it can be difficult to find out where they are going wrong.
According to Julia Nix, regional manager for Job Centre Plus in the East, addressing some of those problems can be done in a variety of ways with impressive success rates.
“It’s the small things, the tiny small things that can help – like a mock interview. Any support or guidance is welcome.The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product.
“From one mock interview to a full- blown job, each step helps a single person. That one mock interview could help that single person into a job later on,” she said.
The most successful type of support comes in the form of pre-employment training which, according to Mrs Nix, has an 85pc chance of leading to a job.
The training is often provided by the Job Centre and can be tailored to suit a specific job or industry. It helps address the issue of a lack of experience in a particular field and reassures employers a young person has the kind of knowledge and attitude to work they are looking for.
Work experience has a 50pc chance of leading to a job and requires absolutely no commitment from a business when they agree to give someone that opportunity.
“Sometimes it’s about the employer just realising that the talent is out there. Sometimes it gives guidance and support for an individual who can then work out what they were doing wrong – what they were saying wrong in an interview, or not putting the right thing in their CV.
“Sometimes it’s just a confidence boost that somebody has shown an interest and they no longer think they are useless.”
At City College Norwich, chief executive Dick Palmer,They manufacture custom rubber and silicone bracelet and bracelets. who like Mrs Nix is a steering group member of Norwich For Jobs, has seen the positive impact those programmes and opportunities can have.
He said: “It’s really important to understand just how the workplace operates for young people to feel confident when they go forward to an interview.
“We really do want to encourage people willing to help with CV writing, do mock interviews, a placement,Where you can create a custom lanyard from our wide selection of styles and materials. whether it’s just one day or one day a week for six months. All of those can really make a difference to young people who will find it extremely hard because the vacancies out there are few and far between and the people with experience will have a better chance.”
A couple of years ago, City College ran a project with Norwich-based Tribe PR which saw students learning to tailor their CVs and fill in an application for a fictional job.
The best candidates were invited for an interview and the prize for the student who impressed most was an internship with Tribe.
Mr Palmer said it proved hugely successful for her. “The girl, at the end of that year, got a job with another PR company. She was really clear that it was the experience leading up to that internship that made a real difference to her,” he said.
Brookfield Township trustees want residents to know there is “no more Mr. Nice Guy” when it comes to those who don’t follow township ordinances.
Leaning on the police, fire and code enforcement department heads to write more citations for everything from parking violations to building maintenance, Trustee Chairman Ron Haun said it’s a matter of preserving the township before slum areas take over.
“The bad areas are depreciating the value of other homes. We have 8,500 residents. Do you want to be down to 6,500? We already lost one business out of Masury because of the neighborhood,” he said.
He met Monday with police Chief Dan Faustino, fire Chief Keith Barrett, road Supervisor Jamie Fredenberg and code enforcement Officer James Ewing and went through a list of topics that included writing tickets for tractor-trailers that travel roads marked “No trucks” to doing more code enforcement inspections in businesses.
La Crescent teacher accused of sexual conduct with student
A special education teacher at La Crescent Montessori & STEM
School in La Crescent has been charged with having sexual contact with
three female students, all under the age of 13.
Jason David Barker,in Winona, was charged Jan. 22 in Houston County District Court with three counts of felony second-degree criminal sexual conduct and three counts of gross misdemeanor fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct.
Bail was set at $30,000 with conditions, $60,000 without conditions; bond was posted Monday, according to court records.
Once the allegations surfaced two weeks ago, the school took immediate action, said Dawn Harris, an attorney for the school, which has 62 students. Barker was immediately placed on administrative leave and he resigned, she said.
"He has not been on the premises since the day the allegations surfaced," she said. "The key issue has been the kids … he has not been back at that school nor will he be, period."
Barker also has been charged with assault in Winona,Where you can create a custom lanyard from our wide selection of styles and materials. but he was hired in April as a part-time teacher before those charges were filed, she said. He was hired full-time in September, according to the complaint. His license was approved by the state before any assault allegations surfaced, she said.
The complaint alleges the matter arose Jan. 16. On that day, a student at the school heard two younger students talking about how uncomfortable they were with how Barker acted with them.
Three girls were later interviewed and reported Barker had put his hands under their shirts, bras and jeans and touched them inappropriately, according to the complaint.
In interviews with law enforcement, Barker said admitted having physical contact with some students but denied touching any students' breasts, buttocks or vaginal areas.
Environmental groups hope Kerry's judgements will ultimately be in their favor. The self-described "passionate advocate" for confronting climate change earned a reputation for backing environmentally friendly bills during his tenure in the Senate. Kerry consistently received high marks on the League of Conservation Voters' national environmental scorecard, earning a perfect 100 percent in 2011. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Kerry called global climate change a "life-threatening" issue and endorsed clean energy as an important job creator.
"We are excited that he will bring his strong credentials on climate to the critical decisions facing our planet," Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a statement Tuesday, "including increasing access to affordable clean energy options and stopping the expansion of dirty tar sands and coal worldwide.Online shopping for luggage tag from a great selection of Clothing."
The League of Conservation Voters' president, Gene Karpinski, singled out the Keystone XL project, expressing hope that Secretary Kerry would reject the pipeline, which would transport oil products from Canadian tar sands to US refineries. Because it crosses an international border, the pipeline requires a review from the State Department and a presidential permit.
As chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees the State Department,You must not use the laser cutter without being trained. Kerry told The Hill in 2011, “There's a lot at stake here and I’ll do my best to leave no question unanswered including every possible economic and environmental consideration before a final decision is made.”
The prospect of a climate hawk heading the State Department doesn't seem to deter Russ Girling, the CEO of TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone project.
"I think anybody in that position will look at those facts objectively and come to the conclusion that the national interest of the United States is best served by the approval of the Keystone pipeline, and stringent oversight, obviously, on pipeline safety, which they do in the United States today,They manufacture custom rubber and silicone bracelet and bracelets." Girling told Reuters in a December 2012 interview.
Before any judgment is made on the matter, Kerry has said he will divest from assets that could be conflicts of interest. Those investments include Calgary-based Suncor and Cenovus Energy, two energy companies that might benefit from Keystone's approval.The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product.
Jason David Barker,in Winona, was charged Jan. 22 in Houston County District Court with three counts of felony second-degree criminal sexual conduct and three counts of gross misdemeanor fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct.
Bail was set at $30,000 with conditions, $60,000 without conditions; bond was posted Monday, according to court records.
Once the allegations surfaced two weeks ago, the school took immediate action, said Dawn Harris, an attorney for the school, which has 62 students. Barker was immediately placed on administrative leave and he resigned, she said.
"He has not been on the premises since the day the allegations surfaced," she said. "The key issue has been the kids … he has not been back at that school nor will he be, period."
Barker also has been charged with assault in Winona,Where you can create a custom lanyard from our wide selection of styles and materials. but he was hired in April as a part-time teacher before those charges were filed, she said. He was hired full-time in September, according to the complaint. His license was approved by the state before any assault allegations surfaced, she said.
The complaint alleges the matter arose Jan. 16. On that day, a student at the school heard two younger students talking about how uncomfortable they were with how Barker acted with them.
Three girls were later interviewed and reported Barker had put his hands under their shirts, bras and jeans and touched them inappropriately, according to the complaint.
In interviews with law enforcement, Barker said admitted having physical contact with some students but denied touching any students' breasts, buttocks or vaginal areas.
Environmental groups hope Kerry's judgements will ultimately be in their favor. The self-described "passionate advocate" for confronting climate change earned a reputation for backing environmentally friendly bills during his tenure in the Senate. Kerry consistently received high marks on the League of Conservation Voters' national environmental scorecard, earning a perfect 100 percent in 2011. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Kerry called global climate change a "life-threatening" issue and endorsed clean energy as an important job creator.
"We are excited that he will bring his strong credentials on climate to the critical decisions facing our planet," Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a statement Tuesday, "including increasing access to affordable clean energy options and stopping the expansion of dirty tar sands and coal worldwide.Online shopping for luggage tag from a great selection of Clothing."
The League of Conservation Voters' president, Gene Karpinski, singled out the Keystone XL project, expressing hope that Secretary Kerry would reject the pipeline, which would transport oil products from Canadian tar sands to US refineries. Because it crosses an international border, the pipeline requires a review from the State Department and a presidential permit.
As chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees the State Department,You must not use the laser cutter without being trained. Kerry told The Hill in 2011, “There's a lot at stake here and I’ll do my best to leave no question unanswered including every possible economic and environmental consideration before a final decision is made.”
The prospect of a climate hawk heading the State Department doesn't seem to deter Russ Girling, the CEO of TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone project.
"I think anybody in that position will look at those facts objectively and come to the conclusion that the national interest of the United States is best served by the approval of the Keystone pipeline, and stringent oversight, obviously, on pipeline safety, which they do in the United States today,They manufacture custom rubber and silicone bracelet and bracelets." Girling told Reuters in a December 2012 interview.
Before any judgment is made on the matter, Kerry has said he will divest from assets that could be conflicts of interest. Those investments include Calgary-based Suncor and Cenovus Energy, two energy companies that might benefit from Keystone's approval.The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product.
2013年1月29日星期二
New Analysis Calls W&L Law Best Legal Education Story of 2013
Bill Henderson, a law professor at Indiana University School of Law
and one of the most influential legal bloggers writing today, has posted
a thorough exploration of Washington and Lee University’s third-year
curriculum on his site, The Legal Whiteboard.
The essay, titled “Washington & Lee is Biggest Legal Education Story of 2013,” includes an extensive analysis of W&L’s Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) data and concludes that “there is empirical evidence that [W&L] is delivering a significantly better education to 3L students—significantly better than prior graduating classes at W&L, and significantly better than W&L’s primary competitors.”
The LSSSE survey includes 100 questions on a variety of topics related to student classroom experience, faculty interaction,Service Report a problem with a street light. type and quantity of assessments, time allocation, and perceived gains on dimensions related to personal and professional development. W&L’s results on the 2012 survey show major increases across all dimensions when compared with surveys from 2004 and 2008.
Henderson first saw the LSSSE data during a presentation by Jim Moliterno, Vincent Bradford Professor of Law at W&L and one of the third-year program’s chief architects, at a meeting of the 2012 Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers conference at the University of Denver.
“When I presented this data at Denver, people in the room literally gasped,Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a smart card can authenticate your computer usage and data.” says Moliterno. “The fact that we now have empirical data that support what we have been saying about the third-year program is incredibly important, and I believe it will encourage other schools to emulate what we have done at W&L.”
Henderson, a tough critic of legal education and outspoken advocate of legal education reform across the curriculum, notes in his post that despite W&L’s gains, there remains room for improvement. Nevertheless, he writes that “W&L is tooling around in a Model-T while the rest of us rely on horse and buggy.”
W&L Law Dean Nora Demleitner views this report as verification that W&L graduates can be meaningful contributors once they graduate and begin to practice.
“Our LSSSE data demonstrate that the much-maligned 3L year can be not only a valuable bridge to the profession but also engage and inspire students and help them grow professionally,” says Demleitner.
The InterLock is a seat post with a bike lock inside of it. The bike lock is an integrated lock that hides inside of the frame of virtually any bicycle.you are involved every step of the way in creating your own personalized bobbleheads. While the lock is not in use, it is concealed and stored in the seat post, allowing cyclists to ride without a lock hanging off of their bike.
The newest product by Solgaard Design, The InterLock, has taken off on the popular crowdfunding site, Kickstarter. Adrian Solgaard Janzen, creator of The InterLock, has set the project’s initial funding goal at $48,000 and needs to raise these funds in order to cover tooling and material costs for the lock.
There are different ways to use the The InterLock; simply pull the cable out and slip it through the frame of a bike or use it in conjunction with a standard U-Lock which is recommended for high-risk areas in order to secure the seat and rear wheel to the bike. Some may wonder whether or not removing the seat means the bike can be stolen, but the answer is no. Just be sure to run the the cable through the frame and rear wheel to secure the entire bike to the bike rack.
“About a year ago, my bike was stolen due to a faulty lock,” explains Solgaard.Welcome to www.drycabinets.net! “Losing my bike combined with the hassle of carrying around a bulky bike lock inspired me to create The InterLock for cyclists around the world.”
The lock will retail for an estimated $50, but is offered at a discount for early adopters on Kickstarter. For a pledge of $39, backers will receive the InterLock bicycle seat post with a weather resistant lock and two keys. However, in order for the product to be manufactured,I thought it would be fun to show you the inspiration behind the broken china-mosaics. it must reach its total funding goal of $48,000.
The essay, titled “Washington & Lee is Biggest Legal Education Story of 2013,” includes an extensive analysis of W&L’s Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) data and concludes that “there is empirical evidence that [W&L] is delivering a significantly better education to 3L students—significantly better than prior graduating classes at W&L, and significantly better than W&L’s primary competitors.”
The LSSSE survey includes 100 questions on a variety of topics related to student classroom experience, faculty interaction,Service Report a problem with a street light. type and quantity of assessments, time allocation, and perceived gains on dimensions related to personal and professional development. W&L’s results on the 2012 survey show major increases across all dimensions when compared with surveys from 2004 and 2008.
Henderson first saw the LSSSE data during a presentation by Jim Moliterno, Vincent Bradford Professor of Law at W&L and one of the third-year program’s chief architects, at a meeting of the 2012 Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers conference at the University of Denver.
“When I presented this data at Denver, people in the room literally gasped,Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a smart card can authenticate your computer usage and data.” says Moliterno. “The fact that we now have empirical data that support what we have been saying about the third-year program is incredibly important, and I believe it will encourage other schools to emulate what we have done at W&L.”
Henderson, a tough critic of legal education and outspoken advocate of legal education reform across the curriculum, notes in his post that despite W&L’s gains, there remains room for improvement. Nevertheless, he writes that “W&L is tooling around in a Model-T while the rest of us rely on horse and buggy.”
W&L Law Dean Nora Demleitner views this report as verification that W&L graduates can be meaningful contributors once they graduate and begin to practice.
“Our LSSSE data demonstrate that the much-maligned 3L year can be not only a valuable bridge to the profession but also engage and inspire students and help them grow professionally,” says Demleitner.
The InterLock is a seat post with a bike lock inside of it. The bike lock is an integrated lock that hides inside of the frame of virtually any bicycle.you are involved every step of the way in creating your own personalized bobbleheads. While the lock is not in use, it is concealed and stored in the seat post, allowing cyclists to ride without a lock hanging off of their bike.
The newest product by Solgaard Design, The InterLock, has taken off on the popular crowdfunding site, Kickstarter. Adrian Solgaard Janzen, creator of The InterLock, has set the project’s initial funding goal at $48,000 and needs to raise these funds in order to cover tooling and material costs for the lock.
There are different ways to use the The InterLock; simply pull the cable out and slip it through the frame of a bike or use it in conjunction with a standard U-Lock which is recommended for high-risk areas in order to secure the seat and rear wheel to the bike. Some may wonder whether or not removing the seat means the bike can be stolen, but the answer is no. Just be sure to run the the cable through the frame and rear wheel to secure the entire bike to the bike rack.
“About a year ago, my bike was stolen due to a faulty lock,” explains Solgaard.Welcome to www.drycabinets.net! “Losing my bike combined with the hassle of carrying around a bulky bike lock inspired me to create The InterLock for cyclists around the world.”
The lock will retail for an estimated $50, but is offered at a discount for early adopters on Kickstarter. For a pledge of $39, backers will receive the InterLock bicycle seat post with a weather resistant lock and two keys. However, in order for the product to be manufactured,I thought it would be fun to show you the inspiration behind the broken china-mosaics. it must reach its total funding goal of $48,000.
In Residence with Haywood Newkirk
On a sloped embankment overlooking Airlie Road, architect Haywood
Newkirk designed the last house in a decades-long career for his eldest
son, Haywood Newkirk IV. Wrapped in an envelope of windows facing east
and south, the architect took advantage of the site fringed with live
oak and deciduous trees.
See, therere no leaves, Newkirk points out one winter day. When the sun gets down to this angle in the wintertime, its solar the sun comes in. In the summer, the sun is straight up, and therere leaves on the trees, and its cool.you are involved every step of the way in creating your own personalized bobbleheads.
Buffered by a hedgerow that muffles the sound of passing vehicles, the sites elevation allows views of Wrightsvilles marina district.
Haywood Newkirk the younger says he wanted to be able to sit in his living room and see his boat and watch his beautiful wife cook dinner. What the client wants in laymans terms is what his father calls the program.
Everybody has a program so many bedrooms, living, dining.Welcome to www.drycabinets.net! Everybody has a program and a budget, a site. When you have the site, a budget, a program, it designs itself. You dont do a thing but put it together. You have climate, orientation, on and on and on; you put all these factors together. Its like a computer. You feed something into a computer and out pops a solution, architect Newkirk explains, making a complex problem sound so simple. It is, he says, if you dont allow some of it to become muddled with some owners infatuation with some stupid idea. And if you tell them its a stupid idea and ignore it, its OK. But if you go along with some stupid idea youre gonna wind up with a stupid solution.
At his sons home, all living is on the ground level. Bedrooms are upstairs, including two for the Newkirk girls, plus the master suite and adjoining deck cantilevered over an open porch and supported with concrete columns and stainless steel beams.
Even though you can see as far south as the Intracoastal Waterway from this point, it is striking the balance between the limitless scale of the natural surroundings the orientation of the house on its site and crafting a livable human scale that is Newkirks hallmark.
A large oil painting hangs above the Airlie Road elevation. Painted by Zack, Newkirks youngest son, its unbridled energy rambles across the canvas. A more controlled painting by Newkirk is a contemporary landscape a golden orb on a dark field of color.
Newkirk currently lives on Wrightsvilles Sunset Avenue with his son, Craig Newkirk, who has drafted many of his fathers designs. When the architect isnt fishing Banks Channel or out in the Gulf Stream, he is never too far away from a sketch pad and a pencil, or a fresh canvas and paint brush.
I never could paint, Newkirk says. I always wanted to. I did win first place in oils in college and been accepted in the North Carolina Artists Exhibition a few times, and Irene Leache and painting of the year.
Joe Cox and I had a two-man show in Wilmington down at Second and Orange, he recalls one afternoon last month. He won the painting of the year contest that year, Newkirk says. He did some of those fishermen paintings way before Claude saw them.
The telling of the story is inspired by a recent visit to the Figure Eight Island home of Rachel Camp, a home Newkirk designed for her in the 1980s. Camp owns three large paintings by the late Claude Howell.
Beams supporting the open interior space extend inside out where amply proportioned decks are buffered by wide overhanging second-floor balconies. Like the beams, the balconies are also articulated inside by cantilevered third-floor balconies that hang beneath the 30-foot ceiling and look over the cavernous living area. The balconies perforate the loft, creating Newkirks idiomatic human scale.
When you live directly on the ocean or a large body of water,I thought it would be fun to show you the inspiration behind the broken china-mosaics. the climate is relatively different, than an inland climate because the wind directions will change due to conditions that the water creates, Newkirk says. When you design on the water you get very strong, prevailing, stormy wind directions that you have to account for.Service Report a problem with a street light.
On the east deck there is a compass rose routed into the floor, reminding the owner and the architect of the homes orientation. From the open deck, its possible to snuggle down on the south side, protected from the north.
One thing about this exposure, in the winter you can be out here because thats north and youre protected from the north wind. Orientation is very, very important, Camp says. And Haywood saw to it that this was how it is. Its like another room out here. Plus you get the shade from the sun.
You need that shade during portions of the year. In August, that shade works out pretty well, Newkirk says.
On its low march across the winter sky, the sun floods Camps living room, where Haywood Newkirks sculpture is its centerpiece. The sculpture defines the open stair landing and divides it from the dining room.Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a smart card can authenticate your computer usage and data.
See, therere no leaves, Newkirk points out one winter day. When the sun gets down to this angle in the wintertime, its solar the sun comes in. In the summer, the sun is straight up, and therere leaves on the trees, and its cool.you are involved every step of the way in creating your own personalized bobbleheads.
Buffered by a hedgerow that muffles the sound of passing vehicles, the sites elevation allows views of Wrightsvilles marina district.
Haywood Newkirk the younger says he wanted to be able to sit in his living room and see his boat and watch his beautiful wife cook dinner. What the client wants in laymans terms is what his father calls the program.
Everybody has a program so many bedrooms, living, dining.Welcome to www.drycabinets.net! Everybody has a program and a budget, a site. When you have the site, a budget, a program, it designs itself. You dont do a thing but put it together. You have climate, orientation, on and on and on; you put all these factors together. Its like a computer. You feed something into a computer and out pops a solution, architect Newkirk explains, making a complex problem sound so simple. It is, he says, if you dont allow some of it to become muddled with some owners infatuation with some stupid idea. And if you tell them its a stupid idea and ignore it, its OK. But if you go along with some stupid idea youre gonna wind up with a stupid solution.
At his sons home, all living is on the ground level. Bedrooms are upstairs, including two for the Newkirk girls, plus the master suite and adjoining deck cantilevered over an open porch and supported with concrete columns and stainless steel beams.
Even though you can see as far south as the Intracoastal Waterway from this point, it is striking the balance between the limitless scale of the natural surroundings the orientation of the house on its site and crafting a livable human scale that is Newkirks hallmark.
A large oil painting hangs above the Airlie Road elevation. Painted by Zack, Newkirks youngest son, its unbridled energy rambles across the canvas. A more controlled painting by Newkirk is a contemporary landscape a golden orb on a dark field of color.
Newkirk currently lives on Wrightsvilles Sunset Avenue with his son, Craig Newkirk, who has drafted many of his fathers designs. When the architect isnt fishing Banks Channel or out in the Gulf Stream, he is never too far away from a sketch pad and a pencil, or a fresh canvas and paint brush.
I never could paint, Newkirk says. I always wanted to. I did win first place in oils in college and been accepted in the North Carolina Artists Exhibition a few times, and Irene Leache and painting of the year.
Joe Cox and I had a two-man show in Wilmington down at Second and Orange, he recalls one afternoon last month. He won the painting of the year contest that year, Newkirk says. He did some of those fishermen paintings way before Claude saw them.
The telling of the story is inspired by a recent visit to the Figure Eight Island home of Rachel Camp, a home Newkirk designed for her in the 1980s. Camp owns three large paintings by the late Claude Howell.
Beams supporting the open interior space extend inside out where amply proportioned decks are buffered by wide overhanging second-floor balconies. Like the beams, the balconies are also articulated inside by cantilevered third-floor balconies that hang beneath the 30-foot ceiling and look over the cavernous living area. The balconies perforate the loft, creating Newkirks idiomatic human scale.
When you live directly on the ocean or a large body of water,I thought it would be fun to show you the inspiration behind the broken china-mosaics. the climate is relatively different, than an inland climate because the wind directions will change due to conditions that the water creates, Newkirk says. When you design on the water you get very strong, prevailing, stormy wind directions that you have to account for.Service Report a problem with a street light.
On the east deck there is a compass rose routed into the floor, reminding the owner and the architect of the homes orientation. From the open deck, its possible to snuggle down on the south side, protected from the north.
One thing about this exposure, in the winter you can be out here because thats north and youre protected from the north wind. Orientation is very, very important, Camp says. And Haywood saw to it that this was how it is. Its like another room out here. Plus you get the shade from the sun.
You need that shade during portions of the year. In August, that shade works out pretty well, Newkirk says.
On its low march across the winter sky, the sun floods Camps living room, where Haywood Newkirks sculpture is its centerpiece. The sculpture defines the open stair landing and divides it from the dining room.Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a smart card can authenticate your computer usage and data.
Holder of Navion type certificate targets new aircraft production
South St Paul, Minn.-based Sierra Hotel Aero Inc., holder of the type
certificate for the Navion, says it is two to three years away from
bringing the aircraft back into production.
The type certificate came up for auction about 10 years ago, said Chris Gardner, owner of Sierra Hotel Aero. “At the time, we had been developing an STC to put a baggage door on the aircraft, since the original didn’t have one,” he said.
Gardner said he has always loved the design of the Navion, which made him interested in the type certificate. “My father originally had one in early 1960s, then got another one in the early 1990s, and I helped him work on the aircraft,” he recalled. “I had experience with the P-51 (Mustang), and was interested in how the airplanes were similar in design.
The Navion was originally built in the late 1940s by North American Aviation, the manufacturer that also built the P-51. It was built to target what was seen as a growing post-war civilian market,Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a smart card can authenticate your computer usage and data. but 83 were ordered by the Army Air Force. Ryan Aeronautical Company bought the Navion’s type certificate in 1948. Sierra Hotel Aero bought the certificate from Navion Aircraft Co. of Bowling Green, Ohio, said Gardner.
“I loved the way it looked and how it flew. And at that time, the type certificate happened to come up while I was getting things rolling to do structural work and more modifications on the aircraft,” Gardner said.I thought it would be fun to show you the inspiration behind the broken china-mosaics.
Since receiving the type certificate, Sierra Hotel Aero has upgraded the fuel system, said Gardner.you are involved every step of the way in creating your own personalized bobbleheads. “The FAA issued an airworthiness directive to replace the faulty fuel selectors, which were worn out,” he said. “We immediately got a valve design approved that was better than the original.”
Sierra Hotel Aero has also upgraded the electrical system and is working on upgrades to the powerplant, taking the engine from 185 horsepower to 310 hp, said Gardner. “We’re also working on an STC for replacement propellers,Service Report a problem with a street light.” he said. “The original propellers are either obsolete or very expensive to acquire. This will give owners more options to have newer equipment.”
Navion owners can receive everything from minor maintenance to complete factory rebuilds at Sierra Hotel Aero, said Gardner. “We utilize the original factory fixtures and tooling, which was part of the purchase of the type certificate,” he said.
“Everything we’ve done with the existing fleet is a test plan that gives us the basis to put out a new model airplane. We hold a Parts Manufacturer Approval, and can build that into a production certificate, which will lead to newer, more modern aircraft,” said Gardner. “We can take the knowledge gleaned from the original fleet and design a new model as if we’ve been the producer all along.”
Gardner estimates that around 1,200 Navions are still flying worldwide. “More people are buying them and fixing them up,Welcome to www.drycabinets.net!” he said. “We’ve heard about Navions recently in Australia, Switzerland, and Uruguay.
Navion owners are devoted to their aircraft because of the way it flies and handles, said Gardner. “Owners also love the way it looks and its warbird heritage and it’s a very easy aircraft to fly,” he said. “It’s very versatile and a workhorse.”
As we mull the Eagles of the present and the future and gauge just how much re-tooling this roster needs, Trent Cole's name as to be one of the most pressing at the top of the list. He isn't just any ordinary player on this defense. Cole has been a linchpin of production for years since the Eagles smartly used a fifth-round draft pick on him and then developed him from a 235-pound 'tweener to a 270-pound rock of a man at right defensive end.
Cole's rep, well earned, is one of a warrior on the football field who exhausts every ounce of energy and effort on every play. He is in the mold of former Eagle Hugh Douglas, a fighter on every play who finds a way to beat his man -- often, in fact, two men -- on the path to the quarterback.
Defensive ends, though, are a tricky breed to project. We've seen it many times as the Eagles have used high draft picks through the decades on defensive ends, only to see those players achieve varying degrees of success. Cole is one who made it in the NFL and stayed at a high level and now, as his ninth season waits in the distance, is a huge, very important question mark that needs to be answered the right way.
What if, the thinking goes from this perspective, the Eagles want to move to a 3-4 defense from what they've been running, the 4-3 front? Instead of putting his hand on the ground and emerging from the snap of the ball from a three-point stance, Cole would be asked to line up in space outside the tackle box as a rush linebacker.
The type certificate came up for auction about 10 years ago, said Chris Gardner, owner of Sierra Hotel Aero. “At the time, we had been developing an STC to put a baggage door on the aircraft, since the original didn’t have one,” he said.
Gardner said he has always loved the design of the Navion, which made him interested in the type certificate. “My father originally had one in early 1960s, then got another one in the early 1990s, and I helped him work on the aircraft,” he recalled. “I had experience with the P-51 (Mustang), and was interested in how the airplanes were similar in design.
The Navion was originally built in the late 1940s by North American Aviation, the manufacturer that also built the P-51. It was built to target what was seen as a growing post-war civilian market,Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a smart card can authenticate your computer usage and data. but 83 were ordered by the Army Air Force. Ryan Aeronautical Company bought the Navion’s type certificate in 1948. Sierra Hotel Aero bought the certificate from Navion Aircraft Co. of Bowling Green, Ohio, said Gardner.
“I loved the way it looked and how it flew. And at that time, the type certificate happened to come up while I was getting things rolling to do structural work and more modifications on the aircraft,” Gardner said.I thought it would be fun to show you the inspiration behind the broken china-mosaics.
Since receiving the type certificate, Sierra Hotel Aero has upgraded the fuel system, said Gardner.you are involved every step of the way in creating your own personalized bobbleheads. “The FAA issued an airworthiness directive to replace the faulty fuel selectors, which were worn out,” he said. “We immediately got a valve design approved that was better than the original.”
Sierra Hotel Aero has also upgraded the electrical system and is working on upgrades to the powerplant, taking the engine from 185 horsepower to 310 hp, said Gardner. “We’re also working on an STC for replacement propellers,Service Report a problem with a street light.” he said. “The original propellers are either obsolete or very expensive to acquire. This will give owners more options to have newer equipment.”
Navion owners can receive everything from minor maintenance to complete factory rebuilds at Sierra Hotel Aero, said Gardner. “We utilize the original factory fixtures and tooling, which was part of the purchase of the type certificate,” he said.
“Everything we’ve done with the existing fleet is a test plan that gives us the basis to put out a new model airplane. We hold a Parts Manufacturer Approval, and can build that into a production certificate, which will lead to newer, more modern aircraft,” said Gardner. “We can take the knowledge gleaned from the original fleet and design a new model as if we’ve been the producer all along.”
Gardner estimates that around 1,200 Navions are still flying worldwide. “More people are buying them and fixing them up,Welcome to www.drycabinets.net!” he said. “We’ve heard about Navions recently in Australia, Switzerland, and Uruguay.
Navion owners are devoted to their aircraft because of the way it flies and handles, said Gardner. “Owners also love the way it looks and its warbird heritage and it’s a very easy aircraft to fly,” he said. “It’s very versatile and a workhorse.”
As we mull the Eagles of the present and the future and gauge just how much re-tooling this roster needs, Trent Cole's name as to be one of the most pressing at the top of the list. He isn't just any ordinary player on this defense. Cole has been a linchpin of production for years since the Eagles smartly used a fifth-round draft pick on him and then developed him from a 235-pound 'tweener to a 270-pound rock of a man at right defensive end.
Cole's rep, well earned, is one of a warrior on the football field who exhausts every ounce of energy and effort on every play. He is in the mold of former Eagle Hugh Douglas, a fighter on every play who finds a way to beat his man -- often, in fact, two men -- on the path to the quarterback.
Defensive ends, though, are a tricky breed to project. We've seen it many times as the Eagles have used high draft picks through the decades on defensive ends, only to see those players achieve varying degrees of success. Cole is one who made it in the NFL and stayed at a high level and now, as his ninth season waits in the distance, is a huge, very important question mark that needs to be answered the right way.
What if, the thinking goes from this perspective, the Eagles want to move to a 3-4 defense from what they've been running, the 4-3 front? Instead of putting his hand on the ground and emerging from the snap of the ball from a three-point stance, Cole would be asked to line up in space outside the tackle box as a rush linebacker.
Obama must accept border security as part of immigration reform
President Barack Obama must be willing to accept border security
measures as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package or else
"there won't be a solution," Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, a
leader of the GOP reform effort, said on Tuesday.
Rubio, who on Monday unveiled a blueprint for an immigration overhaul as part of a bipartisan group of eight senators, said Obama must embrace the principles in the outline. The president was announcing his own vision for immigration reform on Tuesday afternoon in Las Vegas.
"He can either decide that he wants to be part of the solution, or he can decide he wants to be part of a political issue and try to trigger a bidding war. I'm not going to be part of a bidding war to see who can come up with the most lenient path forward," Rubio said during an interview on Rush Limbaugh's radio program before Obama's speech. "If he's gone to Las Vegas to give a speech and try to trigger a bidding war, then no, it doesn't bode well. There won't be a solution. We'll just continue to have what we have now, because that issue I think is a bright line for most of us that are involved in this effort. Unless there's real enforcement triggers, we're not going to have a bill that moves on."
Rubio's appearance on Limbaugh's radio show, a program that boasts the largest audience of conservative listeners in the country, is part of a media campaign to urge conservatives to join his efforts to change the nation's immigration system. Some prominent Republicans, including Limbaugh, have expressed concern that the bill will ultimately amount to "amnesty" for illegal immigrants.I thought it would be fun to show you the inspiration behind the broken china-mosaics. Rubio argued that it was important for Republicans to contribute ideas to the effort so their views won't be "defined" by Democrats.you are involved every step of the way in creating your own personalized bobbleheads.
"I thought it was critically important that we outline the key principles," Rubio said.
The eight senators leading the effort agreed that a major immigration bill would require that the country's borders be "secured" before illegal immigrants already living in the country be offered a pathway to citizenship or permanent residency. During Obama's first term, his administration deported more illegal immigrants than any other president, an effort that has drawn criticism from liberal immigration reform activists.
While the general outline of the priorities in the Senate immigration bill were made public on Monday, it will be about a month for a bill to be formally introduced to the chamber. The senators leading the effort expect the early language of the measure to reach the Senate by March, and they are aiming for passage in early summer at the latest.
Prior to the shutdown, the employees had been working amid the asbestos for almost two months, even though they had no training for handling the toxic substance, the union leaders said.
“They put people’s lives in danger,’’ said James Parker, president of American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, Local 2272. “We pulled them out and the director sent them back in.’’ Parker said Public Works Director Christopher Coke threatened the employees with insubordination charges if they did not go back into the shut-down location on the second floor of 133 Ellison Street.
Another official with the union, Michael Jackson, said the city failed to provide the workers with protective suits and gave them substandard masks. Jackson also said Coke used fans to air out the work area where the asbestos tiles were being removed from the floor before he went ahead conducted tests to check for the toxic substance.Service Report a problem with a street light.
Three departments of state government are investigating the situation. Also, Passaic County Sheriff Richard Berdnik is conducting his own inquiry because his office says it was never told asbestos was involved when he supplied the city with inmates from a community service work crew who were assigned to the office renovation project.
When asked about the union leaders’ assertions, Coke said, “As much as I would like to comment, I’ve been advised by the legal department not to comment because the investigation is still going on.’’
Paterson Business Administrator Charles Thomas said Paterson’s legal department was researching the case. Thomas said he had not seen a formal grievance filed by the labor union and declined to respond to comments made by union leaders until after he had read the grievance. Thomas said the city wanted to make sure that in the future all renovation projects were done in compliance with state law regarding asbestos. He also said the city planned to hire a firm with expertise in dealing with the hazardous materials to complete the work at the offices.
Jackson, the head of the union’s grievance committee, said seven employees worked on the renovations at the site. Workers initially raised questions about the asbestos in October, Jackson said. Officials told them not to worry, that there was no danger, he said.
Officials have said the type of asbestos at the site would only become a problem if the tiles were broken apart and the asbestos fibers became airborne.Welcome to www.drycabinets.net! Jackson said that’s exactly what was going on at 133 Ellison.
The workers were using scrapers to chip the tiles off the floor, said Jackson. He asserted that the proper way to remove such tile is applying heat so that they slide off the floor. “None of these guys had ever been trained in how to deal with asbestos,’’ said Jackson. “They should have never been there.Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a smart card can authenticate your computer usage and data.’’
Rubio, who on Monday unveiled a blueprint for an immigration overhaul as part of a bipartisan group of eight senators, said Obama must embrace the principles in the outline. The president was announcing his own vision for immigration reform on Tuesday afternoon in Las Vegas.
"He can either decide that he wants to be part of the solution, or he can decide he wants to be part of a political issue and try to trigger a bidding war. I'm not going to be part of a bidding war to see who can come up with the most lenient path forward," Rubio said during an interview on Rush Limbaugh's radio program before Obama's speech. "If he's gone to Las Vegas to give a speech and try to trigger a bidding war, then no, it doesn't bode well. There won't be a solution. We'll just continue to have what we have now, because that issue I think is a bright line for most of us that are involved in this effort. Unless there's real enforcement triggers, we're not going to have a bill that moves on."
Rubio's appearance on Limbaugh's radio show, a program that boasts the largest audience of conservative listeners in the country, is part of a media campaign to urge conservatives to join his efforts to change the nation's immigration system. Some prominent Republicans, including Limbaugh, have expressed concern that the bill will ultimately amount to "amnesty" for illegal immigrants.I thought it would be fun to show you the inspiration behind the broken china-mosaics. Rubio argued that it was important for Republicans to contribute ideas to the effort so their views won't be "defined" by Democrats.you are involved every step of the way in creating your own personalized bobbleheads.
"I thought it was critically important that we outline the key principles," Rubio said.
The eight senators leading the effort agreed that a major immigration bill would require that the country's borders be "secured" before illegal immigrants already living in the country be offered a pathway to citizenship or permanent residency. During Obama's first term, his administration deported more illegal immigrants than any other president, an effort that has drawn criticism from liberal immigration reform activists.
While the general outline of the priorities in the Senate immigration bill were made public on Monday, it will be about a month for a bill to be formally introduced to the chamber. The senators leading the effort expect the early language of the measure to reach the Senate by March, and they are aiming for passage in early summer at the latest.
Prior to the shutdown, the employees had been working amid the asbestos for almost two months, even though they had no training for handling the toxic substance, the union leaders said.
“They put people’s lives in danger,’’ said James Parker, president of American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, Local 2272. “We pulled them out and the director sent them back in.’’ Parker said Public Works Director Christopher Coke threatened the employees with insubordination charges if they did not go back into the shut-down location on the second floor of 133 Ellison Street.
Another official with the union, Michael Jackson, said the city failed to provide the workers with protective suits and gave them substandard masks. Jackson also said Coke used fans to air out the work area where the asbestos tiles were being removed from the floor before he went ahead conducted tests to check for the toxic substance.Service Report a problem with a street light.
Three departments of state government are investigating the situation. Also, Passaic County Sheriff Richard Berdnik is conducting his own inquiry because his office says it was never told asbestos was involved when he supplied the city with inmates from a community service work crew who were assigned to the office renovation project.
When asked about the union leaders’ assertions, Coke said, “As much as I would like to comment, I’ve been advised by the legal department not to comment because the investigation is still going on.’’
Paterson Business Administrator Charles Thomas said Paterson’s legal department was researching the case. Thomas said he had not seen a formal grievance filed by the labor union and declined to respond to comments made by union leaders until after he had read the grievance. Thomas said the city wanted to make sure that in the future all renovation projects were done in compliance with state law regarding asbestos. He also said the city planned to hire a firm with expertise in dealing with the hazardous materials to complete the work at the offices.
Jackson, the head of the union’s grievance committee, said seven employees worked on the renovations at the site. Workers initially raised questions about the asbestos in October, Jackson said. Officials told them not to worry, that there was no danger, he said.
Officials have said the type of asbestos at the site would only become a problem if the tiles were broken apart and the asbestos fibers became airborne.Welcome to www.drycabinets.net! Jackson said that’s exactly what was going on at 133 Ellison.
The workers were using scrapers to chip the tiles off the floor, said Jackson. He asserted that the proper way to remove such tile is applying heat so that they slide off the floor. “None of these guys had ever been trained in how to deal with asbestos,’’ said Jackson. “They should have never been there.Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a smart card can authenticate your computer usage and data.’’
2013年1月28日星期一
Bipartisan group of key Senators
Side
by side, leading Democratic and Republican senators pledged Monday to
propel far-reaching immigration legislation through the Senate by
summer providing a possible path to citizenship for an estimated 11
million people now in the U.S. illegally.
The senators acknowledged pitfalls that have doomed such efforts in the past, but they suggested that November's elections — with Hispanics voting heavily for President Barack Obama and other Democrats — could make this time different.Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers.
Passage of the emotionally charged legislation by the Democratic-controlled Senate is far from assured, and a taller hurdle could come later in the House, which is dominated by conservative Republicans who've shown little interest in immigration overhaul. Obama will lay out his own proposals Tuesday, most of which mirror the Senate plans.
Besides the citizenship provision, including new qualifications, the Senate measure would increase border security, allow more temporary workers to stay and crack down on employers who would hire illegal immigrants. The plans are still short on detail, and all the senators conceded that months of tedious and politically treacherous negotiations lie ahead.
But with a re-elected Obama pledging his commitment,The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product. the lawmakers argued that six years after the last sustained congressional effort at an immigration overhaul came up short in the Senate, chances for approval this year are much better.
“Other bipartisan groups of senators have stood in the same spot before, trumpeting similar proposals,” said Sen. Charles Schumer,They manufacture custom rubber and silicone bracelet and bracelets. D-N.Online shopping for luggage tag from a great selection of Clothing.Y. “But we believe this will be the year Congress finally gets it done. The politics on this issue have been turned upside down,” Schumer said, arguing that polls show more support than ever for immigration changes and political risk in opposing it.
“Elections. Elections,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. “The Republican Party is losing the support of our Hispanic citizens. And we realize that there are many issues on which we think we are in agreement with our Hispanic citizens, but this is a pre-eminent issue with those citizens.”
Obama got 71 percent of the Latino vote in November compared to 27 percent for Republican Mitt Romney.Where you can create a custom lanyard from our wide selection of styles and materials.
The president will endorse the Senate process during an event in Las Vegas Tuesday, administration officials said. He will outline a similar vision for overhauling the nation's immigration laws, drawing on the immigration “blueprint” he first released in 2011.
The blueprint focuses on four key areas: a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., improved border security, an overhaul of the legal immigration system and making it easier for businesses to verify the legal status of workers.
Seeking to ramp up pressure on lawmakers, the White House has prepared formal immigration legislation that it could sent to Capitol Hill should the Senate process stall, administration officials said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal strategy.
Like the president's blueprint, the Senate proposals also call for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here. But lawmakers want the creation of that pathway to be contingent upon securing the border and better tracking of people in the U.S. on visas.
The Senate's five-page framework also calls for overhauling the legal immigration system, including awarding green cards to immigrants who obtain certain advanced degrees from American universities, creating an effective high-tech employment verification system to ensure that employers do not hire illegal immigrants in the future and allowing more low-skill and agricultural workers.
The group claims a notable newcomer in Rubio, a potential 2016 presidential candidate whose conservative bona fides may help smooth the way for support among conservatives wary of anything that smacks of amnesty. Rubio has been working with the group while also detailing his own similar immigration proposals to selected media, getting a generally positive reaction from conservative media.
“There are 11 million human beings in this country today that are undocumented. That's not something that anyone is happy about; that's not something that anyone wanted to see happen, but that is what happened. And we have an obligation and the need to address the reality of the situation that we face,” Rubio said Monday.
As the group turns to the work of writing legislation, which they hope to see come to a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee in March, there may be most disagreement over the path to staying in the U.S. legally. In order to satisfy the concerns of Rubio and other Republicans, the senators are calling for the completion of steps on border security and oversight of those here on visas before taking major steps forward on the path to citizenship.
Even then, those here illegally would have to pass background checks and pay fines and taxes in order to qualify for a “probationary legal status” that would allow them to live and work here — and not qualify for federal benefits — before being able to apply for permanent residency, a critical step toward citizenship. Once they are allowed to apply they would do so behind everyone else already in line for a green card within the current immigration system.
That could be a highly cumbersome process, but how to make it more workable is being left to future negotiations. The senators envision a more streamlined process toward citizenship for immigrants brought here as children, and for agricultural workers.
The senators acknowledged pitfalls that have doomed such efforts in the past, but they suggested that November's elections — with Hispanics voting heavily for President Barack Obama and other Democrats — could make this time different.Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers.
Passage of the emotionally charged legislation by the Democratic-controlled Senate is far from assured, and a taller hurdle could come later in the House, which is dominated by conservative Republicans who've shown little interest in immigration overhaul. Obama will lay out his own proposals Tuesday, most of which mirror the Senate plans.
Besides the citizenship provision, including new qualifications, the Senate measure would increase border security, allow more temporary workers to stay and crack down on employers who would hire illegal immigrants. The plans are still short on detail, and all the senators conceded that months of tedious and politically treacherous negotiations lie ahead.
But with a re-elected Obama pledging his commitment,The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product. the lawmakers argued that six years after the last sustained congressional effort at an immigration overhaul came up short in the Senate, chances for approval this year are much better.
“Other bipartisan groups of senators have stood in the same spot before, trumpeting similar proposals,” said Sen. Charles Schumer,They manufacture custom rubber and silicone bracelet and bracelets. D-N.Online shopping for luggage tag from a great selection of Clothing.Y. “But we believe this will be the year Congress finally gets it done. The politics on this issue have been turned upside down,” Schumer said, arguing that polls show more support than ever for immigration changes and political risk in opposing it.
“Elections. Elections,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. “The Republican Party is losing the support of our Hispanic citizens. And we realize that there are many issues on which we think we are in agreement with our Hispanic citizens, but this is a pre-eminent issue with those citizens.”
Obama got 71 percent of the Latino vote in November compared to 27 percent for Republican Mitt Romney.Where you can create a custom lanyard from our wide selection of styles and materials.
The president will endorse the Senate process during an event in Las Vegas Tuesday, administration officials said. He will outline a similar vision for overhauling the nation's immigration laws, drawing on the immigration “blueprint” he first released in 2011.
The blueprint focuses on four key areas: a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., improved border security, an overhaul of the legal immigration system and making it easier for businesses to verify the legal status of workers.
Seeking to ramp up pressure on lawmakers, the White House has prepared formal immigration legislation that it could sent to Capitol Hill should the Senate process stall, administration officials said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal strategy.
Like the president's blueprint, the Senate proposals also call for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here. But lawmakers want the creation of that pathway to be contingent upon securing the border and better tracking of people in the U.S. on visas.
The Senate's five-page framework also calls for overhauling the legal immigration system, including awarding green cards to immigrants who obtain certain advanced degrees from American universities, creating an effective high-tech employment verification system to ensure that employers do not hire illegal immigrants in the future and allowing more low-skill and agricultural workers.
The group claims a notable newcomer in Rubio, a potential 2016 presidential candidate whose conservative bona fides may help smooth the way for support among conservatives wary of anything that smacks of amnesty. Rubio has been working with the group while also detailing his own similar immigration proposals to selected media, getting a generally positive reaction from conservative media.
“There are 11 million human beings in this country today that are undocumented. That's not something that anyone is happy about; that's not something that anyone wanted to see happen, but that is what happened. And we have an obligation and the need to address the reality of the situation that we face,” Rubio said Monday.
As the group turns to the work of writing legislation, which they hope to see come to a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee in March, there may be most disagreement over the path to staying in the U.S. legally. In order to satisfy the concerns of Rubio and other Republicans, the senators are calling for the completion of steps on border security and oversight of those here on visas before taking major steps forward on the path to citizenship.
Even then, those here illegally would have to pass background checks and pay fines and taxes in order to qualify for a “probationary legal status” that would allow them to live and work here — and not qualify for federal benefits — before being able to apply for permanent residency, a critical step toward citizenship. Once they are allowed to apply they would do so behind everyone else already in line for a green card within the current immigration system.
That could be a highly cumbersome process, but how to make it more workable is being left to future negotiations. The senators envision a more streamlined process toward citizenship for immigrants brought here as children, and for agricultural workers.
Jane Austen's 'Pride And Prejudice' At 200
My
favorite item from the growing mountain of Pride and Prejudice
bicentennial trivia comes courtesy of an article in something called
Regency World Magazine, which is going gaga over the anniversary. The
article, "Albert Goes Ape for Austen," describes how a 200-pound
orangutan named Albert, living in the Gdansk Zoo in Poland, insists on
having 50 pages a night of Pride and Prejudice read to him at bedtime by
his keeper or else he refuses to go to sleep.
What does Albert the orangutan hear in Pride and Prejudice, I wonder? Maybe the same thing my students hear when I teach survey courses on the evolution of the novel. We start our voyage out with Robinson Crusoe and often go on to Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy — fine, weird novels that seem to hail from a civilization a million light years from our own. Then we arrive home, on Planet Austen.
The relief in the classroom is palpable; the energy of class discussion spikes. It's certainly not that my students mistake Austen's world for our own. After all, her novels revolve around the make-or-break perils of a highly ritualized marriage market. Rather, it's Austen's smart-girl voice: peppery, wry, eye rolling — that seems so close to modern consciousness. Austen could be gal pals with Tina Fey and Lena Dunham; she talks to us directly, bridging time and custom.
Pride and Prejudice, Austen's most widely read novel, was first published on Jan. 28, 1813, and has since generated musicals and computer games, operas and anime, Masterpiece Theatre costume dramas and Bollywood movies. It's been updated and reimagined as mystery fiction, sci-fi,The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product. X-rated erotica and vampire gore. We readers clearly want Austen's voice to go on and on — a voice that was silenced when she died at the age of 41 in 1817.
Though I could happily watch Bridget Jones's Diary for eternity, I mostly think the best way to revisit Austen and learn something new is through the art of criticism. Out of the slew of critical books that have been spawned by the book's bicentennial, one that particularly caught my eye is called The Real Jane Austen by Paula Byrne. Byrne has previously written about Austen and the theater; here, she takes a clever approach to scrutinizing the few facts that we know about Austen's life.
Byrne reads Austen's life through key objects, many of which would have surrounded her in her parlor and bedroom. There are familiar relics like the three vellum notebooks in which a juvenile Austen penned poems and stories, as well as the pair of gorgeous topaz crosses that Austen's sailor brother Charles bought for Jane and her sister, Cassandra.
Then there are more exotic tokens: an "East Indian shawl" belonged to Austen's Aunt Philadelphia, who sailed to India with other single girls in search of husbands; they were part of what was then derisively called "the fishing fleet." Byrne's aim is to show how these objects, many of them reproduced in her book in lush color plates, reveal a much more cosmopolitan awareness of the world than is commonly credited to Austen.
Byrne also throws in a wild card: a small Regency-era portrait sketch of a slim middle-aged woman, cap on head, pen in hand. The portrait's provenance is unknown; on its back someone wrote: "Miss Jane Austin," spelling the last name with an "I," as Austen herself did on her 1816 royalty check for her novel Emma.
If this is, indeed, an authentic portrait of Austen, she looks like you might want her to look: staring off into the distance, faintly smiling, perhaps getting a kick out of a vision of the great fuss futurity would make of the creatures of her imagination.
To add impetus to its request, Anonymous on Saturday promised that the Asteroids game defacements aren't the only card up its sleeve. The group tweeted on Monday,Online shopping for luggage tag from a great selection of Clothing. "How about a nice game of chess Mr Government?" According to a statement released by the group, it's infiltrated a number of government websites and databases -- it refused to disclose which ones -- and stolen sensitive information, which it's been distributing in an encrypted file that has been mirrored to numerous websites.
"The contents are various and we won't ruin the speculation by revealing them," said Anonymous. "Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public.Where you can create a custom lanyard from our wide selection of styles and materials. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file."
Threats aside, Anonymous is far from the only group calling for the CFAA to be revised. Notably, George Washington University professor Orin Kerr, a former Department of Justice computer crime prosecutor,Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers. has proposed specific changes to CFAA, including making it harder for minor crimes to be classified as felonies.
Kerr's proposals have been picked up and refined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),They manufacture custom rubber and silicone bracelet and bracelets. in what calls "Aaron's Law." The group's suggestions have also been endorsed by Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, who described Kerr's initial efforts as "necessary but not sufficient."
Both the EFF and Granick are pushing for a better definition of "without authorization" in the CFAA, which governs when accessing a network resource or system is, or isn't, illegal. "There should be an exception to CFAA liability when a service is offered for free to the public but implements technological controls on either automation, download rate or access time," said Granick in a blog post. "Certainly evading these limits could be a civil violation, or the service may find a way to ban the offender completely, but it should not be a federal crime."
What does Albert the orangutan hear in Pride and Prejudice, I wonder? Maybe the same thing my students hear when I teach survey courses on the evolution of the novel. We start our voyage out with Robinson Crusoe and often go on to Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy — fine, weird novels that seem to hail from a civilization a million light years from our own. Then we arrive home, on Planet Austen.
The relief in the classroom is palpable; the energy of class discussion spikes. It's certainly not that my students mistake Austen's world for our own. After all, her novels revolve around the make-or-break perils of a highly ritualized marriage market. Rather, it's Austen's smart-girl voice: peppery, wry, eye rolling — that seems so close to modern consciousness. Austen could be gal pals with Tina Fey and Lena Dunham; she talks to us directly, bridging time and custom.
Pride and Prejudice, Austen's most widely read novel, was first published on Jan. 28, 1813, and has since generated musicals and computer games, operas and anime, Masterpiece Theatre costume dramas and Bollywood movies. It's been updated and reimagined as mystery fiction, sci-fi,The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product. X-rated erotica and vampire gore. We readers clearly want Austen's voice to go on and on — a voice that was silenced when she died at the age of 41 in 1817.
Though I could happily watch Bridget Jones's Diary for eternity, I mostly think the best way to revisit Austen and learn something new is through the art of criticism. Out of the slew of critical books that have been spawned by the book's bicentennial, one that particularly caught my eye is called The Real Jane Austen by Paula Byrne. Byrne has previously written about Austen and the theater; here, she takes a clever approach to scrutinizing the few facts that we know about Austen's life.
Byrne reads Austen's life through key objects, many of which would have surrounded her in her parlor and bedroom. There are familiar relics like the three vellum notebooks in which a juvenile Austen penned poems and stories, as well as the pair of gorgeous topaz crosses that Austen's sailor brother Charles bought for Jane and her sister, Cassandra.
Then there are more exotic tokens: an "East Indian shawl" belonged to Austen's Aunt Philadelphia, who sailed to India with other single girls in search of husbands; they were part of what was then derisively called "the fishing fleet." Byrne's aim is to show how these objects, many of them reproduced in her book in lush color plates, reveal a much more cosmopolitan awareness of the world than is commonly credited to Austen.
Byrne also throws in a wild card: a small Regency-era portrait sketch of a slim middle-aged woman, cap on head, pen in hand. The portrait's provenance is unknown; on its back someone wrote: "Miss Jane Austin," spelling the last name with an "I," as Austen herself did on her 1816 royalty check for her novel Emma.
If this is, indeed, an authentic portrait of Austen, she looks like you might want her to look: staring off into the distance, faintly smiling, perhaps getting a kick out of a vision of the great fuss futurity would make of the creatures of her imagination.
To add impetus to its request, Anonymous on Saturday promised that the Asteroids game defacements aren't the only card up its sleeve. The group tweeted on Monday,Online shopping for luggage tag from a great selection of Clothing. "How about a nice game of chess Mr Government?" According to a statement released by the group, it's infiltrated a number of government websites and databases -- it refused to disclose which ones -- and stolen sensitive information, which it's been distributing in an encrypted file that has been mirrored to numerous websites.
"The contents are various and we won't ruin the speculation by revealing them," said Anonymous. "Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public.Where you can create a custom lanyard from our wide selection of styles and materials. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file."
Threats aside, Anonymous is far from the only group calling for the CFAA to be revised. Notably, George Washington University professor Orin Kerr, a former Department of Justice computer crime prosecutor,Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers. has proposed specific changes to CFAA, including making it harder for minor crimes to be classified as felonies.
Kerr's proposals have been picked up and refined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),They manufacture custom rubber and silicone bracelet and bracelets. in what calls "Aaron's Law." The group's suggestions have also been endorsed by Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, who described Kerr's initial efforts as "necessary but not sufficient."
Both the EFF and Granick are pushing for a better definition of "without authorization" in the CFAA, which governs when accessing a network resource or system is, or isn't, illegal. "There should be an exception to CFAA liability when a service is offered for free to the public but implements technological controls on either automation, download rate or access time," said Granick in a blog post. "Certainly evading these limits could be a civil violation, or the service may find a way to ban the offender completely, but it should not be a federal crime."
Counting Down to 2014 in Afghanistan
Compromise,
conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan what to expect in 2014 and you’re
likely to get a scenario that falls under one of those three headings.
2014, of course, is the year of the double whammy in Afghanistan: the
next presidential election coupled with the departure of most American
and other foreign forces. Many Afghans fear a turn for the worse, while
others are no less afraid that everything will stay the same. Some even
think things will get better when the occupying forces leave. Most
predict a more conservative climate, but everyone is quick to say that
it’s anybody’s guess.
Only one thing is certain in 2014: it will be a year of American military defeat. For more than a decade, U.S. forces have fought many types of wars in Afghanistan, from a low-footprint invasion, to multiple surges, to a flirtation with Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, to a ramped-up, gloves-off air war. And yet, despite all the experiments in styles of war-making, the American military and its coalition partners have ended up in the same place: stalemate, which in a battle with guerrillas means defeat. For years, a modest-sized, generally unpopular, ragtag set of insurgents has fought the planet’s most heavily armed, technologically advanced military to a standstill, leaving the country shaken and its citizens anxiously imagining the outcome of unpalatable scenarios.
The first,The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product. compromise, suggests the possibility of reaching some sort of almost inconceivable power-sharing agreement with multiple insurgent militias. While Washington presses for negotiations with its designated enemy, “the Taliban,” representatives of President Hamid Karzai’s High Peace Council, which includes 12 members of the former Taliban government and many sympathizers, are making the rounds to talk disarmament and reconciliation with all the armed insurgent groups that the Afghan intelligence service has identified across the country. There are 1,500 of them.
One member of the Council told me, “It will take a long time before we get to Mullah Omar [the Taliban’s titular leader]. Some of these militias can’t even remember what they’ve been fighting about.”
The second scenario, open conflict, would mean another dreaded round of civil war like the one in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union withdrew in defeat — the one that destroyed the Afghan capital, Kabul, devastated parts of the country, and gave rise to the Taliban.
The third scenario, collapse, sounds so apocalyptic that it’s seldom brought up by Afghans, but it’s implied in the exodus already underway of those citizens who can afford to leave the country. The departures aren’t dramatic. There are no helicopters lifting off the roof of the U.S. Embassy with desperate Afghans clamoring to get on board; just a record number of asylum applications in 2011, a year in which, according to official figures, almost 36,000 Afghans were openly looking for a safe place to land, preferably in Europe.Where you can create a custom lanyard from our wide selection of styles and materials. That figure is likely to be at least matched, if not exceeded, when the U.N. releases the complete data for 2012.
In January, I went to Kabul to learn what old friends and current officials are thinking about the critical months ahead. At the same time, Afghan President Karzai flew to Washington to confer with President Obama. Their talks seem to have differed radically from the conversations I had with ordinary Afghans. In Kabul, where strange rumors fly, an official reassured me that the future looked bright for the country because Karzai was expected to return from Washington with the promise of American radar systems, presumably for the Afghan Air Force, which is not yet “operational.” (He actually returned with the promise of helicopters, cargo planes, fighter jets, and drones.) Who knew that the fate of the nation and its suffering citizens hinged on that? In my conversations with ordinary Afghans, one thing that never came up was radar.
Another term that never seems to enter ordinary Afghan conversation, much as it obsesses Americans, is “al-Qaeda.Online shopping for luggage tag from a great selection of Clothing.” President Obama, for instance, announced at a joint press conference with President Karzai: “Our core objective — the reason we went to war in the first place — is now within reach: ensuring that al-Qaeda can never again use Afghanistan to launch attacks against America.” An Afghan journalist asked me, “Why does he worry so much about al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? Doesn’t he know they are everywhere else?”
At the same Washington press conference, Obama said, “The nation we need to rebuild is our own.” Afghans long ago gave up waiting for the U.S. to make good on its promises to rebuild theirs.They manufacture custom rubber and silicone bracelet and bracelets. What’s now striking, however, is the vast gulf between the pronouncements of American officialdom and the hopes of ordinary Afghans. It’s a gap so wide you would hardly think — as Afghans once did — that we are fighting for them.
To take just one example: the official American view of events in Afghanistan is wonderfully black and white. The president, for instance, speaks of the way U.S. forces heroically “pushed the Taliban out of their strongholds.” Like other top U.S. officials over the years, he forgets whom we pushed into the Afghan government, our “stronghold” in the years after the 2001 invasion: ex-Taliban and Taliban-like fundamentalists, the most brutal civil warriors, and serial human rights violators.
Afghans, however, haven’t forgotten just whom the U.S. put in place to govern them — exactly the men they feared and hated most in exactly the place where few Afghans wanted them to be. Early on, between 2002 and 2004, 90 percent of Afghans surveyed nationwide told the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission that such men should not be allowed to hold public office; 76 percent wanted them tried as war criminals.
In my recent conversations, many Afghans still cited the first loya jirga, an assembly convened in 2003 to ratify the newly drafted constitution, or the first presidential election in 2004, or the parliamentary election of 2005, all held under international auspices, as the moments when the aspirations of Afghans and the “international community” parted company. In that first parliament, as in the earlier gatherings, most of the men were affiliated with armed militias; every other member was a former jihadi, and nearly half were affiliated with fundamentalist Islamist parties, including the Taliban.
In this way, Afghans were consigned to live under a government of bloodstained warlords and fundamentalists, who turned out to be Washington’s guys. Many had once battled the Soviets using American money and weapons, and quite a few, like the former warlord, druglord, minister of defense, and current vice-president Muhammad Qasim Fahim, had been very chummy with the CIA.Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers.
In the U.S., such details of our Afghan War, now in its 12th year, are long forgotten, but to Afghans who live under the rule of the same old suspects, the memory remains painfully raw. Worse, Afghans know that it is these very men, rearmed and ready, who will once again compete for power in 2014.
Only one thing is certain in 2014: it will be a year of American military defeat. For more than a decade, U.S. forces have fought many types of wars in Afghanistan, from a low-footprint invasion, to multiple surges, to a flirtation with Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, to a ramped-up, gloves-off air war. And yet, despite all the experiments in styles of war-making, the American military and its coalition partners have ended up in the same place: stalemate, which in a battle with guerrillas means defeat. For years, a modest-sized, generally unpopular, ragtag set of insurgents has fought the planet’s most heavily armed, technologically advanced military to a standstill, leaving the country shaken and its citizens anxiously imagining the outcome of unpalatable scenarios.
The first,The USB flash drives wholesale is our flagship product. compromise, suggests the possibility of reaching some sort of almost inconceivable power-sharing agreement with multiple insurgent militias. While Washington presses for negotiations with its designated enemy, “the Taliban,” representatives of President Hamid Karzai’s High Peace Council, which includes 12 members of the former Taliban government and many sympathizers, are making the rounds to talk disarmament and reconciliation with all the armed insurgent groups that the Afghan intelligence service has identified across the country. There are 1,500 of them.
One member of the Council told me, “It will take a long time before we get to Mullah Omar [the Taliban’s titular leader]. Some of these militias can’t even remember what they’ve been fighting about.”
The second scenario, open conflict, would mean another dreaded round of civil war like the one in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union withdrew in defeat — the one that destroyed the Afghan capital, Kabul, devastated parts of the country, and gave rise to the Taliban.
The third scenario, collapse, sounds so apocalyptic that it’s seldom brought up by Afghans, but it’s implied in the exodus already underway of those citizens who can afford to leave the country. The departures aren’t dramatic. There are no helicopters lifting off the roof of the U.S. Embassy with desperate Afghans clamoring to get on board; just a record number of asylum applications in 2011, a year in which, according to official figures, almost 36,000 Afghans were openly looking for a safe place to land, preferably in Europe.Where you can create a custom lanyard from our wide selection of styles and materials. That figure is likely to be at least matched, if not exceeded, when the U.N. releases the complete data for 2012.
In January, I went to Kabul to learn what old friends and current officials are thinking about the critical months ahead. At the same time, Afghan President Karzai flew to Washington to confer with President Obama. Their talks seem to have differed radically from the conversations I had with ordinary Afghans. In Kabul, where strange rumors fly, an official reassured me that the future looked bright for the country because Karzai was expected to return from Washington with the promise of American radar systems, presumably for the Afghan Air Force, which is not yet “operational.” (He actually returned with the promise of helicopters, cargo planes, fighter jets, and drones.) Who knew that the fate of the nation and its suffering citizens hinged on that? In my conversations with ordinary Afghans, one thing that never came up was radar.
Another term that never seems to enter ordinary Afghan conversation, much as it obsesses Americans, is “al-Qaeda.Online shopping for luggage tag from a great selection of Clothing.” President Obama, for instance, announced at a joint press conference with President Karzai: “Our core objective — the reason we went to war in the first place — is now within reach: ensuring that al-Qaeda can never again use Afghanistan to launch attacks against America.” An Afghan journalist asked me, “Why does he worry so much about al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? Doesn’t he know they are everywhere else?”
At the same Washington press conference, Obama said, “The nation we need to rebuild is our own.” Afghans long ago gave up waiting for the U.S. to make good on its promises to rebuild theirs.They manufacture custom rubber and silicone bracelet and bracelets. What’s now striking, however, is the vast gulf between the pronouncements of American officialdom and the hopes of ordinary Afghans. It’s a gap so wide you would hardly think — as Afghans once did — that we are fighting for them.
To take just one example: the official American view of events in Afghanistan is wonderfully black and white. The president, for instance, speaks of the way U.S. forces heroically “pushed the Taliban out of their strongholds.” Like other top U.S. officials over the years, he forgets whom we pushed into the Afghan government, our “stronghold” in the years after the 2001 invasion: ex-Taliban and Taliban-like fundamentalists, the most brutal civil warriors, and serial human rights violators.
Afghans, however, haven’t forgotten just whom the U.S. put in place to govern them — exactly the men they feared and hated most in exactly the place where few Afghans wanted them to be. Early on, between 2002 and 2004, 90 percent of Afghans surveyed nationwide told the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission that such men should not be allowed to hold public office; 76 percent wanted them tried as war criminals.
In my recent conversations, many Afghans still cited the first loya jirga, an assembly convened in 2003 to ratify the newly drafted constitution, or the first presidential election in 2004, or the parliamentary election of 2005, all held under international auspices, as the moments when the aspirations of Afghans and the “international community” parted company. In that first parliament, as in the earlier gatherings, most of the men were affiliated with armed militias; every other member was a former jihadi, and nearly half were affiliated with fundamentalist Islamist parties, including the Taliban.
In this way, Afghans were consigned to live under a government of bloodstained warlords and fundamentalists, who turned out to be Washington’s guys. Many had once battled the Soviets using American money and weapons, and quite a few, like the former warlord, druglord, minister of defense, and current vice-president Muhammad Qasim Fahim, had been very chummy with the CIA.Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers.
In the U.S., such details of our Afghan War, now in its 12th year, are long forgotten, but to Afghans who live under the rule of the same old suspects, the memory remains painfully raw. Worse, Afghans know that it is these very men, rearmed and ready, who will once again compete for power in 2014.
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