From 2008 to 2014, insurrectionist activity has sequentially erupted across the globe, from Tunisia and Egypt to Syria and Yemen; from Greece, Spain, Turkey and Brazil to Thailand, Bosnia, Venezuela and the Ukraine...Details at the link.
...beneath what we’ve come to perceive as isolated and distinct events is a shared but neglected root cause of environmental crisis. What most people don’t realize is that outbreaks of social unrest are preceded, usually, by a single pattern — an unholy trinity of drought, low crop yield and soaring food prices.
So what do the Arab Spring, Syrian civil war, Occupy Gezi, and the recent conflicts in the Ukraine, Venezuela, Bosnia and Thailand all have in common? Expensive food… and not much of it.
"As well as being a singer and television personality, Conchita Wurst has become a fashion icon. Almost every Facebook photo includes a list of designers responsible for her outfits...Text from Metro, via The Dish, where Andrew Sullivan pondered how well Conchita Wurst would do on American Idol.
There have been petitions in Russia and Belarus to have the song blocked from the broadcast because it is ‘unnatural’. The view of most European nations however is that freedom of expression and freedom of speech are at the cornerstone of democracy and of the Eurovision Song Contest..."
Mrs. Gertrude Hunt most generously presented her collection of collars to the Leeds Castle Foundation in memory of her husband, John Hunt, the distinguished medievalist. The collection of over 100 collars and related exhibits has since been added to and enhanced by the Foundation itself. Spanning five centuries, the collection contains examples of collars from fearsome fetters for the great hunting hounds of the past, to canine couture for 21st century pooches.Photo by AMALY, via The Telegraph's photo essay on The World's Most Boring Museums (lawnmowers, pencils, soap, wallpaper, Spam, mustard and others).
We found litter to be present in the deepest areas and at locations as remote from land as the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone across the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The highest litter density occurs in submarine canyons, whilst the lowest density can be found on continental shelves and on ocean ridges. Plastic was the most prevalent litter item found on the seafloor...More discouraging details on the trashing of our oceans at PLOS ONE.
Plastics are a source of toxic chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins that can be lethal to marine fauna. Furthermore, the degradation of plastics generates microplastics which, when ingested by organisms, can deliver contaminants across trophic levels... Contrary to a common notion that most plastic items float at the sea surface it has been estimated that 70% of the plastic sinks to the seafloor...
Yafet Askale, 28, denied breaking into the vehicle which had been fitted with a traceable liquid called SmartWater, which contains a dye that becomes visible under ultra violet light. Photo: Reuters
SmartWater is a proprietary forensic asset marking system that is applied to personal, commercial, and industrial items of value to deter theft and to identify culprits for prosecution. The non-hazardous liquid leaves a long-lasting and unique identifier that is invisible to the naked eye except under an ultraviolet black light.
Brent Police have recently been working with SmartWater using trap cars and houses equipped with technology to deter thieves from committing crime and to catch those that do.The company's website is here.
Residents have also been provided with free kits to mark valuable property with the substance within their homes which has led to reductions in burglary and street robbery and 80 and 40 percent respectively.
The journal Nature announced a diamond discovery that helped settle a dispute about the Earth’s composition. The dispute concerned whether there is water in the transition zone — the portion of the Earth’s mantle 250 to 410 miles underground. Skeptics have argued that water cannot exist at that depth...At around 310 miles underground, wadsleyite is pressed into ringwoodite. Both substances can hold water. Now, geophysicists working in Brazil have uncovered a diamond containing ringwoodite that came steaming out of a volcano...The paper emphasized the volume of water likely to be present in the transition zone — possibly more than all of the oceans combined. But it’s at least 250 miles underground, and we’ve never drilled deeper than seven.
Plate tectonics recycles Earth's crust by pushing and pulling slabs of oceanic crust into subduction zones, where it sinks into the mantle. This crust, soaked by the ocean, ferries water into the mantle. Many of these slabs end up stuck in the mantle transition zone. "We think that a significant portion of the water in the mantle transition zone is from the emplacement of these slabs," Pearson said. "The transition zone seems to be a graveyard of subducted slabs."
The war on doorknobs is part of a broader campaign to make buildings more accessible to the elderly and disabled, many of whom find levered doorhandles easier to operate than fiddly knobs. Vancouver’s code adds private homes to rules already in place in most of Canada for large buildings, stipulating wider entry doors, lower thresholds and lever-operated taps in bathrooms and kitchens.More at the link, and at Legal Insurrection (whence the image).
The rules have provoked grumbling about the nanny state, much of it from doorknob manufacturers... True, elderly and disabled people find it easier to operate doors with handles. But so do bears... One newspaper columnist in the pro-knob camp has noted that the velociraptors in “Jurassic Park” were able to open doors by their handles.
Cornealious "Mike" Anderson is 36 years old, a married father of four, youth football coach, volunteer, homeowner and small business owner in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1999, he was arrested and later convicted of participating in a robbery of a Burger King manager. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison. He was released on bail while his appeals were pending, and after he lost his appeals, the State of Missouri simply forgot about him. They never told him to report to prison to serve his sentence.The full story, with extensive details, is at Riverfront Times.
When he was arrested, he was 22 years old, had no children, was not married, and did not own a home or a business.
From 1999 to 2013, he lived a law-abiding life, paid taxes, and worked to build a career as a carpenter. He never became a fugitive, tried to change his identity, or flee from justice. He had no further trouble with the law. He stayed right in St. Louis. He got married, had 4 children, built his own home in Missouri, and started several successful small businesses, including a contracting business. He volunteered at his church and coached his son's youth football team.
In July, 2013, the State of Missouri suddenly realized, 13 years later, that Mike Anderson had never served the sentence, and that he was out on bail this entire time. They raided his house with a SWAT team, and ripped him from his home without warning, hauled him off to prison, and told him he now had to serve 13 years in prison.
If he is required to serve the sentence, he will be 50 years old when he is released. His kids will have grown up without a father, his wife will have had to raise 4 children alone, and they will lose their home and business - everything he had worked so hard to attain in the last 13 years of leading a normal life.
The victim of the robbery believes that Mike Anderson should not be forced to now serve a 13-year sentence, and believes the State of Missouri dropped the ball. He has said that he believes it would serve no purpose in now incarcerating this man.
Judge Terry Lynn Brown lauded Anderson's "exemplary" behavior during his 13 years of freedom before the arrest. "You've been a good father. You've been a good husband. You've been a good taxpaying citizen of the state of Missouri. "That leads me to believe that you are a good man and a changed man."Anderson walked out of the courtroom with his wife and 3-year-old daughter on one arm and his mom on the other. Before being driven away to a freedom celebration at an undisclosed spot, Anderson told reporters he was "very happy. My faith has always been in God. I'm just so thankful. Thank God for everything."
Zero copula is a linguistic phenomenon whereby the subject is joined to the predicate without overt marking of this relationship (like the copula 'to be' in English)... used most frequently in rhetoric and casual speech...The Wikipedia page goes on to discuss zero copula in languages other than English (note zero copula is standard in American Sign Language).
Standard English exhibits a very limited form of the zero copula, common in statements like "The higher, the better"; "The more, the merrier"...
Zero copula also appears in casual questions and statements like "You from out of town?"; "Enough already!" where the verb (and more) may be omitted due to syncope. Apart from syncope, the zero copula is probably not used productively in standard English.
The zero copula is far more productive in Caribbean creoles and African American Vernacular English, some varieties of which regularly omit the copula. For instance, "You crazy!", "Where you at?" and "Who she?" As in Russian, this is the case only in the present tense. In past-tense sentences, the copula must be specified...
The zero copula is also present, in a slightly different and more regular form, in the headlines of English newspapers, where short words and articles are generally omitted to conserve space. For example, a headline would more likely say "Gulf coast in ruins" than "Gulf coast is in ruins"...
Crimea was part of Russia from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Battle of Kozludzha, until 1954, when the Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR)...My excerpts probably don't do justice to the complexity of the arguments. Those wishing to orate upon this at cocktail parties would do well to consult the source.
Of particular importance were the role of Nikita Khrushchev, the recent traumas inflicted on Ukraine, and the ongoing power struggle in the USSR... Khrushchev saw the transfer as a way of fortifying and perpetuating Soviet control over Ukraine now that the civil war had finally been won. Some 860,000 ethnic Russians would be joining the already large Russian minority in Ukraine...
The transfer of Crimea to the UkrSSR also was politically useful for Khrushchev as he sought to firm up the support he needed in his ongoing power struggle with Soviet Prime Minister Georgii Malenkov, who had initially emerged as the preeminent leader in the USSR in 1953 after Joseph Stalin’s death...
The earlier published documents, and materials that have emerged more recently, make clear that the transfer of Crimea from the RSFSR to the UkrSSR was carried out in accordance with the 1936 Soviet constitution... the main point to stress here is that it is incorrect to say (as some Russian commentators and government officials recently have) that Crimea was transferred unconstitutionally or illegally. The legal system in the Soviet Union was mostly a fiction, but the transfer did occur in accordance with the rules in effect at the time.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Tom Frieden, recently pointed out that if we don’t act on this issue soon, “our medicine cabinet will be empty and we won’t have the antibiotics we need to save lives.”That doesn't mean that we have no new antibiotics, because there are varieties of drugs within these classes. But when organisms develop drug resistance, it often spans the entire class.
Nonetheless, research in this area has largely stalled, and only a handful of new antibiotics have been created over the past decade. That’s partly because it isn’t as profitable for pharmaceutical companies to invest in creating new drugs. Last year, the U.S. government formed a partnership with a pharma giant in the hopes of spurring innovation. Some infectious disease experts are urging Congress to pass tax credits to encourage the development of new antibiotics.
