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DETROIT (AP) -- One of the busiest bridges between the U.S. and Canada has been reopened to traffic after a bomb threat shut it down for hours.
Detroit police spokeswoman Sgt. Eren Stephens said early Tuesday that the bridge had been reopened at midnight after security sweeps failed to turn up any incendiary devices.
The threat was just four days after a similar threat closed a nearby commuter tunnel that also connects Detroit to Windsor, Ontario.
Detroit police said a 911 call came in around 7:20 p.m. to authorities on the U.S. side of the Ambassador Bridge. The caller warned that a bomb would go off in 10 minutes along the busy freight crossing, police Inspector Don Johnson said during news conference Monday night.
The call prompted authorities in both cities to halt all truck and car traffic across the bridge, Stephens said.
Police had set up several roadblocks near the bridge, where canine units were called in to search the bridge. The Coast Guard was patrolling the Detroit River beneath the bridge and blocked river traffic.
The closing led to major traffic backups on expressways and other major roads leading into downtown Detroit, Stephens said. Car and light truck traffic was being diverted to the Detroit Windsor Tunnel about 2 miles away, though large trucks cannot use the underwater commuter tunnel.
A similar threat was phoned in Thursday to Windsor authorities that lead to a four-hour closing of the Detroit Windsor Tunnel, a busy border crossing beneath the river that also connects the two border cities. No explosives were found.
At the time, police said a man had called from a street pay phone and warned of a bomb on the Canadian side of the tunnel. Authorities have since said surveillance video from a coffee shop near the phone booth where the call was made might offer clues about the caller.
Stephens said Detroit police are leading the investigation into the bridge threat and working with state and federal law enforcement agencies.
Johnson said the call came in from somewhere in Detroit, though other details weren't immediately released.
Dan Stamper, president of the company that owns the bridge, told WJBK-TV that crews thoroughly inspected the bridge and had found no signs of explosives by Monday night.
The Detroit International Bridge Company released this statement from Stamper:
"Similar to the Detroit-Windsor tunnel threat last week, Detroit Police received a threat against the Ambassador Bridge tonight at approximately 7:55 pm. We take any threat very seriously, and set in motion the security measures the bridge has had in place since 9/11, staying in constant contact with first responders. We expect that after a thorough inspection, the bridge will open soon. We have thoroughly examined the bridge and await the completion of Detroit Police exercises for the bridge to be opened.
We cannot confirm, but suspect, that this has something to do with Canada's disinvestment at the border by cutting back on customs' agents. The Detroit International Bridge Company remains vigilant in its efforts to ensure that all those who cross the Ambassador Bridge remain safe."


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Sam's Joint auctions vintage décor
Sam's Joint opened in Caledonia in 1977, and owner Sam Bravata began decorating the restaurant with his unique collection of antiques and oddities. The restaurant has since closed, and on Tuesday, Feb. 12, Bravata will auction off the original location's decor.
Orbitbid.com will conduct the online auction, which will begin at 8 a.m. and conclude at 6 p.m. Items will be available for preview from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 11.
The Sam's Joint auction will feature wide range of items: vintage furniture, organs and pianos, scale model airplanes and boats, vintage firearms, an Italian granite bust and a carved eagle with an 11-foot wingspan, a diving bell, mid-century collectibles, a vintage gas pump, military artifacts, statues, carvings, old sports memorabilia, rare metal signs, old dolls, stained-glass windows, stained glass Tiffany shades and vintage toys, trucks and pedal cards.
Sam's Joint locations in Plainwell, Alaska, Gun Lake, Coopersville, Rockford and Norton Shores remain open. The Caledonia location is for sale.
The online auction is being conducted to help with operations at the remaining locations.

subset: commoncrawl


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Gathering and Use of Information
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Allergic Living is accountable for all information in its control. Peter Wilmshurst, Publisher of Allergic Living, is the designated Chief Privacy Officer. Allergic Living abides by the provisions of the federal law, and assumes responsibility for doing so.
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Allergic Living keeps personal information on consumers as up to date as possible for the defined need.
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The Chief Privacy Officer, accountable for Allergic Living policies and practices relating to privacy, and to whom complaints or inquiries can be forwarded is as follows:
Mr. Peter Wilmshurst
Allergic Living
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Please be assured that we take your privacy seriously, and make every reasonable effort to protect it.


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BALTIMORE – UMBC's starting backcourt of local products Rodney Elliott (Baltimore, Md./John Carroll) and Quentin Jones (Baltimore, Md./Mount St. Joseph) combined for 37 points as the host Retrievers rallied for a 68-57 victory over New Hampshire in an America East Conference contest played at the RAC Arena.
Elliott scored 21 points and dished out four assists, while Jones tied a career-high with 16 points, hitting all three attempts from behind the arc. Elliott earned UMBC's America East Player of the Game honor, while Wildcat leading scorer, freshman wing Jacoby Armstrong led his side with 14 points and claimed the post-game honor.
The Retrievers equaled last year's win total by improving to 8-15 overall and moved to 4-6 in America East play. UMBC has won three of its last four outings and improved to 7-3 at home this season. UNH slipped to 5-17, 3-6.
UMBC trailed, 29-24 at the break and New Hampshire increased its lead to a game-high 33-24 just 1:13 into the second frame. UNH led, 42-36 after a pair of Jaleen Smith free throws with 13:55 remaining, but the Retrievers would go on a mammoth 24-5 surge over the next eight minutes to take control.
The Retrievers would take the lead for good on senior forward Chase Plummer's (Plainfield, N.J./St. Patrick) lay-up at 45-44 with 11:11 remaining. Elliott would hit a trey to extend the lead to 52-46 with 9:14 remaining and senior post Brett Roseboro (Quakertown, Pa./Quakertown) hit back-to-back lay-ins in an 18-second span to increase the margin to 58-47 with 7:34 to play.
Elliott converted two more free throws to extend the advantage to 13 points at the 6:44 mark, but the Wildcats made a final push. UNH countered with a 10-2 run, capped by a pair of Armstrong free throws to bring the visitors to within 62-57 with 2:04 remaining.
But a great back-door pass by Roseboro found Elliott cutting down the baseline and the freshman guard converted the short bank shot and subsequent free throw with 1:24 left to restore an eight-point UMBC advantage.
UNH was unable to score on their final four possessions.
UMBC hit ten of its first 15 shots from the floor in the second half and finished at 52.5 percent (21-of-40) for the game, while UNH struggled to 33.3 percent shooting (16-of-48). Both teams excelled from the charity stripe, as the Wildcats converted 20-of-25 and the Retrievers converted 20-of-22.
UMBC misfired on 19 of 40 attempts in Saturday's 83-80 loss at Maine. Tonight, Elliott was 7-for-7 from the line and Jones hit all five of his attempts.
Roseboro was a third Retriever in double figures with 10 points and he led the hosts with five caroms. Armstrong led his side with eight rebounds, as UNH outrebounded UMBC, 29-23.
UMBC opened the game on an 8-1 run, but New Hampshire scored the next 15 points of the contest to capture a 16-8 advantage at the 11:07 mark of the first half. The Wildcats led for the remainder of the stanza, but UMBC won for the sixth time when trailing at the break.
The Retrievers continue their three-game homestand when they welcome America East newcomer UMass Lowell to the RAC Arena for a 2:00 p.m. tilt on Saturday, Feb. 8.


text: E38.org is the source for sharing knowledge and information about enjoying, caring for, maintaining, repairing and owning the BMW e23, e32 and e38 7-series automobiles.. Engine Related Information. How to Retrieve ECM Trouble Codes when your "Service Engine Soon" light comes on by Paul Carreiro.; Engine Tech section of SS Thunder site by Steve Parker. Note: Steve's site has been temporarilly recreated here on MonteCarloSS.com since his original site disappeared.. Scribd is the world's largest social reading and publishing site.. Chadtoolio said 11 days later:. Murray, Chad from MINI of Charleston here Just to clarify some of what you said. Ian the management of the EWS or Electronic Watchdog System, is in the General Body Module, but when activated it kills the starter motor and also. Kmart Battery Charger Car Car Battery Dead After Sitting 2 Days Kmart Battery Charger Car Agm Battery 31p Where To Recycle Batteries In Evansville In Reconditioned Car Agent In Japan Batteries Plus Ogden Utah It is always better harmless than hello there.. It takes most people new to electronics assembly 6-10 hours for their first time assembly of a PCBv3 ECU, a bit less for a PCB2.2, and the stimulator (which you should do first) is very simple and takes maybe an hour to assemble for a first-timer.. ELMConfig – Enable/Disable Ford ECU Functions. In this guide, I will explain how to update your Ford Focus's / Kuga's / C-Max's / Mondeo's / S-Max's / Galaxy's ECU settings yourself, just like the people at Ford can, for less then £10, using a program called ELMConfig. To be continued. 16th of November 2018 Ari Huju from Finland made a beautiful uTracer that opens like a book! Hello Ronald and friends! It is very nice to write You for a very long time.. Two-Amplifier Cascade A few times, I have mentioned my preferred solid-state power amplifier layout, which is two amplifiers in series, each with its own negative feedback loop.. Fukuoka | Japan Fukuoka | Japan.


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"Silence is golden" is still a phrase companies adhere to when it comes to hacking incidents.
The numbers seem to back that up as at least a half-dozen major U.S. companies whose computers suffered attacks have not admitted to the incidents despite new guidance from securities regulators urging such disclosures.
Hidden Secret: VeriSign Hacked
Upstate NY Utility Breached
Motivated Hacker Always Gets In
Steel Giant Hacked; Info Leaked
It remains a known fact in the manufacturing automation market that more companies suffer from hack attempts than either will admit or know about. But silence does remain golden.
Top U.S. cyber security officials believe corporate hacking is widespread, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a lengthy "guidance" document on October 13 outlining how and when publicly traded companies should report hacking incidents and cyber security risk.
With one full quarter passed since the SEC request, some major companies that had significant digital security breaches have said nothing about the incidents in their regulatory filings.
Defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. said last May it fought off a "significant and tenacious" cyber attack on its networks. But Lockheed's most recent 10-Q quarterly filing, like its filing for the period that included the attack, does not even list hacking as a generic risk, let alone state that it had been a target.
A Reuters review of more than 2,000 filings since the SEC guidance found some companies, including Internet infrastructure company VeriSign Inc. and credit card and debit card transaction processor VeriFone Systems Inc, revealed significant information about hacking incidents.
Yet the vast majority of companies addressing the issue only used new boilerplate language to describe a general risk. Some hacking victims did not even do that.
"It's completely confusing to me why companies aren't reporting cyber risks" if only to avoid SEC enforcement or private lawsuits, said Jacob Olcott, former counsel for the Senate Commerce committee. The chair of that committee, John D. Rockefeller, urged the SEC to act last year.
Stewart Baker, a corporate attorney and former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said the SEC guidance had enough details that hacked companies would "have to work pretty hard not to disclose something about the scope and risk of the intrusion."
Otherwise, "this is an opportunity for enforcement that practically hands the case to the SEC on a platter," Baker said.
Lockheed spokesman Chris Williams said the hacking topic was in the company's most recent annual securities filing, which has as one of many risk factors "security threats, including threats to our information technology infrastructure, attempts to gain access to our proprietary or classified information, threats to physical security of our facilities and employees, and terrorist acts."
Williams said the May attack had "no material effect on our business."
Mantech International Corp, CACI International Inc and other defense and technology firms known to be hacking victims by security researchers remained silent in their most recent filings.
Sikorsky Aircraft, knowing New Hampshire has a strict law warning individuals at risk of identity theft, wrote to that state's attorney general in August that hackers had gotten into its system and could have accessed Social Security numbers of 55 employees who lived in the state.
Sikorsky said the employee data likely was not the hackers' target, which suggests that they might have been after designs or other trade secrets. But Sikorsky parent United Technologies Corp did not mention the May intrusion in subsequent SEC filings.
Cyber security has been an increasing concern in Washington, and President Barack Obama asked during his State of the Union speech for action on legislative proposals. Security experts believe hackers are frequently targeting valuable digital information including strategic plans, blueprints and secret formulas.
But security experts in and out of government have complained for years that most companies don't disclose even very successful hacking attacks, because they never find out about them or simply don't want to spook investors, customers or business partners.


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Torne River
It's fall, and the temperature is dropping. Summer's warmth rises in vapourfrom the river. Now the water and the cold begin a game of cat and mouse. The river seems to flow more slowly each day. In late-October, the current gives in to the cold, allowing it to seize the waves and stop them in their tracks. An overwhelming sense of peace falls as the freezing begins. At last, it is time for the river to rest.
Each winter, ICEHOTEL borrows several hundred tonnes of ice from the Torne River. As soon as the ice freezes up, the section of the river to be harvested is marked. All winter the ice field is kept free of snow, so that the ice can grow. "Ice that grows in height is of no interest to us. We want it to grow downwards. That's how we get the crystal-clear ice that has become the signature of ICEHOTEL," says Alf Kero, who manages Ice Production.
The slow, natural freeze-in gives the Torne River ice unique properties that cannot be created artificially, for example, with common tap water. Ice from the Torne River is perfectly crystal-clear and completely free from bubbles and cracks. And, thanks to its pristine natural source, 200 km north of the Arctic Circle, it is also free of pollutants. This results in high-quality ice that is ideal for sculpting and building. Since it is natural and contains no additives, it makes superb ice for drinks.
Fine Torne River Water
ICEHOTEL borrows only a marginal amount of water in frozen form each year from the mighty Torne River. Watch the flowing river for a minute, right where it passes Jukkasjärvi, and the equivalent of the annual 'water loan' for ICEHOTEL passes before your eyes. Most of it is returned to the eco-cycle when spring arrives and ICEHOTEL melts silently back into the river again.
The drawings and ideas for the next year's ICEHOTEL are usually ready by January. ICE Production works in close consultation with the architects and artists. At harvest time, the artists are curious about the quality of the ice. We can see that the ice has different properties, depending on temperature and precipitation. It definitely varies from year to year. Long periods with temperatures below minus twenty degrees are favourable for the raw material. From the shore, close by the magnificent ICEHOTEL, visitors from all corners of the world watch in amazement as the ice is harvested. Perhaps only then do they fathom the magnitude of this incredible project. To first harvest and store huge quantities of ice, and then build a hotel filled with fabulous art and design the following winter is indeed a marvel. It's surreal, to say the least. And, most amazingly, this is no one-off project. It is a vital and creative enterprise, with a new hotel each winter for two decades now, and always with a new theme, new art and new design. ICEHOTEL presence is now world-wide, thanks to ICEBAR's that offer a cold and fleeting pure taste of Lapland.
One might say that this makes the Torne River the world's longest. As the river slowly freezes, the building start approaches. In mid-November, specially selected international artists and designers arrive. They will decorate this year's version of ICEHOTEL. For some, this is the first time they will work in snow and ice. Others have been with the project since the early-1990s. This blend of neophytes and veterans keeps the art form fresh and vital. The ambition level is high and the creativity is almost palpable. Finally, the river will show what it has to offer. Finally, the ice will be transformed into art.
When the warm spring sun returns and the days grow longer, the snow and ice begin their slow retreat. Tiny rivulets of clear meltwater trickle back towards the source and become one again with the mighty Torne River. Summer is knocking at the door and the river turns to new tasks. For ICEHOTEL, all that remains is to offer humble thanks for the water it has borrowed. And next year, a new ICEHOTEL will be born.


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Feeling more than usually restless, James Baldwin flew from New York to Paris in the late summer of 1961, and from there to Israel. Then, rather than proceed as he had planned to Africa—a part of the world he was not ready to confront—he decided to visit a friend in Istanbul. Baldwin's arrival at his Turkish friend's door, in the midst of a party, was, as the friend recalled, a great surprise: two rings of the bell, and there stood a small and bedraggled black man with a battered suitcase and enormous eyes. Engin Cezzar was a Turkish actor who had worked with Baldwin in New York, and he excitedly introduced "Jimmy Baldwin, of literary fame, the famous black American novelist" to the roomful of intellectuals and artists. Baldwin, in his element, eventually fell asleep in an actress's lap.
It soon became clear that Baldwin was in terrible shape: exhausted, in poor health, worried that he was losing sight of his aims both as a writer and as a man. He desperately needed to be taken care of, Cezzar said; or, in the more dramatic terms that Baldwin used throughout his life, to be saved. His suitcase contained the manuscript of a long and ambitious novel that he had been working on for years, and that had already brought him to the brink of suicide. Of the many things that the wandering writer hoped to find—friends, rest, peace of mind—his single overwhelming need, his only real hope of salvation, was to finish the book.
Baldwin had been fleeing from place to place for much of his adult life. He was barely out of his teens when he left his Harlem home for Greenwich Village, in the early forties, and he had escaped altogether at twenty-four, in 1948, buying a one-way ticket to Paris, with no intention of coming back. His father was dead by then, and his mother had eight younger children whom it tortured him to be deserting; he didn't have the courage to tell her he was going until the afternoon he left. There was, of course, no shortage of reasons for a young black man to leave the country in 1948. Devastation was all around: his contemporaries, out on Lenox Avenue, were steadily going to jail or else were on "the needle." His father, a factory worker and a preacher—"he was righteous in the pulpit," Baldwin said, "and a monster in the house"—had died insane, poisoned with racial bitterness. Baldwin had also sought refuge in the church, becoming a boy preacher when he was fourteen, but had soon realized that he was hiding from everything he wanted and feared he could never achieve. He began his first novel, about himself and his father, around the time he left the church, at seventeen. Within a few years, he was publishing regularly in magazines; book reviews, mostly, but finally an essay and even a short story. Still, who really believed that he could make it as a writer? In America?
The answer to both questions came from Richard Wright. Although Baldwin seemed a natural heir to the Harlem Renaissance—he was born right there, in 1924, and Countee Cullen was one of his schoolteachers—the bittersweet poetry of writers like Cullen and Langston Hughes held no appeal for him. It was Wright's unabating fury that hit him hard. Reading "Native Son," Wright's novel about a Negro rapist and murderer, Baldwin was stunned to recognize the world that he saw around him. He knew those far from bittersweet tenements, he knew the rats inside the walls. Equally striking for a young writer, it would seem, was Wright's success: "Native Son," published in 1940, had been greeted as a revelation about the cruelties of a racist culture and its vicious human costs. In the swell of national self-congratulation over the fact that such a book could be published, it became a big best-seller. Wright was the most successful black author in history when Baldwin—twenty years old, hungry and scared—got himself invited to Wright's Brooklyn home, where, over a generously proffered bottle of bourbon, he explained the novel that he was trying to write. Wright, sixteen years Baldwin's senior, was more than sympathetic; he read Baldwin's pages, found him a publisher, and got him a fellowship to give him time to write. Although the publisher ultimately turned the book down, Wright gave Baldwin the confidence to continue, and the wisdom to do it somewhere else.
Wright moved to Paris in 1947 and, the following year, greeted Baldwin at the café Les Deux Magots on the day that he arrived, introducing him to editors of a new publication, called Zero, who were eager for his contributions. Baldwin had forty dollars, spoke no French, and knew hardly anyone else. Wright helped him find a room, and while it is true that the two writers were not close friends—Baldwin later noted the difference in their ages, and the fact that he had never even visited the brutal American South where Wright was formed—one can appreciate Wright's shock when Baldwin's first article for Zero was an attack on "the protest novel," and, in particular, on "Native Son." The central problem with the book, as Baldwin saw it, was that Wright's criminal hero was "defined by his hatred and his fear," and represented not a man but a social category; as a literary figure, he was no better than Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom. And he was more dangerous, perpetuating the "monstrous legend" of the black killer which Wright had meant to destroy. Wright blew up at Baldwin when they ran into each other at the Brasserie Lipp, but Baldwin did not back down. His article, reprinted later that year in Partisan Review, marked the start of his reputation in New York. He went on to publish even harsher attacks—arguing that Wright's work was gratuitously violent, that it ignored the traditions of Negro life, that Wright had become a spokesman rather than an artist—as he struggled to formulate everything that he wanted his own work to be.
Baldwin knew very well the hatred and fear that Wright described. Crucial to his development, he said, was the notion that he was a "bastard of the West," without any natural claim to "Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres": to all the things that, as a budding artist and a Western citizen, he treasured most. As a result, he was forced to admit, "I hated and feared white people," which did not mean that he loved blacks: "On the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt." He had been encouraged by white teachers, though, and was surrounded by white high-school friends, so that this cultural hatred seemed to remain a fairly abstract notion, and he had assumed that he would never feel his father's rage. Then one day, not long out of school, he was turned away from a New Jersey diner and, in a kind of trance, deliberately entered a glittering, obviously whites-only restaurant, and sat down. This time, when the waitress refused to serve him, he pretended not to hear in order to draw her closer—"I wanted her to come close enough for me to get her neck between my hands"—and finally hurled a mug of water at her and ran, realizing only when he had come to himself that he had been ready to murder another human being. In some ways, "Native Son" may have hit too hard.
The terrifying experience in the restaurant—terrifying not because of the evil done to him but because of the evil he suddenly felt able to do—helped to give Baldwin his first real understanding of his father, who had grown up in the South, the son of a slave, and who had, like Wright, been witness to unnameable horrors before escaping to the mundane humiliations of the North. Baldwin knew by then that the man whom he called his father was actually his stepfather, having married his mother when James was two years old; but, if this seemed to explain the extra measure of harshness that had been meted out to him, the greater tragedy of the man's embittered life and death remained. On the day of his funeral, in 1943, Baldwin recognized the need to fight this dreadful legacy, if he, too, were not to be consumed. More than a decade before the earliest stirrings of the civil-rights movement, the only way to conceive this fight was from within. "It now had been laid to my charge," he wrote, "to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair."
It takes a fire-breathing religion to blunt the hatred and despair in "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1953), the autobiographical coming-of-age novel that Baldwin wrote and rewrote for a decade, centering on the battle for the soul of young John Grimes, on the occasion of his fourteenth birthday, in a shouting and swaying Harlem storefront church. For the boy, being saved is a way of winning the love of his preacher father—an impossible task. Still, part of the nobility of this remarkable book derives from Baldwin's reluctance to stain religious faith with too much psychological knowingness. More of the nobility lies in its language, which is touched with the grandeur of the sermons that Baldwin had heard so often in his youth. Then, too, after arriving in Paris, he had become immersed in the works of Henry James and, reading Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," had strongly identified with its self-creating hero. "He would not be like his father or his father's fathers," John Grimes swears. "He would have another life." Baldwin, led by these supreme authorial guides, to whom he felt a perfectly natural claim, set out to turn his shabby Harlem streets and churches into world-class literature. The book's moral and linguistic victories are seamless. Although Baldwin's people speak a simple and irregular "black" grammar, their loosely uttered "ain't"s and "I reckon"s flow without strain into prose of Jamesian complexity, of Biblical richness, as he penetrates their minds.
Baldwin wrote about the strictures of Harlem piety while living the bohemian life in Paris, hanging out in cafés and jazz clubs and gay bars; after having affairs with both men and women in New York, he had slowly come to accept that his desires were exclusively for men. His often frantic social schedule was one reason that the writing of "Go Tell It on the Mountain" dragged on and on. It also began to seem as though he somehow used places up and had to move to others, at least temporarily, in order to write. In the winter of 1951, he had packed the unruly manuscript and gone to stay with his current lover in a small Swiss village, where he completed it in three months, listening to Bessie Smith records to get the native sounds back in his ears. Published two years later, the book was a critical success; Baldwin claimed to have missed out on the National Book Award only because Ralph Ellison had won for "Invisible Man" the year before, and two Negroes in a row was just too much.
But it was Wright whom he still took for the monster he had to slay—or, perhaps, as he sometimes worried, for his father—and the book of essays that Baldwin published in 1955, which included two that were vehemently anti-Wright, was titled, in direct challenge, "Notes of a Native Son." It was not, by intent, a political book. In its first few pages, Baldwin explained that race was something he had to address in order to be free to write about other subjects: the writer's only real task was "to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art." The best of these essays are indeed closely personal, but invariably open to a political awareness that endows them with both order and weight. Baldwin's greatest strength, in fact, is the way the personal and the political intertwine, so that it becomes impossible to distinguish between these aspects of a life. The story of his father's funeral is also the story of a riot that broke out in Harlem that day, in the summer of 1943, when a white policeman shot a black soldier and set off a rampage in which white businesses were looted and smashed. "For Harlem had needed something to smash," Baldwin writes. If it had not been so late in the evening and the stores had not been closed, he warned, a lot more blood might have been shed.
In 1955, the injustice of the black experience was no longer news, and if Baldwin's warning drew attention it was overshadowed by the gentler yet more startling statements that made his work unique. In this newly politicized context, there was a larger lesson to be drawn from the hard-won wisdom, offered from his father's grave, that hatred "never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law." Addressing a predominantly white audience—many of these essays were originally published in white liberal magazines—he sounds a tone very much like sympathy. Living abroad, he explained, had made him realize how irrevocably he was an American; he confessed that he felt a closer kinship with the white Americans he saw in Paris than with the African blacks, whose culture and experiences he had never shared. The races' mutual obsession, in America, and their long if hidden history of physical commingling had finally made them something like a family. For these reasons, Baldwin revoked the threat of violence with an astonishingly broad reassurance: American Negroes, he claimed, have no desire for vengeance. The relationship of blacks and whites is, after all, "a blood relationship, perhaps the most profound reality of the American experience," and cannot be understood until we recognize how much it contains of "the force and anguish and terror of love."
When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus, in December, 1955, Baldwin was absorbed with the publication of his second novel, "Giovanni's Room"; he watched from Paris as the civil-rights movement got under way, that spring. His new book had a Paris setting, no black characters, and not a word about race. Even more boldly, it was about homosexual love—or, rather, about the inability of a privileged young American man to come to terms with his sexuality and ultimately to feel any love at all. Brief and intense, the novel is brilliant in its exploration of emotional cowardice but marred by a portentous tone that at times feels cheaply secondhand—more "Bonjour Tristesse" than Gide or Genet. Although Baldwin had been cautioned about the prospects of a book with such a controversial subject, it received good reviews and went into a second printing in six weeks. As a writer, he had won the freedom he desired, and the decision to live abroad seemed fully vindicated. By late 1956, however, the atmosphere in Paris was changing. The Algerian war had made it difficult to ignore France's own racial problems, and newspaper headlines in the kiosks outside the cafés made it even harder to forget the troubles back home. And so the following summer Baldwin embarked on his most adventurous trip, to the land that some in Harlem still called the Old Country: the American South.
He was genuinely afraid. Looking down from the plane as it circled the red earth of Georgia, he could not help thinking that it "had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees." It was September, 1957, and he was arriving just as the small number of black children who were entering all-white schools were being harassed by jeering mobs, spat upon, and threatened with much worse. In Charlotte, North Carolina, he interviewed one of these children—a proudly stoic straight-A student—and his mother. ("I wonder sometimes," she says, "what makes white folks so mean.") He also spoke with the principal of the boy's new school, a white man who had dutifully escorted the boy past a blockade of students but announced that he did not believe in racial integration, because it was "contrary to everything he had ever seen or believed." Baldwin, who is elsewhere stingingly eloquent about the effects of segregation, confronts this individual with the scope of his sympathies intact. Seeing him as the victim of a sorry heritage, he does not argue but instead commiserates, with a kind of higher moral cunning, about the difficulty of having to mistreat an innocent child. And at these words, Baldwin reports, "a veil fell, and I found myself staring at a man in anguish."
This evidence of dawning white conscience, as it appeared to Baldwin, accorded with the optimistic faith that he found in Atlanta, where he met the twenty-eight-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., and heard him preach. Baldwin was struck by King's description of bigotry as a disease most harmful to the bigots, and by his solution that, in Baldwin's words, "these people could only be saved by love." This idealistic notion, shared by the two preachers' sons, was a basic tenet, and a basic strength, of the early civil-rights movement. Baldwin went on to visit Birmingham ("a doomed city"), Little Rock, Tuskegee, Montgomery, and Nashville; in 1960, he covered the sit-in movement in Tallahassee. His second volume of essays, "Nobody Knows My Name," published in 1961, was welcomed by white readers as something of a guidebook to the uncharted racial landscape. Although Baldwin laid the so-called "Negro problem" squarely at white America's door, viewing racism as a species of pathology, he nevertheless offered the consoling possibility of redemption through mutual love—no other writer would have described the historic relation of the races in America as "a wedding." And he avowed an enduring belief in "the vitality of the so transgressed Western ideals." The book was on the best-seller list for six months, and Baldwin was suddenly, as much as Richard Wright had ever been, a spokesman for his race.
The role was a great temptation and a greater danger. Given his ambitions, this was not the sort of success that he most wanted, and the previous few years had been plagued with disappointment at failing to achieve the successes he craved. A play he had adapted from "Giovanni's Room," for the Actors Studio, in New York, had yielded nothing except a friendship with the young Turkish actor, Engin Cezzar, whom Baldwin had chosen to play Giovanni; the play, which Baldwin hoped would go to Broadway, never made it past the workshop level. His new novel, "Another Country," was hopelessly stalled; the characters, he said, refused to talk to him, and the "unpublishable" manuscript was ruining his life. He was drinking too much, getting hardly any sleep, and his love affairs had all gone sour. He wrote about having reached "the point at which many artists lose their minds, or commit suicide, or throw themselves into good works, or try to enter politics." To fend off all these possibilities, it seems, he accepted a magazine assignment to travel to Israel and Africa, then, out of weariness and fear, took up Cezzar's long-standing invitation, and found himself at the party in Istanbul. It was a wise move. In this distant city, no one wanted to interview him, no one was pressing him for social prophecy. He knew few people. He couldn't speak the language. There was time to work. He stayed for two months, and he was at another party—Baldwin would always find another party—calmly writing at a kitchen counter covered with glasses and papers and hors d'oeuvres, when he put down the final words of "Another Country." The book was dated, with a flourish, "Istanbul, Dec. 10, 1961."
It is an incongruous image, the black American writer in Istanbul, but Baldwin returned to the city many times during the next ten years, making it a second or third not-quite-home. In "James Baldwin's Turkish Decade" (Duke; $24.95), Magdalena J. Zaborowska, a professor of immigrant and African-American literature, sets out to explain not only the enduring attraction the city had for Baldwin but its importance for the rest of his career. For Zaborowska, "Istanbul, Dec. 10, 1961" is not merely a literary sigh of relief and wonderment—Baldwin's earlier books have no such endnote—but an affirmation of "the centrality of the city and date to the final shape of 'Another Country' "; she insists on Istanbul as "a location and lens through which we should reassess his work today." Divided between Europe and Asia, with a Muslim yet highly cosmopolitan population, Istanbul was unlike any place Baldwin had been before and, more to the point, unlike the places that had defined both the color of his skin and his sexuality as shameful problems. Whatever Turkey's history of prejudice, divisions there did not have an automatic black/white racial cast. And, on the sexual front, Istanbul had long been so notorious that Zaborowska is on the defensive against Americans who snidely assume that Baldwin went there for the baths. In fact, during his first days in the city, he was nearly giddy at the sight of men in the street openly holding hands, and could not accept Cezzar's explanation that this was a custom without sexual import. At the heart of the matter is the question of racial and sexual freedom—the city's, the writer's—and its effect on Baldwin's ability to reflect and to experiment in ways that he had not been able to do elsewhere.
But was this freedom real? How much of it can be found in Baldwin's work? Despite a tendency toward jargon—Academia is another country—Zaborowska is a charming companion as she follows Baldwin's steps through Turkey, brimming with enthusiasm at the sights and at the warmth of her reception by his friends. The Polish-born professor, a blithe exemplar of the "transnational" tradition in which she places Baldwin, is too idealistic and far too honest—the tender air of Henry James's Maisie hangs about her—to refrain from reporting her shock at some of those friends' remarks. "Jimmy was not a typical 'gay,' " one explains, "he was a real human being." In the matter of race, she informs us that she is omitting "Cezzar's use of the n-word, which he employed a couple of times but then abandoned, perhaps seeing my discomfort." As she admits, her own evidence refutes the hypothesis that Baldwin's Istanbul was untainted by the usual prejudice. And then there is the problem that Baldwin never wrote anything about Istanbul. Zaborowska labors to soften this hard fact through elaborate inferences and suggestions of symbolism, and by calling on various authorities for disquisitions on "the experience of place," or "Cold War Orientalism." (This is where the jargon really thickens.) But if she ultimately fails to make the case that Istanbul was anything for Baldwin but what he claimed—a refuge in which to write—she makes us feel how necessary such a refuge was as the sixties wore on.
"Another Country" turned out to be a best-seller in the most conventional sense. A sprawling book that brought together Baldwin's concerns with race and sex, its daring themes—black rage, interracial sex, homosexuality, white guilt, urban malaise—make an imposing backdrop for characters who refuse to come to life. A black jazz musician who plummets into madness because of an affair with a white woman; a white bisexual saint who cures both men and women in his bed—the social agenda shines through these figures like light through glass. More than anything else, the book reveals Baldwin's immense will and professionalism; like the contemporary best-sellers "Ship of Fools" and "The Group," it suggests a delicate and fine-tuned talent pushed past its narrative limits in pursuit of the "big" work. Baldwin claimed to be going after the sound of jazz musicians in his prose, but aside from some lingo on the order of "Some cat turned her on, and then he split," the language is stale compared with his earlier works—or compared with the burnished eloquence of his next book, which shook the American rafters when it was published, in early 1963.
"The Fire Next Time," Baldwin's most celebrated work, is a pair of essays, totalling little more than a hundred pages. Some of these pages were written in Istanbul, but more significant is the fact that Baldwin had finally gone to Africa. And, after years of worry that the Africans would look down on him, or, worse, that he would look down on them, he had been accepted and impressed. The book also reveals a renewed closeness with his family, whose support now counterbalanced both his public performances and his private loneliness. Eagerly making up for his desertion, Baldwin was a munificent son and brother and a doting uncle, glorying in the role of paterfamilias: his brother David was his closest friend and aide; his sister Gloria managed his money; he bought a large house in Manhattan, well outside Harlem, for his mother and the rest of the clan to share. To hear him tell it, this is what he had intended ever since he'd left. A new and protective pride is evident in the brief introductory "Letter to My Nephew," in which he assures the boy, his brother Wilmer's son James, that he descends from "some of the greatest poets since Homer," and quotes the words of a Negro spiritual; and in the longer essay, "Down at the Cross," when he portrays the black children who had faced down mobs as "the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced." Although Baldwin writes once again of his childhood, his father, and his church, his central subject is the Black Muslim movement then terrifying white America.
With the fire of the title blazing ever nearer, Baldwin praised the truthfulness of Malcolm X but rejected the separatism and violence of the Muslim movement. He offered pity rather than hatred—pity in order to avoid hatred—to the racists who, he firmly believed, despised in blacks the very things they feared in themselves. And, seeking dignity as much as freedom, he counselled black people to desist from doing to others as had been done to them. Most important, Baldwin once again promised a way out: "If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world."
When did he stop believing it? No matter how many months he hid away in Istanbul or Paris, the sixties were inescapably Baldwin's American decade. In the spring of 1963, thanks to his most recent and entirely unconventional best-seller, he appeared on the cover of Time. Although he insisted that he was a writer and not a public spokesman, he had nonetheless undertaken a lecture tour of the South for CORE and soon held a meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy; in August, he took part in the March on Washington. It was with the bombing of a Birmingham church barely two weeks later, and the death of four schoolgirls, that he began to voice doubt about the efficacy of nonviolence. The murder of his friend Medgar Evers, and the dangers and humiliations involved in working on a voter-registration drive in Selma, brought a new toughness to his writing: a new willingness to deal in white stereotypes, and a new regard for hate. ("You're going to make yourself sick with hatred," someone warns a young man in Baldwin's 1964 play, "Blues for Mister Charlie." "No, I'm not," he replies, "I'm going to make myself well.") It is ironic that Baldwin was dismissed by the new radical activists and attacked by Eldridge Cleaver as this change was taking place: in an essay titled "Notes on a Native Son," in 1966, Cleaver did to Baldwin something like what Baldwin had done to Richard Wright, attacking him as a sycophant to whites and a traitor to his people. The new macho militants derided Baldwin's homosexuality, even referring to him as Martin Luther Queen. But the end point for Baldwin was the murder of King, in 1968; after that, he confessed, "something has altered in me, something has gone away."
In the era of the Black Panthers, he was politically obsolete. By the early seventies, when Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggested an article about Baldwin for Time, he found the magazine no longer interested. Far worse for Baldwin, he was also seen as artistically exhausted. On this, Zaborowska disagrees. In championing the "Turkish decade," she attempts to defend some of Baldwin's later, nearly forgotten works. She is right to speak up for "No Name in the Street," a deeply troubled but erratically brilliant book-length essay, published in 1972 and described by Baldwin as being about "the life and death of what we call the civil rights movement." (And which, during these years, he preferred to call a "slave rebellion.") Unable to believe anymore that he or anyone else could "reach the conscience of a nation," he embraced the Panthers as folk heroes, while resignedly turning the other cheek to Cleaver, whom he mildly excused for confusing him with "all those faggots, punks, and sissies, the sight and sound of whom, in prison, must have made him vomit." As Baldwin knew, hatred unleashed is not easy to control, and here he demonstrates the dire results of giving up the fight.
"No Name in the Street" is a disorderly book, both chronologically and emotionally chaotic; Zaborowska sees its lack of structure as deliberately "experimental," and she may be right. At its core, Baldwin details his long and fruitless attempt to get a falsely accused friend out of prison; he looks back at the Southern experiences that he had reported on so coolly years before, and exposes the agony that he had felt. At the same time, he wants us to know how far he has come: there is ample mention of the Cadillac limousine and the cook-chauffeur and the private pool; he assures us that the sufferings of the world make even the Beverly Hills Hotel, for him, "another circle of Hell." And he is undoubtedly suffering. He does his best to denounce Western culture in the terms of the day, as a "mask for power," and insists that to be rid of Texaco and Coca-Cola one should be prepared to jettison Balzac and Shakespeare. Then, as though he had finally gone too far, he adds, "later, of course, one may welcome them back," a loss of nerve that he immediately feels he has to justify: "Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it and some of the people in it." Struggling to finish the book, Baldwin left Istanbul behind in 1971—the city was now as overfilled with distractions as Paris or New York—and bought a house in the South of France. The book's concluding dateline, a glaring mixture of restlessness and pride, reads "New York, San Francisco, Hollywood, London, Istanbul, St. Paul de Vence, 1967-1971."
It is difficult for even the most fervent advocate to defend "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone," an oddly depthless novel about a famous black actor, which, on its publication, in 1968, appeared to finish Baldwin as a novelist in the minds of everyone but Baldwin, whose ambitions seemed only to grow. His next two novels, largely about family love, are mixed achievements: "If Beale Street Could Talk" (1974), the brief and affecting story of an unjustly imprisoned Harlem youth, is told from the surprising perspective of his pregnant teen-age girlfriend (who only occasionally sounds like James Baldwin); "Just Above My Head" (1979), a multi-generational melodrama, contains one unforgettable segment, nearly four hundred pages in, about a trio of young black men travelling through the South. There were still signs of the exceptional gift. But the intensity, the coruscating language, the tight coherence of that first novel—where had they gone? The answers to this often asked question have varied: he had stayed away too long, and become detached from his essential subject; he had been corrupted by fame, and the booze didn't help; or, maybe, he could only really write about himself. Baldwin's biographer and close friend David Leeming suggested to Baldwin, in the mid-sixties, that "the anarchic aspect" of his daily existence was interfering with his work. But the most widely credited accusation is that his political commitments had deprived him of the necessary concentration, and cost him his creative life.
The case is presented by another of Baldwin's biographers, James Campbell, who states that in 1963 Baldwin "exchanged art for politics, the patient scrutiny for the hasty judgment, le mot juste for le mot fort," and that as a result he "died a little death." But isn't it as likely that Baldwin's dedication to the movement, starting back in the late fifties, allowed him to accomplish as much as he did? That the hope it occasioned helped him to push back a lifetime's hatred and despair and, no less than the retreat to Paris or Istanbul, made it possible for him to write at all? It is important to note that the flaws of the later books are evident in "Another Country," and even in "Giovanni's Room," both completed before he had marched a step. As for the roads not taken, among black writers who had similar choices: Richard Wright did not return to the United States and continued writing novels, in France, until his death, in 1960, yet his later books have been dismissed as major disappointments; Ralph Ellison took no part in the civil-rights movement, yet did not publish another novel after "Invisible Man." Every talent has its terms, and, while Baldwin was in no ordinary sense a political writer, something in him required that he rise above himself. "How, indeed, would I be able to keep on working," he worried, "if I could never be released from the prison of my egocentricity?" As Baldwin noted about his childhood, it may be that the things that helped him and the things that hurt him cannot be divorced.
The final years were often bitter. Campbell recalls Baldwin, in 1984, reading aloud from an essay about Harlem that he'd written in the forties, crying out after every catalogued indignity, "Nothing has changed!" He was already in failing health, and tremendously overworked. He had begun to teach—the conviviality and uplift seem to have filled the place of politics—while keeping to his usual hectic schedule; he saw no need to cut back on alcohol or cigarettes. Baldwin was only sixty-three when he died, of cancer, in 1987, at his house in France. He was in the midst of several projects: a novel that would have been, in part, about Istanbul; a triple biography of "Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin"; and, of all things, introductions to paperback editions of two novels by Richard Wright. But Baldwin's final book was "The Price of the Ticket," a thick volume of his collected essays, summing up nearly forty years, in which his faith in human possibility burns like a candle in the historical dark. The concluding essay, about the myths of masculinity, offers a plea for the recognition that "each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white."
It is shocking to realize that as early as 1951, and based on no evidence whatever, Baldwin saw that our "fantastic racial history" might ultimately be for the good. "Out of what has been our greatest shame," he wrote in an essay, "we may be able to create one day our greatest opportunity." He would have been eighty-four had he lived to see Barack Obama elected President. It is an event that he might have imagined more easily in his youth than in his age, but an event to which he surely contributed, through his essays and novels, his teaching and preaching, the outsized faith and energy that he spent so freely in so many ways. During his wanderings, Baldwin warned a friend who had urged him to settle down that "the place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it." It was, of course, impossible to make such a place alone. But, by the grace of those who have kept on working, as he put it, "to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life," we have at last the beginnings of a country to which James Baldwin could come home. ♦


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It's time for Nintendo to resort to its classic rainbow strategy to sell more Wiis: Its net profit for the past six months fell by 50 percent, almost perfectly matching a near 50 percent drop in Wii sales.
Nintendo sold 5.75 million Wiis over the past six months, versus 10.1 million a year ago. Which is why Nintendo finally got around to cutting the price of the Wii—to move more units, even though that sliced into profits. (Interestingly, it shows Wii sales finally dipped below a million a month, if barely, and just how insanely profitable the Wii is for Nintendo.) If it makes Nintendo feel any better, the Xbox 360 is the only console that's actually seen growth this year, in the US, anyway, thanks to its own price cut.
So, um, next stop: Wiis in multiple colors. Hey, it's worked for Nintendo like a million times before. That, or you know, that Wii HD people are so fond of talking about. [WSJ


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Booker T. Washington
Born a slave on a Virginia farm, Washington (1856-1915) rose to become one of the most influential African-American intellectuals of the late 19th century. In 1881, he founded the Tuskegee Institute, a black school in Alabama devoted to training teachers. Washington was also behind the formation of the National Negro Business League 20 years later, and he served as an adviser to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Although Washington clashed with other black leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and drew ire for his seeming acceptance of segregation, he is recognized for his educational advancements and attempts to promote economic self-reliance among African Americans.


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What if your problems were serving your purpose?
There are three approaches to problems:
- You ignore them. Or try to ignore them. But what you don't know can hurt you; and you actually know your problems despite your effort to ignore them.
- You try to solve them. If you are in this camp, you probably have read books (many books!) on self-help / personal development. You may even have attended seminars and workshops. So you know what to do. Then why do you still have problems?
- This is an approach few know, much less practice: You understand the fundamental nature of life's problems and accept yours. This transforms problems into opportunities.
The third approach may sound crazy and absurd. Most people spend many, many years trying the first and second approaches before they finally figure out personal development can do only so much.
Because personal development is about the small self. The good news, however, is you are not the self you think you are. You are a soul currently living in a body.
What are the Akashic Records?
The Akashic Records are the energetic records of all souls about their past lives, the present lives, and possible future lives. Each soul has its Akashic Records, like a series of books with each book representing one lifetime. The Hall (or Library) of the Akashic Records is where all souls' Akashic Records are stored energetically. In other words, the information is stored in the Akashic field (also called zero point field). The Akashic Records, however, are not a dry compilation of events. They also contain our collective wisdom.
You can read your Akashic Records. It takes some practice, but you don't need to be a guru. (The how-to is shared free on this website; it is an excerpt from the book.) The real question is: how do you utilize the information?
The Akashic Records are a great resource, but it's only a resource. How you utilize it in your life is up to you. After assisting many clients with her professional "Akashic Record Reading" service (the term is increasingly popular these days, but Akemi was the one who set up the original namesake website; the URL now directs to this website), she realized the need to explain the fundamental purpose of life and how things work in this world of phenomena toward this purpose.
Your problems are not happening in a haphazard manner and they are not meaningless roadblocks. Your life is working even when you don't think so, and you can move through your life with less resistance when you understand it. On the other hand, when you don't have the proper reference points, psychic readings can become yet another attempt of problem-solving. (Do you find yourself consulting psychics repeatedly?)
Why We Are Born: Remembering Our Purpose through the Akashic Records, helps you see through the veil. No more running around trying to fix your life; let insignificant problems resolve on their own and have fun with the real challenges as you'd have fun with creative expressions.
Here are a few testimonials from her former clients, just to show the powerfulness of utilizing the wisdom of the Akashic Records. Please keep in mind that you can do the same for yourself. (Akemi is no longer taking clients. Also, she has discontinued her blog Yes to Me / Real Life Spirituality because she wants to focus on writing books.)
"I signed up for an Akashic Record Reading after my husband raved about his. Since he is pretty much the Most Practical Living Human, I figured if it was good enough for him, it's good enough for me. I was mildly skeptical, but I didn't want to be unsupportive, so I tried to have an open mind.
Honestly, in the month or so after having our records read, it felt like our lives fell apart all at once. Whole sections of our families disowned us with seemingly no provocation. My biggest client very nicely fired me for no real reason. Another company I was doing work for went out of business, totally unexpectedly. My blog — which is my livelihood — came under major public attack. It was unbelievable. The crap really hit the fan.
BUT. In the context of the things that Akemi and I talked about, it all made sense. All of those relationships that were toxic and draining — gone. All of the clients I wasn't happy about working with — gone. All the fears that I had associated with my career and my public image and all that stuff — it all just got, I don't know, dealt with. It was like God or the Divine or the Whatever You Want To Call It said, OK. Now that you're ready, I'll put things in order for you.
I don't go in for stuff like this. I get freaked out by things I don't understand. But honestly, I'll pay whatever Akemi charges because it worked. My life is so much clearer. I didn't realize that living my life was like trying to walk in quicksand until I wasn't in the quicksand anymore. And it's wonderful." ~ N.D., Canada
"Dear Akemi,
Almost a year ago to the day I had an Akashic Record Reading and I can tell you that my life is nothing like it was just one year ago. I've been meaning to write to you about the profound changes that have taken place in my life so it seems like now is the time to do just that.
I've always been quite intentional in life, I truly love life, people and this planet to the core and I suppose as a result I've been able to move through this world as I need to, with love, honesty and clarity to do things that some would deem amazing, liberating. However, around the age of 27 after coming back to Canada from working in Africa, I began to live by the conventions of society and thus moved further and further away from my true self.
As the years went by I started to feel increasingly "stuck" (the only way I can describe it), some would call this 'normal' existence but I knew better. Fast-forward nine years to when I had my reading with you. I was in a job where I was so miserable and I knew that I was not reaching my full potential as a human being.
In the Akashic Record Reading in Nov. 08 you mentioned there were people at work that hated me, you also mentioned the 26-27 year old milestone. I was kind of surprised to hear about the people at work but shortly after it became apparent who hated me - my boss started to harass me and it only got worse and worse. I started to have anxiety, digestive issues, and insomnia as a result. After coming very close to being in a terrible car accident in Dec. 08, things really started to shift for me. I took Jan. 09 off due to stress and took the time to re-evaluate.
I quit my job at the end of March 09, moved, cleared out of my life in all aspects from relationships to 'stuff' and past emotional baggage. I felt I just needed a full house cleaning starting with every cell of my body to my physical space, job…..everything. In May 09 I started a new job that was way less stressful with a fantastic boss and a 4 day workweek that involved work that I actually enjoyed. Was it my dream job, I would say No, but it was a significant improvement over my previous situation.
In July 09, the issues over the past year manifested physically and I became increasingly ill. I didn't see this as a bad thing, just a sign that there was more work to be done. I finished my contract, and am taking time off (Sept. 09 to now) to focus on deep healing. Natural healers came my way, with their help, self-care, time off, and spiritual practice I can say that I'm feeling way better than I've felt in years.
Needless to say, I'm now so at ease with my life, in my body, mind and soul - I feel whole. Not a coincidence that a few months back I met the love of my life (on a River on a warm sunny day…). We are both astounded to have found each other and a love so deep and profound that we are truly awe struck. We speak of starting a family together, an idea that was once stuffed into a little box and buried somewhere very deep after my seperation and divorce 4 years ago.
I'm in such a great place, I don't even have the words to describe how great I feel, and how wonderful life truly is. I'm able to cherish these precious moments and fully accept the gifts that have been offered to me. I would like for people to know that life is so meant to be happy and joy filled, we are not here to suffer. We are here to experience only wonder, abundance, and joy.
I want to extend gratitude to you for helping me to become "unstuck" so I can once again live a life that is truly and utterly full…!
With greatest sincerity," ~ D.D., Canada
"It was a sudden intuition to do Akemi's Akashic Record Reading, around the time of my birthday. I used to get astrology transit readings annually around that time, but have not done that in awhile. But I had this strong feeling to do this after starting to read Akemi's blog, and I have learned not to ignore such intuitions, even when I don't know why.
I was expecting more a 'past-life regression' type thing, where she would tell me a lot of my past lives, and since I have had those before, on the conscious level I didn't see what the value would be. However, it was very different. She focused in on one past life, and a particular energetic problem that had been created in that life, and on how to clear it. I actually had been aware of a certain residual energy like the one she described in my awareness for some time, and was unsure how to release it. The meditation form I practice surfaces such things, so my own feeling is that this particular 'karma' (which is what these energy formations are in my own lexicon) had 'risen to the top', and I was drawn to her reading in order to help release it.
She also mentioned specific physical issues that I had not told her about as being related to this, and sure enough, after doing the clearing exercises, these problems disappeared! " ~ Lisa E., California
How to read your own
Akashic Records
Excerpt from the book Why We Are Born: Remembering Out Purpose through the Akashic Records


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Maybe I shouldn't say........ but secretly doing the chicken dance with Phil is peach's life long dream, she might deny it but it had to be told!!
Seems they had to use their Visas on the trip from Delhi to Almaty when they few into and out of Moscow.
Dr. Rox sometimes at major airports you have to exit, then go through reentry in the SAME terminal. This happened to me in July at Dusseldorf. I would think that Moscow-Sheremetyevo to Almaty would leave from the same terminal that Delhi to SVO came in. changing to the domestic terminal, which I think is unlikely for a flight to Kazakhstan, may not have triggered the via use.
Russian visas are very very strict. When Dallas lost his passport, it was the VISA that was the problem, not the passport. Replacing a visa is very complicated and can take up to 20 days. Visas are what entitle you to enter a country, and in the case of Russia, you also have to have one to LEAVE the country. SO the way I understand it, T/S had a Visa for Russia of course. But when they flew thru Moscow on the way to Almaty (which they were not supposed to do), their passports were stamped as they transited the airport (despite in progress negotiations on the spot), which means that their visa (one entry--one exit) had been used, and they would not have had a current, valid visa to enter Moscow had they not been eliminated.It may have been unlikely that a new visa could have been obtained in time for them to enter again....And they could not of course enter Russia for the decoy duty either.
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Loading Map…
Date(s) - Tuesday, April 30, 2019
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
McKenzie College
Come draw from the human figure and improve your drawing skills.
- Self directed (no instructor)
- Bring your own drawing materials and paper (or other media that is easy to clean up)
- Easels and other drawing aids available (or bring your own)
- All experience levels welcome
$16: Drop in / one session
$13: Packages of 2 to 7 sessions
$10: Packages of 10 or more sessions
Buy a package to get discounted pricing, and attend at your convenience. Packages are good for three months from purchase date.


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Stay on TRACK
The "Stay on TRACK" awareness campaign calls students' attention to the fact that they must make conscious choices in order to graduate in time.
Five things students can do to graduate in time:
1) Take at least 30 credit hours per year.
2) Register early to get the classes they need.
3) Ask an academic advisor and use DegreeWorks.
4) Choose a major and stick with it.
5) Keep up their grades.


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LRT 1090-2.1 Rough-Terrain Crane
The LRT 1090-2.1 features superb all-terrain manoeuvrability. The standard VarioBase® ensures that the Liebherr rough-terrain crane delivers a high level of safety and performance. The hydro-mechanical telescoping system with rope pull technology enables the telescope to be extended to the required length quickly and easily.
Gallery loading.
|Max. load capacity
|90 t
|Telescopic boom
|47 m
|Max. hoist height
|66 m
|Max. radius
|50 m
|Number of axles


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So, you're a Duke Energy (formerly Progress Energy) customer and you want to know how much you've paid toward two failed nuclear projects?
My Saturday column revealed that since 2009, I've paid about $500 toward the boondoggle known as the proposed nuclear plant in Levy County and the botched fix-it job done on an existing nuclear plant in Crystal River. That dollar amount is for a house that's roughly 2,000 square feet.
Your amount will depend on how big your house is and how much power you use.
If you want to know how much your monthly power bill has been inflated by these projects, here's how.
Go to Duke Energy Florida and log in under your account. On the right side you'll see a list of options. Click on "usage details." At the top of the page you'll see "average monthly usage." Write down that number.
Now you'll need to do some simple math. If this journalism-major can do it so can you. Here we go.
The nuclear charges per 1,000 kWh for each year are as follows:
2013: $4.73
2012: $2.86
2010: $6.99
2009 January-March: $12.11
2009 April-December: $4.31
Let's say your monthly average usage is 1,100 (Duke says the average for residential customers is slightly more than 1,000).
Multiply each of the yearly dollar figures by 1.1 to get the dollar amount for 1,100 kWh of power. (If your average amount was 1,800 kWh you would multiply by 1.8. If it's 1,200 you multiply by 1.2 and so on.)
So to figure out the amount for 2013 we multply $4.73 x 1.1 and we get $5.20. Now we have to multiply $5.20 x 12 because there are 12 months in a year. We get $62.40 total for 2013.
Do this for all of the years. Remember in 2009 there were two different rates. So you multiply the January-March rate by 3 for three months. And the April-December rate by 9 for nine months.
Now add all of your yearly totals together and you have your answer.
For our example of 1,100 kWh (close to average for residential customers) the total from 2009 through 2013 is about $348.
Boy am I glad I'm not a math teacher. But this stuff is important.
And whatever your amount is, know that it could have been worse.
Public Counsel J.R. Kelly, customers' Legislature-appointed advocate in Tallahassee, negotiated capped amounts with Duke Energy.
Right now customers are on the hook for an estimated $1.2 billion for the work done on the canceled nuclear plant in Levy County. And we could owe as much as $1.4 billion for the shuttered Crystal River plant.
There could have been more. As part of a settlement agreement last year, customers won't have to pay for about $400 million to buy replacement power after Crystal River shut down.
A new settlement agreement announced last week also says, among other things, that Duke will write down $295 million on the value of Crystal River.
And, of course, the big announcement from last week is that Duke said it will cancel its engineering and construction contract for the new plant in Levy County.
That means the bleeding stops and customers will stop incurring new costs for a project that will never result in a single watt of power.
It's complicated stuff. But since utilities are regulated monopolies in Florida and we don't get to choose who to buy power from, it's worth understanding where your money goes.


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Dreams of a Life Trailer (2011)
Trailer for Dreams of a Life.
Would anyone miss you? Nobody noticed when Joyce Vincent died in her bedsit above a shopping mall in North London in 2003. Her body wasnt discovered for three years, surrounded by Christmas presents she had been wrapping, and with the TV still on. Newspaper reports offered few details of her life not even a photograph.
Interweaving interviews with imagined scenes from Joyces life, Dreams of a Life is an imaginative, powerful, multilayered quest, and is not only a portrait of Joyce but a portrait of London in the eightiesthe City, music, and race. It is a film about urban lives, contemporary life, and how, like Joyce, we are all different things to different people. It is about how little we may ever know each other, but nevertheless, how much we can love.
2 min 11 sec
Posted On
November 23, 2011
Carol Morley
Carol Morley
December 16, 2011
Zawe Ashton
Jonathan Harden
Daren Elliott Holmes
Ki'juan Whitton
No Music Available


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Automatic Yogurt Maker
- Free Fast Shipping
- Vendor Shipped
- PRICE MATCH GUARANTEE - Learn More
Easy, hassle-free returns online and in-store for eligible items.Learn More
Earn 5% Back in rewards4 plus free standard shipping3every day when you shop with your Williams Sonoma credit card at Williams Sonoma.Apply Now Learn More
- Summary
Prepare fresh all-natural yogurt – from traditional Greek styles to fruit-flavored varieties – with this easy-to-use electric machine. Simply pour a mixture of heated milk and yogurt starter (sold separately) into the glass jars and set the timer. Yogurt maker shuts off automatically when the cycle is complete.
- Digital controls customize fermentation time up to 15 hours.
- Makes seven 6-oz. servings in 6–10 hours.
- Includes seven reusable glass jars and plastic lids.
- Dating system allows you to note the yogurt's made-on date.
- Built-in timer; beep alerts you when batch is done.
- Yogurt starter sold separately.
- Recipes included.
- Dimensions & More Info
Yogurt Maker includes:
- 7 glass jars and plastic lids.
- Recipes.
- Instructions.
Additional information
- Plastic construction with stainless-steel exterior.
- 9 1/2" diam., 6 3/4" high.
- 6-oz.-cap. jars.
- 5 lb.
- This product is intended for use in the United States and Canada and is built to United States electrical standards.
- Made in China.
- Use & Care
- May be used with freeze-dried starter or fresh unsweetened yogurt.
- Avoid using harsh detergents, abrasive cleansers or scouring pads.
- Jars and lids are dishwasher safe.
- Wipe exterior of machine with a damp cloth.
- Shipping
Shipping Information
UPS can deliver most in-stock items within 3–5 business days. UPS is unable to deliver to P.O. boxes.
Shipping Rates
The shipping rate varies depending on your order total and shipping destination. View Shipping Options and Charges.
Next Day Delivery
For an additional charge of $26 per address, we can expedite delivery to most destinations. This service is not available for some oversize items, items shipped directly from the supplier (including perishable and custom-manufactured items), out-of-stock items and items to be shipped outside the contiguous 48 states.
Orders received by 9:00 p.m. ET Monday through Thursday will arrive the next business day; orders placed Friday through Sunday will arrive on the following Tuesday.
Return Policy
At Williams Sonoma, we take great pride in the quality and craftsmanship of our products. Attention to design, materials, safety and construction are our priority. Upon receipt, please inspect your purchase and notify us of any damage; we will arrange for a prompt replacement.
If within 30 days, you are dissatisfied for any reason, you may return your purchase for a refund of the merchandise value. An original receipt or gift receipt is required for all returns and exchanges. Returns with a gift receipt will be refunded in the form of a Merchandise Credit for the amount indicated on the gift receipt. Returns with original receipt will be refunded in the original form of payment, cash and check refunds over $100 will be issued as a company check (may take 14 business days from time of request).
For all cutlery returns (knife sets, single knives, cutting boards, knife sharpeners and knife storage), please contact us at 888.922.4108 to initiate the return.
We cannot accept returns on monogrammed, personalized, special-order items, custom upholstery, food, items shipped direct from the vendor or on items damaged through normal wear and tear. Final sale items ending in .97 or .99 cannot be returned.
Made to Order and Final Sale Furniture items are non-returnable and cannot be cancelled once the order is placed.
For returns of items purchased from your Williams Sonoma Gift Registry, we will gladly provide a refund or exchange for the merchandise within 90 days of your event or within 90 days of purchase, whichever date is later. View Full Returns Policy.
- Price Match Guarantee
Williams Sonoma Price Match Guarantee
At Williams Sonoma, we're committed to bringing you the best quality at the best prices.
If you find a lower price on any of our products, we'll match it—guaranteed. Click here for details.
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- Vendor Shipped
- PRICE MATCH GUARANTEE - Learn More
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Rated 5 out of 5 by Karens1010 from Love love love this product I bought this yogurt incubator in order to make raw, unpasteurized yogurt. The first time I tried, it was a flop. My starter was store bought raw plain yogurt. Then, I decided to try the starter which came with the product, and my yogurt turned out perfect! First, I slightly boiled the raw milk to 110 degrees so as not to kill the enzymes in the raw milk. Second, I mixed in 1 packet of the euro starter. Third, I poured the 42oz of milk into each little glass jar. Fourth, I placed a thermometer on top, which hovered right at 100 degrees F. Fifth, set the timer to 8 hours and I got perfect sweet and a little tangy plain yogurt! I should also say that I was afraid of using raw milk, but my store is reputable and I trust it. If a person wants to boil it to 180 1st, I'm sure it's good too. Plus, I was going to buy the more expensive model, but I'm glad I saved the money, this model turned out to be great.Date published: 2015-04-16Rated 4 out of 5 by hgolightly from Nice item. Love those glass jars! I have several yogurt makers. One was given to me by a friend, the other (same model--the one from French Women Don;t Get Fat) from a tag sale, and this one. With the first two I had mixed results. I honestly think it has more to do with HOW you prepare the yogurt than the maker itself, as you can make yogurt on your counter top with NO machine, for goodness sake! I chose to buy this maker from WS because it had glass jars. Yup, that's the only reason. I was getting weary of storing liquid food plastic containers and really liked the idea of glass jars. Having said that, I have never made a bad batch, which did happen with the other brand. Glass jars (and those plastic ones) are difficult to clean around the rims, but I LOVE the date feature. For me, I just really like knowing what is IN my yogurt, which I can control my making it myself.Date published: 2015-03-04Rated 5 out of 5 by Lindalou1107 from Best yogurt I ever ate! This is a great machine. I just bought a second set of jars so I can always have some on hand...I really missed my yogurt fix on the odd day I ran out. I'm a health nut so I purchase grass fed, organic whole milk and use grass fed kefir for my starter. I found a place (Fairway on LI) to get the milk for $7 a gallon and I buy the kefir in a quart-sized container for $4. At these prices I can make my extra-healthy yogurt for just 54 cents per 7 oz. I'm saving a bunch of money by making my own, as organic grass fed yogurt costs about $2.39 for 6oz.! When preparing the yogurt no real measuring is needed. Just fill one of the jars seven times with milk and heat. Cool, then add one jar measure of kefir and you're good to go. One note: I've tried adding cooked fruit and other flavorings to this yogurt as described in the pamphlet that came with the maker. After 3 gritty batches, I cut my losses. Make plain and add your flavorings just before consuming. Or eat plain...its wonderful!Date published: 2015-02-10Rated 4 out of 5 by MPMLJ from For adults and (very) big kids I like this machine, it does require some practice and patience to get the desirable yogurt consistency but the batch normally turns out well. You need a good pot for boiling milk and an instant-read thermometer. The best yogurt comes from the whole milk and one Siggi's 0% plain yogurt as a starter. It's thick and delicious. My little kids do not eat this yogurt though (even if I add jam or chocolate or anything); for them it's still different from the store-bought super sweet yogurt and lacks 'that' colorful package. Alternatively, teens and adults seem to like this yogurt. Whole milk yogurt takes 8 hrs, fat free milk yogurt takes about 13 hrs, then refrigerate the jars for 3 hours.Date published: 2014-07-13Rated 5 out of 5 by Everythingcook from Creamy thick yogurt overnight! This yogurt incubator is so easy. Boiling the milk yields creamy greek-like yogurt. Taste is very fresh. If you've never made yogurt before, you'll have no problem using this machine. And if you are tired of spending $$$ on store bought yogurt, this will do the trick!Date published: 2014-07-08Rated 5 out of 5 by MakeitEZ12 from Saves money and delicious! I've been using this machine for about 8 months now, with organic skim milk and about half of the suggested nonfat dry milk, and organic Greek yogurt as a starter. I culture it in the machine only 6.5-7 hours, you can control the tartness by the time and by what culture you choose. The manufacturer sells both a 2nd tier for this machine and extra jars with the dating option in the lids, so I make about 12-14 jars at a time now (I switch the top and bottom row about 1/2 way through). The yogurt is thick and delicious and making it myself is saving a LOT of money! You'll have to prepare the yogurt culture before putting it in the jars and that takes me about 25 minutes, make sure you have a thermometer and perhaps a timer. This product only counts down the hours, not minutes...so if it says "1" that could mean 5 minutes or 59 minutes to go, so I use a separate timer in addition. I have found this machine does a great job!Date published: 2014-06-29Rated 4 out of 5 by RussBrown from Yogurt Maker This is simple and easy to use, both for yogurt and kefir. I use any container that will fit and regular yogurt/fefir as a starter. You do not have to boil the milk nor add powdered milk to get good, thick yogurt/kefir.Date published: 2014-05-19Rated 4 out of 5 by SkyAdventuress from Yogurt with no additives! This yogurt maker is easy to use, worked as expected. The yogurt turned out slightly tart, which is the way I like it. Now, I will experiment with using different milks, dry milk, etc. The glass jars included appear to contain slightly less than you would get buying a small container at the store. Having the choice of using different-sized glass containers to make the yogurt would have been nice.Date published: 2014-05-18
what is the model number of this machine? thank you.Hi Vera, The model number is YM80.Date published: 2019-07-15
Does it work with full fat goat milk?Hi AliceMorgan, Yes, this will work with any pasteurized milk of any fat content.Date published: 2019-02-01


text: Are you looking for affordable auto insurance in New Providence PA ? Look no further, our car insurance directory has over 35,000 local agents and companies who can provide you a quote. Either fill out your zip code above or use our search feature below to find a New Providence PA car insurance company. Our goal is to get you the most affordable rates in Pennsylvania!


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Many times we experience significant life events that may have an impact on our taxes! This page is designed to help you while explaining to individuals the tax impact of these events. All of these forms and publication links are linked to the most recent IRS document available.
From Birth through Childhood
Publication 4156 Life Cycle Brochure
Form SS-5, Application for a Social Security Card
Publication 501, Exemptions, Standard Deductions, and Filing Status
What is an ATIN Adoption Taxpayer Identification Number
Publication 972, Child Tax Credit
Publication 596, Earned Income Tax Credit can lower your federal tax liabilities
Publication 929, Tax Rules for Children and Dependents
Publication 970, Tax Benefits for Education
Form 8863, Education Credits (Hope and Lifetime Learning Credits)
Marriage or Divorce - Check your Social Security Number
Publication 555, Community Property
Form SS-5, Application for a Social Security Card
Divorce or Separation
Publication 504, Divorced or Separated Individuals/Alimony
Publication 555, Community Property
Job Loss or Starting a new Career or Job
Publication 4128, Tax Impact of Job Loss
Unemployment - Tips
Publication 531, Reporting Tip Income
Withholding - Withholding Calculator
Publication 505, Tax Withholding and Estimated Tax
Publication 15-B, Cafeteria Plans
Publication 587, Business Use of Your Home (including use of home by Daycare Providers)
Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income
Publication 969, Medical Savings Accounts
Independent Contractor or Employee? - How to determine what you are considered
Publication 463, Travel, Entertainment, Gift, and Car Expenses
Publication 571, Tax-Sheltered Annuity Programs for Employees of Public Schools and Certain Tax-Exempt Organizations
Form W-4, Employee's Withholding Allowance Certificate
Form W-4(SP), Employee's Withholding Allowance Certificate- Spanish
Persons with Disabilities
Publication 3966, Taxpayers with Disabilities
Publication 907, Tax Highlights for Persons with Disabilities
Publication 524, Credit for the Elderly or Disabled
Publication 502, Medical and Dental Expenses
Planning for Retirement?
Retirement Savings Contributions Credit (Saver's Credit)
Choosing a Retirement Plan, 403(b) Tax-Sheltered Annuity Plan
IRA Based Plans, Choosing a Retirement Plan
Publication 915, Social Security and Equivalent Railroad Retirement Benefits
Publication 554, Older Americans' Tax Guide
Publication 721, Tax Guide to U.S. Civil Service Retirement Benefits
Publication 550, Mutual Fund Distributions
Publication 4334, SIMPLE IRA Publication
Publication 524, Credit for the Elderly
First Time Homebuyer
Publication 530, Tax Information for First-Time Homeowners
Publication 936, Home Mortgage Interest Deduction
Publication 521, Moving Expenses
Form 3903, Moving Expenses
Publication 530, Tax Information for First-Time Homeowners
Publication 17, Your Federal Income Tax
Publication 523, Selling Your Home
Form 8822, Change of Address
Publication 908, Bankruptcy Tax Guide
Publication 559, Survivors, Executors and Administrators
Form 56, Notice Concerning Fiduciary Relationship
Form 1310, Statement of Person Claiming Refund Due a Deceased Taxpayer
Form 4810, Request For Prompt Assessment Under Internal Revenue Code Section 6501(d)


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Dear Timothy James,
Today we celebrate 8 years of marriage. Sometimes we say it's been the best 6 years of our life. Thankfully, those first two years were difficult enough that it pushed us towards seeking counseling, doing self work, and being committed to recovery. As a result we've realized that good marriages are a dime a dozen, but great marriages take lots of hard work. I'm thankful that we work hard at ours every day!
I'm also thankful for the places we've traveled and the memories we've made. We've snorkeled in the Bahamas, sipped wine in Napa, eaten crab legs in Seattle, panned for gold in Alaska, kayaked in the Juneau Borough, taken naps in hammocks in Mexico, participated in adventure races, watched Bon Iver perform from the 2nd row, fly fished in Austin, Arkansas, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Kentucky, camped in the Blue Ridge Mountains, spoken about grace and forgiveness in Uganda, named our first dog after one of our favorite things, moved across the country, and bought our first home. These memories will always be near and dear to my heart, but nothing tops giving you stitches in our office and watching you graduate from PA school. I've never been so proud of you!
Thank you for constantly reminding me to get outside and play, to find joy in the small things, and to poke dead things with sticks. I adore you.
All my heart,


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Getting around in games can be a hassle. Just like in real life, it's nice to have a faster option so that you don't always have to trudge through Mt. Moon one step at a time, fending off Zubats. Unlike real life, you don't have to settle for a used '96 Toyota Corolla. Here are the 10 greatest modes of transportation in videogame history.
The only thing better than a loyal dog companion is a loyal dog companion that can turn into a jet, a submarine, a springboard, and about 20 other things (depending on which game you happen to be playing). Rush, the robot dog of Mega Man, was a blessing when he first appeared now you had the option of flying across the pits of spikes instead of trying to make perilous and risky jumps. Of course, you could only use Rush for short bursts of time, just like a regular dog who caught on that you were out of Beggin' Strips.
The most exciting thing about Rocket Skates in Toejam and Earl was 9 times out of 10 you had no idea you were about to get them. You're opening an mystery present, and BAM! Suddenly you're rocketing across the level, barely able to control yourself, and 10 times out of 10 you'll fall off a cliff and back to the previous level. But the biggest allure of the rocket skates was allowing you the chance to jump back to level 1 and use them to cross the sea and find the secret level 0. Assuming your older brother told you about it first.
Final Fantasy is known for two types of transportation: aerodynamically-questionable airships and Chocobos. Of the two, Chocobos are easily the more interesting and endearing option. The giant goofy birds could rarely fly, preferring instead to act like a cross between an ostrich and a horse, galloping across fields much faster than you'd be able to do on foot, and sometimes even able to be summoned into battle. Not that they were perfect Chocobos would often leave you upon dismounting or only able to be ridden for a limited amount of time. Still, that's a small price to pay for getting to ride Big Bird into battle.
In the early playing of the first Pokemon games, you start to think to yourself, "Self, I own an enormous bird, several giant fishes, and a fire horse. Why the hell can't I ride them?" And (besides the fire horse) it turns out you can! You can fly to different cities and locations instead of walk and you can swim across water. Don't want to go through that cave again to get to another town? You never have to again! It's still bullshit that you can't ride your fire horse though.


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Blaenau Gwent Learning Zone
Blaenau Gwent Learning Zone
Our vibrant Learning Zone campus opened in 2012 and became the home of all A Level education in Blaenau Gwent. In 2014 our students were the borough's most successful A Level students ever.
The Learning Zone forms part of the regeneration of the old Steelworks site in Ebbw Vale, now known as The Works. The first thing you'll notice about the Learning Zone is our beautiful atrium which gives plenty of space and light.
Choose from a wide mix of courses including 32 A Level subjects and vocational courses for a broad range of industries. Our Learning Zone staff are award winning too, so you can be confident that you'll be getting a top quality experience.
Be inspired by our cutting edge facilities which are designed to get you ahead, including:
- Professional kitchens
- Recording studio
- Mac computer suites
- Hair and beauty salons (open to the public)
- Costa Coffee outlet
All of our campuses feature plenty of places to study and socialise, and you can stay connected with free student WiFi.


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After over 900,000 votes, we're narrowed down the Mortal Kombat series to the top 20 kharacters (extremely subtle reference). Did your favorite differently-colored-vest ninja make it? How about your lady-wearing-virtually-no-clothes of choice? Your personal top stupidly-difficult-and-frustrating boss battle? You won't have to wonder long, because the results are below. And don't forget to test your might by complaining how wrong everyone was not to vote for your favorites in the comments.
Why should dudes have all the fun? While Mortal Kombat is often derided (mayyybe rightfully) for having a bunch of dude ninjas that are virtually identical-looking (give or take a few color switches), people often forget that Mortal Kombat II introduced the feminine equivalent with Mileena, Kitana, and Jade. One of the most memorable amongst these three ridiculously skimpily-dressed ladies was Mileena, perhaps best remembered for a) being ridiculously skimpily-dressed (although she started out pretty modest compare to her current design) and b) hiding a messed-up demonic mouth under her bandana (much like Bret Michaels). But on top of that, Mileena was just a ridiculously solid fighter from MKII on, since she's really motivated to win the tournament and use her winnings to get some dental work done (or take over the Earthrealm, whatever).
When Mortal Kombat III came around, the developers had a problem - they'd swapped palettes of lady ninjas and dude ninjas, so what was left? Then it hit them: ROBOT NINJAS. Sure, the entire notion of these cyborg fighters was kinda in the face of the ancient kung-fu tone of the rest of the series, but whatever CUZ ROBOT NINJAS. What else more could kids want in the mid-90s other than excessive violence and robots punching mall cops? Which brings us to Sektor....he was the red one.
A former law enforcement agent, super effective fighter, and the only female option in the original Mortal Kombat, Sonya Blade is something of a major achievement in fighting games: she's probably one of the least sexualized female characters in a major fighting franchise. Granted, she's still extremely sexualized, but compared to Mileena she looks like a nun. Also, she's managed to be one of the more grounded and strong-willed characters in MK history, even though in the 1st movie they somehow manage to make her a damsel in distress even though she can burn people to a crisp with a kiss. Major missed opportunity there.
The original badass with four arms and a really ugly ponytail, Goro served as the penultimate boss of the original Mortal Kombat - and one of the most frustratingly difficult battles in videogame history. Although, judging by how badly Johnny Cage's sucker punch to the balls knocks the wind out of him, he may also have four of something other than his arms, if you catch my drift (talkin' quad-dicks), which puts him at a pretty huge disadvantage.


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Bisons win big over Memphis
The Buffalo Bisons were 13-3 winners over the Memphis Redbirds (Triple-A affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals) on Sunday afternoon from Jupiter, FL.
The victory gives the Bisons a 3-6 record on their 13-game spring training schedule.
RHP DILLON GEE earned the victory for the Herd, tossing five shutout innings. The righty also struck out five batters.
LISTEN: Bisons preview show talked to the players before the big day.
INF RUBEN TEJADA was 1-3 at the plate, including a bases-loaded triple. INF ZACH LUTZ was 2-4 with a solo home run while INF JUSTIN TURNER (2-4) and OF KIRK NIEUWENHUIS (2-4, 3B) finished with multi-hit efforts.
There are just 11 days until the Bisons' 2011 Home Opener on Thursday, April 7 against the Syracuse Chiefs (3:05 p.m.). Tickets are now on-sale at bisons.com or by calling THE-HERD at (843-4373).