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Investigation into the "Fast and Furious" gun-walking scandal continues to reveal disturbing developments. On Sunday, Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee that is leading the investigation into the operation, told ABC News' Jake Tapper that pertinent emails revealed that the agenda of the operation was to advocate for greater gun control, not as alleged to pursue criminal prosecutions of drug cartel members.
During the interview, Tapper played a video clip of Issa speaking at a National Rifle Association convention in April. "We've never answered the question, 'What were they thinking of?'" Issa commented during that speech. "Could it be that what they really were thinking of was in fact to use this walking of guns in order to promote an assault weapons ban? Many think so, and they haven't come up with an explanation that would cause any of us not to agree."
Noting Issa's implication that "Fast and Furious" was in fact intentionally fumbled in order to make the case for stronger gun laws, Tapper asked, "Do you really think that it was a possibility that they were sending guns across the border — not because they were trying to get people in the Mexican drug cartels, not 'cause they were trying to figure out gun trafficking, but because they were trying to push gun control?"
"Two things, quickly," Issa responded. "First of all, this was so flawed that you can't believe they expected to actually get criminal prosecutions as a result of it, so the level of flaw — if that's a word — here is huge. But here's the real answer as to gun control: We have emails from people involved in this that are talking about using what they're finding here to support, basically assault weapons ban or greater reporting." He continued,
So, chicken or egg, we don't know which came first. We probably never will. We do know that during this Fast and Furious Operation there were e-mails in which they're saying, "We can use this as part of additional reporting or things like assault weapons ban." So, the people involved saw the benefit of what they were gathering. Whether or not that was the original purpose, we probably will never know.
Much of the evidence showing that the agenda behind Fast and Furious may have in fact been greater gun control was obtained by CBS News.
According to CBS, "ATF [still the initials for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] officials didn't intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called 'Demand Letter 3.' That would require some US gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or 'long guns.' "
An email from ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait to ATF Phoenix Special Agent Bill Newell, who was in charge of Fast and Furious, showed Chait asking Newell for "anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales" based on sales included in Fast and Furious.
On Jan. 4, 2011, as ATF officials prepared a press conference to announce arrests in Fast and Furious, Newell saw it as "another time to address Multiple Sale on Long Guns issue."
Following that conference, Chait emailed Newell applauding him for taking advantage of that opportunity:"Bill--well done yesterday... In light of our request for Demand letter 3, this case could be a strong supporting factor if we can determine how many multiple sales of long guns occurred during the course of this case."
Revelations that the ATF may have in fact been using Fast and Furious to push for stricter gun control provoked an angry response from Larry Keane, spokesman for National Shooting Sports Foundation. He maintained that it was "deeply troubling" if sales made by gun dealers "voluntarily cooperating with ATF's flawed 'Operation Fast & Furious' were going to be used by some individuals within ATF to justify imposing a multiple sales reporting requirement for rifles."
And even before those discoveries, National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre accused the ATF of that very agenda last October 14 in an interview with NewsmaxTV.
"It's the only thing that makes any sense," LaPierre observed of the gunrunning "sting" operation that resulted in thousands of U.S.-purchased firearms ending up in the hands of violent Mexican drug traffickers. LaPierre noted that "over a period of two or three years they were running thousands and thousands of guns to the most evil people on earth," while government officials were claiming that 90 percent of the guns used by the Mexican cartels were coming from the United States. However, said LaPierre:
That [90 percent] was a phony figure from the very start. Even the Wikileaks cables from our own State Department prove they are coming from Central America; they are not coming from the U.S. Every police officer will tell you that they're coming from Russia, they're coming from China, most of them are coming from Central America and a lot of them are coming from defections from the Mexican Army.
LaPierre continued to lay out his argument:
Look at what has happened. We had our Department of Justice under the Obama administration running thousands and thousands of guns over the border and watching them go directly into the hands of some of the most evil people on earth, the Mexican drug cartels.
At the same time they were letting the reputation of good, honest, decent Americans, law-abiding American gun dealers, be ruined.
They ordered these sales to be made — they even overrode the InstaCheck system and ordered the dealers to make the sales. Then, when it all starts coming out, there's a massive cover-up.
LaPierre was proven right by the documents obtained by CBS News.
Congress has been investigating Fast and Furious for over a year; however, it has hit a number of roadblocks, including strong resistance from Attorney General Eric Holder to fully comply with the investigation, and President Obama's controversial invoking of "executive privilege" to protect Holder from having to submit all the subpoenaed documents pertaining to the gun-walking operation.
Photo: In this June 19, 2012 file photo, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) speaks to reporters following his meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder on Capitol Hill in Washington: AP Images


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China's Middle Class in No Mood to Spend
Businesses have been targeting China's growing middle class, but it may be some time before this strategy pays off. The WSJ's Wei Gu tells us why China's middle class isn't in a spending mood.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
... the the ... all of this Act are getting China's growing middle class but just how many are today ... and are they willing to spend ... I'd ever con Cheney me now is Wall Street Journal column this week ... the gateway is the difference in China between the working class and the middle ... of the ASIC huge difference between what one cars in the middle cause ... working Pasok only the majority of the people ... with Jeff and enough to cover their basic me ... and then fundamental cause who can afford to spend a little more um I think the like not necessarily in the fact that he ... meant by Mikhail Ceaser and reckoning ... cannot only has six percent of the people who I at that stage for the surprisingly the new layout again not happy ... they say the added we sit in on how the unnamed new Chinese the in this age based expand the state this issue of safety net so that more people will spend money ... to this that domestic consumption ... so I'm is this middle class that a lot of companies are targeting actually ... worried about their financial future actually not spending ... there are very well reviewed ... I have read financings connecting Highway our peak amplitude living the way a ... cool people are being taken care of becoming overweight to more than ten percent every year ... it's the middle cause what policy multinationals were actually use the government ... can not necessarily getting the wage increases every area anymore ... and also basic the slide and contaminated the baby boomers ... have good care ... of private hospital even just to accommodate hospital ... every time it's a struggle going down to reflect history I was to flee after checking to see the doctor put two men and ... saw the things made the tennis middle cost to current difficulty ... so is a wrong that companies to relate our gets the middle class and ... how much are they responsible for growth for economic growth ... and I'd be a bit of exaggeration down tennis middle-class chill people are getting rich ... and bike twenty twenty it is expected to edge back forty percent of people in China on going to be the no cost ... extremis also notorious for having very high savings rate ... has the leading have a social ... very good social welfare and consistent so they just have to say the devil ... says we see examples of Chinese lunching on the flight had backed abroad when debating minded PFI your whole family well their friends and maybe this is this is just there when the effects I e we added a at this stage then not really ready to spend on things that they just like an interesting perspective considering I can tell you how many times I've talking to the people who told me it's it's it's all that as China's expanding ... thanks Fran that's column this weekend ... for more I know ways call on the people's money you can go to Des beest dot com under for ...

subset: commoncrawl


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GOP split resurfaces over Capito bid
West Virginia Rep. Shelley Moore Capito's Senate candidacy is already creating an unsettling sense of déjà vu for Republicans.
An experienced and popular candidate with wide name recognition announces a bid in a state that looks ripe for a pickup — and anti-establishment, Beltway-based conservatives swiftly object.
Story Continued Below
It's the tension that's dogged the GOP in its quest for a Senate majority the past two election cycles and threatens to afflict the party again as it enters 2014 with a favorable map.
( Also on POLITICO: DeMint group gives Capitol cold reception)
Not even three weeks since the election, Capito's challenge to Democrat Sen. Jay Rockefeller is already shaping up as test case of whether Republicans can overcome deep fissures within the party and produce palatable general-election candidates who aren't fatally wounded by bruising primary battles.
"We never have been able to guarantee the most electable candidate can win a primary," acknowledged veteran GOP power broker Charlie Black. "There was all that talk after 2010 when we kicked three seats away and nothing changed."
( Also on POLITICO: Club fro growth whacks Capito)
Indeed, within an hour of Capito's campaign kickoff in Charleston, the anti-tax Club for Growth fired the first warning shot.
Fresh off winning a seventh term in the House, Capito was deemed too "establishment" and not conservative enough by the Washington-based group, which most recently assisted in the takedown of Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar.
"Congresswoman Capito has a long record of support of bailouts, pork and bigger government," Club for Growth President Chris Chocola said in a statement. "She voted to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for massive expansions of government-run health insurance, giveaways to Big Labor, and repeatedly voted to continue funding for wasteful earmarks like an Exploratorium in San Francisco and an aquarium in South Carolina. That's not the formula for GOP success in U.S. Senate races."
The Senate Conservatives Fund, which was founded by South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, also signaled outright opposition.
"Congresswoman Capito is not someone we can endorse because her spending record in the House is too liberal," said SCF Executive Director Matt Hoskins. "If Republicans in West Virginia want to save their country, they need to find another candidate with the courage to say 'no' to more spending and debt."
Another conservative group, FreedomWorks, cited Capito's mediocre 61 percent rating in its vote rankings in saying an endorsement would not be "automatic."
"It's pretty early to make a decision on something like this, but I'm sure we will check with our members in West Virginia in the months to come to see what they say," FreedomWorks' Brendan Steinhauser told POLITICO.
Capito is unquestionably a moderate: She supports abortion rights, has voted to extend unemployment benefits and is in favor of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. In 2008, she ran a television ad that touted her willingness to break from her party by voting against tax breaks for oil companies and twice supporting an override of President George W. Bush's veto of the SCHIP bill.


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Missionalia (Online) vol.41 no.1 Pretoria ago. 2013
Migrants, mission and theological education
Stephen Hayes1
The Christian Church has faced problems of mission and migrancy from its inception. This paper, however, is limited to southern Africa in the last fifty years, using examples from the Anglican and Orthodox Churches, based mainly on the personal experiences of the author. It begins with the story of a migratory cattle herder in northwestern Namibia who became an evangelist and was trying to plant a church among a nomadic people. There have been other patterns of migration in Southern Africa, including migratory labour, forced removals, refugees, and immigration, both legal and illegal. Theological Education by Extension (TEE), which developed about 40-50 years ago, had the potential to meet some of these needs, though emphasis was often put in the wrong places, so that it did not fulfil the promise of meeting the needs of migrant ministries as well as had been hoped. Materials and resources often had to be improvised, but in many ways much has been achieved.
In this article I shall try to look at historical Christian responses to migration and mission, and to the challenges to theological education that these have posed. That is a pretty broad field, and so I shall limit the scope in time mostly to the last fifty years, and in space mostly to Southern Africa. One reason for those limitations is that that is largely the scope of my personal experience, and my personal experience has been primarily in the Anglican and Orthodox Churches, and, to a lesser extent, some African Independent Churches.
I have used an anecdotal, narrative approach to try to show how attempts to provide theological education to aid mission to migrants have often failed, and I have drawn together a number of examples, mostly from my own experience. I believe that there are things that can be learnt from these examples.
Since it is based mainly on personal experience, it may be helpful to the reader if I put this experience into a time frame.
From 1969-1972 I worked in the Anglican Church in Namibia as a self-supporting deacon and later priest. For money I worked in a newspaper office. Among other things I was responsible for ministry among Herero-speaking Anglicans, and also liaison with some African Independent Churches, the Oruuano Church and the Church of Africa, which the Anglican Church had previously helped with theological education.
In February 1972 I was deported from Namibia, along with the bishop and two other church workers, and spent the next four months travelling around South Africa trying to promote the concept of Theological Education by Extension (TEE). At the end of that period I was banned by the South African government, and prohibited from engaging in any educational activities for the next four years.
In 1976 my ban was lifted and I went to work in the Anglican Diocese of Zululand, where I was responsible, among other things, for training self-supporting deacons and priests.
In 1983 I moved to the Anglican Diocese of Pretoria as director of mission and evangelism, and in 1985 left the Anglican Church and subsequently joined in the Orthodox Church. From 2002-2009 I was involved, with others, in training people for ministry in the Orthodox Archdiocese of Johannesburg and Pretoria.
This brief summary should give an indication of the scope and the limitations of the account that follows. One of the limitations is in the literature cited. Most of the works cited are those that were available at the time, and which influenced the theory and practice of what we were doing back then. I hope that this paper can help to show what worked, what did not work, and what could have been done better.
Case study: Thomas Ruhozu
I offer as a case study Thomas Ruhozu, a man from northwestern Namibia, the region known as the Kaokoveld. It has a dry climate, and most of the people were migrant cattle herders, following their herds to find grazing and water. Their main diet was omaere -- a kind of yoghurt, and wild vegetables and bulbs.
In the late 1960s Thomas Ruhozu and two friends of his decided that they wanted to go to school, so they walked about 300 kilometres to the east to St Mary's Anglican School at Odibo, in Ovamboland, which was at that time the only English language school for blacks in Namibia.
They suffered from culture shock. Ovambo food was vastly different from Ovahimba food in the Kaokoveld. The climate was different, the language was different, and the culture was different. Thomas's two friends gave up and went home after a few months. Thomas stuck it out for four years, and then his father died, and he had to go home to look after the family's cattle.
While at Odibo, Thomas Ruhozu had also joined the Anglican Church. He had been baptised and confirmed. On his return to the Kaokoveld, however, there was no Anglican Church within 150 kilometres.
In June 1971 I was a self-supporting priest in the Anglican Church in Windhoek. I worked as a proof-reader at a local newspaper, the Windhoek Advertiser, and visited various congregations to celebrate the Eucharist and teach at weekends. Most of these congregations were composed of migrant workers, mainly from Ovamboland. Some were isolated at mines, or road and railway workers' camps, while the largest was St Michael's at Katutura township in Windhoek. My main pastoral ministry was among the Herero-speaking Anglicans, who were few and scattered.
I spoke to Abraham Hangula, an Anglican evangelist who had been brought from Ovamboland to work among the mainly Ovambo migrant workers in Windhoek. He told me about Thomas Ruhozu, and said we should consider him as a possible evangelist in the Kaokoveld, where the people spoke the Herero language. I went through files in the church office, and found some correspondence relating to Thomas Ruhozu in the time of the previous bishop, but the church seemed to have lost touch with him. I wrote a letter to him at the last address I found for him, asking how he was and what he was doing, and if there were any people in the Kaokoveld who might be interested in the Anglican Church. There was a Dutch Reformed Mission in the Kaokoveld, but Abraham Hangula had told me that the people there did not trust the Dutch Reformed Church, and though they were anxious to hear the Gospel, they would rather hear it from Anglicans.
The answer to my letter arrived in person. Thomas Ruhozu appeared on my doorstep in Windhoek. Having received my letter he did not write back, but travelled 1000 kilometres to see me. In some ways it was not a good time. It was on the eve of the Anglican diocesan synod, which I had to attend. But it was good in that he would be able to see the gathered church from all over Namibia. I arranged for him to attend as an observer, and for Abraham Hangula, who knew a little Herero, to translate for him. But the proceedings were largely irrelevant to him and boring, so on the subsequent days of the synod I set him up in our kitchen with a bunch of Herero catechetical books produced by the Roman Catholic Church for children of about his reading level. I asked him to read them, and make notes, and notes of any questions he had.2 In the evenings after the synod sessions I sat with him, and we tried to communicate, he in his broken English and me in my broken Herero. I was not sure how much he understood.
When the synod was over, I took him to see the Herero chief, Clemens Kapuuo, who acted as interpreter, And Thomas explained his plans to me. He was going back to evangelise, which he now felt confident to do. He would begin with his own family, and he would talk to others as they travelled around with their herds looking for grazing. It sounded like a pretty good mission plan to me.
After the synod, a bakkie taking synod representatives back to Ovamboland overturned. Two were killed and several were in hospital. The remainder who were well enough to travel now had no transport, so I took them. We first drove to Kamanjab, the closest town to the Kaokoveld, and left Thomas Ruhozu there, but to enter the Kaokoveld one needed a permit, and I did not have one, and nor did any of the others travelling with me. I didn't have a permit to enter Ovamboland either, but when we reached the border I hid among the luggage in the back of the bakkie covered by a tarpaulin and sneaked in that way.
Since it was my one and only opportunity to visit Ovamboland, I spent much time as possible with Father Lazarus Haukongo, the Archdeacon of Ovamboland, who spoke a little Herero. I arranged with him for him to visit Thomas Ruhozu in Kaokoveld, which he managed to do about six weeks later. He told me he had admitted about 20 catechumens. After another couple of months he visited again, baptised the first 20, and admitted another 35. In the mean time I was reading Ralph Winter's book on Theological Education by Extension (Winter 1969) and wondering how we could set up Theological Education by Extension for Thomas Ruhozu and others like him.
Soon after that I was deported from Namibia, and lost touch with most of the people there, so the anecdote must have a truncated ending, as such anecdotes often do.
Reflection and analysis of case study
The point of this case study is that it combines the three themes of this article: migrancy, mission and theological education.
There is migrancy, in the sense that most people in the Kaokoveld were nomadic cattle herders, moving from place to place to find grazing and water. I was only beginning to think of the consequences of this for the kind of church we were trying to plant in the Kaokoveld before I was deported. My thoughts went roughly along these lines: that as soon as there were enough baptised people there to form a church, Thomas Ruhozu should be ordained as a priest to serve them. Such a thing was almost unthinkable in the Anglican Church in Southern Africa forty years ago. I was a self-supporting priest, working as a proof-reader, but I had a university degree in theology, and had been trained in a full-time seminary. I was self-supporting because the church didn't have money to pay me. The Anglican Diocese of Zululand had a training scheme for self-supporting clergy, but one of the criteria for training was that they have a fairly high level of schooling, at the very least Grade 10 or 11, and not Grade 4, like Thomas Ruhozu.
But sixty years earlier Roland Allen in his book Missionary methods: St Paul's or ours (Allen 1979) had advocated exactly what I was thinking of, though at that stage I had not heard of Roland Allen. He advocated ordaining people like Thomas Ruhozu. And as a nomadic priest among a nomadic people, Thomas Ruhozu would follow the people around. Perhaps they could construct a tabernacle like the ancient Israelites.
So instead of the then current pattern of university or seminary training before ordination, the training would follow ordination. It would be Theological Education by Extension. But very few people were developing materials for the theological education of people at the Grade 4 level, so we would have to improvise, as I had done with the Roman Catholic catechetical books intended for children.
Whether it would have worked or how well it would have worked I can't tell because we were deported before we had the opportunity to try it. Migrancy among nomadic peoples was not very common in Southern Africa at that time. But there was also the other sort of migrancy, which was much more widespread: migrant labour. There was also the migrancy of the forced removals that took place as a result of the ethnic cleansing demanded by the apartheid policy of the South African government.
And those also applied in Namibia.
There was widespread ethnic cleansing as a result of the implementation of the Odendaal Report, which laid out a blueprint for the application of apartheid to Namibia, but I shall deal with this more in relation to South Africa in a later section of this paper.
There was also a contract labour system that applied especially to Ovambo from the north who went to work in the south of Namibia (the police zone). Recruitment of workers was the monopoly of Swanla, the South West Africa Native Labour Association. Prospective employers would "order" their workers from Swanla, as they would order other materials necessary to carry on their business. The Ovambo workers were seen, quite literally, as "human resources", reified and commodified for sale.3
The workers would be recruited and assigned to employers by Swanla, regardless of aptitude, skills or experience. A labour unit was, after all, just a labour unit. If they were underpaid or abused there was very little the workers could do except leave, and then they could be charged with breaking their contract. In the last few months I was in Namibia there was a strike against the contract labour system.
It was with these conditions in mind too that we proposed the use of Theological Education by Extension.
TEE in Southern Africa
After I was deported from Namibia I went straight to a meeting of the Anglican Church's Department of Christian Education (which I had been due to attend anyway), and there met Richard Kraft, who was running the self-supporting ministry training programme of the Anglican Diocese of Zululand. The students met for a weekend once a month, and for a 10-day annual meeting in January. Most of the training was by guided reading based on whatever books were available.
What seemed to be needed, both in Namibia and Zululand, were study materials designed for this kind of training. Louise Walker had written about ways in which such texts could be developed, using programmed instruction methods (Winter 1969: 340, 546), but the only place we knew of that was even thinking of doing such a thing was a course being developed by the Christian Institute in conjunction with the African Independent Churches Association (AICA).
The AICA course had began some years before when a group of African Independent Churches (AICs) approached the Christian Institute, asking for help in training their ministers. The Christian Institute said they could help, but the AICs needed to set up an association that would be responsible for such a project, and so AICA was set up. The government felt threatened by this, and attempted to disrupt the movement, and a rival organisation, the Reformed Independent Churches Association (RICA) was set up, and supported by the Dutch Reformed Church, which then supported the government (Molobi 2011: 4-5). The Christian Institute helped to get financial support from overseas, but four changes of director between 1969 and 1972 did not help much, and the fourth director, under great pressure to produce, issued badly planned and almost unusable course material.
Richard Kraft, John Aitchison and I believed that if the Christian Institute and AICA could spend half a million Rand and not produce a theology course, we could produce a theology course and not spend half a million Rand. We started by producing a twenty-page summary of Ralph Winter's book, explaining the difference between a residential seminary and an extension seminary, and how they could be developed to work in South Africa. It was distributed to existing theological institutions and to church leaders, including all the Anglican bishops. We set up a pilot project called the Khanya Theological Correspondence Course, and John Aitchison began preparing a pilot course in the Book of Amos, designed for people of Grade 4-6 education. This was illegal, because he was banned at the time. It also caused some difficulties, as some people were very suspicious of what we were doing, and accused us of being vague and secretive about who was behind it. We could say little other than that it had the approval of the Christian Education Department of the Anglican Diocese of Zululand. The project ground to a halt when I was banned, and the three main movers could not meet together.
Eventually the Khanya project joined with two other projects, one run in the Transkei by Robin Briggs, and one run in Johannesburg by Louis Peters, to form the Theological Education by Extension College of Southern Africa (TEEC), which still exists today. The three founding projects dealt with three different levels of education, and these were continued with the TEE College. Louis Peters was then a Dominican priest, and his course was at tertiary level, mainly for people in the Roman Catholic Church who had passed Matric. This became the TEEC Diploma course. Robin Briggs in the Transkei, based at St Bede's Theological College, had a course aimed at people with a Grade 9-10 education. This became the TEEC Certificate course. And the Khanya course, aimed at people with a Grade 4-6 education, became the TEEC award course.
There were other attempts to provide suitable course materials for such courses. The Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches produced a good series of relatively affordable text books in the 1970s, though I am not aware of their being used much in Southern Africa. I myself used two of the church history ones, The first advance and Setback and recovery in the Orthodox catechetical school in Johannesburg some 30 years later.
One of the thoughts in the minds of those who were promoting TEE in the early 1970s was that Christianity was facing persecution from an increasingly totalitarian government. Several of those involved in promoting TEE were banned. The forced closing of the Federal Theological Seminary in Alice in 1973 seemed to confirm this, made some of us think that theological education and training for ministry would need to go underground, and would need to be much more broadly based. Things never got quite as bad as we envisaged, but at the time such thoughts made it seem urgent.
Mission and ministry
In my experience much discussion on the topic of mission and ministry has been obscured by language and the unspoken assumptions or hidden presuppositions that lie behind it.
For example, many have assumed that the main purpose of "theological education" is training for "the ministry". Much has been written and spoken about this, but very often important distinctions have been obscured.
The ministry and the ministries
One of the distinctions is the distinction between "the ministry" and "ministries". All too often there has been a "one man band" model of ministry, where one person is expected to lead in everything. In Pentecostal churches this person is usually called "the pastor", whereas in episcopal churches - Anglican, Roman Catholic and Orthodox, it is usually called "the priest".
Here I describe the distinction mainly in terms of the ministries in Anglican and Orthodox Churches, but the same kinds of distinctions apply, mutatis mutandis, to other Christian bodies.
There are ordained ministries of bishops, priests and deacons. People are ordained to these after a formal process of training and selection. All are involved in leading worship, and in addition bishops have the responsibility of ruling, priests of teaching and deacons of serving. In practice, however, the ministry of the priest is often seen as the ministry.
There are also other ministries, some mentioned in the New Testament - apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, healers etc. Generally no training is given for these, and people in these ministries are not formally ordained or appointed, they are simply recognised after the fact. In the Orthodox Church, for example, St Mary Magdalene is called "equal to the apostle" and "apostle to the apostles". No one ordained her to be an apostle, and she received no training. She was a witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and was sent to tell his other disciples, which she did. An apostle is one who is sent, and she was sent and did what she was sent to do.
These ministries are sometimes called charismatic ministries; they are given by the gift of the Holy Spirit. But though they may often be exercised spontaneously, if they are exercised regularly within a parish, then, in the Orthodox Church at least, the parish priest must give a blessing for it. If the ministry is wider than a parish, the blessing of the bishop must be sought, and the bishop would want to know that a teacher, for example, had sufficient knowledge to teach others. And so for these ministries too, some training is often needed.
Theological education and training for ministry
For a couple of years (2002-2004) I was involved in the work of the Standards Generating Body (SGB) for qualifications in Christian theology and ministry of the South African Qualifications Authority SAQA). This was when the government believed that Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) was the panacea for the educational problems of South Africa.
One thing that that exercise made clear to me, at any rate, was that it would be much easier to specify desired outcomes for training for ministry than it would for theological education.
I once attended Mattins in a rural Anglican church at Groenvlei, in Northern KwaZulu-Natal, and watched the Reader take about 10 minutes to read from the Bible, leaning out of the window to get more light, squinting to see the text through badly-scratched glasses, and reading the words one at a time, with many pauses to puzzle out the next word, often saying each word three times to correct previous mispronunciations. Much of the time it was inaudible, because his head was in the window alcove.
In training for ministry it is easy to set an outcome: that the text must be read in such a way that it can be heard intelligibly by someone sitting at the back of the church. And it is measurable because a person at the back of the church either hears it or does not hear it.
In this case, training for ministry would be training people to read the text in an intelligible manner. Theological education goes a step beyond this, and deals with the understanding of the text, expounding it, and possibly applying it. But all too often theological education is putting the cart before the horse: before you can interpret or expound the text, you must be able to hear it. And Jesus in the Gospels does not emphasise the interpretation or exposition of the text. That is the task of the scribes and the Pharisees. The important thing about the word of the Lord is that we should hear and do it (Matt 7:24-27).
In both the Anglican and the Orthodox Churches, in leading worship priests, deacons and other ministers have certain things to say and do when leading worship. Whether it is reading from the Bible, or preparing the bread and wine for communion, they need to be able to do these things competently and well, and to know what they are doing. Training for ministry enables them to do that. Teaching them to give a detailed exposition of the theology behind it all is theological education.
In some ways the Orthodox Church has, at least in the past, observed the distinction better. In Greece, especially, most of the parish priests had little theological education; they had training for ministry, usually by being apprenticed to and learning from another priest. The professors of theology in the universities are, even now, usually not ordained, and most of those studying academic theology are not preparing for ordination. In the Russian Orthodox Church there are seminaries where the clergy are trained, and there is some theological education as well, but the main theological education, as distinct from training for ministry, is done in theological academies rather than in the seminaries.
In the Anglican Diocese of Zululand TEE proved quite difficult to implement in practice. A training meeting was held one weekend a month, when all would gather at the diocesan conference centre at KwaNzimela. Some were taking courses with the TEE College, while others were taking courses with Unisa. We tried to get people to register for courses in the same general subject area each year, so that there could be tutorial groups where people were doing roughly the same course. But in practice many could not manage this, and were studying a course that no one else was doing. And there were widely varying academic levels, from a student who had left school at the end of Grade 6, and could not speak English, to one with an engineering degree who could speak no Zulu.
There were also many who found difficulty with the materials produced by the TEE College. They needed to learn to read before they could read to learn. That was in part a deficiency of Bantu Education, and showed up the education problems in the country. A Grade 7 Maths teacher himself had a Grade 6 reading level, and could not cope with written study material from the TEE College. In the end we found that we could spend the time together more fruitfully by discussing practical ministry problems brought up by students, and, in a way, acting as a support group.
Self-supporting clergy in the Anglican Church
In the 1970s the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference produced a booklet called The transformation of the ministry in which they considered six models of parish ministry. Model 5 was what they called the Anglican model of one self-supporting priest in a congregation, while Model 6 was the one that they were proposing (still not implemented) - each local congregation having several-self-supporting priests, deacons, readers, evangelists, pastors, teachers and other ministries, with church-supported leaders visiting them for training and encouragement.
The actual Anglican practice fell far short of the ideal picture presented in The transformation of the ministry booklet. Roland Allen had advocated ordaining priests (elders) shortly after a church was planted, to provide the new parish with the sacraments. This required training for ministry rather than theological education. The idea was that they should be local.
In many rural congregations in South Africa, however, a priest visits once every month, or sometimes at longer intervals. So most rural congregations experience the Eucharist only rarely. But where self-supporting priests were ordained in the Anglican Church, instead of serving in the local congregation where they lived (outstations, in Anglican terminology) they were treated by the church-supported clergy as unpaid assistants, expected to travel around to all the congregations, but at their own expense. As a result their local home congregation was almost as neglected as before. The vision was put before the Anglican Diocese of Zululand, but was modified in such a way as to undermine it.
Roland Allen observed this back in 1927, when he had spoken to Bishop Azariah in India about it. Allen said of objections to the notion of self-supporting clergy in the Anglican Church:
When we got back I propounded to (the Bishop) the question which I put to Bombay, whether we ought not (if we decline to ordain voluntary clergy) to teach our people to act for themselves, and he surprised me by saying that the Bishop instead of ordaining priests, might license men to celebrate, without any ordination. I answered that men so licensed would be in effect priests and a new order would be created of unordained priests, against which there would be far more serious opposition than against voluntary clergy. He said that I ought to take that line. It seems to me just a cheap way of avoiding a difficulty, the difficulty which arises from the jealousy of the present clergy for their position" (Paton 1968:129; Hayes 1985).
Fifty years later the same objections were being raised by the church-supported clergy in the Anglican diocese of Zululand, and even now, 80 years after Allen wrote, some Anglicans are still debating "lay presidency" at the Eucharist, which now, as back then, still arises from "the jealousy of the present clergy for their position."
Another case study comes from an Anglican priest/evangelist in the Anglican Diocese of Pretoria. He was an enthusiastic evangelist, and within a short period had planted about 25-30 churches, and then stopped. He no longer travelled around evangelising, he travelled to those same 20-30 churches celebrating the Eucharist, which took up all his time. If he had followed Roland Allen's method, there would have been at least 2-3 local self-supporting priests in every one of those congregations, as well as other ministries, and he might have continued to visit them to train them, but not to celebrate the Eucharist.
A later attempt was made to do something similar in KwaNdebele, with a clearly articulated intention of following the Roland Allen model. Though no one consciously and explicitly argued against the Allen model, it failed to follow that model either because many did not actually grasp the model, or because they obstructed it without articulating their objections (Hayes 1993).
Mission, migrancy and pastoral care
I mentioned earlier some of the working of the migrant labour system in Namibia 40 years ago, when it was still under South African rule. There was similar migrant labour in South Africa, with workers coming from all over the subcontinent.
Davies (1983:119) notes that "the church has a main duty to see that migrants do not get the worst of both worlds, being treated as real members and not mere 'appendages', both in the home church and in the church in the work area."
That is the negative side of mission relating to migrants, where migrant workers are seen as either objects of mission, or else as pastoral problems -when they go to work, they are out of range of their home parish, and the church in the place where they work is not in a position to receive them, and often unaware of their existence. One of the ways in which this tension manifests itself is in the question of who gets the church collections. Migrant workers are expected to support their families back home, and implicitly their home parish, but when they go to churches in the places where they are working, they usually make their contributions to the local church there.
There have been some interesting exceptions to this. When I was a self-supporting Anglican priest in Namibia, I and other church members in Windhoek travelled to isolated mines, and road and railway workers' camps, usually on Saturday afternoons.
At one mine a colleague reported that the miners, most of whom had come from the same parish in Ovamboland, were six months into their contract, and had been holding services every Sunday, and presented him with six months of collections they had taken at these services, to take to the church office in Windhoek. The priest of their home parish was the same Lazarus Haukongo who had gone to the Kaokoveld to visit Thomas Ruhozu, and the miners were a testimony to his ministry. He had clearly taught them that they all had a ministry that did not cease when they were out of range of the parish church. Whether TEE courses would have made any difference, I do not know. The most important factor seems to have been the vision and attitude of the parish priest, in setting others free for ministry.
But that was an exception. In most such places, people had been brought together for work from many different places, and they belonged to many different denominations, and were out of reach of all of them. When we visited one mine, we held a service for the Anglicans there, and they told us that there were more contract workers across the valley, working on the electrical installations. We called on them, found most were from South Africa, and as we usually did, offered prayer books, hymn books and Bibles for sale. Their white foreman came and told them that anyone who bought any of those books would be instantly sacked. They were communist Bibles, he told them. So sometimes the employers could be discouraging as well. But Davies (1983:119) also points to a positive side.
The Anglican Church in Mozambique owes its origin not to European missionaries from far away but to black mineworkers on the Witwatersrand who were touched by the Christian faith during their mine contract who took their faith home with them. And in a place like a mine compound, very rural and un-cosmopolitan men from a great variety of areas can meet and discover a fellowship that crosses divides of nationality and language, a fellowship of a common identity as a black working class.
And this applies equally to many African Independent Churches. In some cases returning migrant workers started churches at their homes. In others, Mozambican workers in South Africa who belonged to various denominations thought their needs were being neglected, and banded together to form an ethnic church for people from Mozambique. One such denomination was founded in 1918, but we can find others started by immigrants from other countries, such as Nigerians, Congolese etc. A paper read at a conference on migrancy and theological education in Pietermaritzburg in June 1912 pointed out that there were more than 30 French-speaking churches in Pretoria. This applies to immigrants from beyond Africa too - most of the Orthodox parishes in Gauteng were started by immigrants from a particular country, Greeks, Serbs, Russians etc. Among Roman Catholics there is a Maronite Church for Lebanese and a Croatian parish in Johannesburg.
An Orthodox experiment
Until the 1980s the Orthodox Church in South Africa had shown very little interest in mission. It had been established mainly to care for immigrant communities, the so-called Diaspora. These were mostly from Greece, with smaller communities from other Balkan countries. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Hayes 2010), diaspora is not conducive to mission. The apartheid regime imposed visa restrictions on expatriate religious leaders and journalists, and one of the conditions it imposed on expatriate Orthodox clergy was that they should confine their ministry to their own ethnic communities.
In about 1990, however, this began to change. Leaders of a number of African Independent Churches with an Orthodox tradition, mainly factions of the African Orthodox Church, asked for theological training, and in 1993 an attempt was made to set up a TEE scheme, the St Moses of Ethiopia Theological Course. This proved difficult to run, as there were only two part-time people running it, and there were students with at least four different academic levels scattered all over the country.
In 1997 leaders of the African Orthodox Episcopal Church (AOEC) asked to be united with the Orthodox Church. I had some reservations about this, as I thought there had not been sufficient consultation with the members in their congregations. I suggested that the leaders should gradually introduce more Orthodox forms of worship to their congregations, and that leaders from the different congregations be gathered at regular intervals, every 2-3 months, for training seminars, where the basics of Orthodox theology could be explained, and where they could experience Orthodox worship. This would not be academic training, but something much less formal. After 2-3 years, the members of the congregations could then decide whether or not they wanted to join the Orthodox Church.
What actually happened was that a committee, most of the members of which had never seen an Orthodox service, made the decision at one meeting, and wrote a letter to the Orthodox Archbishop of Johannesburg asking to be received into the Orthodox Church.
Six years later, in 2003, under a new and more mission-minded bishop, the first, and last, training meeting took place. It was held at the Orthodox Cathedral in downtown Johannesburg, where the 25 people attending the course had to stay in a nearby hotel, which was quite expensive.
Three months later the Archbishop decided to establish a residential seminary. There were several problems with this. One was that several of the students were expatriates, including two refugees from the Congo and a Zimbabwean. Most of the local congregations of the AOEC had no representatives there, and those that did were deprived of leaders at a critical point of their development - which was one of the very things that TEE was designed to avoid.
Another problem is that most of the leaders who were trained were not used by the church for effective ministry after their training. The Congolese students, for example, could have had an effective ministry in some of the more cosmopolitan areas of Johannesburg, where there are numerous immigrants from French-speaking countries in Africa. This could have been a useful response to another form of migrancy, but nothing was done about it. Once they had completed their training the students were left to fend for themselves, with no recognised ministry.
I am not saying that the presence of the expatriate students at the school was a problem; the problem was rather the absence of South African students, and especially students from the African Orthodox Episcopal Church. The AOEC approached the Orthodox Archdiocese of Johannesburg and Pretoria to ask for teaching in Orthodox theology in 1995. In 1997, they asked to be united with the Orthodox Church, yet 15 years later their leaders have received no theological training.
The seminary closed in 2008 after it had run for six years, and had had two groups of students who had been there for 3 years each. I believe its establishment was premature, and that it did not succeed in its aim of training leaders for the Orthodox Church in Southern Africa. At the time that it was established, none of the South African students who attended had been adequately catechised.
But it did succeed in ways that were unintended.
Some of the former students still remember the school as a place of community and acceptance. Two of them were former "street children" who had grown too old for the shelter they were staying in before.4 Though there were occasional quarrels, there was a sense of fellowship and community between the South African students and the expatriates. The Dean of the seminary was himself an expatriate, a priest from Kenya, Father Athanasius Akunda, who while he was in charge of the seminary also studied for a doctorate in missiology at Unisa, and it was largely due to him that the school developed a sense of community that caused former students to look back on their time there as a time of happiness and community.
The school was in Yeoville, one of the more cosmopolitan areas of Johannesburg, and the students were amused when the police stopped some students walking to the shops in one of their crackdowns on illegal immigrants, and it was one of the South African students that they picked on for questioning. Yeoville was not much affected by the xenophobic violence that broke out in 2008, but I believe that one of the things the school did achieve was to equip the students to deal with xenophobia, and to oppose it, not so much because of the teaching they had received, but because of the very nature of their community.
What lessons can be learnt from these case studies, and from the way in which Theological Education by Extension has been applied in Southern Africa?
One possibility, which would apply particularly to Anglican ministry in rural areas, is that church-supported ministers should not be ordained. Many rural Anglican parishes consist of a central parish church, with anything from 5 to 50 "outstations", where the parish priest, and occasionally an assistant priest, go to celebrate the Eucharist according to a rota of visits. If, however, there were 2-3 self-supporting priests (and a similar number of deacons) at each outstation, the itinerant minister would not need to be ordained (and if not ordained would be preserved from the temptation to travel round celebrating the Eucharist). Instead the church-supported minister would be a travelling pastor/teacher, going primarily to train the local leaders in the congregation.
Instead of arriving for a service, haranguing the congregation in a sermon, taking the money, and dashing off to the next place, the pastor-teacher could stay for a whole weekend, teaching the leaders and the people, knowing that in the other congregations the Eucharist would be celebrated by the local self-supporting priests and deacons.
This would be possible in the Anglican set-up because in most Anglican diocese the church-supported ministers are paid by the diocese. It would not be possible in the Orthodox set-up in southern Africa, as presently constituted, because most clergy are paid by their parishes. But it is something that could be considered for the future.
Another important point, and related to this, is that in-service training is often better than pre-service training. With in-service training learning can be immediate, and can be applied when and where it is needed. This has been applied in the Methodist Church in Southern Africa, where students spent a year in a practical ministry situation before attending seminary. In the Methodist tradition, especially in its early stages, the ministers were actually itinerant pastor/teachers, as proposed in the preceding paragraphs, and the sacramental ministry was left to the local Anglican parish clergy. But recently the Methodist model has been moving closer to the one of the presbyter/priest rather than the pastor/teacher.
One of the points that was emphasised by the early advocates of TEE was that extracting leaders from their congregations to train them in a residential seminary often deprives those congregations of leadership at the very time that they need it most. This was certainly true in the Orthodox example that I gave. In addition, there were many leaders in the local congregations of the African Orthodox Episcopal Church who were untouched by the training, apart from those who were able to attend the one training meeting that was held.
Another lesson to be learned is that theological courses are not necessarily best designed by people sitting in offices.
In the development of TEE in South Africa one of the things that has been seen as important, and that I myself saw as important at the early stages, has been the development of written course materials. Looking back, I would say that that is not nearly as important as regular gatherings of students. Written course materials are designed by people who have lots of books in their homes. But very often the people for whom they are designing the courses do not have books in their homes. Fifty years ago J.V. Taylor wrote in his book The primal vision that Christianity in Africa had tended to become a "classroom religion". My experience in Zululand showed that while many of the self-supporting ministry trainees were literate, in the sense that they had learned to read, they had not made the transition from learning to read to reading to learn.
It was a pity that the Orthodox Church, whose worship is much less literate, should have fallen into the same trap. In the one training meeting for leaders that we did hold I think the students learnt far more by going round the church hearing stories about the ikons and the people depicted in them than they did sitting in formal rows, classroom style, listening to formal lectures, or from written materials. The leaders of worship, such as the clergy and the choir, do use a lot of books, but members of the congregation generally do not need books, nor do they need projectors and screens, But this is a different kind of reading. It is fluent reading aloud that is needed, rather than the ability to read and understand abstract theological texts.
The important question for TEE in training people for mission and ministry is to ask: who are the leaders in this community, and how can we train them and help them to become more effective without extracting them from the community and so depriving the community of leadership? The extractive form of training also leads to a further problem: that while the extracted leaders are away, either the community falls apart, or they are replaced by other, less qualified leaders, who, when the extracted leaders return, regard them as rivals, which again can lead to the community falling apart.
I have written quite a lot about failures in the application of the principles of Theological Education by Extension, failures in mission and failures in ministry to migrants. But the picture is not all gloomy.
In some ways some visions from 40 years ago have been fulfilled. From the Anglican Diocese of Namibia came the news that in December 2011 forty deacons had been ordained, trained by TEE. It was forty years, almost to the day, since a proposal had been made to and accepted by the diocesan standing committee that TEE be used to train and rapidly extend various ministries in the church, and forty years later, that is what happened.
Allen, Roland. 1979 [1962]. Missionary methods: St Paul's or ours? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. [ Links ]
Davies, John. 1983. The church abroad. Oxford: Blackwell. [ Links ]
Foster, John. 1972. The first advance: AD 29-500. London: SPCK. (TEF Study Guide 5). [ Links ]
Foster, John. 1974. Setback and recovery: AD 500-1500. London: SPCK. (TEF Study Guide 8). [ Links ]
Hayes, Stephen. 1985. Mission and ministry. Pretoria: Department of Mission and Evangelism, Diocese of Pretoria. [ Links ]
Hayes, Stephen. 1993. The IViyo loFakazi bakaKristu and the KwaNdebele Mission of the Anglican Diocese of Pretoria. Pretoria: University of South Africa, M.Th. dissertation. [ Links ]
Hayes, Stephen, 2010. Orthodox diaspora and mission in South Africa, in Studies in World Christianity, Vol. 16(3). Pages 286-303. [ Links ]
Molobi, Masilo. 2011. Power struggles, poverty and breakaways in the African Independent Churches in South Africa, in Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, September 2011, 37(2), 51-65. [ Links ]
Paton, David M. (ed.). 1968. The reform of the ministry: a study in the work of Roland Allen. London: Lutterworth. [ Links ]
South African Catholic Bishops Conference. Nd. The transformation of the ministry. Pretoria: SACBC. [ Links ]
Taylor, John V. 1963. The primal vision: Christian presence amid African religion. London: SCM. [ Links ]
Winter, Ralph D. (ed). 1969. Theological Education by Extension. Pasadena: William Carey Library. [ Links ]
Wynne, Ronald. 1988. The pool that never dries up. London: USPG. [ Links ]
1 Stephen Hayes (DTh, Unisa) is a deacon in the Orthodox Church, and is mission adviser to the Orthodox Archbishop of Johannesburg and Pretoria.
2 The books were the "People of God Catechetical Series", published by Geoffrey Chapman, 1969-1973).
3 The term "human resources" has become quite common nowadays, so that people don't think twice before using it, but I can still remember the shock I felt on first seeing it, about 30 years ago, in a newspaper advertisement for a "human resources manager", at how dehumanising it was.
4 I use the term "street children" because it is widely used and well-understood. The students rejected the term "street children" because, as they put it, "streets don't give birth to children".


text: Wind-whipped on its geographical perch, you can't exactly say that North East England is overlooked. But it is often forgotten, bypassed and curiously under-visited. Occupying the countryside between England and Scotland, this borderland is strewn with historical monuments, dense forests, quaint towns and vibrant cities. History buffs are at no loss for attractions, from the Roman Hadrian's Wall, to the Norman cathedral in Durham, to the Beamish Open Air Museum. Outdoor enthusiasts delve into the deep wilderness of Northumberland National Park, where climbs to the top of the Cheviot Hills are all the rage. You can live out your own fairy tale fantasy along the castle-strew shores of Northumberland, and then head into dynamic Newcastle for a taste of the urban new. People here are known for their resilience and independence; one look into the dramatic beauty of the land, and you'll see why this frontier land has been so fiercely defended—and fiercely loved.


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Plainfield North's Ekowa has one touchdown pass in Minnesota St. Mavericks football win
Ekowa is a 6-1, 205 pound freshman quarterback from Plainfield.
Up next: Minnesota St. Mavericks football plays at Northern St. Wolves football on Sept. 23.
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text:
Last Year, Japanese artist ag+ put together one of the most amazing pieces of fan art the world has ever seen.
Well, obviously drawing inspiration from that image, here's a slightly smaller, more focused effort by L-DAWB, which instead of spanning the series' entire history just looks at Skyward Sword.
I'm really liking the different styles coming together in the one piece.
LOZ SKYWARD SWORD [DeviantArt, via Video Game Nostalgia


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PREP TIME: 30m
- 2 tbsp. Chopped red onion
- 2 large ripe nectarines
- 1 small red pepper
- 1 jalapeño chile
- 2 tbsp. fresh lime juice
- 1 tbsp. chopped fresh cilantro
- ½ tsp. salt
- ¼ tsp. coarsely ground black pepper
- 1 tbsp. dried tarragon
- 4 piece skinless salmon fillet
- 1 tsp. olive oil
PREPARATION:1. Grease clean grill grate. Prepare outdoor grill for covered, direct grilling on medium.
2. Meanwhile, in cup, place chopped red onion; cover with cold water and let sit 10 minutes. (This will take some of the sharpness out of the raw onion.) In medium bowl, stir together remaining salsa ingredients: chopped nectarines, chopped red pepper, finely chopped jalapeño, lime juice, chopped cilantro, and 1/4 teaspoon salt; set aside.
3. In small bowl, combine tarragon, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper. Brush salmon with oil and rub with tarragon mixture to coat both sides.
4. Place salmon on hot grill grate. Cover grill and cook salmon 8 to 10 minutes or until it turns opaque throughout, turning over once with large spatula. Transfer to platter.
5. Drain onion well. Stir onion into nectarine mixture. Serve nectarine salsa with grilled salmon.
6. Enjoy


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There are few comfort food dishes as easy to make and economical as fried rice. Like many New Yorkers, I fall into the trap of grabbing pizza or halal chicken when I'm famished late at night and everything else is closed. I really should go home and check what's in my cabinets for cooking, I usually think. Then I end up grabbing that slice of pizza anyway.
Then I learned a few years ago to just make extra rice when I do have the time to cook. Because you can always use it for something, whether it's fried rice, congee, or just reheated with other leftovers. Of those three, fried rice might be my favorite. And it also helps you get rid of other leftover meats and veggies in your fridge.
Over the years I've made many variations, including Edamame Fried Rice, Thai Basil Chicken Fried Rice, Pumpkin Fried Rice, and just a simple Vegetable Fried Rice. But when you're also a huge fan of spicy food, eventually you'll also make one featuring chili sauce.
This Sriracha fried rice is vegetarian, but you can easily make it meaty by adding fresh or leftover chicken, pork, or shrimp. It's also kind of a tongue-scorcher, so if you'd like just a hint of spiciness, just cut the amount of Sriracha by half.
Sriracha Fried Rice
Serves 4 as a side dish or 2 as a main entree
- 2 tablespoons peanut or vegetable oil
- 1 clove garlic, minced
- 1 teaspoon minced ginger
- 2 scallions, white and green parts separated and thinly sliced
- 5 or 6 fresh shiitake mushrooms, stems removed and caps finely chopped
- 1/2 cup frozen peas
- 3 cups cold leftover rice
- 3 tablespoons Sriracha
- 3 tablespoon soy sauce
- 2 teaspoons sesame oil
- Freshly ground black or white pepper to taste
- Break up the cold cooked rice into smaller clumps.
- Heat a wok or large skillet over medium-high heat until a bead of water sizzles and evaporates on contact. Add the oil and swirl to coat the base. Add the garlic, ginger, and scallion whites and cook for about 30 seconds, until just aromatic. And the mushrooms and stir-fry for about 1 minute.
- Toss in the rice and break up any remaining clumps with a spatula. Add the peas. Continue to stir-fry until the rice starts to turn golden, about 2 minutes. Stir in the Sriracha, soy sauce, and sesame oil. Add pepper to taste.
- Optional: In a separate pan, fry an egg to top off the fried rice. Sprinkle a little salt and pepper on the egg if you'd like.
- Transfer the rice to bowls, sprinkle the scallion greens on top, and serve.


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- Your information is stored on servers in physically secure locations
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- Employee access to your information is restricted and audited
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For processing payments, we use systems that are compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). All payment information is safely stored according to PCI DSS requirements.
While we use acceptable industry-standard practices to protect your information, no computer system or Internet communication is ever completely secure or error-free. As a result, we cannot and do not guarantee that your information will be absolutely secure.
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We will share your information when you give us permission; for example, when you use a third-party web client to access your account, or when you give us permission to make information public.
Within the Inflection Family of Products
Other Inflection products may use your information, but only in ways that are consistent with this Privacy Policy.
To Provide Certain Services
We use certain trusted third parties to provide certain services for us. We may share your information with these third parties, but when we do, we will only share the minimum amount of information necessary to provide the service. In addition, any third-party service provider we use is required to give your information the same protections that are outlined here in this Privacy Policy.
Public, Anonymous and Aggregated DataWe may share or disclose information that is non-private, anonymously aggregated, or otherwise non-personal.
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In the event that Inflection is involved in a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets, your information may be sold or transferred as part of that transaction. The obligations of this Privacy Policy will continue to apply to the new entity after the sale or transfer.
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We partner with certain third party vendors to prevent fraud and abuse. When you make a purchase, we analyze your payment information and unique device identifiers (including, but not limited to, IP address, geographical location, browser and operating system settings, and device ID) to identify suspected fraudulent activity and block it.
When we detect suspected fraud or abuse, we may share information associated with that particular transaction or event (including, but not limited to, payment information, email addresses, and unique device identifiers) with our security partners or law enforcement for further investigation.
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We may preserve or share your information in the following circumstances:
- When required by law, regulation, or legal request such as a warrant or subpoena
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Nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal defenses or objections that you may have to a third party or government request to disclose your information.
We may use third-party advertising companies to serve targeted ads when you visit our website. These companies may use non-personal information about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you.
While we do not provide any personal information to the advertiser when you interact with or view a targeted advertisement, you are consenting to the possibility that the advertiser will make the assumption that you meet the targeting criteria used to display the advertisement (for example, women ages 18-24 from a particular geographic area.)
If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, please click here.
How do I access and control my personal information?
Access and Choice
You may use your account to access, correct, or change any personal information you have provided to us or that is associated with your account. You may also email our Privacy Team at. We will respond to your request within 30 days.
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If you would like to stop receiving newsletters and marketing emails from, please provide us with the email address you would like to unsubscribe by emailing or calling 1-800-652-8360. Please note that you may still receive account and billing notices from us, if applicable.
Compliance Notices
California Do Not Track Disclosure
When you browse our website, we may use trusted third-party tools to analyze website usage, monitor performance, and prevent fraud. All analytics and performance data collected by third-party tools is anonymous. We may use these tools regardless of whether or not you enable the Do Not Track setting in your browser.
Fraud prevention tools may collect personally identifiable information regardless of whether or not you enable the Do Not Track setting in your browser; however, this data is used specifically for fraud and abuse prevention and will never be used for marketing purposes.
California Information-Sharing Disclosure
We do not share your personal information with third parties for their own use without your permission.
Children's Online Privacy Protection Act
complies with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) where it applies to our information collection practices. This website is not directed to individuals under the age of 18. We do not actively or knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13. If we discover that we have collected personal information on a child under the age of 13 without proper consent, we will promptly remove that information from our systems.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
We may update this privacy policy to reflect changes to our information practices. If we make any material changes we will notify you by email (sent to the email address specified in your account) or by means of a notice posted to this website prior to the change becoming effective. We encourage you to periodically review this page for the latest information on our privacy practices.
Contact Information
If you have questions or concerns regarding this policy, you can contact us by emailing calling 1-800-652-8361, or writing to us at:
ATTN: Privacy Department
P.O. Box 391143
Omaha, NE 68138
aintains offices at 557 Twin Dolphin Drive #200, Redwood City, CA 94066.


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Birds Outline Solution Tangram Card
Solutions for outlines of birds (duck, swan, turkey vulture, cormorant, and egret) made from tangram pieces. Tangrams, invented by the Chinese, are used to develop geometric thinking and spatial sense. 7 figures consisting of triangles, squares, and parallelograms are used to construct the given shapes.
animal, animals, answer, answers, bird, birds, Chinese puzzle, Cormorant, cormorants, duck, ducks, egret, egrets, geometric figures, geometrical pieces, geometry, parallelogram, parallelograms, polygon, polygons, problem solving, problem-solving, puzzles, quadrilateral, quadrilaterals, shape, shapes, solutions, square, squares, Swan, swans, tangram outline solution, tangrams, triangle, triangles, turkey vulture, vultures
Florida Center for Instructional Technology Clipart ETC (Tampa, FL: University of South Florida, 2009)


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- Home
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The Medride Program in Carrollton is in need of volunteers. It is operated out of the Senior Center on Sixth Street and the van is parked in front of the center. Volunteer drivers take seniors to medical appointments, usually to Madison, Ind., La Grange, Louisville and occasionally to Campbellsburg or Warsaw.
We could use more retirees, or anyone else, who can help with the driving. Even if you can only help during the summer months, that would be useful. People are sometimes turned down for a ride because there isn't anyone available on a certain day.
If you currently subscribe or have subscribed in the past to the The News-Democrat, then simply find your account number on your mailing label and enter it below.
Click the question mark below to see where your account ID appears on your mailing label.
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The following are ambience sound effects libraries recorded in either stereo, 5.1, or multi-tracks.
The following is the Creek 2B ambience 5.1 surround sound effects library. The 3 minutes 6 channel poly wave file was recorded in 24/96. The location was near Jackson, Wyoming, USA.
Channel 1 = Left, Channel 2 = Right, Channel 3 = Center, Channel 4 = LFE, Channel 5 = Surround Left, Channel 6 = Surround Right
The download is a compressed .rar file. For Mac users, we recommend using UnRARX. For Windows, we recommend WinRAR
The following is a sample demo in stereo.


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You still have time to participate in Papercraft Business Challenge #5. It's "anything goes w/option of "Birthday".
AJ's Design Artz
Artist and Designer in Tulsa, Oklahoma
October 14, 2017
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The European Challenge Tour's season finale never fails to produce fireworks and this season's edition, held at the suitably spectacular Al Badia Golf Club by InterContinental for the first time, was no different.
Kapur's glorious victory meant he skyrocketed into the crucial top 15 in the Rankings, from 20th to third, to create history as the first Indian to graduate from the Challenge Tour to The European Tour, while Jamie McLeary secured a rookie season on The Race to Dubai in similarly imperious fashion with a tied runner-up finish
Andrea Pavan, meanwhile, brought his stunning season to a fitting end as the Italian claimed tied fourth place to wrap up the title of Challenge Tour Number One, following in the footsteps of the likes of Thomas Björn (1995), Henrik Stenson (2000), Edoardo Molinari (2009) and Tommy Fleetwood (2011).
On a day of ever-changing permutations, hypothetical what ifs and jangling nerves for many players in and around the brink of graduation to The European Tour, Kapur made sure that his impending return to the top tier was at least one nailed on certainty having begun the day four clear in Dubai.
Utilising the kind of nous and experience gained from seven years on The European Tour, he cruised to a bogey-free two under par final round of 70.
The only threat to his position at the top of the leaderboard came fleetingly early in the round as the New Delhi man's playing partner Wil Besseling, needing a win this week to secure European Tour status, moved to within two shots of the top before falling back.
Kapur was delighted to have sealed the deal in such composed style and cannot wait to return to the top and compete for a maiden European Tour title, having claimed the first and last Challenge Tour titles of the 2013 season.
"I'm really pleased," said the 32 year old. "It was a tough week and I had to battle away. I knew today was going to be hard. Wil made a charge with a couple of birdies early on but I just had to stick to my game plan to keep mistakes off my card.
"I'm very proud of myself to shoot a bogey-free round and once I did that the pressure was on the rest of the guys so I'm extremely happy.
"I made it a little hard on myself this year not playing as many tournaments as some other players on the Challenge Tour but I backed myself and told myself that if I played well enough I would make it back on to The European Tour.
"Sometimes when you plan these things and they don't work out it looks like a great plan so I'm pretty pleased with how it worked out. It would obviously have been nice to have less pressure coming into this week but there is no better feeling than when you win.
"I have had five or six professional wins but given the circumstances and everything leading up to the week, this one is right up there with the best of them.
"I have spent seven years on The European Tour and I've wanted to get back there. It's a great tour which is going from strength to strength and I cannot wait to get back. I'm really looking forward to the year."
McLeary provided one of the real stories of the day at the sun-kissed United Arab Emirates venue as the Scot claimed the last of the 15 European Tour cards at the death thanks to a three under par 69.
The 32 year old carded four birdies in the first 13 holes to move clear into outright second place, the position he felt he required to make the cut. But when his playing partner José-Filipe Lima made a late charge that finished with a birdie to join the Edinburgh man as joint runner-up, he believed he had failed to make the grade at the eleventh hour.
It was only when he had signed his card that it was confirmed McLeary had sealed a rookie season on The European Tour, rounding off a tense day for those on the bubble.
"I'm delighted," explained the 32 year old from Edinburgh. "To finish the way I did was nice. I knew it was going to be a tough day and I kind of knew the score I wanted to shoot
"I worried that I would never make it to The European Tour, that I was one of those guys that was really consistent but without the big finishes at the big events that I needed. It has taken a lot longer than I thought it would, and the older you get the more nervous you get, but I've got my chance and I'm confident I'll take it.
"I'm just delighted I've finally made it to The European Tour after six or seven years. It's been a long road but I got there."
Nacho Elvira was another of those whose future was in the balance heading into the final day but he roared to a six under par 66 to clinch a top ten finish, enough to move him from 15th in the Rankings to 14th and seal a rookie season on The European Tour.
American Daniel Im and Sam Walker of England were the unfortunate ones to miss out as they dropped out of the top 15 from 13th place and 14th place respectively.
|Player name
|KAPUR, Shiv
|MCLEARY, Jamie
|LIMA, José-Filipe
|DAVIES, Rhys
|PAVAN, Andrea
|DUBOIS, Edouard


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UK Continues To Criminalize Bad Taste And Stupidity In Online Postings
from the can't-we-just-be-grown-up-about-this? dept
In the wake of the Twitter joke trial fiasco, which saw Paul Chambers dragged through the courts for two years before being acquitted, the UK's Director of Public Prosecutions announced that there should be an "informed debate" about the boundaries of free speech for social media. That really can't happen soon enough, as the UK continues to arrest and punish people for the crime of posting stupid and tasteless messages online. Here are some of the latest developments.
A man was arrested after creating a page on Facebook that appeared to praise the alleged murderer of two British policewomen. The UK student charged with writing a "grossly offensive" Facebook post about British soldiers killed in Afghanistan, has now been sentenced to 240 hours of community service, and to pay £300 (about $500) costs. He got off quite lightly compared to 19-year-old Matthew Woods, who has just been sent to prison for three months for making jokes about two young girls who are missing:
A teenager who posted explicit comments and jokes about April Jones on his Facebook page has been jailed for 12 weeks.
The Guardian article, quoted above, goes on to reproduce some of Woods' comments, which are exceptionally insensitive given the fact that the fate of both the young girls in question is still unknown -- an appalling situation for their respective parents. But it's hard not to get the feeling that the harsh punishment was imposed in part to assuage public anger:
Matthew Woods, 19, from Chorley, Lancashire, made comments about April and Madeleine McCann, the three-year-old who went missing during a family holiday in Portugal in 2007.
"The reason for the sentence is the seriousness of the offense, the public outrage that has been caused and we felt there was no other sentence this court could have passed which conveys to you the abhorrence that many in society feel this crime should receive."
Indeed, the Guardian article includes the following disturbing fact:
Woods was arrested for his own safety after about 50 people descended on his home.
This is getting dangerously close to mob justice, with the courts responding to public outrage by imposing disproportionately severe punishments. What's particularly worrying is that such sentences are likely to feed public anger in future cases, rather than quell it: people will have a benchmark for how grossly offensive comments should be punished, and the courts may well feel obliged to bow to that implicit pressure.
That makes the Director of Public Prosecution's review of this whole area crucially important. Sadly, another feature in the Guardian suggests that the preferred solution of the UK government is self-censorship by social networks:
The director of public prosecutions is exploring whether Facebook and Twitter should take more responsibility for policing their networks for abuse and harassment in an attempt to reduce the number of cases coming to court.
As that makes clear, this is not really solving the problem by coming up with a sensible legal framework, merely sweeping it under the carpet so that fewer cases come to court. A better long-term solution would to accept that stupid people will always say offensive things, and that the best policy and punishment is to treat them with the contempt they deserve unless they clearly break laws other than those of good taste.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Filed Under: bad taste, free speech, uk


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94 N. Main Street, Jasper, GA - (706) 253-2457
Cooking guru Rachael Ray got busy moms everywhere excited when she began showcasing quick and healthy meals on her Food Network cooking show 30 Minute Meals.
While the food looks good, we'd like to alert the show Mythbusters to this one.
Prepping and cooking a meal for hungry families from start to finish in 30 minutes simply isn't possible.
There. We've said it.
Sure, Rachael Ray and Sandra Dee may sell cookbooks and garner large television audiences for proclaiming quick solutions to the never-ending "What's for dinner tonight?" question. But by the time we wash the veggies, boil the water, sear the meat, sautee the aforementioned veggies and meat, season it, prep a side dish, lay out the plates, and, if we're lucky, procure a tasty dessert, there's no chance we're out of the kitchen in less than an hour… and that doesn't include the clean-up.
Unless you're Super Woman or can cook in fast-forward like Rachel Ray, 30-minute meal preparation is not possible. It's more feasible if you have prep work completed by an unseen assistant or before you start the timer, but for a solo at-home cook, forget it. Attempts to beat the 30-minute test are futile, resulting in frazzled hair and a messy kitchen.
Toss the 30-minute-meal on the scrapheap of myth. And we'd also like to personally refute the following: If we step on a crack we won't break our mother's back; touching a toad won't give us warts, and we didn't really need to wait an hour after eating to go swimming (even if the fare included birthday cake and popsicles).
We can always hold out hope that one day a Ferrari will show up in our driveway after wishing while throwing many a penny into Jasper's duck pond or that "the pounds will simply melt away" after buying any of a thousand products.
We're also chalking up to myth the 16th century English dramatist John Heywood's suggestion that the best way to recover from a hangover was to have the "hair of the dog that bit you" -- A fable likely spun-off from the misguided notion that you could cure a dog bite by plucking a hair from the dog and holding it to the wound.
We hear lots of sayings as we grow up, mostly designed to keep us safe. And, maybe eating that apple every day will keep the doctors away - our mothers have certainly told us that one enough times over the years. Sometimes scientists back up the sayings, discovering that along with boosting our immune system, eating six apples a day prevents breast cancer in primates. Maybe our moms know a thing or two about what's good for us after all but it must be noted that one Granny Smith versus half-a-dozen every day is world apart.
The only saying we're willing to bet on is the one that reminds us that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are.
So, Rachael Ray, we love the idea behind your 30-minute philosophy, but until you come into our kitchens and prep and cook a meal in 30 minutes or less, we're tossing your cookbook out along with our egg timers. And we're going to keep our aprons at the ready, knowing they will be as much a part of our day as business suits and heels.
Knock on wood.


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San Francisco, Houston win Super Bowl bids
In one of the least suspenseful Super Bowl votes in recent years, NFL owners awarded Super Bowl L, in 2016, to the San Francisco/Santa Clara area and Super Bowl LI, in 2017, to Houston on Tuesday, shutting out Miami, which until a few weeks ago was a heavy favorite to host the 50th game.
Miami has hosted 10 Super Bowls and remains a favorite site for them, but the twin defeats were an indication of the NFL's dissatisfaction with the condition of Sun Life Stadium and with the Miami Dolphins' inability to secure financing for renovations the team and the league feel are necessary to make it competitive with state-of-the-art stadiums like the one under construction in Santa Clara and Reliant Stadium in Houston.
The NFL had hoped to put the 50th Super Bowl in Miami, to celebrate the legacy of the game in a place that has hosted some of its most memorable moments. And Miami would almost certainly have won the bidding for it had a referendum on use of tax dollars and rebates to pay for stadium renovations passed — an iffy proposition in an area still seething over the public financing of the ballpark for the Miami Marlins, whose payroll has since been slashed by ownership. Stephen Ross, the Dolphins owner, has said he will not foot the entire $350 million bill for upgrades to the stadium, which opened in 1987. When the Florida legislature did not allow the controversial referendum to be held, the planned renovations stalled, perhaps indefinitely. It is unclear what the Dolphins' plan for renovations is now, and without them it seems likely that Miami — facing increased competition from cities with newer stadiums and a willingness by the NFL to place its showcase game in nontraditional locations like Indianapolis and the New York metropolitan area — could join San Diego as beloved Super Bowl destinations undermined by outdated stadiums.
Miami's stadium shortcomings stood in sharp contrast to the proposal from San Francisco, which emphasized how technologically advanced the new stadium in Santa Clara would be. Spectators will be able to order drinks and food from their seats using smartphones, for instance. When Miami did not secure the stadium renovations, Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, emerged as the favorite for the 50th game, with the NFL quietly framing it as a step into the future. But it also brings the Super Bowl full circle. The first Super Bowl was played in Los Angeles, and for a few years the NFL had hoped to play the 50th game there until it became clear there would be no suitable stadium in Southern California in time for the game.
The 2014 and 2015 Super Bowls will be held at MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands, N.J., and the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.


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