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I don't understand how Dubrovnik Airport could participate. Since they have built up the airport with EU funds which stipulates there must be no changes in the ownership structure.ReplyDelete
- Replies
- Anonymous09:04
The question is what does Croatia Airlines do now? If airports are not going to be part of a holding?ReplyDelete
- Anonymous09:05
To me it looks like this will be another failed privatization. I fear afterwards the EU will probably request those 33 million euros to be returned.ReplyDelete
- Anonymous09:06
" We are already assisting Croatia Airlines the best way we can, through the development of certain routes, particularly during the winter months"ReplyDelete
Which routes does Croatia Airlines maintain from Split in winter which are receiving assistance from the airport?Replies
- Anonymous09:08
"The government has tied the recent 33.7 million euros in state aid it is providing the company with the completion of the privatisation process by June 2020"ReplyDelete
And if the privatisation process is not done until June 2020?
Bye, bye?Replies
- Anonymous09:10
It was probably the way the government could give OU 33 million without the EU making an issue out of it. They probably said they would give them money now and have the airline sold by June 2020.Delete
I am sure EU will check the situation in June 2020.Delete
If not privatised OU will have to pay back 33 million EUR and it practially means end of all their operations
- Anonymous09:13
They will probably manage to sell the company to someone by June but the thing is, as time passes by desperation will kick in and they will sell it to anyone, like Adria was sold to 4k Invest.Delete
I think its very improbable that anyone will buy OU by June. It's turning out to be a bigger and bigger mess with each passing month. This whole airport financing story is one of the most desperate moves I've heard of. A collation of the unwilling. In the end, OU will go down directly due to regulatory breaches and indirectly due to its life support being cut off.Delete
- Replies
- Anonymous09:09
But all those airports depend heavily on that dinosaur and will be affected if it wasn't around.Delete
- Anonymous09:18
They depend heavily on OU? Split? Dubrovnik? What's OU share there in summer? If they decide to waste their money in OU, they would be dead.Delete
- Anonymous09:18
Croatia Airlines is still Split's number 1 customer. So I don't know how they moved on?Delete
- Anonymous09:20
Yes they do depend on OU. OU's share might decline in summer (not too much because they have substantial networks out of both in summer) but in winter they significantly help the airports. Seasonality would be even worse without them. Look at easy jet with the dozens of routes they have from DBV and SPU yet they don't want to fly during winter at all.
I don't think it's the best move for the airports but the alternative would be bad for them and the airports.Delete
Airports such as Dubrovnik, Split, Pula and Rijeka are already effecting Croatia Airlines' fleet utilization negatively, but this is not their problem. Croatia Airlines must be managed by people who are aware of the business models in aviation (i.e. hub&spoke) and who can resist the political influence (who can refuse the request to operate from every airport directly to the major hubs out of the country).Delete
- Anonymous09:26
I think the alternative would be bad for OU. Airports like Split and Dubrovnik would recover quickly. The negative thing for them would be winter. Oh yeah, and I see another big potential loser here, Zagreb.Delete
- Anonymous09:14
Split Airport will do what it's told by its owner which is - the Croatian government.ReplyDelete
- Anonymous09:15
"We discussed it with the Director General of the European Region of the Airports Council International (ACI), Olivier Jankovec. We are already assisting Croatia Airlines the best way we can, through the development of certain routes, particularly during the winter months", Mr Novak said.ReplyDelete
How they help during during winter months? There is something in addition to PSO ?Replies
There are probably incentives for winter flying from Split. Like there are incentives from many airports.Delete
- Anonymous09:28
And this incentives are open to all airlines flying during winter or they are exclusive to OU?Delete
I don't remember public bid for this but I wasn't tracking it really...
- Anonymous09:31
No they are not exclusive they are offered to everyone. They don't have to bid for it. They get it automatically by flying in winter.Delete
- Anonymous09:31
Until few years ago coastal airports were offering all services free of charge during winter (despite their official tariff), some were even offering additional money (joint marketing campaign) via their tourist boards.Delete
- Anonymous11:08
Interesting. I'm surprised more airlines didn't use that opportunity to launch flights in winter.Delete
- Anonymous11:25
Anon 9:31 I believe you are also not aware that many of those flights are cancelled due to no booked pax at allDelete
- Anonymous09:24
The government will make some deal for OU in the end. Remember that if OU collapses the government will have to make big payouts to the concessionaire of Zagreb Airport. That's part of the deal.ReplyDeleteReplies
- Anonymous09:35
If OU dies the airport will be forced to make a deal with a new airlines because the government won't be willing to pay the French fines because of mistakes their party members made.Delete
- Anonymous10:52
Who cares if they are not willing? They have to, if the contract says so. Im surprised how the rules are (not) followed in this part of the world.Delete
- Replies
- Anonymous09:28
DBV is run by HDZ so they will do it if they can (not sure if they allowed to because of European bank loan rules).Delete
- Anonymous09:37
Why would OSI reject it? OSI is the only one that would benefit from it. As a loss maker they would not be forced to invest anything while other members of the holding would probably have to invest in OSI.Delete
- Anonymous09:29
So they would like that the coastal airport sacrifice themselves to save (?) OU. In return, OU will kill them all.ReplyDeleteReplies
- Anonymous09:45
I hope this is not the only solution the privatization advisers will give. They are being paid good money.ReplyDelete
- Anonymous09:49
Honestly I don't see any airports being interested in this except maybe Osijek which doesn't know what to do with itself.ReplyDelete
- Anonymous09:50
Is their a current example anywhere in the world of airports running an airline?ReplyDelete
- Anonymous10:00
I also don't see how this would work since it's against the EU rules. Airports shouldn't own an airline. it's against competition rules.ReplyDeleteReplies
- Anonymous13:44
Fraport Shareholder Structure*Delete
State of Hesse 31.31 %
Stadtwerke Frankfurt am Main Holding GmbH 20.16 %
Deutsche Lufthansa AG 8.44 %
Lazard Asset Management LLC 5.02 %
Unkown 35.07 %
* The relative ownership interests were adjusted to the current total number of shares and therefore may differ from the figures given at the time of reporting or from the respective shareholders' own disclosures. Shares below 3% are classified under "Free Float".
- Anonymous10:05
This was obviously an idea and they purposely made it public to see what the reaction would be from various stakeholders. Now that they have seen its mostly negative, I do hope they give up on the idea.ReplyDelete
- Anonymous10:07
If this actually happened it would also mean none of the state owned airport could be put up for concession at any point in time.ReplyDelete
- Anonymous10:09
Just sell the airline for one euro to any other airline. I'm sure someone would be interested. It's better than this holding thing.ReplyDelete
- Anonymous10:19
There is no future for Croatia Airlines as long as it builds market position as Lufthansa feeder.ReplyDeleteReplies
+ 1 000 000Delete
- Anonymous12:59
Well Lufthansa does feeds Croatia. Many pax from Asia and USA on OU flights. Las time I saw a group from Dallas and Hong Kong.Delete
Before posting, please be so kind to check terminology of the topic in order not to write stupid stuff here. Otherwise people laugh at your posts. FEEDER is company which is operating shorter flights with smaller planes, usually in co-operation or under code-share agreements, within alliances, or outside of the alliances, in order to fill bigger planes, and longer routes, of the bigger partners, or "partners". Therefore, no matter whether we talk about outbound or incoming flights (and you obviously fail to make difference here and equalise the second flight of the entire route with the one being feeded, which is simply not the case). So in 99%of the cases, and particularly the one you talk about, DFW and HKG, OU is feeder and LH the one who is feeded, no matter of the emitive market and origin/destination of the passenger or the group of passengers.Delete
- Anonymous10:42
If there were interested parties Croatia Airlines would have been sold by now. Unless the government is waiting for some grand announcement before the elections next December. They don't even know what they want. It started off as a privatization now they are thinking of recapitalization.ReplyDelete
- Anonymous10:43
I'm more interested in seeing what Croatia Airlines is planning for next summer. Will there be any new routes? Will they again lease the CRJ1000s?ReplyDeleteReplies
- Anonymous17:06
Slazem se!Ovdje je,na Balkanu,trebalo prvo spojiti JP,OU,YM...ali zbog politike to se nikad nije desilo(a bilo je ideja 2012-te),ali....:-(Delete
E ja se bas ne slazem. Ovdje gdje je sada "Balkan", "Zapadni Balkan" i ostali pezorativni i posprdni pojmovi koji simboliziraju ovo podrucje, bila je jedna velika, uspjesna i sretna zemlja JUGOSLAVIJA koja je imala JUGOSLAVENSKI AEROTRANSPORT, kompaniju koja je bila veca, jaca i bolja od Turkisha i Austriana i u rangu Finnaira, Olympica i Sabene. Nije trebalo nista spajati i krpati. A onda su dosli nacionalisti, sovinisti, fasisti, mafiozi i kriminalci, i danas imamo ovo sto imamo, od Triglava do Gevgelije.Delete
- Anonymous10:47
I don't think that this will go well, government should shut it down, they've done everything possible to ruin it, too late to regret now.ReplyDelete
- Replies
- Anonymous11:19
They won't continue the way they are because the government won't be able to provide any more money. My guess is they will then try to sell the company bit by bit - maintenance division, other subsidiaries etc.Delete
- Anonymous12:07
Not only will they be unable to provide more money, but OU will have to repay the 33 mil already received as it's state aid and against EU rules.Delete
- Anonymous15:57
Yes, like Anon 12:07 said. That's why they put themselves into very risky situation. It's clear that they have to be sold whatever it costs.Delete
- Anonymous20:19
They can still sell assets such as remaining slots e.g in LHR. This will already give them the 33 million and more.Delete
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Welcome to SG
The "MB" in those internet speed options stands for "Megabits per second". The more common abbreviation for this is "Mbps". It is common for residential connections to have faster "download" speeds than "upload", as you are getting stuff (downloading) from the internet more than sending stuff (uploading).
Obviously the fastest one would be the "50 MB download / 10 MB upload" , however, you may want to try the "25 MB download / 5 MB upload" and change later. Note that all internet providers do not guarantee residential speeds, they quote them "Up to .... speed". Meaning that in the evening when everyone is watching videos online it may slow down.
For Video streaming on Youtube, Netflix, etc. you need about 5+ Mbps or more, they recommend 10 Mbps for Netflix. With faster speeds, all web pages, email and other content will load a bit faster too, as they all have grown bigger over the years. The faster speeds would also help if you have multiple clients using the internet at home at the same time.
DSL speed gets degraded over long distances, the wireless internet provider may be a good option to try.
I hope this helps

subset: commoncrawl


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FOX8 WGHP's Danny Harnden anchors for FOX8 Sports and News. He is part of the Nexstar team that covers the Daytona 500.
• • •
Danny Harnden returned to the east coast in 2001 after "wandering in the desert" for 20 years. Born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia, as the youngest of six kids, Danny went west to attend Arizona State University in the fall of 1982. He played one year of J.V. baseball for the Sun Devils before becoming "Sparky" the ASU mascot for two years.
After graduation Danny got his first TV job moving down to cover ASU's rival, the Arizona Wildcats in Tucson. He was lucky enough to attend 3 Final Fours with the Cats including their incredible run to the 1997 National Championship. Danny stayed at KVOA-TV for 15 years before accepting the job here at FOX8.
Danny met his wife Sandy in May of 1994 at a Phoenix Suns/Houston Rockets playoff game. The sports guy from Tucson and the news producer from Phoenix hit it off and got engaged six weeks after their first date and were married in six months. Danny and Sandy have two children, Jeffrey and Kelliann. Danny enjoys chicken wings, homemade chocolate chip cookies, Diet Coke, wide fairways, tennis, the sound of a "swish," talking to community groups, attending Westover Church and hanging out with his family.


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Pioneer Farms - Yannis Malevitis
This wedding was coordinated by Every Little Detail. The venue was Pioneer Farms, in Warwick, NY. There were many beautiful moments during the wedding day. The flower girls was adorable. The signing of the ketubah was very sentimental as the Rabbi Jill Kreitman was explaining the significance of the document.


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Identity theft was the top complaint filed by U.S. residents to the Federal Trade Commission in 2011, with Internet-related fraud also a top concern, the agency said Tuesday.
Fifteen percent of the 1.8 million complaints the FTC received through its online Consumer Sentinel Network involved ID theft, the agency said.
Fifty-five percent of the complaints involved some type of other fraud, and of the people who reported where that fraud originated, 43% said email and 13% said a website. Twenty-nine percent of the fraud complaints started with a phone call, the FTC said.
Under identity theft, government benefits or documents fraud made up 27% of the complaints, credit card fraud made up 14% and telephone or utilities fraud made up 13%, the FTC said.
Identity theft made up 17% of the complaints to the FTC in 2010 and 20% of the complaints in 2009. The FTC received 1.5 million complaints through the online database in 2010, and 1.4 million in 2009. Since 2001, the number of complaints has risen every year except for one.
The online database is an "incredibly powerful tool for law enforcers who are working to protect consumers and go after the bad guys," David Vladeck, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. "It's used by agencies across the country and around the world to enhance their enforcement efforts."
Other federal and state law enforcement agencies contribute complaints to the Consumer Sentinel Network, including the U. S. Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Department of Justice's Internet Crime Complaint Center and the offices of eight state attorneys general. Other organizations that contribute complaints include all U.S. and Canadian members of the Better Business Bureau, Western Union and Moneygram.
Debt collection complaints were 10% of the total complaints in 2011, the agency said. Prizes, sweepstakes and lottery complaints made up 6%. Complaints about Internet services were the sixth largest category, at about 5%, and complaints about telephone and mobile services ranked ninth, with 4%.
The median loss for all the fraud complaints -- not including ID theft -- was $537, the FTC said.
Florida was the state with the highest per capita rate of reported ID theft complaints, followed by Georgia and California. Colorado was the state with the highest per capita rate of reported fraud and other complaints, followed by Delaware and Maryland.
Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's e-mail address is email@example.com.


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The other day I heard a woman interviewed on the radio about the film The Artist. She had a connection to the movie that doesn't need explaining here. But in short, the interviewer was enticing her to see the film for the purposes of his programme and she said, "OK, but if that dog gets killed I'll never forgive you."
And I knew what she meant.
Sometimes it doesn't matter how brave or intriguing a film may supposedly be, I'm just not willing to see a dog killed or a man mutilated or a woman shot. Sometimes I want a happy ending – or at least be able to get into bed without fear of turning off the lights.
Is it age? Maybe. When I was younger the thought of a ride on a killer rollercoaster had a certain appeal. Now I just think why would I want to make myself sick? It's the same with films. Why would I want to see a movie that promises to scare the wits out of me when I could be having a nice dinner? I don't need to prove to anyone that these films have no impact on me – they do.
I have developed a set of movie phobias that goes beyond most people's average concerns. Primarily I cannot watch anything involving operations or injections or with too much blood. But even I make mistakes when picking a night in front of the big screen (the presence of an injection is not always mentioned in a review).
I made the mistake of going to see Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In and spent a good hour of the film under my coat. The scenes I saw through my fingers left me perspiring like I was in the tropics. I'd only gone to improve my Spanish. At least it was not my Pulp Fiction injection moment – I had to lie down on the cinema's floor because I was about to faint and had gone a full-on shade of green.
These things are easier when you're at home. I have just watched the second series of Boardwalk Empire. Well, I watched 90 per cent of it. When cleavers were being inserted in skulls I would wander off to the kitchen, find a glass of wine, dry a cup, do anything.
Some violence is fine – Bourne films, not a problem. But that 'we want to make you throw up' kind of violence I am happy to pass on. Oddly, I have no squeamishness about the real thing – war photography I can cope with.
As the Oscars near, I have a feeling I am not alone. The Best Picture nominees include not just The Artist but Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Hugo. These are films that despite broken relationships, fires and lost opportunities, don't leave you gasping for breath. And they have directors who know that the dog must live.
I know what film I want to win Best Picture this year.


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Revolution Large Bowl
Award Winning Handcrafted Revolution Large Reversible Glass Bowl
Low in Stock
Revolution Large Bowl makes contents appear to float gracefully along the landscape of the table.
Revolution Collection, the original fferrone glassware collection designed by Felicia Ferrone in 2001, was introduced into the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and stands out today as fferrone's most iconic glassware design. The idea for its dual-sided functionality was the result of an evening dining with close friends as seen through Ferrone's trained architect's lens. The moniker of the collection is fitting; the glassware reinvents the landscape of the table with its minimalist architectural forms. Wine, water, cocktails and soup all appear to defy gravity with the floating effect of the hollow opposite side. The minimal design easily adapts from everyday occasions to exceptional ones.
An award-winning design, the Revolution Collection received the Good Design Award in 2004. Glassware in the collection has been featured widely in publications such as Financial Times How to Spend It, Wallpaper Magazine, Elle Decor Italia and InStyle.
A favorite of stylists, the Revolution Collection has appeared on the set of major motion pictures such as Always Be My Maybe (2019), Oblivion (2013), Star Trek (2009) and series such as Westworld (2017), and it has been widely published in magazines internationally.
Each piece is handcrafted without the use of molds by master glassblowers. The borosilicate glass allows for a range of hot and cold applications. As is the case for all fferrone glassware collections, the Revolution Collection is oven, microwave, and dishwasher safe for everyday use.
Sold individually
material• borosilicate glass
type• glassware
size• 860 mL / 440 mL
h. 8.5 cm ø15 cm
Design: Felicia Ferrone, 2001-2014
Handcrafted in Czech Republic


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|A Cooperative Extension System Basic Investing Home Study Course
Sponsored by Rutgers Cooperative Extension in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Financial Security for All community of eXtension, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Dear Home Study Course Reader,
Welcome to the home study course Investing For Your Future. This 11-unit home study course was developed by the Cooperative Extension System for beginning investors with small dollar amounts to invest at any one time. It is updated annually to keep it current. We assumed that many readers will be investing for the first time or selecting investment products, such as a stock index fund or unit investment trust, that they have not purchased previously.
The course units were developed in a logical order. "Basic" topics such as setting goals, investment terms (e.g., diversification, dollar-cost averaging, asset allocation), and finding money to invest lay a foundation to help readers understand how and why they're investing. You'll also begin to understand that there's generally a trade off between risk and reward. The more risk an investor assumes, the greater the chance of a high long-term return, as well as the greater chance of short-term losses along the way.
After exploring "the basics," the course describes specific types of investments (e.g., stocks and bonds) in detail. You'll begin to understand their characteristics, how they are purchased, and what it costs to purchase each investment. There are also units that focus specifically on tax-advantaged investments and investments that can be purchased with $1,000 or less.
Finally, Investing For Your Future concludes with additional topics of use to investors: available resources, how to select professional financial advisors, and information to help you avoid becoming a victim of investment fraud. You can choose to read the entire course, in any order that makes sense to you, or select only those topics that are of most interest. The choice is yours.
Simply reading Investing For Your Future will not turn you into a successful investor, however. A printed page simply can never replace the personal motivation that is required to take action to achieve financial goals. That is why there are "action steps" listed at the end of each unit. These are specific steps that readers can take to apply the course material to their lives. We urge you to consider each action step carefully and take action that is appropriate for your individual financial situation. The course also contains a number of worksheets, which, again, are tools to help readers apply the information contained within each unit. We encouage you to use them to make your experience with Investing For Your Future a personal one.
Another resource to help you achieve your financial goals is your local Cooperative Extension office. Look in the "county government" section of your phone book to find the nearest office. Free or low-cost publications are available, as well as classes, Web sites, computerized financial analyses, newsletters, and other program delivery methods.
Thank you for participating in Investing For Your Future. We hope that you find it helpful and that all of your future financial goals are achieved.
Description of the Home Study Course
Investing For Your Future is an 11-part home study course that was initially written in 2000 by a consortium of six land-grant universities (Rutgers University, Cornell University, Clemson University, Virginia Tech, Michigan State University, and the University of Idaho), the U.S. Department of Agriculture Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It is currently sponsored by the Financial Security for All community of eXtension and is updated annually for changes in tax law and other key information.
Course Objectives
Mention of a trademark, proprietary product, or commercial firm in text or figures does not constitute an endorsement by the Cooperative Extension System and does not imply approval to the exclusion of other suitable products or firms.
An eight-lesson course designed to help farm families plan for a financially stable future that meets their long-term needs. Developed by a team of Extension educators from several states, farm families can work at their own pace while taking the course.


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What is it with cars and killing people that gets the mainstream media so upset? Decades before series like Grand Theft Auto and Carmageddon were earning tut tuts and disapproving looks, an arcade game called Death Race ended up squarely in the sights of TV networks, newspapers and magazines.
Taking more than a few cues (and letters in its name) from classic 1975 movie Death Race 2000, Death Race was a two-player arcade title, released in 1976, in which you had to drive a car around running over little gremlins. Once you did, a tombstone would pop up.
Or at least, they were supposed to be gremlins. The graphics were so primitive at the time that what the developers called gremlins looked a lot like humans, since all that could be rendered was a blocky stick figure.
Which didn't look too great. Neither did the giant grim reaper on the flyer, or the skeletons all over the arcade cabinet. In a world and time where video games were seen as colourful blocks and children's toys, this was a very adult game, and the relatively conservative media of 1976 didn't like it one bit.
Combine all that with the fact it got out that the game's working title had been Pedestrian, making the "gremlin's" similarity to humans seem all the more transparent, and you've got the makings of gaming's first ever mainstream media controversy.
There was a story on 60 Minutes looking at the dangers of the game's psychological impact. The National Safety Council said Death Race was "sick and morbid". These concerns, and the first ever protests over the content of a video game, prompted further coverage in outlets like the National Enquirer and the NBC's Weekend Show.
And how did all this buzz affect sales of the game? Have a guess. A former employee of developers Exidy says "The end result was that Exidy sales doubled or quadrupled," following Death Race's controversial exposure, while former Exidy president Pete Kauffman says ""It seemed like the more controversy…the more our sales increased."
Exidy have been bust for a long, long time, but the Death Race brand has long outlasted it. It was re-released on the NES over 20 years later, and again on PC in the late 90s. As for the original arcade game, owing to both the controversy and its relative rarity (only around 1000 units were ever sold), working cabinets can these days sell for thousands of dollars.
Total Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends. You'll find Total Recall stories every Mon-Fri between 11pm and Midnight ET.


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The Times of London has an article about women in their thirties who get pregnant "accidentally on purpose," meaning they have unprotected sex with someone they think is "good father material" without the dude knowing their intentions. The paper talks to a woman named Katya who kept the baby that resulted from a 2 week fling; she is making no demands on the father. "I'm not expecting him to be involved. I'm financially independent, so I know I can give this baby an amazing life," she says. "I will be able to offer a more stable life than some of my girlfriends, who gave up their jobs a decade ago to have children, and who are now in failing marriages and have no independent income."It's very Maude Lebowski. Obviously the men are agreeing to have unprotected sex, but for these women wouldn't it just be easier to go to a sperm bank if they don't want the father involved? The title of the article is misleading anyway, as many of the women discussed, like Elizabeth Hurley and Scary Spice Mel B. had unplanned pregnancies and it's just public conjecture that their pregnancies were "accidentally on purpose." It also seems like a bit of a sexist urban legend, the idea of aggressive, baby hungry young professionals. But then there are women like Sarah, a 35-year-old editor, who told the Times:
In the past, with other boyfriends, I had been much more careful, but I was in my early thirties and my biological clock was in overdrive. I really, really wanted a baby, and I didn't have any time to waste. My daughter's father was clever and good-looking, and I suppose it seemed safer to have an affair with him than a one-night stand. And it was cheaper and a lot more fun than doing it in a clinic…He put pressure on me not to have the baby, but for me, it wasn't an accident.
Is this morally suspect or is it ok because the men involved agreed to have condom-free sex? I'm leaning towards the former but would like to hear arguments to the contrary. Women Who Conceive Accidentally On Purpose [Times of London]


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The Iraq war ends with a sovereign Iraq kicking US out
That the Iraqis were in a position to kick the US out is probably the main accomplishment of the Iraq war.
So the Iraq war ends. What began as a mad dash to Baghdad without much worry about what came next, complete with an infamous May 1, 2003, "Mission Accomplished" moment ("In the battle of Iraq, the US and our allies have prevailed" President Bush said from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln then) quickly cratered into an insurgency and civil war that claimed at least 100,000 Iraqi lives and 4,500 American ones.
Now it's over, and it's time for a thousand retrospectives to bloom. US politicians and the pundits that serve them have been trying to frame the Iraq war in terms of whether Bush won Iraq, or Obama lost it, or vice versa. They're almost all of them wrong. The claim that President Obama met a campaign promise today is technically true – but only because Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki forced him to. Obama was seeking to keep troops in Iraq, perhaps as many as 15,000 of them, beyond the Dec. 31 withdrawal date.
But the Iraqi government, led by Shiite Islamists with ties to Iran and well aware that an extension of the US occupation would be political poison for them (already dealing with public anger at rampant corruption and poor service delivery), had none of it. Mr. Maliki told Obama he could have his troops in the country if they were subject to Iraqi law, something he and everyone else knew was a deal-breaker.
The claims from the right that Obama has "abandoned" Iraq are equally absurd, for the reasons just explained. Max Boot, a hawkish pundit and one of the most ardent boosters of the Iraq war at the time of the US invasion, writes this week that Obama is "attempting to put his abandonment of Iraq in the best possible light" and that he's "taking an enormous gamble, not only with the security of Iraq, the United States, and the entire Middle East but also with his own historical reputation."
Obama had absolutely no say in the decision to leave Iraq. Beyond a decision to reoccupy the country – strip Maliki's duly-elected government of sovereignty and send in the Coalition Provisional Authority 2.0 (former CPA chief Paul Bremer might even be available for the mission again) – we had to go. It's also true that the US public had tired of the war ($800 billion and change) and the US departure now is popular. But the US has been more or less locked into this outcome since 2008, when President Bush signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqis that expires Jan. 1, 2012.
The SOFA was represented as an achievement in its own right, which it was, since it marked the transition from a time when the US military in Iraq acted by fiat to one in which it was present with the permission of a sovereign government. While it was hoped that in the intervening years the US relationship with Iraq's senior officials would strengthen, and perhaps we'd be invited to stay around a while longer, that was almost always going to be disappointed.
The simple fact of the matter is that one of the few things that Iraq's majority Shiite Arabs and minority Sunni Arabs agree on is that the US military presence, universally deemed an occupation, was a national humiliation. Were Maliki to have granted the US an extended stay, allies from his coalition government would have abandoned him in droves.
That's actually one of the pieces of good news in Iraq – the public will, and politics, now affect what happens.
Unlike Saddam's era, no one is ruling by fiat. That isn't to say the country is a flourishing democracy – far from it. The country still has high levels of sectarian violence (though much lower than the height of the 2006-07 civil war), security forces that routinely torture detainees, and an emerging authoritarian political culture that are all causes for concern. From an American perspective, the Maliki government's warm relations with Tehran (and to a lesser extent, Damascus) are a disappointment, but hardly surprising.
Many of the Shiite politicians the US helped bring to power were Iranian clients in exile during Hussein's reign, have social and religious ties to Iran, and recognize that Iran is a permanent neighbor, the US a more fleeting presence.
Yes, the Iraq war is over and Iraq is acting like an independent nation. The US will have to get used to it.


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Mobile is the new PC, says Epic
GDC Europe 2012: Mobile "starting to compete with current consoles," next-generation chips will be 20 times as powerful.
Infinity Blade 1-3 have been removed from the App Store in a surprising and unexpected move.
GDC Europe 2012: Mobile "starting to compete with current consoles," next-generation chips will be 20 times as powerful.
Tim Sweeney reveals in terms of man years invested, iPhone and iPad game more profitable than Gears of War, believes free-to-play will spur industry growth.
Developer launches new publisher Warchest to focus on free-to-play games on iOS, PC, and console; first release RAD Soldiers will hit iOS this June.
On the Spot brings you demos of Tactical Intervention, Infinity Blade II, Fez, and The Walking Dead, as well as a Prototype 2 exclusive trailer, news on the BF3 patch, ...
Watch the Infinity Blade demo from this week's On the Spot.
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Cupertino technology giant's new 4G-enabled tablet computer off to a red-hot start, good for "strongest iPad launch" ever.
Apple's new tablet sports 4G LTE support, 1080p 5-megapixel camera, and quad-core processor; Epic exec says it's more powerful than an Xbox 360.
Leaders of the industry chime in on their thoughts of the Sony PlayStation Vita and the future of mobile gaming at D.I.C.E 2012.
The Elder Scrolls V caps a big night by winning multiple categories, top honors at the Interactive Achievement Awards.
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2008 VACP A/C: Valor Awards Banquet & Board Installation
The Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police on August 19, 2008 presented eight Virginia police officers from five agencies with the Association's highest honor, the Award for Valor. The awards were presented at the Valor Awards Banquet at the annual conference of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police, held this year in Hot Springs, Virginia. The Award for Valor recognizes a law enforcement officer who, in the line of duty, performs an act of extraordinary heroism while engaged with an adversary at imminent personal risk. The Award for Outstanding Contribution to Law Enforcement also was presented to The Honorable John L. Brownlee, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia. Additionally, 2007-2008 VACP President Chief Ray Lavinder, Roanoke Co. Police Department, presented Roanoke Chief Joe Gaskins with the VACP President's Award and the 2008-2009 VACP Executive Board was installed. GALLERY INSTRUCTIONS: To DOWNLOAD photos, simply click on the "Save Photo" button in the pop-up menu that appears when you roll your mouse over the photo. You can also right-click on photos to download them to your computer. PRINTS are available for purchase at minimal cost by clicking on the "Buy This Photo" icon above the photo. Photographer: Erin Schrad, VACPRead More
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text: I was unhappy with their declaration because it buys into the enemy's propaganda term "Intellectual property". Here is the FSF's declaration about ACTA, which we have invited everyone else to sign. Message-ID: <4C194643.6050203 at fsf.org> Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:46:43 -0400 From: Peter Brown <info at fsf.org> To: info-press at fsf.org, info-fsf at fsf.org Subject: [FSF] FSF says: Take a stand with us for freedom, against ACTA Reply-To: info at fsf.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" FSF says: Take a stand with us for freedom, against ACTA http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/why-acta-declaration http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/acta-declaration BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Wednesday, June 16, 2010 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today published a new declaration calling for rejection of ACTA unless key changes to protect the public's freedom are made, and is asking people around the world to add their names in support before the next round of negotiations on the treaty happen in Switzerland at the end of this month. In an article introducing the declaration, FSF president Richard Stallman says, "ACTA threatens, in a disguised way, to punish Internet users with disconnection if they are accused of sharing, and requires countries to prohibit software that can break Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), also known as digital handcuffs." The FSF statement praises the aim of an earlier effort, the Wellington Declaration published by citizens in New Zealand to condemn ACTA's prohibition of devices that can break digital handcuffs, but takes a firmer stance. Stallman explains the need to go further as, "When we oppose ACTA, we are not asking our governments for a favor. Defending our freedom is their reason for being, and we demand it by right. We should not 'compromise' by volunteering to cede some of our freedom so that they have less to do." FSF's operations manager John Sullivan added, "Now that some details of ACTA have been made public, we know that our previous concerns were justified. We are asking the free software community to join us in speaking out against this attack on the public's freedom, and I hope that people will not only sign the statement, but also write and publish their own specific thoughts about the issues. This is a time for people to show -- in as many ways as possible -- that they value the freedoms ACTA threatens. The more signatures and visible support we have, the weaker ACTA will look." The petition is available for signing at http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/acta-declaration, and Stallman's article explaining the background behind it is at http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/why-acta-declaration. About the Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA. About Free Software and Open Source The free software movement's goal is freedom for computer users. Some, especially corporations, advocate a different viewpoint, known as "open source," which cites only practical goals such as making software powerful and reliable, focuses on development models, and avoids discussion of ethics and freedom. These two viewpoints are different at the deepest level. For more explanation, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html. Media Contacts Peter Brown Executive Director Free Software Foundation +1 (617) 319 5832 campaigns at fsf.org ### info-fsf mailing list info-fsf at fsf.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/info-fsf


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The good news is that it takes 3,500 excess calories to gain a pound — so you might escape from your holiday feast with little to show for it.
The bad news is that at least 40 percent of the excess calories you've eaten probably come from fat. Fat is the most calorically dense (nine calories a gram versus four for protein and carbohydrates), and it converts most easily into fat on your hips.
Your stomach and intestines burn off about 20 percent of the calories in the process of converting excess carbohydrates and proteins into fat. However, your body doesn't burn a single calorie when it is converting nutritional fat into body fat. Your small intestine simply dumps it straight into your bloodstream.
"If you eat 100 excess fat calories, most of the 100 are stored as fat," explains Franca Alphin, R.D., L.D.N., administrative director of Duke University Diet & Fitness Center. With 100 calories of excess carbs, about 20 go to fat storage.
HOLIDAY SURVIVAL GUIDE: How to fake quality time with your family
Mixed nuts and crackers, 289 calories, 23 g fat
Sour cream and spinach dip, 108 calories, 9 g fat
Small salad with dressing, 173 calories, 16 g fat
Dark and white turkey meat, 239 calories, 10 g fat
Herb stuffing, 292 calories,10 g fat
Cranberry sauce, 200 calories, 0 g fat
Gravy, 84 calories, 7 g fat
Sweet potato casserole, 309 calories, 9 g fat
Green beans almondine, 124 calories, 8 g fat
Cornbread with butter, 338 calories, 23 g fat
Two glasses white wine, 201 calories, 0 g fat
Pumpkin pie with whipped cream, 321 calories, 24 g fat
Pecan pie with whipped cream, 568 calories, 43 g fat
TOTAL: 3,246 calories, 182 g fat (50 percent of total calories come from fat).
Prepare for the Big Feast
You can minimize the damage with a little forward planning:
Eat light, low-fat, high-fiber meals beforehand, and don't skip whole meals in advance. "You'll be so famished, you'll eat way too much when it comes to the feast," says Anne Dubner, R.D., of the American Dietetic Association. When you're hungry, your body compensates by lowering your metabolism to guard against starvation. "It acts like a dry sponge — and will just soak up more fat."
Drink less alcohol beforehand. Alcohol douses your resolve, ignites hunger, and adds to your calorie load.
A half hour before the meal, fill up on water and calorie-free beverages, such as sugar-free soda, iced tea, or coffee. Eat a small snack high in hunger-satisfying fiber, perhaps an apple, carrot, small salad, or yogurt topped with bran. Or have some soup. A study conducted by Baylor College of Medicine in Houston found that people who consumed a bowl of hot soup before meals ate less, lost more weight (about a pound more yearly), and kept it off longer. "It's hot, so you have to eat it slowly and pay attention," says John Foreyt, Ph.D., director of the Nutrition Research Center at Baylor. "Soup also fills your stomach, so you eat less later."
Increase your workout days in advance. Take a hike, play Frisbee, or go jogging. You may be too tired to gorge, and you may burn off enough calories to compensate for those you'll be bulking up on later. "Physical activity is the currency with which you pay for food," says Pamela Peeke, M.D., author of Fight Fat After 40 (Penguin USA, May 2001).
Shopping on Black Friday? Get 100 Chic and Easy Gift Ideas here. Plus, get FREE GIFTS 17 Gift Ideas That Don't Cost a Thing
Read on for tips on how to survive (and enjoy!) the holidays without gaining a pound.
While You Eat
Be aware that friendship is a dieter's enemy. A study by Pennsylvania State University found that when people ate among friends or family, they consumed about 50 percent more than if they were alone or among strangers. Barbara J. Rolls, Ph.D., professor of nutrition at Penn State, theorizes that drinking and watching others indulge lowers our resolve, and that conversation prolongs the meal and distracts us from calorie counting.
Tighten your belt. If you are wearing fitted clothing, you have a constant reminder not to overeat.
Go on a reconnaissance mission. Once you've checked out the buffet, you can pick out what you'll succumb to and what you'll ignore. Then serve yourself (if possible), so you can control portion sizes. Avoid sauces, cheese toppings, and nuts. You also might choose pumpkin pie over pecan pie (the latter has far more calories than the former).
Perfect the "platter pass." To further thwart temptation, make sure a low-fat dish lands by you when you pass dishes around the table.
Follow the "three quarter rule": Fill your plate three-fourths full of lower-calorie foods — salad, vegetables, turkey — and one-fourth full of higher-calorie choices, including stuffing and mashed potatoes. A further visual aid is making your plate appear fuller by creating a river of space, about an inch wide, between different foods.
Downsize your portions — and forget seconds. "The greatest pleasure comes from the first two or three forkfuls," says Peeke. She suggests putting a money value on each dish, with the more caloric ones being the priciest. "Tell yourself you have a budget, and decide where you'll spend it." A good place to splurge: the foods you only eat at holidays.
Prolong your pleasure. Eat slowly and take breathers. Get up from the table during the meal and leave the room. You need to get yourself out of an unconscious "food coma," which is when you eat and eat without realizing what's going on.
Make a point of signaling the end of your meal. When you've finished, have a mint or piece of gum to clear the taste of food from your mouth — it'll make post-meal nibbling less appealing.
What happens to food after you've eaten it?
When you put down your silverware, your body has only begun a major production, eight hours in the making. When food enters your mouth, saliva breaks down each morsel. "The rate at which you eat and swallow affects how quickly you fill up," says Barbara J. Rolls, Ph.D., professor of nutrition at Pennsylvania State University.
First to be metabolized is alcohol, which is sent directly to the liver to burn up within minutes. Liquids follow, and over the next few hours the body breaks down solid foods, disposing first of carbohydrates, then protein, leaving fats for last. Why? Because fats are more complex to break down. This is another reason why, after overeating, it's so often the fat calories that will be left over.
"A 3,000-calorie meal takes about two hours to be digested in the stomach, and another four to six hours for nutrients to be absorbed in the intestines," says Kenneth Koch, M.D., gastroenterologist and professor of medicine at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Penn State. The food stimulates the release of hormones to alert the brain that you're full. "The higher the fat content and larger the meal," Koch says, "the more slowly food passes through the stomach, and the longer those satiety signals take to get their message across."
By morning, everything has been absorbed or disposed of. All that remains are the extra calories your body stores.
Watch what you drink
Alcohol makes the calories add up faster than you think. Though the majority of our calories come from solid foods, "fluid calories also add to your caloric intake, but with little effect on your satiety," says Richard Mattes, Ph.D., a nutrition professor at Purdue University.
Alcohol also slows the breakdown of fat. In one study, people drank 100 grams of alcohol — about six drinks — and their ability to burn fat dropped more than 30 percent. "We burn fat in our liver. But when we drink alcohol, the alcohol burns instead of fat," says Charles Lieber, M.D., director of alcohol research, Bronx Veterans Administration Center.
Beer (12 oz.), 138 cal.
Light beer (12 oz.), 96 cal.
Champagne (6 oz.), 121 cal.
Red wine (6 oz.), 123 cal.
Dry white wine (6 oz.), 114 cal.
Manhattan (2 oz.), 145 cal.
Vodka and tonic (8 oz.), 169 cal.
Coffee liqueur (2 oz.), 191 cal.
Vodka martini with olive (2 oz.), 149 cal.
Why Am I Hungry the Morning After?
You were as bloated as a balloon when you rolled into bed. So how come you wake up ravenous the next morning?
"Your gut is empty and begging for more food to fuel your body's daily functions," explains Bettye Nowlin, R.D., spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association. A large meal also makes your digestive system work overtime, raising your blood sugar. Once the meal is digested — usually while you sleep — your blood sugar drops, triggering greater secretion of insulin, which further whets the early morning hungries.
"There's also the effect of great expectations," says John Foreyt, Ph.D., director of nutrition research at Baylor College of Medicine. "If you eat a large meal, your mind tells you to do it again. It's a psychological phenomenon."
Post pig-out
Don't berate yourself and start a downward spiral. "If you dwell on it, you may get depressed, which only leads to more eating," Alphin says.
Avoid the scale: You might get a scare since all that food makes you bloat — temporarily. You'll also retain water for a day or two (less if you drink more water during the meal and afterward).
Don't deprive yourself the next day to compensate. Your body will go into starvation mode — your metabolism will plummet so your body can hoard nutrients. Think of your dining splurge as a shopping one: Pay it off gradually with exercise and healthy eating.
Take your time to undo the damage — at least a week. You'll be less likely to binge as a reaction.
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You've seen it in countless movies and television shows: A forensic video analyst magnifies and clarifies grainy surveillance footage of a person's face or a license plate to get the key piece of evidence to catch the killer. While some of the details are exaggerated in Hollywood scripts, such tools do exist and they are frequently used to identify and prosecute offenders.
Ocean Systems' dTective is a video analysis software suite devoted to the task, which the Tarrant County District Attorney's Office in Texas routinely uses to run one of four regional labs across the country dedicated to retrieving and processing video evidence.
A recent arson investigation in Tarrant County required multiple Ocean Systems forensic video analysis tools to identify the person seen on surveillance video setting fire to a Fort Worth dry cleaning business. This involved pinpointing and comparing items of interest in the case.
Accident or Arson
When the Fort Worth Fire Department responded to the scene, it wasn't clear what had caused the blaze. Fortunately, the business used a surveillance system, which the owner hoped could provide some answers.
So while the agency collected and photographed physical evidence, an investigator from the Fort Worth Fire Department's Arson and Bomb Unit contacted Mark Porter, a forensic video analyst with the Regional Forensic Video Lab-Fort Worth at the Tarrant County District Attorney's Office, to retrieve the data. Porter brought to the scene his laptops equipped with Ocean Systems' software suite and set to work.
"I have a dedicated laptop from Ocean Systems that has the Avid product Media Composer and Ocean Systems' DVR dCoder program on it. That allows us to capture the video [on the scene] in its native format, and we can export that data and put it on our laptop from Ocean Systems," explains Porter.
"If the player [that plays the video] is on the disk, we can use the DVR dCoder, which is like a screen capture utility, to highlight the playback window and capture the images as they're playing in the playback software. We can then export them out uncompressed, which is very important to make sure we have the best image quality to work with."
Porter found that the DVR system had survived the fire with little smoke damage. Two cameras from the business' digital video surveillance system had recorded video of the incident. One camera was positioned on an outside wall with a clear view of a window on the side of the building. The other was positioned inside with a view of the opposite side of the window.
Using the playback software, Porter viewed the video from both cameras, which showed a man walk up to the window of the business three separate times between 2:20 and 3:15 in the morning. Each time, he ignited an incendiary device and pushed it through a gap in the window. This proved the fire had been caused by arson.
"If you can get to the scene and get the evidence collected, and do an initial processing of it early on in the investigation, a lot of times it can aid you in what you're looking for," says Miles Brissette, Tarrant County assistant criminal district attorney. "With this case, we were able to rule out quickly that this was not an accidental fire. The video showed that this was an intentional act, so we knew we had a crime."
Finding the Right Person
With the knowledge that the building fire had been caused by arson, Porter set about determining who was in the photo. "Once I come back to the lab, I import the collected still images and Quicktime movie files into our Avid system from Ocean Systems. Then I can start working with the images," says Porter.
One of the first steps was going through the video frame by frame to create clear still images of the person's face. They were printed and handed out to police officers and citizens in the area.
"Between the beat officers and the owner of the store they were able to narrow down the list of people we wanted to talk to," says Brissette. "And, in fact, one person walked right up to us and said, 'I know exactly who that guy is and here's where he hangs out.'"
Within a few days, a suspect was arrested just around the corner from the dry cleaning business on other charges. He was a transient who was known to hang out in the area.
But the case didn't end there.
The suspect's defense claimed the person seen in the video was instead the suspect's brother. To settle the matter, Porter and his team needed to compare images of the suspect with those of his brother, and compare both against images from the surveillance video. Because the brother had been in the corrections system, photos of him were readily available.
It's often difficult to compare high-resolution images such as recent mug shots to low-resolution video stills. Porter used Ocean Systems' MAGNIFi filter to enlarge the images and ClearID to clarify the pictures.
Based on height and facial characteristics, it was determined conclusively that the brother was not the person in the surveillance video. This put the investigation's focus back on the original suspect.
Known v. Unknown
In this case, in addition to the person seen on screen, the items the person was wearing and carrying were all being compared to items found at the scene or on the suspect's person. Zeroing in on details such as the piping on a hat, a specific logo on a T-shirt, and the coloration, size, and shape of the bag being carried by the person in the video proved essential in tying the suspect to the scene of the crime.
Incendiary devices found in the dry cleaning business and photographed by the fire department were also compared to the sources of fuel shown in the surveillance video both in the hands of the person and seen entering the establishment via the window.
"The forensic tools that Ocean Systems provides with its suite allow us to take that next evolutionary step and really get it narrowed down to see and find out if this person committed the elements of the crime or not," says Brissette.
When the investigation report was complete, the evidence was so damning that the case never reached trial.
"We were ready to pick a jury, and the defendant decided he was going to plead guilty and go to the judge for punishment," says Brissette. "He did and he was eligible for a lower sentence, but the judge gave him 15 out of 20 years for this fire."
What's in it for You
Ocean Systems' forensic video analysis tools can help law enforcement agencies solve many types of crimes, including kidnappings, murders, and burglaries. Using video taken at businesses near the scene of a crime could capture valuable data about suspects and victims if you know what to look for and how to process it.
It's often surprising what evidence can be collected, even from crime scenes where the recording system might have suffered damage. "It's not just fire scenes," says Brissette. "It's police vehicles that have been completely destroyed in accidents where we have to use power tools to cut the DVRs or VCRs out from the trunks to get the evidence off of them."
Such resources can be a boon to both police departments and prosecutors. But if you're interested in establishing your own in-house forensic video analysis staff, you need to be prepared to follow through after purchasing the equipment. Expertise is essential, and it takes three or four years for someone to become proficient in forensic video analysis. And that's just the beginning. Tarrant County's Porter is one of 45 people in the world to achieve his level of certification, CompTIA A+. He continues to attend three or four training classes per year through the Law Enforcement Video Association (LEVA) to maintain his skill set.
If you're at a smaller agency, one of the country's four regional labs can process your evidence. But it might take a while. If you're a larger agency that can take on the cost of the necessary equipment and both initial and continual training of experts on staff, it could greatly benefit you.
As Brissette says, "It is a commitment, but it's a commitment that can make the difference between a jury saying guilty and not guilty."
Ocean Systems Forensic Solutions
Video Analysis: dTective
Image Analysis: ClearID
Audio Clarification: QEAS
Asset Storage: archive-R


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|London Tube is the original and No. 1 selling application
for getting around London.
Apple has selected London Tube (iPad version) to be featured at the Apple Store Regent Street & Convent Garden London. Demos are available.
You can add new Point of Interest (POI) databases to London Tube application via in-app purchase. These options allow you to activate Food & Drink POI, Leisure POI, Attractions POI, and Accommodation POI in all over the UK. You will be able to locate all nearby POI on Google Maps, and through a unique Augmented Reality view.
We have added London Cycle Hire (TfL) official points in Leisure POI Pack :
- Locate the nearest Cycle Hire docking stations from your GPS location.
The Augmented Reality functionality is only available to iOS4 (iPhone 3GS & iPhone 4) users.
- iPhone vertical position: 360-degree view of all docking stations nearby your location, updated in real time as you walk in the streets.
- iPhone horizontal position: List of all nearest docking stations. When a docking station is selected, a red arrow (compass) is displayed to show the direction and the distance to that point.
- Latest official map of London Tube with zones (2010). Landscape and portrait modes. Maps of all London Tube lines.
- Precise location of each station on the map (with a red circle). This application is fully compatible with Google Maps, each station is represented by a red pin, a popup shows you the distance, and it's updated live (thanks to GPS) as you walk in the streets of London!
- The journey planner tool allows you to find automatically the best route to get to your destination in London Tube. Interactive map to choose your stations for the route. To get better Route results, please switch into Best Route in the settings. The journey planner does not require a network connection to operate, it works perfectly while in the subway.
- A bookmark manager allows you to save your stations and routes.
- The application locates the nearest Tube stations from your position in London. You can also provide an address in London, the application indicates the stations closest to that address.
- London Tube Your New Eye. This is a unique augmented reality functionality that enables you to see the nearest stations and POI with iPhone's camera live view. Elements located at a distance less than 1km (0,621miles) only will be displayed.
- London Tube Service updates (Live travel news) are available.
- London Tube has added the push notification support
that allows you to be notified in background, even if you have closed
the application. This new feature allows you to receive Tube alerts in
real time, when a disrupted line is detected, a notification is automatically
sent to your iPhone / iPod Touch. A numbered badge to London Tube
application icon shows the current number of disrupted lines.
- London Bus is now available for the first time in
the same application via in-app purchase. This option allows you to switch
between the underground and bus systems at any time using the same application.
This add-on includes the official (Central) London Buses map from TfL
with the key bus routes, locates the nearest bus stations, and also offers
a Journey Planner tool.
- The application is available in English, French, Spanish, Deutsch and Japanese.
Thank you for taking the time to report any bugs or to request an enhancement to London Tube application. Feedback is very important to us. We will do our best to answer queries. Email us at
All official maps are copyright Transport for London (TfL).
London Tube for iPhone is developed by Presselite. All trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective owners. email :


text:
IN THE GENERAL RARE BOOKS COLLECTION at Princeton University Library sits a stunning two-volume edition of John Milton that once belonged to Herman Melville. Melville's tremendous debt to Milton — and to Homer, Virgil, the Bible, and Shakespeare — might be evident to anyone who has wrestled with the moral and intellectual complexity that lends Moby Dick its immortal heft, but to see Melville's marginalia in his 1836 Poetical Works of John Milton is to understand just how intimately the author of the great American novel engaged with the author of the greatest poem in English. Checkmarks, underscores, annotations, and Xs reveal the passages in Paradise Lost and other poems that would have such a determining effect on Melville's own work.
Captain Ahab, that vengeful seeker puffed with "fatal pride," simply could not have been imagined without Milton's Satan, paragon of seditiousness and the heroic sublime. Both tragic heroes are solipsists and madmen who believe that God is an ill-mannered lunatic undeserving of his reign, and yet both evoke our best sympathy in their epic struggles. Ahab knows he is as "proud as Lucifer" and "damned in the midst of Paradise," and he shares Satan's mytho-maniacal poeticism: "I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass."
Like Shelley and Blake, Melville was charmed by the individualism and heroic striving of Milton's Satan, and he imbued Ahab with the same sense of outsized self-mythologizing. His rereading of Paradise Lost during the composition of Moby Dick significantly altered the novel's meaning and mythic scope. The extraordinary fact is that as late as 1849 (Moby Dick was published in 1851), Melville had yet to conceive of Captain Ahab and was focused instead on the non-epic bildungsroman of a shipmate called Ishmael. Take Milton's Satan away from Melville and you can forget about the earthshaking achievement of Moby Dick.
In his biography of Melville, Andrew Delbanco contends that Melville's "immersion" in great writers at this time "lifted him to a new level of epic ambition." Delbanco gives particular attention not only to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein but to Dryden's seminal translation of Virgil's Aeneid, which Melville also reread during the writing of Moby Dick. After that "encounter" with the Aeneid, Delbanco writes, Melville "found himself recapitulating Virgil's story of a haunted mariner voyaging out to avenge a grievous loss." In other words: a vigorous rereading of epics vivified his creation of the most compelling quester in the American canon.
Delbanco's use of "recapitulate" stresses the reality that Moby Dick was not born in a vacuum, that Melville's genius, his far-reaching metaphysical vision, required the verbal and allegorical acumen of the great books. He was incapable of reading one classic without relating it to another — in his edition of Chapman's Homer he scrawled lines he preferred from Pope's Homer — or else contemplating how he himself would render the same material. Immersed in Virgil, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton, he recreated those myths and human truths for 19th century America, and in doing so, made them his own. As Hershel Parker emphasizes in his meticulous two-volume biography, "Melville was not reading in order to acquire knowledge for its own sake," but rather, "his evident purpose in reading epics of Western civilization was to learn how to write."
Melville remains one of the best American examples of how every important writer is foremost an indefatigable reader of golden books, someone who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.
How might Melville react to today's writers' conferences and creative writing workshops in which so many have no usable knowledge of literary tradition and are mostly mere weekend readers of in-vogue books? An untold number of Americans will finish a book manuscript this year, and the mind-numbing majority of them will be confected by nonreaders. How can a nonreader imagine himself an author, the creator of an artifact that he himself admittedly would have no interest in? Can you fathom an architect who's not fond of impressive buildings, or a violinist who has never listened to music? The erroneous assumption among the multitude is that writing doesn't demand specialized skills. In The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis offers this explanation why so many wish to "join in" the game of literature: "Because words (unlike palettes and pianos) lead a double life: we all have a competence."
The Austrian journalist Karl Kraus, an aphorist as scathingly accurate as Oscar Wilde and H.L. Mencken, once quipped: "So many people write because they lack the character not to." By "character" Kraus meant the good sense to know that not every story is worth telling; not everyone can muster the intellectual, emotional, and narrative equipment needed to succeed as a novelist. But the abracadabra of the internet has transformed us into a society of berserk scribblers; now anyone can have a public voice and spew his middling stories and thoughts at will. Forget that blog is just one letter away from bog, or that the passel of burgeoning "literary" websites is largely a harvest of inanity with only the most tenuous hold on actual literature. Our capacity for untamed, ceaseless communication has convinced us that we have something priceless to say. Amis maintains that "democratization" via the internet "has made one inalienable gain: equality of the sentiments." He paraphrases Gore Vidal: "Nowadays, nobody's feelings are more authentic, and thus more important, than anybody else's." Our every precious notion must be broadcast for consumption, tweeted or emailed or posted for attention, otherwise the validity of our existence withers. See me, hear me, all the time.
But we Americans have once again confused the incessant with the important, and somewhere along the line millions of our citizens have taken the illogical leap from being able to sign their names and send an email to the belief that they can write novels, which is rather like deciding to swim the English Channel simply because you're able to take a bath. They haven't realized that just as a successful violinist must train her ear in Bach or Stéphane Grappelli, a successful novelist must spend decades training herself in canonical literature. When Samuel Johnson said that "the greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book," he wasn't exaggerating.
Everyone knows Flannery O'Connor's barb against MFA programs — they cultivate the mediocre and banal — but less well-known is a line from her superb essay on the Southern grotesque: "The writer is initially set going by literature more than by life." The great Allan Gurganus tells the story of his first days studying with John Cheever at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the mid-1970s, and how astounded he was to find that his fellow students hadn't read Cheever's imperishable work: "When I asked one kid what he thought of our teacher's brilliant stories, the kid [. . .] replied, 'I don't want to be influenced.' I longed to pat the back of his hand and say, 'Risk it!'" Near the beginning of Jeffrey Eugenides's novel The Marriage Plot, one of his central characters says, "Books aren't about 'real life.' Books are about other books."
If potent writers are by nature a narcissistic lot — if, as Lionel Trilling asserted, referring to Mailer, Bellow, and Malamud, potent writers must "insist on being the center of their universe" — then novice writers who believe they have no need of canonical literature suffer from narcissism's less effective family members: presumptuousness and self-satisfaction. Their contented delusions about the punch of their own unaided literary powers is a species of audacity with no corollary in other art forms. A ballet dancer who did not apprentice himself raw would never expect to perform in Carnegie Hall, and yet untrained, poorly read writers everywhere are scratching down novels with high hopes of triumph. The vainglorious enterprise of every writer warrants the humbling that first-rate reading provides — it tempers the strut and pomp of the ego's brash aim.
If you've ever been to a writers' conference for aspiring authors you might have noticed a ruck of attendees eyeing retirement and praying for a bestseller, or a contingent of troubled twenty-somethings who have been bamboozled by second-raters such as Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski and have arrived to molest you with spontaneous prose which ought to remain incarcerated inside their diaries. You might have glimpsed manuscripts choking on either the toxic stupidity of Tom Clancy or the vapid bathos of Nicholas Sparks. Manuscripts defaced by cliché — the end of the world, a summertime love affair, another young guy's proud struggle with drugs — doodled by individuals who love Harry Potter and the belching of George R. R. Martin but can't be bothered by anything more substantive or adult. Always sentences with the totter of a starved hobo. And always the same intimation of why these new writers will not have a relationship with the best literature: because quality reading is difficult, but writing is pleasurable.
Over the last several years, at conferences around the country — from Florida to Utah to New Jersey to Massachusetts to Maine — I've been repeatedly astonished by how many attendees genuinely enjoy the act of writing. For me the process has always been maddening at best and soul-strangling at worst. Those who don't find writing a slow, excruciating endeavor aren't doing it right — like climbing K2, if it isn't difficult, someone's carrying you. Sheridan wrote, "Easy writing's curst hard reading," and Samuel Johnson believed that "what is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." Your sentences should be a constant source of disappointment and dread, a reminder of the regretful inadequacy of all language and how bloodily you must labor for emotional truth, intellectual assertion, and le mot juste. Joseph Epstein once wrote that "to be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment."
When asked, Hemingway never failed to stress how anguished the writing process must be. The author of the most honest stories in the American canon knew that honesty in prose gets fought for in the trenches because the human being's default mode is self-deception. From this knowledge came his memorable advice that every writer should "develop a built-in bullshit detector," one capable of catching boy wizards and other flagrant bromides. Barry Hannah once told some writing students that their ghastly work was not deserving of even "an elegant trash can."
Unread dopes become wealthy, semi-famous authors — the bestseller list has testified to this from the start. And swarms of the uninitiated are taking stabs at their own books because each Sunday afternoon they curl up with lobotomized bestsellers that make writing a book seem as effortless as linking paperclips. Sit down with Middlemarch and The Sound and the Fury instead of Jodi Picoult or Dan Brown and you'll see you have quite the mountain path to hike before your own words are ready for the world.
Despite their absurd private yearning for fortune and a fan club, people want to write books for the same reason they want to have children: to be remembered, to contribute a shard of themselves to the swirling madness of the world. But that impact and remembrance won't happen unless their books are aesthetically meaningful and tightly made, unless they consist of Keatsian beauty and truth. Anemic novels written without anguished toil will vanish into the abyss because time has a reliable knack for promoting what matters and forgetting what doesn't. And the only way to have any hope of birthing a novel that matters is through an abiding dialogue with literature, an unflagging religious immersion in the great books—not reading as another distraction or emotional indulgence, but reading as formal study, as intellectual nourishment. If you see in Keats only ejaculation of emotion and not the perfection of craft then you aren't really seeing Keats at all.
"The true artist," Wilde wrote, "is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything." One of the most naturally gifted intellects of the 19th century, Wilde nevertheless had the modesty to know that without a commitment to literature his genius would always be an adolescent. If Melville depended upon the Western epics to augment his adventure and provide the language-stimulus for his own literature, Wilde, like Emily Dickinson, seems to have needed no adventure at all, only reading. Many novice old-timers get ensnared in that fallacy, confusing their having had a full life with their ability to write a fully functional novel, while whippersnappers of every ilk spend a summer in the Orient because they believe that being in an interesting place will make them interesting people. Think of all those dippy authors' bios which proudly declare that X has held dozens of jobs, from the esoteric (circus clown and train conductor) to the painfully quotidian (bartender and construction worker), as if having worked at peculiar and menial labor — or, worse, as if simply living in Brooklyn — ipso facto deems him a skilled writer. It does not.
Francis Bacon hit upon this idea of fullness as far back as 1625, in an essay called "Of Studies." He wrote: "Reading maketh a full man [...] and writing an exact man." That formulation from reading to writing is vital: one goes from full to exact, not the reverse. Exactitude cannot be achieved without fullness first, and fullness for the writer means an education in literature, not a Hemingway-inspired romp through the African bush. Followers of the Hemingway model conveniently ignore that in addition to being an adventurer he was also one of the best-read writers of his generation; he understood that he needed to grapple with Turgenev and Tolstoy to come into his own and fashion art for the ages — he understood that his own personal story, his own mere experience, wasn't enough.
In his 1940 essay called "The Cult of Experience," Philip Rahv memorably dispatched that genus of American writer who promiscuously indulges in his own experience without recourse "to ideas generally, to theories of value, to the wit of the speculative and problematical, and to that new-fashioned sense of irony which at once expresses and modulates the conflicts in modern belief." In other words: moral, social, and spiritual imagination is sacrificed to the precious immersion in one's own biography. Rahv goes on to prefer Henry James's "expansion of life beyond its primitive needs" to Hemingway's "bedazzlement by sheer experience," but does acknowledge that writers "less gifted" than Hemingway "have come to grief through this same creative psychology" — the inadequate creative psychology that says your own life story is all you'll ever need to write important books. Writers who believe this, says Rahv, "have produced work so limited to the recording of the unmistakably and recurrently real that it can truly be said of them that their art ends exactly where it should properly begin."
Art must pass through art to realize itself and endure. What is Harold Bloom's notorious theory of "the anxiety of influence" if not a command that we become wiser readers, wiser lovers of poetic tradition, Sherlock-Holmesian text detectives? For Bloom, every "strong" poet is engaged in psychic "agon" with a strong poet who came before because every strong poet unconsciously knows he is "belated," too late to be original. "Without Tennyson's reading of Keats," Bloom writes, "we would have almost no Tennyson." As on Darwin's battlefield, agon leads to evolution. An animal's struggle for survival eventually builds a better beast. A writer's struggle with classics eventually builds a better book.
Critic Harry Levin wrote this in 1957: "The novelist must begin by playing the sedulous ape, assimilating the craft of his predecessors; but he does not master his own form until he has somehow exposed and surpassed them." To master and surpass: this is the purpose, the pursuit of every novelist. In his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot believed the same: "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance . . . is the appreciation of his relationship to the dead poets and artists." So if you're preparing to author the next great social novel and you haven't studied Stendhal, James, and Austen's half-dozen, you might have better luck with badminton.
Would Cervantes and Shakespeare have made their masterworks if they hadn't been devoted readers? Perhaps. But I hope it goes without saying that the rest of us aren't Cervantes and Shakespeare. Try to imagine a teenager who never read an important book and yet produced a novel as permanent as Middlemarch. It cannot be done. Literature isn't music or painting; there are no idiot savants in literature. Of course quality reading never assures success on your own pages. Judging from his latest insult to trees, Dan Brown has apparently tried to read Dante, and yet his sentences are still stacked like so many corpses. Still, quality reading is the only chance born writers have of succeeding in the creation of art.
Out at sea for many perilous months at a time, holed up in cramped quarters, Melville took with him on those voyages only the necessities. And among those necessities were always scores of books, the deathless classics of Western literature that were as critical to him as the rations and water that would keep him healthy. So put down your pen awhile. Pick up Moby Dick.
William Giraldi's most recent piece for LARB was on rotten reviews.


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This week we bring you the most illuminated in our continuing feature on lesser known saints.
For this installment we present:
Saint Elijah
Patron Saint of Lawn Ornaments
Saint Elijah lived in Lourdes, France, in the early part of the 20th century. Like many brothers in his monastary he learned a trade to help with the day-to-day upkeep.
Every Christmas more and more people would come to the monastary to see brother Elijah's elaborate displays. The heads of his order condemned the displays as garish and expensive, since electricity was a fairly new commodity at the time. Brother Elijah kneeled down and said a prayer for his Christmas displays. The next day when he checked the meter, the ornaments were running at half the killowat/hours as before. This miracle continued through the rest of the season, and every time Elijah designed the Christmas display.
One stormy night a plane full of sick children was flying into Lourdes to be prayed over, when the power at the air field went out. News quickly spread through the small town, and in a vision Elijah saw what he must do. Gathering every lawn ornament he had, he carried them all to the airfield landing strip. Carfully he plugged them in to a series fo extension chords that ran the 3 miles back to his monastary. Shouting a prayer against the wind Elijah plugged in the last connection, and against all odds the ornaments lit up. Guided in by a series of plastic snowmen and twinkling reindeer the plane was able to find the landing strip. Elijah was regrettably decapitated by the plane's wing, holding a finicky plug together so the plane could land safely. His severed head continued to give directions on handling the ornaments until they were all safely taken down and put away the way he liked it.
Saint Elijah is now the Patron Saint of electricians, lawn ornaments, and air traffic controllers.
You can pay homage to Saint Olivia, or any of the forgotten saints, by taking up a mop and acquiring the Saint Misbehavin' guide, lovingly created by NobleWorks.


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Excerpts: "For whatever reason, dead and deformed piglets are a problem in all pig farming situations where GM soy is used in the diet. Mr Pedersen is convinced that this is connected to the residues of glyphosate that are allowed in feed within the EU
-- 20 ppm in corn and soybean. He says that residues have been measured at 17 ppm in soybean meal, and that the permitted level of tolerance has been fixed at the behest of the GM industry. In Argentina, he says, farmers typically spray 4 litres of Roundup in growing 1 tonne of GM soybeans. GMO crops are typically sprayed 2 times with Roundup in the growing season. Argentina is a major supplier of GM soy into the European market."
Read the full story here: GM-Soy linked to health damage in pigs - Danish Dossier
Full report was published by GM-Free Cymru on April 27th 2012.
The material in the full report is freely available for use under the normal terms of the Creative Commons license. If you repost the full report or parts of the report, then you should also inform that this information was produced by GM-Free Cymru.
Recommended reading
This Little Piggy was Fed GMOs
Independent science - GMO and Roundup can cause cancer and problems with liver and kidney
GMO eggplant confirmed to be toxic
Monsanto's herbicide Roundup linked to birth defects in Argentina's agricultural areas?
Two Cute Piglets: © Martine De Graaf | Dreamstime.com


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The federal government must move to implement ambitious and comprehensive legislation to support workers and communities in the shift toward a net-zero carbon economy, according to a new report,...April 1, 2021 | National Office
VANCOUVER — Like in many Canadian cities, full-time licensed child care in BC is struggling under the financial burden of COVID-19—registering a dramatic drop in enrolment while revenue-generating...March 18, 2021 | BC Office
Full-time licensed child care in most Canadian cities is struggling under the financial burden of COVID-19—registering a dramatic drop in enrolment while revenue-generating parent fees remain...March 18, 2021 | National Office
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Dans la plupart des villes canadiennes, les services de garde réglementés offrant des services à temps plein peinent sous le poids financier de la COVID-19 et ils sont aux prises avec une baisse...March 18, 2021 | National Office
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a report today that provides evidence that without urgent investment we risk losing the child care spaces we have. Sounding the Alarm: COVID-19's...March 18, 2021 | Nova Scotia Office
VANCOUVER - A non-profit model for building rental housing in Metro Vancouver could deliver substantially lower monthly rents, shows new research released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy...March 16, 2021 | BC Office
VANCOUVER — A one per cent tax on wealth over $20 million would generate nearly twice as much revenue as previously calculated by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, money that could lift thousands of...March 11, 2021 | BC Office
OTTAWA – As governments around the world prepare for World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings on intellectual property rights March 10-11, civil society groups are urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau...March 10, 2021 | National Office
"Decades of gender equality progress was wiped away in two short months during 2020, the budget must contain meaningful action and funding for universal child care, training and skills-building, and...March 8, 2021 | Manitoba Office


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They are young, bright and speak good English. Russia has trained 25,000 volunteers to work at the upcoming Sochi Games.
President Vladimir Putin, who views the Olympics that start on Feb. 7 as a top priority of his presidency, met with a few dozen volunteers Friday at a biathlon venue in the mountains above Sochi, saying their work "to a greater extent is key to the atmosphere" at the Games.
Volunteer candidates were expected to demonstrate at least an upper-intermediate command of English, and those selected were given online English classes. Some speak several languages.
Most of the volunteers are young and typically undergraduates like Yulia Nagaitseva, a 21-year-old journalism student from the city of Voronezh in southwestern Russia.
Nagaitseva was on a four-month work and travel program in the U.S. when she heard the Sochi organizers' call for volunteers.
"There are once in a lifetime events, and it is one of them," she said after the meeting with Putin. "I could not miss it."
Nagaitseva and other volunteers spoke of a stringent selection process for volunteers, which included multiple tests and Skype interviews.
Many foreign visitors at test events in Sochi last year spoke highly of the volunteers' language skills. They were also pleasantly surprised to see Russians smiling at them, unlike most Russians whose culture does not encourage smiling to strangers.
Volunteers were given classes on cultural awareness, which taught them to smile, among other things, said Sergei Pilipenko, a 52-year-old English professor from Kuban State University in the nearby city of Krasnodar.
Pilipenko, who will work at the main media center, recalled a recent meeting with a Japanese journalist.
"I saw a Japanese man bow — and we bowed back."
At his meeting with volunteers, Putin joked with the audience and answered their questions.
A volunteer from Beijing, who is studying to become a Russian translator, told Putin it was her dream to meet him.
"I simply cannot believe it," the woman said. "It is like a dream."
"I'll pinch you later," Putin replied.
Volunteers had roles assigned to them months ago, so they are getting training according to their future jobs, said Natalya Salmina, head of a training center in the Urals city of Ufa, who also attended the meeting with Putin.
Some volunteers are going to man transport hubs, showing visitors the way. Others will be responsible for helping professionals prepare ski slopes, for example. There will also be medical volunteers.
The 30-years-old Salmina, who teaches X-ray diagnostics at a university in Ufa, heads a training center that specializes in teaching volunteers for medical purposes.
Some of them are doctors with years of experience, but because of the Russian legislation, medical volunteers, even if they are practicing physicians, will not be allowed to treat patients on their own, she said. They will be working as assistant doctors in conjunction with paid doctors and medical translators.
Some medical volunteers speak several foreign languages. They will mostly be stationed at high-risk venues such as freestyle, Salmina said, "where they are most needed."
Volunteers in Sochi will account for a third of the total workforce at the games.