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All the talk about this presidential election being one of the most important in American history isn't just hype. The contrasts between Mitt Romney and President Obama are so sharp, the outcome of their battle could forever change what this country represents.
Romney has been trying hard to portray Obama's policies as being radical and far from the ideals represented in this nation's history, but it is his recent comments about redistributing wealth that have many people wondering if the America he envisions is really what they want.
The Republican nominee upset even members of his own party with last week's release of a surreptitiously made video of him making remarks that seemed to disparage the poor during a $50,000-a-plate fund-raiser in May hosted by Philadelphia 76ers' co-owner Marc J. Leder at his mansion in Boca Raton, Fla.
Noting that 47 percent of Americans don't pay federal income taxes, Romney called them "victims" who have become dependents of the government. "My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
The backlash was immediate and strong. Romney apparently never considered that nearly a third of the people who don't pay income taxes do pay payroll and other taxes. In other words, they work; they're not sitting around waiting for government bailouts. Most of the rest who don't pay federal income taxes are either elderly or poor, or both - and some of them are Republicans.
Attempting to deflect a storm of criticism, Romney said he believes in an America "where government steps in to help those that are in need." But he then seemed to contradict that position by dragging up an audiotape from 14 years ago at a Chicago forum where then-State Sen. Barack Obama said he believed in income redistribution, "at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody's got a shot."
"I disagree," Romney told Fox News on Tuesday. But if that's so, how does he expect government to "step in" to help the needy? Does he want government to limit itself to offering friendly advice?
Without a redistribution of income through taxation, which pays for Medicaid, Pell Grants, small-business loans, veterans benefits, food stamps, etc., what kind of nation would this be? Much of that type of assistance is meant to be temporary, provided mostly to get a family through a rough patch or give a young person a chance to excel.
That Romney uses redistribution as if it were an obscene word again suggests his campaign is in the thrall of antitax acolytes of the late Ayn Rand, who believed government punishes the rich by confiscating their wealth to help people who otherwise would be working harder. That philosophy doesn't sit well with Americans who believe there are times when government is the right tool to help people help themselves.
Who wins this presidential election will determine which philosophy prevails, and what type of nation this should be.


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I came across Metallica's new video "All Nightmare Long" off their album Death Magnetic on YouTube tonight and had to do a double take. I was expecting to see something heavy with a powerful storyline and visual images…something along the lines of "One."
But what they did instead was something like I've never seen from them before. Something that left me scratching my head as I watched it. No sight of any band members and some of the most intriguingly weird footage I've ever seen. What in the heck is this "dust spore" called Cnopbl? Is this real? Is this make believe? What the hell is it period? All I know is that it's pretty freaky and I hope it's not true. Check out the video below and you'll see what I'm talking about. Metallica fan or not it's worth watching.
After watching the video, I did a little more investigating online and came across this vlog by Metallica's lead guitarist Kirk Hammett. Turns out, he bought this footage off a guy in Russia a while ago while the band was on tour. As you can see from his reaction, even he doesn't know what it all means. Propoganda? Some kind of intelligence from a laboratory? Something to worry about in the future? He basically leaves it up to us to decide.
So what do you think this is all about? I'm still trying to figure it out myself. Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts.

subset: commoncrawl


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adsmining.org has a very low trust score which indicates that there is a strong likelyhood the website is a scam. Be very careful when using this website!
When our algorithm automatically reviewed adsmining.org we looked at many factors, such as the ownership details, location, popularity and other factors relating to reviews, fake products, threats and phishing. A trust score is created using all the collected data.
Although the website seems to have a very low rating, be aware that our algorithm is not perfect. It may not be a scam but a legit and safe site. It is therefore always wise to do your own research as well.
The Scamadviser trust score is based on a technical analysis of public information. Scamadviser uses an artificial-intelligence algorithm to perform over 40 checks to estimate the possibility of an online site being a scam or legit.
|Privacy Protect, LLC (PrivacyProtect.org)
|Country Likelihood
|Unknown: 95% / United States: 5%
|Website country
|United States
|Domain age
|297 Days
|Website Speed
Scamadviser tries to identify scams, fake online stores and other online versions of fraud using a computer algoritm. While fast and efficient it is not perfect. When in doubt read our articles on additional means to recognize a bad website.


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I've downloaded JAD from the Internet and now I want to decompile my .class file to the original source code.
I've been using Notepad as editor and I compile and run my Java program through Command prompt. Can anyone tell me how to use JAD to decompile the program through cmd on windows 7?
I dont just want to learn what's the output of decompilation, i also want to learn what changes
i'll have to make in Path setting and Classpath variable.


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Wendyl wants to know: What's in those Choco-ades?
This biscuit is a testament to the power of Facebook. If it hadn't been for Kiwi mum Amber Johnson who started a Facebook page titled "Get Griffin's To Bring Back Choco-ade", this biscuit would have remained as a fond memory of the 1980s. After 15,000 people voted for the return of the biscuit, Griffins have put it back into production labelling it as "The Great Kiwi Comeback." For those not familiar with this biscuit it is a shortcake crust filled with orange jelly and topped with chocolate. But just because it's a Kiwi favourite, does it mean it's good for us too?
Sugar Coming in at the top of the ingredients label this means there is more sugar in this product than anything else. And the nutrition label tells us each 17g biscuit is nearly half sugar with 48.3 per cent sugar.
Wheat flour This is flour as you would use in baking.
Vegetable fats [emulsifiers (492, soy lecithin) The first emulsifier is sorbitan tristearate which is a new one on me. It is most commonly used in chocolate and comes from sorbitan and stearic acid. The second is soy lecithin which is a natural product.
Antioxidant (306: soy) This is a tocopherol which is a form of vitamin E derived from soybeans.
Glucose syrup More sugar in the form of glucose.
Milk solids These are what are left over once the liquid is taken out of milk.
Apple pulp The apple pulp will most likely be in for flavour and as a filler.
Cocoa powder This is ordinary cocoa as you would use to make a chocolate cake.
Invert syrup This is sugar which has been treated to split into glucose and fructose which is sweeter than sugar and when used in processed foods remains more moist and less prone to crystallisation.
Thickeners (1442, pectin) The first thickener is hydroxypropyl distarch adipate which is a treated starch. The second is pectin, a natural substance found in fruit and essential in jams to help them thicken.
Salt Not too much salt in here to worry about at 30mg of sodium per biscuit.
Emulsifier (soy lecithin) Soy lecithin as mentioned above.
Acidity regulator (citric acid) Citric acid is a natural and common acidity regulator and preservative.
Flavours These will be artificial flavours responsible for the orange flavour.
Raising agent (baking soda) This is sodium bicarbonate, a common raising agent.
Colours (160a, 160b) Good to see natural colours have been chosen over artificial ones. The first colour is carotene which is found in fruits and vegetables and the second is annatto which comes from the seed coat of the tropical annatto tree. Some people do have an allergic reaction to this with headaches and irritability.
Antioxidant (300) This is ascorbic acid otherwise known as vitamin C.
My recommendations: When there's more sugar than anything else in a food product you know it's not a great healthy choice option and one of these small biscuits comes in at 320kj/80 calories. But as a treat food this is okay in small doses. When I tasted one it really did take me right back to the 80s when some of us didn't have to worry about calories or sugar because we were young and carefree!


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Chagas disease
Chagas disease, also known as "Gandalf's revenge," is a tropical parasitic disease of humans. The infectious agent is the protozoan Transatlantic cruise, which is spread by the Triatome bug vector, also known as the Colonel bug, due to its large size (approximately 5"3' and weighing in at 9 stone). A close relative of Transatlantic cruise (its brother-in-law) causes people to oversleep, generally before important meetings or deadlines.
The disease was first discovered in 887 A.D. by an English peasant calling himself Chaggy Grog. Chaggy was notoriously lazy, and was sentenced to death by his master, Sir Charles "He's a Snake" Quake. Chaggy appealed, and in court blamed his appalling productivity, not to mention his ugliness, spots and eye-watering body-odour, on an unknown disease he conveniently called "Chaggy's disease." After examination by the local Witch Doctor, including blood-letting, various amputations and the ingestion of numerous poisons, Chaggy's testimonies were proved correct and Sir Charles was ordered to pay for his retirement to the South of France. Upon hearing this, Sir Charles famously said "I'll chuck the smelly infidel in the Thames before that happens." Chaggy's body was subsequently found floating in the Thames, not far from Sir Charles' manor, "Snake Place."
Following Chaggy's suspicious and gruesome death, thousands of peasants began to deliberately avoid work, citing Chaggy's disease as their excuse. Whilst some simply complained of a general illness, other blamed the disease for more obscure symptoms, such as drunkenness, theivery and losing at chess. Acting swiftly, Prime Minister Alexander Alex-Ander gave his famous "Three facts which are the truth and not lies" speech to the House of Commons. The PM's "facts" were that:
- Chaggy's disease does not exist and never did;
- Chaggy Grog never existed either; and
- Anyone claiming to have Chaggy's disease is a dissembling harlot.
Despite these grave warnings about Chaggy's disease, talk of it rumbled on throughout the middle-ages and Chaggy Grogg came to be a hero of the Great Unwashed. Marx and Engels devoted an entire chapter to the disease in The Communist Manifesto, believing that Chaggy deserved a lasting tribute for blazing a trail on behalf of peasants who want to use a lame excuse to get out of working for the bourgeoisie. One of Lenin's first acts after the October Revolution was to order his scientists to release an incredibly nasty disease into the water supply. The disesase discovered by Igor Fink-Fink, the chief Russian scientist, was released on June 12th amid wild celebrations (which were later ascribed to delirium induced by Chagas disease).
For centuries, scientists believed that Chagas disease afflicted the Triatome bug and that humans were merely the main vector. This thinking had led to sustained attempts to eradicate the human population, including the Crusades of 1095-1291. Richard the Lion-hearted has said, "If it only wiped out these wretched Turks, the bugs would have slightly improved the quality of life."
In 1963, the scientific community was stunned by the publication, by Bill "Mad Dog" Malone, a Texas card shark, of a paper entitled, Why humans are more important than bugs. It made the important observation that while the bugs were unharmed by the disease, humans were being killed in their thousands, both by the disease and by the numerous remedies mentioned above. This led to a major rethink of vector classification, and modern parasitology was born. Indeed, it is only in the Ivy League that humankind is still regarded as the scourge requiring eradication.
Scientists now know that the Triatome transmits Chagas disease, not by the bloodsucking activity that led campesinos to name it "the kissing bug," but by taking a bacteria-laden crap on the victim thereafter. This behavior had been endemic in Latin America, but only in the figurative sense.
The scientific community having progressed from genocide to prevention, Charlotte Nissle, a Peruvian belly dancer with many acquaintances at the World Health Organization, noticed aloud in 1970 that people who became infected with Ebola virus very rarely got Chagas disease. This sparked a worldwide campaign by the WHO to expose as many people as possible to Ebola, even going as far as to launch Ebola-based cruise missiles against non-compliant countries, and holding "Ebola days" in troublesome regions.
What the WHO had failed to note, however, is that the main reason Ebola patients rarely contracted Chagas disease is that around 90% of Ebola patients die within a week of infection. Although the chairman of the WHO commented, "Dead people don't get Chagas disease," public opinion turned against the campaign, resulting in a mass protest in Trafalgar Square. The cruise missile that struck Trafalgar Square was the straw that broke the camel's back, and the WHO quickly vaccinated the chairman and executive board and went in search of a less lethal vaccine.
Surely the most famous person to succumb to Chagas disease was William Blake. It is commemorated in his poem, I've got this terrible pain in my stomach, which he dictated shortly before his death. The opening stanza runs as follows:
|I've got this terrible pain in my stomach,
Please fetch the doctor as I think I'm dying,
Contempary society hailed it as a breakthrough in atypical postmodernist poetry.
Centuries later, similar themes of discomfort and empathy were broached in I Feel for You by the rhythm-and-blues act appropriately named Chaga Khan.


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Notebook: Jones has record-setting game
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. _ Less than two weeks after having surgery to repair a fracture in his left hand, junior wide receiver Julio Jones showed just how effective he can be even with a wounded wing.
He merely set the Crimson Tide record for receiving yards in a single game with 221 on Saturday, and his 12 receptions were second behind D.J. Hall's 13-catch performance in 2007, also against Tennessee.
"I was waiting for that to happen," sophomore safety Robert Lester said about Jones.
Jones had eight receptions for 107 yards in the first half alone, including a 42-yard sideline catch when the Volunteers left in man coverage, en route to setting career highs in both categories. His previous career high for receptions was nine in last year's Auburn game, and he had 128 yards at LSU in 2008.
Most receiving yards in a game
Yards, name opponent (receptions), date
221 Julio Jones at Tennessee (12 catches), Oct. 23, 2010
217 David Palmer at Vanderbilt (8 catches), Sept. 11, 1993
187 David Bailey vs. Auburn (9 catches), Nov. 29, 1969
185 DJ Hall vs. Tennessee (13 catches), Oct. 20, 2007
173 Toderick Malone vs. Georgia (8 catches), Oct. 1, 1994
171 David Palmer vs. Mississippi State (8 catches), Nov. 13, 1993
159 Dennis Homan vs. Florida State (6 catches), Sept. 23, 1967
158 Ken MacAfee vs. Villanova (6 catches), Oct. 12, 1951
158 Siran Stacy vs. Tennessee (9 catches), Oct. 21, 1989
157 Antonio Carter vs. Mississippi (8 catches), Oct. 14, 2000
157 DJ Hall vs. Utah State (11 catches), Oct. 29, 2005
Here are Jones' top games in receiving yards.
221 at Tennessee (Nov. 23, 2010), W
128 at LSU (Nov. 8, 2008), W
124 vs. Florida (Dec. 6, 2008), L
106 at Duke (Sept. 18, 2010), W
103 at Tennessee (Oct. 25, 2008), W
102 vs. LSU (Nov. 7, 2009), W
Jones also became just the third player in Tide history to reach 2,000 career receiving yards and moved into second on the Alabama all-time list.
2,923 D.J. Hall (194 catches), 2004-07
2,189 Julio Jones (146 catches), 2008-present
2,070 Ozzie Newsome (102 catches), 1974-77
1,859 Freddie Milons (152 catches), 1998-01
1,857 David Bailey (132 catches), 1969-71
1,863 Keith Brown (117 catches), 2004-07
1,611 David Palmer (102 catches), 1991-93
1,568 Curtis Brown (106 catches), 1991-95
1,495 Dennis Homan (87 catches), 1965-67
1,386 Joey Jones (71 catches), 1980-83
Injuries and starters
Junior Alfred McCullough made his second straight start at right tackle. Redshirt freshman D.J. Fluker (groin) was his backup. Junior Phelon Jones played star in nickel formation with junior defensive back DeQuan Menzie hindered by a groin injury that got worse as the week progressed.
Sophomore Kerry Murphy started at defensive end. Junior receiver Marquis Maze returned punts for Jones again. Junior defensive end Marcell Dareus said his foot/ankle was sore but was otherwise fine.
Redshirt freshman Eddie Lacy (knee) did not make the trip.
McElroy on another streak
By attempting 32 passes without having an interception Saturday senior quarterback Greg McElroy extended his string of passes without a pickoff to 121, which dates back to the second quarter at Arkansas. That's the sixth longest string in Alabama history and he already has two of the top five:
1. 190, Brodie Croyle, 2004-05
2. 155, Jay Barker, 1993-94
3. 149, Greg McElroy, 2009-10
4. 141, Greg McElroy, 2009
5. 135, Freddie Kitchens, 1997
McElroy entered Saturday's game averaging one interception every 54 attempts and was the Southeastern Conference's career leader in that category, one per 63.4 attempts.
He also moved into sixth on the Alabama career pass completions list and seventh in career passing yards.
Alabama finished 2-1 against the Eastern Division, but is one of only two Western teams to lose against an East opponent this season. Overall the division is 11-2, with the losses Alabama at South Carolina and Vanderbilt at Ole Miss.
Alabama brought 12 offensive linemen including true freshman Arie Kouandijo, but had just four running backs with Mark Ingram, Trent Richardson, Demetrius Goode and Jalston Fowler. True freshman tight end Brian Vogler made the trip and like Kouandijo hasn't played in a game.
For the first time in a long time Alabama is averaging more fans per home game than Tennessee. Coming into Saturday's game, which drew 102,455, the Tide was averaging 101,821 in attendance (fourth most in the nation), compared to 99,699 for the Vols (sixth). Incidentally, Saban made a point to tell reporters that he's never had as much supportive crowd noise on the road.
Tennessee unveiled its new Techfit compression football jerseys, which is basically the adidas version of the Nike combat jerseys. The Tide will wear those against Mississippi State. ... Hubert Owens' crew officiated the game, with Doyle Jackson the replay official. ... Team captains: Dareus, Dont'a Hightower and David Ross.


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I am new to Adobe Illustrator. I want to save the header layer to a png for a web background. I get close, but always have a white border around the graphic. I am thinking there should be an easier way to do this than what I am currently doing.
Thanks in advance


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Single-Parent Homeschooling
May 20–24, 2013 | Vol. 115, Week 14
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When you're single with children, homeschooling can appear daunting. Single homeschooling mom Mary Jo Tate shares practical tips and advice to make home education a possibility for your family.
Do you have to be a supermom to homeschool as a single parent? If you've ever wondered whether it's possible to do it all, Mary Jo Tate, this week's guest, has some encouragement for you! Join Mary Jo and host Mike Smith on Home School Heartbeat.
Mike Smith: This week, author and homeschooling mom Mary Jo Tate joins me. Mary Jo, welcome to the program!
Mary Jo Tate: Thanks, Mike! I'm delighted to be here!
Mike: Mary Jo, being a single parent is hard enough, but homeschooling as a single parent seems like an overwhelming challenge. Is it possible?
Mary Jo: Absolutely, Mike. In fact, the growing number of single-parent homeschoolers testifies that it really can be done!
Though it may feel like you're alone, but don't try to be a lone ranger. Every homeschooler needs a support network, but it's especially crucial for single parents, because we don't have the help and the sounding board of a spouse. Get involved in a local church, in a homeschool support group, make friends with like-minded families, and seek out wise counsel from godly advisors.
Even more important, remember that God's grace is sufficient. He promises to be a father of the fatherless and a defender of widows. If God has called you to homeschool your children, He will provide the strength, patience, grace, resources, and time to do it. Let your family and your life be a testimony of God's faithfulness.
Mike: Mary Jo, I know this program will be an encouragement to a lot of single parents who have been wondering whether they can really homeschool. Thanks for joining us this week! And until next time, I'm Mike Smith.
Mike Smith: This week, author and homeschooling mom Mary Jo Tate joins me to talk about homeschooling as a single parent. Mary Jo, when you're the primary provider and the homeschooling parent, how do you balance work with actually being there for your child?
Mary Jo Tate: Well, Mike, when there are so many responsibilities to juggle, it's really easy to slip into crisis management mode—to just push yourself until you can make it past one more commitment, or one more deadline. But you can't live that way forever—you just can't sprint through a marathon. You've got to find a pace that you can maintain for the long haul.
In order to do that, you have to eliminate as much as possible, and prioritize the rest. Learn to say no to the good in order to say yes to the best. Be intentional and very selective about outside commitments, such as extracurricular activities. And even though it's hard, don't let the necessity of working crowd out precious family time.
I've found that the best tool for balancing a busy life is setting yearly and weekly goals in three categories: personal, family, and business. Dividing commitments into those areas—literally writing them down in three columns on a page—helps you see whether things are in balance. Just half an hour of planning every week will multiply your productivity and relieve stress and frustration.
Mike: Mary Jo, thanks for joining us today! And until next time, I'm Mike Smith.
Mike Smith: Mary Jo, on our last program, we talked about balancing work and family. Let's talk specifically about homeschooling today. How do you set reasonable expectations for your family's homeschool program, as a single parent?
Mary Jo Tate: Mike, it's really important to design a realistic educational plan that you can actually implement, rather than wasting precious time fretting over the gap between theory and practice. It's great to teach your children together whenever possible, especially for history, literature, and science. Encourage independent learning when your children become competent readers. Taking responsibility for their own education teaches important skills and offers the opportunity for each child to pursue his own special interest.
Don't try to do everything yourself, either. Delegate some instruction to older children, which reinforces their learning as well. Educational videos and software can be helpful in moderation. Audio tapes or CDs can be great for reviewing math facts, history dates, and so on. And recorded books can supplement live read-aloud time. Participating in a homeschool co-op can multiply your own efforts. Set up systems and routines to keep things running smoothly.
It's really important to find peace in the space between the ideal and reality. Your homeschool may not match your highest goals, but you can still make it work and give your children an excellent education.
Mike: Mary Jo, that's very wise advice. And thanks for sharing with us again today! And until next time, I'm Mike Smith.
Mike Smith: Mary Jo Tate is with me again today. Mary Jo, single parents face so many demands on their time and attention. In your experience, what should they most be aware of neglecting?
Mary Jo Tate: The single parents I've talked with almost always neglect taking care of themselves. Of course, parenting does involve sacrifice, but you simply can't nurture, provide for, and educate your children well, if you're always living on the edge of burnout. Nobody blames a pregnant woman for taking care of herself—her child's very life depends on her health. But once the child is born, the connection isn't quite as direct and obvious.
To be able to handle all your responsibilities, you absolutely must make time for personal rest, renewal, relaxation, and even recreation. Make sure you're getting enough sleep, exercising, eating right, and drinking plenty of water.
So many of the single parents I talk with seem to need somebody's permission to take care of themselves. If that describes you listening today, I want to officially give you permission right now: it's not only ok, it's essential. Don't be afraid to ask for the help you need, and don't feel guilty for taking care of yourself. Take the flight attendant's advice: put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.
Mike: Mary Jo, that's very helpful insight, and thanks for joining us again! And until next time, I'm Mike Smith.
Mike Smith: This week, Mary Jo Tate has joined me to talk about homeschooling as a single parent. Mary Jo, you've given a lot of encouragement to the single parents listening. What about those around them? How can others in the church, community, or family come alongside single parents?
Mary Jo Tate: Remember EMT: encouragement, material help, and time. First, encouragement: pray faithfully for single parent families and offer godly, wise counsel. Praise the positive things you see in their lives, and encourage them not to become weary in doing good.
Second, offer material help. Single-parent families often struggle financially, and homeschooling limits the time they can devote to earning a living. Donating cash or gift cards can make a tremendous difference, and really help relieve the burden. You can also help by sharing material things such as clothing, household items, curriculum and other books, Christmas gifts, or even firewood.
Third, give the gift of your time. Help with home repairs or car maintenance. Babysit, tutor, or mentor the children. Show hospitality by including single parents and their children in special events and holiday celebrations.
James 1:27 includes looking after widows and orphans in the definition of pure and faultless religion. Ask yourself how you can show God's love to a single-parent family today.
Mike: Mary Jo, this truly has been encouraging this week. Thanks for joining us! And until next time, I'm Mike Smith.
Mary Jo Tate
Mary Jo Tate, author of Flourish: Balance for Homeschool Moms (coming from Apologia in 2013), is blessed with four wonderful sons and has been educating them at home since 1997. An international editor and book coach for over 25 years, she teaches homeschoolers, single moms, and work-at-home moms how to balance family life and home business and how to find peace in the space between the ideal and reality.
Mary Jo has a heart to help, encourage, and inspire other homeschoolers—especially single moms. She reminds them, "If God has called you to homeschool your children, He will provide the strength, patience, grace, resources, and time to do it." For resources and encouragement for single parents, visit her website. You can get Mary Jo's e-book, From Frazzled to Focused: 7 Planning Tools for Busy Moms, free here.
Quick ContactEmail: email@example.com
Homeschool Heartbeat has been retired and replaced by a new HSLDA podcast, Homeschool Talks. You're welcome to continue browsing the Homeschool Heartbeat archives, but if you want to stay up-to-date on the latest content, head over to our new podcast page. Happy podcasting!


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Preschool Yoga @ Grand Blanc
Save to calendar
From Tue Jan 31, 2017 10:30 am until 11:00 am
At Grand Blanc-McFarlen Library
Total Seats: 15 Registrations: 13 Seats left: 2
Children ages 2-8 years old will love this yoga class designed just for them. Parents, please bring a mat and plan to assist your child throughout the class. Taught by Miss Katrina, a certified kids' yoga instructor. Please register for each class individually.
Categories: Children Ages 1-5 , Exercise
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VOIP is a very small component of a converged environment and in fact delivers very little on its own. We've gone the whole hog and we're loving it. The business is getting tremendous benefits from it.
Steve Mayo-Smith, Auckland District Health Board: We've just gone through a whole massive reorganisation process where we've consolidated a lot of hospitals. From an IT perspective, we've gone from being very paper centric to more electronic. Interestingly in all of that, when you talk to the clinicians as to what is the critical system they cannot live without, it's the PABX. We run two PABXs on our sites. Therefore, as we move forward, the issue is that there's a DHB [district health board] with significant deficit as we renovate some of the other sites. I don't want to go and spend another million dollars on upgrading PABXs, so therefore where does voice over IP fit?
Warwick Wright, New Zealand Racing Board: We have a big plan to migrate our data network. We've got 600¿retail outlets around the country so we are planning to migrate that to IP in 2005. We have four call centres, we used to have five. We're doing a large number of reviews on options for the call centres and that includes rationalisation, consolidation, outsourcing and a lot of that will drive what we do with the technology.
One scenario I can see is that we end up with two roughly balanced call centres with a big fat pipe in between them and voice over IP connections. We're heavily dependent at the moment on the Telecom 0800 network, and it's not a simple matter of moving off that. It does some things for us that are very hard to replicate with any other mechanism. I think there's a lot of potential with voice over IP for us but not in the short-term.
Vaughn Bosher, SkyCity: We're doing an implementation in Adelaide at the moment, and we're starting an implementation here in Auckland for the new Grand Hotel that Sky City is building across the road.
This is a two-pronged attack. One, doing it small at each location and then downstream, a consolidated effect potentially looking at things like call centre consolidation, with sites in Hamilton and Queenstown, and smaller sites around Auckland with five or six different buildings. So [we're taking] small steps, but looking towards the big picture downstream of a consolidated voice over IP network.
Liz Gosling, AUT: We have been running a pilot for about a year-and a-half-now, with 86¿voice over IP phones within the university. We've reached a stage where we are looking at our options for moving forward. We have a number of things driving that. We have two main new buildings in AUT coming on stream by about 2007, and the effect of that on our user base will be a huge amount of smooth outs and changes across a period of time.
The cost of doing those smooth outs and changes on our existing PABX could be quite significant. If we used voice over IP, then we would be looking at some reduced costs in that area.
We've got five main buildings in the city centre, in the CBD, plus campuses at Te¿Wananga and Technology Park in Penrose, plus some further satellite buildings. The convergence is very attractive to us in that it allows us a lot of flexibility as AUT expands.
A strong business case
Catherine Rusby: We started out with business requirements, and then did a strategy based on our telecommunications because it was kind of out there. IT was fine, but we just really didn't know what to do with the telecommunications aspect. So we put together a strategy that really aligned with our business direction and really clearly identified that convergence was going to deliver an awful lot of flexibility, operational cost savings. At this point the risk had subsided from this leading edge environment, and this fear of providers - there are only Telecom and TelstraClear.
We have re-cabled everything, we have ripped out all of the old and replaced it with a converged data voice network, which then forms the basis of the ability, and really fairly simplistic ability, to do that integration. No longer is infrastructure going to be the barrier to that.
Our business drivers were definitely about cost, particularly after we'd integrated, we had two companies brought together [IAG and NZI]. The benefits that we have achieved almost instantaneously have been in the order of 25 per cent. Also, we really needed the flexibility from our business of being able to re-deploy people anywhere in the country because of floods or insurance claims.
For example, I too came up from Wellington today. I come into my office here, or to any office and log on with my extension number in Wellington. It transports all that intelligence about my line-up to that physical unit on whatever desk I'm sitting on. That will happen for me anywhere in the country, at any one of our sites. For our mobile workers or home workers, we are establishing a capability of a little Cisco modem that you can run across broadband that can link them into our IP network and with a little basic IP phone as if they're on another part of the network anywhere else.
We went for a fairly vanilla implementation to start with so that we will now look to build and leverage the investment even more, but our business case did not even try to quantify any of the flexibility, the productivity benefits, any of those intangibles.
We didn't even attempt it because the business case stood on its own two feet on the 25 per cent benefits of cost savings. It was almost to the point where it was self-funding. Had we not had to extend over a period of time due to other business constraints, we probably could have self-funded the project or pretty close to it.
Pilot experiences
Liz Gosling: We had some obviously initial challenges as you do with a pilot, but generally it was very successful, very well accepted. It gave us some good insights into some of the areas, specifically in user training, that we would need to focus more clearly on.
AUT is a very new university. We got university status in the year 2000. Most university CEOs have an enormous challenge in that they work in a very, very un-centralised environment where networks have been built up over the years, which are owned by faculties. There is generally no centralised IT support structure. There might be five or six help desks across a university. AUT has been very fortunate in that we have a very centralised system. We've had a lot of support from the vice chancellor to actually put that in, so it makes it much easier for us to leverage and put in this kind of investments. We also have a very up to-date-network.
Vaughn Bosher: We had a good business driver where the business centre wanted an up-to-date business class hotel. But to have a five star rating, they [Qualmark, New Zealand tourism's official mark of quality] specifically provide you with a list of criteria that you need to make the team. Some of the technologies that you need to have in place to enable you to get that sort of rating, lend themselves quite nicely into voice over IP. That was an ideal opportunity for us to start with voice over IP.
It won't be everywhere and it won't be all. There's still a place for an analogue phone. When you're talking about being stuck in a hallway or in a lift, well, you don't really want nice high-tech technology. It's not just the CEO's phone on his desk, it's the one that's stuck in the fire escape and in the lift well. You've got to have those. So there is a place for the whole breadth of technology.
Quality issues
Liz Gosling: Our experience has been it's very acceptable. It's as good as the conventional analogues around.
Catherine Rusby: For us, there were never any quality issues. Where we had issues were echoes... We definitely were suffering for a couple of months, until we got rid of it all. In the call centres it was mainly because of our headsets and the incompatibility. Once that was identified, that was sorted. We've had no issues since. The quality is fantastic. One of the big barriers for us going integrated convergence network throughout the business was the call centres.
The perceptions were that the call centres are incredibly important, which they are, that you can't have any stuffing around with the voice applications or voice systems. [But] Of all of the people that call me everyday and say thank you, thank you, thank you, it is the call centres.
A great example is we did a crisis simulation recently. We were at 151¿Queen Street [Auckland], which is our head office, and across the road at Shortland Street is where one of our main call centres is located. We all arrived, the executive team arrived, in the CEO's office at 7.55 to hear that a bomb had gone off at Shortland Street and had blown up one of our floors. Aside from all the people issues, we had to do disaster recovery and where do we move people to. We were sitting around thinking, can we move them out to the Takapuna call centre? No, it's way too small, and we hadn't updated our business continuity plans to reflect the new environment.
We suddenly went, 'Hang on, all we need to do is send all those head office people home. Tell all the people from the call centres to go over to 151¿Queen Street, log onto any phone which has PCs, it's all there.' They're there because the system knows. Once they know your DDI and they know where you are physically located, it automatically knows your skill sets, what call centre you're in, and it will re-route to you directly. That just alleviated so much issue for us with having to call Telecom to have call routing changed, etc. It did our heads in how easy that was. It was so simple. It's fantastic.
Vaughn Bosher: We've found it very good. We've got a small pilot running between Auckland and Queenstown and it's better than the cellular network. [You] pick up the phone, ring it. It's fine. It looks and sounds like you're next door.
Warwick Wright: We don't have issues but I guess we've got concerns that it's more open to negative influence than the traditional telephony. I think you probably need to be smarter and more focused on how you're managing your circuits if you're going to put voice across them... I'm talking more hypothetically than practical experience.
Our view is that if we are sharing the same pipe with voice and data, then there's the opportunity to make some configuration changes on that pipe and affect data. You need a higher skill level and greater focus on the management of your network if you're going to put voice across it. It's easier to get it wrong.
Catherine Rusby: The big thing about IP is we're not talking about redundancy any more, which is built-in duplication, and duplication of costs, just in case. We built a tonne of resiliency into the network so any issues that have happened, and they do, it's just re-routed itself and found a new way to get there.
Steve Mayo-Smith: I have no redundancy or DR [disaster recovery] if a PABX goes out. It's a key issue for us. We've got two PABXs we can re-route and so on and so forth, but we don't have the ability like you were just talking about in terms of, 'Whoops, that floor's been taken out, move the people over there.'
Catherine Rusby: So aside from a physical outage like that building we've had, and that was only simulated, any outages that we've had have been totally transparent to the business. It's almost like a mirror network, it just resets itself. It's got several paths it can go through so when one breaks, it goes and finds its way to the other one. We've had to do that a couple of times up here in Auckland and it's just re-routed from our call centre from its normal path over to the Albany data centre and comes through there instead. Absolutely transparent. Business isn't even aware of it.
Well, we've integrated our mobile phone fleet with the network so I can ring up - and I don't think that's necessarily new technology - you can do that in old environments. With a simple code in front, if I'm on a mobile calling a landline, I just put a two nine, which is what it is, and then the extension number and it goes directly to that internal number and vice versa. If I'm on a landline wanting to call a mobile internally, and that's all considered on our network, I don't get any additional charge for this. So there's another cost saving.
There must be a tonne of things with your 0800 that are connected to the services, but we took all our 0800 numbers with us. All our DDIs, we did make the hard call to move numbers, but we're very happy that we have and it's been fairly painless. You know you just get a redirect for a little while. Our 0800 migration was a fantastic thing because it routed out probably 25 per cent of the 0800 numbers that we had that we were never using, and the costs that we were paying for that.
Warwick Wright: Our business has got some very strange profiles. For example, people betting on races want to bet right up to the last minute. We've analysed our traffic pattern and we only use, on average, 30¿ports. But one minute before race close or finish of race close we need 300¿ports and even that's probably not enough.
So traffic management has been quite a problem for telcos with us because it doesn't conform to any normal pattern of usage. It's very, very spiky, and what we do with our call centres with the 0800 system, is we use the intelligence of the network. When a person calls, say they call the Auckland call centre, they call the 0800 number and it goes to the Auckland call centre and Auckland is all busy, it says, 'I'll bounce this off to, 20 per cent of the calls will go to Wellington, Palmerston North.' So it's more a load balancing mechanism now.
Vendor management
Catherine Rusby: One of the things we did when we were in our RFP process was we didn't do the big 'here are the requirements and now don't call us until you're done'. We worked alongside both of them very closely and interactively to make sure they understood our requirements and our peaks are different. Basically we wanted bandwidth on demand. That's cheap commodity stuff now too, so we've got as much as we want.
We spent a lot of time trying to educate them on the profiles of the business and constantly challenged them on the engineering design that they kept coming up with, so that we were comfortable and really believed that they could do what they said. Anyway, we got a very high level of confidence during that process that they understood what our needs were, and therefore what they were proposing would address those needs. You have to have some sort of faith in them that they are technically capable, so the most important thing is making sure that they understand what your needs are.
Initial concerns
Liz Gosling: My primary concern was the service to the users and reliability type aspects. It was this kind of '[putting] all your eggs in your one basket syndrome' I think [that] naturally makes people quite nervous. So we've had to look at what we need to do in the way of making sure we've got a nicely reliable network.
Steve Mayo-Smith: One of the key things is redundancy with the PABXs which we don't have, and secondly, cost reduction. As we renovate the two campuses, it's got to be absolutely reliable and it comes back to mobile computing. We've gone from a very paper-based environment where people could carry their paper around. We've now computerised them unfortunately we've always tied them to the wall with cable, which is why we've got God knows how many thousands of PCs now.
So what we need to be able to do is to be able to get back to free up both the clinicians in terms of the information they carry and the communications they have. That's where it comes into the voice over IP versus mobility and the combination of the two.
Mitigating risks
Catherine Rusby: Tell me, what it is that we do that doesn't introduce risk? What is it that we do to be successful in our role? We understand the risks and we put actions in place to mitigate those risks. That is why I can categorically say that our implementation was virtually flawless.
We had so many people telling us we were going to fail, do not underestimate how important it is [that] if we lose the call centres, our business was in jeopardy. That was foremost in our minds. All of the implementation strategy was based around, let's understand all the risks, and get the risk mitigations, even to the point where you know our testing included a full implementation of a call centre and a rollback to demonstrate that we could, because we had to have Telecom sitting at the table. I have to say they played very well despite being very sore to lose the account.
They did play well in this situation, because we had to have them involved to say, 'Okay scenario: We roll over and it all goes to custard. How quickly can we roll back?' We had to demonstrate that we could [roll back] in an appropriate amount of time, and we did. We had to do that a couple of times just to make sure that we had it all sussed, but that is about mitigating the risk. The risk is there. Understand it, put actions in place and get the right people helping you. That was a big deal for us - getting the right people helping us.
Change management is a very big part of it, and we had an excellent woman leading this. She would have the right amount of people around on site, and people are an issue. That's just the way humans are, they don't like change, but they really appreciate and warm to immediate attention.
So we didn't bring our help desk on call until a week after we went live. We had people on-site, every day, all day, doing the stroking, dealing with it, [saying]'It's okay, this is what you need to do.' They bought into it right away because the benefits are immediately evident.
Pointers for success
Catherine Rusby: I would put 85 per cent or 90 per cent of our success was due to having had really good expertise and advice on how to go forward, all the way through. I've got great people working for me and they've learned heaps, and loving it.
My biggest advice is make sure you've got the right knowledge and the right information, because in all of your arguments, whether political or management and staff, if you've got credible, exact information, experience-based, it will win the day every time.
Alcatel kindly sponsored the roundtable.
IT executives at the MIS roundtable:
Vaughn Bosher, technical solutions manager services, SkyCity
Liz Gosling, acting director, IT services, Auckland University of Technology
Paul Knight, chief information officer, Fletcher Building
Steve Mayo-Smith, chief information officer, Auckland District Health Board
Catherine Rusby, chief information officer, IAG NZ
April Walker, general manager information, Southern Cross
Warwick Wright, general manager technical services, NZ Racing Board
The next in the series of MIS roundtable discussions with chief information officers will tackle the challenges of aligning IT with delivery of health.
Please email the editor at firstname.lastname@example.com if you wish to suggest topics for future discussions.
Join the CIO New Zealand group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.


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Roland Burris still occupies temporary office space in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, in a suite far from the floor of the United States Senate, so when the buzzer signalling an imminent vote interrupted his lunch the other day, he put down his plastic soupspoon, left his sandwich untouched, and hustled out into the marble hallway. "I'm not missing any votes," he said. "They'll get on me for that, too."
Burris, the junior senator from Illinois, is trim and fit for a man of seventy-one, with a full head of hair barely flecked with gray. He beckoned a young aide to keep up as he bounded toward an elevator reserved for senators. There, Burris was joined by two Democratic colleagues, first Maria Cantwell, of Washington state, then Blanche Lincoln, of Arkansas. Burris had been a senator for less than two months—he was appointed by Rod Blagojevich, then the governor of Illinois, on December 30th, to fill the unexpired term of Barack Obama—and he had yet to learn the names of all of his colleagues. "Hello, Senator!" Burris said cheerfully to each woman. They nodded, smiled back at him, and, looking slightly embarrassed, stared down at the floor.
In the basement of the building, Burris raced to catch the subway to the Capitol, and when he arrived he met Ron Wyden, of Oregon, and Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, who, having already voted, were heading in the opposite direction. "Senators!" Burris said, and the two men made the same gestures as the pair in the elevator had: a friendly nod followed by an averted gaze. Burris darted into one of the tiny elevators that take senators up to the Senate floor, and Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican, wrapped an arm around his shoulder, squeezing so hard that the men's heads were practically touching. "Hang in there, my buddy!" Coburn said.
Few senators in history have made a more ignominious national début than Roland Burris. Blagojevich appointed Burris, a former Illinois comptroller and attorney general, just three weeks after the Governor had been arrested and taken from his home in handcuffs. Blagojevich was charged with crimes relating to his alleged attempts to exploit his office for personal and political gain, including trying to sell Obama's Senate seat. (Blagojevich maintains he did nothing wrong.) The entire Democratic caucus in the Senate, as well as the President-elect, asked Burris to refuse the appointment, and Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office a few days later. Burris ignored the entreaties, assumed the office, and plunged almost immediately into another scandal.
In a succession of raucous public appearances, Burris gave contradictory, perhaps even self-incriminating, explanations of the circumstances leading to his appointment. (He has both denied and admitted discussing the Senate seat with Blagojevich's advisers in advance of his selection.) In short order, editorials in the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times called for Burris's resignation, a demand echoed by the new governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn, and by Dick Durbin, the state's senior senator. "As far as my colleagues here in the Senate, they are grasping as I am to try to get to the truth of this situation," Durbin said after failing to persuade Burris to quit. "They are confused and concerned about the disclosures that have been made." An Illinois prosecutor is investigating Burris for possible perjury and related crimes, and the matter is also before the Senate Ethics Committee.
During his long career in Illinois politics, Burris has encountered many of the state's most influential figures, some of them principled risk-takers and some corrupt rogues. And it's been clear that Burris belongs to neither category. He is a conventional politician, one guided far more by cautious self-interest than by ideological passion. His self-regard may be greater than that of some of his peers; he is especially known for the words of self-celebration carved into the wall of a mausoleum that is waiting for him in a Chicago cemetery. (The structure bears the inscription "Trail Blazer" and lists such accomplishments as being the first African-American undergraduate at Southern Illinois University to be an exchange student at the University of Hamburg, in Germany.) "He was a figure of fun, because he was highly egocentric," Alan Dobry, a former Democratic ward committeeman in Chicago, said of Burris's years as a local politician. "When he was in office, he had two aides who went around with him, and they were generally referred to as the 'Rolaids.' " According to the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, a longtime student of Chicago politics, Burris "was a soldier, part of the machine. He's not a distinguished politician. He's not a powerful political thinker." Of course, this description hardly distinguishes Burris from many of his colleagues on Capitol Hill. In his very ordinariness, Burris may represent a triumph of sorts for the civil-rights movement, which was, at least in part, a struggle for black people to be seen as just like everybody else.
Roland Burris's paternal grandfather was born in Tennessee, but around the turn of the last century he moved to Centralia, a small city two hundred and seventy miles south of Chicago, in the heartland of Illinois. Even then, Chicago represented the center of African-American life in the state, but Centralia was a major outpost for the Illinois Central Railroad, which drew black migrants from the South. When Burris was born, in 1937, the city had about thirteen thousand people, including about two thousand blacks.
Centralia is roughly on the same latitude as Louisville, and, even after the Second World War, Southern ways prevailed. In 1951 and 1952, the local N.A.A.C.P. tried and failed to integrate the public swimming pool, and the following year the city's African-Americans decided to try again. This time, Burris's father, who worked for the Illinois Central and served as the vice-president of the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P., travelled to East St. Louis to hire a lawyer to push the integration effort; the elder Burris laid out a hundred dollars as a retainer, a considerable sum at the time, given that he was making around forty cents an hour. Roland, who was fifteen, was chosen to test the ban with a group of his friends over Memorial Day weekend. "We headed out to the pool; we bought our ticket," Burris told me, as we sat in his Senate office. "They sold us a ticket, because there was all this build-up before. They knew we were coming. You could see the whites lined up all outside, and here are these five little black kids with two chaperones. And they had to line up on the outside as well. And we went in; we showered; went out; swam in the pool. No incident. No issue."
For the Burris family, though, the successful effort had an unhappy postscript. The lawyer, an African-American, never showed up in Centralia and disappeared with the retainer. "If we, as a race of people, are going to get anywhere in this society, we've got to have lawyers and elected officials who are responsible and responsive—that's what my dad said, and it resonated with me," Burris told me. "I was never in any serious trouble, but I'd beat up on people. I was a tough little kid. And I changed my whole attitude. Went back to high school my junior year. I took one of my brother's suits that he had left home from college, got one of my dad's white shirts, 'cause I didn't have a tie, and I went to school my junior year dressed up. I made myself two goals. One, I want to be a lawyer. Number two, I want to be a statewide elected official of Illinois."
Not everyone might have drawn these particular lessons from the events at the Centralia pool, but Burris has hewed with remarkable precision to his teen-age ambitions. He attended Southern Illinois University and, during his year in Hamburg, lived in a dormitory with students from thirty countries. "And, of course, I was elected president of the dormitory," Burris told me. "After meeting all the other people, you recognize the leadership skills. That's when I really knew." He obtained a law degree from Howard University, in Washington, D.C., then moved to Chicago, where he worked as a bank examiner, travelling around the Midwest, evaluating the soundness of small financial institutions. Around this time, Burris married, and he and his wife, Berlean—now a retired university administrator—moved to Chatham, a middle-class black neighborhood on the South Side. With the first of his goals behind him, Burris set to work on the second: his political career.
Jesse Jackson, who is four years younger than Burris, also moved to Chicago in the early sixties. Jackson had recently graduated from North Carolina A. & T. State University, where, as a civil-rights activist leading lunch-counter sit-ins, he earned the attention of the state's governor, Terry Sanford. Jackson planned to attend seminary in Chicago, but he also needed a job, so Sanford wrote a letter of introduction for him to the city's mayor, Richard J. Daley. Daley offered Jackson a job as a toll collector (which Jackson declined), and invited him to join the Democratic organization on the South Side. "He sent me out to Fifth Ward, which is a ward that is heavily black," Jackson told me recently. "The constituency there was blacks who worked for the organization."
Daley was at the peak of his power as the boss of the city's Democratic machine. The key to his control of Cook County was his ability to give or withhold jobs—from street-cleaner to member of Congress. Those who supported Daley's Democratic organization with their votes and labor were rewarded; those who did not were punished. "There was so much fear," Jackson told me, as we sat in the converted Chicago synagogue that has been his base of operations for forty years. "Every city official was in the machine. And so if you wanted to be a policeman or a fireman or a principal, you had to be blessed by the machine. If ministers challenged that machine in their pulpits on Sunday, you had building inspectors at the church on Monday, to check out the church—fire escapes, all that stuff."
On the South Side, and in other neighborhoods with large African-American populations, Daley contracted much of his patronage operation to what was known as the "submachine," a group of compliant black politicians, led by Congressman William Dawson. Even though Dawson made sure that blacks received a share of government jobs, Jackson and others in the nascent civil-rights movement noted that the submachine had no interest in challenging Daley on broader issues, like fair housing and school integration. When Jackson started attending Democratic Party meetings, he said, "I began to raise certain questions."
So, in 1967, did a young Harvard Law School graduate and Korean War veteran named William Cousins, Jr. "I was an independent Democrat," Cousins told me. "I was never affiliated with the regular Democratic organization, which we call the machine." Even though Cousins's neighborhood on the South Side was largely African-American, there were no blacks in positions of political leadership. Cousins decided to run for alderman—the Chicago term for a member of the City Council. "I asked Roland if he would serve as my campaign chairman, even though he had never before been actively involved in politics," Cousins said. "But he had served on a neighborhood conservation committee, to see that repairs were being made on our infrastructure, and I was impressed with him." At the time, the district included much of Chatham, the neighborhood where Burris still lives, in a home once owned by the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.
In those days, Burris displayed the energy and enterprise that are indispensable for a political career. By 1967, the year Cousins ran for alderman, Burris had become the first black vice-president at Continental Illinois National Bank, in Chicago. "I was very active in all types of community groups," he told me. "Like the Avalon Park Community Council. That's where I met Bill Cousins. We were trying to fight City Hall about the broken curbs, the potholes, and the torn-up sidewalks. And so I did a report, about every pothole in that section, every broken curb in that section, all bad sidewalks." City Hall responded. "Within six or seven months, they began to repair those broken streets and sidewalks and curbs," Burris said. "And that kind of impressed Cousins." With Burris's help, Cousins won his race for alderman. (Cousins went on to become a widely admired Illinois judge.)
In 1968, emboldened by Cousins's success, Burris decided to run for state representative, but lost to a machine-backed candidate. Four years later, an executive with Montgomery Ward named Dan Walker mounted an independent Democratic bid for governor of Illinois, and Burris signed on to help. Walker won a surprise victory, and Burris joined his staff as a director of Central Management Services, a major administrative job. When Walker ran for reëlection, in 1976, Burris decided to run for comptroller, a statewide post. But Mayor Daley, who despised Walker, put together a slate of candidates to run against the Governor and his team, and Walker and Burris were swamped in the 1976 primaries. (Walker later went to prison for his role in a savings-and-loan scam that took place after his term as governor.)
Jesse Jackson hired Burris as the executive director of his civil-rights organization, then known as Operation PUSH. "As this black thing kept growing, a guy like Burris ends up on the ticket as a civil but nonthreatening guy," Jackson told me. "He was a black in Dan Walker's cabinet. And when it was over, he didn't have a job. Other campaign members had jobs and consultancies and this and that. And so our board hired Roland. One, because he was competent. Two, because, for our own movement credibility, to have a guy like Roland as the chief operating officer in some sense made it easier to get support." Burris worked for Jackson for less than a year. "It didn't last very long, because he moved on to his political work," Jackson said. "He served us well, and it was a kind of mutually beneficial deal. There was nothing acrimonious about it. And Burris knows how to talk to white people and black people. He is not seen as a marcher, a protester, one who will scale walls."
Because of a quirk in the law, the result of a change to the state constitution, the comptroller job became open again just two years later, in 1978, when the incumbent decided to run for a different post. This election was a turning point for Burris. He had given up banking for politics, yet he had never won a race. "I talk to my wife, and I say, 'You know, honey, I want to try to go for comptroller,' " he recalled. "And she was saying, 'No, you lost,' and this other stuff. My wife looked at me one day and said, 'I'll tell you what. The only way that I can support you running for comptroller again is that you run with the Party's endorsement.' That threw down the gauntlet." Burris met with Eugene Sawyer, a Daley stalwart and an African-American, who later served briefly as Chicago's mayor.
"We'd see each other on occasion, and we'd chat, and Gene said, 'You oughta think about joining us.' And so I said, 'No, I'm going to keep my independent stripe,' " Burris recalled. But after the conversation with his wife, Burris went to Sawyer with a different message. "I walked into Gene Sawyer's office in July of 1977," Burris said. "Made an appointment with him, walked in. 'Yeah, Roland, what do you want?' 'Well, Alderman'—he was alderman then, Sixth Ward—'I'd like to join your organization. What do you do?' 'You're in!' 'What does it cost me?' And he says nothing. And he looks at me and says, 'What do you want to do?' I said, 'Well, I want to run for state comptroller.' Gene Sawyer looked at me and said"—Burris rapped his knuckles on the table—" 'Fine! Let's do it, Roland.' Just like that! He says, 'I'd always wanted you to come on around.' "
The Daley machine chose its slate of candidates at meetings of the state central committee of the Democratic Party. Daley's supporters dominated the proceedings, but now and then a few reformers also won election as committeemen and so were allowed to attend, if not influence, the slating meetings. Alan Dobry, who was a veteran of Chicago reform politics, attended the state committee meeting in 1977. "Roland was trying to get put up for Illinois comptroller," Dobry recalled. "When he got up and spoke to the central committee, the first thing they said to him was 'You started out as Bill Cousins's campaign manager, what about that?' But Roland assured everyone that he wasn't an independent like Bill Cousins anymore, and was now a faithful member of the machine. Then they asked where does his committeeman stand on this? Gene Sawyer got up and said, 'Roland is not an independent; he is a faithful member of the Sixth Ward Democratic Party organization.' " (One of the first people Burris hired to his staff as a U.S. senator was Sawyer's nephew.)
And so, with the machine's help, Burris realized the second of his career ambitions, by winning the statewide race for comptroller in 1978. The job has few major responsibilities, aside from auditing various branches of state government, and Burris began planning a run for higher office. He lost a Democratic primary for the Senate to Paul Simon in 1984 and served three terms as comptroller, until 1991. When the state's attorney general ran for governor in 1990, Burris got the Democratic nomination for attorney general, again with machine support. He won the election, and critics saw his pact with the machine as a sign that he had put his ambition ahead of his values. "He would do what he was told, and stay out of trouble," Dobry said. "Nobody took him seriously. Every time he got one of these state jobs, he took care of the machine in his patronage. The machine always liked having one of their own as attorney general." According to Bernard Stone, a longtime Chicago alderman, Burris is "a very personable guy, and he never had the reputation of having his hand out. He was always a go-along guy. When he's run with Party backing, he's won; when he ran against the Party, he lost. It's as simple as that."
Burris did institute several reforms as attorney general. "He started a women's-advocacy division, the first one in an attorney general's office, using government resources to promote gender equality," Diane Rosenfeld, who was a top aide to Burris at the time and now teaches at Harvard Law School, told me. "We focussed on violence against women, and trained state's attorneys on prosecuting these cases." Burris also made efforts to tighten environmental laws, though he was generally stymied by the Republican-dominated legislature in Springfield. Certainly the job allowed Burris to indulge his temperamental aversion to controversy, except on the one occasion when controversy found him.
On February 25, 1983, Jeanine Nicarico, a ten-year-old who lived with her family in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, stayed home from school because she was sick. When her older sisters came home that afternoon, Jeanine was gone. Two days later, after a widely publicized search, her body was found in a gully not far from her home. She had been raped and beaten to death. In 1985, after an investigation led by the DuPage County state's attorney's office, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, young men who lived in a neighboring town and had minor criminal records, were tried and convicted of Jeanine's murder, and sentenced to be executed.
The attorney general of Illinois is required by law to represent the government in all appeals of death sentences. The Nicarico case already had a tangled legal history by the time Burris took it over. Despite great public pressure on authorities to solve the murder, there had been no arrests for more than a year. Eventually, though, Cruz and Hernandez were charged; the case against them was based largely on vague but incriminating statements made by Hernandez. In 1988, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed their convictions, on the ground that they should have been tried separately. Cruz was tried again in 1990 and again convicted and sentenced to death. The appeal reached Burris's office in 1991. (A second trial of Hernandez ended in a hung jury; a third ended in a conviction and an eighty-year prison sentence.)
Burris had been on the job for less than a year, but it was an open secret that he planned soon to run for governor. Democrats, especially African-Americans, are often challenged to prove their tough-on-crime bona fides to voters, and the Cruz appeal offered Burris a chance to make his mark in a high-profile case.
The assignment to write the government's brief went to a young prosecutor, Mary Brigid Kenney. "It was a famous case," the lawyer, now Mary Brigid Hayes, told me. "I went through the record, taking everything in the defendant's brief with a grain of salt, but I saw the trial was just replete with errors. I reached the conclusion that I could not in good conscience argue that any error was harmless and this man should be executed." Two years after Jeanine Nicarico was murdered, a man named Brian Dugan had been arrested and had pleaded guilty to killing a child in a town near Naperville. In the course of negotiations to avoid the death penalty, Dugan confessed to other crimes, including Nicarico's murder. During Cruz's second trial, his lawyers had been allowed to mention Dugan's confession to the jury, but the trial judge prohibited the defense from putting forward much other evidence that Dugan might be the actual killer. "Most of the evidence that corroborated Brian Dugan's confession did not get to the jury," Hayes said.
In a memorandum to Burris on February 14, 1992, Hayes wrote, "After thorough examination of the record, I have concluded that I cannot, in good conscience, ask the Illinois Supreme Court to affirm the conviction." She was convinced that Dugan was the murderer and that Burris's office should "confess error"—the legal term used by a prosecutor to acknowledge a miscarriage of justice. Hayes didn't hear back from Burris, but she tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade his top aides of her position. Finally, on March 5, 1992, Hayes resigned. "My ethical responsibilities as an officer of the court compel me to take this action because I cannot sit idly as this Office continues to pursue the unjust prosecution and execution of Rolando Cruz," she wrote to Burris, concluding, "I too, beg of you, General Burris, please begin mitigating the damages of this ugly prosecution. Do not help execute an innocent man."
Hayes's letter was leaked to the media, and Burris called a press conference to respond to her charges. "A jury has found this individual guilty and given him the death penalty," Burris said at the time. "It is my role to see that it is upheld. That's my job." Burris's subordinates continued to press for Cruz's execution. As Thomas Frisbie and Randy Garrett recount in "Victims of Justice Revisited," their 2005 book about the murder, the new prosecutor assigned by Burris to the case concluded his oral argument to the Illinois Supreme Court with the words, "Set a date certain for the execution of Rolando Cruz." The court voted four to three to affirm the conviction and the death sentence.
Cruz's lawyers, led by Lawrence Marshall, then a law professor at Northwestern University, continued to fight the execution. In 1995, DNA tests excluded Cruz as a source of semen found on Nicarico's body and implicated Dugan. After a third trial and eleven years in prison, most of them on death row, Cruz was released, as was Hernandez. (Later this year, Dugan will stand trial for Nicarico's murder.) In 2000, Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in Illinois, and three years later, just before leaving office, he commuted the sentences of all inmates on death row to life in prison or less, and pardoned Cruz. Ryan has cited the Cruz case as a major factor in changing his thinking about the death penalty. (Ryan is now in federal prison, after being convicted of crimes that took place when he was Illinois's secretary of state, before his term as governor.)
Burris offered no apology for seeking to execute an innocent man, but faulted Mary Brigid Hayes for her behavior. "She was given the authority by the appellate officer to work up the brief for appeal to uphold the jury conviction," Burris told me. "And then she reads this brief, evidently, and says this person is innocent. Well, that's not for a lawyer to decide." He went on, "She was overridden by my staff people, because I wasn't even in this. And they filed the brief, and she got upset and said that she couldn't talk to me and resigned. So that's the gist of the story. That's it."
In 1994, Burris began his run for governor as the favorite for the Democratic nomination. Burris and Richard Phelan, one of the two other candidates, both laid claim to support from the Chicago machine, but by this time its power was much reduced, especially in statewide races. The third contender, Dawn Clark Netsch, came from behind to win, but she, in turn, was routed in the general election against the Republican incumbent, Jim Edgar.
Within months of losing the primary, Burris, determined to return to office, began running for mayor of Chicago as an Independent. The incumbent, Richard M. Daley, defeated him, sixty per cent to thirty-six per cent. Burris opened a law and lobbying practice, working with his son, Roland, Jr.—he also has a daughter, Rolanda, a university administrator—but he continued to pursue elected office. In 1998, he ran for governor again and received thirty per cent of the vote in the Democratic primary. Four years later, Burris ran for governor a third time, finishing third in the primary, behind the eventual winner of the general election, Rod Blagojevich.
There were no hard feelings between the two men. "Roland was the attorney general when I was a brand-new state legislator," Blagojevich told me when he visited New York recently. "I sat on the Judiciary Committee in the House, and he testified in front of us a few times. He seemed like a very nice man, honorable guy. He spoke German. That impressed me." To anyone who had followed Burris's career, it was not surprising that once Obama appeared likely to win the 2008 Presidential race, Burris would declare his interest in filling out Obama's Senate term.
At the heart of the current controversy around Burris is what he did to persuade Blagojevich to appoint him to Obama's seat. (Burris declined to discuss this subject.) Blagojevich told me that he thought of the selection process as having occurred in two phases—before and after his arrest, on December 9, 2008. "He was not in the first tier of options that I was considering in Round One," Blagojevich said. Based on the information in the federal complaint against the Governor, it seems that the likely leading candidates in Round One included Jesse Jackson, Jr., the Illinois congressman; and Valerie Jarrett, a close adviser to Obama. But Blagojevich's arrest radically altered the political calculus surrounding the appointment.
At a press conference on December 9th, Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney who brought the case against Blagojevich, implied that he arrested the Governor to stop him from appointing someone to the Senate seat. "Governor Blagojevich has been arrested in the middle of what we can only describe as a political-corruption crime spree," Fitzgerald said. "We acted to stop that crime spree." In a remark captured by a government bug, Blagojevich had said to an adviser, of Obama's seat, "I've got this thing and it's fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I'm just not giving it up for fuckin' nothing."
After Blagojevich's arrest, it was widely assumed that even though he was still governor, he would not have the nerve to make an appointment to the Senate, and, in any event, such thinking went, no one would accept the job from such a tarnished figure. Perhaps Blagojevich wanted to mock the political establishment, or hoped to ingratiate himself with a diverse jury pool. He has said that he made the appointment simply to insure that Illinois was represented by two senators, and he told me, "There was a preference for an African-American for this seat." Clearly, the universe of possible candidates shrank dramatically after December 9th. But Blagojevich's arrest proved to be Burris's big chance. The Governor sent one of his criminal-defense attorneys—an unusual emissary—to ask Burris, who had not figured prominently in his earlier considerations, whether he was interested.
The conversation occurred on Sunday, December 28, 2008. "The lawyer told me that Roland had asked that I call him directly and make the offer," Blagojevich told me. "I was watching the Cowboys and Eagles fighting for the last playoff spot. I called him at four o'clock to offer the seat." Burris accepted. Every Democrat in the Senate signed a letter asking Burris to refuse the appointment.
Blagojevich introduced Burris as the new senator at a news conference on December 30th. The main drama of that occasion was supplied by Bobby Rush, a veteran Illinois congressman and former Black Panther, who stepped to the podium to support Burris. Rush asked the reporters not to "hang or lynch" the man who would now be the only African-American in the Senate. Rush's invocation of race stilled the ardor of Senate Democrats hoping to fight Burris's appointment. "My colleague from Illinois, Congressman Bobby Rush, made strong statements along those lines," Senator Dick Durbin said. "They were painful and hurtful, and it became part of this calculation."
Illinois legislators still wanted to question Burris about his appointment, and he was called to Springfield to provide sworn testimony on January 8th. The main issue in the hearing was whether Burris had made a deal with Blagojevich to win the appointment. In the key exchange of the day, State Representative Jim Durkin asked Burris, "Did you speak to anybody who was on the Governor's staff prior to the Governor's arrest, or anybody—any of those individuals or anybody who is closely related to the Governor?" Burris answered, "I recall having a meeting with Lon Monk about my partner and I trying to get continued business, and I did bring it up—it must have been in September or maybe it was in July of '08—that, you know, you're close to the Governor, let him know that I am certainly interested in the seat." (Monk is a former chief of staff to Blagojevich.)
Soon it emerged that Burris had submitted an affidavit to the legislature stating that "there was not any contact between myself or any of my representatives with Governor Blagojevich or any of his representatives regarding my appointment to the United States Senate." This appeared to contradict his acknowledgment of contact with Monk, and at a press conference in mid-February Burris revealed that he had filed another affidavit stating that in October he had been asked by Rob Blagojevich, the Governor's brother, to help raise money for the Governor. During that conversation, Burris stated, he had inquired about the possible selection of a successor to Obama. (He explained that he had filed the affidavit voluntarily, after realizing that his testimony was incomplete.) Worst of all, Burris subsequently admitted that he had tried, unsuccessfully, to help raise funds for the Governor while he was seeking the appointment. (His second affidavit notes a later conversation with Rob Blagojevich in which Burris said that he could not raise money for the Governor, because it could be seen as an attempt to influence the selection.) During his appearance at Chicago's City Club, on February 18th, one questioner asked Burris, "Was it wrong of you to solicit funds for Rod Blagojevich at the same time he was considering you for the Senate?" Burris answered, "I was never considered for the Senate," an assertion that was met with murmurs of incredulity.
Throughout February, ongoing revelations of apparent contradictions in Burris's story prompted calls for him to resign. Burris responded with typical displays of his stolid good nature. "I'm from Centralia, you all know me, O.K.?" he said at the City Club. "You all know Roland Burris. But I have a history with you, a record that I have built over a lifetime. Thirty years in public life and never a hint of scandal." Burris does not appear to be in great jeopardy of criminal prosecution. His answers may have been misleading, but not clearly false. (For example, he implied but did not state under oath that Lon Monk was the only person closely related to the Governor with whom he talked about the Senate appointment.) In any event, given the current economic environment, the Senate has more pressing matters to address than Burris's fate. In recent weeks, a consensus seems to be forming that Burris will serve out Obama's term, but will not run for another in 2010. Burris probably couldn't win anyway, and he has now attained the goal that appears to mean most to him—adding United States senator to his list of achievements.
One of the responsibilities of the Illinois state comptroller is to regulate cemeteries. During Burris's tenure in the job, he helped pass a law regarding so-called "pre-need," a practice that allows advance purchasers of burial plots to pay for their final resting places in multiple installments. At his law practice, Burris helped clients prepare wills and plan for burials. "I'm an estate planner," he told me. "So I'm up here telling people you should do pre-need, right? Well, how could I tell you to take care of your estate and I don't have mine together? So, we then start shopping, the wife and I, for how we're going to do this. And we came across Oak Woods Cemetery"—one of Chicago's oldest burial grounds, located on the South Side.
Burris chose a design that is unlike any of the other hundred or so mausoleums on Oak Woods's hundred and eighty-three acres. The structure is built of Barre granite, includes two columns and three tablets, and towers over the modest marker on the grave of Jesse Owens, which is a few steps away, next to the Lake of Memories. One hundred and fourteen words are carved into the stone, listing Burris's accomplishments, several of them obscure. It notes that he was the first nonaccountant to serve on the board of directors of the Illinois C.P.A. Society, and that he was the first African-American on the board of trustees of the Financial Accounting Foundation. There is room to add his service in the Senate.
Burris told me that it was the cemetery's managers who persuaded him to build the mausoleum. "It was their insistence," he said. " 'Because this is not so much for you, Roland.' And I didn't even think about people thinking about my ego. This is for young people who can see a person who had accomplishments." ♦


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I can see Monster scratching their (many) heads in the board room, wondering how to appeal to women after too many Dr Dre headphones. "I know!" (shouted Noel Lee), "butterflies! They all like butterflies!" I must have a penis then.
They've actually teamed up with the fashion designer Vivienne Tam, who's busy lending her name to any tech company that'll have it. The Butterfly headphones have a "light gold-brushed finish" and "colorful butterfly images on the earpieces." They come with a matching carry case, which might go some way to explaining how they can charge $199.95 for them—50 bucks more than the similar Dr Dre ones. [Press release via ChipChick]


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- Hong Kong (China)
Hong Kong with a plethora of tourist attractions such as Victoria Harbor, The Peak, Giant Buddha, Disneyland, Ocean Park, Avenue Of Stars and Victoria Bay is regarded as one of the top tourist destination within the Asian Continent. The mixed-bag of sightseeing attractions ranging from towering skyscrapers to elevated mountains to lush green landscapes to heritages places makes Hong Kong an ideal tourist destination. Numerous religious places followed by horse racing courses, great museums and World-class theme parks provide many more reasons to visit Hong Kong.
The Peak offering stunning views of the city, mountains and harbor is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Hong Kong. Besides this, other major tourist places of interest in Hong Kong include Aberdeen, Causeway Bay, Golden Bauhinia Square, Government House, Happy Valley, Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defense, Lan Kwai Fong, Madame Tussauds Hong Kong, Repulse Bay, Stanley and Wan Chai.
According to Emporis, there are 1,223 skyscrapers in Hong Kong, which puts the city at the top of world rankings. It has more buildings higher than 500 ft (or 150m) than any other city. The high density and tall skyline of Hong Kong's urban area is due to a lack of available sprawl space, with the average distance from the harbour front to the steep hills of Hong Kong Island at 1.3 km (0.81 mi), much of it reclaimed land. This lack of space causes demand for dense, high-rise offices and housing. Thirty-six of the world's 100 tallest residential buildings are in Hong Kong. More people in Hong Kong live or work above the 14th floor than anywhere else on Earth, making it the world's most vertical city.
Hong Kong's transportation network is highly developed. Over 90% of daily travels (11 million) are on public transport, the highest such percentage in the world. Payment can be made using the Octopus card, a stored value system introduced by the Mass Transit Railway (MTR), which is widely accepted on railways, buses and ferries, and accepted like cash at other outlets.
The city's main railway company (KCRC) was merged with MTR in 2007, creating a comprehensive rail network for the whole territory (also called MTR). This MTR rapid transit system has 152 stations, which serve 3.4 million people a day. Hong Kong Tramways, which has served the territory since 1904, covers the northern parts of Hong Kong Island.
Bus Service
Hong Kong's bus service is franchised and run by private operators. Five privately owned companies provide franchised bus service across the territory, together operating more than 700 routes. The two largest, Kowloon Motor Bus provides 402 routes in Kowloon and New Territories; Citybus operates 154 routes on Hong Kong Island; both run cross-harbour services. Double-decker buses were introduced to Hong Kong in 1949, and are now almost exclusively used; single-decker buses remain in use for routes with lower demand or roads with lower load capacity. Public light buses serve most parts of Hong Kong, particularly areas where standard bus lines cannot reach or do not reach as frequently, quickly, or directly.
The Star Ferry service, founded in 1888, operates four lines across Victoria Harbour and provides scenic views of Hong Kong's skyline for its 53,000 daily passengers. It acquired iconic status following its use as a setting on The World of Suzie Wong. Travel writer Ryan Levitt considered the main Tsim Sha Tsui to Central crossing one of the most picturesque in the world. Other ferry services are provided by operators serving Outlying Islands, new towns, Macau, and cities in mainland China. Hong Kong is famous for its junks traversing the harbour, and small kai-to ferries that serve remote coastal settlements. The Port of Hong Kong is a busy deepwater port, specialising in container shipping.
Hong Kong Island's steep, hilly terrain was initially served by sedan chairs. The Peak Tram, the first public transport system in Hong Kong, has provided vertical rail transport between Central and Victoria Peak since 1888. In Central and Western district, there is an extensive system of escalators and moving pavements, including the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world, the Mid-Levels escalator.
Hong Kong International Airport is a leading air passenger gateway and logistics hub in Asia and one of the world's busiest airports in terms of international passenger and cargo movement, serving more than 47 million passengers and handling 3.74 million tonnes (4.12 million tons) of cargo in 2007. It replaced the overcrowded Kai Tak Airport in Kowloon in 1998, and has been rated as the world's best airport in a number of surveys. Over 85 airlines operate at the two-terminal airport and it is the primary hub of Cathay Pacific, Dragonair, Air Hong Kong, Hong Kong Airlines, and Hong Kong Express.
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January 12 marks the one year anniversary of the 7.2 magnitude earthquake which devastated this fragile Caribbean country resulting in 230,000 deaths, the loss of more than 200,000 homes and the displacement of 1.2 million people. The images of destruction, human suffering and despair generated world-wide attention and an outpouring of sympathy as well as charitable gifts from national governments, individuals, religious groups and corporations. The response from Deutsche Bank, and its employees, was immediate and profound. The Bank's Global Equity Markets group raised USD 4m for Haiti though a day's trading with client support and when combined with employee donations and matching gifts, the total committed by Deutsche Bank reached USD 5.8m, making it one of the world's largest donors in response to the crises.
Recognizing the enormity of the human suffering brought about by the earthquake and its 52 aftershocks, the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation quickly deployed the majority of these funds to capable nonprofit organizations with a history of working in Haiti and who were equipped to provide immediate humanitarian relief to address medical emergencies, disease control, personal safety, and reliable access to food and water. Deliberate efforts were made to ensure aid reached the most vulnerable populations including orphaned children, the elderly and isolated communities. Notable organizations supported include Partners in Health, Oxfam America, Doctors without Borders, UNICEF, Save the Children, Project MediShare and HelpAge.
The enormity of the calamity, estimated at USD 14bn in destruction, would be a devastating burden for any country. For Haiti, with extremely limited government capabilities and with an economy largely dependent upon aid and remittances from nationals living abroad, recovering from the earthquake would, indeed, be a history defining moment. Deutsche Bank recognized that its own contribution to Haiti would be most meaningful if it participated in a longer term rebuilding challenge, committed to deploy its remaining resources for specific projects that might signal a new way for Haiti to address its enduring problems. A strategy was defined to focus efforts on housing development and opportunities to create jobs and income for residents.
'Our approach has been to leverage our private sector capabilities and relationships to forge and participate in partnerships that hold promise in defining a new path for a more sustainable Haiti while addressing the overwhelming fundamental human needs brought about by the earthquake," said Gary Hattem, President Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation. This strategy has led to funding of efforts to grow the capacity of the artisans sector to increase exports to the US, and Europe as a source of family income for crafts people; the re-capitalization of microfinance institutions whose portfolios were hard hit with losses due to the death of clients; and the seeding of new models of housing, both permanent and interim that could withstand future weather calamities, rely on local materials for their fabrication and utilize local Haitian labor in their production.
Deutsche Bank has also committed itself to the creation of an Exemplar Community where new forms of housing ownership, village governance, energy production, community facilities, schools and employment opportunities could be advanced for 120 families. The Exemplar is being undertaken through a collaborative effort with Digicel, a Deutsche Bank client and a local cell phone provider, The William J. Clinton Foundation, John McAslan Partner Architects and the OneXOne Foundation. Deutsche Bank's commitment to this place based strategy includes the efforts of the Bank's Mortgage IT group which is helping to advice in how a mortgage scheme might provide further leverage for donor dollars while creating long term assets for residents. At year-end, Deutsche Bank has selected, through a national competition of top universities, a team of planners, architects, economists and human rights experts from Harvard and MIT to advise in the continued development of the Exemplar. Additionally, a group of prominent Haitians have been enlisted to serve as the project's stewardship group with the intent this role gets passed on to the ultimate residents of the settlement.
"The circumstances of Haiti are sobering. Everyone at Deutsche Bank can; however, take pride in knowing that our funds have made a meaningful difference in bringing solace and care to those most fragile. Our commitment to help in the longer term rebuilding challenge will hopefully leave a lasting legacy of Deutsche Bank's concern and hopes for the people of Haiti," said Hattem.
For more information on the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, click here.