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The jungle outpost of Lago Agrio is in northeastern Ecuador, where the elevation plummets from the serrated ridge of the Andes to the swampy lowlands of the Amazon Basin. Ecuadorans call the region the Oriente. For centuries, the rain forest was inhabited only by indigenous tribes. But, in 1967, American drillers working for Texaco discovered that two miles beneath the jungle floor lay abundant reserves of crude oil. For twenty-three years, a consortium of companies, led by Texaco, drilled wells throughout the Ecuadoran Amazon. Initially, the jungle was so impenetrable that the consortium had to fly in equipment by helicopter. But laborers hacked paths with machetes, and, eventually, Texaco paved roads and built an airport.
Today, Lago Agrio feels squalid. The buildings look thrown together, as if no one had believed that the boom might last. Stray dogs prowl the dusty streets, and a slender oil pipeline snakes alongside each major road, elevated on stilts, waist high, like an endless bannister. The Colombian border is ten miles to the north, and drug traffickers and paramilitaries have infested the Oriente, as have sicarios—paid assassins—who post ads online and charge as little as twenty dollars. In 2010, in a single month, the bodies of thirty murder victims were found along a stretch of road near the border.
One day last February, a judge in Lago Agrio, presiding over a spare, concrete courtroom in a shopping mall on the edge of town, issued an opinion that reverberated far beyond the Amazon. Since 1993, a group of Ecuadorans had been pursuing an apparently fruitless legal struggle to hold Texaco responsible for environmental destruction in the Oriente. During the decades when Texaco operated there, the lawsuit maintained, it dumped eighteen billion gallons of toxic waste. When the company ceased operations in Ecuador, in 1992, it allegedly left behind hundreds of open pits full of malignant black sludge. The harm done by Texaco, the plaintiffs contended, could be measured in cancer deaths, miscarriages, birth defects, dead livestock, sick fish, and the near-extinction of several tribes; Texaco's legacy in the region amounted to a "rain-forest Chernobyl."
By the time the judge, Nicolás Zambrano, issued his decision, the case had been going on for eighteen years. It had outlasted jurists on two continents. Zambrano was the sixth judge to preside in Ecuador; one federal judge in New York had died before he could rule on the case. The litigation even outlasted Texaco: in 2001, the company was subsumed by Chevron, which inherited the lawsuit. The dispute is now considered one of the nastiest legal contests in memory, a spectacle almost as ugly as the pollution that prompted it.
Chevron, which operates in more than a hundred countries, is America's third-largest corporation. Its annual revenue, which often tops two hundred billion dollars, is nearly four times as much as Ecuador's economic output. The plaintiffs, who named themselves the afectados—the affected ones—included indigenous people and uneducated settlers in the Oriente; some of them initially signed documents in the case with a fingerprint. They were represented by a fractious coalition of American and Ecuadoran lawyers, most of whom were working for contingency fees. An environmental lawsuit against a major corporation can resemble a war of attrition, and in 1993 few observers would have predicted that the plaintiffs could endure as long as they did. But, on February 14, 2011, their persistence was rewarded. Judge Zambrano ruled that Chevron was responsible for vast contamination, and ordered it to pay eighteen billion dollars in damages—the largest judgment ever awarded in an environmental lawsuit.
It was an extraordinary triumph, particularly for one of the plaintiffs' lead lawyers, a tenacious American named Steven Donziger, who had been a key figure in the case since its inception. Donziger speaks Spanish, and for years has shuttled between Ecuador and New York. "This trial is historic," he has said. "This is the first time that a small developing country has had power over a multinational American company."
Chevron categorically denies the charges made in the lawsuit, insisting that it bears no responsibility for pollution in the Amazon and that Texaco's operations were "completely in line with the standards of the day." A Chevron spokesman told me that "there is no corroborating evidence" of adverse health effects related to oil development in the Oriente, and blamed "trial lawyers" for "perpetuating false information."
In recent years, Chevron has invested millions of dollars in remolding its public image. Elegant television commercials, narrated by the actor Campbell Scott, emphasize that the company aims to "practice and espouse conservation." A print advertisement features a photograph of two smiling African women, and the caption "Oil Companies Should Support the Communities They're a Part Of." This fall, at a breakfast discussion on "Business and Human Rights," in New York, Chevron's manager for global issues, Silvia Garrigo, said that the company makes "social investments" wherever it operates, noting, "We're in countries for the long haul."
In the courtroom, however, Chevron has been far less conciliatory. Not long ago, after the company successfully defeated a lawsuit seeking to hold it responsible for the shooting deaths of protesters on an offshore oil platform in Nigeria, it tried to compel the impoverished Nigerian plaintiffs, some of whom were widows or children, to reimburse its attorneys' fees. (No fees were awarded, and a judge admonished Chevron for trying.) "That's how they litigate," Bert Voorhees, one of the Nigerians' lawyers, told me. "The point is to scare off the next community that might try to assert its human rights."
Chevron has been especially defiant in the face of the Lago Agrio accusations, which its lawyers have labelled "a shakedown." In addition to defending itself in Ecuador, it has fought the case in more than a dozen U.S. federal courts, hiring hundreds of lawyers and producing what its own attorneys have called "an avalanche of paper." Donziger has maintained that Chevron is motivated not merely by fear of an adverse judgment but by a desire "to destroy the very idea that indigenous people can bring an environmental lawsuit against an oil company." In 2008, a Chevron lobbyist in Washington told Newsweek, "We can't let little countries screw around with big companies like this." One Chevron spokesman has said, "We're going to fight this until Hell freezes over—and then we'll fight it out on the ice."
When the verdict was issued in Lago Agrio, Chevron declared the judgment to be "illegitimate and unenforceable," and said that the company, which has no assets in Ecuador, would not pay. Instead, it countered with an audacious move—suing Steven Donziger, the architect of the suit against it. At the very moment that Donziger might have been celebrating a landmark victory in Ecuador, he found himself facing charges of extortion and fraud in New York.
When Donziger is not in Ecuador, he works out of the paper-strewn kitchen of a two-bedroom apartment that he shares with his wife and young son, on the Upper West Side. But Donziger also does a lot of business in restaurants. He will set up shop over lunch at the Ocean Grill, opposite the Museum of Natural History, and work his phone until all the other patrons have left. Wherever he goes, a MacBook Air is tucked under his arm.
If discretion is a signature imperative of the legal profession, Donziger is a rather unorthodox lawyer. He is a compulsive talker, his incessant conversational stream tracking the course of his volatile emotions. Roused by his own orations, he often crescendos, suddenly, into a shout. At six feet four, with big facial features, close-cropped charcoal-gray hair, and enormous hands, Donziger is a formidable physical presence. Friends from Harvard Law School refer to him as "Big Steve." He played basketball at Harvard with Barack Obama, another member of the Class of 1991. Since then, Donziger has devoted his career to a single case.
Shortly after Donziger graduated from law school, a Massachusetts attorney named Cristóbal Bonifaz began considering a lawsuit against Texaco. Bonifaz was a courtly émigré from a prominent Ecuadoran family. (His grandfather had served, briefly, as President.) In April, 1993, after learning about the environmental damage in the Oriente from an Oxfam report, he assembled a team of lawyers, doctors, and specialists from the Harvard School of Public Health for a reconnaissance trip to the Amazon. Bonifaz invited Donziger, a family friend, to join the expedition.
When Texaco struck oil in Ecuador, the country was unstable and impoverished; its chief export was bananas. As Judith Kimerling, the author of the book "Amazon Crude," has written, the "first barrel" of Ecuadoran oil was paraded through the streets of Quito. In 1972, when Texaco completed construction of a pipeline to funnel oil to the Pacific coast, Ecuador instantly became the second-largest oil exporter in Latin America, after Venezuela. Within a decade, per-capita G.D.P. had nearly doubled.
One challenge of drilling oil wells is what to do with "produced water"—a malodorous liquid, fortified with heavy metals, that comes mingled with the oil that is pumped out of the ground. In the United States, it is standard practice, once the oil has been isolated from this mixture, to "reinject" the produced water, pumping it deep underground into dedicated wells, in order to prevent damage to the local habitat. But reinjection is expensive, and in Ecuador Texaco simply dumped the liquid into swimming-pool-size pits. Produced water does not biodegrade, and when Donziger and his colleagues visited the Oriente they discovered that hundreds of oily pools pockmarked the rain forest.
The government of Ecuador had been aware of Texaco's techniques from the start, and for many years Texaco was in a consortium that included the national oil company. Texaco's practices did not directly violate Ecuadoran law; in fact, the country had no meaningful environmental regulations at the time. Most Ecuadorans knew little about the science of petroleum extraction—and most of what they learned came from Texaco. Lago Agrio was named for Sour Lake, the East Texas town where Texaco was established, and, as the oil camp grew into a boom town, pipeline spills became common. Texaco trucks sprayed roads with oil, to keep down dust. In Quito, I met a woman named Margarita Yépez, who spent eighteen years as a social worker for Texaco. In the early days, she said, gringo oilmen told Lago Agrio locals, in jest, that oil was good for one's health; a coffee can full of crude could cure arthritis or male-pattern baldness—just rub some on the affected area. "They were the authority, so we trusted them," she said. "We were dumb."
Initially, the indigenous tribes were the only Ecuadorans affected by the drilling. And though the oil lay under their native land, they weren't entitled to any of the profits, because the government retained all "subsurface" rights. ("The meek shall inherit the earth," the oilman J. Paul Getty once observed. "But not its mineral rights.") The tribes cut down trees to block Texaco's trucks, and launched attacks on oil workers. In 1987, the bishop from a local Capuchin mission volunteered to reach out to one particularly reclusive tribe, the Tagaeri, who lived on land that another oil company wished to explore. A helicopter deposited the bishop, along with a nun, in Tagaeri territory. When the pilot returned, the next day, he discovered their corpses, pinned to the jungle floor by twenty-one heavy wooden spears.
Such gestures of rebellion proved futile. In the decade after Texaco began paving roads, a hundred thousand Ecuadoran settlers moved to the Oriente, lured by free acreage and the promise of work. They razed the forest to accommodate crop farming, and local tribes were reduced to selling trinkets at the oil camps, or to retreating further into the bush. "It was the absolute destruction of their lives," Miguel Angel Cabodevilla, a Spanish monk who has worked with the tribes for decades, told me.
In November, 1993, Cristóbal Bonifaz filed a class-action lawsuit against Texaco in a federal court in Manhattan, on behalf of thirty thousand afectados. Texaco rejected the allegations, maintaining that it had "operated under sound industry practices and complied with all Ecuadoran laws."
Donziger, initially, was involved less in the legal strategy than in a public-relations campaign against Texaco. Before law school, he had worked in Central America as a journalist, and he was unabashed about using a little stagecraft to dramatize his clients' story. At important court hearings in Manhattan, Donziger presented them to the press in their native beads and war paint. Development had exposed most of the plaintiffs to modern customs, and, after appearing in feathers at a press conference, they often changed into jeans at their hotel, then went shopping in Times Square. But journalists were smitten with the transplanted tribesmen. A Times article bore the headline "JUST TOURISTS ON BROADWAY, BUT BAREFOOT AND CRAVING ROAST MONKEY."
For eight years, Texaco fought to have the lawsuit dismissed, on the ground that it should be tried not in the U.S. but in Ecuador. Donziger and his colleagues feared such a turn: Ecuador's judicial system was notoriously corrupt, and its government relied on oil revenues for a third of its annual budget. "Texaco ran that country for twenty years," Chris Jochnick, a law-school friend of Donziger's who lived in Ecuador at the time and now works for Oxfam America, told me. "They had the U.S. Embassy in their pocket. They had the military. Politically, there was no way that Texaco was going to be held accountable in Ecuador." Texaco denied that Ecuador was incapable of offering a fair trial, insisting that the country's legal norms were "similar to those in many European nations."
In 2001, Texaco prevailed. A federal judge in New York dismissed the case, ruling that it had "everything to do with Ecuador and very little to do with the United States." By that time, Texaco's acquisition by Chevron was under way. In a print advertisement, Donziger and his colleagues warned Chevron shareholders that "Texaco comes with a lot of assets, and one huge liability." But it must have seemed that the lawsuit had run its course. Just before the acquisition, a Chevron spokesman said that the company felt no need to "particularly highlight" the Ecuadoran claims to shareholders.
In 2003, Donziger and his colleagues re-filed their case, in Lago Agrio, despite their misgivings about the Ecuadoran legal system. They recruited a team of Ecuadoran lawyers, and Donziger began making regular trips to the region. Because he was not licensed to practice law in Ecuador, his role was ostensibly an advisory one. But he relished the rigors of litigation in the sweltering Oriente, and, by virtue of his galvanic personality and his repeated visits, he gradually supplanted Bonifaz as the driving force in the case.
Not everyone embraced Donziger's leadership. Esperanza Martínez, who runs Oilwatch Sudamérica, an environmental group in Quito, told me, "I confess, the intense personality that Steve has, it's a struggle for me." Sarah Leah Whitson, a longtime friend of his, who is now at Human Rights Watch, acknowledged that some people are put off by Donziger's stubbornness and his theatricality. But it was precisely these qualities, she said, that enabled him to take on an oil giant: "He's a leader, and the fact is that he's the one who has been with this case for over a decade and has kept it going."
As the lawsuit moved forward in Ecuador, Donziger and his team felt daunted by what seemed like grave disadvantages. In his diary, Donziger lamented that trying to hold oil companies accountable in Ecuador "goes against the flow of the entire economy." The country does not have jury trials, so enormous discretionary power is invested in judges, who, for the most part, are poorly paid civil servants; Donziger worried that they might be susceptible to bribery. In the U.S., lawyers are forbidden to meet with a judge "ex parte," or outside the presence of opposing counsel. But in Ecuador at the time no such rules applied, making it difficult to monitor whether a judge had been subjected to improper influence.
Julio Prieto, a young Ecuadoran lawyer working for the plaintiffs, told me that when he was in law school in Quito "it was always on the table that there's a way things should be, but in practice there's a lot of dirt." I asked him if it was dispiriting to work in such a system. "Have you ever bribed a cop?" he asked. I shook my head. "In Ecuador, everybody does," he said. "But that doesn't mean we don't need cops."
Chevron hired a fleet of local lawyers, who were often accompanied in Lago Agrio by bodyguards. Donziger grew obsessed by the vast power of his adversary. "No matter what I do, they can outmaneuver me with money," he complained. Anytime a new judge or technical expert entered the case, Donziger wondered whether the person was contagiado—corrupted. Members of the plaintiffs' legal team came to believe that they were under surveillance by Chevron agents. After the brother of Pablo Fajardo, the lead Ecuadoran lawyer for the plaintiffs, was murdered near the Colombian border, in 2004, some members of Donziger's team insinuated that Chevron was involved. Donziger worried about his own safety, wondering if he might also "become a victim." (Chevron strenuously denies involvement in the murder, and the plaintiffs have offered no support for this theory.)
The plaintiffs' greatest asset, in Donziger's view, was the incontrovertible evidence of environmental contamination—the disfigured forest, the toxic pits. When journalists visited the Amazon, the plaintiffs ferried them from site to site, in a routine that became known as "the toxic tour." At the same time, Donziger feared that, in the end, the legal outcome might hinge not on the truth but on manipulations of the system.
These concerns intensified in 2006, when Donziger heard accusations that a new judge assigned to the case, Germán Yánez, was, as Donziger put it, "a womanizer" and "a drinker." (Around this time, Yánez was accused of sexually harassing an intern, a charge that he dismissed as politically motivated.) Yánez had "the perfect psychological profile for blackmail and corruption," Donziger thought. Some nights, he glanced up from his laptop and, seeing his face in a mirror, was struck by how much older he looked than he had when the case began. He fretted about what he had come to think of as "the fool's-errand problem."
The law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher is more than a century old and has a thousand attorneys. One day this fall, I visited the firm's New York offices, on the forty-sixth floor of the MetLife Building, to meet Randy Mastro, a fifty-five-year-old partner who, for the past two years, has represented Chevron in the Ecuador case. Mastro, who has peaked eyebrows and unruly white hair, is soft-spoken, but, even by the pugilistic standards of the New York bar, he has a reputation as a merciless litigator. In the courtroom, wearing a conservative suit, with his spectacles perched on the tip of his nose, Mastro springs to life. He bounces on his toes to underscore the obviousness of his logic, and dices the air with his hand, keeping time with his argument, like a rapper. His swagger is transfixing.
As a federal prosecutor, and then as a deputy mayor under Rudolph Giuliani, Mastro fought the New York Mob, cleaning up the Fulton Fish Market and the San Gennaro Festival, despite death threats. At City Hall, he occasionally wielded a baseball bat during meetings, to accentuate a point. The Daily News once observed that Mastro was the only person in the Giuliani administration who made the Mayor seem like a nice guy. ****
When Mastro entered the plush conference room where I was waiting, he carried a towering stack of binders containing thousands of pages of Chevron briefs and affidavits. I could barely see his face. He set them on the table with a thud. "Clients look to our firm to give them the kind of zealous advocacy that can help turn around a case," Mastro told me, and Gibson, Dunn has been lauded for its success in rescuing major corporations from legal threats. In 2010, Walmart, after a successful defense in a major employment lawsuit, credited the "lifeboat lawyers" of Gibson, Dunn. Others have suggested that the firm can go too far. Several years ago, in an unrelated case, the Montana Supreme Court reprimanded Gibson, Dunn for engaging in "legal thuggery."
The lawsuit in the Amazon is meritless, Mastro assured me—Donziger was merely "out to make a buck." But the fact that Chevron solicited Mastro's aid suggested that the company was anxious about its prospects in the case. Donziger's court-the-press strategy had proved exceptionally effective. In 2005, he approached Joe Berlinger, a well-regarded New York filmmaker, and suggested that he make a documentary about the case. The film, "Crude," was released in 2009. That same year, "60 Minutes" ran a segment that was highly critical of Chevron. In it, Silvia Garrigo came across as a caricature of heartlessness as she downplayed the health hazards of petroleum. "I have makeup on, and there's naturally occurring oil on my face," she said. "Doesn't mean I'm going to get sick from it."
Donziger, in addition to his roles as a lawyer and a P.R. strategist, had become, by necessity, an expert fund-raiser. He was relentless and creative in cultivating celebrities for the cause, including Sting and Daryl Hannah, and in eliciting support from wealthy patrons such as Russ DeLeon, a law-school contemporary who had made a fortune through an online-gambling venture. "You've got to figure out ways that you can sustain efforts like this," Donziger explained in a recent speech, because when you sue a multinational corporation its "main strategy is to exhaust you." For years, the case was underwritten largely by a Philadelphia law firm, Kohn, Swift & Graf, which gave financial and legal support in exchange for contingency fees. But, as the case dragged on, the wire transfers from Philadelphia did not arrive regularly enough to cover expenses.
Looking elsewhere for financial support, Donziger found it in the emerging field of "litigation finance." In recent years, certain hedge funds have started investing in class-action lawsuits, providing up-front capital to cover the expenses of a case in exchange for an equity share in a successful outcome. These arrangements are unregulated and controversial. But for Donziger they presented a crucial opportunity to keep the litigation alive. He offered investors a high-risk, high-reward proposition. The judgment could run to billions of dollars, he said, with attorneys' fees making up roughly a third of that figure. In confidence, he noted that his personal fee alone could amount to two hundred million dollars. Eventually, a fund called Burford Capital, which is based in the Channel Islands, made a multimillion-dollar investment in the case. A powerful law firm in Washington, D.C., Patton Boggs, also joined the plaintiffs' team.
As Randy Mastro sees it, the wealthy, for-profit players who are bankrolling Donziger's efforts betray an underlying cynicism behind the plaintiffs' case. This suit is driven not by poor Ecuadorans, he told me, but by "lawyers and consultants and financiers." Donziger's ambition was certainly grandiose, but it seemed motivated as much by a combative idealism as by a desire for riches. He wanted to recalibrate the power dynamic that had traditionally made it difficult for marginalized foreigners to sue American companies. He felt that he was creating a viable "business model for a human-rights case."
In 2006, Ecuador elected a new President, the left-leaning economist Rafael Correa. Donziger was elated. On the day of Correa's inauguration, he told Berlinger's camera crew, "There is no way under an administration led by this man that Chevron could ever get away with what it usually does here, which is bribes, backdoor meetings, and manipulation of government power." The next year, after lobbying by the plaintiffs, Correa visited the Oriente, and surveyed the waste pits. "Let's not deceive ourselves," he said, at a press conference in Lago Agrio. "There was a crime against humanity here."
The surest sign that the momentum in Ecuador had shifted against Chevron came on November 26, 2008, when a geological engineer named Richard Cabrera, who had been appointed to serve as an independent environmental-damages expert, delivered a report recommending that the court find Chevron responsible for twenty-seven billion dollars in damages. Chevron denounced the report, saying that it contained "fabricated and erroneous evidence" and suggesting that Cabrera was biased toward the plaintiffs. But Donziger's team commissioned a peer review of the findings from Stratus, an environmental consulting firm in Boulder, Colorado, that has done extensive work for the U.S. government. Stratus endorsed Cabrera's report as "sound, reasonable, and consistent with approaches used in other environmental-damage cases."
By this time, the leadership at Chevron may have come to regret Texaco's strenuous efforts, in the nineties, to move the lawsuit out of the U.S. Chevron representatives now expressed alarm at the dire state of the Ecuadoran judiciary, likening due process in the country to what one might find in North Korea. The danger, as Mastro later explained, was that the Correa regime might put a "thumb on the scale" of justice in favor of the plaintiffs.
In August, 2009, Chevron offered startling evidence to support its claim that Ecuador was hopelessly corrupt: it released video footage that allegedly implicated the judge then presiding over the Lago Agrio case, Juan Nuñez, in a bribery scheme. An Ecuadoran businessman named Diego Borja had been hoping to secure a cleanup contract in the event of a judgment against Chevron. But when Borja met with the judge and a Correa administration official, the company explained, he was informed that he first needed to pay a million dollars each to Nuñez, to the administration, and to the Lago Agrio plaintiffs. Borja and an associate secretly recorded the discussions, using cameras embedded in a watch and a pen. Charles James, a Chevron executive, declared, "This information absolutely disqualifies the judge and nullifies anything that he has ever done in this case."
Judge Nuñez stepped aside. But he insisted that he was innocent. The videos, which Chevron posted online, showed Borja and the official elliptically discussing the possibility of a bribe with Nuñez, but offered no proof that the judge had solicited or accepted one. Nuñez told me that the scandal was a setup, and Donziger has called the incident "a Chevron sting." It has subsequently emerged that the purported Correa administration official was in fact a Quito car salesman and part-time caterer, whose name does not appear in a party database of registered members. The businessman, Borja, was a former Chevron contractor.
Chevron insists that it did not prompt Borja to raise discussions about paying bribes, and says that he was not compensated for his efforts. But, according to court documents, Borja and his wife were relocated, at Chevron's expense, to the U.S., and supplied with a house, a car, a generous monthly stipend, and the services of a top criminal-defense attorney. The attorney would not make Borja available to speak with me, but a friend of Borja's, Santiago Escobar, told me that Judge Nuñez was innocent, and that Borja concocted the scheme to entrap him. "He's not a good Samaritan," Escobar said. "He was looking for money."
A few months ago, I took the toxic tour. For half the day, my guide was a spokesperson for Donziger and the plaintiffs; for the other half, I was accompanied by a Chevron representative. Both sides now employ full-time public-relations specialists. In fact, they have spent so many years contesting one another that the controversy can resemble a vituperative political campaign—a constant volley of talking points and rebuttals. No scientific or historical assertion goes undisputed by the other side. (Miguel Angel Cabodevilla, the monk, told me, "In the jungle, there is more literature than history.")
Chevron has hired dozens of ecological consultants, who challenge nearly all the plaintiffs' empirical claims. The company denies that the contamination and the health dangers posed by it are anything close to what Donziger has alleged. When the plaintiffs produced a study showing unusually high rates of cancer in the Oriente, Chevron countered with a study of its own, maintaining that cancer rates in the area are actually lower than elsewhere in Ecuador. Silvia Garrigo, the global-issues executive, has complained that the afectados blame Texaco for their every affliction: "If their cow dies, it's Texaco. If their wife has diabetes, it's Texaco."
During the plaintiffs' portion of the tour, a local man named Donald Moncayo showed me around. Wearing white surgical gloves, he dug up a fistful of black mud and held it so that the sunlight caught the telltale blue-orange tint of petroleum. At one fetid pit in a jungle glade, he stepped gingerly onto the surface of the pool, where the solid matter in the produced water had congealed into a tarlike crust that was sturdy enough to support him. Smiling a little, Moncayo shifted his weight from one foot to the other, until the whole surface began to undulate beneath him. He looked like a kid on a waterbed. According to the plaintiffs, there are nearly a thousand of these pits in the Oriente, scattered across an area the size of Rhode Island.
Watching Moncayo, I had a sense of déjà vu. He is the regular master of ceremonies on the toxic tour; I had read accounts of his routine, and had seen it enacted, in nearly identical fashion, in "Crude," the Berlinger documentary. But, if Moncayo's cadences were rote, there was nothing feigned about his indignation. He led me down a steep ravine to a creek. In the gauzy light filtering through the canopy, the water, which was only a foot deep, looked crystalline. Moncayo drove a stick into the creek bed and churned the mud until the water grew clouded by sediment. At his encouragement, I skimmed my hand across the surface of the creek. My palm was coated in an acrid film.
Moncayo watched me with grim satisfaction. "We tell Chevron, 'If you think this is O.K. for human consumption, then why don't you drink from it?' " he said.
Jim Craig, a Chevron spokesman, took me around Lago Agrio. He told me that the company has taken its own water samples in the Oriente, and has never identified a positive reading for hydrocarbon contamination. He speculated that, in some cases, the plaintiffs may have "spiked" local water sources after Chevron did its tests.
Craig told me that the skin infections and gastrointestinal problems attributed by the plaintiffs to oil pollution were more likely caused by sewer lines that run into local streams and rivers. "You can imagine all kinds of stomach problems arising from the ingestion of that crap," he said.
A few miles outside Lago Agrio, we stood on the lip of a waste pit, and Craig told me that the vile-looking residue on its surface was only a few inches thick. To illustrate this point, he picked up a rock and lobbed it into the pit. It landed, with a sickly thud, on the surface. "If we had a bigger rock . . ." he said, and threw a much larger one. It, too, failed to sink.
In Chevron's reckoning, however, these environmental claims and counterclaims are all somewhat beside the point, because the company's defense ultimately rests not on science but on law. In 1995, Texaco acknowledged that it had made a mess in the Amazon, and committed itself to doing some remediation. But the company also emphasized that it had been part of a consortium in Ecuador—one that included the national oil company—and that its stake in the partnership had been thirty-seven per cent. Texaco therefore agreed to clean up only thirty-seven per cent of the pits, even though, as the consortium's sole "operator," it had been responsible for both drilling the wells and digging the pits.
Texaco spent forty million dollars on the cleanup, and in 1998 the Ecuadoran government granted the company a release from any future claims against it. Chevron freely admits that large sludge pits still dot the Amazon, but denies that it has a legal obligation to clean up more of them. Instead, it suggests, that responsibility should fall to the national oil company, Petroecuador, which has managed extraction in Lago Agrio since Texaco's departure and has been accused of polluting extensively in the region. "This is not about dirt in Ecuador," a Chevron lawyer once remarked. "It is about a contract and how to interpret it."
In January, 2009, Donziger travelled to Park City, Utah, to attend the première of "Crude," at the Sundance Film Festival. The film depicts him as a domineering presence; at one point, when he believes that Chevron's lawyers may have manipulated an elderly judge in Quito, he storms into the judge's chambers, towering over the man. "Be very careful with the Texaco lawyers," Donziger warns. "They play dirty." To the camera, he concedes that he would never do such a thing in America, but explains that in Ecuador "this is how the game is played."
In another scene, Donziger coaches one of his indigenous clients, Emergildo Criollo, preparing him to crash Chevron's annual shareholders' meeting, in Houston. He tells Criollo not to be cowed and suggests some rhetoric: " 'You spent twenty-eight years in my territory. I can spend three minutes in your territory.' " Pleased with the line, he says, "That's a good one, right?" In the next scene, Criollo delivers the sound bite to the shareholders.
When Randy Mastro and his colleagues scrutinized the film, they noticed a tiny discrepancy between the version that aired at Sundance and the one that was subsequently released on DVD. A scene in the film captures a consultation between the plaintiffs' lawyers and a tribe that they represent. At Sundance, a Spanish physician named Carlos Beristain was visible in the scene. In the DVD version, he was edited out. This struck Mastro as potentially significant, because after the meeting in question Beristain had gone to work for the independent environmental-damages expert. Had the director edited out the physician at the plaintiffs' request?
"That had our antennae way up," Mastro told me.
He wondered what other "outtakes" might exist from the three years that Berlinger spent filming Donziger, and in April, 2010, he asked a federal judge in New York to compel Berlinger to turn over all his raw footage. Mastro cited a little-used statute that entitles an American litigant facing a lawsuit abroad to pursue extensive "discovery" inside the United States. Chevron needed the outtakes, Mastro argued, "to prove it was denied due process" in Ecuador.
Berlinger's lawyers objected that Chevron was on a "fishing expedition," and invoked the journalist's privilege. Mastro responded that "Crude" was not journalism at all but "an unapologetic work of propaganda." Because Donziger had pitched Berlinger to make the film, Mastro argued, and because Berlinger had cut the shot of the Spanish doctor at the plaintiffs' request, he was not a truly independent filmmaker.
Despite the interventions of news organizations, including the Times, which argued that obliging Berlinger to turn over the footage would set a dangerous precedent, both the judge, Lewis Kaplan, and an appeals court sided with Chevron. Mastro's team was soon in possession of six hundred hours of footage.
It was not long before Mastro requested another hearing before Kaplan, an acerbic but respected senior federal judge, who worked as a corporate lawyer before his appointment to the bench, by Bill Clinton, in 1994. "If we were on a fishing expedition, we caught a whopper," Mastro announced in court. Donziger appeared to have grown so comfortable with Berlinger's crew that he disregarded the fact that they were recording everything he said. As Mastro played a series of outtakes for Judge Kaplan, Donziger's outspokenness was on full display. He riffed, indignantly, about the inadequacies of the Ecuadoran legal system. "They're all corrupt," he says of Ecuadoran judges in one clip. "It's their birthright to be corrupt."
Judging from the outtakes, Donziger's fear that the case would not be decided on its merits had led him to doubt the importance of the evidence itself. In one scene, a scientific expert for the plaintiffs tells him that one measurement of groundwater contamination was not as strong as he had thought. "This is Ecuador, O.K.?" Donziger says. "At the end of the day, if there's a thousand people around the courthouse you're going to get what you want." As for the scientific data, he adds, it's "just a bunch of smoke and mirrors and bullshit."
It was a devastating presentation. Just as Chevron was asserting that Ecuador was too corrupt to ever guarantee a fair trial, here was its adversary, effectively saying the same thing. The documentary was the plaintiffs' "undoing," Mastro told me.
In another scene that Mastro showed to the court, Donziger chats with associates over dinner at a restaurant. Someone at the table, referring to the popular antipathy toward Chevron in Ecuador, suggests that if the judge in Lago Agrio ruled against the plaintiffs he might be killed.
"He might not be," Donziger replies, cradling a glass of red wine. "But he thinks he will. Which is just as good."
In the course of several hearings, Judge Kaplan exhibited a palpable dislike for Donziger. He described him as "the field general of a political and media offensive," and seemed to take umbrage at what he called the "flat-out admissions by Donziger that what's going on in Ecuador is mud wrestling, not bona-fide litigation."
Donziger's lawyers tried to play down his loose talk. But Mastro argued that the outtakes exposed a criminal conspiracy, in which Donziger was exploiting the corruption of the Ecuadoran system to pressure Chevron into a huge settlement. Suddenly, the very qualities that had enabled Donziger to remain steadfast in the face of staggering odds—his runaway rhetoric, his knack for P.R.—had placed him, and the entire case, in peril. "Knives are effective for cutting through things," his friend Sarah Leah Whitson told me. "But sometimes you can slice your own finger."
Mastro, emboldened by his success with the outtakes, decided to go one step further. The video footage revealed such outlandish impropriety, he argued to Judge Kaplan, that Chevron should be entitled to Donziger's own documents. Because much of what Donziger did was fund-raising and publicity, rather than lawyering, Mastro suggested, he should not be afforded attorney-client privilege; and, even if he was entitled to the privilege, he had waived it by inviting Berlinger's cameras to film him. "He has one privilege left," Mastro told Judge Kaplan. "He can assert the Fifth Amendment."
Normally, a lawyer who is subpoenaed creates a log of any confidential documents to be withheld. But Chevron was requesting Donziger's entire case file—documents spanning nearly two decades—and Donziger did not have a staff of associates to help him go through it. When he failed to deliver a privilege log that met Kaplan's approval, the judge agreed with Mastro that "the genie is out of the bottle"—and granted Chevron access to Donziger's confidential documents. Donziger was forced to turn over two hundred thousand pages of material.
Twenty Gibson, Dunn associates set to work reviewing stacks of memos and e-mails marked "Confidential*"* and "Attorney Work Product." They averaged five thousand pages a day. Gibson, Dunn also requested, and received, Donziger's tax returns, his bank-account information, and his personal computers. Technicians forensically scanned his hard drives, and Gibson, Dunn copied everything they found. An attorney for Donziger protested that this meant that Chevron's lawyers could interrogate his communications with his wife, as well as other unrelated matters.
"He doesn't have any other matters," Kaplan said. "This is his life."
Kaplan's decision was extreme; rarely had such a wealth of sensitive material been handed to a legal adversary. As Gibson, Dunn attorneys fanned across the country, appearing before seventeen federal courts to request further information, one appellate judge noted that the sheer extent of this kind of discovery was "unique in the annals of American judicial history." Kaplan even granted Chevron permission to depose Donziger—a highly unusual move.
"No lawyer wants to be deposed," Stephen Gillers, a legal ethicist at New York University School of Law, told me. "It unnerves us, as a profession. We like to believe that we operate in this zone of privacy that no one can pierce, unless we permit it. Indeed, that enables us to do our jobs."
For fourteen days, in a conference room in a midtown skyscraper, Mastro and other Chevron attorneys questioned Donziger, under oath, about the financing of the case, and about various legal strategies that he had used. Donziger soon grew brittle and exhausted. One task of the inquisitor in a deposition is to confine the person being questioned to simple yes or no answers. But Donziger insisted on defending his conduct loquaciously, to the point where Judge Kaplan reprimanded him, remarking, "The man could have a career as a filibustering senator."
At one point, Donziger was asked whether he kept a diary. Initially, he said no. But his diary, which he had maintained for several years, was saved on one of his laptops, and Gibson, Dunn found it on his hard drive. When Chevron filed the text, unexpurgated, with the court, it became part of the public record—another humiliation for Donziger. In the diary, he details his doubts and aspirations, and returns, obsessively, to the subject of his adversary, who in his shorthand is simply "Tex." He recounts arguments with his wife and makes unsparing observations about his colleagues.
Donziger also describes meetings with Judge Yánez—the judge he had feared would be vulnerable, because of his alleged womanizing and drinking, to blackmail. In one entry, Donziger wrote, "I called the judge and he asked that we bring over some whiskey or some wine. We didn't." On another occasion, he described Yánez asking him for help in obtaining a visa, so that his girlfriend might visit America. Donziger did not help him, but noted in his diary that the plaintiffs had drawn up a complaint about Yánez's conduct, and had informed him that "we might file it if he does not adhere to the law and what we need."
Donziger had worried that Yánez could be manipulated into making a corrupt ruling. But, in urging him to remain upright, the plaintiffs were exploiting Yánez's vulnerabilities as leverage. "So instead of a strong judge who sees the viability of our case," Donziger wrote, "we now might have a weak judge who wants to rule correctly for all the wrong, personal reasons."
Esperanza Martínez, the Quito environmentalist, told me that, in the complex moral landscape of Ecuador, there are different types of "pressure" that can be exerted on a public official. If you pressure an official to abrogate the rights of someone, that is unquestionably corrupt. But if you pressure the official to uphold someone's rights, Martínez maintained, that "is the farthest thing from corruption."
As Mastro and his associates made their way through the trove of material on Donziger, the information that most interested them had to do with the independent environmental-damages expert, Richard Cabrera. Originally, when the decision was made to appoint a single damages expert, Donziger had worried that in Ecuador anyone with that much influence over the outcome of a multibillion-dollar case could be bought. But he was pleased about the appointment of Cabrera—indeed, the Gibson lawyers discovered, Donziger knew in advance that Cabrera would be the court's choice. "We have an expert," he says in one outtake. "The judge is going to appoint a guy in Ecuador to be the expert. But really, you know, we'll be supporting him with our work."
The appointment decision fell to Judge Yánez. The plaintiffs had never filed their complaint against him, and Donziger felt that Yánez owed him a favor. "We saved him," Donziger wrote of the judge, in January, 2007. "And now we are reaping the benefits." (A spokesperson for Donziger told me that "reaping the benefits" simply meant that Judge Yánez was acting independently of Chevron.)
Another outtake captures a plaintiffs' meeting on March 3, 2007, two weeks before Cabrera's official appointment. Donziger attended, along with the lead Ecuadoran lawyer, Pablo Fajardo, and Cabrera himself. On video, Fajardo explains to the team that Cabrera will soon be asked to produce an independent evaluation of Chevron's liability. He will "give his opinion, sign the report, and review it," Fajardo says. "But all of us have to contribute."
"But not Chevron," somebody says—a joke, met with laughter.
Before the meeting concludes, the camera captures Donziger turning to Cabrera. "Richard, of course, you really have to be comfortable with all that," he says. As the meeting wraps up, Donziger exclaims, "We could jack this thing up to thirty billion dollars in one day!"
Mastro and his colleagues were stunned. "It's the kind of shocking revelation that would ordinarily have blown up a plaintiff's case," he told me. "That's the amazing thing about this case—it's smoking gun after smoking gun."
Gibson, Dunn subpoenaed Stratus, the Colorado consulting firm that had endorsed Cabrera's report recommending a twenty-seven-billion-dollar penalty for Chevron. When Julio Prieto, the young lawyer for the plaintiffs, learned that Chevron was seeking information from Stratus, he sent a frantic e-mail to his colleagues. Disclosure of Stratus's documents could be "potentially devastating," he wrote, adding that he and his Ecuadoran associates "might go to jail."
What Mastro's team recovered from Stratus was a document, in English, that the company had sent to Ecuador a few days before the publication of Cabrera's report. The first line of the Stratus document said, "This report was written by Richard Cabrera." It was a draft of the "independent" damages assessment. As Mastro put it to me, "The plaintiffs' team had ghostwritten his report."
The plaintiffs have since insisted that there was nothing improper about Stratus submitting materials to Cabrera for his consideration, and that Chevron could have done the same. But Donziger, in his deposition, acknowledged that Cabrera's final report was drawn "pretty much verbatim" from the Stratus document.
One oddity of Gibson, Dunn's ongoing discovery was that, in something close to real time, Chevron's lawyers were able to obtain internal e-mails in which Donziger and his colleagues discussed how best to deal with these very revelations. "I wonder whether we do better by explaining that we authored the report," one of Donziger's American associates wrote, "rather than letting Chevron tell that story like Nancy Drew." The e-mail was subsequently turned over to Gibson, Dunn.
During the deposition, Donziger was asked, "Was it agreed that Stratus would draft the report in a form that could be submitted to the Ecuadoran court by Mr. Cabrera?"
"That was the general idea," he said.
It may be that the logic of systemic corruption is akin to that of doping in athletics. If you have good reason to believe that everyone else is gaining a competitive advantage through surreptitious transgressions, then you may conclude that to do otherwise, on principle, would fatally undermine your case. "I think it is a miracle how much we have accomplished with so little," Donziger wrote in his diary. "But in the end of the day that means nothing if we don't win."
Donziger's deposition concluded on January 31, 2011. The next day, Chevron sued him in federal court, along with other members of the plaintiffs' team, alleging that they were part of a racketeering conspiracy, and had colluded with corrupt elements in Ecuador to extort billions of dollars.
After questions arose about the independence of the Cabrera report, Nicolás Zambrano, the judge in Lago Agrio, said that he would not rely on it to reach his verdict. But Chevron was not placated. Zambrano's judgment would be fraudulent, Mastro argued, and he asked Judge Kaplan to issue an injunction that would prevent the plaintiffs from attempting to collect damages from Chevron. "We are facing the ultimate sword of Damocles," he said.
Gibson, Dunn, in its discovery, had obtained an internal memo describing the plaintiffs' plan to enforce the Ecuadoran judgment by going after Chevron assets in foreign countries. Mastro called this strategy "vexatious," and asked Judge Kaplan to bar Donziger and his colleagues from trying to collect on the judgment not just in New York but anywhere in the world. Mastro assured Kaplan, "You have the right to enjoin litigation here and overseas."
Kaplan was sympathetic to this position. As he put it, "I don't think there is anybody in this courtroom who wants to pull his car into a gas station to fill up and find that there isn't any gas because these folks have attached it in Singapore or wherever else." He granted the injunction. When, that same month, Judge Zambrano issued his eighteen-billion-dollar decision against Chevron, it was unclear if the plaintiffs would ever receive a penny.
One evening in September, in New York, I met a man named Humberto Piaguaje, who is a member of the Secoya tribe. He was born in the Ecuadoran Amazon in 1964, and he has been involved in the case for nearly half his life. We met in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, on the thirty-fifth floor of the Time Warner Center. One of the lawyers in the case was staying there, and Donziger and his colleagues had colonized the lobby bar and turned it into a meeting space. Piaguaje wore a polo shirt and jeans. He has been speaking to American journalists for years, and smoothly recited the indignities that his people have suffered. "We're poor," he said. "There are no animals to eat. We don't have our traditional medicines from plants. We don't have clean water. Chevron left us in poverty." In recent years, he said, seven of his relatives had died of cancer. He expressed outrage that his people, after being denied the opportunity to bring their case to America, were now being told that they could not find justice in Ecuador, either. Perhaps, he said, Chevron would like to hold the trial in Heaven. "I'm sure they would decide that wasn't good enough, and ask to move it somewhere else," he added.
Outside the hotel, dusk began to settle over Central Park, and lights flickered on in the buildings across Columbus Circle. If Piaguaje was struck by the incongruity of his surroundings, he did not let on. I asked him if it ever seemed that the case had taken on a life of its own, disconnected from what really happened in the Oriente. He shrugged. "It's a search for justice," he said. "How can we do that without lawyers?"
Piaguaje had flown to New York to attend an oral argument before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, centering on whether Judge Kaplan had the authority to stop the plaintiffs from collecting on the Ecuadoran judgment anywhere in the world. If Kaplan's injunction was upheld, it would create a major precedent, effectively allowing American courts to pass judgment on the transparency or corruption of their foreign counterparts, and set aside verdicts against American companies when the legal systems issuing them were deemed problematic. The prospect was breathtaking: Chevron looked poised not only to avoid liability but also to acquire greater immunity in its actions abroad. Shell, Dole, and Dow Chemical submitted a brief to the court, urging it to side with Chevron.
On September 16th, three appellate judges took their seats in a courtroom in downtown Manhattan. A contingent of Chevron lawyers was in attendance, as were Donziger, his legal team, and Piaguaje. Randy Mastro argued that the plaintiffs' wrongdoing was so severe that the only solution was to invalidate the Ecuadoran court's judgment. "In thirty years of practice and as a former prosecutor, I've never seen a record so shocking of illegal and improper conduct," he said. "We don't tolerate judgments procured by fraud."
"Anywhere in the world?" one judge asked incredulously. "We will not tolerate a South African judgment being procured by fraud and enforced in Russia?"
The oral arguments took place on a Friday. Normally, appeals courts take several months after hearing arguments to rule on a case, but the judges were ready the following Monday. In a terse, unanimous decision, they reversed Judge Kaplan, and dissolved the injunction.
This fall, I had half a dozen long conversations with Steven Donziger about his time in Ecuador and his battle with Gibson, Dunn. Ultimately, he chose, on the advice of his lawyers, not to answer any questions on the record. ("He knows now that anything he says can be used against him," a Chevron representative told me.) In a statement, Donziger argued, "The story of this case is not about the lawyers. It is about the people of Ecuador and how they have suffered at the hands of an American oil company that flouts the law and will stop at nothing to protect its ill-gotten profits."
Chevron's racketeering lawsuit against Donziger has been stayed, for the moment, but if it proceeds Kaplan will likely remain the judge in the case. In an act of desperation, Donziger formally requested that Kaplan be removed, arguing that he had shown a consistent bias toward Chevron. But the request was denied.
Civil racketeering suits seldom go to trial, and some observers suggest that Gibson, Dunn employed the countersuit as a harassment tactic to smear and intimidate the plaintiffs. "Deflect and defame—that's a strategy," one of Donziger's law-school friends told me.
When I aired this theory to Randy Mastro, he gave a thin smile and murmured, "I look forward to the trial."
A person close to the case told me, "What's so unfortunate here is that we're going up against a giant corporation that has acted in such a callous way. They don't get exposed for the way they've acted, because instead the spotlight shifts to this rogue lawyer. Steve should have known. If you want to engage in this kind of David-and-Goliath fight, you've got to focus on your own conduct. Because, if you don't, you give them exactly the ammunition they're looking for."
Chevron has appealed the eighteen-billion-dollar judgment in Ecuador. It has also tried to block the lawsuit by appealing to an arbitration tribunal in The Hague. But the case could still end in a settlement. This might seem hard to imagine, given the rancor on both sides, but it has nearly happened before. Cristóbal Bonifaz told me that in 2001 the plaintiffs indicated, in writing, that they would drop their claims in exchange for a hundred and forty million dollars. But, on the eve of the Chevron merger, Texaco walked away from the offer. Chevron will not comment, but the plaintiffs estimate that the company now spends roughly that amount each year to fight the case.
One day in February, 2007, Donziger sat down with a Chevron lawyer in New York. The meeting was secret. The lawyer indicated that Chevron was ready to find a way to conclude the matter. "We don't want our children or grandchildren to be litigating it," he said.
In his diary, Donziger expressed ambivalence about a settlement, wondering how he could end something that had "so defined" his life. Ultimately, the two sides did not come to terms. "We all have become prisoners of our own creation," Donziger wrote, in another entry. "We all have too much invested to stop." ♦


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Several weeks ago Tessa came home from the local Hillsboro Farmer's Market where she had been working, raving about a black bean hummus she had tasted from one of the vendors at the market. It turns out the vendor was someone I already knew – Charles Hartz of Hartz Spice. Charles lives here in Portland and he has developed a wonderful line of spice blends and recipes to go with them. The black bean hummus is one of them.
Our neighborhood Fourth of July BBQ was the perfect time to try it out. It was a hit.
The flavor combination is great -black beans, garlic, roasted red peppers, tahini and features Charles' Garlic and Herb Spice Blend. Hummus is usually made with garbanzo beans but the black beans are a fun and flavorful change.
Everything is blended in the food processor so it is quick and easy to put together.
I served it with some pita chips I made out of flat bread. You can find my pita chip recipe here. It's great with regular tortilla chips too. It would also make a great dip for fresh veggies. I think just about anything would taste could dipped in black bean hummus.
Now here comes the best part. If you aren't lucky enough to live in Portland, Oregon all of Charles' spice blends can be purchased from his website.
If you do live in the Portland area go visit him at the Hillsboro Farmer's Market on Saturdays.
Charles is giving away a wonderful set of his spice blends to one of my readers. ($49.00 value)
Be sure and visit Charles' blog to find more wonderful recipes that can be used with his spice blends. I can't wait to try the Greek Balsamic Vinaigrette .
To enter the giveaway leave a comment below. Also for a second entry go on over and "like" his Facebook page.
Giveaway limited to those with a US mailing address. Giveaway is open until Tuesday, July 10, midnight PST.
Thanks Charles for sponsoring the giveaway!
Raised on the East coast, trained on the West, Charles makes his home in the culinary crossroads of Portland, Oregon. He is a classically-trained executive chef, having worked in many diverse kitchens in Arizona, Nebraska, and Oregon. Each environment has influenced his palate and shaped the evolution of his unique spice blends. Spices and herbs have become the tools he uses to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Having tried, evaluated and refined his craft in many fine restaurant kitchens, Charles has become a spicemaster.
Black Bean Hummus
- 3 cans black beans rinsed & drained
- 1 garlic cloves I used 2
- 8 oz jar roasted red peppers drained
- 1 tsp Hartz Garlic & Herb Spice Blend
- 3 lemons juiced (I used 2)
- 1 tsp kosher salt
- 1/4 C plain greek yogurt
- 1 tsp ground corinader
- 1/2 tsp cumin
- 1 1/2 Tbsp tahini Paste
- Combine everything in a food processor
- Puree until smooth
- Refrigerate until ready to serve
- Serve with pita chips, chips or fresh veggies
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Perhaps nothing personifies Hollywood glamour quite like sunglasses, and "50 Shades" (Reel Art Press, $29.95) by Lauren Goldstein Crowe features 50 of the century's icons in the coolest of frames. Steve McQueen, Diana Ross, Bob Dylan, Audrey Hepburn and more are included, alongside quotes that reveal something about the celebrity hiding behind the shades.
"Hollywood Unseen" (ACC Editions, $75) by Robert Dance is a tribute to the studio portraits, both wonderful and weird, taken in the golden age of Hollywood. Drawing from the archive of the John Kobal Foundation, the staged photos depict stars leading "ordinary" lives, including Humphrey Bogart with his dog, Carole Lombard with her cat, Ginger Rogers at the beach and shirtless Burt Lancaster playing tennis.
Of course, not every star submitted to the whims of the studio image makers. "Katharine Hepburn: Rebel Chic" (Skira Rizzoli, $40) presents the headstrong actress as fashion icon. Her idiosyncratic style is documented from the 1930s to '80s through photos of looks from her professional and personal wardrobes, from the sublimely simple Valentina gowns she wore as Tracy Lord in "The Philadelphia Story" on Broadway to the trousers and fur coat she chose for off-duty hours.


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Family of kidnapped US aid worker in sad limbo
ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) — In the three years since American aid worker Warren Weinstein was kidnapped by militants in Lahore, Pakistan, his family has existed in a strange, sad limbo.
His wife, Elaine Weinstein, keeps their home in suburban Rockville tidy and recently had the back deck resurfaced, but she won't paint or redecorate without her husband. Their daughter, Jennifer Coakley, mentioned the other day that she would be riding the Metro subway, and Coakley's 6-year-old son asked if his grandfather would be on the train.
Holidays and birthdays are the worst — the occasions when, no matter where his globe-trotting career took him, Weinstein would be home.
Weinstein, who turned 73 in July, was abducted on Aug. 13, 2011, four days before his seven-year stint in Pakistan was scheduled to end. It's believed that he's being held in a mountainous region near the Afghan border where the Pakistani military is fighting extremists. His captors have released four videos of him, most recently last Christmas.
Since then, his family has received no substantive updates. He has a heart condition that requires medication, along with high blood pressure and asthma. His family is worried that his health could fail or that he could be mistakenly killed by Pakistani forces. Still, Elaine Weinstein, 71, said she is confident that she'll see her husband alive again.
"If I give up hope, I won't get up in the morning," she told The Associated Press in an interview at her home. "That's basically my reason."
Warren Weinstein was a business development expert working in Pakistan on a contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID has come under recent scrutiny for sending contract workers to Cuba to do dangerous undercover work. Elaine Weinstein said she had no reason to believe her husband was involved in any covert operations. She spent months with him at a time in Pakistan and accompanied him on international trips with Pakistani businesspeople.
"He was so busy with what he had to do, there's no way that he had time to do anything else," she said.
Warren lived in Pakistan full time from 2004 until his kidnapping, coming home about four times a year. He took all the necessary precautions, she said. She never felt unsafe when she was there.
Warren wore traditional Pakistani garments while living there and speaks Urdu. He is Jewish, but not observant, and his wife said she did not think her husband was targeted because of his religion.
"If that was going to happen, I think that would have happened way, way earlier," she said.
Follow Ben Nuckols on Twitter at https://twitter.com/APBenNuckols.
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Culture for kids? That's right, and nowhere does this better than Germany's worlds of discovery, which are always a hit with young families. As well as amusement parks, Germany boasts all kinds of themed attractions – each with something different to offer: you can see incredible film sets and meet cartoon characters and big-screen heroes at the movie parks, star-gaze at planetariums or go treasure hunting at a fairytale park. These eclectic attractions are like giant adventure playgrounds, keeping boredom at bay for all ages with their sensational shows, special events and guaranteed thrills and spills. You can walk through the rainforest one day, go to a water park the next, enjoy a spa or watch fantastic entertainment on stage. Everyone loves making a splash – better yet, one combined with a loop-the-loop. Now, at Germany's water parks, you can feel the adrenaline rush of a rollercoaster on a loop-the-loop waterslide or a spectacular tube slide. The dizzyingly high climbing parks guarantee fun for families with a taste for heights and adventure. Other attractions reveal the history of the Earth and the dinosaurs in vivid fashion. And where but at a wildlife park could you see native and exotic animals one minute and scale a climbing frame or whizz down a tall slide the next? But we won't give it all away here – take a look and see for yourself!
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Bill Murray has a reputation for being extremely picky when it comes to choosing scripts and projects that he wants to be a part of, so there must be something pretty special about the new Barry Levinson-directed comedy Rock The Kasbah. According to Deadline, the new film has gotten Murray sign on to star and will be looking to find international distribution at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Based on a script by Mitch Glazer, who previously worked with Murray on the absolutely awful film Passion Play, the new movie tells the story of a "burned-out music manager" who flies off to the Middle East when his last remaining client signs up for the USO tour. After a series of events, the protagonist finds himself alone, broke and stranded in Afghanistan without a passport - but his fortunes change when he meets a young girl with a beautiful voice. She has dreams of starring on the Afghanistan's equivalent of American Idol, and the main character helps her get to Kabul so that she can compete.
Said Glazer in a statement about the new director and star being attached to the project, "Bill Murray and Barry Levinson are the perfect team to capture the lunacy, heartbreak and hope of this story. I'm ecstatic."
Murray may be picky when it comes to scripts, but don't confuse that for thinking that he only stars in great projects. As great as Murray's collaborations with Wes Anderson have been, the last few years of his career are peppered with some critically panned titles like Hyde Park on Hudson and A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. Passion Play, however, was its own special kind of awful, and it's honestly surprising that Murray would be so quick to work from a Glazer script again. Remember, this was the film that Mickey Rourke trashed even before it was released:
That said, Murray does have some extremely promising stuff on the horizon. He'll next be seen as part of the all-star ensemble that George Clooney has brought together for his World War II dramedy The Monuments Men, and he's already completed his work on Anderson's next film, the Europe-set period piece Grand Budapest Hotel. He is currently in production on the Black List comedy St. Vincent de Van Nuys, which co-stars Chris O'Dowd, Naomi Watts and Megan McCarthy. You can get a brief look at Murray in Monuments Men in the trailer below:


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Church, Samantha 1979-425-02-p9-p4/
Unidentified Photographer, Portrait Photograph of Samantha & Amanda Church, Date N/A
Photographer: unidentified
THE SITTER(s):
Name(s): Samantha and Amanda Church
Description: Cabinet card of two women's bust. There hair is pulled back and they have velvet bodices with high collars.
Biographical Note: add, augment
Family Affiliation:
Bibliography: add, augment
Format / Size: cabinet card, size N/A
Medium: albumen photographic print mounted on cardstock
Description, Obverse: (identify group or individual, gender(s); identify pose, furniture & props; describe composition, background, added color…)
Description, Reverse: N/A
Date: N/A
Condition: (note tears, foxing, fading)
Owner: Petaluma Historical Library & Museum, 1979-425-01-p9-p4
Reproduction rights: The Petaluma Museum Association makes no assertions as to ownership of any original copyrights to the digitized images here reproduced. These images are intended for personal or research use only. Any other kind of use, including, but not limited to commercial or scholarly publication in any medium or format, public exhibition, or use online or in a web site, may be subject to additional restrictions including but not limited to the copyrights held by parties other than the Association. USERS ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE for determining the existence of such rights and for obtaining any permissions and/or paying associated fees necessary for the proposed use.


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Lewis Hamilton prepared for an emotional farewell to McLaren with the fastest time in practice for the season-ending Brazilian Grand Prix on Friday.
The Briton, who took his 2008 Formula One title at Interlagos and arrived in Brazil after winning the US Grand Prix in Texas last Sunday, lapped the anti-clockwise layout with a best time of one minute 14.131 seconds in sunny but hazy morning conditions.
The 27-year-old, who joins Mercedes next season, then lapped in 1:14.026 in the heat of the afternoon.
Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel, the championship leader who is favourite to clinch his third successive title on Sunday, was second fastest in both sessions. He was just 0.009 off Hamilton's pace before lunch and 0.274 slower after the break.
However, the 25-year-old German set his morning time on this year's Pirelli tyres while Hamilton's came in a test of next year's prototype rubber.
Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, Vettel's only title rival but 13 points off the lead, was fifth on both timesheets — 0.261 and 0.566 slower respectively than the quickest McLaren.
Hamilton, who welled up with emotion in a 'BBC' interview earlier in the week, said he was savouring every moment of the weekend.
"I just took some pictures of my engineers. I'll take some pictures of my mechanics later on today and I said we have to take a picture every day," he told reporters after practice. "This is one of the best Fridays we've had for a long, long time. It's a perfect last Friday to have.
"I feel very good at the moment. we're definitely strong, just as we were in the last three or four races," said the Briton.
Vettel said the track had been very slippery but was happy with his day's work. "It was quite hot today and, in terms of track conditions, not that easy," he said.
Australian Mark Webber was third in the morning and afternoon while McLaren's Jenson Button was fourth in the first session. Alonso's Brazilian team-mate Felipe Massa was fourth after lunch.
Spaniard Alonso must finish on the podium on Sunday to have any hope of taking his third title while Vettel will be champion regardless of other results if he can secure fourth place or better.
"We have not yet found the ideal balance on the car, so there is still a lot of work to be done with the engineers going into the rest of the weekend," said the Spaniard, mindful also that the weather is expected to turn wet at the weekend. "Our targets are clear but also difficult to achieve."
Hamilton has raced for McLaren for all of his Formula One career and could face a barren spell at Mercedes, a team that has been largely uncompetitive this year with their only highlight Nico Rosberg's win in China.
The Briton acknowledged after arriving in Brazil that Sunday's race could be his last chance in a while to stand on top of the podium but Mercedes did their best to give him some hope on Friday.
Michael Schumacher, the seven-times world champion who is retiring for the second time on Sunday to make way for Hamilton at Mercedes, was sixth in the second session ahead of Rosberg with Button eighth. The 43-year-old German had a special message for his fans on his helmet: "Life is about passions, thank you for sharing mine."


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The Last Man On Earth (1964) WS (Letterboxed) NTSC (region free)
ed2k: LAST_MAN_ON_EARTH.MDS [4.2 Kb] [Stats]
ed2k: LAST_MAN_ON_EARTH.ISO [2.62 Gb] [Stats]
http://thedvdclub.org/details.php?id=6114 (private tracker)
Image Info
DVD5: 1:1 rip
video: untouched
audio: untouched
-MDS included
-movie is black & white
Vincent Price
A devastating plauge wipes out the world's population.
The lone survivor Dr. Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) manges
to stay alive thanks to a mysterious immunity he picked up
while researching bacteria in Central America. As night falls
, plauge victims leave their graves to form a hellish undead
army thirsting for blood!
I don't actually know if there are any subs or not. I only watched once. It's not exactly a thrilling movie. Very much a part of the 50s, 60s, 70s contagion paranoia (kinda like andromeda strain).
In case you're wondering, this was the first of three film adaptation attempts at the Robert Matheson story I Am Legend. I've developed an interest in it spurred on by the new movie. Then I remembered I owned this DVD (it was like $2!), so I thought others might also be curious.
FYI: the image is only 2.9x gb. It's an old movie, so it doesn't need much, but it's also from a shoddy label ("genius entertainment"?), so iunno anything about the actual transfer. looks fine to me on the projector. but that's the deal. the image is a scan of the box cover. I'll see about screens later. have to pull them from a different comp.
*caps made from mpc default settings. imageshack seems to have converted the bitmaps into png's.
[ Add all 2 links to your ed2k client ]


text:
Connor Shaw to start for Gamecocks despite shoulder sprain
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier says Connor Shaw will start at quarterback for the 13th-ranked Gamecocks against Kentucky on Saturday night.
Shaw was knocked out of South Carolina's 28-25 victory at UCF in the first quarter and spent the rest of the game on the sidelines with his right arm in a sling and ice bags on his right shoulder. Spurrier said Sunday he was told Shaw might miss two-to-three weeks with a shoulder sprain.
MORE: Week 6 picks | Spurrier has TV show yanked | First-and-ten
Spurrier said Wednesday that Shaw was throwing passes at practice Monday and has progressed strongly throughout the week. He says the senior QB looked good and would start under center against the Wildcats (1-3, 0-1 Southeastern Conference).
Shaw's fourth in SEC passing efficiency. He's thrown six touchdowns without an interception for the Gamecocks (3-1, 1-1).


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Very good note Jason! It would be ver helpful for all of us to start an official Stereophile High End Recorded Music Classification, in any media either physical or computerized. I even would pay a monthly suscription if you provide a monthly listings with some comments of the best track's passages to stress some frequency range benchmarks, say in the low, mid or high frequencies. I in love with classical, jazz, jazz vocal and opera music material but I struggle to find very good recorded music!!! I have 700 CDs and some DVDs but I could say that maybe just 100 of them are sonically worth it!! I have bought some CD albums from eMusic and most of it is really well recorded. My system is B&W 802D, Classe CA-M400 amps, Bryston BP26, Brysotn DAC BDA-1, Apple Mac Mini as Music Server with Seagate external HDD and I am waiting to buy a good Blu Ray (Marantz U9004 perhaps?). I have the system and everytime that I have up graded it is much more evident that the recordings have to improve too, not just the hardwar
Squeezing the Music...
At the final seminar, presented Sunday at 11am, John set the tone by playing his reference-quality, 24-bit, 88.2kHz recording of the male acappella choral group Cantus singing Eric Whitacre's transporting Lux Aurumque. The sound, as you might expect, was extremely natural and inviting, and captured the natural dynamics of a small ensemble in peak form.
However, "It's getting increasingly difficult to find albums to review that don't have the life squeezed out of them," John told the packed house. "Recently, Robert Baird presented me with Delbert McLinton's Acquired Taste, which he thought would be a candidate for "Recording of the Month" if the sound was good. But when I played one of the tracks, "Mama's Little Baby Doll," "I discovered relentless, in-your-face sound."
John then played the raucous track, and ran real-time software that showed the waveform banging its head against the top. The entire dynamic range had been compressed to 4, 5, and at the most 6dB, and was mostly composed of square waveforms that were responsible for its clipped sound. He also challenged Don Was, the A list producer responsible for the sonic travesty, for caving into to music industry honchos who believe that unrelenting loudness is what people want to hear.
Next he played "Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. "This is great rock," he said "but again, while it starts supposedly quietly, it soon bumps its head at the top end. Look how it constantly peaks into the red zone, which shows danger. It's clipped, it's distorted, it's universally loud.
"If you squash the dynamic range this much, you get something close to noise. The light and shade are gone. You're close to not having any music at all. Miles Davis expressed it best years ago, when he said, 'Music resides in the silences between notes. If you minimize those silences, you minimize the music.'"
Dynamic range is not the same as loudness, John explained. The ear and brain judge loudness by the music's average level, but maximizing loudness minimizes music's peaks. Hence the paradox: the louder the music, the lower the dynamic range. Record companies squash the music more and more to make it louder and louder, and damage it in the process. [For further information on this point, as well as addresses of organizations trying to reverse the louder is better trend, see John's "As We See It" in the November issue].
"Compression," John asserted, "is not a bad thing if used judiciously. On the Mary Chapin Carpenter cut I'll play, "Party Doll," the engineer slightly lowers the level of the guitar when the voice comes in. But he uses compression judiciously. This is not a bad thing. Compression can work if you compress one instrument but not others." But, as demonstrated when playing back a cut of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, the arch of dynamics can be distorted even by moderate compression that is not applied with discretion.
The killer came with playback of a classic Beatles track, "Nowhere Man." Real-time analysis revealed a 1314dB dynamic range. John then replayed the track, this time compressing it by 6dB, then by 10dB. There was no question that what was formerly beautiful had become raucous. It's one thing to read about this; hearing it, and feeling how heavy-handedly applied compression kills the music and squashes detail, space, and beauty, is another. Even when he turned it down, it wasn't any better. Wholesale compression had destroyed both the micro and macro levels of the music.
Compression destroys the beauty of classical music as well as rock. After noting that Robert Silverman's Mozart sonatas, recorded using Ray Kimber's IsoMike technique, are due out from Ray in both SACD and Blu-ray, John subjected his own recording of Silverman's second movement of Beethoven's Sonata 31, Op.110 to the kind of compression heard on the radio. Again, the artistry, dynamics, and increasing sense of drama were destroyed. Fans of John's work will hear the opposite next year, when his new Stereophile recording of Silverman playing Brahms and Schumann becomes available.
After irrefutably demonstrating that many current recordings are not worthy of playback on our high-end systems"the more you turn them up, the more you want to turn them down"John closed the seminar with his high-resolution Cantus recording of "There is Sweet Music." It was a joy. After going room-to-room for two days, hearing little more than snippets of recordings, it was wonderful to be reminded just how beautiful well-recorded music can sound.
The type of dynamic compression mentioned by JA sounds similar to the "gain riding" techniques used by TV and radio broadcasters, in order that commercial messages are "better heard". I have been told that many of these messages come perilously close to the FCC imposed modulation limit, and have no reason to doubt that statement. But I wonder at times if the FCC is listening in. In any case, the "mute" button on the RC is easily the most used!
On a totally unrelated subject - just wondering if Thiel Audio was present at the show. I would certainly understand their absence, if such was the case. But I sincerely hope that Kathy G. & Co. will continue to carry the product, and Jims' spirit, to future shows!
I'd like to see some extended discussion (and education) as well, in the pages of Stereophile. Album reviews (in this magazine), without question, should consider compression applied to recordings, and talk about them more if possible. Great (musical) albums like Elvis Costello's (Sugarcane) or Dinosaur Jr's (Farm) latest illustrate how critical it is to explaining the overall sound of an album. 'Sugarcane' sounds pretty natural, but compression fouls the quiet AND dynamic parts of the lp, and to much of the same extent, the cd. It is a palpable, almost low-bit rate hazing as well to the midrange and treble that is undeniable. I do understand this may have been intentional, as it is classic Bluegrass. In the case of Dino Jr, certain instruments were were intentionally & artfully compressed (similar to Neil Young's 'Mirror Ball'). I understand that compression is everywhere, but it's interesting how and where it has deleterious effects.
Something about this ruthless loudness war is starting to be done.Alhough it might not seem elegant to point to external links of a different magazine, I think this is one case for exception, due to the "horizontal" importannce of this topic. Look here: http://www.tnt-audio.com/topics/dr_measurements_e.html.Regards,Carlo Iaccarino - Naples - Italy
I'll leave it to John, who is out of town at the moment, to answer the technical questions. As for Thiel, they did not arrange to exhibit. I wouldn't conclude that this has to do Jim's passing; the deadline for reserving rooms had passed before his death. Rather, their absence most likely reflected the fact that RMAF and the Tokyo show coincided. You'd need to ask them to be sure.


text:
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text:
It's Flex Time
It brought a smile to my face, the 2013 Ford Flex sitting in my driveway with its Ruby Red Metallic Tint paint glistening in the sun, full of holiday cheer. With three rows and seating for up to seven, the Ford Flex is a standout with its unique crossover design that's both modern and functional.
As it enters its fifth year on the market, the Ford Flex is turning heads and gaining more fans (it went on sale in 2008 as a 2009 model). In 2012, sales were up 3.5 percent over 2011. And it's easy to see why, especially if you are in the market for a crossover that offers a comfortable interior, along with great cargo capacity.
Lots of room
Designed to accommodate passengers and their stuff, the Flex is … well … flexible. Inside there is plenty of cargo room, especially if both the third- and second-row seats are folded. With both folded, cargo capacity is 83.2 cubic feet. Fold just the third and you'll have 43.2 cubic feet. And with no rows folded, there is 20 cubic feet of storage capacity.
Fresh new look – inside and out
So what's new for this full-size crossover available in three models: SE, SEL and Limited?
For 2013, Flex's new front end is now slightly rounded, creating more visual harmony between the front and the rest of the vehicle. Notably, the signature Ford blue oval has been removed from the front, which now solely bears the Flex badge. There are also six all-new wheel styles, including three all-new 20-inch selections.
Also new is an Appearance Package available on Limited and SEL models that includes a two-tone black roof and black mirrors, 20-inch machined aluminum wheels with painted pockets, leather seats, unique door trim panels and other interior upgrades for a truly distinctive premium look and feel.
The new Flex comes in nine exterior colors, including three new colors for 2013. Customers also can choose from body-color roofs, or two-tone with white, silver or black, standard on the Appearance Package.
Fuel economy
Under the hood, Flex's new base engine delivers even more efficiency and performance with the addition of twin independent variable camshaft timing (Ti-VCT) to the 3.5-liter V6.
The upgraded 3.5-liter Ti-VCT V6 engine provides 287 horsepower – an approximate 25 horsepower increase from the previous engine – and 254 pound-feet of torque. The new Flex will also deliver 1 mpg more in fuel economy, with EPA-certified fuel economy of 18 mpg city and 25 mpg highway (FWD). Fuel economy for the AWD model is 17 mpg city and 23 mpg highway.
The 3.5-liter EcoBoost V6 is still available on the new Flex, bringing the fuel economy of a V6 engine with all-wheel-drive capability and V8-like performance of 365 horsepower and 350 pound-feet of torque. The fuel economy rating for the 3.5-litter EcoBoost V6 is 16 mpg in the city and 23 mpg on the highway.
Both engines are mated to a six-speed SelectShift Automatic transmission.
Both engines also are made more efficient with EPAS (electric power-assisted steering). EPAS improves fuel economy approximately 4 percent, and reduces emissions while improving steering performance primarily because the steering system is powered by an electric motor connected to the vehicle's battery, instead of an engine-mounted hydraulic pump steering system.
The Flex's starting MSRP is $30,885 (SE model). To learn more about this versatile crossover, visit your local Southeast Texas Ford dealer or go online to www.ford.com.


text:
**Read Love Me Like You Do 15+ before reading.** When...
Love Me Like You Do 15+117777658
- by HayleyPayne<33 & HannahHoran<3
- Rating:
- Published: 16 Feb 2013
- Updated: 10 Mar 2013
- Status: In Progress
What happens when two girls meet five of the most famous guys? When they go off to tour what happens?
Join MovellasFind out what all the buzz is about. Join now to start sharing your creativity and passion
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text: Administrative OfficesThe University of Nebraska is one university, governed by a Board of Regents whose members are elected by Nebraska voters. The board appoints a chief executive officer—the president of the University of Nebraska—who is the single administrative officer responsible to the board. The university conducts its programs primarily on its four campuses. The president's office provides overall leadership to the university in academic affairs, budget development and control, business and finance, physical planning, policy development, external affairs, diversity and equity, and legal affairs. The chancellors of the four campuses, who are appointed by the president, also serve as vice presidents of the university and as chief operating officers on their own campus.


text:
Stress Management: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Basics
- Do you find yourself constantly worrying about the future, stuck in the past, or on "auto-pilot"? Mindfulness is about paying attention and cultivating an awareness of your thoughts, actions and motivations. Two decades of published research indicate that the majority of people who complete an MBSR program experience:
-An ability to respond more effectively to both short and long-term stress
-Decreased pain and an improved ability to cope with pain or illness that may not go away
-Potential benefits to immune function
-An ability to make choices with greater clarity and awareness
-An increased sense of well-being and appreciation for life
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is a program that was developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979.
We are offering a modified 4-week program, which will introduce you to the basic tools of MBSR. These include practicing gentle, mindful movement, sitting and walking meditation, body scan meditation and group dialogue. The traditional MBSR program is a more intensive 8-week training. Mindfulness-Based Programs are taught in a non-religious way and focus on integrating mindfulness into the realities of daily living.
People taking MBSR classes come from all walks of life, but they share a common interest in that they want to find more balance, peace, and happiness in their lives. They are committed to doing the "homework" and to learning to actively participate in their own care.
Instructor: Carole Melkonian, RN, L.Ac., has been practicing meditation for over 30 years. She trained for four years at a Zen Buddhist monastery, and for 16 years studied closely with Thich Nhat Hanh - helping start his publishing company, Parallax Press, in 1985. In 1997, she attended the MBSR training course with Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli and has since taught MBSR in Northern California, at the National College of Natural Medicine and, since 2009, she has been teaching in the Providence Hospital System. Under the guidance of Tara Brach and James Baraz, she completed the 3-year Community Dharma Leadership Training, which certifies her to teach meditation courses. She has attended 3-month meditation retreats every year since 2010. In 2015 she spent 13 consecutive months on a meditation retreat at Buddhist monasteries in England, USA, and Canada. She continues to do month-long mindfulness meditation retreats at least once a year. Since February 2016, she has resumed her work as a meditation instructor, hospice RN at Hopewell House, and Licensed Acupuncturist.
This program includes four two-hour classes and a Saturday retreat. The classes will be held on Wednesdays October 25 - November 15, 2017 from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m., and on Saturday November 11, 2017 from 8:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m., for a 5-hour silent retreat.
Providence Health Plan members receive a discount on this class, and the discount is determined at registration check-out. If you are a Providence Medicare member, please call the Providence Resource Line at (503) 574-6595 to register for this class over the phone, to receive your discount for the class.
Please wear loose, comfortable clothing, and please bring a folded blanket, and yoga mat if you have one. Please bring a sack lunch to the Saturday retreat.
The evening class sessions will be held in the Basecamp Cardiac Wellness + Prevention Center, located on the first floor of the Providence Mother Joseph Plaza, on the Providence St. Vincent Medical Center campus, and Saturday 5-hour silent retreat will be held at the Providence Diabetes and Health Education Building, 9340 SW Barnes Road Suite 200.
*PROVIDENCE EMPLOYEES: if you would like to register for this class series, please send an e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.com or call the Providence Health Education Services Class Hotline at 503-216-5641.*


text:
The Cherokeean. (Rusk, Tex.), Vol. 111, No. 44, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 23, 1959
Description: Weekly newspaper from Rusk, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.
Date: April 23, 1959
Creator: Whitehead, E. H.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Newspaper
Partner: Singletary Memorial Library


text:
I'm building a game.
Each character has an energy bar. It's red when it's in the low, and green when it's full.
I'd like to make it obvious for the user to see that the bar is progressing ( getting full ) when he's playing with the character.
So far I've been thinking about making the bar glow. Result is OK but I'm wondering if there's any better idea.


text:
My question is: "Is it possible to have a sound and rigorous legitimation of the following construction ?". This construction is:
0/ Let ZFC be the usuel set theory, and let us add to the language capital latin letters as names for classes.Let V={x/x=x} be the usual universal class (that is a proper class, directly by foundation, or by Russel's paradox and separation) and P(x)={y/y⊆x} be the usual Power set fonction.
1/ Let us now extend the domain of the power set fonction to all classes, so that P(A)={y/y⊆A} We have that P(A)is a set if A is a set by the power set axiom;but as F(x)={x} in an injection from A into P(A), we also hav}e that P(A) must be a proper class if A is such. So that P(A) is a set iff A is a set. The universal class V being transitive and well-founded, we have that V={x/x⊆V}={x/x⊆V}=P(V); So that: V=P(0,V)=P(V)=P(1,V)=P(P(n,V))=P(n+1,V). Let us also remark that for every class A, we have A⊆V, so tat V is the greater possible class.
2/ Now, let us recursively build the following Q construction: Q(0,V)=P(V)=V{x/x⊆V}=V and Q(n+1,V)={A/(B∈A-->B∈Q(n,V)}={A/A Q(n,V)} Moreover let the collection Q be the union of the collections Q(n,V): Q=∪〈n∈N〉Q(n,V);
By induction, we have Q(n,V)⊆Q(n+1,V). We already know that the elements of Q(0,V)=V are axactly sets, and that the elements of Q(1,V)={A/A⊆V} are exactly usual classes. So that Q(0,V)⊆Q(1,V); moreover, the elements of the difference Q(1,V)/Q(0,V) are exactly usual proper classes and V is such an element. We also have Q(n,V)⊆Q(n+1,V)-->Q(n+1,V)⊆Q(n+2,V) because A∈Q(n+1,V)<-->(∀B∈A(B∈Q(n,V)) and by hypothesis B∈Q(n,V)-->B∈Q(n+1,V), so that A∈Q(n+2,V).
It is now natural to name sets as level 0 super-classes, proper classes as level 1 super-classes, and more generally elements of the difference Q(n+1,V)/Q(n,V) as level (n+1) super-classes, and also members of Q as super-classes.
We already know that Q(0,V) and Q(1,V)/Q(0,V) are non-void. more generally we have that Q(n+1,V)/Q(n,V) is non-void. To see this, let A and B be two level n super-classes and consider R(A,B)={D∈Q(n,V)/A⊆D⊆B}. It is clear that R(A,B) is a level (n+1) super-class that is non-void as soon as A⊆B. Particularly R(∅,A)={B/B⊆A} and R(A,A)={A} are such level (n+1) super-classes. So, we have by induction that Q(n,V)⊆Q(n+1,V) and also that Q(n,V)∈Q(n+1,V); for every level n, Q(n,V) is the greater element of Q(n+1,V) for inclusion.
3/ We also obtain that the difference of two super-classes (of level n) is a super-class (of level n), and that the union (the intersection) of a finite (of any family, but what can be the collection of indices ?) family of super-classes (of level n) is a super-class (of level n; of level ≤n).
Gérard Lang


text:
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