text:
How Much Is Inside Mustard? "A staple of summertime living, French's classic yellow mustard is the only suitable companion to hot dogs. However, while other websites delve into the buns 8-pack vs. frank 10-pack controversy, here at How Much is Inside, we wondered, how many hot dogs can you dress with one bottle of Mustard? On Friday night, we decided to find out." I heart you Rob Cockerham, you man of science, you.
Ready for dinner on Mars? Alain Ducasse's company was one of two tasked by the European Space Agency to develop delicious recipes for astronauts to prepare on long duration space missions. "The menus were all based on nine main ingredients that ESA envisions could be grown in greenhouses of future colonies on Mars or other planets. The nine must comprise at least 40% of the final diet, while the remaining (up to) 60% could be additional vegetables, herbs, oil, butter, salt, pepper, sugar and other seasoning brought from Earth." Guess this means I won't be going into space till the science of fake meat has advanced a considerable deal.
Glee Gum's Make Your Own Chewing Gum kit. "And it's really easy: Soften the chicle gum base, either in the microwave or on the stove. Then you add the sugar, corn syrup, and the flavor packets, knead it a little, and WOW! You've made your own gum!" $10 gets you enough to make 50 pieces, refills are $6. [via kottke.org]
One of my most traumatic eating moments ever came a few years ago, when a vegan friend lured me to a vegetarian restaurant in Chinatown by saying something like, "You have to try the fake kung pao chicken! It tastes just like the real thing!"
I'll spare you the unpleasant details, but let's just say that since then I've become exceedingly wary of meat substitutes—tofu is great but when it's tofu, not dressed up trying to be something else. (And don't even get me started on the abomination that is seitan, may it never cross my lips or the lips of anyone I care about again.)
Anyway, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick did a fake meat roundup way back in 2001, subjecting herself and her friends to all sorts of pork, beef and turkey substitutes. Some products did well (Lightlife's Steak Style Strips had testers saying things like "close to steak," "beefy," "wow I'm converted."), while others tested the limits of friendship (Worthington's Savory Slices was the worst of show, with comments like "tastes like eating suede," "something removed in a doctor show," "oh, my God," and "you've got to be kidding."). Lithwick closes her piece with this:
"One hates to be a reactionary, but sometimes absolute relativism is an evil unto itself. Plunging neck deep into the world of meat alternatives made it clear that the good Lord may have put cows and soybeans on different ends of his great classification system for good reason. Pigs rarely aspire to be asparagus. And wheat should not strive to be meat. With enough sauces, and marinades, and spices, a filament of gluten can pass for a strip of steak. But no one should be forced to eat three full courses of products that are all, as one of the artists among us observed, shaped either in circles or blobs. And no one should have to choke down stringy, tasteless, or chewy morsels just because they are coated in a sauce that might once have coated something at McDonald's. Call me a food fundamentalist, but the land in which meat and tofus collide is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."
It's been four years since she wrote that, people. Four years! Has food science advanced any since then? Are there any new fake meat products that won't make dedicated carnivores like myself ill? Tell me about them, or share your tales of bad fake meat experiences in the comments.
Two hours north of Barcelona and only open six months out of the year, Ferran Adrià's experimental flagship El Bulli is widely considered to be the best restaurant in the world. So, as you might well imagine, it's rather hard to get reservations and even if you can get them you'll have considerable travelling costs, but for a few hundred dollars each you can get Adrià's El Bulli cookbooks off of Amazon and have fun in your own kitchen. Each hardcover book is "filled with full color photographs, presents not only El Bulli's unparalleled recipes, but also an analysis of their development, philosophy, and technique" and is "presented as a boxed set that includes the main volume, along with a detailed Users Guide and an interactive CD that contains each recipe, numbered and catalogued by year."
El Bulli: 1983-1993, the first volume, is only available special order and at its list price: a whopping $492. Most expensive cookbook ever? I sure think (hope?) so, but if you know differently please let me know.
El Bulli: 1994-1997 is slightly cheaper than its predecessor but still also going for its list price of $450. Third volume El Bulli: 1998-2002 is currently deeply discounted from $350 to $220.50, so if you're an Adrià fan or know someone who is, that probably makes it the El Bulli cookbook to pick up this season.
(Free Super Saver Shipping, if that helps!)
Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream. "If you are anything like me, then you love ice cream. There is nothing like making your own, but the problem is, it just takes too long to freeze and some things just don't like to freeze. A while ago Scientific American [April, 1994 pgs. 66-71] had an article call Cooking with Chemistry or something along those lines. One of the recipes was one for using Liquid Nitrogen to make Ice Cream. Great!" This site is circa 1996 but still going strong. Make sure to watch the video!
Wonder Pizza vending machines. "The innovative machine holds, cooks and serves 9” whole pizza pies in just 2 minutes. There are 3 different pizzas available in each machine at one time. Delicious Connie’s Pizza of Chicago is featured in all WonderPizza Kiosks." Imported from Italy, I wonder if they'll be successful in the US? I want to say they won't appear in New York given the pizza joints on every other corner, but then again against all logic Domino's seems to be doing well here, so. [via Linklog]


text:
Here are some results of independent gambling research in France. ARJEL – the French gambling commission has presented some unfavorable trends in the development of online gambling.
The third quarter of the year has led to 5% decrease of online industry gain. This tendency has also effected poker gambling. Poker players from 18 to 24 years old do not play poker so much as in previous year.
There is some good news together with this deplorable tendency of online gambling reduction. Mobile market is characterized by active development. More than the half of all funds is deposited by means of Smart phones. There are about 20 percent of online poker bets and bookmaking bets among them.
Legalization of gambling market in Europe has affected a number of online casinos. For instance, Bwin Casino is closely interwoven with the legalization of gambling in a number of European countries. Bwin Casino went on strike working illegally in Belgium though its activity is legal in many other European countries. The company expresses dissatisfaction in this way about continuous increasing of taxes on online gambling in Europe.

domain: sociology


Its a shotgun blast with no pumps or anything extra.
Shooting a single shot in a Glock 19. Caliber 9mm. There is a pretty strong echo in the sound which ...
For more information check out our cookies policy.


text:
The West Bank and the Valley of the Kings - Full Day Tour
Valley of the Kings or Wadi el-Muluk: It is a valley in Egypt where tombs were built for the Pharaoh and powerful nobles of the New Kingdom. The valley stands on the west bank of the Nile and consists of two valleys, East and West, with the majority of the royal tombs situated in the East Valley.
• Queens Valley: It is a place where wives of the pharaohs were buried in ancient times. It was also known as Ta-Set-Neferu, meaning ‘the place of the children of the Pharaoh’. The valley is located near the Valley of the Kings. Here, along with the queens of the 18th, 19th and 20th dynasties, many princes and princesses were also buried with members of the nobility.
• Temple of Queen Hatshepsut: Also known as ‘Dier El Bahari’, it was established by Queen Hatshepsut, the only woman who ruled Egypt in the Pharaonic history. As you approach it from the distance, it is as of you are looking at a modern building that has been carved out of a mountain. Dier El-Bahari was commissioned by Queen Hatshepsut as a funerary monument to honor her father, Tutmose I and herself.
• Ramesseum: It is a funerary temple of King Ramesses II. On its walls is recorded the famous battle of Qadesh. Ramesseum built his fabulous mortuary temple on the site pf Seti I’s ruined temple where he identified himself with the local form of the god, Amun. The remains of the complex include a royal palace and a large number of mud-brick granaries and storerooms, as well as a small temple dedicated to Ramesses’ mother Tuya and wife Nefertari.
• Madinet Habu Temple: It is the funerary temple of King Ramesses II with military and religious motifs. The entire Temple of Ramses III, palace and town is enclosed within a defensive wall. Entry is through the High gate, or Migdol, which, in appearance resembles an Asiatic fort. Just inside the High gate, to the south, are the chapels of Amenirdis I, Shepenwepet II and Nitoket, wives of the god Amun. To the north side is the chapel of Amun. These chapels were a later addition dating to the 18th Dynasties, by Hatshepsut and Tutmose II. Close to the temple is the remains of a Nilo meter. These 'flood warnings' were positioned strategically along the river to determine the position of the river every year.
• Deir El Madina: It is a community of workmen and their families, supervisors and foremen and their families, all dedicated to building the great tombs of the Egyptian kings. You will be served lunch on this tour. After exploring the historical sites, you will be dropped back to your hotel in Luxor........... End of service

domain: geography


WASHINGTON — President Trump met on Tuesday at the White House with Attorney General William P. Barr and key Republican lawmakers in an effort to resolve a fight in Congress over domestic spying powers before three F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation tools expire next week.
The meeting came as a range of surveillance critics on Capitol Hill — from liberal advocates of civil liberties to conservative allies of President Trump who have been critical of the Russia investigation — were seeking to restrict the F.B.I.’s authorities. They want to attach changes to legislation to reauthorize the three provisions run out on March 15.
No clear resolution came out of the meeting, according to congressional officials briefed on it. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, and Mr. Barr made a case for passing a bill that would simply extend the expiring provisions without changes, relying on rules changes Mr. Barr could make on his own.
But several House Republicans pushed for a bill that would impose sharp new limits on national-security wiretapping — and Mr. Trump appeared to be more sympathetic to the idea of a sweeping overhaul, too, according to the officials.
It is far from clear, however, whether any legislation that makes substantive changes to surveillance law can pass both chambers before March 15.
Other voices at the meeting, like Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, argued for a short-term extension of the expiring provisions — such as for a month — to permit time to draft a bill. Mr. Graham noted that the expiring tools were different than the wiretapping in the Russia investigation that Mr. Trump and his allies widely denounced.
But for that to work, Mr. Trump would need to sign any extension into law. The president has a history of volatility on surveillance issues, responding to Fox News commentators but displaying little grasp of the legal policy details of national-security surveillance. Mr. Barr has stepped in to float the idea that he could tighten many rules on F.B.I. wiretapping on his own.
Further, some longtime libertarian-leaning members of Mr. Trump’s own party — including several who attended the meeting, like Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky — want to seize the moment to install more sweeping changes through legislation.
Disagreements among Democrats over whether proposed changes go too far or not far enough has already derailed legislation in the House, and the determination of some would-be reformers to capitalize on the window of opportunity created by the deadline heightened the possibility of an impasse allowing the tools to expire without any overhaul.
Mr. Trump’s frequent complaints about surveillance whipped up new levels of support among some of his congressional allies for broad new restrictions on the F.B.I. The president has pointed to its wiretapping of his former campaign adviser Carter Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, as evidence that the bureau abused its power in an effort to undermine him.
Though an inspector general inquiry found serious mistakes with the wiretapping of Mr. Page, it did not find evidence to support the narrative pushed by Mr. Trump and his allies that the high-level F.B.I. officials conspired to weaponize FISA against him.
Before the meeting, Mr. McConnell said he would try to prevent an outcome in which gridlock allowed the provisions to lapse, but acknowledged significant differences of opinion among members of Congress.
“Whether we can resolve those and pass new legislation is unclear,” Mr. McConnell said at his weekly news conference in the Capitol. “If we are unable to resolve our differences, my preference would be for another extension, which would give us more time to talk.”
While Mr. McConnell and many Republican senators want to largely leave the surveillance powers intact, deferring to Mr. Barr to make policy changes within the Justice Department to address concerns raised by Mr. Trump, some of their most vocal opponents come from within Republican ranks.
Before the meeting, Mr. Lee said that extending the expiring provisions without revising the FISA law was “one of the dumbest things we could do.” He called such a move “policy and political malpractice” and said it would happen “over my dead body.”
Democrats have their own internal disputes, with national security-minded moderates facing off with progressives driven by what they see as undue infringement on civil liberties. The tensions burst into the open last week, when a senior Democratic lawmaker effectively derailed a bill negotiated by two House chairmen that would have extended most of the expiring powers while putting in place some new limits to FISA and allowing a dysfunctional and defunct National Security Agency call records program to lapse.
The Democratic lawmaker, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, planned to offer amendments backed by progressives and some Republicans that would have curtailed surveillance, including requiring a “friend of the court” be appointed to critique the government’s arguments whenever it applied for a warrant to spy on Americans.
The main Democratic bill — backed by Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who negotiated it with the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York — would also expand the role for such a so-called amicus.
But it would have significantly less operational consequence. The Nadler-Schiff bill would call for the appointment of a critic when a FISA warrant request would affect First Amendment activities like a political campaign or religious worship, as opposed to every time any American is targeted.
Mr. Schiff said on Tuesday that he was leading last-minute talks with Ms. Lofgren and other progressive lawmakers to try to find a compromise. But with time dwindling, he had yet to close the gap.
“We are trying to arrive at an agreement on when an amicus would be called for, how long business records should be retained,” Mr. Schiff said in an interview.
But Democratic leaders in the House concede that it is increasingly likely they will simply have to accept whatever the Senate passes and sends to the House for consideration — likely a short-term extension of the powers — or let the program lapse and deal with the consequences.
The Justice Department first moved to impose more oversight over the FISA process in December, when its inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, released the scathing results of an investigation into the wiretapping of Mr. Page. The report found several instances where law enforcement officials seeking permission to wiretap his phone calls and emails gave the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court incomplete or incorrect information about Mr. Page.
Mr. Horowitz did not find evidence that the agent responsible for most of the problems was politically biased against Mr. Trump. But he rejected the explanation that he and his supervisors were simply busy with other aspects of the Russia investigation.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.


text:
Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Deltaby Richard Grant
Mississippi's #1 Bestseller of 2015 (The Clarion-Ledger)
A New York Times Bestseller
In Dispatches from Pluto, adventure writer Richard Grant takes on “the most American place on Earth”—the enigmatic, beautiful, often derided Mississippi/i>/b>/i>/b>/i>/b>
Winner of the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize
Mississippi's #1 Bestseller of 2015 (The Clarion-Ledger)
A New York Times Bestseller
In Dispatches from Pluto, adventure writer Richard Grant takes on “the most American place on Earth”—the enigmatic, beautiful, often derided Mississippi Delta.
Richard Grant and his girlfriend were living in a shoebox apartment in New York City when they decided on a whim to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. Dispatches from Pluto is their journey of discovery into this strange and wonderful American place. Imagine A Year In Provence with alligators and assassins, or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with hunting scenes and swamp-to-table dining.
On a remote, isolated strip of land, three miles beyond the tiny community of Pluto, Richard and his girlfriend, Mariah, embark on a new life. They learn to hunt, grow their own food, and fend off alligators, snakes, and varmints galore. They befriend an array of unforgettable local characters—blues legend T-Model Ford, cookbook maven Martha Foose, catfish farmers, eccentric millionaires, and the actor Morgan Freeman. Grant brings an adept, empathetic eye to the fascinating people he meets, capturing the rich, extraordinary culture of the Delta, while tracking its utterly bizarre and criminal extremes. Reporting from all angles as only an outsider can, Grant also delves deeply into the Delta’s lingering racial tensions. He finds that de facto segregation continues. Yet even as he observes major structural problems, he encounters many close, loving, and interdependent relationships between black and white families—and good reasons for hope.
Dispatches from Pluto is a book as unique as the Delta itself. It’s lively, entertaining, and funny, containing a travel writer’s flair for in-depth reporting alongside insightful reflections on poverty, community, and race. It’s also a love story, as the nomadic Grant learns to settle down. He falls not just for his girlfriend but for the beguiling place they now call home. Mississippi, Grant concludes, is the best-kept secret in America.
—Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic
“[Grant] succeeds, and with flair. His empathic manner, reportorial talent and eye for the unexpected detail make this a chigger-bitten trip that entertains as much as it informs.”
—The New York Times Book Review
"Grant takes a fillet knife and lays us open to the bone, like you might a catfish. He exposes our idiosyncratic insanity and brilliance, both the failure and the promise that are driven by an intimate yet remote love/hate relationship along the racial divide. It’s sad and beautiful at the same time."
—Mississippi State Senator John Horhn
“Readers with an appetite for a deep-fried version of A Year in Provence will find much to sate them here. … [Grant is] like a deeper and way funkier version of Peter Mayle. … it’s the individual voices and anecdotes he records that give Dispatches from Pluto its dissonant lilt and outré charm.”
—Jonathan Miles, Garden & Gun
“One of the best books to have been written about this part of Mississippi. Richard Grant has done something completely different from previous forays into this fascinating and frequently vilified part of America. … Grant’s book strikes a good balance between being partly A Year in Provence, Mississippi-style, and partly a searching investigation of the local culture. This is a man who has done his homework, asked hard questions, and made a point of getting to know everybody, white and black alike.”
—The New Criterion
“This book’s great virtue…is how it sets aside assumptions to look with clear, questioning eyes. Mississippi’s landscape, with its ‘crated little town(s)’ and ‘primordial interruptions in the empire of modern agriculture,’ is refreshed by Grant’s lovely prose.”
“Part travelogue, part sociological study, part memoir, and part nonfiction heir to the works of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, Dispatches from Pluto is provocative in the best kind of way. Grant approaches his subjects with empathy, yet pulls no punches. The result is an honest, engaging account of life in one of America’s most beguiling, bewildering cultural outposts. This book is a revelation.”
—Alan Huffman, author of Mississippi in Africa
"An appealing stew of fecklessness and curiosity, social psychology and social dysfunction, hope and despair."
“[A] delightful inside look at life on today's Mississippi Delta.”
—Frans De Waal, one of his “6 favorite books” in The Week
“Grant writes with an admiration and tenderness for his new home and neighbors. The book’s often riotously funny, particularly when describing real-life crime stories in Greenwood and elsewhere. But Grant’s also thoughtful and earnest in trying to understand race relations in modern-day Mississippi… Grant’s insights as an outsider trying to decipher a new world make this book compelling and also challenging. He’s confronting tough truths and asking hard questions, but from a place of genuine respect and love.”
—Mississippi Business Journal
“Whether he’s writing about how to shoot a buck or how to heat a house, Grant is funny, funny, funny. He’s even funny at funerals, yet through all the escapades and hilarity, he never loses sight of the problem of Delta race relations. As much as anything else, this is a book about racism in America, and Grant confronts the issue with an outsider’s honesty and aplomb.”
—Amy Wilentz, author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo
"A lovely, appreciative and entertaining tour of the strange and rich Mississippi Delta."
“A fascinating blend of memoir and travelogue … a vivid and captivating portrait of the modern American South.”
“Think what Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil could have been like if the author had a sympathetic understanding of the people. Richard Grant's Plutonic approach to the Delta turns up some marvelous surprises here.”
—Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls' Rising
“In the best tradition of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, British travel writer Richard Grant explores the otherworldly Mississippi Delta by settling into an aging plantation home and letting himself be captured by an eccentric, racially-tortured and wondrously hospitable culture. Dispatches from Pluto is wise, wry, sympathetic and spot-on.”
—Curtis Wilkie, author of The Fall of the House of Zeus
“I’ve never read anything like this before, so ‘plain out’ revealing of humanity’s true nature—how we have tangled ourselves up into the goofball messy life we’ve made on earth (let alone Pluto) while still having a moment or two where we are incredibly kind and sensible.”
—Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine and Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves
“Richard Grant gets it. Many authors that write about the Delta may come and stay a few months, then go back to their comfortable hometowns to burn or scathe the Delta’s mores, customs and culture. Richard bought an old plantation house here to become a part of the Delta and he writes about it in a way that brings laughter, astonishment, complexity and perplexity.”
—Hank Burdine, Delta Magazine
“Richard Grant is the ultimate cool customer, a fearless and skilled writer navigating the backwaters of rural Mississippi with his humanity on his sleeve, trying to get to the heart of what makes the Delta such a unique and soulful place while recounting a harrowing and funny, wise and heartwarming personal journey from nomad to proud homeowner. This is a great book.”
—Mark Haskell Smith, author of Naked at Lunch
While visiting the Mississippi Delta, Grant (Crazy River) fell in love with a beautiful plantation-style house with lower monthly payments than the Manhattan apartment he and his girlfriend, Mariah, rented. So begins their life in Pluto, a world of its own. Soon Grant and Mariah battle fire ants and cottonmouths in the garden, shoot deer for food, and get used to driving over 50 miles to the nearest Walmart. The locals take them under their wing and help them acclimate to a region where blacks and whites still remain segregated in many ways. Despite the confusing racial etiquette, along with the alligators sunning themselves in the backyard and the armadillos digging up the front yard, they become enthralled with the community and its generous people. Though the phrase "that's so Delta" is appropriate for much of day-to-day life there, the lifestyle suits them better than they would have expected. VERDICT A likely hit with fans of memoirs or travel fiction as well as those who enjoy a well-told story, this is a surprisingly humorous yet insightful read. Grant's writing is relaxed and familiar in the way of great storytellers.—Stacy Shaw, Orange, CA
Calling himself "a misfit Englishman…with a taste for remote places," the author of God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre (2008) buys a former plantation house, deep in the Mississippi Delta, and thus commences an education—his and ours. When journalist and TV host Grant decided to move to Holes County, "the poorest county in America's poorest state," neither he nor his girlfriend, Mariah, had ever been to the region. Nonetheless, they bought their place near the Yazoo River in an area called Pluto and immediately begin receiving tutelage from nature and neighbors. The author provides accounts of battles with cottonmouths, armadillos, and biting insects, of deer hunting (Mariah, once a vegetarian, changed her tastes), of struggles with heat and humidity and remoteness. They were stunned to discover the generosity of neighbors, both black and white. The Delta, which is more than 80 percent black, still manifests—as Grant repeatedly shows—many lingering troubles from slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and beyond. Among the most useful early advice he received: compartmentalize. Overlook the noxious opinions of your neighbors; enjoy the good parts. So he and Mariah did precisely that. Throughout the course of the year's residence that Grant records, he takes us on hunting excursions, to dangerous taverns, a black church, Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Prison), a school that's doing pretty well (most are not), and a local political campaign. We sit in on visits with local musicians and local raconteurs, whose tales, at times, tend to go on a bit, testing readers' patience. But the issue that repeatedly emerges—and how can it not?—is race. Continually, we hear the views of locals, the author, and Mariah, and we discover that corrosive racism is still alive and well. An appealing stew of fecklessness and curiosity, social psychology and social dysfunction, hope and despair.
- Simon & Schuster
- Publication date:
- Edition description:
- 1st Edition
- Sales rank:
- Product dimensions:
- 8.30(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.90(d)
Read an Excerpt
Dispatches from Pluto
I WAS LIVING in New York City when I decided to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. It was out in the cotton fields and cypress swamps of Holmes County, the poorest county in America’s poorest state. “There’s No Place Like Holmes, Catch The Southern Spirit,” announced a weather-beaten sign on the county line. It was illustrated with magnolia blossoms and perforated by shotgun blasts. The nearest neighbors were three miles away across fields and woods. The nearest supermarket was twenty-five miles away. It was well stocked with pig knuckles, hog jowls, boiled peanuts, and hunting magazines, but it was another twenty-five miles to find organic eggs, strong cheese, or crusty bread.
A few close friends understood why I wanted to live there, as a misfit Englishman with a US passport and a taste for remote places, but most people were genuinely mystified, or doubtful about my sanity. Why would anyone in his right mind choose to live in the backwoods of Mississippi? No state has a more beautiful name—Miss and Sis are sipping on something sippy, and it’s probably a sweet tea or an iced bourbon drink—but no state is more synonymous in the rest of the country with racism, ignorance, and cultural backwardness.
When I told them about my plans, many friends and acquaintances felt compelled to sing me the chorus of a 1964 Nina Simone song, “Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!” In bad imitation Southern drawls, they cracked wise about toothlessness, banjo music, men named Bubba, and the probability of getting myself raped in the woods one Saturday night. One white woman accused me of being racist for wanting to live in Mississippi, even though it’s the blackest state in America and Holmes County is more than 80 percent African-American. “All Southerners are racists, and Mississippi is the worst of all,” she opined. She had never set foot in the state, and never intended to, because she already knew everything she needed to know about Mississippi.
One of my hopes in writing this book is to dissolve these clumsy old stereotypes, and illustrate my conviction that Mississippi is the best-kept secret in America. Nowhere else is so poorly understood by outsiders, so unfairly maligned, so surreal and peculiar, so charming and maddening. Individually, collectively, and above all politically, Mississippians have a kind of genius for charging after phantoms and lost causes. Nowhere else in the world have I met so many fine, generous, honorable people, but if you look at the statistics, and read the news stories coming out of Mississippi, the state gives every appearance of being a redneck disaster zone.
As I was scrabbling around for a mortgage, and trying to persuade my liberal girlfriend to move there with me, Mississippi was found once again to be the poorest state in the Union, a position it has held consistently since the end of the Civil War. Once again, it was the fattest state, with more than a third of its adult population classified as obese. It was number one in the nation for teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, failure to graduate high school, religious devotion, political conservatism, and sexually transmitted diseases. The Republican-dominated legislature, caricatured by Saturday Night Live as “thirty hissing possums in a barn,” was trying to close down the state’s last abortion clinic, and a fifty-two-year-old Delta man had just been arrested in a police sting operation while having carnal relations with a show hog.
“Do y’all even know what a show hog looks like when they get through with all the shampooing and blow-drying and beauty treatments?” said my friend Martha Foose the cookbook writer. She was calling from her house in the Delta town of Greenwood, less than a mile from the unnatural crime scene. “It’s a beauty pageant for swine, and they get those hogs dolled up. They shave their underparts, and curl their eyelashes, and buff their little trotters, and I guess it’s just more than some guys can stand. I call it ‘dating down the food chain,’ and frankly, it’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more often.”
I first met Martha a few years ago in Oxford, Mississippi, the elegant, cultured, slightly dissolute university town in the northern hills of the state, where William Faulkner lived most of his life. I had stumbled across Oxford while interviewing elderly blues singers in the mid-1990s, fallen under its charms, and visited regularly ever since. Martha was there promoting her first cookbook, Screen Doors and Sweet Tea, a collection of recipes and stories drawn from her upbringing in the Mississippi Delta, and influenced by her training at a top cooking school in Paris. The book went on to win a James Beard Award for American Cooking. At the reading, she served high-octane bourbon cocktails, told some outlandish tales, and then we all decamped to the mayor’s house for more drinks and an impromptu dance party. At that time, the mayor of Oxford was the owner of the local bookstore, Square Books, and he and his wife kept their doors open to visiting writers and anyone else in the mood for fun.
At the party Martha kept imploring me to visit her beloved home ground in the Delta, a part of the state I didn’t know at all. She described it as a separate place from the rest of Mississippi, with its own unique history and culture, although nowhere on earth was more deeply Southern. She offered to take me on a grand tour of the Delta, and said I could stay for as long as I liked at her family’s farm, in a remote and mysterious sounding place called Pluto.
“GPS doesn’t work there, it just spins round and around, and that’s the way we like it,” she drawled in my ear as the mayor cranked up the music. “They took away our zip code, because we ran out of people and the postmistress drank too much. And it’s so beautiful there, uh! You’ll never want to leave.”
Other people cautioned me about the Delta. “Things get weird as shit down there,” said my friend Doug Roberts, and this made me pay attention, because Doug’s standards of weirdness and normalcy are fairly skewed to begin with. A law school graduate who couldn’t face being a lawyer, he sometimes appears at social functions wearing a penis gourd from Papua New Guinea and a coyote pelt on his head.
“The Delta is our Haiti,” he said. “It’s the third world right in the middle of America. Crime is bad, corruption is bad. It’s seventy percent black and the poverty is hard-core. Whole towns are basically caving in and rotting away. And you’ve got a bunch of rich white farmers living the good life right in the middle of it, and trying to pretend like everything’s normal. It’s the South, we’re great at denying reality, but the strain of it makes us weird sometimes, and you see a lot of that in the Delta. Lots of eccentrics, boozers, nutballs.”
The mayor’s wife described the Delta as, “beautiful, tragic, and totally batshit crazy.” Then she resumed go-go dancing with Martha to Booker T. and the MG’s until the mayor boogalooed headlong into the stereo and sent the needle skittering across the old record.
IT TOOK A couple of years, but I finally freed up the time and money for Martha’s grand Delta tour. I drove down from New York City, where my girlfriend was on edge and my dog was depressed, all of us crammed into a tiny Manhattan apartment we couldn’t afford. Our plan had been to live in New York for a year, because life is short, and our best friends were there, but four months had emptied out our bank accounts in a way that scarcely seemed possible. Lying awake in bed at night, I had the persistent illusion that the city’s molars were gnawing on my skull, while its fingers rifled through my pockets for yet more money.
Neither of us wanted to go back to Tucson, Arizona, where Mariah had lived all her life, and I had kept an address for twenty years. But it was becoming clear that we didn’t belong in New York. Mariah missed her garden and the presence of nature. Our dog Savanna lay on the floor of the apartment all day without moving, head resting on her paws, eyes open and mournful, a picture of canine despondency. A burly energetic German shepherd mix, she had grown up in a sunny Arizona backyard. Now she was cooped up in a four-hundred-and-twenty-five-square-foot apartment and getting increasingly aggressive at the dog park.
I knew the feeling. I was starting to experience violent revenge fantasies against strangers who cut in line. If one more person told me smugly what they weren’t eating now, I was going to scream. As I was settling a billing dispute at a parking garage, trying to exit and get on the road to Mississippi, the driver behind me started honking his horn. I walked over to him in a coiled rage and pounded my fist on the roof of his car. New York was still a marvel, a wonder, an endless fascination, but as I left the city behind, I breathed a deep sigh of relief, and then realized how long it had been since I breathed deeply. Like most New Yorkers, I was in the habit of grabbing my oxygen in shallow snatches from the grimy air.
Driving south, I left the grimy dregs of winter behind and crossed over into spring. Redbuds were blooming. Wildflowers lined the two-lane highways as I came down through Tennessee and passed a big blue highway sign saying, “Welcome to Mississippi, Birthplace of America’s Music.” The music was the first thing I knew of Mississippi. As a teenager in London, working back through American popular music, I found my way to Jimmie Rodgers, the pioneer of country western, from Meridian, Mississippi; Elvis Presley from Tupelo; Ike Turner from Clarksdale; and above all, the Delta blues and the electrified version that Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and other Mississippians developed in Chicago. Around the same time, I discovered the novels of William Faulkner, which deepened the mystery of Mississippi in my young mind.
Now I drove through the hills around Oxford, which Faulkner had immortalized in a dozen books and renamed Yoknapatawpha County, and I kept driving west until the hills came to an end. Now the road swung me down on to the vast alluvial plain of the Delta, a place unlike anywhere I had seen before.
The sky yawned open and the horizons leapt out. The light turned golden and radiant, pouring down on shimmering fields of cotton and corn and soybeans. The land was as flat as the ocean, and as I drove across it, I came across primordial interruptions in the empire of modern agriculture: remnant swamps of cypress and tupelo gum, stretches of thick jungly woods. It was also a landscape of ruins. Abandoned barns and shacks were being swallowed whole by lush and monstrous growths of Virginia creeper and trumpet vines. Weeds fractured the forecourt of an old gas station with the pumps standing there like tombstones and a loose dog trotting past with his ribs showing.
I drove past rivers, creeks, and bayous, all brimful with the same muddy brown water, kept back from the croplands by an elaborate system of levees, pumps, sluice gates, and drainage ditches. The true delta of the Mississippi River, the place where it reaches the sea, is down in coastal Louisiana. The place known as the Mississippi Delta is the shared ancestral floodplain of the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, a place that still wants to go underwater every spring. Two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point, it begins just south of Memphis and ends at Vicksburg.
In 1865, at the end of the Civil War, nine-tenths of the Delta was still virgin wilderness. It was the last real frontier in the lower forty-eight states, a forbidding swamp forest full of immense trees and impenetrable canebrakes, teeming with wolves, bears, panthers, alligators, snakes, and disease-carrying insects. Then, by a staggering quantity of effort, most of it exerted by mules and newly freed slaves, the ancient forests were cleared to get at the rich alluvial soil. The swamps were drained, and levees built up to keep the rivers from flooding. Great fortunes were made and lost and made again on the new Delta cotton plantations. It was a fickle, demanding crop that promised to make you rich—if the weather cooperated, and the levee held back the high water, and the dreaded boll weevil didn’t infest the fields, and overproduction didn’t sink the price.
Lebanese, Jewish, and Chinese merchants arrived. Italian peasants were imported as farm labor, but didn’t take to it. Black sharecroppers did most of the work and lived in dire poverty, as the white planters established a flamboyant quasi-aristocracy that was heavily dependent on credit at the bank. The ravages of malaria continued into the 1940s, and during bad outbreaks, a Delta planter might propose marriage to his belle by saying, “Miss Lucy, may I have the honor of buying your coffin?”
I MET UP with Martha in Greenwood, once the bustling, thriving, self-proclaimed Cotton Capital of the World. Now, like all Delta towns, it was in decline and losing population. We stayed up late drinking bourbon, and she told me about the wonderfully eccentric places she was going to take me. The next morning she showed up with a sausage-and-biscuit sandwich made by her husband Donald, a baker, and announced that my long-awaited Delta tour was canceled. “I’m too hungover,” she said. “We’ll go to Pluto instead. And don’t give me any lip or I’ll dump you in Tchula.”
It was a heartbreakingly gorgeous spring day. We drove south on Highway 49 with red-tailed hawks wheeling overhead, wildflowers everywhere, the light slanting down through the clouds in ladders. Big hopping vultures were eating a road-killed dog by a road sign pointing to a town called Egypt. A few miles down the road, more vultures, another dead dog. Then a road-killed armadillo. Then a road-killed coyote. Mississippi calls itself the Magnolia State, and the Hospitality State. It could also claim the Loose Dog State, the Roadkill State, and the Dreamland of Highway Vultures.
In the cratered little town of Tchula, black men were standing around in a derelict gas station, drinking 40-ounce beers and smoking cigarettes. Behind them was a big red hand-painted sign that said NO LOITERING. People wandered in and out of the road without much regard for traffic. An unaccompanied infant toddled along through the roadside grit. There were swaybacked trailers, and listing shacks with sheets of plastic on the roof to keep the rain out, among neat little houses with well-kept lawns. Hard-eyed young men cruised up and down in flashy new cars and trucks. In a mile we passed seven or eight churches. Drugs, religion, and welfare appeared to be the cornerstones of the local economy.
South of Tchula, in the tiny hamlet of Mileston, Martha turned off the highway onto a dirt track. She drove past a small scruffy shack to an even smaller, scruffier shack. “This is Miss Pat’s,” she said. “Her real name is Willie Ruth. She used to have a sign saying “Pat’s Kitchen,” but it was making too much business, so she took it down. She does a plate lunch with fried chicken, three vegetables, cornbread, sweet tea and dessert, all for six bucks. I ate here every day when I was pregnant.”
Miss Pat was a slow-moving, unflappable black woman with a bad knee and a kerchief tied around her head. Her customers were tractor drivers, farm hands, railroad workers, home health nurses with elaborate hairdos, picking up lunches to go. They spoke with a deep, thick, slurred accent, almost a dialect. It omitted so many consonants that I could barely understand it, and Martha had to quietly translate when it came time for me to order. I thought back to Indian reservations in South Dakota, the street gangs I had written about in South Central Los Angeles, poor whites in rural Appalachia. In none of those places did I feel like such an outsider, or have such trouble with basic communication. It added to the mounting impression that I had entered another country.
The air was heavy and still, with a metallic drone of insects, a languorous melancholy, an undercurrent of racial tension beneath a guarded surface politeness. There were cats everywhere, prowling after discarded chicken bones. A man sat on a table, staring into the middle distance, unmoving and inscrutable. We took our lunches to go, and drove along the shore of an oxbow lake. Cypress trees festooned with Spanish moss grew out in the water. Great blue herons and egrets flapped away. Turtles plopped off logs. A few miles more and we reached a small cluster of big houses with lawns and flower gardens and enormous shade trees full of mockingbirds.
“Welcome to Pluto, my favorite place on earth,” said Martha, parking behind a two-story gabled house that had belonged to her grandmother. We sat in the deep green shade of a magnificent oak tree, eating Miss Pat’s crunchy succulent fried chicken, drinking wine, watching cloud formations drift across the sky, and the changing light on the fields and catfish ponds. I took off my shoes and lay back in the grass, feeling relaxed for the first time in months. “Martha, this is just . . .”
“Isn’t it, though? The Delta is such a mess, but it puts a spell on you. I’ve lived in Paris, LA, Vermont, Minneapolis, and here I am, back home at last.”
“Why is it called Pluto?”
“Pluto was the Lord of the Underworld, that’s the story I always heard. All this was just a big, mean, hellish swamp.”
Later that afternoon, Martha said she might as well give me a tour of Pluto. She drove along a dirt road on top of a levee, passing her cousin’s catfish ponds, and entered some sun-dappled woods hung with long tendrils of vine. Eight or nine deer ran across the road. We emerged a few minutes later in open fields, and drove up to a stately old house standing by itself in a grove of huge trees. It had a seven-columned front porch looking out over manicured lawns and ponds and flower gardens.
“What a beautiful house,” I said.
“It’s for sale,” said Martha. “A 1910 plantation house with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, on six acres of land, I think. It’s my daddy’s house.”
“How much?” I said, expecting to hear a figure somewhere in advance of $400,000.
“He’s asking $160,000, I think, but you could probably pick it up for $130,000,” said Martha.
“What kind of shape is it in?”
“It’s in great shape. Daddy’s been fixing it up for twenty years.”
In all my restless nomadic adult life, I had never seen a house I wanted to own, or even live in for an extended period of time. Mortgages had always scared me. I’d never aspired to own property, because it meant getting trapped in one place. In twenty-two years, I had changed my address eighteen times. I was a wanderer, a drifter, forever passing through, taking notes, and moving on. That’s what I told myself as Martha opened the front door and took me inside.
The rooms were large with wooden floors and a sturdy old-fashioned elegance. There was a six-sided dining room with glass-fronted cabinets, a farmhouse kitchen, a study with a built-in gun rack, open fireplaces in most of the rooms. Behind the house were extensive vegetable gardens, fruit trees, muscadine grapevines, a fenced-in dog run that was eight times larger than our New York apartment. There was a two-acre horse pasture with a barn, and nestled into a stand of bamboo was a small, compact studio that looked ideal for writing.
“Is it safe here?” I asked.
“You need a dog and a gun,” said Martha. “You might get a crackhead looking for something to steal, or a meth-head coming through to poach deer or party on the lake. An alligator might show up when the water’s high. That’s the Yazoo River down through those trees, and that’d be your property line.”
That night, while the frogs and insects worked up a sawing rhythmic music, and we sat drinking bourbon under the stars, I couldn’t stop thinking about that old house down the levee. I pictured myself reading William Faulkner on the front porch, writing in the studio, Mariah working happily in the garden. We’d be able to grow our own vegetables, and harvest figs, pears, apples, persimmons, muscadines, and pecans. Maybe I could start hunting deer and putting meat on the table, if I could overcome my aversion to killing animals.
Martha and her cousins would be just down the road. We’d wake up listening to birdsong instead of traffic roar and jackhammers. We’d never hear a police siren. I’d been toying with the idea of living in Mississippi, and writing about it, for a long time. I liked the food, the music, the warmth of the culture, the easy conviviality and drawling repartee. Most of all, I liked the storytelling. It was an integral part of life here, an art form respected at all levels of society, and the stories themselves got so wild and improbable. They burned with a strange fever, and made a mockery of the usual standards of cause and effect. They were a window into a place and a culture where contradictions hung in the air like swamp gas, and eccentricity was as natural as rain.
Lyndon Johnson said, “There’s America, there’s the South, then there’s Mississippi.” To which Martha Foose added, “And then there’s the Delta. You have no idea what you’re getting into down here, and that’s what makes it so perfect. I’ll work on Daddy. You get back up there and work on Mariah. We’re going to be neighbors, and you’re going to write a book about the whole thing.”
Meet the Author
Richard Grant is an award-winning author, journalist, and television host. His books include Crazy River, the adventure classic God’s Middle Finger, and American Nomads, which has since been made into a BBC documentary of the same name.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
See all customer reviews
Fun, informative and be prepared to change your ideas about the people that live in the Mississippi delta area. I liked the history ,music, customs, and putting up with critters. Also the great old house they bought.
If your expecting another great exploration book like Grants masterful " God's Middle Finger".. you maybe dissapointed. Grant relocates to the Delta and spends much of the book on Racism. If your a foreigner from outside the U.S. it maybe an intriguing read. But otherwise it's all been explored before. The only highlight was discovering to my disssapointment was what a jerk the actor Morgan Freeman can be. Grants a great writer..so I'll await his next effort.

domain: literature


text:
That gives Langley, an athletically gifted player who climbed to the spotlight from a small school stage, an opportunity to provide an impact, though it probably won happen right away.
Can win 50 50 balls and produce with physicality although not a straight line burner.. One day a businessman in the audience invited her to do a modeling job for his company at, of all things, a cutlery convention in Chicago.
When I see the film, I see how the coaches try to make mismatches for him like they do for me at USC. But missing those four should not ruin a defense so severely.
On its opening drive, they banged out a couple of first downs to move to their 44. As such, prospective agents can enter this profession through a bachelor’s degree in law, business administration or sports management.
The 49ers? They have Brian Hoyer and went 2 14 last season. NFL cameramen are in the radio and television broadcasting industry, which held the highest employment level in May 2010, with an estimated 6,550 jobs, according to the BLS.
“Think ‘yoga’ from the time you rise until you walk out the door for work it’s a mediation in motion.” Do some shoulder openers in the shower while shampooing, blow dry your hair upside down to stretch out your hamstrings, and lunge into a warrior III while making your bed.
Now, they gone. Alone.And now Villaneuva the hero; his teammates, the dark hearted.The Steelers were reportedly surprised that Villaneuva didn stay in the locker room with the rest of the team.
LOUIS RAMS LIONS: QUESTIONABLE: DE Ezekiel Ansah (hamstring, elbow), WR Calvin Johnson (ankle), LB Travis Lewis (ankle), WR Lance Moore (ankle), T Michael Ola (knee), S Glover Quin (ankle), DT Caraun Reid (ankle), C Travis Swanson (ankle).
Prosise gained three yards. But Kaepernick, who quarterbacked the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl in 2013, has never been arrested, has never been accused of hitting a woman.
You have a opportunity to score more points in a PPR league because you receive (P)oints (P)er (R)ecepetion. Only when we attempt to stifle dissent do we show disrespect..
This can create tension between a coach and general manager and has caused instability for some franchises. Sixteen of those teams drafted a quarterback the following year in the first or second round.
So, many parents, especially first timers, tend to panic about everything, like whether they started their child listening to Baby Mozart six months too late for the maximum developmental boost, or whether their infant’s lack of interest in NFL telecasts indicates they might be gay (or European)..
I think that a good thing.. “I mean, that’s not the best formula. Rodgers, who was 27 of 39 for 300 yards, threw a go ahead, 3 yard TD pass to Davante Adams with 9:23 left in the third quarter.
The statement said the league and Texans would continue to closely monitor the situation in Houston and adjust the team plans as necessary..
The National Football League sponsors a number of flag football teams for kids in cities all around the country. Two dozen receivers gained more than 1,000 yards last season, but that counts New Orleans tight end Jimmy Graham,..
At least that’s the thought. In the case when a team is competitive, GMs may trade young players or prospects for a proven performer who can help the team win a championship now.
He played some wide receiver when asked, and showed a flash here and there of the explosive player he used to be.. How far he is willing to go, however, is uncertain.
Sirius XM Holdings Inc. So we really believe by moving it to Global, not only will we grow that audience one step further but we have an opportunity to monetize it quite differently on the bigger platform as well.”.
Of his own players, the Hall of Famer said, we are disrespecting the flag, then we won play. Backup cornerback Quinten Rollins (ankle) was also lost during the game.
After so many accomplishments in the face of doubters, and especially tonight’s dead on performance, what’s left to question? His team beat last year’s SuperBowl contenders and in the playoffs; being the most aggressive time of the season.
Neither McCarthy nor special teams coordinator Ron Zook were pleased with rookie punter Justin Vogels up and down performance.
In Maine approved ranked choice voting because they tired of politics as usual. A 2012 report from the World Bank, an organization whose mission is to end extreme poverty, said that the number of Haitians living on $1.23 or less per day dropped from 31 percent to 24 percent since 2000.
Jaguars 2015 live stream: Time, TV schedule and how to watch online SB Nation 1 hour ago Game Preview: Panthers at Jaguars.
The emphasis is on glory and winning, and all of America seems to join the NFL in this culture of recklessly disregarding the outcome for the individual player.
The Cowboys last employed two kickers in 2009.. Were impressed with me at the combine and my workout. Wiley didn’t give up, and he was able to get saccharin banned from use in processed foods, but direct sales to consumers were permitted.
And you were spot on about the media reaction to it. Group was broken up in 1957, and Tittle lost his job to John Brodie for most of his final three seasons with San Francisco.
“In Q1 2017, we aired more than 800 hours of live stream content from over 400 events across sports, news, politics and entertainment,” a spokesman said in a statement.
Has 4.5 sacks FF in past 6 on road vs. New England used the tactic on three plays during a touchdown drive in the third quarter that cut the Ravens lead to a touchdown..
But in 1939 college leagues voted to make helmets mandatory and in 1943 the NFL joined them. “We have lots of people that are really angry and if they can channel that anger to playing a sport I don’t think we will have any issue with security in Nigeria.”ty to appear substantially older than his age would suggest, has chipped in 7 goals from defence.
Even though I don’t play an athletic position like they do, I still try to take that same mindset of: If it’s not going to help me get better at what I want to get better at, then I’m not going to do it

domain: news


text:
Man hid pen cameras in locker room at King of Prussia mall, spied on teens, PoliceSay – NBC10 Philadelphia
A man has been accused of using hidden cameras to record unsuspecting victims, including teenagers, as they changed in two separate stores in the King of Prussia Mall.
Smyrna, Delaware, resident Joseph Stevenson, 26, has been charged with numerous counts of invasion of privacy, disorderly conduct and interception, disclosure or use of wired communications.
The investigation began on July 3, when a 14-year-old girl found a hidden camera in the locker room of a Hollister store in the King of Prussia Mall, said Lt. Paul Cooper of the Township Police Department. ‘Upper Merion. The girl handed the camera over to management.
Stevenson later returned to attempt to claim the camera, but employees refused to return it, court documents show. He left, but not before he bought something with his store loyalty card, which police used to track Stevenson after store management contacted them, court documents show.
Police found footage of seven people – six women and one man – in various stages of undressing on camera, Cooper said. All the victims have been identified and notified of the investigation.
During the investigation, police identified a person of interest and learned that the man had also been inside an Urban Outfitters store. Management told police an employee found another pen camera while checking the changing rooms.
This camera contained images of two women. Police are trying to identify the couple, who were inside Urban Outfitters between 2:20 p.m. and 2:55 p.m. on July 3, Cooper said.
Court documents indicate that the majority of the victims were teenage girls, with the youngest being 13 years old. The victims also include a 17-year-old boy and a 29-year-old woman, according to court documents.
Police do not believe footage of any of the victims was released.
Stevenson was released on $ 10,000 bail. He was ordered to refrain from going to shopping centers and to stay away from the victims or their families.
A message left with the law firm representing Stevenson was not immediately returned.

domain: law


Checks and Balances: Experts say Police Act needs amendments “not only to protect democracy but also to construct modern India”
Sweta Ranjan | April 8, 2022 | New Delhi
Police reforms in our country are long overdue. Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also stressed upon the need for police reforms. He called for radical changes in the police administration. He said that the policing system in the country had not changed in the 75 years after Independence and that the perception even now about the police is that “one should stay away from them”.
Chief Justice of India NV Ramana also recently said that the image of the police is tarnished. People hesitate to approach police in times of despair as their image is stained due to corruption, excesses, lack of impartiality and close nexus with the political class. He said, “People hesitate to approach the police in times of despair. The image of the institution of police is regrettably tarnished by allegations of corruption, police excesses, lack of impartiality and close nexus with the political class.”
But, then, why no reforms have taken place in 75 years? Why no measures were taken by the successive governments to introduce amendments in the Police Act of 1861 – if not its replacement?
Prakash Singh, former DGP of Uttar Pradesh who has always spoken in favour of police reforms, filed a PIL before the Supreme Court in 1996, which was expected to free the police from political control, mainly in relation to transfers and postings. On Singh’s appeal, the top court had issued directives to introduce police reforms but no party in power showed interest in making the police department more efficient and responsive to the needs of the people. Multiple commissions since 1971 have recommended a string of reforms but not much has been done in this direction.
The latest edition of ‘Checks and Balances’, an online discussion with experts on governance challenges hosted by Sweta Ranjan, focuses on the police reforms.
[You can watch this and previous episodes of Checks and Balances here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-fTSP7yn4ZTD9EAHDCqq3Q]
Curiously, the need for police reforms has been highlighted for more than the last 120 years. First of all, the Police Commission constituted by Lord Curzon in 1902 had expressed concern in this direction. AHL Fraser, chairman of the Second Police Commission, had said that the police is seen as a corrupt and oppressive institution and its condition in the whole country is very unsatisfactory. The commission had expressed the need for immediate reforms in the police.
Even after more than a century, the situation remains the same. There does not appear to be any significant improvement or change in the police.
Taking cognizance of the misuse of the police force during the Emergency, when the Janata Party came to power, one of its first decisions was to constitute the National Police Commission under the chairmanship of former ICS Dharamveer for police reforms. Between 1977 and 1981, the commission submitted eight reports. It attached the draft of the Model Police Act in the last report of 1981, but this too could not be implemented. After which a public interest litigation was filed by Prakash Singh in the Supreme Court in 1996 for police reforms.
The contempt petition was filed in the court for non-compliance of the directions, since then the hearing is going on till now.
India’s politicians ignored the need for introducing the change in the police system and sat upon the legacy problem inherited from the colonial rulers. Experts say it suits them as they used policing as a tool to instill fear among people.
During the discussion, Prakash Singh said, “Police reforms are important not only to protect democracy but also to construct modern India. It’s important to understand that in 1861 the British government had introduced the Police Act after the rebellion of 1857. The British had understood that to rule over India successfully they needed a force that blindly follows their orders and is politically useful. After Independence in 1947, the government should have brought in changes with new goals and philosophy. With decline in the standards of politics there was a massive misuse of the police force. This was most prominent during the emergency period.”
Vikram Singh, a former top cop of Uttar Pradesh, said, “It is the frustration of the governments and their selfish approach that has obstructed the reforms in the police system. The governments have deliberately kept the police system handicapped for achieving their political goals. The comments made by the Frazer committee in 1902 are relevant even today. We are celebrating the 75th year of Independence, but no measure is taken towards police reforms. We have seen the example of Mumbai Police, it shows, if reforms are not introduced on time the result could be disastrous. It is the lack of willingness that is delaying this much needed reform.”
Ashok Wankhede, a senior journalist, said that the Supreme Court made a historic statement on September 22, 2006 by pointing out seven directives that should have been introduced immediately but nothing has been done till date. He said, “The cabinet includes 43 percent tainted ministers and 37 percent of them have cases of serious crimes like rape, murder and attempt to murder against them. How can you expect reforms to happen in the police system if such is the political set-up?”
Ashok Kumar, Director General of Police, Uttarakhand, said that his state has brought in reforms in the Police Act. He said, “Things have become better in the state but a lot needs to be done.”
BMC commissioner and administrator Iqbal Singh Chahal has been conferred with a Honorary Doctor of Science Degree (honoris causa) by Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar, Punjab. Chahal was conferred the degree during the 48th convocation of the University in Amritsar at the hands of Punjab
Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) aims to use a two-track approach on environmental social and corporate governance (ESG). Addressing a conference on ‘ESG for Atmanirbhar Bharat` in Mumbai, Sebi chairperson Madhabi Puri Buch said that that there should not be a single carbo
Presenting authentic information is the prime responsibility of media and that facts should be properly checked before they are put in the public domain, union minister of information and broadcasting Anurag Thakur has said. “While speed with which the information is transmitted is imp
Union minister for finance and corporate affairs Nirmala Sitharaman has concluded the pre-budget consultation meetings for Budget 2023-24 that were held from November 21 to 28 in the virtual mode. More than 110 invitees representing seven stakeholder groups participated in eight meetings sch
The total coal production in the country stands at 448 million tonnes (MT) for the month of October 2022 which is 18% higher than the production of the corresponding period of last year. The growth of coal production from Coal India Ltd (CIL) is also more than 17%. The ministry of coal said
The number of social innovators and entrepreneurs has considerably increased recently in India. The idea of social entrepreneurship, which aspires to provide novel solutions for the world`s most critical social issues, is now receiving more attention. Challenges like overworked healthcare,


text: The United Nations Human Rights Council appointed Makarim Wibisono – an Indonesian diplomat who has expressed pro-Palestinian views – on Thursday to a six-year term as its special investigator of Israeli actions in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.In a surprising move, UNHRC President Baudelaire Ndong Ella gave the post to Wibisono after disregarding the three vetted candidates that a UNHRC consultative group of five member states put forward.The investigator’s reports to the UNHRC carry weight within the larger UN system and impact its legal stance on Israel. Wibisono replaces US legal expert Richard Falk, who had advocated boycotting Israeli settlements, said that Israel had “genocidal” intentions toward the Palestinians, and endorsed 9/11 conspiracy theories.To calm the waters after Falk, the UN consultative group had tapped American legal expert Christina Cerna of Georgetown University, because she was a neutral candidate who had not taken a public stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.The Arab League wrote a letter of protest and called for the appointment of British legal expert Christine Chinkin, who helped author the controversial 2009 Goldstone Report on Israeli military activity in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. The UN consultive group listed her as its second choice.Ndong Ella had initially agreed to appoint her at the end of March, when he presented the UNHRC with a list of 19 nominees for investigatory positions on a wide array of human rights issues. But member states complained that the list favored men over women, and certain parts of the globe over others.After a long series of conversations among member states, Ndong Ella presented a new list on Thursday, at which point he exercised his powers as president of the council to ignore the vetted candidates in favor of an appointee he favored – in this case, Wibisono. He made other changes, such as dropping Israel Doron – an Israeli citizen who was initially tapped for the post of independent expert on the enjoyment of all human rights by older persons – in favor of Chilean Rosa Kornfeld-Matte.No Israelis were among the 19 appointments.In spite of the objections of countries such as the US, Falk’s wife, Hilal Elvar of Turkey, remained on the list and was appointed on Thursday as the UNHRC special rapporteur on the right to food.At Thursday’s UNHRC debate, a number of countries, including Peru and Argentina, continued to object to the list.Saoud El-Saadi, a representative of Kuwait, asked Ndong Ella to explain the procedure by which the vetted candidates for Wibisono’s post had been set aside.“How was the name arrived at?” he asked.Ndong Ella seemed startled by the question and responded that the request for an alternative candidate had come from Saadi’s own group. “You are from the Arab group, and you must know how the procedure occurred, since I carried out this procedure with your group and I did so at the request of certain members of your group,” Ndong Ella said.He explained that Wibisono had been one of 10 candidates who had initially applied for the position.“I respected procedures by interviewing the candidates. I clarified that there were two that were not interviewed. I interviewed them. I chose the candidate who not only corresponded to the [UN] criteria, but also the person [who met] the expectations of the concerned parties in the system,” he said.Ndong Ella said there had been irreconcilable differences regarding this position, and that Wibisono’s appointment had erased that gridlock.In March, Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, had predicted that Wibisono would get the post.At the time, he had charged that Wibisono was problematic because in the past he had “accused Israel of ‘unconscionable use of force against the Palestinians,’ ‘untenable acts of aggression,’ and of having a ‘policy of retribution against the entire Palestinian nation.’” Neuer said that “Wibisono has referred to the ‘stark and brutal nature of the policies pursued by the occupying power,’ accused Israel of being ‘the aggressor and the perpetrator of wanton violence,’ and repeatedly minimized Israeli suffering, speaking of ‘the handful of Israelis who have died,’ and of Israel’s battle with rocket and other terrorist attacks as a ‘flimsy pretext.’” The UNHRC has 37 rapporteurs, of which 15 are for specific countries. But Israel is the only country to which a rapporteur is permanently assigned. Its mandate focuses solely on Israeli actions with regard to the Palestinians.


text:
William O. Smith. For more than half a century a resident of Champaign County, William O. Smith is known to the people of this section as a man who did his brave and efficient duty in the Civil W T ar, as an active and industrious farmer, and as one who in all the relations of a long and busy life has lived up to the best standards of citizenship. He is also known through his children, a number of whom now occupy worthy and honorable places in community affairs.
Mr. Smith was born at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, January 5, 1839, a son of S. B. and Mary Ellen (Sheperd) Smith. His father’s native home was near Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. William O. Smith was one of a family of five sons and two daughters. In 1846, when he was seven years of age, the family removed to Sangamon County, Illinois, and rented a house in Sheldon’s Row in the city of Springfield. For two years they had the distinction of living in the same house with Abraham Lincoln and his wife. The house was a double apartment, the Smiths occupying one side and the Lincolns the other. S. B. Smith served eighteen years as justice of the peace in Sangamon County.
Mr. W. O. Smith as a boy attended the Lake Creek District School in Sangamon County. After leaving the common schools and working for a year he realized the need of more education and saved and earned the money necessary to give him a course in the Springfield High School.
While in high school he was invited to join a debating club. The rules of the club were that members should be called upon for extempore speeches, limited to fifteen minutes on any given topic. Failure to make a speech made the member subject to a forfeit or fine of twenty-five cents.
When young Smith was first called upon for such an ordeal the chairman reached in a box, as was the custom, drew out a subject for the speech and handed it to the young man. Much to his suprise the slip contained the one word, soap. That was a test of quick thinking and ready wit. Another factor was that young Smith was not troubled with many quarter dollars in those days, and he promptly waded into his subject. He elucidated every phase and fact concerning soap, and much to the amusement and delight of the audience. Finally the time was up and the president had to ring him down. About sixty-five years later Mr. Smith met in Springfield one of his old schoolmates, who after mutual greeting laughingly asked “Smith, how is soap in Champaign County?”
Mr. Smith was a young man of twenty-two when the war cloud broke and deluged the country with hostilities. Filled with enthusiasm, he enlisted in his country’s service at Springfield in 1861 and became a member of Company I, Twenty-ninth Illinois Infantry. This regiment it has been frequently said was the regiment that “put down the rebellion.” He signed his enlistment papers August 7, 1861, at one o’clock in the afternoon. He immediately went home and bid his mother goodbye and next morning ate his breakfast at Cairo, Illinois. For nearly three years of his service Mr. Smith was employed as a United States scout. He was in many of the principal engagements, including Fort Donaldson and Fort Heniy, Pittsburg Landing or Shiloh, Black River, and many other scenes of carnage and bloodshed that have never effaced themselves from his memory. Even yet he shrinks from talking about the terrific side of war. It is only such men who can completely realize the tremendous sacrifices that were made in making this country a free and united people. He became a corporal in his company and was subsequently promoted to the post of deputy to a general. Finally General Grant took him to his headquarters and employed him there for two years. Some years later, when General Grant was in his second term as president, Mr. Smith visited Washington. Desiring to see his old general he presented himself at the door of the White House. The soldier on guard asked him to ‘ present his card. This Illinois veteran was not prepared with visiting cards and consequently was told that the President could not see him. It chanced that the President was close by, and recognizing the voice of the old soldier called him in and gave him his warm and characteristically kind greeting. They spent some time talking over old days in the army.
Mr. Smith was one time taken prisoner but was paroled. Eleven days after the expiration of his term of enlistment he was mustered out at Natchez, Mississippi, and received his honorable discharge at Springfield August 27, 1864. He was under Capt. Samuel H. Russell, the brave soldier who subsequently accompanied General Custer on the expedition against the Indians in the Northwest and fell another victim to the frenzy of the red men under Sitting Bull in the massacre of 1876.
After the war Mr. Smith engaged in farming in Champaign County and in 1865, at Mahomet, married Miss Louzsa Rea. Five children were born to them: Ida Lillian, Grace Eleanor, Jessie R., William O., Jr., Mary Ellen. These children were well educated in the Ludlow schools and the Paxton schools. W. O. Jr., after his education in these institutions studied law at Normal University three years, graduated, and has since practiced as a successful young attorney. He married Martha Whitcome and has one child, Raymond. The daughter Ida married Charles Hammerlin, and their children are Charles, Lew, Vera, Myrtle, Chester, Dewey, Rex and Clara. Grace E. is the wife of Charles Coon. Their children are Flossie, Bede, Carl, Lois, Lillian, Glen, Jay, Marian and June. Jessie R. is the wife of Charles S. Wallace. Mr. Smith now makes his home with this daughter, Mrs. Jessie Wallace, at Champaign. By a former marriage Mrs. Wallace has one daughter, Lou Iris, who married T. H. Doty, and they have one child, Robert Hurrel Doty. This great-grandchild, a great comfort and the pride of his great-grandfather, was born November 17, 1913. The daughter Mary E. married William Clark, and their children are William, Robert, Laurel, Evelyn, Richard and Opal. The Clark family reside in Urbana.
After a happy home life of nearly a half a century Mr. Smith’s companionship with his beloved sharer of joys and sorrows was terminated in the death of Mrs. Smith on March 30, 1914. She was a loving mother and true and noble wife. Mr. Smith is a kind hearted and most hospitable man, and his long experience has made him the delightful companion of both old and young. One of his aims has been to make a new friend each day, and his motto, oft repeated and a constant abiding principle with him is “he who is armed with right is thrice doubly armed and need have no fear.”

domain: library


text:
About the Author
On Kiana’s tenth birthday, she made a secret wish to understand the mysteries of love, Angels, and ghost. At the end of each decade, she attempts to answer her childhood desire. Close to five decades later, she continues to explore her quest in creative writing.
She is an animal, nature, and humanitarian advocate. A part of her life was spent in the financial and nonprofit sector, but she continued her love of the arts – dance, painting, and literature.
She is a graduate of the UC Berkeley Ext.’s Post Baccalaureate program and an MFA in Popular Fiction and Publishing at Emerson College.
She received a merit-based scholarship at Emerson for her short story Evergreen.
Agents’ inquiries are welcome.
Get to Know Kiana Zier:
I love to dance Hula and ballet.
Yes, I was a teen in the 80s!
I’m still figuring out what it means to get older.
I admire the passion of artists, musicians, and writers.
In my 20s, I dreamed of working as a concierge at a resort in Hawaii.
I love paper art, journals, and calligraphy pens.
I left an executive MBA program to pursue creative writing.
A supporter of animal welfare.
Introvert by nature and an extrovert out of necessity.
Hawaiian culture and World Religion fascinate me.
Former cultural pageant winner in the Bay Area.
Writes under a pen name.
California Writers Club
Nina LaCour: The Slow Novel Lab (Spring 2021)
Emersonian Alumni writing group
Novel: Voice of Lavinia
Young Adult | Mystery / Magical Realism | 60,000 words | Agents' inquiries are welcome
In life, it is the mysterious that matter, things like love, ghost, and unspoken rules.
Cate S. Cruz unknowingly breaks the Academy’s unspoken rules, which cast her as a social pariah. Freshman year is supposed to be about promising prospects. Instead, friendships are shifting just when she needs to focus. Bad grows to worst when an evil apparition reappears from her childhood. Alone with questionable sanity, she escapes through songwriting and Lavinia’s piano, for it articulates the complexities of life. There is no language other than music that can fully express the depths of the unexplainable.
Music is the key to another dimension. Cate will find her way through the chaos, and the truth will emerge.
Inside Cate's World:
Watch & Listen:
Lyrics by Cate S. Cruz
Tell me your earliest memory, oh girl,
and I will fathom your life.
The first time you felt love—
though it was doomed.
How misleading is the compass of life?
Oh yeah, it’s called the metamorphosis rite.
Or what about fear?
The raw form of evil that appears,
yet a child knows it won’t disappear.
Tell me, what you really believe,
and I will try not to grieve.
Oh yeah, it’s revealed when we are stripped –
Down – down to the core.
Our loves and fears exposed;
what strange rules in life.
How misleading is the compass of life.
Oh girl, tell me what is the metamorphosis rite?
Other Works by Kiana Zier
A Girl Named Tina
Society of Eve
Children's Book Series
Cocoa & Yoyo - in progress
Little Brown Girl
Quest in Creative Writing...
"A secret wish to understand the mysteries of love, Angels, and ghost."

domain: artistic


text:
kikovic - stock.adobe.com
Asos is embarking on an expanded cloud agreement with Microsoft that will see the online retail giant commit to using the software giant’s Azure platform for another five years.
Microsoft’s work with Asos dates back several years, after the retailer decided to migrate to an Azure-powered microservices architecture in 2016 to underpin its push to offer a more personalised and responsive shopping experience to its customers.
This work was geared towards helping streamline the online shopping experience for its customers through the roll-out of a real-time product recommendation platform to help users sift with greater ease through the tens of thousands of items Asos sells.
That same year, Asos credited Microsoft and its Azure platform with helping it to process 167 million customer requests during the 24-hour Black Friday holiday shopping period.
Since then, Asos has continued to dig into the Microsoft Azure portfolio of cloud products to underpin its forays into artificial intelligence (AI) and support the roll-out of its other data-led customer-facing offerings.
“Over the past few years, Asos’ engineering teams – which number around 70 – have worked with Microsoft to build a customer platform that enables technical agility, global scale and resilience,” said the two firms in a blog post announcing the five-year cloud contract extension.
“This has been critical in handling high levels of customer demand and helping its customers find the fashion and beauty products they want, in a way that suits them.”
Asos said it already has a pipeline of projects it is looking forward to embarking on with Microsoft that are geared towards supporting its “strategic growth plans” that are focused on expanding its product ranges and the availability of the items it sells.
“Asos will evolve its existing Azure data platform as the foundation to further accelerate its journey to become a data-driven organisation – enabling the co-creation of industry-leading capabilities that leverage AI and machine learning as the catalyst for even deeper personalisation of the customer experience, driving unique recommendations from the approximately 90,000 products on site,” the company said.
“Leveraging Microsoft research, alongside its own data science expertise, will enable Asos to deliver operational efficiencies by better predicting customer demand, optimising logistics and delivering efficiencies across price and stock investments.”
Scott Guthrie, executive vice-president of cloud and AI at Microsoft, said that retail remains one of the most competitive and dynamic industries in the world, which is why firms such as Asos are using cloud to ensure they can respond in timely way to changing customer demands and preferences.
“By harnessing the power of the Microsoft cloud and its AI capabilities, Asos will be able to better meet customer demand, provide greater product availability, and deliver more seamless and personalised digital experiences,” said Guthrie.
Meanwhile, Cliff Cohen, CTO of Asos, described Microsoft as a “critical partner” that has assisted the firm with a rebuild of its technology stack to ready itself to become a global business.
“As we embark on the next phase of growth, we see Microsoft as a critical partner that is trusted and can provide a comprehensive set of cloud and AI solutions as a key enabler for evolution of our customer offering, particularly in building capabilities to support our growth strategy and embedding data-driven insights across our business.”
Read more about Asos and its tech strategy
- Asos’s digital product director Andy Berks talks about how the online retailer has used AI and machine learning technologies – and why the needs of the customer have to come first.
- Asos has launched augmented reality (AR) technology to allow customers to see what clothes might look on their body type, with models currently unable to attend its studios for photoshoots to prevent the spread of coronavirus.


4/24 Update: Rumors have it that free dining for the US will be released tomorrow! This is just a rumor at this point but some information has leaked:
- Booking Dates: April 25, 2016 to August 31, 2016.
- Valid for arrivals from August 14th – Oct 1st, Nov 15th – Nov 21st, Nov 26th – Nov 28th, and Dec 10th – Dec 21st
- Minimum 3 nights, must be booked with a minimum 2 day Magic Your Way Ticket.
- Disney’s Port Orleans French Quarter excluded from the offer.
Stay tuned, I’ll post full details if/when I hear any more information tomorrow.
For those of you who are keeping their fingers crossed that Disney announces a free dining package for 2016, I possibly have some good news. Earlier this week, Disney rolled out a new free dining promotion, discount tickets + $200 Disney Gift Card promotion available in the UK only for dates in early 2017. For those of you who are in the UK – congrats! I know that doesn’t do much for most of us here in the US but I would take it as a sign of good news that Disney is still actively rolling out free dining promotions.
This free dining promotion is a bit unique, let’s take a look at some of the details for hints of what we may possibly see. [click to continue…]
Disney has released their fist discount packages for 2016, these first promotions are for spring stays. Once we get into early 2016 I would expect to begin seeing some discount packages being released for summer 2016 then into spring we’ll start seeing fall 2016 discount packages being released. As with all promotions, timing can vary along with the type of discount offered. Two discount packages have been released for Spring 2016: [click to continue…]
One of the most popular promotions that Disney has historically released just about every year is the free dining package. This promotion adds on the Disney Dining Package for free if you book a non-discounted (full price) Magic Your Way room + park ticket package. Disney announced the free dining promotion for 2015 a few months ago but I have already started getting inquiries from readers who are looking into their 2016 trips if Disney will be releasing a package for next year. [click to continue…]
As I’m writing up this post it’s a beautiful 20 degrees outside (although sunny). Having come from warm and beatufiful central Florida it’s quite a shock to the system going back to weather 50 degrees colder. I just returned from a great trip down to the ‘World to watch my brother run the Disney 10k as part of the Marathon Weekend.
I wanted to share some thoughts, notes and observations from my trip along with some of the pictures I took while there. Overall it was an amazing trip as always, all of the parks are looking good as usual but a lot of construction which I like to see. That means we’ll be seeing some new things coming soon which I’m very excited about. [click to continue…]
Welcome to those of you joining me from Mommy To All Girls and those of you just hopping aboard. I am the 3rd stop on our Magical Blogorail!
Disney World can be one of the best places to celebrate the Christmas season – they don’t miss a beat when it comes to celebrating Christmas in every corner of the parks and resorts. One of the best seasonal events – in my opinion the very best is Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas party which is held at the Magic Kingdom on certain dates in November and December.
[click to continue…]


07 March 2017
07 March 2017
A door for a hydrogen powered car, constructed using Composites Evolution’s Biotex Flax, will be on display in the Auto Planet at JEC World, Paris, France, on the 14th – 16th March, 2017.
The door panel, developed by NetComposites, KS Composites and Riversimple for the Rasa hydrogen fuel cell car, has been built using a novel carbon/flax hybrid micro-sandwich which combines the mechanical benefits of carbon with the added advantages of reduced weight, cost, NVH and environmental impact of flax.
The need to reduce weight to improve vehicle efficiency and range is leading to the adoption of carbon fibre, which is relatively expensive, energy/CO2 intensive, and can cause noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) issues.
Flax is a natural fibre which is low cost, low density, sustainable and has excellent vibration damping properties, and has been shown to work well when combined with carbon fibre in hybrid composite structures.
Brendon Weager, Technical Director at Composites Evolution, explains “The Riversimple Rasa door panel demonstrates the great technical, economic and environmental benefits of the flax/carbon hybrid composites. This lightweight materials technology fits well with the ethos of Riversimple and zero emission vehicles as a whole. We fully expect this technology to be rolled out to a wider range of components in the near future.”
The door panel will be on display at the JEC World 2017 show, Paris, 14-16 March in the Auto Planet showcase area.
The Project research and development activities have been supported through grant funding provided by the Niche Vehicle Network.
Photo provided by Riversimple
Project 12 has collaborated with Total Composite Solutions (TCS), the UK partner of Microtex, on automotive OEM projects for bespoke carbon parts.
Continental Structural Plastics (CSP) will install a sheet moulding compound (SMC) production line at its facility in Pouance, France, to support the need for its composite formulations in Europe.
Solvay has celebrated the groundbreaking of its Greenville, Texas, US, manufacturing footprint expansion that increases the site’s resin mixing capacity to meet the growing needs of commercial and military aerospace composite customers.


text:
At BASF, we create chemistry for a sustainable future. We combine economic success with environmental protection and social responsibility.
Our portfolio is organized into six segments : Chemicals, Materials, Industrial Solutions, Surface Technologies, Nutrition & Care and Agricultural Solutions.
BASFs Asia Pacific regional headquarters is located in Hong Kong and had 390 employees by the end of 2020.
BASF is currently building a new Verbund site in Zhanjiang, Guangdong province. Announced in July 2018 and officially commenced in November 2019, BASF Guangdong Verbund site project would be BASFs largest investment with up to US$10 billion upon completion and would be operated under the sole responsibility of BASF.
The site would ultimately be the third-largest BASF site worldwide and will be built into a role model for smart manufacturing and sustainable production by utilizing the latest digital technologies and applying the highest safety standards.
Objectives of the Position
As part of the Smart Supply Chain & Logistics team in Hong Kong, you will support the team in Data Analytics, Data Visualization & AI models of the new Verbund site.


text:
The legal team at Immigration Solutions LLC is experienced at handling the documentation, the appeals, and any other details that are necessary for your Green Card case. There are many issues that can surprise those who are inexperienced with Brockton-specific rules and those issues could quickly put a halt to your Green Card application and deny your eligibility.
Your Green Card attorney is always bound by attorney-client privilege, which means he or she must keep your confidences while advising you how to proceed. Hiring an Green Card legal expert in Brockton is critical to imrpoving your chance of success. Our many years of experience handling Green Card cases can be worth every penny you spend.
Immigration Solutions LLC has maintained a reputation in the Brockton area for excellent service in Green Card matters. We have helped individuals and families throughout Brockton overcome numerous problems and delays in the immigration process.
Ready to work with us?
At Immigration Solutions LLC, we hope you will take a moment to reach out to us by calling (617) 536-0584. We know that Green Card matters are difficult to understand and traverse on your own, so we take the time out to explain all of the relevant laws and guide you throughout the entire process. We are more than happy to aid all those seeking help throughout Brockton.
Immigration Solutions LLC
585 Boylston Street, 4th Floor
Boston, MA 02116
Related Articles: Family Visa Lawyer Lawrence MA, H1B Visa Lawyer Cambridge MA, Visa Lawyer Lynn MA, Waivers of Inadmissibility Lawyer Revere MA, Deportation Defense Attorney Peabody MA, Employment Authorization Attorney Revere MA, Family Immigration Attorney Revere MA, Fiancé Visa Attorney Somerville MA, Immigration Appeals Attorney Malden MA, Investor Green Card Attorney Peabody MA,


(Associated Press) Though last year’s racial justice protests unleashed an avalanche of donations for minority causes, the philanthropic community remains divided about which donations should be counted as advancing racial equity.
Candid, a leading philanthropy research organization, told The Associated Press that it broadened its definition of racial equity to better reflect the intent of contributors and to help foster additional donations.
It now defines racial equity donations as “grantmaking explicitly awarded to benefit people of color broadly or to organizations that serve these populations.” Previously, it had limited its definition to “grantmaking focused on systemic change to advance racial equity.”
The change, introduced on its website Wednesday, raised the number of racial equity donations the organization has categorized in the past decade from roughly 60,000 to 600,000, according to Anna Koob, Candid’s director of research.
Under the new definition, Candid says it’s cataloged nearly 29,000 grants valued at $14.1 billion donated since George Floyd’s death. These include grants from foundations, corporations and wealthy philanthropists though not from everyday Americans, whose giving is difficult to fully track.
Contributions to racial equity are generally defined as providing resources to racial groups according to need, a practice that has been criticized by some conservatives who argue that this approach could neglect other communities in need.
Before the change was announced, Howard Husock, a philanthropy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, had criticized Candid’s prior definition as favoring counting advocacy initiatives instead of programs that provide direct services. Husock says the new definition is an improvement.
A consensus definition of what constitutes racial equity giving would provide clearer examples of donations to minority communities, said Una Osili, an associate dean at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, and make it easier to determine how much money flows into these causes.
“The reality is there is inexactness in a huge range of terminology within the foundation sector,” said Lori Villarosa, PRE’s executive director. “The number of different ways funders decide what is arts, what is education, what is health, is often fuzzy,”
Though it worked with Candid on its new definition, PRE has a definition of its own. It defines racial equity giving as grants that focus “on the prevention of harm and the redistribution of benefits within existing systems.”
Using Candid’s new definition, which was developed with PRE, the organization reported this week that only about $3.4 billion was given to racial equity by corporations and foundations in 2020, even though billions more have been promised in business and other initiatives to benefit minority communities.