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On August 6th, a week after the Democratic Convention, a clandestine summit meeting took place at the Aspen Institute, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The participants, all Democrats, were sworn to secrecy, and few of them will discuss the event. One thing that is certain, however, is that the guests formed a tableau that not many people would associate with the Democratic Party of the past. Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the future of progressive politics in America. The billionaires were not especially close socially, nor were they in complete agreement about politics or strategy. Yet they shared a common goal: to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush in the 2004 election.
“No one was supposed to know about this,” an assistant to one participant told me, declining to be named. “We don’t want people thinking it’s a cabal, or some sort of Masonic plot!” His concern was understandable: the prospect of rich men concentrating their wealth in order to sway an American election was an inflammatory one, particularly given the Democratic Party’s populist rhetoric. This private meeting of plutocrats was an unintended consequence of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law of 2002. Previously, wealthy donors had contributed “soft money” to the political parties, which controlled how the funds were spent. The reform legislation had banned such gifts, forcing donors to find new ways of influencing the political process.
The meeting’s organizer was Peter B. Lewis, the seventy-year-old reclusive chairman of the Progressive Corporation, an insurance company based in Cleveland, Ohio. He has spent much of 2004 discreetly directing millions of dollars to liberal groups allied with the Democratic Party, such as America Coming Together and MoveOn.org, while cruising the Mediterranean Sea on his two-hundred-and-fifty-foot yacht, Lone Ranger. The yacht has communications equipment that allows Lewis to monitor political developments in America while sunbathing off the coast of Italy. Lewis, a major backer of efforts to decriminalize marijuana, has helped underwrite campaigns to hold referenda on decriminalization in Arizona and California. (In 2000, he was arrested in New Zealand for possessing marijuana.) According to Lewis’s friends, he concluded that it would be best to remain a shadow figure in the 2004 campaign; he has declined all requests for interviews.
Flying in from Arizona was John Sperling, an octogenarian businessman who in 1976 created the for-profit University of Phoenix. Sperling is also the co-author of a recent book, “The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America,” which suggests that the 2004 election is a contest between “ ‘God, Family, and Flag’ folks”—who live in the South, the Great Plains, the Rockies, and Appalachia—and forward-thinking metropolitans who support “economic modernity,” “religious moderation,” and “excellence in education and science.”
Herb and Marion Sandler, a California couple in their seventies, came to Aspen looking for ways to give back to a country that had allowed them to prosper. The founders of Golden West Financial Corporation, a savings-and-loan company worth seventeen billion dollars, the Sandlers are devoted to the idea of preserving progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes.
The wealthiest participant at this meeting of hard-core partisans—and the one whose presence was the most surprising—was George Soros, the seventy-four-year-old Wall Street speculator turned philanthropist. Soros, who was born in Budapest in 1930, is short, with a crest of gray hair, owlish glasses surrounding blue eyes, and a hearing aid in one ear. At Aspen, his deep Hungarian accent, and his taste for abstract ideas, made him seem like a European professor who had walked into the wrong seminar. “The participants kind of talked past each other,” a person who attended the meeting told me.
To the distress of some of the strategists present, the billionaires spent much of the time bemoaning the superior powers of the G.O.P. In exasperation, one participant, Harold Ickes, Bill Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, attempted to rally the group with a look back at liberalism’s legacy of achievement, from the civil-rights era to the feminist movement. Much remained to be accomplished, he suggested.
Sperling proposed a potential new project for the group: unionizing Wal-Mart workers. Soros, however, had no interest in union drives. He wanted to stay focussed on the main objective—ousting Bush. Yet he also warned the group against the idea of combatting right-wing propaganda with leftist demagoguery. “I do not have an interest in replacing one extremist movement with another,” he said.
Andrew Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union, a holdover from the traditional working-class base of the Democratic Party, was also at the summit. In an interview not long ago, he conceded that consorting with billionaires had become a strange but increasingly common part of his job. “I have to admit, I used to think I was doing well when I met millionaires,” he said. “I’m glad we’ve got the billionaires with us. But it did feel a bit odd.”
George Soros immigrated to America from London in 1956, then went on to launch the Quantum Fund, one of the world’s first private hedge funds. For the past two decades, he has been among the wealthiest men in the world. Forbes currently ranks him as America’s twenty-fourth-richest person, and estimates his fortune to be $7.2 billion. Soros’s Wall Street background makes him a relatively rare figure in the world of Democratic donors. Hollywood liberals and trial lawyers have long made large contributions to liberal causes, but financiers are less often associated with a desire to upend the status quo. Soros himself is new to campaign politics: this is his first large-scale involvement in an American Presidential election.
Equally surprising is Soros’s willingness to join forces with other liberals—he has always been a loner, an independent, restless, and eccentric thinker who is determined not to be stuck in a fixed position for long. The Quantum fund, a pool for hugely wealthy investors that profited by anticipating and exploiting price swings in foreign currencies, is famously iconoclastic. Soros recently passed much of the fund’s management to his two grown sons, Robert and Jonathan, but under his direction it rejected the prevailing orthodoxy about the rationality of the market in favor of the notion that markets were prone to chaos and distortions stemming from human error. The fund, which is registered in the Netherlands Antilles, turned an original investment of six million dollars, in 1969, into five and a half billion dollars by 1999.
Soros’s political history is unorthodox as well. When he first arrived in America, a friend of his told me, Soros was hardly an enemy of conservative politicians. He had seen Hungary crushed by the Soviet bloc, and his political thinking was shaped primarily by his bitterness toward Communism. He held Ronald Reagan in high regard for his contributions toward breaking up the Soviet empire.
In the nineteen-eighties, Soros became a major philanthropist. In 1993, he created the Open Society Institute, a New York-based foundation that has supported intellectual freedom, human rights, and civil liberties in oppressive regimes around the world. Soros’s philanthropy is animated by a central idea: that the free expression of critical thought, such as he has practiced in his financial career, is the wellspring of democracy, or an “open society.” Soros has financed every kind of project imaginable in promoting this goal, from supporting dissidents such as Václav Havel, of the Czech Republic, to providing water-filtration systems for city residents during the siege of Sarajevo. Since he began his philanthropic efforts, Soros has given away more than four billion dollars—an amount that places him in the ranks of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
On September 11, 2001, Soros was in Beijing; he watched the Twin Towers fall on television. “It touched me,” he said in one of several recent interviews. But he soon began to feel that the country was “heading way off the rails.” The statements of Attorney General John Ashcroft, he said, “reminded me of Germany, under the Nazis. It was the kind of talk that Goebbels used to use to line the Germans up. I remember, I was thirteen or fourteen. It was the same kind of propaganda about how ‘We are endangered’ and ‘We have to be united.’ ”
Soros supported the military strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but, after the passage of the U.S.A. Patriot Act and the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq in a preëmptive strike, he came to believe that the American government was itself becoming an oppressive regime. “I decided the most important thing I could do to foster global open societies was to get Bush out of the White House,” he told me.
America, as Soros sees it, is poised at a dangerous intersection. The Bush Administration, he said, has exploited the terrorist threat to consolidate its own power, in ways that threaten the country’s core democratic values. “Ancient Rome was a great democracy, too, but it turned into an empire,” he said. “Caesar crossed the Rubicon. We may be at the Rubicon. Terrorism, like the barbarians at the gate, may become a permanent threat that never disappears. If we always have to rely on troops to protect us from the terrorists, and we can never criticize the Commander-in-Chief without undercutting the troops, then that’s the end of our open society.”
According to Soros, the war in Iraq attempted to spread democracy in precisely the wrong way—at gunpoint. “Democracy can only be built if local forces are eager to see it established,” he said. More broadly, he feared that the detention of terrorist suspects in Guantánamo Bay, and the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, would undermine America’s ability to champion human rights. (Soros suggested that the Bush Administration’s meek reaction to Vladimir Putin’s recent retreat from democracy in Russia was a consequence of our compromised credibility.) Soros’s increasingly strident opinions, he admitted, “put me at odds, somewhat, with the general public. But I didn’t worry. I am old! I don’t have much to lose. It’s a luxury, a reward for having been successful, that I can now risk that success.”
In May, 2003, Bush had what seemed like intimidatingly high popularity ratings, and there was overwhelming public support for the war. But Soros had one of his anticipatory hunches that the President’s support was a bubble that could burst. Moreover, he had the ego and the audacity to think that he could pop it. He commissioned two political researchers, Mark Steitz and Tom Novick, to determine whether it would be possible for Soros himself to exert political impact.
The following July, Soros invited a group of top Democratic activists to join him in the salmon-colored drawing room at El Mirador, his weekend estate in Southampton, Long Island, for the presentation of the consultants’ report. Steitz and Novick indicated that the 2004 election would probably be very close. The electorate was polarized, with only ten per cent of likely voters undecided. The best strategy, they said, would be to mobilize the Democratic base and persuade undecided voters with a state-of-the-art field operation. The plan was projected to cost at least seventy-five million dollars. As the researchers gave their presentation, Steitz recalled, “Soros was very engrossed. He leaned forward when we were talking about getting out the vote, and asked, ‘You mean you actually go door to door?’ All the practical aspects caught his imagination.”
Under the new campaign-finance law, supporters could no longer give unlimited funds directly to the Democratic Party—but according to the consultants’ interpretation of the law they could funnel private contributions into allied “independent” groups. As the discussion proceeded, it was proposed that Soros provide enough funds to these groups to pay for field operations in six or seven of the seventeen states that were expected to be the most contested. Soros, Steitz recalled, insisted that funds be offered for all seventeen. “He said, ‘I don’t want to build half a bridge! I want to do what’s necessary to effect the outcome!’ ”
When I asked Soros why he hadn’t just written a check for the whole seventy-five million, he said, “I thought ten would do.” Peter Lewis had agreed to match each donation—and, Soros hoped, their example would get others to join in. “They were doing what rich old guys should do when they think things have gone awry,” Peter Lewis’s son, Jonathan, told me. “They’re like a married couple,” he said of the two men. “If they have differences of opinion, they work it out.”
David Magleby, a dean at Brigham Young University, who studies politics and money, said that Soros’s decision had a catalytic effect. “He made himself highly visible in a way that was surprising,” Magleby said. “He became a lightning rod. It was a conscious decision to energize the Democrats. And Soros was right. Soros launched a counterattack that surprised the Republicans, and probably even the Democrats. The money was particularly important because it was so early. It’s investment banking applied to politics.”
In concert with Peter Lewis, Soros made large donations to ostensibly independent groups such as America Coming Together and the Young Voter Alliance. By this October, Soros had become one of the largest political-campaign contributors in American history, having spent an estimated eighteen and a half million dollars to defeat Bush.
Critics of Soros see his donations as brazenly hypocritical, considering that, until recently, he was a leading crusader for campaign-finance reform in America. Starting in the late nineteen-nineties, he donated eighteen million dollars to groups that supported the cause, and he is credited with having contributed significantly to the passage of the McCain-Feingold law. When Soros was asked about this reversal, he said, “This is the most important election of my lifetime. These aren’t normal times. The ends justify every legal means possible.”
For someone as rich as Soros, eighteen and half a million dollars is almost a negligible amount of money. I recently asked him if he even felt it when he gave away nearly twenty million dollars to the Democrats. He shook his head and shrugged no. He noted that he typically gives away more than four hundred million dollars a year.
Considering that over-all spending in the 2004 campaign may well surpass a billion dollars, Soros’s contribution is clearly too small to be determinative. Nonetheless, it is large enough to have made him a favorite target of conservative critics. Earlier this year, the Bush campaign, eager to deflect charges that the G.O.P. is the party of the rich, made a lengthy anti-Soros dossier available to any reporter willing not to disclose the sourcing. The Wall Street Journal ran a mocking editorial describing Soros as “the new Daddy Warbucks of the Democratic Party.” Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News talk-show host, has devoted several shows to Soros, characterizing him as a “sleazoid” and a “far-left radical bomb-thrower.” In an interview on Fox, Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, falsely accused Soros of wanting “to spend seventy-five million dollars” in the current campaign—almost quadrupling the true sum. Soros, who had long been considered emotionally aloof, was only spurred on by such attacks. “I’ve never seen him so partisan,” Robert Boorstin, an executive at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, said.
Originally, Soros had planned to keep quiet about his personal political agenda until after the election. Late this summer, he jettisoned this strategy in favor of waging his own media-grabbing political campaign. He hired a publicist for a twelve-city, three-million-dollar speaking tour. He sponsored a two-page ad containing a lengthy summary of his views in the Wall Street Journal, and set up a blog on which he promised to answer strangers’ e-mails.
Soros also asked his publisher, Public Affairs, to print an additional fifty thousand paperback copies of his recent book, “The Bubble of American Supremacy,” a polemic against what Soros saw as the Bush Administration’s doomed efforts to force other nations into military and economic submission. Though the book attacked the President’s actions, Soros’s decision to go on tour was also a slap at Bush’s opponent, John Kerry. In early October, Soros told me, “I feel that Kerry hasn’t gone far enough about Iraq.” What had the candidate failed to say? “We need to convince the people of Iraq that we’re going to leave,” Soros said. Hadn’t Kerry said precisely that, during his first debate with Bush? “Yes, well, he did, but we have to make clear under what conditions we’ll leave, and what we’ll leave behind. We have to put in place systems for allocating the oil revenues.”
As Soros has toured the country, he has transformed himself from a lordly patron of powerless political dissidents into a dissident himself. He has not heard a word from the Kerry campaign about his efforts. “The professionals have told me not to get mad but to get even,” he said. Some fellow-activists on the Democratic side, such as Wes Boyd, the founder of MoveOn.org, had cautioned him about becoming a distraction in the campaign. Privately, some Democratic officials were more scathing. One worried that the Party’s top funder was getting “kooky,” and said, “He should shut up!” Another suggested acidly, “Why doesn’t he just run for President himself?” Soros, his critics said, seemed about to become the Democratic Party’s answer to the conservative movement’s largest bankroller—the reclusive Richard Mellon Scaife.
“I hope I am more open, and more public-spirited,” Soros said of the Scaife comparison. “But I recognize that what I’ve done has raised eyebrows, not just among the right wing but with ordinary people, too.” Soros’s fervor has sparked some ridicule even within his own family. According to a family friend, George’s brother, Paul, a global investor who lives in Connecticut, once joked of his sibling, “He was perfectly normal until he made his first hundred million.”
Richard Medley, a former partner at Soros’s hedge fund, was more sympathetic. “It’s much deeper for him, in terms of his personal life, than most people realize,” he said, adding that Bush “poses a massive threat” to everything that Soros values. The President’s resistance to contemplating his own errors, for instance, was anathema to Soros, who regards self-criticism as the beginning of wisdom. “George is a creature of the Enlightenment,” Medley said. “He believes in rationality, science, the discoverable truth, and in relentless honesty. He’s not a fundamentalist about markets or anything else. The problem for him is that Bush is kind of the first anti-Enlightenment President we’ve had.”
In our conversations, Soros argued that for eighteen months after September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration had managed to “suspend the critical process” and “suppress all dissent” by labelling any criticism unpatriotic. It’s an argument that not every Bush critic accepts. “I disagree with him,” Michael Kazin, a progressive American historian at Georgetown University, said. “In the days after 9/11, the overwhelming majority of Americans obviously backed Bush’s tough stand against terrorism and the invasion of Afghanistan. He didn’t need to ‘silence’ them. And a small but vocal minority—Noam Chomsky, Katha Pollitt, Tariq Ali—were quite capable of making their views known.” Since 2003, Soros acknowledges, dissent has become more widespread, and the best-seller lists are filled with anti-Bush books. Still, he pointed out, Bush recently tried to stigmatize dissent by claiming that Kerry’s critique of the war in Iraq could “embolden an enemy”; Vice-President Dick Cheney, he noted, went even further, by proclaiming that a vote for Kerry could invite another attack.
One of Soros’s former associates, whose political views are more conservative, and who asked not to be identified, suggested that the financier, encouraged by like-minded liberals in New York, was mired in the same kind of fallacious group thinking that he had seized upon during his hedge-fund days. “He’s lost his bearings,” she argued. “How can he credibly compare America to a police state?”
At El Mirador on a sparkling day in late summer, Soros spoke darkly about the future. “I find it really difficult to conceive of a Bush victory,” he said. “It would be so detrimental to the world, to the U.S., and to me personally.”
It was hard to feel too worried in those surroundings. We sat on the brick patio of a Mediterranean-style pavilion; the velvety green lawns were dotted with magnificent specimen trees, meticulously tended flower beds, and lily ponds. El Mirador is known for being occupied by mismatched house guests, who spend summer weekends dipping into the pool and playing chess in the drawing room, amid upholstered wicker chaises and Cubist paintings. The poet Allen Ginsberg used to visit El Mirador; on the day I visited, Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, was due to arrive soon. Soros’s social set also includes the rock star Bono and the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.
For now, however, El Mirador felt empty. The compound was surrounded by tall white plastered walls, and monitored by a security system. The only immediately visible threat was the presence of a man swinging lethargically in a distant hammock. “Is he with you?” Soros asked, a little nervously, as the man got up and began to approach, apparently intent on joining our alfresco meal. Only when the man came within ten feet or so did Soros recognize him—he was the local tennis pro, and he had come to play a game with Soros, who is a fiercely competitive player, on the wrong day.
Considering the hatred that Soros’s activism has aroused, worries about security were no joke. He has received physical threats, prompting Soros’s firm to hire an armed security guard. “They’ve turned me into some kind of a devil, a golem!” he said. Vicious and sometimes anti-Semitic smears—Soros was born into a Jewish family—have appeared on the Internet. One screed, entitled “Satan Lives in George Soros,” compared him to Shylock and said that “Jews rule the world by proxy.”
Some of these wild attacks came from people not associated with the lunatic fringe. In August, Dennis Hastert, the Republican Speaker of the House, gave an interview on Fox News in which he insinuated that Soros, who, like Lewis, favors the decriminalization of marijuana, was funded by “drug groups”—a falsehood that the Speaker could not substantiate. When he was challenged by the show’s startled host to explain his charge, Hastert compounded the smear by saying, “The fact is, we don’t know where this money comes from.” (Hastert’s press secretary, John Feehery, declined to set up an interview for Hastert to comment.) The Speaker’s insinuation that Soros was tied to the illegal-narcotics trade was soon echoed on the state-run television news in Kazakhstan, where the Open Society Institute has been working to fight corruption.
“I asked for it,” Soros said, with a wry smile. The Hastert attack reminded him of politically orchestrated smears that had been made against him in the countries of the former Soviet bloc. During the nineteen-nineties, Soros spent an estimated billion dollars in Russia; he became a hero and benefactor to countless civic and cultural institutions, funding everything from literary journals to democracy-building groups. Masha Lipman, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that members of the Russian media had accused Soros of “basically being a spy.” The nationalist newspaper Zavtra called him “an enemy of humanity” whose “checks are infected,” and whose “gendarmes are local Jews.” Lipman added, “The allegation was that he couldn’t possibly be doing this out of philanthropy—he must have had an evil design.” Hard-line Communists and nationalists accused Soros of trying to influence the course of Russian history in order to benefit himself financially. And when the ruble collapsed, in the summer of 1998—a catastrophic moment in the attempt to rebuild the economy—Soros was blamed as a main source of Russia’s problems. Lipman said, “It’s not that Soros didn’t do the right thing. Russia’s legacy simply proved too strong for anyone to push it on a sustainable democratic path.”
More recently, Soros endured similar attacks in Ukraine. He recalled, “The government sent out messages about me, telling the media what to say. It’s the same with the Republican National Committee and Fox. They denigrate me personally in order to avoid the substance of my ideas.”
Yet Soros’s analysis of the Bush White House did not always rise above the personal. He dismissed the President as an ignorant fool. “Bush was just chosen as a figurehead, an acceptable face for a sinister group,” he said, adding, “Cheney is the Capo.” Pressed on how so much of the country could support Bush and Cheney, given his dismissive assessment, Soros cited the German scholar Erich Fromm’s landmark study of totalitarianism, “Escape from Freedom,” suggesting, “In uncertain times, people want to escape to safety. They seek a father figure, who acts with conviction.” He added, “Bush does have conviction. He practically claims a link to God.”
Soros, who describes himself as an agnostic, contended that Bush’s religious beliefs are in conflict with America’s democratic traditions. “The separation of church and state, the bedrock of our democracy, is clearly undermined by having a born-again President,” he said. “Our concern about Islamic fundamentalism is that there’s no separation between church and state, yet we are about to erode that here.” He lamented that, in the current climate, most American politicians could not risk making such politically incorrect statements. “You can see it, but you can’t say it,” he said.
During our lunch, a spare, low-carb entrée of grilled swordfish on sautéed greens served by a young man in a white polo shirt with the name of the estate emblazoned on the pocket, Soros was so engrossed in his thoughts that he ate absent-mindedly. A crew of gardeners mowed the large, empty lawn.
In our conversation, Soros tiptoed around his personal feelings for John Kerry, although he has known him socially for a number of years. Throughout the campaign, Soros has maintained a careful distance from Kerry, since the independent political groups he had funded are legally required not to coördinate their activities with the candidate. But both Soros and Kerry own houses in Sun Valley, Idaho, and they spent an afternoon in December, 2001, together, discussing Kerry’s ambition to run for President. At the time, Kerry was preparing a major foreignpolicy statement. “I helped him with it,” Soros told me. Yet Soros’s description of Kerry as “very acceptable”—the same ranking that he gave to Howard Dean and Wesley Clark—had all the warmth of a corporate personnel office. “I would have backed any of them over Bush,” he said.
Soros seemed rather isolated in his political adventure. Although he often chatted with Peter Lewis, Soros said that there was no Brain Trust advising him of political developments. He talked from time to time with Bill Moyers and with Harold Ickes, whom he described as “a real pro.” But, he said, “I am a political neophyte. I get most of my information from the newspapers.” Democratic partisans, he said, “send me books of polls, but, frankly, they’re not of much interest. I don’t read them.” He hadn’t attended the Democratic Convention, and he had decided to stay away from a large fund-raising event held the night before at a nearby beach house, even though Kerry had attended. He made no pretense of being a Washington insider. During one conversation, he mistakenly assumed that the conservative columnist David Brooks, of the Times, and the anti-conservative activist David Brock were the same person.
“This is not my strength,” he confessed. “I’m eager to get out of this partisan position that I’m pigeonholed into. I heartily dislike it.” He added, “I’ve always been against dividing the world into ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ So this ‘us’-versus-‘them’ campaign is very uncomfortable for me.”
Soros expressed so many reservations about partisan politics that it was almost difficult to understand why he had got so enmeshed. The Republicans had explained Soros’s involvement with simpleminded shorthand, suggesting that he wanted to own the White House. But Soros’s buying habits, like nearly everything else about him, were complicated. El Mirador, for instance, was large and elegant, but it wasn’t perched on the beach, and it barely had a view of the Atlantic Ocean. Soros was said to be a man of relatively modest tastes, given the possibilities. “I’m not very materialistic,” he said. “I don’t really have a talent for shopping.” He has tried. An admirer of modern art and, in particular, of the delicate abstractions of Paul Klee, Soros once found a dealer who sold him a miniature Klee canvas, on approval. But, as it hung on his wall, Soros told me, “I couldn’t really see it anymore. All I saw was the forty-thousand-dollar check I had written. I couldn’t enjoy it. So I returned it.”
Soros spent years in therapy, and was undoubtedly familiar with psychoanalytic theories that the wealthy bought art as a means of assuaging their guilt, by transforming filthy lucre into objects of beauty. But he didn’t seem particularly afflicted with this neurosis. He said, “I’m not one of those rich people who pretend they’re not rich, or try to live that way. I just happen to have a more abstract bent.” A friend who asked not to be identified said that Soros was so uninterested in money that he often travelled with an empty wallet, forcing friends to loan him cash for cab fare, which he invariably forgot to pay back. Women, the friend said, flocked to him, “because they expect him to leave hundred-dollar bills in their pocketbooks. But he never does.” Soros’s second wife, Susan, from whom he is separated, sumptuously decorated the couple’s Fifth Avenue apartment and an estate in Bedford, New York. But Soros spoke with indifference of the Sargent and Whistler paintings they owned.
“Money is just a tool for him,” the friend said. “It’s how he manipulates a lot of things in his life.” Indeed, when I asked Soros to name one thing in the world that he wished he could have, he replied with a laugh,“If I want it, I own it.” He paused. “But I do want something,” Soros finally said, his smile fading. “I want my ideas to be heard.”
Soros explained that he had been trying to influence American policy since 1989. “On my own, I was trying to do things, but if I could influence American policy I could be much more effective,” he said. Soros said that he tries to maintain a strict separation between his financial and his philanthropic work. Yet he acknowledged, “There are occasionally symbiotic moments between political and business interests.” He cited one example: an attempt to set up a public-policy think tank in England which had at first looked like a fruitless venture; it had landed him in what promised to be one of the most boring conferences of his life. But, chatting with British notables, he caught a serendipitous glimpse of a way to break into the closed world of the British bond market, which he soon did. It became “one of the most rewarding weekends of my life,” he said. “I made many millions.”
A number of Soros’s previous efforts to influence American policy had been frustrated. After the Berlin Wall fell, he met with the Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, in an attempt to get the first Bush Administration to provide more support for Mikhail Gorbachev, whose reform instincts Soros took more seriously than the Administration did. “They told me that we can never help Russia so long as it is allied with Cuba,” he recalled. In the mid-nineties, Soros had also tried, with mixed success, to influence the foreign policy of the Clinton Administration, in favor of intervening against Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia. After donating fifty million dollars to the relief effort in Bosnia, and a hundred thousand dollars to Clinton’s reëlection effort, Soros expected a warm welcome. But Clinton’s chief of staff, Thomas (Mack) McLarty, kept him waiting for so long in his empty office, Soros said, that he walked out. Aides ran after him, telling him that the President wanted to see him. But, Soros said, Clinton seemed less interested in Soros’s thoughts on Yugoslavia than in the stock market. “He just wanted to please me as a donor,” Soros said, sighing. “It happens a lot.”
During the fight over Yugoslavia, Soros developed an amiable rapport with Paul Wolfowitz, who shared his view on the necessity of intervening. Wolfowitz, who was then the dean of Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, invited Soros to deliver an address on his theories of open societies. When Wolfowitz later became the Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Bush Administration, and emerged as a key figure arguing for the invasion of Iraq, Soros told me that he had proposed to debate Wolfowitz publicly. “I got no reply,” he said. Soros clearly hopes that a Kerry White House would be more receptive to his views. “I put my money where my mouth is,” he said.
To his disappointment, however, his money often seemed to attract more admiration than his ideas did. He was humiliated in 1988 when foreign-policy dignitaries in Germany openly laughed at a speech he made advocating extensive aid for Eastern European countries. Although his most recent book received respectful reviews, a polemic that he wrote in 1998, “The Crisis of Global Capitalism,” which predicted imminent global economic collapse, was not only wrong—it was ridiculed as the work of a dilettante. In The New Republic, Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, dismissed Soros’s book as “embarrassingly banal”; the review was titled “The Amateur.”
George Soros was born George Schwartz, the second son of a well-to-do, nonobservant Jewish family. His bourgeois father, Tivadar, who loomed large in Soros’s young life, was a lawyer and a charmer in Budapest. Tivadar, an urbane freethinker, was philosophically opposed to the idea of working too hard; raising his two sons became his main project. Soros’s mother, Erzebet, whom Tivadar married in 1924, came from a family that owned a thriving silk shop, where the fashionable ordered their clothes. According to an authoritative 2002 biography by Michael T. Kaufman, “Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire,” Soros’s father had survived Siberian imprisonment during the First World War and emerged with a keen eye for human folly, a sensibility that he passed on to his sons.
The war had left the elder Soros skeptical about nationalism and all forms of sectarianism. He became an ardent internationalist, learning Esperanto and changing the family’s surname to the Esperanto-inspired palindrome “Soros.” He told his sons, “Money is a means to an end, but not to be taken that seriously.” More important, he taught them that while quaint ideals of heroism and the rule of law were admirable in normal times, there were moments, such as during war, when society was so traumatized—so “far from equilibrium,” as George Soros later put it—that survival required that ordinary conventions be suspended.
Soros did poorly in the strictly conformist schools he attended. Nonetheless, he confessed to his biographer that “I always considered myself exceptional.” He has even admitted that, at times, his self-regard bordered on “God-like.”
As an adolescent during the Second World War, Soros had a chance to test his father’s precepts. Critics of Soros, who include a number of Jews angered by his religious indifference and by his aversion to donating money to Israel, note with distaste that he once described 1944—the year that Adolf Eichmann directed the Nazis to deport half a million Hungarian Jews to death camps—as “the happiest year of my life.” According to his biographer, Soros’s comment referred to his excitement that his father had acted as a hero that year, saving the members of his immediate family by supplying them with false identity papers. Soros’s father helped rescue many other Jews, too, but while he devised false documentation for his family and friends for free, he evidently profited from selling such papers to others.
I asked Soros about this in September, while travelling with him on a private Hawker-800 jet that he had chartered for a trip to deliver a speech in Chicago. Reclining in a beige leather club chair, Soros told me, “I was lucky to have a father who understood that this was not normalcy, and if you go by the normal rules you are going to die. Many Jews did not take evasive action. My family did. What I learned during the war is that sometimes you can lose everything, even your life, by not taking risks.”
Risk-taking, in the form of huge and often highly leveraged bets, had been a major factor in his financial success. (These gambles, he admitted, had at times made him so dizzy from the stress that he could barely walk.) Now, he said, he felt impelled to risk his reputation in the Presidential campaign, because he thought that inaction was more dangerous. “The people in the Weimar Republic also thought everything would stay the same,” he said, gazing out the plane’s windows. “They didn’t think those things could happen. But I have a particular sensitivity to these matters, because I lived under both Nazi and Communist occupation.”
In truth, Soros did not live long under Communism. In 1947, when he was seventeen, his father arranged false identity papers for him, so that he could emigrate to London. His family, by then, had lost most of its fortune, and Soros was relegated to living in rooming houses, scrounging together money for his education by working as a busboy and a railroad porter. As a friendless foreigner in a clubby society, he resorted to standing at Speakers’ Corner, in Hyde Park, and holding forth about the importance of internationalism—in Esperanto, no less.
After several attempts, Soros was accepted to the London School of Economics, where he studied under the eminent political philosopher Sir Karl Popper, the author of “The Open Society and Its Enemies” (1945). Popper’s theories have taken on an iconic meaning for Soros, despite his dogma against dogma. Popper’s ideas helped Soros make sense of Fascism and Communism. These two seemingly opposed ideologies, Popper argued, were actually quite alike, for they both falsely claimed absolute truth—which, he held, was unattainable. Popper championed the idea of a society defined by rational debate, where false ideas would lose out to stronger ones.
Soros dreamed of becoming a philosopher, but he got scant encouragement. Frustrated by an unsuccessful effort to write a philosophical treatise in his spare time—he abandoned it one morning after being unable to comprehend what he had written the night before—Soros instead applied his own abstruse interpretation of Popper’s thinking to the world of finance, emphasizing what he called “reflexivity,” or the interplay of investors’ assumptions in the markets. Others who have analyzed Soros’s success have pointed to less rational explanations for it. Soros’s son Robert has joked that his father simply buys when he’s feeling good, and sells when his back hurts. Stanley Druckenmiller, his former partner at Quantum, was even more blunt. “The ugly way to describe it would be ‘balls,’ ” he told Soros’s biographer.
By the time Soros was fifty, he had exceeded his most extravagant financial goals, but he was miserable, for he felt his life lacked a greater “meaning.” He decided to set up a foundation devoted to promoting Popper’s ideal of open societies. It didn’t hurt that a provision in the American tax code offered a significant tax incentive to individuals who formed “charitable lead trusts.” During our lunch, Soros beamed when he told me that, upon launching his foundation, he had exploited this provision to pass on to his heirs hundreds of millions of dollars—and, in the process, saved untold millions in taxes.
The astonishing amount of cash that Soros has poured into the Presidential race is nonetheless dwarfed by Republican efforts to influence public policy through private donations. Perhaps the best perspective has been provided by Rob Stein, a Democratic strategist based in Washington. After the 2002 election, the G.O.P. controlled the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and most state legislatures; Stein worried that the country was in danger of succumbing to one-party rule. In an effort to figure out how the Republicans had emerged so victorious, he spent months studying the public tax records of right-wing nonprofit groups. He then put together a PowerPoint presentation that, in certain Democratic circles, has taken on the aura of the Rosetta stone. It showed that, since the nineteen-seventies, wealthy conservative backers had poured between two and a half billion to three billion dollars into financing a war of ideas to tilt mainstream thinking in America rightward.
Stein identified nine hugely wealthy families who had anchored the effort, all of whom were sustained by corporate fortunes; the list included the Olins, the Bradleys, the Coorses, the Kochs, the Smith-Richardsons, and the Mellon Scaifes. Between 1985 and 2001, the nine families had collectively given half a billion dollars to charitable foundations promoting policies that were in their immediate self-interest, such as lowering income taxes and deregulating industry. Scaife’s foundations have reportedly spent at least three hundred and forty million dollars supporting the conservative cause. Money from conservative donors hasn’t simply gone to Republican campaigns; it has been dispersed more broadly, to a startlingly effective array of institutions that market the conservative message to the average American. Stein told me that such groups, which he called a “conservative message machine,” had a budget of four hundred million dollars in 2002 alone. “There is not an analogous capacity on the Democratic side,” Stein said. In fact, he said, the right wing had turned this machinery against Soros himself—even though Soros’s campaign expenditures were a pittance by comparison. “What they’re doing to him is an example of the dark side of the message machine. They will use the machinery to denigrate anyone who is competitive with them.”
Unlike Soros, Scaife prefers to operate behind the scenes; he has never written an article under his own name or given a public speech. Based in Pittsburgh, where his Mellon forebears made the steel fortune that he inherited, he has been fighting liberalism much longer than Soros has been defending it. Notorious for funding the “Arkansas Project” during the Clinton years, which paid investigators to dig up dirt on the Clintons and their associates, Scaife recently invested in NewsMax, a magazine that features rambling, pointed investigations of Soros. One NewsMax cover story, “George Soros’s Coup,” was written by Richard Poe, a forty-five-year-old author of motivational books. In October, Poe co-wrote “The Shadow Party,” another critique of Soros, for an online magazine run by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which receives funding from Scaife. This summer, Poe appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor” to lambaste Soros. The gist of his argument, Poe recently told me, was that Soros was “using his philanthropy to gain influence globally.” What Soros wanted, Poe said, was “to get control of the Democratic Party for a relatively cheap price . . . put his own President in, and, behind the scenes, tell him what to do.” He concluded that Soros was “a definite type . . . the self-hating Jew.” Another investigator into Soros’s activities who indirectly receives money from Scaife—and who also appeared on O’Reilly’s program this summer—is John Carlisle. He recently wrote a report for the Scaife-funded Capital Research Center, in which he claimed that Soros considered President Bush to be a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.
“I don’t oppose other views, even right-wing ones,” Soros told me, “because I think in an open society a variety of points of view should be heard. But, by giving this money, I was trying to level the playing field. The Republicans have so much more money, the debate had become lopsided.”
Soros’s outsized financial role in the election has also stirred alarm in some traditionally liberal circles. Even people who share his views on Bush worry about what sort of influence so much money might buy. Frank Mankiewicz, a former aide to George McGovern and Robert Kennedy, told me, “It’s tough when you realize guys like Soros have so much money. Billions! I can’t believe there’s an election that can’t be won for that kind of money.”
Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, an advocacy group whose stated mission is to help “eliminate the undue influence of big money in American politics,” told me, “I understand how important this election is, but when George Soros puts eighteen million dollars in it’s creating the image that there’s a special right that the very rich have to determine the outcome of elections. Most wealthy people have interests pending in front of the government—regulatory or tax issues, or something. Even if George Soros is only looking for influence to get out of Iraq, that’s not appropriate. These laws were designed to insure that influence over government decisions is not bought and sold, and that applies to areas that are economic and ideological.” Wertheimer then alluded to Soros’s past support for campaign-finance reform. “Soros is in an odd position,” he said. (Soros donated money to Democracy 21 during his days as a campaign-finance-reform advocate.)
When Soros was asked about Wertheimer’s comments, he said, “I am not a turncoat. I play by the prevailing rules, and our lawyers said that what we did this year was legally permissible.” Soros acknowledged that, “after this election, there will be a need for further reform.” He suggested that it was unrealistic to expect that money wouldn’t find some other way into future campaigns, but he added that with more public financing there might be ways to dilute its influence. As the situation stood this year, though, Soros conceded, “I think it’s unhealthy.”
It won’t be known until Election Day if Soros’s extreme measures will pay off. Conceivably, if the election is very close, the get-out-the-vote operation he paid for could make a decisive difference. (According to a recent analysis by the Times, in the battleground state of Ohio voter registration in Democratic precincts is up by two hundred and fifty per cent from 2000.) But even the best delivery system in the world needs a product to sell, and in this case the product—John Kerry—is beyond Soros’s control.
If Kerry wins, Soros will be in a unique position. He told me that he would not accept any offers of a government appointment. “I’m not looking for a job,” he said, then joked, “I don’t believe in working.” But, he added, “I would be very happy to advise Kerry, if he’s willing to listen to me, and to criticize him, if he isn’t. I’ve been trying to exert some influence over our policies, and I hope I’ll get a better hearing under Kerry.”
Soros had already compiled a list of specific notions about how to solve the crisis in Iraq which he’d like the next President to consider. He and Leslie H. Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, had worked out a plan calling for summit talks on Iraq, under U.N. auspices, which would include neighboring countries. The two men envisioned that Iraq could be divided along ethnic lines into largely autonomous regions, united by a federal government that would distribute oil revenues. “It’s purely an idea, but one I’d support, and advocate,” Soros said. He also told me that he would push for eliminating Bush’s tax cuts.
Such an outcome is a pleasing scenario for Soros to contemplate—but if the President is reëlected, he acknowledged, he may well find himself in an “uncomfortable” situation. As he put it, “After all, I regard Bush as danger. And I am sure he holds the same opinion of me.” ♦


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Did Gov. Susana Martinez violate the state’s sunshine law by failing to provide public records to a Santa Fe newspaper? That’s one of two questions at the heart of a lawsuit brought by the Santa Fe Reporter against the governor. We talked about the paper’s discrimination claim in our first story. Here we dig into the lawsuit’s allegations of government secrecy.
Testimony ended today in the three-day trial of SFR v. Gov. Susana Martinez with Mark Zusman, who co-owns the newspaper and two other weeklies, saying all three prioritize the watchdog function of journalism.

domain: politics


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New from CMK for September come a largescale Italian pilot figure and a very useful range of 1:72 depth charges.
Special Hobby have sent us details of a plethora of resin upgrade sets aimed at both their own new 1:32 Hawker Tempest and the out of production PCM kit.
Next month sees some exciting new releases from Special Hobby. There‘s a new boxing of the 1:32 Tempest Mk. V and a couple of very interesting tie-ins: ICM‘s well-received 1:48 Junkers Ju 88 reworked as a solid nose Ju 88C-4 and some very welcome news - the first of a series of re-releases of the sorely missed Classic Airframes range in the form of the Fokker D.XXI.
Miniart continues releasing accessories for scenes, and now is working on concrete telegraph poles.
Freedom Model Kits latest release in their range of F-20 aircraft in 1/48th is a "What If" F/A-20C Tigershark.
Matho models has released several new items, including sheets of PVC Foam of different thickness.
One more shooting star on their way from Great Wall Hobby this one as a limited edition
Hasegawa are due to release a new tooled Kawanishi H8K2 Type 2 Flying boat.
Yannis V. Papadopoulos kindly informed us on many ETA products in different scales to bring realism to World War II scenes.
He also published some step-by-step photo articles on how to use their products.
Glen Coleman has sent us photos of the built-up test shot of Kitty Hawk's second McDonnell Banshee - this time the long-nose F2H-2P photo-reconnaissance aircraft.
Eagle Editions have sent us details of their new decals for the Dornier Do 335 Pfeil. The new sheet has been researched by Mark Proulx and will be available in three popular scales.
HDModels presents their range of diorama accessories for Italian urban scenes, a series of elements that are typical from Italy and have been reproduced using 3D printing technology.
Kinetic Models have posted pictures of a new tool 1/48th BAe Harrier T.2/T.4/T.8 on their Facebook page.
IsraDecals have now got for release the Beechcraft T-6A/T-6B/T-6C TEXAN II and the Israeli AF Ouragan MD 450.
Yannis V. Papadopoulos kindly informed us on their new products in different scales.
1/35 scale products look really useful for dioramas.
Fisher Model & Pattern are to release a new tool 1/32nd Bell X-1A / B rocket powered research aircraft..
Several new and upcoming sheets from AOA covering Intruders, Trojans, Phantoms, Skyhawks, & tailhooks!
New kits from Mark 1 models including Gladiators, Beaufighters, Farmer and Brewster Buffalo including one dual combo kit.
Special Hobby have gone to town on the English Electric (BAC) Lightning with a plethora of 1:48 resin upgrades in their CMK range. The sets are designed for the Airfix kits and the Eduard reboxing.
Special Hobby have announced the welcome re-release of the 1:48 Pfalz E. I, previously part of the Gavia range.
HPH Models are about to release a huge Bf 109E
HPH Models latest release is a 1/32nd resin kit of the naval SB2C-4 Helldiver.
Following on from Meng's earlier release of the G.91R Light Fighter/Bomber, Meng have released a kit with the markings for three NATO aircraft.
Two new kits from Trumpeter this month with a 1/72nd Chinese J-20 Mighty Dragon Prototype and a 1/48th Mig-27M Flogger J.
Hobby Boss are to release two new kits for August, a 109G-6 and a IAR-80, both in 1/48th.

domain: hobby


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What Does God Think about Money?
Money is a very difficult, personal, private thing to talk about. We all internally groan when we see the stewardship envelopes in the pews. It’s tempting to mentally check out when your priest stands at the pulpit to appeal for the weakly offertory. Your priest most likely dreads it too.
Some people walk with blinders on surrounding their personal finances, racking up debt, looking to satisfy an itch that can’t be scratched, and comparing their stuff with the stuff of the people around them.
The subject of money makes us feel uncomfortable, but frankly, we should be willing to talk about money, especially since it's necessary for us to live. Money is mentioned over 800 times in Scripture. God has a very clear message about money, therefore, it’s important to understand it.
What does God think about Money?
Money is one of the few things in the world that is 100% neutral. It is neither good nor bad. It’s what we do with it that determines the morality of it, but money in and of itself neutral.
It’s also important to note that money touches everything. I spent time trying to think of one thing that money doesn’t impact (If you can think of something, let us know in the comments). It touches all of the food we eat; it touches the clothes we wear; it touches everything we own.
It touches our faith.
Money is necessary to build our parishes and keep them operational; it’s necessary to pay ministry staff to develop faith-building materials; to buy the sacramentals like rosaries which help us deepen our relationship with the Lord.
The Lord cares about money and how we use it.
Our Biblical guide to understanding money and God’s hand in it can be found in the Parable of the Talents (Mt 25:14-30, Lk 19:12-27). In the story, a master is preparing to travel away from his home for a significant amount of time. He distributes his talents (a large amount of money) to three of his servants. One receives 5, one receives 3, and one receives 1 talent.
When the master returns, the servants with 5 and 3 talents had put the talents to work and the value of the talents doubled. The third servant hid his talent and as a result, it didn’t grow in equity.
In the end, the master blesses the servant who invested the money well saying, 'Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master's joy.' (Mt 25:23).
But to the servant who was not wise with his talent, the master condemned him as 'wicked and lazy' and threw him out of the house where 'there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.' (Mt 25:26, 30)
The story tells us that money is a gift from God, who gives it to us to steward and handle it well. He trusts us to be prudent with it. If we do this, we will enter the kingdom of heaven.
What does God think about Debt?
About 80% of Americans have debt ranging from student loans to credit cards to car payments to mortgages.
The modern thought process typically believes is that debt is either good and necessary or a necessary evil. But that is not the case. Debt is bad and should be avoided.
Proverbs says explicitly, “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.” (Pro 22:7). Debt puts us in a state of slavery, the very thing that Jesus came to save us from.
Debt prevents young couples from starting families; it’s forcing college graduates to start their careers strapped paying off loans they took out as a naive 18-year-old; it leaves us unprepared for emergencies and keeps us from having a fruitful and blessed retirement.
It’s crucial to learn how to budget and exercise self-discipline when spending, which is good for our faith. There are countless resources online that teach us how to do both things.
What does God think about Giving?
Giving alms may be something you hear about from your priest at the pulpit a couple of times a year or when the church’s HVAC unit breaks. “Tithe” is a buzzword we often hear referring to the ancient practice of giving 10% of our income.
In the Old Testament, tithing was frequently seen, including Abram’s offer to Melchizedek (Gen 14:20) and Jacob’s promise to God (Gen 28:77). Tithing was required under the Law of Moses (Num 18:26). However, Jesus fulfilled the Mosaic law (Mt 5:17), so we are no longer bound by it.
The Church as a whole obligates that every Catholic adult who is able to do so should give a form of material support to the church, but she doesn't specify what percentage of the income should be given. In the Summa Theologia (Question 87), St. Thomas Aquinas states the Church can change the amount the faithful are to give based upon circumstances.
According to a 2013 study done by the USCCB, only 46% of the American Catholic population has made a charitable donation in the last year to religious organizations. The study says:
About a third of working-age Catholics give $100 or less to their parish per year (34 percent). Another third give $101 to $500 (33 percent) per year, and another third give $501 or more (33 percent).
Imagine the impact the church would have if 100% of Catholics were to start giving. The numbers would be astronomical and help with funding our Catholic schools, feeding the hungry, updating run-down church buildings, and more!
If you choose to tithe 10%, here is a recommended way to apportion your money according to the USCCB:
- 5% to the Weekly Offertory
- 3% to the Bishop’s Annual Appeal
- 2% to Faith-Based Charities
If you feel called to give 10% but don’t know where to start, start small with a certain percentage (5%) whatever gross income you receive, then slowly work your way up as you feel comfortable. Every 3-6 months, bump it up another half percentage until you get to 10%. The purpose is to be intentional with it.
If you don’t feel comfortable giving 10% or want to give more than 10%, pick a set amount with each paycheck, then distribute it like so:
- 50% to the Weekly Offertory
- 30% to the Bishop’s Annual Appeal
- 20% to Faith-Based Charities
It’s important to pick that set amount before you spend another dime for anything else.
John D. Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest Americans of modern time, said, "I never would have been able to tithe the first million dollars I ever made if I had not tithed my first salary, which was $1.50 per week."
It may sting a little to see that money leave each time you donate, but at the heart of it, it’s an act of trust between you and the Lord.
In essence, you are saying, “Lord, I could really use this money for myself, but I’m offering it to you because you have given me everything and this is my opportunity to give a small portion back to you in Thanksgiving. I trust that you will take care of me and take care of your church with this gift.”

domain: finance


HICO, W.Va. — For the second time in two months, a threat has been made against Midland Trail High School in Fayette County.
Investigators said a note was found in a bathroom Wednesday, stating a bomb was going to detonate. Students immediately were taken to a safe zone, and part of Route 60 was closed to allow other students to get to a safe shelter.
West Virginia State Police and Fayette County Sheriff’s Department deputies arrived at the school and dispatched bomb-sniffing dogs inside and around the school building. No explosive device was found.
Classes and school activites were cancelled for the rest of the day.
On Feb. 23, the school was placed on lockdown due to what Fayette County Sheriff Mike Fridley described at the time as “a potential security situation.” The nature of the threat was not disclosed.


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PARK INFO: The park is closed until further notice.
About 75% to 80% of the park burned. Some of the fires were slow underbrush fires and others were much hotter and damaged trees and soil. Most of the buildings the park survived. Robert Ferguson Observatory, the Visitor Center, main campground bathrooms, white barn, and red barn all were undamaged. We did lose two of 6 toilets in the campground, one water tank, and the meadow trail bridge.
Temporary Park Phone Number: 707-806-9033 (leave a message)
If you have any questions, please email John@sonomaecologycenter.org for overall all park questions, and for event questions email email@example.com.
CAMPING INFO: We have stopped taking reservations and are refunding all reservations through November. Once we have a better idea of conditions in the park, we decide our next steps.
To cancel reservations, please call Reserve California at 1-800-444-7275 or visit reservecalifornia.com.
To those campers who left camping items in the campground, we are not sure of the condition of your items at this time. Please let us know if you had anything in the campground and we will secure it for you as soon as we are back into the park.
Your donations are needed to help reopen and restore Sugarloaf. Please donate now.
Camping at Sugarloaf
You can enjoy camping year-round at Sugarloaf with 47 family-friendly and alchohol free camping spaces surrounded by a large meadow, bordered by a year-round stream and a hillside forest.
Stargazing at Robert Ferguson Observatory
Completely dedicated to public viewing and education, the Robert Ferguson Observatory is the largest in the western United States and it’s right here at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park.

domain: travel


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In Abbevilles Dinosaurs series, a talented artist and a noted paleontologist have teamed up to re-create the vanished world of the dinosaurs in comic-book form. Each volume in the series tells the action-packed yet scientifically accurate story of a different dinosaur living in its particular time and place, and also includes an illustrated essay that explains more about the creatures and settings encountered in the comic.
Giant vs. Giant, the fifth title in the series, shows what life was like for Argentinosaurus, the largest animal that ever existed. As a herd of these outsized herbivores travel across the plains of prehistoric South America, they encounter other amazing species of the late Cretaceous period, like the eight-ton crocodile Sarcosuchus and the primitive bird Patagopteryx, and do battle with their nemesis, the enormous carnivore Giganotosaurus.
Matteo Bacchin is a Milan-based illustrator specializing in paleontological subjects. Marco Signore is a paleontologist known for his work on a remarkably well-preserved fossil of the small dinosaur Scipionyx samniticus. Mark Norell is curator in charge of fossil reptiles, amphibians, and birds at the American Museum of Natural History.

domain: entertainment


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Or spend & store bitcoin with the BitPay Card and Wallet.
Might blockchain and cryptos aid in cutting paper from the process? BitPay.
Bitcoin Daily. 2.2K. Bitcoin . Bitcoin Daily: Twitch Reactivates Bitcoin Payments; Hackers Steal $4M In.
Bitcoin Daily: Coinbase Scoops Up Blockspring; BitPay Claims $1B+ In 2018.
3 Oct 2017.
BitPay's Bitcoin payment volumes have surged over 300 percent this year as the.
BitPay is “on pace” to process $1 bln per year in Bitcoin payments as its.
announcing exclusive partnerships such as the multimillion-dollar.
Currently, there are roughly 3 million bitcoins which have yet to be mined.
Bitcoin mining is the process by which bitcoins are released into circulation.
require a Bitcoin merchant tool (an external processor like Coinbase or BitPay).
against the dollar attracts potential investors and traders interested in currency plays.
Bitcoin Wallets 2018 New data support the idea that small bitcoin investors are multiplying rapidly. Anecdotal evidence suggests much of that. Bixin stands as one of the earliest Bitcoin (BTC) wallet startups and miner operators. On Friday, the company announced that. Bitcoin wallet startups have seen a sudden uptick in activity. In short, more people want to hold
BitPay has launched a partnership with the world’s largest digital asset exchange that the Atlanta-based blockchain payments.
Bitcoin Art Gallery 25/05/2019 · Calling All Bitcoin Artists. The Bitcoin 2019 Art Gallery is an open-source, community-driven project designed to celebrate the people, projects, events and ideas that have shaped the decade of Bitcoin’s history. Thomas Crown Art, the creators of "smART" (Smart Art), a revolutionary system that turns art into a Blockchain Wallet with built-in incorruptible, immutable
Bitcoin Now Price Bitcoin is the top listed asset on crypto market data provider CoinMarketCap. Because it is a deflationary currency due to. BTC/USD is currently wildly fluctuating around the $10,000 level as the bulls and bears are engaged in a furious tug of war. Buy or sell Bitcoin. View real-time BTC price, and stay up to date
Bitcoin price recovery is likely to climb above the resistance at $8,000 pre-halving. Bitcoin block reward halving will take.
You might be familiar with the names Bitcoin and Ethereum but do you really know that these names can be used as a mode of.
PM ET Company Participants Jason Lee – Head-Investor Relations Jack Dorsey – Chief Executive Officer Amrita Ahuja – Chief Financial Officer Conference Call Participants Tien-Tsin Huang – JPMorgan.


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McKesson adopts Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform
October 16, 2007
Customer: McKesson Provider Technologies
Integrate disparate software applications on one unified platform to provide a comprehensive solution to improve patient care
Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network, JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite, and Hibernate,McKesson healthcare solutions, Oracle RAC
Intel dual and quad-core Xeon server platforms
Gained huge efficiencies, saved customers up to one million dollars in total cost of ownership, and provided a reliable, enterprise-ready solution that helps provide high-quality patient care
McKesson Provider Technologies is a $2.6 billion division of McKesson Corporation, the world’s largest healthcare IT services company specializing in the development of healthcare systems, distribution of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, and disease management solutions. McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 18th on the FORTUNE 500, is dedicated to helping its customers deliver high-quality healthcare by reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving the quality and safety of patient care. McKesson has grown by providing pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management across the spectrum of care; healthcare information technology for hospitals, physicians, homecare and payors; hospital and retail pharmacy automation; and services for manufacturers and payors designed to improve outcomes for patients.
McKesson Provider Technologies wanted to create a comprehensive underlying architecture for its clinical information systems that support a full range of patient care and administrative processes within a healthcare organization. To address evolving requirements over the years, however, McKesson had developed a number of different applications, built on several different architecture platforms. “We wanted to improve the integration between these systems and reduce the cost of ownership and system management for our customers. To do this, we needed to create one enterprise architecture strategy,” said Michael J. Simpson, Senior Vice President and General Manager for McKesson’s Horizon Clinicals suite of solutions.
As a component of integrating its patient care software onto one platform, McKesson decided to migrate from mainframe Unix to Linux. The healthcare community had been using Unix for 20 years, so McKesson had to educate its customers on the support, efficiency, and ROI benefits of Linux. The company needed a highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective solution to assure a risk-averse customer base that migrating from a known system and process would maintain the levels of mission-critical reliability required for patient care.
Prior to this project, McKesson was already employing Red Hat solutions in specific areas throughout the company. “Red Hat had become the standard Linux solution among our employees and had always provided cost-effective ways to implement customer solutions quickly. We knew we wanted to leverage Red Hat’s excellent support and high performance for this project,” said Simpson.
Working with Red Hat, McKesson became the first company to adopt the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform, a new solution featuring Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Network, and JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. “We chose Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform because it provides a high-value open platform specifically designed to meet the missioncritical demands of healthcare IT,” he said.
Using the solutions within the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform, McKesson was able to integrate the many healthcare applications it provides to its customers on a single middletier architecture. The flexibility of the Red Hat and JBoss solutions enabled the company to leverage all of its existing software and hardware and contributed to lowering the total cost of ownership for McKesson’s healthcare organization customers. In addition, The Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform was optimized for the Intel dual and quad-core Xeon server platform, enabling McKesson to adopt an affordable, highperformance architecture for its customers.
To support a wide range of hospitals and healthcare providers of different sizes and with varying hardware, McKesson runs a variety of configurations of Oracle on RHEL in the database tier. For each hospital, McKesson also operates between five and 90 application servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite, and Hibernate.
As a result of implementing the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform, McKesson was able to realize tremendous cost-savings on behalf of its customers. “Migrating to Red Hat enabled us to lower the total cost of ownership for our solutions significantly. We’ve saved customers in large mainframe environments up to a million dollars in combined software and hardware costs,” said Simpson. Red Hat’s dedicated customer support and services also helped improve McKesson’s customer relationships. In one instance, Red Hat flew its engineers to a McKesson customer location to provide on-site help. And JBoss solved one technical issue within two days, a vast improvement over the four-month turnaround time the company had experienced previously with a competitor.
Migrating to Red Hat enabled us to lower the total cost of ownership for our solutions significantly. We’ve saved customers in large mainframe environments up to a million dollars in combined software and hardware costs. Michael J. Simpson, Senior Vice President and General Manager for McKesson’s Horizon Clinicals suite of solutions
Red Hat solutions enabled McKesson to gain significant efficiencies in product development and testing. Prior to implementing Red Hat, McKesson supported multiple variants of Unix, which caused the company to spend time and resources testing products on each individual system. Red Hat eliminated the need for McKesson to buy mainframes to test its products on a wide range of systems. Now, the company only tests on one system, and all of its engineers speak a common Linux language across the organization. This has resulted in enormous productivity and cost savings, enabling McKesson to re-provision its resources more effectively.
Finally, the reliability of the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform enables McKesson to support its customers’ delivery of safe, high-quality patient care. “Our healthcare customers depend on our solutions to care for patients 24/7. They require highly reliable systems with highly responsive support, and the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform fits seamlessly with our commitment to product quality and customer service,” said Simpson. “Red Hat is designed to provide a very flexible approach to business continuity, giving us the mission-critical reliability we need for patient care at a much lower cost,” he said.


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By this point you should already have the paver’s, wall stones picked out that you find interesting and that fits your taste. This helps the contractor not having to show you 10 different catalogues and overwhelming you with choice. Tell the contractor what your intentions are for the space. Then listen to what the contractors suggestions are. This is a very important step. 9 times out of 10 the contractor will see things that you didn’t see or consider, example elevation, yard water run off, and maybe offer some tips to use these unforeseen’s into positive design aspects.
Next expect a design! This may be one if not the most important aspects of the vision for your project. A contractor can visualize the space in his mind, but there is no way you can see that vision, unless you can “mind read”! There is a design fee that usually starts anywhere from $250-1500 for a 2 dimensional plan or up to $6000 for a 3D design depending how large and intricate the plan needs to be. I don’t know about you but I have never seen a house built with out a plan and drawings. Same should be said with landscaping. Now this plan will have a fee initially but most companies will remove this fee when hired. They will take the cost you paid of the job price. This does not apply when hiring a landscape designer that freelances. That is there sole business and they need to be compensated for there efforts.
The next meeting should be with a completed design, and the following. Their certifications and insurance information as well as WSIB info. Any professional will with no hesitation give you this information. You need to make sure you are protected from being sued for a contractor getting hurt on your property. Ask if you need permits. I’m sure you have seen Mike Holmes advocating this point and its true. But if you are unsure call the city and they will be glad to give you the right answer’s. Also is the contractor part of any organizations that are within the industry. These contractors are usually part of large associations like Landscape Ontario or ICPI.
Next is the proposal, it needs to be in depth and should give you installation information down to contract terms and conditions. Also payment terms need to be clear.
Next step is to go see the contractor’s references. This is a crucial step. Don’t just call them, ask to go and see the project. Any homeowner will be pleased at showing there great landscape to you for simple pride that they were part of the designed project. I hope this helps you get that project under way and helps prevent those fly by nighters from stealing your hard earned money!

domain: design


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Should I save my miscarriage tissue?
You may or may not see tissue that looks like an embryo or fetus. If this is a recurrent (not first) miscarriage, you may want to save the tissue for testing. Once everything in your uterus has been expelled, bleeding will continue, lessening over several days.
How long will I pass tissue after miscarriage?
Your doctor might advise you that no treatment is necessary. This is called ‘expectant management’, and you just wait to see what will happen. Eventually, the pregnancy tissue (the fetus/baby, pregnancy sac and placenta) will pass naturally. This can take a few days or as long as 3 to 4 weeks.
What happens if tissue is left after a miscarriage?
Often, some of the pregnancy tissue remains in the uterus after a miscarriage. If it is not removed by scraping the uterus with a curette (a spoon-shaped instrument), you may bleed for a long time or develop an infection.
Can you miscarry without passing tissue?
Bleeding during pregnancy loss occurs when the uterus empties. In some cases, the fetus dies but the womb does not empty, and a woman will experience no bleeding. Some doctors refer to this type of pregnancy loss as a missed miscarriage. The loss may go unnoticed for many weeks, and some women do not seek treatment.
What color is miscarriage tissue?
Bleeding during miscarriage can appear brown and resemble coffee grounds. Or it can be pink to bright red. It can alternate between light and heavy or even stop temporarily before starting up again. If you miscarry before you’re eight weeks pregnant, it might look the same as a heavy period.
What does tissue look like in miscarriage?
In a miscarriage that happens beyond 6 weeks, more tissue will be expelled. The expelled tissue usually resemble large blood clots. Depending on the point at which the pregnancy stopped developing, the expelled tissue could range in size from as small as a pea to as big or bigger than an orange.
Are you super fertile after a miscarriage?
You can ovulate and become pregnant as soon as two weeks after a miscarriage. Once you feel emotionally and physically ready for pregnancy after miscarriage, ask your health care provider for guidance. After one miscarriage, there might be no need to wait to conceive.
How can I clean my womb after miscarriage?
This treatment involves a surgical procedure known as a dilatation and curettage (D&C) which is done under a general anaesthetic. The procedure will remove any pregnancy tissue from your uterus. It is successful in 95 to 100 per cent of cases but there are small surgical risks.
How do you know a miscarriage is complete?
If you have a miscarriage in your first trimester, you may choose to wait 7 to 14 days after a miscarriage for the tissue to pass out naturally. This is called expectant management. If the pain and bleeding have lessened or stopped completely during this time, this usually means the miscarriage has finished.
What are signs of an incomplete abortion?
Signs of an incomplete miscarriage
- heavy bleeding – get medical help if you’re soaking through a pad in an hour.
- bleeding that carries on and doesn’t settle down.
- passing blood clots.
- increasing tummy pain, which may feel like cramps or contractions.
- a raised temperature (fever) and flu-like symptoms.
How long does a miscarriage last for?
A woman early in her pregnancy may have a miscarriage and only experience bleeding and cramping for a few hours. But another woman may have miscarriage bleeding for up to a week. The bleeding can be heavy with clots, but it slowly tapers off over days before stopping, usually within two weeks.
What are the first signs of a missed miscarriage?
What are the symptoms of a missed abortion? It’s common to have no symptoms with a missed miscarriage. Sometimes there may be a brownish discharge. You may also notice that early pregnancy symptoms, such as nausea and breast soreness, lessen or disappear.
Can you lose tissue and still be pregnant?
Summary. Miscarriage is one of the less common causes of bleeding during pregnancy, especially when the bleeding occurs early on. Some other indications of pregnancy loss include cramping and passing clots or tissue. Only a healthcare professional can accurately identify a miscarriage.
Can you stop a miscarriage once it starts?
In most cases, you cannot stop a miscarriage once it has started, no matter the trimester you are currently in. The symptoms of a miscarriage typically indicate the pregnancy is already over. In some cases, the symptoms may be a sign of a condition called threatened miscarriage.
What happens if a dead fetus is not removed?
Waiting for spontaneous expulsion is also possible. Women who retain the dead embryo/fetus can experience severe blood loss or develop an infection of the womb. These are rare complications.

domain: medical


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|14/1||Arsenal are 14/1 with Bet365 to beat Southampton 4-0
The 26-year-old’s match-winning display in les Bleus’ opening World Cup 2014 qualifier against Finland at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium was blighted by a late muscular concern, just weeks after returning for almost a year out.
Diaby has been plagued by injury since fracturing his ankle against Sunderland in 2006 - but Wenger has moved quickly to allay fears of another spell on the sidelines.
"[The injury] doesn't seem serious to me at all. He has a small chance of playing on Saturday," he told TFI.
France boss Didier Deschamps confirmed the setback earlier in the week, telling Eurosport: "Diaby took a bad shot and he has muscular discomfort. He is not free in his movements."
The marauding midfielder has been a stand-out performer for Arsenal in their strong start to the new Premier League season - as the Gunners have notached a win and two draws without conceding a goal in their opening three games.

domain: news


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A large-screen television was swiped from the altar of a Williston Park church sometime between Saturday night and Sunday morning, according to Nassau police.
Third Squad detectives were called out to St. Aidan's Church, 505 Willis Ave., Sunday morning to investigate the burglary after a church worker discovered the missing Samsung television.
Police found the church's rear door had been pried open and said the burglary likely took place between 8:45 p.m. Saturday and 7 a.m. Sunday.
The value of the television is undetermined. Detectives are asking anyone with information to contact Nassau County Crime Stoppers at 800-244-TIPS (8477).


The Lancet Public Health, Volume 6, November 2021
A Viewpoint on Europe's response to climate change, in the context of SDGs 12, 13, and 17, focusing specifically on the use of region-specific indicators to address the main challenges and opportunities of Europe's response in the context of public and planetary health.
Elsevier, The Lancet, Volume 397, 9 January 2021
The 2020 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: responding to converging crises
Translations: For the Chinese, French, German, and Spanish translations of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section.
Elsevier, Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 32, April 2020
Although several empirical studies and systematic reviews have documented the mental health impacts of global climate change, the range of impacts has not been well understood. This review examines mental health impacts of three types of climate-related events: (1) acute events such as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires; (2) subacute or long-term changes such as drought and heat stress; and (3) the existential threat of long-lasting changes, including higher temperatures, rising sea levels and a permanently altered and potentially uninhabitable physical environment.


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Posted March 1, 2012
Wiz Khalifa and Amber Rose were asked if they planned on getting engaged anytime soon!
Well I guess it got Wiz motivated, because he asked and she said YES! And what a ring!
Amber Rose Releases Debut Single “Fame” Ft. Wiz Khalifa [AUDIO]
Snoop Dogg & Wiz Khalifa Go To “High School” With DJ Drama [EXCLUSIVE]
Amber Rose On Her Mom Smoking Weed With Wiz Khalifa: “Wiz Is Like The Son She Never Had” [EXCLUSIVE]
Did Amber Rose & Wiz Khalifa Already Get Married?
Amber Rose Breaks Down In Tears While Explaining The Backlash Of Being Kanye’s Ex [VIDEO]
Amber Rose Reveals All About Wiz, Kanye & Reggie On “Wendy” [VIDEO]
Wiz Khalifa Adds Juicy J To Taylor Gang
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domain: celebrity


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My name is Corey Smith, and I am an educator, guitarist, DJ, and electronic music producer from Vancouver, Canada. My musical curriculum vitae includes playing as a session guitarist, a wedding musician, a guitarist in multiple cover bands, working in a recording studio, working for live sound production company, running the bench of a repair shop and (a couple times) filling in as a trumpeter in a mariachi band. My current project is operating under the moniker "24" and I am working on my first solo album (set to be released sometime 2022). I also run a monthly live-streamed show promoting women, non-binary, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ electronic producers called t(He).feminist.DJ on the last Friday of each month. Make sure to check out my YouTube page for past episodes, and other content, follow my Instagram Page @dj.24.official for my most current updates, news, shows, and releases.
Like what you hear or what you see? Let me know by contacting me or connecting through social media:
For bookings or clinic work, please email me directly at:

domain: artistic


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At the moment, "Information Management" is assessed by Milne Library in freshman INTD 105 classes as a part of the end-of-semester assessment. INTD 105 faculty are asked to bring their students into the library to administer this computer based assessment.
Closing the loop on these learning outcomes is especially difficult. Four of the five learning outcomes that Geneseo assesses are not taught by Milne Library, who is responsible for assessing the outcomes. Although Milne Librarians generally work with most INTD 105 classes, their sessions are more focused on research skills (Information Management outcome #4), and the INTD 105 course itself focuses on writing skills rather than computer skills.
Learning Outcomes in Information Management
Students will demonstrate the ability to
- Identify, access, and use the basic operating system features of a personal computer.
- Identify, access, and operate the appropriate software for a given task.
- Access and navigate the Intranet.
- Access, navigate, and evaluate information and resources on the Internet.
- Use a computer to communicate with others.
Because Milne Library's in-class efforts are focused on outcome #4, our closing the loop efforts have also been aimed at this goal. To this end, Milne Librarians have taken the following actions:
- Developed goals and objectives for the one-shot session the librarians teach in INTD 105 classes
- Conducted a pre- and post-assessment during the 2008-2009 school year, in order to determine the skill level of our entering students
- Revised our goals and objectives based on the 2008-2009 assessment to better meet the needs of students regarding their skills with accessing, navigating and evaluating information resources.
In addition, we also encourage INTD 105 faculty to include more than one library session, allowing us to reinforce certain skills and introduce additional skills to students.
There is some need for a discussion about how the campus teaches and assesses the information management learning outcomes. For example, outcome #3 asks students to navigate the Intranet. Does this refer to the Geneseo wiki? Does this refer to in and out boxes? And who is responsible for teaching students these skills?
Also, we may want to evaluate whether or not the freshman level (INTD 105) is the right place to evaluate these skills.

domain: library


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WILD HORSES: The image was captured by Fayetteville photographer Tim Fitzharris for a new stamp.
The U.S. Postal Service
announced today that a Fayetteville photographer, Tim Fitzharris
, had supplied one of the photos for a new series of stamps
commemorating 100 years of the National Park Service.
(PS: Sorry. I forgot to post this yesterday.)
His photo of wild horses on Maryland’s and Virginia’s Assateague Island National Seashore will appear on a "Forever" stamp to be issued June 2.
Here's more about the stam
More on Fitzharris at his website.


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This Literature Botanical Garden
Map Have Map No Map
Roi Et attractions
Attractions in Thailand
Operating day: Daily
Operating time: 08.00 - 18.00
It is the regional literature botanical garden of the Northeast situated in Dong Ma-i National Forest Reserve, Tambon Pha Nam Yoi, about 86 km. from the city.
It covers a total area of about 1,000 rai, featuring plants mentioned in Thai literature such as the Vessantara Jataka, Khun Chang - Khun Phaen, Lilit Phra Lo, Lilit Taleng Phai, Buddha’s history, etc. There is also an herb garden. The entire garden has a lively atmosphere.
This Literature Botanical Garden Map
Category: ●Entertainment and Agricultural
Tag: ●This Literature Botanical Garden
Last Update: 4 YearAgo

domain: literature


Steelers and Packers Should Be Ashamed
The Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers should be embarrassed of themselves following their performances on Championship Sunday. To allow the Falcons to score 44 points and the Patriots 36 in a championship game is inexcusable. Quarterback veterans Tom Brady and Matt Ryan were both outstanding, but there is no way it should be that easy. The Steelers are traditionally an organization that doesn’t fire head coaches but it feels like time has to be running out on Mike Tomlin. Steelers fan deserve better. He was totally out coached by Bill Belichick and it was on display for everyone to see.


Nagapattinam (Tamil Nadu), Dec. 29: The harbour has moved into the town.
As survivors picked through piles of rubble and debris, a legacy of Sunday's giant waves, one word kept coming back amid the ruins ' 'titanic'.
Lifted by the deadly swell, dozens of fishing vessels had rammed into each other. When the water receded, they remained stuck in backyards of houses, on roads and on a vital bridge close to the shoreline. 'In one line, the good old fishing harbour has moved into town pushing the coastline inward,' said Palani, one of the survivors.
'Mangled fishing boats are seen every 10 feet,' said state information technology secretary and zonal relief commissioner Vivek Harinarayan, as he supervised rescue operations with Thanjavur collector J. Radhakrishnan and army officials.
A huge 15-foot-long motorised fishing boat almost knocked down C. Palanivelu's kitchen. The modest official residence of the assistant divisional engineer of the highways department is deserted, except the front room, which is used for keeping relief material.
Amid twisted wires, uprooted trees, silted debris and the stench of rotting corpses, the seafront looks like a dwelling of ghosts. Far above the debris, kites and vultures circle lazily in the hot tropical sky.
'Nearly 750 big, motorised fishing boats have been destroyed, besides 1,000 traditional craft,' said G.R. Apparaj, president of the state-level Parvatharaja Kulam Meenavar (fishermen) Sangham. Fishing activities have come to a standstill, and the loss in monetary terms is about Rs 8 crore a week, he added.
'A tragedy of this nature, India has not seen,' said a pensive Harinarayan, as he surveyed the wreckage of overturned fishing boats that blocked an entire stretch of a vital road bridge connecting the port-town with the adjacent fishing village, Akkarapet. In the first two days after the tragedy, the village, which has so far accounted for 300 to 400 deaths, could not be accessed.
At some places, up to three boats had collided under the tsunami's impact, forming 'artificial triangles'. People had to crawl under the hanging debris. 'We have been able to clear this land bridge,' said an army officer.
The army used electric arc-cutters to disentangle the boats. Soldiers also extricated some of the huge earth-moving equipment that had stuck in the slushy terrain.
Another bridge on the East Coast Road, north of the harbour, connecting Nagapattinam with Karaikal is also severely damaged. 'We are building a temporary bridge there now which will be completed tonight,' the army officer said. 'But we are not involved in the physical retrieval of bodies which are done by local volunteers,' he added.
The toll in Tamil Nadu crossed 6,000 this evening. Harinarayan said 4,300 bodies had been retrieved so far in Nagapattinam district alone.
A large number of the missing were yet to be accounted for, while 76,000 people had been accommodated in relief camps, including those in neighbouring Tiruvarur and Thanjavur districts.
The courtyard of the 200-year-old Neelasakshmi Amman temple also houses a camp for the survivors. A large open kitchen has been set up on the temple premises.
With the state government relief machinery still sluggish, there is a scramble for food and other relief material that private individuals and organisations have volunteered to reach Nagapattinam and the adjoining 33 fishing villages.
Teams of doctors, including some from private hospitals like the Apollo in Chennai, are doing the rounds at relief centres and ensuring that inmates are given tetanus shots.
'The survivors suffer from mostly multiple injuries which are not very serious,' said Dr M. Shanmugham of the Government Hospital in Karaikudi and now on deputation here. 'Though 10 per cent of the cases I have seen so far suffer from infectious disease like diarrhoea and dysentery, we are trying our best to ensure there is no major epidemic outbreak,' he said.
Dr Pai, who is heading a team from the Jawaharlal Institute of Medical Education and Research in Pondicherry, said they had brought with them analgesics, antibiotics, and oral rehydration solutions.


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Call 855-492-7388 and talk to one of our Senior Production Specialists about your manufacturing needs. Our team is on call 24/7/365!
Most of the time, the answer has to do with moisture. Certain ingredients are more sensitive to moisture (hydroscopic). This can be particularly difficult due to the climate and moisture control during the manufacturing process.
Some ingredients, like certain amino acids, can carry a pungent odor.
Generally, protein is a higher weight than a pre-workout, but volume plays a significant role in a scoop size as well. Due to density variations, a formula’s scoop size usually takes some light R & D to assure the correct unit of measure
During the filling process, the powder volume is much higher than after the product settles. Because of this, you must choose a bottle that is bigger than the fill. If you don't, there will be production delays, and a much higher potential of loss during the production process.
Requests for natural and allergen free products have been on the rise for years. One thing that you need to know is certain formulations just aren’t able to taste great using natural flavor systems; especially if you are looking for a no added sugar claim.
Besides natural ingredients being more expensive, many times you will also need to use more of it to achieve the desired effect.
This is very common. Due to different flavor systems, it is almost impossible that you will use the exact amount of flavor for various flavors.
Certain formulas can create a gas within the bottle. Unless vented seals are used, this can become a potential problem.
Due to raw materials like herbs, it is possible that many natural ingredients can vary in taste. This could potentially adjust the flavor systems from batch to batch. This is why getting a pre-sample before bottling is so important.
Regardless of whether you're new to the industry, looking for a new contract manufacturer or seeking to expand your product line, NutraScience Labs can help you.
Choose one of the following options below to get in touch with us.

domain: chemistry