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“Richmond is the root of oppression.” That’s one of the ways Ashley J. Williams described the city she’s called home for 10 years.
She said she was speaking of the Virginia capital as a whole, as well as specifically the neighborhood of Shockoe Bottom and the 17th Street Market.
The 17th Street Market has been a site of commerce since the 1700s. Depending on whom you ask, that commerce included enslaved Africans, with the 17th Street Market being the site of an auction block. (Others say it was close to an auction block.) A few minutes away at Lumpkin’s Jail, or Devil’s Half Acre, enslaved people were jailed and tortured before being sold.
Today, less than a five-minute walk from the open-air 17th Street Market, you’ll see a few markers for the Slave Trail, but these are easy to miss if you’re not keen on the history.
But for Williams, a yoga therapist and the CEO of BareSOUL, who’s been with the studio since 2015, “there’s energy that’s very present.”
“Our whole role is to restore the energy there and reenvision what it looks like to bring more life and vibrant energy while acknowledging and honoring the past,” she said.
The wellness space, especially yoga, can feel extremely white, she added. BareSOUL employs a dozen Black instructors, and each 17th Street practice begins with a brief history of the space that was once a source of pain.
“The 17th Street Market was a place where Black families were split up. It’s where the Black life was devalued. So the practice of yoga is a practice of connection. And it’s a practice of liberation of our minds,” Williams said.
Williams isn’t the only small-business owner bringing new life to the space. After being approached by Richmond Parks and Recreation to host an outdoor, COVID-19-friendly event in August, Faith Wilkerson, UnlockingRVA‘s owner and founder, who’s run the event-planning company for five years, lined the concrete and cobblestone walkways with partyers donning neon-lit headphones playing old-school and current tunes.
“Every single moment I step foot on that market, it’s done with authority and purpose because it’s what the ancestors would want us to do. Black Americans have this special gift of turning tragedy and pain into triumph and longevity. You see so much joy in our guests’ faces as they dance the night away, and it makes the moment even more special,” Wilkerson said.
Participants in yoga or the silent disco usually work up an appetite, so Williams and Wilkerson do their parts to support and promote food vendors, especially Black-owned ones, in the area.
But the women acknowledged initial hiccups in businesses not exactly embracing their audiences, which tend to be predominantly Black.
Williams even recalled one business owner calling the police on a homeless yoga participant. Both women chalked it up to establishments adapting to new faces, new spaces, and a COVID-19 world.
Adrienne Cole Johnson and Melody Short, the cofounders of the Richmond Night Market, also experienced the same blowback from some owners in the area when they brought their nighttime affair to 17th Street two years ago. They said that quickly blew over once they introduced themselves.
Johnson and Short described the work they and the Night Market do as reprogramming and reclaiming the space. The market operates on the second Saturday of each month in the summer to early fall.
Though they’re open to all vendors, Short acknowledged that the market naturally attracts a majority of Black businesses.
“I think people feel safe. It’s different when you’ve got Black women leading the charge because we welcome everybody – versus sometimes when it’s led by other groups. Black people, sometimes, we don’t feel welcome,” Short said. Being heavily invested in the businesses and the people behind the businesses is what she said keeps vendors returning year after year.
For their first in-person event since the pandemic, the market hosted about 20 vendors selling everything from art to handmade goods and food.
“We’re often, as Black people, putting our money in other communities,” Short said. The market allows them to flip the script, she added.
Rep. Madison Cawthorn tried to emphasize the importance of facts on the House floor – only to get his own facts wrong.
During a speech attacking President Joe Biden’s economic policies on Thursday evening, the North Carolina Republican ended up misquoting one of the Founding Fathers.
“It was Thomas Jefferson that said: ‘Facts are stubborn things. And whatever may be our wishes, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence,'” Cawthorn said. “Let’s cast our eyes over the facts, shall we.”
Many Twitter users were quick to call out the flub, pointing out that former President John Adams had actually made the statement. Adams uttered the infamous phrase during his defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre of 1770 that preceded the Revolutionary War.
This isn’t the first time Cawthorn, a self-described patriot, has spoken inaccurately. The vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump rose to GOP prominence last August after he gave a speech at the Republican National Convention. But during those remarks, he mistakenly said that James Madison, at 25 years old, signed the Declaration of Independence. The Founding Father was indeed 25 years old in 1776, but he did not sign the document and is actually known for his contributions to the Constitution.
Cawthorn attempted to correct the record, tweeting later: “About the Madison mistake: I ad libbed that line and meant to say James Madison was 25 when the Declaration was signed. Arguably my favorite founder.”
In the lead-up to the error, Cawthorn, who is 25 years old, said those who underestimate young people “don’t know American history.”
“If you don’t think young people can change the world, then you just don’t know American history,” Cawthorn said, pointing out the achievements of presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Madison, while they were in their early 20s.
“I’m a lover of history, so it’s incredible to be in a place where we had the vote to decide to have the Emancipation Proclamation,” he said. Lincoln issued the presidential proclamation in 1863 – there was no such vote in Congress.
Beyond factual mistakes, Cawthorn has also amplified conspiracy theories and spread disinformation since being elected to Congress, joining a faction of far-right pro-Trump lawmakers, including fellow GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
On the day of the insurrection, he called into a conservative radio show, saying: “You can call them ‘antifa,’ you can call them people paid by the Democratic machine, but … to make this look like it was a violent outrage when really the battle is being fought by people like myself and other great patriots who were standing up against the establishment,” per reporting from The Washington Post.
The Historic Square in Denton, Texas, is a sprawling lawn dotted with old oak trees. On weekends, it’s a destination for families and students from Denton’s two major universities. The historic County Courthouse is in the center, surrounded by a commercial strip with a few hip coffee shops, a pizza joint where indie bands play late into the night, an old-fashioned ice cream shop, and a bookstore.
For over a century – until last June 25 – there was also a Confederate monument: A 20-foot statue of a uniformed soldier over the words, “Our Confederate Soldiers.” And for the last two decades, nearly every week on Sunday afternoon, from 4 to 7pm, a Black resident of Denton named Willie Hudspeth would set up a lawn chair, some signs, and sit in protest.
The standoff finally came to an end one year ago, exactly one month after the killing of George Floyd, when under the cover of dark, county officials quietly dismantled the monument.
Hudspeth – a retired middle school teacher, Vietnam veteran, and leader of the local NAACP – was already 54 years-old when he started his protests; by the time he watched it come down, he was 75 and bent with age. On the infamous night, Hudspeth was there, hauled out of bed at 4 in the morning by allies who heard the commotion. Cell phone video caught Hudspeth’s shocked reaction, as buzzsaws could be heard cutting through concrete. “Thank god it actually happened,” he said in an interview the next day. But the secrecy around the removal was bittersweet. “For 21-years, I have been going down there, talking about removing the statue, and it’s just like these commissioners to do what they did.”
Today, there’s no trace of the monument on the Square. Denton has changed in other ways, too.
Hudspeth’s weekly protests were a catalyst for an investigation into Denton’s past – the legacy of Klavern No. 136, Denton’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan; the razing of the Black middle class district known as Quakertown; the dates that Black men were lynched in Denton County. At the end of 2020, Denton even elected its first Black mayor – a Republican who is also Hudspeth’s son.
“He read them for filth”
For Hudspeth, the whole thing started in 1999 with a seemingly innocuous proposal to turn on a pair of water fountains that were affixed to each leg of the monument’s arch. The consensus among county leaders, all of whom were white, was that the fountains had never been operable – that pipes would have to be put down for the fountains to work.
Denton’s Black residents remembered it differently; the fountains had definitely worked, and they were “white only.”
The fountains presented a mystery, and solving it required knowing the statue’s origin story. Around the turn of the 20th century when the South was emerging from Reconstruction to enter a new world order where Black people were now free, a few groups formed to remind everybody of how things used to be, and in their view, were supposed to be. One was the KKK, whose members sang in white churches on Sunday mornings and terrorized Black neighborhoods at night. White women who wanted to do their part could join the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).
And do their part they did-all across the South, as Jim Crow ramped up in the late 1800s and “The Birth of a Nation” hit theatres in 1915, the UDC and other similar groups fundraised to erect over 700 Confederate monuments in places of public prominence. A large majority were erected between 1900 and 1920, and tended to have a cookie-cutter look, reflecting the swift establishment under the perception of lost ground from the white South. Many of the statues feature a sculpted concrete image of a soldier atop arches or mounts emblazoned with “Our Confederate Soldiers” and a plaque honoring the sons conscripted into the War of Northern Aggression. The Denton Confederate monument went up toward the end of this era, in 1918, but with one distinction-the fountains on either side of the arch.
As the debate in 1999 turned increasingly contentious, a local historian dug up old newspaper clippings that showed the fountains in use. (Years later, in 2018, the county commissioned a ground test and confirmed that the fountains had indeed been operable.) But increasingly, it was a conversation that few wanted to have, and shutting it down meant tabling the water fountain discussion altogether. “Because,” Hudspeth says of the town, “it would show they were racist.” As Hudspeth saw it, Denton needed to deal with its past and, for that to happen, the fountains had to be turned on. “Turn them on,” became his battle cry. even before the fate of the monument was on the table. “Turn them on and let everyone drink.”
County leaders held firm. “I know for a fact that the memorial has never had an operable fountain,” Mary Horn, the chair of the Denton County Commissioner’s Court, which oversaw the monument, and who would spar with Hudspeth over the monument until her retirement in 2018, said at the time. “There is NO water line from the building to the memorial and never has been.”
Hudspeth started attending nearly every Commissioner’s Court meeting to talk about the monument. He showed up at City Council meetings. Katina Stone-Butler, a local artist, remembers stumbling upon Hudspeth on the local access TV channel in the nineties. “Just giving everybody the business,” she laughs. “He read them for filth.”
The Commissioner’s Court referred Hudspeth to the Denton County Historical Commission, which then referred him to the Texas Historical Commission, which then referred him back to the Commissioner’s Court. “They had me going in circles,” Hudspeth says. “Rabbit chases to wear me down.”
Finally, Hudspeth had had enough. If county leaders weren’t willing to engage with him, he would take the conversation to the Square. “[That] Willie was angry,” Hudspeth says, looking back. “He was angry at everybody and everything. My name was chaos. I wanted to create chaos wherever I could-and I mean everywhere.”
He was working then as a junk hauler but he had Sundays off. And so, on one Sunday in 1999, he held his first protest at the foot of the Confederate monument.
To the Black community in Denton, the city’s selective memory was nothing new. The forced relocation of Quakertown proved it.
In the decades after the Civil War. Quakertown was a thriving Black merchant district near the center of town. Denton was Denton-but Quakertown was theirs. There were Black doctors and lawyers and Black-owned shops.
But then, white Denton decided that Quakertown was in the way. The College of Industrial Arts, a school for white women, had been built on the edge of Quakertown, just beyond the Square. The town claimed the students needed more space for the ladies to walk safely from school. Plans had also been drawn up for a new Denton Civic Park – exactly where Quakertown then stood. As a historical marker set down in the park in 2013 puts it, “the civic-minded interests of Denton’s white residents threatened the future of Quakertown.”
In 1921, three years after the Confederate monument went up in Denton, the town voted to relocate the whole of Quakertown to Solomon Hill, a swampy cow pasture on the other side of the railroad tracks in southeast Denton, thus giving the white ladies their walking path to school. More than 60 families lost their homes and many residents left Denton altogether. It was the same year as the Tulsa Race Massacre, 270 miles north, when the city’s “Black Wall Street” was burned and 300 people were killed.
What happened to Quakertown sealed in a wound that has not healed to this day. Some of the old Quakertown homes still sit on cinder blocks from the hasty relocation. There was never an apology from Denton’s white leadership, much less compensation offered to those who had lost their community and livelihoods.
“I think it broke their spirit, really,” says Linnie M. McAdams, who is 83 and served as Denton’s first Black councilwoman. In the 1980s, she pushed to revitalize southeast Denton, where the grandchildren of the original Quakertown residents still live to this day, but she says that getting people involved in local politics was like pulling teeth.
Once McAdams, who had come to Denton as an adult, learned the history of Quakertown, things started making sense. “I didn’t understand the devastation of that move,” she says. “And what it did to those people to be moved out of their homes over to a god forsaken area with no city services. And the city was in no hurry to do anything about it.”
Katina Stone-Butler, an artist who also moved to Denton as an adult, described a similar experience. “Black people don’t really go on the Square,” Stone-Butler says. “There’s a spiritual barrier there because of the racist history of this county.”
With two major universities in town, a world-class School of Jazz, and progressive leadership on the city council, Denton enjoys a reputation as a blue dot amid the conservative Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
But to Stone-Butler, who is Black and co-hosts the podcast, Black History for White People, it’s the same old racism, just in a hipster outfit. “Coffee house, skinny jean racism,” she says.
A long, solitary protest
That first Sunday of Hudspeth’s protest, he set up a sign that read “God loves us all” – with a smiley face for the “o” in God – and sat down in a lawn chair at the base of the monument. And for years after that, rain or shine, he stuck with it. Often, he would strike up conversations with people about the history of the statue.
As the years passed, Hudspeth’s goals shifted – a fact that his detractors would seize on. At first, he wanted the fountains turned on, along with a plaque that would explain their history of Jim Crow segregation. Later, he said the monument should be moved to a museum.
If there was going to be a Confederate monument on public property, Hudspeth figured he would be its living presence, there to offer context and perspective. If the monument paid tribute to Confederate soldiers, as Horn and its defenders claimed, Hudspeth’s protests inspired a deep look at the past.
At times, students rallied behind him, though their efforts tended to come and go with the graduation cycles. In 2008, after students circulated a petition calling for the monument’s removal, the Denton County Historical Commission announced a plan for a Quakertown House Museum dedicated to Denton’s Black history.
In walking tours, blog posts and podcasts, the excavation of Denton’s racist past had started. Students found old newspaper clippings that revealed a KKK parade through Denton in 1921, more Klan activity alongside the raising of Quakertown, and Klan ties to city leadership. When Hudspeth discovered unmarked graves at the overgrown and unkempt St. John’s Cemetery, a plaque was ordered and work began to identify the dead and piece together their stories. Denton County lynchings were catalogued.
“Willie is a heat-seeking missile man of action,” says Shaun Treat, a local activist and historian. “He doesn’t quit.”
As Hudspeth continued his protest, the tension in Denton rose.
In 2015, after the words “This is Racist” were spray-painted on top of the monument, a white man confronted Hudspeth on the Square with a loaded AK-47, shouting “Counterprotest!”
The area had been thick with families and onlookers. When police arrived, the man forfeited his ammunition but was allowed to leave the scene with his rifle. He claimed that he was there “to make a point” and was never charged. Security in the Square ramped up after that.
Pressure was also building from outside.
The 2017 “United the Right” rally in Charlottesville brought things to a head. “That was a big one,” Hudspeth says. “We [Black Lives Matter] joined together, and chaos was on again.”
In 2019, Texas finally agreed to remove from its statehouse a plaque stating that the Civil War “was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery.” Texas still observes Confederate History Month every April and, according to the Texas Observer, while the state had removed more Confederate symbols than any other, as of 2019, 68 remained.
Denton announced a new Confederate Memorial Advisory Committee, which included Hudspeth in its 15 members. When the committee voted 12-3 to keep the monument in place, but add a plaque decrying slavery and video kiosks dedicated to Black history in Denton, Hudspeth was one of the dissenting votes.
However, it was only a recommendation and the Commissioner’s Court, now led by Judge Andy Eads, needed to approve it. Eads ordered ground-penetrating tests that finally confirmed the fountains had been linked to pipes.
But then came COVID. And then, the killings of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. Confederate statues were coming down across the south. In Denton, police shot and killed Darius Tarver, a young Black man in mental crisis. There were also renewed questions about the mysterious death of Lermont Stowers Jones two years earlier on Denton’s Old Alton Bridge, a rumored site of past lynchings.
Suddenly, it wasn’t just Willie Hudspeth protesting at the Confederate monument.
On June 9, 2020, the Commissioner’s Court approved an emergency request to the Texas Historical Commission to relocate the monument to protect it from “desecration.” When Denton woke up on the morning of June 25, the Confederate soldier was gone.
Hudspeth spends his Sundays at home with his wife of 52 years, who is happy to see him simmer down for once. But he still attends county meetings, as he says, to keep its leaders in check. And he shares his views with his son, Gerard Hudspeth, who was elected as Denton’s first Black Mayor in December 2020 and has largely stayed out of Denton’s debates about race.
“My dad and I still argue politics and sometimes it gets hot,” Mayor Hudspeth says. “I am what I am because of his modeling on how to serve and be active in your community.”
“He surprises me,” Hudspeth says of his son. “We still fight. But we laugh, too.”
Hudspeth chuckles and shakes his head. “He’s doing a good job.”
What comes next is up to the Texas Historical Commission, which in April approved plans to move the monument to Denton’s Courthouse-on-the-Square Museum. McAdams, the retired councilwoman, is pushing for a memorial honoring victims of lynchings in Denton County to be installed there, too.
“That statue is a tribute to the people who have mistreated me all my life,” she says. “It gives comfort and a sense of right to those people who are bigoted and filled with hate… a symbol of the good ol’ days when they had control and you didn’t have all these n*****s walking around everywhere. That’s what it says to them.”
As Stone-Butler, the Denton artist, sees it: “It’s not enough to move a monument that has been the physical gatekeeper of racism and systemic oppression. It needs to crumble to the ground.”
“If Denton wants to put up a monument,” Stone-Butler says. “They can put up a monument of Willie Hudspeth.”
President Joe Biden made his first presidential address to a joint session of Congress, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris, sitting behind him at the rostrum, made history.
The occasion marked the first time that the Speaker of the House and president of the Senate were both women – and the first time that a US president was flanked by two women presiding in those positions during a presidential address.
During the speech, Biden is expected to speak about the progress his administration has made tackling the coronavirus pandemic within his first 100 days. Biden is also set to push the American Families Plan, his administration’s $1.8 trillion legislative package aiming to invest in education, infrastructure, child care, and various labor policies like paid family leave.
Biden is also expected to lay out his vision for economic recovery related to the coronavirus pandemic.
When asked about the moment, Harris said it felt, “normal.”
“Madam Speaker and Madam Vice President,” Biden said as he took to the stage. “No sitting US president has ever said those words. It’s about time!” Biden said.
Prehistoric cave dwellers living in Europe purposefully starved themselves of oxygen to hallucinate while creating their decorative wall paintings, a groundbreaking new study has found.
Researchers have been questioning for years why so many of the world’s oldest paintings were located in often pitch-black tunnel systems, far away from cave entrances.
But a recent study by Tel Aviv University now reveals that the location was deliberate because it induced oxygen deprivation and caused cavemen to experience a state called hypoxia.
Hypoxia can bring about symptoms including shortness of breath, headaches, confusion, and rapid heartbeat, which can lead to feelings of euphoria, near-death experiences, and out-of-body sensations. The team of researchers believes it would have been “very similar to when you are taking drugs”, the Times reported.
“It appears that Upper Paleolithic people barely used the interior of deep caves for daily, domestic activities. Such activities were mostly performed at open-air sites, rock shelters, or cave entrances,” the study says, according to CNN.
“While depictions were not created solely in the deep and dark parts of the caves, images at such locations are a very impressive aspect of cave depictions and are thus the focus of this study,” it adds.
According to Ran Barkai, the co-author of the study, the cavemen used fire to light up the caves, which would simultaneously also reduce oxygen levels. Painting in these conditions was done deliberately and as a means of connecting to the cosmos, the researcher says.
“It was used to get connected with things,” Barkai told CNN, adding that cave painters often thought of the rock face as a portal connecting their world with the underworld, which was associated with prosperity and growth. The researcher also suggested that cave paintings could have been used as part of a kind of initiation rite.
The fascinating cave paintings, which date from around 40,000 to 14,000 years ago, depict animals such as mammoths, bison, and ibex.
“It was not the decoration that rendered the caves significant but the opposite: The significance of the chosen caves was the reason for their decoration,” the study reads, according to CNN.
The study focused on decorated caves in Europe, mostly in Spain and France. It was published last week in the scientific journal “Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness, and Culture.”
When President Ronald Reagan in 1981 moved to trim $884 million from a budget used by Amtrak, Senator Joe Biden was the only member of the Senate Budget Committee to vote against Reagan’s plan.
“You can’t come back next year or the next year and change it,” Biden said, according to a report from United Press International. “Those railroads will have gone.”
Now, four decades later, Biden’s in the seat once held by Reagan. And he’s announced a $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which would include $80 billion for Amtrak. The money would go toward expanding and fixing the country’s crumbling railway infrastructure, which he’s fought in favor of for his whole career in Washington.
It’s often said that Biden’s nickname is “Amtrak Joe,” although it’s difficult to pinpoint when that nickname started to solidify.
In the late 2000s, as Biden joined Barack Obama on the presidential ticket, the nickname started popping up regularly on CNN. The first record that Insider could find of a prominent news outlet using “Amtrak Joe” was from August 2008, when CNN’s Soledad O’Brien called him by the nickname on air.
“Coming up next, more on the Washington insider who is also a proud Delaware outsider. They called him the Amtrak Joe Biden. God, I have seen him on Amtrak a lot,” O’Brien said as she threw to a commercial, according to a transcript.
The following month, The New York times published a blog post using the nickname.
We’ve combed newspaper archives dating back to Biden’s early days as a senator, pulling some of his long-ago quotes about Amtrak. Here’s a brief history of Biden’s interactions with Amtrak.
In October 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the Rail Passenger Service Act to create Amtrak, which was then called the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, according to Amtrak’s official history.
Three years later, Biden entered office.
During his decades in the Senate, Biden commuted home to Delaware each day via Amtrak to be home with his sons at night. CNN estimated he took about 8,000 round trips on the same route.
Throughout the 1980s, Biden’s name popped up in budget stories about Amtrak. He often butted heads with Reagan about railroad spending. In May 1985, for example, Reagan had proposed slashing Amtrak’s budget. Biden at the time said the cuts were “a creeping regionalism,” according to The Providence Journal.
“I’m really beginning to wonder if we’re seven regions or one country,” he said. “Why should we help? I’ll tell you why we should help: We’re Americans. A simple reason.”
In 1987, when Biden launched his bid for the Democratic nomination for president, he chose a Delaware train station as his backdrop, according to UPI.
Amtrak announced in the late 1990s that it was developing a high-speed rail for the north-east, called the Acela. Biden said it was “the single most important transportation need in America,” according to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“That would be hundreds of thousands of tons of pollution,” Biden said, according to the report. “Amtrak is important not only because it helps our quality of life. It literally impacts our health.”
A few years later, after Obama won the presidential election, the first and second families travelled together via the railway to the inauguration.
As vice president, Biden was often sent to blue-collar states to campaign for Obama’s reelection, using the political skills he’s honed riding the train for all those years, as The Daily Beast reported in 2012.
“This is, after all, a guy famous for making friends with anyone and everyone – fellow travelers, train conductors, red caps – he crossed paths with on his old Amtrak commute from Delaware,” the magazine said.
Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign was also interwoven with Amtrak. During 2020, he travelled by train to several states, making whistle-stop speeches as he went.
He’d planned to take a train to Washington, as he’d done with Obama 12 years earlier but cancelled the trip amid security concerns, after rioters mobbed the Capitol.
In a statement, Biden’s team said: “In the week since the attack on Congress by a mob that included domestic terrorists and violent extremists, the nation has continued to learn more about the threat to our democracy and about the potential for additional violence in the coming days, both in the National Capital Region and in cities across the country. This is a challenge that the President-elect and his team take incredibly seriously.”
When Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson held their first trans-Atlantic phone call, some of their conversation reportedly focused on a mutual love of train travel.
More recently, a few days after announcing the infrastructure deal, he said. “Imagine a world where you and your family can travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas, or in a high-speed train, close to as fast as you can go across the country in a plane.”
Amtrak published a map of an expanded US rail network based on Biden’s funding proposal. Materials prepped for the announcement said the plan would bolster transportation options for diverse populations throughout the country.
The new routes include cities that haven’t before been connected to the national rail service, including western outposts like Las Vegas and Phoenix.
It would also break ground on routes throughout the southern US, including ones to Nashville, Tennessee; Montgomery, Alabama; and Macon, Georgia. Materials prepped for the announcement said the plan would bolster transportation options for diverse populations throughout the country.
“Millions of people, including large populations of people of color, do not have access to a reliable, fast, sustainable, and affordable passenger rail option. This is neither fair nor equitable,” the railway said.
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Discovery Plus offers all your favorite Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, Food Network, and HGTV shows.
The service costs $5 a month with ads, or $7 a month without commercials.
The interface has flaws, but the low price makes it a great option for fans of Discovery’s networks.
Table of Contents: Masthead StickyFree Trial for Verizon Unlimited Customers (small)Monthly Plan (ad-supported) (small)
Discovery Plus is one of the latest services to throw its hat into the streaming wars.
The platform launched in the US on January 4 and is the streaming home for programs from Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery, Travel Channel, HGTV, and Food Network. It also features dozens of new Discovery Plus Originals and handy 24/7 streaming channels for popular shows.
I signed up for the ad-supported plan and tried the service for about a week to see how it performs. While browsing through the Discovery Plus library, it’s been exciting to circle back to classic shows and discover brand-new series, but the interface could still use some work.
Price, plans, and deals
Discovery Plus costs $5 a month for ad-supported viewing, or $7 a month for commercial-free streaming. Each plan comes with a free seven-day trial.
Verizon is also giving select customers up to 12 months of Discovery Plus for free. The promotion is for the ad-free plan and is available to new Fios customers, new 5G internet customers, and all unlimited phone plan customers.
Free Trial for Verizon Unlimited Customers (small)
Unlike some other services, Discovery Plus only offers monthly plans, so there’s no discount if you pay for a full year up front. The service does offer gift cards, however, for 12 months ($83.75) or six months ($41.75) of its ad-free plan.
Discovery Plus understands its lane, offering a big library of shows designed to cater to fans of reality TV, nature programs, cooking, true crime, and education. People who like scripted dramas and comedies, however, will have to look elsewhere. Discovery Plus is purely a service for fans of Discovery networks, and in that sense, its catalog offers a lot of value.
With classic titles pulled from all of Discovery’s brands and networks, the service is jam-packed with blasts from the past, including “Dirty Jobs,” “The Crocodile Hunter,” “Mythbusters,” and “Unwrapped.” There are also dozens of new Discovery Plus Originals, like “Cocktails and Tall Tales,” “Luda Can’t Cook,” and “Monster Garage.”
The original shows, in particular, have creative concepts – like rapper Ludacris learning how to cook different dishes. As a whole, the entire lineup features a solid selection of quality shows centered around the home, food, and history.
By our count, we found 91 programs listed as “Discovery Plus Originals” either with full episodes or trailers indicating they are coming soon. Not every original program was under the Discovery Plus Originals category, however, as we found at least 12 under the platform’s tab for the upcoming Magnolia Network (rebrand of DIY Network).
The Discovery Plus interface works well enough but it doesn’t have any standout characteristics and it can feel bulky and hard to navigate. It’s particularly confusing to find the platform’s 24/7 streaming channels, as they aren’t on the sidebar or top menu like you’d expect.
The platform’s sidebar contains the basics for exploring the catalog, including a tab for browsing shows, a tab for saved programs (“My List”), and a search bar. The “Browse” tab allows you to find content by its original channel and also by category such as “True Crime” and “Lifestyle.”
To get to the 24/7 channels, you need to scroll down a bit on the “For You” page. This is also where you’ll find rows for the platform’s themed collections. The 24/7 channels are a terrific inclusion for binge-watchers as they let you stream non-stop episodes of “House Hunters,” “Property Brothers,” and “90 Day Fiancé” – I just wish they were easier to find.
One of the redeeming features of the Discovery Plus interface is its helpful recommendation feature. When visiting a show’s main page there are up to 20 additional series recommendations to explore, making it easy to jump into similar programs you might like.
I was hopeful that the platform’s “My List” would easily compile all my favorite content in one place, but it turns out that this feature doesn’t let you save individual episodes. In addition to a limited “Recently Watched” section – which is only accessible on the “For You” page – there isn’t a place to queue up specific episodes I want to watch over the span of a few hours. This makes the experience difficult as I have to go back and sort through shows to find episodes.
Discovery Plus does include some 4K titles for subscribers who have the necessary gear, but it’s not easy to find these programs as there’s no specific 4K category in the main menu.
The platform requires you to search “Ultra HD” to find this content. After you do this, an “Ultra HD” tab will appear in the results. Once you click on a 4K title, a “UHD” icon will appear on its page to let you know that it plays in 4K. That said, the icon may not appear on certain devices.
While most of the UHD content is limited to a few nature programs – such as “Planet Earth II” and BBC’s “Dynasties” – I was surprised to find programs like “NASA Mars Landing,” “Misfit Garage” and “American Titans” in 4K quality. On the downside, unlike Netflix and other popular 4K services, Discovery Plus does not support HDR.
While Discovery Plus is relatively new and will likely roll out new features throughout 2021, there are already obvious faults that I hope it fixes.
One of these is the lack of offline downloads, making Discovery Plus the only major streaming service that doesn’t provide this feature.
Aside from that drawback, Discovery Plus is mostly on par with other platforms thanks to its 4K content and support for up to four simultaneous streams (just like Disney Plus). Its starting plan is also one of the cheapest streaming options there is, at just $5 a month. That’s comparable to Apple TV Plus and Peacock Premium.
Should you subscribe to Discovery Plus?
Discovery Plus’ low price makes it a solid option for big fans of reality TV, cooking shows, nature docs, and other nonfiction programs. It’s also an affordable choice if you’re looking for a secondary service to supplement your primary streaming platform, whether that be Netflix, HBO Max, Prime Video, Disney Plus, or Hulu.
Personally, I’d tack an ad-supported Discovery Plus plan onto a Disney Plus bundle. With this combo, you’ll get scripted shows and movies from Hulu and Disney Plus, sports from ESPN+, and nonfiction programs from Discovery for a total of $19 a month.
Discovery Plus, even with ads, is worth it for fans of its cable channels. The exclusive programs, in addition to its extensive on-demand library, can lead to hours of entertainment, even if there are hiccups with the interface.
The bottom line
Discovery Plus is still new, which gives it time to sort out its flaws, especially its limited “My List” feature and lack of downloads. These flaws make the catalog of shows and documentaries difficult to explore to the fullest extent.
But beyond these faults, Discovery Plus knows what its networks do best: offer entertaining and informative content about our homes, lives, history, and natural world.
Fans of scripted TV dramas and comedies will have to look elsewhere, but shows like “Guy’s Grocery Games,” “Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations,” and “Ghost Adventures: Cecil Hotel” are binge-worthy adventures for anyone bored with fictional dramas.
Working women have come a long way in the last 100 years.
In the 1920s, women entered the workforce in astonishing numbers as a result of the industrial revolution.
Then, as men were sent off to war, more women got involved in the wartime effort in factories and other professions previously dominated by men.
Women’s equality movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s gave even more opportunities to working women, and in recent years, more women were in the US workforce than men. However, the coronavirus pandemic has caused the women’s labor force participation rate to hit a 33-year low.
Here are 28 vintage photos that show how the role of women in the workforce has evolved in the last 100 years.
In the wake of the industrial revolution, more women than ever began to leave the household and go out to work.
Women held jobs as postal clerks, sorting letters and packages. While it wasn’t uncommon for women to work in post offices, very few women actually delivered mail. According to USPS, in 1920, only 5% of the nation’s 943 village carriers were women.
As village delivery was gradually phased out in favor of city delivery, a majority of the remaining women village carriers either resigned from their positions or were transferred to clerk positions.
Many women also began working in factories.
In 1920, women made up about 20% of the labor force, and many of them were involved in the manufacturing of apparel, food, and tobacco products.
Women of color, on the other hand, were largely employed in agriculture and domestic service work for much of the early 20th century.
During World War I, women held occupations in domestic and personal service, clerical occupations, and factory work.
Many women learned to type in order to secure higher-paying jobs in an office as a secretary or a typist in a clerical office, rather than having to work in a factory. According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, working conditions, wages, and hours in clerical work were seen as the best at the time.
Clerical work attracted young, literate, mostly white women who would work as typists until they were married, only to be replaced by another young unmarried woman.
After the Women’s Bureau was established in the US Department of Labor on June 5, 1920, women had even more opportunities in the labor force.
In 1923, “Business Woman” published a list of 29 different jobs that women held in the film industry, apart from actresses. Job positions included that of a typist, secretary to the stars and executive secretary, costume designer, seamstress, telephone operator, hairdresser, script girl, film retoucher, title writer, publicity writer, musician, film editor, director, and producer, among others.
Women also held jobs as blacksmiths and worked on vehicles.
However, most occupations were seen solely as a precursor to marriage. Among married white women of both native and immigrant backgrounds, only around 10% held jobs. It was more common for married women of color to hold jobs, however, out of pure financial necessity.
Unemployed women during the Great Depression could join “SheSheShe” camps.
Inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which only allowed men to join in exchange for free room and board, Eleanor Roosevelt started “SheSheShe” camps as a way for women to gain employment in environmental conservation as well.
Many families during the Great Depression were able to achieve middle-class status by adding another working member to the household – in many cases, a woman.
Many women during the Great Depression found work as secretaries, teachers, telephone operators, and nurses. Women also made an income by sewing clothes in Works Progress Administration (WPA) sewing rooms, which manufactured men’s trousers, boys’ coveralls, baby clothes, dresses, and diapers.
During World War II, women assisted in manufacturing wartime necessities like gas masks. By 1945, one in every four married women worked in jobs outside the home.
According to Forbes, between 1940 and 1945, female participation in the US workforce increased from 27% to nearly 37%.
Before the war, women were in traditionally “female” fields such as nursing and teaching. By 1943, women made up 65% of the US aircraft industry’s workforce.
In 1935, women made 25% less than men for government jobs. In 1942, even though the War Labor Board required these women to be paid the same as men, the war ended before they could receive equal pay.
In 1935, a law titled the National Recovery Act required women who held jobs within the government to receive 25% less pay than men in the same jobs, according to the National Committee on Pay Equity. During wartime in 1942, the War Labor Board ruled that women would be paid the same as male workers who were now away at war.
Women were largely seen as “supplemental” workers in the 1950s, meaning their income was secondary to their husband’s.
Even though there were technically more women in the workforce in 1952 than during the war, women were not taken seriously in regards to their careers.
Women returned to stereotypically “feminine” jobs – in some cases, jobs were advertised as for women only.
Many women were forced to give up the jobs they had worked in during wartime to male soldiers returning home. The most popular jobs for women during the 1950s were secretaries, bank tellers or clerical workers, sales clerks, private household workers, and teachers, according to The Week.
Female secretaries in the 1950s gained a reputation for being young and attractive. In fact, a 1959 quiz from a secretarial training program in Waco, Texas, asking women if they have what it takes to be a secretary includes “smiling readily and naturally” and being “usually cheerful” among its requirements.
The 1950s marked the beginning of the “jet age,” and many young women found work as flight attendants, then called “stewardesses.”
Flight attendants during the 195os became symbols of the golden age of flying — when traveling by air was seen as the height of sophistication and glamour. However, with this “glamorous” career also came a host of sexist protocols.
According to Conde Nast Traveler, women were not allowed to work as flight attendants after they reached the ages of 32 to 35, while male flight attendants could work well into their 60s. In 1957, Trans World Airlines dropped its no-marriage rule for female flight attendants. However, many airlines continued to only hire non-married female flight attendants.
While many women joined the workforce, they were nevertheless expected to fulfill their duties at home, in what would be coined “the second shift.”
After women returned home from their secretarial or office jobs, they had another job to do — caring for the children, doing the housekeeping, and, of course, putting a hot dinner in front of their husband.
This became known as the “second shift.” If women didn’t hold office or other jobs during the day, they were relegated to being “housewives.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, women found creative ways to make their own incomes from their homes.
Many suburban women began selling Tupperware out of their own homes in what became known as “Tupperware parties.”
“Tupperware … took those moms out of the kitchen where they were ‘supposed to be’ and let them enter the workforce, and let them have something outside the home,” Lorna Boyd, whose mother Sylvia was an at-home Tupperware seller in the 1960s, told the Smithsonian Institution.
While technology-based and other computer programming jobs may now be dominated by men, the same jobs were considered “women’s work” in the 1960s.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, “computer girls” became a term for “savvy young women” pursuing careers in computer programming. Computer programming was seen as “easy work” similar to typing or filing, so many women ended up building the field that would come to be known as software development.
Women soon made up a majority of the trained workforce in the computing industry.
However, the work was seen as “unskilled.”
“Women were seen as an easy, tractable labor force for jobs that were critical and yet simultaneously devalued,” technology historian Marie Hicks said in her book “Programmed Inequality,” according to The Guardian.
In the 1960s, multiple pieces of legislation were passed to protect women in the workplace from discrimination.
Title VII was added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, protecting workers from employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
In 1963, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was passed in order to protect men and women who perform “substantially equal work in the same establishment” from sex-based wage discrimination.
Other strides were made for women in the late 1970s. In 1978, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed as an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This meant that women could start building families without fearing how it would affect their careers.
Women in the workforce in the 1980s continued to make strides, but there was still a ways to go.
According to The Atlantic, in 1985, half of all college graduates were women. However, only 41% of women between the ages of 25 and 44 held full-time year-round jobs.
Even in the mid-1980s, women themselves saw their own careers as inferior to their husbands’. According to The Atlantic, which cited a 1985 Roper survey, only 10% of women said that a husband should turn down a “very good job” in another city “so the wife can continue her job.”
However, women of the 1980s made history in their fields. Dr. Mae Jemison was among 15 new astronauts named by NASA and became the first black female shuttle flyer.
In recent years, women held more jobs than men in the US workforce.
At the start of 2020, there are now 109,000 more women working than men, and women in the US made up 50.4% of the labor force.
Sectors that traditionally hire women, like healthcare and education, were growing, and other industries previously dominated by men were also hiring more women than ever before.
According to Forbes, 13.8% of mining and logging jobs were currently held by women, and more women were employed in manufacturing and transportation than in years past as well.
The coronavirus pandemic caused the women’s labor force participation rate to hit a 33-year low in January 2021.
According to CNBC, more than 2.3 million women in the US have left the labor force since February 2020, compared to about 1.8 million men who have registered as unemployed. This places the women’s labor force participation rate at 57%, the lowest rate since 1988, according to the National Women’s Law Center.
However, the actual number of women who are currently unemployed may be much higher due to those who may have left the labor force but are not actively looking for work. Instead, many women may be staying home due to mass closures of schools and daycare facilities.
The data is undeniably dire, despite more jobs being added to the workforce in recent months. In January 2021, 275,000 women left the labor force, accounting for 80% of all unemployed workers over the age of 20 that month.
The situation is even worse for women of color, Insider’s Juliana Kaplan previously reported. According to the NWLC, 8.5% of Black women age 20 and over were unemployed in January 2021, compared to 8.4% in December 2020 and 4.9% in February 2020.
Adversely, the unemployment rate for white men age 20 and over was 5.5% in January 2021, compared to 5.8% in December 2020 and 2.7% in February 2020.
San Francisco’s public schools were among the first in the US to shut down at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in February 2020.
They’re still closed. And the outrage over the endless foot-dragging on re-opening is well-deserved, especially considering what the city’s school board has spent precious time on rather than laser-focusing on reopening.
And yet for some reason, San Francisco’s Board of Education recently devoted a disproportionate amount of time and energy on an effort to review every single public school in the district with the goal of swiftly renaming any building bearing the name of a person who contributed to the abuse or subjugation of women, minorities, queer people, and the environment.
There’s still no set date to reopen San Francisco’s schools.
But the same excuses offered by the school board and teachers unions for why schools can’t reopen remain unchanged:
“Teachers’ lives would be at grave risk” is a common argument – even though the CDC has repeatedly stated that schools are among the lowest-risk public places for spreading COVID.
“Schools need revamped ventilation systems” is another – even though the CDC has recommended reopening schools with basic social distancing and ventilation measures (like a fan and an open window) as soon as possible.
“Teachers need to be vaccinated” is yet another – even though teachers are among the prioritized professions for vaccination in California already.
And while California is slowly ramping up its vaccine roll out, the school district and unions could use their resources to help teachers and school employees coordinate COVID vaccination appointments. Thus far, there has been no demonstrable urgency in taking such initiatives.
But no one can argue the school board hasn’t treated the effort to rename schools with the utmost urgency.
Originally conceived in 2018 in the wake of the Neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, the school re-naming project was kicked into high gear this past summer following the police killing of George Floyd and protests against racism and police brutality.
A schools renaming committee was convened and as can be seen in public video of its deliberations, adherence to historical facts was a secondary concern, and the scope of its own mission seemed to change on the whims of a few of its members.
Committee members were expected to come to the meeting having already conducted their research, and yet during the meeting members are seen Google-searching for impeachable evidence of reputation-destroying racism or contributions to colonialism.
And even with such flimsy source material, members sometimes misread the information before them, as demonstrated when a committee member said Paul Revere participated in a conquest of Native American land.
Other names deemed worthy of removal included Abraham Lincoln, because despite signing the Emancipation Proclamation his policies were “detrimental” to Native Americans, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein for her support of an urban renewal project that displaced members of a Filipino community while she served as the city’s mayor.
One committee member noted that former Mayor George Moscone also supported neighborhood-disrupting urban renewal projects, but the school named for the martyred Moscone (who in 1978 was assassinated along with the legendary gay rights activist and city supervisor Harvey Milk) was spared by the committee.
The mythical city of “El Dorado” – in which a king sprinkled subjects in gold dust – was deemed removable because the Gold Rush led to the death of Native Americans and, as one committee member put it, “I don’t think the concept of greed and lust for gold is a concept we want our children to be given.”
Another committee member pushed back, arguing that not only is El Dorado not real, it’s not a person, and therefore out of the scope of the group’s stated guidelines. His point of view was rejected out of hand.
There were several more egregious mistakes, but the San Francisco school board voted 6 to 1 to accept the committee’s recommendations and to begin the process of swiftly renaming 44 schools – including those named for Revere, Lincoln, and Feinstein.
The response was tough but fair.
A historical embarrassment
An exasperated Mayor Breed said the school board should “bring the same urgency and focus on getting our kids back in the classroom” and only when that’s accomplished should we “have that longer conversation about the future of school names.”
And in an interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, school board president Gabriela Lopez appeared to defend the committee’s decision to not consult historians who could have easily helped the committee avoid its embarrassing mistakes. Lopez said she didn’t want “get into a process where we then discredit the work that this group has done.”
Historians, previously deemed inessential to the process of re-examining historical figures, will be invited into future discussions.
There is still no anticipated date for San Francisco public schools to reopen, despite private schools and public schools in neighboring counties being opened for months.
We need schools, and we need facts
It’s tempting to view the San Francisco school renaming debacle through a one-way culture war lens: with woke lefties beclowning themselves and a liberal city’s government unable to provide a basic public function. But that’s reductive.
If the San Francisco community believes school renaming should be a priority for the district, the board should by all means push forward on those efforts. But it’s tragically comical to focus on renaming schools that have been closed for a year and for the foreseeable future.
It is a story of misplaced priorities, but it is also indicative of a greater societal problem – which is the conscious choice by many to adopt a Manichean point of view that defines everyone as simply good or simply evil, with facts deemed secondary nuisances.
That’s why the San Francisco debacle matters. Because for citizens of this country to be able to share a reality-based existence, partisans on both sides need to accept that facts matter, political narratives be damned.


text:
A ranch kid from Southern Colorado who grew up surrounded by natural beauty and cows--also beautiful. I always loved reading and watching epic stories (LotR, Star Wars, etc.) and at about fifteen I decided that's what I wanted to do: make stories that ennoble people.
In college I specialized in both directing and acting. Both of these pursuits are inextricably tied to one another and I've found that increasing my skill in one, necessarily increases my skill in the other as well. I am always at my happiest when I am on-set working in either of those two positions.
Another aspect of my bio I would be remiss to leave out is my background in combat sports. Since I was a wee lad of but seven years I have done karate. It has been critical to the development of my coordination, confidence, and sick kicks (sick as in cool, not diseased). I have now been a black-belt for over a decade, and been teaching for four. I think that the teaching has been key to becoming a better director and filmmaker because I have had to learn to articulate movements and ideas in many different ways so that a wide variety of minds can fully grasp the concept. This has saved so much time on-set because I can immediately cycle through ways of saying what I need instead of rambling on in a babble hoping the other person understands.
I also wrestled from about middle-school through high school and honestly got my ass kicked for the first seven years. I kept losing time after time and getting beat down (literally and figuratively) again and again. Then the Summer before my Junior year of high school something snapped and the switch turned on. The last two years of my high school career I actually won and was competing with the top ranked kids in the state! However, I never won the state tournament. My Senior year I made it to the finals of the state tournament and lost. I made a few minor physical mistakes, but I made a huge error with my mindset and reverted to who I had been two years prior. It's a lesson I will remember the rest of my life: Never get too caught up in a single mistake, there is always an opportunity for victory if you believe there is and fight like a demon to reach it.

domain: artistic


text: DALLAS, July 11 -- Alcatel and SDG Information Co., an optical fiber manufacturer in Shenzen, China, have decided to join forces in a plan to manufacture one million kilometers of Alcatel's single mode fiber by 2002, said Alcatel. The companies will operate out of Shenzen to supply China and possibly other parts of Asia as the demand for optical fiber continues to grow, said Alcatel. Alcatel has always been an active player in China, and this joint venture agreement continues to emphasize the strategic importance of China to us, said Yvon Raak, president of Alcatel's Telecom Products Division. SDGI is a highly reputable and strong player in the market. Alcatel has a 55 percent interest in the $28 million (US) joint venture and will be responsible for providing the process technology. SDG Information is a ten-year veteran of the optical fiber cable business, the company produces optical digital transmission equipment, access equipment, optical fiber and cable. The venture will initially employ about 120 people.

domain: economics


Lakehead Thunderwolves Men’s BBall Home Next Weekend
THUNDER BAY – Lakehead University Sports – The Lakehead Thunderwolves men’s basketball team came up against a much improved Waterloo Warriors team on Saturday evening, dropping a 77-71 decision.
It was clear from the tip that Waterloo was playing with renewed purpose, jumping out to lead 19-15 after the first quarter and 38-26 at the half. Waterloo would stretch their lead to 19 early in the 3rd quarter.
Once again Waterloo’s zone defense caused fits for Lakehead’s offense, which struggled to get going until the third quarter, as they scored 20 to narrow Waterloo’s lead to 6 with 10 minutes to play.
With the game on the line late in the fourth quarter Waterloo shooters were on point, led by Jaspreet Gill who scored a game-high 27 points (6-of-10 3FG). By contrast the entire Lakehead roster hit only 5 long range shots on 23 attempts.
Three of those three-pointers came from Jamar Coke, who led the Wolves with 15 points, 8 rebounds and 5 assists. Reserve post Justin Bell had an efficient 11 points while Igor Lebov put in 13 of his own with 7 rebounds.
Three other Warriors hit double figures, including veteran Wayne Bridge with 19 points.
Coach Matt Erdman said “We weren’t ready to play tonight but credit to Waterloo for playing the way they did. Even though we went down 19, we still had a chance to win the game. I know our guys are disappointed with our effort but all we we can do now is learn from this and have a great 4 days of practice.”
The men’s team is at home again next weekend to take on the Western Mustangs.


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With so many heartwarming, heartbreaking, and heart-stopping moments, you know Pretty Little Liars Season 2, Episode 9 had an amazing soundtrack. Check out all the best tunes from the episode here.Artist: Lex LandSong: "Could've Had Me"Album: Orange Days more
Are you in the mood for a side of juicy spoilers with tonight’s all-new episode of Pretty Little Liars? PLL showrunner Marlene King chatted with The Insider and gave them the scoop on what we can expect later this season. Believe us, you don’t want to mis more
What's the newest happenings from Rosewood on "Pretty Little Liars"? Well, it turns out Jason DiLaurentis is even more of a giant creeper than we thought.The biggest revelation this week is that Jason DiLaurentis is even more sinister than we initially su more
Watch a preview and check out photos of the upcoming episode of Pretty Little Liars “Picture This” Season 2 Episode 9 which airs Tuesday, August 9 at 8pm on ABC Family , Synopsis: PRETTY LITTLE LIARS “Picture This” Season 2 Episode 9 – The Liars focus more
Air Date: August 9, 2011.Caleb has a hard decision to make, and Hanna actually has good advice about it on Pretty Little Liars Season 2, Episode 9, "Picture This."
Air Date: August 9, 2011.The liars return to the hospital, and overhear a very interesting conversation on Pretty Little Liars Season 2, Episode 9, "Picture This."
Air Date: August 9, 2011.Aria and Ezra share an intimate moment on Pretty Little Liars Season 2, Episode 9, "Picture This."
Who else is traumatized by the thought of Ezria breaking up? Yeah, we thought so. If Aria (Lucy Hale) keeps being so distant with her teach, he’s going to do worse things than write emo journal entries about his broken heart! Well, calm your nerves, Team more


text:
01-19-2009, 01:10 PM
| || |
Originally Posted by onefish2fish
welcome to the forum.
i agree with everything that has been said.
how much/often/what do you feed? preventing yourself from overfeeding will reduce some of the "gunk" found in the gravel. not only is that food particles but its also extra fish poop that gets produced from eating extra food. make sense? regardless your going to have detritus and debris in your gravel but again preventing yourself from overfeeding will help this.
do you have neon tetras, or danios? (or glofish which come in neon colors but are actually painted danios)
They get fed twice a day. I've been feeding in the A.M. with flakes, and in the P.M. with either flakes or some pellets, and every few days some freeze-dried shrimp. I try not to overfeed, just give them what they can consume in a few minutes. The blood parrot and the g. pellegrini will usually graze for what fell to the bottom, so there is not usually a whole lot of junk that's visible on top of the gravel.
The dayglo danios are definitely danios, and they are not dyed. My LFS specifically told me they do NOT carry any dyed fish. The ones they stock were bred for the bright colors.

domain: biology


text:
McDonald's will soon serve Beyond Meat McPlant Burgers at select US locations.
McDonald's announced this morning that it will start selling Beyond Meat burgers made from plant-based ingredients in selected locations after it had announced a partnership with Beyond Meat in February.
The McPlant will become available in eight fast-food giants starting November 3. It is available in Irving, Carrollton, Texas, Cedar Falls and Iowa, Jennings, Lake Charles, Louisiana, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, California, and Jennings, Iowa.
Although the deal is still in its early stages, McDonald's plans to use it as a test for Beyonds patties. These are made with plant-based ingredients such as peas and rice. Similar piloting was conducted in several international locations including the U.K./Ireland, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.
McDonald's says the patty comes on a sesame-seed bun with tomato, pickles and onions. It also includes mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise and a slice American cheese. The burger has the classic taste of a McDonald's burger.
McPlant will also be expanding its product line to include plant-based McPlant versions of chicken, pork, and egg.
Beyond entered into a partnership in February with Yum Brands. Yum Brands includes KFC and Pizza Hut. Competitor Impossible Foods has deals with White Castle, Starbucks, and Burger King.

domain: food


text:
From the Niagara Falls Review:
Outdoor skating is on its way to Table Rock.
The Niagara Parks Commission has approved a plan by the Winter Festival of Lights for the ‘Rink at the Brink,’ putting a 20- by-40-metre sheet of ice next to the Horseshoe Falls.
Festival of Lights manager Dino Fazio envisions a family attraction similar to the world-famous rink at New York City’s Rockefeller Center.
“It has been quite a challenge for us this year with this project,” he says. “The timelines have been tight since Day 1.”
Planning began in February, and Fazio says the “logistics” were overwhelming.
But once it’s up and running in November, he expects it to become an “iconic” winter attraction for the city.
Someone with a Blogger blog has posted about a recent trip to Niagara Falls (including pictures):
Even if I have been here before, I was still excited when I found out that our former officemate in SGS would drive us to Niagara to see The Great Falls. I was excited for my family especially the kids. It was a Labour Day Holiday so Jocel and Tina fetched us early last Monday and drove us to Niagara. At last, I saw the falls from the Canada side and I got a better view of the Horseshoe Falls which I was not able to see last year because it was misty and there was snow in the viewing deck in the US Park. It is still summer or the start of Fall but the place is still misty, we were not able to get near the Horseshoe Falls or the camera will get wet. Here are the scenes that we were able to capture in our Niagara Falls adventure:
LIFE.com has some great shots of natural wonders, including this one of Niagara Falls…
From the Niagara Gazette:
After a man was stopped from jumping into the Niagara River and plummeting over the Horseshoe Falls Tuesday night, emergency personnel were unable to stop another man’s attempt Wednesday morning.
Unfortunately, it seems that the police are keeping busy with this sort of thing…

domain: news


ZTE has announced a new smartphone today, the ZTE G720C model, that stands out through a 64 bit CPU and LTE support. This model adopts a rectangular design, pretty narrow bezels and seems to apply a custom UI on top of Android.
The product will be sold on China Telecom, with TD-LTE and FDD-LTE support included. The handset runs Android 4.4.x KitKat and relies on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 64 bit processor, clocked at 1.5 GHz. It also has a 5 inch Full HD display, a front 5 megapixel camera with CMOS sensor, plus a 13 megapixel back camera. It comes with LTE Category 4 support, which means it’s ached to reach a max download speed of 150 Mbps and upload of 50 Mbps tops.
By the way, the ZTE G720C is a dual SIM model, that involves two micro SIM card slots. It offers Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity, WiFi, 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage. Its battery is a pretty modest 2300 mAh unit and the product will be available in two color versions. Expect to see it on the Chinese market soon.


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At the end of this blog, you will find several sheets of decorative elements inspired by nature. These are free printable PDF’s which you can use in your projects during the summer.
If you like journaling, writing and scrapbooking, but not very confident at drawing, then here are some ideas for you.
You are most welcome to download these Free PDF sheets, print off, cut out the elements and add them to your summer projects.
You can add decorative elements to the borders of your summer learning journal for a little bit of colour and variation. Decorate your journal, diary or creative writing pages with natural forms.
Choose between butterflies, robins, abstract flowers and leaves.
Add a decorative and colourful touch to your writing, poems, quotes, journaling or even your “to- do” list, to create fun and unique colour coordinated designs inspired by nature.
You can also decorate your letter writing paper if you are writing to your friends this summer. Decorate envelopes for fun snail mail to friends and family.
Incorporate colourful nature elements into your daily journaling. Create a splash of colour by gluing a design element for an interesting detail.
You could make your own design elements too! Have a go, it’s easier than you think!
Summer project ideas and how to use decorative elements in your projects:
Ideal to use in a summer scrapbook project
Create a border around a quote
Make a small natural element collage in your diary
Put together a cluster of elements on a journal page
Decorate brown wrapping paper for gift and matching gift tag
Decorate a handwritten quote by adding an element for a splash of colour
Create a personalised bookmark for yourself or a friend
Make a pretty greeting card with matching envelope
Write a letter and decorate the margins with butterflies
Create a nature display with things you find on your nature walk and add cut out elements to create a colourful display
Make a fancy journal title and paste one of the elements on the first page
Decorate the margins of your writing journal pages with pretty flowers
You could even paste a butterfly on a jar to hold your brushes and pencils!
For best results, please print on colour setting. Cut out each image neatly, either along the border or leaving a small white border, whatever is the easiest. Do use a good glue stick rather than wet, sloshy glue. Make sure you add glue to all of the margins for best sticking results.
Please share this page with friends and family, so they too can make use of these free resources.
Thank you for reading this blog, the PDF's are just below this line!


text:
On Saturday, the Florida Gators hosted several prospects from out of state on campus for the Gators spring practice.
Tight end John Copenhaver (6-3, 210, Roswell, GA. High) was one of those guys who visited campus on Saturday and he liked how the Gators practiced.
“It was a good visit, I went down for the spring practice,” Copenhaver said of his visit to Florida on Saturday. “It was a little different then what they do at times, they would do 7-on-7 and then they had a mini scrimmage, I liked the intensity they brought. After that I toured the facilities, they were beautiful and I loved it.”
While on campus, Copenhaver talked to several of Florida’s coaches including head coach Dan Mullen.
“I talked with Coach [Dan] Mullen but mainly talked with Coach [Larry] Scott in his office for a little bit,” he said of the coaches he talked to on Saturday. “I talked to Coach Mullen during practice, it was just a hey, how are you doing type of talk.”
Tight ends coach Larry Scott broke down to Copenhaver how the Gators would use him in Florida’s offense if he chooses the Gators for college.
“He was just saying that I’m more of a hybrid tight end and not really an in the dirt guy,” Copenhaver said of the message from Larry Scott about how he fits into Florida’s offense. “He said that I can go flexed out as a wide out or in the slot. He really liked how aggressive I was. Just kind of a hybrid tight end.”
Scott has been recruiting Copenhaver for a few months now and something Scott did on Saturday stood out to the tight end.
“It’s a pretty good relationship,” he said of his relationship with Larry Scott. “I was talking to my parents about this but I noticed how that if a tight end did something wrong, he would get in your face and yell out them but he just wouldn’t leave it at that. He would go back and correct them and I think that’s a really good thing.”
Copenhaver says the Gators improved their chances for him on Saturday and several things played into that.
“Just how they’ve used past tight ends and I was watching [Kemore] Gamble play, it just shows that you don’t have to be a 6-7, 260-pound tight end to succeed there,” Copenhaver said on what he likes about Florida. “It shows that you can just ball out, no matter what your size or weight is there. Academics really stood out to me, I knew they were pretty good but not as good as they really are.”
Next up for Copenhaver will be a few more visits and then the tight end hopes to narrow down his choices.
“I’m going to try to visit Purdue, Iowa and Nebraska before the middle of May,” he said on upcoming visits. “Then I’m going to try and visit Michigan towards the end of May or June. Then I will narrow it down to a top 7 or top five and take my officials from there.”


text:
Dear IBP friends and partners,
In January, I announced my decision to step down at the end of 2022 as Executive Director. It has been an extraordinary privilege to lead IBP for 21 years. The opening for a new Executive Director is available here. I will continue to work closely with our board to assist with the transition throughout this year.
The most rewarding part of this job has been to cultivate and benefit from so many enduring partnerships with organizations around the world that are leveraging budget advocacy to shift power and transform communities. I am deeply grateful for our partnership and proud of what we have accomplished together. I am also in awe of your collective power to drive change forward.
Just 20 years ago, the idea of civic actors influencing public budgets was unthinkable. Today, we partner with a vast and diverse network of social movements, think tanks and advocacy organizations across 120 countries that use public finance analysis and advocacy to advance social justice. Together, we have ensured civic organizations have a seat at the table influencing game-changing resource decisions and systems for excluded communities. Working together at the international level, we have reinforced these changes by transforming global norms. Thanks to our collective efforts, the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, among others, promote open and equitable budgets as good practice. As Mandela observed, it only seems impossible until it is done.
We are poised to deepen our collective impact and drive this agenda forward at a critical time. Despite the tightening of civic space globally, it is exciting to hear the calls for fiscal justice in campaigns for racial and gender justice and decolonizing aid. Our work has also never been more urgent. As countries address the burden of mounting debt, pandemic relief and recovery, and declining tax receipts, they will face intense budgetary trade-offs. We have difficult battles ahead to continue to build the evidence and the coalitions to advance equity and justice in this environment. But we also know that to restore our societies and our democracies in the years ahead, people must have a voice in deeply consequential decisions around how resources are raised and managed, especially systematically underserved communities.
This is a powerful moment to bring into IBP a leader with new ideas, lived experiences, and profile to reposition the organization for the next phase in its evolution.
I am proud and profoundly optimistic about IBP’s potential to seize change and be a driving force for equity and justice globally. Thank you for continuing to believe in us and our partnership.

domain: sociology


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For millions of Americans, Obama raised the nation. To the white supremacists, he lit a barrel of gunpowder.
His election overwhelmed the divisions that had existed since the birth of the country.
Hate created two Americas. Two realities. Split-screen reactions to the same events that continued and were exacerbated with President Trump's victory and time in office.
The era that began with hope and change has now become a hatred without remorse.
Very different war cries
Not all Americans saw it that way. Racists saw a black man in power as a sign of America's darkening. It was the sight they feared most. They were terrified and enraged.
The white supremacists, Klansmen and others began to vent, plot and act. As Obama asked people to unite, they used their existence to alienate the nation.
His war cry became "We have a black man in the White House and you need to do something about it," according to Ken Parker, then a KKK Grand Dragon and neo-Nazi.
"We even play among ourselves, we're going to send President Obama an honorary affiliation for the Klan because he's our … greatest recruiting tool."
Some racism has been exposed – especially one directed at Obama and his family.
The former president was shown as a wizard and often photoshopped on "Uncle Ben" rice. His face was superimposed on the body of a chimpanzee. His wife and former First Lady Michelle Obama was called "High Heels".
This trend of racism came as the country faced a split Washington and economic crisis after the Great Recession.
Kevin Nelson, a pastor in Kentucky, knew the reality of being black in America. More likely to be considered a thief. To be pulled. To be a target. The pastor knew that a black man rising to the highest office could not magically change what happened on the spot, in the neighborhoods where attitudes were so deeply rooted.
However, Nelson was among the cautiously optimistic: "I think that, like most people, I have celebrated the fact that our country has reached the point where we did not allow the pigmentation of a person's skin to prevent them from reaching the Oval Hall ". told CNN recently.
Any hope of progress toward racial harmony was struck by a seemingly endless wave of black men, mostly young and unarmed, being killed by police officers.
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald and Tamir Rice. Walter Scott. Alton Sterling. Activists post an abrupt message: "Black lives matter". Critics have rebuffed "blue lives matter" in support of law enforcement or just "all lives matter".
The white supremacists went further. The neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer has published stories stating, "Not really, Black Lives Do not Matter." They called Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown, a "heroic killer" of Brown, whom they called a "black terrorist," with no evidence at all.
Then came Charleston and a man trying to start a racial war.
But online, the racists were applauding the killer.
"They had a Klan hotline and pre-recorded message, clearly saying we needed more warriors like the Dylann Roof," said Parker, the former Klansman player.
The message ended simply: "Hail Dylann Roof, save the victory."
In a neo-Nazi chat room, readers of the Daily Stormer used different symbols to celebrate attacks against non-whites, similar to Facebook's "liking" button. The haircut from the Charleston Killer Basin became one of them. A caricature of one Jew's face was another. A gas chamber button too.
Again, it was clear that the black churches were not safe. That, as in the dark days of the Civil Rights movement and the killing of four little girls in an Alabama church bombing, believers could be the target of skin color.
In Kentucky, Pastor Nelson began locking the church doors. He could never know that he would save the lives of his worshipers.
No black and white
The Obama presidency lasted a time of multiplier and complicated hatred.
"After my election, there were talks about a post-racial America. Such a view, however well-intentioned, was never realistic," he admitted. "Because race continues to be a powerful and often divisive force in our society. I lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10, 20, or 30 years ago."
Donald Trump's rhetoric in the 2016 election campaign seemed to bring these divisions to the surface. Trump received great support in perceived and outwardly racist language. From his request for a so-called Muslim ban, to denigrate the Mexicans in his campaign announcement, Trump shook the cauldron of diversity and hatred of the United States emerged.
It was not just race. Jews, Muslims, Latinos, gays, immigrants and other minority groups have seen themselves as targets for hatred – both online and in real life.
When Trump declared that he would make America great again, the racists heard a trumpet. White supremacists realized the message as it was time to make America "white" again.
Trump's victory coincided with the growth of readership on white supremacist internet sites and language on forums like 4chan and Reddit became increasingly vitriolic. A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center analyzing hate groups in 2017 found that there were over 600 groups adhering to some form of white supremacist ideology. Within this category, neo-Nazis had the highest growth last year, from 99 to 121 groups.
"Hail to our people, save the victory!" Spencer shrieked as the right-alt supporters – indeed just renamed white nationalists – raised their arms in a Nazi salute.
Each incident sparked outrage in the mainstream, which helped recruiters into the hate movement. Parker was one such recruiter for the Klan and the National Socialist Movement. He was vulnerable when he left the Navy after 11 years of submarine torpedo service and returned home in awful condition in a collapse of the wedding.
When he contacted, seeking to fill a void, a Klansman returned to him in 15 minutes and began to sow hatred. Parker was hooked, ended up tattooing a swastika on his chest, a white power symbol on one leg, and two SS lightning on the other, a reference to Hitler's elite paramilitary force is now a common image for white supremacists.
And he would also recruit, saying that the goal was to "wake up the white race, let them know we have a problem with minorities, the Jewish people running it all."
His hatred has spread in real life.
"If I and one of my fellow white supremacists were in the grocery store and we saw a Jew, … we would start mocking them," he explains. "Like, oh, that sticky Jewish nose over there, you know, probably looking for pennies," he said. "Where you see a Muslim in the grocery store, we start talking about Mohammed's new design … sometimes we think about getting a bacon package and throwing it in the shopping cart and walking out."
As he vomited his insults, sites like the Daily Stormer increased their readership; The site is now visited more than 2.5 million times a month, according to data from analytics company SimilarWeb. YouTube channels and podcasts dedicated to white supremacy began to grow exponentially, creating an easy way to spread racist and religious hate propaganda.
"By race and nation," we read. "Diversity is a code word for white genocide," another said. "Danger: Sanctuary City Ahead," read another. "You will not replace us, stop immigration now," said another.
The goal, as always, Parker explained, was to increase the number of people who felt the same way.
"You can not get into a battle with five people," he said. "So that was the perspective they were looking at, we're going to have a racial war one day, and the more people on our side, the better."
Looking for a fight
If there was a war, the preliminary battle seemed to be Charlottesville.
"I'm not going to lie, as if there were all sorts of people who went to Charlottesville who knew there would be a lot of conflicts and that they were just waiting a little bit to be able to defend themselves with, like, extremely excessive force," Parker said.
While traveling in a van to Charlottesville, Jacksonville, Florida, with "all sorts of white nationalists, Southern nationalists, Nazis, anything," he thought of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell had used a "hate bus" to harass the Freedom Riders in the 1960s. Parker liked the similarities and nicknamed his "race bus" transportation.
"On paper, we were going there to defend the white race and defend our heritage, to keep the [Confederate] monuments of descent, "says Parker of those who participated in the rally Unite the Right." But honestly, I think everyone would fight. "
Charlottesville followed numerous protests across the country on campuses and public parks where small groups held flags declaring white supremacy, sometimes in nominal support to keep the Confederate statues in tribute to American history.
In Charlottesville, the white supremacists' longstanding hatred of the Jews and their perceived control of the levers of power also manifested itself.
A group of white men carrying torches marched around the city shouting "Jews will not replace us." Some sang Nazi slogans and carried Nazi flags.
The next day, anti-protesters gathered to challenge the rally Unite the Right. Most were peaceful, but there were violent clashes between the two sides, with Antifa extremists joining opponents.
The death of Heyer brought appeals to end the violent hatred that plagues the country. But for some like Parker, the recruiter of the hate group, this brought joy. Someone who opposed his views had died.
"It was like a jubilation with all white nationalists when that happened," Parker said.
He finally renounced white supremacy and his odious views after meeting a Muslim filmmaker in Charlottesville. After spending some time together, Parker realized he did not hate his wife. He now says he regrets his opinions and actions.
Those who look to vomit hate felt that they were justified – and continue to quote Trump's words to this day.
Some victims felt that lack of condemnation would leave hatred unchecked and increase the possibility of more violence.
"The current administration has never stood up and said, stop hating," said Millard Braunstein, a 91-year-old resident of Cherry Hill, New Jersey. "In Charlottesville, the president said, there are good people on both sides. Show me a good neo-Nazi and show me a good Ku Klux Klansmen, I mean, it's just not there."
A racial war did not erupt after Charlottesville.
But even though America has not seen the repetition of a great manifestation of white supremacy, it is debatable that no place is safe from hatred.
Even the dead could not rest in peace.
"How could this happen in America today? That was my first thought," Braunstein said.
For the Jews, the America they saw as a sanctuary, in many cases it was gone. Anti-Semitic acts in 2017 were the second highest since the Anti-Defamation League began tracking it in 1979.
Barry Werber knew what it meant to have a refuge as a Jew.
"This was the land of milk and honey," he said. "This was where everything would be right."
Some of Werber's cousins died in Nazi concentration camps. Those who survived were permanently scarred – by numbers tattooed on their arms, and worse still.
Werber tells the story of a cousin. "It was used by German scientists for experiments to find out if the muscles will regenerate when you cut them off an arm. They literally cut off the muscles in your arms to see if they would grow back," Werber recalled, beginning to choke. above. "And he had to live with it. Thank God I never had to go through with it."
Werber's dose of hell would come unexpectedly, 73 years after the Holocaust, and on American soil.
He went to the temple to tell the Kaddish of the Mourner by his mother, when an armed man entered and crossed the building. Eleven of his fellow worshipers died in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history, according to ADL.
He buried many friends in just a week. And always with a growing fear that, instead of the "Never Again" refrain that followed the Holocaust, there will be a "Again". He fears that people may be afraid to associate with the Jews as they become frequent targets. This resembles the Shtetls, the ghettos and small villages where the Jews were grouped together before the Nazis came to them.
"This can happen again? Unfortunately, it can happen if the error continues to grow, and the permission of any leadership to allow it to grow," says Werber. "There are always people willing to jump into bandwagons of hatred and that's exactly what it is."
The Pittsburgh shooter was in Gab, a social media site preferred by followers of alt-right, which is a frequent source of hate speech and images, especially for Jews.
Locked but not locked
The doors of First Baptist Church in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, are locked.
Pastor Nelson wants it to be an open paradise, like the temple in Pittsburgh or how Mother Emanuel had been in Charleston.
But since the black church was attacked, the doors were closed in this house of worship that serves the largest and oldest black congregation in the area, surrounded by predominantly white suburbs.
And the locked doors probably changed the history of the church.
"Cameras catch him trying to get in and at the door of the sanctuary," says Pastor Nelson. "He knocks him and pulls him up and he backs up, puts his hand on the gun, so whoever opened it could possibly have been shot and killed."
Unable to enter, the man left. The locked doors may have saved some of Nelson's herds, but they did not stop their hatred.
The stranger went to a nearby supermarket. He walked through the crowded hallways. He could have shot at many people, but he did not. He chose two. They were black. Before being captured, the shooter said to a spectator: "Whites do not shoot whites".
His intention was clear. He sought to take black people's lives. One of them was Vickie Jones, who was shopping for the night when she was shot dead.
His nephew Kevin Gunn says he can not believe his aunt survived breast cancer just to die at the hands of hatred.
"It hurts to think that there are people out there who just do not like people because they are different, be it skin color or race, gender, sexual orientation," he says.
He blames the political rhetoric and the proliferation of online hatred for culture that seems to allow hatred to develop.
"We used to meet people in the middle and agree to disagree," says Gunn.
Pastor Nelson also believes that things are on a dangerous course. But he saw where we were and, as a Negro living in the south, there is little more that surprises him.
"I'm not shocked or surprised by anything because of everything we've gone through and we keep going," he says. "I am always saddened that in 2018 and on the verge of 2019 has not improved anything yet."
Still, he tries to convey a positive message to his parishioners.
"Although things and people get worse, we do not have to get any worse at all."
Gunn, who has lost his aunt, can not think what worse still seems.
"I have to sleep at night," he says.
But he can not help being afraid.
"I think the more we try to fight racism, it seems to come back twice now," Gunn says.
"It's like Hydra," says Gunn, comparing racists to the multiple-headed serpent of Greek mythology.
"You cut one and then … two more appear in your place."
Parker, the now repentant former Nazi, is taking his laser tattoos. As with America, the stain of hatred can take a long time to disappear and eventually heal.
Jason Kravarik of CNN contributed to this story. Eleanor Shakespeare illustration


text:
Latest Update on Lassa Fever Outbreak in Nigeria
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen as I bring you the latest update on the dreaded lassa fever outbreak in Nigeria.
There are a total of about 318 suspected cases. The confirmed cases are 95 in number. confirmed lassa fever deaths are 19. there are 19 states in Nigeria with confirmed lasa fever virus.

domain: medical


text:
RBI is celebrating Financial Awareness Week and is creating awareness about how people can identify a fake currency notes.
There have been many complaints and several reports have claimed that as people are being cautious about the higher denomination notes, hence people who are running a racket of counterfeit notes have now shifted their focus on circulating the lower denomination notes like Rs 100 and Rs 50.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has come forward to raise awareness about fake currency notes of 50 and 200. People are being informed about how to identify the fake notes which are being circulating.
RBI is celebrating Financial Awareness Week. On the occasion, the central bank’s Regional Director Laxmikant Rao has imparted important information. He said that RBI is offering services and informing how people can identify a fake currency note. He also enlightened people on how the customers can register a complaint if he is are not satisfied with the service of the bank or has any other issue.
ALSO READ: Yes Bank, No Money Story


text:
The Monkey Wrench Gang
Baker & Taylor, CATS, Nov 10, 2009 - 421 pages
Ex-Green Beret George Hayduke has returned from war to find his beloved southwestern desert threatened by industrial development. Joining with Bronx exile and feminist saboteur Bonnie Abzug, wilderness guide and outcast Mormon Seldom Seen Smith, and libertarian billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., Hayduke is ready to fight the power-taking on the strip miners, clear-cutters, and the highway, dam, and bridge builders who are threatening the natural habitat. The Monkey Wrench Gang is on the move-and peaceful coexistence be damned!
What people are saying - Write a review
LibraryThing ReviewUser Review - TheDivineOomba - LibraryThing
Apparently, this is a book that many eco-activists use as there go to guide for stopping large, environmentally unfriendly projects, either public or private. I don't know how much of this type of ... Read full review
LibraryThing ReviewUser Review - RickHarsch - LibraryThing
What fate befalls the cult classic over time? Forgotten is one option, trapped in time is another. Retention of status quo is probably the most pure, the book ‘rediscovered’ every generation or so ... Read full review

domain: literature


text:
10% of all print sales are donated to non-profit organizations serving the countries, regions, and/or communities depicted.
street photography and travel portraiture by audrey n.
based in Los Angeles, CA and Albuquerque, NM
iMotif - Sohn Fine Art Gallery
Lenox, MA (2021)
The Human Body - Life Framer
London, UK (2018)