text:
Embrace a touch of boho style with this decorative pillow from the Amy Sia Artisan Bedding Collection. Measuring 12-in. W x 22-in. L, the pillow boasts a tie-dye face in hues of green and white, a solid white back, and a hidden zipper closure.
- 12-in. W x 22-in. L
- Spot clean only
For orders being shipped to California, please click here for Proposition 65 WARNING.


text:
Dance music, food trucks, cruises: How clinics are luring people to get COVID-19 shots
Dance music, a food truck, free drinks and snacks were part of a COVID-19 vaccine clinic offered last week in Louisville at a local church as community leaders work to get more young people vaccinated, especially Black Louisvillians.
Vaccinations were available Thursday on board a Walgreens bus at the Kingdom Fellowship Christian Life Center on East Broadway.
The red, white and blue bus is traveling the country, making stops in various cities to promote COVID-19 vaccines and offer free, walk-in clinics. On Thursday, both the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine and the two-shot Pfizer vaccine were available.
James Nichols, a young Black man who stopped by for a vaccine, was among the demographic Louisville health officials are trying to get vaccinated, citing their concern about a recent increase in COVID-19 cases among Black residents who now account for about half of all new local cases of the virus.
Nichols said he wasn't opposed to the shot but hadn't got around to getting a vaccine until his grandmother called to urge him to go to Thursday's clinic.
"She told me I should get it," he said.
Nichols said he agreed.
"A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do if we want things to get better," he said.
Another under-40 Black Louisvillian getting vaccinated was Sheridan Williams, a musician and member of Kingdom Fellowship.
Williams said he had been looking for a site to get vaccinated and then discovered his church was offering Thursday's clinic. The event was timely, said Williams, because as a keyboard artist and producer focusing on Christian music, he expects to begin traveling to shows as COVID-19 restrictions ease.
Also, he felt more comfortable getting vaccinated at his church.
"I knew I was going to get it," Williams said. "It was just the right time and the right situation."
Kingdom Fellowship already has held several vaccine clinics earlier this year, and the Rev. Timothy Findley Jr. said he shares concerns of health officials about the need to get more Black Louisvillians vaccinated.
"I jump at every opportunity to do things like this," he said.
The Walgreens bus will return to Kingdom Fellowship in three weeks to give the second dose of the two-dose Pfizer vaccine.
Get a shot, win a prize
The stakes just got sweeter for those 18 or older who get a COVID-19 vaccine through CVS Health, which operates more than 9,000 drugstores nationwide, including 76 in Kentucky.
Starting June 1, adult customers who get a COVID-19 vaccine through CVS or register to receive one may enter a sweepstakes that include cash, Caribbean cruises, a trip to the Super Bowl, vacations, weekend getaways and other prizes.
Called the #OneStepCloser Sweepstakes, the six-week event is designed to encourage more people to get vaccinated.
"Getting as much of the population fully vaccinated will bring us one step closer to all the things we've missed during the past 14 months, and keep our country moving in the right direction," said Dr. Kyu Rhee, chief medical officer of CVS Health.
CVS hopes to reach adults who may be reluctant to get the COVID-19 vaccine, citing a recent CDC survey that found about 17% of adults remain hesitant.
Weekly drawings for the prizes will be held for six weeks, ending July 10. Anyone who gets a vaccine through a CVS drugstore or other CVS Health-sponsored site, such as a clinic or nursing home, is eligible to enter.
CVS will give away 125 $500 cash prizes as well as five grand prizes of $5,000 for family reunions.
Other partners providing prizes include the Norwegian Cruise Line, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, the Bermuda Tourism Authority, Hinge, iHeart Media, smarTours and Wyndham Rewards.
More information on contest rules and how to enter will be available June 1 at cvs.com/onestepclosersweeps.
CVS reports that so far, it has administered 17 million vaccines in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. Around 85% of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a CVS pharmacy, the company said in a news release.
Reminder, COVID-19 vaccines are free
COVID-19 vaccines at drugstores, pop-up clinics, churches and other sites are offered at no charge, a point health officials continue to stress as the rate of vaccination slows in Kentucky and around the country.
Dr. Sarah Moyer, director of Louisville Metro Health and Wellness, repeatedly stressed that vaccines are free at a news briefing Tuesday as she urged more Louisvillians to take advantage of them with summer holidays approaching.
"Today's the day to get vaccinated if you want to be fully vaccinated by the 4th of July," she said. "The vaccine is free and easy to get."
Such reminders come as surveys show some people remain concerned about the cost.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on its website, assures people the federal government covers the costs of the COVID-19 vaccine and no one should be charged to get one.
Gov. Andy Beshear:Kentucky to resume 100% capacity, end mask mandate in June
About 50% of people in Jefferson County have now had at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, including a higher percentage of senior citizens who were among the first eligible for the shots.
Louisville health officials are particularly anxious to get more younger people vaccinated, adding there are ample supplies of vaccine at drive-through clinics, grocery pharmacies, drugstores and other sites.
"We have a ton of these vaccine supplies here in Louisville," Moyer said. "Schedule your free vaccine appointment."
More information about vaccines is available on the health department website.
Get Kentucky COVID-19 information
For people with general questions about COVID-19, such as symptoms, treatment or tests, the Kentucky Poison Control Center is taking calls at 800-722-5725.
For more, see the state's website, govstatus.egov.com/kycovid19, or call the COVID-19 hotline, 800-722-5725 or 502-912-8598. Information on COVID-19 test sites is available on the website.
Information also is available at louisvilleky.gov/government/health-wellness from the Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness. The department's COVID-19 dashboard is at louisvilleky.gov/covid19.
For information on vaccines, call the state toll-free line at 855-598-2246 or visit the state website at vaccine.ky.gov.
Reach news reporter Sarah Ladd at email@example.com. Follow her on Twitter at @ladd_sarah. Reach Deborah Yetter at firstname.lastname@example.org. Follow her on Twitter at @d_yetter.

domain: medical


Bruce Lengacher received his Bachelor of Music Education and a Master of Arts in Secondary Education from San Francisco State University. He is in his eighteenth year as the director of choral activities at Acalanes High School in Lafayette, California and serves as the Chairperson of the Performing Arts Department, a position he has held for the past eight years. Bruce has served as the General / Classroom Music and Choral Representative for the Bay Section of the California Music Educators Association and is presently the CMEA Bay Section President Elect. In 2015, he received the Outstanding Choral Director Award from CMEA Bay Section. He holds memberships in the American Choral Directors Association and the National Association for Music Education. Bruce has worked with Ragazzi Boys Chorus, the Peninsula Girls Chorus, Chanticleer and Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choirs. He has studied with Robert Shaw, Rodney Eichenberger, and Byron Macgilvray. He is a composer/arranger, a clinician, and a founding member of the Choral Project. He lives in El Cerrito California with his wife, Leslie.


text:
This edition of Tee It Up Grand Strand takes us to Wilmington, North Carolina for a visit to our friend Kirk Baker at Masonboro Country Club. Kirk is the owner and director of instruction at Carolina Coastal Golf Instruction. Today we are going to learn how to hit a high draw.
First, Kirk talks to us about how to hit a draw shot. A draw will give extra distance off the tee due to the top spin on the ball that will give more roll once the ball hits the ground. It is a very useful shot if it can be learned and the tragetory controlled. Once that is done it is a shot that all golfers will love using off the tee.
There are 2 drills that Kirk recommends and teaches to help amateur golfers learn how to hit a draw. Learning to hit a draw does that a lot of practice since most amateur golfers naturally hit a fade or slice on their shots. The drills are fairly simple and easy to work on.
Hitting a smash bag training aid is a good place to start. As you you practice the swing the bag needs to move to the right of the stick. The idea of the draw swing is to swing the head of the club OUT toward the ball. Most golfers pull there hands and arms from the outside IN to hit the ball. That swing causes a fade or slice. So practicing swinging out to the ball will promote a draw swing.
The second drill takes a sleeve of golf balls. No not to hit but to use as a guide. Place the sleeve of balls about 6 to 8 inches directly in front of the teed up ball. The object is to not hit the sleeve of balls on the follow through. This promotes a swing that catches the ball on the upswing of the driver. This promotes the high shot that we are looking for.
With a golf swing that goes out towards the ball and catches the ball on the upswing will lead to a nice high draw that will gain more carry in the air and more roll on the ground. What golfer does not want that off the tee? We thought so.
For more information about lessons from Kirk at Carolina Coastal Golf Instruction visit coastalcarolinagolfinstruction.com. For tee times or more golf course information visit masonborocountryclub.com.
Tee It Up Grand Strand is produced by Zeus Digital Newtork for TheGolfDirector.com.

domain: sports


text:
|By PR Newswire||
|February 4, 2014 06:01 AM EST||
NEW YORK, Feb. 4, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Reportlinker.com announces that a new market research report is available in its catalogue:
Hosted IP Telephony and Unified Communications Including Video Conferencing and Tele-presence in South Africa
Increasing Bandwidth Availability and Pay-as-you-go Infrastructure Purchasing Spur Investments
This research service is an analysis of the hosted IP telephony and unified communications (UC) market in South Africa. The study essentially takes a comprehensive assessment of market development for hosted/cloud-based UC and collaboration systems. While traditional, on-premise systems are maturing, having been in existence in South Africa for a number of years, hosted solutions were introduced recently with the increasing prominence of cloud computing. The study further examines the key market drivers and restraints, key trends, competitive environment, industry best practices, and the key ITC Mega Trends that will impact the market. The base year is 2012 and forecasts run through 2018.
•Unified communications (UC) as a key component of IT services is likely to be driven by the recovery of the ICT industry after the recent economic slowdown, as well as by the on-going developments in infrastructure that have increased bandwidth availability.
•At the same time, the increasing prominence of cloud computing has given enterprises the option of buying IT infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go basis. This method enables enterprises to invest in infrastructure as an operational expenditure (OPEX) model and not as a capital expenditure (CAPEX) model.
•The South African hosted IP telephony and UC services market is in the initial growth stage. The early adopters are large corporate customers, including the telecommunications, financial services, and public sectors.
•With increasing bandwidth, fixed-line broadband penetration is expected to improve significantly in the next Xto X years, substantially opening up the market to SME participants.
•With the increasing prominence of UC deployment in large organisations, SMEs will also be more inclined to adopt UC solutions in the future in order to restructure their business processes and improve their operating efficiency.
Market Overview—Aim and Objectives
The aim of this study is to provide an analysis of the current hosted IP telephony and UC services market in South Africa.
To understand the development of the hosted IP telephony and unified communications in South Africa
To analyse key drivers and restraints relating to the hosted/ cloud-based IP telephony and UC market
To identify key trends in the hosted IP telephony and UC market
To analyse the competitive landscape and highlight the key industry best practices
Hosted IP PBX (Internet protocol private branch exchange)
Hosted UC (voice, data, and video)
Value-added resellers (VARs)
Carrier service providers (network operators)
•This study specifically focuses on emerging hosted IP telephony and UC services, including hosted IP PBX, which are a foundation for more comprehensive UC service bundles.
•It does not cover time-division multiplexing (TDM) centrex, centrex IP, or voice-over IP (VoIP) access services.
•These service bundles, in addition to the hosted IP PBX features, include unified messaging (UM), instant messaging (IM) and presence, video conferencing, and collaboration. Unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) delivery is enabled by emerging cloud-computing infrastructure.
•Hosted IP telephony services are delivered using multi-tenant or multi-instance (virtualised) IP platforms residing on the service provider network.
UC is defined as an integrated set of voice, data, and video communications, all of which utilise PC- and telephony-based presence information and simplify communications with ubiquitous and seamless access to various tools.
Table of Contents
1. Executive Summary
2. Research Aim and Objectives
3. Research Scope and Definitions
4. Market Overview
5. Market Drivers and Restraints
6. Key Market Trends
7. Mega Trends and Industry Convergence Implications
8. Competitive Environment—Hosted IP Telephony and UC Services Market
9. Industry Best Practices
To order this report: Hosted IP Telephony and Unified Communications Including Video Conferencing and Tele-presence in South Africa
Contact Clare: [email protected]
Intl: +1 339-368-6001
As enterprises work to take advantage of Big Data technologies, they frequently become distracted by product-level decisions. In most new Big Data builds this approach is completely counter-productive: it presupposes tools that may not be a fit for development teams, forces IT to take on the burden of evaluating and maintaining unfamiliar technology, and represents a major up-front expense. In his session at @BigDataExpo at @ThingsExpo, Andrew Warfield, CTO and Co-Founder of Coho Data, will dis...
Feb. 6, 2016 07:15 PM EST
As someone who has been dedicated to automation and Application Release Automation (ARA) technology for almost six years now, one of the most common questions I get asked regards Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Specifically, people want to know whether release automation is still needed when a PaaS is in place, and why. Isn't that what a PaaS provides? A solution to the deployment and runtime challenges of an application? Why would anyone using a PaaS then need an automation engine with workflow ...
Feb. 6, 2016 03:30 PM EST
SYS-CON Events announced today that Fusion, a leading provider of cloud services, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Fusion, a leading provider of integrated cloud solutions to small, medium and large businesses, is the industry's single source for the cloud. Fusion's advanced, proprietary cloud service platform enables the integration of leading edge solutions in the cloud, including clou...
Feb. 6, 2016 03:30 PM EST Reads: 703
With the Apple Watch making its way onto wrists all over the world, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a staple in the workplace. In fact, Forrester reported that 68 percent of technology and business decision-makers characterize wearables as a top priority for 2015. Recognizing their business value early on, FinancialForce.com was the first to bring ERP to wearables, helping streamline communication across front and back office functions. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Kevin Roberts...
Feb. 6, 2016 03:15 PM EST Reads: 319
SYS-CON Events announced today that Commvault, a global leader in enterprise data protection and information management, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7–9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Commvault is a leading provider of data protection and information management...
Feb. 6, 2016 02:30 PM EST Reads: 348
Your business relies on your applications and your employees to stay in business. Whether you develop apps or manage business critical apps that help fuel your business, what happens when users experience sluggish performance? You and all technical teams across the organization – application, network, operations, among others, as well as, those outside the organization, like ISPs and third-party providers – are called in to solve the problem.
Feb. 6, 2016 02:00 PM EST Reads: 678
SYS-CON Events announced today that Alert Logic, Inc., the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Alert Logic, Inc., provides Security-as-a-Service for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, delivering deep security insight and continuous protection for customers at a lower cost than traditional security solutions. Ful...
Feb. 6, 2016 01:30 PM EST Reads: 336
@DevOpsSummit taking place June 7-9, 2016 at Javits Center, New York City, and Nov 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with the 18th International @CloudExpo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York Call for Papers is now open.
Feb. 6, 2016 01:15 PM EST Reads: 509
SYS-CON Events announced today that VAI, a leading ERP software provider, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.) is a leading independent mid-market ERP software developer renowned for its flexible solutions and ability to automate critical business functions for the distribution, manufacturing, specialty retail and service sectors. An IBM Premier Business Part...
Feb. 6, 2016 01:00 PM EST Reads: 534
SYS-CON Events announced today that Catchpoint Systems, Inc., a provider of innovative web and infrastructure monitoring solutions, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON's DevOps Summit at 18th Cloud Expo New York, which will take place June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Catchpoint is a leading Digital Performance Analytics company that provides unparalleled insight into customer-critical services to help consistently deliver an amazing customer experience. Designed...
Feb. 6, 2016 12:00 PM EST Reads: 313
Let’s face it, embracing new storage technologies, capabilities and upgrading to new hardware often adds complexity and increases costs. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Seth Oxenhorn, Vice President of Business Development & Alliances at FalconStor, will discuss how a truly heterogeneous software-defined storage approach can add value to legacy platforms and heterogeneous environments. The result reduces complexity, significantly lowers cost, and provides IT organizations with improved effi...
Feb. 6, 2016 12:00 PM EST Reads: 199
SYS-CON Events announced today that Pythian, a global IT services company specializing in helping companies adopt disruptive technologies to optimize revenue-generating systems, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2015 at the Javits Center in New York, New York. Founded in 1997, Pythian is a global IT services company that helps companies compete by adopting disruptive technologies such as cloud, Big Data, advanced analytics, and DevO...
Feb. 6, 2016 11:15 AM EST Reads: 129
SYS-CON Events announced today that Men & Mice, the leading global provider of DNS, DHCP and IP address management overlay solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. The Men & Mice Suite overlay solution is already known for its powerful application in heterogeneous operating environments, enabling enterprises to scale without fuss. Building on a solid range of diverse platform support,...
Feb. 6, 2016 11:15 AM EST Reads: 118
One of the bewildering things about DevOps is integrating the massive toolchain including the dozens of new tools that seem to crop up every year. Part of DevOps is Continuous Delivery and having a complex toolchain can add additional integration and setup to your developer environment. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Miko Matsumura, Chief Marketing Officer of Gradle Inc., will discuss which tools to use in a developer stack, how to provision the toolchain to minimize onboa...
Feb. 6, 2016 11:00 AM EST
The cloud promises new levels of agility and cost-savings for Big Data, data warehousing and analytics. But it’s challenging to understand all the options – from IaaS and PaaS to newer services like HaaS (Hadoop as a Service) and BDaaS (Big Data as a Service). In her session at @BigDataExpo at @ThingsExpo, Hannah Smalltree, a director at Cazena, will provide an educational overview of emerging “as-a-service” options for Big Data in the cloud. This is critical background for IT and data profes...
Feb. 6, 2016 11:00 AM EST Reads: 111

domain: news


text:
Canada’s biotech sector has been exploding, with good reason given the events of the last year.
“Innovation and biotechnology was the star of the day.”
The sector has become so significant that it also received a spotlight in the recent federal budget. According to Andrew Casey, President and CEO of BIOTECanada, “innovation and biotechnology was the star of the day.”
Casey joins on the podcast today (recorded right after the budget dropped), along with Anne Woods, managing director of the Life Science and Healthcare practice at Silicon Valley Bank. The two provide an overview of Canada’s biotech landscape, what changed with COVID-19, and the potential impact of federal budget commitments on the sector.
Learn more about the customized Xero features built specifically for Canadian small businesses.


text:
Few things in nature are less predictable than a tornado.
They can form quickly. They strike weirdly, leveling one building while leaving its neighbor untouched. They can fling a car a half mile and turn a piece of lumber into a wall-piercing missile.
In spring 2011, as a series of tornadoes devastated Alabama, Rita White tracked an EF-5 monster moving over Limestone County, where she works as emergency management director. The tornado was miles from her office in Athens, but her husband was texting her about pieces of tin falling on the roof of their house in the northwest Alabama city.
Also falling from the sky over Athens were blue jeans scattered from a Wrangler factory the tornado had obliterated 77 miles away.
“They do baffling things,” says Rick Smith, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla.
How do you prepare for a freak of nature? Even people who live in tornado-tested places have mixed feelings about how much is necessary.
While tornadoes are unpredictable — they can happen any time of year, any time of day and strike all 50 states — they aren’t totally random, either. We’re in the thick of “tornado weather,” March through July, and the storms are far more common in parts of the South, West and Midwest than they are elsewhere.
Tornadoes don’t tend to hit cities, either, if only because of probabilities. There is far more undeveloped land than buildings in the places where tornadoes usually form.
“Most of the time they’re out scaring cows,” says Keith Stammer, director of emergency management for Joplin and Jasper County, Mo.
A massive EF-5 tornado — the top of the scale, with winds reaching 200 to 250 mph — struck there on May 22, 2011. The storm destroyed a third of Joplin, killed 161 people and caused up to $2.8 billion in damage, making it the costliest tornado on record, according to the National Weather Service.
Jasper County gets more tornadoes than any other part of Missouri, Stammer said, but almost all are weak. The enormous tornado in May 2011 was so unusual — it formed in about a minute and plodded along at a fraction of the speed of the typical tornado that size — that Stammer coined a word for it: “oddball-ness.”
Facing tornadoes there means planning ahead. Stammer is involved in roughly nine emergency planning drills a year with other agencies and nonprofits. The city had participated in a four-hour drill for earthquake response just four days before the tornado hit.
Agencies around the area already know who is responsible for what and who has what kinds of equipment. There are agreements in place for things like providing shelter with churches and universities.
“The disaster scene is not the place to exchange business cards,” Stammer said.
Timothy W. Manning, a deputy administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, noted he didn’t need to deploy FEMA’s specialized search-and-rescue teams after the Joplin tornado because local groups did all of that work so rapidly.
Stammer does one thing differently now. He would never have planned for a tornado that large before May 22, 2011. Now, he tells other emergency managers to think big.
“If you’re thinking flooding, think a big flood,” he counsels. “Overwhelm yourself.”
One thing Joplin did not do after the May 2011 tornado is require people to add storm shelters or safe rooms. Well-built shelters protect people from debris — the main source of death and injuries from tornadoes. But shelters cost $2,500 to $10,000 to build.
Many in Joplin assumed the expense anyway, and the city has especially focused on fortifying community shelters and safe rooms in schools. One engineer estimated Joplin and the region are adding 750,000 square feet of public shelter space —about $120 million worth. That’s enough to harbor 100,000 people.
About half of the homes rebuilt within a year of the tornado included a shelter, according to one official’s estimate.
FEMA has helped cover the cost of residential shelters in some states, but some question the practicality of broader government programs or requirements that would force people to install them.
Kevin Simmons, an economist at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, says to fund shelters for every household in Oklahoma would cost between $5 million and $10 million per tornado-related death and in Alabama the price tag would be about $40 million per fatality — an expense that may be hard to justify.
That’s because dying from a tornado is only slightly more likely than being killed by lightning. About 70 people a year are killed by one of about 1,200 tornadoes that hit the United States, according to government data. Lightning kills about 54 people a year.
Even in 2011 — a horrible year with 500 more tornadoes than is typical — the storms killed 553 people. Car accidents, meanwhile, killed about 690 people per week in 2009, and that was an unusually low number.
“If you’re going to force people to spend money, is it logical to force them to spend an extra $10,000 on a house when their biggest risk is dying in a car?” asks Tim Reinhold, chief engineer at the Institute for Business and Home Safety.
Athens did not change building codes following the May 2011 tornadoes. Limestone County itself has no building codes, even though housing development is happening in unincorporated parts of the county.
After the 2011 tornados in Athens, Ala., Limestone County worked to improve communications and warnings. It added five satellite phones because of troubles with cellphone communications after the tornado, and it built a small call center so volunteers after a storm won’t have to use the desks of the three-person emergency management staff.
The county also began registering people with storm shelters, to make sure rescue crews can find those trapped during a future storm. It also got FEMA grants to pay for new $20,000 warning sirens.
Joplin upgraded all 33 of its warning sirens, after surveys found residents jaded by the sound of sirens being tested every week. The new sirens can be tested electronically and are sounded just once a month, to remind residents of how they sound.
When those sirens go off now, people head straight to shelter, said Jane Cage, chief operating officer at Heartland Technology Solutions and chairwoman of Joplin’s Citizens Advisory Recovery Team, a volunteer group formed after the tornado.
“We all act differently now. I would think there’s hardly anyone who, when the weather gets really bad, doesn’t get a little feeling in the pit of their stomach,” she said.
Even so, Cage said the community has to act practically when it comes to preparation.
“How far do you prepare for something,” she said, “with the likelihood that you’ll never use it?”


Girl’s hunger to help feeds thousands
You’re never too old or too young to make a difference in your community.
Mackenzie Hinson, 12, of Goldsboro, North Carolina, is proof.
At the age of 10, Hinson decided she wanted to open her own food pantry to help community members in need.
“It was actually a 4-H speech that got me started,” she says. “I volunteered at a couple other food pantries and I saw how they operated and I decided I wanted to start my own. I started in a church fellowship hall helping about 50 families a month. It went from 50 to 4,000 people a month. It’s grown tremendously.”
Make A Difference Food Pantry, which is set up like a grocery store, is open the second, third and fourth Thursdays of each month from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
How do you balance being a kid and running a food pantry?
Hinson has a flexible homeschool schedule and receives support from her parents and about 15 volunteers. Her efforts don’t go unnoticed. She was recently invited to Harry Connick Jr.’s show to celebrate her being a “Little #LeadingLady.”
As if the surprise of being on the “Harry” show wasn’t enough, Hinson received an additional surprise during her interview with him in front of an audience of kids. (Watch the video.)
Connick Jr. revealed that General Mills was donating $13,000 worth of food to Hinson – 1,500 boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and 600 Nature Valley protein bars – to help offset her breakfast food costs. (Listen to her talk about the impact of the donation in this audio clip).
Hinson receives support from the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, which serves 34 counties and has more than 850 partner agencies like hers. Their efforts are on the front lines in numerous communities, fighting hunger every day.
The network, and Hinson’s food pantry, also are affiliated with Feeding America.
“We are always inspired by people like Kenzie who see the need in their community and roll up their sleeves to help,” says Nell Kolpin, director of corporate partnerships at Feeding America. “It will take all of us, working together, to end hunger which is why we are so grateful for our partnership with General Mills.”
General Mills has been a valuable partner to Feeding America and its network of 200 food banks for more than 35 years.
“We are incredibly thankful to the company for the way in which they seek out opportunities to elevate the issue of hunger and support our network and partner agencies, like Kenzie’s,” adds Kolpin.
Hinson says she hopes to inspire people to make a difference in their community. And she’s seen it first hand from people who’ve received help through her food pantry.
“They’re so grateful when they come in the door. And most of the people that come to the food pantry actually come back and volunteer,” she says. “They’ve said they’re giving back to the community because I’ve helped them and they’re going to try and help me back.”
What does Hinson think of being an inspiration to people of all ages?
“It’s actually pretty cool because it doesn’t matter how old you are, what race you are, what religion you are, you can always make a difference – one meal, one family at a time.”
Our mission at General Mills is to serve the world by making food people love. And we love how passionate Kenzie Hinson is about serving her community through accessible food.
To learn more about Make A Difference Food Pantry, visit MadPantry.org.
Have an idea for a story you’d like to see on “A Taste of General Mills”? Please let us know in the comments below or via email at firstname.lastname@example.org.
Subscribe to “A Taste of General Mills” by email – here – and we’ll notify you about our latest posts.


We live in a golden age of Pop Technology. Pop Technology is a lot like pop culture, or pop music, except that instead of having a fascination for an object (pet rock), a fashion trend (shoulder pads for women) or a singer (Lady Gaga), the immediate objects of public fascination are standalone Web programs or apps for a device, like an iPhone or an Android.
Pop Technology is hip and cool, and may last only for a little while. It’s Blippy or Swipely or Billshrink. Some PopTech may catch fire or disappear into a crowded app-scape. My Space was the standard-bearer of social networking until it wasn’t.
More important, however, is the environment which nurtured the development of all the cool stuff. The crucial question whether those forces will be able to survive or whether they will be beaten into submission.
The excitement and buzz belong to services (for good or ill) like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or Foursquare, that came out of nowhere and burst on the scene. Inspiration and dedication, not a grand plan, lead to creation and maybe more. A year ago Foursquare was completing its first round of financing, and now has close to one million users with a stratospheric valuation.
Sometimes those programs are just the beginning of a food chain. Foursquare, which allows users to tell each other where they are at any given time and accumulate points, allows others to use its platform to make even more programs like Mob Zombies, Kickball or Pee-Free. Companies from Starbucks to Harry Caray’s tavern in Chicago to Alito’s Garage in San Francisco are now jumping on Foursquare as a formal promotional platform. Thousands of other businesses get a jump when Foursquare users frequent those establishments.
All of these new, hip sites spring from the Internet tradition of “innovation without permission.” Jack Dorsey at Twitter or Dennis Crowley at Foursquare had good ideas, worked on them, got funding and let them loose on the digital world. It’s that attitude and enthusiasm which led to the development of about 200,000 apps even in the “mother-may-I” world of Apple’s iPhone app store. There are third-party apps from iBeer, which pictures a beer, to the Stanley tool company sponsoring an app that looks like a level for making sure pictures are straight. There are tens of thousands of apps being written for the newer, more open Android. 3DCoche helps you locate your car in a parking lot, while PuzzleQube is, well, a puzzle putting together a cube.
That’s a lot of economic activity from the creating to the purchasing. Millions of dollars are being invested in new applications and services. People make their living providing services for the people to reach online. One iPhone app developer made $40,000 – in two days. Others have smaller income, but can still do well.
All of this activity means jobs are constantly being created in the Web space, for entrepreneurs and others. By one government estimate, there were more than 200,000 people working as Web developers in 2008, with the number expected to increase by another 70,000 over the next few years. That job description only skims the surface of the economic opportunity. Every new idea for an application comes with the potential for job creation and growth.
Hold that vision of a bold, creative, risk-taking culture ready for life online. Contrast it with the corporate-driven megalith that is the phone company or the cable company. Their corporate histories are built not on creativity, but on playing regulators and politicians while squashing any competitors that may venture into their sight. Contrast it with the pleas of company executives who lay off thousands of workers while telling gullible members of Congress that new openness rules to fix the mistakes of the past will hurt investment and cost jobs. One has to wonder which investment and which jobs they are talking about.
Are these the people eager to embrace the innovation without permission culture? The ones who say they want to set priorities for Internet traffic? Who want to squeeze money from Web developers for “better” service and have their judgment replace the fundamental equalities of the Internet? Or who hijack browsers or throttle traffic and lie about it?
The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) recent decision to approve Verizon’s sale about five million telephone lines to Frontier (which will now triple in size) provides some dreadful commentary on the hypocritical “investment” strategy of the phone companies. Only 62 percent of the Verizon lines could carry any broadband, and only half can carry broadband at speeds higher than 3 mbps. FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn said Verizon left a legacy of “poor telecommunications services and broadband access provided by a company that shows little interest in developing its rural business.”
In order to gain approval of the transaction, Frontier promised to make certain 85 percent of households had access to 4 mbps broadband by 2015. So Frontier has five years to get its customers up to speed for service that could have/should have been installed by Verizon years ago. Now that’s investment.
At the heart of the debate over the open Internet is that intangible which makes the Internet what it has become – the wide-open culture that encourages investment, imagination and innovation. The imagination factor tends to get lost in all of the legal arguments about Title This or Title That and all of the engineering disputes about how much “jitter” is acceptable. For most people, the Internet is not about under which title of the Communications Act the Internet is placed. It’s not about jitter or packet prioritization. It’s about the feeling of a wide-open space that can never be filled by developers of new services and apps. It’s about the wide-open space for consumers looking for things to help inform, amuse, educate, purchase or a thousand other tasks.
There is nothing in the history or current behavior that leads anyone to believe that the telephone companies with their history of control and the cable companies which run their own closed networks will keep the Internet as free and open as it is now. Their executives have long talked about serving up prioritized services that would change the Internet dynamic.
The big communications companies are spending millions on lobbying for a reason, and that reason isn’t so the freewheeling Internet culture can exist unimpeded. They want their piece of the action, even if the action isn’t theirs to have. Said action will come disguised as “quality of service” or “managed service” or “reasonable network management.” If the FCC doesn’t act boldly to protect the Internet economy and to safeguard consumers, the great job machine will truly grind to a halt, and the era of Pop Technology will fade away with it.


(Health.com) -- Elaine Murszewski is a self-proclaimed coffee addict.
"I have been a coffee drinker for more years than I can remember," she says. "My coffeemaker must have an auto-start feature so that when I wake up, it's ready."
The 53-year-old former software company representative from Aurora, Colorado, never uses cream or milk because they just "spoil the taste." She prefers coffee over alcohol -- even at a bar.
Murszewski has a lot of company. More than half of adults in the U.S., or 54 percent, are habitual coffee drinkers, according to the National Coffee Association. In fact, 146 billion cups are consumed in the U.S. each year, nearly three times more than tea.
But for years, coffee had a bad reputation. Linked in many people's minds with smoking, coffee is associated with over-caffeination and insomnia.
The caffeine found in coffee can stay in your system for up to 12 hours, making it more difficult to fall asleep, and it affects your quality of sleep as well. Caffeine is also a diuretic, meaning that it increases urine output, which can lead to dehydration.
The general consensus used to be that tea was the better bet in terms of health benefits. But recent research suggests that despite the downsides of coffee, the "devil's brew" does have an upside: Coffee drinkers may be at lower risk of liver and colon cancer, type 2 diabetes, and Parkinson's disease.
And in 2009, two coffee studies suggested additional benefits: Coffee-drinking men seemed to have a lower risk of advanced or lethal prostate cancer than other men, and middle-aged people who drank moderate amounts of coffee -- three to five cups a day -- had the lowest risk for dementia and Alzheimer's disease later in life compared to less (or more) frequent drinkers.
Can drinking coffee even help you live longer? Maybe. A 2008 study found that women who drank coffee regularly -- up to six cups a day -- were less likely to die of various causes during the study than their non-coffee-drinking counterparts. Because consumption of decaf coffee showed similar results, researchers don't think caffeine is at work.
Coffee contains antioxidants
While coffee drinkers may have other lifestyle habits that could explain the potential health benefits, researchers are also looking for compounds in coffee that explain the results.
One possibility? Antioxidants, those healthy compounds most often associated with fruits and vegetables. While the amount of antioxidants per serving is indeed much higher in things like berries, beans, and pecans, these foods are consumed less frequently than coffee.
In fact, a 2005 study found that Americans get more antioxidants from coffee than anywhere else. More than half of adults drink coffee daily, and the average coffee drinker downs about three cups each day.
"Most people drink it for the caffeine," says Joe A. Vinson, Ph.D., a professor of chemistry at the University of Scranton who led the 2005 study and has studied coffee extensively. "[But] it's the Number 1 source of antioxidants in the U.S. diet."
Polyphenols or flavonoids, the type of antioxidants found in coffee, are also found in other foods and drinks, like tea, red wine, and chocolate. All three have been proven to moderately help brain function, a benefit that can't be chalked up to caffeine, says Vinson, who has received speaking fees from the National Coffee Association. Caffeine, the most commonly used drug in the U.S., says Vinson, does affect alertness, but hasn't been found to offer much in the way of health benefits.
Polyphenols are the "the good guys in coffee," says Vinson. "If you're not interested in keeping alert, then it seems decaf coffee would be your best bet."
Researchers have investigated other compounds in coffee, such as chlorogenic acid, which also gives eggplant its bitter flavor. In fact, there are potentially hundreds of biologically active compounds in coffee. "One of the detriments of working with foods and beverages is they're mixtures," says Vinson. "There's no magic bullet compound; it's the mix."
The beneficial effects could be due to natural agents that discourage the growth of harmful bacteria, or those that encourage the growth of helpful bacteria, called probiotics. Coffee may also alter levels of gut peptides, the hormones naturally released to control things like hunger or fullness.
Coffee may even have a hormone-like effect in the body, says Clinton Allred, an assistant professor in the department of nutrition and food science at Texas A&M University. A compound known as trigonelline "can act like estrogen," he says. "People didn't know coffee would carry such activity."
Because it acts as a hormone, trigonelline may be dangerous in women who have breast cancer, but it may also protect against colon cancer. "Estrogen is preventative of tumor formation for colon cancer, we believe," says Allred. "But it's just way too early for us to know [all] this particular compound could do."
Coffee drinkers may have healthier lifestyles
Another obstacle in pinpointing the benefits of coffee is that it's difficult to isolate the effects of coffee from other healthy habits or lifestyles associated with coffee drinking. A 1999 study of coffee and tea consumption in Scotland, for instance, found that coffee drinkers were younger, had higher incomes, and were healthier in general than tea drinkers.
Coffee drinkers in the U.S. seem to fit a similar profile. Seventy percent of Americans with an annual household income of $150,000 or more drink coffee, compared with 54 percent of Americans in a household making less than $25,000 a year, according to consumer market research firm Experian Simmons.
Research has shown for decades that poorer people are more likely to die from virtually any cause than people with a higher socioeconomic status. Wealthier people are more likely to be physically active and eat healthier, and less likely to smoke -- behaviors that could prevent some of the conditions assumed to be affected by coffee.
"That's the problem [with most of the studies done on coffee]," says Vinson. "There's no perfect study out there because they can't control all the variables. The problem with a human study is everybody's different."
To isolate the benefits of the coffee in particular, newer studies have focused on filtering out the effects of less-than-healthy behaviors, like smoking, that coffee drinkers are likely to engage in.
In a 2008 study, Esther Lopez-Garcia, a researcher in the department of preventive medicine and public health at the Autonomous University of Madrid, in Spain, found that coffee drinkers had a slightly lower risk of death from all causes than people who didn't drink coffee.
Although the participants in her study were all nurses and health professionals, she says the results are probably applicable to people with similar education and socioeconomic status. "However," she warns, "[generalizing the results] has to be made with precaution, because it's clear that socioeconomic status influences mortality."
Of course, coffee isn't a quick fix, and may even cause problems in some people. It can worsen existing heart conditions, and caffeine could cause sleeping problems, as well as a racing heartbeat and anxiety. Plus, many coffee drinkers are only adding calories and fat to their diet by mixing in heavy cream and too much sugar.
More research needs to be completed before doctors can recommend coffee to their patients, experts say.
"It is always difficult to give dietary recommendations based on studies that lasted only several months, because they cannot investigate long-term effects," says Christian Herder, a diabetes researcher at Heinrich Heine University, in Dusseldorf, Germany. In a 2010 study, for instance, Herder found that changes in coffee-drinking habits had no adverse effects on diabetes risk factors.
But because the study lasted only three months, he says, it didn't provide enough evidence to directly recommend -- or prohibit -- drinking coffee. "There seems to be no reason to discourage middle-aged men and women from drinking coffee," Herder adds.
However, says Lopez-Garcia, "anyone with health problems that can be worsened by coffee -- insomnia, anxiety, hypertension, or heart problems -- should ask the doctor about his specific risk."
A better understanding of the risks and benefits of coffee might not come anytime soon. "Studies are few and far between," says Vinson. Plus, he says, many of the studies that have been done entailed "super-high consumptions" (12 cups a day, for example) and may not apply to the normal amount Americans typically drink.
So far, evidence of coffee's health benefits is limited. "I want to be convinced, but I haven't been. It's not cause and effect; it's just a hint," says Vinson. "[But] there are a lot of wonderful hints."
In the meantime, coffee drinkers can still dare to hope their precious brew is also good for them. Murszewski says she has noticed benefits from her java habit. "I have not asked my doctor about the benefits of coffee, although I have noticed that when suffering from a migraine, coffee helps," she says. "It's not full-blown with drinking coffee."
Copyright Health Magazine 2011


text:
The Guillotines (2013)
Average Rating: 4.5/10
Reviews Counted: 12
Fresh: 3 | Rotten: 9
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 4.4/10
Critic Reviews: 7
Fresh: 1 | Rotten: 6
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 2.4/5
User Ratings: 278
It is the deadliest weapon made by man. The mere mention of its name fills hearts with terror. Long shrouded in mystery, it launches from a distance and locks onto the target's head, the internal blades decapitating the victim with the yank of a chain. A weapon of choice for elite fighters, the flying guillotine leaves victims begging for mercy. A secret brotherhood of assassins - known only as The Guillotines - were once favored by the Emperor, but are now a force of terror and oppression under
Jun 14, 2013 Limited
Aug 13, 2013
Well Go USA - Official Site
Watch It Now
Latest News on The Guillotines
June 14, 2013:Critics Consensus: Man of Steel Is Up, Up, and Okay
This week at the movies, we've got the return of Superman (Man of Steel, starring Henry Cavill and...
No Friends? Inconceivable! Log in to see what your friends have to say.
The lack of rip-roaring martial arts or even a half-decent storyline will leave genre aficionados feeling short-changed.
The plot is of little importance - the spectacular action and gorgeous landscapes and costumes are what matter.
The blades fly as do the heads, but the movie remains disappointingly aground.
The Guillotines expends most of its energy in its first 30 minutes, leaving the audience with roughly 90 minutes of soapy Qing Dynasty fan fiction.
A historical action epic set during the Qing dynasty that amounts to a bait-and-switch for wuxia fans stoked for steel-meets-flesh mayhem.
A corny saga of social and generational conflict, it's ultimately yet another Chinese period epic that functions as a thinly veiled treatise on the nobility of socialist equality.
The Guillotines is an overdramatic and fluffy piece of cinema that has a few decent moments, but is otherwise forgettable.
Any topical relevance for the material is compromised by a script that is woefully clumsy and melodramatic.
Although a bit too gory for me and difficult to follow at times, the film also boasts some gorgeous visuals as well as intriguing characters played by Ethan Juan and Xiaoming Huang.
Despite the multitude of cinematic tricks the prolific Andrew Lau has up his sleeve, the film is a disappointingly rote entry in the wuxia pantheon.
Audience Reviews for The Guillotines
There are no featured audience reviews yet. Click the link below to see what others say about The Guillotines!
Discuss The Guillotines on our Movie forum!
Featured on RT
- The Guillotines (Xue di zi) (DE)
- The Guillotines (Xue di zi) (UK)

domain: artistic


SpaceX capsule was destroyed in 'anomaly': lawmaker
A space capsule suspected to have exploded last month in an incident characterized by manufacturer SpaceX as an "anomaly" was in fact completely destroyed, a US Senator confirmed Wednesday.
"The most recent SpaceX anomaly caused the complete loss of the (crew) capsule," Senator Richard Shelby, chairman of a Senate committee that manages NASA's budget, said during a hearing.
NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told Shelby the agency, which has contracted its mission to resume carrying US astronauts to the International Space Station to Elon Musk's SpaceX and Boeing, would be carrying out a joint investigation with SpaceX.
NASA and SpaceX have remained tight-lipped about what caused the serious incident during engine tests on April 25.
A leaked video posted on Twitter, later indirectly authenticated by NASA, showed an explosion.
NASA is counting on SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS, a task handled since 2011 by Russia, with first manned flight planned before the end of the year.
The capsule that exploded was to be launched by a rocket in the coming months during a full-scale test of its in-flight abort system that would allow it to return to Earth in case of an emergency.
SpaceX and NASA must now urgently work to discover the cause of the explosion as well as replace the capsule—calling into question NASA's stated goal of launching American astronauts into space from US soil by the end of 2019.
© 2019 AFP


Dubai World Cup Tips, Betting Offers and Odds
Dubai World Cup Preview: Tips, Betting Offers and Odds, Meydan
The final Saturday in March each year brings us the Dubai World Cup. Here we look at the best odds and offers available, as well as providing our betting tips for the Meydan showpiece.
There aren’t many races which offer more financial incentive than the Dubai World Cup. Only the Pegasus World Cup in fact offers more prize money, but when we consider that connections have to stump up a hefty $1 million entry fee for that Gulfstream Park contest, this offering from Meydan is probably still the most attractive contest in the world from a prize money perspective. The race for $10 million is on once again.
First run in 1996, this 1m2f Grade 1 flat contest attracts equine stars from around the globe. It’s easy to see why they come, with that whopping $10 million in prize money on offer!
Dubai World Cup Tips – 2020 Race Preview
Previous Race Winners
- 2019 – Thunder Snow – jockey Christophe Soumillon, trainer Saeed bin Suroor
- 2018 – Thunder Snow – jockey Christophe Soumillon, trainer Saeed bin Suroor
- 2017 – Arrogate – jockey Mike E Smith, trainer Bob Baffert
- 2016 – California Chrome – jockey Victor Espinoza, trainer Art Sherman
- 2015 – Prince Bishop – jockey William Buick, trainer Saeed bin Suroor
- 2014 – African Story – jockey Silvestre de Sousa, trainer Saeed bin Suroor
- 2013 – Animal Kingdom – jockey Joel Rosario, trainer Graham Motion
- 2012 – Monterosso – jockey Mickael Barzalona, trainer Mahmood al Zarooni
- 2011 – Victoire Pisa – jockey Mirco Demuro, trainer Katsuhiko Sumii
- 2010 – Gloria de Campeao – jockey T.J. Pereira, trainer Pascal Bary
- 2009 – Well Armed – jockey Aaron Gryder, trainer Eoin G. Harty
- 2008 – Curlin – jockey Robby Albarado, trainer Steve Asmussen
- 2007 – Invasor – jockey Fernando Jara, trainer Kiaran McLaughlin
- 2006 – Electrocutionist – jockey Frankie Dettori, trainer Saeed bin Suroor
Dubai World Cup History
Acting as the final spectacular act of the nine race Dubai World Cup Night card, this is far and away the richest horse race in the World. The race was held on the dirt track at Nad Al Sheba from its inaugural running in 1996 until 2009. From 2010 onwards it has taken place at the new home of racing in the United Arab Emirates, Meydan. A new location also brought a new surface, with Tapeta being used from 2010 to 2014. However this synthetic all-weather surface was not welcomed by all, particularly the connections of the American runners who are far more accustomed to running on dirt. The race was switched back to dirt from its 2015 edition.
The first ever winner of the Dubai World Cup was one of the most talented American horses in a generation, William I. Mott’s superstar, Cigar. The Nad Al Sheba years also saw the first British trained winner of the race as Sir Michael Stoute’s Singspiel brought the prize home. As of 2015 British trainers had failed to record another win here.
Godolphin are the most successful owners in the history of the race with a remarkable six victories. The year 2000 saw the apple of Sheikh Mohammed’s eye, Dubai Millennium, put up a blistering display to win easily, posting the fastest time in the races history in the process.
Six of Godolphin’s seven winners were trained by Saeed Bin Suroor. Having also won in 1999 for Hamdan Al Maktoum and in 2015 for Handan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, Bin Suroor is well clear in the trainers’ race with eight wins in total.
The final year at Nad Al Sheba wasn’t viewed as a classic renewal beforehand, but it nevertheless found its way into the record books. American raider Well Armed paid no heed to the supposed open nature of the race, routing his rivals by a massive 14 lengths, a record winning distance for the contest.
Trials for this race don’t come much better than the Breeder’s Cup Classic. Of the four winners of that American race to line up here, all have won, namely Cigar, Invasor, Pleasantly Perfect and Curlin.
Texan Jockey Jerry Bailey has won this race more than any other. Interestingly his four victories have come for four different owners and trainers.
Horses trained in the USA or the UAE have dominated the Dubai World Cup, winning 17 of the first 20 editions between them. British, French and Japanese trainers have won the race once apiece in this time. Given that the bulk of these races have been held on dirt, it comes as no surprise to see the USA leading the way with 9 wins. USA breeding is geared far more towards dirt performers than elsewhere in the World. The USA won only once in the five editions of the race that were run on Tapeta.
When looking at the age of the winner, it is the four-year-olds who have fared best with 10 wins, followed by five-year-olds with seven. 2015 winner Prince Bishop became the oldest in the history of the race at eight years of age.


text:
An exceptional vintage Barska Anchormaster AE 10824 brass telescope with quality mahogany tripod legs that extend. Includes "Barska" stamp on brass. It is fully functional and offer high quality optics. The brass cradle mount allows the scope to move smoothly in all directions.
50"H x 38.5"W x 14.5"D

domain: hobby


text:
In 2008, new vehicles with four-cylinders made up 40 percent of the market, according to market researcher R.L. Polk & Co.; today, they are 53 percent of the new-vehicle market.
RANGOON, Burma - Maroon robes for Buddhist monks had long drawn customers to the shop in downtown Rangoon.
Joe Thompson was chosen to lead the new division as its president to develop propane autogas technology for fleet vehicles for companies to deliver products or governmental entities that needed to use vehicles, driving them frequently and accumulating hundreds and hundreds of miles.
General Motors paid special attention to smoothness and quietness, neither normally associated with big pickups, in redesigning its full-size trucks for 2014.
Since CEO Alan Mulally took the helm in 2006, Ford Motor Company morphed from a multinational enterprise characterized by regional fiefdoms, to a truly global operation building cars on common platforms worldwide.
SENIOR EDITOR AT LARGE J.P. VETTRAINO: Go ahead, laugh at the old guy. He's geeked at the prospect of seat time in a 2013 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter cargo van .
John Force ended a 19-race No. 1 qualifying slump with a track-record Funny Car run Saturday in the NHRA Kansas Nationals.
While Cadillac sells more models every month than Lincoln, Ford's premium brand offers more SUVs.
Joel oversees High Gear Media's social media channels, video, and OEM outreach, while also reporting the latest automotive news.
At a special event to celebrate the title's 15th anniversary, its creator said he hopes the brand will eventually build its own car.
Ram Truck Director Bob Hegbloom on the 3500 Diesel: Ram Truck Director Bob Hegbloom speaks about the 30,000-pound towing capacity of the new 3500 Ram diesel, 5/15/13. Kathleen Galligan/Detroit Free Press Mike Cairns, Head of Ram Truck Engineering speaks at Chrysler Chelsea Proving Grounds, Wednesday, May 15, 2013.
Gentlemen : I hope you guys could do a piece for me on the relic category, the large sedan.
When the Ford C-MAX Energi was launched, Ford had an agreement with Best Buy's Geek Squad to provide Ford customers with easy installation of 240-volt charging stations in their homes.
Ford Motor Co.'s shift to beef up car offerings that appeal to coastal markets is accelerating ahead of schedule.
First the bad news. During a week of mixed driving, the 2013 Ford C-MAX Hybrid did not get its EPA-estimated 47 miles per gallon.


text:
Halo-halo is a traditional Filipino cold dessert prepared using crushed ice, evaporated milk or condensed milk, and many other optional ingredients depending on taste. Common additional ingredients include: ube, sweetened beans, coconut strips, sago, gulaman (agar), pinipig rice, boiled taro or soft yams in cubes, slices or portions of fruit preserves and other root crop preserves, and flan. It is often topped with a scoop of ube ice cream.
The fruits and all other ingredients are added to a tall glass (generally a spoonful of all ingredients) in no specific order, and they are topped with plenty of shaved ice. The next step is to dribble some evaporated milk over the shaved ice. It is then topped with a scoop of ube ice cream and other toppings are also added.
The texture of halo-halo is on the creamier side (due to the presence of ube ice cream and milk), but the inclusion of shaved ice also provides the dessert with its fair share of crunch.
Halo-halo is believed to be the unofficial national dessert of the Philippines. Although, there is no fixed set of ingredients used to prepare the dish, there are common ones such as jellies, flan, macapuno, palm seeds, sweetened red beans, shaved ice, ube ice cream, fresh fruit, toasted coconut flakes and pinipig.
Origin & Cultural Significance
The word ‘halo-halo’ in Tagalog literally translates to mix-mix in English.
The origin of halo-halo dates back to the Japanese kakigōri class of desserts that was introduced to the Philippines by a Japanese diaspora living in the Philippines. One of the initial types of dish was a dessert locally called monggo con hielo or mongo-ya, and was comprised of only boiled mung beans in syrup (minatamis na monggo) served on top of crushed ice with milk and sugar.
With time, variations of the dish began to emerge as people started started using more innate ingredients, which eventually led to the creation of the modern halo-halo. However, the main thing that differentiates halo-halo and its Japanese ancestor is the positioning of the ingredients (typically underneath the ice instead of over it).
How is Halo-Halo Eaten?
People generally consume halo-halo like an ice cream sundae, instead of drinking it using a straw (like a juice). This dish is usually served in a tall glass instead of a bowl. As far as the volume of the dessert is considered, it is believed that the mix-ins only occupy 1/3 of the dish, and the rest is just shaved ice.
As the name itself suggests, all the ingredients of halo-halo are supposed to be combined properly before eating. Because the majority of the ingredients will be resting at the bottom of the glass, mixing is important to relish all the blends of flavors present in the dish. One can find every bite of this exotic dessert totally different from the last. This differentiates halo-halo from all the other desserts present out there.
Generally consumed during the summers, this dessert is considered to be a refreshing treat packed with complex flavours.
Halo-halo is a traditional Filipino cold dessert prepared using crushed ice, evaporated milk or condensed milk, and many other optional ingredients depending on taste.
- Shaved Ice - 2 Cups
- Mangoes (ripe) - 2
- Bananas (large and ripe) - 1
- Jackfruit (ripe) - 1 cup
- Fresh or Bottled Young Shredded Coconut - 1 cup
- Sweet Corn or Chickpeas (garbanzos) - 1/2 cup
- Firm Gelatin, Gelled and Cut into 1/2-inch cubes - 1 cup
- Rice Pop - 1/2 cup
- Cooked Sweet Yams or (Ube halaya) - 1 Cup
- Your Preferred Ice cream - 4 scoops
- Evaporated Milk - 2 Cups
- Begin by peeling mangoes and cutting them into half-inch cubes.
- Now, divide every ingredient into 4 equal portions. Take 4 tall glasses and, in layers, place all the ingredients in the glasses.
- Add one-half cup of shaved ice to every single glass.
- Next, add a quarter of milk on top of shaved ice to every glass.
- Place one scoop of your preferred ice cream on top.
- In the end, add a few nuts or rice crispies over the ice cream and voila! Your halo halo is ready to be eaten!
Amount Per Serving: Calories: 3573Total Fat: 102gSaturated Fat: 65gTrans Fat: 0gUnsaturated Fat: 29gCholesterol: 262mgSodium: 1263mgCarbohydrates: 519gFiber: 47gSugar: 334gProtein: 175g

domain: food


text:
Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower's Bible (Paperback)
On Our Shelves Now
Featuring information by more than 300 contributors--a veritable "who's who" of cannabis cultivation--this is the most complete book on the subject available. New greenhouse and outdoor growing chapters have been added to this edition.
About the Author
Cervantes is a world-renown expert on indoor, outdoor, and greenhouse cannabis cultivation. He puts more than thirty years of expert cannabis growing knowledge and hands-on experience at your fingertips with his books, articles, photographs and videos. His expert advice has guided millions of growers worldwide to apply simple, effective horticultural techniques to high-yield closet, basement, backyard, medicinal, and guerrilla gardens. Cervantes solves growers' problems with definitive clarity. Cervantes finds the time to contribute feature cultivation articles to a dozen European cannabis magazines and speaks at international cannabis fairs in Europe each year. With more than a million books sold, you can also find his books in French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, & German.

domain: library


Discover Hackney's hidden gems for Open Garden Squares Weekend
Eleven Hackney gardens will be unlocked to the public on 18 to 19 June
FROM traditional private squares to contemporary roof gardens, via skips, barges, museums, schools and allotments… Over 200 gardens will be unlocked to the public for Open Garden Squares Weekend on 18 to 19 June.
Some of these gardens are private, others are not normally open at weekends, and all are hidden gems. Most are cared for by dedicated volunteer groups, passionate about their garden and their local community. For a single weekend, one £12/14 ticket allows you access to all of them, as well as a full programme of tours, art activities and guided walks.
This year, 11 Hackney gardens are taking part in the festival. Natalie Mady, who helps to run Cordwainers Garden off Mare Street, said: “The garden is quite hidden so for us Open Garden Squares Weekend gives us the opportunity to show others what our group has achieved.
“We love welcoming new people into the space, sharing our experience and hopefully this inspires others to do the same. This year we’ll have the finished piece from our ‘Grow a London Garment’ project on display, as well as tea, delicious cakes and plants for sale.”
Clissold Community Garden is a prime example of a housing association’s horticultural therapy programme and their 'plot-to-plate' project, funded by the Big Lottery local food scheme, while at The Growing Kitchen, in a quiet corner of Hoxton, you can witness how residents transformed a formerly disused site into a beautiful shared garden.
Elsewhere in Hackney, the place that inspired the BBC television series EastEnders – Fassett Square (pictured below) – will be on show, while gardening activities for children will be hosted in the Geffrye Museum’s grounds.
Nancy Loader, the museum’s Communication Manager, said: “We want to welcome as many people as possible to discover and enjoy our gardens, which are described as an oasis in the heart of the city.”
Q&A sessions with founders and volunteers at Dalston Eastern Curve Garden will be accompanied by pizzas, baked in the clay oven.
Marie Murray who co-runs the space, said: “We love the enthusiasm for the garden from the visitors who come from far and wide for Open Garden Squares Weekend. We are always very proud to show them how this old railway line has been transformed into a green haven for people and wildlife.
“For many of the visitors it’s an opportunity to visit Hackney for the first time and see a side of the borough that they didn’t know existed. It’s great to hear many of them say ‘I wish we had a garden like this where we live!’”
Meanwhile, if you head down to the award-winning Gloucester Square Residents’ Garden, situated between Haggerston Park and Regent’s Canal, you can see how a once neglected area has been turned into a thriving community garden.
Check out Abney Park, a 32-acre historic park, cemetery and nature reserve in a built-up inner-city area, which was opened in 1840 as a Nonconformist garden cemetery, or discover The Castle, a large Victorian water pumping station, listed grade II*, with a food, wildlife and education garden.
Tickets to Open Garden Squares Weekend cost £12 before the event and £14 on 18 & 19 June.


text:
Published April 30, 2007
by PublishAmerica .
Written in English
|The Physical Object|
|Number of Pages||76|
(Meet Fifty Shades Continued #1) Rating details 1, ratings 63 reviews. Converted to ebook format, Cover Updated. Fifty Shades of Grey from Christian's POV. Get inside Christian Grey's mind, as you read the complete Fifty Shades trilogy retold from his point of view, carrying on where E L James left off at the end of 'Fifty 4/5. Online continuing education courses by expert presenters and companies in audiology and hearing healthcare. ASHA, AAA, IHS, CAA, CASLPA, BAA and other offerings available. Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books. My library. Summary and Analysis Part 3: Mein Kampf: The Struggler, Continued Summary. Death returns briefly to the struggle of Max Vandenburg, who rides on a train. After spending weeks more in the storage closet, Max's friend Walter Kugler makes his last delivery to Max, which includes food, a razor, and a train ticket from Stuttgart to Munich to Pasing.
Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. Something went wrong. Please try your request again later. Jesus, Continued: Find all the books, read about the author, and more. Learn about Author Central. Author interviews, book reviews, editors' picks, and more. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll /5(). A summary of Book I (continued) in Frank Herbert's Dune. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Dune and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans. making disciples like in the book of acts Our movement is transforming ordinary people into powerful disciples of Jesus Christ, just like in the Book of Acts. They will heal the sick, cast out demons, preach the Gospel that leads to repentance, . With more and more visitors flocking to Gibbs Gardens the number and range of questions continued to grow until Jim decided to take the advice of one visitor: write a book. About three years ago when the gardens were closed for the winter, he started recording his memories about the events in his life that led up to his decision to design and.
• Denise Mina’s latest book is Blood, Salt, Water (Orion). To order To Be Continued for £ (RRP £) go to or . Cont. vs. Cont’d Most style guides, including The Chicago Manual of Style, advise that if you have to abbreviate the word continue, you should write “cont” and add a period after cont. as the abbreviation for continued will not get you in trouble in general use, and it probably won’t get you in trouble in academic or professional use.. That being said, if you have to adhere. John Chapter 14 Second Continued Once again, Jesus emphasized the need for the habitual practice of obedience to His commands as evidence of the believer’s love for Him and the Father. This is consistent with the teaching of (James ), that true saving faith is manifest by works produced by God in the transforming, regenerating power of. Continued definition is - lasting or extending without interruption. How to use continued in a sentence.


text: Whether you're a karaoke singer or preparing for an audition, the Pro Vocal series is for you. The book contains the lyrics, melody, and chord symbols for eight classic songs. The CD contains demos for listening and separate backing tracks so you can sing along. The CD is playable on anyCD, but it is also enhanced for PC and Mac computer users so you can ad just the recording to any pitch without changing the tempo! Perfect for home rehearsal, parties, auditions, corporate events, and gigs without abackup band. This volume includes 8 Disney favorites, including: Bibbid i-Bobbidi-Boo (The Magic Song) Can You Feel the Love Tonight A DreamIs a Wish Your Heart Makes I Won't Say (I'm in Love) If I Never Kne w You (Love Theme from Pocahontas) Reflection A Whole New World Written in the Stars.

domain: entertainment


text:
What is a civil lawsuit? A civil lawsuit is a method for a person who has been physically, emotionally or monetarily harmed by another person or company to hold that person or company accountable for their actions and get compensation for injuries and suffering.
What leads to lawsuits? Imagine you are driving home from a summer vacation and an 18-wheeler bashes into your car, causing severe damage to your car and injuries. You end up with a totaled car and numerous surgeries (medical bills). You make a claim, but the truck driver says it was your fault. You have a choice to make. You can pay all your own medicals bills and damages that were caused by someone else or you can use a civil lawsuit to hold them accountable.
What is the process and is it worth all the trouble?
1. Find a good attorney-A local attorney that has experience and a reputation of honesty, good values, hard work, and would dedicate his or her time to your case.
2. The Pleadings-Your attorney will write “the complaint,” which will consist of the facts of the case, names of everyone involved, legal theories, and a request for compensation.
3. Serving the Defendant- The complaint is delivered to the defendant, the person or company who you are claiming is liable for your injuries, and the defendant is given a summons of what he or she needs to do.
4. Defendant’s Response-The defendant has a set number of days to respond to the complaint or he or she will have to pay the full damages without negotiation known as a default judgment.
5. Discovery-After the defendant answers or issues a motion, your attorney will gather evidence, information, and important facts that will be needed to prove your case.
6. Negotiating a Settlement- Settlements end the lawsuit, instead of going to court. According to thelawdictionary.org, 95% of lawsuits end in a pre-trial settlement.
7. Trial Prep- If negotiation fails, the lawsuit is taken to court. Only five percent of personal injury cases go to court. Your case may be decided by a judge or jury depending on different factors.
8. Trial- The trial entails an opening and closing statement, questioning witnesses and the jury’s verdict. In civil cases, the burden of proof is usually on the plaintiff.
Are most lawsuits successful? Ninety percent of cases that go to trial end in victory for the plaintiff. Although trials and lawsuits cannot fix pain and suffering, compensation can help fix financial struggles, and help make up for physical and mental pain.

domain: law


text:
Discover the momentous motoring events that have taken place this week in history …
120 years ago this week, the Winton Motor Carriage Company completed its first sale as Robert Allison of Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, US received a one cylinder Winton phaeton [1 April 1898]……90 years ago this week, Tazio Nuvolari driving a Bugatti T35C won the Pozzo Circuit Grand Prix at Pozzo [28 March 1928]……. The first Australian Grand Prix was run at the Phillip Island circuit in Victoria, Australia [31 March 1928]. The race was originally to be held on Monday 26 March however rain forced postponement until Saturday 31 March. It was open to “light” cars of up to 2 litre capacity and it attracted 30 entries, of which 17 started. The event was conducted as two separate races, with the first held in the morning for Class B (750cc to 1100cc) and D (1500cc to 2000cc) entries, and the second held in the afternoon, for Class A (up to 750cc) and C (1100cc to 1500cc) cars. The competitor setting the fastest time was to receive a £100 trophy donated by Mr CB Kellow and would be regarded as “Champion of the Day”. The overall winner was Arthur Waite in an Austin 7……. 70 years ago this week, the Necochea 1000 miles at Playas de Necochea in Argentina was won by Oscar Galvez in a Alfa Romeo 308 [28 March 1948]……. The modern era of Formula 1 began with the Grand Prix de Pau (France), which was won by Nello Pagani in a Maserati 4CL. Yves Giraud-Cabantous finished second and Charles Pozzi third [29 March 1948]…... the following day [30 March 1948] Giovanni Ceirano (83), Italian industrialist and automotive pioneer, died. He co founded ‘Junior Fabbrica Automobili Torinese‘ in 1905, ‘Società Ceirano Automobili Torino’ in 1906, ‘Fabbrica Automobili Ceirano‘ in 1917 and ‘SCAT- Ceirano‘ in 1923……. 60 years ago this week, the White Motor Company acquired the Diamond T Motor Car Company for $10,400,000 [1 April 1958]……. 40 years ago this week, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article about the 1978 Corvette Indianapolis 500 Pace Cars, indicating they would be excellent investments [27 March 1978]……. 30 years ago this week, all new cars manufactured after this date for the UK market were required to run on unleaded p
etrol [1 April 1988]……. On the same day [1 April 1988] the Chevrolet Corvette 35th Anniversary Edition
was introduced at the New York Auto Show…….20 years ago this week, Ferdinand Porsche Jr (88), who helped his father develop the Volkswagen Beetle before World War II and later founded the sports car firm that bears his name, died [27 March 1998]……. Mika Hakkinen completed his third straight victory and McLaren secured its third straight 1-2 finish at the Brazilian Grand Prix [29 March 1998]. Hakkinen started from pole and led from start to finish, with the fastest lap thrown in for good measure. The race was notable for Damon Hill being disqualified for having an underweight car. ‘I don’t think it gets much worse than this,’ he said…….German automaker BMW bought Rolls-Royce for $570 million [30 March 1998]. But the deal was not smooth and has a very interesting story behind it. In 1998, owners Vickers decided to sell Rolls-Royce Motors. The most likely buyer was BMW, who already supplied engines and other components for Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars, but BMW’s final offer of £340m was beaten by Volkswagen’s £430m. A stipulation in the ownership documents of Rolls-Royce dictated that Rolls-Royce plc, the aero-engine maker would retain certain essential trademarks (the Rolls-Royce name and logo) if the automotive division was sold. Rolls-Royce plc chose to license not to VW but to BMW, with whom it had recently had joint business ventures. VW had bought rights to the “Spirit of Ecstasy” bonnet (hood) ornament and the shape of the radiator grille, but it lacked rights to the Rolls-Royce name necessary to build the cars. Likewise, BMW lacked rights to the grille and mascot. BMW bought an option on the trademarks, licensing the name and “RR” logo for £40 million, a deal that many commentators thought was a bargain for possibly the most valuable property in the deal. VW claimed that it had only really wanted Bentley anyway. BMW and VW arrived at a solution. From 1998 to 2002 BMW would continue to supply engines for the cars and would allow use of the names, but this would cease on 1 January 2003. From that date, only BMW would be able to name cars “Rolls-Royce”, and VW’s former Rolls-Royce/Bentley division would build only cars called “Bentley”. The Rolls-Royce’s Corniche ceased production in 2002…….on the same day [30 March 1998] The last air-cooled Porsche 911 was delivered to its proud owner, the US TV star Jerry Seinfeld…….Andy Wallace drove a standard McLaren F1 production car at 240.14 mph (386.46 kmh) at the Volkswagen Proving Ground, Wolfsburg, Germany [31 March 1998]…... In China a new law requiring motorists in Beijing to install pollution-reduction devices went into effect [1 April 1998]…….10 years ago this week, the Ford Motor Company announced the sale of its Jaguar and Land Rover divisions to the Tata Group, one of India’s oldest and largest business conglomerates, for some $2.3 billion–less than half of what Ford originally paid for the brands [26 March 2008]. The sale came at a time when Ford, along with much of the rest of the auto industry, was experiencing a sales slump as a result of the global economic crisis. For Tata, which earlier that year had unveiled the Nano, the world’s cheapest car, the purchase of the venerable British-based luxury brands was referred to by some observers as a “mass to class” acquisition…….Jean-Marie Balestre (86), who once was the most powerful man in motor sport for 13 years as president of the Federation Internationale de Sport Automobile (FISA) between 1979 to 1991, died [28 March 2008]. He was heavily involved in what is colloquially called the FISA-FOCA war, a political battle over finances and control of the Formula One World Championships between 1980 and 1982. Balestre and his opponent, Bernie Ecclestone, settled the dispute after Enzo Ferrari brokered a compromise. Balestre signed the first Concorde Agreement, under which FOCA was granted the commercial rights to Formula One while the FIA retained control of all sporting and technical regulations. Balestre was elected as president of the FIA, while remaining president of FISA, in 1986 and is credited with establishing specific crash test requirements for Formula One cars, significantly improving the safety of the sport. He was also a key proponent of the switch to naturally aspirated engines in 1989, also arguing that such a move was essential for safety reasons. In 1991 he lost the election for FISA president to Max Mosley. With the merger of FISA and the FIA he also lost the FIA presidency to Mosley in 1993 and retreated to the presidency of the FFSA until the end of 1996…….The News of the World published their infamous expose on FIA Max Mosley’s private life [30 March 2008]. The newspaper claimed that he took part in an orgy with Nazi overtones. Moseley admitted the orgy with 5 prostitutes but denied the Nazi theme, took the paper to court and won……BMW announced its latest milestone in its pursuit of the hydrogen future, the BMW Hydrogen 7 mono-fuel [31 March 2008]. Based on the BMW Hydrogen 7 bi-fuel version (gasoline and hydrogen), the mono-fuel vehicle’s internal combustion engine was optimized to run solely on hydrogen and shared the performance, comfort, and safety qualities of every production BMW 7 Series.


BREAKING: Philippines officially terminates VFA with US
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines has officially sent the notice to terminate the Visiting Forces Agreement to the United States.
Malacañang on Tuesday confirmed that the notice has been signed by Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro “Teddy Boy” Locsin, Jr. and sent to the US government on the same day.
“The President directed the Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea to tell Secretary Teddy Boy Locsin of the Foreign Affairs to send a notice of termination to the US government last night and the Executive Secretary sent the message to Secretary Teddy Boy Locsin and the latter signed the notice of termination… and sent to the US government today,” Presidential spokesman Panelo told a press briefing.
According to Panelo, the termination will take effect after 180 days from now.
Locsin in a tweet said the Deputy Chief of Mission of the US Embassy has received the notice of termination.
@DFAPHL The Deputy Chief of Mission of the Embassy of the United States has received the notice of termination of the Visiting Forces Agreement. As a diplomatic courtesy there will be no further factual announcements following this self-explanatory development. https://t.co/qQhywEpcea
— Teddy Locsin Jr. (@teddyboylocsin) February 11, 2020
“As a diplomatic courtesy there will be no further factual announcements following this self-explanatory development,” the senior diplomat said.
Subscribe to our regional newsletter
Disclaimer: The comments uploaded on this site do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of management and owner of Cebudailynews. We reserve the right to exclude comments that we deem to be inconsistent with our editorial standards.


text:
Bruce Baker announces the release of his newest single, “I Know Why,” which was written and produced by Bruce Baker Music.
Bruce Baker is an international singer/songwriter and composer who started singing at an early age, competing in school talent shows and impressing audiences with his abilities at the young age of 12. Teaming up with some of the biggest names in the Christian/Gospel music industry as a songwriter and composer, he felt led by the Spirit of God to release his testimony to the world through music.
He later established a music career in the forefront with his debut single “I Am Your Healer.” In total transparency about his 10-year Heroin and Cocaine addiction, his battle with eating disorders and dealing with both of his parents being diagnosed with cancer, “I Am Your Healer” reveals how the healing power of God changed their lives forever. In response to a song that has impacted the hearts of many all over the world, there is a demand for Bruce Baker to share how he has been healed of the sufferings of his past.
Bruce has taken a step out in faith by releasing this new single, “I Know Why,” staying true to the rock and roll spirit that God put in his heart. Bruce said, “God filled me with His fire to set the world on fire!”
Passionate about reaching the next generation of youth, Bruce has a desire to speak into their lives and proclaim the gospel! His hope is that anyone who listens to “I Know Why” will become a proclamation petitioner and a voice that will scream, “There is such a thing as freedom!” That freedom is the freedom to surf, skateboard and live a rambunctious, extreme life filled with exploration in The Holy Spirit.
Bruce Baker is open and enthusiastic about what the Lord has called him to do. He doesn’t view himself as a gospel, hip-hop artist but as a Rock n’ Roll Pastor who loves to worship the son of the Living God, Jesus Christ! While enjoying ministering throughout the world through the power of music, Bruce Baker began exploring other projects including a guidance program in Tampa, Florida that assists youth with tools, opportunities, wellness and counseling.


text:
I am the first person to admit that I make mistakes as a mother, lots of them. I am absolutely not perfect, far from it. It is really important to me that people understand this. I have always been uncomfortable being referred to as a ‘parenting expert’ (although the term is necessary for SEO/marketing/PR), because an expert to me is somebody who gets things right most of the time and rarely slips up. Although I find experts inspirational, I don’t view them as ‘real people’ and often they can de-motivate me, when I think “I could never be as amazing as they are”. I don’t want people to look at me and think that I don’t make mistakes, because I do. Everybody does. Perfection just doesn’t exist, real does.
What does a real parent do? They try their best, but there are always times when they wish they had done better, times they slip up, lose their temper and act in ways towards their children that they are not proud of. There are two paths real parents can take and it is these paths that matter more than their mistakes. They can either ignore their flaws, become blinded to them and blame their sometimes ineffective parenting on their children. Or, they can accept their flaws, forgive themselves and learn from them. Teaching their children humility and apology. The latter is the parent I aspire to be and the one that is most beneficial to children.
If you aim to be perfect, you will fail. The pressure you place upon yourself will be too much. One day you will slip up and you will struggle far too much with your guilt. It is better to aim to be ‘good enough’. I have previously written about my 70/30 ratio HERE, in my book it’s OK to be proud of seventy percent of your parenting and feel that thirty percent could be improved upon – so long as you do try to improve it.
Not only are parental slip-ups inevitable, they are also incredibly important. Because if you don’t make mistakes, how will your children learn how to react when they make one? We spend our lives teaching our children, mostly through modelling appropriate behaviour to them. When you make a mistake, when you yell at your child, lose your patience with them and snap at them, they learn that ‘perfect’ is not a goal to aim for, they learn it’s OK to make mistakes and most importantly of all – they learn how to rectify them. When you lose it with your child and you apologise to them, explaining why you acted in a certain way and attempting to rectify the damage, you teach them an incredibly important lesson. How to apologise and make things right. If you don’t make mistakes, you deprive them of this important life lesson!
This doesn’t mean that it’s OK to mess up in a big way everyday, this is what my 70/30 ratio is all about. You need to strive to do your best, but recognise that sometimes your best is enough, even when you don’t feel that it is.
For more on fighting your own parental demons, rectifying your mistakes and controlling your temper, see my new Gentle Discipline Book – out now in the UK and coming soon in the USA and Canada,.
p.s: Come and chat with me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
Or watch my videos on YouTube
You can also sign up for my free parenting newsletter HERE.

domain: literature


text:
MEDIA — Patriotism was in the air at the Media Theatre Saturday night - in the show, “Eleanor, An American Love Story,” and during a special pre-show salute to U.S. Army Combat Veteran Matt Yagel of West Chester.
For 20 years, the Media Theatre Veterans Alliance's "Veterans Night" has been honoring veterans, getting them together to share a meal and enjoy a show with friends and family. Prior to curtain time, the alliance held an hour-long reception for veterans and their guests upstairs in the theatre’s Crystal Room. Yagel was accompanied to the show by his girlfriend Michelle Buchanan and his parents, Judy and Ken Yagel of Williamsport, Pa.
“I am very grateful for this recognition,” Yagel stated. “Sometime, it seems like soldiers’ service can be forgotten. However, it’s a special night like this, when veterans feel really good about their service being appreciated.”
Before the start of “Eleanor, The Musical,” a short ceremony took place, with the Delaware County Marine Corps League Detachment #288 in Upland serving as Color Guard and the National Anthem sung by Media Theatre student Maddie Van Horn. The veterans alliance award was presented to Yagel on stage in front of the entire audience by veterans Ed Buffman Sr. of Upper Providence, Arthur Burn of Linwood and Media Mayor Bob McMahon. Burn read a biography of the honoree, which was prepared by Jolene Buffman, a key member of the alliance.
“It’s a truly humbling experience to be honored in a room so full of history and years and years of military experience,” Yagel said as he looked around him at the guests before him, some in military uniforms, in the beautiful historic theater. “This is a huge honor and privilege to be included with the past honorees and I am honestly, just so grateful for this award.”
Yagel was sworn into the National Guard during his senior year at Williamsport Area High School. After graduating, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and was sent to basic training at Fort Benning in July 2004.
“I chose the National Guard because it provided an opportunity for me to attend college, while continuing to serve,” Yagel explained. “Paying for school was one of my main motivations at that time.”
Yagel was following in the footsteps of his grandfather, a World War II veteran. He also has an uncle who was in the U.S. Marines and a nephew and cousin in the U.S. Navy. He said his parents and his four sisters were “incredibly supportive” of him during his years of service.
After completing basic training, Yagel was assigned to the First 109th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division, 2nd Brigade Combat Team.
In 2005, Yagel’s Division was activated and he began a six-month active duty training period in Camp Shelby, Miss. Training involved qualifying on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and on the Rifle Range to prepare for his tour of duty in Iraq. Yagel was the telephone operator for the platoon, carrying a backpack radio and acting as the voice of the platoon lieutenant.
In August 2005, Yagel was sent to Kuwait for one month to prepare for Iraq where the war had been raging for two years. By late 2004, over 1,000 U.S. troops had been killed. In Kuwait, Yagel became the driver of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, a lightly armored, fully tracked transport vehicle, providing cross-country mobility. Extra plates of armor were added to the vehicles for protection from IED explosions.
In September 2005, Yagel’s company was split up and he was attached to a company from Vermont that drove light vehicles. There were two Bradleys per platoon, and Yagel was the driver of one of them that provided extra fire power for the company. Their mission was to keep the area that they were patrolling manned for 24 hours. Yagel and his crew patrolled every day, on an eight-hour basis, constantly vigilant, looking for any changes in the area.
By 2006, after several weeks without incident, Yagel was working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift when he got a call to take a S.S. Sniper Team to his sector. Along the way, he hit an IED and his Bradley was badly damaged with a cracked engine. Luckily, nothing penetrated the vehicle. Yagel and his crew had to stay with the damaged vehicle for 24 hours in enemy territory, waiting to be picked up and returned to base. The sniper team left the Bradley and went on to complete their mission.
In another incident, Yagel’s unit went onto a road that hadn’t been cleared and an IED blew up another nearby Bradley. The Bradley burned for two days, killing every soldier inside. Yagel and his unit had to watch it burn as they were unable to get to it. After the fire went out, Yagel and his crew had the grim task of removing the soldiers’ remains.
Yagel’s tour of duty ended in June 2006. He came home and enrolled in Penn State, remaining in the National Guard. In his junior year at college, Yagel was re-activated. In 2008, Yagel spent three months at Camp Shelby, assigned to the 5th Striker Brigade, a special combat team. By December, he was sent to Camp Tajl, outside of Baghdad, where he was the radio telephone operator. Yagel worked 12 hours a day with the camp CEO, coordinating all orders to the U.S. troops.
In September 2009, Yagel returned home and was honorably discharged. The solider was released from the National Guard in 2011. Through his years in service, Yagel had earned the Combat Infantry Badge, the Iraqi Campaign Medal With Two Campaign Stars, the Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, Army Good Conduct Medal, Army Reserve Components Achievement Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Global War on Terrorism Medal, Overseas Service Ribbon, Armed Forces Reserve Medal With Device, and the Driver and Mechanic Badge With Driver Tracked Vehicles.
Yagel returned to Penn State, earning a degree in business management in 2013 and then starting a career in banking. Currently a resident of West Chester, Yagel is working as a mortgage broker with Vantage Pointe Mortgage in Blue Bell. In his spare time, the veteran, who calls himself an “avid outdoorsman,” enjoys hiking, fishing, hunting, snowboarding and summer day trips to the beach. He also enjoys all types of music, from rock and country to hip hop and blues.
After the show, Yagel and his fellow veterans gave a thumbs up to “Eleanor, An American Love Story.” The musical, on stage at the Media Theatre through Sunday, Feb. 23, is based on the early lives of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt from their passionate courtship, through their complicated marriage with a domineering mother-in-law, to Eleanor’s emerging role as a catalyst for social change in America. “Eleanor” touches on marital issues, the pressure of being an elected leader’s wife, raising five children, in-law contention, women’s rights, along with the broader scope of being a catalyst for social change.
Veterans Night at the Media Theatre was the event which planted the seed in 2001 for what became the Pennsylvania Veterans Museum, 12 E. State St., Media, in the former Armory below Trader Joe's. The museum got its start in 2001 in the Media Theatre after a stage production of "South Pacific." Veterans were encouraged to bring memorabilia from their service days to make a display for the theatre during the show's run. Local veterans came with photos, ribbons, letters to home and medals for the exhibit, unknowingly forging the foundation for what was later to become the Pennsylvania Veterans Museum, just a short distance down the street from the theatre.
The museum, opened in 2005, continues to expand content and exhibits, as it educates visitors of all ages to the experiences and history of veterans during times of war. It is the museum's mission to ensure that current and future generations understand the true nature of war, and recognize the sacrifices made in the name of freedom and security
The nonprofit museum has free admission. Hours are noon-5 p.m., Thursday through Sunday. For more information on the museum, call 610-566-0788.
For more information on Media Theatre's upcoming productions, including “Eleanor, An American Love Story,” or for tickets to the next Veterans Night at Media Theatre, call 610-891-0100 or visit mediatheatre.org.

domain: history