| 1453 | France defeats England at Castillon, France, ending the Hundred Years' War. | |
| 1762 | Peter III of Russia is murdered and his wife, Catherine II, takes the throne. | |
| 1785 | France limits the importation of goods from Britain. | |
| 1791 | National Guard troops open fire on a crowd of demonstrators in Paris. | |
| 1799 | Ottoman forces, supported by the British, capture Aboukir, Egypt from the French. | |
| 1801 | The U.S. fleet arrives in Tripoli. | |
| 1815 | Napoleon Bonaparte surrenders to the British at Rochefort, France. | |
| 1821 | Andrew Jackson becomes the governor of Florida. | |
| 1864 | Confederate President Jefferson Davis replaces General Joseph E. Johnston with General John Bell Hood in hopes of defeating Union General William T. Sherman outside Atlanta. | |
| 1898 | U.S. troops under General William R. Shafter take Santiago de Cuba during the Spanish-American War. | |
| 1944 | Field Marshall Erwin Rommel is wounded when an Allied fighter strafes his staff car in France. | |
| 1946 | Chinese communists attack the Nationalist army on the Yangtze River. | |
| 1960 | American pilot Francis Gary Powers pleads guilty to spying charges in a Moscow court. | |
| 1966 | Ho Chi Minh orders a partial mobilization of North Vietnam to defend against American airstrikes. | |
| 1987 | Lt. Col. Oliver North and Rear Adm. John Poindexter begin testifying to Congress regarding the Iran-Contra scandal. |
The conflict in Syria was effectively declared a civil war by the Red Cross on Sunday, as the "most intense" fighting since the start of the uprising was reported in Damascus.
The Red Cross had previously designated Idlib, Homs and Hama as war zones, but the change in status means international humanitarian law applies wherever fighting occurs throughout the country
Combatants will now be officially subject to the Geneva Conventions, and will be more exposed to war crimes prosecutions, after the ICRC declared that the conflict was a "non-international armed conflict", or in lay terms a civil war.
Mitt Romney's top campaign adviser [Ed Gillespie] insisted on Sunday that Romney has no responsibility for any decisions made at Bain Capital during the three years from 1999 to 2001, during which he claimed that he had resigned from the company to go run the Olympics in Utah, explaining that Romney had "retired retroactively to 1999" from the company.Then Gillespie accidentally shoots a torpedo in Romney's claim that he didn't do any substantive work at Bain during his leave of absence - a leave that left him as CEO, Chairman of the Board, and President - because he was just too gosh-darned busy to do anything else.
"There may have been a thought at the time that he, that it could be part time, but it was not part time," he said. "The Olympics was in a shambles. There was corruption."But there's a problem with Gillespie's explanation. If Romney was working 16 hours day at the Olympics, and therefore couldn't find time to have anything to do with Bain, then how did he find time to travel cross-country to "most" of Staples' board meetings during the same period?
Gillespie said that, even if Bain Capital had thought Romney could take a part-time leave of absence from the company, the reality of the demands of the job was different.
"If that's what it said, maybe that's what they thought at the time was that he could do it part time," Gillespie said. "It was not a part-time job. It was a 16-hour a day job."
Romney told the Massachusetts election panel in 2002 that he remained active in a number of companies while in Utah, including Marriott and Staples, the office supply giant he helped create through investments from Bain.In other words, his "16-hour-a-day" job at the Olympics did not stop Romney from being involved in the decision-making of other corporations - it even gave him enough time to fly across the country to board meetings - so the excuse doesn't work for Bain either. If Romney had time to fly home to be at several Staples board meetings, he had time to sit in on at least one Bain board meeting by phone.
During his ballot commission testimony, when asked whether he continued to serve on boards while working on the Olympics, Romney answered: “Yes.”
“I immediately resigned from the board of Sports Authority located in Florida, feeling it could present a conflict of interest with my Olympic responsibilities and of course the travel could be challenging as well. I remained on the board of the Staples Corporation and Marriott International, the Life Like Corporation. And I remained as a corporator of the Belmont Hill School,” he said.
Asked specifically about the Staples board, Romney said there were four to five meetings a year and he returned to Massachusetts “for most of those meetings. Others I attended by telephone if I could not return.”
4. Surely someone from Bain occasionally called you up and asked your opinion about something work related from 1999 to 2002. Wouldn’t that qualify as “involvement,” if only on a minor level?
5. You earned at least $100,000 as an executive from Bain in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings according to filings with State of Massachusetts. Can you give an example of anyone else you personally know getting a six figure income, not dividend or investment return, but actual income, from a company they had nothing to do with?
6. What did you do for this $100,000 salary you earned from Bain in both 2000 and 2001?
7. If you did nothing to earn this salary, did the Bain managers violate their fiduciary duty by paying you a salary for no discernible reason?
8. Are there other companies that pay you six figures a year as earned income, not investment income, for which you have no involvement?
24. Why do SEC documents claim you were Chief Executive Officer, President, and Managing Director of Bain Capital 2000 and 2001 if you were merely the sole owner?
25. Did you sign this SEC document?
26. Is this accurate or not?
27. If you didn’t sign it, is someone guilty of lying to the SEC?
28. True or false, it is a felony to lie on SEC filings?
34. You are obviously bright, hard working and energetic. Isn’t is possible that you put in 60 hours a week on the Olympics but still put in 5 hours a week as an active consultant or adviser by phone, email and the occasional meeting with the full time managers of Bain?
Frum doesn't seem to see the importance of the controversy swirling around Romney's time at Bain as being a real character issue, something that is helping voters understand what kind of man Romney essentially is.Then he quotes Frum. Notice (say I) what Frum does get:
[Romney's] legalistic but thoroughly deceitful and opportunistic filings and excuses for filings with government boards tells voters far more about him than the fact he's a Mormon bishop or a happily married man with a pack of sons who refused to serve in the military or wealthy enough to have a dancing horse and a new elevator for his car collection.
Non-college whites may dislike Barack Obama, but they don’t like corporate raiders either."Corporate raider" says it all. Simple. Clean. Deadly. He's being defined as Michael Milkin. Gordon Gekko. Carl Ichan. A T-Rex predator in a world of foot-tall primates (that would be us).
In the repugican primaries of both 2008 and 2012, Romney consistently lost among repugicans earning less than $100,000 per year. (Back in 2008, Romney’s populist rival Mike Huckabee quipped, “People want to vote for somebody who reminds them of the guy they work with-- not the guy who laid them off.”)
I grab a chair from a stack in the corner and take a seat, studying a sign that implores me to be "true" and "passionate" and "creative." In reality, passion and creativity have nothing to do with it. Labor Ready provides warm bodies for grunt work that pays minimum wage or thereabouts. "Here's a sledgehammer, there's the wall," is how Stacey Burke, the company's vice-president of communications, characterized the work to Businessweek back in 2006.Read the whole piece here: "Everyone Only Wants Temps"
Mulligan began laying out a series of poster-size maps of the Panhandle. The first showed the base of the aquifer in burgundy. During the late Tertiary Period, he explained, the region we know as the Great Plains wasn’t composed of plains at all—it was a stony terrain of cliffs and valleys. Gradually that surface was buried by erosion sediment from the Rockies, which blanketed the region with the smooth surface of today’s plains. But underneath, the hills and valleys of the prehistoric landscape remain, forming the bottom of the Ogallala Aquifer.Text excerpt and image from a fascinating article in this week's Harper's Magazine, entitled "Broken Heartland. The looming collapse of agriculture on the Great Plains."
Mulligan spread out a second map on top, which showed the same region, but in shades of blue instead of burgundy. “This is the saturated thickness of the Ogallala in 2004,” he said. “So that’s basically the available water.” The contours of the prehistoric landscape remained clear: where there had been hills, the water was shallow, and where there had been valleys, the water was deep.
Next Mulligan spread out a map recording the impact of wells, which were represented with hundreds of tiny dots. The burnt-orange shading on the map indicated a rapid rate of depletion. Mulligan said, “What you’re looking at is a drawdown on the order of five to six feet per year. So over the last fifteen years, it’s gone down eighty, ninety, one hundred feet.”
None of which, he went on, is likely to come back. For complex reasons involving wind, weather, and soil composition, the Ogallala does not recharge in the way one might expect. In fact, of the eight states above the aquifer, only Nebraska, with its sandhill dunes, is permeable enough to contribute any serious replenishment.
Now Mulligan spread out the last two maps of the region. The first was covered with crimson spots. “So what we did is, we highlighted all the areas that are less than thirty feet,” he said. “Thirty feet is kind of a magic number. You’re down to so little water that you’re not going to be able to pump nearly enough.” The map was almost a quarter red. “So that’s 2004,” he said, turning, “and this is 2030.”
In the last map the Panhandle was nearly all red. “I look at that,” Mulligan said, “and I can only surmise that there will be very little irrigated agriculture on the high plains twenty years from now.”
“It’s hard to imagine what there will be,” I offered.
Mulligan smiled. “Just because we’re all born into this, we think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. But our human perspective is very biased.”
Fifty-five percent of the continental U.S. was in a moderate to
extreme drought by the end of June, NOAA's National Climactic Data
Center in Asheville, N.C., said in its monthly State of the Climate
drought report. That's the largest percentage since December 1956, when
58 percent of the country was covered by drought.
Despite
the ever-louder drumbeat for sustainability and global efforts to
advance environmental initiatives, Earth remains on a collision course
with ...
The destruction of Pompeii in 79AD is the most viewed video at YouTube. The first comment is..."OMG so cool! Volcanos ROCK!"
But around each of those sentences of functional shift we also provided three counter-examples which were shown on screen to the experiment’s subjects in random order: all they had to do was press a button saying whether the sentence roughly made sense or not. Thus, below, A (“accompany”) is a sentence which is conventionally grammatical, makes simple sense, and acts as a control; B (“charcoal”) is grammatically odd, like a functional shift, but it makes no semantic sense in context; C (“incubate”) is grammatically correct but still semantically does not make sense; D (“companion”) is a Shakespearian functional shift from noun to verb, and is grammatically odd but does make sense:According to the EEG, subjects had a greater comprehension of more complex lines once they had read a line featuring Shakespeare’s functional shift:
A) I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would accompany me.
B) I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would charcoal me.
C) I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would incubate me.
D) I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would companion me.
What happened to our subjects’ brains when they read the critical words on screen in front of them?
In other words, while the Shakespearian functional shift was semantically integrated with ease, it triggered a syntactic re-evaluation process likely to raise attention and give more weight to the sentence as a whole. Shakespeare is stretching us; he is opening up the possibility of further peaks, new potential pathways or developments. Our findings show how Shakespeare created dramatic effects by implicitly taking advantage of the relative independence–at the neural level–of semantics and syntax in sentence comprehension. It is as though he is a pianist using one hand to keep the background melody going, whilst simultaneously the other pushes towards ever more complex variations and syncopations.
A
team of scientists led by José Córdoba from Yale University and Erich
Astudillo from the University of Chile have developed a chemical that
can kill all the cavity-causing bacteria in a person’s mouth -in only 60
seconds! They call it Keep 32, because using it may let you keep all 32
of your teeth for a lifetime.If Keep 32 is as successful in testing as it is in the lab, it’s likely that the chemical would be added to toothpaste, mouthwash, and other oral hygiene products, especially if researchers sell their patent to one of the major pharmaceutical companies. However, Astudillo isn’t limiting his product to the dental world. He also hopes to license the chemical to candy companies like Hershey’s or Cadbury. Keep 32 could be added to sticky sweets, meaning that consumers would no longer need to be concerned that a package of saltwater taffy or caramel would cause tooth decay. Parents will have to come up with a different excuse to prevent their children from eating copious amounts of Laffy Taffy.After seven years of research, Keep 32 is ready for human trials, if the researchers can get the funding.
There's no magic elixir for healthy aging, but here's one more thing to add to the list: good gut health.
Chromatophores are pigment-rich, light-reflecting cells found in amphibians, fish, reptiles and cephalopods, such as squid. The cells dictate eye and skin color and, in some species, allow the bearer to adopt a color-changing camouflage when stimulated by heat, stress and other factors — a process known as metachrosis. The camouflage is also used in communication.Marine biologist Michael Bok took advantage of a squid with skin cells still active despite being shipped on ice, to make this video. More
Squid rapidly change color when the muscles surrounding a chromatophore-filled sac contracts and expands — when it contracts, the pigment appears denser, when it expands the color becomes muted and disappears. The squid changes its color according to exterior factors — such as a threat or the presence of a potential mate – because each chromatophore is linked to a nerve ending.
There
are only a few thousand snow leopards left in the wild, and they are
extremely reclusive, living in the mountains and hunting only at dawn
and dusk. Now, for the first time time, we have video footage of a snow
leopard mother and cubs in their natural habitat. A team of researchers
from the Snow Leopard Trust and Panthera
found the den by attaching GPS units to snow leopards four years ago.
Imagine that job! The leopards’ movements clued them in that it was time
to give birth, high in the Tost Mountains of Mongolia.“As we stood outside the den we could hear the cub and smell the cats but not see anything inside the den,” said Panthera scientist Orjan Johansson. He and colleagues acted quickly, taping a camera to their antenna pole and extending it over the ledge blocking the den entrance. The footage captured shows a female leopard looking up at the camera, keeping a protective paw over her cub.See two short videos at Surprising Science.
At the second den—a narrow crack in a cliff wall—the scientists discovered that the mother was away hunting, leaving her two male cubs unattended, seen below. “This was an unprecedented opportunity,” said Rutherford. “We wanted to be as careful as possible and only take the most pressing data.” The team quickly weighed, measured, photographed and collected hair samples from the cubs, which allowed genetic testing that confirmed sex and other information. More pictures of the cubs are available at Panthera’s photo gallery.
