Read more: Viral Video, Gif, England, Birmingham, Surveillance Video, Dancing Thief, Crime News
The Bosphorus Bridge is one of two suspension bridges that connects Europe and Asia across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, Turkey. Last night, members of the Turkish military closed down the bridges during an attempt to seize control from the ruling government. News media are now reporting that government forces have reasserted their control over the country. /// Source imagery: @digitalglobe (at Bosphorus Bridge)
Luther.Studio posted a photo:
The View From The Shard
Luther.Studio posted a photo:
The View From The Shard
Luther.Studio posted a photo:
The View From The Shard
Luther.Studio posted a photo:
The View From The Shard
wilco737 posted a photo:
This is the 2nd picture of this airplane I uploaded. The first one can be seen here during touchdown:
flic.kr/p/gGExYB
The SP is a very special 747 which you don't see too often anymore.
This airplane was built in 1976 and was flying for Syrian Airlines until 2007 when it was stored at DAM.
Anybody an idea what happened to that airplane? Scrapped? Still sitting at DAM? For sale maybe ;-)
In 2009, a chemist and his students stumbled across a blue pigment that had never before been seen. Now that it's been licensed for commercial use, you may start seeing it everywhere.
New studies prove that dinosaurs may not have roared in their days on the earth. NPR's Linda Wertheimer talks to paleontologist Julia Clarke about her new discovery — the cooing sounds of dinosaurs.
In this era of ISIS, many debates in the West center on how followers of Islam will eventually, through a series of steps and growing pains, arrive at liberal democracy. Shadi Hamid, the author of the new book Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World, believes that Muslims don't want that path. In this animated interview by The Atlantic, Hamid explains how not only was the Prophet Mohammed a religious figure, he was a politician. In fact, for much of the Middle East's existence, there hasn't been a separation of religion and governance. "Islam has proven to be resistant to secularization," he says. “We don't have to like it or agree with it...but the goal shouldn't be to push [Islam] away or exclude people, it has to be to find ways to accommodate Islam in a legal, peaceful, democratic process.”
Antoinesc posted a photo:
Antoinesc posted a photo:
Dallas Morning News | El Centro College moves on after Dallas police shooting: 'We will not be defined by this at all' Dallas Morning News In the end, Johnson was holed up in an El Centro hallway when police used a remote-controlled robot armed with explosives to kill him and end the standoff. Adames was able to tour ... “People could envision the future of that space rather than the past ... and more » |
Slate Magazine (blog) | The Emmys Have a Knack for Being Both Stodgy and Trailblazing at Once Slate Magazine (blog) Joining The Americans as a first time Best Drama contender is the incisive Mr. Robot, whose star Rami Malek adds some fizz to the Best Actor in a Drama category. Thomas Middleditch, who is great as the nervous twitchball at the center of Silicon Valley ... and more » |
The Free Weekly | “No Conflict Has Ever Been Solved with Violence” The Free Weekly Instead of trying to capture him alive, perhaps allowing us to learn more about whether his experience abroad affected his mental stability, a “drone” (robot-delivered) bomb was used to blow him up, a tactic associated with the military, never before ... |
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The new Design Museum, which is set to open in London's Kensington this November, has revealed the interiors of its shop.
The shop, which opens today 15 July at 224-238 Kensington High Street, marks the museum's first retail space at its new site.
The Design Museum is due to open at this site in November, after the previous museum at Shad Thames closed its doors on 30 June. It will take over the former Commonwealth Institute building.
The 76m2 shop space has been created by designer John Pawson, who is also designing the interiors for the museum itself.
It will include a curated selection of “design classics”, says the Design Museum, which will include items from exhibitions on show at the museum itself, alongside other international pieces.
It will also include a Design Museum-branded range, alongside collaborations with designers and arts book publishers such as Phaidon.
The interiors of the shop aim to reflect the aesthetic of the upcoming museum, says the Design Museum, and use materials such as stained oak, glass and terrazzo, and Dieter Rams-designed shelving. It will also include a shop fixture by Swiss furniture company Vitra Retail.
Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum, says: “The Design Museum shop reflects the values of the museum itself. It's our ambassador on the high street, always changing, always full of fascinating things, displayed with style, and staffed by people who live and breathe design.”
The new museum will be more than three times the size of the old museum, and will include three floors of gallery spaces, a library and archive, a learning centre with workshop space, two events spaces and an auditorium for talks and seminars. There will also be a café, restaurant, film studio, meeting rooms and offices, and another smaller shop based within the museum itself.
Sudjic says he hopes the new museum will act as a “bridge between the V&A and the Science Museum”, as it moves into London's museum quarter.
Alongside the new physical space, the Design Museum also saw a rebrand in March, adding a “the” to its name and creating a graphic pattern based on the roof at the Commonwealth Institute.
The new Design Museum will open on 24 November.
The post A look inside the Design Museum's new shop appeared first on Design Week.
The Swinging 60s sway back into the capital and a sea of naked strangers descends on east Yorkshire. All that and more in your weekly art dispatch
William Eggleston Portraits
Powerful and haunting images of the American south by one of the country's greatest photographers.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, 21 July-23 October.
Walsham-le-Willows, Suffolk
From the peaceful water garden to the sparkling shrine room, this Suffolk meditation complex fuses the exotic with the agricultural
“My name is Maitrivajri,” says the lady waiting at the entrance to a smart black barn, deep in the Suffolk countryside. “It means a diamond thunderbolt of universal loving kindness.”
It's not quite what you expect to encounter on the edge of the sleepy village of Walsham-le-Willows, but then this is no ordinary barn. Since 2000, Potash farm has been home to Vajrasana, the rural outpost of the London Buddhist Centre, now reborn as a £4m purpose-built retreat complex.
Related: Modernist living: let your mind wander at Alain de Botton's Life House
Continue reading...Micro cabins by Reiulf Ramstad Architects
Exhibition at Gateshead's Baltic gallery showcases children's play areas from a bygone age that put the risk back in to frisky
For most parents, the playground is a place to sit on a bench and fiddle with their phones while occasionally glancing up to check their children are still intact. Nothing can go too wrong, anyway: all the equipment is designed so there are no hard landings, jagged edges or dark hiding spaces.
But a new exhibition at the Baltic gallery in Gateshead is celebrating the radical playgrounds designed by mid-20th century visionaries who wanted children to take risks away from mum or dad's overprotective gaze.
Continue reading...Pentagram partner Abbott Miller has relaunched the quarterly dance magazine that he edited and directed, 20 years after it was first published.
Originally started by Miller in 1989 along with publisher Patsy Tarr, the two of them have picked up where they left off with Dance Ink in 1996, with the publication of Volume 8, Number 1.
The magazine, which developed a cult following among dancers, photographers and designers in the 1990s, has also expanded its remit to include additional formats. Two large-scale posters will be produced with every issue, and single or multiple images are designed to be used as wall murals.
Transparency is one of the key themes of the new issue it comes in a clear sleeve, while the design plays with the transparency of ink on the page, “suggesting layers of performance and motion”, according to Miller.
The format consists of a single collaboration with a photographer and performer, and the look will vary from issue to issue.
Volume 8, Number 1 is limited to a run of 500 copies, and can be purchased online here.
We speak to Miller to find out more about the Dance Ink relaunch and the design inspiration behind it.
Design Week: Was the relaunch something you've wanted to do for a while?
Abbott Miller: For many years the 2wice Arts Foundation has been operating on a schedule of producing one or two projects a year, depending on the complexity and expense of the projects.
Our last three endeavors were a series of digital apps (Fifth Wall, Dot Dot Dot, and Passe Partout) that were really exciting but also fairly complicated and expensive. We recalled how direct and comparatively inexpensive print is and we thought we would make a return to something tangible and seductive.
DW: Why was it important for you to pick up where you left off with Volume 8, Number 1?
AM:That was more a perverse sense of humour! We liked the idea that you could pick up where you left off despite the passage of 20 years. It was a way for us to continue a story and a mission, but with new characters.
DW: What was the main inspiration behind the design of the magazine?
AM: A kind of complex simplicity a feeling of bareness and focus that feels a little bit like starting from zero. I had a funny struggle with going back in time, and my way around it was to maintain the notion of pacing and rhythm in the layouts, but have more restraint in the type.
The biggest component was to honour our original idea of making dance happen on the page, so the shoot is really conceived for a sequence that transpires in the scale and sequence of the magazine.
DW: What are the key design features and why have you included them?
AM: I used colour in a specific way, where the imagery is primarily black and white, but it is reproduced in CMYK to give it a beautiful depth. The type allows hints of that colour to show through. In one feature there is a slippage between different layers of the letters so they create overall dark letterforms, but there are edges that reveal the magenta, yellow, and cyan to be perceived.
In another feature the tattered oriental carpet is present in most of the images. I asked Christian Witkin to shoot direct overhead details of the carpet and used those to create layered letterforms that incorporated the CMYK layers to create a distinctive texture within the letterforms.
I saw these as subtle ways to introduce colour in a largely black and white world. The restraint of those contrasts with the full-on red world of the last dance sequence, which feels more powerful because of the importance of red in the costume that Robert Rauschenberg designed for Merce Cunningham, which was performed in the issue by Silas Riener.
DW: Why have you decided to expand its remit to include new formats such as posters and murals?
AM: All media is now multi-media. We are now accustomed to the translation of images and texts from one medium to another. That is a different type of elasticity than what existed when we published the original Dance Ink, and we liked the idea of offering other ways of seeing the imagery we'd developed with Christian Witkin.
The wallpaper mural format allows someone to incorporate the imagery into an architectural space. Having designed several wallpaper patterns, and doing a lot of environmentally-scaled work, I was interested in the idea of a magazine that could become a part of an architectural space.
DW: How has the dance community changed since you first set up the magazine, and how have you relaunched the magazine to reflect this?
AM: The biggest difference is generational there is a totally new generation of artists from when we last published. The other difference is that the promotion of dance and performance has become more sophisticated. Whether small companies, individual choreographers, or big organisations, the use of video as a creative tool is now pretty standard.
The other difference is what seems to be a kind of renaissance of choreography, especially in the classical arena. Originally Dance Ink was far more aligned with modern and contemporary dancers and choreographers because that was where the creative focus was, whereas now you are seeing large classical ballet companies commissioning young choreographers like Justin Peck, Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky, Benjamin Millipied, Jessica Lang, and Lauren Lovette. That just means we may have more of a complex mixture of forms in the magazine.
The post Pentagram's Abbott Miller relaunches 90s dance mag Dance Ink appeared first on Design Week.
The UK's new Conservative prime minister Theresa May has announced her new cabinet, which includes a reshuffle of MPs in charge of culture and business.
The two main governmental departments which affect design businesses are Culture, Media and Sport, and Business, Innovation and Skills.
Culture, Media and Sport is in charge of protecting and promoting cultural sites and heritage, and investing in funds and innovation that enable creative businesses to grow.
John Whittingdale has been sacked as Culture, Media and Sport Secretary. He took up the post when the Conservatives won the general election last year and David Cameron entered his second term of office.
He has been superseded by Karen Bradley, a former Home Office minister who was a Remain supporter throughout the EU referendum.
Business, Innovation and Skills was previously in charge of economic growth, and invests in skills and education which aim to promote trade, boost innovation and also enable people to start and develop businesses.
The Business, Innovation and Skills department is now being “reshaped”, according to the BBC, with former BIS secretary Sajid Javid having been reappointed as Communities Secretary. Javid is also pro-Remain.
A new department has been created called Business, Energy and Industrial strategy, with Greg Clarke appointed as secretary. Clarke is also a Remain supporter.
10 Downing Street was unable to confirm at the time of publication whether Business, Innovation and Skills will continue to exist as a department in its own right.
The post Theresa May's cabinet includes new Culture, Media and Sport secretary appeared first on Design Week.
Ikea has opened its first UK store for seven years in Reading, complete with sensory features designed to make it feel homelier.
The 32,000m2 store, which opened in Thames Valley today, includes features such as fireplaces that smell of wood and which make crackling sounds.
“The sensory features help to bring our room sets to life, further helping our customers to imagine and feel how our products will look in their home,” says Ikea.
The furniture company has already introduced features such as these in its Cardiff store, and says it is looking to introduce them in future stores as well.
Of the 50 room sets that make up the new space, five of them come with ceilings designed to “give customers a clearer image of how products will look in [the] home”.
Visitors will also be able to try out a new Style Island concept, which help them to design a kitchen by creating a mood board for inspiration.
Ikea says its key inspiration when designing the store was “the people of the Thames Valley”.
“Our dedicated team have carried out extensive home research in the region to ensure that each of the room sets in our store reflect real-life living situations of those who live nearby, whether it be room-sets that reflect clever storage solutions for children's toys in the living room or practical spaces for recycling bins in the kitchen.”
The post Ikea opens new immersive store in Reading appeared first on Design Week.
The post Age of Design: exploring design-led businesses appeared first on Design Week.
National railway service Network Rail promised to better accommodate for people with disabilities this week, announcing a new inclusive design strategy.
The Spaces and Places for Everyone programme has been launched in order to improve services for people with disabilities, after research found that rail was the most used form of public transport by people with disabilities (67%), yet a quarter of these people felt travel by train was difficult for them.
Network Rail chief executive Mark Carne said he wants to create a national rail service where “everyone can travel equally, confidently and independently”.
The new guidelines have started to make headway, as new facilities for visually impaired people have already been implemented at Birmingham New Street and Reading stations. You can find the inclusivity document here.
Last week, we ran a feature speaking to the founder of Hidden Women of Design a new talks programme which looks to raise the profile of female designers.
This week, a talk took place in Peckham, London, which allowed a female freelance designer, consultancy-based designer and design educator to share their stories.
The programme will continue to run, and includes Pecha Kucha-style evenings where each designer is given 20 minutes and 20 slides to talk about their career and work.
It hopes to encourage people to talk about women's representation in the design industry, says founder Lorna Allan. “Having groups of female designers promoting and supporting each other can make a difference,” she says.
Annual research conducted by accountancy firm Kingston Smith across the marketing and creative sectors showed this week that the design sector is “performing well” and has “continued to grow this year”.
It found that its Top 30 design consultancies (based on financial results) have an increased amount of gross income compared to last year (£13.5 million more).
However, it also found that margins between fee income and expenditure had decreased, while employment costs had crept up compared to fee income.
You can see the full report here.
Food and drink giant Nestlé opened a 3500m2 interactive exhibition space in Switzerland recently, to mark the company's 150th anniversary.
Nest is based in Nestlé founder Henri Nestlé's original 1866 factory in Vevy, Lake Geneva, and has been renovated by Swiss architectural practice Concept-Consult Architectes in a 45m (£38m) project.
This week, we spoke to the exhibition designers, Dutch consultancy Tinker Imagineers, about how they incorporated “organic” interior design alongside the industrial aesthetic of the venue.
The space is split into past, present and future zones, looking at the history and future possibilities of the brand, through ten different immersive exhibits.
This week, the BBC published a tender saying it is seeking a team to design several of its most prevalent financial documents.
This would include its Annual Report and Accounts (ARA), full financial statements and six other print documents.
The broadcaster highlights the importance of this job, in that these reports play a key role in showing openness and transparency, and make the BBC's financial performance publicly available.
The contract value is £400,000, and will run for up to four years from December 2016 to December 2020. More details can be found here.
The post 5 important things that happened in design this week appeared first on Design Week.
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Have you ever had an idea that you wanted to be involved in and execute, but it never quite happened for you? For Tillman, Design Director for Society of Grownups, this was not only true for her, but at times it felt like the defining sentiment of her career. While we live in a world of interconnection, it's still so easy to feel like we're not making the impact that we'd like, or that we're not taking advantage of all of our opportunities. But instead of asking for permission or waiting for opportunities to magically unfold before us Kristy challenges us to make our own opportunities. How? By inviting yourself to the table.
Kristy Tillman currently serves as the Design Director for Society of Grownups, a Boston-based start-up whose mission is to democratize financial literacy for the young adult set. There she leads design teams dedicated to crafting exceptional experiences across both digital and physical platforms.
Prior to Society of Grownups, Kristy was a designer at IDEO, an award-winning global design consultancy where she helped solve design problems across a variety of industries including consumer product goods, finance, education, and healthcare. She also did a tour through the footwear industry as a product graphic designer at PUMA and Reebok.
Kristy believes in a future where design is a tool that aids undeserved communities in solving socio-cultural problems. As the former co-founder of the Detroit Water Project and founder of Tomorrow Looks Bright, Kristy has a strong commitment to furthering the accessibility of design.
She is an alumna of Florida A&M University.
US one sheet for ATLANTIC CITY (Louis Malle, USA, 1980)
Designer: Gerard Huerta
Poster source: Heritage Auctions
1970 East German poster for IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (Norman Jewison, USA, 1967)
Designer: Erhard Grüttner
Poster source: Posteritati
philsfotos1 Thanks Everyone for over 3/4 of a mill posted a photo:
you go to the right,... i"ll go to the left....Left Right Left..Great Lakes Piping Plover juveniles Practicing the art of yoga....
Une lectrice du @lemondefr nous envoie ce dessin après l'attaque de #Nice. Dire que l'été était arrivé... pic.twitter.com/mJdliTpDGX
-- Clément Martel (@martelclem) July 15, 2016
WHO WE ARE
EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's news coverage. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are World Reporters. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.
CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.
EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).
VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.
The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.
Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.
ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.
From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
There's also an entirely engaging story happening here: a group of four friends, all nerdy boys of the Dungeons & Dragons varietal, is hurled into a supernatural mystery when one of them, kind and thoughtful Will (Noah Schnapp), goes missing. This frightening event coincides with some sort of incident at a nearby military-research facility, a looming, ominous presence that the sleepy town of Hawkins, Indiana, doesn't seem all that aware of. Will's mother, played with convincing fire by none other than Winona Ryder, begins a mad hunt for her son, while his friends, led by Finn Wolfhard's (what a name!) Mike, embark on their own quest. Mike's sister, Nancy (Natalia Dyer), also gets involved, teen romance swirling around winningly with teen terror, as does the local sheriff, a shambly guy with a tragic backstory played with perfect underdog heroism by the great David Harbour.- Stranger Things: The Excellent Netflix Show That's Going to Take Over Your Weekend [GQ]
Stranger Things is a show so '80s, it's almost tempting to make fun of it. Created with nostalgic affection by Matt and Ross Duffer, it looks like Spielberg, sounds like John Carpenter, and smells a bit like Stephen King. It feels like a scary story told over a campfire, about a thing that happened to a friend of a friend a long time ago, about what really goes on in that mysterious building at the edge of town no one knows anything about, and what might happen there late at night. Altogether, it's pretty wonderful.- Winona Ryder's Guide To New Netflix Show 'Stranger Things' [NME]
1. I play Joyce Buyers.
2. I'm not a parent.
3. I was trying to look as unglamorous as possible.
4. Stranger Things is set in a small town.
Man vs. Robot: The Battle of Customer Service Turning Digital Customer Think When automation and online experiences first became popular, businesses were struggling to create strong relationships with their customers. It's difficult to engage on a personal level with empathy, relevance, and kindness when your entire operation ... |
VentureBeat | Anki introduces tool that allows developers to hack its Cozmo A.I. robot VentureBeat Cozmo is a playful, intelligent robot with an essence of artificial intelligence. As VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi described it, it's “something like Eve the robot in Pixar's Wall-E animated film.” Anki cofounder and president Hanns Tappeiner explained ... Hanging out with Anki's Cozmo, the toy robot putting AI at our fingertipsThe Verge Meet Cozmo, the AI robot with emotions video - CNETCNET AI-Powered Cozmo Robot Gets Easy-To-Use Development KitTop Tech News all 37 news articles » |
The Faroe Islands tourism board launched a campaign called Sheep View 360, shot by attaching cameras to some of the archipelago's many sheep.
When images and video of violent incidents like the attack in Nice, France, saturate the news and social media, many people feel overwhelmed and just want to turn away.
Will the Internet ever be free for families relying on housing assistance? HUD Secretary Julian Castro and Comcast's David Cohen weigh in on challenges of connecting public housing to the Internet.
Read more: Rob Greenfield, Sustainability, Green Living, Sustainable, Compost, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Upcycle, Biking, Environment, Environmental, Outspeak, HuffPost Live 321 News
scott.hammond34 posted a photo:
Not the most original composition this to say the least, but as i was nearby and the light was decent i couldn't help myself. Opted for the 35mm over the UWA to try and compress the city and the sky a little as it lost impact at 17 and 24mm. Generally i find if the light and composition looks good to my eyes as i look at it then the best lens to convey that is the 35mm, brings the sunrise toward me a little more. I never really thought of until recently but London is stunning at dawn and Dusk; I cant wait to get back up there, especially in the winter when the sun rises behind tower bridge. (I think)
Thanks for viewing, all comments and faves previously are very much appreciated :-)
Great Patsby posted a photo:
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Read more: Catholic Church, Global Warming, Environment, Los Angeles, Women Artists, Painting, Artists, Cathedral, Serenity, Arts News
By Farley Fitzgerald, National Geographic Society
The National Geographic Society and the U.S. Department of State today announced the names of the five candidates selected for the third class of the Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship. The Fellowship provides a unique platform for U.S. Fulbright awardees to build awareness of transnational challenges, comparing and contrasting cross-border issues. Their stories will be shared on National Geographic digital platforms using a variety of digital storytelling tools, including text, photography, video, audio, graphic illustrations and/or social media.
Over a nine-month period, the five storytellers will create stories on globally significant social or environmental topics, including cultures, wildlife and food. They are:
Finalists were selected by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board following recommendations by National Geographic Society editorial experts. Fulbright-National Geographic Storytellers receive funding for travel, living expenses and health/accident coverage as well as a reporting and materials allowance from the U.S. Department of State. National Geographic organizes a pre-departure training, and staff mentor the Storytellers, helping them tell their stories to a wider global audience.
“We are thrilled to partner with the U.S. Department of State for the third class of the Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship,” said Keith Jenkins, general manager of digital for the National Geographic Society. “This platform is exactly in line with our belief in the power of science, exploration and storytelling to change the world. Our team is excited to work closely with the five Storytellers on their projects throughout the coming year.”
For more information and details on applying for the Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship, visit http://us.fulbrightonline.org/fulbright-nat-geo-fellowship.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Fulbright Program. Established by Congress in 1946, the educational exchange program is designed to increase mutual understanding between people of the United States and people of other countries. The Fulbright Program annually supports more than 8,000 students, scholars, artists and professionals from the United States and more than 160 countries to study, teach, conduct research, exchange ideas and find solutions to shared international challenges.
For media inquiries about the 2016/2017 Fulbright-National Geographic Fellows, please contact:
Farley Fitzgerald, National Geographic Society
(202) 775-6119
ffitzgerald@ngs.org
"This is the first study of the role of serious mental illness in all family homicides.
There are approximately 4,000 family homicides in the United States each year. Individuals with serious mental illness are responsible for 29% of these, or approximately 1,150 homicides. This is 7% of all homicides in the U.S.
The role of serious mental illness varies depending on the family relationships. Approximately 67% of children who kill their parents are seriously mentally ill, but only 10% of spouses who kill their spouses,
Although total homicides have decreased markedly in the US in recent years, there has been no decrease in the number of children killing parents or parents killing children, the two types of family homicides most closely associated with serious mental illness.
Women are responsible for 11% of all homicides in the US but 26% of family homicides.
Elderly family members, especially women, are disproportionately victimized. Among all homicides in the US, only 2.2% of victims are ages 75 and older. In a sample of 2015 family homicides, 9.2% of the victims were age 75 and older.
Guns are used as the weapon in less than half of family homicides.
The failure of individuals with serious mental illness to take their medication and their abuse of alcohol and drugs are risk factors for family homicides. The majority of family homicides are preceded by warnings and threats that are often ignored. The adequate treatment of individuals with serious mental illness would prevent the majority of family homicides associated with serious mental illness."
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
jygoh92 posted a photo:
all roads lead to St Paul's
▲ Black Orchid ♫ posted a photo:
The Anker RoboVac 10 cleans just as well as a $750 bot.
In “Unmask,” the second-season premiere of Mr. Robot, Elliot (Rami Malek) is keeping a tenuous grip on sanity, but he's menaced by intrusive thoughts. His nonexistent alter ego (Christian Slater) keeps turning up uninvited, visiting violence upon Elliot or those who threaten him, so much that it becomes routine. After Mr. Robot blows Elliot's brains out with a handgun, Elliot nonchalantly scribbles in his journal, “He shot me in the head again.”
Mr. Robot, as a show, has porous boundaries, whether it's soaking in current events or regurgitating half-digested chunks of Fight Club. But in “Unmask,” the show latched onto a particularly inspired reference point. As the literally shadowy figures who control the nation's banks addressed Philip Price (Michael Crisfoter), the CEO of the malevolent E Corp, to explain why the country couldn't bail out his beleaguered conglomerate, the only background noise was the faint hum of inside-the-Beltway air conditioning. But as Price rose to his feet, turning the tables on his would-be masters, a musical theme rose to buoy his words: Michael Small's score from the 1974 thriller The Parallax View.
The Parallax View, which was directed by Alan J. Pakula, stars Warren Beatty as a reporter who unearths evidence of a massive conspiracy to assassinate political figures, the work of the sinister Parallax Corporation. It's part of a wave of similarly paranoid thrillers that swept through movie theaters in the 1970s in response to post-1968 disillusionment and the bonafide conspiracy of Watergate: Pakula's All the President's Men, Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor, and many more. The influence of the genre in general and The Parallax View in particular on Mr. Robot has been noted many times, but this explicit homage—which Vulture's Matt Zoller Seitz was one of few critics to point out in advance — takes us into a different realm, one where those past movies go from reference points to source material. It's as if they're trying to break through the surface of Mr. Robot, as if the show is being hacked as we're watching it.
In substance, Price's speech is hardly groundbreaking stuff, although it's presented with the pomp and circumstance of a major revelation, recalling New York Times' critic James Poniewozik's deadly observation that watching Mr. Robot can be “like being cornered at a party by a guy who was blown away by this Intercept article he read.” It's staged like a key monologue in 1976's Network, the one where TV network head Ned Beatty explains to would-be revolutionary Howard Beale that “the world is a business.” Price's explanation of how the stock market and the economy work—and why the government has to give his company yet another bailout—is similarly entry-level. “Every day when that market bell rings, we con people into believing in something,” he says. “The American Dream. Family values. Could be Freedom Fries for all I care. It doesn't matter as long as the con works and people buy and sell whatever it is we want them to. If I resign, then any scrap of confidence the public is already clinging on to will be destroyed. And we all know a con doesn't work without the confidence.”
The writing here is Mr. Robot at its worst, regurgitating Econ 101 lessons as if they're closely guarded secrets. (The idea that stocks rise and fall with investor confidence is pretty much a definition of how the market functions.) But Cristofer—who, incidentally, is also a Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright —gives it all he's got, biting down on the “con” in “confidence” like it's his last meal. There's a deliberate unnaturalness to his performance, which, coupled with the creeping dread of that borrowed score, throws the whole scene productively off-kilter, making us doubt our eyes as much as Elliot does his.
In the lead-up to the second season, USA has been at pains to stress Mr. Robot's topical relevance, producing an hour-long special stressing the show's realistic depiction of computer hacking techniques and describing the series, somewhat optimistically, as “a cultural phenomenon.” But like the 1970s movies it draws on, the show is far more powerful as a psychological study of madness and obsession than as a pseudo-profound tract with Something Important to Say About Society.
What makes The Parallax View powerful isn't it the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were both part of some ominous plot, but the way Beatty plays a man who sounds crazier the closer he gets to the truth, and the way Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis frame the world in ever-more extreme and alienating ways. It forces us to see things as he does, to take on that feeling of madness. That's what Mr. Robot does best, thanks especially to Rami Malek's captivatingly unnerving performance as Elliot. In Season 2, we're moving outside of Elliot's head, seeing the world as it is and not as he imagines it. (In the first episode, we hear E Corp referred to by its real name, and not “Evil Corp,” Elliot's preferred moniker.) But that's a dangerous place for it to go, since Mr. Robot's version of the real world is a lot less interesting than Elliot's delusion.
Reports on Thursday that Donald Trump may be picking Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate led Mark Joseph Stern to reflect that Pence may be just the ticket: “Pence is a fatuous yes-man, a milquetoast mook with no strong convictions other than a desire to win and be popular,” Stern writes. “He will faithfully follow Trump's whims and commands.”
Meanwhile, Reihan Salam calls Pence a “drearily conventional figure,” and Jim Newell wonders whether Pence can even survive the mind-bending rigors of being Trump's running mate: “Pence has had his disagreements with Trump throughout the campaign, and if he is indeed VP he may struggle to keep up with Trump's relentless bullshit.”
Dahlia Lithwick looks at Ruth Bader Ginsburg's recent attacks on Trump and wonders whether longtime Ginsburg fans are right to cheer her candor. “She may be trying to speak on behalf of the judicial branch itself, a branch that has been almost completely silent in the face of six brutal months of attacks from the right,” Lithwick writes, trying to suss out RBG's reasoning. “In one sense, by speaking up for a judicial branch that has absorbed one body blow after another in recent months, she did nothing but level the playing field.”
Watching the Facebook Live video Diamond Reynolds made after the shooting of Philando Castile last week, John Kelly notes how Reynolds used politeness as “a powerful tool for dignity and subversion.” Reynolds, Kelly writes in a meditation on her repeated use of “sir,” “transforms a title of respect into a refusal to accept brutality, a performance of transcendent dignity, and a disruption of the status quo.”
Willa Paskin surveys this year's Emmy nominations and finds them full of “good taste and blind spots.” Hooray: Mr. Robot for best drama; Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch for Best Actor in a Comedy; many nods for The People v. O.J. Simpson. Boo: No Crazy Ex-Girlfriend? No Jane the Virgin?
For fun: When did you first fall in love with breakout Ghostbuster Kate McKinnon?
Tiny oomails,
Rebecca
The Emmys have become a good test for whether you are a glass half-full or a glass half-empty kind of person. With so much television available these days, there is, depending on your perspective, more great stuff than ever for the Emmys to choose from, or more great stuff than ever for the Emmys to ignore. This year's nominations, announced earlier today, abounded with good taste and blind spots. After years of being ignored, The Americans was finally nominated for Best Drama, and its canoodling lead actors, Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell, the 'ship to end all 'ships, received best actor nods. And yet the Emmys did not bounce aging snoozes like Downton Abbey, Homeland, or House of Cards in order to make room for The Americans, but rather the much more vital, if still aging, Orange is the New Black, whose cast was also nearly shut out in the supporting categories. Not everything can be nominated and yet—why can't everything good be nominated?
When it comes to the Emmys I have been, for years, a glass half-full kind of person, and this year's nominations seem to me almost brimming. Joining The Americans as a first time Best Drama contender is the incisive Mr. Robot, whose star Rami Malek adds some fizz to the Best Actor in a Drama category. Thomas Middleditch, who is great as the nervous twitchball at the center of Silicon Valley, was nominated in a Best Actor in a Comedy category that couldn't be better, except for the inclusion of William H. Macy, the most annoying thing about Shameless. Black-ish's Tracee Ellis Ross, UnReal's Constance Zimmer, RuPaul, Laurie Metcalf, Beyonce the Director, and everyone involved with The People v. O.J. Simpson were all rightly recognized, Metcalf three times. I even think that the Emmy voters showed good taste in ignoring the well-done but plodding Show Me a Hero, the brutal Horace and Pete, and Hulu's troubled-in-Silverlake comedy Casual. (Troubled-in-Silverlake comedy You're the Worst deserved some love though.)
It is true that for all these good choices, the Emmys ignored the CW's deserving Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin, whose inimitable narrator was at least nominated in the Best Narrator category. It is also true that Broad City wasn't even in the Emmy conversation. But this is what happens, a little give, a little take; no nomination for Colbert, but none for The Daily Show either. In fact, I feel calm, cool, and collected about almost all of the nominees (Sam Bee, it's your year next year!), except when I realize that Sophie Turner, the best young actress on Game of Thrones by a dragon's length, was not nominated, yet Lena Headey, Maisie Williams, and Emilia Clarke were. God damn you, Emmys!
The Emmys still has vestigial fuddy-duddy taste. It holds on to stodgy favorites like Modern Family, House of Cards, Downton Abbey, and Homeland even as it bounces edgier former-favorites like Orange, Girls, and American Horror Story. (I don't think The Good Wife is stodgy, but it got bounced this year too; so did Jim Parsons.) If I had to guess, I would wager that there is a core group of Emmy voters who like what they like no matter what is cool—PBS costume dramas, big-tent network comedies, apparently Bloodline—and a core group of voters who is sampling more widely, watching TV under the influence of cool, without being slaves to it. I'm sure these groups have overlapping taste, but this dynamic would explain both the Emmy's loyalty and its daring, and should give hope to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: if you can become the Tatiana Maslany or The Americans of the future—i.e. the thing people point to when discussing the Emmys idiocy—you have a pretty good chance of one day getting an Emmy.
The Emmys make an interesting counterpoint to the Motion Picture Academy, which has lately been embroiled in a controversy about how old and white it is, and thus, how staid in its taste. For a few years now, the Emmys have been much fleeter of foot, slowly but surely moving away from reflexively nominating bland network fare to nominating that which is vibrant, excellent and, often, diverse—alongside some bland not-necessarily network fare. There is no surefire “Emmy bait,” except that which has the feel of a phenomenon (Making a Murderer, Game of Thrones, The People v. O.J. Simpson) and as long as this is true, every Emmy nomination day should be as nicely eclectic as this one.
In an essay yesterday for the Los Angeles Times, Mary McNamara argued that the Emmy Awards have essentially replaced ratings—what with the splintering of outlets and audiences—as the standard bearer of industry success. Indeed, the Emmys have defined the programming strategies of upstarts like Netflix and Amazon, and they've reformed cable and broadcast networks alike.
This morning's Emmy nominations announcement affirmed this new Emmy-centric business model. USA Network received its first-ever Outstanding Drama Series nomination for its cyberpunk polemic Mr. Robot; Lifetime, formerly (and still largely) a purveyor of fluffy fare not taken seriously by awards-givers, netted a pair of major nominations for its flagship prestige drama UnREAL; and both Netflix and Amazon continued to build on their success with their distinct new half-hour series—Master of None and Catastrophe, respectively—also cracking the field. Even FX's decision to stick with low-rated critical darling The Americans paid off immensely, as its fourth season was slotted into Outstanding Drama Series and netted recognition for both of its lead actors.
The Television Academy is a voting body that, rather notoriously, tends to be averse to change. But the rapidly shifting shape of television is forcing an evolution in what, and who, is being recognized. The Limited Series/TV Movie categories are dominated this year by The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, FX's historical depiction that pays special attention to the complex racial and gender dynamics of the “trial of the century”; other major players include American Crime, John Ridley's provocative tapestry of intolerance in contemporary American life, and Roots, the urgent update on the classic 1977 miniseries. Over on the half-hour side, five of the seven nominees for Outstanding Comedy Series—Transparent, Black-ish, Veep,Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Master of None—center on either women, LGBTQ people or people of color.
In some ways, the story is the same: Game of Thrones only built on its control over the drama field with first-time nominations for Kit Harington and Maisie Williams, and it was once again joined in the top category by past-their-prime veterans Homeland, House of Cards, and the concluded Downton Abbey. And Veep is on top again among comedies. But of more pressing interest is the new crop of series and voices introduced to the ceremony—the future of the Emmys.
Considering the eligible new drama series, voters could have easily gone for HBO's Vinyl (which was abruptly canceled near the end of the voting period) or Showtime's Billions to replace the departed Mad Men (and snubbed Orange Is the New Black). Both represent quality cable television as it's been traditionally defined: anchored by an antihero, exceedingly dark in tone, and of a masculinized aesthetic. Their omissions are especially stark in comparison to the multi-nominated Mr. Robot and UnREAL, whose radical thematic underpinnings—a trippy call for revolution and redistribution in the former's case; a boldly feminist rewiring of tired TV tropes in the latter's—reflect the medium's turn toward a narrower commercial focus and broader artistic license.
Such heightened political aspirations speak volumes about what distributors are looking for in the new media market. American Crime, which this season advocated forthrightly for victims of sexual assault and LGBTQ bullying, was recognized for a second straight year in the Outstanding Limited Series category, and—despite low ratings—is beginning production on a third season set in North Carolina. After a single major nomination last year, ABC's Black-ish fit into Outstanding Comedy Series for its sophomore year on the strength of its powerful, issue-centric episodes, which tackled the use of the N-word and police brutality, among other prescient topics. It also bears noting that a season of television steeped in queer theory and intra-feminist discourse—that'd be Transparent's second season—is among the most cited series this year, with 10 nominations.
But no nominee shows this more clearly than Aziz Ansari. As the campaign season was ramping up, he told the Hollywood Reporter that he'd been initially sure that no network would give him "a show like Master of None. It definitely would have gone to some white guy.” Of course, Netflix—the original pioneer of this new specific programming strategy—did just that. And now, as a Best Comedy Actor nominee, he's the first South-Asian person ever to be nominated for a lead acting Emmy. (In fact, he received four nominations—for acting, writing, directing, and producing Master of None—this year alone.) You can bet that his success, along with that of many others this morning, will continue pushing outlets toward more Emmys—and more voices.
Below is a list of the nominations.
Outstanding Drama Series
The Americans
Better Call Saul
Downton Abbey
Game of Thrones
Homeland
House of Cards
Mr. Robot
Outstanding Comedy Series
Black-ish
Master of None
Modern Family
Silicon Valley
Transparent
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Veep
Outstanding Limited Series
American Crime
Fargo
The Night Manager
The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story
Roots
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series
Claire Danes, Homeland
Viola Davis, How to Get Away With Murder
Taraji P. Henson, Empire
Tatiana Maslany, Orphan Black
Keri Russell, The Americans
Robin Wright, House of Cards
Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series
Kyle Chandler, Bloodline
Rami Malek, Mr. Robot
Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul
Matthew Rhys, The Americans
Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan
Kevin Spacey, House of Cards
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series
Ellie Kemper, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep
Laurie Metcalf, Getting On
Tracee Ellis Ross, Black-ish
Amy Schumer, Inside Amy Schumer
Lily Tomlin, Grace and Frankie
Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series
Anthony Anderson, Black-ish
Aziz Ansari, Master of None
Will Forte, Last Man on Earth
William H. Macy, Shameless
Thomas Middleditch, Silicon Valley
Jeffrey Tambor, Transparent
Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie
Bryan Cranston, All the Way
Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock: The Abominable Bride
Idris Elba, Luther
Cuba Gooding Jr., People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story
Tom Hiddleston, The Night Manager
Courtney B. Vance, People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series of Movie
Kirsten Dunst, Fargo
Felicity Huffman, American Crime
Audra McDonald, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill
Sarah Paulson, People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story
Lili Taylor, American Crime
Kerry Washington, Confirmation
Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series
Jonathan Banks, Better Call Saul
Ben Mendelsohn, Bloodline
Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones
Kit Harington, Game of Thrones
Michael Kelly, House of Cards
Jon Voight, Ray Donovan
Outstanding Supporting Actress—Drama Series
Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey
Maisie Williams, Game of Thrones
Lena Headey, Game of Thrones
Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones
Maura Tierney, The Affair
Constance Zimmer, UnREAL
Outstanding Supporting Actor—Comedy Series
Louie Anderson, Baskets
Andre Braugher, Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Keegan-Michael Key, Key & Peele
Ty Burrell, Modern Family
Tituss Burgess, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Matt Walsh, Veep
Tony Hale, Veep
Outstanding Supporting Actress—Comedy Series
Niecy Nash, Getting On
Allison Janney, Mom
Kate McKinnon, Saturday Night Live
Gaby Hoffmann, Transparent
Judith Light, Transparent
Anna Chlumsky, Veep
Outstanding Supporting Actor—Limited Series of Movie
Jesse Plemons, Fargo
Bokeem Woodbine, Fargo
Hugh Laurie, The Night Manager
John Travolta, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story
Sterling K. Brown, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story
David Schwimmer, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story
Outstanding Supporting Actress—Limited Series or Movie
Melissa Leo, All the Way
Regina King, American Crime
Sarah Paulson, American Horror Story: Hotel
Kathy Bates, Iris
Jean Smart, Fargo
Olivia Colman, The Night Manager
Outstanding TV Movie
A Very Murray Christmas
All the Way
Confirmation
Luther
Sherlock: The Abominable Bride
The Verge | Hanging out with Anki's Cozmo, the toy robot putting AI at our fingertips The Verge When playing with Cozmo, Anki's palm-sized artificial intelligence robot, it's easy to forgot all of the engineering and software running behind the scenes. Every action, from Cozmo's audible chirps of victory when it wins a game to its childlike ... Anki introduces tool that allows developers to hack its Cozmo A.I. robotVentureBeat Anki's AI-Powered Toy Robot Is Opening Cozmo Code To Anyone To UseiTech Post Meet Cozmo, the AI robot with emotions video - CNETCNET NewsFactor Network all 37 news articles » |
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Monarch Airlines A321-231 Reg: G-ZBAJ "MONARCH 1725" departing Lisbon at sunset back to London, Gatwick.
In the hunt to create the ultimate cyborg researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have unveiled a robot which uses human-like muscles to move.
The robot has been, rather worryingly, built over a human skeleton and shows a network of microfilament muscle “tissues” which are able to accurately able to mimic human movements.
What makes them really scary is that the researchers have created the muscles as an almost exact replica of our own muscle groups, allowing them to contract and expand just as you would your own limbs.
The team even went so far as to try and mimic the muscle groups in the jaw, which they did to worrying effect:
Ok so this robot isn't going to be winning any 100m contests anytime soon, but what it does show is that we both have the technology and understanding to use our own biology to shape the future of robotics, and in particular humanoid robots.
At the moment the team's prototype is still very much a prototype, so much so in fact that it can't walk without being held up.
We're going to regret saying this but we can't wait to see what they come up with next.
Three endangered Persian leopard cubs are intended to reintroduce the species to the Sochi area but new plans for a ski trail put the future of the reserve and the animals at risk
Three Persian leopard cubs have been released into the Sochi area of Russia's western Caucasus, a day after Unesco threatened to deem the area a “world heritage site in danger” because of a planned ski resort expansion.
Persian leopards once prowled across the Caucasus mountains in great numbers but poaching, poisoning and human encroachment wiped out the species in Russia, in the early 20th century.
Continue reading...In order for the Paris Agreement to "Enter into Force" and become international law 55 countries that account for 55 percent of the world's emissions will need to ratify the agreement through their domestic processes. Recent developments in Brazil and Ukraine highlight that both countries are on the cusp of formally joining this year. It is now looking very likely that the Paris Agreement will reach the entry-into-force threshold this year based upon publicly announced intentions from countries.
Earlier this week, Brazil's House of Representatives unanimously approved a legislative decree to ratify the Paris Agreement. The bill now moves to the Senate. Brazilian observers are confident that the Senate will pass a similar bill, possibly in the coming days or weeks. It would then be sent to Acting President Temer for his approval in order to make it domestic law. Each of these steps is very likely to happen this year. Brazil accounts for 2.5 percent of emissions towards the threshold.
The Ukraine government moved even closer to formally joining the Paris Agreement as its Parliament voted to ratify the agreement. The Ukrainian Government will now need to take the final step and formally notify the U.N. that they have ratified the agreement. Ukraine accounts for one percent of emissions towards the threshold.
Eighteen countries have formally notified the U.N. of their ratification and 29 (including Brazil and Ukraine) have already announced their intent to join this year. The emissions from these 47 countries account for 54.08 percent of the world's emissions. With India, who signaled with President Obama their intent to join this year and have started their domestic process, we would be at over 58 percent of emissions. With Japan, who hasn't said anything publicly but could easily do it this year, we would be at about 62 percent of emissions (see figure and table). And reaching the 55 country threshold should be easily within reach as a number of small emitting countries are likely to join but haven't yet said anything publicly.
It now looks very likely that the Paris Agreement will enter-into-force this year. This continues the huge momentum for stronger climate action that has occurred since the agreement was finalized and signifies that countries are formally committed to delivering stronger climate action in the years to come.
NRDC has been tracking the countries that have publicly announced that they will ratify the Paris Agreement this year. The table below is based upon those public announcements. Other countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, have sent some public signals that they will ratify this year but since these aren't formal announcements we haven't included them at this stage.
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I am a climate scientist, and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate model output and observational climate data, trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change.
What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we've spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see the impacts of climate change playing out in real time on our television screens in the 24 hour news cycle.
Regardless of how you measure the impacts of climate change -- whether it be food, water, health, national security, our economy -- climate change is already taking a great toll. And we see that tool in the damage done by more extreme floods, like the floods we've seen over the past year in Texas and in South Carolina. We see it in the devastating combination of sea level rise and more destructive hurricanes which has led to calamities like "Superstorm" Sandy and what is now the perennial flooding of Miami beach. We see it in the unprecedented drought, like that which continues to afflict California, a doubling in the area of wildfire, fire burning in the western U.S., and indeed, in the record heat we may see this weekend in phoenix.
The signal of climate change is no longer subtle. It is obvious.
Wealthy privately held corporations and foundations with close interests in, or ties to, the fossil fuel industry, such as Koch Industries and the Scaife Foundations, have become increasingly active funders of the climate change denial campaign in recent years. Unlike publicly traded companies such as ExxonMobil, these private outfits can hide their finances from public view, and they remain largely invulnerable to outside pressure. In recent years, as ExxonMobil has been pressured by politicians on both sides of the aisle to withdraw from funding the climate change denial movement, Koch and Scaife have stepped up, contributing millions of dollars to the effort.
One report showed that twenty or so organizations funded at least in part by Koch Industries had "repeatedly rebroadcast, referenced and appeared as media spokespeople" in stories about climategate.
In mid-January 2010, a group known as the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), which receives funding from the Scaife Foundations, led a campaign to have my NSF grants revoked. The perverse premise was that I was somehow pocketing millions of dollars of "Obama" stimulus money simply because I was a coinvestigator on several recently funded NSF grants. These absurd distortions were--no surprise--promoted by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and others of similar persuasion.
Two Scaife-funded groups.. the Southeastern Legal Foundation and the Landmark Legal Foundation, had swung into action. The latter had already sued the University of Massachusetts and University of Arizona to obtain copies of my personal e-mails with my two hockey stick coauthors, while in May 2010 the former demanded extensive information from the NSF regarding grants that had been made to me as well as to several of my colleagues at Penn State, the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, the University of Arizona, and Columbia University.
It began to strike me as curious that so many of the demands that I be investigated could be traced back to organizations with ties to the Scaife Foundations. The Commonwealth Foundation, a Pennsylvania organization that is the recipient of considerable Scaife largess, for example, had been pressuring Penn State University to fi e me since climategate broke in late November 2009. It managed to get the sympathetic Republican chair of the Pennsylvania state senate education committee to threaten to hold Penn State's funding hostage until "appropriate action is taken by the university against associate [sic] professor Michael Mann." Indeed, it was the Commonwealth Foundation attacks that essentially forced Penn State to launch its initial inquiry into the various allegations against me in December 2009 (similar inquiries and investigations of CRU scientists were initiated in the United Kingdom). The Commonwealth Foundation kept the pressure on for months through a barrage of press conferences and press releases attacking me personally and criticizing Penn State for its supposed "whitewash" treatment of any number of supposed offenses. It also ran daily attack ads against me in our university newspaper The Collegian for an entire week in January and helped organize a protest rally against me on campus. It is likely that these attacks forced Penn State's hand yet again, leading it, following the completion of the initial inquiry in February 2010, to move to a formal investigation, despite having found no evidence of misconduct in the initial inquiry phase.
Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars and the recently updated and expanded Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change. His latest book The Madhouse Effect, with Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles, is due out in early September.
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The events that occurred in the beautiful city of Nice, France yesterday have become all too regular on our planet. For today's post I'd like to share the words of a friend that I came across this morning: “Each morning I brace myself before I turn my phone on. I find that I need to ready myself before the news alerts start peppering my phone with the tragedies we've inflicted on each other and the world in the past eight hours /// I know many of you are also coping with this daily. I know many of you are consciously choosing to remain loving and courageous in the face of these horrors. It's not easy. I know because I feel the emotional weight of it too. /// Thank you for charging on and doing the best you can every day while carrying your grieving and embattled hearts. It takes something not to give up and not to shut down. Please know that you are not alone in this. We will figure this out. I believe in us.” /// May everyone have a safe and happy weekend, wherever you are in the world. /// Words by @ialhusseini, source imagery from @digitalglobe (at Nice, France)
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Black Lives Matter in Baton Rouge, a dog surfs in Croatia, a hot air balloon glides over Australia, Serena Williams triumphs, a deadly truck attack in Nice, a new view of Jupiter, and much more.
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John Fowler - Scientist of the Day
Sir John Fowler, an English civil engineer, was born July 15, 1817.
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