Russian Sledges

Karamba Diaby and Charles M Huber arrive in Bundestag in moment hailed as historic by equality campaigners

Germany's first MP of African descent said he was looking forward to the challenge of working in the Bundestag and that he would campaign for more equal opportunities in education.

In an interview at the German parliament Karamba Diaby, 51, of the Social Democratic party of Germany, said: "I myself am the product of equal opportunities and was given the chance to study as an orphan, and I want to make a difference for other people in this area too."

Diaby and Charles M Huber, of the Christian Democratic Union, are the first two black members of the Bundestag, a development hailed as a "historic moment" by equal opportunity campaigners. In addition, Angela Merkel's party will also include a Muslim MP for the first time.

Born in Senegal, Diaby moved to East Germany in 1985 and went on to become a chemist. He will represent the town of Halle in the former east. Huber, a TV actor born in Munich whose father is Senegalese, will represent the southern city of Darmstadt.

Cemile Giousouf, 35, whose parents were part of the Turkish minority in Greece and moved to Leverkusen 40 years ago, will represent Hagen in North-Rhine Westphalia. There have been Muslim politicians in Germany's parliament since 1994, but Giousouf will be the first representative for the Christian Democrats.

The number of MPs with an immigrant background has risen from 21 to 34, with the leftwing Die Linke having the highest percentage of multicultural politicians in their ranks followed by the Green party.

Mekonnen Mesghena, a migration policy expert for the Böll Foundation, described the arrival of black Germans in the Bundestag as landmark moment: "Germany has a colonial history that stretches back to the 19th century, yet until now black Germans have had no political representation."

A detailed breakdown of the ethnic background of German citizens has only been published since 2005, but there are estimated to be about 500,000 people of recent African descent and between 3.8 million and 4.3 million Muslims living in Germany.

One of the policy areas that Diaby, Huber and Giousouf will be expected to debate in parliament is the introduction of dual citizenship, which has been advocated by the SPD and the Greens. At the moment, German citizens born to non-German nationals have to chose one citizenship before they turn 23.

Yesterday we were tipped off to this Groupon deal, which ends in a couple days due to a "limited quantity available." The deal offers an "$18 Admission for One to The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Up to $25 Value)." Of course, the museum's admission fee is actually just "recommended," something they have been hiding in fine print for so long that it's put them at the center of two lawsuits, which claim that the venerable institution is defrauding visitors. They even sell tickets online. [ more › ]

In addition to snaring dinner and protecting spider babies, spider silk makes a pretty good shield for bioreactive enzymes. Even when it's not made by the spiders themselves. Turns out, self-assembling spider silk capsules, crafted by colonies of bacteria, are pretty good at keeping reactive molecules calm. "We called this 'Spiderbag'," said Thomas Scheibel, a protein-chemist-turned-engineer, ...

Thesoro delos. pobres en medicína & cirurgia. en romance, 1519.

Typ 560.19.467

Houghton Library, Harvard University

Central Falls, Rhode Island went bankrupt in 2011 after promising overly generous pensions to city employees. The city pulled itself out of bankruptcy last year and must now stick to a penny-pinching plan with no room for error or for luxuries like trash cans and public art. As a result, the impoverished city is getting creative: it's now raising $10,044 on the civic crowdfunding platform Citizinvestor in order to clean up its main public park. It's raised $245 so far.

Citizinvestor launched in September of 2012 to allow citizens to make tax-deductible donations to their cities and propose their own ideas. The site charges a 5 percent fee in addition to a 3 percent payment processing fee. Like Kickstarter, backers will not be charged...

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The Russian president has his fans here—who see him as the very epitome of macho manliness.

the-fisher-queen:

ileolai:

#FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

(sigh)

necro81 writes "Hyperlinks are not forever. Link rot occurs when a source you've linked to no longer exists — or worse, exists in a different state than when the link was originally made. Even permalinks aren't necessarily permanent if a domain goes silent or switches ownership. According to new research from Harvard Law, some 49% of hyperlinks in Supreme Court documents no longer point to the correct original content. A second study on link rot from Yale stresses that for the Court footnotes, citations, parenthetical asides, and historical context mean as much as the text of an opinion itself, which makes link rot a threat to future scholarship."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A veteran theology professor at a California Christian college has been asked to leave his teaching post after coming out as transgender in a sermon.

Heath Adam Ackley (who, before coming out as transgender, went by the name Heather Clements) told Religion News Service that, after teaching at Azusa Pacific University for 15 years, other faculty will be taking over his classes. Ackley is in his third year of a five-year contract.

“I did not get a sense directly from the individuals with whom I was speaking that they had a theological problem with transgender identity,” Ackley told RNS. “I did get the message that it has to do with their concern that other people, such as donors, parents and churches connected to the university will have problems not understanding transgender identity.”

While the terms of Ackley's departure remain unclear (Ackley intends to meet with a lawyer on Monday, he told RNS), Ackley acknowledged how he was encouraged for years by many in his Christian community to deny his transgender identity.

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Firstpost

NYPD probes possible bias attack on Columbia professor CBS News NEW YORK Police are investigating an attack on a pedestrian in upper Manhattan by a group of young men who made anti-Muslim statements. Prabhjot Singh, a professor at Columbia University who is Sikh, tells the New York Daily News he suffered a ... Police Investigating Harlem Assault as a Hate CrimeWall Street Journal Professor Attacked By Mob in NYC; Men Yelled Anti-Muslim Remarks While ...Headlines & Global News Police: NYC mob attacks Sikh professor, thinking he's MuslimTucson Citizen IBNLive all 90 news articles »

Yesterday we showed you Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen exploring the Big Apple. Now they're joined by Leonard Nimoy. Coney Island has been blessed. (Twitter)

Philip Spaelti wrote:

I was struck today by a *plural* s in a headline in Slate: "A tale of two Flint, Michigans"

I agree that "Flints, Michigan" sounds strange (stranger?), but it's still striking. One might argue that Flint, Michigan is a single name, but I'm wondering about the prosodic shape of the phrase. I feel that I pronounce this as two phrases.

But "two Flint, Michigans" is obviously correct, as Philip notes, even though this intuition does seem a bit bizarre at first. Presumably this is the same as other appositive nominal constructions ("two Conan the Barbarians", "three peach melbas", "four Cafe Carolinas", "five Macbook Pros"), though not other sorts of post-modification ("six hens in aspic", "seven attorneys general", "eight swans a-swimming"). See here and here for some further discussion.

Anyhow, there's other noteworthy aspect of this headline, namely the "Tale of Two Xs" template. This was presumably elevated to cliché status by Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, and now if you search the NYT index for "a tale of two", you get 4,810 results, of the which the first few pages yield (mostly headlines) discussing "A tale of two__"

artists, brothers, cab drivers, cafes, coaches, companies, congressmen, countries, delis, detectives, drop-kickers, drug problems, eras, golfers, families, federal sentences, fish, fishermen, horses, houses, Irelands, locker rooms, low-budget houses, Martha's Vinyards, moralities, novels, operas, playwrights, power plants, prices, pylons, tells, travelers, trials, turkeys, schools, shores, sisters, views, villages, volcanoes, …

In fairness, many of those 4,810 hits are actually the original "Tale of Two Cities". But searching Google News for {"a tales of two" -cities} yields a claim of 23,600 results. The first few pages include tales of two __

Aarons, abortion expansions, Avrahams, bank of Japan governors, black hairstyles, boardwalks, bond deals, California shrines, campuses, Charlies, Chicagos, Chiles, cloud migrations, concentration camps, conferences, cultures, dynasties, eateries, economies, eras, expensive central defenders, file sharers, first downs, food bank vouchers, football teams, governors, halves, hitters, indexes,  lives, naughty boys, neighborhoods, nines, office cultures, online business models, PV test labs, revolutions, sites, sons, speeches, statements, studies, subway-style mediterranean joints in Tempe, teachers, trials, turnovers, tweeters, very different banks, worlds, zip codes, …

And in looking for early examples closer to the "Flint, Michigans" case, I was reminded of the old journalistic practice of referring to sports teams with a plural form of the city or state of their origin, e.g.

Or again:

This practice involved not only to referring to the White Sox as "the Chicagos", or the Orioles as "the Baltimores", but also to the University of Michigan's football team as "the Michigans", or Penn's crew squad as "the Pennsylvanias". An analogous practice applied to non-geographical university names, so that teams from Harvard were "the Harvards", and those from Notre Dame were "the Notre Dames".

For some reason, this use of plural city, state, or institution names seems to have died out in the late 19th century, replaced by collective singulars ("Chicago shut out New York") or by plural forms of team (nick-) names ("the Yankees", "the Orioles").

Update — The old city-name plural surfaces occasionally, as in this recent story: Matt Wilstein, "Did ESPN Announcer ‘Inadvertently’ Call D.C. Redskins ‘The Washingtons’?",  Mediaite 9/17/2013.

 

From Sweets

[Photograph: Quentin Bacon]

Coffee at the end of a meal signifies an end and a beginning; the plates have been cleared, but the company has stayed, and conversation will flow long into the night. Balaboosta: Bold Mediterranean Recipes To Feed The People You Love turns this tradition into something tangible with Turkish coffee brownies. Mixing cardamom, espresso powder, and dark chocolate is powerful magic that can sustain any party.

Tips & Tweaks: If you've never whisked straight sugar and egg yolks, do this step by hand to get a good look at the process. The yolks will go from marigold to daffodil to baby chick—that's where you stop, and whisk in the rest of the ingredients.

As always with our Bake the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Balaboosta to give away.

Get the Recipe!

LaPierre on #MTP: "The outrage outta be placed on an unprotected Naval Base."

— Sarah Boxer (@Sarah_Boxer) September 22, 2013

Obviously a military installation isn't inherently secure just because it's brimming with guns and heavier armaments. But it is kind of telling when we've gotten to the point that the NRA is claiming the country's military bases are part of the gun-phobic girly-man culture that is supposedly responsible for all our other mass shootings.

The death of a Duquesne University adjunct professor sparked sharp anger over the treatment of part-time faculty.

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Two are dead, and two wounded in two separate shooting Saturday.

Digging deeper than many reflections on the recent film about Hannah Arendt and her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Fr. Robert Barron reminds us of Arendt’s debt to St. Augustine:

The young Hannah Arendt had written her doctoral dissertation under the great German philosopher Karl Jaspers, and the topic of her work was the concept of love in the writings of Saint Augustine. One of the most significant intellectual breakthroughs of Augustine’s life was the insight that evil is not something substantial, but rather a type of non-being, a lack of some perfection that ought to be present. Thus, a cancer is evil in the measure that it compromises the proper functioning of a bodily organ, and a sin is evil in the measure that it represents a distortion or twisting of a rightly functioning will. Accordingly, evil does not stand over and against the good as a kind of co-equal metaphysical force, as the Manichees would have it. Rather, it is invariably parasitic upon the good, existing only as a sort of shadow.

J.R.R. Tolkien gave visual expression to this Augustinian notion in his portrayal of the Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings. Those terrible and terrifying threats, flying through the air on fearsome beasts, are revealed, once their capes and hoods are pulled away, to be precisely nothing, emptiness. And this is exactly why, to return to Arendt’s description, evil can never be radical. It can never sink down into the roots of being; it can never stand on its own; it has no integrity, no real depth or substance. To be sure, it can be extreme and it can, as Arendt’s image suggests, spread far and wide, doing enormous damage. But it can never truly be.

Recent Dish on Arendt here, here, and here.

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — Before its public push to have Maine reconsider wind energy proposals, Gov. Paul LePage's administration worked behind the scenes to explicitly derail Norwegian company Statoil's multimillion-dollar agreement with the state for an offshore wind project, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

fungipunk:

Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca or the False Chanterelle. Often mistaken for a true Chanterelle, especially as they get older and begin to dry out and fade to pale orange/yellow. Fortunately, this mushroom isn’t poisonous but neither is it tasty, unlike its much sought after delicious doppleganger.
The False Chanterelle is a beautiful mushroom in its own right, with fantastic gills. The gills remind me of a firework explosion or an old fashioned church organ. Sometimes, I feel fungi fanciers, in their haste to fill their baskets, often dismiss non edible species as a distraction. If you enjoy photography, nature provides wonderful models in the bizarre world of mycology.

hodad

#drinks

Original Source

1. Feather Exploding Into Tiny Birds

Louisiana State Rep. Jeff Thompson (R) is urging conservatives to boycott Starbucks and instead go to coffee shops that have "gun friendly" owners.

Thompson's call, made Friday on the Defend Louisiana website, is in response to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz asking customers to not "bring fire arms" into Starbucks coffee shops. Defend Louisiana is a campaign Thompson founded in opposition to new gun laws.

"The home of the most expensive cup of coffee is apparently now the home of one of the most dangerous as well," Thompson said in the statement.

Thompson plans to host "Guns & Coffee" events in the next few weeks where he will buy supporters a cup of coffee and discuss the current debate over gun laws.

"I hope residents in Bossier and across Louisiana come out for a free cup of coffee," Thompson continued in the statement. "You won’t find me in Starbucks… not when I know they openly try to make villains out of law abiding citizens who own guns. I choose to support small business owners who share a love of our Louisiana heritage, the great outdoors and join in my efforts to defend our right to protect our families."

"Not only will I buy you a cup of coffee,” Thompson added. “You will also have the opportunity to register for a giveaway of a limited edition, engraved 200 years of Louisiana statehood commemorative 12 gauge Browning shotgun."

By Joshua Keating Slate WASHINGTON — Pope Francis may have made headlines Thursday with surprisingly open-minded comments about homosexuality, but another world leader has gone in the opposite direction. Here’s what Vladimir Putin had to say today about his friend Silvio Berlusconi, who is currently appealing a conviction for having sex with an underage prostitute, as reported by Agence France Presse Thursday: “Berlusconi is on trial for living with women, but if he were a homosexual, nobody ...

Gay Star News reports that Vitaly Milonov, the author of Russia's "homosexual propaganda" ban, yesterday crashed an LGBT film festival in St. Petersburg.

The homophobic United Russia city parliament deputy Vitaly Milonov reportedly arrived with an entourage of five to six people calling guests 'animals, 'un-Russian' and 'faggots', according to QueerFest organizers. The Russian lawmaker, who co-sponsored the 'non-traditional relationships' law, previously said a gay activist must die for his 'extremism'. According to organizers, Milonov and his group also shoved around two guests, slapping them in the face. After Milonov and his group started attacking guests, police reportedly arrived shortly after, harassing venue owners to show ownership papers.

Queer Fest reports that the police left after "finding no cause for action and everything in order."  Organizers acknowledge that merely holding their event puts them at risk of fines and arrests. Theirs is the first LGBT event to test Russia's new law.

Jam, due to density, needs to be spread prior to clotted cream

Claiming that she never signed a release, a Brooklyn woman has filed suit against the stock photography company Getty Images after she appeared in an HIV awareness campaign published by the state of New York. The woman's lawyer says that the state will also be sued.

Avril Nolan, 25, a Greenpoint resident who does not have HIV, alleged through her lawyer Wednesday that Getty Images, a photo agency, sold a photograph of her to the New York State Division of Human Rights without her approval. The state agency then took out an ad in the April 3 edition of amNew York that featured the photo of Nolan standing in front of a graffiti-covered storefront, along with the messages: “I am positive (+)” and “I have rights.” Nolan, who is originally from Ireland and works in public relations, charges that the ad forced her to have awkward conversations with her employer, friends and “potential romantic partners,” according to her suit against Getty, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. It seeks $450,000 in damages. “She was mortified,” said Nolan’s lawyer, Erin Lloyd. “It has caused a lot of anxiety.” Getty did not respond to a request for comment. Lloyd said she will pursue claims against the Division of Human Rights for defamation and violation of Nolan’s civil rights.

The photographer claims to have misunderstood the contract with Getty Images.

The organizers of the Man Booker prize announced this week that Americans will be eligible to win the prize starting next year. M.A. Orthofer applauds the Booker’s inclusiveness, but Radhika Jones protests:

[U]ltimately, the American inclusion would mean that the Man Booker is voluntarily ending its status as an arbiter of English literature—a canon with a longer and decidedly different cultural and political history than American lit, which the Booker itself played a role in transforming. Considering how quickly the Booker earned that arbiter status, it seems to me a pity to give up the prospect of continuing it.

Tim Parks is also opposed:

[T]he Man Booker Prize is simply following a trend which tends to weaken ties between writers and their national communities. … [Considering American novels] would reinforce the illusion that Britain and the US share a common culture. Above all it would contribute to a growing feeling that the author is an international entertainer rather than an artist involved in a home community with a literary tradition. In fact the rise of the international award goes hand in hand with the decline of the novel as a serious influence in national debate, or a medium where the native language might be mined and renewed. To top it all, the Americans, basking in a global power that confers cultural self-sufficiency, would be underwhelmed. No American author will prefer the Booker to the Pulitzer.

Leo Robson finds the hand-wringing unncessary:

Certainly the prospect, for a British writer, of a whole new category of competition, whatever the nationality, will not be welcome. But to imagine that Booker juries will be engulfed by a wave of American genius is to exhibit an odd inversion of Cultural Cringe, whereby the former empire becomes falsely convinced that, compared with those of a successful former colony, its own achievements are piffling, irrelevant, and drab.

Robert McCrum approves of the decision and puts it in context:

[I]n the evolution of English-language culture in the contemporary world, this is a small but significant milestone, a recognition that you cannot lay claim to being “most important literary award in the English-speaking world” and exclude the American literary tradition. …

Here’s the bottom line. Booker is a longstanding literary trophy. But no amount of longevity can disguise its essential character: it’s a lottery; a sweepstake. It has only a coincidental and fortuitous relationship with literary excellence. As Julian Barnes put it (in a phrase that’s almost obligatory to quote in these discussions), Booker and the other prizes are simply “posh bingo”.

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