firehose

Can a president really be that popular? The New Times, a Rwandan daily, reports that after a three-week countrywide consultation of “millions of Rwandans,” the country’s lawmakers found only 10 people who were against letting Paul Kagame run for a third term as president.

That figure may not be quite as ludicrous as it sounds. The consultation came after parliament received (or so it says) nearly 3.8 million signatures—in a country of 12 million people—on a petition calling for a constitutional amendment to abolish term limits. Kagame, who has been president since 2003 and (as vice-president and defense minister) was seen as the de facto leader for years before that, is widely credited with advancing economic and social progress in Rwanda, 21 years after the 1994 genocide in which 800,000 people were killed.

The World Bank reports that from 2001 to 2014, the country’s real GDP growth averaged 9% per year, and the poverty rate dropped from 59% in 2001 to 45% in 2011. There is near-universal primary school enrolment, and child mortality has fallen by over 60% since Kagame became president, having already fallen sharply after the end of the civil war.

Despite these achievements, there are also criticisms of press suppression (paywall) and concerns over human-rights violations under Kagame’s watch. A 2014/2015 Amnesty International Report mentions assassinations of political dissidents in Rwanda and in foreign countries, harassment and intimidation of human-rights groups, and arbitrary and unlawful arrests and detentions by the country’s military.

So while Kagame may enjoy genuine support among Rwandans, it would be surprising if at least some of it weren’t artificially manufactured. In testimony (pdf, p. 2) to the US Senate’s foreign affairs subcommittee in May this year, Sarah Margon, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, argued that with a 93% electoral majority, a weak independent civil society, and a constrained press, Kagame’s ruling party—the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)—controls dominates all aspects of political and public life in the country, leaving no space for meaningful opposition. There have been reports of people being pressured to sign the petition to abolish term limits, or of not knowing what they were signing.

Though he may have earned his popular acclaim honestly, Kagame now looks like falling prey to Africa’s “Big Man” syndrome of staying perpetually in power. If he had the country’s true interests at heart, he might devote himself to creating the conditions for a competent successor. But judging by his response to one person on Twitter who questioned Kagame’s long reign, that’s not where his intentions lie.

For years, the US pork industry has stood by the safety and efficacy of a controversial growth drug banned in nearly 200 countries. But now, thanks to Chinese regulations, the National Pork Board is quietly encouraging American pork producers to stop using it.

Ractopamine is a beta-agonist, a drug that changes animals’ metabolism so that they develop more muscle instead of fat. The result is a meat that is both leaner and, because muscle is heavier than fat, heavier. That translates into benefits for consumers looking to cut the fat in their diets, as well as producers, because hogs can get heavier on less food.

But ractopamine is far from a dream drug. “The drug has triggered more adverse reports in pigs than any other animal drug on the market,” Helena Bottemiller reported for the Food & Environment Reporting Network in 2012. Documented effects include “hyperactivity, trembling, broken limbs, inability to walk and death.” The FDA said the data didn’t establish cause and effect, and the National Pork Producers Council and National Pork Board have both said the drug is safe. But health and animal-welfare advocates have been sounding the alarm for years, noting that its impacts on human health are largely unknown and that the approval from Codex, the World Health Organization’s international food safety body, is based on a single study of six men, one of whom had to drop out because he experienced negative health effects.

The drug, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1999, is banned in many countries, including the EU, Russia, and China, the number one pork-consuming country in the world.

In addition to its massive demand, China is an excellent trading partner for American pork producers because Chinese consumers like the byproducts Americans don’t want, such as feet, neckbones, ears, and stomachs. In 2014, the US exported $775 million of pork to Hong Kong/China, according to National Pork Producers Council.

Not all US pork is raised with ractopamine, but even producers using the drug had been able to sell meat to China for years through its “gray market.” However, that backdoor effectively ended last year under current President Xi Jinping. “He shut off that,” National Pork Board CEO Chris Hodges told Quartz.

By that time, the US pork industry was already having trouble in China. A few months earlier, Russia had stopped importing pork from the EU, forcing producers there to find another market. They did: China.

Now, the American pork industry is trying to regain share by reducing the use of the growth drug. Though Hodges says the National Pork Board isn’t taking a position on ractopamine, it is encouraging producers to reevaluate whether it’s worth it to their operations financially.

“What the Pork Board’s been doing is informing pork producers of the opportunity,” Hodges told Quartz.

In a room with Illinois pork producers earlier this month, Hodges stopped just short of telling producers to stop using the drug entirely. “I ask you to do the math in terms of what does ractopamine mean to your operation, what is the cost and what is the increase in value to you from your packer and from the industry as a whole,” he told the Illinois producers, industry publication AgriNews reported.

It’s unclear if producers are heeding the call. Neither Elanco, which manufactures the branded version of ractopamine, nor Zoetis, which makes a generic version, would comment to Quartz on whether sales of the drug had slipped.

Not everyone is convinced that cutting out ractopamine would solve the problem. “Were we to be 100% ractopamine free tomorrow, could we ship as much as we want to China? Unlikely,” Brett Stuart of market analysis firm Global AgriTrends, which counts Elanco as a client, told Quartz. “Bottom line of the China situation is that it’s very complicated. It’s much more complicated than just ractopamine.”

There are certainly no guarantees that removing ractopamine would open China back up to all the pork American producers wants to sell it, but Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, may offer a glimpse at the opportunity. In 2013, just weeks after announcing that half of its pork would soon be ractopamine-free, it announced an impending takeover by China’s Shuanghui Group for $4.7 billion—making it the largest Chinese acquisition of an American company to date.

So synonymous is local beer writer Jeff Alworth with Portland beer that his long-running blog is named Beervana. For virtually two straight years he has turned his attention, and frequent flyer miles, to exploring the entire world of beer—yes, it exists beyond our tasty little bubble—for a tome of biblical proportions. Join him tonight at Belmont Station for the release of The Beer Bible (Workman Publishing).

This may be a cheap trick for a book that puts beer into words, but let’s start with some numbers to illustrate how voluminous those words are. Alworth traveled some 17,000 miles to research this book. (Be jealous, but also be reverential since that’s easier said than done.) He wrote over 600 pages' worth. And the book weighs 1.14 pounds. But here’s the most impressive number: one. The Beer Bible was written by one man. Put that in contrast to The Oxford Companion to Beer, which required 166 contributors (of which I was one) from 24 countries.

Delving so deeply into so many facets of the world’s second favorite beverage (after tea) in just two years seems unfathomable. Two years? It would take even the most dedicated beer lover to find himself or herself in half as many places over twice the timespan just to drink the beers, let alone write about their styles, ingredients, and appellations in this much depth.

As for the content itself, it is simultaneously geared toward newbies, mid-grade beer lovers, and high-octane geeks. It is both a jumping-off point and a refresher course, and contains beer travel insights that even the most globetrotting beer nerds will salivate over. Hundreds of beer styles and brands are dissected, spanning the globe and the ages.

And it does not require reading starting on the first page, since experiencing beer has always been like those Choose Your Own Adventure books. Why, just flipping to, say, page 479, readers learn about Anchor Steam beer from San Francisco, whereas a page earlier we’re learning about zoigl breweries—think the community garden of brewing—that are popular in a region of the Czech Republic called the Oberpfalz, dating back centuries.

(Sidenote: Alworth's other book, Cider Made Simple, comes out in a month.)

I’m sure Gideon was cool and all, but just imagine how awesome it’d be if travelers checking into hotels, or local Airbnbs, opened their nightstand drawers and found Alworth’s Beer Bible instead. (Another sidenote: Workman Publishing previously published The Wine Bible, which now has 550,000 copies in print.)

Tonight, August 11, the book, ridiculously fair in price at $20, can be purchased at Broadway Books and signed by the author at Belmont Station (4500 SE Stark) starting at 5 pm, with a speech and toast around 6 pm.

On Thursday, August 13, Alworth will be signing at the new Block 15 Taproom (3415 SW Deschutes) in Corvallis at 6:30-8:30 pm.

On Saturday, August 15, he’ll be at Ninkasi Brewing (272 Van Buren) in Eugene at noon-1:30 pm.

On Sunday, August 23, he’ll be at Double Mountain Brewery & Taproom (8 Fourth St) in Hood River during their Great Bottle Round Up Street Party.

And finally, on Monday, August 31 back closer to home, he’ll be at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing (3415 SW Cedar Hills) in Beaverton at 7 pm.

The cable channel has released new promo art for David Lynch and Mark Frost’s revival of the cult television series.

towritecomicsonherarms:

The Movement #1

When this issue came out, I got a ton of grief for showing police behaving this way. Seems almost quaint now, sadly.

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The Global Energy Balance Network— a research institute supported by Coca-Cola—is claiming that exercise, and not diet, is the best way to prevent weight gain. It’s a dubious and self-serving message that’s not going over well amongst diet and obesity experts.

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In 2010, a very skilled and balanced African grey parrot named Stanley took a very smooth ride all the way down the curved banister, much to the appreciation the dogs waiting below. According to Stanley’s human, Janice Jensen, the dogs were giving him “applause at the end”.

via Nothing To Do With Arbroath

Sure, they might not be coming back to TV until 2016, but this week X-Files’ 11th season kicks off in a new run of comics. But that’s not all there is to enjoy in the newest comics of the week: DC’s Bombshells make their physical debut, Sleepy Hollow’s Abbie and Ichabod return to comics, and much, much more!

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As part of her World 3.0 series, Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric will be releasing a a feature tomorrow entitled “Rise of the Female Superhero” that highlights some of the most exciting female voices working right now in the geek world.

In anticipation of that release, we’re proud to present an exclusive clip of Jennifer Lawrence, Hayley Atwell, and Melissa Benoist talking about what it’s like to kick butt and be an inspiration to underrepresented fans.

The full video will be live on Yahoo tomorrow (8/12), and in the meantime you can read more about it right here:

In this World 3.0 feature, Katie Couric covers the current popularity of female Superheroes. These heroines are now sharing the limelight with their male comic book counterparts in an industry that has for years been considered a “boys club.” From Wonder Woman to Supergirl to Captain Marvel to Agent Carter, we spoke with the top female creative talent in the comic book industry, female writers and artists who are finally getting their voices behind these characters, about how the superhero industry has moved from a misogynistic past to a place where almost half the fan base is female. From the heads of Marvel and DC Comics, to writers, artists, retailers and even some of the actresses playing these characters (such as Jennifer Lawrence, Melissa Benoist, Hayley Atwell) the piece hears from a wide variety of creative voices. Katie examines the changing landscape of these female superheroes, where they’ve been, where they are now, and where they are going.

UPDATE: You can now watch the clip in its entirety here.

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Earlier this year “The Stickman” showed off his amazing talents playing the Chapman Stick which led to him winning the Solo Instrumental video challenge on indi.com.

via reddit

Hillary Clinton has instructed her attorney to hand over her private email server and a thumb drive of all her work-related emails to the Justice Department in an effort to blunt an expanding probe into the use of a private email account.

dunkindonuts420:

me: *writes 1 line of code for my theme*

vieking:

skazka-fr:

vieking:

whaleshark dragon design!! they have coral horns and claws. look at that FACE

I vote these guys for the next breed.

not unless FR wants to pay me some damn good money

theartofanimation:

Burari     -     http://burari.deviantart.com

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

from Colossal.

Earth View is a giant collection of 1,500 curated images that represent the most striking images found through Google Earth. You can can click or swipe randomly through the far flung reaches of the planet as captured from satellites as captured from the world.

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John Harriman, one of the Oath Keepers, said the group was in the area to protect a reporter from the website Infowars.com. Videos posted to YouTube by the InfoWars site showed Oath Keepers and protesters discussing tax codes.


Chris King, editorial director of the St. Louis American, said the group’s presence highlights racial bias in “threat assessment.”

“You have law enforcement officers looking at these conservative middle-aged white men with assault rifles and not assessing them as a threat because they see [themselves] as like them,” King told CNN. “These same law enforcement officers consistently look at 15- to 25-year-old African-Americans with cell phones or bottles of fragrance and assume they’re carrying handguns when they’re actually carrying cell phones or bottles of fragrance.”

King added: “If we could get law enforcement to make those decisions the same for those two categories of people, we could get somewhere with this movement.”
(Permalink)

Four years to the day after FBI agents raided Portland offices as part of a public-corruption investigation, the parking-meter company tied to the scandal said it did nothing wrong.

Sweden-based Cale Group issued a public statement Monday saying an internal investigation found no evidence that company officials knew about or provided bribes to Portland's former parking manager, Ellis McCoy.

The company also said its investigation turned up no evidence that officials violated Portland contracting rules in 2006, though Cale does plan "corrective actions."

But Cale's chief executive officer, Anton Kaya, declined to publicly release the investigation. He also declined to answer questions about recently disclosed emails from 2005 and 2006 – the emails that led to the investigation and that prompted "grave concerns" among Portland officials about a new $11.9 million contract with Cale's U.S. subsidiary.

The upshot for Portland residents? It's not clear when or whether they'll ever learn specifics of the investigation, and installation of meters in Northwest Portland remains on hold.
(Permalink)

Here's yet another way cybercrime can pay -- at least for a while. Hackers allegedly broke into the computer networks of press release distribution companies such as PRNewswire, BusinessWire and Marketwired to access nonpublic information and use it to illegal advantage in their stock trading. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission complaint, the insider trading scheme allegedly netted more than $100 million in illicit profits and went on for five years.

"This international scheme is unprecedented in terms of the scope of the hacking, the number of traders, the number of securities traded and profits generated," said SEC Chair Mary Jo White in a statement.

The SEC said Ukraine-based hackers Ivan Turchynov and Oleksandr Ieremenko hacked into the computer network of the newswires, stealing information from more than 100,000 press releases, many of which discussed corporate earnings. Turchynov and Iremenko worked "in concert" with a network of traders located in the U.S., Russia, Ukraine and France who paid them either a flat fee or a percentage of their illegal profits.
(Permalink)

This stunning gallery on Blavity showcases eight up-and-coming visual artists influenced by Afrofuturism, science fiction that explores the experiences and culture of people of color. They’re amazingly diverse not just in their sci-fi visions, but the media they use to express them. Painting, comics, illustration, mixed-media collage, even masks—there are endless ways to bring the future to life.

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obviousplant:

Secret tip hidden in the Glendale Library

It's not that I'm surprised, but it's ugly nonetheless.

Newly obtained documents from Jason Leopold of VICE confirm what we already suspected: The Department of Homeland Security is not only fully monitoring the accounts of black activists and leaders, but has taken a cultural stance on who they are.

A lifelong educator and former Head of Human Capital for Minneapolis Public Schools, DeRay McKesson has poured his heart and soul out as a leading voice nationally on the the issues of police brutality and racial injustice. He's also my friend and we've come to know and respect each other a great deal over the past 12 months, most of which he was working full time in education while moonlighting as an advocate for victims across the country.

See the document below...