Scene for ‘Trading Paint’ movie starring John Travolta, Shania Twain to be shot in Hoover Friday – Hoover Sun

Producers of the Trading Paint movie that stars John Travolta, Shania Twain and Tony Sebastian are scheduled to film a scene for the movie at a Hoover restaurant Friday, the owner of the restaurant said.

Nick Manakides, owner of the Golden Rule Bar-B-Q at 1571 Montgomery Highway, said the film crew for the movie is supposed to arrive about 7:30 or 8 a.m., followed by extras at 9:30 a.m. and actors at 10 a.m.

Theyre filming a scene in which a restaurant manager inappropriately touches the wife of a dirt track race car driver played by Sebastian, sparking a conflict, Manakides said.

Theres no word on what all cast members will be present for this scene, but about 80 cast and crew members are expected to be involved in filming the scene, Manakides said. About 16 of his employees are scheduled to be extras, he said.

He originally had hoped to play the restaurant manager until he learned what the scene was about and was told they needed someone with a different physique for the part, he said.

Manakides said theres only about two minutes of screen time scheduled for the shot and hes not sure how long filming will take.

He wasnt sure why they chose his restaurant, but the director of the movie, Karzan Kader, had been coming to eat there frequently for several weeks with the director of cinematography before they inquired about filming there.

Manakides said he thinks they didnt want a restaurant that looked too modern, and his restaurant looks exactly like it did when he opened in 1974. Another restaurant in Hueytown was considered, but his Golden Rule Bar-B-Q was smaller and more intimate than the restaurant in Hueytown, he said.

Manakides said the producers of the Woodlawn movie were supposed to shoot a scene at his restaurant when that movie was made but ended up going somewhere else because he was going to charge them a fee for shutting his restaurant down. This time, he decided to let the producers of Trading Paint have time at his restaurant for free, he said. Were doing it for the fun of it, he said.

The Trading Paint movie tells the story of how a veteran race car driver (Travolta) and his son, a fellow driver, (Sebastian), overcome family and professional conflicts and balance competition, ego, resentment and a racing nemesis to come out stronger on the other side, according to the International Movie Database website.

Much of the movie reportedly is being shot in the Birmingham area, particularly the Bessemer/Hueytown area, between mid-August and mid-September. The film is due out in theaters in June 2018, according to IMDB.

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Scene for 'Trading Paint' movie starring John Travolta, Shania Twain to be shot in Hoover Friday - Hoover Sun

Golden Rule recommended by Communities of Faith – Victoria Advocate

Golden Rule recommended by Communities of Faith
Victoria Advocate
Most of us know the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The words may vary, but every major religion, culture and even those who identify as not being religious have a bottom line for how people are to treat one another.

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Golden Rule recommended by Communities of Faith - Victoria Advocate

Golden Rule Peace Boat moors in Monterey on voyage against nuclear weapons – Monterey County Herald

Monterey >> As a new crew member of the Golden Rule Peace Boat and its educational crusade against nuclear weapons, Col. Ann Wright spent her first day aboard sailing out of Monterey Bay amidst a bevy of whales and dolphins.

Twenty miles south of Monterey, the retired United States Army Colonel and State Department official spotted a humpback whale 100 yards off the port side that was 60 feet long and breaching.

Wright, 71, joined fellow shipmate Helen Jaccard, who had begun the journey in the Pacific Northwest, and two other crewmates, Bullitt D. Bourbon and Wil Van Natta and spent the last three days in the Monterey Bay reaching out to anyone interested in the historic boat and its mission to preach the dangers of nuclear weapons and war.

The Golden Rule, a 30-foot ketch, was the first environmental action and peace vessel put to sea. In 1958, with a crew of four Quaker activists, it sailed from Los Angeles in an attempt to halt atmospheric nuclear weapon testing in the Western Pacific. While the boat never made it to its destination, with the crew members arrested in Hawaii, the voyage did ignite an international movement to stop the testing because of their determination to sail into a nuclear bomb test zone in the Marshall Islands.

In 2015, the historic boat was restored by the Veterans For Peace for a 10-year peace-making voyage across North America with the mission to promote a nuclear free world.

Im a great supporter of just a heroic effort to preserve a remarkable ship, said Wright.

Besides her outspoken views about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Wright was one of three State Department officials to publicly resign in direct protest of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Theres the fear by us that some of our governments may use them for the destruction of the world, said Wright, noting the current frenzy surrounding nuclear weapons. So its a very opportune time for this boat to be on this educational voyage to alert people to their horrific danger.

Wright, who spent 29 years in the military and has been to North Korea on her own peace-making mission, noted the 122 countries that less than two months ago voted as part of a global treaty that nuclear weapons should be banned from the face of the earth. Participants did not include any of the worlds nine nuclear powers, including the United States.

For Wright, who also spoke at a gathering Monday night with about 30 people at the Monterey Peace and Justice Center, the sea life sightings on Tuesday were a bonus to what she described as a positive experience in Monterey. She currently lives in Hawaii.

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Monterey was a very generous port where the harbormaster encourages education boats to come in and we had a lot of visitors including international visitors, said Wright, noting the educational tours that were given on the Golden Rule.

We have to be concerned about the future of our world these nuclear weapons in particular still pose such a danger to us, said Wright. When nuclear nations decide theyre going to use them, theyre not just going to use one, but hundreds that will affect agriculture, food production, the atmosphere ...

Now, the boat is headed to Morro Bay and then Santa Barbara, Ventura, Long Beach and San Diego, where it is ending its current trip. The ship will stop at ports along the way.

Following the journey down to Southern California, Wright said the vessels next trip will be next year when it travels through the inland waterway of the Gulf Coast and then up the East Coast. Then the ship will likely travel through the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi.

Eventually, Wright said the crew plans to sail the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii and then up to the Marshall Islands where the United States tested nuclear weapons from 1946 to 1958 and where the Golden Rule attempted to sail in 1958.

Wright said the inhabitants there are still feeling the effects from those tests. She hopes the boats current mission can help prevent any future catastrophe.

It is something we need to acknowledge and face that these things are going to be the end of our earth and we as citizens have a responsibility to really hold our government accountable, said Wright. Theres a wonderful future for the Golden Rule as far as educating people about the danger of nuclear weapons.

Carly Mayberry can be reached at 831-726-4363.

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Golden Rule Peace Boat moors in Monterey on voyage against nuclear weapons - Monterey County Herald

Text to speech | Multilingual | Natural voices | Talkify

Listen to article The super-connector airlines face a world of troubles

WHEN a video of a passenger being dragged off a United Airlines flight went viral last month, the American carriers Middle Eastern rivals were quick to mock its customer service. Qatar Airways updated its smartphone app to say it doesnt support drag and drop. The ribbing was justified. Over a decade of expansion, Qatar Airways, along with Emirates of Dubai, the worlds largest airline by international passenger miles travelled, and Etihad Airways of Abu Dhabi, wowed customers with superior service and better-value fares.Passengers joined them in droves, abandoning hub airports in America and Europe as well as the airlines that use them.

Crew members and the father had a disagreement over where to store a birthday cake.

The Derek Jeter interview: How he became No. 2

A look behind some of the words that are making an impact in the general election campaign this week.

Government must unveil revised plans on 9 May and cannot wait until after the general election as it wanted to

More than 200 jail officers in Cook County, Ill. called out sick Sunday, forcing the facility to be placed on lockdown, officials said.

Classroom collaboration software exists, but Epigrammar thinks its approach better tackles the issue of student grammar, test creation and comprehension. Teachers can help facilitate student conversations on an assigned text by uploading it to Epigrammar, then helping their students review and annotate the work, in real time. Read More

Opposition to the Dakota Access oil pipeline has persuaded some banks to stop supporting projects that might harm the environment or tread on indigenous rights, but calling the divest movement a success might be a stretch

The biggest cyberattack the world has ever seen is still claiming victims and threatens to create even more havoc on Monday when people return to work.

W. Kamau Bell explores the causes behind poverty, unemployment and crime among the country's indigenous people. "United Shades of America" airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

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Leo Igwe – The Maravi Post

Leo Igwe

Leo Igwe (born July 26, 1970) is a Nigerian human rights advocate and humanist. Igwe is a former Western and Southern African representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and has specialized in campaigning against and documenting the impacts of child witchcraft accusations. He holds a Ph.D from the Bayreuth International School of African Studies at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, having earned a graduate degree in Philosophy from the University of Calabar in Nigeria. Igwe's human rights advocacy has brought him into conflict with high-profile witchcraft believers, such as Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries, because of his criticism of what he describes as their role in the violence and child abandonment that sometimes result from accusations of witchcraft. His human rights fieldwork has led to his arrest on several occasions in Nigeria. Igwe has held leadership roles in the Nigerian Humanist Movement, Atheist Alliance International, and the Center For InquiryNigeria. In 2012, Igwe was appointed as a Research Fellow of the James Randi Educational Foundation, where he continues working toward the goal of responding to what he sees as the deleterious effects of superstition, advancing skepticism throughout Africa and around the world. In 2014, Igwe was chosen as a laureate of the International Academy of Humanism and in 2017 received the Distinguished Services to Humanism Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Igwe was raised in southeastern Nigeria, and describes his household as being strictly Catholic in the midst of a "highly superstitious community," according to an interview in the Gold Coast Bulletin.[1] At age twelve, Igwe entered the seminary, beginning to study for the Catholic priesthood, but later was confused by conflicting beliefs between Christian theology and the beliefs in witches and wizards that are "entrenched in Nigerian society."[1] After a period of research and internal conflict due to doubts about the "odd blend of tribalism and fundamentalist Christianity he believes is stunting African development," a 24-year-old Igwe resigned from the seminary and relocated to Ibadan, Nigeria

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Leo Igwe - The Maravi Post

Human Genetics Alert – The Threat of Human Genetic Engineering

David King

The main debate around human genetics currently centres on the ethics of genetic testing, and possibilities for genetic discrimination and selective eugenics. But while ethicists and the media constantly re-hash these issues, a small group of scientists and publicists are working towards an even more frightening prospect: the intentional genetic engineering of human beings. Just as Ian Wilmut presented us with the first clone of an adult mammal, Dolly, as a fait accompli, so these scientists aim to set in place the tools of a new techno-eugenics, before the public has ever had a chance to decide whether this is the direction we want to go in. The publicists, meanwhile are trying to convince us that these developments are inevitable. The Campaign Against Human Genetic Engineering, has been set up in response to this threat.

Currently, genetic engineering is only applied to non-reproductive cells (this is known as 'gene therapy') in order to treat diseases in a single patient, rather than in all their descendants. Gene therapy is still very unsuccessful, and we are often told that the prospect of reproductive genetic engineering is remote. In fact, the basic technologies for human genetic engineering (HGE) have been available for some time and at present are being refined and improved in a number of ways. We should not make the same mistake that was made with cloning, and assume that the issue is one for the far future.

In the first instance, the likely justifications of HGE will be medical. One major step towards reproductive genetic engineering is the proposal by US gene therapy pioneer, French Anderson, to begin doing gene therapy on foetuses, to treat certain genetic diseases. Although not directly targeted at reproductive cells, Anderson's proposed technique poses a relatively high risk that genes will be 'inadvertently' altered in the reproductive cells of the foetus, as well as in the blood cells which he wants to fix. Thus, if he is allowed to go ahead, the descendants of the foetus will be genetically engineered in every cell of their body. Another scientist, James Grifo of New York University is transferring cell nuclei from the eggs of older to younger women, using similar techniques to those used in cloning. He aims to overcome certain fertility problems, but the result would be babies with three genetic parents, arguably a form of HGE. In addition to the two normal parents, these babies will have mitochondria (gene-containing subcellular bodies which control energy production in cells) from the younger woman.

Anderson is a declared advocate of HGE for medical purposes, and was a speaker at a symposium last year at UCLA, at which advocates of HGE set out their stall. At the symposium, which was attended by nearly 1,000 people, James Watson, of DNA discovery fame, advocated the use of HGE not merely for medical purposes, but for 'enhancement': 'And the other thing, because no one really has the guts to say it, I mean, if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we do it?'

In his recent book, Re-Making Eden (1998), Princeton biologist, Lee Silver celebrates the coming future of human 'enhancement', in which the health, appearance, personality, cognitive ability, sensory capacity, and life-span of our children all become artifacts of genetic engineering, literally selected from a catalog. Silver acknowledges that the costs of these technologies will limit their full use to only a small 'elite', so that over time society will segregate into the "GenRich" and the "Naturals":

"The GenRich - who account for 10 percent of the American population - all carry synthetic genes... that were created in the laboratory ...All aspects of the economy, the media, the entertainment industry, and the knowledge industry are controlled by members of the GenRich class...Naturals work as low-paid service providers or as labourers, and their children go to public schools... If the accumulation of genetic knowledge and advances in genetic enhancement technology continue ... the GenRich class and the Natural class will become...entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee."

Silver, another speaker at the UCLA symposium, believes that these trends should not and cannot be stopped, because to do so would infringe on liberty.

Most scientists say that what is preventing them from embarking on HGE is the risk that the process will itself generate new mutations, which will be passed on to future generations. Official scientific and ethical bodies tend to rely on this as the basis for forbidding attempts at HGE, rather than any principled opposition to the idea.

In my view, we should not allow ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by this argument. Experience with genetically engineered crops, for example, shows that we are unlikely ever to arrive at a situation when we can be sure that the risks are zero. Instead, when scientists are ready to proceed, we will be told that the risks are 'acceptable', compared to the benefits. Meanwhile, there will be people telling us loudly that since they are taking the risks with their children, we have no right to interfere.

One of the flaws in the argument of those who support the possibility of HGE for medical purposes is that there seem to be very few good examples where it is the only solution to the medical problem of genetic disease. The main advantage of HGE is said to be the elimination of disease genes from a family. Yet in nearly all cases, existing technologies of prenatal and preimplantation genetic testing of embryos allow the avoidance of actual disease. There are only a few very rare cases where HGE is the only option.

Furthermore, there is always another solution for those couples who are certain to produce a genetically disabled child and cannot, or do not want to deal with this possibility. They can choose not to have children, to adopt a child, or to use donor eggs or sperm. Parenthood is not the only way to create fulfilment through close, intimate and long lasting relationships with children. The question we have to ask is whether we should develop the technology for HGE, in order to satisfy a very small number of people.

Although the arguments for the first uses of HGE will be medical, in fact the main market for the technology will be 'enhancement'. Once it was available, how would it be possible to ensure that HGE was used for purely medical purposes? The same problem applies to prenatal genetic screening and to somatic gene therapy, and not only are there no accepted criteria for deciding what constitutes a medical condition, but in a free market society there seems to be no convincing mechanism for arriving at such decision. The best answer that conventional medical ethics seems to have is to `leave it up to the parents', ie. to market forces.

Existing trends leave little doubt about what to expect. Sophisticated medical technology and medical personnel are already employed in increasingly fashionable cosmetic surgery. Another example is the use of genetically engineered human growth hormone (HGH), developed to remedy the medical condition of growth hormone deficiency. Because of aggressive marketing by its manufacturers, HGH is routinely prescribed in the USA to normal short children with no hormone deficiency. If these pressures already exist, how much stronger will they be for a technology with as great a power to manipulate human life as HGE?

Germ line manipulation opens up, for the first time in human history, the possibility of consciously designing human beings, in a myriad of different ways. I am not generally happy about using the concept of playing God, but it is difficult to avoid in this case. The advocates of genetic engineering point out that humans constantly 'play God', in a sense, by interfering with nature. Yet the environmental crisis has forced us to realise that many of the ways we already do this are not wise, destroy the environment and cannot be sustained. Furthermore, HGE is not just a continuation of existing trends. Once we begin to consciously design ourselves, we will have entered a completely new era of human history, in which human subjects, rather than being accepted as they are will become just another kind of object, shaped according to parental whims and market forces.

In essence, the vision of the advocates of HGE is a sanitised version of the old eugenics doctrines, updated for the 1990s. Instead of 'elimination of the unfit', HGE is presented as a tool to end, once and for all, the suffering associated with genetic diseases. And in place of 'improving the race', the 1990s emphasis is on freedom of choice, where 'reproductive rights' become consumer rights to choose the characteristics of your child. No doubt the resulting eugenic society would be a little less brutal than those of earlier this century. On the other hand the capabilities of geneticists are much greater now than they were then. Unrestrained, HGE is perfectly capable of producing Lee Silver's dystopia.

In most cases, the public's function with respect to science is to consume its products, or to pay to clean up the mess. But with HGE, there is still time to prevent it, before it becomes reality. We need an international ban on HGE and cloning. There is a good chance this can be achieved, since both are already illegal in many countries. Of course it may be impossible to prevent a scientist, somewhere, from attempting to clone or genetically engineer humans. But there is a great difference between a society which would jail such a scientist and one which would permit HGE to become widespread and respectable. If we fail to act now, we will only have ourselves to blame.

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Human Genetics Alert - The Threat of Human Genetic Engineering

On Monuments and Minimum Wages – The American Prospect – The American Prospect

The statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va.

At 9 p.m. last Tuesday night, city workers began to enclose in plywood the Confederate monument that sits in Birminghams Linn Park. By the following afternoon, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall had announced that he was suing the city for violating state law.

Activists in Birmingham first began calling for the removal of the 52-foot Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument in 2015, after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina, church. That, in turn, prompted Gerald Allen, a state senator from Tuscaloosa, to introduce the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act to prohibit cities from removing or altering historic monuments more than 40 years old without the approval of a state committee. The predominantly (if not entirely) white Republicans who control the legislature passed the bill along party lines. Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed it into law in May.

Birmingham Mayor William Bell ordered the monument to be covered amid a renewed and urgent call from activists and officials to remove such tributes to the Confederacy, after white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, rallied around a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and proceeded to attack counter-protesters, killing one woman. Several citiesfrom Baltimore to San Antoniohave since taken down Confederate monuments while others debate similar actions.

Mayor Bell, who is black, says he doesnt necessarily want to remove the statuedespite demands from local activistsbut he does think it should provide a broader context that condemns the Confederacy, rather than celebrates it. The Confederacy was an act of sedition and treason against the United States of America and represented the continuation of human bondage of people of color, Bell told the Prospect in an interview. Its anathema to anyone supportive of the United States government to have such a structure sitting on public property.

Furthermore, he points out, Birmingham didnt become a city until 1871, during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. And the monument wasnt erected until 190550 years after the war endedwhen a local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy commissioned the memorial as a gift to the city.

Its my desire to no longer allow this statute to be seen by public until such time that we can tell the full story of slavery, the full story of what the Confederacy really meant, Bell told reporters last week. Now, Bell says, the city is exploring its legal options in light of the states lawsuit. The state attorney general is asking a district court to fine the city $25,000.

I don't believe that the legislative body has the authority to dictate what monuments or statues we have on public property. Thats a right that the municipal government should control, Bell says. This was built with private dollars and is now protected by the state. The city should have the power to eliminate any source of contention and to maintain public tranquility.

THE STATE OF ALABAMA'S CRACKDOWN ON BIRMINGHAMis just its latest attempt to limit the authority of the majority-black city, which has a black mayor and a majority-black city council. In February 2016, the Birmingham city council approved a $10.10-an-hour minimum wage. Two days later, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law prohibiting Alabama cities from passing such ordinances and voiding a wage hike for tens of thousands of Birminghams low-wage workers.

The experience of Birmingham is indicative of a broader GOP-led assault on the political power and home rule of Southern cities, home to large black populations, often led by black politicians, and, increasingly, purveyors of progressive policies that seek to improve upon the low standards of state law. From the removal of Confederate monuments to the enactment of local minimum wages, Republican-controlled statehouses are preempting blue citiesand undermining black voices.

These are nothing more than 21st-century Jim Crow laws, Johnathan Austin, chair of the Birmingham City Council, said of the monument removal and minimum-wage preemption laws in an interview with the Prospect. The state of Alabama is trying to control the [states] largest cityand largest black city by prohibiting us from governing ourselves.

Twenty-five statesincluding nearly every Southern statehave laws that prohibit cities and counties from setting their own minimum wage. The five states that have no minimum wage of their own (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee), adhering to the federal minimum instead, are in the South. Now, at least six states have laws limiting the power of cities to remove Confederate monuments, with most passed in the last couple years. All of them are in the South, where Republicans control every single legislative chamber. Despite their calls for local control and fewer regulations, state Republicans are now regulating both the cultural and economic authority of localities.

Last year, state legislators passed the Tennessee Heritage Preservation Act of 2016, which requires public notice, hearings, and a two-thirds majority vote of the legislature in order to remove historic monuments. In 2015, North Carolina signed the Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act, an Orwellian amalgamation of nouns that requires a state historical commission to approve any removal of monuments. Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia also have similar laws.

In Memphis, a majority-black city, officials are ready to suethe stateif it denies its a new waiver request to remove a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis downtown, as well as a statue of Confederate General and Ku Klux Klan founding member Nathan Bedford Forrest. The move came after the city tried and failed to slog its way through the byzantine maze of GOP-instituted regulations protecting such statues. The matter may very well end up before the state Supreme Court. Legislators in Tennessee, which has the highest proportion of minimum-wage workers in the country, also passed a law in 2014 that prohibits cities from enacting minimum-wage ordinances higher than the state level, which is chained to the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.

As Barry Yeoman reported for the Prospect last week, protesters in Durham, North Carolinaa liberal city stripped of its authority to take down monuments by the right-wing legislaturefound a way around that impasse by pulling down a Confederate statue themselves. I understand why people felt this was the most expedient way, Jillian Johnson, an African American member of the city council, told Yeoman. There was no legal way to make it happen.

Meanwhile, the Durham council has also been barred from increasing the minimum wage (save for city employees) by the same infamous legislation that restricted transgenders bathroom use.

Durham is just one of dozens of Democratic-controlled citiesAtlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Charleston, Durham, Jackson, Nashville, Memphis, and so on, the blue dots in red stateswhich have lost the authority to raise wages for their (predominately black) workers struggling to get over the poverty line or to remove prominent monuments to a racist and oppressive ideology so their residents dont have to see a general fighting for slavery looking down on them as they go to work.

Republicans insist that protecting these monumentsthe majority of which were built in the early 1900s or during the 1960sare about preserving the history and heritage of the South. Just as they insist that prohibiting local increases to the minimum wagewhich hasnt been lifted on the federal level in eight yearsis about protecting low-wage workers from job loss.

In these ways, GOP lawmakers are actually memorializing the values of the Antebellum South: White supremacy and lowor, rather, nowages.

This article has been corrected to clarify that the city of Memphis has not yet sued the state, but intends to if its waiver to remove its Confederate monuments is denied, and that one of the statues is of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

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On Monuments and Minimum Wages - The American Prospect - The American Prospect

Letter: Environmental damage is not Christian – Roanoke Times

What if The Bible was written by divinely-inspired men, but not by God? Imagine if there were a Goddess as well as a God. Imagine that homosexuality is a quality of a beautiful, special class of people...

Why doesn't our nation strive for peace by all means, and end wage slavery in the developing world? Why have we taken and mutilated the land of Native Americans, and killed off most Native Americans? Why have we caused environmental damage worldwide? This is not Christian.

I love just as Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Asians, and Christians. We are all sisters and brothers in the love that we believe in. Think about how the military-industrial complex is treating our aforementioned brothers and sisters. This is a nightmare. My question to the dominant group of Christians is, what are you really afraid of? Use common sense at this point. The truth will set you free. We are in the middle of our own fascism. Millions are dead from war, millions are in wage slavery. Read "Killing Hope" by Blum, http://www.workersrights.org and "Made in China" by Ngai to begin to change. We are not a Christian nation.

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Letter: Environmental damage is not Christian - Roanoke Times

FANTASTIC NEGRITO Addresses Current Events in New Tracks – Broadway World

When FANTASTIC NEGRITO released his Grammy award-winning album The Last Days of Oakland in 2016, it received critical acclaim for its honest look at racism, gun violence, wage slavery, and other challenges facing our country. That continues with the re-release of the album on September 1, 2017 via Cooking Vinyl, which features two new tracks, "Push Back" and "The Shadows", which anticipated the events of today.

Almost prophetic in its subject matter, both "Push Back" and "The Shadows" reveal the soul of an artist trying to make sense of the political world around him that affects not only the governments but the fate of families, especially for people of color. Tackling the results and lack of progress from the current Administration head on in "The Shadows" ("I got trouble on my mind / I've been reading the headlines / That man that said "you're fired" / Brought the Devil out of retirement") and the Border Wall and immigration in "Push Back" ("They're trying to build a wall / But that won't help at all"), these two tracks are a direct response to the current state we as a country are in.

"Being African American in this country is f****** brutal," he explains. "It's painful and we, as individuals, have a way to combat that. And Fantastic Negrito for me is a way to combat that."

In addition, Fantastic Negrito will be supporting Sturgill Simpson on his Fall U.S. tour. TOUR DATES Supporting Sturgill Simpson

SEP 07 Smart Financial Centre / Sugarland, TX SEP 08 Verizon Theatre / Grand Prairie, TX SEP 09 AUSTIN360 Amphitheatre / De Valle, TX SEP 14 Radio City Music Hall / New York, NY SEP 15 Merriweather Post Pavilion / Columbia, MD SEP 16 Blue Hills Bank Pavilion / Boston, MA SEP 19 Fox Theatre / Detroit, MI SEP 21 Fox Theatre / St. Louis, MO SEP 22 Huntington Bank Pavilion / Chicago, IL SEP 25 Red Rocks Amphitheatre / Morrison, CO SEP 28 Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall / Portland, OR SEP 29 Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall / Portland, OR SEP 30 Marymoor Amphitheater / Redmond, WA OCT 06 The Greek Theatre / Los Angeles, CA

Fantastic Negrito's The Last Days of Oakland took home the 2017 Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album Grammy Award. While blues is an integral part of Fantastic Negrito's overall foundation, his music defies genre, blending hip hop, rock, and other styles to create a sound that led Pitchfork's Greil Marcus to say "he could be inventing the blues for the first time."

He made his national television debut as Fantastic Negrito on the season finale of Fox's Empire, performing both his single "Lost in a Crowd"-the track that brought him to national attention, winning NPR's inaugural Tiny Desk Concert Contest-and the hit song "Good Enough" alongside "Empire's" Jamal Lyon.

Photo Credit: Max Claus

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FANTASTIC NEGRITO Addresses Current Events in New Tracks - Broadway World

Letter: Par for the column – Glenwood Springs Post Independent

Vince Emmer, your golf metaphor for big government is a really, really sad attempt to dis big government. But columns have always been the work of a duffer.

First thing your metaphor misses is there is a par to each hole. You don't make us understand what constitutes under and over the balance line that would be consensus. What is the bogey or the hole in one, spending wise?

Next most golfers play 18 holes, and the game is much more about the back nine than the front end.

But of course your brand of economics never ventures onto the back nine, where the sand traps of wage slavery and rust-belt industry are negotiated only by Asian players.

Case in point, saying each household owes $56,000 a year is just a fear tactic. With the current tax structure, and the many ways government finances debt, nobody actually owes this. Instead we pay forward a portion of the earning (which the government is borrowing, interest free) plus various fees and taxes to local agency, where one chooses to be a member of the same civility. This would be the front nine.

The back nine is the fact that the structure of government is much the same as corporations, in that they are champions or duffers to the extent they can carry debt.

The ability to carry debt in capitalist societies keeps the operation under par even with forays into the woods like Afghanistan and Iraq, and breath test-qualified mortgage-backed securities, etc. If you equate the per-household equivalent in the corporate world, it would be the cost passed onto consumers, hidden fees and the fact banks are borrowing peoples savings at a rate as close to interest free as it can manage.

But of course, our current neo-liberal economist and business school caddies don't even know the difference between the putter and the driver in this matter. Face the fact governments are financed by more than one club and must always play the full round, while business can spin off debt into subsidiaries and spend their time in the clubhouse.

Eric Olander

Glenwood Springs

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Letter: Par for the column - Glenwood Springs Post Independent

Why the West should care about Thailand’s new fight against fishing slavery – PRI

Thailands $7 billion fishing trade is among the worlds biggest. In recent years, its also been one of the most severely scandalized an industry blighted by reports of slavery on fishing trawlers. Many of these tales recall 18th century-style barbarity at sea.

Each year, Thailands docks have traditionally launched thousands of trawlers into the ocean, often with crews of roughly 20 men. Most are not complicit in forced labor. But less scrupulous captains have taken advantage of the oceans lawlessness.

In port cities, theyve bought men from Myanmar and Cambodia for $600 to $1,000 per head. Duped by traffickers, the migrants come to Thailand seeking under-the-table work in factories or farms.

Instead, theyve found themselves hustled onto fishing boats that motor into the abyss, thousands of miles from civilization, where they are forced to fish for no pay. Various investigations have uncovered thousands of cases.

As one deputy boat captain of a Thai trawler told GlobalPost: Once a captain is tired of a [captive], hes sold to another captain for profit. A guy can be out there for 10 years just getting sold over and over.

Related: Read our award-winning investigationSeafood Slavery

But Thailand is now installing a new system that if effective could seriously reform an industry that has been murky for far too long.

Were trying to change as fast as possible, says Adisorn Promthep, director general of Thailands Department of Fisheries. We want to make sure no vessel escapes our scope.

Installed last year by Thailands military government, Adisorn is charged with bringing transparency to a business marked by opacity.

For years, fish have been routed through a dark supply chain that obscures their origins. This has given exporters plausible deniability with regard to forced labor.

Practically everyone has acknowledged the accounts of escaped or freed slaves, who have come ashore reporting tales of murder and beatings aboard trawlers. But there has been genuinely no way of proving whether this pound of mackerel or that box of fish sticks was sourced from a captive.

This is not a concern limited to Asia. It has serious implications for shoppers in the United States and European Union, two primary importers of seafood from Thailand.

Recent investigations by Greenpeace have implicated Nestl Purina and The J.M. Smucker Company producers of Fancy Feast and Meow Mix cat food, respectively in sourcing fish from factories accused of forced labor violations. Other reports have shown Costco and Walmart entangled in tainted supply chains allegations that led both to join a Seafood Task Force to clean up criminality in the seafood industry.

Here are some key elements of the Thai governments new plan, which is designed to reduce overfishing as well as root out forced labor.

Obscuring the origins of fish caught on dodgy vessels has traditionally proved rather easy. The fish is often offloaded to a massive mothership, a sort of way station and marketplace floating on distant seas, hundreds of thousands of miles from Thai shores. There, slave-caught fish gets mixed in with legit catches.

But under new rules, Adisorn says, every batch of fish will be recorded in an extensive digital log book. Once fully operational, this will illuminate the entire supply chain so that any factory, any consumer, should be able to check where the fish actually came from.

Thai authorities have actually banned offloading fish from trawlers to motherships for the time being. This applies to any boat officially flying the Thai flag and is designed, in part, to stop captains from buying and selling captives on motherships.

There is a caveat: These transshipments may be allowed if monitored by onboard observers. These observers are paid roughly $120 per day an incredible salary, considering Thailands daily minimum wage hovers around $10. These observers are technically freelancers. But they will be trained by Thailands fisheries department. Their main job is to collect data on the supply of fish in parts of the ocean prone to overfishing.

But the Thai government also expects them to deter illegal labor practices on board. Only a few dozen have been trained for deployment so far.

Every boat that can carry 60 tons or more will be outfitted with a GPS-style monitoring system that is just like the navigator in your car, Adisorn says.

Captains used to file paper documents about their whereabouts. Thats no longer good enough, Adisorn says. We need to know where theyre located. At all times.

Moreover, most of the boats now undergo rigorous inspections at newly installed control centers every single time they leave or return to port. Thai officers wont just check equipment and inspect nets full of wriggling fish. Theyre also supposed to check that crew records match the actual fishermen on board.

If a captain has 10 laborers, and one isnt supposed to be there, the arrest happens at the port, Adisorn says. The prosecution starts right there.

We have about 10,000 vessels total that we have to check. We cant check all of them, he says. Last year, officials tried to do that, he says, and managed to cover roughly 85 percent. But sometimes, when you try to do too much, the quality isnt good enough.

The officers have since been ordered to conduct more intensive checks on fewer boats a shift to give them ample time to properly scrutinize each crew. Adisorn recalls one recent case in which an officer, skeptical about a young fishermans age, pulled the worker off the boat and checked his bone density at a local hospital. He turned out to be underage.

This complex set of rules and tracking systems is now roughly 80 percent operational, Adisorn says. Such a sweeping effort to sanitize the Thai fishing industrys turbid supply chain will face great resistance from many factions. Among them: unscrupulous officials, corrupt factory owners and uncooperative boat captains.

The current government of Thailand, a junta that seized power in 2014,is also an unlikely crusader for liberty. Critics of the royally backed army government can be treated as seditionists. Some have been locked away for mere Facebook posts.

But the governments anti-slavery plan is already earning cautious praise from Greenpeace, an organization that is more often railing against the fishing industrys abuses.

I actually think theyre trying to do the best they can, says Anchalee Pipattanawattanakul, a Bangkok-based campaigner for the group. They want to show theyre being transparent. They mostly want the EU to see them as progressive.

Two years back, the EU sowed fear among Thai officials by threatening to ban all seafood shipments from Thailand if illegality continued unabated. That threat remains in place.

These reforms were also prodded along by the US State Department, which ranked Thailands trafficking problem in a tier alongside the worlds worst offenders such as Haiti or Sudan.

The US has since lifted Thailand from that bottom ranking a move to acknowledge a wave of prosecutions and asset seizures against traffickers that add up to more than $21 million.

Meanwhile, Thai officials privately note that US pressure has relented under President Donald Trumps administration, which has proved uncommunicative and not terribly interested in the trafficking issue.

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Why the West should care about Thailand's new fight against fishing slavery - PRI

Breyer: Second Amendment Not About ‘the Right of an Individual to Keep a Gun Next to His Bed’ – PJ Media

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said in an interview aired Tuesday that judges make poor politicians, that he misses late Justice Antonin Scalia, and that the Second Amendment doesn't apply to a citizen keeping a gun next to their bed.

In a wide-ranging interview with PBS' Charlie Rose, Breyer said he thought Chief Justice Roger Taney, who wrote the 1857Dred Scott v. Sandford decision that found blacks could not be American citizens, "tried to be a politician."

"And he thought that -- perhaps he thought, that by reaching a decision saying a black person was not a person, that's roughly what he held, unbelievable. But, he thought he would help prevent the Civil War...if anything, he helped bring about the Civil War because Benjamin Curtis wrote a great dissent showing, I think, at the time, his decision was wrong. It's not using hindsight, but really wrong. Abraham Lincoln picked it up, read Taney's decision and said this is a shocker, then used the dissent in his speech at Cooper Union," Breyer noted.

"Which was the speech that propelled him to the head of the Republican Party, and helped get him the nomination and then all followed. He was really an abolitionist at heart. They knew that in the South and then, the Civil War followed," he added. "So, if that was Taney's idea, he was wrong. Judges are not good politicians. They may have some exposure to politics, but that's what I mean when I say junior league."

Breyer recalled Scalia being a masterful writer. "The job of a judge in an appellate court is, in an opinion, to explain the reasons why he or she reached this opinion," he said. "Now, I don't think that that calls for or requires what you might be able to do in terms of great phrasing but if you can do that, it can be an advantage. But what I meant because people -- when Nino and I use -- I miss him, I do."

Breyer stressed that "it's a big country" with 320 million people who "think a lot of different things," thus "it is not such a terrible thing, if on the Supreme Court, there are people who have different, somewhat different jurisprudential outlooks."

"You know, Scalia probably likes rules more than I do. He tends to find clarity in trying to get a clear rule. I have probably more of a view that life is a mess," the justice said, adding that it comes down to "basic outlook about the Constitution, how it applies today to people who must live under it."

"Those are where the differences come up. It's not politics."

Breyer said people shouldn't look at the High Court as a political arbiter. "It is not the Supreme Court that tells people what to do. [The Constitution] sets boundaries. We are, in a sense, the boundary commission," he said. "...But don't make the mistake of confusing a tough question at the boundary with the fact about what the document is like, because the document leaves vast space in between the boundaries for people themselves through the ballot box to decide what cities, towns, states, what kind of a nation they want. That's what this foresees, and if you do not participate, it won't work."

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Breyer: Second Amendment Not About 'the Right of an Individual to Keep a Gun Next to His Bed' - PJ Media

LA Times: Restrict the Second Amendment at First Amendment … – Hot Air

The LA Times published an editorial Wednesday titled Dont restrict free speech. Restrict the right to carry guns at potentially explosive public events. The argument is that free speech is too important to restrict but, for safetys sake, police should be willing to tell people no guns allowed at outdoor rallies. And as the Times points out, its not just right-wing gun owners bringing weapons to these rallies.

Virginia is a preemption state that also allows open carry, and the nation saw the results at Charlottesville, where paramilitary militias men heavily armed with military-style weapons and in some cases battle gear appeared as part of the Unite the Right rally. But far-left groups, including the so-calledRedneck Revolt, a liberal pro-gun group, have alsoparaded aroundwith their firearms at various demonstrations.

That last link is a reference to armed members of Redneck Revolt who showed up in Phoenix last night, but the same group was also present in Charlottesville. The groups own report on the situation says they had 20 members on the street, most carrying rifles:

Today, with hundreds more white supremacists expected to converge on Charlottesville, our Redneck Revolt branches worked together with local organizers to create and secure a staging area at Justice Park, within a short distance of the planned Unite the Right rally location, Emancipation Park (formerly Lee Park). Approximately 20 Redneck Revolt members created a securityperimeter around the park, most of them open-carrying tactical rifles.

Im not sure why the Times failed to point out that there were armed, left-wing militia members in Charlottesville except perhaps that it tends to support what Trump said about there being violence (or the potential for it) on many sides. In any case, the Times suggests this is too dangerous to allow it to continue:

This is a problem that the nation must resolve. A group of self-organized, trained and heavily armed men (and these groups are predominantly male) is a paramilitary organization, and giving it megaphones and parade banners doesnt magically transform it into something peaceful. Adding open carry to a contentious event can put public safety at risk, and thepresence of visible firearmscreates unique problems for the police

Its not the right to speech and assembly that should be restricted; its the right to carry guns in certain potentially explosive situations. Gun advocates like to argue they have the right to bear arms as a bulwark against tyrannical government, but government has a responsibility here as well: to keep people safe.

I suspect the editorial writers for the LA Times are not gun owners and, maybe, dont know any gun owners. But its worth noting that despite having two ostensibly opposing groups of armed people in Charlottesville, no shots were fired. It wasnt the gun owners who got violent, it was the kids with flagpoles and onenutwith a muscle car.

Im not a lawyer so maybe there is some sort of time and place exception that could be used by local police when doling out permits. But it seems to me that, ultimately, the state cant dole out one constitutional right to be exercisedat a time. We dont get to have the First Amendment only if we agree togive up the Second, at least I hope not.

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LA Times: Restrict the Second Amendment at First Amendment ... - Hot Air

D.C. attorney general wants federal judges to look at city’s strict gun … – Washington Post

The Districts top lawyer on Thursday asked a federal appeals court to rehear a challenge to the citys strict limits on carrying concealed firearms.

Attorney General Karl A. Racines decision follows a ruling last month from a three-judge panel that blocks the Districts requirement of a good reason to obtain a permit because the requirement prevents most residents from carrying guns in public places.

City officials say the restrictions are common sense gun rules needed to promote public safety in the nations capital. Racine wants a full complement of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the panels ruling against the city.

Review by the full court is necessary due to the importance of this question, which affects the safety of every person who lives in, works in, or visits the District, according to the new court filing. Through their elected representatives, District residents have decided that public carrying without good reason is inconsistent with public safety.

The citys permitting system remains in effect while the appeal is under review. If the court declines to revisit the panels decision, the order to permanently block enforcement of the good reason requirement would take effect seven days later.

In its 2-to-1 ruling last month, the panel found the D.C. law in violation of the Second Amendment.

Bans on the ability of most citizens to exercise an enumerated right would have to flunk any judicial test, wrote Judge Thomas B. Griffith, who was joined by Judge Stephen F. Williams.

Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson dissented, siding with the city and finding that the regulation passes muster because of the Districts unique security challenges and because the measure does not affect the right to keep a firearm at home.

[Appeals court blocks enforcement of D.C.s strict concealed-carry law]

The Supreme Court in 2008 used a D.C. case to declare for the first time an individual right to gun ownership apart from military service. But the high court has shown little interest in going further to decide whether the Second Amendment applies outside the home.

In June, for instance, the Supreme Court declined to take up a California case in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said the Second Amendment does not protect the right to carry a concealed weapon in public.

[Gun ruling raises an issue the Supreme Court has been reluctant to review]

Under the Districts law, residents who want a permit to carry a concealed firearm must show that they have good reason to fear injury or a proper reason, such as transporting valuables. The regulations specify that living or working in a high crime area shall not by itself qualify as a good reason to carry.

As of July 15, D.C. police had approved 126 concealed-carry licenses and denied 417 applicants, according to the police department.

The Districts requirement is similar to rules in other states, including Maryland, New York and New Jersey.

Petitions for rehearing by a full complement of judges on the D.C. Circuit are filed frequently, but the court rarely grants such requests, taking up less than a handful each term.

A single judge may call for a vote on such a petition, but a rehearing requires sign-off from a majority of the 11 active judges on the court.

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D.C. attorney general wants federal judges to look at city's strict gun ... - Washington Post

Duke combines immunotherapy, tumor-roasting nanotech to vaccinate mice against cancer – Durham Herald Sun


Durham Herald Sun
Duke combines immunotherapy, tumor-roasting nanotech to vaccinate mice against cancer
Durham Herald Sun
By combining an FDA-approved cancer immunotherapy with an emerging tumor-roasting nanotechnology, Duke University researchers improved the efficacy of both therapies in a proof-of-concept study using mice. The potent combination also attacked ...

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Duke combines immunotherapy, tumor-roasting nanotech to vaccinate mice against cancer - Durham Herald Sun

No Batteries Required: Energy-Harvesting Yarns Generate Electricity – University of Texas at Dallas (press release)

Text size: research

Aug. 25, 2017

An international research team led by scientists at The University of Texas at Dallas and Hanyang University in South Korea has developed high-tech yarns that generate electricity when they are stretched or twisted.

In a study published in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Science, researchers describe twistron yarns and their possible applications, such as harvesting energy from the motion of ocean waves or from temperature fluctuations. When sewn into a shirt, these yarns served as a self-powered breathing monitor.

The easiest way to think of twistron harvesters is, you have a piece of yarn, you stretch it, and out comes electricity, said Dr. Carter Haines BS11, PhD15, associate research professor in the Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute at UT Dallas and co-lead author of thearticle. The article also includes researchers from South Korea, Virginia Tech, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and China.

Yarns Based on Nanotechnology

The yarns are constructed from carbon nanotubes, which are hollow cylinders of carbon 10,000 times smaller in diameter than a human hair. The researchers first twist-spun the nanotubes into high-strength, lightweight yarns. To make the yarns highly elastic, they introduced so much twist that the yarns coiled like an over-twisted rubber band.

In order to generate electricity, the yarns must be either submerged in or coated with an ionically conducting material, or electrolyte, which can be as simple as a mixture of ordinary table salt and water.

Fundamentally, these yarns are supercapacitors, said Dr. Na Li, a research scientist at the NanoTech Institute and co-lead author of the study. In a normal capacitor, you use energy like from a battery to add charges to the capacitor. But in our case, when you insert the carbon nanotube yarn into an electrolyte bath, the yarns are charged by the electrolyte itself. No external battery, or voltage, is needed.

When a harvester yarn is twisted or stretched, the volume of the carbon nanotube yarn decreases, bringing the electric charges on the yarn closer together and increasing their energy, Haines said. This increases the voltage associated with the charge stored in the yarn, enabling the harvesting of electricity.

Stretching the coiled twistron yarns 30 times a second generated 250 watts per kilogram of peak electrical power when normalized to the harvesters weight, said Dr. Ray Baughman, director of the NanoTech Institute and a corresponding author of the study.

Although numerous alternative harvesters have been investigated for many decades, no other reported harvester provides such high electrical power or energy output per cycle as ours for stretching rates between a few cycles per second and 600 cycles per second.

Lab Tests Show Potential Applications

In the lab, the researchers showed that a twistron yarn weighing less than a housefly could power a small LED, which lit up each time the yarn was stretched.

To show that twistrons can harvest waste thermal energy from the environment, Li connected a twistron yarn to a polymer artificial muscle that contracts and expands when heated and cooled. The twistron harvester converted the mechanical energy generated by the polymer muscle to electrical energy.

There is a lot of interest in using waste energy to power the Internet of Things, such as arrays of distributed sensors, Li said. Twistron technology might be exploited for such applications where changing batteries is impractical.

The researchers also sewed twistron harvesters into a shirt. Normal breathing stretched the yarn and generated an electrical signal, demonstrating its potential as a self-powered respiration sensor.

Electronic textiles are of major commercial interest, but how are you going to power them? Baughman said. Harvesting electrical energy from human motion is one strategy for eliminating the need for batteries. Our yarns produced over a hundred times higher electrical power per weight when stretched compared to other weavable fibers reported in the literature.

Electricity from Ocean Waves

In the lab we showed that our energy harvesters worked using a solution of table salt as the electrolyte, said Baughman, who holds the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Chemistry in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. But we wanted to show that they would also work in ocean water, which is chemically more complex.

If our twistron harvesters could be made less expensively, they might ultimately be able to harvest the enormous amount of energy available from ocean waves.

Dr. Ray Baughman, director of the NanoTech Institute and a corresponding author of the study

In a proof-of-concept demonstration, co-lead author Dr. Shi Hyeong Kim, a postdoctoral researcher at the NanoTech Institute, waded into the frigid surf off the east coast of South Korea to deploy a coiled twistron in the sea. He attached a 10 centimeter-long yarn, weighing only 1 milligram (about the weight of a mosquito), between a balloon and a sinker that rested on the seabed.

Every time an ocean wave arrived, the balloon would rise, stretching the yarn up to 25 percent, thereby generating measured electricity.

Even though the investigators used very small amounts of twistron yarn in the current study, they have shown that harvester performance is scalable, both by increasing twistron diameter and by operating many yarns in parallel.

If our twistron harvesters could be made less expensively, they might ultimately be able to harvest the enormous amount of energy available from ocean waves, Baughman said. However, at present these harvesters are most suitable for powering sensors and sensor communications. Based on demonstrated average power output, just 31 milligrams of carbon nanotube yarn harvester could provide the electrical energy needed to transmit a 2-kilobyte packet of data over a 100-meter radius every 10 seconds for the Internet of Things.

Researchers from the UT Dallas Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and Lintec of Americas Nano-Science & Technology Center also participated in the study.

The investigators have filed a patent on the technology.

In the U.S., the research was funded by the Air Force, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, NASA, the Office of Naval Research and the Robert A. Welch Foundation. In Korea, the research was supported by the Korea-U.S. Air Force Cooperation Program and the Creative Research Initiative Center for Self-powered Actuation of the National Research Foundation and the Ministry of Science.

Media Contact: Amanda Siegfried, UT Dallas, (972) 883-4335, [emailprotected] or the Office of Media Relations, UT Dallas, (972) 883-2155, [emailprotected]

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No Batteries Required: Energy-Harvesting Yarns Generate Electricity - University of Texas at Dallas (press release)

Nanotech Security Retires $3.0 Million Note | Investing News Network – Investing News Network (registration)

Nanotech Security (TSXV:NTS) has announced the early retirement of a $3 million secured note.

As quoted in the press release:

The note was previously issued to finance real estate assets acquired in the Fortress Optical Features Ltd. acquisition in September 2014. It bore a 4% annual interest rate and was due in September 2017.

The Company used funds originally earmarked to redeem its $4.2 million convertible debentures. As many debenture holders elected to convert their debentures into common shares of the Company, only $1.4 million was required to be repaid. With the recent retirement of the convertible debentures and now with the payment of the $3.0 million secured note, the Company is debt free.

Given our recent $13.3 million financing, the cash from operations generated in the third quarter, and the visibility into our pipeline, we decided to repay the debt early, instead of refinancing, to reduce our interest expense, said Nanotech CEO Doug Blakeway. Doing so saves the Company $120,000 per yearin interest and the Company is now debt free with a strong cash balance to execute on our growth opportunities.

Click here to read the full press release.

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Nanotech Security Retires $3.0 Million Note | Investing News Network - Investing News Network (registration)

Immunotherapy, Nanotech Combine to Kill Cancer Cells More … – Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News

Scientists at Duke University say they have combined a cancer immunotherapeutic with nanotechnology to improve the efficacy of both therapies in a mouse study. They published their work, "Synergistic Immuno Photothermal Nanotherapy (SYMPHONY) for the Treatment of Unresectable and Metastatic Cancers," in Scientific Reports.

The new approach also attacked satellite tumors and distant cancerous cells, leading to two mice being cured of the disease and one being vaccinated against it.

Using a combination of immune-checkpoint inhibition and plasmonic gold nanostar (GNS)-mediated photothermal therapy, we were able to achieve complete eradication of primary treated tumors and distant untreated tumors in some mice implanted with the MB49 bladder cancer cells, wrote the investigators. Delayed rechallenge with MB49 cancer cells injection in mice that appeared cured by SYMPHONY did not lead to new tumor formation after 60 days observation, indicating that SYMPHONY treatment induced effective long-lasting immunity against MB49 cancer cells.

"The ideal cancer treatment is noninvasive, safe, and uses multiple approaches," said Tuan Vo-Dinh, Ph.D., the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson Professor of Biomedical Engineering, professor of chemistry, and director of the Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics at Duke University. "We also aim at activating the patient's own immune system to eradicate residual metastatic tumors. If we can create a long-term anticancer immunity, then we'd truly have a cure."

The specific photothermal immunotherapy was developed by Duke researchers and uses lasers and gold nanostars to heat and kill tumors in combination with an immunotherapeutic drug. The technique works based on the ability of nanoparticles to accumulate preferentially within a tumor due to its leaky vasculature, according to the scientists, who add that gold nanostars have the advantage of geometry. With many sharp spikes, they can capture the laser's energy more efficiently, thus permitting them to work with less exposure, making them more effective deeper within a tissue.

"The nanostar spikes work like lightning rods, concentrating the electromagnetic energy at their tips," said Dr. Vo-Dinh. "We've experimented with these gold nanostars to treat tumors before, but we wanted to know if we could also treat tumors we didn't even know were there or tumors that have spread throughout the body."

Dr. Vo-Dinh explained that the body's immune system protects against the growth of cancerous cells. Many tumors, however, overproduce the programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) molecule, which disables T cells so they cannot attack the tumor. A number of drugs are being developed to block the action of PD-L1.

In the study, the Duke team injected bladder cancer cells into both hind legs of a group of mice. After waiting for the tumors to grow, the researchers explored a number of therapies, but only on one of the legs.

Those that received no treatments all quickly succumbed to the cancer, as did those receiving only the gold nanostar phototherapy, because the treatment did nothing to affect the tumor in the untreated leg. While a few mice responded well to the immunotherapy alone, with the drug stalling both tumors, none survived more than 49 days.

The group treated with both the anti-PD-L1 immunotherapy and the gold nanostar phototherapy fared much better, with two of the five mice surviving more than 55 days.

"When a tumor dies, it releases particles that trigger the immune system to attack the remnants," said Dr. Vo-Dinh. "By destroying the primary tumor, we activated the immune system against the remaining cancerous cells, and the immunotherapy prevented them from hiding."

According to Dr. Vo-Dinh, one mouse is still alive almost a year out with zero recurrence of the cancer. When more cancerous cells were injected, the mouse's immune system attacked and destroyed them, demonstrating a vaccine effect in the cured mouse.

The Duke team has plans to follow up with larger cohorts of mice and to work with other clinical researchers to test the treatment on mouse models of brain, breast, and lung cancers.

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Immunotherapy, Nanotech Combine to Kill Cancer Cells More ... - Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News

Comets to play Crunch in preseason game in Rome – Times Telegram – The Times Telegram

Ben Birnell

The Utica Comets are set to return to a familiar place in the Mohawk Valley for a preseason game.

Their opponent also is well-known to hockey fans in Central New York.

The Comets announced Thursday the team will host the rival Syracuse Crunch at 5 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 30, at Kennedy Arena in Rome to begin out a home-and-home exhibition series.

Tickets are $10 and will go on sale at 2 p.m. Friday, Sept. 8, at the Kennedy Arena box office.A special Season Ticket member presale will begin at 10 a.m.All proceeds will go to Kennedy Arena.

The preseason game is being played in Rome because of the construction project at Utica Memorial Auditorium. The contest will mark the third time since the Comets began play in 2013 that the team will have a preseason game at the Rome rink. The Comets played preseason contests in Rome in 2013 and 2014.

I like Kennedy Arena, Comets president Rob Esche said. "Im happy we were able to work ... with the city of Rome and the AHL to highlight such a great hockey community, and to kick off what is to be a very special fifth anniversary season.

This will be the third consecutive preseason that the Comets have taken on Syracuse, which is Tampa Bay Lightnings top affiliate. Last season, a home-and-home series between teams included a game at the Aud. In 2015, the teams traveled to France for training camp and preseason.

The teams will close out the preseason series at 5 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 1, at War Memorial arena in Syracuse. Including the regular season, the North Division foes will meet a total of 14 times in 2017-18. This season, the series has some added intrigue as new Comets coach Trent Cull and associate coach Gary Agnew previously were coaches at different times with Syracuse.

The Comets open the regular season the first full weekend of October. Utica travels to North Division rival Toronto for a two-game set on Saturday, Oct. 7, and Sunday, Oct. 8. Both games are set for 3 p.m. starts. It is the first of seven consecutive road games for the Comets to start the season.

Cometssign goaltender

The Utica Comets signed goaltender Michael Garteigto a one-year American Hockey League contract,general manager Ryan Johnson announced Thursday.

Garteig appeared in eight games with the Comets last season. He went 0-4-1 with a .897 save percentage and a 3.01 goals against average in net for Utica.

The 25-year-old British Columbia native and former Quinnipiac University skater posted an 11-6-2 record for the Alaska Aces last season in the ECHL.Standing at6-foot-1, 183-pound, Garteig dressed in 22 games for Alaska, recording a .906 save percentage and a 3.11 goals against average.

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Comets to play Crunch in preseason game in Rome - Times Telegram - The Times Telegram

Comet Facts – Interesting Facts about Comets – Space Facts

Comet ISON stardustobservatory.org/images.php?page=details&id=363

A comet is a very small solar system body made mostly of ices mixed with smaller amounts of dust and rock. Most comets are no larger than a few kilometres across. The main body of the comet is called the nucleus, and it can contain water, methane, nitrogen and other ices.

When a comet is heated by the Sun, its ices begin to sublimate (similar to the way dry ice fizzes when you leave it in sunlight). The mixture of ice crystals and dust blows away from the comet nucleus in the solar wind, creating a pair of tails. The dust tail is what we normally see when we view comets from Earth.

A plasma tail also forms when molecules of gas are excited by interaction with the solar wind. The plasma tail is not normally seen with the naked eye, but can be imaged. Comets normally orbit the Sun, and have their origins in the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt regions of the outer solar system.

There are many misconceptions about comets, which are simply pieces of solar system ices travelling in orbit around the Sun. Here are some fascinating and true facts about comets.

Comets come in several categories. The most common are periodic and non-periodic.

In the past, comets were named for their discoverers, such as Comet Halley for Sir Edmond Halley. In modern times, comet names are governed by rules set forth by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). A comet is given an official designation, and can also be identified by the last names of up to three independent discoverers.

Heres how it works. Once a comet has been confirmed, the following naming rules are followed. First, if the comet is a periodic comet, then it is indicated with a P/ followed by the year of its discovery, a letter indicating the half-month in which it was discovered, followed by a number indicating its order of discovery. So, for example, the second periodic comet found in the first half of January, 2015 would be called P/2015 A2.

A non-periodic comet would be indicated with a C/ followed by the year of its discovery, a letter indicating the half-month in which it was discovered, followed by a number indicating its order of discovery.

If a comet is independently discovered by three people named Smith, Jones, and Petersen, it could also be called Comet Smith-Jones-Petersen, in addition to its formal designation. Today, many comets are found through automated instrument searches, and so the formal designations are more commonly used.

Well-known comets include the non-periodic comets Hale-Bopp (C/1995 O1), Hyakutake (C/1996 B2), McNaught (C2006 P1), and Lovejoy (C/2011 W3). These flared brightly in our skies and then faded into obscurity.

In addition, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (D/1993 F2) was spotted after it had broken up after a close call with Jupiter. (The D in its proper designation means it has disappeared or is determined to no longer exist). More than a year later, the pieces of the comet crashed into Jupiter.

The periodic Comet Halley (1P/Halley) is the most famous in history. It returns to the inner solar system once every 76 years. Other well-known periodic comets include 2P/Encke, which appears ever 3.3 years and 9P/Tempel (Tempel 2), which was visited by the Deep Impact and Stardust probes, and makes perihelion around the Sun every 5.5 years.

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Comet Facts - Interesting Facts about Comets - Space Facts