Hammered on a gene therapy setback, Dimension cuts staff and circles the wagons – Endpoints News

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Dimension Therapeutics is winnowing out 25% of its staff as it concentrates on three gene therapy programs, including one partnered with Bayer that has the potential to generate some badly needed milestone cash.

The biotech says it has enough revenue in hand to operate for another year, adding that it can extend the runway out to the end of 2018, provided it bags about $15 million in cash in its deal with Bayer. Three years ago Dimension inked a $252 million pact with Bayer, with $20 million of that upfront.

Annalisa Jenkins

Counting milestone money in your business plan isnt likely to generate much confidence among investors, especially after some disappointing results and evidence of liver toxicity for its initial lead gene therapy for hemophilia B in January crushed the biotechs stock price. DTX101 which faced more advanced competitors with better data has now been shoved out of the spotlight.

The biotechs market cap has now shrunk to $38 million.

The lead program in the clinic now is DTX301 for rare cases of ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC) deficiency. The biotech is lining up two more programs for INDs, including DTX201 allied with Bayer.

Dimension was one of several gene therapy companies to get started with a technology licensing deal with ReGenX, a spinoff from the University of Pennsylvania which is working with AAV technology developed by scientific founder James Wilson.

Our key focus is to deliver initial data from our ongoing Phase I/II clinical trial for DTX301 in OTC deficiency, advance two proof-of-concept studies for glycogen storage disease type Ia (GSDIa) and hemophilia A, the latter in collaboration with Bayer, and advance our unique HeLa 2.0 manufacturing platform, says CEO Annalisa Jenkins. We believe we can deliver these important objectives in 2017-2018 with our current financial position.

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Hammered on a gene therapy setback, Dimension cuts staff and circles the wagons - Endpoints News

Everything That Interests Elon Musk Besides Building Cars | Benzinga – Benzinga

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Rocket ships, brain chips, music streaming, autonomous driving, solar power, underground roads with elevators it might be easier to list all the stuff that doesnt capture Elon Musks active imagination.

Best known as a car mogul, the founder and CEO of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) has even teased an interest in building an Iron Man suit for the Pentagon, a fitting venture for a tycoon who may have a Tony Stark fixation (or vice versa).

When he isnt battling existing state laws requiring carmakers to have a separate dealer network to sell, he's doing other stuff.

Heres a brief tour through the varying interests (distractions?) that constitute Musks million-dollar musings.

SpaceX succeeded in launching two of its Dragon 9 rockets over a 48-hour stretch last weekend, one to deliver Bulgarias first telecom satellite on Friday and a second on Sunday. The latter was to deliver 10 satellites for Iridium Communications Inc (NASDAQ: IRDM), which is setting up a global positioning system for commercial aircraft.

Delivering satellites and carrying payloads for NASA to the International Space Station are lucrative priorities reusing rockets and capsules is essential to Musks space business model but he has higher aspirations, such as colonizing Mars.

The stuff of sci-fi, Musks people are working on a neural interface that would allow the brain to directly control a computer and, theoretically, everything a computer controls. The venture even has a name Neuralink, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company, with a target of four years, aims to sell a product for people with brain injuries. It would eventually allow the human brain to connect to cloud storage, turning people into cyborgs with the ability to combat the rise in Artificial Intelligence, brain-for-brain, in a fight for dominance. No, really.

Musk just doesnt want to make autonomous electric cars, Martian colonies and space ships; he wants to get into the media content business, beginning with music.

Recode, quoting music industry sources, said Tesla is in talks with major music labels about licensing a proprietary music service that would be bundled with its automobiles. This report certainly came out of left field, but at this point, the world should have learned not to be surprised by Elon Musk's seemingly limitless entrepreneurial ambitions, Forbes said.

Its not really Elon, but his brother, Kimbal. A year younger, Kimbal Musk, like Elon, worked for a bit on the family farm in Canada. Hes seeking to overhaul the worlds nutritional values and the way the food supply is grown, harvested and distributed. "[My brother] told me it was crazy to get into the food business; I told him it was crazy to get into the space business," Kimbal Musk told CNBC. "It's working out fine."

Its telling that sectors that havent caught Musks attention (as far as we know) are, well, clamoring for it. Some health experts say if Musk wants to colonize the cosmos, hed better get going on diagnostic tools, health sensors and 3D-device printing to deal with specialized health care required for humans in space.

Right, been there. Musk made his first fortune as co-founder of Paypal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: PYPL), which revolutionized the way people buy stuff online. Moving on.

SolarCity Corporation, which seeks to monetize and reduce costs of companies switching to solar energy. The multi-billion corporation, which was founded by a couple of Musk cousins on the advice of Elon, is now owned by Tesla.

The Boring Company is looking into boring traffic tunnels underground, where elevators would take multiperson vehicles to traffic-lite thoroughfares and transport people on high-speed sleds. Flying cars also are in the mix.

Related Link: Earth To Elon: Musk Wants To Conquer Music

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Social Media Giants Just Formed An Anti-Terrorism Partnership – Futurism

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In Brief Four of the biggest names on the internet are banding together to create a forum to fight terrorist recruitment on social media. Microsoft, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter have created the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.

Four of the biggest names in tech and the internet have joined forces to fight terrorism right at its online roots. Microsoft, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter have created the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.

Terrorist organizations, such as ISIS, use social media as a tool for recruitment, and often those platforms are heavily criticized for theirinadvertent facilitation of such activity. As a response, Twitter has released a blog post that goes over the goals of the new forum, saying, We take these issues very seriously, and each of our companies have developed policies and removal practices that enable us to take a hard line against terrorist or violent extremist content on our hosted consumer services.

The forum will help these social media companies tocooperate more easily with each other as well as with governmental agencies, smaller companies, and non-governmental organizations with an interest in battling terrorism.

Assessing the successfulness of existing anti-terrorist recruitment efforts is difficult, if not impossible. However, with greater cooperation, we can ensure that methods can be researched and deployed on a larger scale to maximize effectiveness.

Fighting terrorism has long been more than simply a matter of boots on the ground. With rapid technological development, the battleis getting even more complicated. We can only hope this initiativecan help to mitigate the damage.

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Social Media Giants Just Formed An Anti-Terrorism Partnership - Futurism

China Has Officially Started Construction on the World’s First Forest City – Futurism

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In Brief The world's first "Forest City," designed to fight pollution and climate change, is under construction in China. Covered in greenery and trees, it will absorb nearly 10,000 tons of CO2 and 57 tons of pollutants yearly, and produce 900 tons of oxygen.

The worlds first Forest City, created to fight pollution, is now under construction in Liuzhou, Guangxi Province, China. Designed by Stefano Boeri Architetti, a team that develops green projects all around the world, the futuristic Forest City will be home to a community of about 30,000 people. It will be covered in greenery, including nearly 1 million plants of more than 100 species and 40,000 trees that together absorb almost 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide and 57 tons of pollutants, and produce approximately 900 tons of oxygen annually. As a result, Forest City will help to decrease the average air temperature, improve local air quality, create noise barriers, generate habitats, and improve local biodiversity in the region.

Liuzhou Forest City will be self-sufficient, running on renewable energy sources such as geothermal and solar energy. The city will also be entirely wired, and will include commercial zones, residential areas, recreational spaces, a hospital, and two schools. Forest City will be connected to Liuzhou by a fast rail line for electric cars.

Liuzhou Municipality Urban Planning commissioned the design for the 175-hectare Liuzhou Forest City which will be situated along the Liujiang River in the northern part of Liuzhou. The project has a high profile in China and, if it succeeds, it will set an example for green city design elsewhere in the country and around the world. The project is planned to be complete sometime in 2020.

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Volvo Is Rivaling Tesla With Their Own Driverless Car – Futurism

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In Brief Volvo announced new partnerships with both Nvidia and Autoliv in an attempt to become a major player in the autonomous car industry. This is just the latest company to move toward driverless cars, which can only be good for our driverless future. Volvos New Partnerships

After a recent announcement that Volvo will attempt to challenge Tesla in the electric vehicle market, the car manufacturer hasnow also made a gambit to join the autonomous vehicle competition. The Swedish car giant has teamed up with Nvidia for the project, specifically utilizing Nvidias Drive PX, which is capable of processing data from 12video cameras as well as lidar, radar, and ultrasonic sensors.

This news comes in the wake of an announcement from the CEOof Volvo, Hakan Samuelsson, thatthe company intends to square off with Tesla at the expense of diesel engines.Samuelsson explained in an email to Reuters,We have to recognize that Tesla has managed to offer such a car for which people are lining up. In this area, there should also be space for us, with high quality and attractive design.

The software that will govern the driverless system is provided by Autoliv, who Volvo ispartnering with under the new name Zenuity for this venture. Although some parts of the collaboration will be exclusive for Volvo, other aspects that Autoliv will develop couldbe sold to other car makers.

Volvo and Nvidia have teamed up before for Volvos autonomous car pilot program, Drive Me, but this the first time they have teamed up for a commercially available vehicle, which the companyaims to launchin 2021.

The ever growing hype around driverless car technology which has the potential to make our roads safer and fasterhas encouraged several other notable players in the motor vehicle and computerindustries to start developing their own variants of the technology. Volvo is another racehorse in stable of big-name, big-money ventures.

Also joining the race for the future of transport are: Tesla, who arguably pioneereddriverless technology and have a potential industry changer in their hotly anticipated Model 3; Google, who have also entered the fray by launching as Volvo did a separate company called Google Auto LLCto develop their driverless cars; and Ford, who have goneas far to test their cars in snowy conditions last year.

There is, therefore, a huge amount of competition among car makers, which is exciting for our driverless future as it will lead to the best autonomous cars possible on our roads. Competition breeds innovation, after all.

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Germany Wants to Crack Down on the Digital World’s Lack of Regulation – Futurism

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In Brief German Chancellor Angela Merkel has spoken out against the digital world's freedom from the stringent regulation that is applied to international finance and trade. To address this issue, she plans to lay the groundwork for global digital regulation at the G20 summit in July. Merkel and the Digital World

At the Dual Year Germany Mexico event in Mexico City earlier this month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressedthe lack of regulation within the transglobal digital world, pointing outthe relative freedom companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon enjoy in comparison to those involved in areas such as finance or trade.

Merkel stated that the world needs to introduce an international policy to govern Industry 4.0, a term used by German politiciansto describe thegrowth of the Internet of Things (IoT), smart devices, and automation. She argued that the need is pressing asthe disparate national policies currently in place could prove disastrous at any moment.

We still have no international rules, Merkel explained during her visit. Some provider could emerge thats an island, and from which things could be done, relevant to security, that could destroy an entire system. On this question of the rules-based handling of it, were still right at the start.

Europe has already begun to take serious action against the misuse of data, now the worlds most popular resource. European antitrust officialsjust fined Google a record $2.7 billionfor skewing results in their own favor. Meanwhile, Germany has been spearheading the prosecution of digital data firms, recently introducing a 9th amendment to the German Competition Act (ARC) that makes it easierto fine digital companies.

However, Merkel has no plans to wait for something to be done on a global scale. Her goal is to lay the groundwork for global regulation at a G20 summitin July, working out a consistent policy on how to approach the possible violations of security, privacy, and coercion enacted by internet behemoths.

As Merkel noted during her visit to Mexico,ensuring the security of the digital world will require international collaboration, so hopefully all of the countriesin the G20 will be open to working together to that end when they meet inHamburg in a few short weeks.

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Flappers, futurists, Bloomsbury and Putney Wyndham Lewis’s many enemies – Spectator.co.uk

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Wyndham Lewis was a painter, poet, publisher and picker of fights. No target was too grand or too trivial: sentimental Victorians and the modern man of government; shark art dealers and the atrocious Royal Academy; compilers of honours lists and editors of literary reviews; thin flapper girls and the fat Belgian bumpkins of Peter Paul Rubens; men who read detective stories and women who liked bowl-of-apple paintings by second-rate Czannes. People who lived in Putney.

The poet Edith Sitwell, who sat for an unfinished portrait by Lewis, was one of his most hoary, tried and reliable enemiesI do not think I should be exaggerating if I described myself as Miss Edith Sitwells favourite enemy. Sitwell was a fierce opponent. When worsted in argument, she throws Queensberry Rules to the winds. She once called me Percy. He had been born Percy Wyndham Lewis (18821957), but was Wyndham by the time he was old enough for Rugby and the Slade.

His best enemies were the Bloomsbury Set, those Fitzroy tinkerers and conscientious objectors, who spent the war pruning trees and planting gooseberries in Sussex, while he watched rats bicker for cheese at Passchendaele. The Bloomsbury grievance kept him going for decades. Roger Fry, director of the Omega Workshops, was a Pecksniff, a hypocrite, a shabby trickster, whose chairs stuck to the seat of ones trousers. The critic Raymond Mortimer was a middle aged man-milliner. Virginia Woolf was a timid peeper at the lives of others; her A Room of Ones Own a highbrow feminist fairyland. A Lewis review never failed to give Woolf one of her headaches. Ive taken the arrow of W.L. to my heart, she wrote after one attack in 1934. She was decapitated by him in 1938, and awaited his poisoned dart in 1940.

He styled himself The Enemy and imagined swaggering out in a Stetson, a cigar between his teeth, swinging bandoliers loaded with vitriol. After breakfast raw meat, blood oranges, a shot of vodka he talked of taking pot shots at the sub-Sitwells and sheep in Woolfes clothing of literary London.

A picker, too, of the wrong side: Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain. Having fought in the first world war, he didnt want a second and thought these men were the ones to stop it. That lonely old volcano of the Right, W.H. Auden called him. Nothing fired him up like a quarrel, a squabble, a skirmish. But war was another matter.

In this, the centenary year of the Battle of Passchendaele, the battle-bog in which Lewis saw his fellow gunners shelled and drowned, the Imperial War Museum North has mounted a superb retrospective of the artists life and work. It makes no apology or excuse for him. The exhibition opens with broadsides from choice enemies. A malicious, thwarted and dangerous man, said Sacheverell Sitwell, brother of Edith. A curious mixture of insolence and nervousness, said E.M. Forster. We do not have to like him for his writing, painting, pamphleteering, to think hes worth remembering.

The war, wrote Lewis, was a landmark as tremendous as the birth of Christ: We say pre-war and post-war, rather as we say BC or AD. Pre-war he had been a troublemaker. He had fallen in with Augustus John at the Slade and travelled to Holland, France, Germany and Spain on his allowance. He returned in 1908 with an exotic wardrobe, an absurd haircut and a moustache. He fired his first shots, made early enemies: I am all in favour of a young man behaving rudely to everyone in sight. This may not be good for the young man, but its good for everyone else.

England was in a somnolent state, still mooning over the pale aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and Kate Greenaways syrupy infants. In July 1914, he launched Blast a battering ram of a magazine and with it the vorticist manifesto a mass of excited thinking, of wild and whirling words. Vorticism was a queasy, uneasy art. Paintings were tipped on their axes, the viewer left motion-sick and dizzy. Bodies and landscapes were angular and abstracted. The mathematician Euclid was one hero, Andrea Mantegna, with his crisp, etch-like outlines, another.

Eleven artists, among them the poet Ezra Pound and sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, signed the vorticist manifesto. Lewis would later claim the movement was all down to a very vigorous One.

Vorticism was written up as an English off-shoot of Italian futurism, but Lewis was against Marinetti and his gang. He wouldnt dignify them with the name futurist. They were Milanese automobilists obsessed with speeding cars and aeroplanes. When Marinetti lectured in Bond Street, Lewis went to heckle. Never had he heard such a lot of hot, noisy air: a day of attack upon the Western Front, with all the heavies hammering together, right back to the horizon was nothing to it.

Blast and vorticism had short lives. Wars have made it impossible to get on with anything for very long, but I am glad that I got in, at the very beginning, a resounding oath. The blast was heard beyond Londons squares and salons. Drilling his squad at Mentsham Camp, Lewis was called over by the adjutant and sergeant-major. Bombardier, said the adjutant, what is all this futurism about? They thought it a great joke. Was this funny gunner really the revolutionary they had read about in the papers? In his war memoir, Blasting and Bombardiering, Lewis noted that the sergeant-major was killed within a fortnight of being sent to the Front.

The war was a stupid nightmare. He had a row with the war artist Sir William Orpen, who insisted: war is hell. Lewis wouldnt accept this infernal clich: I said it was Goya, it was Delacroix all scooped out and very El Greco. But hell, no.

He did not paint the war like Goya, but in the fidgety, jagged style of vorticism. It was right for the pitted, splintered, broken landscape of France, and the shell-shocked, sleepless men who fought there. He could not, he said, have begun to paint a milkmaid in a field of buttercups, but when Mars with his mailed finger showed me a shell-crater and a skeleton, with a couple of shivered tree-stumps behind it, I was still in my abstract element. In paintings like Shell-Humping (1918), Officers and Signallers (1918) and A Battery Shelled (1919) the men arent quite human. They are metallic and riveted with howitzer arms and bayonet legs.

The war ended but Lewis carried on fighting with pen and in paint, prolific and furious. He wrote 50 books and left more than 100 paintings and 1,000 drawings. Even after he lost his sight in his late sixties, he wrote polemics by dictaphone. Blindness was like being pushed into an unlighted room, the door banged and locked for ever.

A Self Portrait of 1932 has him scowling under a hat. Who next for a blast? A Woolf, a Sitwell, an Academy stooge? Rage made him bitter and isolated. He was often wrong, occasionally brilliant and always his own worst enemy.

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The Supreme Court puts a baker’s business and artistic freedom on the line – Washington Post

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By Jim Campbell By Jim Campbell June 28 at 1:05 PM

Jim Campbell is senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents Masterpiece Cakeshop in the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

Should an artist who serves all people be able to decline to create art for an event that conflicts with his deepest convictions? That question much debated in recent years seemed destined to reach the Supreme Court. And on Monday, in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, it finally did.

The owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Jack Phillips, is a cake artist who creates custom works of edible art for special occasions such as weddings and birthdays. He serves everyone, no matter their race, sex, religion or sexual orientation. But he cannot create art for events that conflict with his faith. For years, that practice caused no disturbances. But when a couple asked Phillips to create a cake for a same-sex wedding, things got dicey.

He told the requesting couple that he would gladly sell them anything in his store, but designing a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex marriage was not something he could do. Phillips was compelled to decline that request because of his religious conviction that marriage is a husband-wife union a belief that just two years ago the Supreme Court said is decent and honorable and held in good faith by reasonable and sincere people.

The Colorado Civil Rights Commission determined that Phillipss decision to live by his conscience was unlawful and ordered him to re-educate his staff on the states anti-discrimination law, meaning he must create wedding cakes for same-sex weddings if he creates wedding cakes at all. The commission did this while simultaneously concluding that three other bakers were within their rights when they declined to create cakes bearing biblical messages they found offensive. That anti-religious bias is reason enough for the Supreme Court to reverse the commissions decision to punish Phillips.

But there is far more on the line than one cake artists freedom. At stake is whether the government can conscript artists to ply their expressive talents for events or ideas that they do not support.

If Phillips loses, the rights of all artists will suffer. Under that scenario, the government could compel a lesbian artist to design fliers for a religious event opposing same-sex marriage or a black woodworker to craft a cross for a Ku Klux Klan rally. Almost no one wants to live in a world like that, and thanks to the First Amendment, we dont have to.

Those who oppose Phillips argue that the interests of same-sex couples seeking artists should outweigh his freedom. This argument, however, misperceives the competing interests.

On Phillipss side of the scale is the future of his wedding-cake business and his very livelihood. If Phillips cant create cakes to celebrate same-sex weddings, the government insists, he cant make wedding cakes at all. So a loss in his case means the loss of a fulfilling part of Phillipss work that accounts for roughly 40 percent of his income, a hit thatll risk sinking his business.

Of course, the same-sex couple has an interest in obtaining custom art from businesses. But there is no shortage of cake artists willing to help celebrate same-sex marriages in Denvers suburbs. That a same-sex couple must go to another shop cannot override Phillipss freedom.

Same-sex couples raise another interest: avoiding the frustration and dignity harm that they feel when an artist declines their request. But someones offense at anothers exercise of his artistic and religious freedom is not a reason to suppress it. On the contrary, as the Supreme Court has explained, the First Amendment exists to shield artistic, expressive and religious choices that in someones eyes are hurtful.

In addition, same-sex couples dont have the market cornered on dignity harms. If the law deems Phillipss beliefs odious and unfit for public life which is precisely what a ruling against him would do that would demean not only him but also millions of Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Jews and Muslims who hold similar beliefs.

Some folks nevertheless insist that Phillips is like the racist business owners in the Jim Crow South and must suffer the same fate. This is simply not true. Jim Crow involved the systematic exclusion of black Americans from public life. Countless businesses flatly refused to serve a class of people. But that is not remotely true of Phillips or others like him. He will gladly serve people who identify as gay or lesbian; it is only custom orders for certain wedding cakes that he must decline. Phillips is not deserving of the social margins where racists now reside.

In this hotly contested struggle between artistic freedom and government coercion, it is impossible to predict the outcome. But because to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. the arc of the universe bends toward human freedom, Phillips should feel pretty good about his chances.

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The Media and Silicon Valley Fear the Freedom They Created – The American Conservative

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If the Trump administration and the Trumpist movement represent anything, it is the destruction of establishmentarian sacred cows. Already, the spirit of populist iconoclasm the President embodies has left globalist false idols scattered like tombstones up and down the Acela Corridor. Some of the casualties are obvious, such as the presumption that the administrative state is made up of disinterested experts, rather than ideologically motivated sleeper agents. Some of the losers from the Trumpist Zeitgeist are equally obvious: mainstream media outlets and the tech industry.

However, what seems to occur to few people is that the fall from grace that such ideas and institutions are suffering is not only of their own making, but all traceable back to the same cause. Namely, the shift of such institutions from attempting to promote freedom to attempting to constrict it. In other words, groups that were originally designed and trusted to make the world bigger have instead begun systematically trying to make it smaller. They have gone from battering rams to gatekeepers.

Take the mainstream media. While conservatives correctly bemoan the liberal bias that infects the landmark publications and TV networks, and has infected them all the way back to the Vietnam War, it is easy to forget a simple fact about that anti-Vietnam coverage: It was the first time the medias reporting was not subjected to official censure by the military. No doubt this led to anti-American bias that distorted the story, but for Americans watching, the idea of a media that was critical of the government line no doubt seemed like an advancement for freedom to access information and freedom to be skeptical of government policy.

Flash forward to today, though, and it is obvious that the media has gone from being uncensored truth-tellers to censors themselves. From the cyberbullying, SJW left morality policy approach of sites like the defunct Gawker and Vice, to the arrogant agonizing by media figures over their supposed ability to control what people think, to the overwhelming and unprecedented hostility toward the president that even the most seemingly respected media falls prey to, it is very clear that giving the public greater freedom to make informed decisions has ceased to be a media objective. Rather, out of fear that those informed decisions will not meet the partisan standards of the reporters themselves, they seek a full-on pre-Vietnam role reversal: now the political and military actions approved by the American people must pass muster with them to be legitimate. Americans, who have never much liked being told what they must believe or what they must do, have rightly rebelled.

But while the mainstream medias behavior is egregious, it is also fair to say that they are rapidly becoming a marginal player in the information marketplace. More sinister and influential is the rapidly growing tech industry, and in particular the social media wing of that industry. But here, too, we are observing a corruption of organizations that previously offered freedom. In its early days, Google gave Americans the extraordinary power to find new information and new perspectives, YouTube provided a fertile and untamed Wild West-style playground for creative minds to make a living, and sites like Facebook and Twitter offered the ability to connect and speak to both friends and strangers from all around the world.

To say that this is not the case anymore is a gross understatement. Now, Google openly admits to viewing conservative viewpoints as contrary to science, and acts as if its blatantly partisan policy preferences are somehow apolitical good sense because they can find a few pet Republicans to agree to them. This is reflected in their search results, which now exclude disfavored viewpoints, and their stewardship of YouTube, which now strips money and possibly even subscribers from its users, sometimes for such minor crimes as simply telling off-color jokes that offend the humorless sensibilities of corporate HR departments. Facebook and Twitter, meanwhile, liberally (pun intended) shadowban or outright shut down the accounts of users who do nothing but express distasteful opinions, or call them out on censorship. Facebook has even arrogated to itself the right to decide what does and does not count as fake news using standards insourced from left-wing donors, despite having previously landed in hot water for acting too much like a newsroom and less like a neutral platform.

In short, Silicon Valley fears the freedom that it created and seeks to curtail it, despite the fact that the only thing that gave their business models life was the perception that they were building a world where both people and information could be free.

So far, an emerging rebellion from consumers, in tandem with tougher scrutiny of their practices, is not working out for the mainstream media, or the tech companies. The first is shedding trust and likely will shed viewers in the future. The second is facing an emboldened raft of competitors that actively market their political neutrality and commitment to freedom of speech and information. The gatekeepers have had their gates blasted off their hinges and now are watching their Towers of Babble being sacked.

Good riddance.

Mytheos Holt is the Senior Fellow in Freedom to Innovate at the Institute for Liberty, and a former speechwriter for US Senator John Barrasso (R-WY).

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Workers’ freedom scores a small victory in Washington state – Washington Examiner

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Did you know that just telling union members about their rights under federal law can bring misery down on your head?

Just ask the Freedom Foundation, a state think tank based in Olympia, Wash., which has recently suffered outrageously aggressive legal harassment from the Service Employees International Union.

The SEIU has ginned up three separate lawsuits against the Freedom Foundation and also persuaded the state's attorney general to sue the think tank. At issue: the Freedom Foundation's effort to talk to more than 50,000 people dragooned into becoming SEIU members about their legal right to opt out.

These particular members ended up owing dues to the SEIU because of a dodgy scam the union pulled off with the help of friendly politicians to skim from the benefits paid out to indigent home care patients. The "members" in question didn't ask to join the SEIU; they're simply Washingtonians who receive state Medicaid payments to care for disabled loved ones an ailing parent, say, or a handicapped child, who would otherwise require more expensive institutional care.

As has happened in several other Democrat-controlled states, the union got the governor to invent a shell corporation that supposedly "employs" persons receiving such Medicaid payments. Then, the state had a mail-in "election" on unionization of these home care workers, in which very few benefit-recipients even realized what was happening.

Finally, even though very few people receiving mail-in ballots ever voted, the state declared that the union had won the election and made every payment-recipient an SEIU member. It also began automatically deducting union dues from their Medicaid benefits. Many unlucky "members" knew nothing about what was going on until they saw their payments shrink.

The Freedom Foundation estimates the state SEIU skims something like $25 million a year through this scheme. The same outrage occurs in other states, and the injustice led the U.S. Supreme Court (in its 2014 decision Harris v. Quinn) to hold that individual home care providers in this situation cannot be forced to join or pay a union. "The First Amendment," the court declared, "prohibits the collection of an agency fee from the plaintiffs in the case, home healthcare providers who do not wish to join or support a union."

Home care workers may have won in court, but not many of them were aware of their rights. So, the Freedom Foundation launched an outreach program that employed dozens of paid canvassers going door to door to inform Medicaid providers of their right to opt out of joining and paying the SEIU.

The SEIU hasn't taken kindly to this. Last September, the union and its affiliates filed three lawsuits against the Freedom Foundation. They even hired three separate law firms for the barrage of suits, inundating the foundation with intimidating subpoenas, depositions and discovery demands. The SEIU even convinced Washington State attorney general Bob Ferguson to file lawsuits against the Foundation.

In SEIU 775 v. Elbandagji, the union alleges the Freedom Foundation committed a "civil conspiracy" by inducing a former SEIU employee to give a partial list of SEIU-represented home healthcare workers to the Foundation.

The Freedom Foundation filed a counterclaim against the SEIU for "abuse of process" in the SEIU 775 v. Elbandagji case. A rare "special discovery master" has been appointed in the matter, which remains at a trial court in King County. As part of the discovery process, the Foundation requested documents showing how the SEIU handled information about its members, among other things.

The union refused, but on June 16, the discovery master retired state Judge George A. Finkle demanded that SEIU respond to the Foundation's requests by June 30.

In his order, Finkle declared, "I do not find that SEIU has demonstrated that the Freedom Foundation has wrongfully communicated with SEIU members or used SEIU's confidential information to harass SEIU members or employees. The Freedom Foundation is entitled to contact SEIU members, and prior restraint of its efforts to do so is impermissible." Finkle then cited the Supreme Court's Harris case.

Finkle's order is one small victory in the larger fight for workers' freedoms across America. But it's no small victory if you're one of the Washingtonians who provides in-home health care to a disabled loved one, and a union is trying to skim from that loved one's benefit payments without their permission or yours.

Finally, this decision just may yield some very interesting discoveries about how unions plot to deny their own members' rights.

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Workers' freedom scores a small victory in Washington state - Washington Examiner

‘Big day for freedom’: Trump to trash Obama’s outrageous water rule – WND.com

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President Trump made good on a major campaign promise Tuesday, as the Environmental Protection Agency announced the beginning of a process that will roll back the Waters of the United States rule, a move that has champions of private-property rights cheering loudly.

On Tuesday, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt made the policy shift official.

We are taking significant action to return power to the states and provide regulatory certainty to our nations farmers and businesses, said Pruitt in a statement.

This is the first step in the two-step process to redefine waters of the U.S., and we are committed to moving through this re-evaluation to quickly provide regulatory certainty in a way that is thoughtful, transparent and collaborative with other agencies and the public, he added.

Its a big day for freedom, for property rights and the Constitution, said Robert J. Smith, a senior fellow in environmental policy at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Smith said the Waters of the United States rule, or WOTUS, which was put forward during the Obama administration, was nothing more than gross distortion of what Congress intended for the EPA to regulate as part of the Clean Water Act.

Like the reporting you see here? Sign up for free news alerts from WND.com, Americas independent news network.

The act specifically allowed government to regulate navigable waterways, which Smith said was well understood to mean bodies of water on which commerce traveled through shipping. But he said the government, nevertheless, expanded itsauthority.

Navigable waters kept getting stretched by the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers year after year, Smith explained. First, it would go to tributary streams. Then, it would go to smaller streams. Then, it would go to creeks, and it would go to irrigation ditches, things that nothing could navigate.

It didnt stop there.

Then it began to control the lands that were adjacent to navigable waters and lands that were adjacent to things that ran into navigable waters, he said.

By vastly expanding this, theyve reached a point now where something that was only supposed to protect major rivers to see that commerce could take place in America now controls whether a farmer can plow his own land, Smith said.

Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Robert J. Smith:

And that creeping government control forces property owners to beg Uncle Sam to use their own property.

It takes an endless amount of time, years of time, money and still uncertainty to try to get a permit to use your own land. Anything that rain falls on now could technically be considered waters of the United States, said Smith, noting that building a home on seemingly dry land on onesown property could lead to millions of dollars in government fines.

The rescinding of WOTUS is not the end of the story. Pruitts announcement triggers a 30-day comment period, which will be considered in revising the existing rule.

EPA and the corps together will come up with a revised rule, hopefully a rule that protects property rights and puts the EPA and the corps back into the constitutional mode theyre supposed to be in, Smith said.

He also wants Congress to make sure the EPA can never stretch the definition of navigable waters ever again.

The United States Congress needs to go back and revisit the Clean Water Act of 1972 and amend it so that it unequivocally says that navigable means navigable and it means by commercial shipping, not by somebody in a motor boat, not by somebody in a canoe or a kayak or a rubber raft or even floating down a little tiny creek in a tube, he said.

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‘They Love Freedom’: Ai Weiwei On His Lego Portraits Of Fellow … – NPR

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Ai created his Lego portraits while under house arrest, so getting the materials he needed was tricky. A friend ended up making multiple trips from the U.S. with suitcases full of Legos. Beck Harlan/NPR hide caption

Ai created his Lego portraits while under house arrest, so getting the materials he needed was tricky. A friend ended up making multiple trips from the U.S. with suitcases full of Legos.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has had several confrontations with Chinese authorities. (He was once beaten so badly by police that he had to have brain surgery.) Through it all, Ai continued to make art, and his art continued to travel the world, sometimes without him.

That's what happened with Trace, a series of Lego portraits Ai created while under house arrest. The artworks, which depict activists and political prisoners from around the world, were first shown at the former prison on San Francisco's Alcatraz Island in 2014, and nearly a million people saw them there. But at the time, Ai was still under house arrest and couldn't travel to the exhibition.

Now, the artist has his passport back, and he was able to attend a new show of those portraits which opens Wednesday at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. NPR was there for his first look at Trace in a gallery setting:

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Questions raised on Fisher’s eugenics ties, award name – The Manchester Journal

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ARLINGTON The eugenics movement is a dark chapter of Vermont's history, and now one local author's alleged role in that movement is under intense scrutiny.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher was a prolific local writer, and her namesake rests at various institutions in Arlington today including Fisher Elementary School. In 1957 a Vermont children's literacy program was established in the author's honor, and the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Book Award has recognized outstanding children's writers over the last 60 years.

Fisher's reputation has been questioned in recent weeks, as Essex educator and artist Judy Dow has led the fight for the removal of Fisher's name from the award. Dow, who has both French Canadian and Abenaki roots, claims that Fisher not only stereotyped French Canadians and Native Americans in her extensive works, but played an active role in the eugenics movement as well.

At a presentation to the Vermont Department of Libraries in April, Dow presented evidence of Fisher's ties to Vermont's eugenics movement and argued for the removal of Fisher's name from the award.

"The reason I started this was because our children are our most precious gift," said Dow. "To name an award for a children's book after someone who was a eugenicist is so wrong."

Now, the decision rests with State Librarian Scott Murphy, who will hear a recommendation from the Board of Libraries on July 11 and make a final decision thereafter.

"It's a touchy situation and it's really hard to look at these issues with our current morals and values and to judge history based on that," said Murphy. "I'm trying to get as much input as I possibly can from citizens before I make any decision; I have to be very careful to make sure we are taking the proper steps for Vermont."

A Multifaceted Identity

The allegations of Fisher's eugenicist entanglements stand in stark contrast to the author's identity as an accomplished female writer and social activist, promoting adult education programs and prison reform alongside her organization of World War I relief efforts. Fisher was honored as one of the 10 most influential women in the United States by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a trailblazer in her own right.

Though Fisher made valuable contributions to society and literature, her ties to Vermont's eugenics movement raise questions. While some argue that her involvement was tangential, others claim that Fisher was more deeply involved.

The Vermont eugenics movement, led by University of Vermont Professor Henry F. Perkins, insisted upon the reality of a racial hierarchy in which "degenerate" classes of people including Vermont's French Canadian population, native peoples including the Abenaki, and African-Americans were doomed by heredity. These "degenerates," Perkins insisted, posed a threat to Vermont's way of life and cultural identity in an era when a declining population and economic stagnation topped the list of challenges faced by the state.

"She was a progressive, but it was the progressive party that was running the eugenics program," said Dow. "She was a product of the time, and the product of the time was eugenics."

The eugenics movement resulted in the creation of the Vermont Eugenics Survey, running from 1925 to 1936, as well as the formation of the affiliated Vermont Commission on Country Life (VCCL).

The VCCL was created by Perkins in 1928 to provide a comprehensive survey of the rural regions of the state, with the Eugenics Survey at "its center and core." Fisher was among the more than 70 individuals recruited to contribute to chapters of the organization's 1931 publication, "Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future." In this survey, contributors were charged with answering the question, "What is happening to the old Vermont Stock?"

Fisher was most heavily involved in VCCL's Committee on Tradition and Ideals, focusing heavily on increasing the number of tourists and second home owners in Vermont. In 1932, just one year after a sterilization law sponsored by Perkins and the Eugenics Survey was passed by Vermont's legislature (through which at least 250 "feeble minded" Vermonters were sterilized between 1933 and 1960, according to the Department of Health), Fisher accepted a position on VCCL's executive committee.

"It is not surprising that a writer from an earlier time might have beliefs and opinions that we now condemn," said State Rep. Cynthia Browning, D-Arlington. "This is not just evidence of prejudice: the possible connection to the eugenics movement that had unjust and tragic consequences is of concern."

Local Linkages

Many of Fisher's writings contain problematic racial stereotypes that may have been a byproduct of her era, though many of Dow's critics argue that authors should not be judged by their fictitious works. It is not certain that all of Fisher's representations are pure works of fiction, however.

"Dorothy Canfield Fisher's book "Bonfire" was based on a study the Eugenics Survey of Vermont did on Sandgate," said Dow. "You can go through the report and pull out the names, and match the names used in "Bonfire" to the names in the report."

A 1928 study by the Vermont Eugenics Survey titled "Key Families in Rural Vermont Towns," featured Sandgate as an example of "rural degeneracy." Indeed, many of the names mentioned in the "Town Gossip" section of the report can be found in Fisher's novel "Bonfire," which is set in a fictionalized Vermont town entrenched in poverty and populated primarily by French Canadians and "French Indians." In "Bonfire," residents of this community are depicted as "primitive," and "irresponsible sub-normals." At one point, a character is described as, "half-hound, half-hunter, all Injun."

Outside of her fictional works, Fisher was the author of a state tourism pamphlet produced by the VCCL which aimed to recruit "superior, interesting families of cultivation and good breeding." Additionally, in a 1941 commencement address, Fisher praised the residents of Manchester for taking in the nomadic Icy Palmer, a Tuscarora Indian abandoned at a local sugar house in 1924. Though her intentions seem valiant, Fisher denies in the address that Vermont was home to any measure of "ugly racial hatred and oppression," whilst insisting that no Native American populations ever found a true home in the state.

"I am, of course, deeply disturbed by the allegations concerning Dorothy Canfield Fisher. We always hope that those we honor have an honorable past, but almost always they do not," said Melissa Klick, a native Vermonter with both French Canadian and Abenaki heritage, and the owner of the Icy Palmer Candle Company. "Icy Palmer's funeral was not allowed to be held in a church, and she bowed to white people as they passed; she was assisted but not socially accepted by the Manchester community."

Starting point for dialogue

While a heated debate rages on whether Fisher's name should remain on the book award, Murphy will ultimately rely on the feedback of Vermont's citizens and libraries to decide the issue.

"The whole point of this award is children's literacy, and if this name is going to deny a certain group of people that involvement then that's significant. There's somebody that's feeling pain, and I'm cognizant of that," said Murphy. "On the opposite side is the idea that judging history by today's point of view can be dangerous, and can sometimes do more harm than good."

Regardless, Fisher's complex history has opened the door for a meaningful dialogue on Vermont's troubling history with eugenics.

"I feel we must use historiography to keep examining our past to improve our understanding of the future," said Klik. "Let's move forward to make sure that the ignorance that shaped Canfield's prejudices no longer has a place in Vermont, nor any other corner of America."

"We change everything that's outdated as time goes on, so why wouldn't we change this if it's offensive?" said Dow. "It's time that the oppressor listens to the stories of those that were oppressed, and that's a good start."

More information on Vermont's Eugenics program can be found at http://www.uvm.edu/~eugenics/. The full report on Sandgate can be found at http://www.uvm.edu/~eugenics/primarydocs/ofkfssg090028.xml.

Reach Cherise Madigan at 802-490-6471.

If you'd like to leave a comment (or a tip or a question) about this story with the editors, please email us. We also welcome letters to the editor for publication; you can do that by filling out our letters form and submitting it to the newsroom.

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Questions raised on Fisher's eugenics ties, award name - The Manchester Journal

‘Bioblitz’ collects ecosystem data at Garfiled County sites … – Glenwood Springs Post Independent

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Colorado State University scientists, student interns and a couple of high schoolers are venturing into land in Spring Valley and north of Rifle this week to collect wildlife and plant life data, adding to a data set to be used in future conservation efforts.

Rising before dawn Tuesday morning, the scientists and scientists-to-be made the rounds checking 50 small traps at the ranch they'd set the previous night in the hopes of snaring some small mammals. This is the project's second year to study the ecosystems at these locations, both owned by John Powers.

The team of scientists and interns from CSU's Colorado Natural Heritage Program is in the area for four days conducting a range of biodiversity studies, which the program has dubbed a "bioblitz."

Along with trapping and making records of small mammals, this project includes bird surveys, non-harmful fish shocking, insect surveys, as well as the inventory and study of plant life.

This project is also being conducted in collaboration with CMC staff and students, as well as the Aspen Global Change Institute.

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#EmpireFinTech Conference says thinking beyond Canada, adopting AI key to scaling ecosystem – BetaKit

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Canadas FinTech ecosystem is burgeoning with companies like Wealthsimple and Wave making major moves however, theres a lot Canadian FinTechs can still do to take the ecosystem to the next level.

This was the key takeaway at the Empire Startups FinTech Conference held in Toronto for the first time on June 27. Empire Startups, which has hosted eight FinTech conferences in New York and San Francisco, brought together US and Canadian entrepreneurs, investors, and startups to discuss how the financial services world is changing and the role Canada is playing in the latest FinTech trends.

The conference featured a number of keynotes and panels about Canadas FinTech ecosystem, as well as demos from some of the countrys top FinTech startups.

A panel moderated by co-founder and general partner of Information Venture Partners, Robert Antoniades, and featuring Real Ventures partner Janet Bannister; Wave VP of people and culture Ashira Gobrin; 8VCs founding partner Alex Kolicich; and Thinking Capital CEO and co-founder Jeff Mitelman, focused on how Toronto and at large Canada can continue its reign as the FinTech capital of Canada and beyond. The bright minds touched on the areas Canadian FinTechs are doing well, as well as the challenges and limitations the ecosystem currently faces.

On the strengths of Canadas FinTech ecosystem, Bannister said the countrys strong, diverse talent pool serves as an advantage for Canadian FinTechs based in cities like Toronto and Waterloo.

I think some of the advantages for FinTech companies in Torontois youve got great talent here. Janet Bannister

I think some of the advantages for FinTech companies in Torontois youve got great talent here, said Bannister. Great talent in terms of engineering talent. Youve got a lot of entrepreneurs that the ecosystem is developing. Were seeing second-time entrepreneurs and more experienced entrepreneurs. She added that another advantage is that Canadian FinTechs are seeing more capital than ever before and a lower cost of operating versus in places in the US.

Gobrin agreed that Canada has a large talent pool, but more notably, she praised the countrys immigrant population and engineering schools for allowing companies to scale-up and add diversity to their teams.

One of the biggest assets that we have in Torontoand in Canada in general, is the huge immigrant population, said Gobrin. Half of our city comes from somewhere elsewhich means on these hot topics of diversity and inclusion, [it] makes it really easy to build cultures that are quite diverse with what we have. Theres also a lot of talk to fast-track the immigration process but currently in Toronto, we have some of the better schools in engineering that are producing fantastic talent.

During the panel, Antoniades pointed to a recent report that ranked Toronto as one of the top FinTech centres in the world. He asked the panelists what Toronto, and at large Canada, need to do to rank higher on the global FinTech map.

We adopted the language of collaboration very late. Jeff Mitelman

Kolicichs instant reaction was that Torontos ranking should be higher. He said in order to strengthen Canadas position as a global FinTech hub, its crucial to look at why Canada isnt already a larger FinTech hub and what makes Canadas biggest banks somewhat less innovative on the global stage.

I talked to a lot of Canadian business leaders and they are very proud of how Canadian banks do, and I switch it back on them and say Canadian banks also make the largest percentage of their revenue on consumer fees, said Kolicich. So if an optimal banking system is to give banks profit, then okay Canadas great, but other banks have to innovate to make profit.

He suggested that Canadian financial institutions could create special economic zones to try innovating and determining whats missing and whats necessary to strengthen the ecosystems position and ranking.

Also on the question of what Canada should do to build a stronger FinTech ecosystem, Mitelman stressed the importance of collaboration between banks and FinTechs. He suggested that perhaps limiting collaboration is among the reasons Canadas FinTech ecosystem has been slow to catch up to other hubs.

We adopted the language of collaboration very late, said Mitelman. Theres no two ways about it. The language that we wish to partner with FinTechs, we wish to enable with FinTechs, we wish to finance FinTechs is all a very new language. The reason why the rate of growth in the segment is accelerating now is because were starting from a very low place.

To help Canadian FinTechs catch up to other countries like the United Kingdom and Singapore, Bannister said that Canadian FinTechs need to focus on winning international markets.

We need to do more, but were just a little slow, said Bannister. For FinTechs in Canada, one of the pieces of advice I would give to grow more quickly is to quickly get outside of Canada. I think too many FinTech companies, they stay too long in Canada because they look at Canada and they say this is my backyard and the market is so huge. The bad news is that can limit startups when entrepreneurs think all [they] need to do is win the Canadian market. Often, you can scale much faster in the US.

At the Empire Startups FinTech Conference, another panel featuring Marstone CEO and founder Margaret Hartigan; NestWealth CEO and founder Randy Cass; OutsideIQ founder and CEO Dan Adamson; ffVC partner AJ Plotkin; and Nara Logics CEO Jana Eggers touched on how Canadian engineering schools are churning out the future of artificial intelligence, and whether AI and machine learning is starting to materially affect FinTech. The panel suggested that Canadian FinTechs may have the potential to lead by building AI-enabled technologies for both banks and consumers.

Cass kicked off the panel by explaining how AI has potential applications in the wealth management and investment spaces, especially as the technology can potentially identify behaviour traits and patterns that help determine the types of investments consumers can make.

Where we see AI entering the space right now is in using behaviours to identify what type of investor they [consumers] actually are and adjusting their risk profiles so they are best suited for that type of investment, said Cass.

Adamson discussed how FinTechs across the globe are trying to use AI technologies to solve massive problems that traditional technology cant tackle. Its looking at context [and] nuances, said Adamson. Its difficult problems that theyre trying to solve and this is where weve found a great home for some of these new AI technologies.

Where were seeing the most adoption is in back-end like compliance support or in the insurance industry. Jana Eggers, Nara Logics CEO

The panel also stressed AI applications in areas like compliance and the insurance industry. Where were seeing the most adoption is in [the] back-end, like compliance support, or in the insurance industry for some of that and also in FinTech, said Eggers. We have a lot of back-end operations, but consumers too. With consumers, its really personalization. So its personalized offers, which works in FinTech as well.

As AI and machine learning gain popularity among FinTech startups, Adamson suggested that FinTech companies should be careful when pitching AI-enabled platforms to investors.

Theres a lot of buzz around the terminology and you have to be very careful, said Adamson. There are opportunities there [in AI]. We are early stages on one hand, but on the otherI dont think its enough to say were doing what someone else does but were using deep learning.'

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Trans-Tasman partners grasp ecosystem opportunities at Cisco Live – ARNnet

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Technology businesses from Australia and New Zealand put best feet forward at Cisco Live in Las Vegas

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins delivered his keynote on the opening day of Cisco Live 2017 in Las Vegas

Jonathan Barouch is buzzing. His company, Sydney-based social media monoitoring software developer Local Measure, has just received a big boost as they promote their product on the Cisco Live convention floor in Las Vegas.

As the huge conference kicked off, Cisco senior vice president and general manager of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, Rowan Trollope, tweeted a link to one of the company's case study vidoes with the note...

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins in turn retweeted Trollope's message with: "Our are such a strategic part of our success with customers!"

Local Measure was one of a dozen companies, including Telstra, exhibiting in Cisco's "Collaboration Village" across sprawling convention and exhibition floor at Mandalay Bay.

"In the past, Cisco might never have partnered with a company like us," Barouch said. "Gorillas dance with gorillas, but over the last 12 months we've seen open APIs, they are building a developer ecosystem. The fact that Chuck tweets about an Australian partner is pretty cool."

Barouch has been paying attention to the stream of annoucements flowing from Cisco this week and building on the company's recent announcement of a new management technology that makes the network programmable and much easier to manage from a central console dubbed DNA Centre.

The "intent-based" system allows users to express policies the software platform executes and maintains the dynamically, easing administration workloads at a time when the number of connected devices is forecast to skyrocket due to internet of things developments.

It also improves security through allowing micro-segmentation that can stop intruder from moving laterally through the network.

Barouch said at the heart of the changes is the fact that while Cisco will build the hardware and the core software that operates networks and supports its collaboration portfolio, partners bring a lot to the table.

"Cisco will do a part of it and partners will do a part of it as well," he said. "It's what differentiates Cisco from a lot of their competitors, that they have that ecosystem to build solutions that are industry specific or very targeted.

"I think it's cool to see them go further down the stack towards earlier stage technology companies as well."

Local Measure's software, for instance, integrates with Cisco's collaboration platform Spark to provide a tool for marketers to find social media content related to their companies and close the loop on service to customers by integrating that with existing workflows.

"It's been cool for us because it's a really nice entry into Cisco and it resonates with our clients. Many times they are leading with our capabilities and it just happens it runs on Spark or Maraki, but the business solution comes first."

Barouch poiunts out that Trollope's keynote at Cisco Live was all about getting close to the customer - getting to "zero distance".

"That doesn't sound like a traditional hardware company. That sounds like a software company."

It also changes the conversation from one of price to one of capabilities.

"You add some of the partners on top of the core and it gets pretty interesting," he said.

Another benefit for Cisco, Barouch said, is that their relationships are predominantly with CIOs, CTOs and the like. However, Local Measure speaks to heads of marketing and CEOs, so it becomes a digital transformation discussion.

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The Klein Jukskei turns red with damage imminent to the ecosystem – Randburg Sun

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The paint is dumped in Jukskei Park. Photo: Facebook

It is believed that the red paint in the Klein Jukskei River was deliberately dumped by someone who wanted to throw paint away.

This belief comes after the river turned red on 25 June.

Murray Van Zyl, the operations director for the Klein Jukskei Greenbelt Initiative, said the US Environmental Protection Agency puts paint on the top five list of environmental hazards.

By far, the most important environmental impact from paint is the release of volatile organic compounds, said Van Zyl.

He said the natural flow of the river washed the paint down stream and could potentially damage 20kms of the rivers ecosystem.

The paint was dumped in the river above Robyn Park which is 7kms from the source of the river. Everything downstream from Robyn Park will potentially be affected by toxic substances in the paint.

The remnants of the spilled paint on the ground. Photo: Facebook

He said paint has an impact on the environment during its manufacturing process and on health during its use phase. Unused liquid paint is treated as hazardous and requires appropriate disposal. They generally include pigment carried by a resin and/or binder, a solvent to help the paint application, and a dryer.

In vinyl and acrylic paints they will also include plastics compounds.

Preserving such spaces comes with realising the importance of clean rivers and how biodiversity depends on a healthy ecosystem to thrive.

Without clean water there is no life, and a clean environment is vital for human health.

Van Zyl said South Africa is a water scarce country with very little rainfall throughout the year. The drought created serious and widespread detrimental effects across the country and made people more aware of their water consumption.

The Klein Jukskei River flows red. Photo: Supplied

Within the next 10 years, water shortages will likely be a fact of life for most people on the planet. We cant afford to pollute and destroy our drinking water sources.

He concluded by saying we need to continue promoting awareness, encouraging a healthy environment and conserve our natural resources because our livelihoods depend on it.

The Klein Jukskei River provides a green corridor through our city and suburbs, essentially providing clean air for us to breathe. Also there are so few green spaces left in our ever growing cities that we need to preserve these areas and feel free to explore them without the fear of contaminated water and disease.

ALSO READ:Klein Jukskei River gets cleaned

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The Klein Jukskei turns red with damage imminent to the ecosystem - Randburg Sun

Tonya Evinger says she’s expected Cyborg, UFC fight for years – ESPN (blog)

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The truth is, Tonya Evinger has known she was going to fight Cris "Cyborg" Justino for years.

She didn't know exactly when it was going to happen -- only that it was inevitable. And that it would most likely be her entry into the UFC.

"I didn't know when the UFC would sign me, but I knew it would be to fight Cyborg," Evinger told ESPN on Wednesday. "I just knew it, man. Literally, my coaches and I have been talking about this for years."

The UFC proved Evinger right this week, when it announced she'd face Justino for its vacant 145-pound title at UFC 214 on July 29. Evinger replaces Megan Anderson, who pulled off the card for personal reasons.

Evinger, 36, has waited a long time to make her UFC debut. An original pioneer in women's MMA, with more than 10 years of pro experience, Evinger has fought exclusively in the all-female promotion Invicta FC since 2013. She currently holds the promotion's 135-pound title.

For whatever reason, however, the UFC has passed on Evinger's services until now. The closest she ever came to signing with the promotion was four years ago, when she tried out for the UFC's reality series, "The Ultimate Fighter."

She ended up losing an elimination bout and, despite a perfect 7-0 record in Invicta, hasn't come close to the UFC since.

"I kind of gave up on the UFC," Evinger said. "I got to a point where I said, 'You know what? I'm not going to beg for anything. I'm not going to stress myself out and sit here angry because I'm not where I think I should be.'

"I just needed to look at things through a different window. I realized I was where I needed to be. I was fighting for one of the best promotions in the world against tough opponents. I was doing everything I wanted to do, it just wasn't in the UFC."

Although the UFC was reluctant to sign her, Evinger still knew the Justino fight would come up eventually. There are simply not many women willing to face Justino, a natural featherweight with 15 career wins via knockout.

Evinger, who fights out of Houston, was always one of the few willing to say yes -- as long as the compensation was right. She always figured it might take the UFC's deep pockets to make the fight a reality. And, once again, she was dead on.

"This fight came up a couple times when we were both in Invicta, but my thing was I needed to be paid for it. I didn't want to be making a small amount of money, while the UFC paid her a ton for the fight.

"Don't get me wrong, I'm not going into this with no stress, no worries, no emotions. That's not the case. I have the same feelings before every fight. I'm scared every single fight, just like all of these fighters are. But that's the reason I fight. It brings out the best in me."

After waiting years to debut in the UFC -- and giving up on the idea of actually joining the promotion in her own weight class, as a bantamweight contender -- Evinger has finally signed a multi-fight deal with the UFC.

It took accepting a short-notice fight against the most dominant female of all time to get it done -- but of course, Evinger always knew it would.

"I'm the grinder, man," Evinger said. "I'm going to grind this fight out for a win. I'm going to drag her to the deep end and push the pace as much as she pushes the pace. At the end of the day, I'm a competitor. I'm not going in there intimidated."

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Tonya Evinger says she's expected Cyborg, UFC fight for years - ESPN (blog)

Cyborg Justino Pleads Not Guilty to Charge for Allegedly Punching Angela Magana – Bleacher Report

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Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

Cris "Cyborg" Justino has pleaded not guilty to her battery charge stemming from an alleged punch on a fellow UFC fighter, according to TMZ.

The original incident occurred at a UFC retreat in May, when she and Angela Magana got in a confrontation about social media that allegedly ended with a punch from Justino and a charge for battery.

(Warning: Video contains inappropriate language)

She will be due back in court in August.

She could face up to six months in jail if convicted, while there could be consequences even if she is found not guilty. TMZ also reported Magana has met with a lawyer and plans to bring a civil suit against Justino.

UFC president Dana White recently discussed the situation on theUFC Unfilteredpodcast, clearly siding with Magana.

"You can't put your hands on another human being outside of the Octagon," White said, perDave Doyleof MMAFighting.com. "It's assault, you will get arrested, in the fight world we all love to get caught up in the 'hey, you know what, she had a big mouth and she needed a smack in the mouth' thing, but it doesn't work that way in real life."

Cyborg has been one of the top female fighters in UFC, building up a 16-1 record in her MMA career. Magana is only 11-8 and in a different weight class than her rival, which forced her to challenge Justino to ajujitsu matchin May, although this doesn't seem likely to come to fruition.

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Cyborg Justino Pleads Not Guilty to Charge for Allegedly Punching Angela Magana - Bleacher Report

Video: Cris Cyborg is a savage boxer, should probably fight Floyd Mayweather in place of Conor McGregor – MMAmania.com

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If Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) lightweight champion Conor McGregor gets hurt and doesn't show up for his Floyd Mayweather boxing match on Aug. 26, Showtime can always call upon former Strikeforce featherweight titleholder Cristiane Justino.

Shed probably be a tougher fight anyway, based on this video.

Thats because Cyborg is a SAVAGE inside the ring, going toe-to-toe with two-time Olympic gold medalist Claressa Shields, who is convinced the Brazilian would be a major force in the sweet science with some proper training.

"From today, shed be a great transition in over to boxing. It would be not be hard for you. A year of just training in boxing, six months, youll able to take on some of the top girls, Shields told Justino (via MMA Fighting). "Imagine with one year, just training boxing, I think it would be really nice. Im interested, maybe one day. You'd be a monster.

Sound familiar?

Justino (17-1, 1 NC) is gearing up for her debut in the UFC featherweight division, which comes against Megan Anderson at the UFC 214 pay-per-view (PPV) event on Sat., July 29, 2017 inside Honda Center in Anaheim, California.

A win there and I vote she boxes the winner of McGregor vs. Mayweather.

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Video: Cris Cyborg is a savage boxer, should probably fight Floyd Mayweather in place of Conor McGregor - MMAmania.com