Monthly Archives: July 2017

Ninety-six years after the Ku Klux Klan organized in Charlottesville, about 50 members of the Loyal White Knights of the KKK traveled on Saturday from a small North Carolina town near Virginia's border to protest an effort to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

They were met by more than 1,000 protesters in Justice Park, which is home to a statue of Gen. Thomas "Stonewall Jackson and until recently was named for the Confederate leader. The Lee statue stands in nearby Emancipation Park, which also was renamed.

Meanwhile, those who wanted to protest less directly gathered at "Unity Cville" events scattered throughout the city for concerts, community organizing, discussions on the KKK and other white supremacist and separatist groups and more.

Lurking beyond Saturday's events is another rally planned for Aug. 12. Organized by pro-white blogger Jason Kessler, that event is expected to attract far-right and white nationalist groups. Some saw Saturday's events as a dress rehearsal for the August rally.

Delayed as police worked to create a pathway for them to reach Justice Park, the KKK members rallied for less than an hour, from 3:45 to 4:30 p.m. Their permit had been scheduled for 3 to 4 p.m. Several protesters were arrested as they tried to form a blockade.

The Klansmen then moved to a parking garage on Fourth Street Northeast and High Street, where their vehicles were parked. Police moved with them, and a wall of protesters formed at the garage. Authorities told them that they were to disperse for unlawful assembly. At 4:45 p.m., the vehicles were able to leave the garage.

Police and protesters then moved back toward Justice Park. After "a number of incidents," as a city spokeswoman put it, frustration boiled over and police threatened to use pepper spray. Virginia State Police threw three tear gas canisters to disperse the crowd; among those affected were several Daily Progress reporters and two ACLU legal observers.

The Charlottesville Police Department requested assistance from the Albemarle County Police Department, University of Virginia Police Department, Charlottesville Sheriffs Office, Charlottesville Fire Department, Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad and Virginia State Police.

The spokeswoman said Charlottesville police and Virginia State Police resources "were deployed to secure access to the park and ensure the safety of all involved." By 6 p.m., protests had dispersed.

In all, 23 people had been arrested by 6:15 p.m. Three people were taken to a hospital, two for heat-related issues and one for an alcohol-related issue.

In a statement on Saturday, the Virginia Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, which has opposed the removal of the Lee statue in a legal battle, said it "neither embraces nor espouses acts or ideologies of racial or religious bigotry and further strongly condemns the misuse of our sacred flags, symbols, or monuments in the conduct of the same."

On Facebook, Mayor Mike Signer said residents "made lemonade out of a lemon" on Saturday. "Today could have been a day of rage and indiscriminate and violent confrontation. Instead, it was a day of prayer, education, testimony and protest."

More than 1,000 people were in attendance when about 50 members of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan protested in Justice Park on Saturday, according to a spokeswoman for the city of Charlottesville.

As of 6:15 p.m., 23 people had been arrested. Three people were taken to a hospital, two for heat-related issues and one for an alcohol-related issue.

The spokeswoman said Charlottesville police and Virginia State Police resources "were deployed to secure access to the park and ensure the safety of all involved."

After police allowed the KKK members to leave a parking garage, they began to walk toward Justice Park, she said, and a large group followed. After "a number of incidents," police used pepper spray and state police three three canisters of tear gas to disperse the crowd, the spokeswoman said.

In a statement on Saturday, the Virginia Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, which has opposed the removal of the Lee statue in a legal battle, said it "neither embraces nor espouses acts or ideologies of racial or religious bigotry and further strongly condemns the misuse of our sacred flags, symbols, or monuments in the conduct of the same."

Police and protesters have dispersed from High Street and Justice Park.

Police have used three cans of tear gas on protesters standing in High Street in Charlottesville following the KKK's departure from a protest in Justice Park.

Among those affected were several Daily Progress reporters and a legal observer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Charlottesville Police Department has requested assistance from the Albemarle County Police Department, University of Virginia Police Department, Charlottesville Sheriffs Office, Charlottesville Fire Department, Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad and Virginia State Police.

Surveillance cameras were installed near Emancipation and Justice parks within the last couple of weeks, according to Capt. Wendy Lewis, and they are recording on a loop. Footage will only be viewed for evidentiary or investigative purposes, she said.

Having policed similarly large events, such as the Occupy Charlottesville protest in 2011, Lewis said Charlottesville police are confident they can handle the situation.

I think were very experienced at it, Lewis said earlier this week. We find it a privilege to be able to protect peoples right to assemble and free speech in a transparent way.

About 40 members of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan rallied for less than an hour at Justice Park.

Protesters had tried to stop police from forming a barrier that allowed the KKK to enter their rally area. Several of them were arrested as police created a path.

At about 4:30 p.m., KKK members left the rally to head toward their vehicles in a garage at Fourth Street Northeast and High Street. Protesters gathered to confront them, but police told they would be arrested for unlawful assembly. At about 4:45 p.m., the vehicles left.

Civic leaders have planned events to bring the community elsewhere Saturday, but leftist activists have set up to directly protest the Klan rally at Justice Park, formerly named for the statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson that stands there.. In the weeks leading up to Saturdays events, the city has been on edge, worrying about the possibility of violence between the Klan members and protesters.

On Aug. 12, a rally that will be attended by far-right and extremist groups that promote racist, white nationalist and anti-Semitic sentiments is expected to draw about 400 participants.

Some are looking at Saturdays event as a dress rehearsal for the Unite the Right rally next month in Emancipation Park, formerly named for its statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

The two rallies are being organized as a protest against the citys efforts to remove the Lee statue. Organizers for the two events see the possible removal of the Lee statue as an affront to White-European and Southern culture.

In a statement on Saturday, the Virginia Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, which has opposed the removal of the Lee statue in a legal battle, said it "neither embraces nor espouses acts or ideologies of racial or religious bigotry and further strongly condemns the misuse of our sacred flags, symbols, or monuments in the conduct of the same."

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Tear gas used on protesters after KKK rally at Justice Park; 23 arrested - The Daily Progress

In his ongoing search to locate his hitting stroke, Kyle Schwarber took early batting practice Saturday under the watchful eyes of hitting coach John Mallee and manager Joe Maddon.

Schwarber appeared in his third consecutive game Saturday night after being recalled from Triple-A Iowa, where he was sent to jump-start his lagging offensive production this season. In his first at-bat he lined an opposite-field single in the second inning of the Cubs game with the Pirates at Wrigley Field. He followed that with a solo home run to center field in the fourth.

"It's a continuous process," Schwarber said. "I'm really happy with how the performance from down there is transferring up here. You're back in the big leagues and you want to get ahead of things. Now that it's out of the way I just plan on being myself."

Maddon was on the field for another purpose during Schwarber's pregame hitting session and couldn't help stopping to watch and provide additional instruction.

"I just wanted to be an advocate of what's going on and lend another set of eyes to what they're doing," Maddon said. "Being an old hitting coachwhat they're doing and how they're doing it is very interesting to me."

Schwarber said he has focused on slowing down his mechanics and limiting movement.

"Everything looked really good," Maddon said. "Primarily, everything has been based about shorter movements (and) getting ready sooner."

Coming soon: Starter Kyle Hendricks (tendinitis in his right hand) checked out fine a day after his bullpen session Friday and will make a minor-league start Monday for Double-A Tennessee.

"Once we get that done and accomplished and he's well we'll be able then to try to figure out the post-All-Star break rotation stuff," Maddon said.

Minor honors: The Cubs named catcher Victor Caratini and right-hander Thomas Hatch as the organization's minor-league player and pitcher of the month for June, respectively.

Before the Cubs called him up from Triple A, Caratini hit .345 with four home runs and 21 RBIs in 25 games with Iowa.

Hatch went 3-2 with a 0.98 ERA in five June starts with Class A Myrtle Beach.

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Kyle Schwarber's progress on offense 'a continuous process' - Chicago Tribune

Back in 2012, I had the pleasure of visiting the IBM Watson research center. Among the people I talked with was George Tulevski, who was working on developing carbon nanotubes as a possible replacement for silicon in some critical parts of transistors. IBM likes to think about developing technology with about a 10-year time window, which puts us about halfway to when the company might expect to be making nanotube-based hardware.

So, how's it going? This week, there was a bit of a progress report published in Nature Nanotechnology (which included Tulevski as one of its authors). In it, IBM researchers describe how they're now able to put together test hardware that pushes a carbon nanotube-based processor up to 2.8GHz. It's not an especially useful processor, but the methods used for assembling it show that some (but not all) of the technology needed to commercialize nanotube-based hardware is nearly ready.

The story of putting together a carbon nanotube processor is largely one of overcoming hurdles. You wouldn't necessarily expect that; given that the nanotubes can be naturally semiconducting, they'd seem like a natural fit for existing processor technology. But it's a real challenge to get the right nanotubes in the right place and play nicely with the rest of the processor. In fact, it's a series of challenges.

Note that above I said that nanotubes can be semiconducting. Unfortunately, they can also be metallic. (Well, not entirely unfortunatelythat's quite useful for other applications.) Even more unfortunately, when we make a batch of nanotubes, we can't control whether they're going to be metallic or semiconducting. Instead, you just end up with a random mixture of the two.

There have been two approaches to dealing with this. The first is to just put more carbon nanotubes than you need into place, then identify the metallic ones and destroy them. Needless to say, this isn't especially efficient. The alternative is to take a batch of carbon nanotubes and then separate out the semiconducting ones. There are various ways of doing this, but most of them haven't been 100-percent efficient. Which of course means that, at some level, you're going to be putting a piece of metal where you wanted a semiconductor, shorting part of your processor out.

For the new work, IBM relied on a development pioneered at the National Renewable Energy Lab (a facility targeted for massive cuts by the current administration). Some bright people at NREL realized that semiconducting carbon nanotubes would preferentially interact with complicated organic solvents that have nitrogen-containing rings in their structure.

Researchers at IBM decided this would be very useful indeed, so they tested the technique out. A single extraction with the same technique and, 10,000 individual nanotubes later, they can report that over 99.9 percent of the purified tubes were semiconducting. We can consider NREL's work replicated. And, if 99.9 percent's not good enough, there's no reason that the process couldn't be repeated in order to furtherincreasethe purity.

Of course, those semiconducting nanotubes don't do a processor much good if they're still sitting in solution. Ideally, you want a method of placing them in specific locations on your chip. Here, IBM rolled its own solution. The company developed a system in which polymers would only form on specific material on its chips. These polymers would help guide carbon nanotubes out of solution and in to specific locations.

So, we've now got a basic construction kit for carbon nanotube processors. But it's still not enough to do something useful. Modern processors have a complicated mix of p- and n-type semiconductors (which tend to build up positive or negative charges). Carbon nanotubes are naturally p-type, but they can be converted to n-type if they're placed in proximity to certain metals. Unfortunately, those metals tend to oxidize under normal conditions.

So the people at IBM put a cap over this metal layer to try to protect it. Unfortunately, the metal they used (scandium) turned out to like oxygen so much that itstripped it out of another part of the hardware, a hafnium oxide layer. So, that layer had to be replaced.

With all of the hurdles cleared, the team decided to make some individual transistors. These worked extremely well, with every one of the 192 transistors the researchers tested being operational. So, the team went on to try to build actual circuitry. Not useful circuitry, but instead a typical test case for new processor technology: a ring oscillator. This is a series of gates set up so to flip bits; if the gates get a 1, they convert it to 0 and vice versa. By putting an odd number in a ring-shaped configuration, each individual gate will oscillate between 1 and 0 with a timing that depends on the amount of delay involved in each individual gate changing its state.

The good news is that they produced 55 functional ring oscillators, with a performance of up to 2.8 GHz. This is an important demonstration that the process works. Unfortunately, IBM had to build 160 ring oscillators to get the 55 functional ones. So the process isn't mature. In fact, since ring oscillators only really involve five functional gates, it's a long way off from producing anything that might be considered a product.

But, to return to the point this discussion started with, IBMand the rest of the material science communitystill have a bit of space left in their timeline to get this commercialized. And, five years ago, they were still working on getting pure semiconducting nanotubes. Given the progress since, I wouldn't rule things out.

Nature Nanotechnology, 2017. DOI: 10.1038/NNANO.2017.115 (About DOIs).

Link:

More progress on carbon nanotube processors: a 2.8GHz ring oscillator - Ars Technica

PARIS French President Emmanuel Macron said he told Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin the two countries had made a "tangible" progress in bilateral relations, which could move to a new phase.

The two presidents met for the first time on May 29.

"On the subject of bilateral and regional issues, I welcome the quality and the intensity of the work that has been established since then," Macron, who kept Putin waiting for about 20 minutes, said ahead of their meeting behind closed doors.

"So I think now we can move on to a new phase because we both saw that we were doing what we were saying," Macron added.

(Reporting by Marine Pennetier in Hamburg; Writing by Maya Nikolaeva; editing by John Stonestreet)

HAMBURG President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday he thought his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump had been satisfied with his assertions that Russia had not meddled in the U.S. presidential election.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on Saturday said that the U.S.-Mexico relationship cannot be defined by "murmurs," the day after U.S. President Donald Trump said Mexico would "absolutely" pay for his proposed southern border wall.

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Macron tells Putin tangible progress made in Russo-French relations - Reuters

KUWAIT British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Saturday progress could be made to heal a rift between Qatar and other Arab states, although a solution was unlikely to be found immediately.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain have cut diplomatic and transport ties with Qatar over accusations it was financing terrorism, claims which Doha says are "baseless".

"My impression is progress can be made and there is a way forward," Johnson said in a televised interview released to media after meeting senior government figures in Kuwait which is attempting to mediate between the two sides.

"But I'm not going to pretend to you now that it is necessarily overnight or this is going to be done in the next couple of days," he said.

Johnson, who held meetings on Friday with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is due to travel to Qatar later on Saturday for meetings with its emir and prime minister.

"We think the blockade was unwelcome and we hope there will be a de-escalation," Johnson said.

(Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

HAMBURG President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday he thought his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump had been satisfied with his assertions that Russia had not meddled in the U.S. presidential election.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on Saturday said that the U.S.-Mexico relationship cannot be defined by "murmurs," the day after U.S. President Donald Trump said Mexico would "absolutely" pay for his proposed southern border wall.

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UK's Johnson says progress can be made to ease Qatar tensions - Reuters

HAMBURG German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday there was no glossing over the fact that there had been "very, very slow" progress in implementing the Minsk peace accords aimed at ending years of violence in eastern Ukraine.

Merkel said she would hold four-way telephone talks on next steps soon with the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and France following a more procedural conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Hamburg.

"We agreed to continue the process. But we also observed that progress had been very, very slow - with stagnation in some cases, relapses in others. We didn't gloss over the situation," she said. "We will stay in touch, we'll stick with the format. We don't have any other basis."

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Noah Barkin)

HAMBURG President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday he thought his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump had been satisfied with his assertions that Russia had not meddled in the U.S. presidential election.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on Saturday said that the U.S.-Mexico relationship cannot be defined by "murmurs," the day after U.S. President Donald Trump said Mexico would "absolutely" pay for his proposed southern border wall.

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Merkel cites 'very, very slow' progress on Ukraine peace deal - Reuters