Annan kicks off meetingfilled day at African Union Summit with prayer breakfast
Before he addressed the annual summit, being held this year in Mozambique, the Secretary-General met with the African Union’s Heads of State at a prayer breakfast in which he said that, sadly, “so-called men of religion sometimes invoke the name of God to justify violence against their fellow human beings.””But I believe,” Mr. Annan continued, “we have a duty to love those of our own faiths, those of other faiths, and those of no faith. As leaders, we must summon the moral courage to stand against those who encourage violence and hatred. Instead, we must point the way to tolerance, understanding and the peaceful resolution of conflict.”According to a UN spokesperson in New York, the Secretary-General began the afternoon with a series of meetings in the margins of the Summit.During talks with Antoine Ghonda, the Foreign Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Mr. Annan said he was disappointed that President Joseph Kabila did not come to Maputo, where he had hoped to have a summit on the DRC. The next opportunity for such a summit could be at the General Assembly in September, Mr. Annan said. He congratulated Mr. Ghonda, who was accompanied by representatives of two former parties to the conflict, as well as by a political counsellor to President Kabila, on the formation of a transitional national government, but emphasized that the fighting in the DRC has to stop.The Secretary-General also met with Tunisian Foreign Minister Habib Ben Yahia, with whom he discussed regional issues, as well as the importance of support for the Middle East Road Map; they also touched on Iraq.After that, he met with the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth Secretariat, Don McKinnon, talking with him about Zimbabwe, including the land reform plan which the Secretary-General and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) had proposed. MR. Annan then had a tête-à-tête meeting with President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah of Sierra Leone.After those meetings, the Secretary-General was scheduled to discuss the situation in Zimbabwe with Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. Then, he was to attend a banquet hosted by President Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique.
We all knew that Treyarch and Activision latest Call of Duty title, Call of Duty: Black Ops (or CoD:BlOps, as it’s affectionately known) was selling like gang busters, but it’s more than just a money maker: it’s a billion dollar title.In a press release, Activision has announced that Black Ops has just surpassed $1 billion in total sales internationally… in just a single month. In addition, Black Ops has racked up almost as many game play hours as it has game dollars: six hundred million hours of multiplayer playtime in the last month alone.It’s a milestone number for gaming. “In all of entertainment, only Call of Duty and “Avatar” have ever achieved the billion dollar revenue milestone this quickly,” said Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard.”Black Ops will only rack up more cash from here: the first slice of DLC is due in February.
HBO Max Scores Exclusive ‘Doctor Who’ Streaming RightsJo Tro Do Plo Plo No: ‘Doctor Who’ Welcomes Back Familiar Monster Stay on target New York Comic Con continued its slow but inevitable takeover of Manhattan this year by expanding for the first time to the Theater at Madison Square Garden. And who better to kick off such a momentous occasion than mad man in a box? BBC America took over MSG all Friday morning to give a crowd of screaming Anglophiles a look at the upcoming season of Doctor Who, and its new spin-off show Class. We got a brief introduction to the new Doctor Who spinoff, Class. The show centers on the teenagers who attend Coal Hill Academy. Whovians will recognize that name as Coal Hill has a long history in the series. It first appeared all the way back in 1963, as the school attended by The Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan.Now, Coal Hill Academy is home to students who have had some run in with The Doctor or other extraterrestrial beings. The show’s creator, Patrick Ness said that outside of a cameo in the pilot episode, these kids won’t have the doctor around to tell them what’s going on. They’ll meet aliens and have no way of knowing what they’re called or what they want, and they’ll have to “deal with it in complete bafflement, which is kind of like being a teenager.” That’s the main idea behind this show.We will also be introduced to monsters we don’t recognize. Ness said he sees this show as his one shot to make brand new Doctor Who monsters and leave his footprint on the universe. He’s going to take full advantage of it. He also told us not to expect many cameo appearances from past Who characters. “Cameos are like penises,” he said. “If you put them in a scene, they’re all anyone will talk about.”He did say there will be plenty of more subtle Easter eggs for fans of classic Who. “You’re gonna see stuff you like,” he said to a fan who asked about a possible appearance from Ian and Barbara, The Doctor’s first companions.Class premieres October 22.Finally, we got to the panel we’d all been waiting for. We were joined by Steven Moffat, Brian Minchin, Peter Capaldi, Matt Lucas and the newest addition to the show, Pearl Mackie. We are still a long ways off from the next season, but they were able to give us a taste of what we could expect from the upcoming Christmas special.Titled “The Return of Doctor Mysterio,” the new episode will focus on a superhero. Capaldi described the special as a witty, ironic, positive and good superhero movie and likened it to the 1978 Richard Donner Superman movie.Matt Lucas will also return as a regular cast member, playing a sort of mischievous butler to The Doctor. Matt Lucas, who has a career in Hollywood, was asked why he would move to Cardiff and be a regular cast member on a TV show, and he recalled his first guest appearance on Doctor Who. It mostly came down to the crew. Everyone he worked with was so great, and he had such a good time, he desperately wanted to come back. Moffat says his role was initially much smaller, but as Lucas offered to do more and more, he became a huge part of the upcoming season.Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie, Matt Lucas, Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin at NYCC. (Photo: Screenshot via Youtube/BBC)Finally, we were introduced to Pearl Mackie who plays Bill, The Doctor’s new companion. We weren’t given a ton of information about her, but Steven Moffat wanted everything about the upcoming season to feel new. He says this season won’t require anyone to have watched all the previous ones to know what’s going on. Bill is a completely new character with a completely new perspective on The Doctor. After the last couple seasons went to some really dark places, Moffat wants the show to have a different feel.Capaldi for his part said he can’t wait for people to see how The Doctor meets his new companion. He said they’re introduction is “really quite different” from anything the show has done before.We’ll have to wait a little while to find out, though. Doctor Who returns December 25.
Stay on target The Best Anime On HuluThis Might Be Attack On Titan’s Goriest Moment Of The Series So Far Attack on Titan Season 3 is coming sometime next year, which seems like a long time to wait. However, fans that remember the four-year wait between the first and second season are absolutely thrilled they’ll get to catch two seasons of the show in two consecutive years. To put that in perspective, you could have entered High School as a Freshman the day Attack on Titan season one ended and have graduated before season two started.Spoilers for Attack on Titan Seasons One and Two below.One of the series’ characters designers Kyoji Asano has been releasing a series of sketches showcasing the upcoming season. The latest is a motif of all the Survey Corps members who are still alive at the start of Attack on Titan Season Three. Eren Yeager, Armin Arlet, Mikasa Ackerman, Levi Ackerman, Ymir, Reiner Braun, and Bertolt Hoover are all shown in this lovely new drawing.It’s unusual they’re all shown together though since not everyone is on friendly terms with each other. Attack on Titan Season 3 is set to launch sometime in 2018. The both seasons before it began airing in April, so it’s likely we could see the new episodes as soon as April 2018.That means there’s plenty of time to go before the show comes out, so you can take in the various spinoffs, video games, and other adaptations out there of Attack on Titan before the story picks back up. Just beware of spoilers if you’re looking to keep yourself untainted before the next season begins for a nice, lengthy binge-watching session, because that’s how the show is best experienced so far. You may have heard secrets and theories from other viewers, but try and forget those if you can. Going into Attack on Titan in general without any prior information is the optimal way to view it, after all.Let us know what you like about Geek by taking our survey.
Is 12 Strong good?No.What is it, exactly?The recently declassified true story of “Task Force Dagger;” a joint operation of US Army Green Beret Operational Detachment Alpha 595 and CIA paramilitary ops that aimed to destabilize The Taliban in the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks by integrating and providing air support to anti-Taliban militias loyal to the Northern Alliance. It was an operation whose details were largely classified until recently save for the innately cinematic detail that the rough terrain required much of the travel and combat to be conducted on horseback.So an Afghanistan War movie?Yes.So I imagine this must be kind of grim, considering that whole thing kind of ran way longer and more complicated than we planned, right?No, it’s an orgasmically patriotic “Vengeance For 9-11” U.S. military infomercial from Jerry Bruckheimer. And the overriding theme of which is that charging headlong into a ground war in Afghanistan without much in the way of a plan was a noble and really smart idea that will clearly work out SWELL for everyone in the long run.…did they make this in 2003 and only just remember to release it now?Apparently not, no.So apart from “Lone Survivor, but with horses this time,” what’s the plot?Chris Hemsworth has the lead as the trusted but field-inexperienced Green Beret Captain charged with leading his team into the fight and striking uneasy peace with the hardscrabble Northern Alliance fighters. The film aims for it’s “main arc” to be the supposedly complex relationship between Hemsworth’s character and Navid Negabahn as the commander of their Alliance counterparts. So two tough guys: one young, one old. They sort-of sharing command of a single operation trying to feel each other out and navigate the twisted web of priorities that have briefly put them on the same side against a common enemy though with different tactics and functions.How does that play out?Dramatically, it’s not a bad idea, but 12 Strong just isn’t the kind of movie to deal meaningfully in the shades of gray that would make this all meaningful beyond perfunctory lip-service.Who else is in it?As this is a Jerry Bruckheimer military movie you already know he’s bringing a whole crew of actors who you kinda wish were in more good things but are always reliably solid in these – including Michael Shannon, William Fichtner, Michael Pena, Trevante Rhodes, Rob Riggle and Said Taghmaoui.Is the action at least decent?If you’ve seen ANY of the other mediocre Afghan War movies released over the last (almost) two decades, you’ve seen this one too. Handsome Hollywood actors growing out scruffy beards, scrambling behind rocks, pretending to fire machine guns, airstrikes being called in, explosions going off, wives and families being pined for. It’s full of History 101 platitudes about Afghanistan as “The Graveyard of Empires” being glibly passed off as ominous intonations, they bond, they fight, they suffer setbacks, they win. Eventually, they get the designated main bad guy, someone shows up back at home unexpected and hugs their kid while a low guitar-riff creeps in on the soundtrack, some pre-credits block-text lets you know only the happy parts of what happened next.So overall you don’t recommend it?Look, I’m trying not to sound cynical because YES it’s a war movie, people got killed, I sure as hell remember where I was on 9-11… I get it. But the whole thing isn’t just on auto-pilot but on the same auto-pilot we’ve seen dozens of times now and it feels like it’s actively avoiding bringing something new to the table. The action is generic, the details of what made this particular operation noteworthy and/or special feel sanded-down and generic. The actors are all doing schtick you’ve seen them do better elsewhere and it’s honestly not even visceral or emotionally resonant enough to pull a genuine connection out of a wound as open as 9-11 OR villains as eminently hateable as The Taliban or Al Qaeda. It’s not smart enough to be of historical interest and it’s not even exciting enough to be good propaganda. Stay on target MovieBob Reviews: ‘Shadow’MovieBob Reviews: ‘The Curse of La Llorona’ 
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Categories: Local San Diego News FacebookTwitter KUSI Newsroom San Diego to appeal costly pension ruling to U.S. Posted: October 17, 2018 October 17, 2018 00:00 00:00 spaceplay / pause qunload | stop ffullscreenshift + ←→slower / faster ↑↓volume mmute ←→seek . seek to previous 12… 6 seek to 10%, 20% … 60% XColor SettingsAaAaAaAaTextBackgroundOpacity SettingsTextOpaqueSemi-TransparentBackgroundSemi-TransparentOpaqueTransparentFont SettingsSize||TypeSerif MonospaceSerifSans Serif MonospaceSans SerifCasualCursiveSmallCapsResetSave SettingsSAN DIEGO (KUSI) — KUSI political contributor Jan Goldsmith joined us in studio to discuss San Diego’s decision to appeal a costly pension ruling to the United States Supreme Court. KUSI Newsroom, 
WEST PARK, FLA. (WSVN) – A crook who lured a would-be customer with promises of a cheap Xbox robbed that customer and fired upon him after he gave chase.The victim met with the subject to buy the Xbox video game system, and that’s when he was robbed, at around 1:30 p.m., Monday.According to a Broward Sheriff’s Office spokesperson, the victim chased after the thief until he got out of his vehicle and fired a shot at the victim. Officials confirmed that no one was shot.The incident took place in the area of 21st Street and Southwest 56th Terrace, in West Park.If you have any information about this robbery, call Broward County Crime Stoppers at 954-493-TIPS. Remember, you can always remain anonymous, and you may be eligible for a $3,000 reward.Copyright 2019 Sunbeam Television Corp. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
But the Senate Finance Committee is also pushing for a law establishing a long-term draw rate from the fund’s earnings to pay for state government and the yearly checks to residents. However, House leaders have been cool to setting a permanent fund draw in law without addressing oil or other taxes as part of a fiscal plan. The committee has proposed funding education for the next two years. Advance funding for year two would be contingent upon passage of a law setting a draw rate from Alaska Permanent Fund earnings. Facebook0TwitterEmailPrintFriendly分享JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — A Senate committee is proposing that Alaskans receive $1,600 checks from the state’s oil-wealth fund this year, the same as the House. School funding has been a priority for House leaders, who want to give districts more certainty for planning.
Dan Cohen AUTHOR Since it opened three years ago, the Grand Sky unmanned aerial systems business and aviation park at Grand Forks AFB, N.D., has quickly become a model for how the military can best take advantage of its enhanced use leasing (EUL) authority, according to a profile of the project in the latest edition of Air Force Magazine. The project grew out of the community’s desire to compensate for the installation’s loss of its tanker mission after the last BRAC round, and has helped strengthen ties between the base and local leaders. Most significantly, Grand Sky is an example of a project that has a synergy with the Air Force mission, which has helped spur industry, education, and economic development in the greater region.“It always works better when there’s an idea,” said Thomas Swoyer Jr., president of Grand Sky Development Co. “You can’t really just put a piece of land out there and say, ‘Oh, come develop this for us.’ There has to be a reason to develop it.”Photo courtesy of Grand Sky Development Co.
Shamsuzzaman DuduA Dhaka court on Tuesday sent Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s vice-chairman Shamsuzzaman Dudu to jail in a case filed on sabotage charge with Ramna police station. Dhaka metropolitan magistrate AKM Moinuddin Siddique passed the order after rejecting his bail petition when sub-inspector Sudeep Kumar Gosh, also the investigation officer of the case, produced him before the court. Lawyers Sanaullah Miah and Abul Hannan stood for Shamsuzzaman. The court also ordered the authorities concerned to take necessary measures as per the jail code as counsels sought division for the BNP leader, said court sources.Earlier on 8 February, police arrested the BNP leader from Segunbagicha area in the city in the case.
Twitter via @KXAN_News‘The Price of Liberty’ memorial for recent Texas vetsArtists are putting the final touches on a new monument set to be installed on the grounds of the Capitol complex.Standing 21 feet high, “The Price of Liberty” memorial depicts a version of Lady Liberty pulling a father and husband away to war as his tearful wife holds on and their daughter holds an American flag folded into a triangle, a dreaded gift the nation hands the families and loved ones of those who fall in warfare.The Austin American-Statesman reports the monument honors service members from Texas who have risked and sacrificed their lives since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the families of those who have served.In a dedication ceremony Saturday, the bronze memorial will be unveiled at East 12th Street and San Jacinto Boulevard.Retired Army Col. James Stryker, the Texas War Memorial Foundation’s board chairman, said by the time the Vietnam Veterans Monument was erected on the grounds of the Capitol in 2014, almost 40 years had passed since he served during the unpopular conflict. He had moved on with his life. “I don’t need to go back,” he said.Coming from that perspective, it’s not too soon to honor those who have served since 9/11 and their loved ones, Stryker said.“This generation of warriors really need an opportunity to know, truly, that we as a state appreciate your sacrifice,” he said.The monument will join Capitol memorials to veterans and those who died in every American war since the Civil War, with the exception of Union soldiers.Gov. Greg Abbott in 2015 signed House Concurrent Resolution 70, which gave the State Preservation Board the authority to OK the construction of the memorial. The resolution also mandated that the cost be covered through private funding. Stryker said the foundation “got a pretty good deal,” spending about $400,000 in donations to make the memorial. Ten percent of that amount will cover the cost for the state to maintain the display.“While the memorial will serve as a grim and heartbreaking reminder of tragedy and sorrow, my hope is that it will also be met with determination and resolve as we continue to confront the source of this shared global crisis,” Abbott said in a statement to the American-Statesman. “I am proud that as a state we can unite behind the common cause of combating evil in our world, and hope that this memorial allows for solemn remembrance of the lives lost in the war on terror.”The foundation is still taking donations to cover the cost of travel for Gold Star families, veterans and their families to attend the dedication. Stryker said the foundation plans to make a gift to the state for landscaping at the site and a place to sit.“That’s the key thing,” he said. “As a soldier, I never knew what the family went through until my wife deployed.”Stryker’s wife, retired Maj. Gen. Joy Stevens of the Texas Army National Guard, a member of the foundation’s board, said her father was in the Navy during World War II and was at Pearl Harbor when Japanese forces attacked. He never talked about it, she said.“When I would ask him, he would joke about the beautiful women on the beaches and how he ate pineapple until his teeth turned black — but the joking was a cover for feelings and thoughts that, had he shared them, it may have helped him heal,” she told the Statesman. “It would have also helped me understand as a child a little of what he and my mother lived through. He never did.”Stevens’ father has died, and her mother doesn’t remember the details of his service. Also, Stevens said that history is lost because she could not find his records. That’s why the Living Memorial, an online component associated with the memorial, is important, she added.“It captures the stories and details of the service members and their families that have served since 9/11,” Stevens said. “It keeps the fallen alive in our memories and demonstrates the price of liberty through the stories. It is for those who have served and understand the sacrifice — and for those who have not served, so they might understand too.”More information about the monument can be found at texaswarmemorial.com . Share
The new flow cell produces an average power density of 0.82 W/m2, which is almost 200 times higher than values obtained using previous similar methods. Although it is not yet clear whether the process could be economically viable on a large scale, the early results appear promising and could be further improved with future research.The scientists, Taeyong Kim, Bruce E. Logan, and Christopher A. Gorski at The Pennsylvania State University, have published a paper on the new method of CO2-to-electricity conversion in a recent issue of Environmental Science & Technology Letters.”This work offers an alternative, simpler means to capturing energy from CO2 emissions compared to existing technologies that require expensive catalyst materials and very high temperatures to convert CO2 into useful fuels,” Gorski told Phys.org.While the contrast of gray-white smoke against a blue sky illustrates the adverse environmental impact of burning fossil fuels, the large difference in CO2 concentration between the two gases is also what provides an untapped energy source for generating electricity.In order to harness the potential energy in this concentration difference, the researchers first dissolved CO2 gas and ambient air in separate containers of an aqueous solution, in a process called sparging. At the end of this process, the CO2-sparged solution forms bicarbonate ions, which give it a lower pH of 7.7 compared to the air-sparged solution, which has a pH of 9.4. After sparging, the researchers injected each solution into one of two channels in a flow cell, creating a pH gradient in the cell. The flow cell has electrodes on opposite sides of the two channels, along with a semi-porous membrane between the two channels that prevents instant mixing while still allowing ions to pass through. Due to the pH difference between the two solutions, various ions pass through the membrane, creating a voltage difference between the two electrodes and causing electrons to flow along a wire connecting the electrodes.After the flow cell is discharged, it can be recharged again by switching the channels that the solutions flow through. By switching the solution that flows over each electrode, the charging mechanism is reversed so that the electrons flow in the opposite direction. Tests showed that the cell maintains its performance over 50 cycles of alternating solutions.The results also showed that, the higher the pH difference between the two channels, the higher the average power density. Although the pH-gradient flow cell achieves a power density that is high compared to similar cells that convert waste CO2 to electricity, it is still much lower than the power densities of fuel cell systems that combine CO2 with other fuels, such as H2. However, the new flow cell has certain advantages over these other devices, such as its use of inexpensive materials and room-temperature operation. These features make the flow cell attractive for practical applications at existing power plants.”A system containing numerous identical flow cells would be installed at power plants that combust fossil fuels,” Gorski said. “The flue gas emitted from fossil fuel combustion would need to be pre-cooled, then bubbled through a reservoir of water that can be pumped through the flow cells.”In the future, the researchers plan to further improve the flow cell performance.”We are currently looking to see how the solution conditions can be optimized to maximize the amount of energy produced,” Gorski said. “We are also investigating if we can dissolve chemicals in the water that exhibit pH-dependent redox properties, thus allowing us to increase the amount of energy that can be recovered. The latter approach would be analogous to a flow battery, which reduces and oxidizes dissolved chemicals in aqueous solutions, except we are causing them to be reduced and oxidized here by changing the solution pH with CO2.” © 2017 Phys.org Chemists present an innovative redox-flow battery based on organic polymers and water Explore further (Phys.org)—Researchers have developed a type of rechargeable battery called a flow cell that can be recharged with a water-based solution containing dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from fossil fuel power plants. The device works by taking advantage of the CO2 concentration difference between CO2 emissions and ambient air, which can ultimately be used to generate electricity. The pH-gradient flow cell has two channels: one containing an aqueous solution sparged with carbon dioxide (low pH) and the other containing an aqueous solution sparged with ambient air (high pH). The pH gradient causes ions to flow across the membrane, creating a voltage difference between the two electrodes and causing electrons to flow along a wire connecting the electrodes. Credit: Kim et al. ©2017 American Chemical Society
Journal information: Environmental Science & Technology Letters Citation: Battery can be recharged with carbon dioxide (2017, February 9) retrieved 18 August 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2017-02-battery-recharged-carbon-dioxide.html More information: Taeyoung Kim et al. “A pH-Gradient Flow Cell for Converting Waste CO2 into Electricity.” Environmental Science & Technology Letters. DOI: 10.1021/acs.estlett.6b00467 This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
(photos by Ali Gibbs, text by Shannon Mackenzie) March 7, 2018See the beginning of this process hereThe Arcosanti Foundry built a back up furnace recently. The Foundry works with one Furnace at the time, but it always have three potentially working furnaces. When one deteriorates, they move on the back up one. After building the form (see the previous post linked to at the beginning of this post), the refractory cement is poured. Refractory cement is a special dry-mix that chemically sets and dries brick hard and can withstand very high temperatures. Ali, Taylour, and Stephan worked together to pour the special cement into the built form. When the form is done and the concrete is poured we need to wait until three weeks before to be able to use the new furnace. If the concrete is not completely dry, with the high temperatures, the furnace could explode.