The Indian National anthem originally composed in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore, was adopted in its Hindi version by the Constituent Assembly as the National Anthem of India on 24 January 1950. It was first Sung on 27 December 1911 at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress. The complete song consists of five stanzas. [...]

Most of rural Hawaii's hospitals began long before statehood as plantation-owned medical clinics and hospitals. Some were built by the counties themselves as tuberculosis sanitariums. From 1950 to 1965, the State began to give small subsidies and grants to the different counties to help run these facilities.

Weasel Zippers

The Dalai Lama and America the Buddhaful Minneapolis Star Tribune He's the glue that held his people together after China invaded Tibet in 1950, which later caused him to flee to India, where he's led Tibet's government-in-exile. "His Holiness is the heart and soul of the Tibetan people," said Tsewang Ngodup of the ... The Dahai Lama arrives in Minn. for first visit since 2001Minnesota Public Radio Thousands greet Dalai Lama in St. PaulPioneer Press Even the Dalai Lama Signed Off on Osama bin Laden Killing: Are You With Him?SodaHead News KARE all 14 news articles »

Monday the 9th May is Europe Day and there is a special event to mark the occasion in Puerto del Carmen, Lanzarote.

It was back on the 9th May in 1950 that the first moves were made to create the European Union, Europe Day was created at a summit of EU Leaders in 1985.

On Monday 9th May at 19:30 there will be a celebration for Europe Day in the Plaza de las Naciones in Puerto del Carmen. The consular representatives from different European countries and local authorities will be at the event organised by the Ayuntamiento of Tías and the Casa de Europa in Lanzarote.

The Municipal band of Tías will give a concert after the speeches including Belgian ambassador Johan Swinnen.

Related Information:

Living in Lanzarote

Apparently they missed one . It turns out that yesterday, in 1950 - and I'll bet even Lisanne didn't know this - a fire gutted the venerable Sheepshead Bay landmark Tappen's Restaurant on Emmons Avenue and East 27 th Street.

Apparently they missed one . It turns out that yesterday, in 1950 - and I'll bet even Lisanne didn't know this - a fire gutted the venerable Sheepshead Bay landmark Tappen's Restaurant on Emmons Avenue and East 27 th Street.

USA Today

Denny Hamlin, Jeff Gordon are hoping for strong showings at Darlington Saturday SI.com NASCAR's original superspeedway at 1.361 miles opened in 1950 with Johnny Mantz winning the Southern 300 in a field with 75 starters. Even more than a half-century later, "The Track Too Tough to Tame" still produces wild, unpredictable finishes with ... Did Richmond Put Hamlin Back On the Rails?RacinToday.com Fantasy NASCAR: Junior's quest for victory continuesPost-Tribune Showtime Southern 500 preview: Slumping drivers should be happy to race at ...MLive.com AutoWeek -USA Today -SportingNews.com all 16 news articles »

Video - Raising the Debt Ceiling: It Just Makes Sense.  Not.

Source - Reason

As Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy, has pointed out, we’ve maxed out the nation’s credit card in the past without dire results. In the mid-1980s, the mid-1990s, and in 2002, for instance, the debt limit wasn’t raised for months at a time and the government got along just swell. The government has a big bag of tools it can use, ranging from playing around with the amount of spending that is liable to the limit to prioritizing interest and debt payments over other outlays. Interest on the debt for this year is projected to be about $225 billion and government revenue is expected to be around $2.2 trillion, so the government can easily pay the vig and avoid defaulting.

The boldest plan to rein in spending and debt comes from newcomer Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a Tea Party favorite who dispatched Republican incumbent Bob Bennett in the primaries before coasting to victory in the general election last fall. Lee has vowed to block passage of a debt-limit increase unless Congress signs on to his balanced-budget amendment which would cap annual federal spending at 18 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  The amendment would require a super-majority of two-thirds in the Senate and House of Representatives. Lee’s bill is competing with another Republican proposal from Sens. Hatch (Utah) and Cornyn (Texas) to cap spending at 20 percent of GDP. The Hatch-Cornyn bill has weaker rules on its higher cap as well.

In 2010, spending came to about 24 percent of GDP and it’s expected to come in around 25 percent of GDP in 2011. Since 1950, total federal revenues have averaged 17.8 percent and have reached higher than 20 percent exactly once. Spending over the same time has averaged just under 20 percent.

Continue reading at Reason...

National Journal

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, repeated Monday his plans to block raising the federal debt ceiling until a balanced budget amendment is brought to a vote. An amendment Lee coauthored with Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., would require Congress to balance the budget each year and keep spending at 18 percent of GDP.

“It’s unsustainable, and it’s also way out of whack with what the practice has been over the last 40 years, which puts us between 18 and 19 percent of GDP,” Lee said on Fox & Friends. “We need a federal government that’s not so big and so expensive.”

 

 

Why hike and get all sweaty if you're not going someplace there's fish? http://bit.ly/jegequ # Upstream Battle: What Is Killing Off the Fraser River's Sockeye Salmon? http://ow.ly/4NR5t # This year's Sierra snowpack fourth highest since 1950: http://ow.ly/4Od1F # Powered by Twitter Tools

Measurement shows that almost one-half of all market days are down days and slightly more are up days, but close enough to think of it as 50/50.

Just as the probability of getting a long string of heads-only or tails-only coin flips decreases as the string gets longer, the probability of getting a long string of sequential down days decreases as the string gets longer.

That's all fine in theory, but what is the actual experience? For that, we reviewed each day for the S&P 500 for more than 60 years (from January 3, 1950 through yesterday May 5, 2011) to measure the down days in strings of four or more back-to-back down day strings.

Here is what we found.

Frequency of Up or Down Days:
Of the 60+ years (15,433 market days) we analyzed, 46.4% were down days and 53.6% were up days.

To check for aberrations, we also

submitted by JeromeSvigals to IAmA
[link] [377 comments]

Willie Mays, A Giants Legend, Celebrates His 80th Birthday

For some people, it feels like just yesterday that Willie Mays was making amazing plays for the San Francisco Giants.

Mays, the legendary outfielder dominated the game of baseball like few others did, using every tool you'd want in a baseball player and taking the crowd by storm, crafting a legend and cementing his legacy as one of the greatest players to ever step foot on a baseball diamond.

But don't take my word for it, just listen to Marty Lurie, a baseball historian who did an interview with CSN Bay Area's Grant Cohn.

Per CSNBayArea.com:

“Willie Mays is one of the few players who you could take out of 1950 and put him into 2011 and you’d have a superstar. He was that good. I’ve done 10,000 interviews, and in a lot of the interviews I ask, ‘Who was the best player you ever saw?’ And universally it’s Willie Mays. I’d say 99.9 percent of the players who played in his era would say Mays. He could do everything and he could do it easily. He put the team on his back. He played 15 years and missed 10 games.

“Willie ran the game -- he was the captain on the field. He ran the team. The managers just turned it over to him. He called the pitches from centerfield. He would tell the shortstop, Alvin Dark, what to tell the pitcher to throw.

“He never used the cutoff man. He knew where he was throwing the ball. Back then as an outfielder, the arm was more distinctive. You talked about (Rocky) Colavito, (Carl) Furillo, (Roberto) Clemente, it was the power of the arm. Willie Mays is not known for his arm but he had a great arm.

“But what’s almost as unique as his basket catch was the way he ran the bases, because he ran the bases backwards. He would turn and look back at the outfield but he’d never miss a step.

“He didn’t need a coach. That’s how good he was compared to everyone else.”

The reality is that if you don't have him at the top of your list in terms of the best baseball players of all time, he'll most likely be second to only Babe Ruth in terms of sheer talent.

In other words, Mays is a player that teams would have simply drooled over today.

With the type of money that Carl Crawford got from the Boston Red Sox, imagine what Mays would be making today with his ability to hit for power, run and field.

MUST READ: 2011 MLB Draft: Ranking the 25 Best Overall Draft Prospects

He could do it all and even though he never got to experience the thrill of winning a World Series, Mays' legacy is so brilliant that it's impossible to overshadow. Some players just have a natural feel for the game, and for the former Giants outfielder, he knew what do to at every moment of every game.

Mays helped change the game and set the tone for some of the five-tool players that thrive today. There may be many imitations over the years, but there will only be one Willie Mays.

These monthly highlights from women's history are from the National Women's History Project:May 1, 1950 - Gwendolyn Brooks becomes the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; named Library of Congress's Consultant in Poe...

What is the world's population according to the latest UN estimates? See when it will hit 10 billion - and which countries are growing fastest
• Get the data

By the end of this year the world's seven billionth citizen will be born. The latest United Nations population estimates, out this week, say the global population will reach 10bn in the next 90 years.

According to the UN Population Division's best-case 'medium' estimate - and you can see the original report here - it will take 13 years to add the eighth billion, 18 years to add the ninth billion and 40 years to reach the tenth billion.

The big increases are coming from countries with high fertility rates - the high-fertility countries identified by the UN comprise of 39 countries in Africa, nine in Asia, six in Oceania and four in Latin America. Today, 42% of the world's population lives in low-fertility countries, defined in the UN report as

countries where women are not having enough children to ensure that, on average, each woman is replaced by a daughter who survives to the age of procreation

Low-fertility countries include all countries in Europe except Iceland and Ireland. Europe is the one region in the world to see its population decline by 2100 - and you can see below how fertility rates go down across the globe by 2100:

That trend is not repeated in the UK - our population has grown by 23% since 1950, and will grow another 21% by the year 2100 to reach 75.7m.

Population expert Hans Rosling points out the release is a treasure trove of new data, including detailed fertility rates by country, life expectancy and migration figures.

The high-fertility countries (> 3 kids per women) are mainly in Africa and only have 18% of the world population = 1.2 billion people. They are expected to tripple their population to 3,6 billion this century! The Low fertility countries are 40% of world population and will decrease their population and the intermediate are 40% will level of at 2050 … The peak size of the world population, therefore, depends on how fast peace, school, basic health care, poverty alleviation and family planning will become accessible to all in Africa and a few other countries like Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan

And what about China and India? China will hit its peak population in 2027 when it will have over 1.395bn people, before reducing down to 941m by the year 2100. India will hit 1.718bn in 2062, and will come down after that to 1.6bn by 2100.

The full data is below for you to play with - and we've added country codes too. What can you do with it?

Data summary

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These monthly highlights from women's history are from the National Women's History Project : May 1, 1950 - Gwendolyn Brooks becomes the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; named Library of Congress's Consultant in Poetry (later called Poet Laureate) in 1985. May 5, 1938 - Dr. Dorothy H. Andersen presents results of her medical research identifying the disease...

Source : Tennessee Guerilla Women

En Japón, mi tierra natal, hemos pasado de Hiroshima a Fukushima. Hemos visto las nubes en forma de seta y los terrenos baldíos de 1945 en imágenes en blanco y negro. Pero ahora podemos ver, una y otra vez, a todo color, los cuatro reactores mutilados de Fukushima, una amenaza que pende sobre la vida humana.

Más de un mes y medio después del 11 de marzo, el número de muertos se eleva a 14.616, con 11.111 personas todavía desaparecidas. Las consecuencias del desastre continúan amontonándose. Ahora incluso el aire es una amenaza, al continuar desprendiéndose radiaciones de las plantas nucleares dañadas.

La conmoción que sentí el 11 de marzo fue la misma que vivieron los 78.200 residentes que vivían a 20 kilómetros de la planta nuclear de Fukushima Daiichi. La compartimos con los 130 millones de japoneses que viven en el país y con cientos de millones de personas en todo el planeta.

En nuestras pantallas de televisión también hemos podido ver supervivientes: niños perplejos, mujeres llorosas, ancianas devorando raciones exiguas y durmiendo en el suelo de pabellones deportivos... mujeres que tenían 10 años en 1945. Hemos visto a granjeros de la zona de Fukushima a los que se les ha prohibido vender sus lechugas y espinacas por temor a las radiaciones.

Los pescadores no pueden salir a faenar porque se han detectado altos niveles de yodo radiactivo en los peces capturados en Ibaragi, a mitad de camino entre el emplazamiento del reactor y Tokio. Este ha sido su trabajo durante generaciones. Quizás ya no puedan volver a hacerlo.

Pero, ¿por qué?

La respuesta es simple: porque los ingenieros y ejecutivos de Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), junto con los burócratas y miembros del gobierno japonés han ignorado la historia.

Desde la antigüedad, Japón ha sufrido importantes terremotos y tsunamis. Hoy en día, a lo largo de los cientos de kilómetros de costa nipona se pueden ver unas marcas conocidas como “rocas de los tsunamis”. Algunas son de hace seis siglos, de antes incluso de que Colón llegase a América.

La Historia nos dice que la amenaza de terremotos y olas asesinas no se detuvo al llegar la era moderna.

En 1896 el terremoto de Meiji Sanriku, de magnitud 7,6, golpeó la costa del noreste de Japón y desencadenó un enorme tsunami, que según algunos datos llegó a alcanzar los 38 metros de altura. El epicentro de ese temblor fue casi en el mismo lugar que el de ahora. Hubo 27.000 víctimas.

Pero incluso después del desastre, la mayor parte de los supervivientes reconstruyeron sus casas en la misma zona costera. Algunos incluso se acercaron más al mar, en donde muchos se ganaban la vida.

En 1923 el terremoto de Kanto afectó a Tokio. La magnitud fue de 7,9. Unos vientos feroces ayudaron a propagar un incendio infernal por la capital, que destruyó miles de casas. Murieron al menos 100.000 personas.

Ese año la costa del noreste de Japón apenas sufrió daños. Sus habitantes aparentemente pensaban que los terremotos eran cosa del pasado. Pero 10 años después llegó otro. El segundo terremoto en Sanriku se produjo en 1933. La costa nororiental sufrió grandes daños.

De nuevo, hubo muchas víctimas. Y, de nuevo, miles de casas en el litoral fueron destruidas.

Pero, aún así, durante todo ese tiempo hubo un factor positivo: no había plantas nucleares en Japón. Y tampoco las había en otras partes del planeta. Esa extraordinaria tecnología se desarrolló después de que EEUU dejase caer las bombas atómicas de Hiroshima y Nagasaki.

A medida que la Guerra Fría se fue intensificando, los estadounidenses fueron desarrollando (y después probando) armas atómicas cada vez más poderosas. El programa se iba ejecutando a tenor de los eventos: la noticia en 1949 de que los soviéticos habían probado sus propias armas nucleares, poniendo fin al monopolio estadounidense; el triunfo del Ejército Rojo de Mao en China ese mismo año; el estallido de la Guerra de Corea en 1950.

El 28 de abril de 1952 terminó la ocupación formal de Japón, aunque continuaron estacionados en el país más de 200.000 soldados de EEUU. El 1 de noviembre de ese año, EEUU probó una bomba de hidrógeno en el atolón de Enewetak, en las islas Marshall, a unos 4.800 kilómetros al oeste de Hawái.

Al año siguiente, el nuevo presidente de EEUU, Dwight D. Eisenhower, acordó el alto al fuego en Corea. El 8 de diciembre de 1953, Eisenhower anunció el programa Átomos para la Paz, que impulsaba la idea de EEUU de utilizar la fuerza nuclear como fuente de energía, compartiendo esa tecnología con los países occidentales. Fue una manera de hacer que todo el mundo pudiese beneficiarse de la nueva tecnología para vivir, en lugar de para matar.

EEUU probó la siguiente gran bomba de hidrógeno en el atolón de Bikini, en las islas Marshall, el 1 de marzo de 1954. Fue tan poderosa que un barco atunero japonés, el Lucky Dragon, que estaba a 160 kilómetros del lugar de las pruebas, experimentó sus efectos. Los miembros de su tripulación sufrieron radiaciones, y uno de ellos murió.

John Jay Hopkins, presidente de General Dynamics (constructor del primer submarino atómico) viajó a Japón y abogó firmemente por este nuevo tipo de energía. Por su seguridad. Porque era absolutamente necesaria para Japón, que no tiene ni carbón ni petróleo. Un Japón independiente exigía energía. Entonces, la energía nuclear no era el problema, sino la solución.

PRICE: 10500 € / 15225 USD Line: Luminor 1950 GMT Titanium Reference: Pam311L Condition: 100 % Case/ material: titanium Diameter: 44 mm Strap: leather Dial: brown With papers: Yes With box: Yes

Zalman is set to launch their newest CPU cooler ‘CNPS7X LED‘ in Europe starting next month. First introduced back in April, the CNPS7X LED comes equipped with two V-shaped aluminum heatsinks, three direct touch copper heatpipes and a 92mm blue LEDs fan that operates at 1100 to 1950 RPM. Not to mention, the cooler also [...]

Dunk SB l'équipe australienne dans le New Jersey loin pour les symboles culturels riches et les couleurs sont du drapeau national australien et de l'emblème national. Les uniformes de nouvelles routes et le moderne nike chaussures enfant de V-décolleté, la conception coutures à trois couleurs: l'épaule, la poitrine et les poignets drapeau bleu de la couleur principale en Australie, a souligné l'honneur et l'unité nationales; poitrine d'un design d'or motif symbolise la couleur de l'emblème national, la partie la poitrine du maillot de route en cours d'utilisation en Australie a été utilisé par Yao et pierre bleue. Derrière le col de l'uniforme brodé "Australia", le modèle de mot, une Croix du Sud étoiles de la configuration intérieure col, le motif de ces étoiles a été inspiré par le drapeau australien. logo de l'équipe en Australie, doublé brodé JAMAIS DIRE JAMAIS, ils ont utilisé un chaussure nike pas cher conçus spécifiquement artistes australiens, au nom des animaux rares de l'Australie. L'inspiration derrière le numéro de la conception locale de l'Australie et la note australienne du nombre de polices. nike shox Équipe Shox R4 expédition à leur événement footballistique huitième session, qui a fixé un nouveau record asiatique de casquettes. Les maillots de route dans le nouveau design du tigre imprimés pour évoquer un sentiment patriotique. Le tigre est l'emblème de l'équipe nationale de base-coréen, il implique moral du combattant brave et courageux, mais aussi pour être en mesure de porter ce t-shirt à tous les joueurs qui peuvent courageusement le combat. Le col de la chemise blanche toute neuve avec un cercle de style moderne. Light shirt gris imprimé avec un motif tigre, le modèle inspiré par la culture traditionnelle coréenne et dynamique signes jeune homme, les deux, ensemble, constituent un majestueux tigre, rayures graphiques. Col chemisier et dos "Corée" modèle, est le drapeau national en Corée du Sud à l'intérieur du modèle de collier. Corée du Sud est bordée de logos de l'équipe brodé utiles à la calligraphie traditionnelle coréenne écrit "Tuhon" modèle, il est encouragé. Numéro de Jersey derrière la conception de la combinaison traditionnelle et moderne de son inspiration de conception de la Corée. Cher chaussure nike dunks C'est la sixième fois directement l'équipe américaine pour participer aux finales. Ils veulent de leurs prédécesseurs dans la glorieuse victoire acquise inspiration et de motivation. Les uniformes nouvelle route avec la pierre soleil bleu, avec un col rond rouge de style moderne, le visage rouge et du blanc à bande, cette reproduction de l'équipe américaine en 1950, lorsque Rick Angleterre shirt porté par la conception. Négative de chemises à col imprimé "USA", les mots imprimés à l'intérieur du modèle collier serpent à sonnettes enroulé. Doublure en logo brodé équipe, un autre badge, qui est par le designer américain a également adopté le serpent à sonnettes lové dans les buissons dans le motif, également imprimé un très inspirant "DTOM" mots. Le dicton populaire qui a été mis en place aux Etats-Unis plus de deux siècles, a d'abord été les envahisseurs britanniques d'avertissements, suivie par la formation de la Marine des États-Unis, cette expression apparaît dans le "GADSEN" pavillon. Ces dernières années, du Corps des Marines et de l'équipe de soccer des États-Unis sont encouragés à l'utiliser comme leurs slogans patriotiques.Derrière les chiffres sont très shirt accrocheur, apprendre le jeu et le jeu professionnel de l'American University Union, le nombre de polices utilisées. Chaussures nike 6.0 Blazer SB sera la première fois un Etat pleinement indépendant, a envoyé une équipe de campagne de cas en Afrique du Sud cet été. Avec solide défense et efficace stade offensive groupe équipe de Serbie a battu la France pour gagner les résultats de ce groupe lisse de la coupe. Comme l'entraîneur de l'équipe Anthich dit: «Si nous conserver ce statut, nous serons force incontournable." la popularité croissante équipe serbe, les joueurs porteront un couleurs des identités nationales et le nouveau logo de la campagne stade Jersey. New Jersey design avec col style moderne en forme de V de couleur blanche, que les côtés des manches Shangzhui à deux distincts bande rouge, qui est l'emblème national de la couleur principale de la Serbie.Imprimé col de chemise en face de l'ancien slave "Serbie", la Serbie est imprimé sur le col à l'intérieur de la conception emblème de l'aigle à deux têtes. Logo de l'équipe serbe de l'équipe brodé doublures dans l'ancien slave "Our Hearts sur le terrain", il est encouragé. Slogan de la police utilisée par l'artiste spécialement conçus Serbie, la Serbie Football Association badge et les lettres dans le même. Derrière le numéro de maillot est le nombre typique du football polices, et avec un design en maille pour permettre à plus de ventilation et de chemises légères.

USA Today

NASCAR: Denny Hamlin looks to rebound AutoWeek NASCAR's first superspeedway and its first paved track date to 1950, more than 30 years before he was born. But Hamlin and Darlington have taken a liking to each other. “I love the place,” he recently said. “There' something about the challenge of that ... NASCAR drivers, execs turn out to honor HunterUSA Today CUP: Weekly NASCAR News And NotesSPEEDtv.com Hinton: Darlington remembers a great oneESPN The Province -Motorsport.com -Naples Daily News all 366 news articles »

The upcoming Scandinavian Design auction at Wright includes this mold-blown glass decanter by Kaj Franck who was appointed chief designer for Nuutajärvi in 1950. Nuutajärvi was marketed under trade name Arabia from 1971 to 1977. Decanter, by Kaj Franck, for Nuutajärvi Notsjö, Finland, 1955/1959, Estimate: $2,000 – 3,000, Auction at Wright

In 1950, the United States Weather Bureau started naming Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms. The initial names came from a radio alphabet that began with the words Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog and Easy. Because the alphabet happened to include several given names, you could say the first Atlantic storms that were “named” (in this sense) [...]

Incremental improvements to agriculture have been which have included adoption of two-year crop rotations, precision agriculture technologies, classically bred and genetically engineered crops, and reduced- or no-tillage management systems.

US David researchers are recommending innovative agricultural systems such as organic farming, grass-fed and other alternative livestock production systems, mixed crop and livestock systems, and perennial grains. And it would require significant changes in market structures, policy incentives and public funding for agricultural science, according to the report.

Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century (570 pages)

Modern American agriculture has had an impressive history of increasing productivity that has resulted in affordable food, feed, fiber, and more recently, biofuel crops for domestic purposes and agricultural exports. Although the U.S. domestic and international markets are much larger than they were in the 1900s, farmers of the 21st century produce enough agricultural products to meet the current demands of both markets on the same acreage as a century ago. In addition, the average percentage of disposable income spent by U.S. consumers on food has declined from about 21 percent in 1950 to 9.4 percent in 2004.

Although small and medium-sized farms represent more than 90 percent of total farm numbers and manage about half of U.S. farmland and other farm assets, U.S. agriculture has become increasingly dependent on large-scale, high-input farms that specialize in a few crops and concentrated animal production practices for most U.S farm products. In 2007, the largest 2 percent of U.S. farms were responsible for 59 percent of total farm sales. Large farms have rapidly increased their share of total U.S. farm production value, while midsized commercial family farms that are important to rural community social and economic life are declining in number and importance. These trends can be partly attributed to technical innovations, economies of scale, and the increasing consolidation of food processing, distribution, and retailing sectors.

Many modern agricultural practices have unintended negative consequences, or externalized costs of production, that are mostly unaccounted for in agricultural productivity measurements or by farm enterprise budgets. Loss of water quality through nitrogen and phosphorus loadings in rivers, streams, and ground water contributes to dramatic shifts in aquatic ecosystems and hypoxic zones. Agricultural pesticides can contaminate streams, ground water, and wells. Excessive use of certain pesticides could be harmful to agricultural workers and might pose food safety risks. The nutrient density of 43 garden crops (mostly vegetables) has been shown to have declined between 1950 and 1999 in the United States, suggesting possible tradeoffs between yield and nutrient content. Agriculture contributes to total greenhouse-gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2) from synthetic agrichemical production, nitrous oxide (N2O) from soil management activities, and methane (CH4) from enteric fermentation. Some modern agricultural practices adversely affect soil quality by affecting soil physical, chemical, and biological factors through erosion, compaction, acidification, and salinization. They also reduce biological activity as a result of pesticide applications, excessive fertilization, and loss of organic matter. Industrial confinement of livestock systems is associated with the decline in a number of minor breeds and the accelerated development of genetically similar hogs, poultry, and beef and dairy cattle. Concerns have been raised about the welfare of animals that are kept in large-scale confinement operations. Although on-farm productivity has been increasing, the aggregate value of net farm income received by farmers has not changed dramatically over the last 40 years, primarily due to rising prices of external inputs, including cost of hybrid and genetically engineered (GE) seeds, fuel, and synthetic fertilizers. More than half of U.S. farm operators work off-farm to supplement their income and to obtain health care and retirement benefit plans. The profitability of many U.S. farms, especially large grain producers, is partly determined by federal government commodity support programs.

Sustainable Agriculture

Sustainability has been described as the ability to provide for core societal needs in a way that can be readily continued into the indefinite future without significant negative effects. Accordingly, measuring progress toward sustainability will be inherently subjective if different groups in society have different goals and objectives for agriculture. Even with broad agreement for certain goals, the relative importance assigned to one goal over another will be highly contested. Developing a widely accepted vision of what agricultural sustainability should be is beyond the scope of this report. However, four generally agreed-upon goals help define a sustainable agriculture:

Satisfy human food, feed, and fiber needs, and contribute to biofuel needs.

Enhance environmental quality and the resource base.

Sustain the economic viability of agriculture.

Enhance the quality of life for farmers, farm workers, and society as a whole.

The committee concluded that if U.S. agricultural production is to meet the challenge of maintaining long-term adequacy of food, fiber, feed, and biofuels under scarce or declining resources and under challenges posed by climate change and to minimize negative outcomes, agricultural production will have to substantially accelerate progress toward the four sustainability goals. Such acceleration needs to be undergirded by research and policy evolution that are designed to reduce tradeoffs and enhance synergies between the four goals and to manage risks and uncertainties associated with their pursuit.
Measuring Progress Toward Sustainability

Sustainability is best evaluated not as a particular end state, but rather as a process that moves farming systems along a trajectory toward greater sustainability on each of the four goals. For this report, the committee’s definition of sustainable agriculture does not make a sharp dichotomy between conventional and sustainable farming systems, not only because farming enterprises reflect many combinations of farming practices, organization forms, and management strategies, but also because most types of farming systems can potentially contribute to achieving various sustainability goals and objectives. Pursuit of sustainability is not a matter of defining sustainable or unsustainable agriculture, but rather of assessing whether choices of farming practices and farming systems would lead to a more or less sustainable system as measured by the four goals.

Finding ways to measure progress along a sustainability trajectory is an important part of the experimentation and adaptive management process.

If U.S. agriculture is to address the challenges both incremental and transformative changes will be necessary. Therefore, the committee proposes two parallel and overlapping efforts to ensure continuous improvement in the sustainability performance of U.S. agriculture: incremental and transformative. The incremental approach is an expansion and enhancement of many ongoing efforts that would be directed toward improving the sustainability performance of all farms, irrespective of size or farming systems type, through development and implementation of specific sustainability-focused practices, many of which are the focus of ongoing research and with varying levels of adoption. The transformative approach aims for major improvement in sustainability performance by approaching 21st century agriculture from a systems perspective that considers a multiplicity of interacting factors. The transformative approach would involve:

Developing collaborative efforts between disciplinary experts and civil society to construct a collective and integrated vision for a future of U.S. agriculture that balances and enhances the four sustainability goals.

Encouraging and accelerating the development of new markets and legal frameworks that embody and pursue the collective vision of the sustainable future of U.S. agriculture.

Pursuing research and extension that integrate multiple disciplines relevant to all four goals of agricultural sustainability.

Identifying and researching the potential of new forms of production systems that represent a dramatic departure from (rather than incremental improvement of) the dominant systems of present-day American agriculture.

Identifying and researching system characteristics that increase resilience and adaptability in the face of changing conditions.

Adjusting the mix of farming system types and the practices used in them at the landscape level to address major regional problems such as water overdraft and environmental contamination.

Soil and plant tissue tests, nutrient management plans, and precision agriculture technologies help farmers increase productivity, input-use efficiency, and economic returns, by reducing unnecessary use of agricultural fertilizers, pesticides, or water. Experimental and long-term field studies suggest that the impacts and economic benefits of those practices and tools can be variable across time and space.

Manure, compost, and green manure, as often used in organic systems, can reduce the need for synthetic fertilizer and hence reduce the energy used for fertilizer production. Many farms featured as case studies in this report make successful use of on-farm inputs for soil fertility (for example, animal and green manure), which insulates them from fluctuations in costs of synthetic fertilizer. Published studies, however, show variable results as to whether systems using commercial fertilizers or systems using cover crop-based or animal manure-based nutrient management have higher profits. Those studies often do not include environmental costs and benefits. Because the release of nutrients from manure, compost, and green manure depends on various factors, including temperature, soil properties, and microbial activities in soil, their application has to be timed appropriately to maximize nutrient uptake by plants, and hence productivity and net economic return.

Integrated pest management (IPM) research has identified promising options for improving soil suppressiveness and inducing crop resistance to some diseases and pests in addition to classical biological and ecological pest management. The need to study weeds, diseases, pests, and crops as an interacting complex has been recognized. Adoption of IPM has been reasonable on some crops, but overall IPM use is lagging despite its potential for reducing chemical use.

Livestock genetic improvement can contribute to improving sustainability by increasing feed-use efficiency and by selecting traits to improve animal health and welfare. Improvements in feed conversion through genetics, nutrition, and management have reduced manure and nutrient excretion per unit animal product produced and reduced land required for production.

Business and Marketing Strategies

Diversification of farm enterprises can provide multiple income streams for farming operations. Producing a range of farm crops and animal products can enhance the stability and resilience of farm businesses and can decrease the volatility of farm income. Studies that document the economic effects of modern strategies for enterprise diversification are sparse.

In addition to using production strategies that reduce costs, farmers can increase their farm-level income by increasing the value of their products through sales to niche markets (such as organic or health-food markets) or by selling their products directly to consumers (direct sales) to obtain a larger proportion of the consumers’ dollar spent on the product and to gain control over the prices they get for their products.

Practices for Improving Community Well-being

Diverse farm systems, diversified landscapes (for example, inclusion of non-crop vegetation), and farming practices that improve water and air quality can contribute to community and social well-being. Some direct marketing strategies, such as direct sales at farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture, farm-to-school programs, and agritourism, connect farmers to the community and can contribute to community economic security, but lack underpinning research and extension.


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Enter the information about the item that you wish to have appraised here:

Category: 

American Furniture

Medium - What is the item made out of (e.g. "silver")?: 

metal

Date Period (Estimated date of item if known): 

1950

Condition: 

Excellent

History: 

my grandparents bought this item new and it has been in the house since my mother was born.

Long Description and Pictures (jpg, gif, png): 

this is an iron rite mangle with original chair, instructions, and receipt

Free Classifieds: 

Yes, list item as "For Sale"

Photos: 

iron rite machine.jpg

We noted last night only four other times in the past fifty years has the S&P500 opened May with three consecutive down days.   We find this type analysis great cocktail chat, at best interesting, but not very actionable.  Nevertheless, today’s S&P decline narrows the field to only one other time since 1950 (the beginning of our times series) has the S&P500 traded down in the first four days of the month of May.   The chart below shows that in 1966 the S&P declined in the first six days of May.   Seven Days in May?

The ball is now in Asia’s court and we are watching China and the Hang Seng, which needs to hold 22,600 for the violence in the commodity markets not to spill into equities.  We’re not making a bet it will but definitely staying on McSwan watch.  (click here if chart is not observable)

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Big guy: Lakers center George Mikan, former DePaul University basketball star, in 1950. At 6-foot-10 in a sport then dominated by much smaller men, Mikan was the prototype for the dominating tall players of later decades. Towering over most of...

Filed under: Movie News, Awards

Sophia Loren made her film debut in 1950 at age 16. In the years since, she's starred in countless films and TV movies and become an acting and fashion icon. Loren was the first performer to win an acting Oscar for a foreign-language film with the 1960 Italian movie 'Two Women.' Just last year she was honored by the Screen Actors Guild and Broadcast Film Critics Association with a nominations for Best Acting Ensemble for her work alongside Daniel Day-Lewis, Nicole Kidman and Penelope Cruz in 'Nine.' Her career has spanned over six decades.

And last night in Hollywood, she was again honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at a special tribute event. Some 800 actors, directors, friends and family attended the celebration to mark the 50th anniversary of her precedent-setting Best Actress Oscar win.

"The Academy Award changed my life completely," Loren said at the tribute. "It helped me to believe in myself and encouraged me to push my own artistic boundaries. There are no words to describe my emotions right now."

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Global fisheries data since 1950 indicate a decline in catches for many fish species. Many marine biologists agree that we have a problem and that fisheries will continue collapsing - unless clear actions are taken to restore fish stocks. A handful of scientists, however, are confusing the public by saying that most fish stocks are stable. Why are these 'fish skeptics' wrong?

Footballer, manager and FA Cup finalist

The irony of Allan Brown's impressive football career was that, in his prime with Blackpool, injury ruled him out of two FA Cup finals – and yet he played in a third, with Luton Town. It must have been especially galling for Brown, who has died aged 84, to miss the 1953 final – the so-called Matthews final, nicknamed for the performance of Stanley Matthews that spurred Blackpool to beat Bolton 4-3 – as he had broken a leg while helping his team reach Wembley, with a goal against Arsenal at Highbury in the sixth round.

The Arsenal goalkeeper, Jack Kelsey, later wrote about the incident in detail: "I came towards him as though we were a couple of knights on horseback, jousting in a tournament. He was there first, by a split second, shot just as I dived, and the ball passed under my body and into the net. No Wembley for us." But there was to be no Wembley for Brown, either. "His left shin met my hip at heaven knows how many miles an hour, and it stopped him dead," Kelsey wrote.

Born in the Fife mining village of Kennoway, Brown joined East Fife, then a club of substance, in 1944. Initially a wing-half before he excelled as an inside-left, he was a ball-player, scorer and notable athlete. With East Fife, he won his first three Scotland caps in 1950, against Switzerland, Portugal and France, scoring in all three games.

"I turned a rebel after deciding I wanted to play in English football. I worked at several jobs to keep myself trim and fit." It was Blackpool who held off the challenge of several other leading clubs, paying what was then a record fee for a Scottish player, £26,500.

In early April 1951, a serious injury suffered against Huddersfield Town put Brown out of the 1951 FA Cup final, lost to Newcastle United. Brown went on to resume an impressive career with Blackpool and Scotland, for whom he eventually gained 14 caps. His international career ended in anticlimax at the World Cup of 1954 in Switzerland. The Scots lost their opening game 1-0 to Austria, and in their second match were annihilated 7-0 by Uruguay.

Brown played for Blackpool until 1957, when he was transferred to Luton Town, helping them to reach the 1959 FA Cup final, which they lost to Nottingham Forest. In 1961 he was transferred to Portsmouth and, two years after that, became the player-manager of non-league Wigan Athletic. Next, he returned to Luton Town as manager, and then to Torquay, Bury and Nottingham Forest, before being appointed by Blackpool in 1976. After two years, he took over at a club in Kuwait. His wife, Colleen, spoke bitterly about his time at Bloomfield Road: "Allan did not mind pressure if there was gratitude with it, but he got none of that at Blackpool."

Yet the club reappointed him in 1981. Brown could not stop them descending to the Fourth Division and he left again a year later, though he continued to live in the town. He is survived by Colleen and their two daughters.

• Allan Duncan Brown, footballer and football manager, born 12 October 1926; died 19 April 2011

Osama bin Laden's death opens up a spot on the FBI's list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. But adding a name to the list is "not quite as simple as moving the No. 11 guy up a spot," says Ryan J. Reilly at Talking Points Memo. Here, a brief guide to how the list works:

What exactly is the Ten Most Wanted list?
The list was created in 1950, after a reporter asked "for the names and descriptions of the 'toughest guys'" the feds were after. The story that resulted got so much attention that then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover made the list an official program. Its purpose is to generate publicity about...

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Collection Dialogues
Museum Learning Center, Addison Gallery of American Art

The Addison is pleased to announce a Special Series of Collection Dialogues, free and open to the public, to be held in the Museum Learning Center in the Addison’s Sidney R. Knafel Wing.

Wednesday, May 18, 6:30pm
The Addison’s Architectural Legacy
with Susan Faxon, Associate Director and Curator of Art Before 1950
A discussion of the confluence of three architectural projects: the original 1931 Addison Gallery of American Art building by Charles Platt, the recent addition by Centerbrook Architects and Planners, and the roof renovation by Robert Olson & Associates.

Wednesday, June 1, 6:30pm
Conservation Discoveries and Quandaries
with Allison Kemmerer, Curator of Art After 1950 and of Photography
A "beneath-the-surface" examination of the intriguing and complicated conservation challenges facing curators, using examples from the Addison collection such as paintings by Thomas Eakins, Eastman Johnson, and James McNeill Whistler, watercolors by Winslow Homer, and albums by John LaFarge and Peter Sekaer.

Thursday, June 16, 3:00pm
American and British Silver
with Brian Allen, The Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director
Be among the first to see a newly acquired teapot that belonged to Phillips Academy founders Phoebe Foxcroft Phillips and Samuel Phillips, Jr., along with other examples of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century silver.

Museum Learning Center Access
Entrance to the Museum Leaning Center is through Elson Art Center across from the Andover Inn. Enter by Kemper Auditorium and proceed to the top of the stairs. For wheelchair access, enter by the loading dock through the metal mesh door across from the Chapel Avenue parking lot.

4 May 2011 Last updated at 23:24 ET The number of traditional orchards in England have more than halved since 1950 Nearly half of England’s traditional orchards are in a neglected condition, a study of aerial photographs suggests. Some 35,378 … Continue reading →

U gears up for Dalai Lama's weekend stop Minnesota Daily In 1950, the Dalai Lama assumed full political power of the Tibetan people after China's invasion of Tibet. After a series of futile peace talks with Chinese leaders, he was forced to flee in 1959 and established the home of his exile community in ... Dalai Lama 'says bin Laden killing justified'AFP Dalai Lama speaks of compassion, leadershipOCRegister Dalai Lama Comments Provoke Conversation on Ethics of bin Laden KillingTruthdig Huffington Post (blog) -Examiner.com -Boing Boing all 388 news articles »

'A Matachina Dance, Christmas' by Geronima Cruz-Montoya . Plate 48, American Indian Painters, by O.B. Jacobson and Jeanne D'Ucel, 1950.

Source

DHAKA, BANGLADESH, April 18, 2011 (The Deccan Herald): Leading spiritual personality and principal of Ramkrishna Mission movement in Bangladesh, Swami Aksharananda, died here today after prolonged illness at the age of 82.

"Principal of Dhaka Ramkrishna Math (monastery) and Ramkrishna Mission breathed his last today at (Dhaka's) Apollo Hospital," the Mission said in an announcement.

Born at Khurda village of southwestern Satkhira in 1929, Aksharananda joined Ramkrishna Mission in Narendrapur of Kolkata in 1950 and subsequently turned to asceticism in 1959. He returned to Bangladesh in 1972 to join a succor campaign in the war-ravaged Bangladesh to rehabilitate the distressed people and subsequently became the Principal of Dhaka Ramkrishna Mission, serving in this position for 37 years.

Hundreds of his admirers and followers thronged the mission to pay their last respects to him.

Enfrentarse a la idea de revisitar un clásico, actualizarlo (o no) y convertirlo en una nueva película que satisfaga a crítica y público no es una tarea nada sencilla. Para empezar hay que partir de la base de que cuando se hace el remake de un clásico es porque este lo merece por su calidad y/o su significado histórico. Se entiende que, en la mayoría de los casos, el original supera a la copia y esta siempre sale perdiendo en la comparación. De la mano de Jodie Foster en la dirección y con Mel Gibson como protagonista, el 27 de mayo se estrena ‘El castor’. Su historia –la de un hombre que encuentra en una marioneta a su mejor amigo– se parece a aquella en la que James Stewart iba siempre acompañado por un conejo (‘Harvey’, 1950).

Hacer un remake no es algo de ahora. Maestros del cine ya practicaron este complicado oficio mucho antes. Así ocurrió, por ejemplo, con el ‘Noseratu’ que Walter Herzog estrenó en 1979. Aquel terrorífico relato que tenía como materia prima la historia de Drácula ideada por Bram Stoker era un remake que homenajeaba a otro clásico del cine, el que rodó Murnau en 1922. Los mitos de seres monstruosos son presa fácil para los amigos de las versiones. En 1941 George Waggner dirigió ‘El hombre lobo’, protagonizada por Lon Chaney Jr. Hace un año y con Benicio del Toro en el cartel, este ser mitad hombre mitad bestia saltó de nuevo a las pantallas.

De Frankenstein también son muchas las versiones que circulan. La mejor –pese a que ahora el monstruo parece más patoso que terrorífico– es la de James Whale, titulada en España ‘El doctor Frankenstein’ (1931). Kenneth Branagh se atrevió con el mito en 1994, pero su película era más una nueva adaptación de la novela que un remake de la de Whale. Otro monstruo que ha visitado el cine en más de una ocasión es King Kong. Con ese mismo título existen tres versiones. De 1933, 1976 y 2005. En la última, había toda una escena que parecía que se les había colado del metraje sobrante de ‘Jurassic Park’.

La mitología y la ciencia ficción son dos materias que siempre gustan a la hora de utilizar una película como base para otra. Sobre todo gracias a las nuevas posibilidades que ofrecen los efectos especiales. Así ha ocurrido en los últimos años con títulos como ‘La guerra de los mundos’, ‘Ultimátum a la Tierra’ o ‘La invasión de los ladrones de cuerpos’. El riesgo al que se enfrentan estas revisiones es que las primeras son ya tan míticas que luchar contra eso es realmente complicado, aunque la técnica cinematográfica haya avanzado y la factura de las nuevas versiones sea mucho más espectacular. El relato escrito por H.G. Welles fue adaptado en 1953 por Byron Haskin. Aquella versión es la que los aficionados al género aplauden. La de ahora es la que Steven Spielberg realizó en 2005 con Tom Cruise como protagonista. Era entretenida, pero no significará en la historia del cine lo que su predecesora.

Lo mismo ha ocurrido con los otros dos títulos mencionados. Robert Wise estrenó en 1951 ‘Ultimatum a la Tierra’ y en 2008 llegó Scott Derrickson y colocó a Keanu Reeves como Klaatu en una nueva versión poco convincente. En el caso de ‘La invasión de los ladrones de cuerpos’, de Don Siegel, esta ha sufrido muchas revisiones. Una de las últimas fue en 2007, con Nicole Kidman y Daniel Craig. Por título, ‘Invasión’. La espectacular evolución de los efectos especiales posibilitó también el estreno en 2006 de ‘Poseidón’. Todas se mueven en la misma línea de resultados. Son espectaculares, pero no tendrán un lugar en la historia como las originales.

¿El oeste vuelve a estar de moda?

El del oeste es otro de los géneros que ha tenido sus remakes en los últimos años. No es un tipo de cine que se estile mucho en estos tiempos. Su década dorada fueron los años cuarenta y cincuenta. Aún así, en 2007 se estrenó ‘El tres de las 3:10’, versión del clásico de 1957. Otro western que revivió hace poco ha sido ‘Valor de ley’. Aquella película que le valió su único Oscar como actor a Jonh Wayne sirvió como materia prima a los Coen en 2010. No es la primera vez que esta pareja hace un remake. Antes lo hizo con ‘Ladykillers’ en 2004. La original era una comedia de 1955 con Alec Guinness y Peter Sellers en el cartel.

A la comedia pertenece el simpático Spencer Tracy, quien en 1950 fue ‘El padre de la novia’. Ahora lo es Steve Martin (1991) con secuela incluida, ‘Vuelve el padre de la novia (Ahora también abuelo)’. Se tiende a pensar que lo que funcionó en un momento dado puede volver a hacerlo ahora. Sin embargo, algunos gags no soportan bien el paso del tiempo. Que lo hagan depende mucho de quién los interprete. Specer Tracy, acompañado por Katharine Hepburn y Sidney Portier, era el protagonista de ‘Adivina quién viene esta noche’ (1967). En 2005 acortaron el título dejándolo en ‘Adivina quién’ y pusieron a Ashton Kutcher como protagonista. La cosa ya no tenía tanta gracia.

Sí la tenía, por ejemplo, ‘Sabrina’. La que protagonizaron Harrison Ford y Julia Ormond tenía su encanto. Esta la dirigió Sydney Pollack en 1995. La original es de Billy Wilder, con dos grandes como Audrey Hepburn y Humphrey Bogart. También es bueno el remake de ‘Scarface’ de Brian de Palma. Y es que el hecho de que sea un remake no implica que el resultado sea malo. El mejor ejemplo es ‘El halcón maltés’. La que todo el mundo recuerda, el clásico, es el que protagonizó Bogart en 1941. Pero antes hubo otra que no cuajó. Como le ocurrió a la versión que Tim Burton hizo de ‘El planeta de los simios’.

Hitchcock, una mina para los remakes

Uno de los directores clásicos que más sufren de este vicio del remake es Alfred Hitchcock. Al mago del suspense le han salido un sinfín de imitadores y no siempre con demasiado tino. Mientras él era capaz de convertir novelas de tres al cuarto en grandes películas, otros han perpetrado películas como ‘Disturbia’ (el parecido con ‘La ventana indiscreta’ es más que razonable) y la olvidable ‘Psicosis’ de Gus Van Sant (1998). En 1998, Andrew Davis lo intentó con ‘Un crimen perfecto’, estrenada por Hitchcock en 1954.

Los ochenta, cuna de revisiones

En la interminable lista de remakes que ha dado el cine en los últimos años –existen casos tan raros como Haneke, que se versiona a sí mismo– merecen una especial atención los salidos de la década de los ochenta. Sirven como ejemplo las recientes ‘Hairspray’ y ‘Karate Kid’. En el mismo saco se encuentra también ‘Furia de Titanes’. La original es más una película de culto que clásica. Los muñecos en stop-motion de Ray Harryhausen son míticos. La nueva, la de 2010, funcionó en taquilla y ya está en macha el rodaje de una secuela.

Jeffrey A. Hirsch, Editor-in-Chief of the bestselling Stock Trader’s Almanac, discusses his stunning forecast of Dow 38,820.  In this interview with Wall Street Sector Selector, Jeff explains his detailed research of market and historical cycles that point to the possibility of another super boom and details how you can prepare for what could be another historic bull market.

John Nyaradi: Hi everyone, I’m John Nyaradi, publisher of Wall Street Sector Selector, a financial media site specializing in exchange traded funds, global markets, and economic analysis. Today, I’m really pleased to welcome our special guest, Jeffrey Hirsch. Jeff, welcome to Wall Street Sector Selector.

Jeffrey Hirsch: Hey John, thanks for having me.

John Nyaradi: Great to hear your voice again.  Jeff is president of the Hirsch Organization and editor-in-chief of Stock Traders Almanac. He appears frequently on CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, Fox News, and many other national and international media outlets. Now, Jeff is author of what I think is sure to be a new bestseller, Super Boom: Why the Dow Jones Will Hit 38,820 and How You Can Profit From It.

Jeff, you made some big waves back in October with your prediction of the Dow Jones Industrial Average going to 38,820.  Interestingly, your father, Yale Hirsch, made a similar prediction in 1976 when he forecast correctly that another 15 year super boom was going to take place, a move of 500% or more.

So, Jeff, can just give us an overview of the Super Boom, the concept, your targets, when does it start, how long will it last, and why Dow 38,820? That’s a lot to dive into, but if you could just kind of…

Jeffrey Hirsch: Yes, that’s a loaded question, but basically, the super booms that we’ve had in the past, the 3 major booms in the 20^th century, all followed flat sideways markets and war where the United States was involved overseas in heavy combat operations. So after World War I and after World War II and after Vietnam, we had a period of prolonged peace where inflation caused by all the spending on the war caused the market to take off and inflate itself 500%.

The reason that we get the 38,820 is you take the intraday low,  it was on March 6, 2009, at 6470, and you multiply it by 6, which is a 500% move, and that gets you up to 38,820.

John Nyaradi: You mentioned the cause of this super boom, inflation and peace between major wars, and we’re seeing some of that happening now.

Jeffrey Hirsch: Yeah, that was the sort of epiphany. Actually, the initial forecast was culminated in May, May 13^th, 2010. We put out one of our biweekly alerts to subscribers, to our newsletter service.  What we saw at the time was that you had this massive bear market and the sideways pattern from 2000 from the tech bubble through 2010 in which we hadn’t really gained a whole lot of ground. We were playing out one of those sideways market launching pads like we had in the 3 previous  bust cycles and here we were winding down a major military operation in Iraq and Afghanistan and we’re starting to see inflation beginning to grow.

About a year ago, it wasn’t really apparent that the inflation was there, but we knew it would be. We did a comparison of government spending and inflation, and you see a big spike in government spending following 9/11, and you know, over the next several years, inflation was just starting to perk up.

John Nyaradi: Sure, that makes sense. I know timing is a tricky thing, but what’s your target date for this super boom?

Jeffrey Hirsch: Actually, I’ve put out a little projection pattern of the next 15 years. We came up with it after the book came out, and basically, you know, the short term, the intermediate term over the next several years looks like more of the same sideways pattern with the economy going through fits and starts, the market following that, or leading that, as it usually does, the range staying in that 14,000-7000 area for the Dow over the next 5 or 6 years.

And I see the boom beginning sometime in 2017 or 2018 and rallying up there to 2025, 500% from the low in 2009. So kind of like the move in that the period between ’74 and ’82 where we had the big bottom at ’74, and we went sideways. We had a couple of oil embargos and several other geopolitical issues, and inflation got quite out of control.

And then in ’82, once the new enabling technology took hold, the PC and the internet followed by the cell phone creating that information age, you know, you have the market just actually boom about 1500% from the ’82 lows.  I don’t see us having another information age, but I do see something more akin to the boom that followed the automobile in the roaring ’20s and the television, the suburban, you know, the appliance boom of the ’50s and ’60s, so probably something along those lines.

John Nyaradi: I’m sure you’re going to tell your readers at Stock Traders Almanac when you see this boom arriving, but what kinds of things should the average retail investor be looking for?

Jeffrey Hirsch: Well, you know, as with most of these things, it’s only going to become completely apparent with a bit of hindsight.

There has to be a little bit of looking in the rearview mirror to see that it has happened, but to prepare for that so that you don’t have to miss a bunch of it over the next several years, my mantra as we’ve discussed in the final chapter of the book…. is to trade some of the seasonal patterns we have, stay out of the way of the generally negative periods that the market has exhibited, and anytime the Dow is below 10,000 or a bear market is officially declared in the media, that’s the time to buy stocks. You want to be thinking contrary to the market, buying when things are cheap. You want to buy low, sell high.

So over the next several years, wait for the low periods, sort of wait for there to be a low, for there to be a good amount of selling, and for everyone to be exhibiting some fear, and that’s when you want to get in.

John Nyaradi: And Chapter 10 of the book, of course, is maybe the most important part of this. You have laid out a really good historical foundation for this super boom.  You talked about enabling technologies...When it comes, what are the good places for investors to look, what might be the good sectors, the real leaders?

Jeffrey Hirsch: Right. You know, that’s part of the equation for the boom, the enabling technology. I’m seeing the possibility that it could very well be something that none of us has seen or heard of.  It could be being developed in some lab or garage as we speak, but I think there could be, you know, it could come from the alternative energy area or maybe biotechnology, something that can really touch a broad swath of the planet, and you know, if we could harness the energy of the sun, and Edison recommended that we should, I think that could easily fuel that next boom. Literally fuel it.

John Nyaradi: I’ve been a long-time reader of the Stock Trader Almanac, I quote you often in my own writing, and one of the things I really like best is your historical research about the best 6 months and the worse 6 months.  Can you talk a little about the worst six months of the year since we’re just entering that period now?

Jeffrey Hirsch: Well, sure. From our historical seasonal analysis of market behavior, we noted that most of the market’s gains were made from the November to April period, and that, from May to October, the market pretty much lost ground or went sideways.

So back in ’86, we introduced this 6-month switching strategy. And we’ve seen the market gain about, half a million dollars since 1950 when you put in $10,000 in 1950 compared to the worst 6 months where you lose about $400 to $500 over the 61-year period.  In the best 6 months, you average about a 7.4% gain and so about a $527,000 return.

You could improve on those results by using a little technical timing tool. We used the MACD, which I guess most people are familiar with these days, which is a moving average. It’s called moving average convergence divergence. It takes a few different exponential moving averages, and it shows a nice flip of momentum, and using that timing, this should triple the result as the same $10,000 you put in 1950 turns into about $1.5 million versus a loss of about $6,500.

John Nyaradi: Wow. 

Jeffrey Hirsch: This extends or shortens that 6-month period, you know, by a month or so, depending upon what’s happening, and we just issued our seasonal MACD sell signal for 2011 the other day, and it seems to be working pretty well so far. 

John Nyaradi: I agree. I followed that myself and watched that, and what’s so good about your work is that you really go back and get that historical data and base this system on really reliable information. 

Jeffrey Hirsch: I guess the reassuring thing or a little source of pride for us was that a few years back, we picked David Aronson’s book, “Evidence-Based Technical Analysis,” as our best book of the year for the Almanac, and in it he pretty much refutes about 600 or so different technical systems, some black boxes that were proven to be as much a form of chance than actual strategy, whereas the best 6 months strategy was proven to be sound, unlike any of the other ones that they evaluated. 

John Nyaradi: That’s great. I always like to end these conversations by asking if there is there anything else you’d like to add that’s really on your mind right now, that you’d like to share? 

Jeffrey Hirsch: I guess the one thing is the disaster in Japan that could have some backlash down the road on the global economy and take a pull on it kind of like the San Francisco Quake of 1906 was one of the factors that created the banker’s panic of 1907. So I’m concerned about the lingering effects of the quake and tsunami in Japan. 

John Nyaradi: Sure, I agree with that outlook.  Well, folks, we’ve been talking with Jeffrey Hirsch, author of Super Boom: Why the Dow Jones Will Hit 38,820 and How You Can Profit From It. The book has received great reviews from people like Forbes columnist Ken Fisher, Sam Stovall, Chief Investment Strategist of Standard and Poor’s and many others.

I’ve read the book, and certainly, I can add my voice to these recommendations. It’s a great piece of work and you can click on the link at the end of this interview to learn more about Jeff’s book, Super Boom: Why the Dow Jones Will Hit 38,820 and How You Can Profit From It.

Jeff, it has really been great talking with you today. I really appreciate your time and thanks for joining us. I know we’re all looking forward to talking with you again. 

Jeffrey Hirsch: Hey, the pleasure is mine, John. Thanks for having me.

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM A few wordless minutes into Meek's Cutoff, we see a boy carving the word "LOST" into a log. You know then that Kelly Reichardt has made another movie about being stranded in America, this one a neorealist western. The year is 1845, and a three-wagon caravan is crossing the hardscrabble northwestern plains en route to the Willamette. The families have hired the rogue guide Meek (Bruce Greenwood) to show them the way, but he's only got them low on water. The place we now call Oregon remains contested territory. There are dire murmurs that Meek may be a British agent, purposefully leading American settlers astray; Meek redirects this unease toward the prospect of race war. When the group captures a Cayuse man (Rod Rondeaux), the guide advocates hanging. Sanguine Solomon (Will Patton) maintains that they should keep him on to find water.

The distant shots of the men deliberating their best route — patent guesswork — could be from any of the three women's perspectives, but we have little doubt the attentiveness belongs to Solomon's wife Emily (Michelle Williams, reprising her role as Reichardt's moral center). Millie (Zoe Kazan) is young and weak-minded (she falls prey to Meek's fear-mongering); Glory (Shirley Henderson) is pious, pregnant, and reluctant to accept charity. Emily is skeptical of the wisdom of men.

Meek's Cutoff is in large part about Emily's being brought to action — first to try to earn the Indian's trust by mending his moccasin, and second by holding Meek at gunpoint when he aims to fulfill his blood lust. Unlike the Indians in classical "progressive" westerns like Broken Arrow (1950), the Cayuse does not prove himself as the noble embodiment of liberal values. He remains wholly Other, and any perceived alignment with Emily is ultimately incommensurable. The film offers a clear moral preference for Emily's stand, but Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond's loose chain of scenes — one imagines them as chapters with plainly descriptive titles, as in 19th century novels — neither rewards nor punishes such conviction.

After working with different cinematographers on each of her previous features, Reichardt has found a keeper in Chris Blauvelt: the slow, nearly psychedelic dissolves, distant views of riders approaching and lamp-lit conversations burnish this film with a newfound compositional integrity. Reichardt's expressive sound design (a squeaky wheel is practically a character) and knack for staging muffled performances remain in evidence, but not everything works so well in Meek's Cutoff. In particular, the title character's transformation from charismatic braggart to hateful sociopath feels roughshod. By the time Emily has him at gunpoint, the scales have tipped. She's too brave by half, and his monstrousness is similarly overstretched.

Yet one forgives this narrative convenience because Reichardt in other ways acknowledges the difficulty of mounting a western with a female protagonist. Gone are the telling gestures, close-ups, and music cues glinting through Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008); the oblique camera style shies away even from the minor pleasures of detail. These things have everything to do with the film's torn attitude toward the genre: one in which key dualities of wilderness-civilization and individual-community are resolved by the arrival of a man who knows how and why to use a gun.

Williams submerges into the role as she did with Wendy, another marooned pilgrim, projecting tense defiance rather than magical iconography. Reichardt and Raymond cast the ideal of heroism still further adrift from any notion of destiny in their stand-still plotting of scenes. Meek's Cutoff may be the antithesis of Cormac McCarthy's The Road — instead of a fantasy of fatherly love slicing through a postapocalyptic nowhere, here we have the struggle for the soul of a fragile community that may not survive, but is liable to be remembered.

MEEK'S CUTOFF opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters.

Audio design company, Aiaiai gives us a new pair of headphones they’ve worked on in part with Japanese brand, Gallery 1950. The headphones are designed specially for use with an iPhone, and have a special built in mic for taking calls. Constructed in Denmark, the colorful headset comes with 3 size changeable ear buds for a more comfortable fit, and put out great sound quality, which Aiaiai is known for. They’re available online now for €99.00 from Slam Jam.

Aiaiai X Gallery 1950 Headphones is a post from: SLAMXHYPE

Prominent San Antonio businessman and civic leader Louis H. Stumberg Sr. passed away Tuesday, May 3, after battling a long illness. He was 87. The Rotary Club of San Antonio made the announcement Wednesday. Stumberg joined the club in 1950 and served as president in 1981-1982. In the 1940s after World War II, Stumberg, his father and brother decided to launch Patio Foods, a company that made frozen Mexican dinners. Today, the Patio brand is owned by ConAgra Foods Inc. Stumberg previously served as chairman of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, president of the Boy Scouts of San Antonio and as a member of the Texas Parks and Wildlife...

40-year old NASA space probes are still heating up the field of astronomy after identifying mysterious 'anomaly'.


Portuguese physicists report that they have identified the unknown force whose influence on outward bound interplanetary space probes has puzzled scientists since 1998.

Until now, theorists speculated that this "Pioneer anomaly," -- affecting NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 -- is caused by unseen matter in space, the gravity of an unknown planet, or even new principles of physics: beyond even Einstein's theory of general relativity.

This anomaly is one of a long line of mysterious motions in our solar system, many of which were resolved when investigators discovered new objects or physical effects.

Case in point: In the 19th century, Uranus deviated from its calculated orbit and the gravity of an unknown planet was suggested as the cause. In 1846, the discovery of Neptune solved the mystery. Astronomers blamed a quirk in Mercury's orbit on the influence of undiscovered matter near the sun, perhaps in the form of a small planet, or on a problem with Newton’s theory of gravity. The third suggestion panned out in 1915 -- Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity -- an advance beyond Newton, explained the Mercury effect.

Johann Encke, a 19th century German astronomer, found that a comet returned 2.5 hours early on each 3.5 year orbital trip. Encke suspected that the comet -- now named after him -- was plowing through a thin, resisting medium that was pulling it slowly toward the sun, making the orbit slightly smaller and the round-trip faster. However, some comets arrive later than expected, not early. The once mysterious force that causes the comets to belie their timetables was identified in 1950 by American astronomer Fred Whipple: gases streaming from a comet act like rocket propulsion, advancing or decreasing the comet's motion, depending on stream direction.

In the 1980s, the Naval Observatory searched telescopically for a hypothetical Planet X, to explain possible discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus, finding nothing. But an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, John D. Anderson, hunted X in another way: he searched for deviations in the trajectories of Pioneer 10 and 11 that could be due to the gravity of the supposed planet.

The Pioneer satellites were launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively. By March of 1997, Pioneer 10 was already far beyond Pluto, a little more than 6 billion miles away from the sun. Anderson’s Planet X hunt failed, but in 1998 he and coworkers announced the discovery of the Pioneer anomaly: the probes were moving outward less rapidly than planned. By 2007, the Pioneers were about 250,000 miles short of their predicted distances from the sun, according to "The Hunt for Planet X" by Dutch writer Govert Schilling.

The Portuguese physicists -- including Orfeu Bertolami and graduate student Frederico Francisco of the Instituto Superior Technico in Lisbon -- said that the mystery force originated in the Pioneer spacecraft themselves.

Bertolami's team calculate that infrared radiation from warm parts of each spacecraft, notably the radioactive thermal generators that powered them, and the main equipment compartment, where electrical power from the generators was used to operate electronics, bounces back and forth between exposed surfaces and exerts pressure on the back of each spacecraft's 9 foot wide onboard parabolic radio antenna pointing toward Earth. Seen from a great distance, the Earth is very close to the sun in the sky, and so pressure on the antenna represents a force on the spacecraft in the direction of the sun.

The possibility that onboard heat causes the Pioneer anomaly was considered and dismissed by Anderson in 1998. Jonathan Katz, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., disagreed, suggesting in 1999 that indeed heat is the culprit. The Portuguese physicists used detailed computer modeling to produce the most precise simulation of Pioneer heat flow yet, including both mirror-like and diffuse reflection from spacecraft surfaces. In their paper, they conclude that heat does the trick and "unless new data arises, the puzzle of the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer probes can finally be put to rest."

Katz said that if he were the referee on the Portuguese paper, "I'd recommend publication."

Alan Stern, a former head of space science at NASA and the Principal Investigator of the New Horizons spacecraft that’s now en route to Pluto, said that "I don't think there is any longer any credible evidence" that the Pioneer anomaly originates from anything but heat.

The Pioneer effect will likely be just a footnote in the history of space exploration, but for now, at least it's the end of one mysterious anomaly.

By Stephen P. Maran
Inside Science News Service

A familiar face on TV and a stage actor at the cutting edge

Nicholas Selby, who has died aged 85, was, in many ways, the archetypal supporting actor: dependable, grave and imposing while emitting a sense of authoritarian decency, courtesy and old school charm. And yet, although he was a familiar face on television, playing majors, judges and elderly peers – and a chief constable in the long-running late-1960s police series Softly Softly – he was linked with radical theatre work at the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was one of the earliest associate artists.

Selby was, in fact, an old-fashioned socialist, hailing from a working-class family in Holborn, central London, where his father worked for a rubber company. The family lived above a cinema, where young James (he later changed his name at the behest of Equity), the youngest of three, watched all the new releases free of charge.

He made his stage debut in JB Priestley's Dangerous Corner in Preston, Lancashire, for Ensa, the services entertainment wing, before going abroad, serving in Egypt and Palestine during the second world war. After training from 1948 to 1950 at the Central School of Speech and Drama, London – where he forged lifelong friendships with his fellow students Richard Mayes and Richard Pasco – he appeared in repertory theatres for 10 years in Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry, York, Hornchurch and Cambridge.

He made his London debut in 1959 at the Fortune in William Douglas-Home's Aunt Edwina, joining the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in 1960 to appear in Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter. He had met, and liked, Pinter when the playwright was acting under another name (David Baron) in repertory. Also in 1960, Selby played the eccentric Mr Hardrader, with an imaginary dog, in John Arden's The Happy Haven, and in Chekhov's Platonov, opposite Rex Harrison.

But it was at the RSC that Selby made his true mark during a 10-year association, starting in the history plays cycle of The Wars of the Roses, directed by Peter Hall and John Barton. He was the ideal Lord Chief Justice in Henry IV, gruff and flinty, impatient with Hugh Griffith's lubricious Falstaff, then a supercilious King of France in opposition to Ian Holm's Henry V and a cringing, skin-saving Bishop of Winchester in contrast to David Warner's saintly Henry VI.

His RSC association coincided with the arrival of Trevor Nunn. Selby appeared as the Duke in Nunn's breakthrough production of Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy in 1967, and he was prominent in Nunn's all-white nursery production of The Winter's Tale (as Camillo) in 1969 and his 1971 Henry VIII, starring Donald Sinden.

Selby returned briefly to the Royal Court to appear opposite Ralph Richardson in John Osborne's West of Suez in 1971, and later, in 1975, as the humanely aristocratic Lord Milton in The Fool, Edward Bond's play about the poet John Clare. He played the leading, autobiographical role of Garry Essendine in Noël Coward's Present Laughter at the Birmingham Rep before resuming RSC duty in William Gillette's Sherlock Holmes at the Aldwych in 1974, and in Terry Hands's extravagant, exciting production of Peter Barnes's Bewitched in the same year.

When Peter Hall led the National from the Old Vic on to the South Bank, Selby signed up to play Menander in Hall's luxuriant 1976 staging of Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, led by Albert Finney wielding a curtle-axe in leather chaps. He also chipped in tellingly as Van Swieten in the first performance of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus (1979) with Paul Scofield, Felicity Kendal and Simon Callow.

His few film performances included Duncan in Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971), with Jon Finch and Francesca Annis, and the Speaker in Nicholas Hytner's The Madness of King George (1994), written by Alan Bennett. In between, television kept him busy throughout the 1970s and 80s. He was in seven episodes of the hugely popular Poldark; swished his cloak as Sir Walter Raleigh in Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth R; and popped up as the peppery Uncle George Wooster, with an "unsuitable" girlfriend, in Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie's Jeeves and Wooster series.

Selby made his last West End appearance in 1987, taking over the role of AD Knox, the King's don wearied by war and Wittgenstein, in Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code, starring Derek Jacobi as the code-breaker Alan Turing, when it moved from the Haymarket to the Comedy. And he rejoined the RSC to reprise Duncan in Adrian Noble's Macbeth in 1988 (with Miles Anderson and Maureen Beattie) and to play a definitive Alonso in Hytner's production of The Tempest, starring John Wood as Prospero.

Selby was a relaxed and unfussy actor, as he was a man. He was happy in his career, not particularly ambitious, and renowned for wanting to cut lines rather than give himself too much to do. At the RSC, he got the wardrobe department to provide hidden extra pouches and pockets in his costumes so he would never have to be separated from his beloved pipe. And in the early days at Stratford-upon-Avon, he would roam the countryside with Sinden to indulge his hobby of architecture in general, and old churches in particular.

Most of his later years were dedicated to caring for his wife, Kathleen, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease. Selby had long since removed his details from Spotlight and, although he died in September 2010, the news of his death emerged only last month.

Kathleen died in 2007. He is survived by their daughter, Alison, and two grandchildren.

• Nicholas (James) Ivor Selby, actor, born 13 September 1925; died 14 September 2010

MADRID, 3 (EUROPA PRESS)

El Palacio de Velázquez del Parque del Retiro acoge la primera exposición que se realiza en España sobre la obra de Leon Golub (Chicago 1922- Nueva York 2004). La muestra, organizada por el Museo Reina Sofía, reúne 71 pinturas, la mayoría de gran formato, y una veintena de dibujos, que abarcan toda la trayectoria de Golub, quien intenta plasmar en sus obras la violencia, la ira, el dolor de las guerras y el testimonio de la Historia.

Para el director del Museo Reina Sofía, Manuel Borja-Villel, la obra de Golub refleja la "violencia de la sociedad" sin atender a modas artísticas con "el lenguaje de la violencia".

Asimismo, asegura que la obra de Golub es "testimonial y monumental" y ha recordado que el artista norteamericano se inspiró en las obras de Goya y Picasso.

Por ello, el recorrido de la muestra, abierta desde el 6 de mayo t hasta el 12 de septiembre, se articula en torno al impresionante 'Vietnam II', que el artista realizó en 1973, como respuesta al Guernica de Picasso, que le impactó al verlo en Chicago cuando solamente era un adolescente.

Asimismo, sus obras tratan temas conflictivos y molestos como el aparheid, o la situación de las cárceles donde retrata a víctimas y torturadores hasta "decir la verdad al poder", según explica John Bird, comisario de la muestra.

Colores y texturas de conflictos humanos que todavía no han desaparecido, y que probablemente hoy Leon Golub seguiría denunciando en sus lienzos y dibujos. "Siempre ha representado la violencia soterrada" y era un "gran consumidor de noticias". "Para él la única salvación era nuestras decisiones morales", explica Bird.

OPRESIÓN POLÍTICA Y MILITAR

Asi para Jon Bird, las pinturas de Leon Golub representaban "las formas del poder y la opresión política y militar" y "su impacto sobre los cuerpos sociales individuales y colectivos". "Creó escenas de conflicto y agresión masculina como un modo de acceder a lo real".

Aunque el recorrido de la muestra es básicamente cronológico no está exento de múltiples interrelaciones y nexos temáticos. De la producción de Golub durante los cincuenta y sesenta (primera etapa del artista) se pueden ver obras de iconografía y temática inspiradas en la Antigüedad, como la serie Gigantomachy ("Gigantomaquia") (1966), una revisión moderna del friso clásico. También está presente la serie Napalm (1969), una de sus réplicas a la Guerra del Vietnam.

En los últimos años de la década de los setenta, el artista pasó por un proceso de cambio estilístico y temático, como demuestra la serie 'Political Portraits' (1976-1979), conjunto de bustos de líderes políticos, dictadores, figuras religiosas y presidentes de corporaciones: retratos a tamaño natural que muestran el poder como un reordenamiento de la autoimagen.

En Mercenaries, otra de sus series más importantes y creada a caballo entre esta y la siguiente década, el artista retrató de nuevo los brutales actos cometidos a la sombra de los regímenes represivos.

En los ochenta Golub había conseguido reconocimiento internacional, pero sus obras siguen repletas de figuras de mercenarios, interrogadores y víctimas de tortura, abordando de manera provocadora los miedos y represiones de la sociedad, como en la angustiosa Horsing Around ("Algarabía").

De la misma época es la serie Threnody ('Trenodia') (1986), protagonizada por mujeres dolientes, y las series que ahondan nuevamente en los efectos del poder, la violencia y la represión: Interrogations ('Interrogatorios') (1981), White Squads ('Pelotones blancos') (1982) y Riot ('Disturbio') (1983).

La década siguiente marcó una brecha en lo que respecta a los procedimientos técnicos y compositivos: menos densidad de pintura y un uso nihilista y humorístico del lenguaje, probablemente influenciado por su mujer, la artista Nancy Spero, explica desde el Museo Reina Sofía.

DEL GRANDE AL PEQUEÑO FORMATO

Y a partir del 2000 y con los problemas físicos de la edad, Golub dejó de ejecutar grandes lienzos y comenzó una serie en pequeño formato en la que retornaba a los retratos políticos, pequeños manifiestos que evocaban carteles y notas pegados a las paredes, como This Could Be You o We Can Disappear You, inspirados en Los desastres de la guerra de Goya.

Finalmente, entre 2000 y 2004 realizó pequeños dibujos carnavalescos llenos de personajes mitológicos que aludían a la transgresión, el exceso y el deseo.

Las obras presentes en la exposición proceden fundamentalmente de la colección personal del artista, conservada en Nueva York, y de las dos grandes colecciones de su obra en Norteamérica: la de Rick Meyer y la de Eli Broad.

Leon Golub nació en Chicago, Illinois en 1922. Realizó estudios de historia del arte y se graduó en Bellas Artes en la Universidad de Chicago en 1942, de donde pasó al Instituto de Arte de Chicago para completar su formación. En 1950 realiza su primera exposición en la galería Contemporary de Chicago. En 1951 contrae matrimonio con la también artista, Nancy Spero.

Desde sus comienzos, Golub estuvo comprometido con la política, no sólo a través de sus obras, sino como organizador y participante en diversas causas progresistas. Toda su trayectoria como pintor es, en cierto sentido, una respuesta a la estética neoyorquina y a la política artística mundial.

Cuando comenzó la Guerra de Vietnam en 1965, Golub acentuó más aún su compromiso con los asuntos sociales y, a partir del desembarco norteamericano, se mostró decidídamente antibelicista.

Amnistía Internacional (AI) ha revelado una serie de imágenes tomadas desde satélites que muestran vastos campos de prisioneros políticos en Corea del Norte en los que cerca de 200.000 personas trabajan en condiciones "cercanas a la esclavitud".

Las fotografías difundidas por la organización humanitaria corresponden a cuatro de los seis campos de prisioneros que existen en Corea del Norte, que ocupan enormes extensiones de tierra en regiones desiertas en las provincias de Pyongan del Sur, Hamkyung del Sur y Hamkyung del Norte.

Gracias a las imágenes aéreas se ha comprobado como los campos de reclusión masivos norcoreanos han incrementado considerablemente su tamaño desde 2001.

Los prisioneros en la red de campos de trabajo organizados por el régimen de Pyongyang son forzados a elaborar productos diversos como derivados de la soja, dulces, carbón y cemento.

Según señaló AI, los internos sufren con frecuencia torturas y otros tratos "crueles, degradantes e inhumanos".

La organización ha recogido testimonios de personas que estuvieron presas en el campo de Yodok, en la provincia de Hamgyong del Sur, que aseguraron haber sido testigos de ejecuciones públicas, así como de guardias que trabajaron en otros campos de Corea del Norte.

"Durante décadas las autoridades se han negado a admitir la existencia de campos de prisioneros políticos masivos, pero no pueden seguir ocultando la evidencia", afirmó en un comunicado desde Londres el director de la región de Asia-Pacífico de Amnistía Internacional, Sam Zarifi.

La organización humanitaria cree que desde la década de 1950 funcionan en Corea del Norte los campos de reclusión masivos, en los que se estima que el 40 por ciento de los prisioneros murió por malnutrición entre 1991 y 2001.

Una proporción significativa de los reclusos nunca llega a saber de qué crímenes se les acusa y, la gran mayoría, encerrados en las llamadas "zonas de control total", nunca serán liberados.

Un testigo recogido por Amnistía Internacional, Kim, ex preso en el campo conocido como Kwanliso 15, en Yodok, narró como "todo el mundo en Kwanliso ha sido testigo de ejecuciones".

"Todos los que intentaban escapar eran capturados. Les interrogaban durante dos o tres meses y después les ejecutaban", afirmó Kim.

Otro testigo, Jeong Kyoungil, detenido en Yodok desde 2000 hasta 2003, recuerda como "entre 30 y 40 prisioneros dormían en habitaciones de unos 50 metros cuadrados, en camas hechas con un tablero de madera y tapados con una sabana".

"A cada uno se le asignaban 1.157 metros cuadrados de terreno, y sólo aquellos que acababan su tarea recibían comida. Si, al final del día, sólo habías hecho la mitad de tu trabajo, recibías la mitad de comida", explica Kyoungil.

Amnistía Internacional describe asimismo un "cubo" de tortura utilizado por las autoridades norcoreanas.

Se trata de una celda en la que el detenido no tiene espacio suficiente ni para estirarse ni para erguirse en pie, un lugar donde se suele dejar a los presos durante más de una semana, y hasta ocho meses, según tiene constancia la organización pro derechos humanos.

Justice Antonin Scalia was the lone dissenter when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Wyoming on Monday in a dispute over water rights. Scalia continued his contrary ways when he referred to Wyoming residents as “Wyomans,” the Odd Clauses Watch blog reports. Scalia inserted an asterisk next to the word and explained in a footnote: “The dictionary-approved term is ‘Wyomingite,’ which is also the name of a type of lava, see Webster’s New International Dictionary 2961 (2d ed. 1957). I believe the people of Wyoming deserve better.” Scalia argued the majority incorrectly interpreted a 1950 compact with Montana when it…

arts@sfbg.com

FILM A few wordless minutes into Meek's Cutoff, we see a boy carving the word "LOST" into a log. You know then that Kelly Reichardt has made another movie about being stranded in America, this one a neorealist western. The year is 1845, and a three-wagon caravan is crossing the hardscrabble northwestern plains en route to the Willamette. The families have hired the rogue guide Meek (Bruce Greenwood) to show them the way, but he's only got them low on water. The place we now call Oregon remains contested territory. There are dire murmurs that Meek may be a British agent, purposefully leading American settlers astray; Meek redirects this unease toward the prospect of race war. When the group captures a Cayuse man (Rod Rondeaux), the guide advocates hanging. Sanguine Solomon (Will Patton) maintains that they should keep him on to find water.

The distant shots of the men deliberating their best route — patent guesswork — could be from any of the three women's perspectives, but we have little doubt the attentiveness belongs to Solomon's wife Emily (Michelle Williams, reprising her role as Reichardt's moral center). Millie (Zoe Kazan) is young and weak-minded (she falls prey to Meek's fear-mongering); Glory (Shirley Henderson) is pious, pregnant, and reluctant to accept charity. Emily is skeptical of the wisdom of men.

Meek's Cutoff is in large part about Emily's being brought to action — first to try to earn the Indian's trust by mending his moccasin, and second by holding Meek at gunpoint when he aims to fulfill his blood lust. Unlike the Indians in classical "progressive" westerns like Broken Arrow (1950), the Cayuse does not prove himself as the noble embodiment of liberal values. He remains wholly Other, and any perceived alignment with Emily is ultimately incommensurable. The film offers a clear moral preference for Emily's stand, but Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond's loose chain of scenes — one imagines them as chapters with plainly descriptive titles, as in 19th century novels — neither rewards nor punishes such conviction.

After working with different cinematographers on each of her previous features, Reichardt has found a keeper in Chris Blauvelt: the slow, nearly psychedelic dissolves, distant views of riders approaching and lamp-lit conversations burnish this film with a newfound compositional integrity. Reichardt's expressive sound design (a squeaky wheel is practically a character) and knack for staging muffled performances remain in evidence, but not everything works so well in Meek's Cutoff. In particular, the title character's transformation from charismatic braggart to hateful sociopath feels roughshod. By the time Emily has him at gunpoint, the scales have tipped. She's too brave by half, and his monstrousness is similarly overstretched.

Yet one forgives this narrative convenience because Reichardt in other ways acknowledges the difficulty of mounting a western with a female protagonist. Gone are the telling gestures, close-ups, and music cues glinting through Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008); the oblique camera style shies away even from the minor pleasures of detail. These things have everything to do with the film's torn attitude toward the genre: one in which key dualities of wilderness-civilization and individual-community are resolved by the arrival of a man who knows how and why to use a gun.

Williams submerges into the role as she did with Wendy, another marooned pilgrim, projecting tense defiance rather than magical iconography. Reichardt and Raymond cast the ideal of heroism still further adrift from any notion of destiny in their stand-still plotting of scenes. Meek's Cutoff may be the antithesis of Cormac McCarthy's The Road — instead of a fantasy of fatherly love slicing through a postapocalyptic nowhere, here we have the struggle for the soul of a fragile community that may not survive, but is liable to be remembered.

MEEK'S CUTOFF opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters.

Los Ángeles. El cuerpo de la ex modelo Yvette Vickers, de 82 años, quien fue una de las primeras conejitas de la revista Playboy, fue encontrado momificado en su residencia en Los Ángeles, confirmaron autoridades locales. El hallazgo lo hizo una vecina el pasado 27 de abril; se ha reportado que Vickers pudo haber fallecido desde hace un año. Actuó en producciones cinematográficas como Sunset Boulevard, que en 1950 fue su debut en cine, aunque no obtuvo crédito. En julio de 1959 fue la conejita del mes en Playboy y apareció en otras revistas para caballeros. Voceros del servicio forense señalaron que las causas de su muerte aún están bajo investigación, pero se anticipó que no hay signos de violencia en el cuerpo.

The death of Osama bin Laden offers a perfect opportunity to revisit the list of the World's Most Wanted. So who still makes it?

He wasn't the World's Most Wanted Man. Officially, at least, there's no such thing. But when Osama bin Laden died from a shot to the head and another to the chest sometime between midnight and 1.30am local time on Monday, the man who, in the popular western imagination, held arguably the best – and certainly the best-publicised – claim to be regarded as such left behind him something of a conundrum for those who compile such lists: who could replace him?

It's not such a straightforward question. Leaving aside such niceties as one man's evil terrorist mastermind being another man's blessed freedom fighter, attempting to place in order of importance crimes on the kind of scale that might warrant inclusion in a Top 10 of global iniquity is a task fraught with difficulties. How do you measure a Serbian ethnic cleanser against an American serial killer, dismemberer and necrophile; a Mexican drugs baron against a Rwandan genocide-merchant?

Most lists, sensibly, do not try. The first and perhaps the most famous of all, the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives – from which Bin Laden was summarily ejected on Monday, his photograph stamped with a blood-red banner and the single word "Deceased" – doesn't rank its members, who are confined to criminals indicted by a US federal grand jury. Bin Laden, indicted in absentia in New York in 1999 for his alleged part in the US embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi the previous year, was a bit of a misfit on that list.

His fellow fugitives were, for the most part, fraudsters, rapists, murderers and drug traffickers, with bounties on their heads ranging from $100,000 to $2m; the reward offered for Bin Laden's capture totalled $27m (£16m). Robert William Fisher, for example, is wanted for allegedly killing his wife and two young children and then blowing up the house in which they all lived in Scottsdale, Arizona in April 2001; Alexis Flores for his alleged involvement in the kidnapping and murder of a five-year-old girl in Philadelphia.

Heinous crimes, but hardly the equivalent of masterminding 9/11. Or indeed, as assorted warrants put it, of "organising a global network committed to bringing down the United States". That explains why the FBI created a separate list in 2001, in the wake of the September 11 attacks: Most Wanted Terrorists. The death of the al-Qaida figurehead leaves 29 people on that list, including his reported deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and also indicted for the US embassy bombings; Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, wanted in connection with the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 US sailors; Adam Yahihe Gadahn, sought for providing "material support, comfort and aid" to al-Qaida; and Abdul Rahman Yasin, indicted in the 1993 bombing of the New York World Trade Centre.

The FBI's hope, it seems, was that the terrorist list would have the same mobilising effect on the US public as the original 10 Most Wanted, first launched on 14 March 1950 after the FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, spotted the potential of the publicity generated by a news agency story profiling the "toughest guys" the bureau would like to capture. The first person placed on the list was Thomas James Holden, wanted for the murder of his wife, her brother and her stepbrother. Down the years it has also featured the likes of James Earl Ray, the prime suspect in the assassination of Martin Luther King; the infamous serial killer Ted Bundy; and (briefly) civil rights activist Angela Davis.

According to the FBI, 494 fugitives have figured on its 10 Most Wanted list, and 464 have been captured or at least or located, 152 of them with the help of the public. Priorities have changed over time, the agency says. In the 50s, the list was "primarily comprised of bank robbers, burglars, and car thieves". In the radical 60s, "the list reflected the revolutionaries of the times, with destruction of government property, sabotage, and kidnapping dominating". The 70s were overwhelmingly about organised crime, and in the 80s and 90s the 10 Most Wanted began to include suspected international terrorists as well. In more recent years, common crimes have included rape and other sexual abuse, crimes against children, white-collar crime, gang violence and drug trafficking.

Maintaining such a list on a global scale has obvious pitfalls. Interpol, the international police organisation, makes no attempt to prioritise. The 321 criminals who currently feature on its website range from an Australian kidnapper to an Argentinian counterfeiter.

(In Britain, rather more prosaically, Crimestoppers UK's 10 Most Wanted includes one John Levy, wanted for "driving off from a petrol station without paying for £51 worth of diesel".)

Since 2008, the US business magazine Forbes has published a list of The World's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives, compiled in consultation with law enforcement agencies internationally (see below). Its criteria, the magazine says, are that fugitives have been criminally indicted or charged in national jurisdictions or by an international tribunal, stand accused of "a long history of committing serious crimes", and are "still considered dangerous". In addition, each is said to represent "a type of criminal problem with which legal institutions in diverse jurisdictions are grappling". It also ranks its candidates from one to 10.

Described as "armed, dangerous and very tough to catch – the world's worst thieves and thugs who have eluded local police, armies and international organisations for years", Forbes's most recent list was topped by Bin Laden. It also includes Semion Mogilevich, "the face of Russian organised crime"; Joaquin Guzman, "Mexico's most notorious drug trafficker"; Dawood Ibrahim, "India's most wanted man"; Italian mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro; Rwandan businessman (and alleged genocide financier) Felicien Kabuga; Joseph Kony of the brutal Lord's Resistance Army; and James L Bulger, a Boston mobster wanted in connection with up to 19 murders.

But the list is disputable. Britain, for example, would probably quite like to see Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB operative wanted for the murder by plutonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, somewhere on a list of this kind (although he hasn't been charged). Augustin Bizimana, likewise, is the most senior of the 12 or so people wanted for genocide by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda not to have been apprehended; the former defence minister faces charges over the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. Some might like to see the name of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the Sudanese dictator seen as responsible for ethnic cleansing that has left 300,000 dead and 2.5 million homeless in Darfur and the first sitting head of state ever indicted by the International Criminal Court. And what of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb army chief indicted for genocide in The Hague in 1995? He's still out there, laughing.

So who will replace Bin Laden for the list-makers? It seems logical he could make way on Forbes's list to last year's runner-up, Guzman. The FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list will simply shrink; Bin Laden's name will not be substituted. But on the Top 10 Most Wanted, the jury's out. Some reckon Zawahiri is a shoo-in; other favour the Libyan, Anas al-Liby, or the Egyptian Saif al-Adel, both allegedly implicated in the east African embassy bombings. Adan el Shukrijumah, a Saudi citizen suspected of planning to attack the New York subway in 2009, and Yasin, wanted in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, are also mentioned. But, some observers say, Bin Laden's replacement on America's 10 Most Wanted could be an altogether less rarefied species of lowlife: a white-collar criminal, say, or a bank robber. Ultimately, such lists are always going to be subjective.

The new 10 Most Wanted List

1 Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán Mexican drug lord

"El Chapo" or "Shorty" (he stands 5ft 6in tall) heads an international drug trafficking organisation, the Sinaloa Cartel, and became Mexico's top drug kingpin in 2003 after the arrest of his rival Osiel Cárdenas of the Gulf Cartel. Appears simultaneously on Forbes's lists of the world's most powerful, most wealthy and most wanted men. Ruthless and determined, Guzmán has succeeded in turning Ciudad Juárez, a strategic smuggling point that overlooks El Paso, Texas, into one of the murder capitals of the world through mind-numbingly brutal battles against both the Gulf and La Linea cartels, leaving thousands dead. A faction from La Linea has recently defected to Shorty's side; a local street gang, the Mexicles, has sub-contracted its services in killing, kidnapping, drug dealing and extorting; and even elements of the police and army seem to have thrown their lot in with him. Sinaloa smuggles many tonnes of cocaine from Colombia through Mexico into the United States, and is also heavily involved in Mexican methamphetamine, marijuana and heroin.

2 Dawood Ibrahim Head of Indian crime network

The most wanted man in India heads up a 5,000-strong organised crime network called the D-Company that is involved in everything from drugs trafficking to contract killing in Pakistan, India and the UAE. Currently on the Interpol wanted list for organised crime and counterfeiting, besides association with al-Qaida. According to Washington, Ibrahim uses the same smuggling routes as al-Qaida and has worked with both the mother organisation and its offshoot Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the November 2008 Mumbai attacks. He is also suspected in the 1993 Mumbai bombings that killed 257 people and wounded 713. Like Bin Laden, Ibrahim may well be based in Pakistan.

3 Semion Mogilevich Russian 'boss of bosses'

Arrested in Russia for tax evasion in 2008, Ukrainian-born Mogilevich was released in 2009. Wanted in the US in connection with a $150m share fraud; believed by both European and US law enforcement agencies to be the "boss of bosses" of most Russian mafia syndicates in the world. Nicknames include "Don Semyon" and "The Brainy Don"; often described as "the most dangerous mobster in the world".

4 Matteo Messina Denaro Cosa Nostra kingpin

Sicilian mafioso who has effectively taken control of Italy's Cosa Nostra following the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano and other leading mobsters. Nicknamed "Diabolik", after an Italian comic-book character. Known for his fast lifestyle, Porsches and Rolex watches, he has been on the run since 1993.

5 Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov Uzbek mobster

Major Russian mobster originally from Uzbekistan and apparently known as "Taiwanchik" for his Asian appearance. Washington describes him as a "major figure in international Eurasian organised crime" engaged in "drug distribution, illegal arms sales and trafficking in stolen vehicles." He is even alleged to have bribed the figure skating judges in the 2002 Winter Olympics.

6 Felicien Kabuga Mastermind of genocide

Accused of bankrolling the Rwandan genocide, inciting bloodshed through his radio station and even supplying the machetes and hoes used in the massacres, Kabuga is wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for "serious offences under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, crimes against humanity and genocide" in connection with the massacre of more than 800,000 Rwandan men, women and children in 100 days of terror in 1994. Allegedly hiding in Kenya.

7 Joseph Kony Ugandan guerrilla leader

Head of the Lord's Resistance Army, a guerrilla group engaged in a violent campaign to establish theocratic government in Uganda. Has also operated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan, abducting an estimated 66,000 children and displacing more than two million people since 1986. The International Criminal Court has indicted him on 33 charges including crimes against humanity and war crimes.

8 James 'Whitey' Bulger Old-school US mobster

The ever-so-slightly embarrassing older brother of William Michael Bulger, a former president of the Massachusetts state senate and the University of Massachusetts, Bulger was part of the Winter Hill Gang, a Boston-based Irish-American crime network that for many years ran illicit drugs and extortion rackets. Pursued by the FBI for more than a decade for racketeering, murder (his name has been linked to 19 killings from the early 70s up to the mid-80s), conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, conspiracy to commit extortion, money laundering and narcotics distribution. Bulger's wealth is estimated at between $30m and $50m (£18m-£30m), cash he is said to be using to evade arrest with his longtime girlfriend. Last confirmed sighting was in London in 2002. There is a reward of $2m for information leading to his arrest.

9 Omid 'Nino' Tahvili Head of Canadian crime group

Head of a Persian organised crime network in Canada linked to assorted Triads and other global criminal groups. Arrested on charges of torturing a relative of a man he suspected had stolen a chunk of his organisation's illicit drugs money, he walked out of a Canadian maximum security prison in a janitor's uniform in November 2007 after promising to pay a guard to let him out (he never forked up). US law enforcement wants to talk to him about a fraudulent telemarketing business that targeted people in the US, stealing some $3m from hundreds of victims, most of them elderly.

10 ? Ayman al-Zawahiri Al-Qaida number two

Born in June 1951 into a prominent upper-middle class family in Cairo, Zawahiri was the final "emir" of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which he merged into al-Qaida in 1998. Reportedly a qualified surgeon, he speaks Arabic, English and French. According to former al-Qaida members, Zawahiri has worked with al-Qaida since the organisation's earliest beginnings. He is often described as Bin Laden's right-hand man, and by some as the "real brains" of al-Qaida. The friendship between the two men supposedly began in the 80s when Zawahiri is said to have given medical treatment to Bin Laden in Afghanistan in the teeth of a Soviet attack. According to terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman, Bin Laden considered Zawahiri his mentor. Most experts believe 9/11 could not have happened without Zawahiri's controlling influence.

arts@sfbg.com

FILM A few wordless minutes into Meek's Cutoff, we see a boy carving the word "LOST" into a log. You know then that Kelly Reichardt has made another movie about being stranded in America, this one a neorealist western. The year is 1845, and a three-wagon caravan is crossing the hardscrabble northwestern plains en route to the Willamette. The families have hired the rogue guide Meek (Bruce Greenwood) to show them the way, but he's only got them low on water. The place we now call Oregon remains contested territory. There are dire murmurs that Meek may be a British agent, purposefully leading American settlers astray; Meek redirects this unease toward the prospect of race war. When the group captures a Cayuse man (Rod Rondeaux), the guide advocates hanging. Sanguine Solomon (Will Patton) maintains that they should keep him on to find water.

The distant shots of the men deliberating their best route — patent guesswork — could be from any of the three women's perspectives, but we have little doubt the attentiveness belongs to Solomon's wife Emily (Michelle Williams, reprising her role as Reichardt's moral center). Millie (Zoe Kazan) is young and weak-minded (she falls prey to Meek's fear-mongering); Glory (Shirley Henderson) is pious, pregnant, and reluctant to accept charity. Emily is skeptical of the wisdom of men.

Meek's Cutoff is in large part about Emily's being brought to action — first to try to earn the Indian's trust by mending his moccasin, and second by holding Meek at gunpoint when he aims to fulfill his blood lust. Unlike the Indians in classical "progressive" westerns like Broken Arrow (1950), the Cayuse does not prove himself as the noble embodiment of liberal values. He remains wholly Other, and any perceived alignment with Emily is ultimately incommensurable. The film offers a clear moral preference for Emily's stand, but Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond's loose chain of scenes — one imagines them as chapters with plainly descriptive titles, as in 19th century novels — neither rewards nor punishes such conviction.

After working with different cinematographers on each of her previous features, Reichardt has found a keeper in Chris Blauvelt: the slow, nearly psychedelic dissolves, distant views of riders approaching and lamp-lit conversations burnish this film with a newfound compositional integrity. Reichardt's expressive sound design (a squeaky wheel is practically a character) and knack for staging muffled performances remain in evidence, but not everything works so well in Meek's Cutoff. In particular, the title character's transformation from charismatic braggart to hateful sociopath feels roughshod. By the time Emily has him at gunpoint, the scales have tipped. She's too brave by half, and his monstrousness is similarly overstretched.

Yet one forgives this narrative convenience because Reichardt in other ways acknowledges the difficulty of mounting a western with a female protagonist. Gone are the telling gestures, close-ups, and music cues glinting through Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008); the oblique camera style shies away even from the minor pleasures of detail. These things have everything to do with the film's torn attitude toward the genre: one in which key dualities of wilderness-civilization and individual-community are resolved by the arrival of a man who knows how and why to use a gun.

Williams submerges into the role as she did with Wendy, another marooned pilgrim, projecting tense defiance rather than magical iconography. Reichardt and Raymond cast the ideal of heroism still further adrift from any notion of destiny in their stand-still plotting of scenes. Meek's Cutoff may be the antithesis of Cormac McCarthy's The Road — instead of a fantasy of fatherly love slicing through a postapocalyptic nowhere, here we have the struggle for the soul of a fragile community that may not survive, but is liable to be remembered.

MEEK'S CUTOFF opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters.