Enter a group of fearsome bikers from all walks of life, or for that matter, unlife. The The Gae Ceann have a bad reputation for crime, smuggling, whoring and committing crimes. A welcoming brotherhood of vampires, undead and things that should not be have all united into this gang seeking a new life among their unnatural kin.
The law seeks to punish the lawbreakers, internal conflict punishes the groups sinners, and chaos is rife within the gang as the politics shift for a new leader. A line is crossed, and the sins of the gang are exposed for the world to see. The Gae Ceann are encompassed by enemies and need brothers and sisters more than ever.
You are invited as writers to join this brotherhood of bikers, all you have to do is create a biker related character and report to the clubhouse or shoot me a PM on this right here magical website.
WILSONVILLE, Ore. (AP) ? Oregon officials say a pesticide is to blame for the deaths of tens of thousands of bumble bees in a shopping center parking lot southwest of Portland.
The state Department of Agriculture said Friday that tests on bees and foliage showed the deaths are "directly related to a pesticide application on linden trees" that was meant to control aphids.
It said an investigation is under way to see if the application of the pesticide Safari, done last Saturday, violated the law.
The Oregonian reports that the Agriculture Department, the City of Wilsonville, neighboring towns and some local landscape contractors have covered the sprayed trees with netting in an effort to prevent further insect deaths.
The Xerces (ZERK'-zees) Society for Invertebrate Conservation has upped its estimate of the bee kill to 50,000. Spokesman Scott Black calls that a very conservative number.
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Information from: The Oregonian, http://www.oregonlive.com
WILSONVILLE, Ore. (AP) ? Oregon officials say a pesticide is to blame for the deaths of tens of thousands of bumble bees in a shopping center parking lot southwest of Portland.
The state Department of Agriculture said Friday that tests on bees and foliage showed the deaths are "directly related to a pesticide application on linden trees" that was meant to control aphids.
It said an investigation is under way to see if the application of the pesticide Safari, done last Saturday, violated the law.
The Oregonian reports that the Agriculture Department, the City of Wilsonville, neighboring towns and some local landscape contractors have covered the sprayed trees with netting in an effort to prevent further insect deaths.
The Xerces (ZERK'-zees) Society for Invertebrate Conservation has upped its estimate of the bee kill to 50,000. Spokesman Scott Black calls that a very conservative number.
___
Information from: The Oregonian, http://www.oregonlive.com
It must be tough, being "average" and "middle class" and living within sniffing distance of L.A.'s rich and beautiful people. The designer clothes, the pricey homes, flashy cars and flashier jewelry must seem just within reach, especially to the young and avaricious.
That's the temptation of "The Bling Ring," Sofia Coppola's scintillating followup to the sleep-inducing "Somewhere." Coppola's film, based on a Vanity Fair article about the crimes, the criminals and the world they ran in, is a winking condemnation of a generation of naive, covetous privacy-abandoning teens -- and their victims, celebrities so vapid they leaves doors unlocked, so vulnerable in an age where the Internet tracks their every out-of-town trip, every red carpet appearance.
Because if there's one thing these dizzy L.A. larcenists have a handle on, it's social media.?
They don't wear gloves, don't rush through the houses they enter and pilfer, don't realize that the gate camera (which they walk towards backwards, wearing hoodies, so that their faces are hidden) isn't the only camera in a multi-million dollar hillside Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom or Lindsay Lohan abode. But they can track their prey online and Facebook photos of their haul.Becca (Katie Chang) worships Lohan and a few other staples of "Access Hollywood" and "TMZ." She links up with the new kid in her Calabasas high school, Marc (Israel Broussard), because of his fashion sense. He's gay. And when she says "Let's check some cars" after hitting a party, he's down for anything -- pulling on car doors, seeing what can be snatched from a vehicle that isn't locked.Chloe (Claire Julien) is Becca's blond bombshell pal, also down for anything. Nicki (Emma Watson) and Sam (Taissa Farmiga) are the rest of this pot-smoking, Kanye and M.I.A. listening posse. They discover that the celebrities they long to emulate are as careless about locking their doors as "The Bling Ring," as the media came to call them, are about hiding their activities.As with her best films, Coppola is utterly at ease in this milieu and it shows. We're allowed to giggle at Nicki and Sam's (all names were changed) insipid self-help home schooling mom (Leslie Mann, on the nose) and her "teaching," inspired by "The Secret." The homes of the rich are often expensively tacky. The girls all have that mousy / sexy Kardashian growl and a thorough knowledge of high end brands -- Chanel, Rolex, Louboutin, Herve Leger.?
All it takes is a text -- "Let's go to Paris" -- and they're off, "shopping" at the Hilton home, or Megan or Lindsey or Audrina's house.
The performances capture the utter amorality of it all, with Harry Potter's pal Watson scoring with her dizzy rationalizations of her crimes -- "Karma cleanses my journey" -- Broussard's ease at showing Marc's increasing comfort in his sexuality and Chang's unflinching turn as the fearless / reckless and unfeeling Becca.
They're an amusingly hateful bunch, their sole redeeming quality being the real and really gauche people they're robbing -- many of them glimpsed in TV news coverage edited into the fray.?
If Audrina ("The Hills") Patridge was their inspiration, showing a lifestyle achieved by virtue of looks, shamelessness and a willingness to abandon privacy and "sell" anything, why should anyone be surprised that the ring's imitation of that life went this far?
And if a Kardashian and a Hilton can become paragons of style by virtue of a sex tape, why not those who ransack the Hollywood Hills homes of L.A.'s rich and beautiful? After they're all out of jail, of course.?
------
THE BLING RING
(Grade: A)
Cast: Emma Watson, Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga, Leslie Mann
Written and directed by Sofia Coppola An A24/NALA ?release.?
Running time: 1:30
MPAA rating: ?R for teen drug and alcohol use, and for language including some brief sexual references
Yes, you heard right. According to multiple sources, the name Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have gone with for their infant daughter is ... "North."
A signed birth certificate from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles reportedly revealed the information -- which would make the child's name North West (no middle name).
The baby was born five weeks early on June 15 and is the couple's first child.
But back to the name: It's the joke Jay Leno threw out as "rumored" when Kardashian visited "The Tonight Show" -- and which the reality TV star denied was on their list of names.
"I like Easton. Easton West. I think that's cute," she told Leno at the time.
E! sources say the child will be called "Nori" for short.
Well, at least it's not "Knorth." And thus far, no reported connection to the 1994 movie stinker "North."
Meanwhile, celebrities have wasted no time jumping on the joke bandwagon about the name; Jason Biggs tweeted: "I lost my office pool. I had Ratings Spike Kardashian-West," while "Modern Family" co-creator Steve Levitan also tweeted, "What a ridiculous name, said Wayne Dwop."
SAO PAULO (AP) ? Scattered street demonstrations popped up around Brazil Wednesday as protesters continued their collective cry against the low-quality public services they receive in exchange for high taxes and rising prices.
In one of several protests, about 200 people blocked the Anchieta Highway that links Sao Paulo and the port city of Santos before heading to the industrial suburb of Sao Bernardo do Campo, an industrial suburb on Sao Paulo's outskirts. Another group of protesters later obstructed the highway again.
In the northeastern city of Fortaleza, hundreds of protesters cut off the main access road to the stadium where Brazil will play Mexico in the Confederations Cup soccer tournament later Wednesday. Police responded by diverting traffic away from the road near the venue, but official vehicles of tournament organizers FIFA were among those struggling to reach the stadium.
The actions followed another night of mass marches around Brazil and nearly a week of unrest that has shocked the country's leaders ahead of a papal visit next month and next year's World Cup soccer tournament.
Beginning as protests against bus fare hikes, the demonstrations have quickly ballooned to include broad middle-class outrage over the failure of governments to provide basic services and ensure public safety, even as the country's economy modernizes and tax rates remain some of the highest in the world.
Protest organizers, who have widely employed social media, said new mass demonstrations will be held in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro on Thursday. The Rio action promises the most volatility, with protesters planning to march to Maracana stadium where Spain and Tahiti will meet in a Confederations Cup match. Police have said they will not allow protesters to interrupt the game.
Fortaleza, Rio, Belo Horizonte, Salvador and Brasilia have received soldiers from Brazil's elite National Force to bolster security during tournament games.
On Tuesday night, tens of thousands of Brazilians flooded the streets of the country's biggest city, Sao Paulo, to express their grievances. While mostly peaceful, the demonstration followed the rhythm of mobilizations that drew some 240,000 people across Brazil the previous night, with small bands of radicals splitting off to fight with police and break into stores.
Fernando Grella Vieira, head of the Sao Paulo state public safety department, said 63 people were detained during Tuesday's protests. He told the Globo TV network on Wednesday that police would guarantee the right to demonstrate but would "repress all forms of vandalism."
Local governments in at least four cities have responded to the unrest by agreeing to reverse bus and subway fare hikes, and city and federal politicians have shown signs that the Sao Paulo fare could also be rolled back. It's not clear that will calm the country, though, with the protests already expanding to take on a wide range of other issues.
Beyond complaints about transit fares, protesters haven't produced any concrete demands, mainly venting their anger at not just the government of President Dilma Rousseff, but with the entire governing system. A common chant at the rallies has been "No parties!"
"What I hope comes from these protests is that the governing class comes to understand that we're the ones in charge, not them, and the politicians must learn to respect us," said Yasmine Gomes, a 22-year-old squeezed into the plaza in central Sao Paulo where Tuesday night's protest began.
Rousseff, a former leftist guerrilla who was imprisoned and tortured during Brazil's 1964-85 dictatorship, hailed the protests for raising questions and strengthening Brazil's democracy. "Brazil today woke up stronger," she said in a statement.
Yet Rousseff offered no actions that her government might take to address complaints.
The protests have raised troubling questions about the country's ability to provide security ahead of it playing host to some of the world's biggest events, including the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
Brazil's media has scrambled to cover the sprawling protests and has even sparked the ire of protesters, with the powerful Globo TV network in particular drawing derision.
Whenever what appears to be a Globo helicopter swoops over a demonstration, protesters hiss, raise their fists and chant slogans against what they say was the network's failure to widely show images of a violent police crackdown on protesters last week in Sao Paulo.
Such general protests are rare in this 190 million-person country, with demonstrations generally attracting small numbers of politicized participants. The latest mobilizations, by contrast, have united huge crowds.
Many protesting in Brazil's streets hail from the country's growing middle class, which government figures show has ballooned by some 40 million over the past decade amid a commodities-driven economic boom.
They say they've lost patience with endemic problems such as government corruption and inefficiency. They're also slamming Brazil's government for spending billions of dollars to host the World Cup and Olympics while leaving other needs unmet.
A November report from the government raised to $13.3 billion the projected cost of stadiums, airport renovations and other projects for the World Cup. City, state and other local governments are spending more than $12 billion on projects for the Olympics in Rio.
Attorney Agatha Rossi de Paula, who attended the latest protest in Sao Paulo along with her mother, called Brazil's fiscal priorities "an embarrassment."
"We just want what we paid in taxes back, through health care, education and transportation," said the 34-year-old. "We want the police to protect us, to help the people on the streets who have ended up with no job and no money."
So far, the mass gatherings have shown no evidence of any central leadership. Groups of Brazilians also staged small protests Tuesday in other countries, including Mexico, Portugal, Spain and Denmark.
A cyber-attack knocked the government's official World Cup site offline Tuesday, and the Twitter feed for Brazil's Anonymous hackers group posted links to a host of other government websites whose content had been replaced by a screen calling on citizens to come out to the streets.
___
AP writers Jenny Barchfield in Rio de Janeiro, Marco Sibaja in Brasilia and Jill Langlois in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.
Black-white education gap is worsened by unresponsive state policymakers, Baylor study showsPublic release date: 20-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Terry Goodrich terry_goodrich@baylor.edu 254-710-3321 Baylor University
State policymakers' attention to teacher qualityan issue education research shows is essential to improving schooling outcomes for racial minority studentsis highly responsive to low graduation rates among white students, but not to low graduation rates among black students, according to a Baylor University study.
The findings are evidence that "the persisting achievement gap between white and black students has distinctively political foundations," the researchers wrote.
The article, entitled "The Politic Foundations of the Black-White Education Achievement Gap," is published in the journal American Politics Research. It is coauthored by Patrick Flavin, an assistant professor of political science in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences, and Michael Hartney, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Notre Dame.
The findings come nearly 60 years after Brown vs. the Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case aimed at promoting educational equality by declaring unconstitutional state laws that established separate public schools for black and white students.
But the researchers' findings show that inequality persists when it comes to education reform. "Instead of promoting equality of opportunity, America's system of K-12 education which relies heavily on state and local control may worsen political inequalities," the researchers wrote.
Surprisingly, even in states in which policymakers were more racially balanced, legislators were less responsive about closing the education gap, Flavin said.
"You might expect that in states that have more black students, government would be more attentive, but we didn't find that," Flavin said. "Whether analyzed at the policymaking level or the level of individual citizens' political attitudes, white students receive far more attention and subsequent response compared to African-American students."
For the research, racial disparities in student outcomes were measured using National Assessment of Education Progress scores as well as high school graduation rates. While there was a period of dramatic improvement after the Brown v. Board decision up until early 1990s, the gap between the two racial groups has stagnated or even slightly increased since the early 1990s, according to the study.
To analyze state policymaking, the researchers measured 12 state-level reform policies tracked by the National Council on Teacher Quality. Those policies include such actions as paying teachers more for teaching in high-poverty schools (so-called "combat pay") and tying teacher pay to student achievement.
To analyze citizens' opinions on education, Flavin and Hartney used a variety of nationally representative public opinion polls and found that white citizens "only seem to be alarmed when white students' performance drops," Flavin said.
Whites are less likely to think an education gap exists or to see it as a priority compared to blacks. Whites also are less likely to think that the government has a responsibility to close a gap, the researchers found.
"It's when white students are doing poorly that you start seeing state legislators pass more controversial bills like linking teacher pay and evaluations to student test scores. The question is, 'Why is that?'" Flavin said.
For black policymakers, inaction on policies aimed at improving schooling for racial minorities could be related to the fact that they overwhelmingly tend to be Democrats and teachers' unions contribute most of their campaign funding to Democrats, Flavin said. The unions are "adamantly against linking teacher evaluations to test scores. They have other ideas they think would help, like reducing class sizes and improving resources for teacher professionalization."
The study concludes by noting that the most recent and widespread efforts to address educational inequality have come not from state policymakers but rather from federal ones.
Those included the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which required states to document and report student test score data by racial and ethnic subgroups; and more recently, the "Race to the Top," a competitive grant program that makes willingness to decrease achievement gaps, particularly to increase minority students' access to highly effective teachers, a key factor for states to be awarded federal money.
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Black-white education gap is worsened by unresponsive state policymakers, Baylor study showsPublic release date: 20-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Terry Goodrich terry_goodrich@baylor.edu 254-710-3321 Baylor University
State policymakers' attention to teacher qualityan issue education research shows is essential to improving schooling outcomes for racial minority studentsis highly responsive to low graduation rates among white students, but not to low graduation rates among black students, according to a Baylor University study.
The findings are evidence that "the persisting achievement gap between white and black students has distinctively political foundations," the researchers wrote.
The article, entitled "The Politic Foundations of the Black-White Education Achievement Gap," is published in the journal American Politics Research. It is coauthored by Patrick Flavin, an assistant professor of political science in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences, and Michael Hartney, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Notre Dame.
The findings come nearly 60 years after Brown vs. the Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case aimed at promoting educational equality by declaring unconstitutional state laws that established separate public schools for black and white students.
But the researchers' findings show that inequality persists when it comes to education reform. "Instead of promoting equality of opportunity, America's system of K-12 education which relies heavily on state and local control may worsen political inequalities," the researchers wrote.
Surprisingly, even in states in which policymakers were more racially balanced, legislators were less responsive about closing the education gap, Flavin said.
"You might expect that in states that have more black students, government would be more attentive, but we didn't find that," Flavin said. "Whether analyzed at the policymaking level or the level of individual citizens' political attitudes, white students receive far more attention and subsequent response compared to African-American students."
For the research, racial disparities in student outcomes were measured using National Assessment of Education Progress scores as well as high school graduation rates. While there was a period of dramatic improvement after the Brown v. Board decision up until early 1990s, the gap between the two racial groups has stagnated or even slightly increased since the early 1990s, according to the study.
To analyze state policymaking, the researchers measured 12 state-level reform policies tracked by the National Council on Teacher Quality. Those policies include such actions as paying teachers more for teaching in high-poverty schools (so-called "combat pay") and tying teacher pay to student achievement.
To analyze citizens' opinions on education, Flavin and Hartney used a variety of nationally representative public opinion polls and found that white citizens "only seem to be alarmed when white students' performance drops," Flavin said.
Whites are less likely to think an education gap exists or to see it as a priority compared to blacks. Whites also are less likely to think that the government has a responsibility to close a gap, the researchers found.
"It's when white students are doing poorly that you start seeing state legislators pass more controversial bills like linking teacher pay and evaluations to student test scores. The question is, 'Why is that?'" Flavin said.
For black policymakers, inaction on policies aimed at improving schooling for racial minorities could be related to the fact that they overwhelmingly tend to be Democrats and teachers' unions contribute most of their campaign funding to Democrats, Flavin said. The unions are "adamantly against linking teacher evaluations to test scores. They have other ideas they think would help, like reducing class sizes and improving resources for teacher professionalization."
The study concludes by noting that the most recent and widespread efforts to address educational inequality have come not from state policymakers but rather from federal ones.
Those included the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which required states to document and report student test score data by racial and ethnic subgroups; and more recently, the "Race to the Top," a competitive grant program that makes willingness to decrease achievement gaps, particularly to increase minority students' access to highly effective teachers, a key factor for states to be awarded federal money.
###
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 20-Jun-2013
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