#mySCmoment

these were all so fun to watch - congrats!!!

congratulations!!!!!!!

Félicitations Marie Pier c'est bien mérité ;)

Max is really adorable!

Congratulations!!!

INDIANAPOLIS - The Republican faceoff with labor unions in the Midwest and elsewhere marks not just a fight over money and collective bargaining, but also a test of wills over how to improve the nation's schools. As secretary of state, Henry Kissinger canceled a U.S. warning against carrying out international political assassinations that was to have gone to Chile and two neighboring nations just days before a former ambassador was killed by Chilean agents on Washington's Embassy Row in 1976, a newly...In “Caroline and Jackie,” a surprise birthday party starts an eventful evening that includes ugly confrontations.     The Juvenile Justice Board in Delhi has deferred its verdict against the youngest of the accused in the Delhi gang rape case until July 25. Those planes that look like specks in the stratosphere are flying so high because they are merely passing by the United States - flying bananas to Germany, Canadians to Mexico and Europeans to Jamaica. But should that exempt such flights from the full security screening they would get if their de... The Justice Department has dropped its long-standing objection to proposed changes that would require law enforcement to get a warrant before obtaining e-mail from service providers, regardless of how old an e-mail is or whether it has been read. Read full article >> Damaged and undamaged nickel surfaces, before and after exposure to oxygen A collection of links from the reporters and editors of the Dining section. Hyper-modern Japan forex growth bot peerless at dealing with earthquakes. But potential radiation has created another layer of alarm unseen in other countries recently ravaged by quakes. NATO defense ministers endorsed a plan Friday to hand over responsibility for security in three cities, two provinces and much of the capital to Afghan forces over the next several months, commencing the critical first step in a transition to full Afghan control by the end of 2014. The life of a parent is ever-evolving, and we should resist defining ourselves by phrases like “Retro Wife,” “Opt-Out” or “Lean In.” MEXICO CITY -- Grenades made in the United States and sent to Central America during the Cold War have resurfaced as terrifying new weapons in almost weekly attacks by Mexican drug cartels. The Bush administration is easing its demand for tough national standards for driver's licenses, acting at the behest of state officials who say the "Real ID" plan is unworkable and too costly, officials familiar with the new policy said. You may not get room service or a terry cloth robe, but what Airbnb vacation rentals lack in amenities, they make up for in unbelievable, sometimes rather bizarre experiences.     Tuukka Rask turned an outstanding first season as the Boston Bruins' No. 1 goalie into a long-term commitment on Wednesday by signing an eight-year contract to stay with the Eastern Conference champions.     Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) is considering running for governor of Florida in 2014, his office confirmed Thursday. "I'd say tinnitus miracle that he's considering it," Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin told Roll Call. "But — and as he's said a number of times — he presently doesn't have any intention of running. He's got a job to do as a senator." Read full article >>     The bride and groom graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where they met.     Secretary of State John Kerry said that the Obama administration had gained new confidence that the Syrian opposition can minimize the risk of weapons falling into extremists’ hands. Confusion rose on Wednesday as results from the presidential election were delayed by electronic breakdowns and officials announced a late-night change in tabulating votes. Toronto FC midfielder Maurice Edu, a former Maryland Terrapin, was voted Major League Soccer's rookie of the year yesterday, three weeks after making his international debut. Lawmakers governing the state with the highest rate of obesity in the nation said any law that might limit what Mississippians eat or drink has to go through them — barring federal regulations. TOBRUK, Libya -- Moammar Gadhafi vowed to launch a final assault on the opposition's capital Benghazi and crush the rebellion as his forces advanced toward the city and warplanes bombed its airport Thursday. In the face of Gadhafi's increasingly powerful offensive, the United Nations was to vote on... Albin Mathew, 62, founded Santhi Bhavan Sarvodaya, a shelter for the mentally challenged after serving a jail term for murder.     The festival, called Next Weekend, will take place Aug.

INDIANAPOLIS - The Republican faceoff with labor unions in the Midwest and elsewhere marks not just a fight over money and collective bargaining, but also a test of wills over how to improve the nation's schools. As secretary of state, Henry Kissinger canceled a U.S. warning against carrying out international political assassinations that was to have gone to Chile and two neighboring nations just days before a former ambassador was killed by Chilean agents on Washington's Embassy Row in 1976, a newly...In “Caroline and Jackie,” a surprise birthday party starts an eventful evening that includes ugly confrontations.     The Juvenile Justice Board in Delhi has deferred its verdict against the youngest of the accused in the Delhi gang rape case until July 25. Those planes that look like specks in the stratosphere are flying so high because they are merely passing by the United States - flying bananas to Germany, Canadians to Mexico and Europeans to Jamaica. But should that exempt such flights from the full security screening they would get if their de... The Justice Department has dropped its long-standing objection to proposed changes that would require law enforcement to get a warrant before obtaining e-mail from service providers, regardless of how old an e-mail is or whether it has been read. Read full article >> Damaged and undamaged nickel surfaces, before and after exposure to oxygen A collection of links from the reporters and editors of the Dining section. Hyper-modern Japan forex growth bot peerless at dealing with earthquakes. But potential radiation has created another layer of alarm unseen in other countries recently ravaged by quakes. NATO defense ministers endorsed a plan Friday to hand over responsibility for security in three cities, two provinces and much of the capital to Afghan forces over the next several months, commencing the critical first step in a transition to full Afghan control by the end of 2014. The life of a parent is ever-evolving, and we should resist defining ourselves by phrases like “Retro Wife,” “Opt-Out” or “Lean In.” MEXICO CITY -- Grenades made in the United States and sent to Central America during the Cold War have resurfaced as terrifying new weapons in almost weekly attacks by Mexican drug cartels. The Bush administration is easing its demand for tough national standards for driver's licenses, acting at the behest of state officials who say the "Real ID" plan is unworkable and too costly, officials familiar with the new policy said. You may not get room service or a terry cloth robe, but what Airbnb vacation rentals lack in amenities, they make up for in unbelievable, sometimes rather bizarre experiences.     Tuukka Rask turned an outstanding first season as the Boston Bruins' No. 1 goalie into a long-term commitment on Wednesday by signing an eight-year contract to stay with the Eastern Conference champions.     Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) is considering running for governor of Florida in 2014, his office confirmed Thursday. "I'd say tinnitus miracle that he's considering it," Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin told Roll Call. "But — and as he's said a number of times — he presently doesn't have any intention of running. He's got a job to do as a senator." Read full article >>     The bride and groom graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where they met.     Secretary of State John Kerry said that the Obama administration had gained new confidence that the Syrian opposition can minimize the risk of weapons falling into extremists’ hands. Confusion rose on Wednesday as results from the presidential election were delayed by electronic breakdowns and officials announced a late-night change in tabulating votes. Toronto FC midfielder Maurice Edu, a former Maryland Terrapin, was voted Major League Soccer's rookie of the year yesterday, three weeks after making his international debut. Lawmakers governing the state with the highest rate of obesity in the nation said any law that might limit what Mississippians eat or drink has to go through them — barring federal regulations. TOBRUK, Libya -- Moammar Gadhafi vowed to launch a final assault on the opposition's capital Benghazi and crush the rebellion as his forces advanced toward the city and warplanes bombed its airport Thursday. In the face of Gadhafi's increasingly powerful offensive, the United Nations was to vote on... Albin Mathew, 62, founded Santhi Bhavan Sarvodaya, a shelter for the mentally challenged after serving a jail term for murder.     The festival, called Next Weekend, will take place Aug.

The defective pads were sold at Ace Hardware and Menard's Inc. nationwide between May 24, 2010 and June 13, 2011 for about $6. MIT and Haiti signed a new joint initiative today to promote Kreyòl-language education in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines, part of an effort to help Haitians learn in the language most of them speak at home. “This government will make every effort to make this initiative a big success,” Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe said at the signing ceremony in MIT’s Vannevar Bush Room. “Haiti is moving forward.”The project is taking MIT-developed and technologically based open education resources, translating those materials into Kreyòl, disseminating them in Haiti, and evaluating the materials’ effectiveness. The work is being done in conjunction with professors and educators from a variety of institutions in Haiti, including the State University of Haiti, Université Caraïbe, École Supérieure d’Infotronique d’Haïti, Université Quisqueya, NATCOM and the Foundation for Knowledge and Liberty.“MIT folks are very collaborative,” MIT Provost Chris Kaiser said at the event. The initiative, he added, represented MIT’s “desire to do good in the world.” The idea that more Haitian education should occur in Kreyòl is a longtime belief of MIT linguistics professor Michel DeGraff, a native of Haiti, who has contended that Kreyòl has been improperly marginalized in the Haitian classroom. DeGraff’s extensive research on public perceptions of Kreyòl, and on the language itself, has led him to assert that its perception as a kind of exceptionally simplified hybrid tongue, in comparison to English or French, unfairly diminishes the language. The initiative is meant not to replace French, DeGraff added, but to help Kreyòl-speaking students “build a solid foundation in their own language.” The technology-based open education resources, he noted, are meant to promote “active learning,” as opposed to drill-based rote learning techniques. The initiative is being funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and by MIT. Alongside DeGraff, the project has been developed with the guidance of Vijay Kumar, a principal investigator of the MIT-Haiti Initiative for Kreyòl-based and technology-enhanced STEM education and director of the MIT Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, and Thomas Kochan, the George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-director of MIT's Initiatives in Haiti, coordinating such efforts across the Institute.New educational resources are badly needed in Haiti, especially after the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the country, Lamothe noted. Rebuilding with Kreyòl-language educational tools will help provide “access to quality education for all,” given that 97 percent of Haitians speak Kreyòl. tinnitus miracle download percent of Haitians have an income of less than $1 per day. Lamothe added: “The most productive partnership for Haiti [is] about empowering Haitians to fly with their own wings.”Recently reviewed books of particular interest. Can I say a word about Giorgio Armani?     A play from 1921, “The Detour” brings some feminist notes to the tiny Metropolitan Playhouse. The Supreme Court met the moment Wednesday. With public attitudes shifting dramatically in favor of same-sex marriage, the justices used a pair of rulings to give additional momentum to one of the most rapid changes in social policy in the nation’s history. Read full article >>     NEW YORK - Wells Fargo, which has stood by its foreclosure paperwork for weeks as other major lenders discovered errors and halted sales, conceded Wednesday it had discovered some flaws in its documents as well. Schoolgirls face dangers of many sorts in “Graceland,” which focuses on a Filipino driver trying to do what he must for his family.     A cleverly designed jewelry and lifestyle shop comes to the eastern end of Long Island for the summer.     Monday was a relatively good day for BP in the glare of oil spill inquiries. Tuesday was a bad day. ATLANTA -- Brandon Knight finally got rolling at the Southeastern Conference tournament and No. 15 Kentucky looked like a young team peaking at just the right time with a 72-58 semifinal victory over Alabama on Saturday. Top surveillance critic says he believes Obama is increasingly concerned about privacy issues around NSA collectionOne of the leading civil liberties supporters in the US Senate has said the Obama administration is considering scaling back its bulk collection of Americans' phone records.Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and a member of the Senate intelligence committee, told the New York Times that he believed the administration was increasingly concerned about the privacy implications raised by a surveillance effort it has performed for four and a half years, after National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed it to the Guardian."I have a feeling that the administration is getting concerned about the bulk phone records collection, and that they are thinking about whether to move administratively to stop it," Wyden told the Times.Aides to Wyden said on Friday that the statement was based on public comments from executive branch officials and the senator's prior experience with the termination of a bulk email collection program in 2011, something the Guardian recently reported. The administration has given Wyden no additional assurances of changes to the phone records collection, the aides said.A test panic away pdf administration's intentions about the future of the phone records collection is fast approaching. An order by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court compelling Verizon to provide the NSA with records of customers' phone calls expires on 19 July. The secret surveillance court orders have been renewed every 90 days for years.Yet it is unclear if the public will know whether the bulk collection will continue as it is, be modified, or be cancelled. Fisa court orders are not public documents.It is also unclear when the Fisa court orders on other telecommunications companies expire.Representatives from the White House, NSA, Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately reply to a request for comment.Wyden, among the Senate's leading critics of the surveillance programs, has singled out the phone records collection as a violation of Americans' privacy. He and his Colorado Democratic colleague on the intelligence committee, Mark Udall, have challenged the Obama administration's claims that the phone records collection is vital to preventing terrorist attacks."We have not yet seen any evidence showing that the NSA's dragnet collection of Americans' phone records has produced any uniquely valuable intelligence," they said on 13 June.Wyden and Udall were among 26 senators of both parties – a quarter of the US Senate – who wrote to James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, on 27 June to express concern about the bulk phone records collection. Those senators were concerned that the intelligence agencies might use the same legal provision cited for the phone records collection, Section 215 of the 2001 Patriot Act, to collect "information on credit card purchases, pharmacy records, library records, firearms sales records, financial information and a range of other sensitive subjects."NSAUnited StatesUS SenateDemocratsObama administrationBarack ObamaUS politicsData protectionSurveillanceSpencer Ackermanguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds     In a New York Times/CBS News poll, Catholics said that while their parish priests were in touch with their needs, the Church and most American bishops were not. The Federal Reserve will release details of which banks it lent money to during the financial crisis, as it lost a court battle to keep the information private. This was not the team Ken Hitchcock expected to coach. Yet minus an entire line for an extended stretch and with an All-Star goalie benched indefinitely, the St. Louis Blues have answered the challenge. No official explanation has been given for the apparent ban coffee shop millionaire marketing song, which critics have praised for its sharp humor.     The work holds little promise of resolving the federal debt or partisan divide, but it will look more like regular business and less like a crisis. “Some of these children have many, many seizures every day, and they actually suffer as much from overreaction to these seizures as, potentially, from not reacting to something dangerous,” says Stephan Schuele, the director of the Epilepsy Center at Northwestern University’s Medical Faculty Foundation, who was not involved in the research. “So I think the result is very valuable, particularly in this population, because it doesn’t respond 20 times a day to any seizures. It only responds if you do have a very, very severe seizure. And it seems to be reliably responding to that.”Schuele cautions that the new research “makes the assumption that we do have a neurophysiologic marker for SUDEP, which is EEG suppression,” and that assumption is “a little bit controversial.” “But overall,” he adds, “we do think that it’s probably the best marker we have so far.”Picard is continuing to investigate the possibility that initially intrigued her — that the devices could predict seizures. In the meantime, however, her collaborators at Children’s Hospital are conducting a study that will follow up on the one reported in Neurology, and a similar study is beginning at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Rather than sweatbands with TV and comic-book characters, however, the new studies will use sensors produced by Affectiva, a company that Picard started in order to commercialize her lab’s work. Follow @mitnews Draft bill would establish new agency to oversee highly radioactive material MEXICO CITY -- In unusually somber remarks, President Felipe Calderón told the Mexican people Wednesday that criminal organizations were seeking to topple the state, violence was growing worse, kidnapping and extortion were rampant, and the government needs their help. “A Night With Janis Joplin,” starring Mary Bridget Davies, will come to the Lyceum Theater in September after two years of touring the country.     NEW YORK - Wells Fargo, which has stood by its foreclosure paperwork for weeks as other major lenders discovered errors and halted sales, conceded Wednesday it had discovered some flaws in its documents as well. Post Home Section staffers Jura Koncius and Terri Sapienza take questions on your decorating dilemmas. This week they'll help you get your home ready for holiday houseguests. Finding ways to feel full with fewer calories is a trick that can help you sidestep nutritional mischief and added pounds, especially during the tempting holiday

How to give your old couch a makeover, a tool to calculate your bedtime, medical tests for older people to avoid and other consumer-focused news from The New York Times. Anthony Lanier built an assembly line of engineers, architects, historical preservation specialists, zoning lawyers and construction firms who could pump out renovated buildings one after another.Breastfed babies admitted to hospital with dehydration or weight loss rarely suffered serious damage, researchers findVery few babies become dehydrated and seriously ill because they are not getting enough milk from breastfeeding, according to a study that calls for better support for mothers to help them establish nursing rather than resorting to formula.Following a series of alarming stories where the plight of individual babies was described in medical journals and later in the press, doctors in Bradford and Sheffield began a study to find out how common it was for feeding to go disastrously wrong.They collected details of every case of severe neonatal hypernatraemia – where newborn babies rapidly lose weight, become dehydrated and develop raised salt levels because they are not getting enough milk – in the UK and Republic of Ireland over one year. If not treated, the condition can lead to seizures, gangrene, brain damage and even death.But Dr Sam Oddie and colleagues found only 62 cases from May 2009 to June 2010, a prevalence of seven in every 100,000 live births. In their paper, published on Wednesday in the Archives of Disease in Childhood and seen exclusively by the Guardian, they write that all the babies were admitted to hospital, mostly because of weight loss, and some were intravenously fed.However, all were discharged within two days to two weeks having gained weight and none had long-term damage.The evidence should reassure parents – but the researchers stressed it should also encourage them to seek help when struggling to establish breastfeeding. There are also milder cases of problems where babies are not feeding properly. But Oddie and other experts said the answer is not bottle-feeding but more help for women to ensure the baby attaches properly to the breast and is fed often enough.Oddie said: "While we always expected to see low figures for this level of severity, the very nature of these cases made it important to find out exact data in order to understand what health professionals can do to better support women who breastfeed."This new British and Irish research helps us to understand the scale of the problem for the very first time so we can now work out what to do about it — how to spot it and how to act on it."If picked up soon enough, the effects are easy to reverse with a steady process of rehydration, but it is not always easy to spot as babies can look pink and alert while being on the verge of becoming critically ill."Measures such as early initiation of breastfeeding, skilled helpers observing and supporting women breastfeeding, and targeting help in cases where feeding is difficult – such as where there is excess weight loss, decreased stool output or both – will both support the initiation of breastfeeding in general and find cases where a more serious problem may be developing."As far as I'm concerned the answer isn't more formula feeding, but better support for breastfeeding from the outset. Women who are having difficulties should be monitored and helped – this is something society really needs to invest in."Almost every baby is capable of breastfeeding, Oddie said. "In only a few cases were there special features of the baby that made it likely that there would be a severe feeding problem. [One of the babies, for instance, was found to have a cleft palate.] Normally all babies can get established with breastfeeding with the right support."But Oddie stressed that mothers need confident and well-trained midwives, health visitors and other NHS staff to encourage and advise them. "Healthcare professionals lack confidence in their ability to know when breastfeeding is going well. I think that is interpreted by other healthcare professionals and women as a lack of confidence in the process itself."The paper says that cases of severe hypernatraemia in the UK seem more likely to be linked to problems around getting breastfeeding established than those in, for instance, the Netherlands – where a similar study has been done."It is tempting to speculate that the relatively low rates of initiation and particularly continuation of breastfeeding in the UK may form part of the explanation for this," the researchers write."Where long-term breastfeeding is more common, both health professionals and friends and family are more familiar with it, more aware of how to do it properly and more able to pick up on problems."Anne Woods, deputy programme manager for Unicef's Baby Friendly Initiative (BFI) – a scheme that gives accreditation to hospitals after training the staff to help mothers breastfeed – said the number of babies who could not feed was negligible and only a very small percentage – about 1% – of women would struggle to make enough milk. "The numbers who breastfeed in this country do not reflect the numbers who could breastfeed if they had effective support," she said.Where there are problems, she added, "it fundamentally boils down to the fact that the baby is not tinnitus miracle download the breast effectively. The whole of the baby's mouth has to make contact and draw the breast tissue into the mouth."But because we have a bottle-feeding culture in the UK, she said, some women do not realise this and "try to bottle-feed with their breast", so the baby takes only the nipple and does not get enough milk.The other problem is when babies do not feed often enough. After a difficult labour or pain relief, the baby may be sleepy. There is also an expectation she said, that a baby will feed and then sleep for four hours.Yet most adults eat or drink more than six times in 24 hours, she said -even if it is only a cup of tea and a biscuit.In England, only 20% of hospital maternity units (accounting for nearly 22% of births) are BFI-accredited by Unicef, compared with 70% in Scotland, 60% in Northern Ireland and 40% in Wales. But problems can anyway arise once the baby goes home, because visits from midwives and then health visitors are not as common as they were.There are danger signs that women themselves can look out for, however, and one of the most significant is the frequency of wet and dirty nappies.There should be one soaked nappy in the first 24 hours, two in the second 24 hours and after that, half a dozen a day with tarry meconium stools showing by day three or four and yellow stools thereafter.BreastfeedingHealth & wellbeingParents and parentingHealthMedical researchSarah Boseleyguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds If you have ever been the recipient of catcalls like this, how did it feel? How did you react? If you are male, have you ever commented or whistled at women and girls on the street? Abet Laminati, a global leader in today's decorative laminates industry, began another chapter in its corporate history last month with the opening of its first-ever museum. Army civilian police Capt. Andrew Poulos Jr. helped bust a counterfeiter last year who produced templates for federal law enforcement credentials and sold them over the Internet. Mass MoCA gains an Anselm Kiefer exhibit, a three-hour film is coming to the Frick, and Dorothy Braude Edinburg gives even more works to the Art Institute of Chicago.     Reggie Miller, former star shooting guard for U.C.L.A. and the Indiana Pacers, answered questions via Twitter about the 2013 men’s N.C.A.A. basketball tournament. Miller will be part of the broadcast team covering the tournament for Turner Sports. A new MIT physics MOOC, Mechanics ReView, has a long history of development and a proven ability to help even struggling students master the material. Available for the first time on the edX platform starting June 1, this course has been offered in various incarnations and iteratively developed and improved over the past five years, both in class and online. The course uses a unique pedagogical model developed to help students learn more effective strategies for solving mechanics problems, a model that has been demonstrated in studies to improve student expertise in problem solving and provide skills that carry forward measurably into subsequent courses.“We’ve been able to measure the difference this approach makes,” explains Professor David Pritchard, who developed the course. “We can see that the students move from a focus on formulas to a focus on underlying concepts, and develop better strategies for solving problems. And this is a skill that leads to significantly better performance in their next physics course.”The course originated as a three-week January review of classical mechanics offered in 2009 to MIT students who struggled in first-semester physics course 8.01 Classical Mechanics. The review course was taught as a “flipped classroom,” using class time for teaching advanced problem-solving skills, while making the delivery of course material outside of class as efficient and effective as possible. The instructional team developed a series of sophisticated online supports for the class, using evidence-backed research and careful data analysis of student performance.This material was then supplemented with homework of varying degrees of difficulty and offered as a highly successful free online course in the spring and summer of 2012. Previous offerings have generated impressive retention rates. In its most recent running (on the LON-CAPA platform) a record 74 percent of students attempting the second homework assignment stayed engaged with the course and received certificates, a rate rivaling on-campus retention.  The course has proven very popular with high school physics teachers, and continuing education credit is available for the course at a modest fee through the American Association of Physics Teachers.The course uses a carefully structured pedagogy called Modeling Applied to Problem Solving (MAPS). MAPS is a strategic, systematic approach to problem-solving based on categorization of student knowledge into models. The basic knowledge of Mechanics is represented as five core models, each of which specifies the types of system to which it applies, the interactions that change the motion, represented as the variable of interest (velocity, momentum, mechanical energy, angular velocity or angular momentum) and the equation governing that change. Students are then taught a systematic approach to problem solving called SIM, for System, Interaction and Model. SIM tells students to plan coffee shop millionaire review based on explicitly picking a System, identifying the important Interactions and selecting an appropriate core Model. The course also employs significant research to inform materials design. The frequent use of what are called "checkpoint" questions throughout the online e-text, for example, is based on evidence that the close interweaving of instruction and assessment substantially increases the amount of material read by each student and improves retention. Problem questions were drawn from a large pool of questions that had been pre-vetted by hundreds of other students for effectiveness. Computer-graded online homework replaced written homework, and videos featuring renowned professors, like Walter Lewin, are interspersed throughout. Materials for Mechanics ReView were developed by the RELATE (Research in Learning, Assessing and Tutoring Effectively) research group at MIT, under the direction of Professor David Pritchard in MIT’s Department of Physics and Research Laboratory of Electronics. A new storage system from Henrybuilt resembles a high-end pegboard.     Lord Armstrong's monumental estate at Cragside, the first house in the world to have electric power, notches up its 150th birthday this year. It's getting a new hydro-electric power station as a present.William Armstrong's Cragside home in Northumberland celebrates its 150th birthday this year by reinstalling a hydroelectricity system originally established by the house's first owner. Cragside, which now belongs to the National Trust, was built over more than 20 years from 1853, mostly by the architect Norman Shaw, in a partially Tudor style. Set in the Northumberland landscape near the market town of Rothbury, it was called by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner "the most dramatic Victorian mansion in the North of England." He added:The site is Wagnerian – and so is Shaw's architectureThe new hydro system will provide enough energy to light the house again. Andrew Sawyer, who is the National Trust's conservation and interpretation officer at Cragside, said: Lord Armstrong was an exceptional man with a genius mind and the prospect of bringing his vision for Cragside into the 21st century is a dream come true. Hydroelectricity is the world's most widely used form of renewable energy, so we are looking forward to sharing this very special part of its heritage. In the year of building dreams at Cragside, as well as powering the house by Hydroelectricity once more, later in the year we plan to open a new exhibition in the house which tells how the Armstrongs ensured their dreams had a legacy.The Tyneside industrialist ploughed some of the vast profits from his Elswick armaments works – which employed 25,000 people at its height - into building his huge "palace of a modern magician". In the 1860s, Armstrong dammed streams on the estate to create three lakes. He originally used water power to run a spit for roasting in the kitchen, as well as laundry equipment and a lift, and one of the country's first flushing lavatories. By 1878 he had installed a turbine and dynamo to power an arc lamp in the house's gallery, making Cragside almost certainly the first house in the world with electric light, powered by the world's first hydro-electricity station. The early arc lamps were highly unsatisfactory and were replaced in 1880 by 45 of Joseph's Swan's newly invented incandescent bulbs – not cheap at 25/- each. In October 1880, electric light had first been publicly demonstrated by Swan at a lecture at Newcastle's Lit & Phil, of which Armstrong was the president. Although Swan's house in Gateshead can claim to be the world's first to be lit by electric bulbs, Swan himself wrote about installing his lights with Armstrong:As far as I know, Cragside was the first house in England properly fitted up with my electric lamps. It was a delightful sensation for both of us when the gallery was first lit upThe house had Pre-Raphaelite pictures and stained glass alongside a large number of pictures of dogs and works which Pevsner rather sniffily says show "what was permissible to the Victorian nobleman in the way of erotica." Amongst his better paintings were two important Turner watercolours, and Millais' Chill October, for which he paid £945 at Christie's in 1875 and which was much admired by van Gogh, who wrote in 1884 I for my part always keep thinking about some English paintings - for instance Chill October by Millais. The collection was mostly dispersed after Armstrong's death. Chill October was sold again in 1991, fetching £370,000 at Sotheby's – it now belongs to Andrew Lloyd-Webber.Also taking place at Cragside in 2013 is an exhibition, Captured on Camera, which will show images from a personal photograph album of Lord Armstrong's great nephew and his family, who took over as owners of Cragside when Lord Armstrong died. In June, a number of temporary artworks will be installed at various locations on the Cragside estate as part of the Festival of the North East. The artworks will "give a modern interpretation of the pioneering vision of Lord and Lady Armstrong."Alan Sykes is the Guardian Northerner's roving arts specialist and a sheep farmer in the high Pennines. He Tweets here.NewcastleEnergyHeritageHeritageNorthumberlandThe National TrustAlan Sykesguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds This article originally appeared in the panic away review issue of Spectrvm.J. Meejin Yoon, an award-winning artist, architect and designer, is best known for creating large-scale, public art installations — including “White Noise/White Light,” which was featured at the 2004 Athens Olympics and later at MIT’s inaugural festivities for President Susan Hockfield.She is also an associate professor of architecture at MIT and the co-founder of Höweler + Yoon Architecture. In 2005, she won the prestigious Rome Prize for design, an award that thrusts architects and artists onto the world stage. Recently her firm completed a 60,000-square-foot exhibition hall in Chengdu, China, earning the 2011 Annual Design Review Award for cultural buildings from Architect magazine.“I love architecture because it forces a level of creativity within constraints, and I love doing public art installations because you can make your own constraints,” she says.In her public installation work, Yoon uses sound and light to transform public areas. “Light Drift,” for example, draws visitors to the waterfront with an array of glowing orbs. Created for the city of Philadelphia, “Light Drift” was featured at MIT’s 150th anniversary Festival of Art, Science, and Technology (FAST), which Yoon curated. The piece invites visitors to sit on orbs arrayed onshore and discover that their actions create patterns of light on a river through wireless communication with a matrix of floating orbs.The piece is a technological feat, but Yoon’s primary interest is not technology. “A lot of interactive art plays up the role of technology,” she notes. “However, my interest is in defamiliarizing contexts to create spaces of wonder and new forms of public interaction around them.”In fact, Yoon had no background in computer-aided fabrication or interactive technologies when she began teaching at MIT in 2001. To become more comfortable, she took an MIT class How to Make (Almost) Anything, which proved transformative — introducing her both to the technologies she uses today and to many of the collaborators who help her develop her installations. That’s one of the reasons MIT is an ideal place to work in design, she says. “MIT is a special place, because here people still make things…Design is tied to the physical world.”And the physical world presents its own challenges. Yoon had to wait three weeks for the wind speeds to pick up to power “Wind Screen,” an installation of 400 wind-powered LED lanterns that she hung on MIT’s Green Building for FAST. “[But] then the wind went crazy and it was perfect,” Yoon says. The wind spun each of the microturbine lanterns, and the result was a shimmering curtain of light.“That’s what inspires me to keep doing it.”Yoon developed her first light and sound installation for the Athens Olympics after winning an international design competition. “I thought it would be interesting to capture the ephemeral movement of people through a field in this ancient city — to introduce a temporary unfamiliar landscape in a timeless one,” she says. She created a responsive field of thin fiber optics that lit up and emitted sound when people passed by, and “imagined it to be very serene.”The reality was quite different — “White Noise/White Light” drew huge crowds and was occupied 24 hours a day. But Yoon discovered she loved watching people interact with the piece trying to guess how it worked. “That’s the whole point of my interactive installations. They should get people to talk and interact with each other,” she says. “It’s about creating an experience.” After two years of painstaking effort, officials from the Washington region approved a homeland security strategic plan yesterday, listing steps to improve disaster response in everything from decontaminating victims of a chemical attack to providing for stranded pets. Sportswriters wrote about the N.F.L., its image and the arrest of Aaron Hernandez, a former Patriots tight end, who was charged with murder on Wednesday.     David Lynch doesn't want you to call him a musician He's a renowned filmmaker and self-taught improv[...] Mr. Mirante is a principal of the Canadian commercial real estate company Avison Young and the president of its Tri-State division, which was established last year in New York. BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- Juan Manuel Santos, who as defense minister in Colombian President Álvaro Uribe's government oversaw the biggest blows against an entrenched guerrilla force, was elected president Sunday in a landslide. The “National Day of Struggle,” organized by labor unions and focusing on issues like wages and benefits, disrupted ports and blocked some highways essential to commerce.     President Obama moved this week to close a growing breach with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, sending him a letter reaffirming their close ties and reiterating an invitation to visit Washington next month. A work by the graffiti artist Banksy that appeared on a wall in Haringey, a borough of London, was ripped out, appearing next in an art auction in Miami. MEXICO CITY - Investigators finished removing 18 bodies from a mass grave near Acapulco on Thursday amid speculation that the victims may have been killed by mistake. Performing with Questlove, D’Angelo segued from others’ songs to his own. Susan Phillips is an energy reporter and multimedia journalist with StateImpact Pennsylvania, a collaboration between NPR, WHYY and WITF. In his new autobiography, Jimmy Connors has finally decided to let the real world into the sanctuary he created on and off a tennis

Multiple videos posted online by Syrian citizen journalists claim to show the aftermath of chemical attacks in Ateibeh, a town outside Damascus.     Johnny Nguyen of San Jose, Calif., lost half his left arm and all five fingers on his right hand in a car accident more than five years ago.Saracens 23-14 BathSaracens have finished the season top of the Premiership. And we all shrugged and went about our business. Fifteen years ago such an outcome would have caused rather more of a stir but these days finishing top gets you nothing more than a favourable draw in a semi-final, and, anyway, Saracens have long since become familiar jostlers at the summit of the English game. Still, it's a moment to savour for the club who came from a park in Southgate."It's a big achievement for us," said Mark McCall, before casting his mind back not 15 years ago but a mere four. "When this project started, the one thing we craved more than anything else was consistency. Saracens had been so inconsistent through the professional era. Steadily, we've been there or thereabouts. This will be our fourth consecutive semi-final and the first time we've finished top in Saracens' history. We're very pleased."The win sets up a home tie on Sunday against Northampton, for which Saracens will certainly be without Ernst Joubert, the influential No8 injured in the Heineken Cup semi-final defeat to Toulon. Brad Barritt, injured in the same game, and Will Fraser each have an outside chance of making it.Saracens clinched top seeding with a win that was far from their most impressive. Indeed, this, their fifth Premiership match at their new home, was the first they have failed to take maximum points from. But, six days after that debilitating defeat to Toulon, it was a quietly impressive effort and might have been more than that, had they managed to build on a comfortably dominant first 25 minutes.The Lions prop Mako Vunipola (get used to saying it) scored the second of two first-half tries and very nearly set up Chris Ashton, scorer of the first, for another, but his skilfully flicked pass was considered forward by the TMO. So it was merely 13-0 when Bath, chasing the possibility of a place in next season's Heineken Cup, finally turned their minds to the task in hand."At one stage, I thought, if we don't show good character we could get a good hiding here," confessed Mike Ford, Bath's coach. "But we showed great character and got a foothold in the game. We knew Gloucester were winning, so we had everything to play for. We were just a try away from Europe at one stage. It's disappointing that it came down to the last game. We've let points slip against too many teams below us."Bath's history is rather more illustrious than Saracens', but it is their future they are excited about now. They are assembling the sort of squad Saracens' fans might take for granted these days. Gavin Henson is probably on the way. "We have a spot open for a third 10," said Ford, whose son George has been recruited to generate some young-buck competition for Tom Heathcote in that position. "We're still looking, and Henson's not been signed by anyone."Toby Faletau continues to be linked to the club, who are saying goodbye to two No8s this summer. Faletau would provide competition for Leroy Houston, the former Queensland Red, who has already signed, while two front-row forwards of the most fearsome kind – in other words, Argentine – will lend their weight to next season's efforts. Add in a couple of lively scrum-halfs and a hand-picked selection of London Irish's finest young talents, and you can see why the Bath faithful might start to expect some returns from Bruce Craig's investment.Craig will hope that the road is less-pockmarked and more sharply inclined than that endured by Nigel Wray, Saracens' chairman. But, nearly 20 years after he first looked on Bramley Road and sensed a future, his club are where he wants them to be. Finishing top of the table may not mean what it used to back when Bath were doing it as a matter of routine but it is another milestone for a club who are now passing them with increasing regularity.Saracens: Wyles; Ashton (Maddock, 72), Tomkins, Farrell, Strettle; Hodgson (Taylor, 55), De Kock (Wigglesworth, 53); Vunipola (Gill, 62), Brits (Smit, 55), Stevens (Nieto, 62), Borthwick (capt; Botha, 53), Hargeaves (Kruis, 71), Brown, Saull, WrayTries Ashton, Vunipola, Farrell Con Farrell Pens Farrell 2Bath: Devoto; Agulla, Williams, Eastmond (Biggs h-t), Rokoduguni; Heathcote, Claassens (Stringer, 67); James (Catt, 63), Webber (Batty, 47), Wilson (Perenise, 62), Day (Spencer, 50), Attwood, Louw (capt), Mercer (Gilbert ,58), Taylor (Koster, 72)Tries Webber, Agulla Cons Heathcote 2Referee Martin Fox Att 9,998Premiership 2012-13SaracensBathPremiershipRugby unionMichael Aylwinguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds     Even as a searing credit crunch slows construction across the region, District officials yesterday announced the selection of a developer to turn a vacant building into a mix of market-rate and affordable housing. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit to force the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn over records about a facial-recognition database it is building.     Underneath a defaced Hall of Fame, baseball's steroid scandals have come to represent one truth: Just don't cheat. And, as Alex Rodriguez will discover, the best way to re-start your career if you do cheat, is to confess promptly and live with the consequences. Rafa Benítez has a rematch against the club that inflicted his first defeat as Chelsea manager on Sunday as his team face a West Ham side who are still without their captain, Kevin Nolan. Chelsea will have played three matches in a week once again and Benítez will be looking to make use of his sizeable squad. "There's no time to celebrate – the games are coming one after the other," Ramires, the Chelsea midfielder, said. West Ham are playing only their second game this month but are without a host of first-team players including, Mark Noble and Joe Cole. Matthew Taylor could feature after recovering from a recent bout of concussion. Tom ClarkeVenue Stamford Bridge, Sunday 4pmTickets Sold outLast season Chelsea 3 West Ham 0Referee M OliverThis season's matches 18 Y46, R1, 2.61 cards per gameOdds Chelsea 2-5 West Ham 13-2 Draw 15-4ChelseaSubs from Turnbull, Hilário, Ferreira, Bertrand, Terry, Azpilicueta, Ake, Benayoun, Mikel, Moses, Marin, TorresDoubtful Torres (nose)Injured Romeu (knee, Aug)Suspended NoneForm guide WLWLDWDisciplinary record Y40 R2Leading scorer Ba 15 (13 for Newcastle)West HamSubs from Spiegel, Tomkins, Pogatetz, McCartney, Diarra, C Cole, Vaz Tê, Maïga, ChamakhDoubtful J Cole (hamstring), McCartney (knee)Injured Nolan (toe, 23 Mar), Noble (arm, 23 Mar), Potts (concussion, unknown)Suspended NoneForm guide WLLWLLDisciplinary record Y55 R1Leading scorer Nolan 6Match pointers• Three of the past four league matches between West Ham and Chelsea have featured four goals or more• Frank Lampard and Demba Ba have scored 16 goals between them this term but are yet to register an assist• West Ham are Fernando Torres's favourite opponents, with the Spaniard recording six goals and three assists, although this season he is without a league goal in 11 hours and 22 minutes• West Ham's nine London derbies this season have produced a total of 35 goals (3.89 per game)ChelseaWest Ham UnitedPremier Leagueguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Those who treasure the Nu River in Bingzhongluo, China, say the construction of proposed dams would alter what guidebooks call the Grand Canyon of the East. Not that it will keep her out of the classroom. She would just prefer a different high school. How did the lone cowboy hero become such a potent figure in American culture? In an extract from his final book Fractured Times, the late Eric Hobsbawm follows a trail from cheap novels and B-westerns to Ronald ReaganToday, populations of wild horse-riders and herdsmen exist in a large number of regions all round the world. Some of them are strictly analogous to cowboys, such as gauchos on the plains of the southern cone of Latin America; the llaneros on the plains of Colombia and Venezuela; possibly the vaqueiros of the Brazilian north-east; certainly the Mexican vaqueros from whom indeed, as everyone knows, both the costume of the modern cowboy myth and most of the vocabulary of the cowboy's trade are directly derived: mustang, lasso, lariat, sombrero, chaps (chaparro), a cinch, bronco. There are similar populations in Europe, such as the csikos on the Hungarian plain, or puszta, the Andalusian horsemen in the cattle-raising zone whose flamboyant behaviour probably gave the earliest meaning of the word "flamenco", and the various Cossack communities of the south Russian and Ukrainian plains.In the 16th century there were the exact equivalents of the Chisholm trail leading from the Hungarian plains to the market cities of Augsburg, Nuremberg or Venice. And I do not have to tell you about the great Australian outback, which is essentially ranching country, though for sheep more than cattle.There is thus no shortage of potential cowboy myths in the western world. And, in fact, practically all the groups I have mentioned have generated macho and heroic semi-barbarian myths of one kind or another in their own countries and sometimes even beyond. But none of them has generated a myth with coffee shop millionaire course popularity, let alone one that can compare, even faintly, with the fortunes of the North American cowboy. Why?Our starting point is the fact that, in and outside Europe, the "western" in its modern sense – that is, the myth of the cowboy – is a late variant of a very early and deep-rooted image: that of the wild west in general. Fenimore Cooper, whose popularity in Europe followed immediately upon his first publication – Victor Hugo thought he was "the American Walter Scott" – is the most familiar version of this. Nor is he dead. Without the memory of Leatherstocking, would English punks have invented Mohican hairstyles?The original image of the wild west, I suggest, contains two elements: the confrontation of nature and civilisation, and of freedom with social constraint. Civilisation is what threatens nature; and their move from bondage or constraint into independence, which constitutes the essence of America as a radical European ideal in the 18th and early 19th centuries, is actually what brings civilisation into the wild west and so destroys it. The plough that broke the plains is the end of the buffalo and the Indian.It is clear that many white protagonists of the original wild west epic are in some sense misfits in, or refugees from, "civilisation", but that is not, I think, the main essence of their situation. Basically they are of two types: explorers or visitors seeking something that cannot be found elsewhere – and money is the very last thing they seek; and men who have established a symbiosis with nature, as it exists in its human and non-human shape, in these wilds.In terms of literary pedigree, the invented cowboy was a late romantic creation. But in terms of social content, he had a double function: he represented the ideal of individualist freedom pushed into a sort of inescapable jail by the closing of the frontier and the coming of the big corporations. As a reviewer said of Frederic Remington's articles, illustrated by himself in 1895, the cowboy roamed "where the American may still revel in the great red-shirted freedom which has been pushed so far to the mountain wall that it threatens soon to expire somewhere near the top". In hindsight, the west could seem thus, as it seemed to that sentimentalist and first great star of movie westerns William S Hart, for whom the cattle and mining frontier "to this country … means the very essence of national life … It is but a generation or so since virtually all this country was frontier. Consequently its spirit is bound up in American citizenship." As a quantitative statement this is absurd, but its significance is symbolic. And the invented tradition of the west is entirely symbolic, inasmuch as it generalises the experience of a comparative handful of marginal people. Who, after all, cares that the total number of deaths by gunshot in all the major cattle towns put together between 1870 and 1885 – in Wichita plus Abilene plus Dodge City plus Ellsworth – was 45, or an average of 1.5 per cattle-trading season, or that local western newspapers were not filled with stories about bar-room fights, but about property values and business opportunities?But the cowboy also represented a more dangerous ideal: the defence of the native Waspish American ways against the millions of encroaching immigrants from lower races. Hence the quiet dropping of the Mexican, Indian and black elements, which still appear in the original non-ideological westerns – for instance, Buffalo Bill's show. It is at this stage and in this manner that the cowboy becomes the lanky, tall Aryan. In other words, the invented cowboy tradition is part of the rise of both segregation and anti-immigrant racism; this is a dangerous heritage. The Aryan cowboy is not, of course, entirely mythical. Probably the percentage of Mexicans, Indians and black people did diminish as the wild west ceased to be essentially a south-western, even a Texan, phenomenon, and at the peak of the boom it extended into areas like Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. In the later periods of the cattle boom the cowboys were also joined by a fair number of European dudes, mainly Englishmen, with eastern-bred college-men following them.The new cowboy tradition made its way into the wider world by two routes: the western movie and the much underrated western novel or sub-novel, which was to many foreigners what the private eye thriller was to become in our own times. As for the movies, we know that the genre of the western was firmly established by about 1909. Show business for a mass public being what it is, it will surprise nobody that the celluloid cowboy tended to develop two subspecies: the romantic, strong, shy, silent man of action of exemplified by WS Hart, Gary Cooper and John Wayne, and the cowboy entertainer of the Buffalo Bill type – heroic, no doubt, but essentially showing off his tricks and, as such, usually associated with a particular horse. Tom Mix was no doubt the prototype and much the most successful of these.The cowboy tradition was reinvented in our times as the established myth of Reagan's America. This is really very recent. For instance, cowboys did not become a serious medium for selling things until the 1960s, surprising though this seems: Marlboro country really revealed the enormous potential in American male identification with cow-punchers, who, of course, are increasingly seen not as riding herd but as gunslingers. Who said: "I've always acted alone like the cowboy … the cowboy entering the village or city alone on his horse … He acts, that's all"? Henry Kissinger to Oriana Fallaci in 1972, that's who. Let me quote you the reductio ad absurdum of this myth, which dates back to 1979: "The West. It's not just stage-coaches and sagebrush. It's an image of men who are real and proud. Of the freedom and independence we all would like to feel. Now Ralph Lauren has expressed all this in Chaps, his new men's cologne. Chaps is a cologne a man can put on as naturally as a worn leather jacket or a pair of jeans. Chaps. It's the West. The West you would like to feel inside yourself."Reading this on a mobile? Click here to viewThe real invented tradition of the west, as a mass phenomenon that dominates American policy, is the product of the eras of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Reagan. And of course, Reagan, the first president since Teddy Roosevelt whose image is deliberately western and on horseback, knew what he was doing.Is this Reaganite myth of the west an international tradition? I think not. In the first place because the major American medium by which the invented west was propagated has died out. The western novel, as I have suggested, is no longer an international phenomenon. The private eye has killed the Virginian. Larry McMurtry and his like, whatever their place in American literature, are virtually unknown outside their native country. As for the western movie, it was killed by TV; and the western TV series, which was probably the last genuinely international mass triumph of the invented west, became a mere adjunct to children's hour, and in turn it has faded away. Where are Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Laramie, Gunsmoke and the rest on which the kids of the 1950s thrived? The real western movie became deliberately highbrow, a carrier of social, moral and political significance in the 1950s, until it in turn collapsed under their weight as well as the advancing age of the makers and stars – of Ford and Wayne and Cooper. I'm not criticising them. On the contrary, practically all the westerns that any of us would wish to see again date from after Stagecoach (which was released in 1939). But what carried the west into the hearts and homes of five continents was not movies that aimed at winning Oscars or critical applause. What is more, once the late western movie had itself become infected by Reaganism – or by John Wayne as an ideologist – it became so American that most of the rest of the world didn't get the point, or, if it did, didn't like it.In Britain, at least, the word "cowboy" today has a secondary meaning, which is much more familiar than the primary meaning of a fellow in the Marlboro ads: a fellow who comes in from nowhere offering a service, such as to repair your roof, but who doesn't know what he's doing or doesn't care except about ripping you off: a "cowboy plumber" or a "cowboy bricklayer". I leave you to speculate (a) how this secondary meaning derives from the Shane or John Wayne stereotype and (b) how much it reflects the reality of the Reaganite wearers of dude Stetsons in the sunbelt. I don't know when the term first appears in British usage, but certainly it was not before the mid-1960s. In this version, what a man's got to do is to fleece us and disappear into the sunset.There is, in fact, a European backlash against the John Wayne image of the west, and that is the revived genre of the western movie. Whatever the spaghetti westerns mean, they certainly were deeply critical of the US western myth, and in being so, paradoxically, they showed how much demand there still was among adults in both Europe and the US for the old gunslingers. The western was revived via Sergio Leone, or for that matter panic attack – that is, via non-American intellectuals steeped in the lore and the films of the west, but sceptical of the American invented tradition.In the second place, foreigners simply do not recognise the associations of the western myth for the American right or indeed for ordinary Americans. Everyone wears jeans, but without that spontaneous, if faint urge that so many young Americans feel, to slouch against an imagined hitching post, narrowing their eyes against the sun. Even their aspiring rich don't ever feel tempted to wear Texan-type hats. They can watch John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy without a sense of desecration. In short, only Americans live in Marlboro country. Gary Cooper was never a joke, but JR and the other platinum-plated inhabitants of the great dude ranch in Dallas are. In this sense the west is no longer an international tradition.What was so special about cowboys? First, clearly, that they occurred in a country that was universally visible and central to the 19th-century world, of which it constituted, as it were, the utopian dimension: the living dream. Anything that happened in America seemed bigger, more extreme, more dramatic and unlimited, even when it wasn't – and of course often it was, though not in the case of the cowboys. Second, because the purely local vogue for western myth was magnified and internationalised by means of the global influence of American popular culture, the most original and creative in the industrial and urban world, and the mass media that carried it and which the US dominated. And let me observe in passing that it made its way in the world not only directly, but also indirectly, via the European intellectuals it attracted to the US, or at a distance.This would certainly explain why cowboys are better known than vaqueros or gauchos, but not, I think, the full range of the international vibrations they set up, or used to set up. This, I suggest, is due to the in-built anarchism of American capitalism. I mean not only the anarchism of the market, but the ideal of an individual uncontrolled by any constraints of state authority. In many ways the 19th-century US was a stateless society. Compare the myths of the American and the Canadian west: the one is a myth of a Hobbesian state of nature mitigated only by individual and collective self-help: licensed or unlicensed gunmen, posses of vigilantes and occasional cavalry charges. The other is the myth of the imposition of government and public order as symbolised by the uniforms of the Canadian version of the horseman-hero, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.Reading this on a mobile? Click here to viewIndividualist anarchism had two faces. For the rich and powerful it represents the superiority of profit over law and state. Not just because law and the state can be bought, but because even when they can't, they have no moral legitimacy compared to selfishness and profit. For those who have neither wealth nor power, it represents independence, and the little man's right to make himself respected and show what he can do. I don't think it was an accident that the ideal-typical cowboy hero of the classic invented west was a loner, not beholden to anyone; nor, I think, that money was not important for him. As Tom Mix put it: "I ride into a place owning my own horse, saddle and bridle. It isn't my quarrel, but I get into trouble doing the right thing for somebody else. When it's all ironed out, I never get any money reward."In a way the loner lent himself to imaginary self-identification just because he was a loner. To be Gary Cooper at high noon or Sam Spade, you just have to imagine you are one man, whereas to be Don Corleone or Rico, let alone Hitler, you have to imagine a collective of people who follow and obey you, which is less plausible. I suggest that the cowboy, just because he was a myth of an ultra-individualist society, the only society of the bourgeois era without real pre-bourgeois roots, was an unusually effective vehicle for dreaming – which is all that most of us get in the way of unlimited opportunities. To ride alone is less implausible than to wait until that marshal's baton in your knapsack becomes reality.US televisionWesternsUS politicsJohn WayneUnited StatesEric Hobsbawmguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Protests called by Henrique Capriles blamed for nine deaths as US man detained, accused of trying to destabilise VenezuelaThe fallout from Venezuela's disputed presidential election continued to spread this week as the government of Nicolás Maduro threatened to jail the opposition candidate and arrested a American accused of working for US intelligence.While electoral officials prepared a wider audit of the narrow vote on 14 April, opposition candidate Henrique Capriles added to the tension on Thursday by demanding scrutiny of registers containing voters' signatures and fingerprints.Capriles has refused to accept the declared result, according to which he was defeated by less than 2%. Alleging thousands of cases of vote-rigging and other electoral law violations, he called on his supporters to stage peaceful cacerolazo – a popular form of protest where people bang on pots and pans.The protests have been called off, but the government said the demonstrations last week led to nine deaths, 78 people injured and the burning down of clinics and party headquarters. This too is disputed, but the ruling United Socialist party of Venezuela initiated an investigation in the national assembly this week into whether Capriles should be held responsible."The deaths ordered by the fascist murderer Capriles cannot go unpunished," Diosdado Cabello, the head of the national assembly noted on Twitter on Thursday. "The investigations are going forward."The prison minister, Iris Valera, said she had a cell waiting for the opposition leader."Capriles is the intellectual author of these crimes and will not go unpunished," Varela said on state television. "The only good news for you is that the prison waiting for you, Capriles Radonski, is not like the ones we inherited from the previous governments."Capriles said he was ready to go to jail, rather than accept what he describes as a "stolen" election, but he denied instigating violence."If they want to bring me to trial, what's their reason?" Capriles said on Wednesday. "For asking that the vote boxes be opened? For asking people to bang pots and pans? If that's the cost, then do it fast. Don't keep threatening."Capriles spent 119 days in prison for his alleged involvement in a violent protest outside the Cuban embassy after a failed coup against former president Hugo Chávez in 2002.The ruling camp has promised to audit the vote, yet claimed the result is "irreversible". Capriles supporters say the audit will not be valid unless it includes detailed information from voting notebooks as well as checks on whether people voted more than once and whether votes were registered in the names of dead people.The ruling party and its supporters believe the unrest is the latest attempt by the United States to delegitimise a hostile government that is sitting on the world's biggest oil resources. The US has been reluctant to recognise Maduro as president and called for a recount.Earlier on Thursday authorities detained a US citizen, Timothy Hallet Tracy, who they accuse of trying to destabilise the country on behalf of an unnamed US intelligence agency."We detected the presence of an American who began developing close relations with these [students]," said the interior minister, Miguel Rodriguez, in a press conference. "His actions clearly show training as an intelligence agent, there can be no doubt about it. He knows how to work in clandestine operations."Rodriguez said Tracy, 35, from Michigan, had received financing from a foreign non-profit organisation and had redirected those funds toward student organisations.The ultimate aim was to provoke "civil war", he said.Whether they arrest Capriles and risk creating a martyr remains to be seen, but the opposition leader is not the only focus of government efforts to restore authority in the wake of a result that shocked many in the ruling camp, not least because Maduro lost many of the urban districts where his predecessor Hugo Chávez had been dominant.About 270 people were detained during the protests, including 195 students and juveniles. Opposition provocateurs have been accused of firebombing neighbourhood health clinics staffed by Cuban doctors, but several of the alleged arson attacks have susbsequently been disproved."We have no reports of burnt centres. We saw some aggression but no destruction. I think the government exaggerated this to create a mood or opinion that favoured them", said Maria Esperanza Hermida of Provea, a human rights watchdog.NGO monitoring groups also dispute the number of casualties from the violence, saying the government included several victims of apparently random street crime, while ignoring other political killing cases in which opposition supporters were the victims."The government is not doing this investigation with the thoroughness that it calls for … we find this is being handled politically and not with the transparency it requires," said Marcos Ponce of the Observatory of Social Conflict, a civil rights NGO.The opposition has claimed that state employees have been threatened, punished or fired for joining opposition protests or failing to show sufficient support for Maduro.The minister of labour, Maria Cristina Iglesia, said this was a lie in an interview with a state-run radio station."This could be part of a larger montage to cover tinnitus miracle of violence that took place in our country, and that were promoted by fascism: it is a way of covering up the events," Iglesias said. "It is a very small minority that has the venom of hate, of fascism and that wants to transmit it to others".VenezuelaNicolás MaduroAmericasProtestUnited StatesUS foreign policyVirginia LopezJonathan Wattsguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds     The rapper was sentenced to four months after pleading guilty to not paying taxes on more than $1 million of income.     Startup Watchful Software says it's reviving the technology known as digital rights management (DRM) by expanding it beyond traditional platforms like Microsoft Windows PCs and bringing it to mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone. A selected guide to jazz performances in New York.     When you get bored with having the same desktop wallpaper all day, you can create a background slideshow on your PC or Mac to change things up a bit.     The reduced cost of the index-only funds are partly offset, though, by a fee for individual investment advice. If you have a tiny room that you're thinking about as a bedroom for your child or a guest, getting the most out of a small space is a challenge but not an insurmountable one. More untraditional fashion brands and style blogs are catering to female customers who dress and act in ways traditionally associated with men.     With a rapidly expanding cinema audience, the biggest new films are being adapted for what is now the second largest box office in the worldThere's a lesson to be learned from new teen comedy 21 & Over, though the abstract of that lesson will largely depend on where you see it. Catch it on one of the 300-odd UK screens it opened across yesterday, and witness a jocular salute to the redemptive power of youth, rebellion and getting fucked-up. Hold out for the film's debut in China later this month and you're in for an altogether more moralistic experience.Along with a growing band of Hollywood innovators, the producers of 21 & Over have worked closely with the Chinese government to produce an alternate cut for their audiences, one in which the film's hero is refashioned as a Chinese exchange student who ultimately shakes off the rank delinquency of American college life and returns home a reformed character. With just 34 foreign imports allowed to compete for China's rapidly expanding cinema market in any given year, such drastic acts of appeasement are becoming commonplace.Ever since China reopened its doors to American releases in 1994, with the intrepid cultural ambassador that was The Fugitive, studios have fought hard to capture a fair share of the country's immense cinema audience, with artistic integrity often taking a back seat to the demands of a strict review board. But since China overtook Japan to become the world's second-largest box office last year, Hollywood's more entrepreneurial quarters have been getting busy. Last year, Lionsgate spent $1m digitally substituting Red Dawn's villainous Chinese baddies with North Korean ones; this summer's Brad Pitt-starring zombie epic World War Z has already excised a fleeting suggestion that the outbreak emanated from within the country's walls; while Django Unchained toned down the colour of its many blood splashes.As so often, James Cameron was a pioneer, crediting the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park as the inspiration for the sweeping vistas of Avatar. The film went on to become the highest grossing in Chinese history, while one of the park's peaks was swiftly renamed the Avatar Hallelujah Mountain. Similarly eager to ingratiate, last year's sci-fi hit Looper relocated an entire act from Paris to Shanghai, while 2010's candy-sweet The Karate Kid remake rendered its title meaningless with a calculating move to the land of kung fu.In spite of such blatant pandering, the latter two films failed to meet expectations at the Chinese box office; a sign, perhaps, of a growing cynicism towards such tokenistic approach to cultural inclusiveness. Just this month, Iron Man 3 flew the flag for Sino-American relations by embellishing its Chinese cut with appearances from local stars Wang Xueqi and Fan Bingbing. But it inadvertently made a mockery of their inclusion by reducing both roles to blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos in the US version. If cinema screens continue to pop up in China at a rate of nine a day, the likes of Wang and Fan won't be waiting around for Robert Downey Jr's scraps much longer.China's flourishing box office2008: $0.62bn2009: $0.91bn2010: $1.47bn2011: $2.1bn2012: $2.7bnChina's addition to Iron Man 3Wang XueqiBorn in 1946, Xueqi is a Hong Kong veteran with a taste for playing stirring roles in party-boosting historical dramas (2009's Bodyguards And Assassins, 2011's The Founding Of A Party). Also directed of Sun Bird, which didn't do much.Fan BingbingThirty-one-year-old Bingbing is an actor, singer and the Most Beautiful Person in China 2010. She has also started her own movie studio and fashion line. If she finds a minute, she's set to appear in the next X Men movie, too.James CameronBrad PittCharlie Lyneguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds U.S. stocks rose last week, capping the market's biggest two-week rally since November, after New York area manufacturing expanded and Europe's efforts to contain its debt crisis bolstered confidence in the global economy. In response to a Shortcuts column on why people don’t respond to e-mails, readers offer their own explanations.     A coming exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum focuses on drawings by Matthew Barney; public art exhibitions resume at Rockefeller Center with a series of figures by Ugo Rondinone. I've never owned a car – due to a combination of not being able to afford one and avoiding ownership for environmental reasons – and now I'm about to get my first vehicle for work. Should I go for an electric van from an emissions point of view?Initially the electric vehicle, or EV, looks good: you can still get a grant for one, which brings the cost of a van down by around 20%, and there are simply no tailpipe emissions. However it's important to remember that in effect you are transferring your pollution to a different part of the carbon cycle. Tailpipe pollution is swapped for smoke-stack pollution.Unless you have calculated the amount of electricity you need to recharge and have a renewable option to cover this, such as photovoltaic panels, your EV is not carbon neutral. When you plug into the grid to recharge, you become dependent on the energy mix of the country you live in. In the UK that's not an altogether rosy picture.Here we are largely dependent on coal and gas. A recent study on the real impact of EVs by Norwegian researchers also took into account the carbon-intensive production of EVs. The results were disappointing. Producing the vehicles, particularly the batteries, is polluting. Drive 100,000km (the average battery warranty) over the lifetime of your EV and its "eco" benefit is just 9-14% better than petrol.Here's another issue: imagine there are suddenly 10 million EV owners who all want to charge their EVs after work. This is a nightmare: 80GW of power, or the entire generating capacity available for the UK, would be needed to charge this fleet. Mass EV ownership is simply not viable without an overhaul of the electricity network. Therefore it's incumbent on EV owners to push for a smart grid revolution, too.But let's go back to the future. As petrol gets dirtier (for example requiring oil to be squeezed from tar sands at huge ecological cost), EVs will get cleaner, and easier to produce. Meanwhile the mix of renewables in the UK is supposed to increase (by 2020 coal will provide just 11% of energy). Plus, you can already begin to see the shape of a network of fast-charging points. Institutions such as MIT are working on improving the EV performance to get greater range per unit of electricity (such as working on a cooling/heating system that isn't reliant on battery power).Every day a little more is done. EVs could finally be on the right road, and for that reason this is the route I think you should take.Green crushIt feels as if the nation is slowly reskilling, what with bake-offs and sewing bees. DIY skincare is next. The @Made_In_Hackney kitchen leads the charge with its low-cost edible cosmetics workshops. Julie Riehl (biologist and botanist) and Sarah Bentley (ecologist and permaculture champion) teach all you'll need to know to refill your bathroom cabinet with non-toxic, homemade alternatives that are pure enough to eat (though they warn they don't taste brilliant). Go to madeinhackney.orgGreenspeak: Carpoolchella ka:-pu:l-tÅ¿Elei nounHats off to US music festival Coachella. Carpoolers who went four or more to a vehicle at this year's festival could enter a draw to win VIP passes for life from 2014. Now that's what we call an incentiveIf you have an ethical dilemma, send an email to Lucy at [email protected], hybrid and low-emission carsCarbon emissionsTravel and transportMotoringEthical and green livingLucy Siegleguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds     Stu Jackson will step down as executive vice president for basketball operations at the N.B.A., and Rod Thorn will return as president for basketball operations, the league