Kodak has announced that it’s licensing its name to a range of mobile devices that make it easier to print and share images. The company’s first smartphone will be unveiled at CES in January followed by a "4G handset, a tablet, and a connected camera" arriving in the second half of 2015. The actual hardware will be built by Bullitt Group, an English company that makes a range of ultra-rugged smartphones for construction company Caterpillar and claims to create products "using the unadulterated DNA of the brands we work with."
THERE'S NO TALK OF MEGAPIXELS - THIS IS ALL ABOUT BRANDING
"Kodak is one of the world's most recognizable brands. It is trusted by consumers as a marque of quality and innovation," said Bullitt Mobile CEO Oliver Schulte in a press release. "We've taken that heritage and used it to inspire a range of beautifully designed devices that will let users take great pictures and edit, share, store and print them in an instant." As Schulte suggests, the emphasis is very much on software solutions rather than quality hardware. Neither Kodak nor Bullitt mention any details about megapixels, sensor size, or the like, and instead both seem intent on selling the devices for their ease of use — even including remote management software that will let "family members and friends … provide help and support."
Licensing its brand is a strategy in keeping with the radical restructure that helped Kodak exit bankruptcy last September. The company spun off or shut down its various consumer divisions (including its digital photography team) and is instead concentrating on commercial printing. It won’t be the only struggling firm trying to jump on the mobile bandwagon either: back in September, Panasonic unveiled the experimental Lumix CM1 smartphone, equipped with a large sensor and Leica lens. Kodak can get people interested with its name alone, but it'll have to contribute more than just branding to actually win customers' respect.
Researcher found 600000 cases almost 40% of the cancer victims could have avoided cancer if…….
December 27, 2014
According to a new research by the Cancer Research UK (CRUK), 40 percent of the cancer victims could have avoided cancer by choosing a better lifestyle. According to the study the scientists have discovered that at least 600,000 cancer victims could have avoided cancer by choosing better a lifestyle and continuing that life style. According to the study around 587,000 people living in UK have developed a different type of cancer within five years period after they began consuming alcohol or tobacco. The researchers are suggesting that by choosing a poor lifestyle, these victims have developed cancer. One of the researchers and cancer prevention specialists for the Cancer Research UK said, “There are more than 200 types of cancer each caused by a complex set of factors, involving both our lifestyles and our genes.”
By choosing different lifestyle like exercise, eating healthy food, consuming fewer processed meat, keeping their weight checked, eating less fast food, consuming less alcohol or tobacco; many people can avoid having different forms of cancers. Researchers discovered that tobacco is one of the main reasons behind cancer. A large number of the participants in the study have cancer by consuming tobacco. The researchers also discovered that, among the participants 144,800 people diagnosed with cancer, have poor food habit like eating less green vegetables or red meet regularly. Excessive weight problem was the reason behind 88,100 participants having cancer.
According to Prof Max Parkin, a Cancer Research UK statistician based at Queen Mary University of London, “There’s now little doubt that certain lifestyle choices can have a big impact on cancer risk, with research around the world all pointing to the same key risk factors”. He then added, “Of course everyone enjoys some extra treats during the Christmas holidays so we don’t want to ban mince pies and wine but it’s a good time to think about taking up some healthy habits for 2015. Public Health England says a healthy lifestyle can play a vital role in reducing cancer risk. It says campaigns such as Smoke free, Dry January and Change4Life Sugar Swaps all aim to raise public awareness”. Though the researchers are saying that these are not the only reason people have cancers but there are choices which can avoid this.
2014 is almost at its end, and what a year in news it has been! This year, we saw the Bridgegate scandal, cases of police brutality and the role played by race, questions of religious freedom and LGBT rights. The nation mourned the passing of actor and comedian Robin Williams, the tragic loss of lives from a missing plane over the Indian Ocean and a plane shot down in Ukraine.
It was a big year of news – and msnbc captured it all. Take a look back at msnbc’s 10 most popular videos of 2014 on social media.
The number one most popular msnbc.com video of the year was this segment from “The Last Word” with Lawrence O’Donnell, which examines a major mistake made in the grand jury investigating the death of unarmed teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
On Election Night 2014, Tom Brokaw stopped by to help cover the election results with Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews. But then something unexpected happened … on live TV!
In an appearance on Fox News, economic commentator Ben Stein remarked that President Obama is the “most racist President” America has had. The video of his remarks quickly went viral.
msnbc’s Jose Diaz-Balart looks at how the situation in Ferguson has impacted far beyond Missouri. The video highlights nationwide issues that have captured the entire nation’s attention.
On “The Last Word” in February, LGBT activist and actor George Takei discussed the law passed in Arizona that would allow business owners to discriminate against LGBT customers on grounds of religious freedom. The controversial bill was later vetoed by Governor Jan Brewer.
George Takei on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.
In January, when the Chris Christie administration was under fire for the “Bridgegate” scandal, Rachel Maddow presented a surprising new theory for the reasoning behind the Fort Lee, New Jersey traffic jams.
In January, after President Obama’s State of the Union address, Rachel Maddow anchored msnbc’s post-SOTU coverage. She interviewed Republican Congressman Tim Huelskamp … and things got heated!
After a botched execution in Oklahoma, host Chris Hayes took a deeper look into the policies and practices of Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin back in May. Fallin was later re-elected in November.
In November, a grand jury decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown. Reverend Al Sharpton interviewed Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, on how she felt about the decision.
After the tragic passing of actor Robin Williams in August, James Lipton recalls what Robin Williams said in a previous interview about what he would want to hear if heaven existed.
De Blasio speaks at funeral; officers turn their backs
Elizabeth Weise and David McKay Wilson, USA TODAYDecember 27, 2014
NEW YORK — Vice President Biden honored Rafael Ramos at the slain New York police officer's funeral Saturday.
He spoke of Ramos and his partner, Officer Wenjian Liu, who were shot and killed 7 days ago, ambushed as they sat in their squad car.
"Being a cop was not what they did. It was who they were," Biden said.
Motioning to a sea of blue, police officers from across the USA seated in the church where the funeral was held, Biden said, "It's who you are."
"You all joined for essentially the same reason. There was something about you that made you think that you could help. That you had a duty." That duty, Biden said, was to the rule of law.
The sentiment was echoed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
"We are a nation of laws. We are a state of laws. We are a city of laws," he said.
"You represent those laws. No one, no group is above the law. The threats against New York's police are an insult to law-abiding New Yorkers and they will not be tolerated."
Vice President Joe Biden offered words of comfort to the wife and two sons of NYPD officer Rafael Ramos at his funeral on Saturday. Ramos and his partner Wenjian Liu were gunned down last Saturday in their patrol car. VPC
Ramos started out as a school safety officer but had a dream of becoming a police officer, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said. "He couldn't wait to put on that uniform. He believed in protecting others."
"Those that are called to protect others are a special breed," he said.
Then, speaking in Spanish, de Blasio told the Ramos family and New York that he "was one of your best sons. ... He was a man of much faith and a brave police officer."
As de Blasio spoke, hundreds of officers outside the church turned their backs in a sign of disrespect. Some have said de Blasio contributed to a climate of mistrust toward law enforcement amid anti-police protests.
At a hospital after the Dec. 20 shooting, the police union's president, Patrick Lynch, and others turned their backs on the mayor. Lynch blamed the mayor then for the officers' deaths and said he had blood on his hands.
Speaking to CNN just after the funeral, Lynch said: "The feeling is real. But today is about mourning. Tomorrow is for debate."
A recurring theme at the funeral was the divisiveness caused by the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner on Staten Island, and how the nation must overcome it.
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," Biden told the mourners, quoting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Although some in the nation might "fear diversity, we celebrate it," Cuomo said. "Yes, we have questions" arising out of recent cases, but with study and reflection those can be overcome.
William Bratton, New York City police commissioner, also spoke and announced to applause that he was appointing Ramos an honorary chaplain of the 84th Precinct in New York. Ramos had been studying to become a lay chaplain when he was killed.
Tens of thousands of police officers from around the nation and as far away as Canada are expected to arrive for the funeral of slain NYPD officer Raphael Ramos. Mana Rabiee reports. Video provided by ReutersNewslook
He kept a Bible in his police locker, Biden said.
The NYPD announced Friday that Ramos and Liu had been posthumously promoted to the rank of first-grade detective.
The promotions commonly are given to police killed in the line of duty. They carry with them increased benefits for the families of the slain officers.
Outside the church, police helicopters circled overhead as thousands of uniformed officers thronged the Glendale Queens neighborhood to show their respects to Ramos.
A rumbling phalanx of motorcycles led the funeral procession down Cypress Hills Street to the cemetery. Next came a long procession of buses and city emergency vehicles filled with NYPD officers.
Deputy Sheriff Matt McAllister of San Bernardino County, Calif., had arrived on a red-eye flight from Long Beach courtesy of JetBlue.
At the funeral for NYPD officer Rafael Ramos, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton promoted Ramos and his partner Wenjian Liu to the rank of detective first grade. The officers were gunned down last Saturday in their patrol car. VPC
"We're here to support our brothers and sisters in the NYPD," he said. "We are a brotherhood."
The officers streamed in across the USA. Many were in their dress blues with commendation medals on their jackets, wearing white gloves.
A huge Christmas wreath with shiny ornaments hung over the entrance to Christ Tabernacle Church in a repurposed brick building on Myrtle Avenue in Queens. The street was closed to traffic.
An organist played Silent Night in the bright morning sun on a Saturday morning unseasonably warm for late December
On Friday, an overflow crowd of police, family, friends and dignitaries had packed the church for an eight-hour wake. Six police officers carried Ramos' flag-draped casket into the church as other officers saluted and stood at attention outside the entrance.
By early evening, hundreds of additional mourners had filled the streets outside to hear speakers eulogize Ramos and watch the memorial on giant video screens. Joining Ramos' wife, Maritza, and two teenage sons, Justin and Jaden, were Cuomo, de Blasio,Bratton and Roman Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan.
"What happened to my father was a tragedy, but his death will not be in vain," said Justin Ramos, a student at Bowdoin College in Maine. "My dad was a hero. He touched so many lives and will continue to do so."
He said his father was his rock and his "absolute best friend."
Ramos' sister, Cindy, wept as she expressed her love for her brother.
"Even though I didn't say it as much as I should, I love you from the deepest depths of my soul," she said. "My brother, my heart aches so much right now. Please pray for me as I know you always did. Help me understand why God took you from me so soon."
Pastor Ralph Castillo said Ramos was a beloved member of Christ Tabernacle Church.
"Whether he was helping a mom with a carriage or bringing someone to their seats, he did it with so much love and so much vigor and so much joy," Castillo said.
Ramos, who was 40, served as an usher at Christ Tabernacle and was part of the church's marriage and life group ministries.
As the funeral ended Saturday, thousands of people stood outside silently, at attention, as they awaited the casket. Two trumpeters playedTaps.
When the cortège left the church, 12 police helicopters flew in formation above it and two trumpeters played a mournful rendition of My Country, 'Tis of Thee.
Ismaaiyl Brinsley gunned down Ramos and Liu. Brinsley had posted messages on social media about his intent to target police officers and earlier in the day in Baltimore, he wounded an ex-girlfriend.
After the rampage, Brinsley killed himself in a subway station.
The site where the police officers were shot on Brooklyn's Myrtle Avenue has been transformed into a shrine for the fallen men. Piles of bouquets, Christmas wreaths, teddy bears and candles mark the spot.
It has drawn fellow police officers, family, friends, ministers and ordinary New Yorkers for prayer and reflection.
Funeral plans for Ramos' partner, officer Liu, are pending until family members can make arrangements to travel from their home in China.
David McKay Wilson also reports for The (Westchester County, N.Y.) Journal News.Contributing: The Associated Press
Jaden Ramos, center, arrives at the funeral for his father, slain NYPD officer Rafael Ramos at the Christ Tabernacle Church on Dec. 27, 2014. (Photo: Kevin Hagen, Getty Images)
Elizabeth Warren: can this scourge of Wall Street make it to the White House?
The Democrats’ new darling is, like Barack Obama, a former law professor and a gifted orator whose speeches address America’s ‘rigged’ economy. Hopes are rising that the senator will run for president
Elizabeth Warren is an unlikely looking rock star. The 65-year-old Massachusetts senator, with her winning smile, patient, hopeful manner and rimless glasses, is more convincing as the Oklahoma-born Harvard law professor she was for 20 years before regaining Ted Kennedy’s former seat for the Democrats in the upper house in 2013. Yet for the last year or so, “rock star” is undoubtedly the epithet that has tended to attach itself to her whenever she has stepped on to a stage. No progressive rally is currently complete in the US without Warren’s appearance before adoring fans of all ages. The message at each of these gatherings is that screamed by leading liberal donors as she took the microphone at the annual Democracy Alliance meeting in Washington DC last month: “Run, Liz! Run!”
For the time being, the senator is adamant that she has no plans to seek the Democratic nomination for a presidential campaign in 2016, but large sections of her party, particularly on the left, refuse to believe, in this instance, that no means no. It has long been assumed that a woman would lead the race to succeed Barack Obama at the end of his second term. Hillary Clinton remains the bookies’ favourite to follow her husband to the White House, but Warren’s odds are narrowing by the month. She talks, it seems, not only to beleaguered middle America but also both to the intellectual elite of the east coast, and the Hollywood elite of the west (Barbra Streisand and Danny DeVito are confirmed fans; Cher tweets that “Elizabeth Warren is my HERO!”) For the moment, Warren is performing that most elusive political trick, the one that Obama mastered in 2007: looking like the new, new thing.
There is solid basis for this perception. In her time in Washington, Warren has pushed through considerable reform, not least in her successful insistence on the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau , the new independent agency designed to enforce transparency and fairness in financial services. Her rock star status, though, rests partly, naturally, on a couple of widely bootlegged viral video clips, her greatest hits. In the first, from a campaign speech in 2011, she delivers an impromptu retort to the capitalist ideal of the self-made man, and a fiery defence of redistributive taxation: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” she argues. “Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved the goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate… Now look, you built the factory and it turned into something terrific? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid that comes along…”
Elizabeth Warren speech
This was the clip that most dramatically identified Warren in the minds of the followers of conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh as a “dangerous radical” – and which established her status on the liberal left as someone who might finally tell it like it is. She didn’t stop there, however. Her most telling speeches have often been framed in committee as questions to the leaders of financial institutions and the regulators that have failed, before and after the banking crash of 2007-8, to bring them to account. In her measured tones, Warren articulates the inchoate rage of everyone from Occupy protesters to working professionals unable to pay the rent, that those institutions too big to fail monumentally failed, morally and legally. Her catchphrase is becoming this one: “How many executives of Wall St banks have been prosecuted as a result of their criminal actions?” If she wanted evidence that such questions were hitting their target, Warren received it last week from Melissa Francis, anchor at Fox Business Network. “I can tell you from talking to people in the financial industry, in banking, on Wall Street, they think she is actually the devil,” Francis said. “I mean, without question, Elizabeth Warren is the devil.” What rock star could wish for more?
How Elizabeth Warren got to such questions, and how she has the capacity to deliver them with such authority, is the substance of her political memoir A Fighting Chance, published earlier this year. Its opening could be the voiceover for a title sequence of a Hollywood movie, one pitched somewhere between Erin Brockovich and The Waltons. “I’m Elizabeth Warren,” she writes [cue sequence of our heroine at home and at work, sweating over the Thanksgiving dinner and at her president’s side]. “I’m a wife, a mother and a grandmother. For nearly all my life, I would have said I was a teacher, but I guess I can’t really say that any more. Now I’d have to introduce myself as a United States senator, though I still feel a jolt of surprise whenever I say that. This is my story and it’s a story born of gratitude. My daddy was a maintenance man and my mother worked the phones at Sears. More than anything, my parents wanted to give my three older brothers and me a future…”
Those brothers are happily tailor-made, too, for the mission statement. One, a career soldier, fought 288 combat missions in Vietnam. One, a union man, spent a lifetime in the construction industry. One, a serial entrepreneur, started a new business every time the last one failed. It is a family that Norman Rockwell would have understood, the kind of family that the American dream was invented for. But here’s the thing – her kind of people, she believes, no longer count in America: “The game is rigged – rigged to work for those who have money and power… Meanwhile hard-working families are told they’ll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children.”
It is hard to read the subsequent 278 pages of A Fighting Chance as anything other than an extended hustings speech. It is a well-told story, full of heart and struggle; the most powerful book-length pitch for the hearts and minds of liberal America since Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. Whereas Obama’s biography offered the promise of healing the nation’s cultural divides, Warren’s history seems made for a proper assault on exponentially rising economic inequalities.
Inevitably, her CV is widely measured against that of Hillary Clinton’s. Both have used their Ivy League legal background to take on entrenched power (in Clinton’s case, the health insurance companies.) But Warren has more intimate experience of the lives of those she argues for. Clinton, daughter of a successful businessman, moved relatively easily from the elite Wellesley college to Yale, where she met her future husband, to Washington.
Warren’s path was more fraught with difficulty. Her family – whom she has claimed, controversially, to be loosely descended from Cherokee, Native American ancestors – came close to financial ruin when her father had a heart attack and lost his janitor’s job; she watched their station wagon be repossessed, saw her mother forced out to take a telesales job at 50. Warren herself gave up a full scholarship to George Washington university in order to marry her high school sweetheart, and struggled through college once she had two children; by the time she was a professor, she had experienced divorce, single parenthood and remarriage. Her chosen teaching subject at Harvard, when she arrived there at 40, was, pointedly, bankruptcy. “My daddy and I were both afraid of being poor, really poor,” she writes in her book. “His response was never to talk about money or what might happen if it ran out – never ever ever. My response was to study contracts finance and most of all economic failure to learn everything I could.”
That determination has given her the most expert grounding in the key political issue of her times – the imbalanced structure of the “rigged” economy and the vast resultant inequalities of wealth and opportunity. It is the grounding that provides her point of difference not only with Clinton, but also with Obama – who brought her into government but backed away, in the face of Republican opposition, from appointing her as the first chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she had worked to create. “He picked his economic team and when the going got tough, his economic team picked Wall Street,” she says of Obama’s administration. “They protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes. Not people who lost their jobs. Not young people who were struggling to get an education. And it happened over and over and over.”
Warren believes it must not happen again. It is the kind of argument that leads inevitably to that other question: Can Elizabeth Warren be the change she describes? There are, it seems, a growing number ready to respond: “Yes she can.”
THE WARREN FILE
Born 22 June1949, in Oklahoma City to Don Herring, a janitor, and his wife, Pauline, their fourth child.
Best of times Against strong opposition from the financial lobby and Wall Street advocating and forcing through the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in September 2010, designed to prevent another crash.
Worst of times Failing to win the backing of President Obama to be the first director of the new agency, after 44 of 47 Republican senators signed a letter to the president suggesting that Warren would have too much power in the role.
What she says “Corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.”
What others say “Warren wants stringent government control of firearms, robust health care subsidies, and government-mandated wages for low-paid workers. She would make Obama look like Ronald Reagan.” Bill O’Reilly, Fox News
In 2002 Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a nongovernmental organization in Washington, D.C., updated his earlier estimate of the number of people that have ever existed. To calculate this, he studied the available population data to determine the human population growth rates during different historical periods, and used them to determine the number of people who have ever been born.
For most of history, the population grew slowly, if at all. According to the United Nations' Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, the first Homo sapiens appeared around 50,000 years ago, though this figure is debatable. Little is known about this distant past and how many of us there might have been, but by the time of the agricultural revolution in the Middle East in 9000 B.C., Earth held an estimated five million people.
Between the rise of farming and the height of Roman rule,population growth was sluggish; at less than a tenth of a percent per year, it crawled to about 300 million by A.D. 1. Then the total fell as plagues wiped out large swathes of people. (The "black death" in the 14th century wiped out at least 75 million.) As a result, by 1650 the world population had only increased to about 500 million. By 1800, though, thanks to improved agriculture and sanitation, it doubled to more than one billion. And, in 2002 when Haub last made these calculations, the planet's population had exploded, reaching 6.2 billion.
To calculate how many people have ever lived, Haub followed a minimalist approach, beginning with two people in 50000 B.C.—his Adam and Eve. Then, using his historical growth rates and population benchmarks, he estimated that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. Of those, people alive today comprise only 6 percent, nowhere near 75 percent. "[It is] almost surely true people alive today are some small fraction of [all] people," says Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at the Rockefeller and Columbia Universities in New York City.
For this myth ever to be valid there would have to be more than 100 billion people living on Earth. "How cozy," Cohen says. "It just doesn't seem plausible," he adds.
Today there are more than 6.5 billion people walking on Earth, according to United Nations estimates. Recently, the population has been increasing by about 1.2 percent each year, down from the late 1960s peak of a 2.1 percent yearly growth rate. Some industrialized countries, especially France and Japan, have very low birth rates and their populations are actually dwindling, Haub notes. In developing nations populations continue to grow, but some countries, such as India, are experiencing a slowdown in their growth rate.
Cohen doubts that a doubling of today's population, to 13 billion, will occur, never mind approaching anywhere near 100 billion. Not even the U.N.'s highest projection predicts that much growth, he says. For 2050, the world body's estimates range from 7.3 billion to 10.7 billion people. The median, and most likely, projection of 8.9 billion relies on a gradual slowing of the growth rate. And the U.N. predicts the world population will stabilize at 10 billion inhabitants sometime after 2200. At this rate, the living will never outnumber the dead
"The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason and right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read, "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination." (For more insight into Jefferson's relationship with Islam, see http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2007/01/jeffersons_quran.html)
Gracias a Aurelio por este comentario adicional: "JAJAJA! Ya lo habia visto. Las bromas aparecieron rapidisimo. En Argentina le agregan una frase: ...y cuando Racing Club salga campeon argentino. (Racing Club era el club del Che, y este ano salio campeon despues de .... decadas!)
Alan: I like The Salvation Army's motto: "Doing The Most Good"
It is bloody difficult to keep spirits high when working with the intractable circumstances of society's most down and out. God bless them - each and every one!
In typical fashion, Tyson returned to the scene of the controversy to provide one last little jab to the populace in an effort to make people think (at least I hope so):
He also took to Facebook to address what he is calling his “most re-Tweeted Tweet,” combing over his Twitter history in an attempt to quantify and define the reaction to his Newton comment:
Everybody knows that Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25th. I think fewer people know that Isaac Newton shares the same birthday. Christmas day in England – 1642. And perhaps even fewer people know that before he turned 30, Newton had discovered the laws of motion, the universal law of gravitation, and invented integral and differential calculus. All of which served as the mechanistic foundation for the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries that would forever transform the world.
My sense in this case is that the high rate of re-tweeting, is not to share my enthusiasm of this fact, but is driven by accusations that the tweet is somehow anti-Christian. If a person actually wanted to express anti-Christian sentiment, my guess is that alerting people of Isaac Newton’s birthday would appear nowhere on the list.
Tyson pulls out this Tweet to drive his point home, noting that it garnered only 13,000 RTs compared to the massive 62,000 for the Christmas Newton post:
I guess some folks just get a little sensitive at the holidays. The Facebook post also clears up the confusion over the “exact” date of Newton’s birthday in relation to Christmas Day, something that was a noted rebuttal to his offending tweet:
One last bit of historical fact. All of England was celebrating Christmas the day Newton was born. But the Gregorian Calendar (an awesomely accurate reckoning of Earth’s annual time), introduced in 1584 by Pope Gregory, was not yet adopted in Great Britain. To do so required removing ten days from the calendar — excess time that had accumulated over the previous 16 centuries from the mildly flawed Julian Calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. These remnants of the turbulent schism between the Anglican and Catholic churches meant that Catholic Christendom was celebrating Christmas ten days earlier than anybody was in England.
If you wanted to reckon Newton’s birthday on today’s Gregorian Calendar, we would place his birth on January 4, 1643.
That’s one thing I always like about these Tyson Twitter hullabaloos, they always seem to include something to learn. You can’t say the same thing about Kanye West or Kurt Sutter’s Twitter outbursts, unless the lesson you’re looking for is, “don’t f*ck with these people.”
The Ismael brothers were carpenters, not fighters. But when ISIS attacked, they took up arms and helped stop the jihadists in their tracks.
KOBANI, Syria — It was a sunny day in late November when Ahmed Ismael, 22, went with a group of seven other fighters to ambush militants from the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, on the eastern flank of this besieged town.
Then the plan went terribly wrong. The would-be ambushers were themselves ambushed. Two car bombs exploded and a group of jihadists blocked their way from behind, cutting off their exit route. During the intense firefight that followed, four Kurdish fighters died, including three of Ahmed's cousins.
"They had heavy weapons but we only had AK-47s,” says Ahmed, his voice still shaky as he recounts the details. “It was my first real fight. We stayed there for four hours. We ran out of ammunition. I was next to my cousins when they died."
As the fight raged on, Ahmed and the three women fighters who were part of the mission, sent out calls for help. Finally, a squad of reinforcements arrived and they were able to retreat.
Mohammed A. Salih
Since then, there have been many other skirmishes, so many that war has come to seem a ways of life for Ahmed and his older brother Nusin. But neither had ever thought before that they were destined to become fighters. They had led a quiet life in this otherwise rural and peripheral town in northern Syria that, until a few months ago, few people had ever heard of outside the region. They were carpenters making chairs, beds and other rudimentary pieces of furniture for the locals.
But when the jihadists from ISIS launched a large-scale assault on Kobani in September, the two brothers had to make a choice. "We wondered what to do," says 24-year-old Nushin. "We sent our family to Turkey,” he says, “But this is our town. The two of us did not want to leave. Where could we go? We decided to stay here and defend our home."
One afternoon in mid-December, with AK-47 machine guns hanging from their shoulders, the two brothers wandered around the area near their partially damaged home in central Kobani,
Even as the bloody siege continues, so, too, do signs of life.
Some of the streets in this part of the town have seen large scale-destruction. More than three months of intense combat between the jihadist attackers and the Kurdish defenders, backed by jet fighters from the U.S.-led coalition, has left many homes and businesses in fractured or flattened.
This day is weirdly tranquil. But the two brothers know better. They are cautious. They keep their heads low while running behind a large curtain covering the opening between two housing blocks. Such large sheets are common in Kobani, meant to protect fighters and civilians from the ever gazing eyes of ISIS snipers. This is a town, if not of ghosts, of shadows.
Despite the fact it is under siege from all sides and suffering a shortage of basic needs, the local fighters here say their policy is to not take things from the abandoned shops and homes. And they are pretty serious about that. Many of the stores the two brothers pass by still have their goods on the shelves, from food, to medicine, shoes and clothes.
While Kurdish forces have advanced on some fronts in Iraq, the fight here in Syria seems far from over yet. The town, known in Arabic as Ayn al-Arab, is so significant to ISIS that the group calls it Ayn al-Islam. But it was here in Kobani that ISIS ran into the first major hurdle in its brutal campaign to establish a caliphate across Syria and Iraq.
Like other locals here, the Ismael brothers are quick to point out the town would have likely fallen had it not been for the timely airstrikes by the international coalition. The deployment of Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces armed with heavy weapons also has been helpful in boosting up the resistance here.
But that makes the Ismael brothers no less proud of the resistance that they and other fellow fighters have put up. While the jihadists swept over large parts of four provinces in Iraq in a matter of days in June, their attempt to take Kobani hit a wall. And even as the bloody siege continues, so, too, do signs of life. Adults prepare food and drink dark sweet tea on the doorsteps of their homes as they watch their children playing.
The Ismael brothers even make an effort to look cool, if not fashionable, by local standards. They both wear tight dark jeans. Nushin has put on a light green T-shirt complete with a black rain jacket while Ahmed has a sweater, a vest and a striped dark pink and black turban.
For these Kobani natives, the fight is about holding on to their roots in place that has been the home of their family and their traditions.
"We have lived here all our life; in every corner of this place, we have a memory," says Nushin, his eyes shining with restrained tears as he speaks. "We do not leave our home behind. We would rather die here with honor and dignity. Leaving means we have turned our back on our home."
By the end of 2013, Pope Francis had landed on the cover of Rolling Stone, was Time magazine's Person of the Year - and, according to a Wall Street Journal poll, only 7% of Americans had a negative view of him. By all accounts, it was a historic first year in office and a smashing public relations coup for the Catholic Church.
If 2013 was a year in which Francis' style was in vogue, 2014 was the year that the substance of his teaching took effect. It is worth pausing to take stock of the history he made on behalf of Catholicism and humanity at large.
Much of what Francis did made headlines - in reshaping our understanding of church doctrine, repairing the Vatican's broken-down governance and taking bold steps to make the world a more peaceful and harmonious place.
But much did not. This was a year, recall, in which he staunchly criticized religious persecution at the hands of ISIS, personally intervened in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and powerfully condemned the mafia.
During one address, he passionately pleaded: "Please, silence the weapons, put an end to the violence! No more war!"
This was a year in which he canonized two of his predecessors, John XXIII and John Paul II. In declaring the both saints at the same time, Francis aimed to display the unity of the church by recognizing two popes - the one who began the Second Vatican Council and the other who dedicated his papacy to implementing its reforms.
For most Popes, those acts alone would have made for a remarkable 12 months. For a Pope as intent on making history as Francis, they have practically been relegated to footnotes.
On the heels of Pope Benedict XVI's resignation, the reform of the Roman Curia - the church's main administrative body - was a much-discussed topic.
Because, no matter the power of its moral message, the church's ministry will be handicapped without effective governance.
Chief among Francis' concerns was the need for greater transparency of the Vatican Bank. Along with the restructuring of the Vatican's financial offices and inviting the participation of lay financial experts, this reform initiated by Francis has paid off in a big way.
Earlier this month, the head of the Vatican's ministry of economy announced that the church had discovered several hundred million euros "tucked away" into various accounts. While the work of the church is primarily spiritual in nature, this unexpected blessing provides a real and immediate way to further its causes.
The October Extraordinary Synod on the Family was perhaps the most misunderstood and misconstrued moment in his papacy thus far. Rumors swirled that Francis had endorsed a change in the church's teaching on marriage and divorce, effectively conceding a victory to those who wish to abandon the church's traditional teaching on the indissolubility of marriage as a union between a man and woman.
Instead, Francis sought to use the occasion to draw attention, from within the church and those outside of its borders, to the beauty of the family - what his predecessor termed a "domestic church."
As he declared at the Synod's closing, Francis desires a "church that is not ashamed of the fallen brother and pretends not to see him, but on the contrary feels involved and almost obliged to lift him up and to encourage him to take up the journey again."
In recent months, he has won the hearts of scientists and animal lovers alike by insisting that evolution is compatible with Christianity and that the church, more than any other institution, should be in the business of promoting the welfare of animals.
In his address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Francis echoed sentiments earlier expressed by Pope Pius XII that "The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it."
While such a statement is not a departure from church teaching, by bringing the issue to center stage, Francis is evidencing to the world that faith and science are indeed compatible.
Despite false reports that Francis recently comforted a young boy by telling him that his dog would go to heaven, he has insisted that all of creation - including animals, the elderly, the poor and unborn children - deserves protection. He has frequently denounced, including in his November address to the European parliament, the "throwaway culture" that disregards those on the margins of life.
But perhaps Francis' most surprising, arguably most consequential 2014 move came not in the realm of doctrine, but in international politics. Earlier this month, the Obama administration announced that it would restore diplomatic ties with Cuba after a half-century-long freeze. Behind the scenes, it was Francis who had written letters to both President Obama and Raul Castro encouraging the détente.
Such a move is not only a diplomatic victory for the pontiff, but a continuation of Pope Benedict's 2012 hope that Cuba would "build a renewed and open society, a better society, one more worthy of humanity and which better reflects the goodness of God."
Yet while these actions indicate Francis's desire for harmony, he ended the year with a blistering rebuke for those within the Curia.
While popes have traditionally used their year-end address to those who run the Vatican offices as a time of praise and encouragement, Francis enumerated "Fifteen Spiritual Ailments" that he deemed prevalent within the institution. Among them were pride, gossip, careerism, and infighting. While the address was delivered to those at the top of the church's leadership, its reverberations echo throughout the hierarchy worldwide.
God's "patient fidelity is stronger than darkness and corruption," Francis reminded Catholics at his Christmas Eve homily.
For a church that has known its fair share of scandal, such a message is one worth hearing anew. And for a world beleaguered by ongoing tribulation, it's a message that's open not just those within the church's doors, but in typical Pope Francis fashion, to those beyond as well.
White is coauthor of "Renewal: How a New Generation of Faithful Priests and Bishops is Revitalizing the Catholic Church."
