MikeLigalig.com

Quote from: hubag bohol on June 20, 2018, 03:17:26 PM
FIFA is undoubtedly in the wrong here, but then again, regulating chants is tricky business. Fans yell puto, which roughly means gay prostitute, at the opposing team's goalkeeper as a tactic to distract him from his task, a common enough practice in all sports. In this case, the chant is a very specific, homophobic double-entendre, playing on the concept of letting someone "score a goal on you." In Spanish, to score a goal is meter un gol. That translates literally as to put a goal in, so when a goalie fails at his job, he dejó que se la metieran, or allowed someone to stick it in. You see where this is going: The embarrassment of allowing a goal in your net is akin to being on the receiving end of anal sex—you know, like a gay guy.

Part of me wants to believe something got lost in translation, and that if FIFA really understood and felt the insult, it might act differently. They can abstractly consider what the word means, but they don't understand the visceral gut punch you feel when you hear a slur in your native language. The Mexican team's officials, on the other hand, know exactly what puto means. At the very least, they could give a symbolic statement denouncing it, even if it still takes decades for the fans to catch up.

As we've seen with the way the NBA handled the Clippers' Donald Sterling controversy or the growing outcry over the name of a certain Washington NFL team, sports can be a vehicle for the kinds of social conversations that lead to change. Mexico, Latin America, their sports industries, and their societies could've taken the puto ordeal as a moment to reckon with their homophobia. Instead, they chose to embrace the slur as part of their tradition. We shouldn't have to depend on a FIFA ruling to know this is wrong, but it sure would have been a step in the right direction.


http://www.slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/danny-and-nicole-discuss-a-letter-from-a-very-angry-wedding-guest.html

FIFA is shrugging its shoulders here because the Mexican chant, while clearly offensive, is not an explicit faggot (or maricón in this case). I am certain that if fans were chanting that, Mexican coach Miguel Herrera couldn't get away with saying, "FIFA should be worried about more serious things." Apparently, faggot and gay whore are not quite the same, though the malice of their intent seems difficult to separate.

It's also worth noting that puto is the masculine form of p**t, a clear misogynistic slur. A simple solution would be to ban all forms of the p-word. But language bans are never that simple. The English equivalent for p**t is also f***, since you can conjugate it in similarly versatile ways. "It was f***** hard": putamente difícil. "This f***** cold": este puto frío. "He was fucked up": estaba putiado. Forbidding p**t, like forbidding f***, is insane. I would riot for my right to use f*** in the same way I would riot for my right to conjugate p**t in all its forms.

Obviously, we are not going to erase either p**t or puto from common parlance. The problem here is that a gay slur is being sanctioned on the world stage by an international organization, a national soccer team, and an entire culture.

What's the Puto Problem?
By Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo



Mexican fans celebrate after the Mexico vs. Croatia FIFA World Cup match.
Photo by Pedro PARDO/AFP/Getty Images


If you listened closely during Mexico's match against Croatia on Monday, you might have heard fans of El Tri shouting the Spanish word puto during goal kicks. Despite how it sounds, puto does not mean point or punt. In fact, the word is a clear, if somewhat semantically sophisticated, anti-gay slur, which is why its use by Mexican fans has been so controversial during this World Cup. Still, FIFA has cleared Mexico of improper conduct charges in the wake of official complaints, and despite promises to the contrary, ESPN did not mute the slur during its broadcast on Monday.

FIFA is undoubtedly in the wrong here, but then again, regulating chants is tricky business. Fans yell puto, which roughly means gay prostitute, at the opposing team's goalkeeper as a tactic to distract him from his task, a common enough practice in all sports. In this case, the chant is a very specific, homophobic double-entendre, playing on the concept of letting someone "score a goal on you." In Spanish, to score a goal is meter un gol. That translates literally as to put a goal in, so when a goalie fails at his job, he dejó que se la metieran, or allowed someone to stick it in. You see where this is going: The embarrassment of allowing a goal in your net is akin to being on the receiving end of anal sex—you know, like a gay guy.

Many fans shrug off accusations of homophobia and insist the chant is just a joke. "We do not scream at the goalkeeper because of his sexual preference, we don't even care about it," a YouTube commenter on a 2016 public-service video denouncing the chant wrote. "We shout to create chaos, because it is part of the atmosphere of a stadium in Mexico."

For some, the chant merely illustrates wider homophobia in society. "Mexico is not alone in this. It is the most visible because the chant accompanies the national team," Nadel said. "The problem of homophobia in fútbol, both men's and women's – among fans, teams, and federations – is global. It is very hard to root out. Until societies cease seeing homosexuality through the lens of deviance and transgression, we will see homophobia in fútbol."


https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jun/18/puto-chants-mexico-football-world-cup

In recent years, the federation and players have made their case. Campaigns including public-service announcements from Mexico players have encouraged fans to put a stop to the chants. The Mexican federation this month tweeted – along with a link to rules of civility for the tournament – a direct plea that fans refrain from the chant. But the response suggests fans have no intention of complying.

Added attention has arguably only served to increase its use in MLS and USL stadiums, where Latino support is strong. In recent weeks, "Pride Night" matches at LA Galaxy and New York City FC were tarnished by the chants. Meanwhile, the new USL club Fresno FC, just months into it existence, has already been forced to denounce the fans' chants and launch its own anti-discrimination and anti-homophobia campaign.

"It always seemed like a very abstract thing, something we were saying to the opponent in this euphoric, collective way. It was part of the game that was completely unquestioned," says Romeo Guzman, a first-generation Mexican-American who acknowledged participating in the chant as a teenager and is now an assistant professor of history focusing on Mexican migration at Fresno State University. "As an adult, things have changed. I look at it and I obviously don't do it, and I wish that we could find ways to change it. It's homophobic, and it's not very clever."

But there is no doubt the chant is most prominent among Mexico fans. "To call your opponent homosexual is definitely along a spectrum of machismo, whereby your opponent is weaker – less masculine," says Joshua Nadel, author of Fútbol!: Why Soccer Matters in Latin America.

During the World Cup, Fifa will have observers at all 64 matches and will work with security to remove fans engaging in discriminatory behavior, a spokesperson for the world governing body told the Guardian.

"I think that a lot of the hand-wringing is for show," says Nadel, an assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at North Carolina Central University. "If Fifa and/or the [Mexican federation] can plausibly say, 'Look, we're trying to stop it,' then they can quiet critics without imposing some form of sanction that has real teeth. I'm not saying that they don't care, but it isn't among the top priorities of any federation or confederation."

On Sunday, the chant made its first appearance in the 25th minute when Manuel Neuer lined up a kick. Quickly taken German goalkicks later in the game seemed to soften its presence.

Lamenting Fifa's perceived inaction on the issue in 2014, Slate's Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo wrote: "They can abstractly consider what the word means, but they don't understand the visceral gut punch you feel when you hear a slur in your native language. The Mexican team's officials, on the other hand, know exactly what puto means. At the very least, they could give a symbolic statement denouncing it, even if it still takes decades for the fans to catch up."

'Homophobic and not very clever': why puto chants haunt Mexican football
El Tri's victory over Germany on Sunday was marred by alleged homophobic chanting. It's a common trend across stadiums in the Americas


Victor Balta
Mon 18 Jun 2018 17.34 BST Last modified on Tue 19 Jun 2018 12.57 BST



Mexico fans saw their team record a famous victory against Germany on Sunday. Photograph: Dave Shopland/BPI/REX/Shutterstock


You can say this for Mexican soccer fans: they've managed to turn one of football's least dramatic moments into one of its more controversial and offensive. The pattern is familiar. The opponent's goalkeeper lines up a goalkick and the chant begins: "Ehhhh..." Then Mexican fans' voices rise in unison until the kick prompts a cry of "puto!"

The term is homophobic slang for a male sex worker. And its use by fans at matches from Mexico City to California and now Russia continues to give Fifa and the Mexican federation headaches. On Monday, Fifa announced it has opened a disciplinary procedure against Mexico after the chants were heard during El Tri's victory over Germany.

Homophobia and homophobic chants are not exclusive to Mexico fans. Fifa issued 51 disciplinary actions over homophobia during 2018 World Cup qualifiers. Of these, 11 were handed to the Mexican federation, with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama and Peru also receiving multiple fines. Fifa additionally cited Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Greece, Hungary and Serbia once each for homophobic chants.

A dog loves a person the way people love each other only while in the grip of new love: with intense, unwavering focus, attentive to every move the beloved makes, unaware of imperfections, desiring little more than to be close, to be entwined, to touch and touch and touch. For my mother, who never ceased to miss my father and who must have felt herself to be on the margins of her children's busy lives, it was nothing less than a godsend to be loved by that little dog.

Every time Mom went to visit my sister or my brother, she would leave Emma with me. For days, the dog would sit before our back door, the same door my mother used every night when she and Emma came over for supper. The window in that door is the only one in our house that reaches low enough for a dachshund to see though. She would sit in front of the door and wait. She waited and waited — she had endless reserves of patience and time — and three days later, a week at most, my mother always came back to her.

Two weeks after the funeral, Emma went missing when she was outside with me. That tiny, dapple-colored dog was both willful and invisible: She never once came when called, and she could disappear beneath the lowest bushes, behind the smallest fallen branch. I turned that yard inside out looking for her. When I finally thought to check at Mom's house across the street, I found her at the back door, jumping up and scratching to be let in. She had been scratching so urgently, and for so long, the paint was chipped away from the doorjamb.

That's what it means to be loved by a dog.


https://www.nytimes.com/

As it happens, Emma was my mother's dog first, and losing her has been a double grief. I miss her inimitable sandwich-snarfing, bookshelf-climbing, purse-raiding, cabinet-unlocking, smoothie-stealing, ever-grinning rascal self. I miss the way, even in her nearly blind, completely deaf, partially paralyzed old age, she wanted to be right beside me, tugging her little bed till it was directly under my feet while I worked.

I miss her, but I also miss taking care of her — rushing her to the emergency vet at least three times a year for eating everything from chocolate bonbons to rat poison, carefully dispensing her medicine twice a day, constantly pushing the chairs under the table to keep her from climbing up and launching herself off from the table's full height. Protecting Emma from herself felt like a way to keep caring for Mom even years after Mom was gone.

That little dog caused my lonely mother untold exasperation and delight. Emma would drag Mom's purse under the bed to a place Mom couldn't reach even lying on the floor. Mom would get up from her chair for half a minute and turn around to find Emma in her place, lapping up the coffee she'd left on the table beside the recliner and finishing off the oatmeal too. Half the stories Mom told her grandchildren at supper every night were stories about me as a little girl. The other half were about Emma.

My husband thinks this story is hilarious because it reminds him of the small-town Southerners and country people he grew up among — and also because it is so deeply at odds with the attitudes of suburban America, with its pet strollers and doggy day cares and canine pulmonologists. Iraqi soldiers would have no better luck persuading suburban Nashvillians to banish their dogs to the yard than American soldiers had in persuading Iraqis to invite a dog into the house.

As a measure of how deeply dogs are embedded in our own lives, consider what happened when Emma, our 15-year-old dachshund, died last month. Three friends brought flowers. One brought chocolate. One brought a homemade strawberry pie. One brought a barbecue supper and an original poem. Two little girls who loved her made candle holders. ("I need some water, some glue, a jar and a lot of glitter," the 7-year-old told her father.) On Facebook, 158 people wrote messages of condolence.

The outpouring of kindness reminded me of the days just after my mother's sudden death, when it seemed that everyone I knew brought flowers and food and sweet notes. It might seem disrespectful to compare the loss of even the dearest animal companion to the loss of a beloved mother, but it makes a particular kind of emotional sense. Everyone has a mother, and the profound grief of losing her is one most people instinctively understand, even if their own mothers are alive and well. Everyone who's ever loved a dog knows the true depth of that loss, even if they've never met the specific dog being mourned.

By Margaret Renkl
Contributing Writer
June 18, 2018


Image
The author's dog, Emma. Credit Susan Bryant


NASHVILLE — There's a story my husband has been telling for nearly 15 years, since not long after United States forces invaded Iraq. In a news report, American soldiers were going door to door with bomb-sniffing dogs, trying to persuade the citizens of Baghdad to adopt a well-trained pet.

Many Iraqis regard dogs as unclean, and American soldiers were making the case for rethinking that policy: Baghdad would be safer if dogs were housed throughout the city, sounding the alarm whenever an enemy tried to plant a roadside bomb in the night. Also, a dog will love you unconditionally.

The Iraqi homeowner in the story looked at the G.I. and shrugged. "Then you would be loved by a dog."

America has been dominant for so long that it takes for granted outcomes that support its policies and interests, and undervalues the systemic advantages of institutions and norms. Yet Mr. Trump may end up proving an illiberal preserver of the liberal international order. By calling into question so many fundamental elements of the system that the United States built in the devastated aftermath of World War II, he is forcing Americans to imagine a world in which the United States does not tend the garden of international order, as George Shultz describes foreign policy.

Americans want an international order that makes them safe and prosperous. And no doubt this fall, when Mr. Trump gets his military parade in Washington, we will hear no end of boasts about American power. And during the midterm elections, we will hear all sorts of talk about how the president has made America great again.

But those boasts will ring hollow if, at the same time, America lets go of the world order that is its greatest achievement. Tending the garden that the hard men who fought World War II labored to create is a much less expensive undertaking than allowing it to fall into disrepair and having to recreate it.

The Islamic State in part grew out of the United States doing too little to consolidate the gains of the surge in Iraq and caring too little about the Syrian government's depredations against its people. None of these are outcomes that advance American interests.

Now imagine the longer term. China is already demonstrating that not only will it not play by the rules of the American-led order, but it also intends to write and enforce new rules. Absent American opposition, it will continue to force smaller, weaker states in East Asia into submission and expand its control over sea traffic. It will use technology to monitor, restrain and penalize critics worldwide. A Chinese-led world order would be one of privileges rather than rights, power rather than law, tribute rather than alliance.

That's a very costly peace — if it even succeeds at sustaining peace. More likely, if the United States does not sustain the order, a rising power will eventually force it to defend its interests or succumb. That is what happened in every power transition except the one between Britain and the United States — an exception born of their democratic similarities, and one unlikely to be repeated with the United States and China.

Mr. Trump's attack on the liberal world order is not just about the price America pays for it. He seems bent on destroying the friendships and respect that bind America and its allies. If he succeeds, America will be seen as — and may even become — no different from Russia and China, and countries will have no reason to assist America's efforts rather than theirs.

Contrary to the president's core complaint, the American-led order isn't that expensive, especially as compared with the alternatives. About 40 percent of America's gross domestic product was allocated to the military during World War II. It now stands at less than 4 percent — not an unreasonable price for a tried-and-true insurance policy.

The president and his fellow critics argue that if America does less, others will do more — that its largess facilitates free riders. That hasn't proved true with its closest friends: Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the United States has reduced its military forces in Europe by about 85 percent. But Europeans have even more significantly cut their defense spending, and become more tentative about the use of military force. Far from emboldening allies, the American drawdown has made them less likely to act.

And if others do more, they may not be the right others, and what they do may not serve America's interests. Russia has been doing more in Europe since the United States drew down, and more in Syria as a result of America's doing so little.

China is doing more in the South and East China Seas, and its activities will greatly complicate American military operations in defense of allies, in preserving the free flow of commerce and even in protecting its own territory.

That last point is critical, and it is the genius of the system. America benefits from supporting others. The American security umbrella enables friendly governments to attract investment and grow peacefully. It encourages cooperation. The system allows America and other countries to share the costs of preserving common defense and the free movement of goods and people (although sometimes others put in less than Americans would like).

The world has never seen anything like this — a superpower constraining itself to such a degree — or the peace and stability it brings. America doesn't always get it right; often it's clumsy, fails to live up to its ideology, and breaks its own rules.

But the results speak for themselves. It has been over 70 years since the last great-power conflict. Democracies fight lots of wars, but they do not fight other democracies. The wars they fight are about enlarging the perimeter of security and prosperity, expanding and consolidating the liberal order.

The global economy has grown about sevenfold since 1960, adjusted for inflation. Free people and free markets have produced most of the strongest and most prosperous states in the international order, and those states have linked themselves through alliances, institutions and trade regimes that are mutually beneficial.

Widening disparity of outcomes and fewer avenues of opportunity call the fundamental fairness of the current system into question. Terrible, costly mistakes like the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis destroyed the credibility of experts who are culpable for the failures but insulated from the consequences. And America's allies celebrate the generosity of their social welfare systems and disparage ours, while spending less than America does to defend their countries.

These are all fair points, and they help explain the rise of Mr. Trump and the declining appreciation for a liberal order. But none of these things invalidates the importance of sustaining a system in which America benefits more than other geometries of order will permit.

Let's review what, exactly, that order is. Beginning in the wreckage of World War II, America established a set of global norms that solidified its position atop a rules-based international system. These included promoting democracy, making enduring commitments to countries that share its values, protecting allies, advancing free trade and building institutions and patterns of behavior that legitimize American power by giving less powerful countries a say.

The administration's alternative vision for the international order is a bare-knuckled assertion of unilateral power that some call America First; more colorfully, a White House official characterized it to The Atlantic as the "We're America, Bitch" doctrine. This aggressive disregard for the interests of like-minded countries, indifference to democracy and human rights and cultivation of dictators is the new world Mr. Trump is creating. He and his closest advisers would pull down the liberal order, with America at its helm, that remains the best guarantor of world peace humanity has ever known. We are entering a new, terrifying era.

According to the president, the liberal world order is a con job — he insists America is paying too much and being swindled by its friends. He wants the United States to pull back from its alliances and let its partners fend for themselves, and devote its money to its domestic needs.

Those criticisms resonate in a time when Americans are fearful of how the world is changing, and when the country's leaders have done a poor job of explaining those changes and easing their impact on workers and their families.

by Kori Schake
The New York Times International Edition
18 Jun 2018


The planet is a safer place because of the U.S.-led liberal order. President Trump wants to destroy it.


Decades from now, we may look back at the first weeks of June 2018 as a turning point in world history: the end of the liberal order.

At a summit in Canada, the president of the United States rejected associating the country with "the rules-based international order" that America had built after World War II, and threatened the country's closest allies with a trade war. He insulted the Canadian prime minister, and then, just a few days later, lavished praise on Kim Jong-un, the world's most repressive dictator. Without consulting America's allies in the region, he even reiterated his desire to withdraw American troops from South Korea.

Such reckless disregard for the security concerns of America's allies, hostility to mutually beneficial trade and willful isolation of the United States is unprecedented. Yet this is the foreign policy of the Trump administration. Quite explicitly, the leader of the free world wants to destroy the alliances, trading relationships and international institutions that have characterized the American-led order for 70 years.

But no. Instead, as photographs from the Quebec resort showed, Mr. Trump faced the other leaders with arms defiantly crossed and face locked in a pout. It was a confirmation that so long as Mr. Trump is in the White House, and maybe beyond that, something fundamental in the community of Western democracies will be missing. America, the leader of the free world and the architect of so much of the modern world order, had decided to go its own way.

For the six other Group of 7 nations, this must be a time of resolve and unity. For Americans, it's past time to recognize that this president has transformed "America First" into "America Alone," and that this is the last place a great and powerful nation wants to be.

Indeed, the Group of 7 was just the kind of forum a bully like Mr. Trump cannot abide, not out of geopolitical considerations, but because he cannot dominate and preen. He knew he would be on the defensive — over backing out of the Paris environment accord and the Iran nuclear deal, and now over the tariffs he slapped on European and Canadian steel and aluminum — so he made a point of being late, acting petulant, leaving early and lashing out at Mr. Trudeau.

That behavior, at a meeting intended to project a unified front on the major economic issues of the day, seemed to summarize all the damage and insults Mr. Trump has thrown at the community of democratic nations. The allies had been wary of Mr. Trump from the outset, given his aversion to international organizations and multilateral trade agreements, his conviction that the United States is being ripped off by its military allies and trade partners, and his impatience for the details of foreign affairs. But there was a lingering hope, most recently demonstrated by Mr. Macron's chummy state visit to Washington, that he would respond to old allies and grow into his office.

https://www.nytimes.com/
By The Editorial Board
The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

June 11, 2018

Image
President Trump at the Group of 7 meeting in Canada on Friday.CreditPool photo by Ian Langsdon


When Vladimir Putin ordered his hackers to surreptitiously help Donald Trump in the presidential race, he could hardly have anticipated that once in office, Mr. Trump would so outrageously, destructively and thoroughly alienate America's closest neighbors and allies as he did at the Group of 7 meeting in Canada. The lame explanation from Mr. Trump's courtiers, that he needed to look tough for his meeting with Kim Jong-un, made matters worse by implying that he felt he needed to publicly kick friends aside to impress a murderous dictator.

Nations represented at the meeting — and especially Canada, whose prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was personally insulted in a way defying basic social norms — reacted with horror and dismay. International diplomacy cannot be conducted by "fits of anger," said President Emmanuel Macron of France, who Mr. Trump only recently embraced in Washington. "In a matter of seconds, you can destroy trust with 280 Twitter characters," said the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas. Editorials were less restrained: "When roused, we don't roll over at the request of an insulting bully, no matter how big," hissed Canada's Globe and Mail.

He he...

Tagam...

Tungod sa maong pilosopiya, nagmalinawon jud tuod...

Cool...

Hmm, pwede na 7 years longer. Wa man diay kaso kon pangag ta...

The paper also examines the inherent challenges of bolstering the numbers of a small colony of settlers on the planet. The concept of "love" might have to take a back seat to pure survival, with men and women being paired up by their biology rather than emotion. Additionally, some individuals may never be allowed to have children due to undesirable traits that are a risk to the colony as a whole.

In a somewhat scary aside, the researchers also note that editing the genes of future Mars babies might be an easy way to increase the prospects of survival. Pushing out bad traits and optimizing a human for life on Mars could give us a big edge, but as generations pass it would also result in a new kind of human — one who is fine on Mars but could never live a normal life here on Earth.

In the paper, the researchers tackle a huge number of potential problems that could crop up when humans are finally ready to rear young on Mars. The first and most obvious hurdle is the low gravity environment, which could pose a serious threat to the conception and pregnancy processes that seem so simple here on Earth.

With just one-third the gravity of Earth, Mars travelers will be subjected to a whole range of health problems. Scientists know this because astronauts who have spent months and in some cases years in space have been closely studied for changes to their biology. Lower gravity causes muscles to deteriorate rapidly and can even weaken bone structure. On top of that, astronauts sometimes experience vision problems and even changes to the shape of their brains.

These are just the things that perfectly healthy adults have to deal with in space, which is to say nothing of the challenge of actually carrying a child in a microgravity environment. Put simply, we don't even know if a human mother could carry a child to full term without something going wrong.

http://bgr.com/
Mike Wehner
May 30th, 2018 at 10:50 AM


The idea of a colony of humans on Mars isn't just science fiction anymore; NASA and space agencies around the world, along with independent scientists and researchers, are working hard to determine just what it would take for humanity to take root on the Red Planet. Getting there will be an immense challenge, as will setting up structures, creating sustainable sources of food, and battling the inhospitable elements, but sex might be the biggest risk of all.

In a new research paper published in Futures, an international team of scientists examines the challenges of reproduction on the Martian surface. It's a risky proposition, but if humans succeed in conceiving, carrying, and birthing offspring on another world it might actually be the start of a new species.

Attaboy!

BY JADA GREEN
https://www.menshealth.com/


Ever think about what happens when you "break the seal" during a night of drinking?

Of course you're going to get the urge to pee after you've thrown back a few beers. But all it takes is one whiz to open up the floodgates, and before you know it, you're returning to the bar bathroom every 20 minutes.

The reason you can't stop yourself after that first pee is because the relief of urinating sends feel-good signals to your brain, says Judd W. Moul, M.D., F.A.C.S., Director of the Duke Prostate Center Division of Urologic Surgery.

As the night goes on, your brain essentially tells you, 'Well, you peed a little while ago, it felt good, and you should definitely do that again.'

To curb the frequent trips, you might try to hold in your pee. Bad move: Ignoring a brimming bladder could do some serious damage, says Dr. Moul.

For proof, he shares one horror story from his days as a doctor in the Army.

"A young soldier came in who had gotten totally drunk the night before and passed out," Dr. Moul says. "His bladder was holding the equivalent of about three bottles of wine and it became over distended, like a floppy bag."

After that, the patient was never able to urinate normally again and had to stick a catheter in his penis four to six times a day, Dr. Moul says.

Here you are, Insika ka...

Quote from: hubag bohol on July 17, 2017, 03:20:33 PM



Uloklook?

Uloklook redux...

Rosmah Mansur

Najib Razak and Rosmah Mansur

A police truck being loaded with orange boxes, the signature colour of the French luxury brand Hermes, on May 18, 2018. ST PHOTO: ARIFFIN JAMAR

The police said the items were seized as the team had reasonable grounds to suspect they were the subject matter of a crime or crimes under Malaysia's Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act 2001.

Mr Singh said early Friday morning that the police are still working on opening a safe in that house.

Mr Najib's lawyer, Datuk Harpal Singh, said the police took action to drill through the safe as the key had been misplaced, and the safe had not been opened in two decades.

The raids were conducted as part of an investigation into the scandal-plagued state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).

Mr Najib and his wife have been tied to the country's most high-profile financial scandal. The US Department of Justice, in its probe, found that Ms Rosmah had purchased a pink diamond worth US$23 million with 1MDB funds.

On Saturday, members of Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (PPBM) youth wing filed a police report, claiming that they received video evidence showing an alleged attempt to "hide" at least 50 Birkin bags that could have belonged to Madam Rosmah. The video supposedly showed the bags being moved to Pavilion Residences in a Prime Minister's Department van.

Items were also seized during the raid at Mr Najib's Taman Duta residence on Thursday morning.

On Friday (May 18) the crime investigation team lodged a report of the items seized from the Taman Duta mansion, which included over 50 luxury handbags from brands like Chanel, Gucci and Prada. Amongst the haul were ten luxury watches including several Rolexes and a Patek Philippe, as well as RM537,000 (S$181,000) and 2.87 million Sri Lankan rupees (S$24,400) in cash.

Mr Singh, who spoke to reporters outside the condominium early Friday (May 18) morning after the raid, said the apartments belonged to a "Tan Sri", but declined to say more.

"The total sum worth of items cannot be ascertained now," said Mr Singh. "We'll be counting and will know by tomorrow." He said: "The number of jewellery is rather big."

Many of the orange boxes were labelled with pictures of different Birkin bags, with descriptions such as "Brown Ostrich".

Madam Rosmah Mansor, Datuk Seri Najib's wife, is known for her penchant for Birkin bags. Each bag costs anywhere between US$12,000 (S$16,105) and US$300,000. She caused a stir when it was reported that she bought a US$200,000 crocodile Birkin bag in 2015. Her aide denied it.



A police truck being loaded with orange boxes, the signature colour of the French luxury brand Hermes, on May 18, 2018. ST PHOTO: ARIFFIN JAMAR

Malaysian police seize 284 luxury bags, 72 bags of cash and valuables from Najib-linked apartments



A police truck being loaded with orange boxes, the signature colour of the French luxury brand Hermes, on May 18, 2018. ST PHOTO: ARIFFIN JAMAR

PUBLISHEDMAY 18, 2018, 1:54 AM SGT
UPDATEDMAY 18, 2018, 1:08 PM
Trinna Leong
Malaysia Correspondent


KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysian police on Thursday (May 17) night raided three apartments in a posh Kuala Lumpur condominium owned by former prime minister Najib Razak's family, carting away 284 boxes containing luxury handbags and 72 bags filled with jewellery, cash of various denominations, watches and other valuables.

Mr Amar Singh, director of police commercial crime investigations, said the police have searched six premises since Wednesday - the Prime Minister's Office, Mr Najib's residence in Taman Duta and four other residences linked to him.

At one of these residences, Pavilion Residences, the police took what was likely to be their biggest haul, loading five police trucks with hundreds of orange boxes containing Hermes Birkin bags. Astro Awani reported that a police officer emerged from the condominium with a money counting machine.

In full regalia:

A 2016 study by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Indraprastha Institute of Information Delhi said India topped the list of countries with selfie-related deaths, with 76 deaths from March 2014 to September 2016.

In 2016, a teenager in India's Punjab state died when he accidentally shot himself while posing for a selfie with a loaded gun.

That same year, authorities in Mumbai established 16 no-selfie zones after a spike in selfie-related deaths.

By ARSHAD R. ZARGAR CBS NEWS May 7, 2018, 1:48 PM


NEW DELHI -- A man trying to take a selfie with an injured bear was mauled to death in India on Wednesday, the latest in a string of selfie-related fatalities in the country.

The Hindustan Times reports the victim, Prabhu Bhatara, was returning from a wedding in the Pharsaguda area of the eastern Indian state of Odisha with several others when he stopped his car near a forest to attend to "nature's call." He spotted an injured bear and tried to snap a selfie with the animal.

Amateur footage broadcast by several Indian news networks shows the victim being mauled by a bear while another person tries to ward off the animal using a stick. A stray dog can also be seen attacking the bear. The victim, engaged in a fist-to-claw fight with the bear, manages to stand up briefly, before being dragged down to the ground again.

The Hindustan Times also reported the bystanders "were busy shooting the incident on their mobile phones instead of trying to rescue him." The newspaper quotes forest official Dhanurjaya Mohapatra as saying "Bhatara died on the spot."

After killing Bhatara, the bear did not move from the side of the road. Bhatara's body was recovered only after forest officials arrived and tranquilized the bear.

It's something that many other researchers use in their work, and Johnson stresses that Hawking and Hertog's paper, while intriguing, is simply another entry in the field.

"It's two very good researchers adding a paper to the many very good papers that have been incrementally moving this framework of ideas," Johnson says.

Hawking himself appears to have been still at work on the theory. Just weeks before his death, he submitted a newer version of the paper containing substantial changes. His co-author Hertog will surely continue to refine the work as well.

In the end, this paper is an interesting hypothesis about how our universe could look on the largest scale. It may not reshape our view of the cosmos — at least not yet — but it adds more intellectual firepower to our collective arsenal. And that's probably what Stephen Hawking would have wanted. --http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/

Bringing Clarity

If the kinds of universe that could possibly exist is finite, then scientists could begin to understand how and why our universe looks how it does today. Hawking's paper does not tell us exactly what kind of universes might exist, nor does he definitively prove multiverse or cosmic inflation theories. As Kinney points out, Hawking and Hertog don't even suggest any ways that we might be able to see evidence of the multiverse, meaning that their theory remains, for the moment, untestable.

The two rely on something called the holographic principle to conduct their work. It's a way of reconciling quantum mechanics with gravity — the physics of the very large and the very small, as Mack, puts it. The holographic principle states that all of the information in a volume of space is contained in the boundary of the volume. In effect, it compresses a 3-D space into a 2-D space, and the end result is to make the calculations easier.

But an infinite number of universes presents a problem to physicists. One of the most fundamental questions in science is why our universe looks the way it does. Why is the speed of light 186,282 miles per second? Determining the probability of our universe looking the way it does would help scientists get at the answer. Finding probabilities involving infinity is a useless exercise, though. What Hawking and Hertog have done, using a lot of complicated math, is to propose a way that we could define some boundaries on the kinds of universes that might exist.

"It's like you have a bath full of lots and lots and lots of different kinds of soap bubbles and each soap bubble is a different universe, and there's a huge variety of different soap bubbles of different shapes," says Clifford Johnson, a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Southern California. "And what this model is suggesting is a mechanism by which maybe the variety of soap bubbles that are available is not as large as was thought."

In addition, these universes might look a little more like ours, according to Katie Mack, an assistant professor of physics at North Carolina State University.

"The prediction is for ... a smaller number of universes and they would have more in common with each other," she says. "You could draw more of a straight line between the early universe and what we see today."

And even for one of the brightest minds of our time, the calculations are extremely complex. Hawking and Hertog describe their preliminary theory as a "toy model," or one that significantly simplifies the real world to make the calculations easier. Such a model wouldn't necessarily reflect the universe as we see it. No one said theoretical physics was easy.

Many Universes

Stephen Hawking's last paper is titled "A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?" It tackles the idea of a multiverse, a vast collection of universes that exist simultaneously, though they're spread out almost unimaginably far from each other. Multiverses arose, the theory goes, because of something called inflation. In the fractions of a second after our universe emerged, space-time expanded at an immense rate. As it did so, tiny quantum fluctuations expanded to become the large-scale features of the universe we observe today, and which serve as evidence that the theory might be true.

Under a variation of the theory that Hawking and Hertog work with, called eternal inflation, this inflation continues forever in most places, but, in some patches, it stops. Where it stops, universes form — our own and others, in a repeating process that never ends. In these universes, the laws of physics all look different, meaning constants we take for granted like the speed of light would vary between them.
"Eternal inflation creates an infinite number of patch universes, little bubble universes, all over the place with this inflating space between them," says Will Kinney, a professor of physics at University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences.

What Stephen Hawking's Final Paper Says (And Doesn't Say)
By Nathaniel Scharping | March 20, 2018 4:51 pm


Before he died, renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking submitted a paper, with co-author Thomas Hertog, to an as-yet-unknown journal. Hawking's last known scientific writing, the paper deals with the concept of the multiverse and a theory known as cosmic inflation. Though the paper currently exists only in pre-print form, meaning it hasn't completed the process of peer-review, it's received a significant amount of coverage.  "Stephen Hawking's last paper," after all, does have a bit of a mythological ring to it.

Stephen Hawking wrote a lot of papers, though. Most dealt with the same sort of heady concepts as his last, and few received such an inordinate amount of attention. Claims that the paper make predictions for the end of universe, or could prove the multiverse exists abound. But it's worth remembering that the things Hawking thought and wrote about are abstract, they exist largely in the realm of theory. Even more well-known concepts like Hawking radiation have continued to elude scientists, so drawing solid conclusions from any one paper is difficult.. Like many topics in theoretical physics, the ideas that Stephen Hawking pondered were so radical and far-out that we usually couldn't even test them.

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