Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 139
June 7, 2017
Aly Raisman’s inspiring message: ‘Wear what makes you happy’
Aly Raisman has one message for women: Wear what you want.
The Olympic gymnast, who has often used her platform to speak out against body shaming, posted a photo of herself on Instagram with a message reminding her followers that women don’t have to dress modestly to be respected and the importance of being proud of your body.
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The message:
Wear whatever makes you feel happy and confident. Don’t EVER let anyone tell you how you should or shouldn’t dress. We are all entitled to wear what we want. Females do not have to dress modest to be respected. Be proud of your body. It’s never about the number on the scale it’s about the way you feel. You are all unique and beautiful in your own way. No one is perfect. AND no matter who you are, male or female, we all have those days of insecurity. We are all human. Everyone’s story is important. EVERYONE. You never know what someone is going through. Thank you all for continuing to inspire me each and everyday. Spread the love guys and enjoy your Monday
Obama, Trudeau have dinner in Montreal
The duo dined at trendy Liverpool House on Tuesday when the former US president was in town for a speaking engagement.
The pair have a storied bromance, which began when Mr Trudeau visited the White House for a state dinner last year.
Mr Trudeau, who once called Mr Obama his “sibling”, tweeted that they discussed getting young people “to take action in their communities”.
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The Obama Foundation also tweeted that the two had discussed their “shared commitment” to youth leadership.
Mr Obama was in town to give a speech at the Palais des congrès hosted by the Montreal Chamber of Commerce. The event was sold out, with reports of tickets being resold online for hundreds of dollars.
Canada’s PM toasts “sibling” Obama
Is the US experiencing Trudeaumania
The best Trubama fanfiction
During his speech, Mr Obama commended the Paris climate agreement and expressed disappointment that the US has withdrawn.
“In Paris, we came together around the most ambitious agreement in history to fight climate change,” he said. “An agreement that even with the temporary absence of American leadership will still give our children a fighting chance.”
But it wasn’t all business for the busy former president, who took time to have dinner with the Canadian prime minister.
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Restaurant owner David McMillan told the CBC that the pair seemed jovial at dinner, which included oysters, shrimp, halibut, steak, spaghetti lobster and strawberry shortcake. The restaurant is a favorite of Mr Trudeau’s, who is from Montreal and represents the district of Papineau.
But while the pair were cool and collected inside, outside it was mayhem with about 200 security guards and a street packed with onlookers.
Source:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40190393
Trump floats idea of using solar panels to pay for Mexico wall
President Donald Trump floated putting solar panels on his planned Mexican border wall in a meeting with legislative leaders Tuesday afternoon, according to White House and Capitol Hill officials.
It was unclear why Trump brought up the topic, but he presented the panels as a way to fund the wall, which is expected to cost billions of dollars, according to three people familiar with the conversation.
He didn’t express certainty that it would happen — but that he’d heard it as a possible idea and wanted to see what others thought, said a senior official familiar with the White House meeting.
Trump has insisted that Mexico will pay for the wall’s construction — something Mexican officials have repeatedly denied — but has acknowledged that taxpayers may need to initially foot the bill before being repaid.
Source:
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/06/trump-wall-solar-panels-mexico-239204
Travel insurance could become compulsory to visit Thailand
That’s because Thai tourism officials are pushing forward with a proposal to require all visitors to Thailand to obtain travel insurance before entering the country.
Apparently our misadventures in the South East Asian country are costing local hospitals a fortune.
Officials at the Ministry of Tourism and Sports are deliberating over the proposal raised in a meeting last week to make the insurance compulsory.
According to Jaturon Phakdeewanit, director of the Tourism Safety and Security Standards, visitors without travel insurance have cost Thailand at least 3 billion baht ($A117 million) a year for their medical treatments at state hospitals.
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“We need to push this through as soon as possible because the problem is becoming more serious,” he said.
Government officials will be discussing with tourism operators about the best approach to implement the new rule, before submitting the proposal to the cabinet for approval.
Travel insurance documents will likely be inspected at immigration counters upon arrival, as many visitors do not need visa to enter the country.
Travel insurance policies can cover you for unexpected accidents or illness, lost luggage, theft, personal liability and unforeseen trip cancellation.
The cost of purchasing insurance can vary greatly depending on a range of factors such as age, itinerary and level of cover, but according to a guide on CompareTravelInsurance.com.au, a policy for a person aged around 30-years-old travelling to Thailand for a one-week holiday could cost anywhere from $30 to $250.
Tourism is a major industry in Thailand, with more than 14 million people visiting the country since January 1, generating $US20.5 billion ($A27.4 billion) dollars in revenue.
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Autopsy: Denny’s beating victim died of strangulation, chest compression
John Hernandez died from lack of oxygen to the brain caused by strangulation and chest compression, the Harris County Medical Examiner has ruled.
The autopsy confirmed the 24-year-old man’s death was a homicide.
Hernandez died after being beaten and restrained by the husband of a Harris County deputy. It happened last week outside a Denny’s in the Sheldon area.
A lawyer for the victim’s family released a new witness video Monday that shows the much larger man restraining Hernandez.
“An anonymous concerned citizen brought me the video because he said it shows murder,” Carroll said. “I concur.”
An edited version of the video can be seen below. The faces have been blurred out since no charges have been filed at his time.
The man who beat Hernandez saw him urinating outside the restaurant, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.
Witnesses say Hernandez was quickly overpowered by the man, who continued to beat him then put him in a chokehold for 10 to 15 minutes. They said Hernandez was too drunk to defend himself.
“It’s a very sad video because you’re watching a man basically being killed,” Carroll said. “He was kicking his legs in a helpless fashion, and you can hear him gargling or gurling, ‘Stop, stop.’”
The other man involved in the incident is the husband of a Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy and has not been arrested or named as a suspect.
His wife, the HCSO deputy, was also present during the incident.
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Scot Courtney, the attorney for the HCSO deputy’s husband, said his client acted to subdue Hernandez.
“Mr. Hernandez, after being confronted for urinating in front of the Denny’s entrance in the parking lot after he was told that wasn’t what should be happening, his response was to very quickly approach my client and strike my client in the face. And of course my client went to quickly subdue him,” Courtney said.
Hernandez’s wife and 3-year-old daughter were begging the man to stop.
“She was crying and telling (the man beating Hernandez) stop and he didn’t even stop,” Hernandez’s wife said. “I told him, ‘Please stop. Don’t do that to him. He’s drunk.’ He wasn’t in any position to fight. But, he didn’t have any compassion. He was really angry.”
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez says the deputy helped to restrain Hernandez but then called for help when she noticed he was not breathing.
Eyewitnesses say the deputy did nothing to help and stood by while her husband continued to beat and strangle Hernandez.
“The husband of the off-duty sheriff has the man in what you would call a ‘reverse headlock,’ for lack of a better term,” Carroll said. And he has the man helpless. The husband of the off-duty sheriff’s deputy looks like he weighs at least 300 pounds. Extremely big. He’s very muscular.”
Hernandez was removed from life support three days after the incident.
Family and friends are demanding answers from county officials.
“Even if it was self defense, this act does not merit somebody dying over this,” said Cesar Espinosa, executive director of FIEL. “There was a sheriff’s deputy involved and her husband was also involved and they should’ve known better that when Mr. John Hernandez was gasping for air he was already subdued there was need to murder this young man on the street.”
The video may not be enough evidence to file criminal charges, according to KHOU 11 News legal analyst Gerald Treece.
He viewed every angle of publicly released surveillance video captured inside the Denny’s on Crosby Freeway in east Harris County.
It first showed Hernandez push past his wife to urinate outside. There, Hernandez ran into the husband of a Harris County Sheriff’s deputy. He confronted Hernandez, then “restrained him” investigators said.
“The guy on the bottom really is not resisting/ is he?” Treece asked while watching the videos. “He can’t. That guy (on top) is too big.”
While lawyers for the witness who shot the cell phone video release Monday and Hernandez’s family see a crime.
Treece needs to see more.
“The film, while it’s very interesting, it doesn’t answer the questions a grand jury is going to have to answer,” Treece said.
Texas law only allows citizens to use deadly force when facing an imminent threat to their lives, Treece said. In the Hernandez case, that threat is hard to see.
“If so, when did that imminent fear occur?” Treece asked. “Did it ever stop?”
Grand jurors will likely see complete unedited clips of the scuffle, Treece said. However, how they rule is always a question of who and what grand juries believe, he added.
Sheriff Gonzalez said the homicide is still under investigation and stated he is asking for oversight of the HCSO investigation by the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Source:
UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS STEAL MILLIONS IN UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS WITH HELP FROM CHICAGO-AREA WOMAN
Leticia Garcia set up her garage in a Chicago suburb to look like a bustling home office, outfitting it with computers, employees and posted business hours. But the grandmother was actually conducting a simple unemployment insurance scam, one that stole almost $7 million from the state of Illinois, attracted a federal investigation and on Monday earned Garcia a four-year prison sentence.
Garcia would pass out business cards at gas stations and on some days 10 to 15 people would walk into her office and hire her to file unemployment insurance claims for them, according to court papers filed by federal prosecutors. Many of her clients were Mexican-born immigrants without lawful immigration status or work permits, which made them ineligible for unemployment benefits.
The Illinois Department of Employment Security website asks applicants if they are U.S. citizens and for the city of their birth, and Garcia usually checked the U.S. citizen box—even though she knew her clients were not. She also kept a list of U.S. cities near the Mexican border, handwritten and neatly organized, and selected from it when filling out a client’s application.
Garcia, who lived about an hour from Chicago in Round Lake Beach, also submitted unemployment claims with false Social Security numbers. When a confidential informant told her he was concerned because he bought his Social Security number “on the street,” Garcia and her employee reassured him that wouldn’t be a problem. Garcia told the informant she had clients who used false Social Security numbers for five or six years without problems, and that nine out of 10 applications were approved.
During the time Garcia operated her fraud scam, from about 2009 to 2012, she deposited about $37,000 in cash into accounts in her daughter’s name, listed her occupation on tax returns as “housewife” and didn’t report any income. When federal agents finally searched her home in May 2012, they found evidence she had submitted or prepared claims for at least 668 people.
“Defendant committed wholesale fraud against a state program designed to help some of the most vulnerable state residents get back on their feet after an unexpected job loss,” federal prosecutors said in a sentencing memo, which called Gacia’s crime “fraud on almost an industrial scale” and said the scam took money from unemployed Illinois residents who submitted legitimate claims.
“Garcia defrauded taxpayers of millions of dollars by assisting hundreds of ineligible workers in their efforts to receive unemployment insurance benefits intended for Americans who were out of work,” James Vanderberg, special agent-in-charge of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General in Chicago, said in a press release. “The Office of Inspector General will continue to work with our law-enforcement partners to investigate those who attempt to fraudulently obtain money from Department of Labor Programs.”
A letter filed by Garcia’s defense attorney Paúl Camarena before she was sentenced asked for leniency, arguing Garcia didn’t knowingly file each fraudulent unemployment insurance claim. “Defense counsel would respectfully submit that the court cannot reasonably extrapolate that Ms. Garcia knew of every one of her clients who were ineligible,” the letter states.
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Google to enable publishers to charge users with ad blockers
A new extension called “Funding Choices” provides the publisher with the tool to embed into their website. When a user with an ad blocker visits the site, he is prompted to either to make a payment to remove the ads on the site, or to disable the ad blocker and proceed. Choosing neither of the options means one cannot view the website.
The company is said to receive 10 percent of the fee, which will be set by a publisher individually.
We believe online ads should be better. Here’s how we’ll be supporting the Better Ads Standards → https://t.co/0rJhNijXvQpic.twitter.com/mxruyTLsAq
— Google (@Google) 1 июня 2017 г.
The annoying ads like pop-up windows or auto-playing videos “can lead some people to block all ads—taking a big toll on the content creators, journalists, web developers and videographers who depend on ads to fund their content creation,” Google’s senior vice president for ads and commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy, says.
He added that ad blockers have a negative impact on potential revenue across all of Google properties, particularly in Europe.
What is Google’s anti-adblocking fighting? Users of AdblockPlus, uBlock Origin, NoScript, Ghostery on Firefox. More on Safari, IE and Chrome pic.twitter.com/aYgUD3MEDz
— nattsuhon (@nattsuhon) June 2, 2017
Publishers in North America, UK, Germany, Australia and New Zealand can download the new tool, with the feature becoming available for other countries later this year.
Source:
https://www.rt.com/news/390683-google-anti-adblock-tools/
‘The Hero’ Review: Sam Elliott Delivers An Emotional Punch In The Role Of His Career
As an ailing Western actor suddenly facing is own mortality, the value of his life and how he has lived it, Sam Elliott not only excels but also has the role of his nearly half-century career. The Hero is one of those movies that creeps up on you as it goes along and by its conclusion has knocked you out with an emotional punch that makes this one a keeper.
As I say in my video review (click the link above to watch), the entire cast is simply superb, but it is Elliott’s show. As Lee Hayden, a fading cowboy star whose main claim to fame was a film called The Hero, he has the leading role he has always deserved but seldom gets. In some ways, this part — which was written for him by director and co-writer Brett Haley (with Marc Basch) — is the perfect career bookend for Elliott’s seminal work as a younger man questioning the worth of his life in the underrated 1976 gem Lifeguard, which Paramount’s marketing at the time unfortunately botched. Too often it seems Elliott is a go-to guy for Westerns, but as The Hero and recent supporting roles in such movies as Haley’s I’ll See You in My Dreams and opposite Lily Tomlin in a memorable scene in Grandma proves, a Sam Elliott renaissance is fully underway.
The character of Hayden, who is said to be a mixture of people like Robert Mitchum, James Coburn, Lee Marvin and others (but not in their league), fits Elliott perfectly. He nails this in every conceivable way and gets to the heart and soul of a man whose legacy seems to be just one single film and who wonders if it has all been worth the ride. Actors really are going to identify with much of this film, which shows just how mercurial the business can be. But The Hero goes much deeper than that, offering universal truths about life and living that people of all stripes will be able to identify with.
Hayden is a working thesp, now relegated mainly to voice-over work and minor projects. A turning point for the 71-year-old comes when he receives a life achievement award at a banquet for one of those local Western appreciation societies. He turns his acceptance speech into something unforgettable when he decides on the spot to pick a woman at random out of the audience and give her the award instead. That bit goes viral, and Hayden suddenly finds himself the talk of the town and a hot commodity again at a time when he least expects it — and after a devastating diagnosis of pancreatic cancer that he has not told anyone about. Just as he is facing the end of his life, he suddenly sees his fortunes turned around not only career-wise but also personally with a promising new relationship with a younger woman (Laura Prepon) who works as a stand-up comic.
In the film he is also dealing with an estranged daughter (Krysten Ritter) and ex-wife (played nicely in a couple of scenes by Elliott’s real-life wife Katharine Ross). He also has a friend who is a drug dealer and infrequent actor (a very fine Nick Offerman). Haley skillfully weaves his life on- and offscreen throughout the film in a deliberately scaled-down pace that suits Elliott’s understated but enormously touching performance well. Scenes with Prepon really crackle, and the two have terrific chemistry. For Elliott there are many highlights, but none that resonates quite as emotionally as an audition for a shot at renewed stardom. If there has been better acting by anyone in 2017 so far, I have yet to see it. This is Oscar-worthy stuff.
Source:
http://deadline.com/2017/06/the-hero-review-sam-elliott-role-of-his-career-video-1202107336/
