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1/31/2017
Four people affected by the USA immigration ban
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| Fuad Suleman, center, with his wife and three children, arrive back in Erbil, Iraq. |
President Trump signed Friday an executive order which temporarily bans citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.
People ranging from exchange students in Iran to families with green cards are sharing their stories and worries about whether they will be able to enter the United States.
Here are four people whose lives are on hold and affected by the immigration ban.
1. Kurdish family on their way to Nashville forced to turn back:
Fuad Sharef Suleman, his wife, Arazoo Ibrahim, and their three children were escorted from Cairo International Airport back to Iraq on Saturday, even though they had valid visas to enter the United States.
They were on their way to Nashville when President Trump ordered the travel ban.
"I did not know the president can sign such orders," he said. "It looks like those autocratic leaders in corrupt countries, not in a democratic modern country like America."
Suleman and his family are stranded with no home and no transportation after selling their house, most of their belongings and their vehicles. Suleman quit his job at a pharmaceutical company, Ibrahim resigned from her position as a kindergarten teacher and their children, ages 10-19, left their schools.
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Niki Mossafer Rahmati:
On Saturday, Rahmati tried to return to Boston after visiting her family in Tehran, Iran, for winter break. Rahmati holds a multiple-entry student visa but was prevented from boarding her connecting flight to Boston because of the immigration ban.
In a Facebook post on Saturday, Rahmati said she and 30 other Iranians were prevented from boarding planes to the U.S.
“Among them were old couples trying to go and see their children in the U.S., two old women trying to help their pregnant daughters in the United States and students who had just gotten their visas,” Rahmati wrote in a Facebook post. “All these people had gotten visas legally and had gone through background checks.”
Yesterday Rahmati was told that she will be able to return to the United States, but isn’t sure when.
3. Woman detained at Dubai airport after spending almost seven years in the United States:
Just hours after the executive order was signed Friday, Nazanin Zinouri, who has a degree in data science from an American public university and lives in South Carolina, was detained at Dubai International Airport after arriving from Tehran, where she had visited her family.
"After waiting in the line to get my documents checked and after 40 minutes of questions and answers, I boarded the plane to Washington. Some minutes after, two TSA officers got in and asked me to disembark the plane!" Zinouri said on Facebook. "Yes!! After almost 7 years of living in the United States, I got deported."
"Those trapped in the airports are free now. The bad news is no airline will board any Iranian on any plane heading to the U.S. So there's still no way for me to return. No one warned me when I was leaving, no one cared what will happen to my dog, or my job or my life there."
4. A Syrian man and his American wife stuck in Iraq:
Wael Resol, 30, is an interpreter for journalists in the Kurdish area of Irbil in northern Iraq. But he also is a Syrian, and that birthplace has dashed his hopes of living the American dream in Texas with his U.S.-born wife.
"Trump's decision affected me personally. I have had a migration case open for a long time," said Resol, who worked as a supervisor in an international school and a customer service representative at Qatar Airways before his current job.
He said his wife, Katy McGarr of Amarillo, Texas, is a U.S. citizen and teacher who moved to northern Iraq to be with him. But now he's barred from moving with her to the United States, where he hoped to get a master's degree in linguistics and buy a house in Texas.
"My wife wanted to go back home for a long time but we can't. She's stuck here because of me," he added. "Sometimes I feel bad about that. But then I think, 'Just because I am Syrian, I have to blame myself?'"
1/29/2017
Geolocation - How to find anywhere on the planet
LAST year, a fire threatened the home of Ganhuyag Chuluun Hutagt, who lives in Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar. Instead of giving the fire brigade his address, though, Mr Ganhuyag had to guide them to the blaze by describing a series of landmarks along the way. That was because, like most buildings in Mongolia, his house does not have an address. Road names and building numbers are so sparse there that fewer than 1% of Mongolians do. But Mr Ganhuyag, who is on the board of the country’s post office, Mongol Post, proposes to do something about it.
Thanks to his urging, Mongol Post is adopting an ingenious new system of addresses that can locate any place in the country—and, indeed, in the world. Instead of house number, street name, town, province and so on, or the co-ordinates of latitude and longitude, this system, the brainchild of Chris Sheldrick, boss of What3Words, a firm based in London, divides the Earth’s surface into nine-metre-square blocks. Each block is then given names consisting of trios of randomly selected, unrelated words. One patch of Siberia, for example, is called, in English, “mirroring.surrendered.epidemics”. But it also has nine other names, in other languages, including Russian.
Divvying up Earth’s surface into nine-metre-square blocks requires nearly 57 trillion addresses (to be precise, 56,764,364,951,858 of them). That sounds a lot, but Mr Sheldrick realised that 40,000 words would be enough to do the job—indeed, more than enough, since that number actually yields 64 trillion three-word combinations. Moreover, places that are at sea have only English addresses. The other languages, restricted to the land, require 25,000 words each. When drawing up a list in a new language, What3Words’ linguists toss out homophones, and also any words that may create offence. Otherwise, words are selected based on their familiarity and frequency of use.
Mr Sheldrick’s system is also proving useful in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. That city’s government has, according to Sila Vieira da Silva, failed to generate addresses fast enough to keep up with the new shacks appearing in these shanty towns, and does not bother to bring post into at least 11 of them anyway. Mr Vieira da Silva is one of the owners of Carteiro Amigo, a company that has delivered letters in Rio’s favelas since 2000 by compiling directions to residents who pay for the service. Now, using software licensed from What3Words, Carteiro Amigo is converting to three-word addresses.
Rich countries, too, can benefit, says Peter Atalla, the boss of Navmii, a London firm that has folded What3Words’ software into navigation apps for motorists. Not only are they easy to memorise, type out and communicate by phone, Mr Atalla says people also like the precision of directing others to, say, a specific entrance rather than an entire building, or to a picnic spot instead of the whole park. Direct Today Couriers, another British outfit, reports that converting standard addresses into What3Words ones has reduced the number of missed deliveries by 83%. Watch.this.space.
Argentine Mothers Grow Marijuana (video)
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Argentina: Football for nobody
BUENOS AIRES has 36 stadiums with a capacity of at least 10,000 spectators, more than any other city in the world. Mauricio Macri, Argentina’s president, used his 12 years as president of Boca Juniors, the most popular football club, to launch his political career. He still enjoys a kickabout at the Quinta de Olivos, the presidential residence.
But an ugly row over money is disfiguring the beautiful game. The government owes 350m pesos ($22m) to Argentina’s football association (AFA), which owes the same amount to the country’s football clubs. Many are unable to pay their players. The dispute may delay the restart of the top division’s season, scheduled for February 3rd.
The crisis stems from Mr Macri’s determination to sweep away the populist policies of his predecessor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, which extended to football. He is also using the government’s muscle to force reform on a sport notorious for corruption.
For years, Argentines without cable television could only watch highlights of weekend fixtures. This amounted to “hijacking the goals until Sunday”, Ms Fernández fumed. Her solution was Fútbol Para Todos, a ten-year deal with the AFA to broadcast on free-to-air television matches played by the national and top-tier teams. The government paid 600m pesos in the first season, more than double what the previous rights-holder paid. Fútbol Para Todos provided around a fifth of the revenues of the top clubs.
Fans loved the arrangement. Ms Fernández’s opponents cried foul. Adverts shown at half-time were often government propaganda. In the election campaign in 2015 Mr Macri promised to keep free football but drop the adverts. Confronted in office with a massive fiscal deficit and a prospective annual cost for Fútbol Para Todos of 2.5bn pesos, he killed it. The scheme ended last month. The AFA has yet to find a broadcaster for next season.
The threat to this season comes from the unpaid 350m pesos, which Mr Macri is withholding until the AFA cleans itself up. It is still struggling with the legacy of Julio Grondona, who from 1979 until his death in 2014 ruled football “like an emperor”, says Gustavo Abreu of Austral University. The football clubs have yet to agree on a successor. FIFA, the global governing body, established a “normalisation committee” to propose reforms. But progress is slow. FIFA reportedly threatened to ban Argentina from international competitions. Buenos Aires may have a lot of empty stadiums this year.
1/23/2017
Chinese Soccer Dream
By CHRIS BUCKLEY
article edited from The New York Times
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| Evergrande's 48 soccer fields - Credit Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times |
QINGYUAN, China — The 48 soccer fields of the vast Evergrande Football School in south China seem barely enough for its 2,800 students.
“Soccer will be my career after I grow up,” Wang Kai, a 13-year-old who has studied at the boarding school for over three years, said after a morning session under the supervision of a Spanish coach. “I want to be the Chinese Cristiano Ronaldo,” he said, referring to the Portuguese superstar.
Grooming the next Ronaldo or Messi has become a national project in China, where the country’s No. 1 fan, President Xi Jinping, is determined to transform the country into a great soccer power.
The main Chinese league is attracting foreign stars from Europe and South America with contracts reported to be worth as much as $40 million a year, the highest pay for any soccer player in the world.
The government will clean up and reorganize professional soccer and build a new generation of players by creating tens of thousands of soccer fields and adding soccer programs in tens of thousands of schools. The aim is to establish a flow of top players eventually capable of winning the men’s World Cup and returning the women’s team to its former glory.
In the main pro trading season last year, the 16 Chinese Super League teams spent about $300 million hiring away promising foreign players, outstripping player spending by the English Premier League by nearly $120 million. Prices in 2017 are likely to go even higher.
But Mr. Xi’s focus is on the long game and the next generation of players. His plan calls for 50,000 schools to have a strong emphasis on soccer by 2025, a leap from 5,000 in 2015. The number of soccer fields across the country will grow to over 70,000 by the end of 2020, from under 11,000. By then, the plan says, 50 million Chinese, including 30 million students, will regularly play soccer.
“Now principals at every school are paying quite a bit more attention to soccer,” said Dai Wei, the athletic director at r. Xi’s old school, the Bayi School. “That was unthinkable before.”
Yet there is deep cultural resistance, even at Bayi.
Some parents discourage their children from committing time to sports, Mr. Dai said, because they have so much homework and face stiff competition on academic exams.
While China has excelled at individual sports that demand intense discipline from an early age, the country has not done as well at group sports, where skills like teamwork and improvisation count as much as personal virtuosity.
The privately run Evergrande school, the world’s biggest soccer boarding school, says its formula of intense training combined with a solid education will show the way for developing young players.
“As more soccer schools are built, there’ll be more and more kids playing, and the stars will multiply, too,” said Liu Jiangnan, the principal of the school, which opened in 2012. “I’d guess that in seven or eight years, half the members of the Chinese national squad will come from this school.”
Parents pay up to about $8,700 a year to send children here, where 24 Spanish coaches oversee training. Students spend 90 minutes a day on drills and also play on weekends. Promising players get scholarships, and children from poorer families get discounts.
But even here, the children come to the game later than their European and South American counterparts, and they often lack solid grounding in teamwork and tactics.
“Chinese soccer has failed before through rushing for instant success,” Mr. Zhang, a widely respected soccer commentator, said in an interview in Beijing,“The problem is that everyone thinks soccer is just about getting results, competition, training, creating stars.”
Mr. Zhang is instead encouraging schools to focus on fun and participation. That approach gives more children a break from the monotony of the classroom and will eventually bring out more future champions than an elitist, top-down approach, he argues.
Some schools are trying his way. On a recent afternoon, the smog that often covers Beijing lifted and the children of Caoqiao Elementary School rushed onto the fields, shouting with delight.
“This morning soccer was canceled because of the smog,” said the principal, Lin Yanling. “But at midday, I notified the kids that it was back on, and they all went crazy with relief.”
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Evergrande Football School’s manicured gardens. Credit Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
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article edited from The New York Times
1/22/2017
Trump's press secretary complaint (captions)
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1/20/2017
1/16/2017
Story of the Lewis and Clark 1804 expedition (captions)
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10 strange methods of transportation (captions)
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1/15/2017
New York's airports' upgrade
A study in November 2016 found that New York’s three international airports are the very worst among America’s 30 busiest hubs, in terms of ease of access, wait times and amenities.
LaGuardia came in last, with the highest rate of flight delays and cancellations, but the city’s bigger problem is John F. Kennedy Airport, which has more international passengers than any other airport in America. According to the study, it is massively inconvenient, with the longest drive time to the city center and the longest waits to get through security.
That might be about to change. Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo laid out a plan for a $10bn overhaul of JFK. One-fifth of that funding will go toward improving road access, which is described in the plan as a “confusing spaghetti network for on-airport roads that lead to multiple bottlenecks and chokepoints”. It also recommends exploring the feasibility of building a direct subway route from Manhattan to JFK. (Right now, passengers must transfer to the AirTrain from the subway or the Long Island Rail Road.) Expanding the airport’s terminals is another goal.
In June 2016 work began on the second portion of an $8bn renovation of LaGuardia, which will bring an AirTrain to the hard-to-reach airport. The New York Times described it as “the most ambitious airport project in the country”, at least until the JFK plans were announced.
There are two big caveats, however. The first is that airport projects don’t always go as planned. Mr Cuomo hasn’t given a timeline for the JFK overhaul, but it won’t be quick.
Which brings us to the second caveat, and the one that spells bad news for business travellers. While these massive projects are ongoing, travellers through the airports could experience even more hellish bottlenecks and queues.
The start of the LaGuardia construction has already led to traffic backups bad enough that travellers have been spotted abandoning taxis and cars on the nearby Grand Central Parkway and running down the highway on foot, luggage in tow. The Transportation Security Administration has advised flyers to arrive at LaGuardia at least two to two-and-a-half hours before takeoff. Some travel bloggers have warned it might simply be better to avoid LaGuardia altogether for the next few years – that is, until at least 2024.
Avoiding LaGuardia and JFK won’t be so easy. Newark can only handle so much traffic and so many flights. So while these projects may bring relief to New York travellers once they’re completed, expect some pain in the interim.
Renderings courtesy of New York State:
Renderings courtesy of New York State:
New trend in advertising
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| Lili Boglarka Havasi in a Fisher-Price commercial. |
IN a new commercial for the Fisher-Price Little People Sit ‘n Stand Skyway, Lili Boglarka Havasi claps and smiles as the cars zoom down the plastic raceway. It’s a typical toy ad except for one fact: Lili has Down syndrome.
While many advertisers over the years have featured people with disabilities from time to time, models with Down syndrome recently have become more visible. In addition to Lili, the 2-year-old model from Budapest featured in the Fisher-Price ad, people with Down syndrome have appeared in ads for Target, McDonald’s, the crafts chain A. C. Moore and the online retailer Zulily. Models with Down syndrome have even been spotted recently on New York catwalks.
Using models with Down syndrome or a physical disability allows advertisers to communicate their values and connect with customers, particularly millennials, who respond to inclusiveness and are looking for “authenticity” in advertising.
Teresa Gonzalez Ruiz, the vice president for brand marketing at Fisher-Price, said that the company began using child models with Down syndrome last year in response to the increasing diversity of its global customer base.
“The consumer mind-set has really changed,” she said. “Millennials are so in tune with causes. The biggest shift I’ve seen as a marketer is that in the past three to five years of talking to moms, they care about the product but they also really want to know where the company stands.”
Down syndrome, a chromosomal condition, carries physical traits including flat facial features, a small nose and an upward slant to the eyes. Parents of children with Down syndrome say it’s about time advertisers noticed the distinctive beauty of people with the condition.
“My goal is simply to raise awareness that these kids can be models, too, and then the world sees them,” said Meagan Nash of Buford, Ga., whose 15-month-old son, Asher, has Down syndrome and will soon be modeling for the OshKosh children’s clothing line.
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Meagan Nash’s son, Asher. Credit Crystal Barbee
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Ms. Nash said the fact that Asher has Down syndrome is not going to be the first thing people notice when they see the ad.
“They’re not going to say, ‘Oh, that boy has Down syndrome.’” she said. “They’re going to say, ‘Look at that jacket the boy is wearing in the ad.’”
Jamie Brewer, who had a recurring role on the TV show “American Horror Story,” last year became the first model with Down syndrome to walk in a New York Fashion Week runway show, modeling clothes for the designer Carrie Hammer, who regularly features unconventional models in her shows. This year, Jude Hass, a Texas teenager, became the first male model with Down syndrome to walk during Fashion Week. He was part of a fashion show that featured models with various disabilities.
“It has never been like the way it is now,” said Sara Hart Weir, president of the National Down Syndrome Society. “I don’t think there’s ever been a time before in which you would see an ad with a model with Down syndrome and a TV show” with an actor who also has Down syndrome.
In 2015, a group called Changing the Face of Beauty set out to find 15 retailers to commit to using models with disabilities in their advertisements. The group, spearheaded by Katie Driscoll of Chicago, who has a 7-year-old daughter with Down syndrome, secured commitments from more than 100 companies.
“We focus on what a smart business decision it is to include people with disabilities in advertisements,” Ms. Driscoll said. “You are essentially leaving a lot of money on the table, otherwise.”
Izzy Bradley, a 4-year-old from Stillwater, Minn., who has Down syndrome, has appeared in three Target ads in the last three years and has another in the works. Her mother, Heather Bradley, said the ads simply feature her child playing with toys and don’t “draw attention to the fact that she has Down syndrome.”
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| Izzy Bradley in a Target ad. |
A spokeswoman for Target, Jenna Reck, said the use of children with Down syndrome in its advertising is part of a “concerted effort” on the part of the chain’s creative team to reach out to various communities within its customer base.
“It does not happen on a whim,” Ms. Reck said. “Target always wants to reflect its customers. As society changes and people’s views change, Target reflects that in its advertising, including using models with disabilities and Down syndrome.”
Karrie Brown, who has Down syndrome, appeared in an ad for the Wet Seal clothing store chain three years ago when she was 17. She has since appeared in a training video for the Y.M.C.A. and landed a role in a short film.
“I am more than a clothes model. I’m a role model!” Karrie says.
1/13/2017
1/09/2017
iPhone Turns 10 Years Old (audio)
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McDonald s Introduces Screen Ordering and Table Service
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| Steve Easterbrook, McDonald’s chief executive, demonstrating how ordering is done at a self-service kiosk in New York. CreditShannon Stapleton/Reuters |
Welcome to McDonald’s! May I take your order — and bring it to your table?
McDonald’s changes could reshape the diner’s experience: it will expand its digital self-serve ordering stations and table service to all of its 14,000 American restaurants.
Once people order at one of the stations — sleek, vertical touchscreens — they get a digital location device and can take a seat. When their burgers and fries are ready, a server will go to their table to deliver the food with a big smile and a thank you.
Customers will still be able to order food the old-fashioned way, at the counter. But the move to self-order systems and table service is one way to address one of the biggest problems the company’s restaurants have faced in recent years: slower food delivery to customers, caused by more items on the menu. The thinking is that customers will be more willing to wait if they are sitting at a table instead of waiting at a counter.
But it also raises some questions for the company: What does it mean for workers, and is the chain up for a change this big?
According to Steve Easterbrook, chief executive of McDonald’s, the new system will not reduce costs. But it will mean that workers might have slightly different jobs.
“We’ve not cutting crew; we’re redeploying them,” he said.
McDonald’s has tested the order system in 500 revamped restaurants, or what it calls its “just-for-you experience,” in New York, Florida and Southern California and is now introducing them in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Seattle, Boston and Chicago. Around the globe, the new program is in some 2,600 McDonald’s restaurants.
The company will roll out a mobile order-and-pay system that will also change the way customers get their orders, including customers ordering from their cars.
Much of what is coming to the United States has already been tried in markets like Canada, Australia and Britain, where roughly one-quarter of transactions are done on in-store screens.
How quickly will the restaurants change? The vast majority of McDonald’s locations are owned by franchisees, and they will have to pay for the changes. Equipment and installation of eight order screens at a location in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan cost $56,000. The costs for a store with lower sales volume will probably be about $28,000.
Many of the company’s stores in Britain have already undergone such a reboot, and in a video, Paul Pomroy, the chief executive of the business in Britain, said the investment was worth it.
“The customer’s perception of the quality of the food has changed,” Mr. Pomroy said. “A Big Mac tastes better in a reimaged restaurant, it just does.”
1/08/2017
French Man Cycling Record at Age 105 (audio)
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| Robert Marchand during his one-hour ride. |
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1/07/2017
French right to disconnect (audio)
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