The Real Style
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
sokoto guber: women besiege sokoto inec office, demanding tambuwal’s declaration as winner
Hundreds of Women on Tuesday embarked on peaceful demonstration demanding the release of the March 9 governorship election result in Sokoto state by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
The group led by three serving Commissioners in the state, Prof. A’isha Madawaki, Dr Kulu Abubakar and Hajiya Kulu Sifawa said INEC declaration of the election in the state as inconclusive was injustice and unacceptable.
They called on the electoral body to declared Governor Aminu Tambuwal as the winner of the election without further delay.
Sifawa, who is the Commissioner for Women Affairs, said Tambuwal was duly elected by majority of the votes and run a women-friendly government more than any government in the history of the state.
She said they embarked on the peaceful protest to tell the world the position of women in the state and enjoined INEC to declared people’s choice for peaceful coexistence in the state.
The state Commissioner for Science and Technology, Dr Kulu Abubakar, said women from the 23 local government areas of the state decided to embark on the protest against injustice.
“All we need is justice, which is declaration of Tambuwal as the Governor-elect in the interest of peace in the state,” Abubakar said.
Speaking at the demonstration rally, State PDP Women leader, Hajiya Rabi Iyawa, criticized INEC treatment of PDP candidates in the concluded governorship election.
Iyawa alleged that the INEC pronouncement of the election as inconclusive portrayed insincerity of the present government and its agencies and clear abuse of constitutional provisions.
Among the demonstrators were wife of former Sokoto State Governor and Presidential Candidate, Hajiya Jamila Bafarawa, Permanent Commissioner in Sokoto State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Hajiya Fatima Illo among others.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that INEC on Sunday had declared the March 9 governorship election in Sokoto state inconclusive.
The State Returning Officer said the decision was because the 75, 403 cancelled votes in 136 polling units was higher than the 3, 413 margin difference between Tambuwal’s score and that of the APC candidate.
Prof. Fatima Muktar, Vice-Chancellor, Federal University Dutse (FUD), Jigawa, had declared that Tambuwal polled 489, 558 votes, while his closest rival, Alhaji Ahmad Aliyu of the APC scored 486, 145 votes.
NAN reports that policemen barricaded the road going to INEC to prevent the demonstrators from gaining entrance into the INEC office.
However, none of the INEC officials responded to the protesters.
Monday, March 11, 2019
boeing ceo confident in 737 max safety after second deadly crash
SEATTLE (Reuters) – Boeing Co’s top executive told employees on Monday he was confident in the safety of the U.S. manufacturer’s fastest-selling 737 MAX aircraft in the wake of two deadly crashes since October.
FILE PHOTO: Dennis Muilenburg, CEO, Boeing speaks during a roundtable discussion on defense issues with U.S. President Donald Trump at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, U.S., October 19, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
An Ethiopian Airlines passenger jet bound for Nairobi crashed minutes after take-off on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board and raising questions about the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 model. The same type flown by Lion Air crashed off the coast of Indonesia in October, killing all 189 on board.
“We are confident in the safety of the 737 MAX and in the work of the men and women who design and build it,” Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg told employees in an email seen by Reuters. “Since its certification and entry into service, the MAX family has completed hundreds of thousands of flights safely.”
Muilenburg said Sunday’s crash was “especially challenging” coming only months after the loss of Lion Air Flight 610.
Boeing rolled out the fuel-efficient MAX 8 in 2017 as an update to the already redesigned 50-year-old 737. That family of single-aisle aircraft is the cash cow of the world’s largest planemaker, competing against European rival Airbus SE’s A320neo family.
Boeing has delivered more than 370 MAX Airplanes to 47 customers, Muilenburg said.
In the wake of Sunday’s crash, China ordered its airlines to ground the jet, a move followed by Indonesia and Ethiopia. Other airlines, from North America to the Middle East, kept flying the 737 MAX 8 on Monday after Boeing said it was safe.
Southwest Airlines Co, which operates the largest fleet of 737 MAX 8s, said it remained confident in the safety of all its Boeing planes even as it received a rush of queries from customers wanting to know if they were booked to fly on a 737 MAX 8.
There are still unanswered questions about the causes of the Lion Air crash, and officials and safety experts said it was too soon to draw links with the Ethiopian incident.
Muilenburg said Boeing was fully supporting the crash investigation and providing technical assistance under the direction of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and Ethiopian authorities.
Muilenburg also said Boeing was “further strengthening” support to the 737 team, manufacturing operations and customer service. He urged employees to “stay centered on the facts and avoid speculation” while the investigation unfolds.
“Speculating about the cause of the accident or discussing it without all the necessary facts is not appropriate and could compromise the integrity of the investigation,” Muilenburg said.
Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by James Dalgleish
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
A wildly popular Japanese restaurant chain where diners eat alone in meditation opened its first US location
If you were eating at an Ichiran restaurant right now, you wouldn't be reading this article. You also wouldn't be chatting with a companion or multitasking. What you'd do is slurp noodles in solitude at a solo booth.
The chain of minimalist ramen shops that impose a Zen approach on diners is hugely popular in Japan and Hong Kong, with 60 locations that are all open 24 hours a day. On Oct. 19, Ichiran opened its first US shop, drawing New Yorkers from all over to the hipster enclave of Bushwick, where crowds waited in the shadows of warehouses to spend time alone with a bowl of hot pork broth.
The idea is that focus enhances food enjoyment. Ichiran calls this "low interaction dining" in "flavor-concentration booths." Ichiran says that this “encourages guests to dine alone and focus solely on the bowl of noodles in front of them.”
Diners speak to no one, not even upon arrival or to order. A light panel indicates available booths and food options are limited deliberately. The menu is a soup of long-boiled pig bones, and that's pretty much it. The stock comes in three strengths, and the broth can be customized to five richnesses by dropping various quantities of liquid fat on top; noodles are made on location and served in five levels of softness with a few toppings. Customers check their preferences on a menu printed on a chopstick sleeve, which is then placed over an electronic eye in each table.
A pair of hands appear magically with a bowl. No faces, pleases or thank yous.
Critics are divided on the actual quality of the food. "What we have here is a very plain bowl of noodles," writes senior Eater food critic, Robert Sietsema. But Geoffrey Morrison, writing for Forbes, declared Ichiran the best ramen in the world, noting that its many locations in Japan have lines out door during lunch and dinner.
Of course, there's no shortage of ramen shops in Asia, or New York, and many offer far more options than Ichiran. So it's probably not just the simplicity of the noodles and pork broth that clinched its success, but the rare opportunity it offers for quiet reflection in a hyper-connected frenetic world.
A Nielsen Research study released in July revealed that screen time is on the rise for America adults, up to an average of over 10.5 hours per day, an increase of one hour over last year. Out of 168 hours in the week, people spent more than a third of that time looking at a screen, and, with device ownership on the rise, this figure isn't likely to decrease anytime soon. Meanwhile, about 20% of time Americans are online is spent on social media interacting directly or abstractly with others. Even when we're ostensibly alone, we have constant contact.
No wonder then that people are seeking a dining experience that accommodates the postmodern need for efficiency yet also provides the opportunity to spend some part of the day doing just one thing at a time.
Except it kind of doesn't; at Ichiran, lunch also multitasks as a mindfulness exercise.
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The New York Times needs to stop being squeamish about swear words
The morning after a 2005 videotape of Donald Trump remarking to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush that fame gave him license to “grab [women] by the pussy,” the shame-resistant Republican presidential nominee was finally suffering consequences for his outrageous statements. But for the media organizations covering his comments, this was a big moment on another level.
After what one New York Times editor described as “extensive discussion,” the Times broke one of its cardinal style rules: The words fuck, pussy, bitch, and tits appeared in print on the front page.
This had never happened before.
According to the most recent New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, “the Times very rarely publishes obscene words, and it maintains a steep threshold for vulgar ones.” (“Very rarely” is itself a relaxation of standards; previous editions of the manual said the Times “virtually never“ publishes obscenities.) The Times’ main argument for treating such words as unprintable is the need to maintain standards of civility. Yet article after article will still describe uncensored acts of war, torture, child abuse, and other uncivil behavior.
But the boundaries between polite society and popular culture had been blurring long before Donald Trump came on the scene. These changes in public discourse have made profanity more prevalent and therefore less shocking—which only makes the Times' position seem increasingly outdated. In fact, profanity has become so commonplace that the Times has had to find ways to report obscenities without actually using the obscenities themselves. Even when the subject of the story is a profanely named product, the Times will coyly write around it: The best-selling picture book Go the Fuck to Sleep, for instance, was the subject of three Times articles that failed to mention the title.
[pullquote]The best-selling picture book Go the Fuck to Sleep, for instance, was the subject of three Times articles that failed to mention the title.[/pullquote]After reading all three, I wrote a blog post noting the Times' timidity. Every so often I noticed another writer, peeved by a missing expletive, would commit several hours and hundreds of words to making arguments about hypocrisy, changing social mores, and the porous media ecosystem—and nothing would change. I didn’t expect my post would make a difference, either.
But writing an article is not the only way to make a point. This was in 2011, when data journalism was on the rise. Nate Silver had licensed his website FiveThirtyEight to the Times, and Quartz would launch the following year. Every time I noticed the Times avoiding an obscenity, I began to document the instance on Twitter using the hashtag #fittoprint and invited others to join me. Eventually, I thought, I would have a long list with a large and surprising number of examples on it, all public and verifiable.
In the first 100 examples of Timesian expletive avoidance that were collected, I started to notice patterns. For example, articles about HBO shows kept showing up. (What is HBO, after all, if not foul-mouthed entertainment for Times-reading sophisticates?) I also began to recognize signals that an expletive was being written around: Words like expletive, profanity, four-letter, and unprintable were frequent indicators, and less common ones like saltier.
This knowledge paved the way for a more systematic approach to data collection. In early 2014, I moved the Fit to Print project to Tumblr, since it allowed more than 115 characters (after a link and the hashtag) for context. I also registered for a Times API key, which let me search all new articles for indicator words.
[pullquote]When other people would be looking for new cat GIFs, I’d check the Times Search API instead to see whether any expletives were being avoided that day.[/pullquote]Around lunchtime, when other people would be looking for new cat GIFs, I’d check the Times Search API instead to see whether any expletives were being avoided that day. Saltier returned false positives from the food section—but not as often as you’d expect.
Over 2014 and 2015, I collected 663 examples of articles that avoided expletives. (If an article avoids multiple expletives, I counted it only once.) Some friends who knew about the Fit to Print project shared links with and I stumbled across others while reading Times stories on social media, but most of these examples came through the Times Search API; these search results had become my main way into the Times.
I would not claim that this data set is complete; evidence of avoidance can be almost as hard to find as evidence of absence. Nevertheless, rudimentary data analysis yields some interesting insights.
Unsurprisingly, the big day for expletive-avoidant articles, with 36% of all examples, is Sunday. The Sunday paper is the fattest and includes the most articles. It also has sections dedicated to topics where expletives are most often avoided, such as the arts and sports, plus the magazine, which avoided expletives in 43 articles in 2015—almost once per issue.
The “arts” section in the chart above includes music and television. If you count books, movies, and theater as well, there were 200 instances of expletive avoidances, or 30% of all articles I found. (And the number of arts-related stories with expletive avoidance is surely higher than I found.)
Of course the frequent use of expletives is not limited to cultural activities: Expletive avoidance runs throughout the paper, from business to international affairs to domestic politics. Donald Trump’s name comes up in no fewer than nine articles, as either curser or cursed. (If nine sounds low, remember that this data set ends on December 31, 2015.)
So when the Times avoids an expletive, what euphemism does it use to replace it?
Expletive is the most common euphemism, used 40% of the time. 39% of those instances—107 of 273—have the word in brackets inserted into a quotation, e.g. “I mean, this [expletive] hurt.” (The Times used these bracketed insertions 60% more often in 2015.) The remaining 61% are paraphrases: “‘It was just,’ he added, using an expletive, ‘bad judgment.’”; ”He used an expletive in referring to Keselowski, who took third.”
After expletive, the most common euphemism is unprintable. I find this term particularly irksome since it suggests physical impossibility, that their typesetting software can’t produce that sequence of glyphs. As the Trump tape revealed, the Times is perfectly capable of printing the word fuck. Another instance of its printing was in an ambitious 2013 series on a homeless Brooklyn girl. Margaret Sullivan, who in her tenure as Times public editor kept raising questions about expletive avoidance, looked into why fuckstayed in that 2013 story, and was told that editors “had a very thorough discussion” and decided to make an exception.
[pullquote]Expletive avoidance no longer strikes me as an interesting puzzle for a writer to solve. The policy just seems prissy, arbitrary, and delusional.[/pullquote]The “other” category includes faux-folksy formulations such as “a word more pungent than ‘slop,’” and “a stronger version of the phrase ‘gol darn,’” as well as the straightforward, ”He swore.” When I began the Fit to Print project, I could enjoy the cleverness of some of these contortions. But after reading through hundreds of examples over several years, expletive avoidance no longer strikes me as an interesting puzzle for a writer to solve. The policy just seems prissy, arbitrary, and delusional. All this information is on the internet and, increasingly, the Times links out to the words it will not print.
It is also inconsistently applied. Two weeks before the Trump tape surfaced, the widow of Keith Scott, an African-American man who was shot by police in North Carolina, gave the Times a video showing his final moments. The Times printed a verbatim transcript, but then removed the expletives from the accompanying article. And a few days after describing the tape, the Times ran Jennifer Senior’s review of a wave of books that are critical of Hillary Clinton and claim she “that Mrs. Clinton is a potty mouth” without giving any concrete examples.
At times, I identify with the defeatist tone of New York Times Magazine contributor Dan Brooks, who wrote, ”It was too crude to reproduce here, and anyway, I've learned not to try.” But reporters keep trying. Some (and I’ve heard from members of the newsroom who oppose this policy) may practice expletive avoidance as a form of protest. In other cases, it may simply be that, on a given beat, expletives are not avoidable. The reigning king of expletive avoidance is pop music writer Jon Caramanica, with 16 articles (one with a shared byline) over the course of two years, followed by book reviewer Dwight Garner (11) and reporter Matt Flegenheimer (11, two of them shared).
Between the limitations of my data collection and my statistical acumen, there are limits to what conclusions can be drawn from the Fit to Print data set at this point. I haven’t compiled a record of the expletives that were avoided, but many of those can be tracked down online. There isn’t a control set of articles that don’t avoid expletives that it can be compared with, and there’s no way to know when expletives have been avoided altogether by not being acknowledged at all. You can also quibble with my approach to classification or with what I decided to include or exclude.
In fact, I invite you to do so. Take a look at the spreadsheet. Maybe one of you can take the list of 663 sentences and train a bot that generates Timesian, expletive-avoidant sentences, or can search the Times archives for them better than my primitive API calls.
Or maybe this amassing of information can help put an end to the thorough extensive discussions that take up Times editors’ valuable time and get between readers and the information they seek. Remember: If readers can find it elsewhere, they will.
You can follow Blake on Twitter at @bdeskin. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
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The US is warming to Sweden’s habit of burning trash for energy
Maybe, in the near future, calling something a "dumpster fire" won't carry the flavor of a pejorative that it does now.
The practice of burning trash to generate energy works well for Sweden, but in the US the idea remains controversial. That might be changing. Officials in seven Idaho counties have voted to give it a shot, approving a plan to burn garbage and methane gas from at least one regional landfill.
The idea is simple. Rather than leave garbage to sit dormant and decompose for years at a local dump, communities can burn the waste in plants. The heat from the fire converts water into steam, which is then sent through a turbine generator to produce electricity.
In Idaho, the plan is to begin construction on a federally-approved combustion facility in March, but the overall operation likely won't be profitable until 2023, according to local media.
“The gas is going to be there whether we like it or not,” one local official told the Idaho Mountain Express. “Instead of burning coal, why not support our electric grid with the methane, which is a byproduct of our waste?”
There are a few reasons some energy experts prefer investments in solar (paywall) and wind power to the trash-incineration method. For starters, burning garbage emits pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, mercury compounds, and dioxins. In the 1990s, the US Environmental Protection Agency released regulations to combat those emissions—which forced many garbage-burning facilities to be retrofitted with new pollution control systems or shut down completely. (Idaho's planned facility would be in compliance with these regulations.)
Another reason energy experts don't particularly like trash incineration is the thinking that if society invests in a system that depends on municipal waste to operate, it makes it that much more difficult to encourage reducing waste.
It doesn't help that the second biggest contributor to municipal waste, food, translates to the smallest amount of energy generation, according to the EPA.
In Sweden, people burn as much garbage for energy as they recycle, thanks in part to a landfill tax that incentivizes rerouting trash to energy-recovery facilities. It's also a country that gets 44% of its energy from hydro, and most of the rest from nuclear and wind. Only about 1% of garbage makes it to the landfill, as most of it is recycled or used to create electricity. The Swedes even import garbage—about 700,000 tons of it each year—for electricity generation. That makes the country relatively green compared to the US, which generates only 8% of its energy from hydro and sends 54% of its garbage straight to landfills, burning only 12% for energy, according to government figures.
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