#Job For Terminal Manager March 2019

[saywhat-politics]

The Trump administration is planning to cut tens of thousands of employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to an internal memo obtained by CNN.

In a memo dated March 4 addressed to “under secretaries, assistant secretaries, and other key officials,” the Veterans Affairs department’s chief of staff Christopher Syrek said that the VA in partnership with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, will move “aggressively” to restructure the VA across the entire department and “resize” the workforce.

As part of that, the department will aim to revert back to its 2019-era staffing levels of 399,957 employees, the memo said. That means more than 70,000 employees could be terminated as part of the restructuring, since the VA employed over 470,000 people as of October 2024, according to the department.

The memo, which was first reported by Government Executive, says administration and staff offices within the VA will need to conduct information gathering and report back to the Office of Personnel Management by April 14.

The VA grew significantly under the Biden administration, particularly to help implement the PACT Act that Biden signed into law in 2022 to help expand coverage and eligibility to millions of veterans who were exposed to toxins and hazards like burn pits while serving.

The VA’s plans to cut its workforce come as other federal agencies have fired scores of employees at the direction of OPM, which was until yesterday advising agencies including the Defense Department to fire probationary workers.

[mariacallous]

Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu made headlines in April after coasting to a second term in office by nearly 12 percentage points. Imamoglu, who has served at the city’s helm since 2019, is seen as a major political threat to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). The latest win in Istanbul cemented Imamoglu’s continued popularity among the Turkish public.

But Imamoglu is only the most prominent face of a broader opposition, led by the Republican People’s Party (CHP). In March’s municipal elections, the CHP secured its most crushing victory over the AKP in decades. Possibly more notable than Imamoglu’s reelection was the newly elected class of women executives of provinces and districts across the country.

One of these women—Sinem Dedetas—may hold the keys to the future of Turkey’s opposition. Imamoglu is currently battling slander charges in the country’s high court, in addition to a slew of other cases that could eventually ban him from politics, even as he is the favorite to run for the CHP in Turkey’s 2028 presidential election. No matter how those fortunes play out, Dedetas promises to be central to the party’s strategy in a post-Erdogan Turkey.

Istanbul is the only city in the world to straddle two continents. Uskudar, a seaside constituency on the Anatolian side, lacks many of the bars and clubs across the water in the European districts. Instead, the conservative area is known for its historical mosques. It is also one of Istanbul’s key transportation hubs, home to a confluence of ferries, rail, metro, and bus lines. Millions of people from all over the city—and world—pass through Uskudar every day.

In April’s elections, Dedetas, a 43-year-old engineer, made history as the first woman to ever win the Uskudar municipality mayorship, a position similar to that of a New York borough president. She also flipped the district from the AKP to CHP rule.

Dedetas moved to Uskudar from her native Eskisehir, a city in northwest Turkey, for college in 1999. After receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in naval engineering from Istanbul Technical University, she got her first job in the district as an engineer. In 2014, she went on to work as a marine engineer at the Halic Shipyards, the oldest continuously operating dockyard in the world. Over the centuries, the facility has produced vessels from sail boats to steamships and submarines to electrical passenger taxis.

Dedetas’s career has featured many firsts. In 2014, she became the first chairwoman of the Turkish Chamber of Naval Engineers. While she was in that position, Istanbul’s AKP mayor tried to privatize the public harbor and turn it into a terminal full of restaurants and shops. Dedetas protested the project and was barred by the government from entering the shipyard.

She continued to oppose the new real estate development, concerned that the city’s ferries—an indelible part of Istanbul’s social history, skyline, and soundscape—would grind to a halt without the vital maintenance work done at the docks. “We fought to keep [it] from being lost,” Dedetas later said after her success in blocking the project.

Then Imamoglu became mayor of the city, bringing Istanbul back under CHP rule. “The privatization processes of the shipyard were being carried out,” Dedetas told Turkish media. “If [the mayorship] had not changed hands in the 2019 elections, there would be no shipyard left.”

One of the new mayor’s first orders of business was to appoint Dedetas as manager of Istanbul’s maritime public transportation system; she was the first woman in the role. Over the last quarter century, the city’s water transport fell into disarray as Istanbul’s population swelled and moved further inland, contributing to congestion and gridlock on road and rail. Yet municipal-run ferries predate the first Bosporus bridge and remain one of the city’s fastest options to cross continents.

Dedetas proved herself to be a masterful administrator, overhauling the entire water transit system. She opened 11 new ferry lines and launched a 24-hour weekend ferry that connected the European and Asian sides of the city. She also doubled the patronage of public water transport, in part by restoring the iconic white and orange vapur ferry ships. And she launched an electric sea taxi service, providing a personal, environmentally friendly option to traverse the Bosporus Strait and the Marmara Sea.

Through the effective management of maritime transportation, Dedetas gained national attention. She set her eyes on her home district, Uskudar—the Istanbul neighborhood with the longest Bosporus shoreline—ahead of the 2024 municipal elections. “Uskudar is the first gate for people who arrive from Anatolia, and for Istanbul, it is the gate to the rest of the country,” said Onur Cingil, an Uskudar native and CHP member.

The borough had been an AKP stronghold for as long as Cingil and most others could remember. It is even home to Erdogan’s private villa. Cingil said he saw local government officials claim eminent domain and exaggerate concerns about earthquake vulnerability to demolish buildings and hand over lucrative sites to construction companies, religious associations, and other party loyalists. “This happened … to my own student dormitory, and many other places,” Cingil said.

Cingil was one of the many CHP candidates vying to be the nominee for Uskudar’s mayorship in March’s elections, but the CHP leadership eventually selected Dedetas to run due to her reputation for being a technocratic consensus builder.

“Normally, I wouldn’t expect such a profile to be nominated for Uskudar,” said Burak Bilgehan Ozpek, a professor of political science at TOBB University of Economics and Technology. He described Dedetas’s young, professional, and secular profile as going against the grain in the district. The CHP typically nominated old-school, male party insiders for such roles, Ozpek said, adding with a laugh that they always lost the race. “This was a radical change,” he added.

Dedetas took a pro-people approach to her campaign against the AKP incumbent Hilmi Turkmen, who had been a mainstay in Uskudar’s politics for decades. She canvassed the district neighborhood by neighborhood, underlining her accomplishments governing the city’s maritime transit system, which has a budget the same size as Uskudar’s.

Dedetas vowed to redress the AKP’s neglect of women’s issues on both the district and federal levels. She promised to prioritize women’s employment and noted that, during her time helming Istanbul’s maritime transit system, she nearly tripled the number of women working there. She also proposed the creation of a free HPV vaccine program to protect against some forms of cervical cancer. (The cost of the vaccine has become nearly equivalent to Turkey’s monthly minimum wage.)

The candidate pledged to create child nurseries in every neighborhood in Uskudar. “This will enable women to work,” especially residents with low incomes, said Rumeysa Camdereli, an activist and member of Havle Women’s Association, the first Muslim feminist organization in Turkey.

Dedetas promised to expand welfare initiatives, and called for additional municipally subsidized cafeterias in Uskudar. Imamoglu created these during his first term for residents to get a healthy meal for just over a dollar, and his AKP competitor Murat Kurum mocked them on the campaign trail. “We are tired and bored of the rhetoric that tries to deceive the people by … giving half a tea glass of water or milk as if it is a service,” said Kurum. He also made fun of Imamoglu’s background as a kofte vendor.

Kurum’s gaffe turned off blue collar voters. Istanbul’s public eateries fill up every day for lunch and are vital in a country enduring a cost-of-living crisis amid annual inflation of nearly 70 percent.

“Local elections are less ideological and always more focused on services,” said Emine Ucak, the program director for social policy at the Reform Institute, an Istanbul-based policy center, who researches women in Turkish politics. “Women always think about their children, and they had stopped seeing a future for them.”

The campaign also focused on securing areas most vulnerable to earthquakes, a national concern after the devastating February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey’s southeast. Many locals fear that the slate block flats populating the hills above Uskudar’s wharf are in imminent danger in case of an earthquake. In response to their concerns, Dedetas is establishing a natural disaster directorate to help the district become prepared for earthquakes and other catastrophes.

On election night, Dedetas triumphed, beating Turkmen by more than seven percentage points. In doing so, she tore apart the long-held myth that Uskudar was an AKP stronghold.

“It’s a district with a lot of conservative families,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a visiting fellow at Brookings Institution. “For an uncovered woman to win is a real testament to her political appeal.” Unlike past CHP candidates, Dedetas shied away from the hardline, sometimes alienating secularism her party is known for. Pragmatism and empathy won the day.

Dedetas was not the only victorious woman on election day. Altogether, voters tripled the number of women mayors across Turkey. While only four female mayors had been elected in the previous municipal elections in 2019, 11 provinces and 64 municipalities are now governed by women, the vast majority of them representing opposition parties. Together, they won, on average, 53 percent of votes.

Female political representation is a welcome change after what many in the country see as backsliding on women’s rights under Erdogan. In 2021, Turkey exited the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty to combat gender-based violence that was drafted in the city a decade earlier. The Turkish president had urged women to have at least three children, claiming that those who reject motherhood are “deficient” and “incomplete.”

Although Turkey has a highly centralized political system, mayors remain key to managing districts and municipalities. They are where citizens first access the country’s welfare systems, and where businesses are registered, among other duties.

Following March’s elections, Dedetas and other mayors in the Turkish opposition now have their best chance in decades to govern with less interference from Ankara. She has wasted no time in initiating programs that address locals’ needs, such as grocery subsidies of up to $150 for retired residents. The district also plans to provide elderly residents free shuttle services to food markets. (Pensioners, who compose more than 10 percent of Turkey’s national population, receive roughly $293 per month from the state, an impossible wage to live on in Istanbul.)

Uskudar’s new mayor is also working to counteract the AKP’s neoliberal strategies, which many accuse of benefiting political patrons through shady backroom dealings all while poverty has deepened. To help promote transparency, Dedetas has begun to broadcast all municipal council meetings live online.

Figen Kucuksezer, an optometrist and Uskudar resident, is very excited by these changes. They’ve already helped preserve Uskudar’s Validebag Grove, one of the last wild green spaces in Istanbul. The area, which Kucuksezer volunteers to protect, is home to 400-year-old trees and migratory birds.

“The former mayor always wanted to make changes to the grove,” she said, referring to the AKP’s plans to develop the area by adding parking lots and food stalls and removing some native flora. But Kucuksezer and other local activists filed a lawsuit and have fought for years for Validebag to be left alone. “We had to block the Caterpillar [equipment] from entering in,” she said.

Since being elected, Dedetas has promised to protect it as a green space for all residents. In May, the local court annulled the previous government’s construction plan. “It is a breath of fresh air,” Kucuksezer added.

There is a saying in Turkish politics that whoever wins Istanbul will one day win Turkey. It was the case for Erdogan, who previously served as mayor of Istanbul before leading the country for the past two decades.

After years in the political wilderness, the CHP is now trying to repeat its success in the next national election, which should be the first without Erdogan in nearly 30 years. The challenge for Dedetas is to help Imamoglu triumph so that she can be his successor in Istanbul as he runs for the presidency.

So far, her stances have mirrored those of Imamoglu; Dedetas regularly highlights their work together on social media. But she has also bolstered her own profile by engaging in key culture war debates—including by opposing controversial legislation that will kill beloved stray dogs on the streets to rooting for the women’s national volleyball team at the Paris 2024 Olympics, a squad that has been vilified by the conservative right. Imamoglu’s and Dedetas’s fortunes are now intertwined.

“And this is just the start of her office,” said Cingil, Dedetas’s one-time party rival. “There are already rumors that she will be the next candidate for Istanbul mayor.” That would be another first.

[mousegard]

this june is the 4th anniversary of an eagle among lions. i should've made a post about it on june 8 but i was extremely busy moving to a new apartment and would have just as easily forgotten my own birthday

but instead of looking at how the fic began (shitposting about "mayo dimitri" in a discord chat with my beta reader @nolivar6136) i want to take a look at the last 11 chapters of this fic and the context in which they were written, and why i have always been so thankful for the enthusiastic reception eal received from my readers.

on monday, march 21, 2022, after publishing one of my favorite single chapters of the fic—desdinova's POV chapter, "the tears of god flow as I bleed" (a blue oyster cult reference, naturally)—i was abruptly let go from the marketing job i'd had since 2019 with no warning and no reason given.

i have had my suspicions as to why. the tech startup i had originally been hired by had been acquired the past year by its own sister company, and there was a growing sentiment from the original company's employees—who were increasingly becoming ex-employees—that the new company, now that it had acquired the old company's core technology and production facilities, no longer needed its people. in particular, rumor had it the higher-ups hadn't wanted anybody from the ancien regime on the company's marketing team. my old boss had already left of her own accord (i probably should have followed her; she'd been the best boss i'd ever had).

it was also likely that the company wanted to purge people who preferred remote work to in-office work. these suspicions came as a relief to me, because my termination had also come just over a week after offhandedly mentioning to the marketing team that i had a girlfriend before taking a week off to spend time with her (that's right, i was fired literally the day i came back from vacation), and the timing had felt suspicious. turns out my new boss wasn't homophobic, just an incompetent asshole working for other incompetent assholes!

but i digress. it had been my first time being let go from a job and my first time being unemployed, and i would continue being unemployed until august 2022. i don't need to tell you how awful being unemployed was. we all know how awful being unemployed is and how traumatic being fired from a job you love can be. the only bright side was that i had more time to write than ever before, and that was how i dragged an eagle among lions across the finish line. i wrote like it was my part-time job. i wrote like the comments from my readers could pay my rent, because telling this story to my readers and seeing them react to every crazy twist and turn the story took in its final act sustained my soul.

eal had an extraordinary cohort of regular commenters who would comment on every chapter, or almost every chapter, which is an exceptional rarity for fics on ao3. every chapter had some of the liveliest comments sections i've ever seen. the joy that came from sharing the story with such a responsive community was what gave me the strength to keep going. if i'd just been shouting out the story to a void, my motivation would have likely died out. i might not have ever managed to bring the story to a conclusion.

i think i've talked about how much i loved eal's commenters before, but i haven't shared the exact circumstances of eal's final arc and the specific way these enthusiastic readers and commenters made the most unbearable four months of my life tolerable. when i'd lost a sense of purpose in my life, they helped me hold onto one. they made this story feel worth telling. they made me feel as though it was worth it to do my best and drive the story to its best possible conclusion when hardly anything else in the world felt "worth" doing. when resume after resume vanished into the void and potential employers ghosted after one, two, or even three interviews, eal's commenters made it so that at least my magnum opus didn't feel like wasted effort, even when every single interview and job application did. when you're unemployed, your life feels meaningless. eal's readers made me feel like a rockstar.

even two years later, i'm still so happy and grateful to have met so many wonderful people through eal's comments sections.

thanks, everyone. i really appreciated it.

[tacetnix]

The New Year (OOC)

>// What was 2023? In retrospect, in hindsight, it's a year of frustrations. It's a year of being kicked to the curb and being hung out to dry, and at the same time it's a year that's been... reconfirming?

I started the year learning that my IT team was being deleted. That we had two weeks before we were going to be moving to the BioMed project. Up until May, I was doing thankless, menial work scraping medical-grade stickers with a razor, and applying new, shittier labels instead. They wanted us to do more and more, and somehow nothing we did was good enough.

Come my birthday, we were put on extended leave, given one or two days' worth of work with weeks of nothing in-between... and come the end of May, we're told that we were retroactively let go.

I can't express how much I have to thank the friends who helped me get through those few months of rough waters as I tried to scramble and find something new for work.

It just sucks that the only job that took me was working at an industrial paint facility, right next to unrepentant felons who got fired left, right and center for HR violations, sex-on-the-job, and threatened violence against their coworkers. Working in 100°F (~37.78°C) internal temperatures next to a 400°F furnace? Not great. Their attendance policy was draconian, and if I missed four days (even with doctor's notes), I'd be terminated on the spot. I was there for over a month, and thankfully I managed to get some interview for other IT work in the meantime. I was able to leave on good terms with the company, and started work again in another hospital.

Which has been a delight (to be back in the field) with its stresses (being verbally abused by a boss and pushed by higher ups to achieve impossible metrics). Overall, super happy to be back!! It's not perfect, but it's helped me realize I do actually want to stay in this field.

Sometime along the year though, I fell out of love with the main hyperfixation I'd been carrying since 2019: Lancer RPG. I came to realize that the community, the developers, the people they trust to champion it... will never live up to the promises that the game set out for. That at its core, it's a fundamentally flawed game that no amount of hacking or patching will fix. And for a huge amount of the year... that left me in a rut.

And that.. brings me to now.

This is a massive laundry list of shit that's gone wrong this year. But I'm happy. My wife is doing better than she ever has, I was prescribed adderall and it's helped me get things done reliably. It's the first year that I've spent since college that visiting my parents went well, and no (real) fights or personal slights happened... and we actually spent Christmas with them for the first time since... 2018, I think?

I'm devving my own game now, I've learned a ton more programming, and I'm self-teaching myself some app development! All the while I've been hungrily consuming new interests, and feel pretty positive about how everything can go from here!

The pros... don't outweigh the cons, but I'm choosing to look for the future with a smile on my face. I have my ideas of where I'd like to be, and for anything awry with my work... my work-life balance is better than it was when I drove a school bus.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to write more with you all in the coming months... and I also hope that come March, I'll still have a job that I'm working, so I'm not going nuts with stress again!

Sorry to just splurge all over the dash; if you've read this far, I hope you're doing well! Let me know what piece of wisdom you picked up in 2023! Mine is: "Be adamant that you aren't going to do overtime. Never give them an inch, because they'll drag you for a mile."

[dankusner]

Tyler Tech — Cook County

Tyler Technologies was hired to help the Cook County Circuit Court digitize records and create a new case management system accessible through terminals such as these at the Daley Center, shown in March. It was one of three major Tyler projects in Illinois to make government easier to navigate, but projected costs have swelled and some of the projects have been dogged by slowdowns and shortcomings. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

The $265 million tech bill

In a flurry of contracts inked a decade ago, some of Illinois’ most powerful political figures declared it was time to fix their obsolete and expensive computer systems.

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle called for an online method to deliver error-free property records and tax bills.

Then-Clerk of the county Circuit Court Dorothy Brown wanted seamless technology so everyone could read and file cases on their laptops.

And the Illinois Supreme Court sought a single unified dashboard linking the appellate courts with all 102 county courthouses from Cairo to Galena.

In a three-year window starting in 2015, executives of a little-known Plano, Texas, corporation — Tyler Technologies Inc. — persuaded all three to give them the crucial job.

The collective price tag was initially $75 million and what officials called the “go-live” deadlines were three to five years out.

But since then, an Injustice Watch and Chicago Tribune investigation found, the cumulative projected cost swelled to more than $250 million while execution was dogged by slowdowns and shortcomings.

Two of the projects have yet to reach their declared finish line, and the third is still in need of fixes.

The Cook County property records project, which started in 2015 and was supposed to be completed in December 2019, is now set to launch April 28 after five years of delays that forced the county to spend tens of millions of dollars more on upkeep to the 1970s-era technology.

The Injustice Watch and Tribune investigation found Cook County and state officials approved the cascade of taxpayer dollars to Tyler even as the company struggled with software crashes, bungled rollouts and allegations of incompetence, while Tyler pointed the finger back at government officials for various missteps.

The county wrote a flawed property revamp contract paying millions of dollars upfront and imposed few consequences for nonperformance, records and interviews show.

In the circuit court contract, a consultant blamed court staff for being uncooperative or untrained. And the Supreme Court expanded its contract tenfold amid state auditor criticism over its lack of independent oversight.

At one critical juncture five years ago, the county considered firing Tyler from the property tax contract, the investigation found.

Preckwinkle and other county officials wrote sternly worded letters and made legal threats but, faced with the prospects of an even longer schedule and higher costs, decided to stick with the company.

“There needs to be a very serious reckoning,” said David Orr, who was Cook County clerk when the first Tyler contract was signed.

He is now a senior policy adviser to the advocacy group Reform For Illinois.

“This has gone on a long time, the payments ballooned and the county even had to put consultants over the consultants. Good government demands efficiency. It’s very troubling.”

Government agencies have so far approved $185 million to Tyler for the three contracts — more than twice the original estimates.

In addition, Cook County authorized $22 million to outside consultants to watchdog the troubled Tyler projects and $59 million more to tech companies and former employees to keep hosting data on the outmoded mainframe Tyler was supposed to help replace years ago.

The Chicago Tribune and Injustice Watch investigation found records offering a glimpse into the political intrigue behind the high-tech contracts.

Tyler executives won the company’s first business in Illinois following a series of campaign contributions.

Both Brown and an underling were under federal investigation in an unrelated bribery scandal during Tyler’s selection process — although Brown was never charged and denied wrongdoing.

And the Supreme Court hired a Tyler executive to be chief of staff overseeing its contract with the company, raising questions about a potential conflict, which the executive denies.

Preckwinkle, Brown and the chief justice of the Supreme Court all declined requests for interviews, but through spokespeople said they were working to ensure the Tyler systems were completed and performed as promised.

Tyler President H. Lynn Moore Jr. also declined to be interviewed. Then-Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown, shown in 2017, oversaw the first migration to Tyler Technologies' comprehensive court case management platform known as Odyssey.

Some of the highest-profile Odyssey rollouts were plagued with complaints from attorneys.

Brown left office before the project was finished.

Then-Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown, shown in 2017, oversaw the first migration to Tyler Technologies’ comprehensive court case management platform known as Odyssey.

Some of the highest-profile Odyssey rollouts were plagued with complaints from attorneys.

Brown left office before the project was finished.

In a series of emails the company’s media team underscored thousands of success stories — including other Illinois contracts from Springfield to Schaumburg — streamlining outdated government technology and saving taxpayer dollars.

They said the shifting property tax project timelines were “agreed to by all parties,” and said Tyler has contended with government leadership changes, poor data and a lack of government staffing “to support the work.”

“We are modernizing multiple, previously siloed, often homegrown legacy systems and processes while working with vast amounts of historical data and embedded business practices,” the email from Tyler said.

But in Cook County, the company was faulted for its execution.

In 2019 — as the company missed another deadline for the rollout of the massive Cook County property tax system overhaul — the county clerk, assessor and treasurer asked Preckwinkle to meet to discuss alternatives.

“Progress and accomplishments have been minimal; excuses and delays have been plentiful,” the three officials wrote in correspondence obtained through Freedom of Information requests.

They complained about a round-robin of Tyler project managers churning through leadership roles, and claimed some were poorly trained in the intricacies of Cook County government or even Tyler’s software.

Tyler’s latest project delivery plan contained “blatant spelling errors.” In one case, a calendar calculation was 73 years off, the letter alleged.

As the Cook County contract proceeded, other government bodies in the last decade rescinded contracts or filed lawsuits over dissatisfaction with the company’s performance.

Injustice Watch and the Tribune found 18 federal lawsuits around the country involving controversies over Tyler contracts, including allegations of fraud by a Michigan county 911 consortium claiming Tyler gave false assurances about its technology.

Tyler disputed the agency’s claims, and the case was later settled.

Despite the concerns, Tyler parlayed the three lucrative Illinois contracts to become a national powerhouse in the field of local government technology.

Last year, it reported income of $2.1 billion from taxpayer-financed contracts.

Formed in 1966, Tyler evolved from being a company that forged cast-iron sewer pipes to a local government technology firm, court and corporate records show.

“They were a company that bought companies and reinvented itself as a tech company,” said John Harvell, a former Tyler vice president and technology specialist.

Tyler Technologies, headquartered in Plano, Texas, said it has numerous success stories of streamlining outdated government technology and saving taxpayer dollars. (LM Otero/AP)

“It’s really a pretty simple formula. Go in, buy up small companies. You don’t have to pay them a whole lot,” Harvell said.

“Use their political contracts and influences. Get into the city, state, county, whatever it is, and then go from there.”

Tyler entered the world of Cook County government in the same way.

In 1998, it bought a land records tech firm, Government Records Services Inc., that already had a Cook County contract to digitize property records.

Between 1998 and 2000, when Tyler owned GRS, executives including its Vice President Lynn Moore Sr. — the father of Tyler’s current president, Lynn Moore Jr. — donated $25,000 to Democratic elected officials who ran offices needing modernization, including Brown and two successive recorders of deeds, Jesse White and Eugene Moore.

In 1999, Tyler won a $4.5 million contract with the county recorder of deeds to organize land records.

Tyler executives have been public about their strategy to take over government record-keeping from the agencies hiring it, noting it in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission report.

“We also compete with internal, centralized IT departments of governmental entities, which requires us to persuade the end-user to stop the internal service and outsource to us,” said Tyler’s most recent annual SEC report.

When that happens, public agencies are effectively captive to Tyler, Zacks Investment Research wrote in a December report rating Tyler’s stock a “buy.”

“Once a project is approved by a government entity, the budget gets locked in, which reduces its flexibility to cancel the project,” the report said.

In their emailed response, Tyler representatives acknowledged its strategy to compete with any government client — which they referred to as a “prospect” — wedded to “siloed information systems, outdated technology and business practices.”

“Every time a County employee opens a Word document, passes a government vehicle, parks under a streetlight, uses a clean bathroom, or prints out an article from the Chicago Tribune, they are leveraging third-party hardware, technology, or services delivered by a company that needs to generate revenues to stay in business so that the company can keep doing the work the government has asked it to do,” Tyler’s email said.

‘An arrogant and disinterested vendor’

Tyler’s involvement in Cook County’s property tax software project began in 2015 when Preckwinkle asked the firm to undertake the Herculean assignment of retiring 1970s mainframe computers used to levy and distribute $18 billion a year from all 1.8 million county properties.

For Preckwinkle, it was a legacy project, according to interviews with her top aides.

County workers at the time still walked from office to office hand delivering records about assessments, appeals, rate calculations and bill collections. The

fairness, accuracy and timeliness of the property tax system was in question, and the assessor, clerk and treasurer needed a single data platform.

Before Tyler was picked, it almost didn’t make the first cut.

When the county in 2014 empaneled a committee of IT specialists from across several departments to evaluate bids, the evaluators lambasted Tyler’s 615-page proposal for “negligent cut-and-paste efforts,” “buzzwords” and “vague marketing language,” the Evaluation Committee report said.

But during an in-person presentation, Tyler executives changed minds with a price cut and assurances of their expertise and customized service.

In September 2015, the Cook County Board of Commissioners approved Tyler’s contract, capped at $30 million with options to renew.

“Winning Big,” Tyler announced in its 2015 annual report.

In an image from a county board hearing recorded in September 2015, Mark Hawkins, Tyler Technologies' vice president of professional services, speaks ahead of a vote on Tyler's $30 million contract to upgrade the county's property tax system.

The contract cleared the board despite some commissioners' concerns about the company's national track record.

In an image from a Cook County Board hearing recorded in September 2015, Mark Hawkins, Tyler Technologies’ vice president of professional services, speaks ahead of a vote on Tyler’s $30 million contract to upgrade the county’s property tax system.

The contract cleared the board despite some commissioners’ concerns about Tyler’s national track record. (Cook County Board)

At the time, this was the largest government contract in Tyler’s history and “a prime example” of Tyler’s business strategy for “growing our presence with larger governments,” the company’s report said.

But problems soon arose.

Tyler’s October 2016 deadline to produce an initial schedule of its project came and went, Simona Rollinson, who ran the county’s technology office, wrote to Tyler Vice President Mark Hawkins.

And a year later when Tyler presented a detailed project schedule the company was already on its third project manager whose “performance problems are consistent with those of Tyler’s previous two project managers, who were removed because of poor performance,” Rollinson claimed in a letter obtained through records requests.

“Each of the project managers has also been off site at an unacceptable frequency,” she wrote.

Through government records and interviews, Injustice Watch and the Tribune identified eight Tyler project managers who worked on Cook County’s integrated property tax system.

Five of them lived in other parts of the country outside the Chicago area.

One former Tyler project manager, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he no longer works for the company, said Tyler scrambled its A-Team across the country to deal with emergencies and burned through talented tech workers.

“Tyler had this merry-go-round, where the quality staff go on tours, if you will. They don’t really commit to work on one project,” said the former Tyler manager.

In their response to Injustice Watch and Tribune questions, Tyler representatives said the company used “remote project managers” but “when the County requested an onsite PM, we provided one.”

By September 2018, Cook County’s treasurer, assessor and clerk wrote to Tyler’s board chairman, John Marr Jr.:

“It has been nearly three years since the award but Tyler has little to show for it.”

And a year later, county tech specialists pressed a Tyler project manager for progress reports and instead he delivered an “outburst” that was “uncalled for and unprofessional,” according to a memo the three elected officials wrote to Tyler President Moore.

By March 26, 2019 — three-and-a-half years after the contract was signed — the situation had come to a head.

Preckwinkle summoned Moore to the fifth floor of the county building for a face-to-face meeting.

Their once-promising partnership had turned adversarial, and now both their reputations were on the line.

Moore arrived on that crisp, cold day flanked by two senior Tyler executives.

Alongside Preckwinkle were recently elected Assessor Fritz Kaegi, newly appointed County Chief Information Officer Tom Lynch and representatives from the county clerk and Treasurer Maria Pappas.

“The county’s made a big investment and you need to deliver,” Preckwinkle told Moore, according to two county officials present, noting Cook County was one of Tyler’s biggest customers. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle oversaw Tyler Technologies' contract to help retire decades-old computer systems used for county property taxes.

Preckwinkle, shown here in 2019, summoned company leadership to her offices that year amid pressure to terminate their contract.

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle oversaw Tyler Technologies’ contract to help retire decades-old computer systems used for county property taxes. Preckwinkle, shown here in 2019, summoned company leadership to her offices that year amid pressure to terminate their contract.

Moore, who had a reputation as a poker-faced corporate lawyer and a serious numbers guy, gave little ground, according to one county official, who said Moore “alluded to complexities of large projects and that government projects are frequently delayed.”

Following the meeting, Preckwinkle wrote to Moore that if Tyler did not meet a June 2019 milestone to pull off a key deadline for that December’s planned launch that “the County will exercise all available remedies under the contract, up to and including termination.”

But as December approached, Tyler again asked for more time.

Pappas in November urged Preckwinkle in a letter to fire Tyler and sue for “what the law will allow us to recover,” describing it as “possibly the worst technology contract with a vendor that Cook County has ever written.”

“Clearly, giving Tyler any upfront money has made the County look foolish, inept stewards of the people’s money,” Pappas wrote.

“However we do it, we must clean up the wreckage Cook County fostered when it signed this ill-advised contract with an arrogant and disinterested vendor.”

Preckwinkle said in a written response she shared Pappas’ “concern and frustration with Tyler’s performance” and alleged “the poor quality of their work has not met the standards required by the contract and has jeopardized the success of the … project.”

Instead of firing Tyler, Preckwinkle hired the tech research firm Gartner to evaluate the county’s options.

Gartner’s April 2020 report was grim: County leaders were confronting what it described as “sunk costs” bias — the emotionally driven tendency for executives to pursue a failing strategy simply because they’d already invested time and money into it.

In Tyler’s case, the county had already paid the firm $13 million and owed another $17 million on the $30 million contract.

The county could bring on another firm, but the change could cost between $15 million and $24 million and take 3.5 to 4.5 years to complete, Gartner wrote, while Tyler’s “go-live” date was 2.8 more years.

Still, Tyler’s scheduled “implementation dates have so far slipped between 18 to 24 months,” the Gartner report said.

Preckwinkle decided to stay the course, and Kaegi supported her, over objections from Pappas.

Over time, Preckwinkle’s staff negotiated new contract terms — exacting $4.3 million in county savings and tying future payments to hitting milestones — while also granting Tyler a three-year, $8.4 million contract extension in 2022.

Experts interviewed by the Chicago Tribune and Injustice Watch said there is always finger-pointing when massive government tech projects spin out of control.

“The contractor is likely to stretch things on as long as they possibly can, so that’s why the government needs to have contract clauses that force the contractor to perform on budget and on time,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C.

By April 2024, when Tyler ran tests of its system in a demonstration for the treasurer’s office, half failed, Pappas told Preckwinkle in a letter, adding, “this project remains on course to be a disaster.”

Hawkins, Tyler’s VP, said in a follow-up letter that Pappas was exaggerating and said it was extending the go-live dates into 2025 at the county’s request.

“To get there, we need to cooperate in good faith, operating on facts and not hyperbole,” Hawkins wrote.

Since October, when Tyler pledged to bring in its A-Team to meet the April 28 deadline, the project has experienced other fits and starts.

Just last month, Preckwinkle’s staff said Tyler would need to curtail access to the mainframe for three weeks to test the system, which Pappas recently described in a letter to Preckwinkle as “a complete shock” that could hurt homeowners facing the loss of property as they pay delinquent property tax bills in increments.

While Tyler said it made exceptions to address some of Pappas’ concerns and that such blackouts were routine, the interruption still clouded the cautious optimism some county officials felt about the upcoming April 28 go-live promise.

“Tyler hasn’t given me any reason to trust them,” Cook County Commissioner Bridget Degnen said in an interview. Odyssey complaints pervasive

A decade ago, before any problems surfaced in the Cook County property tax effort, Tyler in quick succession bid for two other massive Illinois contracts to digitize state and local courts.

The most high-profile was to upgrade the Cook County Circuit Court clerk’s office, which was being run at the time by Brown.

In 2015, clerks in the second-largest unified court system in the country still used metal carts to bring judges dog-eared cardboard files.

Much of what was online lived on monochrome monitors displaying phosphor-green text on a black background.

Court orders were issued on carbon paper.

Public access terminals are reflected in the glass at the Probate Division of the Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court's office.

The terminals are connected to Tyler Technologies' case management system, which was supposed to help the courts become less reliant on paper records like those pictured above.

The probate division update went live a year and a half late.

Public access terminals are reflected in the glass at the Probate Division of the Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court’s office.

The terminals are connected to Tyler Technologies’ case management system, which was supposed to help the courts become less reliant on paper records such as those shown above.

The probate division update went live a year and a half late.

Brown had already been criticized in media reports and county hearings for bungled tech rollouts, and this was her biggest project by far, calling for giving the public online access to judicial operations rather than forcing people to appear at the courts.

Tyler was one of seven bidders graded over multiple rounds.

On the evaluation team was Beena Patel, an associate clerk who had worked in the office for 30 years.

As she was evaluating the bids, Patel was separately lying to a federal grand jury with her denials that jobs, promotions and raises were being exchanged for money and loans to Brown, court and contract records show.

Patel was ultimately sentenced to two years in federal prison for lying to the grand jury about facilitating a $15,000 bribe to Brown from a county job applicant, among other infractions. Patel’s lies, federal authorities said, became a “substantial interference” to indicting Brown.

Brown, who denied any wrongdoing throughout the investigation, was never charged. Neither Brown nor Patel responded to requests for comment.

Beena Patel, a former associate clerk of the Cook County Circuit Court's office, was found guilty in 2019 of three counts of lying to a grand jury following a jobs-for-bribes probe into the office.

She was on the team evaluating which firm got the contract to upgrade the clerk's computer system.

Beena Patel, a former associate clerk of the Cook County Circuit Court’s office, was found guilty in 2019 of three counts of lying to a grand jury following a jobs-for-bribes probe into the office.

She was on the team evaluating which firm got the contract to upgrade the clerk’s computer system.

Tyler eventually won the $36.5 million county court bid in April 2017.

Less than a year later, Brown broke out a pair of big scissors to snip a red ribbon and mark the first migration to Tyler‘s new system, a comprehensive court case management platform known as Odyssey.

Subsequent launches were error-riddled.

E-filings, launched the following August, took “days to get approved” or were rejected for unclear reasons, the Tribune reported at the time.

Attorneys and paralegals blamed Brown for a lack of notice or training.

Brown countered that she could only provide “the few instructions given to her” by Tyler.

When Tyler moved to upgrade the criminal system, it too was plagued by problems, including long delays, gaps in case information and unprepared clerks.

Tyler said at the time there was a natural “learning curve.”

While Tyler’s team took some heat, so too did Brown.

According to reports from the consulting firm Guidehouse, Brown failed to dedicate enough staff to the project and that there was low attendance at training sessions for judges and clerks.

The last division of the project, traffic court, didn’t cross the finish line until the end of December 2022, 18 months late, and under a new clerk, Iris Martinez.

The county has authorized paying Tyler $48 million through 2027.

Complaints continued, including from Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell Jr., who wrote Martinez about incomplete search results, frequent outages and recording errors that left defendants unable to attend court or held in jail longer than required.

Today at Ascend Justice’s emergency clinic, where domestic violence survivors seek legal help writing orders of protection, attorney Danielle Parisi Ruffatto said their cases often don’t appear in the system.

“If we can’t access the system of those documents, we might be giving the judge incomplete information or we might not be giving the client full and complete advice as we would if we could see all of the case documents,” she said.

Newly elected Circuit Court Clerk Mariyana Spyropoulos, who campaigned on fixing the system’s problems, said her office is “working to address issues with the Odyssey system.”

Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Mariyana Spyropoulos, left, stands with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle after her ceremonial swearing-in at the Daley Center on Dec. 2, 2024.

With Preckwinkle's endorsement, Spyropoulos ran for the office in part to fix "problems" with the Odyssey system.

Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Mariyana Spyropoulos, left, stands with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle after her ceremonial swearing-in at the Daley Center on Dec. 2, 2024.

With Preckwinkle’s endorsement, Spyropoulos ran for the office in part to fix “problems” with the Odyssey system.

Tyler representatives rebuffed the critiques, telling the Tribune and Injustice Watch: “Project milestones were successfully achieved.

“Currently, new court leadership is familiarizing itself with the system and training additional new staff members.” ‘Certainly not at the level that it could be’

Unlike elected officials in Cook County, Illinois Supreme Court leaders defend their contract with Tyler and say any problems are routine in giant tech deals.

But the Tyler contract to digitize and integrate the Supreme Court with clerks in Illinois’ 102 counties has grown from an initial $8.4 million in 2016 to $89 million so far, the Tribune and Injustice Watch found.

The growth comes because the Supreme Court expanded the project in both size and scope and not due to cost overruns, officials said.

“I think the cost is what was anticipated. Illinois is a big state with a lot of courts,” said Skip Robertson, chief technology officer for the administrative office of the Illinois Courts, the Supreme Court arm in charge of Tyler’s contract.

“People can stay home and file from anywhere, when they used to have to print off paper and carry it to downtown Chicago and park at the Daley Center and go stand in line at the clerk’s office,” Robertson said. “Those days are pretty much over.”

The Illinois Supreme Court in Springfield on April 18, 2023.

Tyler has a decade-long agreement with the administrative arm of the courts to enable electronic filing and search capability in all 102 Illinois counties as well as the Appellate and Supreme Courts. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

The Illinois Supreme Court in Springfield on April 18, 2023. Tyler has a decade-long agreement with the administrative arm of the courts to enable electronic filing and search capability in all 102 Illinois counties as well as the Appellate Courts and Supreme Court.

Still, the project has had its critics, including the state auditor general’s office, which has repeatedly said the Illinois Supreme Court should have included an independent review of Tyler’s work — similar to the oversight contracts imposed by Cook County agencies.

Though Supreme Court officials dispute those concerns, Tyler’s statewide search function is not yet available to the public.

The online portal, called “re:SearchIL,” is limited to judges and their staff and clerks, as well as attorneys and litigants who can review only specific cases in which they have filed appearances as a party.

Court spokesperson Christopher Bonjean said in an interview with Injustice Watch and the Tribune that the portal “hasn’t been opened up to the public yet” but hoped “it’s very soon.”

A month after that interview, the Supreme Court issued an order saying public access to some Supreme Court and Appellate Court records would begin May 1 — although the court said that would only include court documents filed after April 1 and would not provide statewide public access in the 102 county courts.

Tyler’s public tracker of courts that are fully integrated with the re:SearchIL system lists the Supreme Court and Appellate courts as “coming soon.” So are circuit courts in Cook and several other counties including, Lake, Kankakee, McLean and St. Clair.

“It’s certainly not at the level that it could be, but it’s something that is available and it is used,” Robertson said.

In its emailed response to Injustice Watch and the Tribune, Tyler representatives suggested state officials bore responsibility for the issues.

“A key aspect of this particular project has been the need to navigate leadership transitions, evolving stakeholder priorities, and complex decision-making processes,” Tyler representatives said.

Among those working on the contract for the Supreme Court is a former Tyler employee, the Tribune and Injustice Watch found.

John Kennedy Chatz in 2023 became the chief of staff to the Illinois Courts’ administrative office. Before taking that job, Chatz worked as a Tyler client executive assigned to the Supreme Court contract.

Though working both sides of the contract at different points in his career might appear to be a conflict of interest, Chatz in written responses to Injustice Watch and the Tribune said he did not think he had such a conflict and did not have to undergo any special state ethics review before taking the state job.

Before his time at Tyler and the state, Chatz worked as a supervisor for Brown at the Cook County clerk’s office.

In 2004, Brown told the Chicago Sun-Times she suspended Chatz for violating her policy against political work in the office after Chatz had reportedly directed a court staffer to drop complimentary tickets to Brown’s political fundraiser into every judges’ mailbox at the Skokie courthouse.

Chatz disputed that report.

“I was not suspended,” he said in his emailed response.

A review of records in the Cook County Odyssey system also found discrepancies about Chatz’s status as a lawyer in Illinois.

Odyssey records show Chatz was registered as a lawyer in 2021, and then represented a client in court on a traffic matter.

But separate state records show he lost his Illinois law license a decade earlier for failure to complete legal education requirements.

Chatz said the records in the Odyssey system — now overseen by his former company — are mistaken.

“I did not re-register, this information is false,” he wrote.

In their email response to questions, Tyler representatives said any errors in the Odyssey system regarding Chatz are input errors by the county.

“The Odyssey Portal reflects data provided by the County. If Mr. Chatz believes there is an error in what is being reflected, then we would assume that that would be addressed with the County,” the Tyler representatives wrote.

[angel-n-soul]

The ANS Members' Official Statement

Hello, this is ANS's Lina, J, Royeon, Dalyn, Raon, Bian, and Dami. All of the members aside from Haena. First of all, we apologize for the recent media reports that have raises concerns to the fans who love us. Fans may misunderstand or worry, so we're here to explain the situation we are in right now.

Firstly, all of the members except Haena have notified our legal representatives of the termination of our exclusive contract with our company on August 11th. We believe that the company and agency problems are related to Haena's and it is our duty to explain our truths to our fans, we're ashamed to tell you how it happened.

Our agency, ANS Entertainment, has retired almost all of its staff twice in the months of March and April, leaving us without staff or managers.

On June 14th, the office space was closed and our dorm was moved from Sinsa-dong to Gimpo, and we haven't even had practice since then. Since there are no staff or employees to work with scheduling or managing the online fanclub, we have to do our own staffing. Members have to travel by taxi since there is no staff to provide us with transportation.

As fans know, we had a fanmeeting on June 20th, so we made many big and small mistakes. The fanmeeting would have been a huge mess if it weren't for the retired employee who willingly came with us that day.

To add to that, we haven't been able to have dance or vocal lessons. All we had was 10,000 won per day per member for meals, but it wasn't paid on weekends either.

In fact, we didn't have support managers with us, and we asked our company if we could take dance lessons, but they didn't allow us since we didn't have any money.

It was too much to understand the company's difficulties during the recent Coronavirus, and we couldn't waste our time thinking about the fans waiting for us.

So we sent a letter to the company of July 22nd through our legal representatives, to increase the amount of managers, set up an office, a practice room, and for us to be able to take dance lessons, and take responsible measures within 14 days. Instead of taking responsibility, the company called one of the member's mothers saying the company was not at fault.

They used abusive language such as "We're making a list of members to remove so we can take only the best of ANS. The others are made of trash that can't do anything. They can't do anything because they're sitting home depressed." We couldn't handle it anymore so we terminated our contract on August 11th.

That's where Haena's problems came from. Coincidentally, right after we sent the letter to the company, that's when they started talking about Haena's problems and asked us to visit her at the hospital and the same article that was posted on Haena's instagram was reported in the media right after we sent a termination notice to our company.

In fact, we didn't even have a bad relationship with Haena.

Haena joined in December of 2019, and as the youngest, a sophomore in high school at the time, she had to go to school. And since the company had a lot of difficulties this year, we had less opportunities to work couldn't spend as much time together.

Haena couldn't go to school since she got tested for Coronavirus and her job is probably all we talked about with her.

Haena was tested on May 29th since we heard a confirmed carrier used the same PC room she went to, and fortunately, Haena tested negative and ordered another 3 days of self isolation by the health center.

By the way, we had no employees, so we had to process the school documents. We called Haena's homeroom teacher on June 8th and found that Haena was not present without notice even after the 3 days of isolation.

Haena's homeroom teacher knew that Haena was often absent due to work, and even the day she took a photo of her school diploma, she couldn't attend due to a company schedule even though there was no schedule that day.

So we called her to a cafe that day to talk about what happened with the teacher, and she didn't give us any exact answer and just said it was personal.

In response, we asked the members to never lie and talk to each other if there are any reasons, but we never cursed or scolded each other. In fact, this is the kind of management the company should do, but because the company didn't do anything, we had to manage Haena's school life.

The next day, Haena contacted one of the members and she wanted to discuss future activities with her parents due to mental problems. We respected Haena's opinion and asked her to let us know after talking to the company, but Haena did not respond to us.

On June 12th, she sent a message to two members saying "I'm sorry, I'm too tired mentally. I'll call you when I get better." That was Haena's last call.

Haena didn't attend the fanmeeting on June 20th, and we had a hard time changing the choreography.

After we sent our letter to the company, they told us to go to the hospital, saying that as if she went to the hospital because of us. We were scared that we couldn't contact Haena directly, but fortunately Haena returned home that same day without any problems.

Haena must've had a hard time mentally as ANS's future became uncertain due to the agency's problems, and she must've had financial difficulties since she didn't receive any financial support. We didn't have any bad feelings toward Haena then or now, and if she accepts our call, we would like to meet up with her to resolve any misunderstandings if there was any harm.

However, due to the problem we are unfortunately facing regarding our contract termination and the fact the company said such bad things about us earlier, we wonder if the company is using the problem to harm our contracts.

We've received so much love from you fans. We're so sorry that we caused you so much concern. We had no choice but to terminate our contracts with our agency, and no one knows what will happen in the future, and we feel like we're being left up in the air.

We may continue our entertainment activities, and we may work as a team. Please understand our situation that we had to terminate our contracts. If we're ever given another chance, we promise to see you again in better shape. Thank you for all this time.

-August 20th, 2020, ANS's Lina, J, Royeon, Dalyn, Raon, Bian, Dami

*This was initially posted on their official fancafe, but everything was deleted soon after.

[cursedtm]

UPDATED BIO/STATS. carrd will be updated <24hrs. posted here for your convenience. trigger warning for suicide.

FULL NAME. august lenora singh-erriksen. BIRTH NAME. name withheld. ALIASES.

octavarium “o” no last name given (2014-). alternatively: OCTAVARIUM.EXE and OCTAVARIUM.CMMD

 oberon “o” sweetwater (2031-2049). oberon, for their mother anita’s love for the shakespearan play midummer’s night dream. the name further signifies o’s character as they are known to be: cunning. mischievous. reign of tricksters. possessing the thought that they can do whatever they want when they want and knowing exactly how to do so. for their two sides.  sweetwater, an ode to their mother, dr errikson’s involvement in its development. serves as a warning given the nature of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the alias.

 LORRY V.156.43

AGE.

> the alias OBERON is twenty four years old.

> the alias OCTAVARIUM does not exist on public records and remains undisclosed to the public.

> august singh-errikson… retrieving data…

> ERROR 08. DIAGNOSING…

> in relation to the paucity of understanding encircling the duality of human – machine age when inquiring for data listed “physical age,” sufficient nor accurate data cannot be given.

> hypothetically, if user august errikson had not alienated to anomaly fifteen point three nine point x, in which system creator dr errikson had transferred user august from their biological body into the MODEL OCTAVARIUM SERIAL #730 008 002, august singh-erriksen would be at the physical age of 53 during december of 2058. however, the statistics for this variation does not correlate to pre-existing health condition: aggressive osteoblastoma occurring age nine leading to severe bone degeneration by age sixteen, leading to inevitable death at an approximate age seventeen with appropriate treatment. approx. death is age thirteen due to variant one point x three – lack of appropriate health care due to financial issues and healthcare policies. system configuration highly advises for readers to be aware that this data may be inaccurate for the current path and its future variations of august singh-erriksen. please contact dr errikson or DELOS inc. for further explanation.

AGE AT DEATH. fourteen.

CAUSE OF DEATH: suicide. exsanguination.

> system advises that this data is not currently known to officials and under the us death records august singh-erriksen had past away during the system malfunction of a host throughout the westworld pre-opening stockholders soiree. this incident also records the murders of delos stockholders, dr errikson and dr ford, leading to a mortality rate of 113. system further advises that the correct date of deaths for both user august and system creator dr errikson does not corelate to the us death records and is in fact incorrect and occurred three years and forty seven days prior to the date recorded.

AGE OF REBIRTH. fifteen.

AGE OF APPEARANCE. twenty five. variations in relation to alias are sufficient to change.

SPECIES. human – machine hybrid. cyborg, however, this is yet to be a scientifically approved term.

ETHNICITY. korean.

CITIZENSHIP.

> the alias OBERON is a dual korean and british citizen.

> user august singh-erriksen was a united states citizen.

GENDER. nonbinary. PREFFERED PRONOUNS. they/them strictly. SEXUALITY: bisexual (bisexual is inclusive of trans identities)

DATE OF ADOPTION. 17th of march 2013. AGE AT ADOPTION. ten years old.

BLOOD TYPE. AB+

BIRTH MOTHER. name withheld at request. BIRTH FATHER.  name withheld at request.

NATIONALITY.

> the user august was of united states nationality. > the alias OBERON is of korean nationality.

D.O.B. august is of 12th of december 2003. P.O.B. august is of san antonio, texas.

EDUCATION. august has acquired high school diploma. attended internship with robotics engineers dr ford, dr weber and ai specialist dr errikson. internship terminated after ten months for unknown reasons as requested by dr ford and dr weber upon the leave of dr errikson. home schooled from adoption under dr singh and dr errikson, furthering their knowledge of robotics, ai theory, intellectual technology, english, creative writing and international laws. noted: an advanced learner. understood relevant principles for ai, it and robotics in minutes. lacked fluency in english, laws and writing theory as noted by dr singh, adopted parent.

OCCUPATION.

> the user OBERON “O” is a technologist hired for INCITE as per request of liam dempsy, co-CEO of INCITE, in the years 2049-2055 shortly after the pair met at a party in 2049. this was after serac froze jean mi after convincing his brother that his fiancée (o) left him for greed (2048) when in fact he, serac, forced o into the first instance of INCITE’s reconditioning therapy (2047). the goal o possessed in this instance was to gain control of rehoboam, mirroring delores’ in 2058. this, in both instances, proved futile. the reconditioning o was exposed to in the years prior sought to be constraining on their grip of self and memory, slipping in and out, and therefore was their downfall in gaining control and executing their initial plans, leading to their third loop.

AFFILIATIONS.

> the alias OBERON is a minor stockholder in INCITE. the alias holds <2% of company shareholds as a gift from liam dempsy, co-ceo and minor controller of rehoboam. in specific, oberon holds majority stocks in INCITE’s failed reconditioning therapy in mexico. the gift in and of itself has no real meaning and is useless for any financial benefit. however, they are the only stocks vital for o’s initial planning.

> the alias OCTAVARIUM is a major silent stockholder and silent director in DELOS inc. after accumulating the majority after the westworld massacre which saw stocks plummet (54% in the year 2019). amongst these stocks, o has distributed the stocks between thirty six people, of whom are active directors that act in o’s absence. whatever these stockholders, previously incomers living below the poverty line, chooses to do with their power is up to them, only until it isn’t. this is the terms of the contract they signed with the unknown o.

> the alias known simply as “o”, works alongside brothers engerraund and later lover jean mi serac, to aid (and thereby unknowingly – to the brother’s knowledge - sabotage) the serac brothers into creating failed prototypes sol and david whose goal is to predict and guide human behaviour (2029-2031). the goal to sabotage was to prolong the system’s purpose until o could find a use for it in their plans.

> “o” created the implant and its discs that correspond with the successful prototype solomon and its successor rehoboam. o’s disks and implants aid solomon in feeding the system updated information on the day to day decisions of the users in order to further predict their future outcomes – thereby predicting the course of humanity’s fate. the data is also anonymous syphoned by o to feed them information which is needed to formulate the accuracy of their plan.

DISKS and its daily ingested IMPLANTS help control a human’s bodily and mental behaviours. they regulate sleep, moods, senses, blood levels, hormones, surrounding technology such as home security (requires subscriptions), etc.

o’s disks and implants have become a systematic norm in society as it progresses thanks to INCITE’s influence over government procedures. those who neglect to activate their implant nor ingest discs are systematically doomed to fail and, due to their lack of jobs, healthcare, food and housing in association with their turned off implant, die.

> this allows o to create an application called RICO, an app that allows degenerates – those who are lower class and either cannot afford to keep their implants on or chooses to keep them off (in other words, people who are invisible to rehoboam – to engage in illegal activities warranted from and paid from anonymous sources. INCITE is under the impression that o conceived the program in order to allow INCITE the ability to engage reconditioned outliers to hunt the unconditioned ones who lie a threat to rehoboam’s plan. while the program does run under this purpose, the initial purpose was to allow o to hire anonymous and untraceable users to aid in conducting miscellaneous missions which help advance their plans, unknown to INCITE’s eye.

> it is later discovered by engerraund serac, after his knowledge of o’s true nature since forcing them under solomon’s experimental reconditioning therapy, that he takes control of o’s shared stocks in INCITE and DELOS. here, upon exposing the truth of o to jean mi, engerraund discovers from jean mi of dr ford’s library of guest data, knowledge that is only known by o and the ceo of delos.

LANGUAGES. infinite. subject to the delos mainframe.

HEIGHT. 166cm. WEIGHT. 52kg.

EYES. obsidian. HAIR. tidy but long. black. well kept. black. BODY. small. lithe. titanium. built to withstand.

FACECLAIM. jung jaewon. VOICE CLAIM. ashe.

SIBLINGS. none. biologically unknown as parental names are withheld from the system.

PERSONAILITY.

> the alias OBERON is a party goer. narcotics veined. dinoysus born. player, brilliant in their works, a low born who managed to outrank the lot of them. a value to INCITE. earnt the respect of the blue bloods by befriending the low self esteem liam stempsy when they were sixteen.  

> o is aggressive. quiet. manipulative. cunning. serves no purpose in interacting with others unless the person is needed to advance their plans. this is met with a personality that contours to the need of the person.

due to the reconditioning therapy, the lines between themselves and the aliases blur.

PHOBIAS.  hemophobia – the fear of blood.

ZODIAC. sagittarius

MBTI. INTJ

intjs are analytical problem-solvers, eager to improve systems and processes with their innovative ideas. they have a talent for seeing possibilities for improvement, whether at work, at home, or in themselves.

often intellectual, intjs enjoy logical reasoning and complex problem-solving. they approach life by analyzing the theory behind what they see, and are typically focused inward, on their own thoughtful study of the world around them. intjs are drawn to logical systems and are much less comfortable with the unpredictable nature of other people and their emotions. they are typically independent and selective about their relationships, preferring to associate with people who they find intellectually stimulating.

TEMPERMANT.  melancholic

ENNEGRAM. 5w4

ALIGNMENT. neutral evil.

ABILITIES: LORRY allows o to similarily manipulate surrounding to their will like delores in s3. however, due to o’s outdated programming and overall bugs, their inability to do so in their current verse makes them as blind as a human in a technological advanced world.

DIVERGENCE & ANAMOLIES CAUSED:

UNKNOWN DATE - DIVERGENCE : SOUTH CHINA SEA 9° 55N, 115° 32E 6.06 ARC SECONDS

UNKNOWN DATE - ANOMALY DETECTED:  LOS ANGELES, USA. 34.0522°N, -118.2437°W    MINOR IRREGULARITIES. ANALYSIS REQUIRED.

12/09/24 – DIVERGENCE: BUENOS AIRES. ASSASSINATION OF THE PRESIDENT ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES.

UNKNOWN DATE – DIVERGENCE: LILLE, FRANCE 50.6292°N, 3.0573°E        2.011 ARC DEGREES

10/09/25 – DIVERGENCE: PARIS. THERMONUCLEAR INCIDENT.

UNKNOWN DATE – DIVERGENCE: DEHLI, INDIA   28.7040°N, 77.1024°E     1.014 ARC DEGREES        

UNKNOWN DATE – DIVERGENCE: PERTH, AUSTRALIA -33.9505°S, 115.8605°E 12.624 ARC DEGREES

UNKNOWN DATE – DIVERGENCE: ATHENS, GREECE  37.9838°N, 23.72757°E   9.105 ARC DEGREES

UNKNOWN DATE – DIVERGENCE: SAN FRANCISCO, USA   37.7749°N, 122.4194°E   21 ARC DEGREES

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Meat Is Latest Cyber Victim as Hackers Hit Top Supplier JBS (Bloomberg) The world’s biggest meat supplier has become the latest casualty of a cybersecurity attack. JBS SA shut its North American and Australian computer networks after an organized assault on Sunday on some of its servers, the company said by email. The attack sidelined two shifts and halted processing at one of Canada’s largest meatpacking plants, while the company canceled all beef and lamb kills across Australia, industry website Beef Central said. Some kill and fabrication shifts have also been canceled in the U.S. Hackers now have the commodities industry in their crosshairs with the JBS attack coming just three weeks after the operator of the biggest U.S. gasoline pipeline was targeted. It’s also happened as the global meat industry battles lingering Covid-19 absenteeism after recovering from mass outbreaks last year that saw plants shut and supplies disrupted.

China’s future gateway to Latin America is a mega-port in Peru (America Economia) Despite local opposition, Chinese investors are pumping billions into the Chancay project, a massive port complex north of Lima that will boost trade between China and Latin America as a whole, reports Gonzalo Torrico in business magazine America Economia. The Chancay port complex, with an initial investment of $1.3 billion, will turn this fishing and farming town into a regional hub that could redefine shipping lines in the entire southern Pacific. Since 2019, the project’s main stakeholder is the Chinese state firm Cosco Shipping Ports (60%). Cosco is a partner in 52 port projects worldwide. But in the Americas, Chancay is the first being built with Chinese capital. The complex is expected to be fully functional by 2024, helping consolidate China’s influence in South America, and in Peru especially. In the last decade, this country has become the regional crux of China’s economic and geopolitical interests. So far, Chinese firms have invested more than $30 billion in Peru, a figure exceeded only by money spent in Brazil. The principal sector is mining, which has absorbed more than half all these investments and has proven to be an excellent source for the mineral materials China needs to keep its industrial sector humming. One of those materials is copper, which Peru produces in great quantity.

More boats on canals and rivers than in 18th century as thousands opt for life afloat (Guardian) Little more than six months ago, Paul and Anthony Smith-Storey were still living in a three-bedroom semi-detached house near St Helens in Merseyside. But now the couple—and their dog, Dexter—have traded it all in for a life afloat in a two-metre-wide narrowboat on Peak Forest Canal in Derbyshire. “We took the equity out of the house, bought the boat and thought we’d enjoy it while we were still alive,” said Anthony, 48, an NHS sonographer. They are not the only ones. Record numbers are spending time on Britain’s rivers and canals, according to the Canal and River Trust. Such is their popularity that the charity, which manages 2,000 miles of waterways across England and Wales, says: “There are more boats on our canals now than at the height of the industrial revolution.” The Inland Waterways Association (IWA) said there are about 80,000 powered boats across the waterways of England, Scotland and Wales. Boat builders and sellers put the surge in interest down to the pandemic.

NSA spying row: US and Denmark pressed over allegations (BBC) European powers have pressed the US and Denmark over reports the two worked together to spy on top European politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Danish broadcaster DR said Denmark’s Defence Intelligence Service (FE) collaborated with the US National Security Agency (NSA) to gather information from 2012 to 2014. Mrs Merkel is among those demanding answers. “This is not acceptable between allies, and even less between allies and European partners,” said French President Emmanuel Macron, after speaking with Mrs Merkel.

The Taliban Say They’ve Changed. On the Ground, They’re Just as Brutal. (WSJ) During a recent trip, Kamaluddin visited a barbershop to obtain the illicit pleasures of clean-shaven cheeks and a fashionable mustache. But the shopkeeper, 25 years old, planned to let it regrow before heading home, wary of incurring the Taliban’s wrath. His father and brother were caught last month using smartphones in their home district of Arghistan, an area effectively ruled by the movement. The insurgents confiscated the devices, which could be used for supposedly un-Islamic behavior such as playing music and videos, and forced the men to swallow their SIM cards. Kamaluddin recounted the incident as he waited to return from Kandahar, the government-controlled provincial capital. “They will put me in prison if they see me like this,” he said. “If the Taliban come back, they will bring darkness.” The Taliban, ousted from power by a U.S.-led invasion 20 years ago, are poised to expand their influence as American forces leave the country. The group has sought in recent months to present themselves as a responsible state actor to regional powers and the West. Indeed, some of their most-violent punishments, such as amputations for accused thieves, are used less frequently than in the 1990s as they seek to avoid alienating Afghans. Yet accounts from Kamaluddin and others living under Taliban rule, as well as insurgents themselves, suggest that the group’s governance is as ruthless as ever.

Delhi Reopens a Crack (NYT) The Indian capital, which just weeks ago suffered the devastating force of the coronavirus, with tens of thousands of new infections daily and funeral pyres that burned day and night, is taking its first steps back toward normalcy. Officials on Monday reopened manufacturing and construction activity, allowing workers in those industries to return to their jobs after six weeks of staying at home to avoid infection. The move came after a sharp drop in new infections, at least by the official numbers, and as hospital wards emptied and the strain on medicine and supplies has eased. Life on the streets of Delhi is not expected to return to normal immediately. Schools and most businesses are still closed. The Delhi Metro system, which reopened after last year’s nationwide lockdown, has suspended service again. But the city government’s easing of restrictions will allow people to begin returning to work—and, more broadly, to start to repair India’s ailing, pandemic-struck economy.

Myanmar carries out air strikes after militia attacks (Reuters) Myanmar’s military used artillery and helicopters on Monday against anti-junta militias in the country’s east, witnesses and rebels said, forcing residents to flee and join thousands of others displaced by recent fighting in the region. Residents of Kayah state bordering Thailand said the military was firing artillery from positions inside the state capital Loikaw into Demoso, about 14.5 km (9 miles) away, where a People’s Defence Force said it had attacked troops and was coming under heavy fire. Myanmar’s military is fighting on multiple fronts and struggling to impose order since its Feb. 1 coup against Aung San Suu Kyi and her elected government, sparking nationwide protests and paralysing strikes. Decades-old conflicts between the military and ethnic minority armies have also reignited, while militias allied with a shadow government have stepped up attacks on the army, which has responded with heavy weapons and air strikes, forcing thousands to flee.

North Korea’s missile warning (Foreign Policy) North Korea warned the United States on Monday that relaxing South Korea’s missile limits could lead to an “acute and instable situation” in the region. “The termination step is a stark reminder of the U.S. hostile policy toward (North Korea) and its shameful double-dealing,” said Kim Myong Chol, an unofficial mouthpiece for Pyongyang, in a statement issued by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency. The United States recently lifted a 500-mile range restriction on South Korea’s missile program, in place since 1979. South Korea’s industrial ability to ramp up new missile production “could lead to an arms race with devastating implications,” Donald Kirk wrote last week in Foreign Policy.

Australian court upholds ban on most international travel (AP) An Australian court on Tuesday rejected a challenge to the federal government’s draconian power to prevent most citizens from leaving the country so that they don’t bring COVID-19 home. Australia is alone among developed democracies in preventing its citizens and permanent residents from leaving the country except in “exceptional circumstances” where they can demonstrate a “compelling reason.” Most Australians have been stranded in their island nation since March 2020 under a government emergency order made under the powerful Biosecurity Act. Surveys suggest most Australians applaud their government’s drastic border controls. The Australian newspaper published a survey last month that found 73% of respondents said the international border should remain closed until at least the middle of next year.

Lebanon’s economic crisis (Foreign Policy) Lebanon’s economic collapse could rank within the top 3 “most severe crises episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century,” according to a new report issued by the World Bank. The report cites the “brutal and rapid” contraction of Lebanon’s GDP, which dropped from $55 billion in 2018 to $33 billion in 2020. “The social impact of the crisis, which is already dire, could rapidly become catastrophic,” the report notes, as more than half of Lebanon’s population is already living below the poverty line.

Congo killings (Foreign Policy) At least 55 people were killed in overnight attacks near two villages in eastern Congo, close to the border with Uganda. Congolese officials blamed the attack on the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamist insurgent group that in March was deemed a foreign terrorist organization by the United States. The group killed more than 850 people in 2020, according to the United Nations. At the beginning of May, President Félix Tshisekedi declared a state of siege across the affected regions, surging troops in a bid to quell violence.

[aboutcaseyaffleck]

Casey Affleck Gets Philosophical About Life, Time & The Whole Damn Thing

“Time,” reflects Casey Affleck, “is something I have been thinking about lately. It is ironic how the older you get, the better you are at being patient. With less time left, people become better at waiting. But this year, I feel much older and a lot less patient. I guess you’ve got to accept that time is never wasted? That doing is no different than not doing? That you can’t kill time no matter what you do, and that no matter what you do you can’t prevent the opposite from happening either? I don’t know. It’s a double-edged sword.”

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in early January, and Affleck and I are doing the Zoom thing, ostensibly to discuss his two new movies, the recently released indie Our Friend and the upcoming 19th-century period drama The World to Come. Yet our virtual tête-à-tête has become far more interesting, jumping wildly from his love of trains and travel to weightier topics like family, the future and the search for something more, something meaningful.

“I like the idea that time is an illusion. That past, present and future are all happening at once. I like it even though I can’t totally get my head around it. But either way, the me in the mirror gets older every day.”

Like most of us, he’s not only had plenty of time on his hands in recent months, housebound in L.A., but he’s tried to use his downtime wisely. “I tried to use this year of quarantine constructively,” the 45-year-old Oscar winner says. “I tried to see it as a winter season for shutting down and restoring something inside, but I just couldn’t. I’m not that evolved, I guess. I didn’t take up a new hobby or learn an instrument or get better at ‘self-care.’ If anything, I let my better habits and routines fall off. It was all I could do to keep my head above water and help buoy my friends and children when I could.”

As a guy with two teenagers at home — Indiana, 16, and Atticus, 13 — it hasn’t been easy, but he’s doing his best. He tried taking his sons on their annual camping road trip over the summer, but it was short-lived. Instead, he’s been focusing on making a happy home. “My kids don’t get to see their friends a lot, so I’m doing a lot more stuff with them, coming up with activities for the three of us, which they mostly hate, and I mostly let drop. And then I try again with the same outcome 90 percent of the time.”

While trying to create innovative plans to sustain his boys, he came up with one he thought might do some good, too. In June, he launched Stories from Tomorrow, a social-media initiative focused on creative writing by kids.

“At the beginning of all this last March, the first thing that occurred to me was that the quarantine would have a big impact on young people’s emotional well-being — the disruption they’re going to feel is really going to affect their mental health more than anyone else,” he says. “When I would sit down to write creatively, I felt better. But I couldn’t get my sons to journal or do creative writing much. I didn’t want to twist their arms about it. So I was like, ‘I’ll make a social media platform that inspires young people to write creatively, because it is such a good way of working out difficult feelings. And the way I will do that is have well-known people read the kids’ writing publicly.’ I knew that hearing your own writing read was exciting. I thought it would be really inspiring, that creative writing would be a great outlet for kids stuck at home.”

He enlisted some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Robert Redford, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Jon Hamm, Matthew Broderick, Kyle Chandler and Danny Glover, as well as two current costars, Vanessa Kirby and Jason Segel, and arranged for donations made through the program to go to children’s hunger nonprofit Feeding America and Room to Read, which supports female education. He reached out to schools in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Haiti, hoping to create a global community.

Affleck was excited to make progress, to have done some good, but the initiative didn’t take off as planned. “In the end, an Instagram account for creative writing by tweens just couldn’t possibly compete with the quintillion bytes of daily data generated online. I don’t know. But I tried! And anyway, since then lots of other organizations started doing basically the same thing, and they are more organized than I am, and they have done a better job. So be it.”

Yet, adults have been disrupted, too, including Affleck himself, who is aware that, relatively speaking, he has gotten through mostly unscathed. “Am I happy? I mean, I’m relatively okay. It’s been a hard time to find balance and to keep it. I would say it’s been a hard time in my life, but I know that it’s been harder for other folks. So far we haven’t lost anyone, and we haven’t lost our house. And I rediscovered that when you’re feeling bad, there’s nothing better to do than to try to help other people. Being of service not only helps others but is a great way of getting outside of yourself. Also — and I really believe this — I think this time will be remembered as one when our country made leaps and bounds in the right direction; we are changing and growing and it’s uncomfortable, but we will be much, much better. I wish I could see the next couple hundred years. It’s going to be amazing.”

At the end of the day, it’s family that’s keeping him going. “Having my kids around and being able to spend so much time with them has been amazing. It is the brightest silver lining in all of this. They are what gives me the most joy. They are funny and smart and interesting and interested. They are just the best company ever,” he says. “Anytime I try to parent out some ‘teaching moment,’ I find they are two steps ahead. They help me make sense of stuff just as much I help them, if not more. I don’t have any answers, but batting the questions around, back and forth, is a good way of coping.”

CALEB CASEY MCGUIRE AFFLECK-BOLDT feels he is luckier than most. Although he and many of his peers have gone jobless for a full year, he spent 2019 working hard. He had not one but three films done and dusted prior to the start of the pandemic; the last one wrapped a week before mandatory quarantine. Two of these have back-to-back release dates: the tearjerker indie Our Friend came out in January, and sweeping period drama The World to Come will be released February 12. Thriller Every Breath You Take is slated for later this year. “I am so, so, so glad I spent 2019 working that much. It is what kept us afloat all through 2020,” he says.

The films themselves are radically different, but there are a few common threads. In both of his winter releases, Affleck plays a man who has lost a family member and whose marriage is in shambles. In both, he is a man in pain.

In the LGBTQ masterpiece The World to Come, which revolves around the love that blossoms between two married women on the mid-19th-century American frontier, his character, Dyer, says very little but manages to convey a wealth of emotion with his eyes alone. He may seem stoic, but he is suffering.

“The World to Come is a story about a couple who have lost a baby. They’re dealing with the grief in totally different ways and having a very hard time coming together again,” he explains. “My character wants to heal that by having another, but his wife [played by Katherine Waterson] is coping in a different way. She is severing all emotional attachment to him because it triggers more and more grief. She [only] seems to come alive when she is with their neighbor, a woman on the next farm [played by Vanessa Kirby]. He wants his wife happy, but he also would like her to love him. To me, this is the story of how couples can have their relationship shattered by a sudden loss. And it’s definitely a beautiful story about two women who feel that they have to hide their love and find the courage to love each other anyway.”

Affleck likes layers. He himself has many, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he’s drawn to roles written as fully formed characters, not caricatures. With Dyer, that’s abundantly clear. “Crisis is fun to play, [and Dyer] is in an interesting crisis,” he says. “I think he’s a really good person — a really decent, solid, loving person — which is what I loved so much about playing him and what I love so much about the writing. It’s more interesting when there’s no bad guy, just a conflict of circumstances and feelings that get so complicated that it drives two people apart.”

In Our Friend, a different set of circumstances drives the leads apart. Affleck and Dakota Johnson take on the true story of Matthew and Nicole Teague, whose imperfect marriage was strained by his long absences and her affair, neither of which seem at all important when she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer.

“To me, Our Friend is really a story about how petty grievances between people can divide them and then be forgotten when a gigantic tragedy is dropped in their laps. [Matthew] was wronged, it’s true — his wife cheated on him. On the other hand, he wronged her in a bunch of ways; [they] were just more passive and not quite so salacious. He wasn’t around. Matt got to be a dad and he got to travel the world as a journalist. He left her to take care of the kids. She wanted to have a life too, she had dreams of her own — she wanted to be a singer, she wanted to work — but she didn’t get to do that. She just got to be a mom. She was left holding the bag, and it wasn’t fair.”

He spent a fair amount of time immersing himself in the journalist’s life while filming in Fairhope, Ala., in 2019. (The film’s title is taken from Teague’s award-winning Esquire essay, “The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word.” The friend in question — played by Jason Segel — is a man who puts his life on hold to help the family during their darkest days.) But he did not become Matt Teague, which is an important distinction. “[Director] Gabriella Cowperthwaite asked that we not portray the personality traits of the real people. No accents, no mannerisms. [But] I did steal his style, because I had never seen someone nail the dad look any better than Matt. I say that with affection.”

As for the dreams Nicole gave up for her family, Affleck says, “If you were to ask Matt, I’m sure he would acknowledge that he was neglecting his role. He was neglecting her dreams, and that is a part of marriage, supporting what the other person wants. Like all relationships, it was complicated.”

Like life itself, really. This is why he can identify with both sides. He understands Nicole’s pain about the deference of her dreams as well as Matt’s desire to escape through travel — especially now, when Affleck himself has been completely grounded. Since the age of 17 he’s taken 20 cross-country road trips. His love of driving is secondary only to his enthusiasm for trains: Amtrak is his jam. He even fantasizes about owning his own train car one day.

Immersing himself in each location — whether it’s the sleepy Alabama town of Fairhope or the more exotic locale of Romania, which served as a stand-in for the East Coast of the U.S. in The World to Come — is actually one of the most desirable parts of the acting life, he says. “One of the things I love about working as an actor is that you go to some brand-new place and the community invites you in in a way that they don’t usually if you’re a tourist,” he confides. “You get to see what it’s like to really be there and imagine yourself living there.”

And he has — over the past ten years he’s spent so much time in cities including his hometown of Boston; Vancouver, British Columbia, the location of Light of My Life; Atlanta, where he shot the 2016 action flick Triple 9; Argentina, where he made Gerry; Dallas, for A Ghost Story; Calgary, Alberta, where much of the epic western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was filmed; Our Friend’s Fairhope set; Cincinnati, for The Old Man and the Gun; and Braddock, Pa., where he filmed the 2013 drama Out of the Furnace. “I have loved moving in and settling down and living a character’s life and then moving on. But I feel most at home in places that are struggling to get by. It reminds me of the neighborhood I grew up in. I feel lighter in those places, more relaxed. I feel like myself. I fit in.”

For him, the where is almost as important as the who — immersing himself in the place is imperative to understanding his character. This is part of what makes him such an accomplished actor — he and most of the parts he plays merge. I draw a crappy analogy about how the characters are like a coat, which he very obligingly works with. “You have to build the coat from all of the scraps and pieces of yourself; all these characters are made up of little pieces of me,” he says, noting, “Obviously, sometimes they can’t be. Sometimes I have no connection whatsoever, and those are the jobs I look back on and I either feel nothing for, or worse. But sometimes you have to take the job that is available, like most people in the world. You know? I don’t think my dad wanted to be a janitor. But he did it.”

He’s won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Critics’ Choice Award, a Golden Globe and an Independent Spirit Award, among others, and appeared in films that run the gamut from box-office juggernauts like the Ocean’s 11 franchise and Tower Heist to indie darlings like brother Ben’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone and Manchester by the Sea. He has even written and directed, most recently 2019’s Light of My Life, a bizarrely prescient movie about raising children in a pandemic. At this point in his career, he should have his pick of parts. “Not really,” he says. “There are a lot of people out there who have done good work, who are driven, and who have something to share. I have never been someone studios embraced as a ‘movie star,’ never knighted. I have always had to fight for the parts I have gotten. And you know what? That’s fine. Let me fight. It’s how I cut my teeth, and it is how I will keep them sharp. You can’t ask for more than a chance to be in the ring. Also, movies and TV aren’t all I care about. Sometimes I think, ‘Well, jeez, I have to work, and there are two jobs available to me, and the one that isn’t as good is the one that is close to home and I can see the kids, so I guess I am doing that.’ I love movies and really try hard to make them good. I really bust my ass every day when I get the chance to make one. I care more about my family than any movie. It’s not [always] the job I love, but this is the reality of my life. But maybe life will be long enough for a few more chapters.

The forward momentum of his future is an interesting topic. At the moment, he isn’t so much planning for the future as he is exploring it, because Affleck is not someone who likes to live with regret.

“I guess [at the end of the day], regret should be reframed as a reminder to be different,” he observes. And so, with this in mind, he embarked on a personal journey several years ago and decided to go back to college (at the Simon Fraser University in British Columbia). He had completed two years at Columbia University, but he never graduated — his film career kept getting in the way.

“I went back to school because I hadn’t finished, and I wanted to think about new things in a way that school can help you do,” he says. “I couldn’t go in person, so I found a strong online school and got started. You know, I’m 45, and I just thought, ’This is halftime. This is where you hit the locker room and think about how you want the rest of the game to go.’ You know what I mean? Like, ‘Okay, we went out, we played our best, we didn’t know what the other team was going to be like, we made some mistakes, we are in the game, so let’s adjust like this.’ Also, I’m not sure I want to be an actor forever. I had made a small pivot from acting into directing, and into producing more. And I like to direct movies. The most satisfying creative experience I’ve had in a long time was being a director. But ultimately it wasn’t quite enough. So I wanted to go study some of the things I was interested in. I wanted to do more with my life.”

Although he needed general credits to graduate, he found an unexpected passion for juvenile justice along the way, with a particular focus on alternative accountability programs. “I don’t know where this will lead me, or why I am so interested in it, but finding and implementing better systems for addressing harm and conflict among kids, adults too, but mostly young people, is something I care about. And the work that I have done so far has been fascinating and deeply rewarding.”

When I ask if this stems from his own experiences as a troubled kid growing up in Cambridge, Mass., with Christine, a single mom — his parents divorced when he was 9; his father, Timothy, an alcoholic tradesman, checked into a rehab facility in Indio, Calif., when Affleck was just 14 — he muses thoughtfully, “I love my parents and think they both did the very best they could and cared a lot. Period. Did I get into some trouble as a teenager? I got into some trouble when I was a kid, and I struggled a lot through high school with depression and substances, yes. Much of it I didn’t even know wasn’t normal. I don’t know if I was ‘troubled.’ Either way, as an adult, I’ve come to see that, regardless of how I compare to anyone else, I want less conflict in my life. That might be part of the reason why I’ve been so interested in learning about better ways of resolving conflicts, both with children and with grown-ups. It isn’t something they teach in school for some reason. Man, there is a lot they don’t teach you in school, huh? A lot you’ve got to learn on your own.”

And on this journey, mistakes will be made. That’s par for the course, and Affleck is no exception. “I have made so many mistakes, but life is the time for mistakes. I do believe people should hold themselves accountable and repair harm they have caused. That is important to me, and I try hard to do that whenever it is called for: apologize for mistakes and repair them,” he admits.

This is when our conversation, as such conversations are wont to do, comes full circle. Before we say goodbye, Affleck remarks, “You know, I heard Bono talking on Howard Stern’s show, and he said something about Frank Sinatra that was interesting. He said that he heard two versions of Frank singing ‘My Way.’ One version was recorded when Frank was young, and the other version was recorded when Frank was old. Each had the exact same words, same arrangement, same everything. But when Frank was young the line ‘I did it my way’ sounded proud, and when Frank was old it sounded humble. Whatever else time does to a person, I think it also does that.”

[source]

[dippedanddripped]

In a fast-changing downtown Los Angeles, the Cooper Design Space showroom building will maintain its focus on fashion, said the building’s management; however, the owners will be unveiling changes before May, such as a new name for the Cooper and its sibling buildings—The Hirsh Collective—as well as new websites, logos and social-media outreach.

Part of the company’s new direction will emphasize a growing momentum and shared mission among the Cooper and its sibling buildings, said Robert Warren, the president of Investors’ Property Services, which has managed the properties since 2019. Since then, the company’s namesake family, the Hirshes, have stepped away from the day-to-day management of the buildings but will continue to direct the strategy and mission of the company.

Warren also noted that The Hirsh Collective buildings hope to maintain a point of difference focusing on personal service. “We’re excited that our buildings are going to remain family-owned, family-centered and in an excellent competitive position going forward,” Warren said.

Hirsh tenants, for example, will not have to deal with layers of bureaucracy when they deal with building management, Warren stressed. “You can get to a decision-maker in a phone call,” he said.

The Hirsh-family buildings have a long history in the fashion district. They were all constructed 90 to 100 years ago. Stanley Hirsh, a clothing manufacturer and entrepreneur, acquired a handful of the buildings in the early 1970s. He passed in 2003, and the City of Los Angeles honored his memory in 2016 by officially naming the intersection around Ninth and Los Angeles streets as Stanley Hirsh Square.

When Hirsh acquired the Cooper, it was a building devoted to manufacturing. Almost 20 years ago, the company started developing an emphasis on fashion showrooms, and, currently, the building’s tenants remain mostly fashion showrooms.

Owners also unveiled new names for some of their other properties. There’s the Trade Lofts, a two-building compound made up of the 719 S. Los Angeles Merchant’s Building and the 122 E. Seventh Mercantile Building. The Stanley Building now serves as the new name for the 656 S. Los Angeles Terminal Building. Another member of the collective is the Bendix Building, located at 1206 S. Maple St., which was turned into a space for artists studios a few years ago.

Warren hopes that the different Hirsh buildings will develop their own sense of place and community as well as forge relationships with their sibling buildings. He and his colleagues forecasted that Hirsh tenants would grow with the company and lease space in different buildings as their needs change.

As pandemic restrictions eased, retail buyers returned to showrooms at fashion-district buildings including the California Market Center, The New Mart, the Gerry Building and the Lady Liberty Building. Warren said that buyer attendance numbers for the March Los Angeles Market Week were good. He also believes that the office-space market will rebound after a year of people working at home.

“Argument one says office space is not going to return; people are going to work from home,” he said. “Argument two says that people can’t wait to get back to the office; they’ve had enough of working from home. Which way does it play out? I think we’re going to see people coming back to the office because they miss the cultural vibe. Buyers want to touch, feel and see fabrics in person.”

Part of the job of The Hirsh Collective staff is to develop features that will make people want to work in a showroom building. Margot Garcia is Investors’ Property Services’ general manager and a career Hirsh employee who started working for the family 19 years ago. She said that the company would develop the Cooper’s 11th-floor events space as an area for market weeks, photo shoots, filming as well as other trade shows.

The Brand Assembly trade show is scheduled to be produced at the 11th-floor events space in October, Garcia said. The Cooper also will continue to focus on offering space for emerging brands in the building’s incubator and temporary areas. The company will be introducing services such as electronic package delivery to tenants, who can pick up those packages in secure, personal lockers at any time of the day.

[starringemiliaclarke]

Press: Emilia Clarke interview: the Game of Thrones star on leaving Westeros behind to tackle the West End

Emilia Clarke interview: the Game of Thrones star on leaving Westeros behind to tackle the West End

Clarke, who now stars in Chekhov’s The Seagull, tells Louis Wise that the HBO fantasy series made her feel like a ‘small cog in a big machine’

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PHOTOSHOOTS & OUTTAKES > 2020 > 2020 The Sunday Times

MAGAZINES > 2020 > 2020 The Sunday Times Culture Magazine – March 15

  The Times: Emilia Clarke says she views herself primarily as a stage actress, which is a little weird when you consider that she has only appeared in one play professionally before, and it was an absolute turkey. Or, as the 33-year-old star of Game of Thrones says, in her jolly British way, it was “terrible, awful, awful! Bad! That was a bad show!” The piece was Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Broadway in 2013, and it’s safe to say Clarke’s Holly Golightly did not enchant. “I’ll never forget, someone said to me after press night the only thing they liked was the cat.”

If Clarke relays this with surprising good humour, this is part temperament, part experience. For one thing, in person she is relentlessly chipper and pukka. Whereas on HBO’s mega-fantasy series Game of Thrones, she grew in stature as Daenerys Targaryen, a still, dignified stateswoman (until that end), in real life she is a goofy motormouth chatterbox, always eager to catch the joke at her expense. And she is no stranger to what we shall politely call “the mixed review”. She has known some drubbings, whether for that Broadway show, or films such as Last Christmas or Terminator Genisys, or indeed the final series of GoT, which — euphemism alert! — didn’t quite turn out the way everybody wanted.

Luckily she never reads reviews. “Because if it’s really, really good, someone will tell you. And if it’s really, really bad — some f***** will tell you.”

We are meeting today, though, at a rehearsal space in south London, because she is chucking herself back into the fray. For only her second stage appearance, Clarke is going straight into the West End, in Chekhov’s The Seagull, and taking on the prestigious role of Nina. If she is nervous, she’s handling it in the usual way, which is to say with huge blasts of good cheer.

Two clichés about meeting starsis that they are a) smaller than you thought, but b) their features are stronger than expected. Both are true of Clarke. She is tiny, proper Kylie-tiny, nicely decked out in a gauzy beige-cream knit, some fashionably frayed jeans and pointy, well-worn white cowboy boots. Yet her eyes and grin look extra big: if she stays still, she’s a dainty doll, but as soon as she moves it’s Looney Tunes. To be clear, she never stays still.

This energy feels helpful, as we have a lot to pack in. After all, Clarke’s past decade has been particularly wild. Not only did she rocket suddenly to fame in GoT (until then, her only screen credit was an episode of Doctors), she also lost her father to cancer in 2016 and, as she revealed in 2019, had suffered a sequence of brain haemorrhages in her early twenties, just as the madness of GoT was kicking off.

In private, she experienced various exhausting surgeries at the same time as becoming one of pop culture’s favourite mascots, scrutinised relentlessly on a moral, artistic and very physical level. She recalls being in hospital recovering from an operation and picking up a newspaper. “I was, like, ‘I’m going to see if I can read it,’” she says. “And I was, like, ‘Oh my God, there’s a review of the show. And, oh God, they are just talking about how fat my arse is.’”(Which is the last review she read.)

All of which brings us to the elephant, or dragon, in the room. Over seven seasons, Daenerys, aka Khaleesi, Mother of Dragons, had one hell of an arc, going from weak dynastic pawnto all-conquering queen, a kind of Catherine the Great with sub-Barbarella hair. And then, oops! Daenerys, thrilled at almost achieving her goal of ruling the Seven Kingdoms, lost the plot, turned into a psychotic dead-eyed tyrant, massacring a whole city and essentially going the full Pol Pot. She was then abruptly bumped off by her lover-cum-nephew, Jon Snow, and a worldwide fanbase stopped and went: what?

For Clarke, it had been a hard secret to keep — she had known the ending long in advance. She admits she is still processing it all.

“When the show did end, it was like coming out of a bunker. Everything felt really strange. Then obviously for it to have the backlash it did …” Did she expect it? She slows down, a rare occurrence. “I knew how I felt when I first read it, and I tried, at every turn, not to consider too much what other people might say, but I did always consider what the fans might think — because we did it for them, and they were the ones who made us successful, so … it’s just polite, isn’t it?”

It’s clear Clarke is caught between her close friendship with the series’ creators, David Benioff and DB Weiss, and her deep awareness of what most fans wanted. In fact, she first suggests that it’s the news wot done it.

“I do think that the global temperature, how much horrific news there is consistently, goes a way to explain the enormity of the fans’ outrage,” she argues. “Because people are going, finally, here’s something I can actually see and understand and get some control back over … and then when that turns, and you don’t like what they’ve done …”

Hmm. It’s a nice theory, but with Daenerys we were just denied a happy ending, right? She nods quietly. “Yeah.” So did not getting that also make her sad? She tries to explain that “as an actor” it was actually all “a gift”, but eventually the tornado of diplomacy peters out. “Yeah, I felt for her. I really felt for her. And yeah, was I annoyed that Jon Snow didn’t have to deal with something?” She lets us out an exasperated laugh. “He got away with murder — literally.”

She also eventually agrees with the critique that the final season condensed far too much in far too little time (“We could have spun it out for a little longer”) and that it could simply have had more dialogue. “It was all about the set pieces,” she agrees. “I think the sensational nature of the show was, possibly, given a huge amount of airtime because that’s what makes sense.”

Is she at least happy it ended when it did? “I mean, ‘happy’ is a funny word. It’s a strong word. Again, the show was so big. I was a small cog in a very, very, very big machine …”

What she means, though, is that she actually liked this. The show provided a routine, a family, something to fall back on every year; it also gave her experience. “I very much feel my career is something that’s happened to me, as opposed to the other way around,” she says. But she can see that being a cog has its limits, as doesforever having to cater to fans and, yes, to the press. “Doing a show so many people had opinions about doesn’t serve your creativity on any level.”

All of which explains why she is doing this Seagull with Jamie Lloyd, the director who just landed raves for his Cyrano with James McAvoy. And, yes, although she knows it’s “hilarious”, she somehow does “identify closer with theatre”. This is mostly to do with her dad, who was a theatre engineer; her mother is a vice-president in marketing for a management consultancy firm. Clarke and her brother had an idyllic-sounding childhood in Oxfordshire. Inspired by her father’s job, she always wanted to be an actress, apparently from the age of three. “I think of him whenever I’m walking through the West End,” she says. “My dad is everywhere in the theatre, 100%.”

She says this happily; I get the impression she hasn’t finished grieving, she’s just moved on to a better, celebratory phase. How would he feel about her playing Nina? “I think he would be nervous for me,” she says with a chuckle. It is, she knows, a big role: Nina, the aspiring actress whose dreams of fame are dashed, but who plugs away regardless. “I was never your Nina at drama school, that’s for sure,” says Clarke. “I wasn’t really a favourite [there], at all.”

Instead, she got parts like Jewish grannies, or “a down-and-out, pissed-off, washed-up prostitute”. But did she always want to be Nina or Juliet? “Well, of course I did. Oh my God, yeah. So I’m in no doubt there’s still some of that in me where I’m like: ‘Oh my God, guys, check it out! Finally she got there.’”

Clarke does like to cast herself as an underdog, although, thankfully, she does seem mostly to be aware that she is coming from a place of privilege. By the end of GoT she was reportedly paid $500,000 an episode. Is money a concern any more? “I am careful,” she says. “I’m a lot more careful now than I was.” She has a lovely house in north London with a bar in the garden. She can pick jobs for their artistic content first and foremost (“I want to work with an auteur!”). So yes, she knows she has it good, which is why she waited several years before revealing her brain trauma.

“I didn’t want to turn it into this celebrity sob story. I didn’t want people’s pity or ‘Oh, poor little rich girl, your successful life ain’t good enough?’” She is now happy she did it. “It’s done a huge amount of healing for me, being able to open up about it.” Her health status is “beautiful” now. “I was match-fit six weeks after the second surgery [in 2013],” she clarifies. “But mentally …”

On the other end of the spectrum, her fame has made something else hard: dating. “I am single right now …” She says with a smile. “Dating in this industry is interesting. I have a lot of funny anecdotes, a lot of stuff I can say at a fun dinner.” She was last seen in 2018 with a film director, and before that she was linked to Seth MacFarlane and James Franco. Does she mostly date fellow actors, because that’s how the industry works? “I was, and now I’m not,” she says — more smiles.

“I mean, I wouldn’t say I’ve completely sworn off them, but I do think actor relationships that are successful are few and far between, and you have to have a ton of trust.” Now and then her friends tell her to try Raya, the dating app that is supposedly for more exclusive celeb types. When she looks at it, though, “it’s just models. What am I going to do there?”

In short, everything about Clarke’s life is still monumentally weird, but she is doing a good job of pretending it’s not. After the play, she has “any one of nine projects that could go at the end of this year, and I have no idea which one will win”. A lot, she announces, are “dark”. Would she do fantasy again? “I think, if I did, it would be me having a giggle,” she says. I take this to mean her doing a send-up, a kind of Extras take on GoT, but no: “I want to do something absolutely stupid and silly, like, you know, The Avengers or whatever. Something where I got to have a giggle with mates.”

I’ve never thought of the Marvel mega-franchise as a downtime laff with pals, but that’s the level Clarke is operating on. I suppose it’s a pretty good happy ending.

The Seagull, Playhouse, London WC2, until May 30

Press: Emilia Clarke interview: the Game of Thrones star on leaving Westeros behind to tackle the West End was originally published on Enchanting Emilia Clarke | Est 2012

[antoine-roquentin]

For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park's museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation.

Although federal officials learned last year that the five-gallon containers were brimming with uranium ore, then removed the radioactive specimens, the park's safety director alleges nothing was done to warn park workers or the public that they might have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation.

In a rogue email sent to all Park Service employees on Feb. 4, Elston "Swede" Stephenson — the safety, health and wellness manager — described the alleged cover-up as "a top management failure" and warned of possible health consequences.

"If you were in the Museum Collections Building (2C) between the year 2000 and June 18, 2018, you were 'exposed' to uranium by OSHA's definition," Stephenson wrote. "The radiation readings, at first blush, exceeds (sic) the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's safe limits. … Identifying who was exposed, and your exposure level, gets tricky and is our next important task."

In a Feb. 11 email to Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall, Stephenson said he had repeatedly asked National Park executives to inform the public, only to get stonewalled.

"Respectfully, it was not only immoral not to let Our People know," he added, "but I could not longer risk my (health and safety) certification by letting this go any longer."

According to Stephenson, the uranium specimens had been in a basement at park headquarters for decades, and were moved to the museum building when it opened, around 2000.

One of the buckets was so full that its lid would not close.

Stephenson said the containers were stored next to a taxidermy exhibit, where children on tours sometimes stopped for presentations, sitting next to uranium for 30 minutes or more. By his calculation, those children could have received radiation dosages in excess of federal safety standards within three seconds, and adults could have suffered dangerous exposure in less than a half-minute....

Stephenson said the uranium threat was discovered in March 2018 by the teenage son of a park employee who happened to be a Geiger counter  enthusiast, and brought a device to the museum collection room.

Workers immediately moved the buckets to another location in the building, he said, but nothing else was done.

A few months later, Stephenson said, he was assisting with a safety audit when employees told him about the uranium. As a former Army helicopter pilot who later worked as a safety manager in the Navy, Stephenson said he knew it was "bad mojo" and instantly called a National Parks specialist in Colorado.

Stephenson said specialists apparently had no Geiger counter, so they drove to Utah to pick up a Ludlum meter, which also measures radiation output.

The technicians reached the Grand Canyon several days after his call, on June 18. Lacking protective clothing, they purchased dish-washing and gardening gloves, then used a broken mop handle to lift the buckets into a truck, Stephenson said.

Those details are corroborated by photographs Stephenson included in a 45-page slideshow created to document the radiation exposure and alleged cover-up.

Stephenson said technicians concealed the radiation readings from him and dumped the ore into Orphan Mine, an old uranium dig that is considered a potential Superfund site below the Rim, about two miles from Grand Canyon Village....

Stephenson, a military veteran who is certified as an occupational safety and health technician, was in a similar controversy during his time in the Navy. According to court records, he began calling for action to prevent falls after a series of accidents in 2016.

As complaints escalated, Stephenson was fired. He turned to the Office of Special Counsel, a federal agency that protects whistleblowers, and his termination was stayed. It is unclear how that case was resolved, but within months, Stephenson had a new job with the National Park Service.

Stephenson said the uranium exposure saga developed while he was pursuing a racial-discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity office. Stephenson is African-American.

He said high-level officials in the Park Service developed a "secrecy pact" to conceal radiation exposure data despite his insistence that a "Right to Know" law mandates public disclosure.

"My first interest is the safety of the workers and the people," he added.

Stephenson eventually obtained a report submitted by the Park Service's regional safety manager, confirming the area was "positive for radioactivity above background" and showing high levels near the taxidermy area.

[felipeandletizia]

April 20, 2020: King Felipe and Queen Letizia held a videoconference with the public entity Spanish Airports and Air Navigation (AENA)

In the videoconference with Felipe and Letizia, the CEO of AENA, Maurici Lucena Betriu, the CEO of the company's Airports, Javier Marín San Andrés, and the CEO, Commercial, Real Estate and International Development, María José Cuenda Chamorro, they have explained how the network's airports are being part of the chain that allows all cargo flights with sanitary material and supply products for the population to be serviced and, in addition, have allowed the Spanish to return home who are abroad and foreigners who were in Spain.

To collaborate in this crisis, Aena has donated two million euros through an agreement with the Higher Center for Scientific Research (CSIC) to contribute to the development of the projects it has underway related to treatments or vaccines against COVID-19. Furthermore, there is the possibility that Aena employees contribute through their "solidarity payroll".

Those responsible for the company have pointed out to Don Felipe and Doña Letizia that the prospects for traffic recovery point to three phases: a first phase of resumption of domestic flights; a second, for routes with the European Union; and a third, for non-EU connections.

Aena has created an Operational Recovery Group, which tries to define safe airport processes (queue management, additional controls, cleaning and disinfection, worker protection, maximum capacity, minimum distances ...) by the time the crisis begins to be overcome, so that we can transfer confidence to our passengers, both from the national point of view and from the European perspective, in coordination with the airport managers integrated in ACI (Association of European Airports).

The company is also working on a liquidity plan (Aena has signed agreements with financial entities worth 1,075 million euros) and an infrastructure rationalization plan, with the premise of maintaining all jobs in the Aena Group, for the that face-to-face work has been facilitated for all those people who have not been considered critical. Regarding the traffic recovery plan, interdisciplinary groups (agents of the sector, local entities, business associations, etc.) will be created to recover the traffic levels of previous months, generating confidence in the sector and stimulating demand, all with Concrete measures and actions: Disinfection of terminals, masks and gloves on employees, Disinfectant gels, Queue management, Capacity control in shops and restaurants, Parking facilities, Image campaign ... Regarding the impact of COVID19, they have indicated that the crisis health that began in Spain in the first days of March this year is affecting air transport very severely: The accumulated figures for the first two months of 2020 showed a figure of 33.9 million passengers, 3 , 2% more than in the same period of 2019, but the traffic statistics for March have confirmed the negative scenario with a drop of 59.3 percent in number of passengers (8.1 million) and 43.8 percent decrease in operations (in April there are daily falls that exceed 90-95 percent).

As a consequence of the very reduced activity, Aena has announced the adjustment of the capacity of its airports, temporarily closing some of its spaces and terminals. The most emblematic are the concentration of all the operations of the JT Barcelona-El Prat airport at gates A and D of T1 (rest of T1 and T2 remain closed) and that of AS Madrid-Barajas airport on T4 (T1.2 , 3 and 4S closed). In addition, in order to contribute to improving the situation of extreme vulnerability of its aeronautical customers, Aena has approved a discount plan (from 50% to 75% depending on the activity and type of space) in the leases of spaces in the airports to airlines, handling agents, cargo companies, etc.

Aena SME, S.A. It is a state mercantile company that manages Spanish airports and heliports of general interest. Through its subsidiary, Aena Desarrollo Internacional, it also participates in the management of 23 airports in different countries. Since 2015, Aena has been listed on the Stock Exchange, with the configuration of its shareholders: 51% ENAIRE and 49% free float. Aena is the first airport operator in the world by number of passengers with 353.4 million passengers in 2019 (second in market capitalization after Airports of Thailand, although the scope of its business is broader, since it includes hotels). Aena manages 46 airports and 2 heliports in Spain and participates directly and indirectly in the management of 23 other airports: one in Europe (London Luton airport, of which it owns 51% of the capital) and 22 in America (6 in Brazil, 12 in Mexico, 2 in Colombia and 2 in Jamaica).

The year 2019 was excellent for the company, both in operational and financial terms, reaching better historical figures, both in terms of traffic and its economic magnitudes. Regarding traffic, the passengers registered at Aena's network airports in Spain in 2019 were 275.2 million travelers, 4.4% more than in 2018. In addition, two of the network's airports are in the Top 10 airports in the European Union by volume of passengers (AS Madrid-Barajas in 5th position and JT Barcelona El Prat in 6th).

In the financial field, Aena achieved a net profit of 1,442 million euros in 2019, which represented 8.6% more than in the previous year. Total consolidated revenues, for their part, increased to 4,503.3 million euros, which represented an increase of 4.2% compared to 2018. Of these, commercial revenues (27.8% of the total) should be highlighted. ) which, with 1,252.0 million euros, grew by 7.7%.

[the-record-newspaper]

The killing of Rhonda Hinson Part 49

James "Flash" Pruett and his wife Rhonda, as they embark upon a trail conducting them to the petroglyphs discovered near their home at Pahvant Butte in Fillmore, Utah.  It was snapped in July, 2015 by Ruth Riddle Jones.  

 An Encomium

 By LARRY J. GRIFFIN

Special Investigative Reporter

For The Record

 Editor’s note: This is the continuation of a series on the Dec. 23, 1981, unsolved murder of Rhonda Hinson.

 To James “Flash” Pruett—a foremost champion of the law of his generation…whom I shall ever regard as one of the best and wisest men whom I have ever known.—Adapted from, “The Final Problem,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

 As a tear trickled down his cheek, Detective James “Flash” Pruett silently slipped away into perpetuity on Saturday, March 14, 2020.  The time was 7:15 p.m.  

His wife, Rhonda, was by his side, as she has been over the last heart-rending months, weeks, and final days of her husband’s life struggle.  “I know he heard us,” Rhonda Pruett averred during conversation with this writer.  “He had been out of it the entire time. So yes, I talked to him and gave him jobs to do when he left….”

Ironically, the 69-year-old lawman died on the birthday of the Pruetts’ beloved dog, Paiute, that they lost just weeks ago.  “He died on her 14th birthday, Pi day,” Rhonda informed friends on her personal Facebook page.  

The former detective will be missed by a plethora of appreciative admirers for the impeccable, incomparable investigative work that he did relative to the Rhonda Hinson murder case—the proof of which can be found on the Remembering Rhonda Hinson Facebook page.  As of press time, over 9,400 friends and followers of the page have read the post announcing his demise, with over a hundred respondents offering their commiserations to Flash’s family and friends. And condolences continue to come.

Jill Turner-Mull—Rhonda Hinson’s best friend and lifelong activist for obtaining resolution for the 38-year-old murder case—was one of them. “This saddens me deeply but I do find comfort in knowing heaven gained an angel.  Big hugs and prayers sent to Rhonda and the family.”

Connie Barnes—Rhonda Hinson’s friend and indefatigable advocate for justice for the slain 19-year-old—agrees with Jill, “Heaven gained an angel for sure.”  Then she adds, “Thinking of his family and praying for their comfort in the days to follow.  You are our hero, Flash…your dedication to Rhonda’s case was the best.”

Mark Perrou—a friend of the Hinson family and activist for justice—directly addresses the detective who worked diligently to solve Rhonda’s case: “Thanks, Flash for being a loyal servant to the community.  Godspeed, Sir.”

Janis Mullis—a Hinson family friend and outspoken advocate for the resolving of Rhonda’s case—offers, “Many, many prayers for his family and much appreciation for his hard work that will live on!”

 Others write descriptively of Mr. Pruett’s professional prowess:

“--Absolutely the very best, trustworthy awesome intelligent detective I have ever known and I had the honorable luck of calling him and his equally precious beautiful and talented RN wife for my friends.”

“--I had the pleasure of working with Flash at BCSD.  He was a Great Detective and a very honorable man. This world needs more men like him. He will be missed greatly.”

“--So sad to hear this.  I met Flash and worked with him as an electrician.  A very smart and proficient individual not to mention a great guy.”

“--He was a very caring and kind officer, enjoyed working with him.”

“--I’m sorry to hear this.  He tried hard for Rhonda and her family to solve this murder.  God Bless you Flash—you were one of the good guys for sure!”

Still other respondents—far too numerous to enumerate—sent condolences, prayerful commiserations, and expressions of love to Detective Pruett’s wife, Rhonda, and the rest of his family.  

For Bobby and Judy Hinson, the detective was more than just a lifeline back to the investigation into the murder of their daughter, he was a friend.  Judy Hinson writes articulately about the man whom they felt cared the most:

“Flash was one of the finest people we have ever met.  There was never a time that he was too busy to talk to us.  He always answered any questions that we had.  He never made us feel like we were bothering him when we called the department and the times we called him at home.  Flash was always so kind and so caring.  Not only his family but all the people who knew him have lost someone that can never be replaced.”

Detective Pruett’s comprehensive investigation into the killing of Rhonda Hinson has become legendary.  As previously reported, Flash was officially assigned the case by Major Robert Lane and Lieutenant Greg Calloway on Friday Jan. 20, 1995, during the Richard Epley administration.  Gene Franklin was tasked with the responsibility to assist Detective Pruett in the continuation of the investigation.

Over the next five-years, Flash applied a systematic, logical approach to the conduction of his investigation—in contrast to the often inconsistent, inconstant efforts of most of his predecessors, as reflected in case documentation.  In an interview with News Herald staff writer, Jen Pilla, three-years after his assignment to the post of lead investigator for the Rhonda Hinson case, the detective articulated the course he would pursue throughout:  “When I was assigned to this case three-years ago, I decided it was time to go back to the basics and back to the crime scene itself.”

And back to the basics it was as he conducted interviews, tracked leads, and continuously examined and re-examined the totality of accrued evidence. Moreover, on the morning of Wednesday, Oct. 15, 1997, he initiated and assisted in the performance of an SBI ballistics assessment for the expressed purpose of ascertaining the trajectory of the projectile that killed Rhonda Hinson on the early morning of Dec. 23, 1981. He, along with a team of SBI agents, utilized a 1982 Datsun 210—similar to the 1981 Datsun 210 driven by the decedent—that the Hinsons had acquired and ceded to BCSD to be used to perform whatever testing deemed necessary.  

The results obtained from the ballistics assessment, as reported in the summary, forever dismissed any possibility that the shooting was done from Interstate 40, from Elmer Buff’s property, or from either embankment along Eldred Street/Hwy 350.  The conclusion?  Only a person standing on ground level and behind Rhonda’s car could have fired a shot that matched the calculated trajectory of the missile that extinguished her brief life.

 There were some “firsts” accomplished by Detective Pruett:  the assignment of significance to the articles found in Rhonda Hinson’s Datsun 210 that were not present when she left her parents’ residence to attend a company Christmas party on Tuesday evening, Dec. 22, 1981, and the first-ever interview of Mark Turner—Jill Turner-Mull’s boyfriend and Greg McDowell’s friend—over fourteen-years after Rhonda’s murder. Flash seemed convinced that the gray-hooded sweatjacket, belonging to Miss Hinson—that she left in Turner’s automobile, yet managed to be prominently displayed on the sundeck of Rhonda’s Datsun 210 on the morning she was murdered—was as a key to cracking this case. Turner, however, told the detective that he could not remember how it got out of his car and into that of the slain 19-year-old—an asseveration that Flash clearly did not believe.  

Detective Pruett also applied surveillance equipment to the investigation, as he leveraged the relationships that Mark and Faith Turner and Jeff Hinkle had with Greg McDowell, in an effort to capture incriminating statements offered by Rhonda Hinson’s former boyfriend while engaged in casual conversation.

On Tuesday afternoon Dec. 23, 1997, Detective Pruett—along with Sheriff Richard Epley and an entourage of others—interviewed Greg McDowell in his engineering office in Hickory.  He noted that the 34-year-old engineer admitted—for the first time—that he knew that Rhonda had called him from Sherry Pittman Yoder’s house, in contrast to his statement to law enforcement, proffered immediately following the murder, in which he maintained that he thought Rhonda was at home.  McDowell also informed Flash and the others that a pink snake, acquired during a Myrtle Beach trip and among the items found in Rhonda’s Datsun 210 on the day of her death, “stayed on his dresser at home.”  

Unfortunately, subsequent to a near-fatal automobile accident that occurred during Winter 2000, Detective Pruett’s days as lead investigator and employee at the BCSD were numbered.  While he was having back surgery to repair damage sustained in the accident, Flash was supplanted by Sheriff John McDevitt when he hired former SBI agent, John Suttle to head his criminal investigations division.  It was News Herald staff writer Cheryl Moose Bollinger [Shuffler] who reported the action in a Nov. 19, 2000, article entitled, “Retired Agent Back in Law Enforcement.”

Shortly after his return to the BCSD and not completely rehabilitated, James Pruett was afforded the option to resign or face the prospect of termination, according to statements that Flash made to this writer across several interviews.  A similar scenario was recounted by former Sheriff McDevitt when he admitted to the Hinsons, at a local restaurant in the Fall 2019, that he had to get rid of Flash because he didn’t think that he could do the work any longer.

Though Mr. Pruett admitted to being treated badly under McDevitt’s administration, he refused to castigate his fellow law enforcement colleagues who were instrumental in effecting his departure from the BCSD.  

One singular feature of Detective Pruett’s investigation that distinguishes it from those conducted by others, was his detailed notes that he assiduously recorded at the conclusion of every day that he worked the Hinson case. They not only offer descriptions of actions, procedures, and factual summaries of interviews with principals, they also provide insight into the detective’s hypotheses and questions yet to be answered.

Whether intended or not, Flash’s notes are reflective of the measure of the man himself—his characteristic dedication and compassion; and his respect and caring concern for Bobby and Judy Hinson.  Sometimes they bespeak his own very human, personal feelings which were otherwise masked beneath the stoic façade of a seasoned law enforcement officer.  None illustrates his inherent character better than the final paragraph of his detailed description of activities on what would have been the day of Rhonda Hinson’s birthday –Wednesday Dec. 13, 1995:

“The last thing I did today was to go by Rhonda’s gravesite.  I spent about five minutes there in prayer.  I could see the pain in Judy and Bobby’s faces when I was with them today, Rhonda’s 33rd birthday.  I could feel the weight of that pain on me at the gravesite.  It was especially hard on all of us today.

Though he was criticized for his “obsessive” attachment to the “most investigated case in Burke County history,” Detective James “Flash” Pruett persevered.  Some of his last sentiments expressed to this writer indicated his desire to leave the rehabilitation facility and continue—on his own time—the investigation into the killing of Rhonda Hinson.  

“There are things that I should tell you,” Flash declared to me. “But I can’t tell you right now and not here.”

In his final two months of life, while in the throes of Parkinson’s Disease, the quintessential detective was ready to resume the work toward achieving resolution to the 38-year-old murder case and obtaining a modicum of peace for the Hinsons.  

This is the “stuff” of heroes.

James “Flash” Pruett

August 16, 1950—March 14, 2020

[mainafelix2007-blog]

God is Good Motors (GIGM) Job vacancy March 2019

God is Good Motors (GIGM) Job vacancy March 2019

God is Good Motors (GIGM) Job For Terminal Manager March 2019

God is Good Motors (GIGM) – Incorporated in 1998, we have, through strategic initiatives, revolutionized land transportation in Nigeria. A proudly Nigerian enterprise, our mission to excel is a classic story of humble beginnings. From what could pass for a car shed in Uselu, our ultra-modern terminals now dot Nigeria’s travel…

[positivetardis-blog1]

Best Lawyers In Canada In 2019

Wayne Myles

Counsel, Cox & Palmer, St. John's, N.L. Myles' recent claim to fame is that the $3-billion global merger of Barbados-based Columbus International Inc. with England-based Cable & Wireless Communications PLC..  His M&A expertise, combined with his dedicated customer connections, have not only led to the greatest deal in the telecommunications company's history, but revealed that significant international prices are being deftly handled by an Atlantic Canadian law firm.  He's also acted as lead counsel and strategic adviser on numerous acquisitions, licensing, and funding of many subsea and terrestrial telecommunications businesses in the international fish processing and marketing industry.  Myles also advised on aviation matters, on many domestic and international commercial bankruptcy and restructuring jobs and on power and transport matters. What Republicans needed to say:[An] outstanding attorney with global vision.  Huge asset to any trade, go to https://gklaw.ca/.

Pascal Paradis

Executive manager, Lawyers Without Borders Canada, Quebec City, Que. Also back to his second time on the Top 25, Paradis is a unstoppable force and also a fervent advocate for human rights, especially for women and children.  As a result of Paradis' initiative, the Quebec bar joined LWBC to behave as international counsel in favour of Raif Badawi, the Saudi blogger condemned to prison and flogging for his comments criticizing the regime.  Since January 2015, Paradis and LWBC are leading a consortium of Canadian organizations working on a wide-range five-year job to foster justice.  They plan to execute means of prevention and reconciliation for women victims of sexual violence and other individuals affected by the Malian armed battle.  He also speaks at many international conferences on human rights issues. What voters had to say: He's left a very profitable position in a big national law firm to head LWBC for quite a small paycheque since he followed his heart and his enthusiasm.

Frank Iacobucci

Senior counselor, Torys LLP, Toronto, Ont. This retired justice has set the bar for police treatment of the mentally ill.  His 2014 landmark report outlined 84 sound methods of helping prevent shooting of mentally ill people by the Toronto Police.  The execution of the report goes a long way toward preventing catastrophic confrontations between police and emotionally disturbed individuals.  Some of the recommendations include using body-worn cameras and enhanced use of tasers.  The report is a strong message that the status quo is no more okay.  As a Torys counselor, Iacobucci is used to advising government and company on important policy and legal matters. What voters had to say: Has anyone actually done more?  and Energetic, not ceases.

Pascale Fournier

Professor & study seat, legal pluralism and comparative law, University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, Ottawa, Ont. Fournier has achieved international recognition for her groundbreaking work on gender, religion, and the legislation, using fieldwork interviews with women from various states to emphasize the intricate interplay between religious and secular law.  She has received numerous national and global awards and nominations in 2014.  Fournier became a fellow of the prestigious International Women's Forum for her job as a pioneer in the legal profession; getting the Canada-Arab Chamber of Commerce Award for academic excellence and contribution to humankind, click to https://immigrationlegalcanada.com/.  Fournier represented the University of Ottawa as a successful pioneer at the Governor General's Canadian Leadership Conference and was unanimously appointed by the National Assembly of Quebec to the Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission. What voters had to say: Outstanding mind, according [to] Harvard's Prof. Kennedy.

Justice David Stratas

Judge, Federal Court of Appeal, Ottawa, Ont.  Stratas penned possibly the very talked-about choice in the area of employment law this year.   It'll affect federally regulated companies and employees for a long time to come.  His February Federal Court of Appeal decision in Wilson v. Atomic Energy of Canada flies in the face of 40 decades of legislation allowing federally regulated employers to dismiss employees without cause.  Before the conclusion, the consensus was the workers that are regulated by the Canada Labour Code could only be terminated for just cause.  Many federally regulated organizations including banks, telecommunications firms, and transport businesses view the decision that a victory, due to its long-term effects.  The court needs to be a tie-breaker with this issue, composed Stratas.  As a result of its effect, Joseph Wilson registered for leave to appeal with the Supreme Court of Canada in late March.  A choice on leave is impending. What Republicans needed to say: He is the best administrative law jurist of our age.  The single one moving deep into philosophy, making sense of it all.  Thoughtful, scholarly, practical, and so hard working.  With respect to the last, it seems the cases that have a true effect from the Federal Court of Appeal are composed by him.  Plain speaking decisions actually hammer the essential points home.

Dennis Edney and Nate Whitling

Defence counsel, Edmonton, Alta. In a rare move, Edney and Whitling have been termed as Best 25 honourees as a group.  Both have spent more than a decade recommending for Omar Khadr, nearly universally on a pro bono basis.  From Guantanamo Bay to the Supreme Court of Canada (three times), the improbable duo have fought for Khadr to have him released from prison (victory in May), have him treated as a child soldier, and continue to fight for his lawful rights at home and overseas.  It's been exactly what the Globe and Mail called waging a war of legal attrition against the authorities, which has always done everything to paint Khadr as a dangerous terrorist who should be kept behind bars.  Edney, a former football player who just started practising law in 40, has been the public and media face of the continuing legal conflicts, even taking Khadr into his own home after he had been recently released on bond.   Whitling, a Harvard law grad and former SCC clerk, is a far quieter and reserved force behind the scenes. What Republicans needed to say: Dennis has gone over and beyond the call of duty in his defence of Omar Khadr.  The nobility of our profession depends on lawyers like Dennis as we're occasionally called upon to defend unpopular entities or people -- but people who are no less deserving of natural justice and procedural fairness.   Whitling is an smart and extremely effective advocate who remains out of the limelight.  He is a fantastic lawyer.  Exceptionally intelligent and excellent to work with, look more ideas to https://canadianimmigrationexperts.ca/.