Temporal Trends of Sex Disparity in Incidence and Survival of Colorect | CLEP – Dove Medical Press

Ming Sun,1,2 Youxin Wang,2 Jan Sundquist,1,3,4 Kristina Sundquist,1,3,4 Jianguang Ji1

1Center for Primary Health Care Research, Lund University/Region Skne, Malm, Sweden; 2Beijing Key Laboratory of Clinical Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Capital Medical University, Beijing, Peoples Republic of China; 3Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Department of Population Health Science and Policy, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA; 4Center for Community-Based Healthcare Research and Education (CoHRE), Department of Functional Pathology, School of Medicine, Shimane University, Shimane, Japan

Correspondence: Jianguang JiCenter for Primary Health Care Research, Jan Waldenstrms Gata 35, Skne University Hospital, Malm 205 02, SwedenTel +46 40391382Fax +46 40391370Email Jianguang.ji@med.lu.seYouxin WangBeijing Key Laboratory of Clinical Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Capital Medical University, 10 Youanmen Xitoutiao, Beijing 100069, Peoples Republic of ChinaTel +86 10 8391 1779Fax +86 10 8391 1501Email wangy@ccmu.edu.cn

Purpose: The incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) varies by age, sex, and anatomical subsite. Few studies have examined the temporal trends of age-specific sex disparity in incidence and survival by age at diagnosis and anatomical site.Patients and Methods: The study was performed on all incident cases of CRC, using data derived from the nationwide Swedish Cancer Register between 1960 and 2014, including right-sided colon cancer (RCC), left-sided colon cancer (LCC), and rectal cancer. Male-to-female age-standardized incidence rate ratio (IRR) and male-to-female five-year survival rate ratio (SRR) were calculated as the main indicators. Furthermore, we performed joinpoint regression analyses to estimate average annual percentage change.Results: The overall male-to-female IRR was 1.05 for RCC, 1.31 for LCC, and 1.66 for rectal cancer. Male-to-female IRR increased steadily for RCC by an average of 0.4% per year until the mid-1990s and then decreased gradually by an average of 1.0% per year. LCC patients showed an increase of 0.6% per year since the mid-1970s. For rectal cancer, a non-significant random fluctuation was noted during the study period. The temporal trends of male-to-female IRR varied by age at diagnosis. The male-to-female SRR was 0.87 for RCC, 0.88 for LCC, and 0.86 for rectal cancer, which remained relatively stable during the study period.Conclusion: Sex disparity of CRC is age-, period-, and anatomical subsite-dependent. Further studies are needed to investigate the underlying contributing factors.

Keywords: colorectal cancer, sex disparity, incidence, survival, temporal trend

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Temporal Trends of Sex Disparity in Incidence and Survival of Colorect | CLEP - Dove Medical Press

Irish star Richard Flood in dark period of unemployment before landing Greys Anatomy big break with Dr McW – The Irish Sun

ACTOR Richard Flood found himself in a dark period of unemployment before landing his big break on Greys Anatomy.

The Dubliner, 37, will send temperatures soaring as hunky Irish heart surgeon Dr Cormac Hayes in the latest season of the hugely successful medical drama.

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Its a massive turnaround for the dad-of-one who struggled to find work after his Red Rock character Garda James McKay was killed off in the old Virgin Media One soap in 2016.

Flood said: Right after Red Rock, things got a bit scary. Previously, I had a good job, it was pretty well received and I thought surely it would lead to something else.

But auditions didnt go well, the phone didnt ring. Nothing was hitting and that period was pretty scary.

I was living in Dublin, I had a family to look after. Its the nature of this work but that doesnt help when youre going through it. It was a pretty dark period for me.

Now Flood looks set to become the next George Clooney who originally got his break on ER as the new hot doc at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital.

Introduced to viewers at the end of the mid season finale in November, fans reckon Floods Dr Hayes is a new love interest for Ellen Pompeos Meredith Grey who was previously married to Patrick Dempseys Dr McDreamy.

And despite being personally vetted by Pompeo, 50, before landing the role, Richard is careful not to give any spoilers away.

He explained: Im so new to the show, I have no idea whats coming. And its Greys Anatomy they keep their storylines top secret.

Ellen, shes the producer, shes been on it for 16 years, she is the show, its her thing so it made sense for me to meet her during the [casting process].

Richard said the straight-talking TV star is far from a diva on set.

He said: Ellens a really big deal and I was nervous to work with her. But theres something so normal and disarming about her.

I just felt like I was working with another actor who was there to do the job.

During his debut episode, viewers learned Dr Hayes had tragically lost his wife earning him the nickname, Dr McWidow.

Flood laughed: My mates think its hilarious. Patrick Dempsey was McDreamy and I get McWidow. He sounds a bit miserable by comparison.

Raised in the south Dublin suburb of Clonskeagh, Flood got his first taste of small-screen success alongside Amy Huberman and Jack Reynor in a TV adaptation of Cecelia Aherns Three Wise Women in 2010.

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Landing bit parts in Titanic: Blood and Steel and Killing Kennedy with Rob Lowe, Richard scored the lead role in short-lived crime saga Crossing Lines.

And while the series was canned after only three seasons, love blossomed with Italian co-star Gabriella Pession.

Married in 2016, the couple share a five year-old son, Julio.

Currently, Richard splits his time between their home in Milan and his base in L.A. while shooting Greys Anatomy.

But spending time away from his young family is proving a difficult struggle.

He said: We live in Milan most of the time and Im flying in and out of LA and being away from them, that can be really difficult.

Im trying to find a way to manage it. With Greys, hopefully they can come out here for an extended period next year.

Whenever I get a gap in my schedule, five or six days, Im back over to Italy. I mean, its a bit of a trip but its so worth it.

And while the couple try to alternate their work schedules so one is always there for Julio, Richard admitted a recent clash in jobs left him worried for the welfare of his young son.

The newcomer said: Hes a very happy little man, very content.

But its only when Gabriella started shooting a film in Italy recently and I was over here doing Greys, there was about two weeks where he didnt see either of us which I was worried about.

But he handled it like a champ. And Gabriellas mum was there, my parents went over.

Hes surrounded all the time. Hes very happy, very safe and secure. Thats the main thing for us.

Starring in the longest-running medical drama in history 16 seasons and counting Richard is prepared for the crazy fans and paparazzi attention because Gabriella, 42 is so famous in Italy.

He explained: Shes a big star in Italy, been really famous for 20 years so its part of life for her and in turn, for us. Im not sure you get used to that kind of attention.

Its a weird thing when you have guys on the street taking your photos. But Ive learned a lot from her on how to handle it.

However, Richard has already had a taste of life in the spotlight thanks to his starring role as Garda James McKay in Red Rock.

He laughed: I remember being in the pub of Grafton Street at Christmas and people flocking over, dying to tell you how much they liked Red Rock. It was fantastic.

As I say, its a bit weird but ultimately, if everyones being nice to you, whats wrong with that.

JACK THE DAD Love Island's Jack Fincham reveals he's become a dad 9 months after Dani split

'this sucks' Brendan Grace's daughter 'incredibly broken' after pair 'forced to separate'

Spoiler

ORLA SPILLS THE BEANS Fair City's Orla tells Sash that Junior should know he has a sister

GOODBYE BETH Corrie's Lucy Fallon in floods of tears after filming final scene as Bethany

til the end EastEnders fans rage at Louise's exit & say she should have had 'duff duffs'

'rock bottom' EastEnders fans' horror as drunk Linda Carter wets herself on stage

Set to be launched into orbit on Tinseltowns A-list, Flood revealed feeling unsettled by the next George Clooney association.

He said: Ill happily take it although I think its a bit of a stretch. Im really excited by whats to come but you just dont want to get too ahead of yourself.

Its about taking it all one step at a time.

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Irish star Richard Flood in dark period of unemployment before landing Greys Anatomy big break with Dr McW - The Irish Sun

Free whitepaper: a look at how employees really spend their time at work – The Drum

As organizations rely heavily on collaborative tools and software platforms (IDC predicts that the market for collaborative applications will increase to $26.6bn by 2030), it has become harder to track what kind of work employees are actually getting up to.

A new Anatomy of Work Index whitepaper from Asana is all about learning how marketers actually spend their days in the office, and analyzing their overall rate of productivity. It uses this data, which has been drawn from a pool of 10,000 knowledge workers globally and includes workers in roles such as chief marketing officer, head of brand and senior marketing manager, to see where agencies and brands can improve in order to start becoming more effective in the 2020s.

Attend our free 25-minute webinar on 30 January to boost your productivity.

Some of the key learnings include the fact that the majority of global employees (60%) spend most of their time on work about work, which could be emailing someone about plans or doing practical, non-creative tasks such as micro-managing others. In comparison, just 40% spend time on skilled work like executing a campaign, and this highlights the fact that most workers are losing the battle when it comes to finding time to embrace more thoughtful, deeper work tasks.

Even more worrying is the fact that polled employees are only spending 27% of their time at work on skills based work; the craft they were actually trained and hired to carry out. Therefore it is high time we found a solution, and this whitepaper will help to provide practical advice on how you can create a more inspired team thats set up to execute their roles much more effectively.

Asanas Anatomy of Work index also explores how unbalanced workloads are crippling employees and negatively impacting their productivity. The index has found 26% of employees have too much work to do, which subsequently drives stress and feelings of being unsettled. Its goal is to inspire you to find ways to ensure workers are doing their 9-to-5 more effectively, and not wasting their time on things that create unhappiness in the workplace.

Another fascinating insight the index provides is around how many hours a day workers find themselves distracted, and youll be able to compare how UK workers compare to the US, Germany, Australia, and even Japan. The fact, on average, 1 hour and 4 minutes is wasted daily by knowledge workers globally due to distractions or procrastination shows how much room there is for improvement.

The Anatomy of Work examines how to break down those barriers that stop workers from being productive and showing how technology, such as Asanas own work management tool, can help create a system that benefits everybody when applied correctly and not just at a whim.

The most forward-thinking organizations in the world know how to leverage time-saving work management software to reimagine their workplace, and this forward-thinking piece of research will show why taking control of workloads and collaborating more thoughtfully is a must if your workers are to reach the next level.

To access the full report for free, click this link or fill in the form below.

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Free whitepaper: a look at how employees really spend their time at work - The Drum

New York Jets Film Room: The anatomy of a Sam Darnold-to-Robby Anderson TD – Elite Sports NY

FLORHAM PARK, NJAn NFL broadcast can oftentimes last for over three hours. The total time viewers watch live-action (with the ball actually in play) averages out to a measly 10:43, per a 2010 Wall Street Journal study.

Incredibly, the average NFL play is usually just under four seconds.

So why does it feel as though analysts who possess the ability to break down the Xs and Os never have enough time to hit on everything? Well its simple: there actually is too much to go over during each four-second play.

Outside of its nature of pure will, football is a game of strategy. Coaches deploy their pieces as if it was a game of chess, attempting to punch, counterpunch and think multiple moves ahead.

The anatomy of a singular play is complex, especially when a touchdown is involved. The New York Jets first score against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Week 16a Sam Darnold-to-Robby Anderson beautyis no exception.

The ninth play of the Jets opening drive featured a challenge. Nine yards for a first down on an excellent drive that kickstarted the game, something Adam Gases offense has excelled at this season.

At the 23-yard-line, a Sam Ficken field goal try would equal 40 yards. Darnold cannot take a sack and Gase cannot play it conservatively, but he knows the Steelers defense wont lag. Theyll play the sticks aggressively, at the very least.

Darnold scans the defense and nothing is out of the ordinary. Pittsburghs usual single-high/three-deep look is fully intact on this crucial 3rd-down.

By the time Darnold takes the snap, the defense remains vanilla. The Steelers send four at the quarterback with two excellent bookend rushers in T.J. Watt and Bud Dupree.

Therefore, the young quarterback knows he should have time. His five big heavies should handle the four-man rush for at least a standard 5-to-7 drop.

This play is designed for Darnold to hit something on the right side. Of course, the left side is available in the right coverage, meaning a man-to-man look; but the Steelers go with a zone.

Notice the Z-close alignment of Anderson. This is intentionally done by Gase for a reason. On the previous nine plays, Pittsburgh deployed a single-high look with cornerback lag on the outside seven times. The other two plays featured a two-deep look that even saw the strong safety messing around with a lurk/robber position pre-snap.

The soft spot in the zone against a single-high/three-deep look is the seam. (Against a two-deep zone, its the middle of the field on a post or deep dig or down the sideline on a fade/9-route.)

Therefore, Andersons seam out of the close alignment is the perfect call against this Steelers pre-snap look and Darnold should be looking his way from the jump.

The Steelers gamble with the coverage. Instead of allowing the free safety to take his usual deep middle-third zone, he jumps up into a robber position, looking to take away the sticks over-the-middle.

Darnold sees it and knows he doesnt have to adjust. Instead of looking to fit the seam into Anderson against three-deep, he can do it against a two-deep CB look (with the corner maintaining outside leverage).

The free safety action to robber is the key.

Luckily, there wasnt much for young Darnold to think about on this one. Anderson represented the primary target initiallyespecially if single-high/three-deep was the lookand he turned out as a better choice once the free safety walked up into a robber.

The only thing Darnold had to worry about was the strong safety trailing, who helped bracket Anderson.

It didnt matter. Darnolds strong and confident throw coupled with perfect placement allowed Anderson to make a tremendous catchone that showcased the greatest evidence that he can be a No. 1 receiver in the NFL.

Its not always this easy. Granted, the throw and catch were difficult; it was the pre-snap primary target remaining the perfect choice that turned out as a relatively easy quarterback read on this onethanks to the single-high move to robber.

In the end, credit Darnold, Anderson and Gase. Especially credit the play-caller for knowing to place his top wideout in the close alignment to run that seam against a familiar Steelers single-high look.

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New York Jets Film Room: The anatomy of a Sam Darnold-to-Robby Anderson TD - Elite Sports NY

Eye Anatomical Mode Market : Report analyzes the segments and provides the relative contribution to the development Dagoretti News – Dagoretti News

This report presents the worldwide Eye Anatomical Mode market size (value, production and consumption), splits the breakdown (data status 2018 and forecast to 2025), by manufacturers, region, type and application.

This study also analyzes the market status, market share, growth rate, future trends, market drivers, opportunities and challenges, risks and entry barriers, sales channels, distributors and Porters Five Forces Analysis.

The report presents the market competitive landscape and a corresponding detailed analysis of the major vendor/key players in the market.

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Top Companies in the Global Eye Anatomical Mode Market:

3B ScientificSOMSOGPI AnatomicalsErler-ZimmerEdutek InstrumentationSakamoto Model CorporationHonglian Medical TechRUDIGER ANATOMIEXinchengAltay ScientificKanrenDenoyer-GeppertNascoEducational + Scientific Products LtdDynamic TracomBy the product type, the market is primarily split intoSmall Size Eye Anatomical ModelLarge Size Eye Anatomical Model

By the end users/application, this report covers the following segmentsEducationHospitalsClinicOthers

We can also provide the customized separate regional or country-level reports, for the following regions:North AmericaUnited StatesCanadaMexicoAsia-PacificChinaJapanSouth KoreaIndiaAustraliaIndonesiaThailandMalaysiaPhilippinesVietnamEuropeGermanyFranceUKItalyRussiaCentral & South AmericaBrazilMiddle East & AfricaTurkeyGCC CountriesEgyptSouth Africa

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The report provides a valuable source of insightful data for business strategists and competitive analysis of Eye Anatomical Mode Market. It provides the Eye Anatomical Mode industry overview with growth analysis and futuristic cost, revenue and many other aspects. The research analysts provide an elaborate description of the value chain and its distributor analysis. This Tire Eye Anatomical Mode study provides comprehensive data which enhances the understanding, scope and application of this report.

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Eye Anatomical Mode market recent innovations and major events.

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The report has 150 tables and figures browse the report description and TOC:

Table of Contents

1 Study Coverage

1.1 Eye Anatomical Mode Product

1.2 Key Market Segments in This Study

1.3 Key Manufacturers Covered

1.4 Market by Type

1.4.1 Global Eye Anatomical Mode Market Size Growth Rate by Type

1.4.2 Hydraulic Dredges

1.4.3 Hopper Dredges

1.4.4 Mechanical Dredges

1.5 Market by Application

1.5.1 Global Eye Anatomical Mode Market Size Growth Rate by Application

2 Executive Summary

2.1 Global Eye Anatomical Mode Market Size

2.1.1 Global Eye Anatomical Mode Revenue 2014-2025

2.1.2 Global Eye Anatomical Mode Production 2014-2025

2.2 Eye Anatomical Mode Growth Rate (CAGR) 2019-2025

2.3 Analysis of Competitive Landscape

2.3.1 Manufacturers Market Concentration Ratio (CR5 and HHI)

2.3.2 Key Eye Anatomical Mode Manufacturers

2.3.2.1 Eye Anatomical Mode Manufacturing Base Distribution, Headquarters

2.3.2.2 Manufacturers Eye Anatomical Mode Product Offered

2.3.2.3 Date of Manufacturers Enter into Eye Anatomical Mode Market

2.4 Key Trends for Eye Anatomical Mode Markets & Products

3 Market Size by Manufacturers

3.1 Eye Anatomical Mode Production by Manufacturers

3.1.1 Eye Anatomical Mode Production by Manufacturers

3.1.2 Eye Anatomical Mode Production Market Share by Manufacturers

3.2 Eye Anatomical Mode Revenue by Manufacturers

3.2.1 Eye Anatomical Mode Revenue by Manufacturers (2019-2025)

3.2.2 Eye Anatomical Mode Revenue Share by Manufacturers (2019-2025)

3.3 Eye Anatomical Mode Price by Manufacturers

3.4 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion Plans

More Information.

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Eye Anatomical Mode Market : Report analyzes the segments and provides the relative contribution to the development Dagoretti News - Dagoretti News

The anatomy of Caliphate colonialism (5) – Vanguard

By Douglas Anele

But despite their remarkable capacity for creative ingenuity and accomplishments, the Igbo as a group, according to Prof. Chinua Achebe, have the deadly flaws of hubris, overweening pride, obsession with material success and irritatingly noisy exhibitionism or showiness which tend toinvite envy from members of other ethnic groups. Yet, those flaws do not justify their being massacred periodically by northerners or treated as second class citizens in their own country. The May riots of 1966, Ironsis gruesome murder and massacre of Ndigbo afterwards led to a radical rethinking of their attitude to the idea of a unified Nigerian nation. The Igbo began to realise that their belief in a strong central authority that provides a level playing field which enables Nigerians from every ethnic group to actualise the ideal of one nation, one citizenship, and one destiny was a delusion.

The belated Igbo questioning of One Nigeria was consistent with the memorandum submitted by the northern delegation to the Nigerian ad hoc constitutional conference of September 1966. In it, northern representatives claimed that We have pretended for too long that there are no differences between the peoples of this country. The hard fact which we must honestly accept as of paramount importance in the Nigerian experiment especially for the future is that we are different peoples brought together by recent accidents of history. To pretend otherwise would be folly. The north even went further to demand that in any new constitution a secession clause should be inserted granting any member state the right to unilaterally secede completely from the union, and to make arrangements for cooperation with other members of the union in such a manner as they may severally or individually deem fit. Now, from what transpired later, it became clear that northerners were only interested in regional autonomy as long as it favours the north.

We have noted that the civil war that lasted from July 1967 to January 1970 proves the deadly extent caliphate colonialists can go to maintain its dominance in Nigeria. But before the war proper, a last ditch attempt was made in Ghana to save the country from disintegration occasioned by the fallouts of the two military coups in 1966. The Aburi meeting hosted by Ghanas military ruler, Lt. Gen. Joseph Ankrah and attended by senior military and police officers as well as government secretaries, resolved that each region should be responsible for its own affairs, and that the federal government would be responsible for issues dealing with the whole country, such as defence, currency and external affairs. In my opinion, if the Aburi accord had been implemented, the Biafran war would have been averted because eastern region would not have seceded. The agreement collapsed because ab initio there was a mismatch between the delegation led by Gowon and the one from eastern region headed by its military governor, Lt. Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu: whereas Gowon and delegates from other regions apart from the east arrived Aburi with the vague idea that somehow Nigeria must remain as one country, Ojukwu and his group came with a well-articulated detailed vision of what the future political architecture of Nigeria should be. Thus, although the eastern position was eventually adopted, the two parties left Aburi with different ideas of what the agreement meant in practice. As a corollary, some aspects of the accord, especially those dealing with the issue of power relations between the central government and the regions, were unrealistic and impractical to implement given the growing domination of the army and political power by the north, coupled with the strained relations between the Igbo and northerners as a result of pogroms against Ndigbo resident in the north. Moreover, top federal civil servants in Lagos vehemently opposed the accord, and convinced Gowon that it was unworkable. The problem was aggravated by the all-or-nothing attitude to the contents of the accord by Gowon and Ojukwu, which was unnecessarily rigid and myopic. Gowons unilateral repudiation of the agreement was matched by Ojukwus insistence on its full implementation as quickly as possible: both men failed to realise that a give-and-take approach and compromises are required forsuccessful implementation of agreement on troublesome political conflicts.

The non-implementation of the Aburi accord by the federal military government heralded the end of the concept of regional autonomy and self-sufficiency in Nigeria, leading to the consolidation of caliphate colonialism. After Gowon had emerged as military head of state, he started implementing measures that effectively turned Nigeria into a unitarist federation, which increased the powers of the federal government over the federating units beyond what was allowed by the unification decree promulgated when Ironsi was in power and which was used by northern soldiers and their civilian collaborators to justify the bloodthirsty coup of July 29, 1966. Interestingly, northern emirs who had for long opposed the creation of states mainly in order not to compromise the norths geographical and political domination of Nigeria suddenly urged Gowon to create states. Gowon complied with the demand. The creation of states was more detrimental to solidarity among the three regions in the south than to the northern region because southern Nigeria did not have the equivalents of the theocratic emirate system, Islam and a dominant language (Hausa) which tended to unify different ethnic nationalities in the north. Besides, by concentrating more power at the centre ostensibly to keep Nigeria as one united country, Gowon also ensured that the federal government dominated by northerners controlled all revenues from recently discovered large deposits of petroleum mostly in the eastern region. As a result, Gowon not only expanded the pre-independent policy of using resources from the south to develop the north, he instigated the bizarre practice of northern preponderance in the ownership of oil wells in oil-bearing communities. One can claim justifiably that some of the most significant pre-war decisions taken by the federal government headed by Gowon are responsible for the extremely damaging effects of caliphate colonialism in Nigeria since 1967.

Any student of Nigerian history who blames the eastern region, particularly Ndigbo, for seeking self-determination after the horrendous atrocities they suffered in northern Nigeria is either a pathological misanthrope or moron. It is difficult to imagine a self-respecting ethnic nationality with the quantum of human and natural resources of the defunct eastern region that would not desire to take its destiny in its own hands. As Prof. Achebe observed, The Nigeria that meant so much for [Ndigbo] was not reciprocating the affection we had for it. The country had not embraced us, the Igbo people and other easterners, as full-fledged members of the Nigerian family. Hence, on May 30, 1967, when Ojukwu, on behalf of the 335-member Consultative Assembly of Chiefs and Elders who unanimously mandated him to pull out the east from the rest of Nigeria at an early practicable date, announced the secession of Biafra, he was actually demanding that Igbo people and their immediate neighbours be allowed to develop at their own pace untrammelled by the yoke of caliphate colonisation. Many uninformed Nigerians believe the pernicious falsehood that the Igbo declared war on the rest of Nigeria. Far from it because, as I have stated earlier, if there is any group that have contributed most to the building of modern Nigeria and lived the concept of One Nigeria (and still does, admittedly,to its own detriment) it is the Igbo. Therefore, it is in Ndigbos interest that Nigeria continues to exist and prosper. When the eastern region seceded, caliphate colonialists led by Gowon decided to respond with a short, surgical strike through what he called a police action.

In every war, it is always plausible to argue, after the fact, that it could have be
en averted or avoided if the combatants had shown more restraint. The Biafran case is not anexception. The war was led by two young military officers in their early thirties, Ojukwu and Gowon. Perhaps, older and more experienced statesmen could have handled the complex issues that led to the bloody conflict much better in a manner that would have led to a peaceful resolution, although it would have been extremely difficult, judging by the horrors they suffered in the hands of their northern compatriots, to persuade the eastern populace shortly before the civil war broke out that they are equal stakeholders in the Nigerian project.

Now, northern hardliners such as MurtalaMohammed wanted full-blown war as the final solution to teach the Igbo a brutal lesson and consolidate the norths domination of federal power, whereas Gowon saw it as an opportunity to cut the arrogant and rebellious Ojukwu to size. Eastern leaders who mandated Ojukwu to secede at the earliest practicable opportunity were desperate and confused, and the people themselves were emotionally exhausted and disillusioned. In such a psychologically charged atmosphere, critical thinking and logic would be replaced by the exciting logic of war hysteria such that anyone who questions the extreme measures taken by Ojukwu in response to Gowons prevarications and provocations or expresses doubt concerning the propriety of secession without adequate preparation for war would bebranded a spineless coward or saboteur. To be continued.

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The anatomy of Caliphate colonialism (5) - Vanguard

Anatomy of terror: What makes normal people become extremists … – New Scientist

Who and what are we fighting?

Reuters

By Peter Byrne

VERA MIRONOVA rides Humvee shotgun through Mosuls shattered cityscape. It is late January 2017. Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi has just declared east Mosul liberated from three years of rule by Islamic State, or ISIS. Most jihadist fighters are dead or captured, or have crossed the Tigris to the west, digging in for a final stand. Left behind, biding their time, are snipers and suicide bombers.

Much of the population has fled to refugee camps on the outskirts. Those who stayed look lost and dazed. Men pull corpses out of houses destroyed by air strikes. Others cobble together street-corner markets, selling meat and vegetables imported from Erbil, 80 kilometres and another world away.

Few women are visible. Mironova stands out, dressed in combat trousers and a Harvard sweatshirt, wisps of blonde hair escaping her blue stocking hat. Despite travelling in an armoured car, shes clearly not a combatant. Shes a social scientist, and her job is not to fight, but to listen, learn and record.

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We stop for breakfast at My Fair Lady, a ramshackle restaurant that was a favoured eatery of ISIS fighters. The Iraqi special forces soldiers accompanying us say it has the best pacha in town steaming bowls of sheep brains and intestines stuffed with rice, with slices of black, fatty tongue and boiled oranges. Mironova orders a pizza.

A week later, a suicide bomber detonates himself at the entrance to the packed restaurant, killing the owner and several customers.

The United States does not have a real counter-terrorism strategy, says Martha Crenshaw. Faced with continued waves of jihadist terror attacks, in the conflict zones of Syria and Iraq but also closer to home, the West seems at a loss to know what to do. Crenshaw is something like the doyenne of terrorism studies, with a half-century career studying the roots of terror behind her. She occupies an office at Stanford University just down the hall from Condoleezza Rice, the former US national security advisor who was an architect of the global war on terror declared after the attacks of 11 September 2001. There is a vast amount of money being thrown into the counter-terrorism system and nobody is in charge, Crenshaw says. We do not even know what success might look like. We are playing a dangerous game of whack-a-mole: terrorists pop up. We try to beat them down, hoping they will give up.

In July, al-Abadi was back in Mosul, this time to declare the final liberation of Iraqs second city. Near-saturation bombardment of the centre by the US Air Force and a casualty-heavy, house-by-house offensive led by Iraqi forces had eliminated most of the fighters holding the city where the leader of ISIS, Ab Bakr al-Baghdadi, had proclaimed its caliphate in 2014. The liberation came at a huge price. Mosul lies in ruins, and tens of thousands of civilians are dead or wounded. Almost one million residents have been displaced from their homes.

The price has been paid not just in Mosul. In June, 206 civilians were killed in bombings and other attacks carried out or inspired by ISIS in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, Iran, Australia, Pakistan and the UK, where radicalised ISIS supporters murdered eight in an attack near London Bridge on 3 June. A couple of weeks earlier, on 22 May, a 22-year-old British Muslim named Salman Ramadan Abedi detonated an improvised bomb laden with nuts and bolts at the entrance to the Manchester Arena, killing himself and 22 others, many of them children.

Why? Religious fanaticism? Groundless hate? Perverted ideology? Victory in the war on terror requires us to know what and who exactly we are fighting.

After breakfast, we accompany Iraqi commandos into abandoned houses that had been used by ISIS, wary of booby traps. We stare into darkened, steel-barred rooms used as jails for sex slaves and kafirs, Muslims who fell afoul of ISIS. We inspect the labels on tin cans, torn cookie packaging and empty bottles of Scotch whisky.

The soldiers scoop up photographs, checkpoint passes and slips of paper with names and phone numbers. Mironova bags religious tracts written in Arabic and Russian. Many of ISISs foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria are Chechnyans and Tajiks. Someone hands Mironova a diary written in Russian. She reads out loud, translating a letter written by a woman to her jihadist lover.

We are made only for each other, our marriage is sealed in heaven, we are together in this life and the afterlife, God willing. When you left, I counted the days until I got you back, my beloved. Now you are going to the war again; you may be gone forever. I will count the days until we meet again, my beloved Zachary. Following the letter, the woman had penned a recipe for a honey cake that requires a creamy milk not obtainable in Iraq. Jihadists dream of comfort food, too.

During the 1980s, Marc Sageman worked as a case officer for the CIA, operating armed cells resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Now a forensic psychiatrist specialising in criminality and terrorism, he has been investigating what makes a terrorist for decades.

In his 2004 book Understanding Terror Networks, Sageman examined the motivations of 172 jihadist terrorists as revealed primarily in court documents. His conclusions fitted with decades of jail interviews and psychological studies showing that terrorism is neither solely reducible to ideological or religious motivations, nor to personality disorders. Terrorism is not a personality trait, says Sageman. There is no such thing as a terrorist, independent of a person who commits an act of terror.

That presents a problem for efforts to profile, identify and interdict individuals at risk of turning to terrorism, a central plank of anti-radicalisation programmes such as the UKs Prevent strategy (see Nip it in the bud). Democratic societies cannot keep an eye on everyone, and what they are looking for may not even give any obvious sign of its existence.

Crenshaws influential paper The causes of terrorism, published in 1981, summed up decades of observations of terrorists and their organisations, ranging from 19th century Russian anarchists to Irish, Israeli, Basque and Algerian nationalists. The outstanding common characteristic of individual terrorists, she concluded, is their normality. In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, political theorist Hannah Arendt noted the same thing about the banal Nazi concentration camp bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann.

The unremarkable Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann embodied the banality of evil

People who commit terrorist acts are usually embedded in a network of familial and friendship ties with allegiance to a closed group, be that tribal, cultural, national, religious or political. Historically, the conditions for the murder of innocents by terrorism or genocide have occurred when one group fears extinction by another group. Ordinary people are motivated to kill people by category through their own group identity.

Viewed from inside the group, that can seem rational: terrorists are brave altruists protecting the group from harm by powerful outsiders. Terrorist acts are warnings to the out-group, demanding that certain actions be taken, such as withdrawing a military occupation or ending human and civil rights abuses. Terrorism is a militarised public relations ploy to advance a grander scheme a political tactic, not a profession or an overarching ideology.

But the vast majority of people who might share the same sense of grievance or political goals are not motivated to kill and maim the innocent. Criminologist Andrew Silke at the University of East London has conducted many interviews with imprisoned jihadists in the UK. When I ask them why they got involved, the initial answer is ideology, he says. But if I talk to them about how they got involved, I find out about family fractures, what was happening at school and in their personal lives, employment discrimination, yearnings for revenge for the death
toll of Muslims.

Yet this is not a popular view with counter-terrorism agencies, he says. The government does not like to hear that someone became a jihadist because his brothers were beaten up by police or air strikes blew up a bunch of civilians in Mosul. The dominant idea is that if we concentrate on, somehow, defeating the radical Islamicist ideology, we can leave all of the messy, complicated behavioural stuff alone.

Mironova trained as a mathematician, game theorist and behavioural economist. A fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, she is one of few researchers to venture directly into combat zones to examine the roots of jihadist terror. Her work has been funded variously by the US National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), George Soross Open Society Foundations, the United Nations and the World Bank.

During extended stays in Syria, Iraq and Yemen over the past five years, Mironova has built up trust networks in a politically diverse spectrum of insurgents, including radical and moderate jihadists and ISIS members and defectors. She moves easily through the clogged frontline check points surrounding Mosul with the permission of the Iraqi military. She stays close to her protectors, careful not to cross the ethical line of doing no harm that separates academic research from intelligence gathering.

We are playing a dangerous game of whack-a-mole with the terrorists

By seeing things through the eyes of the fighters, Mironova aims to model what drives them, and how their individual motivations affect group behaviours and vice versa. She reads Arabic, but employs local translators in the field. She interviews fighters and civilians in hospitals, refugee camps and on the front lines face to face and via telephone or Skype.

Iraq as a whole is mainly Shia, but Mosul is largely Sunni; ISIS practices an apocalyptic form of the Sunni faith in a region wracked by social and economic catastrophe. Many civilians in the areas under their control collaborate, willingly and unwillingly, with ISIS. Some share their houses with fighters. Some work in ISIS factories, building homemade rockets, cutting and welding steel for jail bars and armour plates for tanks. Some escape into refugee camps. Some marry fighters. Some join sleeper cells.

In The causes of terrorism, Crenshaw observed that it is often the children of social elites who first turn to terrorism, hoping to inspire the less-privileged masses to approve a radical change in the social order. Many Jihadist organisations are led by upper middle class intellectuals, often engineers. Al Qaedas leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is a medical doctor; Ab Bakr al-Baghdadi reportedly has a doctorate in Islamic studies.

But the work of Mironova and others shows that the local ISIS rank and file is more down-to-earth: disenfranchised people struggling to eke out a living for their families in war zones. Foreign fighters tend to be more ideologically driven, and most motivated by factors beyond group identity to make the ultimate sacrifice (see Devoted to the cause).

REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

Some militants seek to avenge the deaths of friends and relatives from US drone attacks, Shia militias, Iraqi police or US and British special operations forces. But as the sex slaves and Scotch suggest, jihadist fighters do not focus exclusively on heavenly rewards, or even hatred or revenge. Not everyone wants to die. Jihadist brigades in Iraq seize oil and vehicles, which they transport to high demand markets in Syria seeking to maximise profits. They often distribute gains from their looting and business operations communally.

Many of their adherents are purely economic actors, recruited with offers of competitive salaries, health insurance and benefits paid to their families should they be killed in battle. Mironova surveyed a cohort of Iraqi women who had encouraged their husbands and sons to join ISIS in order to get better family living quarters. Some recruits just need a job.

In Iraq and Syria, there are more than 1000 radical Islamist, moderate Islamist, and non-sectarian brigades seeking to recruit militants to their brand of insurgency. In Mironovas models, their behaviour is determined by resource constraints, much as capitalist enterprises thrive and die. Groups compete to attract the best fighters. Those with low budgets may choose a radical religious line to attract foreign fanatics who are not as professional as fighters motivated by money, but will work for just room and board. Such models suggest that although the roots of violent jihadism might be expressed as religious fervour, they are anchored in more mundane, utilitarian and perhaps solvable causes.

When the politicians demonise ISIS as evil, hormones flood the brain with danger signals, says Hriar Cabayan. We forget how to think scientifically. We need to get inside the heads of ISIS fighters and look at ourselves as they look at us.

Cabayan runs the Pentagons Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA) programme. His counter-terrorism unit taps the expertise of a volunteer pool of 300 scientists from academia, industry, intelligence agencies and military universities. They convene virtually and physically to answer classified and unclassified questions from combatants, including special operations forces fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The result is a steady stream of white papers largely concluding that the US counter-terrorism strategy decapitating insurgency leadership, bombing terrorist strongholds is counter-productive.

Reliable information on terrorist attacks and the effectiveness of counter-terrorist actions is hard to find. STARTs Global Terrorism Database, based at the University of Maryland, records details of terrorist incidents as reported by English-language media. It does not record counter-terrorist actions. Crunching event-based data from STARTs media sources can reveal statistical patterns in terrorist attacks, including how frequently certain groups attack, numbers of fatalities and types of targets and weapons involved. The Mapping Militant Organizations database, hosted at Stanford University, includes data relevant to the political environments that nurture terrorism, but also relies on English-only news reports and selected academic journals.

Neither database includes acts of terror committed by states, except for Islamic State. The definitional boundaries between insurgency and terrorism and state repression are vague. Militant actions directed against soldiers can be recorded as terrorism, while lethal police actions or government-initiated attacks on civilians are regarded as acts of war, or collateral damage, and so ignored.

Classified data is no more comprehensive: about 80 per cent of top-secret intelligence is drawn from open sources, including media reports. Raw data that contradicts policy or that tarnishes the military is often under-reported or ignored by field officers who are more concerned with living to fight another day. There is censorship, too: a recent investigation by Military Times reports that since 9/11, the Pentagon has failed to publicly report about a third of its air strikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, omitting an estimated 6000 strikes since 2014.

Relying on such imperfect sources can obscure the real motivations and root causes behind events. The problem is that the press usually has a completely wrong narrative about the perpetrators that is only corrected in the evidence presented at the trials, says Sageman. National Security Agency files leaked by Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA has trouble hiring Arabic and Pashtu speaking intelligence analysts who understand the cultures they monitor. Military intelligence agencies focus more on locating and killing terrorist suspects than on understanding sociological motivations.

Cabayan praises Mironovas brave style of research, and the data from the ground that it brings. At the SMA meeting in March this year, the question was whether the physical defeat of ISIS in Mosul would eliminate the threat.
Sixty scientists, including Mironova, examined the problem from a variety of perspectives. Their unequivocal answer was no. Events so far bear out that prediction.

There is no easy solution to the problem of terrorism, says Cabayan, because neither terrorists nor counter-terrorists are entirely rational operators. The words rational and irrational make no sense, he says. People behave emotionally, illogically. Human societies are complex, adaptive systems with unpredictable, emergent properties.

Many strands of evidence now suggest that terrorist and counter-terrorist systems are a single system governed by feedback loops; the actions and tactics of one side continually evolve in response to the actions of the other, as in a wrestling match. From this perspective, ISISs trajectory can be calculated only retrospectively, in response to events.

It is an agile trajectory. Statistical models built around what is known of the frequency and casualty counts of insurgent and terrorist incidents in Syria and Iraq show the jihadists as Davids and conventional armies as lumbering Goliaths. The extremist groups can fragment and coalesce with relative ease: they are anti-fragile, strengthening under attack. They are not wedded to charismatic leaders, but are self-organising networks that can operate independently of a single node of control, and have a ready source of new personnel.

The complex, evolving nature of the groups suggests that the US strategy of increasing troop numbers in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan wont protect against jihadism. That conclusion is borne out by studies of the effects of troop surges in Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2012, both of which appear to have increased terrorism. Real complex systems do not resemble static structures to be collapsed; they are flexible, constantly respun spider webs, in the words of a 2013 SMA study of insurgency.

Drone strikes aimed at decapitating terrorist cells are likely to fail too. A 2017 study by Jennifer Varriale Carson at the University of Central Missouri concluded that killing high-profile jihadists is counter-productive, if its main intention is a decrease in terrorism perpetrated by the global jihadist movement. In July 2016, The Georgetown Public Policy Review reported a statistically significant rise in the number of terrorist attacks [in Pakistan] occurring after the US drone program begins targeting a given province.

Human societies are complex, unpredictable, adaptive systems

The drone strikes follow laws of unintended consequences, says Craig Whiteside of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Killing a charismatic leader may inspire a potent posthumous charismatic appeal, or cause splintering that results in otherwise suppressed extreme factions rising in prominence.

The effects are felt in Manchester as well as Mosul. In her most recent book, Countering Terrorism, Crenshaw writes, Western military engagement has reinforced the jihadist narrative that Muslims everywhere are targeted. It may have made ISIS more determined to inspire rather than direct terrorism. Nor has military action blocked jihadist organisations [in Iraq and Afghanistan] from regrouping, regenerating, and expanding.

The evolving nature of the message means it is difficult to combat by broadcasting counter-narratives. Social networks ensure the message feeds back rapidly to disenfranchised sympathisers in the West (see Network effects). Data scientists from the Naval Postgraduate School have studied Twitter feeds from ISIS strongholds before and after the US began bombing them in late 2014. Before the bombing campaign, the tweets focused ire on near enemies: local mayors, imams, police and soldiers. As the bombs dropped, the tweets went international, calling for the destruction of Western governments and civilians.

During the next three years, ISIS fighters or ISIS-inspired lone wolves targeted innocents in Brussels, Paris, Orlando, San Bernardino, Nice, Manchester and London. Atmospheric changes in social media reflect changes in the ground-level politics of insurgency, and specifically a willingness to export terrorism abroad. In the words of the sister of Abedi, the Manchester attacker, he saw the explosives America drops on [Muslim] children in Syria, and he wanted revenge.

Terrorist groups are seldom defeated by military force; they either achieve political solutions, or they wither away because grievances are solved or dissipate, or they alienate their supporters through excess brutality. Conversely, the US-led bombings of civilians in Fallujah and Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and the atrocities now being committed by the Iraqi liberators against ISIS suspects and their families, risk creating a new round of Sunni grievances.

Peter Byrne

According to a Pentagon-funded meta study of public opinion polls taken during 2015 and 2016, the vast majority of Muslims in Iraq and Syria do not support ISIS. But those who do cite religion or ideology far less than social, economic and governance grievances. And in Mosul, the study said, 46 per cent of the population believed coalition air strikes were the biggest threat to the security of their families, while 38 per cent said ISIS was the greatest threat.

If Iraqs economic and social infrastructure continues to deteriorate, a global war on terror that has to date cost $4 trillion will continue and more civilian lives will be lost to jihadist attacks in the countries involved and the West. The Sunnis in Iraq have a genuine grudge, says Cabayan. They were left out of the Shia-dominated government that we set up; they are under attack, nobody is protecting them. We can and should provide off-ramps for defeated ISIS members safety, jobs, civil rights. If not, after the fall of Mosul, we will be facing ISIS 2.0.

The counter-productive strategies go both ways. The immediate effect of civilian casualties in terror attacks is generally to undermine the ability of the attacked population to perceive the grievances of the attacking group as genuine, and to strengthen the political desire to hit back militarily. Retired US Navy captain Wayne Porter was naval chief of intelligence for the Middle East from 2008 to 2011. He is convinced that the only solution to terrorism is to deal with its root causes.

The only existential threat to us from terrorist attacks, real or imagined, is that we stay on the current counter-productive, anarchically organised, money-driven trajectory, says Porter, who now teaches counter-terrorism classes to military officers at the Naval Postgraduate School. Our current counter-terrorism strategy, which is no strategy, will destroy our democratic values.

When ISIS is driven from west Mosul in July, Mironova is back on the battlefield, gathering more data about the fate of families accused of collaborating. Extrajudicial punishment of Sunnis by Shia and Kurdish forces is causing fear and resentment, and fuelling ISIS, which is far from defeated.

ISIS is like H2O. It can be in several states: ice, water and vapour, she says. In Mosul, it was ice. We melted it. Now it is water, flowing into the countryside, seizing towns. It can vaporise to live and fight another day.

ZUMA/REX/Shutterstock

What makes someone prepared to die for an idea? This is a question that concerns anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Oxfords Centre for Resolution of Intractable Conflicts. Research he has led in some of the most embattled regions of the world, including in Mosul, suggests the answer comes in two parts. Jihadists fuse their individual identity with that of the group, and they adhere to sacred values.

Sacred values are values that cannot be abandoned or exchanged for material gain. They tend to be associated with strong emotions and are often religious in nature, but beliefs held by fervent nationalists and secularists, for example, may earn the label too. Atran has found that people in fighting groups who hold sacred values are perceived by other members of their group as having a spiritual strength that co
unts for more than their physical strength. Whats more, sacred values trump the other main characteristic of extremists: a powerful group identity. When push comes to shove, these fighters will desert their closest buddies for their ideals, he says.

Atran argues that individuals in this state of mind are best understood, not as rational actors but as devoted actors. Once theyre locked in as a devoted actor, none of the classic interventions seem to work, he says. But there might be openings. While a sacred value cannot be abandoned, it can be reinterpreted. Atran cites the case of an imam he interviewed who had worked for ISIS as a recruiter, but had left because he disagreed with their definition of jihad. For him, but not for them, jihadism could accommodate persuasion by non-violent means.

As long as such alternative interpretations are seen as coming from inside the group, Atran says, they can be persuasive within it. He is now advising the US, UK and French governments on the dynamics of jihadist networks to help them tackle terrorism. Laura Spinney

Deradicalisation programmes are the bedrock of counter-terrorism strategies in many countries. They aim to combat extremism by identifying individuals who have become radicalised, or are in danger of becoming so, and reintegrating them to the mainstream using psychological and religious counselling as well as vocational training.

In the UK, some 4000 people are reported to the governments anti-terror programme Prevent every year. The majority 70 per cent are suspected Islamic extremists, but about a quarter are far-right radicals, and that number is growing.

Critics fear that these programmes criminalise and stigmatise communities, families and individuals. In addition, there are questions about who governments collaborate with for information and whether public servants should be obliged to report potential radicals.

There is also very little evidence that the programmes work. Most fail to assess the progress of participants, and rates of recidivism are rarely studied. In a recent report, the UK parliaments human rights committee warned that the governments counter-extremism strategy is based on unproven theories and risks making the situation worse.

The key to combating extremism lies in addressing its social roots, and intervening early, before anyone becomes a devoted actor willing to lay down their lives for a cause, says Scott Atran at the University of Oxfords Centre for Resolution of Intractable Conflicts (see Devoted to the cause). Until then, there are all sorts of things you can do. One of the most effective counter measures, he says, is community engagement. High-school football and the scouts movement have been effective responses to antisocial behaviour among the disenfranchised children of US immigrants, for example.

Another promising avenue is to break down stereotypes, says social psychologist Susan Fiske at Princeton University. These are not necessarily religious or racial stereotypes, but generalised stereotypes we all hold about people around us. When we categorise one another, we are particularly concerned with social status and competition, viewing people of low status as incompetent, and competitors as untrustworthy. Throughout history, violent acts and genocides have tended to be perpetrated against high-status individuals with whom we compete for resources, and who therefore elicit our envy, says Fiske.

Fiskes group has found ways to disrupt stereotypes by making people work together to achieve a common goal, for example. Trivial contact involving food, festivals and flags wont cut it, she says. It has to be a goal people care about and are prepared to invest in, such as a work project or community build. Here, success depends on understanding the minds of your collaborators rehumanising them.

Changing perspectives Tania Singer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, thinks brain training could achieve similar effects. Social neuroscientists have identified two pathways in the brain by which we relate to others. One mobilises empathy and compassion, allowing us to share another persons emotions. The second activates theory of mind, enabling us to see a situation from the others perspective.

Singers group recently completed a project called ReSource, in which 300 volunteers spent nine months doing training, first on mindfulness, and then on compassion and perspective taking. After just a week, the compassion training started to enhance prosocial behaviours, and corresponding structural brain changes were detectable in MRI scans.

Compassion evolved as part of an ancient nurturing instinct that is usually reserved for kin. To extend it to strangers, who may see the world differently from us, we need to add theory of mind. The full results from ReSource arent yet published, but Singer expects to see brain changes associated with perspective-taking training, too. Only if you have both pathways working together in a coordinated fashion can you really move towards global cooperation, she says. By incorporating that training into school curricula, she suggests, we could build a more cohesive, cooperative society that is more resilient to extremism. Laura Spinney

A key feature of jihadist groups is their use of social networks to propagate their ideas. If you can disrupt those connections, thats probably your best shot at stopping people from becoming terrorists, says J. M. Berger at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague and co-author of ISIS: The state of terror.

He believes that the advent of social media has not only increased the number of people extremist groups can reach, but also the potency of their message, because it allows them to circumvent safeguards against revisionism and hate speech. Those most susceptible to the propaganda, his research suggests, are not the chronically poor or deprived, but people experiencing uncertainty in their lives recent converts, young people who have just left the family home, those with psychiatric problems.

Extremist groups are adept at fomenting collective uncertainty, for example by provoking hostility between ethnic groups. At the same time, they present themselves as upholders of clear and unwavering values, an attractive message to individuals who are undergoing potentially destabilising transformations. Through social networks, those experiencing uncertainty can learn about and even enter into contact with extremist networks.

The G7 recognised this with its recent statement that it will combat the misuse of the internet by terrorists. But this is easier said than done, says Berger. Its easy to demand social media companies do something about extremism, but much harder to define what they should do in a way that is consistent with the values of liberal democracies. Laura Spinney

This article appeared in print under the headline Roots of terror

Leader: To tackle extremism, we need to know the enemy

More on these topics:

See original here:
Anatomy of terror: What makes normal people become extremists ... - New Scientist

‘Bombshell’ | Anatomy of a Scene – The New York Times

Hi, Im Jay Roach. I am the director of the film Bombshell. So in this scene, we see Margot Robbie, whos playing Kayla, take a call from clearly, from Roger Ailes office. And Kate McKinnon, whos playing Jess, in the cubicle with her. We have just seen, a few scenes back, that Roger is harassing Kayla right this minute and is now pressuring her to come back up. Weve also seen that Kate McKinnons character has warned her not to talk about it. So right away, its about staying silent. The score is playing this sort of haunting, all womens voices as the instrumentation, almost Phillip Glass thing that Teddy Shapiro came up with to emphasize how alone she is on this walk. And she walks into this elevator and thinks she can be alone. But in walks her actual idol, Megyn Kelly, played by Charlize Theron. And now, two women, who both have secrets, who both have been harassed, are in the same tight space and wont say a word to each other. And theyre going to ride this elevator up to the floor where Roger Ailes is. And this shot here is such a great example of Barry Ackroyds incredibly humanistic operating. Hes just watching the people and paying attention to what theyre reacting to, and finding the composition off of the performance. In comes Gretchen Carlson, played by Nicole Kidman, whos now a third woman in a different level of predicament, a different level of being harassed by Roger. And theyre all stuck in this space. So this was a very important scene, because its the only time in the whole movie when all three women are in the same place. And we wanted a kind of combination of capturing the predicament of them being in the elevator but not supporting each other, and seeing that in the wide shot, that you could actually jump around to watch each womans face in the three-shot and compose for that. And as Megyn watches them walk away, she knows that Margo, especially, is walking into Rogers lair, where almost all of the harassment happened at Fox.

Link:
'Bombshell' | Anatomy of a Scene - The New York Times

What’s New On Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, And HBO This Weekend: ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, ‘Star Trek Beyond’, ‘The … – Decider

Where to Stream

Strap in, cord-cutters, because your weekend is about to be jam-packed with the highest quality content you can get your hands on.Platforms like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO, Showtime, Starz,Sundance Now, and more are delivering more than your moneys worth on all fronts, and between original content and hit television series, the summer streaming selections just keep raising the bar every week.

Netflix has the biggest bingers covered with the latest series of Shonda Rhimes series likeScandalandGreys Anatomydropping this weekend, as well as the ridiculously hilarious original specialOh, Hello On Broadway. Hulu and Amazon Prime Video are following suit with a handful of hit TV series and blockbusters, and HBO has your laughs covered with comedy specialT.J. Miller: Meticulously Ridiculous. Laughs, thrills, and terrifying scares are in the queue for this weekend, so what are you waiting for? You could be spending this time tackling these top-notch titles!

ShondaLand lovers, rejoice the latest seasons of bothGreys AnatomyandScandaldrop on the platform on Saturday, and theyre better than ever. The thirteenth season of the wildly successful medical drama continues to follow our group of staff as they navigate the complicated waters of the hospital and their own personal traumas. With the departure of a major character impending once again (IS ANYONE SAFE?!), the stakes are higher than ever as this ongoing saga continues its reign.

[StreamGreys Anatomy: Season 13 on Netflix June 17]

The latest installment of the Chris Pine/Zachary Quinto iteration of the franchise does not disappoint as the USS Enterprises crew once again explores the furthest reaches of uncharted space and suddenly find themselves face-to-face with an unexpected, unstoppable enemy. Action-packed, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny (largely in part to the delightfulSimon Pegg), this Justin Lin-helmed sequel will bring you just as much joy and excitement as the first two flicks and make you remember the gone-to-soon Anton Yelchin fondly.

[StreamStar Trek Beyondon Hulu and Prime Video June 17]

This 1970s-set follow-up to horror hitThe Conjuringonce again depicts the paranormal investigations of Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) as they take on their most hair-raising case yet. The Warrens travel across the pond to aid a single mother raising four children as she copes with an evil spirit infestation, and obviously, total terror ensues. This eerie thrill-ride is a rare example of a quality horror sequel, and you should bump it up to the top of your queue.

[StreamThe Conjuring 2on HBO June 17]

Aquarius: Season 2 (2016) Counterpunch*Netflix Original El Chapo: Season 1 (2017) Marco Luque: Tamo Junto*Netflix Original Marvels Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Season 4 (2016) Mr. Gaga: A True Story of Love and Dance (2015) Oh, Hello On Broadway*Netflix Original Special Quantico: Season 2 (2016) The Ranch: Part 3 *Netflix Original World of Winx: Season 2 *Netflix Original

Greys Anatomy: Season 13 Scandal: Season 6 (2016) The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015)

Shooter: Season 1 (2016)

American Ninja Warrior: Season 9 Premiere (NBC) Asmodexia (2014) Bayou Maharajah (2013) Cardinal: Complete Season 1 (eOne) Cocaine Cowboys (2006) Control Room (2004) Family Mission: The TJ Labraico Story (2016) The Girls in the Band (2011) The Hunting of the President (2004) Outatime (2016) Spartan: Ultimate Team Challenge: Season 2 Premiere (NBC)

Kundo (2014) Star Trek Beyond(2016)

Grand Piano (2013)

Star Trek Beyond (2016) Suits: Season 6

Entre nos, Part 1 (2017) Krampus Psi:Season 3

The Conjuring 2 T.J. Miller: Meticulously Ridiculous

Backstreet Boys: Show em What Youre Made Of (2015) Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984) Breakin All the Rules (2004) Flaming Star (1960) The Good Shepherd (2006) The Hitcher (2007) The Invisible Woman (2013) The Marine (2006) Nothing Like the Holidays (2008) The People Under the Stairs (1991) Sydney White (2007) Town & Country (2001)

Inferno (2016)

American Gods(2017) SEASON FINALE Episode 108

An Englishman in New York(2009) Latter Days (2003) Out In The Dark (2012) Sand Dollars (2014) Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story (2015)

Among the Living I Want You Inside Me (2016) The Puppet Man (2016) The Treatment (2014)

800 Words: Series 2, Part 2, Episodes 5-6 Count Arthur Strong: Series 3, Episode 4 Danger UXBThe Heart Guy, Series 1, Episodes 3-4

Go here to read the rest:
What's New On Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, And HBO This Weekend: 'Grey's Anatomy', 'Star Trek Beyond', 'The ... - Decider

The Anatomy of Jedd Gyorko’s streaky 2017 – Viva El Birdos

Jedd Gyorko has had a weird season so far. If you read this blog often, youre probably a Cardinals fan, which means youre well aware of that. If not, this graph says it all:

This is a rolling 15-game average of Jedds wRC+ throughout his career, provided by the goodnfolks at Fangraphs.com. wRC+ aggregates all of a hitters contributions at the plate into and spits out a park and league adjusted single number to describe how good or bad a hitter was overall.

Jedd started out the year red hot, and just kept hitting better and better. This eventually culminated in holding a 184 wRC+ for the season on May 6th, 86 plate appearances into the season. That means he was 84% better than league average at the plate over that time frame. If he could have somehow kept that up the whole year, it likely would have resulted in an MVP award. Since then its been all downhill, recording a 76 wRC+ in the next 132 plate appearances. That means hes been 24% worse than league average since that point.

Thats averages out to a 118 wRC+ going into Fridays contest, which is solidly above-average. If he can hold that the rest of the year, it would represent a career high for him, so that sounds great. There is worry among fans though, that hes in a bit of a free fall. Some think hes getting exposed in a full-time role. Lets see what the numbers say.

First off, lets look at Gyorkos strike out and walk numbers throughout the year.

Pitchers mostly have control over strikeouts and walks. They can influence contact quality, but to nowhere near the same level, and its hard to be sure without a really large sample. If pitchers figured something out, youd expect to see it in Gyorkos strikeouts or walks. That doesnt seem to be the case though. Continuing with May 6th as the arbitrary dividing line, heres his K% and BB%:

Nearly identical in walks and strikeouts. Non-contact wOBA is also shown, and that did change. Non-contact wOBA is the non-contact portion of wOBA, which is strikeouts, unintentional walks, and hit-by-pitches. For context, league average is .200. Gyorko is below average over both stretches, but he was .017 points worse over his slump period. However, thats actually only because Gyorko was hit by a pitch during his hot streak, but wasnt during his slump.

So no, Gyorkos struggles havent come in non-contact situations. His slump is due entirely to worse results on-contact. Lets look at a 15-game rolling average of his BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play) and ISO (isolated slugging, or slugging percentage minus batting average, to get a measure of extra base hit ability):

Both peaked around the same time that his wRC+ did, and have plummeted since. The BABIP was always going to regress. No one in the history of the game has a true BABIP ability of .400, let alone .500. And if they could, it wouldnt be someone like Jedd, who is slower than average and tries to hit as many fly balls as he can, which have the worst chance of being an in-play hit.

Thats OK, because hitting for power can make up for that, and thats the game Gyorko plays. The ISO has plummeted as well though. On its own, that doesnt spell doom. While its not as noisy as BABIP, ISO varies a lot over the course of a season. Baseball is a game of inches, and the difference between a homer and a fly out to the warning track is just fractions of an inch in terms of where the ball makes contact with the bat.

So lets dig into Gyorkos contact quality. Heres his radial chart for the 2017 season, provided by the statcast data hosted at BaseballSavant.com.

If you havent seen this image before, the protractor-shaped image above is used to represent any batted ball by Exit Velocity and Launch Angle. The six shaded regions represent the six qualities of contact, and each dot represents one of Gyorkos batted balls in 2017. If thats confusing to you, dont worry, I was too at first. Check out this post for a full breakdown of the six types of contact quality.

While this is a great visual, it lacks context. We want to know how Gyorkos quality compares to league average, and it would also be nice to know how productive each category is. For this situation, it would also be helpful to see a split between what his hot streak looked like compared to his current slump. Heres what all that looks like:

When Gyorko was hot, he was hitting a well above average amount of barrels, the best type of batted ball. He was getting very little solid contact though, which is basically a border surrounding barrels. You have to wonder if that was the first part of the regression. When one player has a lot of barrels or solid contact, but not that much of the other, it seems likely that the two would be more even going forward. Despite barrels representing much more area on the radial chart than solid contact, theyre very comparable in terms of the average likelihood of one occurring.

Also notice the weak category, which is any batted ball under 60 MPH, regardless of angle. Those batted balls actually perform at an above-average rate, likely because the defense usually isnt positioned in preparation for batted balls under 60 MPH.

Regardless, its hard to believe its a good sign for a hitter. Like the connection between barrels and solid contact, it seems believable that if a hitter has a lot of weak contact, going forward some of that will turn into under or topped batted balls, which are the two below-average performing batted balls. That looks like the case with Gyorko, who saw a big reduction in weak contact, and a big increase in getting under the ball.

Next up, well look at Gyorkos xwOBA. xwOBA is also brought to you by BaseballSavant.com, and replaces the on-contact portion of wOBA with what it should have been, based on the average performance of each of the players batted balls. This doesnt take into account foot speed or how often a player is shifted against, but nevertheless Craig found that xwOBA was more predictive of future wOBA than wOBA itself. Heres how Gyorko grades out during both streaks:

During his hot streak, Gyorko out-performed his contact quality by .060 points of wOBA. For context, thats the 32nd biggest negative difference of 317 players with at least 40 at bats over that time frame, just outside the top 10%. Still, .399 is an impressive xwOBA, 29th over that time frame, or among the top 9% of the league. Gyorkos hot streak wasnt just luck, he was also just plain tearing the cover off the ball.

On the flip side, his cold streak was entirely earned, with the wOBA matching the xwOBA. What does this mean? Again, it doesnt have to mean anything. Baseball is a game of inches, and hitting is one of the most obvious examples of that fact. Lets push forward though, and see if pitchers are attacking Gyorko any differently. First off, well look at a heatmap of where Gyorko has been pitched in 2017, provided by Baseball Savant. On the left is the hot streak, on the right is the cold streak:

The differences are very minor. Generally, Gyorko is pitched a little bit to the outside portion of the plate, but with the highest density middle-middle. That was the case during both his hot and cold streaks. But thats just part of the equation. What about pitch selection? Are pitchers throwing him a different mix of pitches? Heres a pie chart by pitch type during the hot streak, again courtesy of Baseball Savant:

And heres the same thing, but for his slump:

Again, strikingly familiar. Jedds Zone% is also almost the same over this stretch as well, so pitchers arent avoiding the zone more often.

Jedd is walking and striking out at the same pace. If he wasnt, it would be a good sign that either something was wrong or pitchers were successfully adjusting to him. While theres a .160 point difference between his wOBA in both time frames, xwOBA brings it down to a .100 difference. Thats still very significant, but at the same time, hes getting pitched virtually the same way. All that appears to be going on here is a great example of
the contrast between a hitter being as locked in as he can be (and have some things goes his way) vs. something being a little off.

Its always fun to find something more concrete, but the season is just full of ups and downs is a valid answer in baseball. Hitters talk about this all the time. Sometimes the ball looks like a beach ball, other times a marble. Its just part of the game. Going forward, hell almost certainly be somewhere in-between. Baseball is a game of streaks. Lets hope Jedd is about done with this one.

Link:
The Anatomy of Jedd Gyorko's streaky 2017 - Viva El Birdos

Anatomy of Andrew Benintendi’s game-saving throw home – WEEI.com (blog)

This was no accident.

When Andrew Benintendi threw out Howie Kendrick at the plate with one out in the eighth inning, potentially saving the game for the Red Sox Tuesday night, it might have simply seemed like a nice toss home coupled with an ill-advised decision by the base-runner to try and score. (To see the play, click here.)

Butthere were a few more factors at play when considering what made Benintendi's throw possible.

The execution of the action could first be tracked back to the night before, when the Red Sox left fielder had scurried over to get a ball before hastily trying to pick it up with his barehand. That resulted in a bad throw. So when Benintendi approached the ricochet off the left field wall - which emanated from Maikel Franco's blast just a few feet shy of reaching home run distance - the memory of Monday night immediately flashed into his head.

"I was going to make sure I picked it up with my glove," Benintendi later said. "I didn't last time, and that didn't work."

The next piece of the equation was also a lesson learned, this one garnered during pregame activities. Prior to Tuesday night's game, Benintendi had joined the other outfielders in working on all their throws to the bases. They were drills that aren't done every day, but ended up being perfectly timed for this occasion, particuarly since it let the rookie get the kinks out.

"I was throwing all cutters. Not straight balls," Benintendi said of his practices tosses. "But the game is all that matters."

But perhaps what made the whole thing come together was simply a demeanor that many have referenced when describing the 22 year old. Throughout the chaos that came with the Red Sox' fate hanging in the balance, Benintendi remained remarkablycalm.

"I saw where the runner was and I saw how he had it gauged up. There was no sense in him panicking," said Red Sox center fielder Jackie Bradley Jr.. "He played the ball the way he was supposed to, but just got a hard kick. As he was running to get the ball I saw him pick his head up and kind of analyze where he was. That's why he knew the distance that he was wasn't very far and he able to throw a strike to home plate."

"To remain under control," said Red Sox manager John Farrell when asked what impressed him most about the play. "Hes got to chase that ball a long way after the carom. He comes up, throws a strike to home plate. Its the even temperament that he shows in probably every aspect of the game, particularly the final swing tonight."

That swing, of course, was Benintndi's first career walk-off hit, giving the Red Sox a 4-3, 12-inning win over the Phillies.

It's a swing that probably isn't made possible, however, if not for the outfielder's casual throw and catch with backstop Chritian Vazquez about an hour before.

Read the original here:
Anatomy of Andrew Benintendi's game-saving throw home - WEEI.com (blog)

The anatomy of Beavers’ win streaks – Mail Tribune

By Bob LundebergMid-Valley Media Group

The two longest winning streaks in Division I baseball this year belong to Oregon State.

The top-seeded Beavers (54-4), who open the College World Series at noon Saturday against Cal State Fullerton (39-22), will take the field at TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha, Nebraska as winners of 21 consecutive games. OSU closed the regular season with 16 straight victories and has outscored opponents 44-9 during its five NCAA tournament games.

Earlier this year, the Beavers won a program-record 23 in a row from Feb. 25 to April 9, including a 12-0 start in Pac-12 play.

The two streaks have accounted for 44 of the teams 54 victories, another single-season school record. With a winning percentage of .931, OSU is on pace to break Arizona States 45-year-old all-time mark of .914 (the Sun Devils finished 64-6 in 1972).

Below is a breakdown of the Beavers winning streaks.

Streak 1, Feb. 25-April 9

Length: 23 games

Runs scored: 136 (5.9 per game)

Runs allowed: 49 (2.1 per game)

One-run games: 6

Shutouts: 6

A loss to Ohio State, which finished 148th in the NCAA RPI, dropped Oregon State to 5-1 early in the season.

The Beavers began the longest winning streak in school history with a 5-2 neutral-site victory over Nebraska, which later came to Oregon for the Corvallis Regional. OSU then got revenge against the Buckeyes to wrap up play in Surprise, Arizona before sweeping consecutive home series with UC Davis and Ball State.

Entering Pac-12 play 14-1 overall, the Beavers outscored Arizona State 16-1 during the three-game set to seize an immediate stranglehold on the conference standings. Starting pitchers Luke Heimlich (eight two-hit innings), Bryce Fehmel (eight innings, one run, four hits) and Jake Thompson (seven two-hit innings) were close to untouchable in the desert.

OSU picked up its first of six walk-off wins at Goss Stadium on March 24, knocking off Arizona 4-3 on a KJ Harrison single that plated Adley Rutschman. The Beavers trailed 3-1 entering the eighth.

One night later, OSU again overcame a deficit and walked off again when Preston Jones scored all the way from second on a wild pitch for a 5-4 win. A comfortable 11-7 decision in the series finale pushed the team to 20-1 overall and 6-0 in Pac-12 play.

The Beavers kept the streak alive with another come-from-behind effort, scoring three times in the ninth to steal a 4-3 victory at Saint Marys on March 28. Nick Madrigal collected the game-winning hit, a two-out, two-RBI single with the bases loaded.

Following another road sweep in which the Beavers outscored Stanford 25-8, OSU pulled out a 4-3 road decision at Portland for its 20th win in a row. Rutschmans two-run single in the sixth put the Beavers in front for good.

A home sweep of Utah including two more walk-offs left OSU 28-1 overall (12-0 Pac-12). Steven Kwan hit a game-winning single in the opener while a Rutschman sacrifice fly brought home Jack Anderson for a 5-4, 16-inning victory in Game 2.

The streak finally came to an end April 13, a 3-2 loss at Washington. But the Beavers fought back to win the final two games of the series.

Streak 2, April 30-current

Length: 21 games

Runs scored: 158 (7.5 per game)

Runs allowed: 41 (2.0 per game)

One-run games: 5

Shutouts: 6

After starting the year 28-1, the Beavers went just 5-3 during a two-week span from April 13-29. The rocky patch included a 7-5, 10-inning home loss to USC, which finished in the Pac-12 basement with Arizona State.

Oregon State came back to rout the Trojans 10-1 in the series finale, igniting a winning streak that has yet to end.

A midweek home victory over Oregon followed by a three-game sweep of California put the Beavers on the brink of the Pac-12 championship. After cruising past the Ducks in Game 1 of the Civil War conference series, Mitchell Verburg struck out Ryne Nelson with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth to seal a 5-4 victory and the outright Pac-12 title.

Verburgs heroics also delivered career win No. 1,000 for coach Pat Casey.

The Beavers blanked Oregon 1-0 to sweep the series and cruised by Portland two days later before coming out flat against Washington State May 19. Trailing 3-2 entering the ninth, Steven Kwan and Jack Anderson drew consecutive base-loaded walks off Cougars closer Scott Sunitsch for a true walk-off.

OSU went on to outscore Washington State 19-3 in the final two games of the series, finishing with the best record in conference history at 27-3.

The streak nearly ended again May 26 against Abilene Christian, the Beavers final regular-season opponent. Knotted at 4 in the bottom of the 11th, Anderson knocked in Andy Atwood with a single for the teams sixth walk-off of the year. Reliever Mitch Hickey proposed to his girlfriend on the Goss Stadium turf immediately following the game.

The Beavers entered the NCAA tournament with a 49-4 record and breezed through the Corvallis Regional, outscoring Holy Cross and Yale by a combined margin of 27-3. Two comfortable wins over Vanderbilt in the Corvallis Super Regional pushed the winning streak to 21 as OSU prepares for its CWS opener.

Read more from the original source:
The anatomy of Beavers' win streaks - Mail Tribune

London fire: Anatomy of a high-rise horror – The Sydney Morning Herald

London:It began with a sudden, frantic knocking on a door, late at night.

On the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower, a block of flats in west London, pregnant Maryam Adam, 41, had been deep in sleep when the loud banging woke her. The clock told her it was just after a quarter to one in the morning.

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Fears the toll will rise with 12 confirmed dead and 78 taken to hospital after the massive blaze at the 24-storey Grenfell Tower in London.

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A blimp at the US Open golf tournament in Wisconsin caught fire and crashed on Thursday.

Fears the toll will rise with 12 confirmed dead and 78 taken to hospital after the massive blaze at the 24-storey Grenfell Tower in London.

She went to the door. It was her neighbour, identified by one newspaper on Thursday as a 44-year old taxi driver from Ethiopia.

"He was shouting that his flat was on fire," Adam said.

She looked across the central corridor in the core of the 24-storey tower. A big bag of clothes sat outside the man's flat.

His door was open and through it she saw a "small" fire in his kitchen, she said later.

Another woman on the same floor, Aalya Moses, had a similar experience.

"There was no alarm, no sprinkler, just my neighbour who told everyone on my floor and the surrounding floors," she said. "If he hadn't told me I wouldn't have known."

Adam echoed the sentiment. "If he had not knocked, I don't know what would have happened."

They left the building, spooked. It was about 10 minutesto one in the morning on Wednesday, June 14.

Within an hour, the place would be an inferno.

This is a story that has many revisions to come.There will be surprise reunions and inevitable funerals. There will be police reports, fire reports and an inquest into the deaths: 17 at Thursday's count, a number that will rise over days and possibly weeks.

And there will be an official public inquiry into what happened and what can be learnt, what must be learntfrom a tragedy that, it appears, could have been and was foreseen, and could have been but wasn't prevented.

It was a pleasant night after a warm day. Many in Grenfell Tower had left their windows open to capture a light, cool night breeze.

The building benefited from new insulation, installed in a renovation that finished in 2016: a sleek aluminium composite cladding covering old, stained concrete.

That cladding was starting to catch fire.

Mahal Egal was another who got out from the fourth floor with his two small children, warned by a neighbour, among the first to evacuate.

He said the neighbour told him his fridge had exploded.

Leaving was against the building's fire safety advice. If residents knew there was a fire outside their flat, they were supposed to shut their door and wait for rescue.

Such buildings are designed to isolate fires. And with residents safe inside their flats, firefighters have more chance of running an orderly evacuation if it becomes necessary.

Indeed, this was reportedly the early advice that firefighters and 000 emergency operators were giving before an evacuation was ordered some time later. If this turns out to be the case, it could have been a fatal mistake firefighters and fire safety experts later said this fire spread faster than any high-rise blaze they had seen before.

Even as Egal left his flat, the first of many fire engines were arriving.

"At first it seemed controllable," he said, watching the fire from the outside. "At this point the fire was no higher than an average tree.

"But really quickly the fire started to rise, as the cladding caught fire."

There was already smoke inside the building, in the single central stairwell, he said.

He thought of his extended family and friends still inside the building, and he worried, and he watched the fire grow out of control, leaping eagerly up the building.

Within minutes it had climbed a dozen floors.

Witness Tanya Thompson said she saw it go "up like a firewall, straight up the side of the building" in about ten minutes. Another, Omar, said it was "like a piece of paper like dominos, fire and then fire and then fire. It was so quick and shocking."

Mickey (Michael) Paramasivan, 37, was woken on the seventh floor by the smell of burning plastic. He tucked his six-year-old daughter Thea into her dressing gown and they ran downstairs.

By the time they were outside "we looked up at the tower and it was like a horror movie", he said.

Mouna Elogbani was on the 11th floor with her husband and three children a friend called and warned her to get out. When they first opened the door to escape "flames burst into the house", she said. They managed to get out down the stairs.

On the 17th floor a man who identified himself on radio as "Methrob" was woken by fire sirens, grabbed his aunty and they started to make their way down.

"By the time that we got downstairs, the fire had gone all the way up and was just about reaching our windows," he said. "The whole side of the building was on fire. The cladding went up like a matchstick."

There are many more stories of narrow escapes. Other stories do not end well.

Jessica Urbano, 12, borrowed someone's phone as she hid in a stairwell with a group of friends making their way down from the 20th floor. She rang her mum.

"Jessica had been asleep in our flat when something woke her - I don't know if it was the smoke or a fire alarm - so she rang me at 1.39am as I was on my way home from work," Jessica's mum, Adriana, told the London Telegraph. "She said,''Mum where are you? Mummy come and get me'." Mrs Urbano urged Jessica to run down the stairs of the tower block and try to find a fire fighter to lead her to safety.

"I told her to get out of there as quickly as she could. I said 'run as fast as you can', but then the line cut out".

On Thursday Jessica was listed among the missing.

On the 14th floor, at 1.38am, ZainabDean phoned her brother Francis.

"She said there was a fire in the building," Francis said later. "She was very nervous and scared. She is a nervous person anyway. She said the fire service arrived and had told everyone to keep calm and to stay where she was."

Twenty minutes later, he got to the building and tried to get in to rescue his sister, but police stopped him.

After an hour, he was desperate with worry.

"I could see the building was going up in flames. I said Zainab you have to get out of the building it's not looking good. She said she didn't want to go down the stairs because there was too much smoke.

"But she tried anyway and then [her three-
year-old son]Jeremiah collapsed in her arms."

Their last contact was at 3am.

"On the phone I just keep telling her they were coming to get her."

He handed his phone to a fireman. The fireman handed it back, saying "tell her you love her".

"I knew then to fear the worst. The phone went dead and I couldn't talk to her."

One firefighter was heard telling his crew "we're going in and we're going up".

"My firefighters battled through intense heat to reach some of the highest floors," said London Fire Brigade Commissioner Dany Cotton.

"I was looking at a building that was engulfed in fire where I knew members of the public were still trapped yet I was committing hundreds of firefighters into a building that to a lot of people looked terribly unsafe.

"My firefighters were desperate to get in there and desperate to rescue people, and we committed crew after crew into a very dangerous, very hot and very difficult situation because we had a passion to do as much as we could to rescue the people in there."

The firefighters were told to write their names and numbers on their helmets before they went in.

"It was like a war zone in there," said one. They rescued at least 65 people.

Another said they were "knee deep in debris and bodies" once they climbed past the 11th floor but they kept going up as high as they could, as far as their legs and oxygen canisters would taken them, touching and feeling their way along corridors and stairs, "sweeping and stamping" to check for obstacles or collapsed flooring.

Outside, the fire hoses simply couldn't reach the upper floors.

By the time the fire reached the top floors, the internal stairwell was ink-black with smoke and those remaining felt there was no escape.

Nura Jemal, mother of three on the 22nd floor, told a friend on the telephone "I'm so sorry, goodbye. Please forgive us. We are not going to make it."

The first victim of the fire to be name was Mohammed al-Haj Ali, 23, a Syrian refugee who came to the UK in 2014 and was studying civil engineering.

He had been in a flat on the 14th floor with his brother Omar.

"We smelled the smoke, opened the door, saw smoke," Omar said. "The smoke came inside. I've seen the fire around me."

They left the apartment together and headed for the stairs.

"I couldn't see anything, even my fingers," Omar said. "I thought I was going to die on those stairs. I was breathing smoke, lots of smoke."

Then, when he was almost out, "I looked behind me and I didn't see my brother."

"I called him [on the phone] and said 'where are you'? He said 'I'm in the flat'. I said 'why didn't you come?' He said 'no one brought me outside'."

There they stayed, Omar outside and Mohammed in. They spoke to the end.

"I was speaking to my brother [on the phone]he said 'I'm dying'. He said 'I cannot breathe'."

Among the lost are a 57-year-old man who told his wife and son to leave him behind, and has not been seen since, and Tony Disson, 66, whose phone fell silent at 4am after speaking to a friend and saying "tell my sons I love them".

Ali Jafari, 82, was escaping with his wife and daughter in the lift but got out at the 10th floor, unable to breathe, and did not get back in before the doors closed.

A mother lost her grip on her 12-year-old daughter's hand as they stumbled down the pitch-black stairwell. She spent Thursday travelling from hospital to hospital searching for her child.

Rania Ibrahim posted frightened videos on Snapchat and Facebook while trapped on the 23rd floor, the hallway outside impassable with smoke. Her last message was "guys, I can't get out".

But there were more survivors, too, emerging from the blaze in the arms of firefighters.

Natasha Elcock, trapped on the 12th floor with her six-year-old daughter, flooded the bathroom and kept her flat damp. After 90 minutes the fire crew told them to get out but they couldn't the door of the flat was too hot to open.

"The door was buckling and the windows bubbling and cracking, it was terrifying," she said.

Fire crews rescued her at 3am. She stepped over a body on the way out.

Schools inspector Marcio Gomes, 38, was told to stay put but by 4.30am the fire had engulfed the whole building, and fire crews were unable to make it up to them.

He wrapped his family up in wet towels and said, "There's no turning back, we have to go," he told the Sun.

"As soon as we opened the door all the smoke came in. We had no choice because the fire started coming in through the windows. We had to go down the stairs.

"You couldn't see anything. We didn't see people, we just felt people. We were just climbing over bodies."

He stayed on the line to the fire operator all the way down.

"They said 'keep going down, keep using your voice'."

Read more:
London fire: Anatomy of a high-rise horror - The Sydney Morning Herald

Grey’s Anatomy Finds A Rainbow Connection – Long Island Weekly News

Jake Borelli as Dr. Levi Schmitt on Greys Anatomy. (Photo by ABC/Mike Rosenthal)By Louis Ghiraldi

If you have ever spent any time in a hospital, you are probably familiar with the term STAT, a fast-moving response to an urgent situation. In a lot of ways, STAT can also apply to the career of Jake Borelli who currently plays Dr. Levi Schmitt in the long-running ABC medical drama Greys Anatomy.

Although Borelli has been a veteran actor from an early age, his current meteoric success is finding the Ohio natives career gaining considerable momentum.

Unlike some of todays actors, Borelli succeeds because of substance rather than style and looks alone. He carries himself in a genuine natural way that resonates with the public and personifies authenticity. Borelli is a social media star with almost 400,000 followers on Instagram and an ever-expanding Twitter presence as well. His fans remain extremely loyal and wont be forgetting about him anytime soon. Borelli interacts with members of his fan base on a regular basis in a sincere and appreciative manner.

The kid from Columbus has come full circle this year, returning to his hometown to be King of the Pride parade, out and successful.

Borelli without hesitation points out, It was special to return home fully out of the closet with my whole family there. That special moment has been repeated on numerous occasions since he came out publicly 12 months ago.

Ive had the chance to meet so many wonderful people who have accepted me and offered kindness, is how he reflects on this whirlwind period. In his down-to-earth manner, Borelli adds that its about being himself and never changing his kind approach to interacting with people.

Those early days after he came out of the closet were complicated and found him personally going into uncharted waters.

I was terrified, and had no idea of what to expect, he said. There was pressure to be open and hope people would respect my decision.

In a case of art imitating life, Greys recently introduced its first gay male storyline that revolved around Borellis character, Levi Schmitt. It was an opportunity that Borelli felt made it the right time to come out in his personal life. Even casual viewers of the show can see how the series stories intersect with each other and how the characters grow, flaws and all.

Borelli points out We tell human stories, that everyone can relate to.

His fans have certainly related to him. Given how hes risen to become one of the more popular young actors on television, it wouldnt be surprising to see ABC lock him up with a long-term development deal for Greys Anatomy and beyond. Borelli remains an integral part of the show. The growth of his character and in his personal life have transcended the television screen and hit home with viewers. Chalk it up to the genuineness Borelli brings to this role that has earned him such broad appeal with viewers.

I try to bring vulnerability to every role that I play is how he describes it.

As a 10-year veteran plying his trade in Los Angeles, Borelli found early success playing Wolfgang in the Nickelodeon comedy series The Thundermans and the Netflix dramatic film Reality High. He also scored guest shots on NCIS: Los Angeles, Parenthood and True Jackson, VP before landing his current role on Greys Anatomy.

While maintaining a busy production schedule, Borelli remains very active in his charity work, working with AIDS Walk LA, the LGBTQ Center and the GLAAD Awards. His interests in these events is heartfelt and his commitment is never-ending. It was through these charitable causes that Borelli found his new creative passiondoing stand-up comedy in Los Angeles. Early reviews have been good and given how much Borelli enjoyed it, this might not be the last time you see him cracking jokes on stage.

Borelli has diverse interests, ranging from needlepoint to traveling and his love of actress Catherine OHara. Even if he had stayed in Columbus, Borelli says I would have been a painter and still pursued acting.

Currently taking singing lessons, Borelli enjoys coming to New York multiple times a year to binge Broadway shows over a few days. The 28-year-old thespian is always on the go, suitcase packed and ready to travel at a moments notice. Japan has been his favorite country to visit so far and Brazil is on his bucket list.

We have such a huge [South American] fan base, I would love to go visit.

As for his current gig, Borelli is thrilled to see that Greys Anatomy is showing no signs of slowing downhitting the 20-year mark seems like a given at this point.

I love it here. I want to stay as long as they will have me, he said of the show and his cast mates.

The network clearly has faith in its young phenom as Borelli has been cast to star in The Thing About Harry, which premieres in February on Freeform (formerly ABC Family).Greys Anatomy returns to ABC on Jan. 23.

Go here to read the rest:
Grey's Anatomy Finds A Rainbow Connection - Long Island Weekly News

‘Grey’s Anatomy’: Patrick Dempsey ‘Immediately Had a Great Connection’ with Ellen Pompeo Here’s Why – Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Connections can be hard to fake between actors.

But thankfully for Patrick Dempsey, who played Dr. Derek Shepherd aka McDreamy on Greys Anatomy, he didnt have to pretend to have a bond with his on-screen love, Dr. Meredith Grey, played by Ellen Pompeo.

The two actors are both happily married in real-life but as a testament to their acting skills, they made audiences believe they were a real couple complete with adorable marriage vows scribbled on a Post-It while starring in Greys Anatomy.

During the course of his 11-season tenure on the show from Shonda Rhimes, Dempsey and his character became beloved by fans. Heck, McDreamy candles are still being sold today long after the actor left the medical drama in 2015.

From the start, the two actors had a connection. According to a 2013 article from TV Guide, Dempsey said he and Pompeo hit it off right away.

I met Ellen, and her Boston accent lit me up because I was from Maine, he said. So, I immediately had a great connection with her.

He echoed the same sentiment again in Oct. 2018 during an interview with Entertainment Tonight three years after his departure from the series.

Dempsey shared that what he and Pompeo had while filming Greys Anatomy proved to be special.

That was a very special bond that just there was a magic to our connection, and thats special, he said.

While they had a bond during Greys Anatomy, Pompeo revealed to Jada Pinkett Smith on an episode of Red Table Talk in Dec. 2018 that she and Dempsey hadnt talked in years, crushing the hearts of Meredith and Derek fans everywhere thinking the two actors were friends in real life.

Pompeo, 50, insisted theres no bad blood between them.

I have no hard feelings toward him, hes a wonderful actor, and we made, you know, the best TV you could make together, she said.

Pompeo emphasized that she and Dempsey arent at odds, saying, Thats a talented man right there he did 11 amazing years.

He continued on doing other things with his acting career, which Pompeo deemed perfectly OK.

You need that time to figure out who you are without the show, she said. So, we have not spoken, but I will always have a place in my heart for Patrick.

While our own hearts hurt a little when Pompeo said she and Dempsey hadnt spoken in years, her sweet comments about her former co-star soften the blow.

Fans were saddened to say goodbye to Dempsey and their favorite surgeon with the ferry boat scrub cap when Derek died in a car crash leaving Meredith to raise their children as a widow. But theyll still appreciate all the scenes Dempsey and Pompeo filmed together where they portrayed one of the most famous couples in recent TV history.

Pompeo continues to star in Greys Anatomy, now in Season 16, which airs Thursday nights at 9 p.m. EST on ABC.

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'Grey's Anatomy': Patrick Dempsey 'Immediately Had a Great Connection' with Ellen Pompeo Here's Why - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

‘Gale-force wind’ and a wipe-out: The anatomy of spring training’s goofiest play – The Athletic

BRADENTON, Fla. Youve seen it, right? If youre here, odds are good that youve seen it.

Mightve been on TV. Mightve been on Twitter. Mightve been in person and this would gain you admission into a blessed club, populated by the special geniuses of LECOM Park. Welcome.

If you havent, here it is a Very Special Baseball Play, starring Oneil Cruz, Kevin Kramer and Jason Martin on one side, and Chavez Young, Kevin Smith and Patrick Cantwell on the other. Well watch it together, and then well discuss why, exactly, it happened. Well do it together.

Standard, indeed. Cruz hit the baseball. Young chased down the baseball and threw it to Smith. Smith threw the baseball to Cantwell. Cantwell tagged Kramer with the baseball, and then Martin. The aristocrats!

On one hand, its spring training; whats the big deal? On the other hand, its spring training the best...

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'Gale-force wind' and a wipe-out: The anatomy of spring training's goofiest play - The Athletic

Kate Walsh hints that she might be returning to Grey’s Anatomy – PopBuzz

15 November 2019, 15:42

Fans have been speculating that Kate Walsh's Addison could return as part of Amelia's pregnancy storyline in season 16.

Grey's Anatomy has pulled off some incredible surprises over the years. And now, in it's sixteenth season (seriously, where has the time gone?), it looks like it's about to pull off another one by bringing back a classic cast member.

At the start of season 16, show runner Krista Vernoff revealed that she was working on bringing back a familiar face. "I'm trying to get someone back," Vernoff revealed at the Television Critics Association press tour (TVLine). "There's someone Im hoping will make an appearance this year, [but] it's a real maybe. I'm trying."

READ MORE: Greys Anatomys powerful sexual assault episode is an important moment in TV history

Fans immediately went into overdrive with theories, with some suggesting Sandra Oh returning as Cristina Yang or even Sara Ramirez as Callie Torres or Katherine Heigl as Izzie Stevens.

Another name thrown into the ring was Kate Walsh, who played the iconic Addison Montgomery. Kate has spoken a few times about wanting to come back to Grey's at "the right time" and with "the right storyline," and judging by the way a certain storyline seems to be heading (*cough cough* Amelia), it looks like the stars might finally align.

Speaking to PopCulture.com about whether or not she would one day be back as Addison, Kate said: "Absolutely. Anything's possible. If it's the right time and the right storyline, yes. I always considered Shondaland my home, and particularly Grey's. That's where it was just a big important piece of my life, and I love everyone involved on the show. So, absolutely I would go back if it made sense to everybody involved yes."

When asked straight up if the character Vernoff was referring to was Addison, she said: "Oh no, I can't say anything. I couldn't. It's like Shondaland, it's serious business. I am sworn to secrecy for real."

Well, that's not a 'no', is it?! IT'S NOT A NO!

As is normally the case with Grey's, everything is being kept under wraps, so nothing is confirmed yet. However, Amelia's pregnancy storyline definitely leaves that door wide open for Addison's return.

In season 5 of Private Practice, Addison supported Amelia when she gave birth to a baby boy with no brain. Addison is one of the few people who saw the devastating journey Amelia went through so it makes total sense for her come back and support her, and maybe even deliver her baby.

And maybe even Bailey's, like she did in season 2. (You know how much Grey's loves a dramatic double birth storyline!)

READ MORE: Greys Anatomy stars defend Meredith and DeLuca's relationship after backlash from fans

The last time we saw Addison on Grey's was in the season 8 alternate universe episode 'If/Then.' Following the series finale of Private Practice, we've only heard Addie's name mentioned a handful of times in Grey's but fans have been dying to see the neonatal legend return to Seattle for years.

BRB, just forming an Addison Montgomery-themed prayer circle and speaking this into existence.

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Kate Walsh hints that she might be returning to Grey's Anatomy - PopBuzz

The Anatomy of a Perfect Holiday Board – D Magazine

A well-composed holiday board can set the stage for main-course merriment. But the at-your-leisure crowd favorite can be a bit intimidating to piece together just right. We sat down with Olivia Genthe owner of Uptowns caf and charcuterie board concept, Fount Board and Table, set to open in mid-December to gather expert advice on curating an impressive and inviting holiday board this season.

Here are her five essentials to help you build a better board.

When it comes to choosing cheese, Genthe suggests opting for a salty and creamy triple cream over classic holiday brie. For a little seasonal flair, spruce-wrapped goat cheese is among her go-tos, while a hard, smoked bleu cheese can offer guests with texture and taste aversions an easy way to enjoy.

Be sure to include cracker, protein, and spread options that guests with dietary restrictions can enjoy. I try to make sure that we have a dairy dip, a non-dairy dip, and a vegan or plant-based thing thats different, Genthe says. Sweet potato crackers are among her gluten-free go-tos, and she suggests bresaola beef as an alternative to classic pork pairings.

Genthe recommends investing in a high-quality, cultured butter that can be served simply or as a complement to other board ingredients. German and Italian butters are her favorites as they provide a creamy texture and subtle flavor that many guests mistake for a cheese option.

Choose herbal garnishes that will complement your boards flavors not overtake them. Be mindful of the stuff that you put physically next to the food, Genthe says. Though spruce, pine, and rosemary can add seasonal scents and visual interest to your boards, they can overpower the flavors in the foods they touch. Genthe recommends selecting a seeded, silver dollar, or willow eucalyptus from Central Market instead.

Genthe advises choosing one item to place on your board that tells your story or lets a particular guest know you are thinking of them. This can be a fruit that brings back memories of your late grandfather, a mustard from your hometown, or even your favorite flower. Its to celebrate each other and who and where you come from, Genthe says.

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The Anatomy of a Perfect Holiday Board - D Magazine

Grey’s Anatomy Season 14 Details – POPSUGAR

Grey's Anatomy Season 14 Is Shaping Up to Be Pretty Dramatic

Even though we only just witnessed the season 13 finale of Grey's Anatomy, it's never too soon to look ahead. In the wake of everything that has happened, it's clear there are plenty of planted seeds that will surely bloom once the show returns in the Fall. Granted, Stephanie will no longer be with us, but with a few new faces, a couple of new flames, and that trademark drama we've always loved, there's plenty to look forward to. There isn't much available information about the 14th season of Grey's, but we do have potential things figured out.

Owen's sister is alive! At the very end of the finale, Owen reconnects with his long-lost sibling, Megan. This could cause all kind of upheaval. It will certainly change Owen's entire life. Then there's Riggs, who was in love with Megan before she vanished. The timing is terrible: Meredith has just opened herself up romantically to Riggs, and now she risks losing him. Will Megan and Riggs be able to pick up where they left off?

There's also a chance Megan will join the ranks at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. Once she recovers from the years of trauma, obviously. But if she does end up on the hospital staff, it'll be interesting to see what kind of ripple effect it has on everyone else.

And by "might" we mean "almost definitely." By the time the finale rolled around, the show had been dropping hints that Maggie and Jackson would pair up. Even in the last episode, April tells Maggie that she's pretty sure Jackson has feelings for her. The question is, will either of them act on it? Call us crazy, but we're still holding out hope for Japril.

Now that Minnick has been fired, there's a strong chance she's leaving Seattle. It seems like Arizona is about to have another wound to tend to unless, for some strange reason, Minnick sticks around. We'll admit, we didn't exactly love Minnick, but it was nice to see Arizona happy!

The storyline with Jo's husband has only heated more and more since we first found out. At the end of the season, Alex meets him in person but fails to follow through with any actual action. The thing is, the show wouldn't have put a face to the name unless we're going meet him again. We have a feeling he's going to be a major player in the episodes to come.

We caught a glimmer of love remaining between Owen and Amelia near the end of season 13 when they embrace and cry it out together in the elevator. Is there a chance Amelia is coming around? Could Owen's sister have softened his hard shell? It's absolutely possible.

ABC has already released the Fall TV lineup for 2017, and Grey's will continue to dominate the Thursday night spot. The show has almost always kicked off the season near the end of September, so we've just got four months to wait.

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Technical Boost: PGIMER to set up state-of-the-art anatomy museum – The Indian Express

Written by Adil Akhzer | Chandigarh | Published:June 15, 2017 4:12 am PGI doctors maintained that the institutes collection of human organs dates back to the 1970s. Of the total preserved organs, the majority are of the human brain, numbering around 2,500. ( File Photo)

The Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) is planning to set up a museum for anatomy. Doctors said the proposed start-of-the-art museum would act as a teaching aid for medical students as well as serve as an attraction for visitors.

At present, PGI has an anatomy museum on the campus, but the new plan is for a manifold expansion. The proposal that has now been prepared would require an outlay of approximately Rs 2 crore. Our existing collection runs into thousands of organ specimens from the human body. It is probably the largest collection in India. These could be an excellent source of medical education for resident doctors and faculty of the institute and even other institutes of the country. With improved display and modernisation [in the new plan], it could be one of the best museums of Asia, PGI spokeswoman Manju Wadwalkar told the Chandigarh Newsline on Wednesday.

The museum, as it exists now, is located in a hall in the research block of PGI. Not all specimens in the collection are on display due to the shortage of space. The main visitors are PGIs medical students. The organ collection includes both healthy and diseased specimens, harvested from cadavers.

PGI doctors maintained that the institutes collection of human organs dates back to the 1970s. Of the total preserved organs, the majority are of the human brain, numbering around 2,500. The world over, teaching hospitals have museums that are as well known as the institute itself. The Gordon Museum of Anatomy at Guys Hospital in London is one such.

The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia at the non-teaching College of Physicians is famous for its exhibit of a piece of Albert Einsteins brain. According to the new proposal, PGI officials said the museum would be divided into zones spread over different floors.

The collection will be curated in the new museum in a manner so that the visitor can have a seamless learning experience of visiting the museum, said an official. There will be different zones, including one for histology (study of microscopic tissues), self-study area, conference space, childrens section and also a tunnel of reflection, he stated.

An additional mezzanine floor has been designed in the new plan to further connect via aerial bridge with the existing mezzanine, informed the official, adding that the new museum would remain open for the general public as well. A senior PGI official said: Huge money is involved and the proposal is under active consideration. Also, deliberations on the financial part of the project have begun.

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Technical Boost: PGIMER to set up state-of-the-art anatomy museum - The Indian Express