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From the Times, UK
President-elect âwas born in Pakistanâ
After years spent fostering the conspiracy theory that President Obama was not an American citizen, Donald Trump now faces a âbirtherâ movement of his own after a Pakistani news channel claimed that the president-elect was born a Muslim in Pakistan.
The Urdu-language broadcaster Neo News claims to have seen evidence that Donald John Trump was born Dawood Ibrahim Khan in lawless North Waziristan. The region is a notorious hotbed of Islamist militancy and a haven for groups such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
In the news report, which was broadcast last month but has gone viral since the election, the presenter announced: âBelieve it or not, presidential candidate Donald Trump was born in Pakistan and not in America.â
Young Dawood was educated in a madrassa, or religious seminary, before he was orphaned when his parents died in a road accident in 1954, Neo News reported. He was then taken to London by a retired Indian captain in the British Army and adopted by the Trump family in 1955.
As evidence of its extraordinary claim, which would disqualify Mr Trump from assuming the presidency, Neo News cited several posts on social media and the grainy photograph of a young, blond-haired boy in Pakistani dress whose surly expression bears a passing resemblance to the president-elect.
Like the birther movement targeting Mr Obama, Neo News is likewise undeterred by the complete lack of evidence for its claims. The broadcaster is calling on Mr Trump to produce his birth certificate and take a DNA test that it believes would uncover his Pakistani heritage.
Conspiracies aside, Pakistan is jittery about the implications of Mr Trumpâs election victory, fearing that he will lean towards its neighbour and rival, India.
The property mogul turned commander-in-chief has been highly critical of US policy towards Pakistan, demanding that Islamabad sever ties with the terrorist groups sheltering within its borders if it wants to continue to receive billions of dollars in American aid.
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Winston Peters decides: National, Labour may learn fate at same time as the public
This is f****d up.
Winston is the junior partner by far in whichever coalition partner he ends up with, and yet he is the one with his name in lights letting us all know what the end result is?
Surely it should be Bill or Jacinda saying we have formed a government with NZ First or the Greens or whatever the arrangement is.
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Squire will start on Saturday.
Watch a replay and see how much work he got through at Eden Park.
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Log in to your account, should be able to see how you got on in the latest ballot.
I got all the ABs playoff games, assuming they win their group.
And Japan v Russia, the opening game, and Japan v Scotland.
Sorted!
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Thought this article might belong here
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Have installed Monier solar tiles on my roof. Tesla Powerwall to be installed soon.
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Commentary Highlight of the night
Marshy - "What a great start from Richie Mo'unga, he's nailed that a good 45 metres, with no real angle, All Black number 1167"
Nisbo - "do you remember your number?"
Marshy "I do"
Nisbo "Go on"
Marshy - "Yes I do, number nine hundred and forty (pause) TWO.
He is in fact number 948
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Maybe Ross can stay a bit longer.
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Pretty interesting guy Glen. Obituary from the Times UK.
OBITUARY
Glen CampbellGod-fearing country star who mixed the Bible with sex and cocaine and whose many musical hits included Rhinestone Cowboy
In an image that captured the dichotomy of his life, Glen Campbell revealed in his autobiography that at the height of his fame he spent his nights hoovering up lines of cocaine while reading the Bible.
He titled the book Rhinestone Cowboy after one of his biggest hits, in which he sang: âThereâs been a load of compromisinâ on the road to my horizon.â Although he had not written the lyric, it was, as a metaphor, as autobiographical as anything in his memoir. A God-fearing, scripture-quoting evangelical who said grace before meals, Campbell made his name singing middle-of-the-road country-pop ballads, but his penchant for drugs, drink and wild women rivalled the feral appetites of the most hedonistic rockânâroller.
A man of many parts, he carved out a career as a brilliant session guitarist in which he backed Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys and the Monkees before he ever became a star. Looking like a true all-American cowboy â âas blonde as the sun and solid as a bale of hayâ as one critic said of his beefcake physique â he also appeared in several films, most notably True Grit with John Wayne.
Yet he was best known for his faultlessly smooth tenor voice on a memorable string of hit records that included Wichita Lineman, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Galveston and Gentle On My Mind, in a career in which he sold more than 45 million records. His appeal lay in the way he effortlessly bridged the worlds of country music and pop â although he insisted that he was ânot a country singer, but a country boy who singsâ.
Many of his biggest hits were written by Jimmy Webb, to whose poetic lyrics Campbell brought an aching sense of melancholy. In Wichita Lineman he poignantly sang of hearing the ghost of an absent lover âsinginâ in the wireâ, while By The Time I Get To Phoenix was the story of a broken affair in which he imagined the daily routine of the woman he had left behind.
Such songs played subtly on themes of loss, longing and memory, and it was a sad irony that after a farewell tour in 2011 Campbell was no longer able to sing them because Alzheimerâs disease robbed him of his ability to remember the words.
By then his wild days were long behind him, a reformation that he attributed to God, but more practically to his fourth wife, Kim Woollen, a Radio City Music Hall dancer, who issued him with an ultimatum after they married in 1982. âHe would fall down drunk five nights a week, just pass out,â she recalled. âI thought, âI canât take it any more.â We had tiny children, and I thought, âIâm not going to expose my children to some drunkard coming home and being mean.â â
She forced him to kick first the cocaine and then the booze, but there were relapses and in 2003 he spent ten days in jail for driving under the influence. He told the officer who arrested him that he wasnât drunk, but had been âover-servedâ and then kicked him in the thigh. He served his time in Phoenix, Arizona, in a jail where the inmates were shamed by being made to wear pink underwear. On his release his wife asked the sheriff to autograph a pair of pink prison-issue boxer shorts and kept them as a warning. âGlen straightened up after that,â she said.
When they met on a blind date at the Waldorf in New York, Campbell was in a high-profile and mutually destructive relationship with Tanya Tucker, another country singer and fellow cocaine addict. Tucker was 21; he was in his early forties. They recorded hits together and brawled, broke up and got back together as the gossip columns had a field day chronicling their drug-fuelled antics, including a suicide attempt by Tucker and a near-fatal overdose by Campbell while the couple were freebasing cocaine.
She told reporters that he was âthe horniest man I ever metâ and claimed that in a violent outburst he had knocked her teeth out. He denied this allegation, but admitted: âIn our sick slavery to things of the flesh, we were either having sex or fighting. We even fought during sex once or twice.â
His first marriage at the age of 17 to his pregnant 15-year-old girlfriend, Diane Kirk, lasted five years. She gave birth to his daughter Debby. When they divorced in 1959 he married Billie Jean Nunley, a beautician with whom he had three children: Kelli, Travis and Kane. By the time they divorced in 1976 he was having an affair with Sarah Barg, the wife of his friend Mac Davis, who wrote In The Ghetto for Elvis Presley and several songs for Campbell. They married in 1976, but divorced three weeks after the birth of their only child, Dillon Campbell. With his fourth wife he had three further children, Cal, Shannon and Ashley, who all played or sang in his band.
Life was sometimes complex. When he was moved to a care facility in 2014 his daughter Debby and son Travis went to court seeking to wrest control of his care from his wife, whom they alleged was refusing to allow them to see him.
He was born Glen Travis Campbell in a small farming community near Delight, Arkansas, the seventh son among 12 children. His father, Wesley, a sharecropper of Scottish ancestry, and his mother, Carrie, were devout members of the Church of Christ. Campbell was an active member of the congregation until his fourth wife introduced him to a Messianic synagogue that follows the Old Testament, but believes that Jesus is the Messiah.
He got his first guitar at the age of four, which was a $5 instrument from a mail-order catalogue. When he needed a capo to clamp to the frets to change key, his father fashioned one out of a corn on the cob and a rubber band: âAll I ever wanted to do was play the guitar; singing was a sideline,â Campbell said. âAnd once I had that capo in place, I didnât look back.â
The family home had no electricity; he learnt to copy songs by listening to a country station on an old battery radio. By his mid-teens he had moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to play in his uncleâs western swing combo, the Dick Bills Band. In 1960 he moved again to Los Angeles, where his burgeoning reputation as one of the hottest guitar pickers in town soon earned him a place in the Wrecking Crew, an informal grouping of A-list session players. The work was plentiful and lucrative. In 1963 he calculated that he played on 586 sessions. His ringing guitar tone became a cornerstone of Phil Spectorâs epic âwall of soundâ, heard on hits such as the Righteous Brothersâ Youâve Lost That Loving Feeling. He also played on Sinatraâs Strangers In The Night.
âWe were all in the studio together, Frank and the band, and we did the whole song in two takes. They spliced together the best bits of both versions for the final record,â Campbell recalled. Yet he was so star-struck that he couldnât stop staring at the singer throughout the session. A disconcerted Sinatra eventually turned to the producer and asked: âWhoâs the fag guitarist over there?â
Despite the awkwardness of their introduction, they went on to become friends. On one occasion when Campbell was playing golf in the Bob Hope Classic in Palm Springs, where Sinatra had a home, he invited him to stay in his house. âI asked him, âWhich one?â He had three of âem,â Campbell said. He also played on sessions for the Beach Boys. When Brian Wilson retired from performing live to concentrate on songwriting, Campbell replaced him. He stayed with the group for 18 months and played on their 1966 masterpiece, Pet Sounds.
His songs played subtly on themes of loss, longing and memory
His performances with the Beach Boys persuaded Capitol Records, who had signed him as a solo act in 1962, to start putting promotional muscle behind him. His breakthrough came in 1967 with Gentle On My Mind, which won four Grammy awards, shared between Campbell and the songâs writer, John Hartford. From that moment top composers wanted to write for him. He had hits with Dreams of the Everyday Housewife and the title song of True Grit, in which John Wayne picked him to play his sidekick, âLa Boeufâ.He shared Wayneâs conservative politics and at the height of the Vietnam War protests Campbell intemperately suggested that draft-card burners âshould be hangedâ. He later performed at the White House for President Nixon and for Ronald Reagan at the Republican National Convention in 1980. Shortly after, he was involved in an altercation with an Indonesian government official over the seating arrangements on a flight and told him that he was going to âcall my friend Ronald and ask him to bomb Jakartaâ.
By then he was in what he called the doldrums of his career and was consuming quantities of cocaine and whiskey that would have killed anyone with a less robust constitution. He admitted that even when he sang The Stars and Stripes for the president he was âhigher than the notes we were singingâ.
He blamed his addictions on the pressures of his solo career; when he was a session player he claimed he had been so busy that there was no time for drugs. âI was hanging out with the wrong crowd, and they were handing me things they said would âknock my head offâ. It was silly but I didnât have any stability,â he explained. âAfter a couple of failed marriages, it became a habit. So I got down on my knees and prayed. And, eventually, I got rid of those demons.â His other recreation was somewhat healthier: he was a fanatical golfer and celebrity host of the Los Angeles Open from 1971 to 1983.
When he announced in People magazine in 2011 that he was suffering from Alzheimerâs disease he was praised for his courage in going public. Yet the signs were becoming apparent and critics were asking awkward questions about the state of his health: one had written of a recent concert performance that he appeared âunprepared at best and disorientated at worstâ. In the interview in which he made the announcement he struggled to recall details of his life and could not remember his age.
This year his wife said he could no longer play the guitar, but continued to sing, although the words were gibberish. âItâs not a melody that we recognise,â she said. âBut you can tell that itâs a happy song and he has a song in his heart.â
Glen Campbell, guitarist and singer, was born on April 22, 1936. He died of Alzheimerâs disease on August 8, 2017, aged 81
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No doubt about Laumape going forward, fantastic.
It might be a tad churlish of me to mention that some of his defence was a bit turnstile like.
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Why do we have to wade through interminable "investigations" of cold case murders that no-one has ever heard of on Stuff and the Ferald these days, as if this passes for investigative journalism, I suppose it may do in some way, but aren't there more pressing issues to investigate, social issues, alleviating poverty, PMs baby names? Gives me the runny shits.
The worst thing about this is that it seems that's pretty much where all the budget for "investigative journalism" goes. Clogs up the websites with unimportant investigations that were first posted months ago.
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From The Times UK
Peter Boghossian: Professor faces sack over hoax that fooled academic journals
The leading academics Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker have defended a hoaxer who sought to expose politically correct ânonsenseâ in social sciences.
Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy, faces losing his job at Portland State University in Oregon after he helped create spoof academic papers. These lampooned scholarship in various fields, including the studies of gender, homosexuality and obesity.
He and two collaborators dashed off 20 papers, each deliberately ridiculous and spiked with what the authors later described as âa little bit of lunacyâ. Seven were accepted by peer-reviewed journals. One, titled âOur Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity feminism as an intersectional reply to neoliberal and choice feminismâ, was a rewrite of chapter 12 of Hitlerâs Mein Kampf with feminist âbuzzwords switched inâ.
âHuman reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregonâ, was published under the fake name Helen Wilson in the journal Gender, Place & Culture, which is owned by Taylor & Francis, the British publisher.
Its author described an investigation of the ârape-condoning spaces of hegemonic masculinityâ that are public dog-walking parks, which had involved examining â10,000 dogsâ genitalsâ.
The paper suggested that men should be trained, like canines, to prevent ârape cultureâ.
âFat Bodybuildingâ showed morbid obesity as a healthy life choice. Another advanced the theory that âit is suspicious that men rarely anally self-penetrate using sex toys, and that this is probably due to fear of being thought homosexual (âhomohysteriaâ) and bigotry against trans people (transphobia)â.
Dr Boghossian and his colleagues said that they were shocked by the ease with which the papers were accepted. âWe wanted to see if these disciplines that we called âgrievance studiesâ are compromised by political activism that allows for the laundering of prejudices and opinions into something that gets treated as knowledge,â he added.
An official for Portland State University said that Dr Boghossian had studied âhuman research subjectsâ â a reference to the staff and peer-reviewers of the journalsâ without proper ethical approvals. A further charge relating to the falsification of data is under review and he could lose his job.
Dawkins, well known for his atheist views, wrote to the university: âDo your humourless colleagues who brought this action want Portland State to become the laughing stock of the academic world? Or at least the world of serious scientific scholarship uncontaminated by pretentious charlatans of exactly the kind Dr Boghossian and his colleagues were satirising?â
Dawkins, who is Emeritus Charles Simonyi Professor at the University of Oxford, added: âHow would you react if you saw the following letter: Dear Mr Orwell, It has come to our notice that your novel, Animal Farm, attributes to pigs the ability to talk, and to walk on their hind legs, chanting âFour legs good, two legs betterâ. This is directly counter to known zoological facts about the Family Suidae, and you are therefore arraigned on a charge of falsifying dataâŠâ
Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, wrote of the false data charge: âThis strikes me (and every colleague Iâve spoken with) as an attempt to weaponise an important principle of academic ethics to punish a scholar for expressing an unpopular opinion.â
Dr Boghossian said: âPortland State University, like many college campuses, is becoming an ideological community and Iâve demonstrated that I donât fit the mould. I truly hope the administration puts its institutional weight behind the pursuit of truth but Iâve been given no indication thatâs what they intend to do.â
Tracy Roberts, publishing director of Taylor & Francis, said: âThis was an elaborate, complex hoax which broke all accepted norms of scholarly communication.â The publisher was taking steps to avoid a repeat, she added.
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Bit of a coincidence that Froome, Wiggins, Mo Farah and the gal who beat Valerie Adams in Rio are all asthmatics.
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Some random thoughts, was at Murrayfield for the first time.
We were in corporate hosting, Doddie Weir was our MC, he was absolutely hilarious. Very moving when he went onto the field before kickoff. Justin Marshall also present, dull by comparison.
Battling win, probably deserved, with about 7 minutes to go the ABs were up by 12. I think Hansen emptied the bench too early. He was basically saying with 10 minutes to go it was all over.
Thought the ref was very good, he seemed to rule absolutely everything, probably better than the other way and allowing a free for all. Did think he got the Naholo situation wrong, yellow card all day for me, massive benefit of doubt there.
Taylor was very good and a credible replacement for Coles as starter which is a good thing. Should have dummied Russell when try butchered!
Romano from the replay poor, needs to get lower on the carry, but was on his own once at least surrounded by four Scots, need your teammates there to help you out sometimes.
Read must be running on empty, thought he had a very, very quiet game, apart from lineout.
Fifita got through a lot of work, mostly good.
Big fan of Liam Squire, massive potential. Should have passed when he made the big break but I guess he thought Sopoaga would get tackled. He did pick the ball off that scrum in preference to Kieran Reid.
Echo what others have said about Edinburgh, great city to go for a test match.
Pakman seems you went to the Hilton buffet so you could rub shoulders with Kane Hames and Crockett, love your work.
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Quite like this video, Head Like A Hole doing I'm On Fire, possibly better than Bruce's version...disclaimer, biased opinion from a Wellingtonian.
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Went ok here, very juicy collect on Caulfield Cup/ Melbourne Cup double, giddyup đ·đ·đ·
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@no-quarter said in AB's v Wales:
I'd really like to see Akira get some game-time in this one. Fifita and Squire are both flat track bullies, and are not the answer long term. Neither of them could put in a performance like Akira did for the Maori vs the Lions while the rest of the pack got their asses handed to them. I see him as our long term 6 following Kaino's retirement.
I think this is nonsense.
I am not a long term Akira watcher, but went to the NZ Maori v French Barbarians game in Bordeaux, and was staggered by how much of the time Akira was walking around behind the play as a passenger. Was also in Rotorua so have some idea of the Akira upside.
Squire is streets ahead of Akira currently, and has the potential to be a great AB 6 IMHO.
Wouldn't want to quote the AB selectors in my defence, as we seem to disagree on other selections, but they seem to be with me on this one.
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Pretty cool video here
Massive shame she got so fucked up.
The backing singers go OK here too.
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