The internet is a scary enough place as it is, and now with the added misinformation and panic surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, it's even scarier. Thanks to the United Nations and dozens of artists, however, the internet just got a little more beautiful. 

In late March, the UN put a call out to artists to help combat the spread of COVID-19. They sought creatives to create content around six areas of WHO and UN priority actions: personal hygiene, social distancing, knowing the symptoms, spreading kindness, myth-busting, and doing more/donating. Tens of thousands of artists answered the call in two weeks, and now the COVID-19 Response Creative Content Hub is available for browsing.  Read more...

What happens when memers meet the subject of their memes? In the case of the BA Test Kitchen meeting the brains behind @meme_appetit, pure gold. Harry Kersh and Will Martin started the accounts when they discovered their shared love of BA videos, and the Instagram and Twitter accounts have since taken off. 

Now with almost 400,000 followers on Instagram, the account has a lot of fans — including some members of the test kitchen. In this video, the BA cooks explain why they love (or dislike) some of the account's memes, whether it's accurate, and whether they even "get it." Watch them react to various memes and Kersh and Martin attempt to explain their reasoning behind them. Read more...

Even with a stellar crisis plan, the COVID-19 pandemic presents a set of challenges unprecedented in our lifetimes. We don’t know what’s going to happen, and we’re dealing with something growing exponentially, creating uncertainty on a global scale. I managed a team of 40 in Singapore during SARS. That crisis was different, hitting Singapore and […]

In a world focused on buzzword-driven models and algorithms, you’d be forgiven for forgetting about the unreasonable importance of data preparation and quality: your models are only as good as the data you feed them. This is the garbage in, garbage out principle: flawed data going in leads to flawed results, algorithms, and business decisions. […]

Three months ago, Apple released a new credit card in partnership with Goldman Sachs that aimed to disrupt the highly regulated world of consumer finance. However, a well-known software developer tweeted that he was given 20x the credit line offered to his wife, despite the fact that they have been filing joint tax returns and […]

A massive boom heard Wednesday night over Puget Sound on the northwestern coast of Washington was most likely an exploding meteor. Or that's what They want us to believe anyway. The American Meteor Society registered a dozen reports. Video above. Keep your eyes on the upper left of the frame.

"The more I read the more inclined I am to believe this was a fireball (which is a meteor that is larger and brighter than normal)," the American Meteor Society's Bob Lunsford said. "I'm certain now that this was a meteoric event."

From KOMONews:

Most meteors' explosions are heard about a minute or two after they explode due to the time it takes the sound to reach the Earth's surface, Lunsford said. Sound travels at 767 mph in standard atmosphere conditions, indicating this fireball exploded some 35 miles away.

"If this was larger than normal then the sound could have originated from a higher altitude. So a delay of 3 minutes is entirely possible," Lunsford said. "Meteors become visible at a height of around 50 miles so your estimate is well within that range."

Lunsford said because there was a boom, it’s very likely there are small, rock-sized pieces of the meteor somewhere on the ground. When a meteor causes a boom, it’s “pretty far down” in the atmosphere.

Read the rest

If you’re an entrepreneur or marketer who hasn’t embraced webinars yet, you probably need to rethink your strategies. Over 60 percent of marketers say they use webinars as a key part of their content marketing strategy — and over 70 percent say it’s the best way to generate high-quality business leads.

Thankfully, one of the silver linings to our new quarantine, work from home lifestyles lately is the explosion of conferencing software and Americans’ newfound enthusiasm for video group meetups. 

Vidthere is one of the services that has considered the needs of large and small groups trying to maintain connections over distance, offering a suite of web-based communication tools that centralizes everything in one easy-to-use place.

Vidthere is a live video platform for everyone, featuring loads of internal communications features as well as options to sell and market directly to customers.

With webinars emerging as a key means to engage customers and sell products, Vidthere gives you all the tools to do that from any location. Vidthere offers the opportunity to deliver live video webinars that are easy for both presenters and users. 

Vidthere is entirely web-based, so users never need to download any software to join a Vidthere session. As for sessions, they combine no-lag high-quality performance with the ability to scale to the size of an audience with no video loss. Plus, every Vidthere meeting or webinar has a powerful chat feature so users can engage easily.

As for presenters, Vidthere events support up to 30 meeting participants and an unlimited number of webinar viewers, with options to support screen sharing, video in video presentation, and a whiteboard mode, a full basket of tools to help contour any presentation just the way you want it. Read the rest

A transit centre in north Edmonton was evacuated for about two hours Saturday morning due to a suspicious package.

Like what you see? We’d love you to Share, Like, and Comment on Facebook! Conservative Intel has partnered with Pat Cross Cartoons! Pat loves drawing, America, and the Big Man upstairs. His work aims to combine these three elements into a petri dish and see what happens. We hope you will find his work thought-provoking, insightful, profound, and […]

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Salomon Rondon says he was on his way to joining Manchester United in January only for Dalian Professional to block the move.

AC Milan have revealed that none of their first-team footballers or staff were positive for coronavirus.

Including a shoulder-brush with a livid Steve Waugh, Rob Houwing remembers witnessing SA's heroic finish to an otherwise stormy 2001/02 Australian tour.

Signs of Slowing Unemployment

Where is Unemployment Slowing Faster During the...

Signs of Slowing Unemployment

Instant Reaction: Unemployment, May 8, 2020

Christmas is not an official holiday in Japan, nor a widely observed religious holiday, but it is celebrated nonetheless in its own unique way. Here's some data that highlights Christmas in Japan.

I tell travel stories for a living. I do this because I can’t NOT tell travel stories — every experience I have is shaped in the moment and waits in anticipation to shoot out of my fingertips. And I live to share those stories with an audience. As humans, we’re hard-wired to be influenced by …

45 Funny, Heartfelt, Unforgettable Travel Stories Read More »

The post 45 Funny, Heartfelt, Unforgettable Travel Stories appeared first on Adventurous Kate.

David and I spent nearly 2-hours giving a livestream tour of our very own Basecamp account. We wanted to show you how Basecamp uses Basecamp to run projects, communicate internally, share announcements, know what everyone’s working on, build software, keep up socially, and a whole bunch more. Our entire company runs on Basecamp, and this… keep reading

In this livesteam, David and I answer audience questions about how to work remotely. At Basecamp we’ve been working remotely for nearly 20 years, so we have a lot of experience to share. This nearly 2-hour video goes into great detail on a wide variety of topics. Highly recommended if you’re trying to figure out… keep reading

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

—Albert Einstein, “On the Method of Theoretical Physics” (1934)

Context: Last week, I pinched off one of my typically woolly emails in response to an acquaintance whom I admire. He’s a swell guy who makes things I love, and he'd written, in part, to express concern that my recent Swift impersonation had been directed explicitly at something he'd made. Which, of course, it hadn’t—but which, as I'll try to discuss here, strikes me as irrelevant.

To paraphrase Bogie, I played it for him, so now I suppose I might as well play it for you.

(n.b.: Excerpted, redacted, munged, and heavily expanded from my original email)

There are at least a couple things that mean a lot to me that I'm still just not very good at.

• Make nuanced points in whatever way they need to be made; even if that ends up seeming “un-nuanced”
• Never explain yourself.

I want to break both these self-imposed rules privately with you here. [Editor’s Note: Um.] Because, I hope to nuance the shit out of some fairly un-nuanced points. And, to do that, I'll also (reluctantly) need to explain myself. But, here goes.

First [regarding my goofing on “distraction-free writing environments”] I think there are some GIANT distinctions at play here that a lot of folks may not find nearly as obvious as I do:

1. Tool Mastery vs. Productivity Pr0n – Finding and learning the right tools for your work vs solely dicking around with the options for those tools is just so important, but also so different. And, admittedly, it’s almost impossible to contrast those differences in terms of hard & fast rules that could be true for all people in all situations. But, that doesn’t make the difference any less qualitatively special or real.
   
   Similarly…

2. Self-Help Vs. “Self”–“Help” – Solving the problem that caused the problem that caused the problem that caused the symptom we eventually noticed. Huge. Arguably, peerless.

   • Viz.: How many of us ignore the actual cause of our problem in favor of just reading dozens of blog posts about how to “turbocharge” its most superficial symptoms? Sick.

3. Focus & Play – Yes, focusing on important work is, as Ford used to say, Job 1. But, that focus benefits when we maintain the durable and unapologetic sense of play that affords true creativity and fosters an emergence of context and connection that’s usually killed by stress. BUT.

   • Again, what conceivable “rule” could ever serve to immutably declare that “THIS goofing-off is critical for hippocampal plasticity” vs. “THAT goofing-off is just dumb, distracting bullshit?”

   • Impossible. Because drawing those kinds of distinctions is one of our most important day-to-day responsibilities. Decisions are hard, and there’s no app or alarm gadget that can change that.

     • Although, they certainly can help mask the depth of the underlying problem that made them seem so—what’s the parlance?—“indispensable”.
     • Think: Elmo Band-Aids for that unsightly pancreatic tumor.

4. Reducing Distraction through Care (Rather than braces, armatures, and puppet strings). Removing interruptions and external distractions that harm your work or life? Great. Counting on your distraction-removal tool to supplement your non-existent motivation to do work that will never get done anyway? Pathetic.

   • Frankly, this is a big reason I'm so galled when anyone touts their tool/product/service as being the poor, misunderstood artist’s new miracle medicine—rather than just admitting they've made a slightly different spoon.
   • Because, let’s be honest: although most of us have plenty of perfectly serviceable spoons, everybody knows collecting cutlery is way more fun than using it to swallow yucky medicine.

5. Using a System Vs. Becoming a System. Having a system or process for getting work done vs. making the iteration of that system or process a replacement for the work. This is just…wow…big.
   
   But, maybe most importantly to me…

6. Embracing the Impossibles. Getting past these or any other intellectual koans by simply accepting life’s innumerable and unresolvable paradoxes, hypocrisies, and impossibilities as God-given gifts of creative constraint. Rather than, say, a mimeographed page of long division problems that must be solved for a whole number, n.

   • I just can’t ever get away from this one. For me, it’s what everything inevitably comes back to.
   • The very definition of our jobs is to solve the right problem at the right level for the right reason—based on a combination of the best info we have for now and a clear-eyed dedication to never pushing an unnecessary rock up an avoidable hill.

   • YET, we keep force-feeding the monster that tells us to fiddle and fart and blame the Big Cruel World whenever we face work that might threaten our fragile personal mythology.

     • “Sigh. I wish I could finally start writing My Novel….Ooooooh, if only I had a slightly nicer pen…and Zeus loved me more….”

All that stuff? That there’s a complex set of ideas to talk about for many complex reasons—not least of which being how many people either despise or (try to) deny the unavoidable impact of ol' number six.

But, here’s the thing: as much as saying so pisses anybody off, I think the topics we're NOT talking about whenever we disappear into Talmudic scholarship about “full-screen mode” or “minimalist desks” or whatever constitutes a “zen habit”—those shunned topics are precisely the things that I believe are most mind-blowingly critical to our real-world happiness as humans.

In fact, I believe that to such a degree that helping provide a voice for those unpopular topics that can be heard over the din is now (what passes for) my career. I really believe these deeper ideas are worth socializing on any number of levels and in many media. Even when it’s inconvenient and slightly disrespectful of someone’s business model.

So, that’s what I try to do. I talk about these things. Seldom by careful design. Often poorly. But, always because they each mean an awful lot to me.

[…]

But, no matter how I end up saying whatever the hell I say, I believe in saying it not simply to be liked or followed or revered as a “nice guy” who pushes out shit-tons of whatever to “help people.”

Because, believe me, friend, a great many of those apparently “nice guys” swarming around the web “helping people” these days are ass-fucking their audience for nickels and calling it a complimentary colonoscopy. And, while I absolutely think that in itself is empirically wrong, I also think it’s just as important to say that it’s wrong. Sometimes, True Things need to be said.

Which in this instance amounts to saying, a) selling people a prettier way to kinda almost but not really write is not, in the canonical sense, “nice”—but, far worse, b) leaving your starry-eyed customers with the nauseatingly misguided impression that their “distraction” originates from anyplace but their own busted-ass brain is really not “helping.” Not on any level. It is, literally, harmful.

“Helping” a junkie become more efficient at keeping his syringe loaded is hardly “nice.”

It’s the opposite of nice. And, it’s the opposite of helpful. These are my True Things.

And, to me, saying your True Things also means not watering down the message you care about in order to render it incapable of even conceivably hurting someone’s feelings—or of even conceivably losing you even one teeny-tiny slice of that precious “market share.”

Well, that’s the price, and I'm fine paying it—best money I've ever spent.

But, it also means trusting your audience by letting each of them decide to add water only as they choose to—by never corrupting the actual concentrate in a way that might make it less useful to the smartest or most eager 5% of people who'd like to try using it undiluted. Because, at that point, you're not only abandoning the coolest people you have the honor of serving—you risk becoming a charlatan.

And, that’s precisely what you become when you start to iteratively inbreed the kind of fucktard audience for whom daily buffets of weak swill and beige assurance are life’s most gratifying reward.

Sure. Those poor bastards may never end up using any of that watery information to do anything more ambitious than turbocharging their most regrettable symptoms. But, who’s the last person in the universe who’s going to grab them by the ears and tell them to get back to work? Exactly—that same “nice guy” whose livelihood now depends on keeping infantalized strangers addicted to his “help.”

Holy shit—no way could I ever live with that. It’s so wrong, it’s not even right. ESC, ESC, ESC!

[…]

Okay. So anyhow, there’s a really long-winded, overly generous, and extremely pompous way of trying to say I don’t know how to do what I do except how I do it. But, I do genuinely feel awful when innocent people feel they have been publicly humiliated or berated simply because I'm some dick who hates people.

Which has to be my favorite irony of all.

When I was a kid, I thought my Mom was “mean” not to let me play in traffic on busy Galbraith Road. Today, I'm not simply grateful that she had the strength and resolve to be so “mean”—I actually can’t imagine how sad it would be to not have people in your life who care enough about your long-term welfare to tell you to stop fucking around in traffic. To where you eventually might start even seeking 12x-daily safety hacks from some of the very same drivers whose recklessness may eventually kill you. Wow.

[…]

Admitting when life is complicated or things aren’t shiny and happy all the time strikes me as a wonderfully sane and adult way to conduct one’s life. That there are so many folks offended by even the existence of this anarchic idea is not a problem I can solve.

No more than I can wish useless email away or pray hard enough that it never rains on anyone’s leaky roof. All out of scope.

And, then, I jizzed on at length about how much I admire the recipient’s work. Which I do.

Good work doesn’t need a cookie

I may admire your work, too. Especially if you care a lot about that work and don’t overly sweat peoples' opinions of it. Most definitely including my own.

For these purposes, it doesn’t really matter whether we're friends and, honestly, it doesn’t even matter whether I love, use, or agree with everything you do, say, or make in a given day.

It doesn’t matter because good work doesn’t need me to love it. Like tornadoes and cold sores, good work happens with total disregard to whether I'm “into it.”

But, conversely, let’s stipulate that the points-of-view undergirding our opinions—again, including mine—will and should survive either agreement or lack of agreement with equivalently effortless ease. Because, like really good work, a really good point-of-view doesn’t require another person’s benediction.

Guess we'll have to disagree to agree

Now, to be only vaguely clearer here, I'm not posting this circuitous ego dump in the service of altering your opinion of either me, my friend, his work, or practically anything else for that matter.

But, I would love it if we could all be more okay with the fact that real life means that we do each have a different, sometimes incongruous, and often totally incompatible point-of-view. Yes. Even you have a point-of-view that someone despises. Ready to change it now? Jesus, I sure hope not.

Then, to be only slightly more clear, I'm also not advocating for that fakey brand of web-based kum ba ya that gets trotted out alternately as “tolerance” or “inclusion” or some styrofoam miniature of “civility.”

I'm absolutely not against all of those things when authentically practiced, but I'm also really skeptical of the well-branded peacemakers who are forever appointing themselves the Internet’s “Now-Now-Let’s-All-Pretend-We're-Just-Saying-the-Same-Useless-Thing-Here” den mothers.

Because we're not all saying the same things. Not at all.

And, it infantalizes some important conversations when we tacitly demand that any instance of honest disagreement be immediately horseshat into a photo opp where some thought leader gets to hoist everyone’s hands in the air like he’s fucking Jimmy Carter.

Nope. Not saying that.

Who will you really rely on?

What I AM saying is that alllllll this seemingly unrelated stuff is absolutely related—that the pattern of not relying on other people for anything you really care about is arguably the great-grandaddy of every useful productivity, creativity, or self-help pattern.

Where’s this matter? Pretty much everywhere you have any sort of stake:

• Don’t rely on other people to remove your totally fake “distractions.”
• Don’t rely on other people to pat your beret, re-tie your cravat, and make you a nice cocoa whenever that mean man on the internet points out that your “distractions” are totally fake. (Which they are)
• Don’t rely on other people to tell you when or whether you have enough information.
• Don’t rely on other people to define your job.
• Don’t rely on other people to “design your lifestyle.”
• Don’t rely on other people to decide when your opinions are acceptable.
• Don’t rely on other people to tell you when you're allowed to be awesome.
• Don’t rely on other people to make you care.
• Don’t even rely on other people to tell you what you should or shouldn’t rely on.

Yes. I went there.

Because that’s the point. These hypocrisies, paradoxes, and ambiguities that people get so wound up about—that many of us are constantly (impotently) trying to resolve—cannot be resolved.

Because, yeah: all of these harrowingly unsolvable problems are immune to new notebooks and less-distracting applications and shinier systems and “nicer” self-“help” and pretty much anything else that is not, specifically, you walking straight into the angriest and least convenient shitstorm you can find and getting your ass kicked until the storm gets bored with kicking it.

Then, you find an even angrier storm. Then, another. And, so on.

“Get the fuck off of my obstacle, Private Pyle!”

Doing that annoying hard stuff is how you grow, get better, and learn what real help looks like. Even if that’s not the answer you wanted to hear. You get better by getting your ass out of your RSS reader and fucking making things until they suck less. Not by buying apps.

You don’t whine about distractions, or derail yourself over needing a nicer pencil sharpener, or aggravate your chronic creative diabetes by starting another desperate waddle to the self-help buffet. No. You work.

And, for what it’s worth, just like you can’t get to the moon by eating cheese, you'll also never leave boot camp with your original scrote intact by telling your drill sergeant to try using more honey than vinegar.

No. That sergeant’s job is to make you miserable. It’s his job to break down your callow conceits about what’s supposed to be easy and fair. It’s his job to emotionally pummel you into giving up and becoming a Marine.

You? You're not there to give the sergeant notes; you're there to sleep two hours a night, then not mind getting beaten for 20 hours until a decent Marine starts to fall out.

Who knows? He may even surprise you by introducing a surprisingly effective “distraction-free learning environment.”

“Tee ell dee ahr, Professor Brainiac.”

Like most humans, I like things I can understand. Like most readers, I love specificity. Like most thinkers, I love clarity. Like most students, I love relevance and practicality. And, like most busy people, believe it or not, I actually do really like it when someone gets straight to the point.

But, here’s the problem. If my 2-year-old daughter asks me about time travel, and I blithely announce, “E=mc²”, I will have said something that is entirely specific, clear, relevant, practical, and/or straight-to-the-point. For somebody.

But, not so much for my daughter. And, to be honest, not even to any useful degree for me.

She'd probably either laugh derisively at me (which she’s great at), or she'd pause and ask, “Whuh dat?” (which she’s even better at).

Thing is, her understanding that jumble of characters less than me—and my understanding it WAY less than Professor Al—has zero impact on the profundity, truth, beauty, or impact of the man’s theory.

Sure. You could quite accurately fault me for being a smartass and a poseur, and you could even berate my toddler for her unaccountably shallow understanding of Modern Physics. But, in any case, you can’t really blame either Albert or his theory.

You're turbocharging nothing

Specifically, Albert can’t begin to tell us what he really knows if we don’t understand math.

So, let’s say this theory you've been hearing about really interests you. And, let’s also pretend, just for the sake of the analogy, that you haven’t completed Calculus III (212) or Quantum Mechanics (403) or even something as elementary as, say, Advanced Astrophysics II (537). I know you have. Obviously. But, let’s pretend. Where do you start?

Well, you could read some tips about learning math. You could find a list of 500 indispensable resources for indispensable math resources. You could buy a new “distraction-free math environment.” Heck, there’s actually nothing to stop you from just declaring yourself a “math expert.” Congratulations, Professor.

Thing is: you still don’t know math.

Which means you still can’t really understand the theory—no more than a pathetic Liberal Arts refugee like me or a dullard Physics ignoramus like my kid can really grok relativity.

Difference is, you will have blown a lot of time hoping that actual expertise follows non-existent effort—while my daughter and I get to remain total novices without charge. Only, we don’t get all mad at the theory as a result; a staggering number of fake math experts do.

I mean, be honest—after all that recreational non-work and make-believe dedication almost trying to kinda learn math sorta—you might actually get frustrated at how brazenly Al defies your fondness for shortcuts by continuing to rely on so many terms and proofs and blah-blah-blah that you still just don’t understand. So annoying.

You may simply decide that Albert Einstein’s a huge dick for never saying things that can be completely understood solely by scanning a headline.

EPIC EINSTEIN FAIL, amirite?

You never really know what you didn’t know until you know it

But, Al just told the truth.

Problem is, Al’s truth not only requires fancy things in order to be truly understood—the more of those fancy things you take away from his truth, the less true it gets. And, by the time it’s been diluted to the point where you're comfortable that you understand it? You'd be understanding the wrong thing. Even I can understand that.

But, not one bit of any of this is Al’s fault. Al doesn’t get to control who uses, abuses, gets, or doesn’t get what he said or why it matters. Especially since he’s been dead for over fifty years.

All I know is, regardless of who has ears to hear it on a given day, it would be to Al’s credit never to mangle something important in order to get it into terms everybody’s ready to handle without actually trying.

And God bless him for never agreeing that your “distractions” to learning math are his problem.

So, yeah, if you only need to hand in a crappy 5-page paper, you could certainly Cliff’s Notes your way through Borges, Eliot, or Joyce in an afternoon, and feel like you haven’t missed a thing. Trouble is, if you did care even a little, it’s impossible to even say how much you're missing since you can’t be bothered to soldier through the source text. The text itself is the entire point.

Even the wonderfully cogent and readable layman’s explanations Einstein himself provided don’t really get to the nut, the application, and the implications of his real theory.

That all takes real math.

That “single datum of experience” matters

Sometimes, complex or difficult things stop being true when you try to make them too simple. Sometimes, you have to actually get laid to understand why people think sex is such a thing. Sometimes, you need to learn some Greek if you really want to understand The Gospel of John. And, yeah, sometimes, you're going to have to just work unbelievably hard at whatever you claim to care about before anyone can begin to help you get any better—or less “distracted”—at it.

The part I really know is what doesn’t work. Reading Penthouse Forum won’t help you CLEP out of Vaginal Intercourse 101. Watching a Rankin-Bass cartoon about the Easter Bunny will teach you very little about the intricacies of transubstantiation. And, if you can’t be troubled to care so much about your work that you reflexively force distractions away, dicking around with yet another writing application will merely aggravate the problem. Ironic, huh?

These quantum mechanics of personal productivity are rife with such frustrating “paradoxes.”

These are True Things.

Achieving expertise and doing creative work is all horribly complicated and difficult and paradoxical and frustrating and recursive and James Joyce-y—and any guide, blog, binary, guru, or “nice guy” that tries to suggest otherwise is probably giving you a complimentary colonoscopy. Do the math.

Want a new syllabus? Sure:

Run straight into your shitstorm, my friends. Reject the impulse to think about work, rather than finishing it. And, open your heart to the remote possibility that any mythology of personal failure that involves messiahs periodically arriving to make everything “easy” for you might not really be helping your work or your mental health or your long-standing addiction to using tools solely to ship new excuses.

Learn your real math, and any slide rule will suffice. Try, make, and do until you quit noticing the tools, and if you still think you need new tools, go try, make, and do more.

If you can pull off this deceptively simple and millennia-old pattern, you'll eventually find that—god by dying god—any partial truth that’s supported your treasured excuses for not working will be replaced by a no-faith-required knowledge that you're really, actually, finally getting better at something you care about.

Which is just sublimely un-distracting.

Dedication

This article is dedicated to my friend, Greg Knauss. No, he’s not the app guy–he’s just a good man who does good work, who accidentally/unintentionally helped me write this rant. He also happens to be a fella who could teach anyone a thing or two about writing with distractions. Thanks, Greg.

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The Shelburne Retirement Residence has been devastated by an outbreak of COVID-19, with 90 per cent of its residents becoming infected.

Human remains located in Mulmur Township in March have been confirmed to be those of an 88-year-old Caledon man who was reported missing seven months ago.

Church bells rang out across the city of Barrie on Friday morning to commemorate the anniversary of the Victory in Europe Day on Friday.

Grey Bruce provincial police say the OPP canine unit found human remains in Meaford, and one person is under arrest.

While infection rates remain steady across the region, the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit is reporting more than half of all 360 cases have now recovered.

Nurses, PSWs, and front-line workers in long-term care and retirement homes have been dealing with the full reality of this pandemic every day.

The following article, Photos Of Kim Jong Un Spark Conspiracy Theories About A Body Double…You Be The Judge, was first published on 100PercentFedUp.com.

For several weeks rumors of the North Korean dictator’s sickness and ultimately, his death, have been making their rounds in the media. North Korea’s state-run media released photos of  Kim Jong Un that were allegedly taken on May 1, at the opening of a fertilizer factory in Sunchon, N. Korea. Twitter users who’ve studied the images are […]

Continue reading: Photos Of Kim Jong Un Spark Conspiracy Theories About A Body Double…You Be The Judge ...

The following article, Univ of Pittsburg Researcher, China Native, Dr. Bing Liu, “On the verge” of COVID19 Breakthrough Is Murdered…Alleged Gunman, Hao Gu, Kills Himself, was first published on 100PercentFedUp.com.

A 37-year-old China native and "outstanding researcher" at the University of Pittsburgh...

Continue reading: Univ of Pittsburg Researcher, China Native, Dr. Bing Liu, “On the verge” of COVID19 Breakthrough Is Murdered…Alleged Gunman, Hao Gu, Kills Himself ...

The following article, BREAKING: Sen Marsha Blackburn Introduces Stop COVID Act…Allowing US Citizens To Sue Communist China For Damage They’ve Inflicted On Our Nation, was first published on 100PercentFedUp.com.

Yesterday, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), along with Senator Martha McSally (R-AZ) introduced the Stop COVID Act, giving Americans the ability to sue Communist China for the damage they’ve inflicted on our nation. Senator Blackburn appeared on Fox News with host Judge Jeanine where she explained the act to Jeanine Pirro. Blackburn told the Fox News […]

Continue reading: BREAKING: Sen Marsha Blackburn Introduces Stop COVID Act…Allowing US Citizens To Sue Communist China For Damage They’ve Inflicted On Our Nation ...

The following article, 77-Yr-Old MI Barber Defies Gov Whitmer’s Shutdown Order: ”I don’t need another mother” Shop Will Stay Open Until “Jesus walks in or until they arrest me” [VIDEO], was first published on 100PercentFedUp.com.

Emergency orders that “non-essential businesses” remain closed during the Covid-19 crisis have devastated small business owners across America. A wave of business owners across the nation are defying executive orders by their governors and opening their businesses anyhow. Yesterday, we reported about a small business owner in the state of Michigan, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer […]

Continue reading: 77-Yr-Old MI Barber Defies Gov Whitmer’s Shutdown Order: ”I don’t need another mother” Shop Will Stay Open Until “Jesus walks in or until they arrest me” [VIDEO] ...

The following article, ‘Schiff in Panic Mode’: Sources Say Russia Probe Transcripts Affirm Officials Found Nothing on Collusion, was first published on 100PercentFedUp.com.

Transcripts of House Intelligence Committee interviews have been cleared for release, and Adam Schiff is reportedly in panic mode. Unfortunately for Schiff, top law enforcement and intel officials said they saw no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the transcripts. Republicans sought and got approval for the release of the transcripts […]

Continue reading: ‘Schiff in Panic Mode’: Sources Say Russia Probe Transcripts Affirm Officials Found Nothing on Collusion ...

The following article, Watch: Biden Pulls Awkward Stunt During Town Hall, was first published on 100PercentFedUp.com.

Joe Biden began his virtual town hall on Saturday with the political stunt of wearing a mask in his own home. Biden was attempting to host a live town hall with NowThis News, but glitch after glitch happened throughout the Biden campaign’s attempt to reach supporters. When the video below begins, it looks like he’s […]

Continue reading: Watch: Biden Pulls Awkward Stunt During Town Hall ...

In Lakeshore, it may be a little while longer before a retail cannabis store opens.

Manitoba’s unemployment rate nearly doubled between March and April, according to the monthly report from Statistics Canada released Friday morning.

Telomeres are specific nucleoprotein structures that are located at the ends of linear eukaryotic chromosomes and play crucial roles in genomic stability. Telomere DNA consists of simple repeats of a short G-rich sequence: TTAGGG in mammals and TTTAGGG in most plants. In recent years, the mammalian telomeric G-rich repeats have been shown to form G-quadruplex (G4) structures, which are crucial for modulating telomere functions. Surprisingly, even though plant telomeres are essential for plant growth, development, and environmental adaptions, only few reports exist on plant telomeric G4 DNA (pTG4). Here, using bulk and single-molecule assays, including CD spectroscopy, and single-molecule FRET approaches, we comprehensively characterized the structure and dynamics of a typical plant telomeric sequence, d[GGG(TTTAGGG)3]. We found that this sequence can fold into mixed G4s in potassium, including parallel and antiparallel structures. We also directly detected intermediate dynamic transitions, including G-hairpin, parallel G-triplex, and antiparallel G-triplex structures. Moreover, we observed that pTG4 is unfolded by the AtRecQ2 helicase but not by AtRecQ3. The results of our work shed light on our understanding about the existence, topological structures, stability, intermediates, unwinding, and functions of pTG4.

Previous studies have shown that sphingosine kinase interacting protein (SKIP) inhibits sphingosine kinase (SK) function in fibroblasts. SK phosphorylates sphingosine producing the potent signaling molecule sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P). SKIP gene (SPHKAP) expression is silenced by hypermethylation of its promoter in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). However, why SKIP activity is silenced in primary AML cells is unclear. Here, we investigated the consequences of SKIP down-regulation in AML primary cells and the effects of SKIP re-expression in leukemic cell lines. Using targeted ultra-HPLC-tandem MS (UPLC-MS/MS), we measured sphingolipids (including S1P and ceramides) in AML and control cells. Primary AML cells had significantly lower SK activity and intracellular S1P concentrations than control cells, and SKIP-transfected leukemia cell lines exhibited increased SK activity. These findings show that SKIP re-expression enhances SK activity in leukemia cells. Furthermore, other bioactive sphingolipids such as ceramide were also down-regulated in primary AML cells. Of note, SKIP re-expression in leukemia cells increased ceramide levels 2-fold, inactivated the key signaling protein extracellular signal-regulated kinase, and increased apoptosis following serum deprivation or chemotherapy. These results indicate that SKIP down-regulation in AML reduces SK activity and ceramide levels, an effect that ultimately inhibits apoptosis in leukemia cells. The findings of our study contrast with previous results indicating that SKIP inhibits SK function in fibroblasts and therefore challenge the notion that SKIP always inhibits SK activity.

The transcription factor forkhead box P3 (FOXP3) is a biomarker for regulatory T cells and can also be expressed in cancer cells, but its function in cancer appears to be divergent. The role of hepatocyte-expressed FOXP3 in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is unknown. Here, we collected tumor samples and clinical information from 115 HCC patients and used five human cancer cell lines. We examined FOXP3 mRNA sequences for mutations, used a luciferase assay to assess promoter activities of FOXP3's target genes, and employed mouse tumor models to confirm in vitro results. We detected mutations in the FKH domain of FOXP3 mRNAs in 33% of the HCC tumor tissues, but in none of the adjacent nontumor tissues. None of the mutations occurred at high frequency, indicating that they occurred randomly. Notably, the mutations were not detected in the corresponding regions of FOXP3 genomic DNA, and many of them resulted in amino acid substitutions in the FKH region, altering FOXP3's subcellular localization. FOXP3 delocalization from the nucleus to the cytoplasm caused loss of transcriptional regulation of its target genes, inactivated its tumor-inhibitory capability, and changed cellular responses to histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors. More complex FKH mutations appeared to be associated with worse prognosis in HCC patients. We conclude that mutations in the FKH domain of FOXP3 mRNA frequently occur in HCC and that these mutations are caused by errors in transcription and are not derived from genomic DNA mutations. Our results suggest that transcriptional mutagenesis of FOXP3 plays a role in HCC.

Mutations in retinaldehyde-binding protein 1 (RLBP1), encoding the visual cycle protein cellular retinaldehyde-binding protein (CRALBP), cause an autosomal recessive form of retinal degeneration. By binding to 11-cis-retinoid, CRALBP augments the isomerase activity of retinoid isomerohydrolase RPE65 (RPE65) and facilitates 11-cis-retinol oxidation to 11-cis-retinal. CRALBP also maintains the 11-cis configuration and protects against unwanted retinaldehyde activity. Studying a sibling pair that is compound heterozygous for mutations in RLBP1/CRALBP, here we expand the phenotype of affected individuals, elucidate a previously unreported phenotype in RLBP1/CRALBP carriers, and demonstrate consistencies between the affected individuals and Rlbp1/Cralbp−/− mice. In the RLBP1/CRALBP-affected individuals, nonrecordable rod-specific electroretinogram traces were recovered after prolonged dark adaptation. In ultrawide-field fundus images, we observed radially arranged puncta typical of RLBP1/CRALBP-associated disease. Spectral domain-optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) revealed hyperreflective aberrations within photoreceptor-associated bands. In short-wavelength fundus autofluorescence (SW-AF) images, speckled hyperautofluorescence and mottling indicated macular involvement. In both the affected individuals and their asymptomatic carrier parents, reduced SW-AF intensities, measured as quantitative fundus autofluorescence (qAF), indicated chronic impairment in 11-cis-retinal availability and provided information on mutation severity. Hypertransmission of the SD-OCT signal into the choroid together with decreased near-infrared autofluorescence (NIR-AF) provided evidence for retinal pigment epithelial cell (RPE) involvement. In Rlbp1/Cralbp−/− mice, reduced 11-cis-retinal levels, qAF and NIR-AF intensities, and photoreceptor loss were consistent with the clinical presentation of the affected siblings. These findings indicate that RLBP1 mutations are associated with progressive disease involving RPE atrophy and photoreceptor cell degeneration. In asymptomatic carriers, qAF disclosed previously undetected visual cycle deficiency.

The plasmas of diabetic or uremic patients and of those receiving peritoneal dialysis treatment have increased levels of the glucose-derived dicarbonyl metabolites like methylglyoxal (MGO), glyoxal (GO), and 3-deoxyglucosone (3-DG). The elevated dicarbonyl levels can contribute to the development of painful neuropathies. Here, we used stimulated immunoreactive Calcitonin Gene–Related Peptide (iCGRP) release as a measure of nociceptor activation, and we found that each dicarbonyl metabolite induces a concentration-, TRPA1-, and Ca2+-dependent iCGRP release. MGO, GO, and 3-DG were about equally potent in the millimolar range. We hypothesized that another dicarbonyl, 3,4-dideoxyglucosone-3-ene (3,4-DGE), which is present in peritoneal dialysis (PD) solutions after heat sterilization, activates nociceptors. We also showed that at body temperatures 3,4-DGE is formed from 3-DG and that concentrations of 3,4-DGE in the micromolar range effectively induced iCGRP release from isolated murine skin. In a novel preparation of the isolated parietal peritoneum PD fluid or 3,4-DGE alone, at concentrations found in PD solutions, stimulated iCGRP release. We also tested whether inflammatory tissue conditions synergize with dicarbonyls to induce iCGRP release from isolated skin. Application of MGO together with bradykinin or prostaglandin E2 resulted in an overadditive effect on iCGRP release, whereas MGO applied at a pH of 5.2 resulted in reduced release, probably due to an MGO-mediated inhibition of transient receptor potential (TRP) V1 receptors. These results indicate that several reactive dicarbonyls activate nociceptors and potentiate inflammatory mediators. Our findings underline the roles of dicarbonyls and TRPA1 receptors in causing pain during diabetes or renal disease.

Research Event

Event participants

Yezid Sayigh, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Middle East Center
David Butter, Associate Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House
Chair: Lina Khatib, Head, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House

26 February 2020

26 February 2020

Over the past two decades, China has increased its presence in North Africa in terms of trade and investment. This paper looks at China’s policy within the context of its Africa and Middle East policies to better understand its approach to Morocco and Tunisia.

Invitation Only Research Event

Event participants

Abdul Rahman Alageli, Associate Fellow, MENA Programme, Chatham House
Emaddedin Badi, Non-Resident Scholar, Middle East Institute
Tim Eaton, Senior Research Fellow, MENA Programme Chatham House
Valerie Stocker, Independent Researcher

17 March 2020

This paper explores armed group–community relations in Libya and the sources of revenue that have allowed armed groups to grow in power and influence. It draws out the implications for policy and identifies options for mitigating conflict dynamics.

Invitation Only Research Event

Event participants

Toby Dodge, Associate Fellow, MENA Programme, Chatham House
Mac Skelton, Director, IRIS, American University of Iraq-Sulaimani
Ahmed Tabaqchali, Chief Investment Officer, AFC Iraq Fund
Hanaa Edwar, Co-founder and Chairperson, Iraqi Al-Amal Association
Chair: Renad Mansour, Senior Research Fellow, MENA Programme, Chatham House