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‘Tis the season for new puppies!

Before you bring home a new puppy this holiday season, be sure you are prepared to properly train and care for your new little bundle of joy.

To help you do so, I have put together some of the top obedience commands every puppy should know and how you can easily enforce them:

1. Make your training sessions short and sweet

Puppies are bundles of energy and have a low level of concentration so keep training sessions short.

Twenty minutes is a good time frame to introduce a trick or command and then follow it up with either a 20-minute session later that day or the following day. If your dog is starting to lose focus (even if it’s only been 5 or 10 minutes), wrap it up and start again tomorrow. You will not gain anything by forcing the training.

Once your dog understands the steps of learning a new trick or command, they will be able to learn new tricks faster (sometimes in the first try).

2. Make puppy training fun and rewarding

Dogs respond to positive reinforcement and stimulation. To make your training more effective, use rewards that your dog loves: a special toy, high-value treats (like chicken vs. kibble), belly rubs or walks. Whatever it is that your dog goes nuts for, use that.

Upping the ante with high value rewards improves motivation and produces faster results. Conversely, not praising or rewarding your dog or only using verbal praise will reduce the effectiveness and lengthen the timeline of your training.

3. Teach effective recall

For safety and practicality, recall is the most important command that you will teach your dog. However, there are two common mistakes people make when teaching recall:

The first is that people become frustrated when their dog is not listening to them, so they may grit their teeth and in a deeper, sterner voice, say “COME HERE NOW.” And the dog still does not come. That’s for the simple reason that dogs are smart. Why on earth would anyone go to a person that is angry? Kids don’t do it. Neither do dogs. Be sure to always convey a happy, positive voice when calling your dog’s name or recall command.

The second mistake is that people inadvertently scold their dog when they should be rewarding their dog. It’s crucial that your dog perceives you to be more important than other dogs, toys, treats and even squirrels. You accomplish this by always rewarding your dog when they come. That means even if your dog does not come for the first five “come here” attempts, when she finally does come, you reward her with praise, scratches and treats not scold her. That’s because she has already forgotten that she didn’t come those first five times. If you scold her instead, she will perceive that coming to you was incorrect and definitely not come to you the next time you call her.

4. Set boundaries early on

Boundaries need to be clear and consistent. Behaviors that might seem cute now, can be problematic when your dog is older (and much bigger). For puppies, there are a few examples of boundaries that are important to teach early on:

• No jumping on people (including you)
• No biting or rough playing
• No sitting on furniture (this is usually a good one for larger dogs or dogs that frequently play outside)
• Do not give into attention seeking behavior
• Do not feed from the table
• Limit space when you leave home (like in a crate or to a room)

Boundaries are difficult to reinforce because we like to make exceptions for our own benefit (like snuggle time with your dog in front of the TV). But bending the rules only diminishes your authority and weakens your relationship with your dog (i.e. they will stop listening to you).

5. Be consistent

The key to successful dog training is consistency. When we’re not consistent, we’re confusing our dogs. Remember for a dog, a no that is always a no will never be contested. A no that is sometimes a yes is always a yes.

For example, let’s use boundaries as an example. You don’t mind when your dog sleeps on the sofa, but when you’re eating on the sofa, you don’t want him on the sofa, you want him to sit on the floor.

This is confusing for most dogs. Your dog is thinking, you allow me to sit on the sofa all day, so why can’t I sit on it now? And so when you tell him “Off,” he will jump off and then jump back on. He did what you commanded, but he doesn’t understand why so he returns to his seat.

When you create a boundary or use a command, do it with consistency and recognize that your dog is not going to understand or interpret the nuances of situations. It needs to be the same message each time. Here are examples:

• “Come to me and I will reward you.” Not “Come to me, and sometimes I might scold you.”
• “No jumping.” Not “You can jump on me when I come home from work, but at no other time.”
• “No begging at the table.” Not “You can get scraps when you look really cute.”
• “No biting.” Not “We can rough play with toys, but you can’t nip at my clothes.”
• “No pottying inside.” Not. “No pottying inside except when I’m really tired you can use a
wee-wee pad.”

By reading the statements above, it’s easy to see how mixed messages can derail your best training intensions and even undo professional training. In addition, mixed messages can cause dogs to be insecure because they don’t know when they are doing something right or wrong.

As the holiday season approaches, some of you will be receiving a puppy as a gift and others will be picking out their adorable doggie as a gift to themselves. Regardless, you now have the tools you need to train your puppy properly this holiday season. For more tips and advice, visit my blog at www.fitdogsportsclub.com/blog.

Happy holidays!

PAHOA, Hawaii (AP) — Lava that’s slowly creeping into a rural Hawaii town is about the length of a basketball court from a house.

The molten stream so far has burned a shed, some tires and vegetation — but no homes. Hawaii County Civil Defense Director Darryl Oliveira said Wednesday the lava is about 100 feet from a Pahoa residence. The couple who lives there has left.

Meanwhile, scientists from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory report the flow’s leading edge is 240 yards from Pahoa Village Road, which leads through downtown.

Dozens of homes, business and other structures are in the area of the flow’s path. That amount could increase as the flow front widens.

The front was about 25 to 30 yards wide early Wednesday. It later widened to 40 to 50 yards.

It took 18 years for DNA evidence to surface that cleared Derrick Williams of a rape and attempted kidnapping in Florida. Prosecutors had relied on the testimony of the victim, who identified Williams as her attacker in 1992. But he walked free at age 48 in 2011 because his DNA didn’t match that left on a gray T-shirt by the actual perpetrator.

The truth might have surfaced sooner if Williams were white or Latino instead of African-American.

There’s no way to know for sure, of course, but data about wrongful convictions show that blacks who are exonerated after a bogus conviction have served 12.68 years on average before the good news, according to Pamela Perez, professor of biostatistics at Loma Linda University. It takes just 9.4 years for whites and 7.87 for Latinos.

“Black Americans are exonerated at a substantially slower rate than any other race,” said a new report from Perez, shown exclusively to The Huffington Post.

There’s enough of a pattern that the differences between racial groups cannot be called random, Perez said. But there isn’t enough information to explain what caused the differences.

“All we can do is infer,” Perez told HuffPost. “You can’t prove a darn thing.”

She discovered the different timespans by examining 1,450 exonerations listed on the National Registry of Exonerations through Oct. 20, 2014. Perez conducted the research for Safer-America.com, a consumer research group.

The findings are based on what is probably only a fraction of all exonerations. There are likely cases that didn’t make it onto the national registry, and there are almost certainly more wrongly convicted people still waiting to clear their names.

The registry didn’t collaborate with Perez, but one of its researchers reviewed Perez’s work at HuffPost’s request and approved of her methodology.

“I’m not surprised by the numbers,” said Sam Gross, the exoneration registry’s editor and a University of Michigan law professor. “The main thing we can say is that it’s very hard to know what it means.”

Perez, Gross and others cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the findings. Without further research, they said, no one knows if the results were caused by a biased criminal justice system or other factors.

The Innocence Project looked at a smaller set of 212 cases in which DNA proof freed their clients. (The national registry includes exonerations due to other contributing factors like false confessions and perjury.) The project found a similar racial disparity, with black inmates serving 14.3 years before being exonerated compared to 12.2 years for all other racial groups.

“These two numbers are statistically different, suggesting that the difference between them isn’t due to chance,” Innocence Project research analyst Vanessa Meterko told HuffPost. “It’s notable, but it’s hard to say what the difference is.”

WASHINGTON — As Islamic State militants inched closer to seizing control of the Kurdish town of Kobani, the international community heaped shame upon neighboring Turkey, condemning it for standing aside and allowing the slaughter to take place for its own political interests.

Turkey’s government, which sees Syrian President Bashar Assad as its prime enemy in Syria, initially saw little reason
to attack Assad’s most powerful foes. It was particularly unwilling to aid Syrian Kurds, whose leadership is aligned with Kurdish militants within Turkey. But under intense pressure from the U.S. and its coalition allies, Turkey recently allowed Iraqi Kurds to travel across its border into Syria to shore up Kobani’s defenders.

Less than a hundred miles away in Aleppo, non-extremist Syrian rebels say they may be wiped out by Assad’s forces. This time, the ally withholding help for political reasons is the United States.

U.S.-backed Syrian rebels, described by the White House as essential partners in the fight against the Islamic State, say they are in the fight of their lives in northwestern Syria — and that without immediate assistance from the U.S.-led coalition, they will be weakened to the point where they will be of little use against the extremists. They warn that unless aid — particularly in the form of weapons — arrives, there could be a mass slaughter of civilians, along with a milestone recruitment moment for ISIS.

But that assistance looks like it will never come through.

Syrian opposition figures, U.S. officials and outside analysts have told The Huffington Post that because of the complex mix of forces involved in these battles — particularly Iranian squads backing the Syrian regime — and growing distrust between the U.S. and the rebels, there is little chance the coalition will aid the rebels in Aleppo and Idlib.

Free Syrian Army rebels have told the U.S. their chief goal is toppling Assad, who is presently pushing to take over Aleppo. Over the weekend, they were outraged when White House envoy Gen. John Allen told an Arab newspaper the U.S. goal in Syria was not to help rebels end Assad’s rule but to make them part of a negotiated political end to the civil war.

Those sympathetic to the rebels believe U.S. policymakers, long wary of toppling Assad, are loath to aid rebels in regions targeted by Assad because of Assad’s support from Iran. At a time when U.S. relations with Iran are better than ever before and a deal over Tehran’s nuclear program seems within reach, they say, Washington does not want to be responsible for undermining Iran’s chief client — or empowering U.S. allies in Syria to do so.

Two leading Syrian opposition figures — Oubai Shahbandar of the Syrian Opposition Coaltion and Mohammad Al Abdallah, a Syrian activist in exile who runs the Syria Justice and Accountability Center — told The Huffington Post they believe the United States’ Syria policy is being influenced by its interests in a relationship with Iran. Scholar Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, at the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya, Israel, also said this is a likely U.S. rationale.

“It is imperative that the administration not value a deal on Iran’s nuclear program above ensuring the safety of its partners in Syria,” Shahbandar said.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment on Iran’s relevance to the United States’ Syria strategy. Wendy Sherman, the top U.S. negotiator working on the administration’s efforts to reach a deal with Iran over its nuclear program, said in a Washington address last week that broader regional concerns — including the fact that Iran and the U.S. are both working to undermine the Islamic State in Iraq — would not affect what she described as a “single-track negotiation.”

But the Wall Street Journal revealed Tuesday night that U.S. officials have explicitly told Iran that their strikes against the Islamic State in Syria will not target Assad’s army or the Iranian fighters working alongside it. It is those Iranian forces, Shahbandar said, that are now moving to quash the U.S.-allied rebels.

The rebels describe themselves as squeezed between forces loyal to Assad in the south, and fighters with al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra (a temporary ISIS ally) in the north. They likely will have to defend themselves without direct help from their ostensible partners.

Shahbandar told The Huffington Post at least two major U.S.-vetted groups in Idlib, the Syrian Revolutionary Front and Harakat Hazm, are at risk of losing “a critical line of supply from the Turkish border.”

“I spoke to the FSA commanders in the field, and they are extremely concerned, particularly since ISIS is moving aid and reinforcements to Nusra in this area,” Shahbandar, whose group liaises regularly with the FSA, said in an email Tuesday. The question, he said, is whether coalition airstrikes will help the FSA fight al Qaeda’s affiliate or allow it “to overrun moderate forces.”

Shahbandar told The Huffington Post in an earlier conversation that the U.S.-backed rebel groups also face a “true existential threat” from the combined forces of Assad, Iran and Hezbollah in Aleppo. His message echoed what Syrian rebels have expressed in recent days.

The U.S. has repeatedly condemned Assad, but has said it will not directly attack him in its present fight against ISIS. The Syrian president has used this guarantee of his safety to hit the rebels especially hard since the U.S.-led airstrikes began. Analysts told The Huffington Post this is because he likely believes the international coalition will deal with the ISIS threat for him. Assad began his latest assault on Aleppo, long a stronghold of the U.S.-backed rebels, at the beginning of this month.

A senior administration official told The Huffington Post the level of U.S. assistance to the rebels in the region is not likely to change immediately in response to Assad’s moves.

“We continue to closely monitor the Assad regime’s actions against the moderate Syrian opposition, and are of course concerned about any attempt by the regime to seek to exploit the coalition campaign,” the official said, speaking on background to discuss administration strategy.

“We have been clear that we are increasing our support to the moderate Syrian opposition as a way to not only fight [ISIS], but to defend against regime attacks, as well as to further the goal of a political solution,” the official added. “The train and equip program, which Turkey and Saudi Arabia have agreed to host, is one important part of this effort.” The official also noted that since the Islamic State is “a threat to the moderate opposition,” U.S. efforts to degrade the Islamic State “will also benefit the moderate opposition.”

Tony Blinken, the president’s deputy national security adviser, addressed the non-extremist rebels’ demands for greater assistance at a Wednesday event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washintgon. Blinken repeated that the focus of the U.S.-led coalition’s airstrikes was on areas strategically important to ISIS. He added that the U.S. had taken action when it identified significant potential humanitarian catastrophes, like the ISIS attempts to capture the Yezidis on Mount Sinjar in Iraq or Kobani earlier this month.

But Shahbandar said the rebels need immediate assistance — faced with battles on two fronts, he said, they cannot wait until next year when the training program begins to send fighters into Syria. He added that Aleppo has more civilians at present than Kobani did when the U.S. intervened.

The administration’s approach to the rebels’ struggle reflects its increasingly difficult relationship with the groups it has said it needs to defeat the Islamic State, and the complexity of the three-year-long Syrian civil war in which the U.S. and its allies have inserted themselves.

The non-extremist rebels have played their own role in making U.S. inaction unlikely, said Hassan Hassan, an analyst at the Delma Institute in Abu Dhabi. Hassan said that while the rebels are in “a very tight position,” they are unlikely to attract strikes or weapons assistance from the U.S.-led coalition because of their own approach to the fight against ISIS — including their vocal criticism of the U.S.-led air campaign.

“The rebels are appealing for help, but at the same time, they don’t seem to make a pitch,” Hassan said. “They expect the world to help them without making any moves to provide anything in exchange. Just before the airstrikes, we saw a lot of gestures from some rebel groups saying, ‘We will chase ISIS!’ Now, we’re not hearing that. There’s a lot of cynicism towards the airstrikes, and there are no concrete promises to help.”

He added, “They’re just expecting the coalition to help them, to strike here and there.”

There are games made for the Xbox 360 that are not available for the Xbox One, which means is that if you have either console at home, you will find yourself switching between devices every now and then which might be a tad inconvenient. This is unlike the PC where gamers can switch between games easily and all from the same device.

Well Ed Zarick has decided to do something about it which has resulted in the Xboox Duo, a marriage of the Xbox 360 and an Xbox One combined into a laptop-like device. What this means is that gamers will be able to swap between either console seamlessly. Unfortunately unlike Zarick’s previous creators, the Xbook One and Playbook 4, the Xboox Duo is not available for purchase.

According to Zarick, the Xboox Duo was created more as a proof of concept after he went over to a friend’s house to play Call of Duty, and realizing that switching between the Xbox 360 and Xbox One was not as easy as he thought. His creation also allows for backwards compatibility, something that the Xbox One does not, by quickly powering down one console and switching to the other.

Now if you’re curious as to how it works, do check it out in the video above for the details. In the meantime what do you guys think? Pretty awesome idea, huh?

Xboox Duo Combines An Xbox One And Xbox 360 Into A Laptop

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