OnePlus is set to make their first foray into India soon, an emerging market where many an OEM is staking claim. Since launching (slowly) stateside, OnePlus’ One smartphone has enjoyed Cyanogen, an operating system built atop Google’s Android. India, however, won’t have the same courtesy. When OnePlus launches their device for the Indian market, Cyanogen won’t be on it. Cyanogen … Continue reading
USB battery packs are my favorite generic holiday gift. They’re useful to literally everyone, they offer a tremendous amount of utility for a modest amount of money, and it still seems like most non-nerds aren’t fully aware that they exist. If you have anyone on your shopping list that could use one, here’s a great deal.
As you head to your local Walmart today for America’s annual reenactment of The Hunger Games, here’s a reminder that sucker-punching someone to get the last $50 tablet might not be the wisest course of action. For several reasons.
It’s that time of year again! You know, the one when you have to hand over your hard-earned cash or dole out the credit card digits to get the loved ones in your life a little something celebratory. Lucky you, we’ve got a slew of great recommendation…
You know all that crap that’s listed on the back of your smartphone and tablet? It looks something like this: A jumble of letters and words, an FCC symbol, and instructions to not throw your electronic equipment into the trash. It’s ugly, and generally a waste of space. But luckily for us, it’s time to say goodbye to that mess. In what feels a bit like a holiday gift,… Read More
By Nnekule Ikemfuna
KANO, Nigeria, Nov 28 (Reuters) – Gunmen set off three bombs and opened fire on worshippers at the central mosque in north Nigeria’s biggest city Kano, killing at least 35 people on Friday, witnesses and police said, in an attack that bore the hallmarks of Islamist Boko Haram militants.
“These people have bombed the mosque. I am face to face with people screaming,” said Chijjani Usman, a local reporter who had gone to the mosque in the old city to pray.
The mosque is next to the palace of the emir of Kano, the second highest Islamic authority in Africa’s most populous country, although the emir himself, former central bank governor Lamido Sanusi, was not present.
No one immediately claimed responsibility but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a Sunni jihadist movement fighting to revive a medieval Islamic caliphate in the region.
Boko Haram regards the traditional Islamic religious authorities in Nigeria with disdain, considering them a corrupt, self-serving elite that is too close to the secular government.
The insurgents have killed thousands in gun and bomb attacks on churches, schools, police stations, military bases, government buildings and mosques that do not share their radical Islamist ideology.
At least 35 people died on Friday, deputy police commissioner Sanusi N. Lemo told reporters in Kano.
“Three bombs were planted in the courtyard to the mosque and they went off simultaneously,” a security source who declined to be named said.
“After multiple explosions, they also opened fire. I cannot tell you the casualties because we all ran away,” added a member of staff at the palace.
Angry youths blocked the mosque’s gates to police, who had to disperse them with tear gas to gain entry.
A MILLION DISPLACED
The insurgency has forced more than one million people to flee during its campaign focused on Nigeria’s northeast, the Red Cross told reporters on Friday, an increase on a September U.N. refugee agency estimate of 700,000.
Islamic leaders sometimes shy away from direct criticism of Boko Haram for fear of reprisals. But Kano’s emir Sanusi, angered by atrocities such as the kidnapping of 200 schoolgirls from the village of Chibok in April, has been increasingly vocal.
He was quoted in the local press as calling on Nigerians this month to defend themselves against Boko Haram. During a broadcast recitation of the Koran he was reported to have said:
“These people, when they attack towns, they kill boys and enslave girls. People must stand resolute … They should acquire what they can to defend themselves. People must not wait for soldiers to protect them.”
Persistent insecurity is dogging President Goodluck Jonathan’s campaign for re-election to a second term in February 2015. (Additional reporting by Julia Payne, Isaac Abrak and Abraham Terngu in Abuja; Writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Every day for the past two years, The Pollination Project has made seed grants to an up and coming social change leaders around the world. We are happy to share the extraordinary people and projects that we are honored to support this week.
Veg Kids in Massachusetts.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Rachel, her 8-year-old son Elias, and her 5-year-old son Theo, were the subjects of a story on NPR’s This American Life, which aired in January 2014. The story focused on Elias’ mission to convert everyone in the world to vegetarianism. At age 4, Elias was mortified to learn that animals were specifically killed to be eaten by humans and stopped eating animal products. Elias vs. The World is a documentary web series that follows the adventures of a determined Elias on his mission to save animals from human cruelty and get everyone in the world to stop eating meat, one carnivore at a time.
Healing in the Philippines. Reiki practitioner Laura Scalet offers healing to islanders affected by the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. She is now training islanders in the art of Reiki with her project Reiki Bantayan. Training graduates will be to offer Reiki to themselves and their families, and also the animals, the waters, the earth, the community and quite honestly the world.
Endangered Species in Florida. Experienced conservation biologist and documentary filmmaker, Jennifer Brown, is producing ‘Smoke & Mirrors: The Tale of the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow’, a film that explores different ideas and characters in the mystery of the endangered sparrow’s decline. After working on the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow field crew during the 2013 breeding season, Jennifer became familiar with the sparrow, the prairie habitat, and the people involved in its recovery. She proceeded to conduct her own extensive research and development to craft an innovative, personal film in hopes of benefiting the sparrow, instead of simply documenting its extinction. Jennifer explains, “The power of visual media to inform local land managers and a national audience about the critically endangered, underrepresented, Florida Grasshopper Sparrow is priceless.”
Combatting Ebola in Sierra Leone. Safiatu Farma, a gender equity advocate and trainer, is using her training and facilitation skills to bring ebola prevention measures and best practices to rural communities in her severely impacted region. Safiatu is an existing Pollination Project grantee, and we are lucky to be able to give funds directly to a trusted person on the ground to carry out this very important work. Safiatu chose to partner with the Alliance for Social Justice and Development (ASJD), and the Community Organization for Mobilization and Empowerment (COME-SL). The Ebola Awareness and Prevention Project will teach the selected communities that Ebola is real, and that people are dying every day.
Community Garden in Reno. 
Katy Chandler, and her organization Edible Hood, have shared seeds and knowledge with the people of Reno, Nevada since 2011, with a mission of fostering food independence. Now they want to take the next step — establishing a neighborhood-scale food forest in their underserved community. “We’ll begin by helping neighbors plant and care for regionally appropriate fruit and nut-tree guilds at their homes, starting a chain of connection, as each participant will find and support another neighbor in planting a guild the following spring. As the trees root and bear fruit in the years to come, so shall our community,” Katy said.
Cartooning with Kids in North Carolina. In the past few years, Steve Barr, a professional cartoonist living in Columbus, North Carolina, has lost four loved ones to cancer. His losses made him reexamine his priorities, and inspired him to want help others in similar situations. Steve decided to create Cartoon Classes for pediatric patients, to offer his services completely free of charge to any hospital or institution that treats pediatric patients. “I want to bring happiness, distraction, hope and a sense of accomplishment to these young patients and their families, and help build sweet memories for them,” he said.
Want to be part of the joy of giving? Join our Daily Giving Community, or simply create your own giving practice. It will change your life!
Awards season is almost here and there’s definitely one thing to be excited for: the return of hosting duo Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. The actresses are returning to the Golden Globes for their third and final hosting gig in 2015 and they already know what they’re planning to wear: a “romper with cheese” and “the ER bandage dress with stilts by the Ohio stilts king.” Forget the red carpet guys, we already know whose going to be the Best Dressed.
Check out the new Globes promo above. The 72nd Golden Globe Awards air on Jan. 11, 2015.
DES PLAINES, Ill. — “Be safe everybody,” a Kmart worker instructed customers here as they filed into the store at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day, looking for deals on items such as headphones and clothes.
But the instruction may have been more of a formality. Once the dozens of people lined up outside the store were inside, they calmly browsed the aisles and compared prices on towels and toasters to those listed in the circulars they had brought along.
Welcome to the new Black Friday. It starts on Thursday or even earlier, lasts for days and isn’t quite the harried environment of years past. The increased popularity of online shopping, combined with retailers’ interest in capturing shoppers’ limited dollars as early as possible, has made the one-day deal bonanza obsolete. Instead, this year Walmart, Target, Amazon and others offered days of deals starting in mid-November.
Sears, which is also owned by Kmart’s parent company, Sears Holdings Corp., opened at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving, two hours earlier than last year, and offered its longest string of doorbuster sales ever — more than 1,000 deals over a 17-hour period — said Jamie Stein, the vice president of public relations at Sears Holdings. The chain is also letting shoppers buy items online and pick them up in person at both Sears and Kmart stores. At one New York Kmart, more than 100 people stopped in Thursday in a period of just a few hours to pick up items they ordered online, Stein said.
“That’s what we saw this year, not a Black Friday but a Black November,” Stein said Friday. “In previous years, the focus on one day did create this craze, but was that the best for our customers? Now it’s less of a frenzy but better in the end.”
Crowds were reportedly thin at malls across the country on Friday morning.
Of course, there were still some elements of the classic Black Friday frenzy at stores across the country. Stein said Kmart managers reported “consistent lines” at 6 a.m. openings Thursday, with 100 people waiting to get in on average.
The increased availability of earlier deals didn’t change the holiday plans of Cindy Bergate and Nancy McFall, two shoppers who were browsing the shoe aisles here around 6:15 a.m. on Thanksgiving. The two said they’ve been Black Friday shopping with four other relatives for years.
After Kmart, they were headed home to cook and eat Thanksgiving dinner, then someone in their shopping crew would leave the meal early to get in line at Walmart. They said they also planned to hit Target and other stores and then head back out again on Friday.
“We’re crazy,” said McFall, 48, adding that she preferred the experience in years past when shoppers waited in line outside for hours.
Pam Pitakis, 53, who was browsing a rack of jackets that were 50 percent off, said she’s nostalgic for the traditional Black Friday for different reasons.
“It’s kind of annoying” that so many deals are on Thanksgiving, she said. Pitakis came to Kmart in the wee hours of the morning to get a tablet. “We’d rather just have it be on Black Friday.”
Kmart has been open on Thanksgiving for 23 years. But it’s been a target of criticism in recent years, along with other retailers, as more chains moved their opening times and best deals to earlier on the holiday. Detractors deride the stores for requiring workers to come in on the holiday and compelling shoppers to rearrange their turkey dinners to make it in time for deals.
“I hate this time of year,” one Kmart veteran who works in human resources in a California store told The Huffington Post earlier this month. Several others, who also requested anonymity to protect their jobs, expressed similar sentiments in interviews, saying they weren’t given the option not to work on Thanksgiving.
Stein said the company “makes every effort” to staff its stores on the holidays with seasonal employees and volunteers before requiring others to come in. Many employees appreciate the chance to work the holiday because they’re paid one and a half times their hourly rate, she said.
The retail giant sets holiday hours for Sears and Kmart based on feedback the company has heard from customers, Stein said. It’s also an aim to stay competitive with other retailers.
Sears Holdings has been struggling for the past several years. The chain hasn’t reported a positive quarter of same-store sales since 2005, according to Retail Metrics, a retail data firm. CEO Eddie Lampert has been using a controversial strategy to turn things around that critics argue has little to do with actually selling more stuff.
The company is trying to maximize the value of its real estate by selling hundreds of its stores to a newly formed real estate investment trust and renting out space to stores such as Whole Foods, Dick’s Sporting Goods and others. It’s shuttering other, underperforming locations by the dozens.
“It’s a very difficult scenario that they find themselves in,” said Ken Perkins, the founder of Retail Metrics. “There’s no buzz.”
Those difficulties are compounded by the struggles facing other retailers that cater to low- and middle-income shoppers. Slow wage growth has meant that most Americans have limited money to spend in stores. Chains are ramping up the deals all month in hopes that strapped Americans will spend their money in their stores, but the traffic and high volume of purchases at steep discounts may do little to actually help their bottom lines, according to Mark Cohen, the director of retail studies at Columbia Business School.
Sears and Kmart “are attempting to participate aggressively,” said Cohen, a former CEO of Sears Canada. “At the end of the day, it’s all for naught. This entire Black Friday window of hyper-promotion is really a race to the bottom for all retailers participating.”
Political economist Gordon Lafer offers some “Bleak Friday” predictions about the corporate agenda for public education…
Berkshire: Now I know Black Friday is usually thought of as a day for bargain hunters to mob Walmart stores and their minimum-wage-ish associates, but can I just point out that by swelling the Walton family coffers, these shoppers are actually helping to create more opportunities for low-income youth? Wait — why are you laughing?
Gordon Lafer: Because it’s preposterous — you can’t be an adult and say that with a straight face. First of all, the thing that correlates most clearly with educational performance in every study is poverty. So when you look at the agenda of the biggest and richest corporate lobbies in the country, it’s impossible to conclude that they want to see the full flowering of the potential of each little kid in poor cities. To say “I want to cut the minimum wage, I want to prevent cities from passing laws raising wages or requiring sick time, I want to cut food stamps, I want to cut the earned income tax credit, I want to cut home heating assistance. Oh but, by the way, I’m really concerned about the quality of education that poor kids are getting” — it’s just not credible. You’re creating the problem that you now claim to want to solve.
Berkshire: I don’t know if it’s a tryptophan hangover, but I feel very confused about something. There’s a long tradition of big corporations in the U.S. trying to reshape public education in an effort to mold their future workers. Think Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller. But does Walmart need vast numbers of college grads? Educate me.
Lafer: Walmart has no trouble filling positions and operating with very high turnover because what’s demanded of people who work there is so little. They’re certainly not asking “where are we going to find more people who can do algebra and craft well-written paragraphs?” In fact, the big problem with the “send every kid to college” argument is that there aren’t jobs for these kids after they graduate. You cannot find an economist who predicts that more than one-third of jobs in the U.S. are going to require a college degree in our lifetime. The real question is not how can everybody be a college graduate, but how can people make a decent living. And here is where you see that the same corporate lobbies that are pushing education reform are doing everything possible to make that harder.
Berkshire: I think when we talk about a “corporate agenda” the reaction is often “oh, there they go again with their leftist crazy talk.” But your academic research involves looking at the confluence of law and policy across the country, and you’ve picked up on what seem to be some definite patterns. What do you see?
Lafer: I worked for the House Education and the Workforce Committee in Washington in 2009-2010 and then came back to my academic job in 2011, which coincided with a huge wave of cutbacks in public services around the country. I started doing these overviews of what’s happening in all 50 states, because that’s really where you start to see the corporate agenda emerging. One of the things that I saw was that the deepest cuts didn’t correspond to where the budget deficits were the worst. It’s easy to write a law to say, for example, that we’re going to kick 100,000 kids out of Pre-K, like Texas did, but have some trigger for restoring it when state revenues bounce back or unemployment drops. But nobody did that. In fact, a number of states passed or tried to pass things to make those cuts permanent. What this basically says is “let’s take the harshest cuts that had to be made because of the worst recession in 70 years and lock them in.” So Texas, you’ll never get those Pre-K slots back. Or look at Ohio, which eliminated full-day kindergarten and in the same year, voted to phase out the inheritance tax, which only ever effected the richest people in the state. That’s another way of saying that putting more money in the pockets of the richest people in the state is so important to us that we’re willing to pay for it by having half-day instead of full day kindergarten for five year olds. So I started looking at these intentional cutbacks in public services and thinking about what they mean, and how all of this fits together.
Berkshire: Wow — these are exactly the questions that keep me awake in the middle of the night: What does it all mean and how does it all fit together? Needless to say I usually fall asleep before I solve the puzzle. I’m curious to hear your take, but please don’t make the analysis so grim that I never sleep again.
Lafer: I think the direction that the most powerful forces in the country are pushing is a bleak and frankly scary one — that at some level they want us to forget the idea of having a right to a decent public education, which is one of the last remaining entitlements, and make it more like health care, which is increasingly seen as a privilege. What’s being done to schooling is, I think, devastating on its merits. It has ideological implications for lowering expectations for what you have a right to as a citizen or a resident. And it raises big, profound questions: How does your experience in school affect, not just your skill set for employment, but your sense of yourself as a person and what you think you deserve from life? I think that for the real one percent, the big political challenge is how do we pursue a policy agenda that makes the country ever more unequal and that makes life harder for the vast majority of people without provoking a populist backlash. One of the ways of doing that is by lowering people’s expectations, and one of the key places to do that is in the school system.
Berkshire: I’ve always thought sleep was overrated anyway… Since we’re already in a dark place, let’s just forge on, shall we? I can’t help but note that some of our reformiest states also seem to be on the cutting edge of trying to shape and limit the content of what kids are taught. Take Jefferson County, Colorado, for example, where school board members proposed a curriculum intended to promote “respect for authority.” Do you see any connection?
Lafer: I don’t think it’s a coincidence. You have Florida which passed a law that history has to be taught as fact and not interpreted or contested and one of the facts is the value of the free enterprise system. Or take Arizona, which has one of the highest percentages of kids in charter schools, where officials got rid of Chicano studies and passed a law which says basically that you can’t have a class that teaches resentment of one group of people, by which they meant the white ruling class. There’s Indiana where Mitch Daniels personally intervened in an effort to keep teacher preparation programs from teaching Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. A lot of this is very local, which is to say that there’s not some smoke-filled room where powerful people meet to plan all of this. But let’s just say that the last thing that the Walton family wants is for kids in poor cities to be going to, say, the Highlander Center and getting education about the power of collective action or how the civil rights movement started.
Berkshire: I don’t know how much more of this I can take! Anything more positive you can send me back to the wassail bowl with?
Lafer: When people have a chance to vote on specific issues there seems to be very broad support for a better version of education, and I think that’s really hopeful. The best example of this is the 2010 vote in Florida on class size. Florida has class size caps written into its constitution. In 2010 the legislature wanted to raise the cap, but because it’s in the constitution it had to go to the voters. The voters voted 57% against raising the cap during a Tea Party wave election. I tried to do the math to calculate just how many people must have voted for Rick Scott and various conservative legislators, but also voted against raising the cap on class size and I figured that there were about 200,000 people who went to the polls thinking something like: “I hate Democrats, I hate government, I hate taxes, I hate unions, but I want my kids in small classes.” I think the corporate education agenda is broadly really unpopular, and all parent want roughly the same thing. All parents want their child to be taught small classes by a mature adult who will get to know their kid as a person, and understand their strengths and weaknesses and how they need to be supported. And that’s all the more true in poor cities than in wealthier places. I think most parents want their kids to have a broader education than just math and English and they certainly want them to be taught by people and not just a computer program. You know, despite all the things we’ve talked about, there’s tremendous public support for decent education. That gives me hope.
Gordon Lafer is a political economist and is an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center. Send comments and rosy predictions to tips@edushyster.com.
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