Apple has set itself up as one of the biggest advocates of privacy and security against government-sanctioned espionage, which is probably why it immediately jumped into action to plug up a serious security hole merely 10 days after it was reported. Just weeks after it rolled out iOS 9.3.4, Apple has issued a critical iOS 9.3.5 update in an attempt … Continue reading
The Department of Defense is looking for a few good creators to help create a brand new biohazard suit to life.
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Does your worry for increased gas heating bills increase with approaching winter? It’s time to keep aside all such worries as a number of inexpensive and easy ways can be opted to save you from bearing outsized heating bills.
Though reducing unnecessary energy use is the easiest way to keep one safe from making a hole in the pocket, there are some wonderful ways which one can use at home absolutely free of cost to save on gas heating bills and keep those escalating energy bills at bay:
Check for Leaks in Weather Stripping and Door Thresholds
Worn weather stripping or gaping door thresholds can cause a lot of energy waste as improperly sealed homes can lead to wastage of almost 10 to 15 percent of the money spent by the homeowners on heating. So, how to save on this? Follow these quick and easy tips:
After checking for leaks and drafts in doors and windows, add weather-stripping and caulk any holes which may allow heat to escape. The most important thing to ensure is that doors are sealed properly.
Seal Vents in Ducts, Wires and Pipes
Use caulking or weather stripping to seal any kind of plumbing vents in ducts, wires or pipes that penetrate the wall or ceiling or floor. It is important as even a small hole can lead to wastage of heat energy for which you pay huge amounts.
Use Pre-Cut Foam Gaskets to Prevent Heat Leaks from Electric Wall Plugs
Use pre-cut foam gaskets for fitting in electric wall plugs and switches as these fit behind the switch plates and prove to be highly efficient in preventing any kind of heat leaks.
Save Heat by Closing Damper on Fireplace when not in Use
Close the damper on your fireplace when not in use. It helps in saving a lot of heat energy as when a fireplace is not in use, the chimney starts functioning as a large open window. It draws warm air out of the room and creates a draft. So, you can follow this effective heat energy saving tip which actually costs nothing.
Save 10% of Heating Bills by Blocking any Leakage through Heating Ducts
Check if the heating ducts of your house are not leaking as mostly such things remain ignored for years causing huge loss of heating energy. However, using duct tapes for sealing the leaking ducts doesn’t prove to be useful as the sealed ductworks dry and fall over time. So, the help of a plumber should be taken to effectively mend all the leaky ducts. It’s important as a field research performed by the California Energy Commission showed that around 10 percent of one’s heating bills can be saved by preventing leaky ducts.
Turn Down Your Thermostat to 68 Degrees
For every degree of heat lowered in the 60-degree to 70-degree range, up to 5% can be saved on heating costs. As your health permits, you can set your thermostat to 68 degrees or lower during the daytime and evening time. In fact, it can also be lowered up to 55 degrees or off at night when you leave home for a longer period. It can actually help in saving 5-20 percent of your heating costs. For this, the best solution is to install a programmable thermostat which can even save up to 15 percent on energy costs.
Replace or Clean Furnace Filters as Recommended
Dirty filters increase the usage of energy by restricting water flow. It is healthy as well as energy saving to keep your furnace clean, lubricated and properly adjusted. It can save up to 5% of your heating bills.
Reduce Hot Water Temperature
You can set your hot water to the normal setting or 120-degrees Fahrenheit unless it requires a higher setting as per the user manual. It can help in saving up to 7-11 percent of water heating costs.
Shorten Showers
By reducing the lingering time by a few minutes, you can save hundreds of gallons of hot water per month as showers account for 2/3 of one’s water heating costs. This simple remedy can reduce your water heating costs by 33 percent.
Increase Ceiling Insulation
Yes, by increasing the ceiling insulation up to R-38, you can reduce heating costs by 5-25 percent. You must consider this if your ceiling is non-insulated or scantily insulated.
Apart from these tips, the simplest and the most effective way to reduce the cost of heating energy is to let the sunshine in by opening the drapes and welcoming the natural heat energy for free.
All the above-mentioned tips are simple to follow and inexpensive to reduce huge amounts spent on your gas heating bills every winter. So, follow these tips and say goodbye to your winter bill worries!
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WASHINGTON – A U.S. Navy ship fired warning shots toward an Iranian fast-attack craft that approached two U.S. ships, a Pentagon spokesman said on Thursday, in the most serious of a number of incidents in the Gulf area this week.
“They did feel compelled ultimately to fire three warning shots and the reason for that is… they had taken steps already to try and de-escalate this situation,” spokesman Peter Cook told reporters.
Tensions have increased in the Gulf in recent days despite an improvement in relations between Iran and the United States.
Years of mutual animosity eased when Washington lifted sanctions on Tehran in January after a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions but serious differences still remain over Iran’s ballistic missile program, Syria and Iraq.
A U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the USS Squall patrol craft fired three warning shots from a .50 caliber gun in the northern Gulf on Wednesday after warning flares did not work.
The incident started with three Iranian vessels, but there was only one around by the time the warning shots were fired, the official said. He described the Iranian behavior as “unsafe, unprofessional, and not routine.”
At one point, the Iranian vessel came within 200 yards (193 meters) of a U.S. ship, the official said.
Another interaction took place between an Iranian and U.S. ship on Wednesday, the defense official said but gave few more details.
The Pentagon earlier this week accused Iranian vessels of harassing a U.S. warship near the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday.
On Thursday, Iran’s defense minister said those Iranian vessels were just doing their job.
“If an American ship enters Iran’s maritime region, it will definitely get a warning. We will monitor them and, if they violate our waters, we will confront them,” Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan said in a statement reported by the Iranian Students’ News Agency.
A State Department spokeswoman said it was not clear what the intentions of the Iranian ships were, but the behavior was unacceptable.
“We believe that these type of actions are of concern, they unnecessarily escalate tensions,” State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau told a briefing.
(Reporting by Idrees Ali; Additional reporting by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Paul Simao and Alistair Bell)
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On April 16, Olympic gold medal gymnast Shawn Johnson married Oakland Raiders long snapper Andrew East in a rustic-chic wedding in Franklin, Tennessee.
A handful of pics from the countryside fete were floating around the internet right after the wedding, but on Sunday we were finally graced with the full album, thanks to photographer Lindsey Grace Whiddon of Wild Native and Style Me Pretty.
Around 350 friends and family gathered to celebrate the bride and groom, who wanted to keep the atmosphere of the day relaxed and down-to-earth. Guest tables were adorned with barn wood boxes as centerpieces. They noshed on comfort food like mini fried chicken and waffles and buttermilk biscuits.
“They’re both very thoughtful people and not showy, so we had to make the wedding very elegant and intimate and nothing over the top,” wedding planner Sara Fried of Fête Nashville told People in April.
Whiddon, who photographed the wedding, told The Huffington Post that Johnson and East were a joy to work with.
“Watching them interact during our portrait sessions was so much fun for all of us and felt more like hanging out with two awesome new friends than work,” she said. “These two were incredibly easy-going and sweet with each other which made them the perfect couple to photograph. There was little posing and so much genuine emotion that made it easy to capture them in a way that was reflective of who they are as a couple.”
The bride and groom exited the ceremony with a dance down the aisle to Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours.” Later, East surprised his bride by singing Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got A Friend In Me” while his dad played along on the piano.
The pair got engaged in July 2015 after Johnson threw the ceremonial first pitch at a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field.
See some more photos from their big day below. To see the album in full, head over to Style Me Pretty.
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Just hours before Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced the landmark peace agreement that would end a half-century war with the FARC guerrillas, U.S. Marshals were arresting one of his most prominent critics in Florida.
Andrés Felipe Arias was convicted in Colombia on corruption charges and sentenced to 17 years in prison back in 2014. He slipped off to the United States shortly before the sentence was handed down. He entered on a tourist visa, with his wife and children, then asked for asylum. His arrest on Wednesday kicks off an extradition process that could land him in a Colombian prison cell.
The Santos administration has long asked for the U.S. to send Arias back. But the timing of his arrest has fueled allegations by Santos’ critics, led by arch-conservative former President Alvaro Uribe, that the seizure amounts to retaliation for opposition to the peace deal. Uribe, now a senator, remains perhaps the country’s leading right-wing politician and one of the most strident critics of the peace deal, which faces a close referendum vote on Oct. 2.
“Because of Santos’ pressure to extradite him to Colombia, Andrés Arias was arrested in the United States,” Uribe tweeted Wednesday.
Arias’ wife, Catalina Serrano, called her husband’s conviction unfounded “political persecution” and said his life would be at risk if he returned to Colombia because of his strong criticism of the FARC.
“This isn’t a coincidence,” Serrano told HuffPost. “This is part of a strategic plan. Precisely on the day that Juan Manuel Santos signs the peace deal with the guerrillas in Cuba, he delivers my husband’s head, via extradition, to the guerrillas.”
Serrano said she doesn’t harbor the same ill will toward the United States, though it was the U.S. government that carried out the arrest order on behalf of Colombia, and it’s the U.S. government keeping Arias in jail.
“We freely chose to come here,” Serrano said. “I have complete confidence in the authorities of this country.”
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Adam Isacson, who researches security policy at the Washington Office of Latin America, said the timing of the arrest was likely coincidental.
“I don’t see the U.S. decision to comply with the extradition order now as a ‘message’ tied to the peace plebiscite or something like that,” Isacson wrote in an email. “It has to be bureaucratic timing. But it’s a blow to Uribe, and a reminder of what an outrage” Arias’ corruption scandal was.
Arias, an economist with a doctorate from the University of California, catapulted to the Colombian cabinet at age 31, when he accepted an appointment to head the ministry of agriculture during Uribe’s second term. Arias became a close associate of Uribe, a towering figure in Colombian politics.
Uribe is widely credited with eviscerating the FARC and returning a modicum of security to a country plagued for decades by war, kidnappings and sky-high homicide rates. But he’s also criticized for scorched-earth policies that led to human rights disasters like the “false positives” scandal, in which military officials killed civilians and then dressed them up as FARC rebels in order to inflate combat statistics.
Arias became so close to Uribe that his critics slapped him with the nickname “Uribito,” Spanish for “little Uribe.” As Uribe’s second and final term drew to a close, Arias launched an unsuccessful presidential primary bid himself.
The young conservative’s political career nosedived as quickly as it had taken off. In 2009, Colombian Sen. Jorge Robledo of the left-wing Polo Democrático Alternativo denounced Arias on the floor of the Senate for taking state subsidies intended for small farmers and instead handing them over to wealthy landowners and agribusiness leaders.
type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=More stories about Colombia… + articlesList=57be1299e4b02673444e3742,57bc61f8e4b007f18199c57b
A group of 51 wealthy beneficiaries who received a combined total of the equivalent of $17 million in various subsidies contributed some $338,000 to Uribe’s presidential campaigns ― massive sums in a developing country. Robledo called the practice corrupt and suggested it might be illegal.
“They took the very few resources we had for the agricultural sector,” Robledo said on the Senate floor, “and they distributed in an extremely concentrated manner to a few very powerful people. … It’s an absolutely disastrous policy.”
The scandal led to Arias’s prosecution. First he was stripped of his ability to hold office for 18 years, then sentenced to the 17-year prison term after fleeing the country.
Despite the severity of the charges, his wife said Arias only faced criminal charges because he sided with Uribe against President Santos’ attempts to negotiate an end to the war with the FARC. Officials who led the ministry of agriculture and other government agencies carried out their contracts as Arias had, she argued.
“He did exactly what ministers did before him,” Serrano said. “But none of them were convicted.”
Until Wednesday, Arias had been optimistic about his case for asylum, his lawyer said. Skeptical judges often send what they suspect are frivolous asylum claims straight into deportation proceedings, making them difficult to win and opening the possibility of immigrant detention. But Arias and his wife were given work authorization and were allowed to renew it. Arias also is trying to press his case before the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Arias’ lawyer, Hans Burgos, on Friday will ask U.S. District Judge John O’Sullivan to free his client on bail while the asylum case winds its way through the courts.
“We think this extradition process is premature, since the asylum process hasn’t finished yet,” Burgos told HuffPost, adding that the timing “adds political subtleties” to the extradition process.
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I am a 5th grader at Echo Horizon School in Culver City, California, and my schoolmates and I started a school newspaper. I am writing the music column. I met Arianna Huffington and after we talked she asked me to blog about interests to people my age. So here goes my first blog (I am super excited!):
(Previously I had written an article about Meghan Trainor and her hit song, All About That Bass.)
In last month’s edition, I talked about Meghan Trainor, and how she was signed to Epic Records by L.A. Reid, (aka, Antonio Reid). Little did I know, my Dad actually knows him and arranged for me to speak with him. He is really funny guy. The following is our interview:
Goldberg: How did you get into the music industry?
Reid: I got into the music industry as a musician. At a young age, I started out playing drums, a little piano, violin, and other instruments. I learned to play and then I learned to write songs. Then I became a songwriter and music producer, and that’s how I got into the music business.
Goldberg: Why do you like music so much?
Reid: Whenever you find something that you really love, there’s a tingling sensation inside, and it makes you excited. Once you have that feeling, you always want that feeling. Music gives me that tingling feeling, and it makes me happy. Whenever I hear music or am around music, it puts me in the world’s greatest mood. I like feeling good, and music makes me feel good.
Goldberg: Is it hard to be in the music business?
Reid: Yes. It is very very difficult. But, the music business isn’t any more difficult than any other business, and if you love it, then it’s not work if you enjoy it. I don’t really think I “work” because I love it so much.
Goldberg: What was the first act you ever signed?
Reid: Oh that’s a good one. The very first artist I ever signed was an artist named Babyface. That would have been in like, early 1983. And I didn’t even have a record label yet, all I had was a band. I asked him to join my band and be one of the singers. That was my first signing, and he became a really big star.
Goldberg: What was the best act you ever signed?
Reid: Ohh, well this will get me in trouble, so I’ll need to plead the fifth. They’re all my favorites.
Goldberg: How do you know when someone is going to be a big hit or not?
Reid: I don’t really know, I only know what I love, and sometimes I’m right, and sometimes I’m wrong. But I’ve been right more than I’ve been wrong. But I only know based on what I love.
Goldberg: What’s the highlight of your job?
Reid: The highlight of my job is being able to interact with talented people. I not only love music, I also really love talented people. So being able to spend a day with someone like Rihanna, or spend an afternoon with someone like Justin Beiber, or spend a day with someone like Meghan Trainor, that’s the highlight of my job. Spending time with talented people.
Goldberg: What’s the most irritating part of your job?
Reid: The most irritating part of my job is when I have to meet with people that I’d rather not meet with.
Goldberg: Is there anything you’d like to say in closing?
Reid: I thoroughly enjoyed this interview, and whenever I do an interview with someone, the questions will determine whether I have enjoyed it or not, and I have so much enjoyed answering your questions because you really have hit on the things that matter most to me.
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Lisa Machenberg interviewed me for her program Amazing Mind on Hypnosis TV and the main thing she wanted to discuss was how to find the best guru.
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Kurt Russell is one of the most fascinating actors in the world. From his start at Disney, to his background in baseball, his wacky comedies, insane list of cult classics, and current resurgence, it feels like there’s nothing he can’t do. So who better to be the subject of their own art show than Jack Burton, Snake Plissken, R.J. MacReady, and Wyatt Earp himself, Kurt Russell?
The Department of Homeland Security is investigating the cyberattack
on Leslie Jones, according to a report by the LA Times.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
