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The driver told police that Sno Cone Joe owners Joshua Malatino and Amanda Scott followed his truck, playing their music at high volume and trying to lure away customers with promises of free ice cream. |
Malatino and Scott were charged Tuesday with second-degree harassment, a violation, and fourth-degree stalking, a misdemeanor. A message left for their lawyer wasn't initially returned Wednesday. |
Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- Earthquake victims, writhing in pain and grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses walk away from a field hospital Friday night after a Belgian medical team evacuated the area, saying it was concerned about security. |
The decision left CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta as the only doctor at the hospital to get the patients through the night. |
CNN initially reported, based on conversations with some of the doctors, that the United Nations ordered the Belgian First Aid and Support Team to evacuate. However, Belgian Chief Coordinator Geert Gijs, a doctor who was at the hospital with 60 Belgian medical personnel, said it was his decision to pull the team out for the night. Gijs said he requested U.N. security personnel to staff the hospital overnight, but was told that peacekeepers would only be able to evacuate the team. |
He said it was a "tough decision" but that he accepted the U.N. offer to evacuate after a Canadian medical team, also at the hospital with Canadian security officers, left the site Friday afternoon. The Belgian team returned Saturday morning. |
Gijs said the United Nations has agreed to provide security for Saturday night. The team has requested the Belgian government to send its own troops for the field hospital, which Gijs expects to arrive late Sunday. |
Responding to the CNN report that Gupta was the only doctor left at the Port-au-Prince field hospital, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said Saturday that the world body's mission in Haiti did not order any medical team to leave. If the team left, it was at the request of their own organization, he said. |
Edmond Mulet, the U.N. assistant secretary general for peacekeeping operations, told reporters later that local security officers deemed the makeshift hospital unsafe. |
"It seems that we've heard some reports in the international media that the United Nations asked or forced some medical teams to not work any more in some clinic -- that is not true, that is completely untrue," Mulet said Saturday. |
CNN video from the scene Friday night shows the Belgian team packing up its supplies and leaving with an escort of blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers in marked trucks. |
View or add to CNN's database of missing persons in Haiti |
Gupta -- assisted by other CNN staffers, security personnel and at least one Haitian nurse who refused to leave -- assessed the needs of the 25 patients, but there was little they could do without supplies. |
More people, some in critical condition, were trickling in late Friday. |
"I've never been in a situation like this. This is quite ridiculous," Gupta said. |
With a dearth of medical facilities in Haiti's capital, ambulances had nowhere else to take patients, some of whom had suffered severe trauma -- amputations and head injuries -- under the rubble. Others had suffered a great deal of blood loss, but there were no blood supplies left at the clinic. |
Gupta feared that some would not survive the night. |
He and the others stayed with the injured all night, after the medical team had left and after the generators gave out and the tents turned pitch black. |
Gupta monitored patients' vital signs, administered painkillers and continued intravenous drips. He stabilized three new patients in critical condition. |
At 3:45 a.m., he posted a message on Twitter: "pulling all nighter at haiti field hosp. lots of work, but all patients stable. turned my crew into a crack med team tonight." |
Are you in Haiti and safe? Share your photos |
He said the Belgian doctors did not want to leave their patients behind but were ordered out by the United Nations, which sent buses to transport them. |
"There is concern about riots not far from here -- and this is part of the problem," Gupta said. |
There have been scattered reports of violence throughout the capital. |
"What is striking to me as a physician is that patients who just had surgery, patients who are critically ill, are essentially being left here, nobody to care for them," Gupta said. |
Sandra Pierre, a Haitian who has been helping at the makeshift hospital, said the medical staff took most of the supplies with them. |
"All the doctors, all the nurses are gone," she said. "They are expected to be back tomorrow. They had no plan on leaving tonight. It was an order that came suddenly." |
She told Gupta, "It's just you." |
A 7.0 magnitude earthquake flattened Haiti's capital city Tuesday afternoon, affecting as many as 3 million people as it fanned out across the island nation. Tens of thousands of people are feared dead. |
Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, lacked adequate medical resources even before the disaster and has been struggling this week to tend to huge numbers of injured. The clinic, set up under several tents, was a godsend to the few who were lucky to have been brought there. |
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who led relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said the evacuation of the clinic's medical staff was unforgivable. |
"Search and rescue must trump security," Honoré said. "I've never seen anything like this before in my life. They need to man up and get back in there." |
Honoré drew parallels between the tragedy in New Orleans, Louisiana, and in Port-au-Prince. But even in the chaos of Katrina, he said, he had never seen medical staff walk away. |
"I find this astonishing these doctors left," he said. "People are scared of the poor." |
CNN's Justine Redman, Danielle Dellorto and John Bonifield contributed to this report. |
Federal employees should be fairly compensated and their benefits protected, according to the 2016 Democratic presidential candidates. |
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said as president that she would ensure feds are paid fairly through “appropriate pay raises” and would “oppose across-the-board arbitrary pay freezes, retirement cuts, or cuts to other employee benefits.” Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was a little more specific, saying the federal workforce deserves a pay raise “of at least 3.8 percent to keep up with cost-of-living increases” and pledged his “strong” support for the FAIR Act, pending legislation in both chambers that would give feds a 5.3 percent pay boost in 2017. |
Clinton and Sanders were responding to a written questionnaire submitted to the 12 Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns still in operation in December by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. As of March 24, only the Clinton and Sanders campaigns had responded to the questions, which covered a range of issues, including federal employee pay, union rights, and the privatization of government jobs. |
“For far too long, the extreme right wing has demonized, belittled, and sought to destroy the federal workforce. That is wrong, that is unconscionable, and that has got to change,” wrote Sanders in response to IFPTE questions asking the candidates if they would work to ensure pay raises for feds and protect their pensions. “The fact of the matter is that no other worker has been asked to sacrifice more on the altar of deficit reduction than our federal workers.” |
Federal workers endured a three-year pay freeze between 2011 and 2013. They’ve received across-the-board pay raises of 1.3 percent in 2016, and 1 percent each in 2015 and 2014. All those boosts were below the percentage mandated by the formula in the 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act. President Obama has proposed a 1.6 percent pay bump for 2017. |
Clinton noted that her experience as secretary of State, New York senator, and First Lady have enabled her to witness “first-hand” federal employees’ contributions to the country. “I was serving as Secretary of State when federal salaries were frozen in 2011, and I saw how difficult it was for employees to be told that even though they were working hard and their living costs were going up, their paychecks were not,” Clinton wrote in response to the IFPTE questionnaire. “The government is not going to be able to recruit and retain the high-caliber employees it needs if it does not pay federal employees fairly for their work.” |
She also said that it’s “unfair to require additional increases in retirement contributions as a backdoor pay-cut for federal workers,” and pledged her continued support for veterans’ preference in federal hiring, in response to a specific IFPTE question. As part of the 2013 budget deal, federal employees hired on or after Jan. 1, 2014, with less than five years of service have to pay 4.4 percent toward their pensions -- 1.3 percent more than employees hired after 2012 contribute to their defined retirement benefit, and 3.6 percent more than most workers hired in or before 2012 contribute. Republican lawmakers since then have offered other proposals -- so far, unsuccessful -- to further increase the amount all federal workers contribute to their pensions. |
Both Democratic candidates, unsurprisingly, also vowed to preserve the right of workers to collectively bargain, and to renew Obama’s 2009 executive order establishing a national labor-management partnership. |
Clinton and Sanders also expressed similar opinions on privatizing federal jobs, arguing that contractors are often more expensive than federal workers. Clinton said she opposed “numerous Bush administration proposals” to privatize the federal workforce while she was in the Senate. “As president, I will oppose efforts to contract out work unless doing so is necessary, in the best interest of the federal government and is clearly cost effective.” Sanders said “we must do everything we can to make sure that federal workers are given the opportunity to provide the services that the American people need, and when we do hire contractors that they are held to the same high standards we expect of our federal workforce.” |
IFPTE’s questionnaire asked the candidates for their views on several other issues, including the minimum wage, trans-Pacific partnership, and guest-worker programs. |
Click here to read Clinton’s responses to IFPTE’s questionnaire, and here to read Sanders’ answers. |
On this episode of the Pony Bits Podcast, in case you couldn’t tell from the episode title, Jon and Colton tackle the subject of what exactly makes “Best Pony”. Jon sets up his own diagram to go over important factors to consider such as design, type of pony and personality. While they go over their own individual specifics of what they look for in their ideal “Best Pony”, Jon and Colton also talk about how realistic each of the Mane 6’s characters are, while juxtaposing that with how illogical the world they live in really is. |
The podcast will be on hiatus until after October 19th when the duo will be back from Texas and can produce another episode, until then, enjoy the episode and send us some emails about your “Best Pony” requirements, the television show or the comics to read on the podcast at [email protected]. |
DOWNLOAD HERE |
Jon’s Diagram (http://i.imgur.com/xdV37QZ.png) |
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The chance that intelligent life might ever encounter this interstellar mixtape—let alone listen to it—has always been infinitesimal. Still, argued astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who helped select the tracks, "the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet." There is indeed something lovely about sharing humanity with the universe in this way, as Megan Garber wrote last year: |
The Golden Records ... carry the transcendent aspects of human existence: the art, the beauty, the ache, the joy. They offer what we have, and what we are, up to the cosmos. |
But what if the improbable were to happen? Here on Earth, 10-year-old CDs are puttering out. What about a pair of 40-year-old records careening through outer space? Even if extraterrestrials found and figured out how to work the Golden Record, would it play anymore? |
Actually, yes, experts say. |
"The gold records that were launched into space were specially constructed discs for the purposes of space travel," said Peter Alyea, a digital conservation specialist at the Library of Congress who specializes in audio recordings. "I believe they were designed to last for a very, very long time and so should still be playable. This kind of disc is not something you could buy commercially at a record store." |
And besides, Voyager's Golden Record has thus far been kept safe from the elements—high temperatures, oxygen, water—known to deteriorate Earthly records. (Voyager is now operating at about negative 110 degrees Fahrenheit.) |
“If I had to guess, I'd say it's as fresh and new as the day it was placed aboard the spacecraft," said David Doody, an engineer on the Voyager mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an email. "It's been stored in a vacuum more perfect than any attainable on Earth, and protected from dust and cosmic rays by an aluminum metal case." |
That protective aluminum case has had quite the adventure—it got a dose of radiation near Jupiter and was blasted with space dust in Saturn's ring plane—but Doody says it has been "basically always shielded" at least enough to protect the record's functionality. "In all, it might have lost a little luster at worst, in my humble opinion," he said. "I'd also venture to guess that it would be in playable condition for many hundreds of millennia.” |
Which raises a theoretical question about what version of Earth the rest of the universe might first encounter, and what songs or sounds we might include today that didn't exist in 1977. The Golden Record, after all, is more of a time capsule than a broadcast. (It doesn't even include any hip-hop, which was still in its cultural nascence the year the Voyagers were launched.) Of course many of the record's sounds have retained the timeless quality they must have had four decades ago—like this greeting from Kurt Waldheim, then the secretary general of the United Nations: |
We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship—to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us, and it is with humility and hope that we take this step. |
NASA has since moved on to new projects to share music with other galaxies, and humanity has graduated beyond the record as the go-to audio format. In 2008, for instance, scientists beamed a song directly into deep space, aiming for the North Star 431 light years away from Earth. That tune, a Beatles classic from the decade before Voyager launched, was "Across the Universe." |
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected]. |
Over the years, I've learned to be cautious with C++ pointers. In particular, I'm always very careful about who owns a given pointer, and who's in charge of calling delete on it. But my caution often forces me to write deliberately inefficient functions. For example: |
vector < string > tokenize_string ( const string & text ); |
Here, we have a large string text , and we want to split it into a vector of tokens. This function is nice and safe, but it allocates one string for every token in the input. Now, if we were feeling reckless, we could avoid these allocations by returning a vector of pointers into text : |
vector < pair < const char * , const char *>> tokenize_string2 ( const string & text ); |
In this version, each token is represented by two pointers into text : One pointing to the first character, and one pointing just beyond the last character.1 But this can go horribly wrong: |
// Disaster strikes! auto v = tokenize_string2 ( get_input_string ()); munge ( v ); |
Why does this fail? The function get_input_string returns a temporary string, and tokenize_string2 builds an array of pointers into that string. Unfortunately, the temporary string only lives until the end of the current expression, and then the underlying memory is released. And so all our pointers in v now point into oblivion—and our program just wound up getting featured in a CERT advisory. So personally, I'm going to prefer the inefficient tokenize_string function almost every time. |
Rust lifetimes to the rescue! |
Going back to our original design, let's declare a type Token . Each token is either a Word or an Other , and each token contains pointers into a pre-existing string. In Rust, we can declare this as follows: |
# [ deriving ( Show , PartialEq )] enum Token < 'a > { Word ( & 'a str ), Other ( & 'a str ) } |
The type &str represents a slice of a pre-existing String . It's sort of like the pair<const char *,const char *> in C++. But the really interesting part here is the 'a . This is a named lifetime parameter, and it says, “A value of type Token has the same lifetime as the &str that it contains.” |
Looking at the LLVM intermediate representation, Token looks like a nice, efficient data structure. It appears to be a tag byte for the enum, some padding, and two pointers for the &str : |
%"enum.Token<[]>" = type { i8, [7 x i8], [2 x i64] } |
Update: According to keeperofdakeys, those last two i64 values are actually a pointer and a length. |
Parsing safely |
Now we can define a safe tokenize_string3 function. Here, the function delaration says, “We take an input value of type &str with lifetime 'a , and we return a Vec<Token> where each token has lifetime 'a .” |
fn tokenize_string3 < 'a > ( text : & 'a str ) -> Vec < Token < 'a >> { let mut result = vec! []; for cap in regex! ( r "( \ w+)|( \ W+)" ) .captures_iter ( text ) { let token = if cap .pos ( 1 ) .is_some () { Word ( cap .at ( 1 )) } else { Other ( cap .at ( 2 )) }; result .push ( token ); } result } |
This works quite nicely: |
# [ test ] fn test_parse_safe () { assert_eq! ( vec! [ Word ( "The" ), Other ( " " ), Word ( "cat" )], tokenize_string3 ( "The cat" )); } |
But what if we destroy text early? |
But let's rewrite this function to work like our C++ code, where our temporary string was destroyed before we tried to use our tokens: |
# [ test ] fn test_parse_unsafe () { let v = { let text = "The cat" .to_string (); tokenize_string3 ( text .as_slice ()) }; assert_eq! ( vec! [ Word ( "The" ), Other ( " " ), Word ( "cat" )], v ); } |
Rust detects the error, and refuses to compile test_parse_unsafe : |
main.rs:67:26: 67:30 error: `text` does not live long enough main.rs:67 tokenize_string3(text.as_slice()) ^~~~ main.rs:64:24: 70:2 note: reference must be valid for the block at 64:23... (…code snippet deleted…) main.rs:65:17: 68:6 note: ...but borrowed value is only valid for the block at 65:16 (…code snippet deleted…) |
In other words, we can do all kinds of apparently reckless things with pointers, and Rust backs us up. |
There are some good discussions of alternative C++ versions on Hacker News, /r/programming and /r/rust. But just to clarify: |
Get cool in-game extras with amiibo accessories! Just tap to score new characters, game modes, or other perks. |
One amiibo may work with multiple games. You might get new outfits, power-ups, or other fun bonuses. |
Link is the main character in The Legend of Zelda games. A young boy living in Hyrule, Link is often given the task of rescuing Princess Zelda and Hyrule from the Gerudo thief Ganondorf. Humble to the end, Link is known not merely as a hero but as a symbol of courage, strength and wisdom as well. |
Compatible Games: |
Write and Read: |
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U |
Read Only: |
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD |
Mario Kart 8 |
Hyrule Warriors |
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker |