Monday, September 22, 2014

Let It Go (Disney's "Frozen") Vivaldi's Winter - ThePianoGuys

Breaking News - US launches air strikes on Syria Islamic State militants - what is the USA getting itself into now?

US launches air strikes on Syria Islamic State militants

In this undated file photo posted on Monday, June 30, 2014 by the Raqqa Media Center of the Islamic State group, a militant extremist group, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, fighters from extremist Islamic State group parade in Raqqa, Syria

Islamic State fighters in Syria

The US and allied nations have launched the first air strikes against Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria, the Pentagon has said.

Spokesman Rear Adm John Kirby said fighter and bomber jets and Tomahawk missiles were used in the attack.

The strikes were expected as part of President Barack Obama's pledge to "degrade and destroy" IS, which has taken huge swathes of Syria and Iraq.

The US has already undertaken 190 air strikes in Iraq since August.

The group has taken control of portions of a vast area between Syria and Iraq, executed captive soldiers, aide workers and journalists, and threatened the mass killing of religious minorities in Iraq.

On Monday, Rear Adm Kirby confirmed "US military and partner nation forces" were undertaking military action in Syria but did not give details.

"Given that these operations are ongoing, we are not in a position to provide additional details at this time," he said in a statement.

Tattoos - yes or no - true stories of people who lost their jobs because of tattoos

'I lost a job because of my tattoos'

Readers have been getting in touch about their experiences of terminated job interviews, losing out on promised promotions and leaving jobs because of their tattoos.

It followed a Magazine article which asked whether discrimination against people with tattoos should be banned in the workplace.

Here are some of their stories.

'I was told I'm a bad example to children'

I'm 35 and quite heavily tattooed. I had a job as a mid-day assistant at a school. I was taken on having tattoos and facial piercings which during the winter months was fine as I was covered up, but when the summer arrived my arms were on show.

I was promptly issued with a "standards of dress" guide. It said that visible tattoos and facial piercings were not setting a good example and should be covered up. This was the first bit of communication I had received during my job.

“Start Quote

I feel sad that children grow up being taught these shallow-minded views”

Karla Valentine

Would you get a tattoo of a company logo?

I was good at my job and the children seemed to like talking about my tattoos. I did start a bit of a campaign but I didn't want to work in an environment that said because I have tattoos and a piercing I cannot do the job.

After a week or so I went to see the headmaster and resigned with immediate effect. He had called me in to have meetings with personnel over the issues I had raised, but I didn't feel I wanted to work in a place that discriminates against tattoos and piercings and I don't believe I should have to fight to justify that I'm a hard worker and a decent person.

I just feel it's sad that in 2014 we can be so discriminatory about people's choices, I feel sad that children grow up being taught these shallow-minded views. The best bit was that after a month or so of me leaving they had a school fete with a temporary tattoo stall for the children!

Karla Valentine, Suffolk, UK

'I had my working hours cut'

Sam showing her tattoo and in her old work uniform

My old boss was against body modifications because of her religious beliefs. I was constantly harassed about my piercings and tattoos.

I had hours cut after getting my tattoos, even though they aren't visible. I have both feet done as well, but always wear socks and shoes. I work in childcare and was told that even out in public I had to keep appearances up, so to keep covered, because I might see the children I looked after outside hours.

In my uniform you can't see my tattoos. As I keep it professional but I've been told that I'm unapproachable and scary with tattoos and piercings and that could lose potential clients to the business.

Sam, Brisbane, Australia

'I was told to cover up'

I have both full sleeves and my previous employer stated you had to cover all tattoos when in work hours, which I found wrong because other members of staff were allowed to wear earrings which is another form of body modification. One rule for one et al.

I now work for a company that does not discriminate against tattoos. I am currently a contract manager for a hospital. In my previous job I was an operations manager where their policies stated that all tattoos had to be covered up at all times. This included any contractor working on site.

Jef, Teddington, UK

'My job interview was terminated'

I'm a heavily tattooed 20-year-old girl. I've had very mixed reactions to my art. I find that because I'm such a young girl and have as many as I do (I lost count at 50) that people either love them and find me brave or hate me and insult me by using my tattoos as ammunition.

I've even had an employer hang up the phone on me when they found out I had tattoos.

About a year and a half ago, in 2012, I applied for a job as a waitress. It was a half telephone interview, half seeing when you're free. It was going fine. The employer started talking about the uniform. When he said it was short-sleeved, as soon as I said I had my arms tattooed, he just hung up.

I was working as a shop assistant in a mobile phone shop when a customer started screaming in my face. They had some problems with their top-up I was trying to help them with but they had bought it from another shop and I couldn't give them a refund. They completely switched.

"You've only got this job because you've got tattoos," they shouted. They were saying I was disgusting and I'd let down the company. They just really kicked off - you know, when they do that look when they tut and they spit at the same time. And then walked out of the shop, so I went round the back and cried.

I have had awards for my customer service and in that shop my manager had sleeves, my other manager had a neck tattoo.

I'm not rude or horrible. I don't do drugs or anything. I work hard, pay bills, do charity work for animals and yet they call me disgusting names for no reasons. The art I have isn't even offensive. Just cause I'm heavily tattooed doesn't mean I'm nasty, scary or stupid.

Amii Parr, Reading, UK

'I missed out on a promotion'

I was promised a promotion when I turned 18. I was waiting on this promotion from a buser - a person who buses tables, washes dishes, serves food and stocks coolers - to a server at a bar and grill for five months.

On my 18th birthday I got a half-sleeve and my boss immediately denied me the promotion he promised me even though some of my co-workers had much more visible tattoos and piercings.

I quit a month later.

He didn't say directly that it was because of my tattoo, but the comments he made toward me made it clear he didn't like it. He asked me if I was crazy for getting it and why my parents would let me do this to myself.

He also said it's very dark (I don't really know if he meant dark as in black or dark as in creepy) and that I'm better for in the kitchen rather then being a waitress.

Emily, Wisconsin, USA

Catastrophic Intern Mistakes - 6 true stories from bringing Heathrow to a standstill to calling in the FBI - great reading!

Catastrophic intern gaffes

By Maria Atanasov

(Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

There’s a steep learning curve for many interns and along the way, mistakes can — and do —happen. Most of the time, those errors are innocent and don’t amount to much more than a learning experience.

But sometimes intern gaffes can lead to major consequences.

We turned to question-and-answer site Quora to find out the most catastrophic mistakes made by an intern at a company. Here’s what respondents reported.

The deal is off

Attention to detail can make or break deals. In a bid to secure a partnership with global shipping company UPS, a team had spent a year ironing out the details. “Everyone on the team had done backbreaking research, and the lead sales roles had spent several hundred hours crafting the higher levels of what this partnership would mean for both companies and drafting it into a beautiful partnership proposal (and I mean beautiful to read and to look at),” wrote Michael Shiplet.

“And then I FedExed it to them,” he wrote. FedEx, of course, is UPS’s main competitor to ship the package. “We lost the partnership two to three business days later.”

Grounding flights

London’s Heathrow Airport is among the busiest in the world. So imagine the chaos when a student intern eating lunch inadvertently brought flight traffic to a standstill.

“We were listening to the control tower instructions and timing how long the pilots took to respond,” wrote the anonymous respondent. “My colleague left for lunch … having turned his radio onto 'broadcast' by accident. As radio is one way, it meant that no one was able to send or receive messages on the frequency that was being used to give take off permission.”

“I started to eat my lunch to discover that all departures from the airport had been brought to a standstill by someone who sounded like they were eating their lunch,” the anonymous respondent wrote of the incident that occurred 18 years ago. “The realisation that it was the sound of MY lunch being eaten hit me about 10 minutes later. I rushed over and flicked the switch to off” and flights resumed.

Whine for wine

Every year at harvest, wineries hire interns to help in the cellar, according to Ashley DuBois, who explains that wineries have to process, ferment and barrel all of the wine they plan to make in a given year within a month or two.

So when an intern driving a forklift through the cellar bumped a tank holding thousands of litres of wine ready to bottle, the damage was irreparable.

“She got a little too close to the tank door and nudged the hinge just enough to dislodge it, busting the door open and creating a very powerful explosion of wine,” DuBois wrote. “This tank was on the upper level of a cellar, so wine didn't just flood that floor, but also the cellar floor beneath it. The pressure of the wine against the door [was] too strong for any combination of people to close it.”

Accidental poor taste

A picture says a 1,000 words but the message sent isn’t always the one intended. In France last year, an intern’s photo selection for an advertisement offering a free kindergarten service caused an uproar, notesAlexandre Coninx. “The problem is that the picture used as a background [in the advertisement] is Gregory Villemin, a 4 year old child that was murdered in 1984 and made the headlines of the national media for a long time (the murder was never elucidated),” Coninx wrote.

Sending the wrong message can be devastating to employers and employees alike. Gerald Salisbury tells of one intern getting two contradictory emails from the chief executive of his firm.

The first was a copy of an email “where the CEO was [complaining] to the supervisory board about the entire division and all the people and the high wages and that he was maybe going to shut the whole thing down in the future, he just was not sure when,” he wrote.

The second email, to be forwarded to all employees on Christmas day “extended his best wishes for all employees and Happy New Year and so on.” Inadvertently, the intern sent the first email out to everyone instead of second, Salisbury wrote.

A spy among you

Don’t underestimate the prowess of an intern — or forget to double check an intern’s background thoroughly, just like any other hire.

“We often hired interns, and we treated them as equals…We didn't send them out for coffee, we immersed them in the work and rewarded them when they contributed,” wrote Jay Bazzinotti, who worked at a company that he says helped propel the internet in the early days by inventing the error-correcting modem.

One, he recalls, stood out among the bunch. “He was quick and bright, and he provided real contributions to the technology,” Bazzinotti wrote. “Then one day, the FBI swarmed down on our company. They came in fast and hard and all work came to a stop while we wondered what the hell was going on. It turned out that our intern had stolen the source code for our most precious and valuable techniques and tried to sell them to the Chinese for the pitiable sum of $50,000. Unfortunately, the Chinese he was selling them to were undercover FBI agents.”

Wedding Detective

Delhi marriage detective in high demand

By Shilpa KannanBBC News, Delhi

Jump media player

Media player help

Out of media player. Press enter to return or tab to continue.

Taralika Lahiri has been working in the private detective industry for more than 25 years

My Business

Weddings in India are big occasions - more so than in other cultures. Families save for their whole lives to pay for this one special event, which very often runs into days of celebrations with thousands of guests.

With so much invested in the extravaganza, it is common for a family to hire a private detective to check up on a prospective bride or groom before the ceremony.

And India has a wealth of pre-matrimonial detective agencies set up to check out people's past relationships, earnings and family history.

Fifty-three-year-old Taralika Lahiri joined the profession in 1987. Without any formal training, she learnt most of her skills on the job.

She then set up her own agency, National Detective & Corporate Consultants (NDCC) in 1994, with an initial investment of $5,000 (£3,000) provided by her family.

Weddings are big business in India - so families don't want any nasty surprises about a prospective spouse

In 1987 she was one of only a handful of women in the field. Now, she says, it is a popular job for a woman.

Demand for female detectives is growing mainly because women are the top clients for matrimonial investigations and they feel comfortable hiring other women to do the snooping.

Online fraudsters

Taralika started out as a one-woman operation but now employs 15 people and says business is thriving.

"One reason pre-matrimonial investigations have grown in India is because increasingly marriages are being fixed on the internet.

"Before, we all had a network of aunts who knew eligible girls and boys and would fix up their matches. Now, you could be dealing with anybody with a false profile - he or she could be in India or abroad."

Families want to be sure that the man or woman chosen for their daughter or son is genuine and not a fraudster.

Is your loved one everything they claim to be?

She recalls a case where a wealthy industrialist based in Delhi hired her to find out more about his daughter's boyfriend.

The prospective son-in-law always wore designer clothing, drove luxury cars, and arranged to meet in expensive cafes. The family grew suspicious and wanted his financial background checked out.

After weeks of following him around, Taralika's team discovered that he was a scam artist who had faked his address and hired cars to fool the girl.

Proof needed

Taralika says it can be tough to tell a young person that the bride or groom they are set on marrying is not who or what they appear to be.

It is important to collect hard evidence such as photographs and phone records to convince clients, she says.

When Taralika first started her agency, she was a one-woman operation

While pre-matrimonial enquiries dominate her portfolio, post-wedding disputes are also providing more and more business.

Divorce rates in India are on the rise. When marriage spats get ugly and head to the courts, both parties look for evidence to back up their claims, which often revolve around extramarital affairs.

Lawyers, too, often hire investigators like Taralika to get the right evidence to support their case.

"It's often a matter of reducing the alimony or getting the custody of a child, but the court wants solid evidence to prove the case," says Taralika.

Undercover filming

She cites a case where a non-resident Indian living in the US hired her to spy on his wife.

His wife had filed a case demanding a huge alimony, citing her inability to work as she was paralysed from the waist down and needed the money to take care of her kids.

The husband knew she was travelling to a wedding in Delhi and provided all the relevant details to Taralika.

So Taralika's team went undercover to the wedding venue as photographers and caterers. When the woman arrived, in typical Indian wedding style, she danced as part of the procession for the groom's party.

Taralika's team filmed the whole event and sent it as evidence to the US court dealing with the divorce. That sealed the case for the husband.

New technology has helped private detectives with their work

Costs for the agency's services vary on a case-by-case basis, but Taralika says a general pre-matrimonial investigation costs about $500.

A post-matrimonial investigation would usually be "much more" though, as you tend to have to gather more evidence.

'Intuition and hard work'

Taralika says things have improved in the profession from when she first began working as a detective.

Now there is much more technology at hand, such as high-resolution cameras with night-vision lenses, and hidden recording devices that fit on your glasses or pockets.

And with the right training, her employees can mine data from the internet to gather information from public records.

But while gadgets have made her life easier, she says that nothing beats "old-fashioned intuition and hard work".

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Nishikori from Japan beats Djokavic to become first Asian male in history to reach US Open final - pics

New Day Dawns for Nishikori

Kei Nishikori Reaches U.S. Open Final, Beating Novak Djokovic

By CHRISTOPHER CLAREYSEPT. 6, 2014

Kei Nishikori of Japan won in four sets on Saturday at the U.S. Open.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

As Kei Nishikori has kept fighting through imposing obstacles at this United States Open, his coach Michael Chang has kept reminding him, “Great effort, but the tournament is not over yet.”

It certainly is not. After fighting his way through consecutive five-set matches to earn a semifinal spot against No. 1-seeded Novak Djokovic, Nishikori extended his one-man show of resilience by upsetting Djokovic to reach the final.

His remarkable 6-4, 1-6, 7-6 (4), 6-3 victory on Saturday made him the first man from Asia to reach a Grand Slam singles final.

“It’s, I don’t know, 4 o’clock in the morning,” Nishikori, 24, said of the time in his native Japan. “But I hope a lot of people are watching.”

If they were not on Saturday, they will be soon. Nishikori, who left home at age 14 to train at the IMG Academy in Bradenton Fla., was a star in his homeland. His run here and his victory over Djokovic will take him to a new level.

“I was a little bit tight,” Nishikori said, “especially it was my first semifinal in a Grand Slam, but it’s just amazing, amazing feeling beating the No. 1 player.”

Novak Djokovic during the match Saturday at Flushing Meadow in Queens.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

In Monday’s final, Nishikori will face the winner of Saturday’s second semifinal between No. 2-seeded Roger Federer and No. 14 Marin Cilic.

The 10th-seeded Nishikori is the lowest seed to reach the final of the United States Open since Pete Sampras, who was seeded 17th when he won the title in 2002 in what turned out to be his final professional match. But Nishikori is just getting started and might well have made this kind of breakthrough earlier if not for a series of injuries, including a serious right elbow problem that required surgery in 2009 and knocked him far out of the top 100.

He has long been considered a great talent by people who have seen plenty of great talent, including Nick Bollettieri, the veteran American coach who is the instructor emeritus at the academy in Bradenton that once bore his name.

“He and Xavier Malisse and Marcelo Rios are the best shotmakers I’ve ever worked with,” Bollettieri said in an interview before this season. “If Kei Nishikori could stay healthy, he could be and would be right up with the big boys.”

Eight months later, there he was in Arthur Ashe Stadium beating the top-ranked player in the world. Nishikori had played Djokovic twice before; losing in the second round of the French Open in straight sets in 2010, and upsetting him in 2011 near the end of Djokovic’s finest season in the semifinals of the indoor tournament in Basel, Switzerland.

But this was certainly a much grander stage than Basel, and what made his victory all the more remarkable was that Nishikori had spent nearly three and a half hours longer on court in this tournament than Djokovic coming into this semifinal.

Nishikori needed five sets and more than four hours to beat fifth-seeded Milos Raonic in a fourth round that ended at 2:26 a.m. Tuesday. He did not get to bed until close to 6 that morning but then bounced back on Wednesday to upset third-seeded Stan Wawrinka, the reigning Australian Open champion, in five sets.

“Before he played Stan, I was more concerned that he would still be focusing on the Raonic match,” Chang said. “So I was like constantly telling him, ‘Hey you’ve got another match here to play, another match, another match.’ Because that tends to be the struggle with players that have a big win and then a letdown following that.”

Chang, the American who shocked the tennis world to win the 1989 French Open at age 17, began coaching Nishikori this season, joining a team that included his coach Dante Bottini and the fitness trainer Hiroto Kon.

“He’s been helping me a lot,” Nishikori said of Chang. “Him and Dante communicating a lot, and it’s been working super well, so that’s why I’m here.”