Controversial leader – who has endorsed extrajudicial executions of drug offenders – says he killed to show police officers ‘if I can do it, why can’t you?’
The Joy of Trump
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte personally killed criminals
Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte says he personally killed criminals
Controversial leader – who has endorsed extrajudicial executions of drug offenders – says he killed to show police officers ‘if I can do it, why can’t you?’
Rodrigo Duterte has announced he personally killed suspected criminals when he was mayor of his home city of Davao in the Philippines, cruising the streets on a motorcycle and “looking for trouble”.
The country’s president made the comments in a speech late on Monday night as he discussed his campaign to eradicate illegal drugs, which has seen police and unknown assailants kill around 5,000 people since he became president on 30 June.
“In Davao I used to do it personally. Just to show to the guys [police officers] that if I can do it, why can’t you,” he was quoted as saying by AFP, talking of his two decades as mayor of the southern city of 1.5 million people.
“And I’d go around in Davao with a motorcycle, with a big bike around, and I would just patrol the streets, looking for trouble also.
“I was really looking for a confrontation so I could kill.”
The former mayor was nicknamed “Duterte Harry”, after the fictional and ruthless police inspector played by Clint Eastwood, for his support for vigilante death squads that killed hundreds of suspected criminals.
Duterte previously has both denied and acknowledged his involvement in the Davao death squads.
Since taking his bloody anti-crime campaign to the nation level, he has been criticised by the United States and United Nations, whose concerns have drawn only angry rebukes.
“If they say that I am to stop because of the human rights and guys … including Obama, sorry, I am not about to do that,” Duterte said in English during his speech at the presidential palace this week.
Duterte has a better relationship with US president-elect Donald Trump, who he said had praised his war on drugs during a phone call this month. This was not confirmed by Trump’s team.
As president Duterte has publicly encouraged civilians to kill drug addicts and said he will not prosecute police for extrajudicial executions. But he has also said he and his security forces will not break the law.
In October Duterte compared himself to Adolf Hitler and said he would be “happy to slaughter” three million drug addicts.
Since his election, police have reported killing 2,086 people in anti-drug operations. More than 3,000 others have been killed in unexplained circumstances, according to official figures.
Often masked assailants break into homes and kill people who have been tagged as drug traffickers or drug users. Human rights groups have warned of a breakdown in the rule of law with police and hired assassins operating with impunity.
A report by the Guardian in October cited a senior officer in the police force who claimed he led one of 10 special operations teams, each with 16 members, tasked with killing suspected drug users, dealers and criminals.
The officer claimed the hit squads are composed of active police officers and that the murders are conducted in such a way as to make them appear to be perpetrated by “vigilantes” to deliberately obscure police involvement and preclude investigation.
The report was later denied by the chief of police. Duterte has insisted police are killing only in self-defence while gangsters are murdering the other victims.
But he has also said he will not allow any police officers to go to jail if they are found guilty of murder in prosecuting his war on crime.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
https://www.theguardian.com/
One Stolen Gun's Path of Destruction in Chicago
A Glock used in five shootings that killed two people sits at the Homan Square police facility June 9, 2016, in Chicago.
(Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)
One gun's journey — 42 bullets fired, 2 killed, 5 wounded
Gun Stolen from legal owner...
The story of the Glock's journey from safe to shoebox comes at a tumultuous time for Chicago as homicides spike to levels unseen in the city for two decades. Chicago police say the proliferation of guns plays a key role in the seemingly endless cycle of violence, particularly in impoverished pockets of the South and West sides.
As police battle the glut of firearms, the Glock illustrates the devastation — both human and financial — that a single gun can leave behind.
The Glock was what police call a gang gun, passed among its members as needed. Its devastation — unusual for one firearm in a year's time — was spread over a significant stretch of the South Side.
Guns get to Chicago in many ways.
In so-called straw purchases, those with a firearm owner's identification card can carve out a niche business buying guns in Illinois for felons barred from owning weapons because of their criminal records. Another option lies a few miles away over the border in Indiana, where gun shows require no background checks.
A study in 2015 by the University of Chicago Crime Lab found 60 percent of the newer guns recovered from gang members had come from out of state — half of those from Indiana. In separate interviews done at Cook County Jail, gun offenders said gangs sometimes tapped members to make buying trips.
"All they need is one person who got a gun card in the 'hood and everybody got (a gun)," the study quoted one inmate as saying.
For now, the Glock's journey has ended at the Homan Square police facility on the city's West Side. Sealed in a Manila envelope, it is stored on a metal shelf in the department's mammoth gun vault, a secure, fenced-in area that includes tens of thousands of guns taken off the street by police over the years.
Read More @ Source:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-chicago-violence-gang-gun-met-20161007-story.html
Monday, October 31, 2016
Monday, June 20, 2016
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Wax sculpture of Hitler on his knees sells for $17.2million
Consider a diamond-encrusted
platinum skull by artist Damien Hirst has been sold to an investment
group for the asking price of $100 million, a spokeswoman for Hirst's
London gallery White Cube said on Thursday.
The skull, cast from a 35-year-old 18th century European man but retaining the original teeth, is coated with 8,601 diamonds, including a large pink diamond worth more than four million pounds in the centre of its forehead.
The skull, cast from a 35-year-old 18th century European man but retaining the original teeth, is coated with 8,601 diamonds, including a large pink diamond worth more than four million pounds in the centre of its forehead.
Maurizio Cattelan's wax and resin sculpture of a diminutive Hitler on his knees is titled 'Him'
- The artwork, completed in 2001, fetched $17.2million at Christie's auction
- Cattelan, known as the art world's resident prankster, has created sculptures of historical figures like JFK and Pope John Paul II
- His fully-functional toilet cast in solid gold will be installed in Guggenheim bathroom this summer
A
statue of Hitler on his knees was auctioned for a record-setting $17.2
million on Sunday, the most for any work by Italian art world prankster
Maurizio Cattelan.
The
wax and resin statue titled Him, called 'one of the most shocking and
disquieting works of art to have emerged in the post-war era', had been
expected to fetch between $10million and $15million at the Christie's
auction in New York's Rockefeller Plaza.
The
previous record for a work by 55-year-old Cattelan was $7.9 million for
a statue featuring a wax statue of himself peeping out of a hole in the
floor.
The artwork 'Him', depicting Hitler on his
knees in prayer, fetched $17.2million today at a Christie's auction in
midtown New York. It is artist Maurizio Cattelan's most expensive work
thus far
Him, which
was completed in 2001, disrupts the viewer's expectations with its
size. From behind, the statue appears to be that of a young boy praying,
while the all too recognizable face creates an unsettling contrast
Him, which was completed in 2001, disrupts the viewer's expectations with its size.
From
behind, the statue appears to be that of a young boy praying, while the
all too recognizable face creates an unsettling contrast.
Cattelan,
who considered destroying the piece of work several times, said:
'Hitler is pure fear; it’s an image of terrible pain. It even hurts to
pronounce his name. And yet that name has conquered my memory, it lives
in my head, even if it remains taboo.
'Hitler
is everywhere, haunting the specter of history; and yet he is
unmentionable, irreproducible, wrapped in a blanket of silence.
'I’m
not trying to offend anyone. I don’t want to raise a new conflict or
create some publicity; I would just like that image to become a
territory for negotiation or a test for our psychoses.’
The
statue sparked controversy in 2012 when it was installed in a former
Warsaw ghetto, where thousands of Jews died under Nazi rule.
Some
accused the work of belittling the suffering of Jewish victims, while
others saw the piece as a reflection on evil and its many forms.
Maurizio Cattelan (pictured) is known as the art world's resident prankster and provocateur
The
controversial artist is known for taking on big names such as John F.
Kennedy, cast in one sculpture lying in a coffin, while the famous La
Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) shows Pope John Paul II being crushed by a
meteor.
But Cattelan shrugs off claims he is a provocateur, saying: 'I actually think that reality is far more provocative than my art.
'I just take it; I’m always borrowing pieces — crumbs really — of everyday reality.
'If you think my work is provocative, it means that reality is extremely provocative, and we just don’t react to it.
'Maybe we no longer pay attention to the way we live in the world… We are anesthetized.’
Cattelan
declared he would retire after his landmark 2011 retrospective at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York, where his work was strung from the
ceiling into the atrium, leaving the galleries empty.
The
55-year-old made headline news in late April after it was revealed a
new site-specific work would be installed at the museum.
Titled
America, Cattelan will be installing a fully functional toilet, cast in
solid gold, at the Guggenheim for the use of its patrons.
He is known for taking
on big names such as John F. Kennedy and Pope John Paul II. Pictured,
his Guggenheim retrospective in 2011, which left the galleries empty as
his work hung from the ceiling
Civilian access to military-style weapons.
Sales spike but Colt is in bankruptcy???
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Robert Lewis <buddhha4@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 4:48 AM
Subject: Grenade Launcher?
To: Robert Lewis <buddhha4@gmail.com>
From: Robert Lewis <buddhha4@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 4:48 AM
Subject: Grenade Launcher?
To: Robert Lewis <buddhha4@gmail.com>
Wait for one of these home grown crazies to get some g's
Javier Zarracina/Vox
Don't tread on my rights...
The AR-15, a trademark owned by Colt but applied to wide range of near-identical guns from different manufacturers, is a civilian version of the M16, a weapon designed for military combat in Vietnam. It's very difficult for civilians to own an M16. The gun can shoot up to three bullets in a single burst, and older versions were fully automatic, meaning they keep firing as long as you hold the trigger. As such, the gun is strictly regulated by the National Firearms Act, the 1934 law that restricted the possession of machine guns. The AR-15, though, is semiautomatic — you have to pull the trigger for each bullet — and so has no such restrictions.
Since 2009, gun manufacturers have preferred to call these guns “modern sporting rifles,” a name that conjures up hunters in the woods rather than soldiers shooting at the enemy. But even enthusiasts agree that the AR-15 doesn’t shine while hunting. It’s better at killing people than it is animals.
So there’s another name for AR-15s and guns like them:
assault weapons. While exact definitions of the term vary, it typically
means a military-style weapon adapted for civilian use, with
modifications that can make it more lethal. This graphic shows some of
those modifications:
And since the federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004, AR-15-style rifles and similar guns, including the gun that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen used, have become astronomically popular.
As Congress debated the assault weapons ban in 1993, production of assault rifles soared, according to a 2004 report from the University of Pennsylvania:
Even while the ban was in effect, barring the production
of certain kinds of assault weapons, gun manufacturers got around it by
creating new “postban” models of guns that went by different names.
Olympic Arms began selling a version known as the PCR — “politically correct rifle” — that lacked a threaded barrel and a bayonet lug, two of the features Congress objected to. Colt stopped making the AR-15, but it made the Colt Match Target, which looks pretty similar.
This has happened at the state level, too: California has an assault weapons ban, but entrepreneurial gun manufacturers have found ways to modify the AR-15 to get around it.
The 1994 assault weapons ban banned the AR-15 by name, including identical versions made by other manufacturers. So as calls to ban the AR-15 intensified this week, some gun defenders argued that the Sig Sauer MCX that Mateen used wasn't an AR-15 at all due to slight technical differences. (Orlando’s police chief, John Mina, initially described the weapon as an AR-15. Reviews of the gun from before the Orlando shooting often compare it to AR-15-style weapons but also highlight the ways in which it differs from standard AR-15s, such as firing several calibers of bullets.)
That's unlikely to convince anyone whose real concern is civilian access to military-style weapons. But when it comes to writing precise legislation, those differences matter, which is one reason the movement to protect guns has seized on them.
But sales didn't really take off for four more years, until President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, when gun sales of all kinds began to soar.
Smith and Wesson manufactured nearly 10 times as many M+P15s, its AR-15 equivalent, in 2008 than in 2006. Their output tripled again in the next year. By December 2012, when the AR-15 became the focus of a debate after the Newtown shootings, there were about 3.8 million AR-15s in circulation in the US, Slate’s Justin Peters estimated.
Then, for a brief moment after the Newtown shootings, additional gun control in the US seemed possible. Obama called for new gun control legislation, including a renewal of the federal assault weapons ban. Connecticut, New York, and Maryland expanded their own state bans.
And sales of AR-15s went nuts. Retail stores doubled or tripled prices in the first months of 2013, finding that desperate gun owners, worried the weapons would be banned, would pay.
The more popular the guns get, the harder it becomes to actually ban them. There are so many AR-15s now owned in the US that gun aficionados argued in summer 2013 that the market was saturated. That means that if a new assault weapons ban, like the 1994 version, grandfathered in guns that people already owned, there would still be millions of AR-15s available in the US. A buyback could get some of those guns off the street, but it would also be expensive.
Still, AR-15 owners are still outnumbered. Assault rifles are a tiny slice of the more than 300 million guns in circulation in the US. The majority of Americans don’t own guns at all, and the majority of Americans favor stricter gun laws.
But the rush to buy AR-15s every time a politician mentions gun control illustrates why the National Rifle Association has so much political clout. Its 5 million members care deeply about their guns, a combination of campaign money, political power, and a single focus that gun control supporters don't have.
Assault rifles aren’t the only weapon of choice in mass
shootings: The Virginia Tech and Charleston mass shootings were tragic
and traumatizing, and the shooters in each only used handguns. But they
get special attention both because those weapons formerly were banned
and because the number of mass shootings appears to have risen since the
assault weapons ban expired.
Between 1984 and 1993, according to the 2004 University of Pennsylvania study on the assault weapons ban, there were 15 mass shootings that killed at least six people or wounded at least 12. Assault weapons were used in only six of these shootings, but those shootings killed and injured more people than the other nine combined.
Mother Jones, which tracks mass shootings that meet specific criteria, counts 46 mass shootings since 2004, when the assault weapons ban expired. Of those 46 shootings, 14 featured assault rifles, including Newtown, Aurora, and San Bernardino.
And assault rifles appear to be becoming more popular among mass shooters. In 2015, five of the seven mass shootings Mother Jones logged featured a shooter carrying an assault rifle.
In the wake of Newtown, a few states did tighten their gun laws, including bans on AR-15s. The Supreme Court might soon have to weigh in on whether those bans are constitutional.
A case against Maryland’s assault weapons ban is making its way through the courts, and in the most recent development, the Fourth Circuit sent that case, Kolbe v. Hogan, back for stricter review at the trial court level. Two conservative justices seemed very skeptical that banning the AR-15 was constitutional.
The reason the Fourth Circuit judges cited was from District of Columbia v. Heller — the 2008 decision that found a constitutional right to own a handgun for self-defense — which included a line saying that, constitutionally, “dangerous and unusual” weapons could still be prohibited.
The AR-15 is certainly dangerous. But it isn’t necessarily unusual. If there were nearly 4 million AR-15s in the hands of American gun owners in 2012, before the Sandy Hook-induced panic, there are almost certainly more now. The specter of a federal ban could make them more popular still.
So the AR-15 is caught in a cycle. The more it’s used in high-profile mass shooting cases, the more people want to ban it. The more people want to ban it, the more AR-15s are sold. And the more AR-15s are sold, the harder it becomes to create a ban that would be able to stop the next tragedy.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the year the National Firearms Act was passed.
Javier Zarracina/VoxThe AR-15 is a military-style rifle that civilians can use
Don't tread on my rights...The AR-15, a trademark owned by Colt but applied to wide range of near-identical guns from different manufacturers, is a civilian version of the M16, a weapon designed for military combat in Vietnam. It's very difficult for civilians to own an M16. The gun can shoot up to three bullets in a single burst, and older versions were fully automatic, meaning they keep firing as long as you hold the trigger. As such, the gun is strictly regulated by the National Firearms Act, the 1934 law that restricted the possession of machine guns. The AR-15, though, is semiautomatic — you have to pull the trigger for each bullet — and so has no such restrictions.
Since 2009, gun manufacturers have preferred to call these guns “modern sporting rifles,” a name that conjures up hunters in the woods rather than soldiers shooting at the enemy. But even enthusiasts agree that the AR-15 doesn’t shine while hunting. It’s better at killing people than it is animals.
And since the federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004, AR-15-style rifles and similar guns, including the gun that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen used, have become astronomically popular.
The more you try to ban the AR-15, the more popular it gets
The federal assault weapons ban, which went into effect in 1994, banned the sale of AR-15-style guns and high-capacity magazines. It was the first example of a phenomenon that’s driven the AR-15’s popularity for two decades: The more gun owners fear their guns will be taken away, the more assault rifles they want to own.As Congress debated the assault weapons ban in 1993, production of assault rifles soared, according to a 2004 report from the University of Pennsylvania:
Even while the ban was in effect, barring the production
of certain kinds of assault weapons, gun manufacturers got around it by
creating new “postban” models of guns that went by different names. Olympic Arms began selling a version known as the PCR — “politically correct rifle” — that lacked a threaded barrel and a bayonet lug, two of the features Congress objected to. Colt stopped making the AR-15, but it made the Colt Match Target, which looks pretty similar.
This has happened at the state level, too: California has an assault weapons ban, but entrepreneurial gun manufacturers have found ways to modify the AR-15 to get around it.
The 1994 assault weapons ban banned the AR-15 by name, including identical versions made by other manufacturers. So as calls to ban the AR-15 intensified this week, some gun defenders argued that the Sig Sauer MCX that Mateen used wasn't an AR-15 at all due to slight technical differences. (Orlando’s police chief, John Mina, initially described the weapon as an AR-15. Reviews of the gun from before the Orlando shooting often compare it to AR-15-style weapons but also highlight the ways in which it differs from standard AR-15s, such as firing several calibers of bullets.)
That's unlikely to convince anyone whose real concern is civilian access to military-style weapons. But when it comes to writing precise legislation, those differences matter, which is one reason the movement to protect guns has seized on them.
Obama’s election made the AR-15 and other assault weapons a lot more popular
Gun manufacturers started making more AR-15s again after the assault weapons ban expired. They became more popular as part of a trend for military-style weapons, in part because they’re endlessly customizable.But sales didn't really take off for four more years, until President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, when gun sales of all kinds began to soar.
Smith and Wesson manufactured nearly 10 times as many M+P15s, its AR-15 equivalent, in 2008 than in 2006. Their output tripled again in the next year. By December 2012, when the AR-15 became the focus of a debate after the Newtown shootings, there were about 3.8 million AR-15s in circulation in the US, Slate’s Justin Peters estimated.
Then, for a brief moment after the Newtown shootings, additional gun control in the US seemed possible. Obama called for new gun control legislation, including a renewal of the federal assault weapons ban. Connecticut, New York, and Maryland expanded their own state bans.
And sales of AR-15s went nuts. Retail stores doubled or tripled prices in the first months of 2013, finding that desperate gun owners, worried the weapons would be banned, would pay.
The more popular the guns get, the harder it becomes to actually ban them. There are so many AR-15s now owned in the US that gun aficionados argued in summer 2013 that the market was saturated. That means that if a new assault weapons ban, like the 1994 version, grandfathered in guns that people already owned, there would still be millions of AR-15s available in the US. A buyback could get some of those guns off the street, but it would also be expensive.
Still, AR-15 owners are still outnumbered. Assault rifles are a tiny slice of the more than 300 million guns in circulation in the US. The majority of Americans don’t own guns at all, and the majority of Americans favor stricter gun laws.
But the rush to buy AR-15s every time a politician mentions gun control illustrates why the National Rifle Association has so much political clout. Its 5 million members care deeply about their guns, a combination of campaign money, political power, and a single focus that gun control supporters don't have.
The other hurdle to banning AR-15s: the Supreme Court
Between 1984 and 1993, according to the 2004 University of Pennsylvania study on the assault weapons ban, there were 15 mass shootings that killed at least six people or wounded at least 12. Assault weapons were used in only six of these shootings, but those shootings killed and injured more people than the other nine combined.
Mother Jones, which tracks mass shootings that meet specific criteria, counts 46 mass shootings since 2004, when the assault weapons ban expired. Of those 46 shootings, 14 featured assault rifles, including Newtown, Aurora, and San Bernardino.
And assault rifles appear to be becoming more popular among mass shooters. In 2015, five of the seven mass shootings Mother Jones logged featured a shooter carrying an assault rifle.
In the wake of Newtown, a few states did tighten their gun laws, including bans on AR-15s. The Supreme Court might soon have to weigh in on whether those bans are constitutional.
A case against Maryland’s assault weapons ban is making its way through the courts, and in the most recent development, the Fourth Circuit sent that case, Kolbe v. Hogan, back for stricter review at the trial court level. Two conservative justices seemed very skeptical that banning the AR-15 was constitutional.
The reason the Fourth Circuit judges cited was from District of Columbia v. Heller — the 2008 decision that found a constitutional right to own a handgun for self-defense — which included a line saying that, constitutionally, “dangerous and unusual” weapons could still be prohibited.
The AR-15 is certainly dangerous. But it isn’t necessarily unusual. If there were nearly 4 million AR-15s in the hands of American gun owners in 2012, before the Sandy Hook-induced panic, there are almost certainly more now. The specter of a federal ban could make them more popular still.
So the AR-15 is caught in a cycle. The more it’s used in high-profile mass shooting cases, the more people want to ban it. The more people want to ban it, the more AR-15s are sold. And the more AR-15s are sold, the harder it becomes to create a ban that would be able to stop the next tragedy.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the year the National Firearms Act was passed.
-
- It took a newspaper columnist 7 minutes to buy an AR-15
- Donald Trump just outlined a plan to profit personally off a Trump administration
Friday, March 11, 2016
"What’s going on in Syria is collective, multilateral madness"
x 
Middle East Eye @MiddleEastEye 24 Nov 2015
"What’s going on in Syria is collective, multilateral madness," writes @DavidaHearst http://ow.ly/V1Bkl pic.twitter.com/WsrRGTHjfe
Middle East Eye @MiddleEastEye 24 Nov 2015 "What’s going on in Syria is collective, multilateral madness," writes @DavidaHearst http://ow.ly/V1Bkl pic.twitter.com/WsrRGTHjfe
Thursday, March 3, 2016
“Frankfurt School” philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the godfather of cultural Marxism
Keynesian Claptrap—— Why The State Is Waging War On Savers And Cash
by Claudio Grass •
Photo via cronachelodigiane.net
“Frankfurt School” philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the godfather of cultural Marxism
Link: http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/keynesian-claptrap-why-the-state-is-waging-war-on-savers-and-cash/
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
New Canadians no longer have to intend to live in Canada
Buy a house in Vancouver and return to China to make more money...this isn't going to help address the housing affordiblity crisis in Vancouver ....
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 02 March, 2016, 5:26am
Dragon dancers perform during a Chinese New Year Parade through Vancouver’s Chinatown on February 16. Photo: Xinhu
But the amendments also carry huge implications for anyone who simply heads back to their country of origin after obtaining a Canadian passport. This modern phenomenon of reverse migration is one that has been thoroughly embraced by tens of thousands Hong Kong and mainland Chinese immigrants alike, to varying degrees of legality.
The changes, for the most part, put things back the way they were in 2014.
The proposed amendments to the Citizenship Act, unveiled last Thursday, remove the requirement that new citizens must intend to live in Canada after obtaining citizenship. According to the government, the intent-to-reside provision “created concern among some new Canadians, who feared their citizenship could be revoked in the future if they moved outside of Canada”.
[Previously,] citizenship was harder to obtain and easier to lose; now it’s easier to obtain and much harder to lose
Immigration lawyer Richard Kurland
The proposals also shorten the period of physical presence required of new citizens to three years (1,095 days) out of the previous five, compared to four years out of six under the Tories; allow periods of non-permanent presence in Canada – for instance, time spent as a student, temporary worker or even a visitor – to be credited among those three years (albeit up to a maximum of one years’ credit, with each full day of non-permanent residency counting as half a day); and shrink the age band for applicants who must pass language tests, from 18-54, compared to 14-64 previously.
Canadian income-tax-filing requirements have been retained, although reduced to three years out of the five years prior to seeking citizenship, in keeping with the new residency rule. In a further supplemental move required as a result of the new non-permanent-resident time credit, a rule requiring 183 days of presence in Canada in four out of six years is also scrapped.
“The government is keeping its commitment to repeal certain provisions of the Citizenship Act, including those that led to different treatment for dual citizens. Canadian citizens are equal under the law. Whether they were born in Canada or were naturalised in Canada or hold a dual citizenship,” Immigration Minister John McCallum said in a statement.
Removing the intent-to-reside-in-Canada rule represents a major switch in thinking, although actual enforcement of rules about intent has been patchy at best. For instance, Quebec’s Immigrant Investor Programme for millionaire permanent residents requires a stated intent to live in the French-speaking province - but that hasn’t stopped about 90 per cent of QIIP applicants from moving elsewhere in Canada (mainly Vancouver). It’s hard to prove false intent at the time a residency statement is made, and the Canadian Charter guarantees freedom of movement.
Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland said he supported the changes, which represented “a total reversal” from the approach of the Tories, under whom “citizenship was harder to obtain and easier to lose; now it’s easier to obtain and much harder to lose”.
The removal of the intent-to-reside provision was “hands down, slam-dunk” the most significant change, Kurland said. He said the previous “exposure to revocation” of citizenship under the intent rule would have “hung over [new citizens’] heads, forever”.
This article is from the South China Morning Post - International edition
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 02 March, 2016, 5:26am
UPDATED : Wednesday, 02 March, 2016, 3:24pm
Citizenship revamp: New Canadians no longer have to intend to live in Canada
Trudeau
government’s ‘total reversal’ of Tory policy also slashes residency
requirements and gives credit for time spent as visitors or students
BIO
Ian
Young is the SCMP's former International Editor. A journalist for more
than 20 years, he worked for Australian newspapers and the London
Evening Standard before arriving in Hong Kong in 1997. There he won or
shared awards for excellence in investigative reporting and human rights
reporting, and the HK News Awards Scoop of the Year. He moved to
Canada with his wife in 2010 and is now the SCMP's Vancouver
correspondent.
Dragon dancers perform during a Chinese New Year Parade through Vancouver’s Chinatown on February 16. Photo: Xinhu
When Canada’s new Liberal government last week unveiled its sweeping rollback of the ousted Conservatives’ citizenship crackdown, much of the focus was on the decision to remove terrorism as grounds for revoking dual citizenship.
But the amendments also carry huge implications for anyone who simply heads back to their country of origin after obtaining a Canadian passport. This modern phenomenon of reverse migration is one that has been thoroughly embraced by tens of thousands Hong Kong and mainland Chinese immigrants alike, to varying degrees of legality.
The changes, for the most part, put things back the way they were in 2014.
Canada's Immigration Minister John McCallum says dual citizens should be treated no differently than native-born sole-citizenship Canadians. Photo: Reuters
The proposed amendments to the Citizenship Act, unveiled last Thursday, remove the requirement that new citizens must intend to live in Canada after obtaining citizenship. According to the government, the intent-to-reside provision “created concern among some new Canadians, who feared their citizenship could be revoked in the future if they moved outside of Canada”.
[Previously,] citizenship was harder to obtain and easier to lose; now it’s easier to obtain and much harder to lose
Immigration lawyer Richard Kurland
The proposals also shorten the period of physical presence required of new citizens to three years (1,095 days) out of the previous five, compared to four years out of six under the Tories; allow periods of non-permanent presence in Canada – for instance, time spent as a student, temporary worker or even a visitor – to be credited among those three years (albeit up to a maximum of one years’ credit, with each full day of non-permanent residency counting as half a day); and shrink the age band for applicants who must pass language tests, from 18-54, compared to 14-64 previously.
Canadian income-tax-filing requirements have been retained, although reduced to three years out of the five years prior to seeking citizenship, in keeping with the new residency rule. In a further supplemental move required as a result of the new non-permanent-resident time credit, a rule requiring 183 days of presence in Canada in four out of six years is also scrapped.
Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland
“The government is keeping its commitment to repeal certain provisions of the Citizenship Act, including those that led to different treatment for dual citizens. Canadian citizens are equal under the law. Whether they were born in Canada or were naturalised in Canada or hold a dual citizenship,” Immigration Minister John McCallum said in a statement.
Removing the intent-to-reside-in-Canada rule represents a major switch in thinking, although actual enforcement of rules about intent has been patchy at best. For instance, Quebec’s Immigrant Investor Programme for millionaire permanent residents requires a stated intent to live in the French-speaking province - but that hasn’t stopped about 90 per cent of QIIP applicants from moving elsewhere in Canada (mainly Vancouver). It’s hard to prove false intent at the time a residency statement is made, and the Canadian Charter guarantees freedom of movement.
Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland said he supported the changes, which represented “a total reversal” from the approach of the Tories, under whom “citizenship was harder to obtain and easier to lose; now it’s easier to obtain and much harder to lose”.
The removal of the intent-to-reside provision was “hands down, slam-dunk” the most significant change, Kurland said. He said the previous “exposure to revocation” of citizenship under the intent rule would have “hung over [new citizens’] heads, forever”.
A Canadian passport has become “easier to obtain and much harder to lose” under new rules, according to immigration lawyer Richard Kurland.
“It’s the difference between sleeping soundly … [versus] knowing that at some day in the future, over decades to come, the state may intrude on your life and decide that you did not have the intent to be Canadian,” he said.
Kurland had lobbied the previous Tory government of prime minister Stephen Harper to introduce the pre-citizenship tax-filing requirement, and he said he was happy to see it retained under the Liberals’ Justin Trudeau as a “non-partisan” policy element.
There are estimated to be almost 300,000 existing Canadian citizens in Hong Kong, most of them returnee immigrants whose decision to head back to the SAR is perfectly legal and will remain so under the new rules.
Yet illegally evading Canada’s pre-citizenship residency requirements has become an industry that caters to some sectors of the wealthy Chinese community. The biggest immigration fraud in Canadian history involved Xun “Sunny” Wang, a Vancouver-area immigration consultant who specialised in helping rich Chinese fake their presence in Canada as permanent residents, in order to later obtain citizenship. Wang’s clients were actually living and working China, but had him doctor their passports and forge various documents to create the illusion that they were in Canada instead. Jailed in October for seven years, Wang helped cheat immigration rules for at least 1,200 clients, who paid him C$10million in the process.
*The Hongcouver blog is devoted to the hybrid culture of its namesake cities: Hong Kong and Vancouver. All story ideas and comments are welcome. Connect with me by email ian.young@scmp.com or on Twitter, @ianjamesyoung70 .
Source: http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1919566/citizenship-revamp-new-canadians-no-longer-have-intend-live-canada?utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=SCMPSocialNewsfeed
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“It’s the difference between sleeping soundly … [versus] knowing that at some day in the future, over decades to come, the state may intrude on your life and decide that you did not have the intent to be Canadian,” he said.
Kurland had lobbied the previous Tory government of prime minister Stephen Harper to introduce the pre-citizenship tax-filing requirement, and he said he was happy to see it retained under the Liberals’ Justin Trudeau as a “non-partisan” policy element.
There are estimated to be almost 300,000 existing Canadian citizens in Hong Kong, most of them returnee immigrants whose decision to head back to the SAR is perfectly legal and will remain so under the new rules.
Yet illegally evading Canada’s pre-citizenship residency requirements has become an industry that caters to some sectors of the wealthy Chinese community. The biggest immigration fraud in Canadian history involved Xun “Sunny” Wang, a Vancouver-area immigration consultant who specialised in helping rich Chinese fake their presence in Canada as permanent residents, in order to later obtain citizenship. Wang’s clients were actually living and working China, but had him doctor their passports and forge various documents to create the illusion that they were in Canada instead. Jailed in October for seven years, Wang helped cheat immigration rules for at least 1,200 clients, who paid him C$10million in the process.
*The Hongcouver blog is devoted to the hybrid culture of its namesake cities: Hong Kong and Vancouver. All story ideas and comments are welcome. Connect with me by email ian.young@scmp.com or on Twitter, @ianjamesyoung70 .
Source: http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1919566/citizenship-revamp-new-canadians-no-longer-have-intend-live-canada?utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=SCMPSocialNewsfeed
Related topics
Hongcouver
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Vancouver’s new property player has deep pockets - and a rich Chinese communist pedigree
24 Feb 2016 - 3:30am
‘Stand Up To China’ campaign pits Vancouver activism against Beijing’s oil ambitions
18 Feb 2016 - 6:13am
Broker behind Vancouver real estate ‘crowdfunding’ website says it was a mistake
12 Feb 2016 - 8:55am
Studying ‘foreign ownership’ in Vancouver won’t explain why this mossy hovel costs C$2.4million
3 Feb 2016 - 5:57am
‘Crowdfunders’ are targeting Vancouver real estate, tapping investors in Chinese community
21 Jan 2016 - 6:32am
Friday, February 26, 2016
Sunday, February 21, 2016
A Sense of Wonder
“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man”
- Albert Einstein
Saturday, February 13, 2016
A brief history of gravity, gravitational waves - Albert Einsein
A brief history of gravity, gravitational waves and #LIGO: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/02/11/a-brief-history-of-gravity/ …
Thursday, February 11, 2016
The Little-Known Recording Trick That Makes Singers Sound Perfect
Put on a Taylor Swift or Mariah Carey or Michael Jackson song
and listen to the vocals. You may think the track was recorded by the
artist singing the song through a few times and the producer choosing
the best take to use on the record. But that’s almost never the case.
The reality is far less romantic. Listen to almost any contemporary pop or rock record and there’s a very good chance the vocals were “comped.” This is when the producer or sound engineer combs through several takes of the vocal track and cherry-picks the best phrases, words, or even syllables of each recording, then stitches them together into one flawless “composite” master track.
Though it’s unknown to most listeners, comping’s been standard practice in the recording industry for decades. Everyone does it—“even the best best best best singers,” says producer and mix engineer Ken Lewis, who’s comped vocals for Mary J Blige, Usher, David Byrne, Lenny Kravitz, Ludacris, Soul Asylum, Diana Ross, and Queen Latifah.
But surely cobbling together a song this way must sound disjointed, robotic, devoid of personality, right? That’s certainly what I thought when I first learned about the practice. And while it’s true that vocal comping is used heavily in pop music where the intention is usually to sound smooth and polished rather than honest and gritty, most producers will tell you that this piecemeal approach is the best way to get a superb recording from any vocalist.
“This is the epitome of all that is unglamorous in music, but very necessary for the best possible presentation of the most important element in the mix,” wrote music producer Frank Gryner in Recording Magazine. He’s recorded the likes of Rob Zombie and Tommy Lee. “I’ve yet to work on a major-label record that didn’t involve vocal comping to arrive at the finished product.”
The process works like this: A singer records the song through a handful of times in the studio, either from start to finish or isolating particularly tricky spots. Starting with between 4-10 takes is typical—too many passes can drain the artist’s energy and confidence and also bog down the editing process later. (That said, it’s sometimes much more. Christina Aguilera’s song “Here to Stay” was compiled from 100 different takes. “She sat on the stool and sang the song for six hours until it was done—didn't leave the booth once and didn't make a single phone call,” engineer Ben Allen said in an interview with Tape Op magazine.)
The engineer generally follows along during the studio recording with a lyric sheet and jots down notes to use as a guide for later, marking whether a phrase was very good, good, bad, sharp or flat, and so on.
When the session’s over, they listen closely to each section of
each take, playing the line back on loop with the volume jacked up twice
as high as it will be in the final mix. They’re listening to make sure
the singer’s on pitch, of course, but that’s not necessarily the primary
measure of what makes the final cut.
Timing, tone, attitude, emotion, personality, and how each phrase or word fits in context with the other instruments and the rest of the vocal track can trump pitch perfection. Those little quirky gems add character and emotion to the track—they’re what the listener remembers.
The recording engineer picks out the best take for each bit of the song and edits all the pieces together, usually in a digital audio workstation (DAW) like Pro Tools.
“Often, I’ll have a three-syllable word in the middle of a line, and I’ll use the first syllable from take 3, the second syllable from take 7, and the third syllable from take 10," Lewis writes in a blog post. “Not kidding.”
Most programs today let you input multiple files within an audio track, so you can simply drag and drop the portion you want from each take into the master track.
“It’s rare that you hear a really bad vocal comp,” says says recording engineer Mike Senior, a columnist for Sound on Sound and author of Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio. But that’s often because the edits are obscured by the other instruments in the track.
About 20 seconds into Aguilera’s “Genie in the Bottle” is a really clunky edit, but you can’t hear it in the song because it’s tucked behind a big heavy drum beat, says Senior. “If you think how many drum beats typically occur in a mainstream song, you can think how many places you can edit without it being heard.”
Listen closely to Adele’s hit “Someone Like You” and you can hear that in the first couple verses the opening breath is missing—there’s just no breath on that phrase, he points out. You can also hear some background noise on the mic throughout the song but then in certain places it cuts out, a sign of an edit.
As
you can imagine, the whole process is incredibly tedious and time
consuming; it can take hours, even days. “That’s why these records are
expensive,” said engineer Mark Bright in an interview with Bobby
Owsinski, author of The Music Producer’s Handbook.Blight
has produced Carrie Underwood, Reba McEntyre, and Rascal Flatts, and
typically spends 8-12 hours comping a track from upwards of 20 takes.
Max Martin and “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, the hitmakers behind mega pop stars like Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry and Britney Spears, are known for relying heavily on comping during their recording process. John Seabrook, author of The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, writes in the New Yorker: “Comping is so mind-numbing boring that even Gottwald, with his powers of concentration, can’t tolerate it.” However, "Max loves comping," songwriter Bonnie McKee told Seabrook. "He’ll do it for hours.’”
But while pop songs are often accused of being sterile, artificial, or overproduced, each producer I talked to said this is not the result of comping. “Comping is not the thing that makes something sound robotic. Actually I would say comping does the opposite,” says Senior.
Comping gets a bad rap because it’s lumped in with other editing tools like pitch correction and auto-tune, but “it is almost unreservedly a good thing,” Senior says. It gives singers the freedom to push the boundaries and perform at the edge of their capability, trusting it’s OK to mess up because there’s the safety net of having multiple other takes. And if there is a rogue bum note in an otherwise killer recording, you can swap it out with an on pitch note from another take instead of relying on pitch correction, which alters the overall sonic quality.
Pushing the limit and taking chances is what leads to those gems that can make a whole track, says Lewis. “That’s one of the beauties of comping—you get to search for the most magical piece of every take.”
“People have a very idealistic view of a producer or recording engineer’s job. If people really knew how records were made, they’d be much more jaded,” says Lewis. “But if you go into record making with the idea that you need to sing the song down from start to finish, come what may, you will rarely find the true magic.”
The reality is far less romantic. Listen to almost any contemporary pop or rock record and there’s a very good chance the vocals were “comped.” This is when the producer or sound engineer combs through several takes of the vocal track and cherry-picks the best phrases, words, or even syllables of each recording, then stitches them together into one flawless “composite” master track.
Though it’s unknown to most listeners, comping’s been standard practice in the recording industry for decades. Everyone does it—“even the best best best best singers,” says producer and mix engineer Ken Lewis, who’s comped vocals for Mary J Blige, Usher, David Byrne, Lenny Kravitz, Ludacris, Soul Asylum, Diana Ross, and Queen Latifah.
“Comping doesn’t have to do with the quality of the vocalist,” Lewis says. “Back in the Michael Jackson days—and Michael Jackson was an incredible singer—they used to comp 48 tracks together, from what I’ve read and what I’ve heard.”“Comping is not the thing that makes something sound robotic. Actually I would say it does the opposite."
But surely cobbling together a song this way must sound disjointed, robotic, devoid of personality, right? That’s certainly what I thought when I first learned about the practice. And while it’s true that vocal comping is used heavily in pop music where the intention is usually to sound smooth and polished rather than honest and gritty, most producers will tell you that this piecemeal approach is the best way to get a superb recording from any vocalist.
“This is the epitome of all that is unglamorous in music, but very necessary for the best possible presentation of the most important element in the mix,” wrote music producer Frank Gryner in Recording Magazine. He’s recorded the likes of Rob Zombie and Tommy Lee. “I’ve yet to work on a major-label record that didn’t involve vocal comping to arrive at the finished product.”
The process works like this: A singer records the song through a handful of times in the studio, either from start to finish or isolating particularly tricky spots. Starting with between 4-10 takes is typical—too many passes can drain the artist’s energy and confidence and also bog down the editing process later. (That said, it’s sometimes much more. Christina Aguilera’s song “Here to Stay” was compiled from 100 different takes. “She sat on the stool and sang the song for six hours until it was done—didn't leave the booth once and didn't make a single phone call,” engineer Ben Allen said in an interview with Tape Op magazine.)
The engineer generally follows along during the studio recording with a lyric sheet and jots down notes to use as a guide for later, marking whether a phrase was very good, good, bad, sharp or flat, and so on.
↑ = sharp ↓ = flat G = good VG = very good X = bad ? = “I can’t decide.” Image: The Music Producer’s Handbook by Bobby Owsinski
An example of a comp sheet for lead
vocal. The columns on the right indicate promising sections of the eight
takes and final decisions are noted over the lyrics. Image: Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio by Mike Senior.
Timing, tone, attitude, emotion, personality, and how each phrase or word fits in context with the other instruments and the rest of the vocal track can trump pitch perfection. Those little quirky gems add character and emotion to the track—they’re what the listener remembers.
The recording engineer picks out the best take for each bit of the song and edits all the pieces together, usually in a digital audio workstation (DAW) like Pro Tools.
“Often, I’ll have a three-syllable word in the middle of a line, and I’ll use the first syllable from take 3, the second syllable from take 7, and the third syllable from take 10," Lewis writes in a blog post. “Not kidding.”
Comping is one of the most common DAW tasks and the software has made it stupid simple, especially compared to cutting tape reels back in the analog days, when editors would mark the cut spot on the open tape reel with a pencil, slice it with a razor blade and attach the two ends together with sticky tape.Christina Aguilera’s song “Here to Stay” was compiled from 100 different takes.
Most programs today let you input multiple files within an audio track, so you can simply drag and drop the portion you want from each take into the master track.
Comping tutorial in Pro Tools. GIF via YouTube
The editor makes sure the transitions are seamless, the track
flows properly, that no glitches or bad edits made it into the final
cut, and importantly, that no emotion or personality is lost in the
process. A sign of a success is that the listener has no idea a song’s
vocals were compiled from several different takes. The work should be
invisible.“It’s rare that you hear a really bad vocal comp,” says says recording engineer Mike Senior, a columnist for Sound on Sound and author of Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio. But that’s often because the edits are obscured by the other instruments in the track.
About 20 seconds into Aguilera’s “Genie in the Bottle” is a really clunky edit, but you can’t hear it in the song because it’s tucked behind a big heavy drum beat, says Senior. “If you think how many drum beats typically occur in a mainstream song, you can think how many places you can edit without it being heard.”
Listen closely to Adele’s hit “Someone Like You” and you can hear that in the first couple verses the opening breath is missing—there’s just no breath on that phrase, he points out. You can also hear some background noise on the mic throughout the song but then in certain places it cuts out, a sign of an edit.
Max Martin and “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, the hitmakers behind mega pop stars like Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry and Britney Spears, are known for relying heavily on comping during their recording process. John Seabrook, author of The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, writes in the New Yorker: “Comping is so mind-numbing boring that even Gottwald, with his powers of concentration, can’t tolerate it.” However, "Max loves comping," songwriter Bonnie McKee told Seabrook. "He’ll do it for hours.’”
But while pop songs are often accused of being sterile, artificial, or overproduced, each producer I talked to said this is not the result of comping. “Comping is not the thing that makes something sound robotic. Actually I would say comping does the opposite,” says Senior.
Comping gets a bad rap because it’s lumped in with other editing tools like pitch correction and auto-tune, but “it is almost unreservedly a good thing,” Senior says. It gives singers the freedom to push the boundaries and perform at the edge of their capability, trusting it’s OK to mess up because there’s the safety net of having multiple other takes. And if there is a rogue bum note in an otherwise killer recording, you can swap it out with an on pitch note from another take instead of relying on pitch correction, which alters the overall sonic quality.
Pushing the limit and taking chances is what leads to those gems that can make a whole track, says Lewis. “That’s one of the beauties of comping—you get to search for the most magical piece of every take.”
“People have a very idealistic view of a producer or recording engineer’s job. If people really knew how records were made, they’d be much more jaded,” says Lewis. “But if you go into record making with the idea that you need to sing the song down from start to finish, come what may, you will rarely find the true magic.”
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