It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
US President Donald Trump blamed Iran for “orchestrating” the attack and said he will hold Tehran responsible.
NOT IRAN THESE DEMONSTRATIONS HAVE BEEN OCCURING DAILY FOR OVER TWO MONTHS NOW THE US IS USING THE ATTACK ON THE SAFEST MOST EXPENSIVE EMBASSY BUILT BY THE USA
UPDATE: Iraqi protesters have got a little way inside the US embassy in Baghdad. They’re setting fires. Video by @Mustafa_salimb https://t.co/mt5gHeUB9G
Twitter
H. Sumeri
IraqiSecurity
Protestors burning the outer walls of the American Embassy in #Baghdad. https://t.co/VeySugdeww
Twitter
BBC News Kataib Hezbollah: Iraq condemns US attacks on Iran-backed militia Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi has condemned the US air strikes which killed at least 25 members of an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia. Mr Mahdi said the ... Yesterday Kurdistan24 Sadr says ready to work on expelling US troops ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Firebrand Iraqi cleric and influential politician Muqtada al-Sadr on Monday expressed his readiness to work with other factions to oust ... Yesterday BBC News US Baghdad embassy attacked by protesters angry at air strikes Protesters angered by recent US air strikes targeting an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia have attacked the American embassy compound in Baghdad. US troops fired ... 3 hours ago
BOEING OUSTS MUILENBURG, NAMES DAVID CALHOUN AS CEO AMID MAX CRISIS
WAS HE FIRED OR DID HE QUIT?
Sacked Boeing boss could walk away with up to $52m Dennis Muilenburg will walk away from Boeing with up to $52m (£40m) after resigning following two deadly plane crashes that prompted a safety scandal.
DECEMBER 23, 2019Boeing's 737 MAX has been grounded worldwide since the March 16, 2019 crash of an Ethiopian airways plane, the second deadly crash of the aircraft, which has raised questions about the company's handling of the crisis
Boeing on Monday pushed out its embattled chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, as it attempts to pivot from a protracted crisis surrounding the grounding of its top-selling 737 MAX after two deadly crashes.
More than nine months after the MAX was grounded and a week after halting production of the aircraft, Boeing named board Chairman David Calhoun as chief executive and president, saying the company needed to "restore confidence" and "repair relationships with regulators, customers and all other stakeholders."
A week ago, Boeing took the monumental step of temporarily shutting down MAX production because of the crisis, which has pushed the aircraft's return to the skies into 2020 and raised the anxiety level among Boeing's workforce and suppliers.
Though coming during the sleepy days ahead of the Christmas holiday, the move was not entirely unexpected after Boeing stripped Muilenburg of his chairman title in October, installing board member Calhoun in that post.
Still, while Boeing watchers had seen Muilenburg's days as numbered, some expected him to stay on until the MAX was returned to service.
But the timing of that landmark event remains unclear and will depend on the Federal Aviation Administration, which has made it clear it is not in a hurry.
An FAA spokesman said the agency does not comment on personnel decisions.
"The FAA continues to follow a thorough process for returning the Boeing 737 MAX to passenger service," the FAA spokesman said. "Our first priority is safety, and we have set no timeframe for when the work will be completed."
Muilenburg repeatedly offered predictions on the 737 MAX return to service that proved overly-optimistic. His prospects further dimmed last week when its Starliner unmanned spacecraft came up short in a NASA mission to reach the International Space Station.
Muilenburg's departure was "long overdue," said former National Transportation Safety Board chief Jim Hall.
"Boeing clearly needs to reset the table and put someone in who puts safety first," Hall told AFP.Boeing selected board chairman David Calhoun (L) to replace Dennis Muilenburg as CEO to 'restore confidence' in the company
Another insider?
Shares rallied on the announcement of the leadership shakeup, which came after calls in Congress for Muilenburg to go. The stock price jumped 2.9 percent to finish at $337.55.
But Scott Hamilton of Leeham News, an aviation website, noted that Calhoun had roundly praised Muilenburg's performance as CEO in a November television interview.
The executive has been "part of the Board policy-making that led to the cost-cutting some say had deleterious impact on the development of the MAX," Hamilton wrote.
"Calhoun has been on the board 10 years," he said. "Is Calhoun, an insider, the right person to pull Boeing out of its dive?"
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, called for a "complete management house cleaning" at Boeing and new leadership "who will take safety seriously."
Calhoun previously served as vice chairman of General Electric, where he had a long career after starting with the company soon after graduating from Virginia Tech. He also currently serves as senior managing director of investment banking firm Blackstone Group.
Following the announcement, Calhoun reached out to lawmakers, airline CEOs, suppliers, regulators and other key stakeholders, a Boeing spokesman said.
Muilenburg will leave the company immediately but Calhoun will not take the CEO post until January 13, 2020, while he exits existing commitments, Boeing said in a news release.
During that period, Chief Financial Officer Greg Smith will serve as interim CEO. Meanwhile, board member Lawrence W. Kellner will become non-executive chairman of the board effective immediatelyBoeing 737 MAX planes parked in a Washington state airport amid a grounding that has dragged on for more than nine months
Awkward response to crisis
Muilenburg's response to the crisis was increasingly criticized as the MAX grounding has dragged on far longer than initially expected as more disturbing details have dribbled out about the certification of the aircraft and issues with the flight software implicated in both crashes.
He also was seen as tone deaf and awkward towards families of the 346 people killed in the crashes.
Michael Stumo, whose daughter Samya was killed in the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March, called Muilenburg's departure "a good first step toward restoring Boeing to a company that focuses on safety and innovation."
"The next step is for several Board members who are underperforming or underqualified to resign," Stumo said.
The company resisted grounding the planes even after the second crash when Muilenburg pressed his case in phone calls with President Donald Trump.
Probes of the two crashes have focused in particular on the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, an automated flight control system.
FAA chief Steve Dickson ripped Muilenburg in October for not disclosing communications from a Boeing pilot that raised questions about the MCAS system.
The FAA also called out the company for its overly-optimistic statements about restoring the MAX saying it created the perception Boeing was trying "to force FAA into taking quicker action."
TheStranger.com It's Time to Nationalize Boeing - Slog Boeing finally fired its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg. Many where baffled by the fact that he still had the job months after the world grounded 700 of the company's ..
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg fired amid 737 Max crisis Boeing Co has fired its Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg, seeking to restore confidence after two fatal crashes forced the world's biggest planemaker to halt ...
Teach a chimpanzee to fish for insects to eat, and you feed her for a lifetime. Teach her a better way to use tools in gathering prey, and you may change the course of evolution.
For most wild chimpanzees, tool use is an important part of life—but learning these skills is no simple feat. Wild chimpanzees transfer tools to each other, and this behavior has previously been shown to serve as a form of teaching.
A new study led by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Miami and Franklin & Marshall College finds that chimpanzees that use a multi-step process and complex tools to gather termites are more likely to share tools with novices. The research was conducted in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society, Lincoln Park Zoo and the Jane Goodall Institute. The study helps illuminate chimpanzees' capacity for prosocial—or helping—behavior, a quality that has been recognized for its potential role in the evolution of human cultural abilities.
"Non-human primates are often thought to learn tool skills by watching others and practicing on their own, with little direct help from mothers or other expert tool users," said Stephanie Musgrave, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, and first author of the study published the week of Dec. 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"In contrast, the results from this research indicate that social learning may vary in relation to how challenging the task is: during tasks that are more difficult, mothers can in fact play a more active role, including behaviors that function to teach."
Beginning with Jane Goodall in the 1960s, researchers have been studying chimpanzee tool use for decades at the Gombe Stream Research Center in Tanzania. The Gombe chimpanzee study is one of the longest running studies of animal behavior in the wild. This year marks the 20-year anniversary of the study of chimpanzees in the Goualougo Triangle, Republic of Congo, where researchers have documented some of the most complex tool behaviors of chimpanzees.
The study is distinctive because it applies standardized methods to directly compare how processes of cultural transmission may differ between two populations of wild chimpanzees. In both populations, the chimpanzees use tools to target the same resource—but the task varies in complexity.
The findings of the current study are important on a number of levels, Musgrave said. "First, chimpanzee populations may vary not only in the complexity of their tool behaviors but in the social mechanisms that support these behaviors," she said. "Second, the capacity for helping in chimpanzees may be both more robust and more flexible than previously appreciated."
Maintaining chimpanzee cultures
Among animals, chimpanzees are exceptional tool users. Different groups of chimpanzees use different types of tools—and likewise, researchers have suggested that the teaching process might be customized to facilitate these local skills.
In this study, researchers examined the transfer of tools between chimpanzees during termite gathering, and compared the population in the Goualougo Triangle, Republic of Congo, with the population in Gombe, Tanzania.
Termites and other insects are a valuable source of fat and protein in the diet of wild chimpanzees and also contribute important vitamins and minerals. Termites build complex nest structures that encompass a network of below-ground chambers, sometimes topped with a towering, freestanding mound reaching several meters high.
Chimpanzees in both locations use fishing-probe style tools to harvest termites, but Goualougo chimpanzees use multiple, different types of tools sequentially. They also make tools from specific plant species and customize fishing probes to improve their efficiency.
The researchers found differences in the rate, probability and types of tool transfer during termite gathering between these two populations.
At Goualougo, where the fishing tasks were more complex, the rate of tool transfer was three times higher than at Gombe, and Goualougo mothers were more likely to transfer a tool in response to a request. Further, mothers at Goualougo most often responded to tool requests by actively giving a tool to offspring. Such active transfers were never observed at Gombe, where mothers most often responded by refusing to transfer tools. Given that offspring in both populations made comparable requests for tools, these differences suggest that mothers at Goualougo were in fact more willing to provide tools.
"We have previously documented that tool transfers at Goualougo function as a form of teaching," said Crickette Sanz, associate professor of biological anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. "The population differences we observed in the present study suggest that teaching may be related specifically to the demands of learning to manufacture tools at Goualougo, where chimpanzees use multiple tool types, make tools from select plant species, and perform modifications that increase tool efficiency."
"An increased role for this type of social learning may thus be an important component of the transmission of complex tool traditions over generations," she said.
"While Gombe and Goualougo chimpanzees both fish for termites, we suspected that there might be differences in how this skill is acquired," said Elizabeth Lonsdorf, associate professor of psychology at Franklin & Marshall College. "But only after many years of accumulating these data were we able to rigorously quantify these differences."
"To date, prosocial helping in chimpanzees has been principally examined in captivity or using differing methods in the wild," said Stephen Ross, director of the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at Lincoln Park Zoo. "This study provides novel evidence for helping behavior in wild chimpanzees and demonstrates that chimpanzees can help flexibly depending on context."
A shared capacity
Understanding how chimpanzee tool traditions are passed on over generations can provide insights into the evolutionary origins of complex cultural abilities in humans.
"Human evolution is characterized by the emergence and elaboration of complex technologies, which is often attributed to our species' aptitude for passing skills onto one another through mechanisms such as teaching and imitation. However, the evolutionary origins of these capacities remain unclear," Musgrave said.
"Our research shows that the human propensity to assist others in acquiring complex skills may build at least in part upon capacities that we share with our closest living relatives."
Conservation efforts are fundamental to this research and future studies.
"Chimpanzees and their cultures are endangered," said Emma Stokes, director of the Central Africa Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society.
"Recent research shows that human activity imperils the survival of chimpanzee cultures. Studying our closest living relatives offers a unique opportunity to gain insights into the evolutionary origins of cultural behavior—but this privilege depends on long-term efforts to conserve these apes and their habitats."
One of the analysed pig jaws for the study. Credit: Dr Richard Madgwick
People transported animals over huge distances for mass gatherings at one of Ireland's most iconic archaeological sites, research concludes.
Dr. Richard Madgwick of Cardiff University led the study, which analysed the bones of 35 animals excavated from Navan Fort, the legendary capital of Ulster. Researchers from Queen's University Belfast, Memorial University Newfoundland and the British Geological Survey were also involved in the research.
The site had long been considered a centre for ritual gatherings, as excavations found a huge 40m diameter building and a barbary ape cranium, likely from at least as far as Iberia. Results suggest the pigs, cattle and sheep were brought from across Ireland, perhaps being reared as far afield as Galway, Donegal, Down, Tyrone and Antrim. Evidence suggests some were brought over more than 100 miles.
Dr. Madgwick, based in Cardiff University's School of History, Archaeology and Religion, said: "Our results provide clear evidence that communities in Iron Age Ireland were very mobile and that livestock were also moved over greater distances than was previously thought.
"The high proportion of pig remains found there is very rare for this period. This suggests that Navan Fort was a feasting centre, as pigs are well-suited as feasting animals and in early Irish literature pork is the preferred food of the feast.
"It is clear that Navan Fort had a vast catchment and that the influence of the site was far-reaching."
Researchers used multi-isotope analysis on samples of tooth enamel to unlock the origins of each animal. Food and water have chemical compositions linked to the geographical areas where they are sourced. When animals eat and drink, these chemical signals are archived in their teeth, allowing scientists to investigate the location where they were raised.
Co-author of the research, Dr. Finbar McCormick, of Queen's University, Belfast, said: "In the absence of human remains, multi-isotope analysis of animals found at Navan Fort provides us with the best indication of human movement at that time.
"Feasting, almost invariably associated with sacrifice, was a social necessity of early societies where the slaughter of a large domesticate necessitated the consumption of a large amount of meat in a short period of time."
Earlier this year, Dr. Madgwick's research of 131 pigs found at sites near Stonehenge revealed animals came from as far away as Scotland and numerous other locations across the British Isles. Before this, the origins of people who visited this area and the extent of the population's movements at the time had been long-standing enigmas in British prehistory.
Dr. Madgwick added: "Transporting animals across the country would have involved a great deal of time and effort so our findings demonstrate the important role they played in society. Food was clearly a central part of people's exchanges and traditions."
