Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/334110170?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Box Office: Tom Hanks' 'Captain Phillips' Earns $600,000 Thursday Night
Sony's Captain Phillips earned $600,000 as it began rolling out in theaters Thursday night, boosting chances that the movie will hit $20 million in its debut.
Directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks, the Somali pirate drama hopes for a berth in this year's awards race. The critically acclaimed film cost $55 million to produce.
Captain Phillips outpaced the $450,000 earned Thursday night by Lee Daniels' The Butler, which had a $24.6 million opening in August. However, with Gravity still taking up plenty of oxygen, Sony believes Captain Phillips will instead match the $19.5 million opening of Argo in October 2012.
EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS: On Board With 'Captain Phillips' Stars Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi
Warner Bros.' Gravity, enjoying record-breaking weekday business, is expected to top the North American box office in its second weekend with a gross north of $28 million. Alfonso Cuaron's space epic, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, will cross the $80 million mark domestically sometime on Friday.
Robert Rodriguez' Machete Kills took in $200,000 Thursday night. The exploitation action film is expected to earn $8 million in its domestic opening.
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'Menstrual Man' Had An Idea To Help Indian Women
Arunachalam Muruganantham installs his machine in a village in Chhattisgarh, India.
Amit Virmani
Arunachalam Muruganantham installs his machine in a village in Chhattisgarh, India.
Amit Virmani
Arunachalam Muruganantham had his light bulb moment when he was 29 years old, and holding a sanitary napkin for the first time.
Examining the cotton pads he was buying as a gift for his new wife, the Indian entrepreneur realized that the multinational company that produced them was probably spending cents on raw materials, and making a huge profit.
Women in Muruganantham's village in Tamil Nadu, including his wife, would often forego these expensive pads for rags they used repeatedly through their cycles. Even more uncomfortably, sometimes they utilized husks or leaves during menstruation.
The exorbitant cost of the foreign-made pads cut into their families' meal budget. Given a choice between fresh pads and fresh milk, they chose the latter.
A new movie, Menstrual Man, documents how, at great personal cost, Muruganantham created a cheap machine to address persistent menstrual hygiene challenges for rural women on the subcontinent. But, as director Amit Virmani points out, the product's traction may have more to do with social entrepreneurship than with health concerns.
Women whose self-help groups buy Muruganantham's machine can make more than a dollar a day — close to a global poverty line — selling the pads.
Sanitary napkins from global companies are in Indian stores for about $1.50 for an eight-pack. The ones from Murugantham's machine wholesale at about 25 cents for an eight-pack; the women's groups can sell them at whatever retail price they choose, retaining the profit. The cost of the machines ranges from about $1,200 to $6,000, depending on the features.
"The primary impulse when people are struggling to make a living is either, 'How can I make more money?,' or 'How can I save more money?'," Virmani said. "If you address those needs, your innovation stands a better chance to be adopted, to spread."
The machine, which Muruganantham began to research in 1998, has three stages of production. Inside a stainless steel container, a motor fluffs cellulose to prepare it as the core material for the napkins. Hand- and leg-operated tools are used to form the core of the napkin. A heat press is used to seal and apply the outer cover to the napkin. It's sterilized and packaged, and then ready to sell.
Muruganantham's invention was already spreading across India when Virmani found him last year, with 500 machines sold and an innovation award from India's president under the entrepreneur's belt. But getting there had been all uphill.
Once Muruganantham had prototyped the machine, he needed testers. But his wife and other family members refused, as did girls at the nearby medical college. So Muru, as Virmani calls him, decided to become a tester himself.
He filled bottles with animal blood and attached tubes that would press the blood into his drawers as he biked and walked around town. His rural village shunned him, viewing this with suspicion. And his wife's suspicions — that he was chasing medical college girls around town for something other than product testing — ended his marriage.
Still, for six years, Muruganantham pressed on (yup, pressed) — and now more than 1,000 of his machines have been sold in India. There's also been global interest in replicating the model, from Afghanistan to Rwanda.
Virmani said he attributes Muruganantham's success to the inventor's understanding of his core audience, starting with the rudimentary nature of the machine. "It's wooden, and it's got pedals where he could have had motors," Virmani said.
"He knows how to motorize the damn things, but the more complicated you make the machines, at some point they'll break down," Virmani said. "The way he's engineered it, it's pretty much something that (the rural women) can repair themselves, and they don't have to keep paying for servicing."
Muruganantham says he wants to see India become a "100 percent sanitary napkin country" in his lifetime.
As for Menstrual Man, it's on the festival circuit, and will be available on iTunes in January.
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Arc-Light Chronicles
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Immerse yourself in a fantasy-Sci-fi roleplay fully loaded with a deep and always evolving storyline, create a character, join a Clan, discover a fully upgradable inheritance system.
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This seems very interesting! I'd like to reserve a character if that's alright, the inheritor of Bahamut preferably.
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Sunday, October 13, 2013
Council tax arrears: 450,000 in court, says Labour | Politics | The ...
Hilary Benn said vulnerable people face jail after the government cut benefits. Photograph: David Gadd/Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
Up to 500,000 vulnerable people, including carers, widows and war veterans, are estimated to have been summonsed to court for failing to pay their council tax after the government cut benefits to help those on low income, according to figures collated by Labour.
Hillary Benn, the shadow local government secretary, said the figures showed that David Cameron had imposed a disastrous new poll tax on the poor, many of whom now face the threat of prison: "Disabled people should not be facing seizure of their possessions or even the threat of prison, simply because this poll tax is penalising them for being poor."
A Labour survey showed that 156,563 vulnerable people were summonsed to court between April and September after support for the means-tested council tax benefit was cut by £500m, around 10% of the total. The government also instructed local authorities to decide how the reduced benefit should be distributed.
Labour made freedom of information requests to all 326 councils in England to ask how many people have been paying council tax for the first time or paying increased council tax since April, when the changes were introduced.
The party then asked how many of the people in this group have received courts summons. Just over a third of the councils, 112, reported that 156,563 people in this group had been summonsed to court. Labour calculates that 455,710 people would have been found to have received summonses had all 326 councils replied.
Benn said: "David Cameron boasts about keeping council tax down, but last April he deliberately imposed a council tax increase on people on the lowest incomes, including hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers. To introduce it on the very same day that he cut taxes for millionaires shows exactly whose side he is on. The failure of this government to identify the number of people affected or to monitor the costs to the courts of all these summonses is negligent and irresponsible. "
Brandon Lewis, the local government minister, said: "This shoddy survey is contradicted by official statistics, which show arrears have fallen in the last year and the council tax collected has increased. In the last year of the Labour government, 3 million summons were issued for unpaid council tax.
Labour dismissed the Tory attack. Sources said the 3 million cited by the Tories covered all courts summons across all income groups — 27 million council tax payers. The Labour figures solely considered 2.6 million poorer people.Labour acknowledges that the highest number of courts summons will have occurred in councils under its control. But it says that Labour councils cover areas with higher levels of deprivation. The cuts in central government grants have hit Labour areas harder. West Oxfordshire Council, which covers Cameron's Witney constituency, has seen its grant increase by 1%. Leeds, where Benn sits as an MP, has seent its grant cut by 5.6% in the last year.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/11/council-tax-arrears-labour
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Friday, October 11, 2013
Crighton Racing CR700P – Because Pistons Are So Passé
Now debuting the 700cc iteration of the twin-rotor machine, the Crighton Racing CR700P revives our rotorlust, and looks bonkers both on paper and on video.
The frame is still the SPONDON number from the NRV588 days, with the rest of the chassis being fairly “normal” with its Brembo/AP Racing brakes and Bitubo suspension pieces. The showcase element is of course the Rotron RT700 Twin Rotor Rotary engine.
Making 200 hp at 11,000 rpm and 100 lbs•ft of torque at 9,500 rpm, the Crighton Racing CR700P is easily in liter-bike territory with its engine output, though it is a bit peaky, as rotaries tend to be. We imagine the CR700P is a bit like a 500cc two-stroke in its power delivery, a thought that seems to be confirmed by the company’s video below. “Fucking quick” is the phrase, is it? Where can we sign-up for a turn boys?
Technical Specifications of the Crighton Racing CR700P:
| Engine | |
| Engine Type | Rotron RT700 Twin Rotor Rotary |
| Displacement | 700cc |
| Compression Ratio | 10:1 |
| Max Power | 200HP @ 11,000RPM |
| Max Torque | 100 lbs/ft @ 9,500RPM |
| Cooling System | Rotron Pressurised Gas |
| Clutch Type | Multiplate Slipper |
| Primary Drive | Kevlar Belt |
| Ignition System | GEMS ECU |
| Fuel System | GEMS ECU |
| Transmission | 6 Speed Sequential |
| Chassis | |
| Chassis Frame | 7000 Series Aluminium Beam |
| Front Suspension | Bitubo |
| Rear Suspension | Bitubo |
| Front Brake | Brembo 4 Piston 320mm Discs |
| Rear Brake | AP Racing Single 2 Piston 195mm Disc |
| Tyres | Dunlop |
| Wheelbase | Aprox. 1,445mm |
| Dry Weight | 136kg |
| Fuel Capacity | 22 Litres |
| Oil Tank Capacity | 1.2 Litres |
Source: Crighton Racing
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Thursday, May 2, 2013
Sony Xperia Z for T-Mobile approved by the FCC with compatible LTE
The FCC's approval process can be incredibly secretive, since most companies prefer not to leak out any information that could give away the identity of their star products. Sony, on the other hand, is typically the most liberal when it comes to letting us in on the scoop, and its latest device is no exception. In this case, the T-Mobile version of the Xperia Z was spotted with a full spread of external and internal photos along with a detailed user manual (which also gives away the model, carrier association and features such as WiFi calling). If you're still in denial for any odd reason, the docs confirm the inclusion of AWS LTE (band 4) and pentaband HSPA+. T-Mobile still hasn't confirmed that Sony's flagship is coming to its smartphone lineup, but we likely won't have to wait very long before we get an official announcement from the Uncarrier. Head below to check out the docs for yourself; or, for the Cliff Notes version, we have a small gallery of images and screenshots below to get the point across.
Sony Xperia Z for T-Mobile at the FCC
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