Oregon Trip 2011Day 1We left the house at 0600 and ate breakfast at Shoneys before heading to Nashville. After dropping off the car at Alexis Inn and Suites and after Mom was finally able to get up into the shuttle van lol we were off.The fl

Trip to Destin JuneJuly 2013Day 1 June 29thWe left the house at 0730 and drove a very LONG 12 hours to get there due to traffic. We went and checked out our condo which was really nice then did some grocery shopping. When we got back Rob and

Trip to Oregon on May 2013 Honeymoon tripDay 1 May 25thWe left Knoxville at 1240. We had a very long flight to Oregon that included long layovers. But had some awesome chocolates at the Charolotte Airport. We didn't get to the hotel in Medford

Expanding our horizons to other forms of alcohol here are some pearls of knowledge Novel word alert ltem stylewebkitfontsmoothing antialiased margin 0px color 333333 fontfamily 'Segoe UI' 'Segoe WP' Arial sansserifgtBourbo

Leaving Mostar was almost sad because we had enjoyed the compact city as a group and on our own. We headed into the hills where towns or villages lined the road for a considerable distance. Rain was falling for the whole drive. I noticed none of the unr

I will try a few jokes to entertain you as well as lighten the mood. I hate being cooped up during the shelter in place but at least I can go to work a few days a week. Thanks to my dear friend Barry the V I once knew a grape which could have been

Since you seem to like my wine emails here is a subject near and dear to us Californians. French wine. Let me start out by saying this about the French. They love to bad mouth Napa Valley after their BIG loss decades ago. On most wine tours in Franc

My love for sparkling wines has not wavered. My trip to Champagne several years ago remains one of my wine tasting highlights. Here is more information should you decided to visit. Champagnes not hurting for name recognitionbubbles are nearsynon

Morning she shouted across the road . Morning I replied . Busy isn't it I thought it was lockdown Yes seems like a lot of people still travelling in their cars was my reply. We agreed the lady on her morning walk and I that this was a lovel

Koh chang has been all about the relax and what a beautiful island to have picked. Its very laid back with lots of cute little towns to explore we defo needed a motorbike to do this as the taxi service is very expensive and seen no sign of a local bus ser

Hi All Just to update you I have converted my Travel Blog from Private to Public as several people could not register with their email addresses. Not all addresses are accepted for some reason. Anyway now public. This time next Sunday I will

Mum and babies are now at home doing fine. Although the night feeding is exhausting with the two of them often waking at the same time. Thanks to all those that emailed.

Thanks for sticking with me through this guys... but since I'm not really travelling well at least not to any interesting places much anymore I thought it more appropriate to do a regular blog. Please follow mehttpthefakesarah.blogspot.comAl

Greetings from rain soaked Maine. We have been here in Scarborough ME since Sunday and were going to leave yesterday but then it rained so we stayed an extra day. Now we are experiencing remnants of Hurriance Iris or whomever and so we are hunkered dow

In Taupo we slept one Night near the Lake. The next Day was Hammer Time again. 15000 feet Skydive. Unbelievable Feeling. At the same Day we driven along the Desert Road Highway 1 to see Mt. Doom and Mordor from the Lord of the Rings. Very cool Scenerys

After escaping the menace of free whiskey buckets we boarded a 'VIP' bus amidst a chorus of yuppies complaining that it didn't have AC or a toilet. I think they looked at the wrong photo when they were buying their tickets and by India standards at leas

Hallo kidsso if anyone ever wants to go to Austria buy an umbrella No one ever told that this place is a rian forest I havent seen this much rain since I was in Prince Rupert It honestly has not stopped and makes doing things quite difficult. And th

Ja da synger ferien p siste verset.Baggasjen er pakket skittentyog vi skal om to timer begynne p veien hjemover.Ruta hjem er som flgendeTuktuk 20 minutter over yaLongtail boat 5 minutterDrosje 5 minutter til flyplassen i Kra

Three weeks into our stint at Monkeyland. times are good sometimes too much spare time the volunteer house is very basic... and as sad as it sounds sometimes it is just nice to sit back and watch mindless or mindful TV. We keep ourselves busy though

Internet connections in Indonesia have been pitifully slow hence there's been no opportunity to update our travelblog. We make landfall in Langkawi Thailand in less than one week about 450 miles to go and there's a better chance of high speed access

This is a frightening thought but I may be the most photographed person in all of China In my first few days here I kept catching people taking pictures of me on the sly and when I looked at them I noticed them waving but thought they wanted me to

Here is a short video taken by my Canadian good friend Mark Takefman. We were on our month long trip from Delhi to Leh back through Spiti Valley. This was just one of a number of challenges we faced on the socalled roads. Mind you there were wonderful

The morning was a lovely day and so after breakfast we set out to lake Cocibolca for a bit of kayaking through the tiny islands near Granada known as Las Isletas. When first touring these islands it's best to do it on boat which I had done 6 weeks before.

THE BASICS We're still amid Utah's gorgeous national parks. We have progressed from Zion to Bryce to Capitol Reef and now are in Moab to enjoy Arches and Canyonlands.THE FLUFFAt the end of my last blog I commented on the women I had seen wearing

17092010 23092010Next day me and Roman checked out the nearby park Terelj. Here we already had a good taste of the incredible landscapes Mongolia has to offer more was yet to come. We stopped also at the huge Djenghis Kahn steel statue for wh

Sometimes I cannot believe that I actually live in this Central American country. It has been raining and raining and raining since we came home from Managua on Friday. Like the pants 7 pairs 3 mine that I washed in the rain on Saturday morning

I decided to introduce my son to video games. We soon found one he liked … and I mean really, really liked

So I decided to introduce my two-year-old son to the world of video games. Before you accuse me of hobbling my offspring's mind, I'd like to point out that a) television is 2,000 times worse, so shove that up your Night Garden and b) I also decided to counterbalance the gaming with exposure to high culture. For every 10 minutes of Fruit Ninja during daylight hours, he'd get 10 pages of a critically acclaimed novel at bedtime. We're currently halfway through The Magus by John Fowles, which he's enjoying immensely. He finds some passages so moving that his protracted sobs drown out my reading completely, and when I return to the beginning of the chapter to start again, he leaps up screaming, trying to snatch the book out of my hands with delight.

Like any self-respecting 2014 toddler, he can swipe, pat and jab at games on a smartphone or tablet, but smartphone games aren't real games. They're interactive dumbshows designed to sedate suicidal commuters. And they're not just basic but insulting, often introducing themselves as free-to-play simply so they can extort money from you later in exchange for more levels or less terrible gameplay. Either that or they fund themselves with pop-up adverts that defile the screen like streaks on a toilet bowl.

Russia v Ukraine, Isis, Boris Johnson, Cliff Richard and Ebola – there's not much to be cheerful about right now, though the ice bucket challenge is working overtime

Ah. Right. Looks like I picked a bad week to draw inspiration from current affairs for this knockabout comedy column. The news is rarely a warehouse of carefree chuckles but at the moment it's like an apocalyptic playlist on perpetual shuffle, with one harrowing crisis overlapping another. Palestine, Libya, Syria … it's all horrifying and upsetting. Not a single nice thing has happened all year, except the recent stealth launch of Cadbury's Wispa Biscuits, and even "stealth launch of Wispa Biscuits" sounds like a terrible euphemism for breaking wind.

The planet is currently playing host to countless alarming crises. There's the nail-biting tension of Russia v Ukraine, a depressing standoff overseen by facial-expression-avoider Vladimir Putin. I don't know if all the strings connecting Putin's face muscles to his brain were accidentally severed during a tragic smiling accident years ago, but I've seen brickwork convey more emotion.

We’ve had the bloodletting of the Ed Wedding. Now we’ve got the full-fat Tory government that virtually no one predicted

It was supposed to be more complicated. After the vote, they said we’d have to get out the constitutional slide rule to try to work out who’d won. The Wikipedia entry on “minority government” experienced a huge spike in traffic. There were more bitter arguments about legitimacy than five seasons of Jeremy Kyle. Everyone agreed the election would herald the gravest constitutional crisis since the abdication, or that time Jade Goody slagged off Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother. Many said Ed Miliband was certain to become prime minister.

Yep. That’s what they said.

As the anthology series Black Mirror returns, its creator explains what fuels the show’s twisted tales – and tells us where we’re going wrong with technology

A sadistic version of The X Factor where contestants perform for their own freedom. An immersive experience where criminals are subjected to the same terrors they inflicted on their victims, in front of a baying audience. A grotesque cartoon demagogue using TV and social media to obtain power. No, these aren’t scenes from the first term of a Donald Trump presidency, but something only marginally less traumatising, and infinitely more likely to happen: Charlie Brooker’s techy anthology series Black Mirror, a show its creator describes as made up of “deliciously horrible ‘what if’s”.

Related: Black Mirror review – Charlie Brooker's splashy new series is still a sinister marvel

Related: Modern tribes: the Pokémon Go aficionado

In den Vorständen deutscher Firmen sitzen kaum Frauen - und deshalb fehle "eine Instanz für Zweifel", sagt die neue Wirtschaftsweise Monika Schnitzer. Männer unter sich einigten sich leichter auf "eine genehme Sicht der Dinge".

"Stoppt Gates", "Legt den Maulkorb ab", "Widerstand": In mehreren deutschen Städten haben Bürger gegen die Corona-Beschränkungen protestiert. Auf Abstandsregeln nahmen nicht alle Rücksicht.

Community gardeners and other activists in Berlin are helping the Transition movement to take root in the German capital as part of its worldwide campaign for a sustainable society.

British pop singer Morrissey has accused DER SPIEGEL of falsely quoting him in a recently published interview. The magazine stands behind its reporting and has made the decision to post the audio online in response.

Guest Post: The most essential part of deploying DNSSEC was to understand what it is and how it works.

Need help with setting up your network to allow your remote employees to access internal business services securely?

Amid the current public health crisis, hospitals and grocery stores have a growing demand for more security personnel. The guards will help to limit access to buildings -- and stop possible fights over goods.

The fight against the coronavirus has paralyzed society and the economy. Lockdown measures are fine for the short term, but they threaten to rapidly destroy the economy and erode our existing social order. What should the next steps be?

Capuchins are highly intelligent monkeys that live in the tropical forests of Central and South America. In the wild, they use tools to crack open nuts and crabs and have learned to rub crushed millipedes on their backs as mosquito repellant. Easily trained, they are historically recognizable as the classic organ-grinder's monkey and are today widely used in lab experiments and occasionally as service animals. What sorts of tasks are monkey helpers trained to perform to assist the disabled?

Ambient pollution is a byproduct of economic activity. It has been widely reported that COVID-19 and associated lockdowns have generated large improvements in air quality worldwide, including to China's notoriously-poor air quality. We analyze China's official pollution monitor data and account for the large, recurrent improvement in air quality following Lunar New Year (LNY), which essentially coincided with lockdowns in 2020. With the important exception of NO2, China's air quality improvements in 2020 are smaller than we should expect near the pandemic's epicenter: Hubei province. Compared with LNY improvements experienced in 2018 and 2019 in Hubei, we see smaller improvements in SO2 while ozone concentrations increased in both relative and absolute terms (roughly doubling). Similar patterns are found for the six provinces neighboring Hubei. We conclude that whether COVID-19 actually decreased pollution in China depends on the pollutant and reference period considered.

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens’ and governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reacted strongly to the crisis: they report engaging in social distancing and hygiene behaviors, and believe that strong policy measures, such as shop closures and curfews, are necessary. They also believe that their government and their country’s citizens are not doing enough and underestimate the degree to which others in their country support strong behavioral and policy responses to the pandemic. The perception of a weak government and public response is associated with higher levels of worries and depression. Using both cross-country panel data and an event-study, we additionally show that strong government reactions correct misperceptions, and reduce worries and depression. Our findings highlight that policy-makers not only need to consider how their decisions affect the spread of COVID-19, but also how such choices influence the mental health of their population.

Twelve weeks after the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic in China, leaders in Beijing are gradually reopening the country. But how can they be sure their decision won't backfire?

Dominican Yankees and Mets stars are working with Pedro Martinez to respond to the coronavirus pandemic in their homeland.

Innovation policy involves trading off monopoly output and pricing in the short run in exchange for incentives for firms to develop new products in the future. While existing research demonstrates that expected profits fuel R&D investments, little is known about the novelty of the projects funded by these investments. Relying on data that describe the scientific approaches used by a large sample of experimental drug projects, we expand on this literature by examining the scientific novelty of pharmaceutical R&D investments following the creation of the Medicare Part D program. We find little evidence that the positive demand shock implied by this program prompted firms to undertake scientifically novel R&D activity, as measured by whether the specific scientific approach had been used before. However, we find some evidence that firms invested in products involving novel combinations of scientific approaches. These estimates can inform economists and policymakers assessing the tradeoffs associated with marginal changes in commercial returns from newly developed pharmaceutical products.

Traveling beyond the immediate surroundings of one’s residence can lead to greater exposure to new ideas and information, jobs, and greater transmission of disease. In this paper, we document the geographic mobility of individuals in the U.S., and how this mobility varies across U.S. cities, regions, and income classes. Using geolocation data for ~1.7 million smartphone users over a 10-month period, we compute different measures of mobility, including the total distance traveled, the median daily distance traveled, the maximum distance traveled from one’s home, and the number of unique haunts visited. We find large differences across cities and income groups. For example, people in New York travel 38% fewer total kilometers and visit 14% fewer block-sized areas than people in Atlanta. And, individuals in the bottom income quartile travel 12% less overall and visit 13% fewer total locations than the top income quartile.

German multinational Bayer underestimated the risks of acquiring Monsanto. Now, the company is desperately seeking to contain the damage by selling business divisions and cutting jobs. So far, though, none of these moves have helped.

Just as Volkswagen was undergoing a radical restructuring to focus on e-mobility and driverless cars, the company has announced it is shutting down factories across Europe due to the coronavirus. There is hope in China, however.