A slimmed down Maikel Franco and a bulked up Scott Kingery will compete for playing time at third base this season.

General Manager Matt Klentak discussed the Phillies' offseason in a press conference on Thursday in Clearwater, Fla. The Phillies remain in contact with the agents for Bryce Harper and Manny Machado. The belief is that the front office still prefers Machado over Harper because of Machado's combination of offense and defense.

Maikel Franco followed the endless and often mind-numbing speculation the past few months from the Dominican Republic. Franco knows that Manny Machado could show up at Spectrum Field at any moment. The Phillies entertained him at Citizens Bank Park just before Christmas. They have made him at least one contract offer. If the Phillies sign him, Franco also knows he could be traded.

The next five weeks will see lots of shuffling on Major League rosters. Here are the most intriguing positional battles on each of the 30 MLB clubs.

It's almost time for Spring Training yet again, as Angels pitchers and catchers report to their Spring Training complex in Tempe, Ariz. on Feb. 12.

The next five weeks will see lots of shuffling on Major League rosters. Here are the most intriguing positional battles on each of the 30 MLB clubs.

Mine Action in Angola: Clearing the Legacies of Conflict to Harness the Potential of Peace Other resource sysadmin 14 June 2019

This publication draws on and updates the briefing note published following a meeting of the All- Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Angola on 26 April 2017. It also incorporates insights from a Chatham House Africa Programme conference session on the legacies of the Angolan Civil War, held on 23 March 2018; and draws on the Africa Programme’s research into conservation-driven development models in Southern Africa.

Almost two decades after the end of its civil war, Angola remains one of the most heavily landmine-contaminated countries in the world. The Angolan government has committed to clearing its landmines by 2025, and there is constructive collaboration between the government and mine clearing agencies in this endeavour, but the target will be achievable only if a decline in funding from international donors is reversed. International funding for mine clearance in Angola fell by more than 80 per cent between 2005 and 2017, and this sharp drop in external support has compounded the impact on domestic funding for national clearance efforts as a result of the downturn in prices for Angola’s main export commodities.

The national mine action agency, the Comissão Nacional Intersectorial de Desminagem e Assistência Humanitária (CNIDAH), is supported by the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) and the HALO Trust. By 2017, 15 years after the end of the civil war, these organizations had collectively helped clear 56 per cent of known landmine-contaminated land. State-led demining has focused principally on clearing areas designated for infrastructure projects. Now, it is critical that humanitarian demining in largely agricultural and conservation areas is prioritized to bring to an end the daily threat to Angola’s rural poor – as well as to the country’s livestock and wildlife – of injury or death as a result of landmine accidents.

Angola has some of the world’s most important remaining wilderness, including the tributary system for the unique Okavango Delta, and the country has the potential to host one of the most diverse wildlife populations on the continent. However, the presence of landmines and other remnants of the civil war render large areas of the country unsafe both for wildlife and for the local people, whose ability to derive a sustainable livelihood from their natural environment is fundamental to its protection.

Wildlife and tourism provide important economic opportunities for diversification beyond an oil-dominated economy. Critically, Angola’s economic diversification and development objectives can only be achieved if the landmines that prohibit access to land for agriculture, mining, tourism and wildlife are cleared.

There are economic opportunities for released land in the most heavily mined provinces of Cuando Cubango and Moxico. Already, some new funding for mine action in Angola, if upscaled or matched by international donors, could be transformative for its people, and for the conservation of the region’s vital biodiversity.

Zimbabwe's Economy During the Coronavirus Pandemic and Beyond 8 September 2020 — 10:00AM TO 11:30AM Anonymous (not verified) 26 August 2020

COVID-19 has had a devastating effect on Zimbabwe’s already floundering economy. Important foreign currency earning industries have virtually stopped, and across the country livelihoods are at risk and an increasing number of people are reliant on government grants.

Businesses are having to become more flexible but are constrained by a weak policy environment and lack of confidence in the economy. Since 2017, the government has been pursuing an economic reform agenda and Transitional Stabilization Programme (TSP), which was scheduled for completion by the end of 2020. The deepening challenges highlight the need to accelerate economic reform and build confidence in order to achieve sustainable and inclusive growth.

At this webinar, speakers discuss the measures that government, businesses, and individuals are adopting in response to the COVID-19 economic challenge, and the policies required for recovery.

Read a meeting summary

This webinar is held in partnership with the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.

Weathering the storm: The UK’s role in the world today 29 November 2022 — 12:00PM TO 1:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 7 November 2022 Chatham House and Online

In conversation with David Miliband, examining the risks and opportunities for the UK in a critical year ahead. 

With a new government in the midst of a global order in flux, the UK’s position in the world needs re-examining.

Just 20 months since the UK’s Integrated Review on international policy and security, Britain’s global blueprint is being reviewed and updated in light of major global developments.

Today, Brexit and the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine require adjustments to the UK’s strategic thinking and positioning in the world.

As the economic and political turmoil of previous weeks begins to abate, this is an important moment to once again determine Britain’s role in Europe and beyond. 
 
Realigning British foreign policy in a rapidly shifting international order will be a major challenge for the new administration.  

International Rescue Committee’s CEO and President, and former UK Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, examines the risks and opportunities for a critical year ahead. 
 
Key questions include:

• What are the crucial decisions the UK needs to make in the coming 12 months?
• What should the UK’s priorities be for its role in the world? How should it project itself amidst geopolitical fracturing?
• How can Britain best respond to humanitarian crises around the world?
• Does the UK have the strategic and economic clout to keep up with its foreign policy and development commitments?

As with all Chatham House member events, questions from members drive the conversation.

Read the transcript. 

War on Ukraine: Exploring the humanitarian response to the conflict 12 April 2022 — 12:00PM TO 1:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 6 April 2022 Online

This event explores the implications of the humanitarian realities from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the largest ground campaign in Europe since World War Two.

Reports from humanitarian organizations working in Ukraine are dire and reveal that a humanitarian disaster on an epic scale is unfolding.

The United Nations (UN) and other organizations estimate 12 million of Ukraine’s population are in need of assistance, 4.1 million have been displaced to neighbouring countries, and 6.4 million have become internally displaced.

Gillian Triggs, the assistant secretary-general and assistant high commissioner for protection at the UNHCR, joins other experts to discuss the humanitarian situation in Ukraine.

The panel considers:

• What are the greatest needs in Ukraine now?
• How can aid agencies meet those needs?
• What are the short and long-term implications of the crisis for Ukraine and Europe?
• How do international organizations work with local NGOs to provide food, medical aid and shelter?

This event is part of a regular series of events offering insight and analysis from experts and policymakers on how the war is affecting Ukraine, the region and the world.

This event is part of Chatham House’s ongoing work on the future of conflict.

Read the transcript

Review: Rediscovering Milan Kundera’s European tragedy The World Today mhiggins.drupal 28 March 2023

The Czech writer’s 40-year-old essay on the roots of Russia’s empire-building, ‘A Kidnapped West’, reads all too presciently, writes Stefan Auer.

A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe
Milan Kundera, Faber, £10

‘In November 1956, the director of the Hungarian News Agency, shortly before his office was flattened by artillery fire, sent a telex to the entire world with a desperate message announcing that the Russian attack against Budapest had begun. The dispatch ended with these words: “We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe.”’ Thus, Milan Kundera began his 1983 essay for the French journal Le Débat, reflecting on the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.

A seminal essay

The Czech author might well have written a near-identical passage about the fraught hours immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In the event, Russian tanks failed to occupy Kyiv, unlike Budapest in 1956. Nevertheless, Faber has chosen this moment, 40 years later, to republish Kundera’s seminal essay on Europe and Russian aggression in its original translation for the New York Review of Books by Edmund White. How salient are its observations today?

The essay’s original French title, ‘Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale’ (The Kidnapped West, or the Tragedy of Central Europe), described the fate of Hungary, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and, to an extent, Poland in 1980-81 at the hands of the Soviet Union. Owing to the Cold War division of Europe, the countries of Central Europe were denied their true destiny, Kundera thought, to be an integral part of the liberal, democratic West. Kundera himself fled Czechoslovakia for France in 1975.

The author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being might no longer be as well-known as he was at the height of his fame in the 1980s, but his novels and essays still deserve attention. So, it is pleasing to see Kundera’s masterpiece republished, even as it is awful to witness the enduring relevance of the questions it raises.

What did the Hungarian journalist mean when he declared his willingness to die for Europe, Kundera asked? That ‘Russians, in attacking Hungary, were attacking Europe itself. He was ready to die so that Hungary might remain Hungary and European’. The journalist did indeed die in the uprising.

It is a line that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his supporters abroad have echoed time and again: that Ukrainian soldiers are not just dying for their country, they are dying for Europe at large.

The ‘tragedy’ in Kundera’s essay was that the West didn’t care. ‘Europe hasn’t noticed the disappearance of its cultural home,’ Kundera wrote, ‘because Europe no longer perceives its unity as a cultural unity.’

In other words, as the cultural sphere in Central Europe continued to defy the political restrictions imposed by the Soviet empire, it embodied the western values of freedom and democracy more than the West itself did. The extent to which this analysis remains relevant today will prove decisive for Europe’s future.

As timely as ever

Kundera’s essay is as timely as ever but in ways that both vindicate and challenge his key arguments. His suspicion of Russia has been validated. His frustration about the indifference of the West less so. But the true tragedy of Ukraine would be if the West has not changed sufficiently. So far, the West appears to be doing enough to enable Ukraine to defend itself, but not enough to defeat the aggressor.

Faber has made an excellent decision in combining The Tragedy of Central Europe with a lesser-known text by Kundera: his 1967 speech to the Czech Writers’ Congress given the year before the ill-fated Prague Spring. In it, Kundera addressed what was to become a lifelong preoccupation: the fate of small nations. ‘For Czechs’, Kundera wrote, ‘nothing has ever constituted an indisputable possession – neither their language nor their belonging to Europe.’

Rather than reflecting the size of its territory or population, a small nation ‘is one whose very existence can be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear, and it knows it.’ In this way Ukraine, Europe’s largest country, apart from Russia, is fighting to avoid the fate of Kundera’s ‘small nation’.

Historically, the ‘small’ nations of Central Europe were threatened by both Germany and Russia. But after the Second World War, the threat was from the Soviet Union, which for Kundera was indistinguishable from Russia (tacitly including Ukraine). In its expansiveness, Russia was the opposite of Central Europe. While the latter was based on the principle of ‘the greatest variety within the smallest space’, the former represented ‘the smallest variety within the greatest space’.

In this sense, authoritarian communism was the fulfilment of Russian history, Kundera argued, writing that ‘Russian communism vigorously reawakened Russia’s old anti-western obsessions and turned it brutally against Europe’. Vladimir Putin’s Russia appears to build on these same pernicious impulses.

Kundera was widely criticized for observations in his essay that smack of civilizational racism (including by me) describing Russians as fundamentally different from us: ‘Russia knows another (greater) dimension of disaster, another image of space (a space so immense that entire nations are swallowed up in it), another sense of time (slow and patient), another way of laughing, living, and dying’.

McKesson Medical-Surgical Inc. entered into an agreement with the Labor Department on Monday resolving employment discrimination issues involving nearly 900 Black, Hispanic, and White applicants at a distribution center

A Qantas airlines flight made an emergency landing at Sydney Airport on Friday afternoon after suffering engine failure shortly after takeoff, the company said.

An explosion at a food-coloring factory in Louisville, Ky., hospitalized at least 11, including two in critical condition, on Tuesday afternoon.

Loopholes in international laws governing the use of incendiary weapons in warfare are allowing warring parties in Ukraine and the Middle East to exploit the use of such weapons without adequately protecting civilians.

A 55-year-old vaccine conspiracy theorist and COVID-19 denier convicted of encouraging violence over Britain's handling of the pandemic was sentenced Monday to five years' imprisonment.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 25, 2024 — ServiceNow has announced that enterprise software industry veteran Amit Zavery will join the company as president, chief product officer (CPO), and chief operating officer […]

The post Google Cloud and Oracle Veteran Amit Zavery to Spearhead Product and Engineering at ServiceNow appeared first on HPCwire.

Veteran quarterback Dak Prescott will undergo season-ending surgery to repair his injured hamstring, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones announced Tuesday.

How can manufacturers apply lessons learned from the dawn of the “Exascale Era” to Computer-Aided Engineering to achieve results like never before? Join Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research, Bill Mannel, VP, High Performance […]

The post Leveraging Exascale Era Technology for Advanced Computer-Aided Engineering appeared first on HPCwire.

An emperor penguin is being cared for by wildlife experts after becoming the first member of its species to make the 2,200-mile trek from Antarctica to Australia.

A B-2 Spirit stealth bomber made an emergency landing at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri earlier this week after the high-tech aircraft malfunctioned during a training flight.

U.S. fighter jets escorted a small plane flown by a U.S. Army soldier out of restricted air space over New York City during the United Nations General Assembly.

The movement toward open source AI made progress today when the Open Source Initiative released the first Open Source AI Definition (OSAID). While the OSAID provides one step forward, the […]

The post OSI Open AI Definition Stops Short of Requiring Open Data for LLMs appeared first on HPCwire.

Divergent Technologies developed a digital production system that can revolutionize automotive and industrial scale manufacturing. Divergent uses new manufacturing solutions and their Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS™) software to make […]

The post Transforming Industrial and Automotive Manufacturing appeared first on HPCwire.

Stimulating the sleeping brain may ease suffering from memory loss, stroke or mental health problems

Weight-loss surgery in adolescents with severe obesity can lead to long-term health benefits, such as more frequent remission of type 2 diabetes than in adults who undergo the same treatment, a large, NIH-funded study.

NEW YORK, Nov. 1, 2024 — NANO Nuclear Energy Inc. has announced the October 29, 2024 closing of the sale of an additional 317,646 shares of its common stock at […]

The post NANO Nuclear Energy Raises Over $40M from Recent Underwritten Follow-On Offering appeared first on HPCwire.

MTV's Europe Music Awards included a heartfelt tribute to late musician Liam Payne.

A federal judge has blocked a new bill in Louisiana that would require the Bible's Ten Commandments to be displayed in the state's publicly-funded schools.

An explosion at a food-coloring factory in Louisville, Ky., hospitalized at least 11, including two in critical condition, on Tuesday afternoon.

Not only does hearing this statement lower IQ, it also makes people more aggressive, other studies have shown.

What's the connection between long-term health and financial stability? Neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki and HSBC Global Private Banking and Wealth's CEO Annabel Spring explore the critical components of a good life — and how simple actions like exercise and financial planning can boost your present and future well-being. They discuss how to maximize your sense of joy, transform your anxiety into a force for good and keep your brain healthy over the course of your life. (This content is made possible by HSBC. It however does not necessarily reflect the views of HSBC.)

Over his decades of farming and ranching, Gabe Brown has noticed a troubling trend: the conventional farming techniques he used were degrading the soil and harming nature. He shares how his family farm turned things around by adopting regenerative agricultural practices — and shows how the wider food system can use these same methods to improve food quality and revitalize the land.

What if AI could help connect you with the right medical care, exactly when you need it? Health systems entrepreneur, surgeon and TED Fellow Mohamed Aburawi explores how his digital health platform, Speetar, uses AI to bridge the healthcare gap in underserved regions, like his native Libya, by connecting patients with doctors who truly understand their needs.

What if solving poverty, caring for nature and fostering well-being were the ultimate goals of the economy, instead of growth for its own sake? Environmentalist and economist Gaya Herrington proposes a shift in thinking from "never enough" to "enough for each," asking us to contemplate whether the end of exponential growth on a finite planet will come by design — or disaster.

Many people who want to be healthy often try to eat a balanced diet and get regular exercise. However, most foods today simply do not contain the nutrition they did in the past. If your goal is to improve your physical and mental health, your body may still require essential nutrients. IV nutrition therapy is […]

The post Exploring the Impact of IV Nutrition Therapy on Mental Health first appeared on What is Psychology?.

Schools must make the critical decision whether to reinforce the learning that students have already done this year or introduce new content.

North Dakota's Senate has endorsed legislation that would bar felons from serving on school boards.

"We have a responsibility to save lives," Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said on Twitter. "We could have waited to close schools, but based on advice from health experts, this is the time to do it."

The mix of hybrid learning approaches is dizzying, but schools are learning valuable lessons about what is worth replicating.

Schools are putting in place or considering measures such as extending holiday breaks or shifting back to full-time remote learning.

While most teachers have online access at home, internet service for many educators in rural areas is spotty, expensive, or nonexistent.

The state's "Influence 100" project includes a leadership development program that will give aspiring district leaders a hands-on opportunity to work through an equity issue in their home districts.

Even with remote learning, there are steps schools can take to reach stressed-out students without pathologizing them.

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos on Wednesday visited a Kentucky high school that is recovering from a 2018 shooting to award additional grant money meant to aid its recovery efforts.