Plotting crimes amongst the fresh produce | News

Crime novelist and one of the new general managers at Woolworths in the Knysna Mall, James Fouch?. Not just a pretty face, Fouch? also speaks fluent Spanish which he began studying in 2005, "because I look damn sexy in the mirror when I do!" he teases. "Nah, I wanted to learn Spanish because I hate it when my mind becomes stagnant and I constantly want to learn new things."

Shopping at Woolworths Knysna these days may offer more than one has bargained for!

Most customers would not expect one of the friendly managers to be a published crime novelist, but James Fouch?, currently content to discuss good food at the Knysna Mall, actually has a New York publisher.

His debut novel, Jack Hanger, was published in 2010 and is the gripping tale of Dave Matters who suffers from a complex form of OCD and selective memory loss. Critics feel that Fouch? successfully lures the reader into the darkest niches of the main character?s disturbed mind.

Fouch?, like many authors, is a habitual observer of humanity, whether he is plotting his latest crime thriller sitting in the back of a coffee shop or at work with customers between the aisles.

?Most authors possess a strong imagination, yet they have an analytical and realistic view of life. We speak our mind by writing it down. This is our voice. In so doing we stumble upon possible solutions or create a cathartic outlet for readers dealing with issues related to the written material,? explains the author whose constant struggle with the injustices of a corrupt and demented society may be the reason he writes.

?In writing a crime novel you take control of the darkness. It is no longer your unknown enemy which may strike at any moment in real life, but you become the one who decides its destiny. You can redeem the twisted soul or not. It is in fact a process of empowering yourself and, in the South African psyche, it gives one some type of closure amidst a fearful and uncertain reality which may seem overwhelming at times.?

Fouch?, who grew up in Goodwood ?very close to Jack Parow?s turf?, he chuckles, admits he was never very good at languages at school, unlike assumptions that the opposite would be true for writers.

?I actually failed Afrikaans until Standard 9 when I finished my first manuscript. I?m a storyteller, more than a good writer, but I soon learned that if I wrote an essay the teachers liked, I would score enough points to carry my grades!?
A young and idealistic Fouch? was intensely disappointed when there was no reaction to the manuscript he had sent away for possible publication.

?Although I did toy around with the possibility of one day becoming an author on the far horizons of my future ambitions, while I was gobbling up Stephen King novels, I gave up the idea when no one was interested in my first attempt.?
It was only years later, urged on by his mother and his fianc?e (now his wife of four years, Marlene) to once again send away a half-finished manuscript, that he mailed off another set of pages.

?This time I had nothing to lose because it was no longer such an issue for me to get published,? he says. ?And when Raider Publishing in New York actually showed interest in my work, it was a very nice surprise, pushing me to finish the novel in the next two months.?

Once the book was published he was even approached by a Seatlle television station?s morning show to make an appearance, but found out to his dismay that he had to get there on his own expense.

Fouch? feels that his one saving grace was the fact that he has always been an avid reader, and the disappearance of a reading culture in the South African educational landscape torments him. He muses that his favourite author may be HG Wells.

Busy with his second novel, the soon to be completed King of Sorrow, he explains his writing process.
?I write mostly in coffee shops at odd hours of the day. There I get to hide in a distant corner where no one can notice me. I observe the world around me and use what I see to shape my characters.?

More experienced now, Fouch? believes a story needs two things before you start writing: a beginning and an end.
?You need to know where you?re going. So I plot the beginning and a rough end in my mind, then I begin on page 1. I also have many photos of places or items which inspired me or motivates me to create a certain scene or character to be used in my books.?

He says that he does ?not really dip into his own dark side to write a bad guy?.

?I?m just fascinated by the criminal mind. I try to understand the point of inception ? the point where the healthy moral conscience becomes the unhealthy uncaring criminal. I become this person and work out the scenes in my mind, then I document what I find.?

King of Sorrow is set in Nigeria (which Fouch? visited in 2010), Cape Town and George.
?I?m hoping this is going to be my big one!? he grins.

The Fouch?s live in George with their two Jack Russell terriers.

ARTICLE: ANOESCHKA VON MECK, KNYSNA-PLETT HERALD JOURNALIST

Source: Knysna-Plett Herald

Source: http://showme.co.za/knysna/news/plotting-crimes-amongst-the-fresh-produce/

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Joe Allbritton, 87, DC media, banking giant, dies

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) ? Joe L. Allbritton, who became one of Washington's most influential men by building media and banking empires, has died at the age of 87.

Allbritton Communications president Frederick Ryan said Allbritton died Wednesday of heart ailments at a hospital in Houston, where he lived.

Allbritton's fortune was self-made, beginning with real estate trades and banking investments. By age 33, he was a millionaire.

His holdings include eight television stations, including WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington whose call letters bear his initials. He owned the Washington Star for several years and his son founded Politico.

He also owned Riggs Bank for more than 20 years, including its final years, which were mired in scandal.

He was a fixture on the D.C. social circuit and good friends with Prince Charles.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-12-12-Obit-Allbritton/id-247417f8f39f42d88d48cac08191a07d

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Boozy Gifts for Merry Drunkards

Yup, some people love to drink. And people who really truly love getting ripped can always appreciate a gadget that make knocking one back a little easier. Here's some loot your thirstiest pal would love to find stashed away in a stocking. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/DuA37TGOjwQ/boozy-gifts-for-merry-drunkards

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Importance of Mining Machinery In National Economy | Hugo Hosting

Mining machinery, plays a extremely important role in economic building, advance of science and technology, and cultural improvement. The advancement of mining machinery is intently related with the technological advance of human, the modern day science and technological innovation, and the whole business stage, especially with the growth of mechanical engineering and mining engineering. The mining equipment manufacturing sector,specially crusher, is not only the basis for the state to build an independent industrial technique, but also an crucial mark to evaluate the industrial strength of a nation, which belongs to the pillar industry of national economic system.

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Mining Machinery is for the vitality, transportation and uncooked substance-based services industry, the principal process is for the serious processing of coal, steel, nonferrous metals, chemical compounds, building materials departments of mining and processing of raw components, as properly as railways, highways, utilities and other significant tasks building to give sophisticated, productive technology and gear. Accordance with national priorities to assist vitality, transportation and raw materials and other simple industrial improvement, industrial policy, mining machinery such basic sectors as the backbone of the region need to get priority for key support, ought to be further developed and improved for the coal, steel and nonmetal mines improvement offer far more advanced worldwide expectations of top quality, effectiveness, environmental protection, energy protecting devices to meet up with the economical growth requirements for electricity and raw materials.

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thirty several years of reform and opening up, China mining equipment industry experienced the introduction of digestion and absorption of overseas sophisticated technological innovation and production to layout harmony, self-created route of improvement, specially in the implementation ?of the Condition Council on Accelerating the tools developing business a amount of opinions? underneath the impetus of mine machinery manufacturing basically two significant modifications, one particular from the generic kind of solution development to innovation-based change the next is the economic climate to reward from the extensive transformation.

Because 2000, the household standard industries and infrastructure, driven by huge-scale improvement, mining equipment market need, industrial output price and product sales growth charge stabilized at 32% to 40%.

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Mining devices developing sector must accelerate the engineering reform speed of mechanical gear under the guidance of nationwide policy, improve solution framework in accordance to market requirement, and enhance cost savings in buy to have a far more long-time period growth. Forming a developing and growth capabilities, potential to venture into, and progressive capability of enterprise entities, the equipment and devices organization into a industry competitiveness and chance-resisting capability of present day mining gear business groups, efforts to supply energy conserving mining gear, to minimize mining the user?s risk and financial commitment as a starting up level, and make beneficial contribution to the improvement of China?s mining devices business.

As the professional company of comprehensive sets of mining equipment, this sort of as Cellular affect crusher,Stone jaw crusher,jaw crusher provider,ore separating line,Cement producing device, Henan Hongxing is always performing the very best in goods and services.

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Source: http://www.hugohosting.com/importance-of-mining-machinery-in-national-economy.html

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$2 billion price tag for presidential election

FILE - This combination of 2012 file photos shows U.S. President Barack Obama, left, and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Boulder, Colo. and Cape Canaveral, Fla. Campaign finance filings with the government now show that the cost of the 2012 U.S. presidential race has surpassed $2 billion, a new record. The new tallies released Thursday, Dec. 6, 2012, which include nearly $86 million in fundraising by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in the election's final weeks, boosted the total campaign haul over the $2 billion mark. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, Charles Dharapak)

FILE - This combination of 2012 file photos shows U.S. President Barack Obama, left, and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Boulder, Colo. and Cape Canaveral, Fla. Campaign finance filings with the government now show that the cost of the 2012 U.S. presidential race has surpassed $2 billion, a new record. The new tallies released Thursday, Dec. 6, 2012, which include nearly $86 million in fundraising by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in the election's final weeks, boosted the total campaign haul over the $2 billion mark. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, Charles Dharapak)

FILE - In this April 12, 2012 file photo, Las Vegas Sands Chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson speaks at a news conference for the Sands Cotai Central in Macau. New campaign finance figures for the final two weeks of the 2012 campaign show that Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife gave $10 million to a "super" political committee supporting losing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Adelson, who owns casinos in Las Vegas, Singapore and the Chinese territory of Macau, has been the top donor in the 2012 race, providing more than $54 million supporting Romney and other GOP presidential candidates and an additional $18 million for other Republicans. The new $10 million figure for Adelson and his wife, Miriam, is for the pro-Romney Restore Our Future super PAC, but their totals could grow as final campaign finance tallies are reported Thursday, Dec. 7. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The 2012 presidential election broke the $2 billion milestone in its final weeks, becoming the most expensive in American political history, according to final federal finance reports released Thursday. The reports detailed a last-minute cascade of money from mega-donors and an onslaught of spending by the Obama and Romney campaigns and "super" political action committees.

The final campaign finance tallies filed with the Federal Election Commission included nearly $86 million in fundraising for the losing presidential candidate, Republican Mitt Romney, in the election's last weeks. That final burst brought the Romney campaign's total for the election to above $1 billion. Final fundraising and spending totals for President Barack Obama's victorious drive also topped $1 billion.

Surpassing the $2 billion mark was long expected after an election season dominated by the supercharged competitive pressures that both campaigns faced in mounting massive fundraising blitzes to stoke expensive media ad battles and ground wars. The Obama and Romney campaigns each mobilized competing squads of ultra-wealthy fundraisers, sought aid from free-spending allied super PACs and deployed multimillion-dollar media broadsides and armies of organizers.

The final thrust of fundraising included a massive late surge of $33 million in donations to pro-Romney political committees from a single billionaire, Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson. In all, Adelson and his wife, Miriam, gave Romney and other Republican candidates $95 million during the election season, closing in on the gambling magnate's vow to give $100 million to GOP causes.

The new campaign finance filings covered the final few weeks of the race, when campaign organizations for Romney and Obama, along with a slew of super PACs, raised and spent millions toward the long-expected $2 billion milestone.

Despite Romney's bitter election loss, his national finance chairman on Thursday declared a fundraising victory. Spencer Zwick said "every dollar we raised was put to use in the effort to elect Mitt Romney" and described the totals as "the most successful in Republican Party history."

Both campaigns already were nearing $1 billion each in expenditures by late October, and super PACs supporting Obama and Romney had spent more than $500 million in media ads. Politically oriented nonprofit "social welfare" organizations that do not have to declare their finances or identify their fundraisers have spent hundreds of millions more on so-called issue ads.

The main pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future, brought in $22 million in the campaign's final weeks, finishing with $152 million for the entire campaign. Adelson and his wife provided $10 million of that last-minute total ? as well as $23 million to American Crossroads, another pro-Romney super PAC headed by veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove. Other top late donors to Restore included Larry Ellison, head of software giant Oracle Corp., who gave $3 million, and Houston Texans owner Robert McNair, who gave $1 million. The Renco Group, a New York company headed by investor Ira Rennert, also gave $1 million.

The rival super PAC supporting Obama, Priorities USA Action, reported raising $15 million during the last weeks of the campaign. The group was run by a group of former White House aides. The committee's final haul accounted for about 20 percent of roughly $78 million in contributions this election cycle.

The group's top donors included Renaissance Technologies investors James H. Simons and Henry Laufer, who each gave $1.5 million. Chicago media mogul Fred Eychaner, Texas lawyer Steve Mostyn, and Stephen Robert, also of Renaissance, also gave $1 million, as did the Laborer's International Union of North America.

But Adelson was the election's single most influential donor, vowing he would give more than $100 million to GOP candidates by the election. His postelection super PAC total does not quite match that figure, but the casino magnate also hinted broadly he would also give millions more to GOP-leaning nonprofits that do not have to report their war chests to the FEC but instead provide confidential figures to the Internal Revenue Service.

Along with his dominant presence in the presidential race, Adelson also poured money into super PACs backing several GOP Senate candidates in the final weeks of the election. More than $1.5 million in Adelson money went to a super PAC backing GOP candidate George Allen in Virginia, $1 million to a committee aiding Michigan candidate Peter Hoekstra and $500,000 to a super PAC supporting Sen. Scott Brown. All were defeated.

Adelson recently told The Wall Street Journal that he would double his $100 million investment in GOP causes by the next election and he has the financial muscle to do it. His massive campaign donations are backed by his lucrative casino holdings in the U.S. and Macau. The most recent November quarterly statement of his Las Vegas Sands Corp. estimated that Adelson's casino revenues surged $1.11 billion in the first nine months of 2012 compared with the same period in 2011.

In late November, Adelson's company announced a special dividend of $2.75 a share in anticipation of the threatened "fiscal cliff" rise in federal tax rates. The dividend move netted Adelson ? who owns more than half of Sands' 820 million shares ? an estimated personal gain of as much as $1.2 billion, according to financial analysts.

Adelson's role as the premiere fundraiser in American politics could be complicated by his casino company's continuing struggles with the federal government over tax revenues and Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission investigations focusing on possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which targets money-laundering and international bribery.

Sands' recent quarterly statement acknowledged the federal probes as well as negotiations with the IRS over "unrecognized tax benefits" highlighted by a tax audit of the company's Macao and Singapore casino earnings between 2005 and 2009.

Sands cited a "possible settlement of matters presently under consideration at appeals in connection with the IRS audit."

___

Follow Jack Gillum on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jackgillum

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-12-06-Campaign%20Money/id-46f4a655fb3443c187775029ac881cd3

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Kermit confesses all in funny new video

TV Guide

By Randee Dawn, NBC News contributor

It seems likely that the latest visitor to TV Guide Magazine's "Cubicle Confessions" would need his office chair lowered quite a bit -- and he might also require some mopping up afterward. After all, he was a frog. And not just any old frog: Kermit the Frog.

Kermit sat down with the magazine for a cheerfully hilarious chat (timing out with the release of "The Muppet Christmas Carol" on Blu-ray), sitting behind a desk in New York City with a Miss Piggy bobblehead at his side (and a black-and-white glamour shot of her hanging behind him) and fielded a few salient questions.

He noted that back when he lived in a swamp, "Probably the worst job I ever had was having to clean up the pond scum.... It's one of those things you do when you're just coming out of tadpole-hood, just as your tail falls off."

Turns out there are many things we didn't know about Kermit: He can handle a chainsaw, and considers himself a handyman; he prefers non-fancy hotels because they're full of bugs and flies, which negates room service, and his favorite shows include "Homeland" and "Duck Dynasty." "It's only because I know so many ducks," he admitted.

Miss Piggy loves the Kardashians, but has a bit of trouble with the food shows, which surprised Kermit. That said, "You know, Piggy and I are both appetizer items on some menus, so you have to be careful."

Check out the video!

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Source: http://entertainment.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/06/15727366-kermit-the-frog-sits-down-for-cubicle-confessions-in-new-video?lite

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His and hers: Male hormones control differences in mammary gland nerve growth

Friday, December 7, 2012

Johns Hopkins scientists have found a surprising mechanism that gives male sex hormones like testosterone control over the gender-specific absence or presence of mammary gland nerves that sense the amount of milk available in breast milk ducts.

In a Dec. 7 report on their discovery in Science, they say the hormones do the job by altering the availability of a nerve growth factor, called BDNF for short.

The most obvious differences between males and females involve the presence or absence of physical structures. Below the surface, however, these structures are penetrated by nerves, which also are present in a sex-specific way.

"We now think we have a broader understanding of how sex-specific nerves reach their proper target in a given sex, say in mammary milk ducts in females, but disappear in the other sex," says David Ginty, Ph.D., a Howard Hughes investigator and professor of neuroscience in the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

For their experiments with sex-specific neural wiring, Yin Liu, a student in Ginty's laboratory, studied nerves in mice that monitor the fullness of milk ducts in females. If the milk supply is low, the nerves are believed to report this to the brain to stimulate milk production, Ginty says. Early in embryonic development, there are no differences between the mammary glands of males and females and this milk-monitoring set of nerves is present in both. Later in development, the nerves are lost in males.

In one experiment, to figure out how the nerves find their way to the immature mammary glands of both sexes during early development, the researchers analyzed the gland cells for the presence of four proteins known to encourage nerve growth. They found only one that was there in significant quantities ? BDNF ? and it was present at similar levels in both sexes.

Ginty says BDNF is known to bind to a protein, known as TrkB, found on the surface of nerve cells. This binding event triggers a series of messages within the nerve cell, telling it to grow towards the source of the signal. When the researchers looked for TrkB in developing mice, they found it, as expected, on the surfaces of nerve cells that grow into the immature glands of both sexes. "So early development could be explained quite simply," says Ginty. "The cells of the early mammary glands released the signaling molecule BDNF, which was detected by TrkB on the nerve cells, which made them grow toward the mammary glands. What remained a mystery was why these nerve cells are lost a few hours later in males."

In a subsequent experiment, using molecular tests, the scientists ruled out the possibility that nerve cells in male pre-mammary glands were receiving a "suicide signal" and dying off. They reasoned that if the nerve cells weren't dying, they must be retracting, and went hunting for what signal was telling them to do so.

Since sex hormones play many different roles in determining sex-specific differences, the researchers monitored the effects of adding male sex hormones to females, and the effects of blocking male sex hormones in males. They found that the female pattern of nerve growth was the "default" and that male sex hormones would cause withdrawal of the nerves from the glands of either sex.

"At this point, we knew that BDNF is found at comparable levels in the glands of both sexes, that TrkB is found at comparable levels on the nerve cells of both sexes, and that male sex hormones were still somehow creating a difference in the system," says Ginty.

To figure out just how the hormones caused the nerve growth differences, they searched for the BDNF receptor protein TrkB in the immature gland tissue (instead of in the nerve cells). They found it ? but only in males.

It turns out that, in addition to regular TrkB made by nerve cells, a shorter version of the protein, dubbed TrkB.T1, also exists. From their experiments, Ginty and his team concluded that as the male embryos got older, male sex hormones, produced by the testes, commanded non-nerve cells in the immature gland tissue to produce TrkB.T1. Though TrkB.T1 can still bind BDNF, once it does so, both proteins are taken inside the cell and recycled, essentially removing BDNF ? and its nerve-growth-promoting signals ? from early mammary gland tissue in males.

"It's as if testosterone sounds the horn for retreat, so that without BDNF present, the nerve endings that had already reached the male mammary glands pull away," says Ginty. "We believe this is the first study to show sex hormones regulating nerve growth and retraction by affecting the availability of BDNF," he adds, noting that "it will be interesting to see if similar mechanisms create other sex-specific differences in neural wiring, including those that affect general behavior."

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Johns Hopkins Medicine: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org

Thanks to Johns Hopkins Medicine for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/125808/His_and_hers__Male_hormones_control_differences_in_mammary_gland_nerve_growth

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