Award winning tenor David Christopher never hits a bad note. So this March 17, lucky revelers can enjoy a rare appearance of David performing his St.Patricks Day Show entitled “Come Back To Erin”, in the Regency Room at Lyons English Grille on Sunday, March 17 at 7pm..
After the show’s eight year hiatus, David returns to perform a selection of traditional Irish ballads accompanied by Ron Syder on the piano, Eric Frankson on the violin and Christian Chalifour on harp.
Songs include Mother Machree, Little Bit of Heaven, That’s How I Spell Ireland, Macushla, Sweet Molly Malone, Danny Boy and more.
Showtime is 7pm with dinner seating at 5:30 pm. Dinner and Show is $44.95 and show Only is $20.00 with a two drink minimum.
For Reservations Call Lyons English Grille at 760-327-1551
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, 76, of Argentina has been elected as Pope. He is the first Pope from Latin America in the history of the Catholic Church.
The new Pope was announced by French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran from a balcony over the main doors of St. Peter’s Basilica as thousands of onlookers cheered from the square below.
Addressing the crowd, Pope Francis asked the faithful to pray for him before blessing the crowd, who greeted him with jubilation.
“Good night and good rest,” Pope Francis said. As the crowd shouting “Grazie!”in reply, bells began sounding throughout Vatican City.
On Wednesday evening, white smoke rose above the Sistine Chapel as the bells of St. Peter Basilica tolled out ‘Habemus papem”, meaning the Catholic Church now has a new Pope.
The 115 cardinal-electors held a full day of deliberations on Wednesday after black smoke appeared following the morning session, signalling that no decision had been made.
White smoke was released up the chimney after five rounds of voting meaning that a two-thirds majority had been reached and that one candidate received at least 77 votes.
Crowds outside St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome cheered and waved flags from many different nations. Some waved crucifixes while others held banners reading ‘long live the Pope’.
Before the conclave began, there was no clear frontrunner to replace Benedict XVI.
Pope Benedict XVI stepped down last month citing a “lack of strength of mind and body” due to his advanced age.
Pope Benedict was the first Pope to resign in 600 years, amid revelations of corruption, petty infighting and mismanagement in the Catholic Church.
The problems facing the Church split the College of Cardinals into camps; one seeking a radical reformer as Pope, the other, including the Holy See’s governance, wanting to defend the status quo.
National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander. (AFP Photo / Getty Images / Chip Somodevilla)
The head of the United States Cyber Command says the US is developing 40 new teams of cyber-agents that will both protect America’s critical infrastructure from hackers and as well as launch attacks against the country’s adversaries.
Gen. Keith Alexander, who leads both the Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, told the US Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that the 40 online support teams should be ready for action by 2015, with 13 of those units existing specifically to attack other countries.
Alexander has been reluctant to go into detail about how the newly-designed teams will engage in cyber battle with America’s enemies, but he did say that the 13 squads of offensive fighters won’t be sitting around waiting for hackers from abroad to strike first. The NSA chief described the groups as ‘‘defend-the-nation’’teams but also stressed that their role will be one that puts them on both sides of the action.
“I would like to be clear that this team. . . is an offensive team,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
“The teams are analogous to battalions in the Army and Marine Corps — or squadrons in the Navy and Air Force,” said Alexander. “In short, they will soon be capable of operating on their own, with a range of operational and intelligence skill sets, as well as a mix of military and civilian personnel.”
Chris Strohm, a national security reporter for Bloomberg, says the units will“focus on missions such as protecting vital computer networks from attacks, supporting combat operations and keeping the Pentagon’s information-technology systems secure.”
The Associated Press reports that Gen. Alexander likened the teams’ duties to“knocking an incoming missile out of the sky before it hits a target,” and that they’d serve as defensive teams with added offensive capabilities.
A 27-year-old Argentinian student claims he was “exploited” by a work-study program offered by a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. The student claims he paid thousands to come to the US, only to find himself on call at all times and working overtime without pay.
“We have been exploited by McDonald’s because we have been working for McDonald’s but we did not receive overtime or the fact that we have been put to be on-call all day had to do with the way McDonald’s designed our schedules,”he told ABC News.
Jorge Rios, the Argentinian student, came to the US in December 2012 to work for the franchise as part of a work-study program offered by the US State Department. Rios claims that he and 17 other foreign students have all faced the same mistreatment. Each of them paid $3,000 to $4,000 for their plane tickets, visa, and other travel costs, only to undergo a level of exploitation that they never expected to face in the US.
A private company that brings foreign students to the US set Rios up with the McDonald’s franchise. Rios is currently enrolled at the National University of Misiones in Posadas, Argentina, and was expecting valuable work experience in the US. He paid the hefty fees that the private company charged him to enroll him in the State Department’s program. But thousands of dollars later, his experience has been nothing less than a nightmare.
Rios has launched a petition demanding that McDonald’s CEO and president Don Thompson provide overtime pay and “basic labor standards” for student workers. The petition, which was launched in partnership with the National Guestworker Alliance, currently has 5,283 signatures.
“We expected to have 40 hours of work a week, but we were given as little as four hours a week at the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour,” he writes in the petition. “The employer knew we were desperate for more hours, and he kept us on call to come in with 30 minutes’ notice all day and night. I didn’t even have time to visit the public library.”
While constantly on call and making little money, Rios has so far been deprived of the cultural experience he was expecting to get out of his four-month visit. Additionally, he claims to have been forced to stay in unlivable conditions in a child-sized bunk bed. Rios and the other foreign workers each paid the McDonald’s franchise $300 per month for inadequate housing.
“As many as eight of us lived in a single basement,” he told ABC. “We slept on bunk beds made for children that shook and squeaked. We had no privacy whatsoever.”
Steel workers look over a pile confiscated illegal weapons in Rancho Cucamonga, California (AFP Photo / David McNew)
In California, the government is already coming for the guns.
Notwithstanding the Second Amendment, rules and regulations across the United States outline certain restrictions for who can legally possess a firearm. In the state of California, factors such as a felony conviction or a history of mental health issues mean roughly 20,000 gun owners are holding onto their firearms illegally. Slowly but surely, though, Golden State police officers are prying them away. There’s more, though: backers of the program suggest this becomes a nation-wide practice, and are asking the White House to help make it happen.
“Very, very few states have an archive of firearm owners like we have,” Garen Wintemute of the Violence Prevention Research Program tells Bloomberg News. Wintemute helped set up a program on the West Coast that monitors not just licensed gun owners but also watches for any red flags that could be raised after admittance to a mental health institute or a quick stint in the slammer.
Wintemute says that as many as 200,000 people across the United States may no longer be qualified to own firearms, and in California they are making sure that number drops day by day. In one example cited in this week’s Bloomberg report, journalists recall a recent scene where nine California Justice Department agents equipped with 40-caliber Glock pistols and outfitted in bulletproof vests knocked on a suburban residence, requested to speak to a certain gun owner and then walked away with whatever arsenal they could apprehend.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris seized roughly 2,000 weapons last year, reports Bloomberg, as well as 117,000 rounds of ammunition and 11,000 high-capacity magazines. But as concerns escalate about a possible war against the right to bear arms in America, will other states soon follow suite?
In California, some shortcuts are already meaning weapons are being removed from lawful owners. Bloomberg reports cite the example of 48-year-old Lynette Phillips, a California woman who was recently hospitalized for mental illness. When a team of agents went to collect her two registered firearms, they also walked out with one registered to her husband.
“The prohibited person can’t have access to a firearm,” regardless of who the registered owner is, said Michelle Gregory, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office.
In other cities and towns across the country, Americans are standing up against what many say are unconstitutional attempts to disarm the United States. In New York State, new legislation is making it harder for Americans to purchase firearms, and one provision will provide gun owners with a felony charge if they ignore new registration rules — which is enough on its own to make owning guns illegal. Across the board more states are demanding stricter background checks, but as efforts to remove weapons from the hands of Americans — voluntarily and involuntarily — are ramped up, though, those that disagree are doing what they can to keep their country armed.
In the wake of last year’s massacres in Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut — among others — lawmakers and the public at large have called on Americans for a mass disarming. Gun buyback programs are being touted in countless cities, and in California the attorney general is hoping for even more help at getting guns away from their once-lawful owners — Attorney General Harris has asked Vice President Joe Biden for help and has asked state lawmakers to increase the number of agents tasked with collecting weapons up to 33. She also told Mr. Biden that she thought the efforts coming out of California could be a good model of a national program, reports Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, though, others are making sure weapons aren’t being put to waste. Residents in Maine hit the polls this week to vote on a law that would require everyone in the town of Byron to register a high-powered weapon.
“It was never my intention to force anyone to own a gun who doesn’t want to. My purpose was to make a statement in support of the Second Amendment,”Head Selectman Anne Simmons-Edmund tells US News & World Report.
“I’m just here because I’d rather see weapons stay with people, rather than turned in to be melted,” a man named Joe, who declined to provide his last name, tells the Bainbridge Island Review. “I’m here to exercise the Second Amendment,” he added. “Even if I don’t get anything, honestly, I’d just rather see people keep them.”
Facebook’s ‘like’ button can reveal more than you realize, a new study has showed. By liking posts and links, you may be revealing personal secrets, like your sexuality or religious and political views. The findings have raised privacy concerns.
A study by the National Academy of Sciences examined 58,000 Facebook users in the US, who volunteered their likes, demographic profiles and psychometric test results. Researchers managed to draw “surprisingly accurate” findings about a given user’s race, IQ, sexuality, substance use, personality and political views by analyzing the topics and items they ‘liked,’ even if they set strong privacy settings for their page.
The study’s authors developed an algorithm that uses Facebook ‘likes’ to create personality profiles, potentially revealing a user’s personality. Anyone with training in data analysis could be able to derive such information, even if users had not explicitly shared it, they explained.
As a result, researchers were able to predict whether men were homosexual with 88 percent accuracy by their ‘like’ clicks on sites related to gay marriage or same-sex relations. Preferences of music and TV shows, for example, were also more revealing than users may have imagined: Men who liked the musical TV show ‘Glee’ were more likely to be gay, the study showed.
In 82 percent of cases, Christians and Muslims were correctly identified among the volunteer profiles. And the study was not only predictive of sexuality or religion, but also a user’s IQ.
Those with higher IQs tended to more frequently like ‘The Colbert Report’ TV show, for example, or films like ‘The Godfather’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Those with lower IQs liked Harley Davidsons and Bret Michaels of the rock band Poison.
