Spanish officials to be questioned over migrant deaths

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Spanish officials to be questioned over migrant deaths

Texas Middle School Principal Suspended for banning Hispanic students from speaking Spanish in the Classroom

Posted on December 5, 2013 by Admin

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The Lone Star Watchdog

A Texas middle school principal is accused of banning students from speaking Spanish in the classrooms.

Kudos to the Principle. This is America, Not Mexico. We speak ENGLISH not Spanish

http://www.thelonestarwatchdog.com/principal-accused-banning-students.html

Sent to us by The Lone Star Watchdog.

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Texas Middle School Principal Suspended for banning Hispanic students from speaking Spanish in the Classroom

What Spanish Recovery?

What Spanish Recovery?
http://currenteconomictrendsandnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/cbaec__20131028_spain_0.jpg

One of the prevailing themes in recent weeks has been that Spain has transformed out of Europe’s economic basket case into a success story. This was further exemplified today by the following quote by DieselBOOM:

• DIJSSELBLOEM: SPANISH RECOVERY IS ON TRACK 


• DIJSSELBLOEM: SPAIN COULD BE FRONT RUNNER OF EURO-AREA RECOVERY

It could, if one listens to bureaucrats peddling snake oily hope, but certainly not based on actual dynamics in its housing market, where mortgage apps have tumbled 90% from all time highs, pocket change investment by Bill Gates notwithstanding, and where even the YoY change has now trippled dipped.

 

… and certainly not based on loan to companies or households, which continue to be the worst in the Eurogroup.

So one wonders: with a housing market deader than ever, and with loan creation that is the worst in the Eurozone, will the modest bounce in employment, which as we explained last week was all driven by a seasonal jump in temp and self-employed workers, just where is Mr. DieselBOOM and the endless ranks of Eurotopians seeing this mythical Spanish recovery? Aside from the IBEX of course, which like every other liquidity-bubble dependent indicator is merely reflecting the roughly $ 3 trillion in annual global liquidity injections by the world’s central banks?

Zero Hedge

Read more about What Spanish Recovery? and other interesting subjects concerning Commentary at TheDailyNewsReport.com

Further Proof of Shakespeare’s Hand in ‘The Spanish Tragedy’

Marsha Miller

Douglas Bruster, a University of Texas professor, has identified various spelling patterns that he says strongly suggest that part of Thomas Kyd’s “ Spanish Tragedy” was written by Shakespeare.

For nearly two centuries, scholars have debated whether some 325 lines in the 1602 quarto edition of Thomas Kyd’s play “The Spanish Tragedy” were, in fact, written by Shakespeare.

Last year, the British scholar Brian Vickers used computer analysis to argue that the so-called Additional Passages were by Shakespeare, a claim hailed by some as the latest triumph of high-tech Elizabethan text mining.

But now, a professor at the University of Texas says he has found something closer to definitive proof using a more old-fashioned method: analyzing Shakespeare’s messy handwriting.

In a terse four-page paper, to be published in the September issue of the journal Notes and Queries, Douglas Bruster argues that various idiosyncratic features of the Additional Passages — including some awkward lines that have struck some doubters as distinctly sub-Shakespearean — may be explained as print shop misreadings of Shakespeare’s penmanship.

“What we’ve got here isn’t bad writing, but bad handwriting,” Mr. Bruster said in a telephone interview.

Claiming Shakespeare authorship can be a perilous endeavor. In 1996, Donald Foster, a pioneer in computer-driven textual analysis, drew front-page headlines with his assertion that Shakespeare was the author of an obscure Elizabethan poem called “A Funeral Elegy,” only to quietly retract his argument six years later after analyses by Mr. Vickers and others linked it to a different author.

This time, editors of some prestigious scholarly editions are betting that Mr. Bruster’s cautiously methodical arguments, piled on top of previous work by Mr. Vickers and others, will make the attribution stick.

“We don’t have any absolute proof, but this is as close as you can get,” said Eric Rasmussen, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and an editor, with Jonathan Bate, of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s edition of the complete Shakespeare.

“I think we can now say with some authority that, yes, this is Shakespeare,” Mr. Rasmussen said. “It has his fingerprints all over it.”

Mr. Rasmussen and Mr. Bate are including “The Spanish Tragedy” in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new edition of Shakespeare’s collaboratively authored plays, to be published in November. And Mr. Bruster plans to include the Additional Passages in his new edition of the Riverside Shakespeare (renamed the Bankside Shakespeare), coming in 2016.

If embraced by the broader world of Shakespeareans, the Additional Passages would become the first largely undisputed new addition to the canon since Shakespeare’s contributions to “Edward III” — another play that some have attributed to Kyd — began appearing in scholarly editions in the mid-1990s.

Acceptance is by no means assured. Three years ago, some scholars were skeptical when the Arden Shakespeare published “Double Falsehood,” an 18th-century play whose connection with a lost Shakespeare drama had long been debated, in its prestigious series.

Tiffany Stern, a professor of early modern drama at Oxford University and an advisory editor for the Arden Shakespeare, praised the empirical rigor of Mr. Bruster’s paper, but said that some new attributions were driven less by solid evidence than by publishers’ desire to offer “more Shakespeare” than their rivals.

“The arguments for ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ are better than for most” putative Shakespeare collaborations, Ms. Stern said. “But I think we’re going a bit Shakespeare-attribution crazy and shoving a lot of stuff in that maybe shouldn’t be there.”

Elizabethan theater was intensely collaborative, with playwrights often punching up old plays or working with other dramatists to cobble together new ones, in the manner of Hollywood script doctors. The 1602 Additional Passages to “The Spanish Tragedy,” inserted more than a decade after Kyd wrote the original, updated the bloody revenge play with a bit of psychological realism, which had become fashionable. (It is not known whether Kyd, who died in 1594, ever met Shakespeare.)

The idea that Shakespeare may have written the Additional Passages — which include a “Hamlet”-like scene of a grief-maddened father discoursing on the death of his son — was first broached in 1833 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But that claim remained a distinctly minority position well into the 20th century, even as scholars began using sophisticated computer software to detect subtle linguistic patterns that seemed to link the passages to Shakespeare’s other work.

Mr. Bruster said he himself was a skeptic until he read Mr. Vickers’s 2012 article, which presented voluminous circumstantial historical evidence alongside linguistic patterns unearthed by software designed to uncover student plagiarism.

“I had to rethink my entire position,” Mr. Bruster said. “His arguments based on literary history were just so strong.”

Mr. Bruster was less persuaded by the linguistic parallels, which he calls merely “suggestive.” And so he turned to perhaps the most literal source of authority: Shakespeare’s own pen.

NYT > Global Home

Further Proof of Shakespeare’s Hand in ‘The Spanish Tragedy’

RPT-Why was doomed Spanish train going so fast?

Fri Jul 26, 2013 2:59am EDT

(Repeats story from July 25 without changes)

By Andrés González and Julien Toyer

MADRID, July 25 (Reuters) – Why was the train going so fast? Did the driver fail to heed speed limits on a sharp curve? Did brakes fail? What about the safety system meant to force the train or the driver to slow down if going too fast?

These are among issues investigators will look into after Spain’s worst train crash in decades, which left at least 80 dead and 94 injured, 35 of them in serious condition.

A day after the crash, the driver of the train which derailed on the outskirts of the northern Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela was under police watch in hospital but had not been arrested.

A judge in the Galicia region ordered police to question the driver, Francisco Jose Garzon, as a suspect and also ordered them to seize the black box of the train.

The 52-year-old driver was a 30-year veteran, said Renfe, the state train company. It has been widely reported that he took a sharp curve with an 80-kmph speed limit at more than twice that speed.

Many newspapers published excerpts from his Facebook account where he boasted of driving trains at high speed. The account was closed early on Thursday.

The driver was not available for comment and Reuters was not able to locate his family or determine whether he has a lawyer.

Representatives of railway unions said it was too early to tell whether the driver was to blame.

“Human error is always a possibility, and in defence of human error what do we have, we have technology, that is what it is for … but it is very difficult to know what might have happened without, for example, hearing what the driver was saying at the time,” said Miguel Angel Cillero, responsible for transport at union UGT.

While police and the judge were looking into potential negligence on the part of the driver, the Public Works Ministry launched a more technical investigation. Renfe and Adif, the state track operator, began their own probes.

Security video footage showed the train, with 247 people on board, hurtling into a concrete wall at the side of the track as carriages jack-knifed and the engine overturned.

The impact was so strong that one carriage of the train flew over a wall and landed on an embankment several metres above.

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Main story on the train disaster

Harrowing scenes

Timeline on Spanish train tragedies

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TWO SAFETY SYSTEMS

The train involved, made by Bombardier and Talgo, was a series 730 that Renfe uses for its Alvia service, which is faster than conventional trains but not as fast as the AVE trains that criss-cross Spain at even higher speeds.

The train was built in 2007-2009, but remodelled in 2012 to use diesel.

The train is designed to operate on conventional and high-speed tracks that make use of two different types of safety systems that are meant to regulate excessive speed.

On high-speed lines, trains use the European Train Control System, or ETCS, system, which automatically slows down a train that is going too fast.

On slower lines, trains operate under an older system called ASFA, a Spanish acronym for Signal Announcement and Automatic Braking, which warns the driver if a train is moving too fast but does not automatically slow it down.

At the site of the disaster, just 3 km before reaching the Santiago de Compostela station, the train was passing through an urban area on a steep curve. At that point of the track, two railway experts said, it uses the older ASFA safety system.

Professor Roger Kemp, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in Britain, said in an e-mailed comment: “As the driver was leaving the high-speed line to join a much slower route before entering the station, there must have been at least prominent visual warnings to reduce speed, if not audible warnings and an electronic speed supervision system.”

Local media reported that railway union representatives had questioned whether a high-speed train should have been adapted to run on a track with curves that had been designed for lower-speed trains.

A source close to ADIF said the safety system was apparently working correctly and a train had passed an hour earlier with no problems.

The train, packed with families visiting relatives and revellers on their way to a major religious festival, was not running late.

It began its seven hour journey to the northern region of Galicia right on time: at 15.00 CET on the dot. It crashed at 20.41, two minutes before it was due to arrive. (Additional reporting by Kate Kelland, Teresa Medrano and Elisabeth O’Leary; Writing by Fiona Ortiz and Sarah White; Editing by Peter Graff)

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RPT-Why was doomed Spanish train going so fast?