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Biden is the most strongly identified Irish-American in the White House since John F Kennedy, the only other Catholic president.

rish nationalist sentiments run high in the US, especially among its large diaspora. US presidents frequently indulge these views, at least symbolically. But, in practical terms, they have had little impact on the US-UK relationship.

More than 30 million people in the US – about one in ten Americans – identify as “Irish”.

The plan put forward by Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner, would give E.U. residents the right to opt out more easily of standard data collection practices used by businesses like Facebook. It would also compel companies to expunge all personal data, permanently, at a consumer’s request. Both elements have the potential to hamper the data-harvesting engine that is at the heart of Facebook’s advertising-driven business, and of its value.

Mr. Schrems appeared on Facebook’s radar last June when he filed a complaint against the company with the Irish regulator, the office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, in Port Arlington, Ireland. He alleged 22 violations of European law. Mr. Schrems filed the grievance after using a provision of Irish law to obtain from Facebook a copy of all of the information the company had been keeping on him. Facebook sent Mr. Schrems a computer disc containing 1,222 pages of information.

The disc, Mr. Schrems said, showed that Facebook was routinely collecting data that he had never consented to give, like his physical location, which he assumes was determined from his computer’s unique address identifiers, which can be traced geographically. Facebook was also retaining data he had deleted, Mr. Schrems said.

Functional Medicine is the alternative medicine Bill Clinton credits with giving him his life back after his 2004 quadruple heart by-pass surgery. Its ideology is embraced by Oprah and regularly features on Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop.

Developed in 1990 by Dr Jeffrey Bland, who in 1991 set up the Institute of Functional Medicine with his wife Susan, today the field is spearheaded by US best-selling author Dr Mark Hyman, adviser to the Clintons and co-director of the controversial Cleveland Clinic for Functional Medicine.

"Functional Medicine is not about a test or a supplement or a particular protocol," he adds. "It's really a new paradigm of disease and how it arises and how to restore health. Within it there are many approaches that are effective, it's not exclusive, it doesn't exclude traditional medications, it includes all modalities depending on what's right for that patient."

Accents can affect how intelligent or attractive a speaker is perceived to be

In the case of Bond, the smooth edge of his voice says 007 is smart. He's sexy. He's worldly. "When you know someone has traveled, it says a lot about that person,"

means they're independent, they have means and a job that's interesting

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

IN 1884 Roger Casement, an ascetic young Ulsterman, joined an expedition up the Congo river led by Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-born American explorer, believing that commerce, Christianity and colonialism would emancipate the dark continent.

When reports reached London that the rubber boom had prompted a similar reign of terror against the indigenous population in Putumayo, in the Peruvian Amazon, the British foreign secretary sent Casement to investigate, with the words: “You're a specialist in atrocities. You can't say no.

Only a few years after his lauded success in Peru he was hanged in Pentonville prison as a traitor. Having transferred his thirst for justice to the fight for Irish independence, he sought German military support for the cause during the first world war

on a visit to the Academy of Sciences in Almaty some years ago I was presented with a souvenir meant to assure me that Central Asia was indeed still producing philosophy worthy of note. It was a collectively authored book entitled “The Development of Materialist Dialectics in Kazakhstan,” and I still display it proudly on my shelf. Its rough binding and paper bespeak economic hardship. It is packed with the traces of ideas, yet everything about the book announces its materiality.I had arrived in the Kazakh capital 1994, just in time to encounter the last of a dying breed: the philosopher as party functionary (they are all by now retired, dead or defenestrated, or have simply given up on what they learned in school). The book, written by committee, was a collection of official talking points, and what passed for conversation there was something much closer to recitation.

The philosophical meaning of materialism may in the final analysis be traced back to a religious view of the world. On this view, to focus on the material side of existence is to turn away from the eternal and divine. Here, the category of the material is assimilated to that of sin or evil.

Yet in fact this feature of Marxist philosophical classification is one that, with some variations, continues to be shared by all philosophers, even in the West, even today

During the Nineties, and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by a perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion. We have become stridently insistent that the past has little of interest to teach us. Ours, we assert, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.

the twentieth century that we have chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus. The overwhelming majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either avowedly nostalgo-triumphalist—praising famous men and celebrating famous victories—or else, and increasingly, they are opportunities for the recollection of selective suffering.

The problem with this lapidary representation of the last century as a uniquely horrible time from which we have now, thankfully, emerged is not the description—it was in many ways a truly awful era, an age of brutality and mass suffering perhaps unequaled in the historical record. The problem is the message: that all of that is now behind us, that its meaning is clear, and that we may now advance—unencumbered by past errors—into a different and better era.

Even the most fanatical pedant must admit that usage is the ultimate arbiter of linguistic propriety. That is to say, a word means a certain thing because significant numbers of people take it to mean a certain thing. An informal process has evolved to monitor any shift in definition. At one end of the spectrum we meet words that will, from time to time, be “mistakenly” used in a way that does not conform to the dictionary definition. A chap might write “limpid” when he means “flaccid”. This still counts as an error. At the other end, we encounter words that, after decades of squabbling, have had their meaning formally transformed. Classical scholars will tell you that, derived from a term used by the Roman military, “decimate” used to mean the killing of one in 10 of any accused group. Now, we take it to mean the same as “annihilate” (which itself used to mean “make null and void”). The really interesting, contentious words can be found in the middle section of the spectrum.

Mr Campbell then asked the minister about a minority languages strategy.

"If it's anything to go by what you just did, we don't need a strategy for pure ignorance," said Ms Ní Chuilín.

A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update.

The revised response still emphasizes transmission in close contact but now says it may be via aerosols — smaller respiratory particles that can float — as well as droplets. It also adds a reason the virus can also be transmitted “in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings,” saying this is because “aerosols remain suspended in the air or travel farther than 1 meter.”

on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also updated its guidance on Covid-19, clearly saying that inhalation of these smaller particles is a key way the virus is transmitted, even at close range, and put it on top of its list of how the disease spreads.

Sometimes one or more cultures may take dominance over another culture, depending on the situation

A number of cultural aspects influence the way we interact with other people,

Different values lead to different behavior, behavior you may not understand. It is important that we try to learn and appreciate these differences in order to work effectively with people from other cultures.

February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch in healthy volunteers

The latest participant in the double-blind trial, a man named Brendan, had filled out a standard questionnaire at the end. Strangely, at the very bottom of the form, Brendan had written in bold letters: "This experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. Google my name. I now know what I need to do."

They googled Brendan's name, and up popped a disturbing revelation: until just a couple of months before, Brendan had been the leader of the US Midwest faction of Identity Evropa, a notorious white nationalist group rebranded in 2019 as the American Identity Movement. Two months earlier, activists at Chicago Antifascist Action had exposed Brendan's identity, and he had lost his job.