Flood barriers hold firm in shielding Bangkok

BANGKOK (AP) ? Barriers protecting Bangkok from Thailand's worst floods in half a century held firm Sunday as the government said some water drenching provinces just north of the capital has begun receding.

That fueled hopes that Bangkok, a city of 9 million, could escape unharmed. But outside the capital, thousands of people remain displaced and hungry residents are struggling to survive in half-submerged towns. On Sunday, the military rescued terrified civilians from the rooftops of flooded buildings in the swamped city of Ayutthaya, one of the country's hardest-hit.

Bangkok has averted calamity so far thanks to a complex system of flood walls, canals, dikes and underground tunnels that are helping divert vast pools of runoff south into the Gulf of Thailand. But if any of the defenses fail, floodwaters could sweep through the tense city.

Ronnarong Wong-Ngern, a bare-chested construction worker in northwestern Bangkok, said residents there still worry that things could go wrong.

"I can't sleep at night," Ronnarong, 38, told The Associated Press as he stood beside a wall of sandbags built over a canal straddling one of the capital's northernmost borders. "Whenever it rains, all the men here get up and start adding new sandbags to these walls."

Seasonal rains that drench Southeast Asia annually have been extraordinarily severe this year, killing hundreds of people across the region. Thailand has been particularly affected. Nearly 300 people have died in the country so far, while more than 200 major highways and roads have been shut, along with the main rail lines to the north.

Despite widespread fears that disaster could touch Bangkok, the city has so far been mostly untouched. Heavy rains showered the capital for much of the day Sunday, but life was otherwise normal with shopping malls open and elevated trains crisscrossing the city.

Nationwide, the government says property damage and losses could total $3 billion dollars or more. The most affected provinces are just north of Bangkok, including Ayutthaya, a former capital which is home to ancient and treasured stone temples.

An Associated Press photographer who flew over Ayutthaya on Sunday in a Thai military helicopter saw the tops of historic pagodas rising out of the water like islands.

In Ayutthaya itself, troops in patrol boats rescued people who had taken refuge on rooftops after waters burst into the Bang Pa-In Industrial Estate.

"It's very scary, it's never been like this since I was born," one of them, Kwaikai Jeunglam, told Associated Press Television News. "Last night the water wasn't this high. Last night, it rose ... this morning, it rose a lot."

Speaking to reporters earlier Sunday, Agriculture Minister Theera Wongsamut expressed confidence the worst was over ? but stopped short of saying the threat to Bangkok had passed completely.

Theera said the largest mass of runoff water flowing south from the country's heavily inundated central plains had already passed through Bangkok's Chao Phraya river and into the sea, and water levels in river would rise no higher.

Floodwaters in the central provinces of Singburi, Angthong, and Ayutthaya had also begun to recede, Theera said.

A spokesman for the government's flood relief center, Wim Rungwattanajinda, said floodwaters have decreased in Nakhon Sawan province as well. Nakhon Sawan is also in central Thailand.

Another worry ? several days of higher-than-normal tides which have slowed runoff into the Chao Phraya ? has also eased. But similarly high tides are expected again at the end of the month.

Late Saturday, Bangkok Gov. Sukhumbhand Paribatra said he was worried about barriers on the northwest side of the capital, saying they were not as strong as in other parts of Bangkok and water could flood around them and into the city from the west. But on Sunday, he said the situation was still under control.

Associated Press journalists who traveled to that area Sunday found no serious flooding in the district bordering Nonthaburi and Nokhon Pathom provinces. Canals were not overflowing and although some residents were still reinforcing sandbag walls, few were worried.

Over the last few days, government officials have voiced increasing confidence the capital would survive without major damage. On Sunday, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra echoed those sentiments again, saying "I believe Bangkok will be safe."

Yingluck spoke just after presiding over a ceremony in which an armada of more than 1,000 small boats stationed in dozens of spots on the Chao Phraya turned on their engines in an effort to help propel water down the river. It wasn't immediately clear what impact the effort would have.

___

Associated Press writers Grant Peck and Sinfah Tunsarawuth contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2011-10-16-AS-Thailand-Floods/id-4feb93f9ff8847cb9d7eeef99665701e

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Occupy Wall Street protests in China? Not for now, anyway.

Occupy Wall Street protests spread to four continents over the weekend, but China's major involvement was conspicuously absent.

As the ?Occupy Wall Street? movement spread to four continents over the weekend, guess which major world capital did not see any protesters?

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Unsurprisingly, since unofficial public gatherings of any kind are taboo in China, Tiananmen Square was not teeming with anticapitalist demonstrators on Saturday.

Not that China might not be ripe for the spreading movement: A growing gulf between rich and poor here would make this fertile ground for the 99-percenters.

And the government knows it, which is why it is censoring any effort to organize protests in China. Type ?Occupy Beijing? into Internet search engines here and you get either completely irrelevant results, or references to protests in America, Japan, Singapore ? anywhere but China.

There is an ?Occupy Beijing? group on Facebook, but you can only get onto Facebook ? which is blocked by the Great Firewall ? if you have censorship-evading software, a comparative rarity in China. That makes the social networking site a poor organizing tool here.

A group of older men did mount a brief demonstration last week in a park in Zhengzhou, the capital of the central province of Henan, but it had a very different feel to it from the youthful tent cities that have sprung up in European capitals, to judge by a video that made it onto the Chinese web.

?Proletarians of the world, Unite!? read their red armbands, reminiscent of Mao?s days. ?At least 700 arrested in New York, democracy and liberty trampled on,? explained a flyer that organizers were handing out.

Even the video of this event proved too inflammatory for the Chinese authorities. It was taken down from the Sina.com website within a day or so.

A pop-up demonstration of some sort does seem to have taken place in the heartland of Chinese capitalism, to judge by photos linked to from the ?Occupy Shanghai? Facebook page. Pictures show a man in a panda mask in a number of different locations in Shanghai holding up a sign reading ?We are the 99 percent. We do not need greedy financial system. We need to move forward mankind? in Chinese and English.

Another man held up a similar sign in the university city of Nanjing. But those two men and their photographer accomplices appear to constitute the full extent of Chinese mainland public participation on the day ?Occupy Wall Street? went global.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/pyPLSgZFXT8/Occupy-Wall-Street-protests-in-China-Not-for-now-anyway

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The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act Is Ready for Legislative ...

The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act, referred to as UELMA, is ready for introduction into state legislatures.? It has undergone its final proofing and formatting process by the National Conference of Commissioners of Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL, or ULC) and has been posted on NCCUSL?s archival Website at the University of Pennsylvania, and is soon to come to NCCUSL?s official site.? The Act will be sent to the American Bar Association?s (ABA?s) House of Delegates for approval at the ABA Midyear Meeting in February, 2012 in New Orleans.

The UELMA addresses important issues in information management, providing sound guidance to states that are transitioning legal publications to digital formats.?? The Act is citizen-oriented, and leaves all issues concerning commercial publishing to state policy and contract law.?? Most importantly, the Act is outcomes-based, keeping it flexible in the face of changing technologies and evolving state practice.? A brief account of UELMA?s development and its main provisions is included in this posting.

The UELMA was drafted in response to a request from the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), following the AALL?s 2007 National Summit on Authentication of Digital Legal Information. The purpose of the Summit was to bring national attention to the issues surrounding the rapid rise in the number of states publishing primary legal information resources electronically and, in some cases, cancelling print resources and publishing legal information only in electronic format.? Foremost among the issues were ensuring the trustworthiness of online legal resources? and preserving the electronic publications to provide for continuing accessibility.?? The drafting of a uniform act on these topics was one of the top recommendations of the Summit?s attendees.

The ULC agreed to consider the development of a uniform law and appointed a Study Committee for that purpose.? The Study Committee recommended that a law be developed and a Drafting Committee was charged with the task.? After two years of consideration, including several face-to-face meetings, conference calls, and circulation of numerous drafts by email, the UELMA was read to and debated for the second time at the Annual Meeting of NCCUSL in July 2011.? After more than six hours of floor consideration, the NCCUSL Committee of the Whole passed the draft act, sending it to a Vote of the States.? UELMA passed its final hurdle with a positive Vote of the States, gaining approval by a vote of 45-0 (with 1 abstention and 7 jurisdictions not voting).

The UELMA, as it passed the Conference, requires a state that publishes official versions of its legal information in electronic format to do three things:

1.? Authenticate the information, by providing a method to determine that the legal material is unaltered from the version published by the state officer or employee that publishes the material;
2.? Preserve the information; and
3.? Ensure public accessibility on a permanent basis.

At a minimum, legal material that is covered by the Act includes the most basic of state-level legal information resources, including the state constitution, session laws, codified laws or statutes, and state agency rules with the effect of law.? In recognition of potential separation of powers issues, the UELMA does not automatically include judicial or executive materials, leaving it to the enacting state to decide whether and how to include those resources.? States may choose to include court rules and decisions, state administrative agency decisions, executive official documents, or almost any other information resources they designate as legal material.

For each type of legal material, the state must name a state agency or official as the ?official publisher.?? The official publisher has the responsibility to authenticate, preserve, and provide access to the legal material. If legal material defined by the Act is published only electronically, that material must be designated ?official? and meet the requirements of the Act.? If there is a print version of the legal material, an official publisher may designate the online version ?official,? but the requirements of the Act to authenticate, preserve, and provide access must be met for the electronic version.

The requirements of the Act are not ended if the official electronic legal material is superseded, overruled, or otherwise ceases to be current law.?? Legal material does not lose its value even if it is no longer in effect.? Accordingly, once a source is designated as official, it continues to be covered by the provisions of the UELMA.? Historical sources must be preserved and made available.

The Act does not affect any relationships between an official state publisher and a commercial publisher, leaving those relationships to contract law.? Copyright laws are unaffected by the Act. The Act does not affect the rules of evidence; judges continue to make decisions about the admissibility of electronic evidence in their courtrooms.

The comments to the UELMA provide a great deal of background on the decisions and intent of the Drafting Committee.? In many instances, the comments offer guidance to legislators who will be asked to consider the UELMA for passage.? The comments are included with the Act on the University of Pennsylvania?s Biddle Law Library Website.

Some issues specific to one of the three parts of the Act (authentication, preservation, and public access) are as follows.? More information on these points can be found in the comments to the Act.

Authentication (Sections 5 and 6) :

The Drafting Committee considered a wide range of approaches to authentication before settling on a policy of presenting a technology-neutral, outcomes-based document, leaving the choice of method used to authenticate legal material up to the states.? This approach also leaves it to each state?s discretion to change methods, as necessary or desirable.? What is required is that the official publisher provides a method for the user to determine that the electronic record is unaltered from the one published by the official publisher.

By the terms of the Act, the authenticated electronic legal material will receive a presumption of accuracy, the same presumption that is created by publication of legal material in print form.? The burden of proving inaccuracy shifts to the party that disputes the accuracy of the electronic legal material.?? Electronic legal material from other states with substantially similar laws will receive the same presumption of accuracy.

Preservation (Section 7):

The Drafting Committee spent considerable time debating the preservation provisions.?? The biggest issues were finding a way to describe what legal material would be covered by a preservation requirement, and how legal material should be preserved.

The Drafting Committee decided that, ultimately, all legal material covered by the Act?s authentication provisions should also be subject to its preservation requirements.? This was stated simply as requiring preservation of legal material ?that is or was designated as official? under the Act.? This language requires that states preserve superseded or amended legal material, which retains importance despite its no longer being currently effective.? The comments to Section 7 make clear that the Drafting Committee intended the Act to cover not only the text of the law, but also the materials commonly published with the legal material.? This would mean that the lists of legislators and state officials typically published with session laws would be preserved, as would proposed or final state constitutional amendments, legislative resolutions, and any other type of information published with a legal material source.

The Drafting Committee decided to use an outcomes-based approach for the preservation requirements, similar to its approach to authentication.?? The ultimate outcome of preservation is that legal material may be preserved in an electronic format, in print, or by whatever method the state may choose in the future; consistent with an outcomes-based approach, state policy and preference dictate the preservation method.

If legal material is preserved electronically, the UELMA requires that the integrity of the record be ensured, including through backup and disaster recovery preparations, and that the continuing usability of the legal material is ensured.? Recent natural disasters in the U.S. have highlighted the importance of disaster recovery preparations.? Further, information that is preserved in an unusable format is of no value.? The comments make clear that migration to new formats or storage media will be required from time to time.

The comments also note that the Drafting Committee intended that legally significant formatting be preserved.? The complexity of presentation of some legal materials ? evident in indentations, italicization, and numbering of internal subdivisions, for example ? may indicate or explain legislative or regulatory intent.? Preservation should not change the meaning of the legal material, but rather should ensure that the legal material is capable of being authenticated.

The Act recognizes that states have decades, and in some instances centuries, of expertise in preserving print materials, and does not specify preservation requirements or outcomes if the state chooses to preserve legal material in print.? Nor does the Act impose a duty on an enacting state to retrospectively convert its print material to an electronic format.? If, however, the state chooses to digitize previously non-electronic legal material, and if that newly electronic legal material is designated as official, then the requirements of the Act must be met.? Publication of legal material in an official electronic version subsequent to the adoption of the UELMA, even if the same legal material was published previously in print, triggers the requirements of the Act.

Permanent Access (Section 8):

Citizens must be informed as to government actions if they are to participate effectively in their government.? Legal material is an essential information source for citizens to access to become informed.?? The UELMA recognizes this in requiring reasonable availability, on a permanent basis, of legal material, even that which is amended, repealed, or superseded.

The Drafting Committee debated conditions of access over several meetings, finally concluding that states already have long-term, relevant experience in making other materials available through archives, libraries, and state offices.? The enacting state has discretion to decide where, when, and how to provide access, including whether to charge fees for access.? Section 8?s requirement of permanent access does not require a state to provide unlimited access to its preserved legal information.? This drafting decision is consistent with the rest of the UELMA, which defers to state policy and practice in its other provisions.? Eventually, the Committee decided that the individual states could set their own requirements for access to legal material preserved under the Act, as long as the access is reasonable and in perpetuity.? For this reason, the Act does not address whether states can charge fees for access to preserved electronic legal material.

The Standards section of the Act (Section 9) directs official publishers of electronic legal material to consider developing standards and best practices as they choose and to implement methods for the authentication, preservation, and permanent access of electronic records.? The ?Guiding Principles to Be Considered in Developing a Future Instrument,? the best practices document of the Hague Conference on Private International Law, were important guidelines that were repeatedly consulted in the drafting process.

Throughout its deliberations, the Drafting Committee was advised and informed by a large number of advisors and observers who came from federal and state governments, commercial legal publishers and software vendors, and a number of interested organizations.? Two American Bar Association advisors brought knowledge of and experience with technologies to the drafting process.? The observers were very helpful in assisting the Committee in its understanding of the possible impacts of proposed sections of the Act.? In some instances, the observers were able to explain existing and emerging technologies that might be used to accomplish the Act?s specified outcomes.? The Committee watched technology demonstrations and investigated various authentication processes already in effect.? The drafting process was strengthened by the level of support and expertise the advisors and observers brought, but, in the end, the Act was entirely the Committee?s work.

By designating the Committee?s product a uniform law, the ULC recognized the importance of the topic and urged wide adoption of the Act.? The final step in the UELMA?s development will be its introduction into state legislatures.?? Bill sponsors are being identified, and the ULC anticipates the UELMA will be introduced in at least 8 states in January 2012, with the possibility of introduction in as many as 12.

The ULC has appointed an Enactment Committee for the UELMA to assist the larger ULC Legislative Committee with its charge to ?endeavor to secure the enactment of [uniform] legislation.??? The Enactment Committee prepares ?talking points? and summaries of the legislation, and works with individual legislatures, on occasion, to answer questions and further the introduction and approval of the Act.? Volunteers from several interested associations are also preparing to work towards the Act?s approval.? With strong support from the ULC and volunteers working on its behalf, by next summer the Uniform Act may itself become ?legal material? in one or more states.

Barbara Bintliff is the Joseph C. Hutcheson Professor in Law at The University of Texas School of Law, and Director of Research at the School?s Tarlton Law Library and Jamail Center for Legal Research. She is The Reporter for The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editor-in-Chief is Robert Richards, to whom queries should be directed. The statements above are not legal advice or legal representation. If you require legal advice, consult a lawyer. Find a lawyer in the Cornell LII Lawyer Directory.

Source: http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2011/10/15/the-uniform-electronic-legal-material-act-is-ready-for-legislative-action/

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Garage blaze displaces family and pets

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - A fire that began in an attached garage left $40,000 in damages at a far east side home, though everyone got out without injury, Indianapolis Fire Department officials say.

The fire in the 9100 block of East 13th Street tied up North Post Road for about an hour during morning rush hour. Firefighters responded around 7:19 a.m. to the home after the family smelled smoke and noticed the garage door from the interior of the house was hot.

It took firefighters 22 minutes to get the blaze under control.

A couple and their 9-year-old son lived in the home and will be staying with family. Firefighters and family also safely rescued the family?s two cats ? Calvin and Edward ? and a fish.

Family members told firefighters they weren?t sure what could have started the fire. They had no cars parked in the garage at the time.
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Source: http://www.wishtv.com/dpp/news/local/marion_county/garage-blaze-displaces-family-and-pets

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Santa Monica Construction & Home Remodeling Contractor 1-800 ...

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California Construction Center is an expert when it comes to construction and home remodeling projects whether they are major or minor. Let the professionals at California Construction Center guide you through your next construction project and make it a pleasant experience.

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Source: http://santamonicaca.global-free-classified-ads.com/listings/Santa-Monica-Construction-amp-Home-Remodeling-Contractor-1-800-372-4080/330490.html

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Using Craigslist for real estate and homes for sale - Rio Rancho Land

As realtors, we try to list our homes for sale on Craigslist.? It seems like there's endless web sites to list properties for sale. We also use Trulia, Zillow, Homes.com, and Realtor.com which we pay premium money for great placement and extra information.

For home sellers, the extra web site and internet exposure sure seems to be worth the marketing money we spend.? We feel we get more home showings because the homes we list for sale get seen.

Visit our supersite for more information on Rio Rancho real estate and to search for homes or land in Albuquerque and Rio Rancho.

Source: http://www.rio-rancho-land.com/2011/10/using-craigslist-for-real-estate-and.html

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Demotivational Pics: Fatherhood - FunnyGang

Sunday, October 2nd, 2011 at 9:19 pm ?

Proud to ?pass? his family name down through the generations.

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Filed under: Demotivational Posters

Source: http://funnygang.com/demotivational-posters/demotivational-pics-fatherhood/

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