Everton boss has faith Barkley can be as good as Ballack |
- Everton boss has faith Barkley can be as good as Ballack
- Barkley shines in Everton’s match against QPR
- Next Media Video: Three dead, including gunman, as Sydney cafe siege ends
- Mango cheesecake, anyone?
- Police ends 16-hour Sydney cafe siege; gunman, 2 hostages dead (VIDEO)
- ‘No’ is a woman’s most powerful word against rape — Megan McArdle
| Everton boss has faith Barkley can be as good as Ballack Posted: 15 Dec 2014 04:51 PM PST
England midfielder Barkley scored a stunning solo goal and orchestrated Everton's 3-1 Premier League win against Queens Park Rangers at Goodison Park on Monday with a man-of-the-match display. The 21-year-old operated in a relatively unfamiliar holding role alongside combative Bosnian Muhamed Besic and dictated play with an array of exquisite passes, powerful surges and forceful tackles. Martinez had previously likened Barkley to the former Bayern Munich and Chelsea midfielder Ballack who was awarded the 2002 UEFA Midfielder of the Year for a series of consistently dominant and inspirational performances. The three-time German footballer of the year won 98 international caps and was widely regarded as one the most complete midfielders of his generation. After Barkley's performance against QPR, Martinez said their was no reason the England international could not develop into as complete a midfielder as Ballack. "Yes, absolutely," Martinez told Sky Sports. "The big enjoyment working with Ross is how quickly he takes concepts on and how quickly he experiments with different starting positions. "As you know the power and pace that he has, combined with that technical ability and ball control, makes him special. "Sometimes you get a really talented footballer who is skilful on the ball or a powerful and strong player that can show that physicality on the pitch. "He's got both." Barkley's breakthrough season last year prompted rave reviews and a place in England's squad for the World Cup in Brazil where he played all three games. Barkley was utilised in the number 10 position behind Romelu Lukaku with whom he formed one of the most dynamic attacking duo's in the Premier League. "As you know he's played in that number 10 role, getting into the box and having the freedom to find good space," Martinez said. "In a deeper position he makes very good decisions on the ball and the link up play today was very, very good at times and it's good for him, at such a young age, that he experiments in different roles." — Reuters   |
| Barkley shines in Everton’s match against QPR Posted: 15 Dec 2014 04:42 PM PST
LIVERPOOL, Dec 16 — Ross Barkley scored a sublime goal as Everton beat Queens Park Rangers 3-1 at Goodison Park on Monday to subject the travel-weary Londoners to their eighth away defeat in as many Premier League matches this season. Barkley picked up possession in his own half in the 33rd minute, exchanged passes with Romelu Lukaku before driving at the defence and unleashing an unstoppable left-foot shot into the top corner for his first goal of an injury-plagued season. Kevin Mirallas doubled the lead after 44 minutes with a wickedly-deflected free kick. Steven Naismith headed a third goal eight minutes after the break before substitute Bobby Zamora notched a late consolation for Rangers. Everton's first league victory since November 22 lifted them above local rivals Liverpool into 10th place on 21 points while QPR, without a point away from home this season, remained 18th, four points above bottom club Leicester City. In the absence of Gareth Barry, man-of-the-match Barkley was deployed in a deep midfield role alongside the tenacious Muhamed Besic and the 21-year-old excelled. "Wherever I am on the pitch I try to affect the game," England international Barkley told Sky Sports television. "Anywhere on the pitch I'll enjoy playing but to get the three points and three goals against a QPR side who played well was great." Barkley's brilliant goal injected life into a stuttering Everton performance against the visitors who had been on the front foot for much of the opening half hour. Mirallas' free kick and Naismith's deflected header, after a series of avoidable defensive errors, added a slightly flattering gloss to the home team's display. QPR battled hard and scored a deserved 80th-minute goal when Zamora supplied a simple finish after keeper Tim Howard had parried Jordan Mutch's well-struck effort. It sparked a late flurry of activity as Everton substitute Samuel Eto'o blazed a low shot against the post and Barkley's tantalising cross was just too strong for Arouna Kone. — Reuters  |
| Next Media Video: Three dead, including gunman, as Sydney cafe siege ends Posted: 15 Dec 2014 04:40 PM PST Duration: 0:41, Published 16 Dec 2014 Three people were confirmed killed after heavily armed Australian police stormed the besieged Lindt Cafe in Sydney early Tuesday morning.  |
| Posted: 15 Dec 2014 04:34 PM PST KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 16 — I had never been fond of sweets, until I was pregnant with my little girl. Then after every meal I headed straight for the fridge hoping to find a box of cheesecake in there. Cravings were MAJOR. Anyhow, fast-forward a couple of months after having my baby girl and I still love my sweets! And I love a slice of cheesecake anytime of the day — yes, you heard right. I am especially in love with this smooth, creamy, slightly tangy recipe I'm about to share with you The key equipment used for making cheesecake is a springform tin. This is the one that comes with a separate base. Normally you'll have to release the lever to remove the upper from the base. Of course we mustn't forget the baking paper used to line the springform tin before pouring in the cheesecake. It is important you use the springform tin as the tin holds the shape of the cheesecake and as cheesecake is quite delicate, it is easier for you to remove the cake from the tin. And the "secret" ingredient in this cheesecake is cornflour, which I have incorporated with the other ingredients. Cornflour will prevent the "cracking" if the cake is overbaked, especially useful if this is your first time baking cheesecake! The starch molecules will actually get in between the egg proteins preventing them from over-coagulating. No coagulation means no cracks! Now join me in spreading this cheesecake love.
330g cream cheese, softened and at room temperature Preheat oven to 150 degrees C. For the base, place digestive biscuits and butter in a food processor and blitz until fine. Lightly grease a 20cm springform tin and line with baking paper. Pour blitzed digestive biscuits into the base of the springform. Use your fingertips and press the mixture into the base. Bake for 10 minutes or until slightly golden. Remove springform tin from the oven and set aside to cool For the filling, place ricotta cheese, cream cheese, cornflour, sugar, lemon juice, vanilla extract in a food processor and combine. Add eggs one at a time while the food processor combines the mixture until you achieve a smooth texture. Pour cream cheese mixture on top of baked base. Shake gently to level the mixture. Bake for 1 hour at 150 degrees C. Turn off oven after 1 hour and leave the cake to stand for 1 hour, leaving oven door closed. Once cheesecake has cooled, top with fresh mangoes Serve cheesecake chilled.  |
| Police ends 16-hour Sydney cafe siege; gunman, 2 hostages dead (VIDEO) Posted: 15 Dec 2014 04:34 PM PST SYDNEY, Dec 16 — Heavily armed Australian police stormed a Sydney cafe early today morning and freed a number of hostages being held there at gunpoint, in a dramatic end to a 16-hour siege in which three people including the attacker were killed. Police have not publicly identified the gunman but a police source named him as Man Haron Monis, an Iranian refugee and self-styled sheikh known for sending hate mail to the families of Australian troops killed in Afghanistan. He was charged last year with being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife, but had been free on bail. Several videos apparently showing hostages inside the Lindt cafe in Sydney's central business district making demands on behalf of Monis were posted on social media during the siege.
The gunman, whom the frightened hostages referred to as "brother", demanded to talk to Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the delivery of an Islamic State flag, and that media broadcast that Australia was under attack by Islamic State. Abbott said the gunman was well known to authorities and had a history of extremism and mental instability. Around 2am local time (1500 GMT yesterday), at least six people believed to have been held captive in the cafe managed to flee after gunshots were heard coming from inside. Police then moved in, with heavy gunfire and blasts from stun grenades echoing from the building. "They made the call because they believed at that time if they didn't enter there would have been many more lives lost," said Andrew Scipione, police commissioner for the state of New South Wales. An investigation would determine whether hostages were killed by the gunman or died in cross-fire, Scipione told reporters just before dawn. Café manager, barrista killed Police said a 50-year-old man, believed to be the attacker, was killed. Television pictures showed he appeared to have been armed with a sawn-off shotgun. A man aged 34 and a 38-year-old woman were also killed, police said. The man was the cafe manager and the woman was a mother and lawyer, Sydney media reported. Four were wounded, including a policeman hit in the face with shotgun pellets. Medics tried to resuscitate at least one person after the raid and took away several wounded people on gurneys, a Reuters witness said. Bomb squad members moved in to search for explosives, but none were found. So far 17 hostages have been accounted for, including at least five others who were released or escaped yesterday. The area near the cafe remained cordoned off today morning, with bystanders and passing office workers leaving flowers under police tape. Flags flew at half-mast across the country. Leaders from around the world had expressed their concern over the siege, including Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, which suffered an attack on its parliament by a suspected jihadist sympathizer in October. No links to terror groups Monis was found guilty in 2012 of sending threatening letters to the families of eight Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan as a protest against Australia's involvement there. He was also facing more than 40 sexual assault charges. "He had a long history of violent crime, infatuation with extremism and mental instability," Abbott told reporters in Canberra. The prime minister did not identify the gunman. New South Wales Premier Mike Baird declined to comment when asked by a journalist whether it was appropriate for Monis to be free on bail. A US security official said the US government was being advised by Australia that there was no sign at this stage that the gunman was connected to known terrorist organisations. Although the hostage taker was known to the authorities, security experts said preventing attacks by people acting alone could be difficult. "We are entering a new phase of terrorism that is far more dangerous and more difficult to defeat than al Qaeda ever was," said Cornell University law professor Jens David Ohlin, speaking in New York. Australia, a staunch ally of the United States and its escalating action against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, has been on high alert for attacks by homegrown militants returning from fighting in the Middle East or their supporters. News footage showed hostages in the cafe holding up a black and white flag displaying the Shahada, a testament to the faith of Muslims. The flag has been popular among Sunni Islamist militant groups such as Islamic State and al Qaeda. The incident forced the evacuation of nearby buildings and sent shockwaves around a country where many people were turning their attention to the Christmas holiday. In September, anti-terrorism police said they had thwarted an imminent threat to behead a random member of the public and, days later, a teenager in the city of Melbourne was shot dead after attacking two anti-terrorism officers with a knife. The siege cafe is in Martin Place, a pedestrian strip popular with workers on their lunch break, which was revealed as a potential location for the thwarted beheading. Muslim leaders urged calm. The Australian National Imams Council condemned "this criminal act unequivocally" in a joint statement with the Grand Mufti of Australia. — Reuters  |
| ‘No’ is a woman’s most powerful word against rape — Megan McArdle Posted: 15 Dec 2014 04:34 PM PST DECEMBER 16 — The furor over the Rolling Stone story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia is dying down. But the conversations continue. This weekend, in the New York Times, Susan Dominus related a scenario that will seem familiar to a lot of women, and probably, a number of men: a friendly member of the opposite sex pouring the drinks with a generous hand, and later, a dark room, the continued pleading that follows the murmured nos, and finally, an exhausted capitulation because it's easier than forming the will to keep arguing, or to get up and leave. When I was in college, around the same time as Dominus, the slogan of college rape activists was "no means no." I said it myself many times. It had all the virtues of a good social rule: simple, easy to follow, and easy for everyone to agree upon. It is still a very good rule, one that every man and woman should honor. Unfortunately, for many women, it was not enough. We had unconsciously framed date rape as a product of the antediluvian values of an earlier era, one that was already, by then, somewhat remote; a time when girls were expected to fight hard to preserve their virtue, and so (the legend went among men) would make a big show of saying "no" even when they actually very much wanted to have sex. So boys would find implied consent elsewhere—in the decision to walk alone on the beach or go for a drive in the mountains—and barge past the formulaic refusals. Maybe sometimes that's what was actually wanted; often, it was not, and those men were rapists. I don't know if this description of that earlier era is accurate, because I wasn't around, though I've heard enough stories to think that it at least approximates the truth of things. Regardless of the accuracy, we believed that these were the values we were fighting, and so we said "no means no"; consent rests on affirmation from the girl, not what she's wearing or why you think she agreed to go back to your room. Whether or not "no means no" might have been adequate to prevent the problems of date rapes behind the sock hop, it was not adequate to all the difficulties we faced. My generation drank more than our mothers had, so that women were more frequently incapable of saying no, or much of anything else. There were no parietal rules to keep us out of each other's rooms, or force us to come home at an early hour. Nor could we fall back on "nice girls don't"; we had to refuse this specific man each time, not on the grounds that some external force was stopping us, but because we simply didn't want to have sex with him. That's an uncomfortable conversation, and modern though we may be, most of us still hated uncomfortable conversations, especially if we'd had a few and just wanted to go to sleep. I'm not calling for a return to single-sex dorms, curfew rules, and the presumption that "nice girls don't." I'm just pointing out that these things gave our mothers an easy way to say "no" that didn't have to be explained or defended, and wouldn't be taken as a specific rejection of this person right in front of you. We were chanting a slogan designed for a world that no longer existed. In the world where we lived, it required an assertiveness and a confident self-knowledge that a lot of 19-year-old girls found hard to muster. It required actions we weren't always willing to take, like loudly saying "no," and leaving if he persisted. In other words, it left us vulnerable, though not in the same way that our mothers had been. Dominus suggests that we need a new language to sort out these toxic situations: Struggling to find language to define that experience after the fact left me longing for more words that could have been used in the moment. What I wish I had had that night was a linguistic rip cord, something without the mundane familiarity of "no" or the intensity demanded in "Get off or I'll scream." "No" and "stop" — of course, they should be said and respected. But several women who told me they felt their consent was ambiguous said that in the moment, they froze, and language eluded them altogether: They said nothing. Because those words are inherently confrontational, they can require a degree of strength that someone who is feeling pressured or confused or is just losing her nerve or changing her mind might not have.. . . One phrase that might work is "red zone" — as in, "Hey, we're in a red zone," or "This is starting to feel too red zone." Descriptive and matter-of-fact, it would not implicitly assign aggressor and victim, but would flatly convey that danger — emotional, possibly legal — lay ahead. Such a phrase could serve as a linguistic proxy for confronting or demanding, both options that can seem impossible in the moment. "We're in a red zone" — the person who utters that is not a supplicant ("Please stop"); or an accuser ("I told you to stop!"). Many young women are uncomfortable in either of those roles; I know I was. Struggling to find language to define that experience after the fact left me longing for more words that could have been used in the moment. What I wish I had had that night was a linguistic rip cord, something without the mundane familiarity of "no" or the intensity demanded in "Get off or I'll scream." I understand what Dominus is trying to do, but I don't think it will work. Twenty-five years after I registered for college, we're still searching for an alternative to the stark simplicity of "No." And unfortunately, there's just no substitute. If you want to "teach men not to rape"—a formulation that floated around the Internet a lot in the days after the Rolling Stone story was published—then you need to give them a rule that can be clearly articulated, and followed even if you've had a few. That's why "no means no" worked so well, even if it wasn't perfect. It's a heuristic that even a guy who's been sucking at the end of a three-story beer funnel can remember and put into practice. The rule obviously needed some refinement, by adding other equally clear rules—like "if she's stumbling drunk or vomiting, just pretend she said no, because she's not legally capable of consent." But the basic idea, of listening to what the woman is saying, not some super-secret countersignals you might think she is sending, is exactly the sort of rule that we need in the often-confusing, choose-your-own-adventure world of modern sexual mores. Compare that with "we're in the red zone." What does that mean? It seems to me that a guy can take this one of two ways: either as "no," or as something less than "no," something which means that there's still hope and he should consider asking again in 15 minutes. If it means "less than no, but maybe more than yes," then we haven't fixed things; we've just added another layer of confusion. But I don't think that's what Dominus is after. I think what she's actually seeking is a way to deliver a definite refusal without having to say the word "no." And being of that same generation of women, one that often goes to absurd lengths to avoid even mild refusals, such as declining to purchase goods or services we don't want, I certainly wish that there were a reliable way to deliver the message without saying the words. But as millions of time-share owners can attest, there is no substitute for a clear "no." My generation has spent decades trying to make things sound less unpleasant by coining new words to replace the older, harsh-sounding ones. The result of this "euphemism treadmill," as Steven Pinker has dubbed it, is not that everyone moves to a new, higher plane, free of the old unpleasantness; it's that the new word takes on all the disagreeable connotations of the old one, and then people start looking for a new euphemism. "Water closet" becomes "toilet" (originally a term for any body care, as in "toilet kit"), which becomes "bathroom", which becomes "rest room," which becomes "lavatory." "Garbage collection" turns into "sanitation," which turns into "environmental services."The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are in charge: give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name. (We will know we have achieved equality and mutual respect when the names for minorities stay put.) "Water closet" becomes "toilet" (originally a term for any body care, as in "toilet kit"), which becomes "bathroom", which becomes "rest room," which becomes "lavatory." "Garbage collection" turns into "sanitation," which turns into "environmental services." The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are in charge: give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name. (We will know we have achieved equality and mutual respect when the names for minorities stay put.) It is not the word "no" that women are struggling with; it is the concept of utter refusal. That is what has to change, not the words to describe it. It is perhaps unfair that this burden should be placed on women, especially when we are socialized to be accommodating and "nice" (especially to men). Unfortunately, no one else can bear the burden of deciding who we want to have sex with, and then articulating it forcefully. Nor should feminists be eager to help women avoid the burden of deciding, and then stating their opinion in the strongest possible terms. "No" and "I don't want to" are great tools for women to master. For centuries, society protected nice middle-class women from having to use them by deciding what we wanted, and punishing anyone who wanted anything else. Now that those rules are gone, some feminists are essentially advocating handing the burden of deciding what we want over to ... men, who are supposed to guess whether we are offering "affirmative consent," and be punished if they guess wrong. The affirmative consent rules are, in my opinion, completely unworkable as either a social or a legal norm. But even worse than that, they give back the power we fought so hard to win: the power to make our own decisions, and then to reap the rewards, or suffer the consequences, of what we decide. "No means no" is a good enough rule. It is not good enough to defeat every psychopath who is willing to use drugs or a man's superior strength to take what is not offered freely, but it is certainly good enough to defeat a "rape culture" that says women don't really know what they want, or deserve to have their desires respected. But even a good rule needs good women to make it work: proud of our decisiveness, confident in our right to self- determination, courageous enough to bear the awkwardness of disappointing those who badly want what we don't want to give. Women need to learn "no" not just to protect themselves from aggressive men in the bedroom, but also to make themselves more powerful in the world outside. We need to embrace "no" in all areas of life, and teach men to expect to hear it from us more often. We need to insist on our own right to have opinions about everything, and to have our opinions count for just as much as a man's do. So we need to tell men "no means no," and that fierce punishment will follow any violation of this simple rule. But we women also need to tell them "I mean no," not "we're in the red zone" or "I shouldn't—I have an early class tomorrow." Most important, however, is what we need to tell women: that the power of "no" is their inalienable birthright, and that those who are given such great gifts have an obligation to use them. — Bloomberg * This is the personal opinion of the columnist.  |
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