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Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/15/gamesgrabr-launches-equity-funding-campaign-to-be-pinterest-for-games/Ryley Walker.
Sometimes, friends of friends are the best way to discover new music. Or, at the very least, friends of artists you never want to miss live. This was the case with Ryley Walker, a close friend and frequent tour buddy of American Primitive guitarist Daniel Bachman. Walker would accompany Bachman in seriously raucous and psychedelic live sets only a couple years ago, and Bachman would tell me, "Just wait 'til you hear Ryley's stuff." Well, now it's here — and it's not at all what I expected.
With the charming swagger of jazz-folk troubadour Tim Buckley and the resonant, full picking style of Bert Jansch, "The West Wind" comes from Walker's first widely available release, a three-song 12". With acoustic guitar in hand and a voice like browned butter, Walker swings and sways in a lush string-and-piano arrangement right out of Buckley's Starsailor; it slowly picks up to a swirling gallop without bucking the rhythm.
The West Wind comes out digitally on Oct. 22 — and as a 12" EP on Nov. 29 — via Tompkins Square Records. Ryley Walker is currently touring Europe with Daniel Bachman.
VALLETTA, Malta (AP) — A Maltese ship brought 143 survivors, mostly Syrians, from a capsized smugglers' boat to Malta on Saturday, as the second migrant tragedy in the Strait of Sicily in just over a week sharpened calls for humanitarian corridors to allow safe passage of refugees fleeing war and repression.
At least 34 people drowned when the boat capsized Friday afternoon about 65 miles (105 kilometers) southeast of Lampedusa, in waters where Malta has search and rescue responsibilities. A joint Italian-Malta operation rescued nearly 200 people after the Italian Coast Guard received a distress call via satellite phone from the boat and a Maltese aircraft sighted the capsized boat with numerous people in the water.
Other survivors, 56 in all, who were not in immediate need of medical attention were heading to Sicily onboard an Italian frigate, which Italian Naval spokesman Cmdr. Marco Maccaroni said also rescued some 180 people from other boats in the same area overnight — another indication of the relentless flows of migrants braving the Mediterranean.
"The flows have never stopped, especially over the summer months," Maccaroni said. "The two accidents in such a short period have raised the attention of the public, but the tensions have been going on all summer."
Some 30,100 migrants arrived in Italy and Malta in the first nine months of 2013, compared with 15,000 in all of 2012, according to the U.N. refugee agency. Most are characterized as asylum seekers, fleeing civil war in Syria or repression and mandatory conscription in Eritrea, unlike the waves of economic migrants a decade ago.
Malta Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said the new waves of Syrians, on top of arrivals of Eritreans and Somalis that have been more prevalent recently, make it more urgent for Europe to agree on a coordinated policy to deal with asylum seekers.
The latest shipwreck comes eight days after a trawler packed with 500 Eritreans capsized and sank within sight of the Italian island of Lampedusa. Just 155 people survived. Caskets carrying the bodies of the 339 Eritreans who died in the tragedy arrived Saturday on a ferry in Sicily, where they are to be buried.
"Urgent measures must be adopted to open humanitarian corridors. There is no time to lose," said Francesco Rocca, the president of the Italian Red Cross, emphasizing that people escaping war and repression must be given a safe route of escape. "In this way it would hit also the traffickers and we could stop this ceaseless massacre."
Italy's integration minister, Cecile Kyenge, called for increased patrols to stop smugglers.
"Behind these tragedies, as the dramatic instability of African countries increases, there are human traffickers who are enriching themselves on the backs of people who are fleeing war and hunger," said the Congolese-borne Kyenge.
Lampedusa is the destination of choice for smugglers who usually charge more than 1,000 euros ($1,355) a head and cram the migrants onto boats that often run into trouble and require rescue. Fortress Europe, an Italian observatory that tracks migrant deaths reported by the media, says about 6,450 people died in the Strait of Sicily between 1994 and 2012.
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Barry reported from Milan.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Playing out just across the Potomac River from shutdown central, the Virginia governor's race has turned into a real-time test of Republican and Democratic positions in the congressional budget battle raging in the nation's capital.
With polls indicating more public resentment toward Republicans than Democrats, the federal work stoppage directly affecting thousands of Virginia residents has forced Republican Ken Cuccinelli on the defensive while giving Democrat Terry McAuliffe an opening in a race that had been neck-and-neck for months.
Now, public and internal surveys show voter support has started breaking McAuliffe's way, with the Democrat leading by 8 percentage points in a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday. The same poll showed that by a nearly 3-1 majority, Virginians opposed Congress shutting down the government in a fight over President Barack Obama's health care law.
The outcome of the Nov. 5 election in this swing-voting state could provide clues about how the issue will play in next fall's House and Senate midterm elections — and give both parties a road map as they fight for control of Congress.
Cuccinelli, the conservative state attorney general, has sought to carefully distance himself from House GOP leaders and tea party lawmakers without alienating his conservative core supporters or moderate independents — particularly in the affluent and fast-growing Washington suburbs.
Earlier this month, Cuccinelli called on congressional Republicans to drop their insistence that Congress dismantle the health care law as a condition for reopening the government. Two days later, he appeared at a conservative Christian group's fundraiser that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also attended. But Cuccinelli didn't make any public mention of Cruz, the tea party hero who led the Senate GOP's effort to defund the health care law.
Cuccinelli has lambasted McAuliffe for saying he wouldn't sign a Virginia budget that didn't include a Medicaid expansion, the mechanism the health care law uses to extend coverage to the poor.
To people in Virginia, Cuccinelli said, McAuliffe's position amounts to "a government shutdown."
McAuliffe is a former national Democratic Party chairman and a friend of former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. McAuliffe has been stoking the notion — on the campaign trail and in TV ads blanketing the state — that Republicans are to blame for the shutdown and that Cuccinelli is no different from those whose demands helped trigger it. He's sought to link Cuccinelli to the tea party and paint him as too ideologically extreme for Virginia.
"I wouldn't even be in the same room with Ted Cruz with the damage he has brought to so many Virginia families," McAuliffe said. "And if I'd gone to the room, I'd tell him to stop using a government shutdown as an ideological bargaining chip."
The arguments are salient in this state, which is home to many federal employees and receives the most military spending per capita in the nation.
Cuccinelli's political adviser, GOP strategist Christopher J. LaCivita, acknowledged that the shutdown has created a challenge for his candidate at a critical time, saying, "We don't get to talk about the good stuff Ken would do as governor."
Josh Schwerin, a senior aide to McAuliffe, said the shutdown played right into his candidate's key argument against Cuccinelli and the tea party: "They're more concerned about pushing their ideological agenda than solving problems."
Downright nasty now, the race has been very negative from almost the start because it pitted two deeply unpopular candidates against each other.
Majorities of Virginia voters long have viewed Cuccinelli and McAuliffe in a negative light, and both brought considerable political baggage into this fall's only competitive governor's race.
Cuccinelli is testing the notion of whether a Republican as conservative as him can win in a swing-voting state.
He was the first attorney general in the nation to challenge the new health overhaul law. A global-warming skeptic, he mounted a two-year inquest into whether a former University of Virginia climate scientist used manipulated data to land federal grants. And only weeks after taking office, Cuccinelli warned Virginia's public college officials that they could not enact policies against discrimination toward gays that are tougher than state law, an action Gov. Bob McDonnell, a fellow Republican social conservative, rescinded.
As attorney general, Cuccinelli pressured members of the State Board of Health to reverse their decision to exempt existing abortion clinics from new regulations that hold facilities where a certain number of abortions are performed to the stringent architectural requirements of hospitals. The board ultimately decided to apply the standards to existing clinics.
Since March, Cuccinelli has been dogged by his ties to a wealthy benefactor whose more than $145,000 in personal gifts and loans to McDonnell and his family remains a subject of federal and state criminal investigations. Cuccinelli accepted $18,000 in gifts from that benefactor, Jonnie R. Williams, chief executive of a Virginia-based nutritional supplements company.
The governor's scandal not only stained Cuccinelli, it drowned out his campaign's message throughout the spring and summer, and it sidelined his most formidable advocate and fundraiser, the sitting governor.
McAuliffe, with his vast national network of donors, has raised nearly twice as much as Cuccinelli.
But he's had his own troubles.
McAuliffe headed a small electric-car company that bypassed Virginia to set up operations in north Mississippi two years ago. Now federal authorities are investigating the company's use of a federal program that grants visas to foreign investors who put at least $500,000 into qualifying American-grown business ventures. McAuliffe was the company's chairman for three years before quietly stepping down after declaring his candidacy last November.
Last week, McAuliffe's name surfaced on a list of investors with a Rhode Island estate planner who is now jailed for using the stolen identities of terminally ill people to secure annuities on them without their knowledge, then collecting insurance benefits when they died.
There is no allegation of wrongdoing by McAuliffe or that he or other investors knew of efforts to defraud the terminally ill. McAuliffe said he was only a passive investor and unaware of the scheme.
The Associated Press last Wednesday initially reported McAuliffe was accused in court documents of having lied to a federal investigator looking into the benefit scheme, but then said the reporting was wrong and withdrew the story. The documents referred to someone by the initials "T.M.," but did not identify McAuliffe as that person.
8 hours ago
"The Walking Dead" opened its fourth season with callbacks to their days on Hershel's farm. Like season two, the survivors are working like farmhands and living off the land. The only thing missing is Hershel's leg and a barn full of zombies.
Gene Page / AMC
Zombies? What zombies? Hershel and Rick have their little prison garden to attend to!
The walkers are still gathering outside the prison fence — and if anything, their numbers are growing. The humans, however, have built some clever booby traps so they can open the gate more safely.
What happened to crazy killer Carl?
After young master Grimes shot an innocent kid in cold blood last season, daddy took his gun away. And like father, like son, Rick is loathe to fire his own weapon. Now Carl's behaving like a normal kid, reading comic books (would Robert Kirkman be too meta?) and befriending the Woodbury survivors he originally wanted to bar from the prison. One of his new buddies is (er, was) Patrick, a nerdy teen who didn't survive the first episode. (That's not to say he won't be back next week.)
Story time
When she's not flirting with Daryl, Carol is reading to the kids, but she has an ulterior motive: she's also secretly teaching them how to use weapons. When Carl found out, she begged him not to tell Rick, who is apparently a pacifist as well as a gentleman farmer. (Fashion police, take note: Sheriff's hats are a farming faux pas.)
Gene Page / AMC
Yeah, you'd fall for this guy too in a zombie apocalypse!
Why is everyone getting sick?
The Grimes spotted the first sign of trouble in an ailing pig, Violet, who dropped before she could make it to the barbecue grill. Swine flu? Whatever it is, at least one human was also infected: Patrick, whose death in the shower was bloodier and more gruesome than anything Hitchcock ever concocted. And unlike Patrick, Janet Leigh didn't turn into a zombie. We have a funny feeling his next move won't involve soap.
New faces
Along with Patrick, several new characters were introduced in the premiere. One of them will actually stick around: former army medic Bob Stookey, played by Lawrence Gilliard Jr. — aka D'Angelo Barksdale in "The Wire." (Chad Coleman, who plays Tyreese, is also an alum.) Beth's new boyfriend, Zack, became one of the unlucky ones when he was killed during a supply run. (Unbelievably, Stookey barely suffered a scratch when an entire rack of booze bottles crashed on him.) A little survival tip: Don't browse the aisles when your world has been taken over by ravenous undead. You'd think the group would have picked up on this by now, but maybe they had a reason to be complacent.
'30 Days Without an Accident'
The title of the episode refers to the respite the prison gang have enjoyed, tracked by Hershel's singing daughter on a safety scorecard. Zack's death knocked the number down to zero, but Beth was surprisingly stoic. "I'm just glad I got to know him," she said. She's sure come a long way since feeding her mom chickens in the barn.
Speaking of accidents, Maggie had a pregnancy scare — which turned out to be false. Glenn was relieved, but his fiancée sides with Lori (RIP) when it comes to bringing new life in their post-apocalyptic world. Anyway, shouldn't they wait until they're married?
Gene Page / AMC
"Oh thank goodness I won't have to shoot you in the head like Carl did with Lori!"
Where is The Governor?
Patches is still MIA, but he'll be back. Maybe not next week, but soon — if Michonne's search party has anything to do with it. Fans can count on seeing the guy who skyrocketed above Rick on the crazy scale. Talking to your dead wife is small potatoes when compared to mowing down your own people, and turning Merle into a walker for his family to find.
Three questions
Boy, the South sure is lousy with lunatics. Rick stumbled across a kindred spirit in the woods: a starving, desperate madwoman who believed her bridegroom was still alive. Rick agreed to take them in if hubby answered three questions to his satisfaction:
Rick never got to ask the guy, but his new gal-pal scored a point for question two when she stabbed herself in the gut. Apparently, Rick just took off and left her to turn. What's one more walker? Maybe they'll meet again in the grocery aisle next week.
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. administration has a little over a month to fix the technology problems crippling its online health insurance marketplace, or jeopardize the goal of signing up millions of Americans in time for benefits under President Barack Obama's healthcare law, experts said on Thursday.
Problems with the federal marketplace's entry portal serving 36 states, the website Healthcare.gov, continued for a 10th day on Thursday despite signs of gradual improvement, keeping a brake on the ability of consumers to shop for federally subsidized health coverage.
Poor turnout in enrollment would provide further ammunition for Republican foes of Obamacare, whose efforts to kill the law have culminated in a federal government shutdown that began on October 1, coinciding with the launch of the health insurance exchanges nationwide.
Already on Thursday, Republican lawmakers in Congress launched a new investigation into the technical glitches, sending letters to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and two of the website's contractors, asking for details on what is causing the failures and any system changes or testing that had been performed.
Up to 7 million Americans are expected to enroll in health plans for 2014 under the law, formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Insurance executives, policy experts and former administration officials said the federal government's technical problems need to be largely sorted out by mid-November.
That would help ensure that large numbers of enrollees - especially healthy young adults needed to make the program work financially - can be processed by a December 15 deadline for January 1 coverage.
"Mid-November would be a time where folks who are getting online or accessing in other ways should really see things move pretty efficiently," Dan Hilferty, chief executive of Philadelphia-based Independence Blue Cross, said in an interview. "As we get closer to January 1, if in fact some of these glitches are not fixed, then I think people will become more and more concerned, and maybe panic about it."
"We have a strong team in place, including external contractors, who are working around the clock to improve Healthcare.gov. We have a plan in place and are making progress, but we will not stop until the doors to Healthcare.gov are wide open," HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said in a statement on Thursday.
HEALTHCARE.GOV
Healthcare.gov is the entry site for consumers in states that have chosen not to build their own healthcare exchanges. The website was hobbled within minutes of its launch on October 1. HHS attributed the crash to an unexpected surge of millions of interested consumers seeking information on the new benefits, and said it was working to address capacity and software problems to quickly fix the problem.
"There have been a lot of server issues, so I haven't been able to get through," said Ira Barth, 24, a part-time classical music singer in Dover, New Jersey, whose exchange relies on the government site. "Right now for me it's actually cheaper to visit the doctor without having insurance. I want to see how affordable it is right now."
Sebelius told a gathering in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Thursday that 13 million people have tried to visit Healthcare.gov so far this month in what she called "a sign of great need."
Joe Bourgart, 55, of Murrysville, Pennsylvania, attended the event that was co-hosted by the Pittsburgh Steelers football team, where he was able to register on Healthcare.gov for the first time.
"You have to do something about this," Bourgart said to Sebelius as she walked by, referring to the website problems. "I promise I will," she responded.
Bourgart, who identified himself as a Republican and a supporter of universal healthcare for Americans, said "whether this is the right way to do it, I can't say. But I do think you have to try things before you can say if they work or not."
"I feel like unfortunately the whole government shutdown issue has put this issue to the sidelines while everyone is focused on the mess in Washington," he added. "I am very disappointed in my party at the moment."
INVESTIGATING THE GLITCHES
The House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, in its letters to Sebelius and contractors CGI and Quality Software Services Inc, questioned the nature of the glitches against testimony from federal officials and company representatives ahead of Healthcare.gov's launch on October 1.
"Despite the widespread belief that the administration was not ready for the health law's October 1 launch, top officials and lead IT contractors looked us in the eye and assured us all systems were a go," said committee chairman Fred Upton, a Republican from Michigan. "The American people deserve to know what caused this mess."
CGI said it would cooperate with the committee's request. Officials at QSSI were not immediately available for comment.
Patience has also begun to run thin among Democrats who worry that the administration is not acting decisively enough.
"They don't seem to be addressing these problems quickly enough. They've had three years to get their ducks in a row. It gets to the point where it becomes inexcusable. And we're not at that point yet. But we're getting close to it," said a senior Democratic aide in Congress.
"With the amount of support the president and the White House have from Silicon Valley, you would think they'd be able to nip these problems in the bud. They could call up any of these people and ask for their assistance. Why not put together a blue ribbon panel with all the guys from Google and Twitter? This should have been done beforehand."
Democratic Senator Edward Markey said Obamacare came up very briefly at a White House meeting between the president and Democratic Senators on Thursday.
"They need a geek squad, not a firing squad," Markey told reporters about the administration's IT challenges.
(Reporting by David Morgan; Additional reporting by Elizabeth Daley in Pittsburgh, Lewis Krauskopf and Sharon Begley in New York and Richard Cowan in Washington; Editing by Michele Gershberg, Eric Walsh and Lisa Shumaker)
