Category: Featured

The University of Central Florida already has the second largest enrollment of any college in the country, but its president thinks there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, UCF President John Hitt was interviewed for about 40 minutes by UCF spokesman Grant Heston on Wednesday.

The event was held in front of a packed ballroom in the Student Union. Students, faculty, and administrators were all present for the State of the University address.

In his speech, Hitt touched on a number of topics, ranging from reducing student loan debt to creating a vibrant downtown Orlando campus for the university. He discussed how legislators and taxpayers are less willing to fund higher education, as well as how schools are no longer able to substantially increase tuition costs.

“We’ve got to be mindful of how we do things and how we can still achieve high quality while containing costs,” the president said.

One of his primary focuses was his mission to make education affordable for people from diverse economic backgrounds, which he claims is one of his greatest worries.

“We’ve got a chance to make a real dent there,” Hitt said. “That will alleviate my sleeplessness.”

The average college graduate in 2015 will have student loans totaling $35,000, and the university is attempting to balance university growth and development with lowered tuition costs.

According to KnightNews.com, some students think that Hitt’s focus on student loan debt was all a crock of “poo emoji.” They held up signs with the popular smartphone symbol while chanting, “Sign the pledge! Sign the pledge! Hey! Hey! Hey!”

The pledge they’re referring to is a program for school employees that would forgive their student loans through a federal program called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.

“This pledge is at no cost to UCF,” protester Nicole Ham said. “It’s just something they can sign and they’re just held accountable to letting their employees know.”

Shortly prior to the protest, Hitt spoke briefly about debt concerns among current students and graduates.

“I would encourage students to really be thoughtful and careful how they spend on rent and other expenses that are not directly related to their education.”

The protesters were briefly removed from the room, but were allowed to stand in the back of the room as they continued to hold their signs for the remainder of the speech.

The art world doesn’t seem to be doing too poorly, at least financially speaking. Between July 2013 and July 2014, auction house Sotheby’s generated more than $390.2 million. Online art auctions don’t appear to be suffering, either. Fully, 71% of art collectors have now purchased art in some form online. At the same time, global online art sales amounted to about $1.57 billion in 2014.

However, it’s not art that’s the most profitable business at auction house Sotheby’s — it’s its finance arm.

The auction house’s activist investors have been pressuring Sotheby’s to boost profitability amidst record art prices. Yet the auction house’s shares have dropped about 25% in 2015. The activists have even gone so far as to force the CEO to resign last March.

In response, Sotheby’s boosted the size of its credit facility by almost three times this past summer to about $1.34 billion, which has enabled Sotheby’s to double its portfolio of loans to $1.3 billion, Business Insider reports.

The problem is that if the art market takes a downturn, the auction house could face some serious problems.

“The potential $1 billion borrowing to support growth at the finance segment would materially weaken Sotheby’s credit metrics and its corresponding credit profile during the next cyclical downturn, compared to the last recession – potentially putting the company’s ratings under pressure in this scenario,” said Margaret Taylor, senior vice president of ratings agency Moody’s.

“Although the finance segment earnings generate the highest margins and are poised to continue growing rapidly, Sotheby’s is sacrificing its balance sheet to support its loan portfolio.”

However, the problem will really only surface if the art market hits turbulence. That, Taylor said, is really only a matter of time.

“The art market is highly cyclical,” said Taylor. “It’s not ‘if,’ it’s ‘when’ there will be a down cycle.”

A seven-month investigation by the Polk County Sheriff’s Department, along with a few other agencies, resulted in 11 arrests and the seizure of 65 pounds of methamphetamine, authorities recently reported.

According to a Sept. 17 Orlando Sentinel article, the drugs were part of a drug trafficking scheme that went from Mexico and through Houston and Atlanta before arriving in Central Florida.

Deputies first learned of the local trafficking ring this spring. Led by Guadalupe Aguirre, 45, of Winter Haven, the trafficking organization distributed the drugs to several individuals to be sold. The meth that was seized during the drug bust is worth $5 million.

Police arrested Aguirre earlier this month while he was attempting to deliver 13.5 pounds of meth in Fort Meade; he had hidden the drugs in a five-gallon bucket in the back of his truck. Sheriff Grady Judd said the meth had been baked into pieces of commercially-packaged candy as a means of disguising it, The Ledger reported.

This arrest is just one of the 11 arrests made in relation to this trafficking ring since July, both in Polk County and elsewhere.

Police also seized $15,390 in cash, two vehicles and seven firearms from the Fort Meade home of suspect Jfelix Hilario-Escobar, 60.

Gilberto Cuevas Hernandez, 27, the alleged cook, is believed to have done the cooking — converting liquid meth to a crystal form — in front of three children aged seven to 10. Jimmy DiCaprio of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Tampa called the candy disguise that put children in jeopardy “ruthless” and “disgusting.”

Methamphetamines are illegal, highly-addictive stimulant opioids. Like the similar methadone, which originated in Germany in 1937, methamphetamines are highly subject to abuse and often result in addiction. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that about 440,000 of the 1.2 million people who use methamphetamines per year abuse the drug.

Most of the suspects arrested in the bust have been charged with trafficking meth, conspiracy to traffic meth and unlawful use of a two-way communication device.

There is almost one person without Internet for every web page out there. Currently, there are about 4.49 billion webpages online, and according to a new study, there are about 4.2 billion people who don’t have Internet access, a problem that’s more serious than you might think.

Of the 7 billion people around the world, a new United Nations report from the Broadband Commission for Digital Development shows that 4.2 billion don’t have regular Internet access. Initially, the Broadband Commission’s original goal for the end of the year was to get 60% of the world online. Now, it looks like only 43.4% will be by the end of 2015. Worst of all, only 2.8% more are online now than last year, with things getting slower.

It’s believed that the 60% goal won’t be reached until 2021 at the very earliest, and that’s not the only bad news.

• Just 5% of the 7,100 languages in the world are represented on the Internet.
• In the developing world, 25% fewer women have Internet access than men. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the number leaps to half (50%).
• Only about 300 million people gained Internet access this past year.
• A staggering 90% of the population of the world’s 48 poorest countries is still offline.
• This is a more serious matter than it appears. The Internet is more than just a place to check Facebook and sports scores.

“Broadband has steadily shifted from an optional amenity to a core utility for households, businesses, and community institutions,” said a White House report from August. “Today, broadband is taking its place alongside water, sewer and electricity as essential infrastructure for communities.”

The issue is that there are still barriers impeding the Internet from spreading, the most obvious of which are economic and governmental challenges. Having an Internet-enabled society requires broadband infrastructure, money, towers, a national plan, and more. Plus, many governments also censor what’s online, as well.

There’s also the issue of language. As previously noted, only about 5% of all languages are represented online. In fact, half of the websites online are in English.

The key to getting the world online is to eliminate these barriers. Once done, the Internet may spread at a breakneck pace, because as Mic puts it, “once the Internet lands, it lands hard.”

According to a recent report from the Ledger-Enquirer, a Columbus man was charged with interference with government property and was taken into custody by police on Friday.

Trevis Sistrunk, 37, was drinking a beer can on the sidewalk at the intersection of Broadway and 12th Street and was causing enough of a disturbance to warrant a call to local police.

When police contained Sistrunk in the back of the police car for public intoxication and the consumption of alcoholic beverages in public, he began to kick the back window on the driver’s side.

Yet while quality impact-resistant windows can withstand up to 200 mph winds, the cruiser’s back window couldn’t withstand the man’s kicks and separated from the door frame. The repair is estimated to cost $600.

In a similar story from Macomb Township, a 22-year-old man was arrested for vandalizing dozens of headstones in a local cemetery, with some that dated all the way back to the Civil War. When he was contained in the police video, the man, Tyler Bryant, began to kick out the police car window.

Macomb Sheriff Anthony Wickersham commented, “This individual had some strength. Our deputies did have to witness that when they took him into custody.”

Though unlike Sistrunk, Bryant wasn’t able to fully kick out the cruiser window; however, he had been able to kick over multiple cement and stone headstones. The town was able to pick up the toppled headstones, but only with the use of construction equipment and local volunteers.

Maybe these aggressive and criminal citizens will help to draw attention to the security of police cars and the benefits of impact-resistant windows. But most importantly, they serve as a reminder to be considerate to the community.

Wickersham commented that he believes that Bryant was on drugs at the time of arrest. Thankfully, he has since calmed down and hasn’t kicked his way out of any jail cells.

“I think he’s still in jail but hasn’t had any problems back there,” Wickersham concluded.

France may have just celebrated its 226th anniversary of independence this past July, but the latest scandal surrounding Marine Le Pen, the president of the country’s conservative Front National party (FN), has made it clear that not every French citizen is treated fairly and respectfully.

Le Pen has been accused of spewing racial slurs at a party rally held in Lyon back in 2010. According to The Guardian and the International Business Times, she compared Muslims praying in the street to the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s.

She had been campaigning to be elected as FN Party President when she mentioned that the number of Muslims praying in the streets of major French cities began increasing as a result of too few mosques in the country.

“I’m sorry, but for those who like talking a lot about World War II, if it comes to talking about the [Nazi] occupation, we can talk about it, because that [Muslims praying in the street] is the occupation of territory,” Le Pen told the crowd gathered in Lyon. “”It is an occupation of part of the territory, suburbs where religious law is applied. Sure, there are no armoured vehicles, no soldiers, but it is an occupation nonetheless and it weighs on residents.”

The French government later made the practice of “street praying” illegal, and Le Pen may have made the remarks five years ago, but the country certainly hasn’t forgotten about it.

According to Yahoo! News, a complaint was registered against Le Pen after her remarks in Lyon. She was investigated for “inciting racial hatred” after French citizens responded to her Islamophobic comments with outrage. The investigation seems to have been dropped without any apparent verdict or explanation, but it was reopened in 2012 after another complaint was filed against Le Pen.

She was recently summoned on Sept. 22 to appear in court and address the allegations and, to use Le Pen’s own words regarding the impending October court summons, “Of course, [she’s] not going to miss such an occasion.”

Le Pen currently heads the far-right leaning FN party — in fact, she ended up winning that election back in 2010 and she succeeded her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011. Many have speculated that Le Pen’s racist sentiments were instilled by her father, who ironically was prosecuted for Holocaust denial — under the very same restricting legislation on free speech — after he stated that the Nazi gas chambers were just a minor “detail” of the second World War.

The FN party is notorious for its anti-immigrant stance, but it has begun to gain more support from French citizens who are becoming increasingly frustrated with the Socialist Party’s blasé response to the current refugee crisis in Europe.

As an invisible illness, electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) is becoming a bigger issue in today’s society. It doesn’t just stop at headaches — in fact, it goes a lot further.

Journalist Mark White from Stuff.co.nz recently spent a day with Bruce Evans, who is likely the last man one would think suffers from this syndrome by looking at him. He is a 50-year-old web designer and former Australian Army commando, and he has electromagnetic hypersensitivity.

In the world today, we live in a society drowning in technology, which leaves those with the syndrome little-to-no places to hide. The syndrome itself is controversial, only partially recognized by the medical community and still not recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is caused by electromagnetic fields (EMF), which are emitted by power lines, cell phones, laptops, wireless routers and the like.

The symptoms of this disease have a wide range — from small headaches to nausea, migraines, fatigue, tingles, and heart palpitations. Basically, EHS puts a large mental strain on anyone affected by it. This stems from both the actual symptoms of the syndrome and the idea that they are faking it.

The syndrome is controversial because the frequencies at which people are affected tend to be well below what is considered even slightly dangerous. It’s a case where most don’t understand, so it’s written off.

Yet a recent study pointed out that chronic EMF exposure causes cells to experience physiological stress after just 1.5 years of exposure, and in today’s world, it’s impossible to not have chronic EMF exposure.
However, a WHO fact sheet still denies its existence. “The collection of symptoms,” says the organization, “is not part of any recognised syndrome.”

In fact, the WHO says that these issues can be classified with other issues already recognized by the organization — Idiopathic Environmental Intolerance (IEI) and multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS) both closely resemble EHS, according to their fact sheet on electromagnetic sensitivity.

The issue, Evans says, is that many sufferers are made to feel silly, or like refugees within their own countries. They often have to move around a lot to find places where they won’t be as affected.

Evans says that his vision for the future is one where there is a community, set away from EMF zones, for sufferers to come to for sanctuary. With a handful of people around the world wishing for the same thing, his dream may take shape soon.