It's good to see you guys and it's good to be here in Prague, coming all the way from Chicago, so a bit of a long flight, but it's good to be here. My name is Chris Flinter and I'm a product manager at DataStacks. Yeah guys, just come on in. And today I'm going to be talking a bit about the DataStacks Enterprise integration on DCOS. And specifically we're going to talk about why production quality, stateful services are hard. We're going to talk a bit about the evolution of the framework, how we went from ground zero to where we're at today. And then I'll go through the current state of the project, show you the couple of tiles that we have on the DCOS universe today. And then we'll talk about some customer deployments, how they're getting real business value out of this service. And then finally we will conclude with a couple of demos just to show you guys how this integration is working today. So I want to start off real quick just by giving an overview of what DataStacks is to try to provide some context for the integration. So it's a peer-to-peer, no SQL database. At the core is Cassandra and we build in enterprise features such as search, graph, analytics, and we add some security on top of it as well. We see a lot of personalization, customer 360 apps built with it, messaging programs. We get a lot of sensor data, IoT stuff.  And then interestingly enough we see it being used for playlists as well. So now I'm going to go into really what goes into developing these production quality, stateful services, and some of the technical challenges behind just the complexities that are involved. So first I'm going to start with some terminology. And this is specific to Cassandra and DataStacks Enterprise. A node is a single instance, so a single unit of DSE. And these make up data centers. And the data centers can be either logical data centers or physical data centers. And Cassandra, the way it works is it replicates your data based upon a snitch. And you can configure how many replicas you want in each one of your data centers. And the largest unit of work is a cluster. And the data centers add up to this larger cluster. And you can have several data centers in a single cluster. And in a world where data autonomy is becoming more and more important, it's important to be able to deploy these clusters either on-premise or in the cloud. And this is going to be a big piece of our DCOS integration that I'll go into a bit more later. So the next thing is the Gossip Protocol. And this is kind of what makes it all work. This is what makes it peer-to-peer. And these nodes are constantly talking. And they exchange these messages every second. And in these messages are the health of the nodes, whether they're up or down, where they're located. And this is really how the different nodes learn about each other. And they're all communicating to each other. It's not just a one-to-one relationship. And based upon this communication, this is how the different requests are routed. So if all of a sudden one node gets very slow, the cluster knows that it'll start steering requests around that slow node in order to keep the different SLAs and latencies in a good state. The next thing I want to touch on here is the write path. So when a request comes in, it's first written to a commit log, which is just a sequential log-based format on disk. And then it goes to the memtable where it's stored in memory. And once this memtable fills up, it'll be flushed to disk. And when it's on disk, compaction runs. And this will load the data back up into memory, sort it, and then write it back into disk in these immutable SS tables. And this is all important because the integration with DCOS, one of the features that we'll provide is node recovery. So it's very important for these different data directories to be able to be stored locally with the possibility of them being attached later on. So the next thing I'm going to touch on is the configuration management. There's more than 30 configuration files in DSC. So there's a lot to keep track of if you're trying to do this all by hand. And depending on your workload, you can have upwards of 1,000 different settings. And especially when you're making changes in production, which changes are likely, it can be very hard to keep track of if you're trying to do that all manually. And specifically here in the Cassandra YAML file, there's more than 1,000 settings, and in the DSC YAML, there's a comparable amount as well. So I describe all these things to get to the point that stateful services are hard, and managing, deploying, configuring stateful services are hard as well. But this is where the DCOS SDK really comes in and adds value to the data stacks deployment. It can do things like manager deployment, like I said before, either on-premise or in the cloud. It can perform maintenance for these stateful services automatically. If a node goes down, we can try to bring it back up automatically up to a certain point until we deem it down and that it will need manual intervention. It can also do things like back-of-the-store configuration, and each one of these pieces we configure the data stack scheduler to do it specific to the DSC tasks that I just described. So at the core of this is DCOS Commons. It's the open source library to manage these sorts of deployment and configuration strategies. And it makes things really convenient when you're operating in this distributed environment or you want to deploy microservices in a uniform fashion. It makes this sort of thing very, very easy and more doable than having to do it all manually. And it accomplishes these tasks through a declarative goal-oriented approach and to show you a little example of that, I have this goal-oriented design here where it's really operating with two states, the current state and the target state. So in this example, if we're starting with CPU 2 and memory 4 gigs and we want to get to having CPU 1 and memory 8 gigs, first the scheduler knows to unreserve one CPU an additional four gigs of memory and then it will communicate with the DSC scheduler to launch a new node with the configuration value specific to DSC that will achieve this target goal here. So now I want to talk more specifically about the integration of these two things and how we went from having nothing to where we're at today. So as I'm sure you guys may know, engineering resources can be strapped sometimes and the number of customers that you need to serve and the needs that you need to serve outnumber that of what you have so you need to be smart with your design. So in version one, we were really looking to go low-touch and make something that would be easy to develop and easy to customize and expand upon. And we wanted all this to be just in a single universe package on DCOS. And the outcome of this, though, we thought, hey, this is great. Like, we can give it to anybody and anybody can use it how they want. We found out that customers actually wanted it all in front for them and they didn't necessarily want to just build it up and extend it themselves. So that brought us to version two. And I have this that give them the plain phrase up there because DSC can really be like a control panel of a plane where there's a million different knobs and switches that you want to turn. And these customers wanted the ability to turn all of them from this interface on DCOS and we really just needed a tighter integration than what we had in version one. So the first step was to dedicate a data stacks engineering team to this effort where we can provide the data stacks expertise needed to make the integration flow much more naturally and to build DSC specific resilient factors into the platform and into the integration. So we were working hand in hand with Mesosphere on this. And at first, we were meeting every single day and then that eventually turned into a few times a week and now it's pretty much just as needed now that the integration is more stable and the foundation is there. We really baited the heck out of this thing. I think we went through five different betas before we went to GA. So we had a pretty tight feedback loop with the customers that were trying this out. So they really let us know exactly what they wanted and it tailored our design and we were able to fulfill those requests for them. And finally, the joint support agreements was something that was definitely needed because with a platform like this, when the integration is so tight, you don't necessarily know as a customer, okay, I just have this error, but you don't know whether it's coming from DSC or whether it's coming from DCOS. So we had to set up a system where customers could contact us and go through either channel and then we would then take that request and go from there based upon whether it was a DCOS bug or whether it was specific to data stacks enterprise. And the outcome of this version too was that we were definitely better together. Like I said before, with all these configuration files and all these different knobs to turn, that's a very difficult task to do manually. So DCOS gives us the ability to have all these things in a standard format. You can fill it out as I'll show you later in the GUI itself and check off boxes for what you want to deploy. And a big advantage to this too is that you can roll back these changes.  DCOS makes it very convenient to be able to roll out these changes for these higher traffic times, which is a very, very useful feature of the integration. And the next bullet I have here is the automated vertical and horizontal scaling. Users of Cassandra and DSC are very used to this ability to scale horizontally. If you need more throughput you can just add more nodes and it will scale linearly. But DCOS gives us the ability to also scale vertically. So in the cases where you might be restricted to the number of nodes you have but they might have the ability to use more resources, DCOS can allocate those for you. So now with this integration you can scale both vertically and horizontally. And finally, the other big advantage that we've seen is the uniform deployment of these enterprise applications. We have a few customers who are using this to do things like platform as a service and also microservices. So when you need to deploy things uniformly and efficiently having the click of a button in DCOS has been a real advantage to those customers. All right, so now we'll touch on the current state of the project and what it actually looks like in the DCOS universe. We have these two tiles. The first is Datastax DSC and Datastax Ops. The Datastax DSC tile is the actual Datastax server.  And I'll go through an example of that in a bit here. And then the second panel is Datastax Ops and that is our Ops center product which provides the ability to get more of a view towards the JMX metrics that DSC produces as well as it lets you do things like backup and restore, schedule repair services and things like that. So we provide both of these products on the DCOS universe. So in this most recent version we have full platform support. So that means that we support the Datastax enterprise features like advanced replication, search, graph, analytics as well as some of our advanced security features. We have node placement and node task failure recovery. I touched on this briefly before but essentially what that means is if DCOS senses that this node has gone down it will try to start it back up automatically until it will eventually give up because sometimes it does require manual intervention. But this is good because it does add some resiliency to these distributed systems where the failures can happen really all over the place. The next thing that we support is strict mode support. This allows you to run on air gap networks. Multitenancy which means that you can have multiple DSC nodes on the same physical host. This is good to just if you have beefy boxes you can build denser and denser nodes. But there are some replication considerations to take into play there. And then the next one here is pod replace with local storage. If you have a pod failure and you have your local storage backed up there's the capability to reattach that to launch a new pod and reattach that to the new pod which again just builds more resiliency into the platform itself. And then the network management and CNI this also comes into play for the dense node support where you can have multiple DSC nodes on the same host. And it's just really important for all that stuff to be working well or if the gossip protocol that I mentioned before isn't able to function your server is going to be a mess. And then finally we have expanded monitoring where you can see some of the errors and some of the DSC statistics actually in the DCOS UI. So that's where we're at today. And then I touched on these briefly before but I'll just go over them again. We have a couple of customer deployments or a couple of patterns in customer deployments. The first one is for a large travel company they're using it to deploy these micro services in a very efficient manner. They typically don't have a lot of time to deploy these services so being able to just hit a button in DCOS and have these things fire up has been a real value add for them. And it really comes back to just being able to have a repeatable consistent deployment where when they have a configuration that's working in dev they can take it directly to test and then directly to production knowing that it's exactly the same and without having to do any manual porting there. And then the second one I mentioned here is a platform as a service. This is similar to the first but it's also very important for them to be able to have this uniform deployment such that when they need more resources or more endpoints to meet their internal on-prem cloud they can just go ahead and fire those up through the DCOS and DSC integration. Alright, now I'm going to get to a couple of demos. They're pre-recorded. I couldn't do them live. I tried last night and it didn't work so I ended up having somebody else send me some videos. So the first one here I'll show you how to install the database through the DCOS catalog. So here if we go to the catalog section we can see the couple panels that I mentioned before Let's try that again. So we'll go to the catalog and you'll see the couple panels that I mentioned before. And if you go ahead and click configure here you can see the different options for enabling any of our full platform support and as well select the number of nodes and the different options that you would see in the Cassandra and DSC yamls here. As you can kind of tell from this there's a lot of options.  It continues to flip through some of the configuration options. The takeaway here is that there's a lot. So after you set all these things you can also deploy Opsnare to the GUI management. After you set all these things you can go ahead and review and like I said download the configuration and then deploy it. So this will take you to the service panel where you can start to see these nodes being launched and in our lab it takes usually about 10 minutes or so. So this is sped up a bit to just make a clear point here but in this case it's a three node DSE cluster and on each one of those nodes there's an agent as well as the DSE service running. And like I said this is sped up just a little bit to just make the point that you can see the resources that each one of the machines has allocated towards it. So that's installing DSE and now we'll go through a quick one for installing Opsnare which is the management GUI. So a separate panel here the data stacks Ops panel but same sort of a thing where you configure it and there's much less options here for this service than the DSE service. And one of the caveats here is that right now the Opsnare service is running on a single node where in the future we're going to have that be running on multiple nodes so that that's actually using a distributed storage system as well. So same sort of system here just launching that Opsnare node which is going to give you a view into your DSE cluster and be able to manage things like backup and restore and repair. And now I'll go over to the command line interface to show how you can pull up that GUI and get the endpoint that it launched at. And my name is not Catherine Erickson but she was the one who provided these demos for me. So you use this DCOS command and you have to install the CLI for the datastacks Opsnare service first. So we see that going on here. And then we'll use this endpoints command to grab the endpoint which we can then throw in the browser to get to this GUI management service. So we're just grabbing the endpoint here and we can see the address right there. So we take that and we can put that into the browser.  So here you can see that we have this three node datastacks enterprise cluster standing which we just launched through the DCOS catalog. So the final thing I want to show you is the most recent command line interface. I don't know if any of you have used this last but there's been a lot of improvements here to make it more usable and just overall more enjoyable. So we see our DSC nodes here again and now we can click on this install CLI and it gives us the commands that we need to install this interface. And she has to use sudo for her curl command here so luckily her password is hidden. Go ahead and install that. And really what this command line interface does is just gives you some more different touch points for your cluster. If you want to essentially SSH directly in you can do that through this command line interface. But again we see this install for the Opsnare command line interface and we also installed the so you have to do a separate command line interface for each one of the packages for DSC and for Opsnare. And now we'll go ahead and look at our DSC endpoints here and the one that we're interested in is the native client which is the communication port that you would write to just regular queries for data stacks. So we grab the IP addresses and the ports here and then we can go ahead and just show a shell on that first node. Now we'll go into CQLSH and we'll show that we can just execute queries directly on this node. And CQLSH is just the shell that is used to interact with Cassandra to issue requests. So we'll go ahead and just create a key space which is essentially just the bin for the data stacks schema. We'll create a table called customer sales. And then we'll just go ahead and insert a couple rows and then do a quick query there just to show how this has been much improved. I don't know if you guys did use it before, but this is like great. So just a normal select query there based upon the rows that were marked with a different time stamp above that one. And that's the command line interface. So next we'll show some of the value and how easy it is to add a node into scale horizontally. And this is really great because typically if you are deploying Cassandra or data stacks enterprise you'd have to do all this stuff manually. And now it's literally you can see the configuration files over here. And then on this side is all the environment variables that you configure. And now all you have to do is add this pod count to 4 and it will go ahead and like we said before with the configuration it takes this new request. It will reserve these new resources and then go ahead and launch that new node for you here. So we can go from our 3 node cluster to our 4 node cluster through a UI with a configuration that we know is working and that exists and is managed in a single place. And we go ahead and just hit deploy and now the DCOS service is launching this with the same resource allocation that was on the previous 3 nodes that we had. So it makes it really easy to scale horizontally for you. So we'll go ahead and here and just do the endpoints command again to show that one was added to the previous 3 node cluster. So just like that now we have these 4 hosts here and our cluster was just scaled horizontally. And that's really what I wanted to show here with this added node demo. But this is the sort of thing that when you are deploying these platforms as a service that if you do need more resources or if you do need more endpoints it's as easy as a few clicks of the button. And now we'll go to the OpCenter again just to show that the same change was reflected in the OpCenter GUI as well. So we load up OpCenter and now we have 4 nodes in our DSE cluster. I put this up here and I'll go ahead so on this MessosCon link here we have a bunch of examples if you want to try this for yourself to go through some of the exact things that we just ran in this demo. So these slide decks are on the MessosCon Europe website so I'd recommend if you guys are interested to go to this link here and take it for a spin. And that's it. Do you guys have any questions about the platform or about anything that we've built here or anything that was presented today? Thanks Chris, great talk. I have a couple questions. So the framework the Messos framework that Datastacks built, it's tied to DCOS, right? So if I want to run a vanilla Messos that will be like tough nuggets, right? Correct. It's built on DCOS it requires DCOS so you need that service to be able to run it. And the second question is you mentioned that the way you work with local disks allows replication and fast moving the container to another node. Can you elaborate a little bit on this? Sure. So when you persist the volume it gets stored to an underlying host pod replace mechanism. That data doesn't actually go anywhere but the previous pod that you had before will go down but then a new pod will be launched and you can tell it to map that local storage that was there the whole time to this new volume or to a new volume in this new pod so then you can access that same data there. So there is no rebuild associated when we recreate the pod on the same node? Correct. And do you work with external storage there as well? I don't know honestly. I'm more just I know more about the data sacks side of things so I don't know exactly but we can follow up later if you want to get an answer to that. Thanks. Just one note for that though the Ops Center management GUI that I mentioned before does provide the ability to back up to S3 or any external storage that you have I'm just not positive about the DCOS side of things working with external storage. Thank you for the nice presentation. Question when you add nodes how does it handle tokens underneath the covers? Yep. So that's going to depend on whether you are using single tokens or V nodes in Cassandra. If you're using virtual nodes that allocation algorithm works automatically so if you let's say you have 256 tokens per node and you launched a new node the way that the token allocation works is that it will automatically select the tokens that would best balance your existing cluster so all of that is done through DSE and Cassandra automatically but if you're using single tokens then you would have to configure that yourself for the best token allocation for your single token architecture. Okay, so you'd put that into I guess the configuration and then when you're done you'd still have to clean up Yeah, you'd still have to clean up if you're doing single tokens. Cool, thank you. And you would just do that via the CLI. You can go into each node and do the cleanup command there. Was that running containers or was that actually running the process? Yeah, it's running containers. Okay, cool. Any other questions? Alright, thanks guys.


to talk to you about citizenship, let's see, so we're going to go over what is naturalization and what is citizenship, the requirements for naturalization and the process of going through that. And then afterwards we have attorneys available to provide one-on-one consultations and to help you prepare your forms if you're ready for that or to answer any questions. So what is naturalization? Naturalization is the process by which you obtain U.S. citizenship if you were not born with U.S. citizenship. So in order to apply for U.S. citizenship or naturalization, you need to complete what's called the Form N-400, but it's sent to U.S. Customs and Immigration Services. In addition to that form, there will be an interview and that is how the officers determine whether or not you're eligible and eventually grant citizenship. So why should you naturalize? Some really important benefits that you get, being able to vote, being able to obtain citizenship for your children if they're under 18, you get priority in bringing relatives from abroad, you, of course, freedom for deportation, being able to travel with the U.S. passport, there's some benefits to that, ability to run for elected office even. So but it's really important that we also talk about what are the liabilities and the risks with applying for citizenship. So it does expose people to grounds of deportation. What does that mean? When you apply for citizenship, immigration is going to look at your whole immigration history and your whole criminal history and all of that and review whether or not you're eligible to be a citizen but also you need to be in this country. So in some cases, in the worst case, you can end up in deportation proceedings by applying for citizenship. So it's really important as we talk through some of the issues that you consult with a lawyer before you apply and let them know if there are any criminal issues at all. Even if you think it's not a big deal, it's best to talk about it. Conversation with the attorney is confidential and you can only benefit you to make sure that you're best prepared for any issues that might come up. Also in some countries, dual nationality is prohibited and you may risk losing your citizenship in your other country and so that's in your original country. So that's something you might need to keep in mind. You'll need to take an oath of allegiance to the United States and you'll be required to serve on a jury which is good and bad for some people. So what are the requirements? This is a list of basic requirements. So you need to be at least 18 years old. You need to be a lawful permanent resident. You have been a permanent resident for five years continuously. It is three years that you've been married to a US citizen over that period of time. And you may have been physically present here for half of those five years or three years. You also need to have good moral character. You need to be able to pass an exam in English and US government in history and then be able to stay loyal to the United States. I'll go over these in detail a little bit. First requirement at your 18, kind of obvious how you prove that. But if you're under 18, if your parents become a citizen while you're under 18, you can then apply for derivation of citizenship as what we call it. It's a slightly different process, but essentially children under 18 acquire citizenship than their parents do. Being a lawful permanent resident, that means you have to be in the car. And like I said, immigration will look at your whole history, which means they might look into how your green card was obtained. So for example, if someone is an asylum seeker and the time that they were a green card holder, they traveled back to their country origin where they had fled. That might raise red flags for immigration could be a problem. So also residency requirements. So you need to have been continuously here in the United States. This is one that gets real sticky for a lot of people really fast. So, for example, as of today, five years would be, what is today? September of 2013. So you need to have been here since September of 2013, or sorry, your green card needs to have an issue before that date. In order to have five years continuous residence. And then you also need to have been in the district or state where you're applying for three months or more. So if you just moved from Texas last month, you need to wait two months to apply. So continuous residence. So this needs to be directly preceding your application. So like I said, you're going to go back five years from today to September of 2013. You won't be putting information about September of 2010 on the application, even if you have received your green card in 2010. That requirement is only for three years if you're married to a US citizen. But you need to show additional proof to show that you are married to a US citizen. That you're living together and all of that. So to show that you've been to the present though, you need to not have absences that show that you were gone for too long or that you haven't maintained your residence here in the United States. That you can go move to another country during the past five years. So what does that mean? Generally, absences or trips of less than six months are okay. Not going to be a problem. But if it's more than six months and less than a year, it could raise a red flag. You'll want to talk to an attorney about it. The officer might have questions about it. You want to be prepared to answer the officer's questions about why that trip was so long and how you actually in fact remained a US resident during that time.  Things like this will show that you still were a US resident. You're still paying your taxes, but you just had for some reason to take a really long trip. If you were gone for more than one year, that's when you really have a problem. And it breaks the period of continuous residence and you'll need to wait to apply for citizenship. So like I was talking about, the period of physical presence is also. So there's continuous residence and physical presence. They're very similar but different requirements. So this again refers to the time that you spend physically here in the United States. And even if you've had only six month trips, if they equaled three years out of the past five years altogether, then you would not qualify for citizenship because you would not need the physical presence requirement because you would not in the United States for half of the time for the past five years. You need to have been present for at least half of the five year or three year period that you're applying for. And again, in the district or state in the last three months. There's some exceptions to that physical presence and abandonment of status. So this is really important. So even if, for example, you had a very long trip for two years, but it was in 2008, so out of the five year period of time, you still could end up in rural proceedings because if you are a green car holder and you move outside of the United States, immigration could say that you abandoned your residency here. And then you would then need to present evidence to the immigration judge that you did not in fact abandon your residence, that there were extenuating circumstances. There was some reason that you were unable to remain here but that you still, your home was in the United States, you didn't leave. You weren't planning to not remain here. And that can be very complicated. So if you have any of those long out, I wouldn't say it's really important to consult an immigration attorney. But it's really important to also remember, particularly this, it happens to people at the border, that only an immigration judge can take away your green card. Only an immigration judge can make this determination. So you don't have to sign away your green card if someone's coming back from a trip for two years at the border. They still have the right to see a judge to make that determination improve. Provide evidence of why they don't, have not abandoned their residence. Again, with abandonment, there's no particular time period. But similarly, six months or less of a trip is usually another column. Six months to a year raises a rebuttable presumption. And then over a year, you'll presume to have abandoned your residence. And you will have a much higher burden to prove that you did not. So other important rules that you have, good moral character. So what does that mean? I mean, you're not deportable. You don't follow the categories of being deportable. You'll see once we get to that, once you do the application, that there's a very, very long list of questions at the end, which are getting at these issues of good moral character. So for example, any criminal issues such as an aggravated felony, those are very serious crimes. Those things that would make you permanently unable to apply for citizenship are permanently unable to show that you have good moral character. Other ones, let's see. It depends on when it happened. If it was the last serious crime, if it happened within the last five years, you probably wouldn't be eligible for citizenship. Yeah, you need to wait. And these are some of the other issues that would show you don't have good moral character, and like I mentioned, come up in that long list of questions. So for example, polygamy, being married to more than one person at the same time, legal gambling, habitual drunkenness, these kinds of things. Terrorist acts, yelling to play child support, or lying to gain immigration benefits. These are all things that will come up in those questions. There are some discretionary factors, and those include things like not having filed your taxes. Also really important to talk to an attorney about that, if that's the case. Also, whether or not you've registered those selective services, so men who work in the United States between the ages of 18 and 26 should have registered for a selective service if they didn't. It's a discretionary thing about whether or not they can determine that they have good moral character. And then we can talk to people about that one on one. One thing I wanted to point out is, one thing we've seen impact particularly in the Muslim community is this secret program that immigration has put forth, and it has led to a very long delays in processing applications. It could be at the green card level or the list of the essential level, and it's called CARP, which is a controlled application review and resolution program. But essentially the only way someone knows that they're being impacted by this is if their application has been delayed like two or five or ten years, and that's the thing that if anyone's application gets delayed, I recommend they speak with someone in our office or another who can assess whether or not that is an issue for them. But generally it comes out of national security concerns. Someone served in the military in their country of origin, things like this. So what's the process? So you will complete the form N400. Today we have copies of those forms today and we can go over that with you. You're eligible within a few, at least about a month or two when you apply to the nearest immigration office. There they will take your fingerprints, take your photo and run a background check. That's when they'll run FBI criminal-pitched background. So then it takes a few months for the background check to clear and then the backlog. So this slide says four months for the application. That's when I get it. Currently it's taking nine months, more or less, in some offices. Last year it was taking over a year. So it's hard to say what it will be when you apply today. You can check online what their processing times are. But generally, generally less than two years I can say uncertainty. But right now I think we're looking at about nine months. Again depending on which office you go to. And so once you have your interview, that's when they actually determine whether or not you become a citizen. The officer will go through your whole application with you again. So it's really important that before you mail it out, you make a copy because in nine months or a year you might not remember what you wrote in your application. So you want to review that before your interview because obviously you'll be looking for consistencies in your statements. And they'll go through that and then they will test you on your English language skills and your US civics, all of that. And then at the end of that they will issue a decision.  Some cases they'll say it'll take time to make a decision. In other cases you will be not denied but they will tell you why. For example you didn't pass English requirements.  They'll let you know what it is. So what is the English test? So you're required to show that you speak English. That's mostly tested by you speaking to the officer. It's only you and an attorney that can go into the interview. You'll be asked to read a sentence in English. You'll be then asked to write a sentence in English. You're given three opportunities in that one meeting to do that. There's some exceptions if you're over 50 or 55 and you've been here for over 15 or 20 years. The civics test is also administered in English. And there are 100 predetermined questions. You will be asked 10 of them, you have to get six right. So you have to get a 60% but a D, right? Not too hard. Seems like it sometimes but just a few six right. And you have all the questions ahead of time. There are CDs, there are apps. There are so many ways to study, prepare for that. If someone is over 65 and they've been a permanent resident for over 20 years, they can get less questions. And that's that. So but if you do fail the English required English test or the civics test, you get another chance to take it.  Hopefully they'll have them study and you can try again. You only get one other shot and then they deny your application. And then you have to reapply, which can be very costly. There is an exemption if you have a medically determined disability. So for example dementia is something that you could get a waiver for the English and civics requirements. But you have to get a doctor to sign a notice explaining all of that. And then finally there is no citizenship oath. Some people don't have to say it if, for example, they have a disability or they have religious reasons why they can't say the things of the oath. But this is the oath, it's also an application. So you support the Constitution of the United States, you bear allegiance, you're willing to bear arms, you support non-combatant services with armed forces, and perform work of national importance. And at the end of this all, you would do it in a big room with lots of other people who are also becoming citizens. It's a ceremony and a nice day. This is the USDA's website. If you don't know any immigration forms you get, you should get from there. They are free. All information is there. You shouldn't pay someone for a copy of the form. Everything can be found there. So today we have two organizations here. In addition to CARES Equality Center is also supporting us. They are another immigration service provider. And so you can reach out to either of our offices if you have any questions beyond the clinic. And thank you all so much.


Gov. Aguil Caffers of Tiber State has charged the State Escrow of the Nigerian Union of Local Government Employees and ULGE not to allow issues of religion to divide them as they are about to conduct elections. Addressing the State Escrow of the Body at Escrow Chamber Government House Jalingo, Gov. Caffers told them that he has no preferred candidates or group or recognize the vital role NULGE is playing on ensuring the welfare of local government staff. According to him, Tiber State is diverse and building harmonious relationships has been the focus of his administration adding that these values should be reflected in the actions and decisions of all. It is an honor to address the officials of the Nigerian Union of Local Government Employees NULGE and the wider public today. I'm here to emphasize the importance of conducting a peaceful and harmonious election for the executive committee. NULGE has a rich history and your norms, patterns, and formulas for electing Escrow have stood the test of time. As the government, we hold no preference for any particular candidate or group that will recognize the vital role NULGE plays in ensuring the welfare of local government staff. I want to take a moment that NULGE is not known to me. At the moment, we had a meeting with NULGE officials at the instance of His Excellency, the Executive Governor of Tiber State, Dr. Abu Kepa, who is label-friendly. So the meeting was very nice, sweet, and successful. So the labels are very accommodating. They are very friendly. We have the route, and it's not something that we rush. But His Excellency graciously gave us time, two days, within which they resolved and come out with amicable positions. So it's very sweet. The meeting went unsuccessfully. So that's not any cause of alarm. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


The algorithms are everywhere and they are making more and more decisions for us. Whether it is face recognition, that's an algorithm. Whether it is voice recognition, that's an algorithm. You want to apply for a job. Guess who's screening you? Not a human being but an algorithm. And what if that algorithm is biased against you? Then in which case, you have a problem. Without that face recognition, the door handles cannot open or the phone cannot get unlocked. If it is voice recognition, it doesn't recognize high pitched voices like that of kids. Or if it is gesture recognition, it sometimes does not recognize the gestures made by the elderly or the women. So what is the reason? These algorithms are biased. No, no, no, they aren't biased. The bias lies in the human beings that are coding those algorithms. What do we do about the algorithms? Nothing. What we need to address is the human beings who are coding those algorithms. The more diverse they are, the more integrated they are with the people around them for whom they are creating their algorithms, the easier it is for them to become relevant. So don't forget to read this article that tells you how do you go about doing this.


يؤمن في الله و في الأخير لا يعني أن يقول الشهادة ، أن يقوم بمشاركة الصحيحة ، أن يقوم بمشاركة الصحيحة ، إذا كان يمكن أن يقوم بمشاركة الصحيحة. ليس فقط هذه الأشياء بسيطة. لا ، يوجد أشياء أخرى. لذلك ، سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم يتكلم في هذه الحديث. كل شيء الذي يتكلم بعد الأشياء الأولى أنه who believes in Allah and the last day سيكون هناك أفكار أنه سيكون هناك أفكار على اليوم في حالة جدرات. وهذا why سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم يقول أنه who believes in Allah and the last day.  فسيكال حياته يمكن أن يساعد. هناك فتاة. سيذهب. there is a bleeding that will heal, but when bad words are said first of all they cannot be taken back, they are said, and the pain they cause is unhealed. these bad words keep hurting a person whenever they are remembered. سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم emphasized on saying good words, on being nice to people. وإن نرى نظر الشيطان من سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم, ونفهم that his words are of simple expressions with comprehensive entailments. وفي عربي يدعم جواميل كاليم. ما يعجب هذا؟ when he speaks صلى الله عليه وسلم he says just a few words but the meaning is so great. if you word that has comprehensive meaning. so our words should be the same as سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم words. we speak when there is a need to speak. ونفهم when we speak when there is a need to speak we say just good words. سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم was asked who is the most excellent among the muslims and he said one from whose tongue and hands the other muslims are secure. من سلي من الناس والليسانة هو يدخل. so this is the good person. من حديث 12 which we discussed earlier we've seen how سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم said من حصني إسلامي المرء الترقه ما لا يعني. part of the perfection of a person's إسلام is he's leaving that which is of no concern to him. we should mind our business. we should not get into things that are not of our concern. we should not say anything that has no value. we should not say anything that would hurt people. سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم is so careful about the relationship between people. so this was his word how we should be. so always make sure to be silent when you are in a gathering and so many people are saying so many different things to not get involved with just evil words, with evil talks or with nonsense. and always make sure to be silent when you are in the presence of the people of Allah. when you are in the presence of scholars of you so you would learn from them. you would benefit from their words listen and reflect think of what they are saying. try to get the the new of the of the of the blessed words they are saying. and if you want to say something just let your tongue be fluent with the remembrance of الله سبحانه وتعالى. so let your words be of good deeds only. and remember that الله سبحانه وتعالى is over watching you and is listening to you. only if this happens then you will you will feel ashamed that Allah سبحانه وتعالى will listen to you saying bad words to others or hurting other people or speaking evil backbiting or gossip. so always scale your words before saying them. and do not argue especially if you know that you're not going to change your mind or the other person is not is not going to change his mind. so don't let your words cause you sorrow on the day of judgment. now the second the second point of this حديث is that whoever believes in Allah in the last day then he should honor his neighbor. whether your neighbor is a Muslim or not a Muslim you should be good to your neighbor. رفت محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم says so Gabriel kept reminding me and kept saying words and أدفاعه في نفسه so much that I thought if he would soon come for أبنه the right of inheritance. so Gabriel was giving the advice to say يدن محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم over and over to be good to the neighbor. ونحن نرى الكثير من الأشياء تخبرنا كيف جميل يدن محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم مع أصدقائه خلال المسلمين المسلمين. لذلك نعلم أصدقائه خلال المسلمين المستخدمين يجب أن يضع المدرسة في his door every night and one night and of course all the محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم would clean it and one night he did not there was no trash so say محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم went to his neighbor to check on him and he said what's going on and he the neighbor felt so ashamed of himself how bad he is treating محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم and how good the prophet has treated him and that was the reason for his uh for embracing Islam so be good to your neighbor so the third the third point is that uh of the of this حديث is that whoever believes in Allah and the day after يجب أن يضع المدرسة فيه so honoring the guest is showing hospitality to your guest if your guest arrived at meal times then you don't you don't leave your guest to to to to go without food you should offer food uh you should be you should show hospitality to your to your to your uh uh to your guests and uh with so many stories of uh people of Allah who even some of them were very poor and uh what what of the stories that one one family the father and the mother and their kids they were poor and they had just uh a little bit of food for dinner and suddenly uh one uh a guest came and it was the habit that food will be served so the the mom took her children and put them to sleep so they won't eat from the very little food that they have and the father noticed what his wife did so he uh turned off the lantern so that when the mom came when the wife came with the food the the guest would not know that they are not eating they are just hitting the spoons against the the plate so he would imagine that everyone is eating honoring the guest being good to the guest so this was the uh uh the the islamic manners that سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم wants us to to follow just saying good words or be silent so be good to your neighbors so just to honor your guests and one of the people of Allah says if Allah loves you then he will he will send guests to you so that you would get the uh blessings and the good deeds of showing hospitality to to to your guests so be happy when you have guests just serve whatever you have just put everything that you might that's irritable to your to your guests and do your best to honor your guests the second the the next حديث سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم عن أبي هريرة رضي الله عنه أن رجل لم قال للنبي صلى الله عليه وسلم أو صيني so these good manners which we just saw in the previous حديث continue in the next حديث so سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم أبي هريرة رضي سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم someone came to him and he said oh messenger of Allah advise me give me an advice so advise me and the messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم said do not get angry and it was repeated do not get angry several times do not get angry again an amazing lesson in good manners so we see here how the حديث started by Sayyidina Buhraira saying رجلن قال للنبي رجلن there was someone who came to Sayyidina Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم and asked him for advice so to each person Sayyidina Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم used to give an answer and sometimes the answers would be different even the same question is asked so Sayyidina Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم used to answer people regarding what is most suitable for them each one of us has developed certain characteristics if anyone has any bad manner then he should change himself and it's the same as having an empty cup if you put an empty cup under the faucet that's dripping one drop after one drop so with time the cup will be filled up now imagine that this cup is filled up with bad manners someone is practicing bad manners so each bad manner fills up a drop in that cup now one day that person decided to take the advice of someone he trusts what should he do so the advisor tells him stop practicing this bad manner and advises him to do several steps actually the first one to empty the cup to clean the cup to shine the cup and to fill it up with good manners and this can be applied to our heart if our heart is filled up with bad manners with the results of the bad manners because each bad deed will have a black dot on our heart and if we do not clean this black dot then with time the whole heart will be filled up with black dots and it will be black so we have to empty our heart we have to empty our heart from these bad bad things that we practice we have to clean our heart and we clean our heart with استغفار and we have to shine our heart we shine our heart we're sending صلابات to سيد محمد صلاحي صلاح and then our heart will be ready to be filled up with good manners with good deeds so the light of these good manners and good deeds will lit the heart anger is a bad manner that we should always be away from and when someone comes to سيد محمد صلاحي وسلم for an advice this advice is not specifically for that person we have to take to take advantage of the answer we have to to fulfill the answer we have to apply the advice of سيد محمد صلاحي وسلم and uh we know that uh أناس نمارك was the servant of سيد محمد صلاحي وسلم and he said i served the prophet for 10 years when he never got angry or he never told me for something i did not do why you did not do it so say in the muhammad صلاحي وسلم never got angry for worldly trivial things this is not done okay fair we will do it we'll do it later don't get angry for no reasons or for silly reasons if people's heart is set on the day after then they will not get angry over petty issues they they will follow the steps of سيد محمد صلاحي وسلم as he never got angry for himself or for proving his point the only time سيد محمد صلاحي وسلم would get angry would be upon seeing evil or if the orders of الله سبحانه وتعالى have been neglected or over past and there was a narration that a non-believer came to سيدنا أبو بطر رضي الله in the presence of Prophet Muhammad صلاحي وسلم and this man started to curse سيدنا أبو بطر رضي الله and he said bad words to him سيدنا أبو بطر did not answer him and Prophet Muhammad صلاحي وسلم was smiling then the man kept going on and on and on and سيدنا أبو بطر wanted to stop him so he started to speak back to to the man suddenly سيدنا محمد صلاحي وسلم frowned and he left and I said I will follow the messenger of Allah صلاحي وسلم and he said to him oh prophet of Allah he was cursing me and you were smiling the minute I started to reply to him you frowned and you left what's my life without you we are سول الله and the messenger of Allah said when you were silent the angels were answering him back but when you started replying back the angels left and the shaitan came and I don't stay in the same place with shaitan so when you got angry that was because of shaitan you invited shaitan now the what is the advice of saint Muhammad صلاحي وسلم to someone who gets angry so his advice is to change the position so if someone if someone gets angry while he is standing then he should sit down and if he is still angry then he should lie down we should say then why because anger is from shaitan and shaitan is from fire and what extinguishes fire is water so making will come the only person so who is who is what what is the definition of being strong so if Muhammad صلاحي وسلم says ليس الشديد بسرعة إنما الشديد الذي يملك نفسه عند الغضب and this is narrated by Abu Huraira that the messenger of Allah صلاحي وسلم قال أن يجيب أن يجيب أن يكون not the one who is good at wrestling عندما يفتح يتبعه هذا ليس قائل المسيح the strong man is the one who controls himself in a fit of rage so this means that the strong man is the one of good manners لقد قد يكون كلامك صحيحا لكن حتى من أسلوبك خاطئة. يجب أن تتحدث مع أسلوبك. يجب أن تكون صحيحا but your style is definitely wrong so just be careful and do not get angry. This is the advice of Sayyidina Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم. So if you feel there is something wrong with your personality and your manners, what should you do? Start with the beginning of the Hadith. The man came to Sayyidina Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم. So ask the people of Allah for guidance. Ask them for advice. Now moving to the next Hadith. عن أبي على شدادي بن أمسن رطي الله عنه عد رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم. إن الله تتبى الإحسان على كل شيء. فإذا قتلتهم فأحسنوا القتلة. وإذا ذبحتهم فأحسنوا الزبحة. واليحدى أحدكم شفرته واليريح ذبيحتها. So أبي على من شدادي بن أمس رضي الله عنه. لقد حلتها أن أضعه الله صلى الله عليه وسلم. وكذباً الله سبحانه وتعالى قد يجب أن يتكلم إحسان. ومفعله على كل شيء. فعند you kill, you must make the killing in the best manner. عندما تلتهم فأخذوا تلك المحافظة في the best manner. لنصبح one his knife and give ease to the animal is slaughtering in order to reduce the pain. إحسام from the Sharia perspective has already been discussed in previous hadiths and hadiths too and in other hadiths. في هذه الحديث، إحسان أكسلانس أو أكسلانس was exemplified in killing anything or slaughtering an animal. So, not only in killing or slaughtering but in all aspects of our lives, we should have perfection. We should do our duties as perfectly as possible. A teacher, a doctor, an engineer, a student, a lawyer. A mom, anyone in any position should have perfection in whatever they do. So, in this حديث, the Messenger of Allah is specified killing and slaughtering. And he specified that the one who is doing the killing or slaughtering should sharpen his knife. So, when you slaughter a sheep as a corbani, you should give ease to the animal that you are slaughtering. And that will reduce the pain that the animal might be suffering. So, be compassionate, be merciful to animals and on a larger scale to people. So, these two, to be passionate and to be merciful, these are the greatest qualities that we should practice with the creatures of Allah. Again, everyone should keep remembering that Allah is overwatching and that Allah likes perfection. So, we have to do all that we do as perfectly as possible. So, this is the general idea of the حديث of إحسان and perfection. Now, moving to the last حديث that we will be covering today. حديث No. 18 عن أبي زر مجلدو ببني جناده وأبي عبد الرحمن معازبني جبل رضي الله عنهما. عن رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم قال اتقل لها حيث ما كنت. وأتبع السجئة الحسنة تمحها وخالق الناس بخلق حسن. So, the messenger, the messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم قال and this is narrated by أبي زر رضي الله عنهما and by معازبني جبل سيد محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم.  Do good deeds after doing bad ones. The former will wipe out the later. So, the good deeds will wipe out the bad ones. And behave decently towards people. So, the main idea of this حديث, it starts with تقوة. So, تقوة. There are three levels of تقوة. How we are with Allah. How we are with ourselves and how we are with other people. So, the حديث starts with فير الله wherever you are. Wherever. Whether you are with people or whether you are alone. Fear Allah. And we have to be careful. And we have to make sure that we do in front of people what we do alone.  And when he prays alone. الله أكبر. الله أكبر. السلام عليكم ورحمة الله. السلام عليكم ورحمة الله. He's done. No. We should have تقوة wherever we are. Whether in front of people or alone. Allah is always there. So, we have to have the intentions. This is where تقوة starts in the heart. So, تقوة has many meanings. And الله سبحانه وتعالى mentioned different meanings in the Qur'an. In سورة البقرة. In ayat 281. الله سبحانه وتعالى says ترجعون فيه إلى الله. ثم توفى كل نفس ما قسبت. وهم لا يُظلمون. So, the word تقوة here. The translation is like translated. And fear a day. ووتقوا يوما. Fear a day. So, تقوة here means fear. And fear a day. When you will be returned to Allah. And then, every soul will be compensated for what it earned. And they will not be treated unjustly. So, the meaning of the word تقوة here is to fear. In another Surah. In سورة ألي عمران ayat 102. الله سبحانه وتعالى says ولا تموتن إلا وأنت المسلمون. Oh, you who believe. Fear Allah as He should be feared. And do not expect as Muslims in submission to Him. And do not die except as Muslims. So, obedience and worship in سورة ألي عمران. This is the meaning of تقوة.  اتقوا الله. Fear Allah. And do not die except as Muslims. So, you have to practice obedience. And you have to worship Allah سبحانه وتعالى. In سورة النور. Which is the third meaning of تقوة. سورة النور ayat 52. The meaning of تقوة here is purifying the heart from sins. So, الله سبحانه وتعالى says And whoever obeys Allah and His messenger and fears Allah and is conscious of Him. It is those who are the winners. So, when you purify your heart from sins, you will be a winner in the day after. And this is تقوة. So, the messenger of Allah سبحانه وتعالى was once giving a ceremony. And he was talking about تقوة. And he, صلى الله عليه وسلم, pointed to his blessed heart. And he said تقوة هنا. So, what does this mean? التقوة هنا. And he pointed to his heart. It means that all the تقوة is within the heart of سيدنا محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم. So, how to gain this تقوة from سيدنا محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم. If all the تقوة is in his heart, so get your heart connected to his blessed heart. So, to know what real تقوة is. When you do so, Allah will guide you by making you follow the footsteps of His حبيب صلى الله عليه وسلم. So, this is the first point of the Hadith. The second point is واتبعي سيئة الحسنة التمحوها. Do good deeds after doing bad ones. So, the good deeds would wipe, will wipe the bad deeds.  What should you do? You should hasten to do good deeds and to seek his forgiveness. Let's say you backbited someone. Oh, this is a big sin. Then what should you do? You should speak good about that person who you backbited and you should make a إستخفار for that person. So, this is if you commit a sin to people.  Then hasten to repent to Allah سبحانه وتعالى and increase in good deeds so to wipe the bad, the sin that you have committed. Now, you might say, are there any conditions for توبة to be accepted? Say, of course, yes. So, the conditions of توبة are of repentance. The first one is to feel sorry that you disobeyed Allah سبحانه وتعالى. Someone might say, okay, this is a small sin. It's not a big sin, just a small sin. I'm gonna do it. And always remember that it's not how small the sin is. But remember who you disobeyed. You disobeyed Allah سبحانه وتعالى. Is it worth it? Is it worth the punishment that you would get in the day after? So, the first condition is to feel sorry that you committed that sin. Then you have to do stufar. أستغفر الله. I seek forgiveness, ya Allah. I'm sorry that I did that sin. And I am asking you to forgive me, ya Allah. And Allah سبحانه وتعالى says, دعوني أستجب لكم. Call me, ask me. Make dua and I will answer your call. And we know that the best time that the dua will be answered is the few minutes before the Adhan of Fajr. Before Fajr gets in. So, Allah سبحانه وتعالى descends down closest to us. And he says, is there someone who is repenting and I would accept the repentance? Is there someone who is asking for forgiveness and I will forgive him? Is there someone who is asking for so-and-so and I will give him so-and-so? So, if you want your toba, ya and if you want to be sure that your toba will be accepted, just do it before Fajr prayer. Of course you can do it during the day. It's not a must, but this is what Allah promised us. When he said, is there someone who is asking for forgiveness and I will forgive him? And the third condition for toba, for toba to be accepted is to make sure that you do not do that sin again. Sometimes people would say, okay, we do that and we promise ourselves not to do it, but we feel bad and we do it again. We feel so weak and we do it again. Just do the three conditions of toba, follow them, feel sorry, ask Allah for forgiveness and make sure to promise Allah that you will not do it and add one more thing. Make dua that Allah سبحانه وتعالى will make you steadfast and will make you away from whatever sin you are doing. The third point of the Hadith is وخالق الناس بخلق الحسن and behave decently towards people which means have good manners. So you see how many Hadith now of the 18 that we have covered several Hadith focus on having good manners. So the Prophet ﷺ said the most complete of believers are the best ones in manners and the Prophet ﷺ also said should I not inform you of the most beloved of you to Allah and the closest of you to me on the Day of Judgment and the Sahaba were so excited and they said yes, Ya Rasoolallah, please do. So Sayyidina Muhammad ﷺ said the best of you in manners and once Sayyidina Muhammad ﷺ was talking with Abu Huraira and he said to him عليك بحسن الخلق you have to have good manners and Sayyidina Abu Huraira said what is good manners ya Rasoolallah أن تصل من قطع وتعطي من حرمك وتعفو عمن ظلمك so you would give those who deprive you you should forgive those who mistreat you and you should get connected those who cut you have good manners some people say oh but that's that's difficult of course you think that always you will have these things no I didn't get that could you try again so sorry for that so what the there is a saying that الجنة عروس مهروه نفوس paradise is like a bride and the dowry of that bride is so expensive so we should practice these expensive things these difficult things so to get into paradise again Abu Huraira رضي الله عن once said that Sayyidina Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم said do you know who is the bankrupt this is what the messenger of Allah asked قالوا المفلس فينا من لا درهم له ولا متاع so the companions entered the bankrupt among us is the one who has neither money with him nor any property so Sayyidina Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم said إن المفلس من أمتي يأتي يوم القيامة بصلاة وصيام وزكاة ويأتي وقد شتما هذا وقد فهذا وأكل ما لهذا وسف كدما هذا وضرب هذا so sayyidina Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم answered the question that he asked and he said the real bankrupt of my umma would be he who would come on the day of resurrection on the day of judgment performance performance charity everything but he will find himself bankrupt on that day as he has extinguished exhausted he has exhausted all his good deeds so he comes with all the worship to Allah سبحانه وتعالى but he finds no reward for him why ويأتي so he revealed others he brought company against others and lofully devoured the wealth of people shed the blood of others beat others so what happens فيعطي هذا من حسناته وهذا من حسناته فإن فانية حسناته قبل أن يقضي ما عليه أخذ من خطاياهم فطرحت عليه ثم طرح في النار so what happens his good deeds would be credited to the account of those people who suffered his bad deeds so if his good deeds fall short when his when his good deeds are all done are all given to other people then what happens their sins would be entered on his account in his account so he will have no good deeds but he will have the bad deeds of those people and he will be thrown in hellfire so خالق الناس بخلق إن حسن and إمام القيم إمام ابن القيم may Allah be pleased with him may Allah be pleased with him he said إن هو الخلق religion is the good manners فمن زاد عليك في الخلق زاد عليك في الدين so whoever exceeds you in good manners then he exceeds you in religion إذا ين محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم used always to make dua اللهم اهديني لأحسن الأخلق يا الله you created me so perfectly so let me have good manners and we all as سورة الحزاق آية 21 says ولكم في رسول الله أصوات الحسنة so your prophet the messenger of Allah the messenger of Allah is your model so just do as he does is making dua for that let's make dua for that اللهم حسن خلقنا كما حسن تخلقنا يا أحمد رحمين اللهم اهدنا لأحسن الأخلق ووالله guide us to the best of manners if you do then we will be lucky فإنه لا يهدي لأحسنها إلا and no one would guide us the best of manners except you يا الله so we ask الله's guidance and we ask him to make us of those whom he is pleased with and we say يا ربنا لك الحمد والشكر والنعمة والرضة يا ربنا لك الحمد كما ينبغي لجلال وجهك and until we meet next week I would like to leave you by sending your best Salam and my best Salam and best Salavat to our beloved prophet سيدنا محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم وسلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته


Okay good morning Monday 16th of March getting straight into the briefing and there's obviously plenty for me to talk about and starting off with this graphic this is really dominating market psychology at the moment and also that of the consumer as you probably saw at the weekend quite phenomenal scenes really I mean when I was going around just generally supermarkets being completely wiped out in terms of the shelves and you know this this is it this is what's further fueling really the economic reality of what it means when we have these kind of quarantined measures put in by national governments now increasing in how stringent they're becoming across the globe and I'm going to get up to speed with some of the major countries we've been we've been monitoring and then also reviewing what the central banks have been doing we've obviously had an emergency another Fed cut the BOJ have been active overnight and what have we got to look out for going forward not just in the session but the the week ahead so quick spot check on the numbers we're total confirmed cases now just short of 170,000 and for the first time deaths now outside of China so including particularly mainland Europe and America and so on now supersede that of mainland China so you can see down here if I just make this a little bigger there's been a distinct overlap as you can see on the far right hand side here which is basically the yellow line is other locations the orange line being that of mainland China and you can see China given the fact that they've been several weeks ahead of the curve in terms of the development of this particular virus and also the kind of how strict they were in locking down the kind of epicenter if you like in Wuhan but other areas of China again I'm sure yes people will comment and say can you believe the Chinese numbers but that aside the the exponential growth now of outside of China that's the number that's going to continue to rise sharply here forward and therefore then the responses now from these national governments across the globe is going to create further economic damage to the global economy so what are we looking at from an overall point of view let's talk about borders and lockdowns first before we actually start looking about what the central banks are doing and also incorporate this into how markets are trading this morning and starting with that continued risk of theme to proceedings the DAX think is already in the futures down about 12 percent US index futures have hit limit down pretty much straight away last night with meaning that they've hit their 5% circuit breaker treasury markets bottom right-hand corner here sharply higher overnight they have given back some of those gains that were held during the Asia Pacific session as Europe has come in but was still up over a full point at the moment and a fairly similar price pattern in gold which was quite sharply higher up at around the initial opening prints were being seen at around 1574 so it's already off a decent amount you know 30 bucks or so from those highs but still up 23 on the session so perhaps just a little bit of calm restored for the moment albeit we're in a fairly depressed position already stocks off sharply as I just said the Dixie the dollar index is down over 1.1 percent again largely reflection as well of the as I'm going to go through in a second rates now in the US back to zero and they've restarted QE of course which we'll look at but in terms of the the borders and lockdowns so to give you a quick run through of what's been going on I'm going to start with well let's start with Australia because overnight the Australian stock market was down in double digit percent losses so what's been going on well in Australia they're tightening their borders and this is something you're probably going to see replicated elsewhere across the globe as well their PM saying on Sunday that everyone arriving from overseas must self isolate for a period of 14 days so if you think about as well what this means for countries which are heavily dependent on tourism as someone like Australia is you know this is going to have a massive impact on their economy and I think I saw a stat this morning in Hong Kong tourist visits to Hong Kong in February were down 97 percent to give you an idea about how radical this is at the moment Australia themselves though are considering preparation of a second round of economic stimulus according to sources this morning they're planning already to inject about 17.6 billion Australian dollars into their economy that equates to about nine and a quarter billion if you were translated to UK pounds we also had last night the RBNZ they slashed rates at an emergency meeting as well so another sharp cut to their interest rates as they continue to want to get ahead of the impending and inevitable downturn as this situation on the coronaviruses is going to get worse before it gets any better I'm afraid is the current status looking elsewhere in America you've probably seen this as well and overnight development New York and Los Angeles now are going to shut all bars and restaurants is the current plan several nations in South and Central America have also closed their borders in order to combat the spread of the virus and then if we move more to mainland Europe a couple of things Italy their government ready to intervene again if needed as measures approved so far proved not enough to sustain a lot of businesses and this is the real area of concern is the small to medium-sized businesses which are going to suffer probably the most and and then those related industries where credit is already being squeezed on a much more bigger broader level that being in the areas of tourism travel and also in energy as well where there's a lot of kind of growth that's being built on debt over recent years and that's what's going to be under pressure whether they can service that debt going forward because oil as well still heavily depressed this morning down trading around a thirsty handle Spain meanwhile they're going to declare today a 15-day national lockdown and the UK's Health Secretary Matt Hancock over the weekend talking about the expectation in the coming weeks that they're going to tell every Britain over the age of 70 is going to have to stay at home for an extended period so again this is what's continuing to drive markets it's this whole idea about then given this reaction that has to happen now in order to contain and delay this virus being worse than it possibly could be is going to impede economic performance sharply going forward now what's happened then well the Fed have gone again another interest rate cut I mean their their rate meeting actually wasn't scheduled until Wednesday and that's now been basically called off and brought forward Sam and I were just having a live chat on Sunday night getting people getting some of our traders ready for the week ahead and then literally as we hung up the phone the Fed cut rates 100 basis points so what does that look like well I mean this is probably the chart to really look at this is the feds benchmark rate being cut slashed a hundred basis points and you know this was after the 50 emergency cut we had at the beginning of the month and follows the three rate cuts we had through 2019 with things like the trade war at that point slowing the potential and the risks for economic prosperity and now look where we are we are back to ground zero where we were immediately after the collapse of Lehman brothers in the depths of the financial crisis so zero interest rate policy has returned and not only that the Fed have restarted quantitative easing to the tune of 700 billion dollars they're going to lift its holding of Treasury securities by at least 500 billion and mortgage back securities by 200 billion and so if you think about it they they really have thrown everything at this now and the other details are that they've announced with several other actions including letting banks borrow from the discount rate window for as long as 90 days reducing reserve requirement ratios to 0% they've also united with five other central banks to ensure dollars are available via worldwide swap lines to add continuous and continuity of liquidity into the market and then pow although importantly did say that even though rates have gone down quickly to zero that they they do not think that negative rates would be appropriate in the US as like what we've seen in other nations like in Europe and in Japan for example but this is quite important I think for where we go from here because with the Fed now having done what they've done and they've literally gone they've gone big they've gone hard and they've gone fast with their monetary response and I know that there will be those that will criticize thinking well perhaps they should be they should leave some back they should have some ammunition perhaps for accelerating the not v potential U-shaped recovery in future but ultimately I think if you were trading in the period of 2008 you'll remember that you know the the action comes swift and fast and they need to get it into the system as quickly as possible the idea here being is that we haven't even seen the worst of it yet economically globally things are gonna get a lot worse before they get better so I think it is the right thing for the Fed to do they need to do this and now it's up to the administration and Donald Trump to really deliver on the fiscal side and that's probably what you're gonna hear from the G7 ministers who are all meeting on a teleconference call today at 2 p.m. London time that includes you as President Donald Trump as they're set to discuss their their methods of trying to counteract and have a coordinated response to this new global issue the Bank of Japan also came out overnight they were due to have a meeting later on in the week but again just wanting to get things right in at the beginning of the week the Bank of Japan has strengthened its stimulus but stopped short of cutting their rate further into negative territory they said they're gonna buy more assets including exchange traded funds or ETFs and corporate bonds and they're gonna offer a new zero interest rate loan program to ensure companies have the financing that they need under active buying of ETFs the central bank will be able to buy an annual pace of 12 trillion yen that equates in dollar terms it's around 113 billion that's double their annual target of 6 trillion so again this whole idea or mantra of whatever it takes has been adopted now globally by every central bank so again just over the weekend you've had the RBNZ slash rates you got the BOJ ramping up there basically buying of ETFs annually they're doubling that and the Fed have cut down to ground zero and restarted QE so everything has been done and and now for sentiment for this week I really do feel that whether or not that's gonna be enough or whether we continue to see high levels of volatility I think that's guaranteed whether or not that's to the downside again as like what we saw last week I think is highly dependent now on how national governments tackle this situation you know people like the UK for example have been a little bit more light-touched than some of the more aggressive measures albeit we are slightly earlier in the phase of the development of the virus but I do think it's all but inevitable that these numbers will go far north of where they are at the moment leading to these kind of national lockdowns like that are being observed in Italy and are going to be observed in lights of Spain and probably France and so on so yeah I would say my bias still is there's more downside risks to come and therefore a natural flight to quality kind of theme probably going to dominate the week until we get more concrete evidence about the fiscal measures and how forthcoming into what size they're going to be going forward so that means that's that's pretty much the overall summary at the moment this was one other thing I wanted to mention though and this was looking at a research note out of Goldman Sachs their main US equity analyst Kostin came out in a note and I wanted to bring up the chart let's have a look at things so let me just just bear with me while I just get my S&P chart fixed and I'm gonna keep this briefing very much centered on the fundamentals rather than technicals Sam's gonna come on after a trading live and have a quick chat but just going to let's remove my camera feed for one second here if I can so you can see the entire chart and this was the the level really around 2400 that we got to last week you can see that was a real key level for the markets to target giving back some of the 2017 highs that we had again resistance here support then touch back in the summer of 17 briefly breaking through that in the big selloff that came in Q4 of 18 and then we tested it pretty much to the tick on the 2400 before a meaningful bounce that occurred on Friday remember we had that Thursday almost 10% selloff than a 10% reversal following some of the things that were happening towards the end of last week but what goldman's is saying basically in this latest research note is that they think that the S&P will likely head back down by almost 10% in the next three months so they're looking at 2450 so you know that that that's not I don't think an unreasonable call but that's not really what we're looking at here it's the latter part that they say that if the economic fallout from the spreading coronavirus deepens the route could take the S&P down another 26% from Friday's close that would put us down at 2000 so they're looking at more of a worst-case scenario the S&P 500 comes all the way down to that area and if we start looking at what does that mean from a from a peak all-time high that we were we were trading an all-time high less than a month ago I mean it's quite incredible and if we got to 2000 that would be 41% lower than where we were from the all-time high if they are proved right however one thing that they do say and they go on to say is if we did get down that low and that he reiterated the stance that a V-shaped recovery in stocks usually follow event-driven bear markets and they would expect then basically a 60% rally from 2000 to finish the year back up to here so again just having a look at this that would be their bear-case scenario of 2000 but if that were to occur they're basically saying then that they would they'd be looking for this to happen in the second half of this year to finish the year at that level I mean that would be an incredible year of price active activity if that were the case so yeah I guess the big question mark is you know do we this week first of all you know xing out what goldman's are saying is that low that we printed towards the end of last week does that get retested and I think yes I think it will is my my kind of base case view if we break that then obviously you've got the 18 low that comes in here and that starts to bring in some of that activity of the low of that consolidation phase that we had at the beginning of 2017 and then a break of that you're looking at these other areas where you've had those similar moves when we were trading of course all-time highs at the time and that's how I'd be kind of playing these these kind of bigger broader targets if we do start to see significant downside so yeah these levels here look quite clustered but don't forget these are big price points I mean we're talking about another three four hundred points to get down to here so but as we've been seeing if it decides to go that way things can move very quickly and if markets have really lost a lot of confidence and central banks have now shown their hand then that's when the whole thing could materially worsen quite quickly in that sense quick look at the calendar and then that's it gonna wrap things up one thing I would say is that when it comes to economic data because even though this week we've got things like Empire State manufacturing this afternoon you've got US retail sales coming out this week quite frankly it's not important it's not what's gonna move markets don't forget things like retail sales these are backward-looking numbers the market is forward-looking if there was one kind of litmus test for how severe could the economic fallout be from coronavirus well look no further than China Chinese data a whole slew of data points came out of China overnight and basically this is what it looked like here you've got industrial production retail sales fixed asset investment property investment and jobless rate and you can see here absolutely catastrophic drop-offs in all of those measures obviously a spike up in the jobless rate you know and this is what this is why the market itself has been so violent because this isn't going to be just the Chinese thing this is going to be every single major economy in the world is gonna experience something very similar to this the idea as well of a v-shaped recovery I would say it's probably getting more and more stressed as a view given the fact that it's more likely to be a more protracted but albeit recovery that will be over the long-term given how severe this is likely to be at that point so going back to the calendar I wouldn't get too bogged down into this to be honest things like further US primaries happening on Tuesday which is the democratic race for who's gonna run against Trump you do have things like Florida Illinois Ohio they are big in terms of their delegate representation within the party but quite frankly all of that is a side issue to the much bigger dominant macro theme at play and even with that you know Biden has this pretty much wrapped up now in that respect so yeah that's it I would say stay tuned make sure you subscribe to the Amplify YouTube channel obviously you can follow me on here on Twitter and do leave any comments or questions on our videos I'll always respond to everyone but one thing I'll finish with is really a word of advice I guess I mean having been an analyst through the financial crisis back in 2008 all I can say is the market becomes very behavioral at certain points I think it's hard to try and pinpoint buying the low in that instance I think sometimes rather than pushing your view on the market you've got to be a lot more agile a lot more open to the fact of kind of just trading the market as you see it not what you think is gonna play out I think it's probably the astute thing a couple of key points the end of the Wall Street session has seen on average 300 point swings in the last 30 minutes so I think if you're looking or if you're involved in US equities at the end of the day just be particularly cautious at that point for big swings in activity don't be surprised as well if you see big counter logical moves in assets like gold which have seen big dumps on kind of Friday afternoons on the back of liquidation of large positions as margin calls start to ramp up given the equity falls that we have been seeing and then things like other indicators I'm looking for any further signs of distress in the market bond the old spreads in Europe we've obviously seen that blowout and likes it Italian yields and BTP movement after some of Christine Nagar's comments last week the performance of high yield and leveraged loans particularly those tied to energy retail and leisure industries I think as well could be a meaningful thing to monitor just to get a sense of just general risk appetite so again be careful out there these are quite unprecedented market conditions and I think this week it's going to be set for continued large scale movement so do keep that in mind and I wish you all the best both in markets and just generally good health to you and your family as well so that's it any other questions let me know otherwise have a good session ahead thanks very much guys


Hi, my name is Dr. Radhakrishnan. I am a paediatric surgeon and a paediatric urologist and I work at the Manipal Hospital in Bangalore. Normally the urethra through which urine is passed out of the body is present at the tip of the penis. Hypospedias is a male birth defect where the end of the urethra is actually present not at the tip but on the underside of the penis. It could be just below the normal location of the tip or as far down as the scrotum and therefore the location of this abnormal position of the urethra can vary widely in hypospedias. Over the last two to three decades the incidence of hypospedias has increased dramatically. While the exact cause of this is not known it is thought that increased vegetarianism especially in the western world or increase in the amount of hormones in the food we eat is thought to be the cause for this increased incidence of hypospedias.


self-gaslighting is the war between your ego and your higher self. So the ego gaslights a better version of you from appearing and emerging by telling this higher version of you, nah, that's not true, nah, we don't want to do that, we're not going to be that, we're not going to say that, we're not going to speak our truth and be out of it.  And I have certainly done that many times in my life, so I'm sure you can all identify with that, but gaslighting often is externalized, what I'm doing with that idea is internalizing it to say, yeah, you can be doing this to you, so it does apply to us all.


Hi, I'm Chris Gordon. I'm faculty here at Heinz College. I'm going to talk to you about our starter kit and fellowship program for citizen-centered policy design courses and future public interest technologists. Our starter kit is based on our public interest technology framework which functions much like an accelerator. We bring in new projects through our course called the Policy Innovation Lab and then the most promising projects move on through a summer fellowship program which finally can become official capstone projects for graduating master students. This provides us with a way to continually vet and improve the best ideas around public interest technology while providing a mechanism for these ideas to become actual viable products or even student-led companies in the future. Our starter kit and fellowship program provide an on-ramp for aspiring public interest technologists through hands-on practical experience-based opportunities. We also provide open access materials, resources, guides, and playbooks for instructors like you looking to build or enhance your own experiential based public interest technology course. So let's talk first about the class. The Policy Innovation Lab is a course at Heinz College that prepares students to become new public interest technologists. We do this by first teaching new master students how to design and build public interest technology services and products that are centered around principles of human-centered design, follow an agile methodology, and finally deliver a minimum viable product for high impact results. The course is available through Canvas Commons, so if you're looking to launch your own first public interest technology course or an enhanced and existing public interest technology course, this can be a good resource for you. Our course works by partnering student teams with real-world partners, usually government agencies or nonprofits, to work on a problem together. Student teams are ultimately in charge of executing a plan to understand and to solve some aspect of a challenging problem faced by the partner, conduct weekly demos, user interviews, design, and prototyping sessions. The teams then deliver a final minimum viable product at the end of the course. In the first year of our grant, we had 33 master students working with nine partners. Since then, participation rates have continued to grow each year since this course has been offered. Another resource in our starter kit is the Policy Innovation Lab Playbook. The Playbook was informed by our students' experiences and captures insights we think would be valuable for incoming students interested in public interest technology. Finally, we have our Public Interest Technology Fellowship Program. This provides promising students and the best project outcomes from the course a runway towards developing into real, sustainable public interest tech projects and initiatives. The best projects from the course become full-time summer fellowships in the second phase, which then can become capstone projects for graduating master students. One example of a recent project from the course was worked on last spring in support of developing an artificial intelligence and machine learning anti-bias toolkit. That led to one of our other major projects coming out of the lab that then continued as fellowship opportunities for four students. So far, we've completed seven projects in support of external partners through the fellowship with 11 fellows working on them. Finally, projects can graduate through the summer fellowship program to become full capstone projects like this one. Impact Green is now an open source green bonds investment platform available on GitHub. We've learned quite a few lessons along the way, and here's a quick summary of some of them. First, courses are time and resource intensive, which means that the load on instructors is greater than that of an average course. Scaling up courses to accommodate larger student enrollment can be difficult. Second, aligning on principles and beliefs between the partners and students can also be challenging, but can also lead to important aspects of the work and insights around public interest technology. Third, maintaining a focus on DEI considerations and building those considerations directly into the course is important, but will likely require additional university resources to support. Want to learn more? All of our resources are available on pitcases.org and through our website. And with that, here's my contact information. Thank you.