I'm Linda Quinlan. I think I'm still Keith Gosland. I'm Ann Charles. It's Tuesday, May 21st. Welcome to All Things LGBTQ. Now we'd like to turn to Linda for headlines. Well, I have some national news, and these are the headlines for today. The Rainbow Railroad, Gay Conservatives, Rocket Man, which I can't wait to see, Olympic medalist, Caster Semenya, transgender women murdered, the Trump administration, Andy Velez dies, Doris Day, in the Broadway musical, The Prom, the Texas House passed an extreme religious liberty bill that could legalize discrimination against LGBTQ people, and Alabama Public Television is refusing to air the recent episode of Author featuring a same-sex wedding. So, really? Yes, on to you. So, just so you know, this is not just any television program you're watching. This is the award-winning, All Things LGBTQ, accepting the award. What? I accepted on our behalf, but also receiving awards that night was Jane Lindholm from VPR, Vermont Edition, and Reggie Kondra, who has brought an out-pad podcast. So, we were in good stead. So, I think your expectations are gonna be higher from now on. I'm also looking at events Sunday, June 2nd, 1 o'clock. Come meet us on the Statehouse lawn. We're gonna be celebrating the 50th. Yes, it indeed has been 50 years since the Stonewall riots. And Zach's gonna be putting up a little flyer that you can see the speakers that we've invited a little overview of the day. Also, for events looking at Larks and Ravens, the gender-free contra-dancing at the Capital City Grange, the first, third, and fifth Saturday, starting at eight o'clock. They'll even teach you how to dance. And... I'll be at the farmer's market. Come and see me. Oh, this coming Saturday? Yes. Like the afternoon before this airs. She's having a Doctor Who moment. But upcoming, the girls are gonna be back because they may be doing a drag queen story hour at the Kellogg-Karbrid Library on Saturday, July 13th at 10.30 in the morning, which I know is early for some of you, but... And then they're repeating it in Williamstown. And then when we come back through, I'm gonna talk a bit about some news about HIV and AIDS and the legislation that didn't happen this year that we're gonna be watching and bills that are currently going through in Maine and New Hampshire. And as Professor Charles keeps trying to interrupt me, this week's trivia question. Out in the mountains, May 1988, feature story, the names quilt is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Who made the nomination? And while it's not a Vermonter, it is someone very much in the news. All right. Now yours. Okay, should we give a little context and say that the girls are Nikki and Emoji, Nikki Champagne and Emoji Nightmare. I thought they should tune in to find out on the air. Okay, okay, I just spilled the beans then. These are my international headlines. Supporters celebrate Taiwan's same-sex marriage law and I have a clip of revelry and tears. News from the international sports world, disturbing news from Turkey and Cuba, citizen activism in Italy and Poland, anti-gay preacher Stephen Anderson banned from Ireland, Bangladesh charges extremists over gay activist murders and deceptive news from Brunei. That is to say, they haven't repealed or withdrawn their draconian law. They postponed the death penalty as a way to placate the international potential hotel goers. But, you know, the law's still on the books and they can revoke it. And they can probably arrest foreigners too, right? For LGBTQ. Right, they're backing off because of the outcry, but it, you know, it's still the same. So you don't get executed, but you'll spend what, 150 years in jail? Well, those are my headlines. And we have the Rainbow Railroad. It's an organization trying to save LGBTQ citizens from hostile governments. As we know, 70 countries, lesbian, gays, bisexual and transgender people live in fear for their freedom in many cases, for their lives. The rainbow railroad functions like the underground railroad that helps slaves sneak across borders. Over six months, many have been helped. In June, Abinac Alies left his old life in Egypt and arrived as a refugee in Toronto as a free person. So, they're also an organization that takes donations. So if you're so inclined, you can look on there. Gay conservatives say that the Equality Act could crush religious freedom. And that Trump has a right to oppose it. They say the Equality Act goes too far and for any level-headed person to agree with it, it blatantly disregards the basic rights to religious freedom. As we all know, the Equality Bill passed the House with all Democrats and eight Republicans voting for it. The Senate, as we know, will not allow it to reach the Senate floor. And even if it did, and even if it did pass, Trump would veto it. And rocket me in. I've seen the trailers and it makes me cry.   Explicit. And there's multiple scenes of men kissing and simulated oral sex and a steamy bedroom scene with both Edgerton and Madden unclothed. Linda, who's it about, this film? Rocket Man. Well, doesn't everybody know who Rocket Man is? Oh, John. Thank you. Okay. Professor Trials, you definitely need to get out more. Yes, you do. Well, didn't Trump call Kim Jong-un? Rocket Man. See? Entirely different context. Well, of course, but I like context. I'll quiet down right into this. Olympic medalist, Caster Semenyana, loses a landmark gender appeal, casting doubt on future competition. The South African 28-year-old Olympic gold medalist was seeking to overturn a discriminatory new eligibility regulation for females to classify for the sport, which was introduced on April 2018. The new regulations mean that women with higher levels of testosterone will not be able to compete in female races. I have a picture of her. That will go up now. Unless they take- Suppressing medication. No, well, no, they take, what's women's estrogen? To lower their testosterone. Which would be a blocker to the testosterone. Right. Well, I really just think that's totally unfair. I mean, you know. As I've said, it's one more way to interfere with women's bodies. Right. And, you know, I just think it's a terrible precedent to be setting, but anyway. Go ahead, Ann. Keith, sorry. Next. All of a sudden, our seating arrangement got return. So looking at a couple of age-ID and age-related issues that have nothing to do with running, but recently, there was a hearing before the U.S. House representative, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, was questioning the CEO of Gilead, regarding Truvada, which is a PrEP medication, a prophylactic prevent exposure to an infection with HIV. Her question to the CEO was a prescription in the United States per month is $1,700. In Australia, same medication, same prescription. Eight dollars a month. And didn't they say it had something to do with patterns? Patents. Patents, yeah, like where they run out quicker in Australia or something that they do in the, I don't know. And the piece that was brought up in the public hearing is it was public funding and grants that financed the development of this medication. Right. So for this company, it was total profit.  Then it was a five-year ban. You had to be celibate for five years, now it's one year. But still, so Canada's moving in the correct direction but they haven't quite landed on something that's truly equitable and based upon science. Exactly. I saw some commentators who said not good enough. Exactly.  So why are you picking one group? Plus an antibody test they estimate can detect within three to six weeks. So looking at some of the things that are happening here in Vermont, if you have not heard, yes indeed the Scott administration says that 857, the right to abortion, will go into law. He is not going to veto it. There's still some question if he's actually going to sign it or just let it pass into law without a signature. In either case. It's going through. It's happening. Looking at some of the other things that are going on, there was a bill that was introduced, H546, and it had to do with insurance coverage for gender affirmation surgery regardless of age. And I made the presumption that it was seniors who might have been denied coverage. I may have been looking at the wrong end of the spectrum. And not really being at liberty to give a whole lot of details. There is an insurance protocol called a RISA. And it is how insurance is given out. And that goes under federal regs, not Vermont state regs. So the feds may have said, no, we're not covering affirmation surgery. But when the Vermont commissioner in charge of insurance heard about this case, he may have reaffirmed to all of the Vermont insurance companies, we do have parity. This will be covered. You will not discriminate and work to ensure that coverage happened. Good. Every now and then we need to have a good story. Yeah, so with that, I'm going to let you take me to bad places. No, I have a good story about Taiwan same sex marriage law. And now I'd like to show you a clip of people celebrating and it just outlines the whole circumstance in Taiwan. So let's look at that for a second. Same sex marriage is now legal in Taiwan. A historic first for Asia. Thousands of supporters gathered outside of parliament in Taipei Friday, waving rainbow flags and embracing after lawmakers voted to pass a special bill which offers same sex couples similar legal protections for marriage as heterosexuals. Asia's first and way to go, Taiwan were chanted from the large crowd that did not let the weather rain on their parade. The law will take effect after being signed by Taiwan's president who wrote on Twitter following the vote. We took a big step towards true equality and made Taiwan a better country. Taiwan puts on a vibrant pride parade every year, one of Asia's largest. But this vote came after a years long debate on the island over marriage equality. In 2017, the Democratic Island's constitutional court declared same sex couples had the right to legally marry and set a deadline of May 24th for legalization. The ruling sparked heated debates dividing Taiwan. Late last year, Taiwan voters opposed same sex marriage in a series of referendums, defining marriage as that between a man and a woman. But on Friday, lawmakers brushed that vote aside, passing the new law 66 to 27 and giving Taiwan the lead in Asia on same sex unions. Makes you wanna laugh and cry, doesn't it? Very affirming, that's right. Now let's go to news from the international sports world if we could. And I have a follow-up to Linda's story. I'd like to introduce you now to Sprinter Dutti Chand. And there's a picture before you.  She revealed that she's in a relationship with a woman from her village in Odisha state. She's 23 and she said in an interview, I have found someone who is my soulmate.  What's interesting, or another interesting fact about this, is that it relates to the Caster Semenya story that Linda just shared because she also has hyperandrogenism, a condition that naturally produces high testosterone levels. She was previously barred from competing under the Association of Athletics Federation's rules and subjected to abuse for being unfeminine. But she won an appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2015, paving the way for athletes with hyperandrogenism to compete in 100 meter and 200 meter races. The decision allowed her to run in the 2018 Asian Games where she won two silver medals. However, this month, as you know, Caster Semenya's appeal was rejected. But Anne Chand said that decision was very sad. So it's... It is very sad. It's awful what they're doing. It seems like kind of an uneven application of rules, too. Now we'd like to go to the next sports first. This is Andy Brennan. He has a picture before you.  Throughout my, he says, throughout my whole A-League and football career, I've never known I've met or spoken with an out gay male footballer in Australia.  When I was at the Newcastle Jets, I didn't want to accept my sexuality. At that time, I wanted to separate it from, I'm paraphrasing now, from my sport. But now he's come out and he's very pleased. He says, I'm happier. I couldn't be happier if you said this. Now he's retired? No, no, he's still playing, yeah. Because there are some of us who actually watch Australian rules football at ESPN three at three o'clock in the morning, so you can watch for him. And when you watch the show, you'll see his picture. All right. Now we have another kind of a payback story from Australia. A rugby star was fired following his anti-gay social media post. His name is Israel Folau, and I'm not gonna show his picture to you because he's deplorable and I don't. And I'm not gonna watch him. No, well, he's out, you can't. There we go. He's a devout Christian who's made 73 international appearances for the Wallabies. Well, this is where George the Wallabies. I know who they are, no. Okay, this is his homophobic social media post. He listed drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicator, thieves, atheists, and idolaters. He said to them, hell, await you. And then he continued. He was thrown out of football. He decided not to appeal. Rugby. I'm sorry, rugby. Thank you. I'm not a real sports follower. But he was thrown out of rugby. Usually neither am I. The chief executive of Australia Rugby said, you know, there's no place for, Rugby is, there's no place in Australia Rugby for someone with those views. He was dropped as a brand ambassador by sportswear brand Aussies in the aftermath with the company describing its partnership with a 30-year-old as untenable. So he's out. He's decided not to appeal. He said, if I went back to rugby with all the perks, it would be the work of Satan. When we come to Christ, it's no longer our will anymore. It is always the will of God that comes first year. He's out. Bye-bye. Bad things happened in Turkey. Violence was used against students holding a pride march. 25 people were arrested. And it's heartbreaking to hear that today's pride march, which should have been a celebration of love and solidarity was so violently broken up, said representative from Amnesty International. I'd like to continue if I may. You have a couple of minutes. Okay, let's go to Cuba. Another hotbed of discontent. The Gay Rights Organization there, which is headed by Mariela Castro, canceled their pride march and some rebels held it anyway. There were 100 people who appeared. They made it four blocks. They made it eight blocks and then were stopped by the police. I have a picture before you of someone being arrested at that march. It was organized by on Facebook and WhatsApp. Cuba, as we know, repressed homosexuals in the decades after its 59 revolution, sending many to forced labor camps, but the government has since barred anti-discrimination and Cynisex, Mariela Castro's group, has been internationally recognized, yet they canceled the gay pride march. The other thing about Cuba is that the provision in their constitution that would have affirmed same-sex marriage was taken out because of the evangelical influence in Cuba. They have evangelicals in Cuba? Betcha. And they're growing ranks and they're feeling a lot of pressure because of Trump's stance in that part of the world, particularly against the Venezuelan government. And there's one more thing. It blocked a blade reporter from entering the country. His name is Michael K. Lavers. He's the Washington Blade International News Editor. I've got a picture of him. He was coming to cover the gay community in Cuba. He'd been there seven times and he couldn't get in. So, and then another journalist, Luz Escobar, was arrested because they think he might have had something to do with this alternate march that was broken up. Okay. All right. I'd like to move to citizen activism in my next segment. Okay. Well, as you may or may not recall, there was a transgender woman who was beaten and it was taken, and people had taken on video. He was rescued by some women. She was rescued by some women. And they found her murdered in Dallas this year, this week. And her name was Malaysia Brooker, 23. They found her on the road early on Saturday. Police are saying it was a result of homicidal violence, but they don't know whether the beating and her death are related. So when we get more news on that, we'll certainly keep you updated. I heard they speculated that it was unrelated. Yeah. And we all saw the clip of her being beaten up. Yeah, it was horrible. Yeah. The Trump administration.  And when they went to get the baby girl and went to the embassy to get her American passport, she was told, they were told that they were asked for the marriage license and they didn't have it with them because they had a little girl, a daughter, from a few years back. And so they didn't think to bring it. And so they go back to the United States and they're told by, I guess there's these new rules that the Trump administration has come up with that if you adopt someone from another country or if you have a surrogate, it doesn't matter whether you're married or not because it would be a child considered out of wedlock. Yeah. So they can't be American citizens. So I know. So anyway, that seems to be a new tactic that they're using. And so anyway. And that's two women? No, this was two men. Okay. It doesn't, it wouldn't matter because the baby. The surrogate was out of the country and not married to one of the donors. So yeah. Yeah. So anyway. And then we have sad news, Andy Velez dies. He was an internationally prominent AIDS activist whose three decades of advocacy work resulted in improved drug access and civil rights for people living with HIV. Especially in the Latino community. He died on May 14th at Mount Sinai, Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan. He was 80. His sons Ben and Abe said the cause of his death was complications arising from a severe fall in his Greenwich Village building in April. Until his recent accident and despite several health challenges, Velez had remained constantly active in the AIDS and social justice communities. Taking part in protests for ACT UP and Rise Up and Resist, Velez was a member of ACT UP joining the group in 1987. It's first year of activity and played a prominent role in the most notorious demonstrations over the past 32 years. And he was involved in the Reclaim Pride Movement that alternate march that we're gonna go to when we go to New York and he went to meetings and we may have seen him in the meeting. We probably did and we went to. Very sad. Very sad. California State Board of Education overhauls sex ed guidance to be more LGBT inclusive. So it goes to California, so it goes to the nation. Absolutely. And another sad story is Doris Day dies at 97 and here are some things that you may or may know about her. She was very close to. Rock Hudson. Rock Hudson. She visited him a few days before he died. She was in pillow talk with him. Love her, come back in. Send me no flowers. And she was his lifelong friend and was an animal activist and also an AIDS activist. And so we say goodbye to her. 97, huh? 96, 97. And also when Ian and I were in Cape Cod, that song kept going through my head. Hey, Sarah. Sarah. In old Cape Cod. Oh, I get it. Now you know why we don't have a musical award. And then we have the Broadway musical prom. A high school PTA decides to cancel the dance rather than allow two girls to attend together. The show's creators, Chad Begulin and Bob Martin started writing a musical eight years ago before same sex marriage was legalized in the United States. They worried that the show might feel irrelevant by now, but they were wrong. The prom just received seven Tony nominations, including Best Musical. Ian and I loved it. If you get to see it, please do, it was really, really good. I have some entertainment news announcements. Sex in the City is starting on June 7th. A new one? Mm-hmm. Or, you know, a version. Yeah. June 9th at the Tony Awards. In June 11th, or 12th is the beginning of Pose, the second. On Fox. Yeah. Yeah. So, a lot to watch in June. The Texas House passed an extreme religious liberty bill this week that could legalize discrimination against LGBTQ people, and it's being called Safe Chick-fil-A. That's what the bill is called. I passed the House on a nearly party line vote, 79 to 62, only one Republican voted against it. The bill is going to pass, let's face it, said Texas Representative Celia Israel Democrat. One was before voting began. It's been cloaked in religious freedom, but the genesis, the nexus of this bill is hatred. So, and then I has one more, oh, about the Alabama Public Television, it's refusing to air the episode of Arthur featuring same sex wedding because it would violate their audience trust. And Arthur is a cartoon? Yes, it is. Yep, yep. You do take it out more. I know. So, looking at Maine, they're about to pass their bill on the Band of Conversion Therapy with minors. It had been through the legislative process about when it got to LePage's desk, he vetoed it. I don't think they're gonna have the same problem with Governor Mills. New Hampshire, they have two pieces of legislation going through. One would allow a gender neutral option on their driver's licenses. You will get to do it here as of July 1st, and then they're also putting a provision in place that someone who identifies as transgender can amend their birth certificate. And that was actually getting a fair amount of pushback from the medical community. We'll watch and see what happens with those. Here in Vermont, the ACLU has challenged the Medicaid division here in the state on their rulemaking and policies. And it's specific to gender-affirming surgeries. And it is, Medicaid has a formulary of those procedures for which coverage will be provided. What the ACLU has discovered is that some of the surgeries associated with gender affirmation are not being included, such as hair removal, shaving of an Adam's apple, feminization of features, there's a whole host of others. So they're challenging them, saying, okay, if these are included under that guise of best practices for gender affirmation, why are you denying coverage? So some of us may be involved in that debate and we will keep you updated. The other bill that got my attention, and it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. And it was a bill about protecting students from bullying. And what it does is it puts a provision in place where if you as a parent feel that the school district has not adequately responded to the harassment and bullying that your child is encountering, there's a whole series of actions that can occur up to and including the school district now needs to pay for the tuition for your child to go to another school district. What's interesting about this bill is that both the lead sponsor and all five co-sponsors are Republicans from conservative districts. What's up with that? They want them to leave the district and go to more liberal schools. Well, and I think what we need to be doing is having a conversation with the Human Rights Commission and looking at the statutory definition in what constitutes bullying and what the underlying implicit biases that's provoking the incident. And we may have an interesting answer.  Yeah, well let's keep you posted.  Let's go first to Italy where the Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini appeared at the World Conference of Families in Verona. And he said that the government would defend the rights of children to have a mother and a father. He had, he had, and so long as I am a minister, wombs for rent do not exist in practice. They are crimes, so he's very anti-choice. So these two young women, Gaia Parisi and Matilda Rizzo, thought they would undermine him a little bit. And I have a picture before you now of the photo bomb. What they did was they approached him. He's the leader of the league party for a selfie. And while he was preparing to smile for the photo, the trap was set by the pair who kissed in front of the camera. So there they are. He's trying to smile and they undermined him. The provocative idea came to our mind because he was clearly standing for the Verona World Conference of Families, they said. We have achieved our goal. We made ourselves heard and this is important. The World Conference of the Family, as we all know, is a U.S. coalition that promotes the values of the Christian right. Its three-day conference in Verona had the backing of the Far Right League, a partner in Italy's coalition government, and attracted neo-fascist groups. Last February, a 15-year-old from Sardinia approached the minister who enjoys posing for selfies with his supporters. As soon as the teenage boy found himself next to Salvini, he recorded a video selfie querying the minister over allegations that the league stole from the Italian state. Salvini walked away. So I love the citizen activism and I like that picture. I think he was. I like the pie in the face of, what's her name? Anita Bryant. Anita Bryant. Remember that? Squeeze the fruit for Amanda, yeah. Well, let's go to Catholic Poland now where we have a little bit of a controversy swirling around the black Madonna of Chestercova. And I knew about this figure, maybe from my Catholic childhood in Buffalo. Your tragic upbringing. Well, Elizabeth Polesna has now been arrested or charged because she set up posters near a church in the city of Ploch in Krakow, Poland on May 6th. Prosecutors, and I suppose I should show you the picture. It's the Madonna and Child with rainbows around them. She's a 51-year-old activist. She placed the posters with altered images of the icon on walls, garbage bins, and mobile toilets near St. Dominic's church in Ploch. She did not physically damage the icon, which was venerated by Pontiffs, including Pope John II. I don't know if that's a good thing for the icon, but let me tell you about it's the icon of the mother god of Chestercova, popularly known as the black Madonna of Chestercova, a painting housed at the Jazznogora Monastery in Chestercova in southern Poland since the 14th century. The case has highlighted the clash between predominantly Catholic Poland and freedom of speech and laws banning hostility against religious beliefs. She defended her action. It's, this is certainly not an attack on religion, certainly not an attack on faith. This is not a form of attack. How can you attack anyone using a picture? Let's be serious, she said. She could face up to two years in prison or stiff fine if convicted. So that's a little guerrilla activism also. I can not. I think we should probably think about finishing up, don't you? We have trivia and we have also interview. Exactly. And we have a very, very good interview with Beverly Little Thunder. I had a lovely conversation earlier in the hour and I'd like to share it with you now. Hi. I'm here with Beverly Little Thunder, two-spirit Lakota elder from Standing Rock, North Dakota. Welcome, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Second visit, you came as we recall with Rachel Siegel earlier because you're a board member of the Peace and Justice Center. Yes. But here on this interview we're gonna talk more exclusively about you if we could and your activism and your native heritage. And we had a lovely conversation before we started taping about the term two-spirit. And how you happened to, it's history and how you happened to use that, although you also use the term lesbian or? When I first came out, lesbian was the word to use. We met as a group of queer native people and went to the anthropology community because there were only two books that were written at that time. One was living with spirit and spirit in the flesh.  And the terms that they used in their wink thing is a Lakota term that means womanlike. And they just applied it to everything and they also used the term birdash, which when we researched it, found out it meant boy prostitute. And that didn't apply to me at all. And so we all told our stories and said, if you're gonna write about us, write about who we are now. We're living, we're not in the past. So often they anthropologists write about native people as if we're past history. And so we said write about us now. And as a result of that, we were asked to put together a book. And during that time, we decided to use the term two spirit because if you were to identify a room full of native queers, you'd have to identify each one of them by whatever the tribe called them and you could have three pages. So two spirit does not translate into any native language in the United States. And it really isn't just about being non-binary. It has its roots in roles that we played in our communities prior to Western invasion. So it doesn't really translate into non-indigenous culture particularly? No, it doesn't. And actually at Standing Rock, a group of two spirit people made it real clear that this is our marker. And not all native people will use that marker, but if we choose to use it, it is ours. It's not something that we want the wider LPGTQ community to latch onto because it's responsibilities with being two spirit. And it's a tribal role I was reading. It's not, and the other, I was reading that that there's a sexual orientation involved with LGBT and that two spirit is more about gender, more about community, is that it? It's more, it's almost a spiritual role. The men were often the ones who took in orphaned children because prior to invasion, there were always orphan children and they took them in and raised them. The women were often the ones who took care of women's health issues. And they both took care of the elders because if an elderly man or woman had a son or daughter who was killed, then they were left on their own. And so the two spirit people would sort of take them in and help them make sure they had what they needed and cared for them. And that role was considered very, very sacred. So they held a sacred space in the circle of all of the community. And it was very considered very honorable if you had a two spirit person name your baby. They believed that a child was gonna grow up to be very, very special if a two spirit person named that child. One thing we were talking about before we started taping was that even though the name implies a binary, it's a role, a tribal role, but also it embraces gender non-conforming and many different genders, as you were saying. Yes, it does, it does. Yeah, that's an important point to think. It is. You came out as a lesbian in 1980, is that correct? In 1980, and I came out to my community in 1985. You know, coming out is a process. It's not, here I am. Yeah, the whole world knows. It's a process. And in 1988, we had our first two spirit gathering in Minneapolis. There were about 50 queer natives that got together. And since that time, there have been other tribal two spirit groups that have emerged all over the country. There are so many two spirit gatherings happening in the country and in Canada that I can't make it to all of them. But we just had our 30 year reunion in Winnipeg last year and it was quite interesting because they showed a video that was taken at the third gathering in Winnipeg. And boy, some of us have aged. Well, 30 years, I know how that goes. Your list, in your bio it says that you're a founding member of the two spirit gathering movement. Yes, I was one of the first ones there. In the original 50, how did you find each other? At that time, I think it was just through word of mouth. It was just- Even though it was people from all across North America. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, it was pretty incredible that we all kind of wound up together. There's a large group of two spirit people in Minneapolis which is why it started there. A woman named Sharon Day, who is still very active, founded the Native American AIDS Task Force and the AIDS epidemic kind of pulled us all together because it was very devastating to our communities. And I think that was what made a lot of people that are on the reservation open up to the idea that their children might be non-binary because there are so many young men who wanted to go home to die. You also mentioned that the two spirit gathering movement has been helpful for youth. It has been very helpful for youth because they have something to look to. They also now have elders. It's hard to think of myself as an elder and a role model, but I am. And there are many of us. And by the way that we have lived our lives and the roles that we have instilled ourselves into in the bigger community has set a model for a lot of those young people. And I saw that very clearly when I was in Winnipeg this last year. It made me smile. The first gathering we had, one of our meetings was upstairs over a bar. And alcoholism and drug use was rampant. And matter of fact, when I first came out, the only place that I ever saw another native, queer native, was in a bar. And they were sloppy drunk. And because I had grown up on a spiritual path, I was really disturbed to see that because I didn't, that wasn't me. So it took me a long time to reconcile the fact that I could be too spirit and sober. You also founded the first and only all women's Sundance in the world. Yes. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Well, that was because when I came out to my community in 85, I was told that women like me were taken out and shot. By the native people whom you came over to? And mainly the women. Really?  And now this. And I said, I'm stronger now than I ever have been.  And I knew the ceremony well enough that I started. And we're in our 30th year. Also your 30th year. Yeah, also our 30th, 32nd year, yes, 32nd year. You meet in various localities. Well, we used to. But now living here in Vermont, we have land and we have a permanent arbor. And we have planted all the trees around the arbor. And the center tree was only three feet tall when we planted it 15 years ago. It's now over 60 feet tall. Oh my gosh. And so we host the ceremony there. This year it's July 13th through July 20th. And if you go on the website, Kunsi Kea, you can find more information about it. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Mm-hmm. You've also written a memoir called One Lead at a Time. Yes. Published in 2016. Mm-hmm. It's an oral memoir. Yes. Can you tell us how you happened to accomplish that? The woman who put it to words insisted that I needed to write the story. And so she sat down and we did 20 hours of recording with me just talking. And she organized it and it was verbatim. And she put it to a book form. Is it organized chronologically or circular or is it? Organized chronologically. Uh-huh. And actually I'm working on writing a second book because after it was written I realized that wasn't the end of my life. There was a whole lot more that has happened since then. Where does the first memoir end? You know, I can't remember. I just read one where the woman ends when she's 40 and that's just the beginning. That was probably about, that was probably about the time that mine ended. Uh-huh. It's hard to remember. Yeah, I know and there's definitely more to tell. I didn't tell as much about the Sundance as I wanted to and so that's gonna be a large part in the progress of how that has come to be. I mean, it's gone through a lot of changes. You know, we also, we welcomed trans women coming in and that was the whole community had to come to terms with that and had to be accepting of that. Was it controversial? There were a couple of women who were very, very against it but the majority had no problem with it and now one of our head dancers is a trans woman and she works at the native college in Montana and so we're in the middle of discussing inviting two-spirit indigenous men and it's gonna take a couple of years talking. I don't know what people are so afraid of. I know it and you and I are Facebook friends and I remember you posted a pro-terrain Facebook post and there was a lot but the opposition seemed to be from Anglo women. Yes, mostly. Yeah, it is and this last year we had 90% women of color and 10% white women whereas 30 years ago it was the opposite. So that's been really a change and a shift. Is there anything else you'd like to tell us? We have a minute left, so. I think that the most important thing is that in the LBGT community there still is a lot of racism and the racism is something that we all need to work on. The earth and the climate change is essential that we come together. It's essential that we all start working to preserve the earth that we live on and so I've been putting a lot of energy into that. You are an activist, not only about many issues you're gonna speak at our Stonewall 50 rally and next week that we'll talk about when we get to the show and we appreciate that and you spoke to the Women's March? Yes, I did. I did and when I leave here, I'm gonna be speaking with the abortion Planned Parenthood I saw that that's happening, yeah. Although Governor Scott has just revealed he's not gonna veto it. Yes, right. That's good. Yes. Well, I appreciate your joining us and I hope you'll come back and tell us when the next memoir comes out. I will, I will, thank you for having me. Thank you. Well that was really good, I really like her a lot. In that conversation started prior to the actual taping of the interview and then long after the taping had closed so that there was more conversation about two-spirit and that growing part within the First Nation community. And you can feel her spirituality when she's in the room. I know. You know, it's amazing. What a lovely person, yeah. And a strong activist. Yeah. She didn't talk about how there are times that the LGBTQ community, we tend to have blinders on in this sense of, you know, and I think it was more of the off-camera interview. White entitlement where, you know, here she was invited to be the grand marshal for the Pride Parade in Burlington in TV Bank was their corporate sponsor and TV Bank is responsible for the desecration of her homeland. Right. Of her sacred space.  You know, she started this whole Sundance Women Only Sundance event in Vermont because she was, you know, living here in Vermont. They have lay in that, you know, they are trying to save as a legacy for other activist women. So it's really.  So the answer to the trivia question. Yes. Little hint, where might the names quilt be stored? Someone in the news a great deal who nominated the quilt in 1988 for Nobel Peace Prize. It might have been a much younger representative, Nancy Pelosi. I was surprised. I mean, it makes sense once you say it, but I was sort of like, wow.  Yeah. Well, thank you Nancy. So with that. Thank you for joining us. We've come to the close of our show. And as Beverly would say, cast your bucket down where you are and resist.


Hello and welcome to this video explaining how to get started with Time of Flight Ranging and Gesture Sensor STM32 Nucleo Expansion Board. This board is part of the STM32 Open Development Environment, a fast and affordable way to develop innovative devices and applications with ST components. Information on how to obtain the board can be found on www.st.com.x-nucleo. Under the reference, X-Nucleo 53L0A1. The board is built around the VL53L0X Time of Flight Sensor, a four-digit display indicating the ranging distance or the gesture detected, two connections to solder external satellites, a cover glass holder, a cover glass, and three spacers of different thicknesses. The board is equipped with an Arduino Uno R3 connector, allowing it to be plugged into an STM32 Nucleo Development Board. First, connect the STM32 Nucleo Development Board to a PC using a mini USB cable. The board is automatically detected and seen as a disk drive. Visit ST.com and search for the keyword X-Nucleo 53L0A1. Click on the main part number link. Then, go to the Tools and Software section and click on the X-Cube link. Finally, go to the end of the page and click on the Download button in the Get Software section. When downloaded, just unzip the file in the folder you want. In the software package, you will find directories with all the required material. Now, let's try a sample application that allows ranging and gesture recognition. The firmware to be installed is called Gesture Detect and can be found in the Applications folder of the project's directory, as shown here. Select the binary file corresponding to your STM32 Nucleo Development Board. Then, drag and drop it onto the Nucleo Disk Drive. Once the firmware is downloaded, the display indicates the distance in centimeters between your hand and the top of the VL53L0X sensor. Press the blue button on the expansion board once to switch to the Tap Gesture Detection example. Another press of the blue button allows you to test the swipe gesture detection. Press the blue button again to come back to the ranging mode. In order to discriminate swipe gesture direction, you need to connect the two satellites to the expansion board. Using the same Gesture Detect code example, press the black reset button and then press the blue button for at least two seconds. The program will switch to the directional swipe mode. The display will indicate the direction of your swipe gesture. Ranging and gesture data can be logged on the PC in real time through a virtual COM port using a terminal application configured at 115,200 baud. A graphic user interface can also be displayed. Please refer to the user manual for the detailed installation procedure. A comprehensive set of documentation for the Ranging and Gesture Sensor Expansion Board, including a user manual, application notes, quick start guide and data sheet is also available. Visit www.st.com. Slash STM32ODE.


Well it's a tradition that spans 36 years and attracts skiers from all over the region. And this week's Northwood's adventure, our Josh Peterson takes a look at why the event's deep traditions continue to bring people back after all these years. After months of preparation, the horn sounded and skiers from all over the region glided their way across the countryside of the Buna Vista Forest. The Minnesota Finlandia has been a winner tradition in the Bemidji area for 36 years and this year was extra special because it was the first time in four years skiers got to enjoy the full course. The racers prefer to do the full 25k because the east side is more gradual rolling and it gives them a chance to take a break and the rest up before they hit the real hilly side. Besides its deep history and rich traditions what draws people to the Minnesota Finlandia is the terrain and beauty of the course. Beauty mixed with tradition is one of the reasons that many of those involved with the race keep coming back year after year. The course is great and we almost always have really good and it's like I said in a way it's small. For some cross country skiing is a family sport. For the Ellert sins from Albert Lee the Minnesota Finlandia provided father and son a chance to compete together while mom enjoys the trip to the north country cheering her family on to victory. Keeping the passion for the sport with his dad so it's really fun to see them ski together and support the sport. We love you know gets you through Minnesota winters having having a hobby like this and a passion like this they train all year round together. For those competing the full course is an enjoyable challenge and we'll be back next year to defend their title. The trails are phenomenal I mean but it's hard to argue when you got a blue sky day. I mean everything looks pretty good but this trail is really fun some challenging hills. With skiers continuing to make history each year the tradition of the Minnesota Finlandia will continue for years to come. With this week's Northwood's adventure in Bemidji, Josh Peterson, Lakeland News. Beautiful day for that. It was that was before the snow we got quite a bit of snow since that time. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


so i have seen the five questions one take tag kind of re-emerge here on youtube and i absolutely love that i did this a few years ago gosh six or seven years ago so i'm excited to do it again we've got a whole new set of questions and i can't wait this is going to be one take truly there's not going to be any edits at all so i'm just going to try not to get too rambly um and also not say anything dumb all right the first question is what has your sewing journey looked like when did you start sewing who taught you any breaks etc already the girls are barking normally i would have edited that out but here we are um okay so my sewing journey i moved from columbia south carolina where i spent most of my life to charleston back in 2009 2010 and obviously didn't know anyone didn't have any friends there um kind of moved for work moved with dan you know a bunch of stuff like that so i had always kind of wanted to try sewing but it never it just never presented itself as an opportunity so i went to meetup.com to try and see like how can i make people here in charleston and came across this crafting meetup and the very next meetup that they had was at a sewing store i had like a quilt shop called five eight seams it's still there in charleston and they were going to be making a tote bag so i was like oh okay well this is like perfect i can try out sewing and um then also meet some new people so i showed up there we made tote bags it was great i met friends one of which i am still friends with to this day one of my dear dear friends and the very next day i went and bought a sewing machine i just knew that i loved it i loved the idea of picking out the fabrics and coordinating things and then obviously taking a flat fabric and turning it into something 3d i was just obsessed with that idea so literally took my sewing machine back to that store the next day like in the box because they had everything set up for us and so i was like i don't know how to plug this in i don't know how to turn it on like certainly don't know how to thread it like what's a needle you know all that kind of stuff so they helped me with that and then i continued to take sewing classes there for the next almost two years i kind of kept um graduating from like 101 to 201 to like an advanced class where they had seamstress who did like alterations and stuff she came in once a week and taught like an advanced class so um but once i sort of graduated from the advanced class i was really left to my own devices and so started you know looking at books and blogs and youtube and stuff like that and taught myself everything else from from those resources i have never taken a break but you know i got started later in life i want to say i was 30 by that point probably um so so yeah that's my and of course i've sewn almost every day since which has been completely awesome all right the next question is describe your sewing space where is it is it shared or private messy or clean and etc all right so this we are in my sewing space it has moments of organization and then moments of an organization what's happening back here this all this right here needs to find a home so i go in between being really organized and then spaces that are just like so completely messy but it is in our apartment um we have a two bedroom apartment the second bedroom is exclusively my sewing room and my youtube studio we got it with the intention of doing that like we were looking for a second we wanted a second bathroom anyways because the girls are well back then when we got the apartment we only had sonny and he is litter was litter box trained the new the girls that i have now biscuit and honey they are litter box trained so we wanted a second bathroom for them so we're not sharing bathroom space with dogs um but it's really hard to find a one bedroom two bath anyway so we said let's go ahead and just get a two bedroom two bath and use the second bedroom as your studio exclusively private space this is not used for anything else and i know i am so blessed like i know i i once when i first started sewing i lived in a like 800 square foot apartment where i cleaned out my pantry and used that for fabric storage my entire island all the storage underneath was used for sewing stuff i cut out fabric on my island so i know what it's like to not have a dedicated sewing space i had to put up my sewing machines every single time after i got done using them so i've been on both sides and i can tell you yes i am aware this is a great great great luxury and i am so so so blessed to have it i don't know if i'll have it forever like if we go to our next apartment maybe you know we won't be able to have a second bedroom i'm not sure so um for now i'm loving it taking advantage of it and not taking it for granted at all all right third question what is it like to be a sewing youtuber does it meet your expectations is you have is it how you thought it would be in a reaction from others so being a sewing youtuber is very interesting especially i think i realized it the most when we moved here to charlotte because you know you're meeting new people moving to a new city and inevitably during the course of small talk it comes up well what do you do for work and so then i would tell them oh i have a youtube channel and instantly whatever other conversation was going on everyone's like what and they want to know what the what the youtube channel is for um and i tell them it's about sewing and of course they're like sewing i thought only grandmas did sewing and i'm like no all kinds of people do sewing and well what do you sew i sell my own clothes are you so did you sew what you're wearing yes i did oh my god i can't and they'll come it's it never it's copy paste every single time that comes up that's how the conversation goes so that has been interesting to get used to like people being so interested in what you do for work like before when i was a social media manager it was like oh you know a few questions about like twitter or whatever but this is like a whole other level of interest because it is so unique and not i mean people have told me before oh i always assumed that when someone said they were a professional youtuber that that just really meant they were unemployed and i was like well i mean i guess technically you don't have an employer but you're self-employed um so they just thought that i guess they they sort of i just really hope they survive this biscuit biscuit this is why one take is really bad for youtubers oh my gosh okay um carrying on um where was i oh about yeah so they just kind of discredit it as a job and so i've had to like explain to people several times no no no like i support myself on my youtube channel i explain to them how with the sponsors and the videos and the ads and all that kind of stuff and then they kind of get it which is cool um so yeah so the reaction is broad um and always very interesting which makes for a very interesting conversation about work oh my gosh i'm gonna have to go get them hey hey hey hey hey that's right come on honey come on honey man you say one take and that's what you get um all right so the fourth question is describe your most memorable project big event total fail biggest success so i've told this story before um back when i was taking those sewing classes i was still in the 101 phase and i just had this hair brained idea i don't know if i saw it on pinterest or what but i wanted a pleated skirt first of all what why did i want a pleated skirt no idea but i wanted a pleated skirt and i wanted the middle pleat on the inside to be a different fabric i just thought this was going to be like the coolest skirt in the world and when i took classes at that shop especially in the 101 series they highly encourage you to buy fabric from them to use during the class and it was pretty much i don't know if it was like a hard and fast rule but it kind of felt that way and so i had on top of that decided to use a quilter weight cotton to make this pleated skirt the women that were teaching me had no idea how to construct this concept that i had in my mind and so we were all kind of just winging it and as you can imagine i mean it was wearable in the end i had a skirt that i could wear but it was weird and wacky and like just so strange the concept ended up being strange the execution ended up being strange i don't even know um but that stands out to me as like my most memorable project just because i feel like it was one of those times where i was really like leaning into the creativity aspect of sewing and realized you know yes you can be creative but you can't just like throw all the rules out the window either like you have to have a balance between creativity and the rules they may not survive this video i'm being perfectly honest they were just asleep when i started so i don't even know um good thing is we are on our last question here this one is one is what is one quote saying or piece of advice that you've gotten that resonates with you and your sewing slash youtube success hands down at the top of my head the one that comes to me is to thine own self be true and of course this is relevant in all aspects of your life but whenever it comes to sewing if you are not sewing things that are authentically yourself you're going to make them and no matter how well they're made no matter how beautiful they are they're just going to hang in your closet because they're not uh going to fit into your lifestyle they're not going to be things that you reach for naturally they're not going to be things that you're like really attracted to on a practical level um and so even though i am like googly eyes over some of the really really nice high end fashion design looks i know that that's not what i should be sewing um every now and again i'll take on like a really tailored coat or something like that to help sort of scratch that itch but you know making gowns and things like that just isn't isn't for me um the same goes with like some of these trends that we come across like some of the trends are really really fun and really cool and really interesting um but practically they're not for me which is why i've sat on this channel a thousand times like can i wear this to target like that is my that's how i determine if it is going to fit into my life or not because if i can wear it to target i can pretty much wear it anywhere um i can dress it up i can dress it down and it will fit into my life and the same thing goes for you know being a youtuber you know if you are not yourself your true authentic self people will see straight through you and you guys wouldn't want to watch a channel of someone who you thought was being super fake um so that's why i always trying to bring my i mean maybe it is like the best version of myself for the most part but it is truly me with my messy room and my crazy dogs and everything in between so to thine own self be true has helped me get through so many sort of stress inducing nervous times in my life um trying to figure out who i am being in new cities and going through new experiences and meeting new people if you are always true to yourself then everything else kind of doesn't matter or just falls falls away you know what i mean because if you're yourself then that's all that should really matter what a great way to end the video right are you guys feeling all warm and fuzzy chill bumps maybe i'm so like deep and poetic right um but yeah that's it those are my five questions one take i've seen a bunch of different versions of this kind of popping around so you can search the hashtag five questions one take but i want to personally invite and tag britney j jones to do this with me i know she's very busy with her brick and mortar sewing shop now but britney is real easy to do takes a few minutes no take so i hope that she will participate in this and give us her take on these five questions but that is going to do it for me today y'all thank you so much for watching i'll see you very soon bye


South Africa's new coach Hugo Burrus has admitted that the SA team might not qualify for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. He further stressed that his major focus for now is to rebuild the team. South Africa will face Ghana, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe in Group C of World Cup qualifiers. The new coach reaffirmed that he will not bow down to pressure and will try his best to perform. Since winning the Cup of Nations for the only time as 1996 host, South Africa has steadily faded as an African powerhouse and was ranked 15th in the continent and 75th in the world last month. And don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


I digress now in the rat on what way you said that You was a conservative liberal liberal. Yes, that's true Technically, yeah, but financially I'm conservative, but lifestyle. I'm liberal.  I'm charitable So not about just making money for me typically right now at this point a lot of the money that I'm trying to make won't even benefit me I'll be dead and gone generation. You know I'm saying so it's more about generational wealth But also with financial empowerment on top of it because it's easy to leave somebody's you know money, but $500 give you more money not gonna help you people don't get financial education when they get money They get financial education and then they get money right you want to get is that the hip-hop community leans on a Like the one that they grab up when they need somebody to go talk sense


How are these goods? I need this, a clash here. Let me recognize their bosses. I'm Bishop Karjila. Let me recognize the clash in your intelligence. Those from within your mother. She is the one way and the rest of the contract. I also wish to recognize my dear Captain Collins, the Minister of Bites who happens to be MP for Sligabonde. The Minister of Transport who also happens to be the MP for Nola Central. He took most of our time today. I've never known him. By the provincial minister who has spoken great. Also to recognize our colleagues, members of parliament, mayor, this city, other mayors, each consulate. I also wish to recognize I know time is not with us, but the temptation when you are meanest men and women of all, I guess, is to say one or two more things. To recognize our party leadership. The party that has seconded some of us into government in this, our constitutional democracy, constitutional multi-party democracy. So I wish to recognize also colleagues from other political parties that may be MPs. The MPs. We're competing to serve the people. I think it's important not to ignore the media. The media players can't know wrong. That's why we call them the 46th. Making it possible for those who are not in this change today to know that we have this very good gathering with men and women of all. We've been invited to the meeting of our great leaders. I must simply appreciate the initiative and your leadership. What you've done to pull us together. We apologize and become late. But we've dedicated my president said two hours Necessarily we'll add the thread out when I come back. It's necessary. I'm sure it's what I want to be happy with. Just to continue what has been started there. First and foremost, to worship our God. To worship our God. Without womb. Without womb. Nothing is possible. When you are looking for examples of God's children who would have never been presidents of this kind without God. This is this one talking. Everything was done to make it impossible. For us to occupy this public office. God says His ways and other ways are very possible. So we must continue what's been done. Complete on everything we want to do. I know a man and a woman of God here. Go. Front, top and what to do. Watch it. In our families to raise our children to be of a certain character, certain minimum moral standards without God's children who recognize us. So I can go on. I don't wish to go on. Because that's your domain. You know how to preach better than me. And I'm only saying things the way I feel. So to continue our prayers we'll be back to you. But to thank you for the initiative again all of all just to be able to gather in this very church this building where we conducted one of the prayers and four lessons. And the very difficult circumstances.  Then the little noise was in. Is that a gunshot or is it a tear gas? All things can change. But now we can gather like this without looking over our shoulders. We should not forget those days. So we don't return to those days. But just to meet in this church again. Number three. To meet men of you in such a peaceful atmosphere. And the message is your given way. Message is your given way around the mindset around the welfare of the people of Tsinghua or the culture. Around issues of health services delivery is appreciated. It's welcomed. There are all values. All of the issues raised are values. And that's the way to be. So when we meet next we want to continue that dialogue and probably respond to some of the issues including my then name with action on one or two of the issues. And I asked for the organizers to spare us copies of what you deliver. Because the job brainer said you run the country in a third order. Yes, we want to look at each of the items you put there. I saw that the push, means to push the partner must work on it. That's what we do now. We run things for an action least best. So please, if that's okay allow us to go away with some concern. I request comment. All of the issues that you raised including those that you haven't covered because you were in a rush. I could see the whole land was empty. Come, come. Come, come. Yes, ma'am. So that's really something I wanted to say today but more important to say, we are here to say, we are here as your servants. Servants of the people of Tsinghua, the people of Kalinushe, people of Masuke, and the people of Chama, the people of Plashinakashi, the people of Chama, the people of Chikarawa. I know you don't know those people. Why do they give special Plashinakashi? I'm really impressed with that. The years I spent taking public office took me to every corner of them. And that information I'm going to use it, we are going to use it to understand the situation. So, we are here to say. For today, I want to focus, we're here to say. Not to be said. We are here to listen. We are here to take counsel. And how can we to work as a partnership in the service of the people? Pastas, bishops, servants, communities, government servants, communities. They are the only ones. They are the intersection. It's common ground. That's what I want to say today. And that we will not use this privilege to say, of course, here. Give me what is this money. Give me what is this money. Because we are here to the country, right at the border. We want to go there. And in one year, six months, when the mayor starts. Something we have accepted to be wrong winners in the UK government is poor communication. We want to learn from the change. We are good communicators. The less of that we are done. Not for crazy. Not for crazy. But simply to teach methodically that this group said to do this is done that. And that. And that.  My own minimum African human living as a self tomorrow. Why is the interest of the people in that space? Thank you for your prayers today. I miss the music which I love. But I'll get the holidays when I come here. And I must say I'll be here for one week on the border. So please continue evangelizing our people. We have our sport and also in a small way our prayers. As we pray for us we pray for you. I think that's what it should be. So today we need you as we catch up with you. We keep in touch in case it's something we need to do preparatory way before we come and the choice of which day, which location we live in to a professional team and yourselves. That's your choice. But definitely professionalism will dedicate that time that we are located for this group and maybe for the others. This meeting will not be at the back of the queue. This meeting will be in front of the queue.


Are silver nanoparticles good or bad for you? To help answer this, we thought we'd round up 7 facts about silver nano that may surprise you. 1. Silver nanoparticles are released from silverware.  As silverware has been around since Roman times, we've been doing this for a couple of millennia now, and of course, if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you've probably been doing it more than most. 2. People have been intentionally dosing themselves with silver nanoparticles for over a hundred years. Colloidal silver, suspensions of silver nanoparticles in a liquid, were popular before modern antibiotics came along. Their uses become widespread again in recent years as a cure for, well, if you read the claims, almost anything apparently. There is no clear evidence that drinking colloidal silver is good for you, but the evidence never stopped people from self-medicating before. 3. Silver nanoparticles are pretty good at killing microbes, but it's the silver ions that they slowly release that do most of the damage. This means you don't necessarily need nanoparticles to make products that kill bugs using silver. For instance, the Michigan company Krypton makes commercial fabrics used everywhere from Hyatt hotels to McDonald's that use silver ions to inhibit bacterial growth. And products using ecstatic silver technology are widely used by athletes, the military, medics and others. Both companies use silver as an antibacterial agent, but as far as can be told, neither company uses nanoparticles. 4. It's hard for pathogens to develop resistance to silver nanoparticles because they interfere with microbes in multiple different ways. However, indiscriminate use of silver as an antibacterial agent could still increase the chances of resistance developing, which isn't great news if you're relying on it to protect particularly vulnerable patients. 5. If you're exposed to enough silver, it'll turn your skin blue, a condition called Algeria. This is cosmetically interesting, but not fatal. In fact, it's thought that royals were originally called bluebloods because, you guessed it, those silver spoons turned their lips a delicate shade of royal blue. 6. Silver nanoparticles aren't likely to be much more dangerous than other forms of silver in the human body, as it's the ions that cause the most damage. Although it's still possible that research may throw up some surprises. Nanoparticles, for instance, might find it easier to get to sensitive places like inside cells before dissolving and releasing their payload of silver ions. And we may still find that the nanoparticles trigger the body's immune system in ways that ions do not. That said, a couple of millennia of imbibing silver nanoparticles hasn't thrown up any obvious risk red flags yet. 7. In contrast, silver is bad news for the environment. We learned this with environmental contamination from the photographic film industry. Silver nanoparticles are at least as harmful as the same amount of silver in any other form, possibly more so if the nanoparticles can get to places other forms of silver cannot. This has got some people wondering whether putting silver in everything from socks and kids toys to bedsheets and carpets is a bad idea. To learn more about silver nanoparticles, check out the blog below and, as always, please do join the conversation in the comments.


So this talk is about change tracking in writer and its performance issues. So I'm Michael Stahl, I work for CEV. And yeah, so first we are going to have a look at what the problem is. So we are trying to solve here. Then we are going to discuss the general idea of the solution. And last part is the implementation. And at the end we are going to have a look at the final status basically. So of course change tracking in writer doesn't have only one problem. This is just basically the most obvious problem there. So unfortunately the other problems will still remain. So in the menu we have this wonderful setting where the user can set the track changes to either be visible or to be hidden. And it's such a popular setting that we even have it twice in the menu. Now this is what your document looks like if you have a track change. So basically it's a very simple document. We have two paragraphs at the bottom. Those are the red marked text notes. And the three letters that are marked in blue, those are supposedly a tracked deletion. So we have deleted these three letters. And if you set the menu item to show the track changes, then your document model will look like this. Then you toggle it to hide them. And what happens is that your document model actually looks different. The track change is moved out of the document body area there and into a special section in this array data structure that then contains the deleted text. And the body text now only contains that part of it that is not deleted. So in order to implement this view option we have to actually modify the model. And now this gives rise to this performance issue where we have a couple of editing operations such as deleting text where the implementation looks like this. So it first saves the current setting of this document model show and view, show or hide. And then it moves the red lines in the document model to be in the body text because what comes next, the implementation of these editing operations, operation can only be performed if the red lines are actually in the body text. And at the end of it, all of the red lines in the document are moved again to where they were previously. So we have to move everything twice. And of course if you have a thousand red lines in your document then it's going to be very slow editing. And then we have this ridiculous dialogue that pops up after I think 250 where the user is advised that hiding the red lines is going to be slow and would you rather show them instead. And what this doesn't tell you is that showing the red lines is also slow but it's less obvious why because the auto format will in that case move them around every time you split a paragraph. So that is the problem and the solution is conceptually quite simple. So essentially we want to extend, we want to get rid of this moving the red lines around in the document model. Instead we want to just teach the layout, the document view to hide the deletions. In order to do this, we extend the layout frame that is associated with the paragraph, the SW text frame with the simple new data type that contains just a listener, a multi-listener that allows the text render to listen at multiple model text nodes. And it contains extensive information that is the text ranges inside of the text node that are actually visible. It contains the merge text that is the visible text in all of the nodes that are in this text frame. And then it has a couple of pointers to specific text nodes like the first and the last one. So this is quite simple but the problem is then making use of this data structure and maintaining it during all of the editing operations. And also the reason why this is some effort to change is that there were previously two invariants that are now invalid. So previously if you had an index into the text frame then that is a one to one, the index into the document model SW text node. So all of the formatting information in the text frame refers directly to indexes into the string that is a member of the SW text node. So with this new merge paragraph data type what we get now is that we have two different indexes, a model index, the SW position and a text frame index. And we have to use the extent information in the merge paragraph to map between the two. And the other invariant is that previously we had a one to two N mapping between nodes and frames. So one text node could have multiple frames. So for example if your paragraph is so large that it's split across multiple pages we'll have one text frame per page. And yeah there is this listener mechanism SW Modify SW Client that is used all over writer and it's also used here. And this mechanism has the limitation that an SW Client can only listen at one SW Modify. So with the merge paragraph what it looks like now is that we have this additional writer multi listener in the text frame. And this allows us to connect one text frame with multiple text nodes. So it will get notifications on every editing operation on every connected text node and can update itself then. So now for the implementation we had four milestones basically. So the first one was that we needed to adapt the text formatting itself. And yeah first we started with adding a new flag to the root frame that is the root class of the layout to that basically stores whether the layout will hide or show the red lines. And yeah we have to add this merge paragraph data type to the SW text frame. And yeah there were lots of classes there involved that needed to be changed. In particular the difficult one is the attribute iterator that is the class that splits the text basically into a portion that within a portion everything has the same formatting. And yeah this has to be done in such a way that it doesn't stop at track change boundaries but merges the text before and after it if it has the same formatting in one portion otherwise you get kerning problems. Yeah and so then we of course have this problem that we have now two different indexes. How do we find all of the places that need to convert between these two different types of indexes? And in that case what really helped a lot is that we leveraged the type system to find all these places. We use this strong int template which basically is a wrapper around an integer which only has explicit conversion between itself and the underlying integer type. And so we can start by annotating the obvious functions in the text frame converting them to the strong int type. And then every operation where the cell int 32 and the strong int are mixed in one function call or in one addition or whatever are going to be flagged by the compiler. So we can just go through all of the compiler errors and adapt 1000, 10,000, no it was like 3000 lines of code to explicitly convert in the right places or change the variable types whatever. And yeah then we will have quite high confidence that we found all of the right places that need to do this conversion. Right and yeah of course there are these mapping functions at the text frame that can actually take an SW position and map it to the text frame index and vice versa. So yeah. Okay and the nice thing about this is that we can do this incrementally so we get a long series of small patches that where we can then use git by sect if we did any mistake to find quickly where the problem is. Right and then we have this other problem that we now have multiple nodes connected with the text frame instead of just one and so we had to remove like five different functions from the text frame that all returned this one node and replaced it with a couple other new functions that return the text node that is going to be used for the paragraph properties and the first text node and also the text itself which is now the merge text which previously was also coming from the one text node. And yeah then there is this SW iterator thing which I am not going to go into detail now. Yeah so that was the scope of the first step basically and the second step was then to adapt the connection between the core model code and the core view code so that the whenever editing operations occur that would merge to paragraphs or split them or something like that that the proper number of text frames merged or not is created for them and so on. And once that was done the feature was in a good enough state that we could turn it on in master and if you have the experimental mode setting enabled. So yeah. That by the way was also the state of where we are at the previous talk on this topic at the LibreOffice conference. So what's coming now is basically the new stuff that we have actually done now where previously it was just planned. And so the third milestone was firstly about accessibility and there was this accessible paragraph class that used to have connections with both the text frame and the text node and would notify any listening accessibility infrastructure about changes there and turned out that this accessible paragraph had yet a third idea of what is actually in the paragraph and a third way of indexing into the paragraph. So there was another way to map indexes already in there and yeah we had to adapt that. And we also had to refactor it so that it is now a client of the SW text frame where previously it would listen at the SW text node which was unique previously because just like the text frame there was one to end connection there. And the other part of this was various things in the document that can be numbered. So the general idea there was that we want to store two numbers for each of them. So in one numbering all the document content is counted and then in the other numbering for when the red lines are hidden we just skip counting everything that is deleted. And yeah this had to be done for footnotes, for numbered lists and outline numbering and this part took I think three times longer than I expected because there is really a lot of stuff that is interested in numbered lists unfortunately. And then there are various different kinds of text fields that have references to other things that are numbered or yeah the chapter field displays the outline numbering and so on. Yeah and so much for that and then the fourth milestone at the end was just a grab back of various miscellaneous things like the paragraph properties. We had to make sure that if paragraph properties are requested or to be set that they are set on the only SW text node that is actually the one that determines the properties of the layout frame and not any other merged ones. So the cursor may be positioned in the second merged text node but the properties should be applied to the first one where the cursor isn't. And yeah that took off some time and then the auto format was surprisingly important actually because it turns out that previously the auto format would only work if the red lines are moved out of the document body into the hidden section in the notes array and that is exactly the situation that we wanted to get rid of. So we had to change the auto format code to no longer work on the document model so it just iterates over the document model but then it actually gets the text that it operates on from the layout frames and it then will iterate to the next text node that is no longer in the same layout frame and so on. Yeah the auto correct is also is actually not implemented in writer but it can be triggered from the auto format in various interesting ways. So yeah but that was because there was already an abstraction layer for the auto correct thing as it was actually not implemented in writer so it could not directly access the text nodes this was relatively easy. And then there were the comments in the margin of the page and those needed to get updates whenever things were deleted so the comments with anchor you just deleted also goes away. And yeah then we have this PDF export which contains a function to export links to everything can link to bookmarks and outline nodes etc so we had to make sure that the things that are deleted if you export your PDF while you have the track changes hidden you don't want to have these links to these hidden elements that don't actually show up in the PDF so the links point to nowhere. Yeah and then there was the find and replace where we have changed it so it will find strings in the layout frames now no longer the text nodes so yeah that was also somewhat difficult. And yeah then there are table of contents indexes and so on. Yeah these also needed changing so that they the generated index also only contains those things that are visible. And yeah the one point we didn't really ideally solve yet is the linguistic features because ideally you might want them to operate on the text frames also but currently they still work on the text nodes. I'm not sure how big a problem that is so if you just if you don't have a track change that starts in the middle of one word and ends in the middle of another word then you might not notice it but yeah we just ran out of time there. And once we were done with all of this we finally removed the silly warning dialogue that I showed you earlier because we no longer need it and then we turned this new way of hiding the track changes on by default in master and it's on by default in 6.2 in the release. So this is your opportunity to test it and file bugs if something still doesn't work. Yeah so what then is the status at the end so this was yeah quite a lot of changes were needed there all over writer so it's yeah. If you want to toggle the new layout based show and hide mode you can use this dispatch or command dot you know short track changes that would that already existed previously but I have changes so that now it works on this view setting. And the document models a red line flags. Those are now while you're working with the document they are almost always set to show everything so everything that means everything is in the document body. And there are just a few features where we still move things around in the document model between the body and the special section for red lines and those are the document compare and merge features which are relatively obscure. And then there is the ODF filter in particular where ODF is defined in such a way that the track changes are well not in the document body they are also in a separate XML element that precedes the document body. And because the import and export filter for ODF work via the UNO API it turns out that we have to move the red lines into the special notes array section in order for that to continue to work. And then there are two properties on the UNO component for the writer document where you are still able to move the to call set red line red line flags internally and to move things around in the document model. Those are the show changes and red line display type properties and the reason why I haven't changed these is that it's possible that there are macros extensions whatever that rely on this current implementation of what they do. And I'm not sure if that is really the case so I just left it like that for now. And yeah in every other case where you do some editing operation in writer the if set red line flags is called then it will do nothing because the flags are already set to have the red lines in the body and the call wants to move them to the body so it does nothing. So yeah we can basically conclude that this performance issue of that that occurs when you edit your writer document is now fixed. Okay this is good because yeah we are at the end and all that remains is that I have to thank our sponsor the city of Munich without whom this work would not be possible. Yes so thank you for your attention. No it's the same. No that what that does is it sets a character automatic style property and a paragraph property so that is the purpose of these properties is that you can compare documents. So these are called RSIDs. So if you have what if you start with one document and then you edit it on one side and edit it on another side and you will have the initial text with one RSID or with a common set of RSIDs in the one branch you have a different kind of RSID. And then the other branch you have also a different kind of RSID so you can match you can see see that these two branches with two different RSIDs from different editing operations and the other things that have the same RSID are from the common ancestor. So then you know when in the compare feature what was deleted what was inserted basically on each of these branches and so on. So I think that's what those features are useful but I don't actually have anything to do with the implementation of them so I'm just trying to remember. So any changes document or that's hard to come by that's the computational complexity that is there for each time you press the key? Yeah I mean I think you could rate for several seconds if you have a thousand red lines or something like that if you just hit backspace. I haven't done really any extensive timing there but at least our customer said that with their test documents they could see that it was the editing operation that was previously slow was now basically instantaneous. So extending change tracking to other types of objects than plain text. Yeah I mean I think it's sort of orthogonal to this work so yeah shouldn't have much of an effect I think. No more questions I think. Oh we are over time we should stop.


Now, we will move on to lesser common neoplasms which are infrequently seen very rarely. Some people will see this once or twice in their career. Again, brain tumors in itself are rare, of the brain tumors, the glial tumors are the most common ones. The other tumors are unique that they arise from each specific cell line and according to the cell line, we will move from one tumor to another and I will just enumerate the most common of those. There are other tumors that I will not get into which are more rare tumors and are very unusual form of tumors which can be treated just as a general holistic approach of how you would approach a brain tumor based on my first lecture. But the most common of the rare tumors, I will go cell by cell in each different category and talk about them. Now, that we will first approach the epitominal lining. This is the big lining which lines the epitominal system right from lateral ventricles down all the way through the fourth ventricle apolaminoplusica. These are all lined, the ventricles are lined by oscillated epithelium called epitominal cells. Now, when a neoplasm arises from these cells, they can be classified as epitominal cell tumor. There are two types of this. One is epitomal and the second is subepitomal. The more malignant is the epidemoma and more benign is the subepidemoma. Both these arise along the epidemomal lining. So let's start with the subepidemoma which is more benign. Now the picture over here is of an epidemoma. The subepidemoma is a more solid tumor. It is a very slow-growing tumor. Some people almost classify it as a benign tumor. It is a WHO1 classification tumor. It does not metastatize very infrequently, if ever will metastatize. It is confined just as this description is. It is subepidemomal in location. It is iso-to-hypointense on T1. It will be as I mentioned earlier, masses have mass effects. So this will be a mass lesion with a very narrow zone of transition, iso-to-hypointense on T1. Sly hyperintense on T2 examination, generally a solid. It may approach heterogeneity if it gets very big and is almost never associated with enhancement. Once resected, it is almost like treated. The second form is which is the more malignant one is the epidemoma, which again arises from the ciliated cells epidemomal lining, which can arise anywhere from the lateral ventricle, superior frontal horn aspect down to the fourth ventricle. Now both epidemoma and subepidemoma frequently arise from fourth ventricle. Common location about greater than 50% are in the fourth ventricle. And epidemoma happens to be the more aggressive one, which is generally low intensity on T1. Hyperintense on T2, frequently associated with cystic foci or micro-cystic foci, can have fine calcifications, which are not clearly are obviously seen, but can be appreciated on SWI images, not so frequently seen on CT images and is associated with intense enhancement in its solid component. Now this solid component is the main tumor and this solid component will show enhancement and may frequently show areas of restricted diffusion because of its cellularity. It is also associated with areas of hemorrhage, again, which will be appreciated on the SWI images. This is classified as WHO2 and frequently as WHO3 as far as the tumor, just because of its aggressive nature. When it abuts the extents into the brain parankyma, it causes a significant vasogenic reaction. It has T2 hyperintensity, wide zone of transition, frequently associated with a hydrocephalus, which may both be related to cell debris, metastasis, like as in seen in coroate plexus papilloma or papillary carcinoma, or may be related to obstructive hydrocephalus. Both of these conditions entities can do that, causing hydrocephalus. Now the important thing about this is it breaches the epinema lining. So it is directly exposed as a neoplasm within the ventricular lining. It can cause drop metastasis. It can metastatize anywhere along the neural axis. So our job when this patient comes in and we see a mass lesion in a lobulated fashion extending into the ventricular lining. Now this may be not specific for epinema. It will be common for medial blastoma, coroate plexus papilloma, coroate plexus papillary carcinoma, or even if you see a central neurocytoma, which generally does not cause any drop metastasis. But once it is there, extending into the central cavity of the CSF, our job is to do imaging of the entire neural axis. The patient should not go home from the MR scanner without getting a full neural axis examination and to all wait for drop metastasis, which will be seen as leptomeningal enhancement, nodularity along the corpus callosum. So these kind of things. So we will have to image the entire neural axis pre and post contract. So this is a case of epinema. It's a pretty aggressive neoplasm, has a solid cystic component, has intense enhancement. This is another case. Again, this is projecting into the brain. Parenchyma has a solid and a cystic component, intense enhancement of the solid component. And here, if you see the periphery of the cyst is also enhancing. That means this is not an cyst as seen with hemangioblastoma or juvenile palo septic astrocytoma, but the cyst is not component of neoplasm. The solid component is the component of neoplasm. In this case, the entire cyst is enhancing. The cyst is also a component of the neoplasm. And when the surgeon goes in, he has to distinct the entire cystic as well as solid component, unlike what we see in hemangioblastoma, where only the solid component needs to be dissected. So this is a very aggressive form of ependemoma projecting into the brain parenchyma. And in this case, there was no leptomineal enhancement. There was no drop metastasis. But once you see this condition extending into the ventricular lining, in the last sagittal and coronal sequences, you can see it extends and abuts the ventricular lining. So this is an ependemoma. Can be confused as an glioblastoma multiforme, but this turned out to be an ependemoma. Once you see this, you do an entire neural access examination. Once again, the important thing in this case when the patient is in the MR scanner is to call the clinician and tell him about the herniation, because that is what is going to kill the patient. Not this tumor immediately, but this mass effect and herniation can decompensate and kill the patient within a matter of a day. So this is what we have to mention and call the clinician and see what he wants, whether he wants the patient to go to the ER or to his clinic, but this patient should not go home from this point. So these are the two main entities arising from the ependemol lining, which is ependemoma, which is the emellignant one. Some ependemoma, which is a benign one. Moving on to the next tumor cell line, we would be talking about the choroidal cell lines. This is the cells which are lining the choroidal matter. So this is, as we know, the choroid plexus extends from the lateral ventricles, passing through the foramen monorho and then through the third ventricle into the fourth ventricle and from there into the foramen of Lusca. So as by definition, a tumor rising from these choroidal cells can arise anywhere along the choroid plexus. These two. So a cauliflower sitting in the left atrial region, lateral ventricle, intense enhancement, associated hydrocephalus. This is not touching the ependemol lining. This is arising from the choroid plexus. So this would be a classist choroid plexus papilloma or papillary carcinoma, but in this case, the choroid plexus papilloma. Now another one, this is a pediatric patient, iso-intense to gray matter signal intensity, iso-to-hyper-intensity to signal in the same area, lob-related cauliflower type of lesion, intense enhancement, clearly associated and attached to the choroid plexus, severe hydrocephalus, unless proven otherwise, this is going to be choroid plexus papilloma or papillary carcinoma. And again, this is a situation just like we talked about in ependemomas. You see this thing? It is our moral responsibility to image the entire neural axis and look for drop metastasis and that is what we will be using to differentiate between choroid plexus power versus papillary carcinoma. So this is an aggressive form. This is not WHO-1. This would be WHO-2 or WHO-3. It's an aggressive neoplasm. It can invade the surrounding soft tissue. It can invade the brain, pattern, chima. It can be associated with areas of hemorrhage. It is frequently, in fact, almost very, very commonly associated with drop metastasis. Can be evaluated by CSF evaluation. By imaging, it will still be a large cauliflower shaped intensely enhancing lesion, sitting inside the ventricular system anywhere within the atrial region which is the most common area in children or within the fourth ventricle which is the most common area within the adult patient. Now, choroid plexus papillary carcinoma almost exclusively happens in children. Very rarely does it happen in adult patients. So this thing would be shedding tumor cells into the CSF. Moving on, I would like to mention another tumor which is arising in the ventricular system. Although we talked about conditions such as appendemoma, sub appendemoma, choroid plexus papilloma, papillary carcinoma. There are many other lesions that can arise from the ventricular lining or ventricular system such as center neurocytoma or SEGA or some giant cell astrocytoma which is frequently seen in tuberous sclerosis or meningioma or some normal variants like K1 septum palusidum, K1 verge, K1 intrepositum or you can see arachnoid cysts or infections such as neurosis to surfaces. All these things arise in the ventricular lining but all of these I would like to mention the choroid cyst over here at this point. So choroid cyst is basically a primitive neuroepithelium arising neoplasm that contains mucin, blood, old blood products, cholesterol, ions in different combinations.  So it is a very variable picture. It can be T1 hyperintense to T1 hyperintense. It can be T2 hyperintense to T2 hyperintense and can give you any signal on MRC. So in no specific signal is characteristic of a choroid cyst but what is very classic is it is almost always almost 100% of the time positive on CT as a hyperdense lesion. CT is much, much more sensitive where it is 95% positive on CT and only 60 to 75% sensitive on MRI examination. So the study of choice in a choroid cyst would be a CT examination, not an MRI examination. Now this presentation is somewhat classic for a choroid cyst where this is a pedunculated lesion that is adjacent to the foramina mondra. So occasionally depending on which side the patient is lying it causes occlusion of the foramina mondra and hydrocephalus or headache. So it will present with position headache. That with this hyperdense focus in this area is pathognomic for a choroid cyst. One thing that you have to differentiate is an aneurysm arising from an anterior communicating artery which is projecting superiorly. That is the critical thing. You don't want to put in a needle without knowing that this is an choroid cyst definitely or it is an aneurysm arising from the anterior communicating artery. So that is one test you want to make sure that you do. The important thing about this is it can cause positional instant occlusion, complete occlusion of CSF drainage and severe hydrocephalus which can potentially kill the patient. So this is a potentially fatal entity. Even though it looks very benign, most of the time almost majority of the time it is incidentally detected. Patient doesn't come specifically with headache or that generally depending on the size it can be associated with mild moderate or severe hydrocephalus. Majority of the time when we see it incidentally it is not associated with any hydrocephalus. Classic presentation, hyperdense cyst situated at the foramina mondra on CT examination. MR is somewhat unreliable here. We see an example of that. It can be very, very variable on intensities almost never associated with enhancement internally may have a mild form of capsular enhancement if at all but enhancement is not any special attribute to this region. It is not associated with restricted diffusion. It is not associated with any pulsation artifact which would be differentiating it from on the face direction on an anterior communicating artery. So moving on, how do we, when we see an intraventricular mass how do we approach it? So if it is a solid completely intraventricular mass lesion intensely enhancing not associated with any of the coroeplexus lining or the ependymal lining associated with restricted diffusion unless when otherwise it would be a meningioma. If it is an entirely cystic component complete cysts, CSF intensity or mixed signal intensity the differential would be arachnoid cyst when it is CSF intensity, cysticercosis when it is CSF intensity, neuropithelial cyst within it is CSF intensity, colloid cyst which we just talked about would be variable intensity. Then most of the time what we'll be seeing is mixed signal, mixed appearance both solid and cystic component. Now then we talked about this when it is attached to wall or coroid lining that is what we'll differentiate it. When it is attached to the wall then it will be ependymoma or subependymoma when it attached to the septum palusidum then it is going to be a central neuropsychoma if it is associated with foramidum mandro a lobulated mass in a patient with tuberculosis we will call it a SEGA or subependymal joint cell astrocytoma when it is not attached to the periphery when it is centrally located attached to the coroeplexus it is going to be a coroeplexus tumor or a coroeplexus metastasis. Now coroeplexus metastasis we could generally tend to underrated there are very, very common coroeplexus metastasis in a patient with diffused metastatic disease if you do the histology more often than not we will find tumor cells within the coroeplexus also. So we should not disregard this at an entity and the other would be a blood clot associated with the coroeplexi hematoma formation that would be the thing that we would and once it gets organized it can potentially enhance and give a mass like epigenes so this is how you would interpret tumor.