pimblr.com

Not to join the nabobs of negativism, but there is very little on paper that makes you think that the Stars can win this first-round series with the Ducks.
Some of the key numbers surrounding goalie Jean-Sebastien Giguere are just amazing. Bottom line, Giguere wins in the playoffs. He is 31-13 in three years in the postseason. He is 8-0 in overtime games. Meanwhile, Marty Turco is 11-18 and 2-8 in overtime games. Now, that’s not all on Turco, because he has done a wonderful job of stretching some of those games out to triple and quadruple overtime before losing, but it just goes to show you the difference between the teams and organizations.
Randy Carlyle has coached in two postseasons and taken the Ducks to the Western Conference finals one year and the Stanley Cup the next. He is 7-1 in playoff series. Dave Tippett has coached the Stars for four postseasons and is 1-4. Chris Pronger has been on two different teams the last two seasons, and both have gotten to the Stanley Cup Finals. There’s something special there when that happens. There’s a calm and a comfort in the postseason.
The Stars don’t seem to have that calm.
The Stars work as hard as any team out there, and they do a thousand things right. But they haven’t had the killer instinct in the playoffs when they have had a team down, and they haven’t had the poise to close out close games when the playoff pressure has been highest. That might be the defense, that might be the forwards, that might be Turco. It might be Tippett and his coaching staff. But the bottom line is that somebody somewhere has found a way to make the last mistake.

dallasnews.com

The Third Side Also Exists:
Regarding the Likely American Attack on Iran
by Nasser Zarafshan
In the current conflict over Iran, the most important question is what America’s real goal in Iran and the Middle East is. Why? Because, as long as we don’t have a certain and reliable answer to this question, as long as we don’t know what the opponent’s hidden real purpose in this crisis is, we are incapable of figuring out what is to be done, in other words, incapable of collectively taking the correct position on this situation. The American foreign policy leaders’ claim in this situation is very simple. They say that the objective of the American interference in this region is to spread democracy and human rights. Based on this claim, the social order that is currently dominant in the world, whose hegemon is America, pretends that there is no ulterior motive or interest and that there is nothing behind its interference. Pro-Americans in Iran and the region, too, naively repeat the same claim. However, does everyone in Iran and the region share the same naive interpretation of the matter? Below — to the extent that space in this short article allows — I will try to answer this question. But there is another question, too: when rights and freedoms of a nation are negated and trampled upon and its progress and development are blocked due to the domination of reactionaries, is it the duty of a destructive foreign power to restore this nation’s rights and freedoms and open the gate of progress and development? Where in history is there an instance of a foreign power, instead of the nation in question itself, doing any such thing?
Those who encourage foreign interference do not understand its implications and have no idea about the impacts of war on people’s lives. They propagandize a vulgar formula that insinuates that anyone who opposes war and foreign interference is in support of the Islamic Republic. There is no evidence for such a claim. Those who insist on it do so in order to "terrorize" the opponents of war and foreign interference and hide their own worship of foreign powers behind it.

mrzine.monthlyreview.org

On April 7, two indigenous Triqui women who worked at the community radio station La Voz que Rompe el Silencio (The Voice that Breaks the Silence), in the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala (Mixteca region), were shot and murdered while on their way to Oaxaca City to participate in the State Forum for the Defense of the Rights of the Peoples of Oaxaca. Three other people were injured.
The two community radio activists were supposed to coordinate the working group for Community and Alternative Communication: Community Radio, Video, Press, and Internet, at the State Forum for the Defense of the Rights of the People of Oaxaca, which was to begin on April 9 in the auditorium of the teachers union in Oaxaca. The Center for Community Support Working Together (CACTUS) released a statement denouncing the murders and demanding that the state authorities investigate and punish those responsible for the crime. Twenty 7.62 caliber bullet shells were found at the site of the murders, along with other arms including an AK-47. International supporters have been asked to contact their local embassies and consulates and organize demonstrations condemning the paramilitary repression of indigenous women and community media projects.
On April 7, two indigenous Triqui women who worked at the community radio station La Voz que Rompe el Silencio (The Voice that Breaks the Silence), in the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala (Mixteca region), were shot and murdered while on their way to Oaxaca City to participate in the State Forum for the Defense of the Rights of the Peoples of Oaxaca. Three other people were injured.
The two community radio activists were supposed to coordinate the working group for Community and Alternative Communication: Community Radio, Video, Press, and Internet, at the State Forum for the Defense of the Rights of the People of Oaxaca, which was to begin on April 9 in the auditorium of the teachers union in Oaxaca. The Center for Community Support Working Together (CACTUS) released a statement denouncing the murders and demanding that the state authorities investigate and punish those responsible for the crime. Twenty 7.62 caliber bullet shells were found at the site of the murders, along with other arms including an AK-47. International supporters have been asked to contact their local embassies and consulates and organize demonstrations condemning the paramilitary repression of indigenous women and community media projects.

de.indymedia.org

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — Detroit Tigers reliever Jason Grilli has every confidence he will continue to do a good job this season. He just hopes Tigers fans will acknowledge the same thing.
Grilli got off to a rough start last season — he had an ERA of 7.59 in his first 16 outings — and the fans let him hear about it. Even though Grilli turned it around in the second half of the year — he had an ERA of 3.70 in his last 41 appearances — he had a tough time shaking his shaky reputation.
“They have the right, they buy a ticket and they can boo me or cheer me,” Grilli said. “But I obviously wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t doing my job.”
“I think I’ve been pretty consistent, and, hopefully, I can change their tune a little bit as well.”
Manager Jim Leyland said the Tigers need Grilli to have a strong season.
• Friday’s news: The game against the Houston Astros was rained out after one full inning. Magglio Ordonez hit a two-run homer in the top of the inning to give the Tigers a 2-0 lead, but then a steady rain came down and it was called after a 32-minute delay.
• Inge at shortstop: Brandon Inge got his first work at shortstop — even if it was for just one inning — and he could see more action there before the spring is over. “I just want to see what he looks like out there. I know he played it in college,” Tigers manager Jim Leyland said. “I’ll give the people up there something to talk about and you (reporters) something to write about. You’ll have him the starting shortstop by next week.”
When asked about Inge’s overall athleticism, Leyland said: “Probably the best. For his ability to play as many positions as he can play, he could be the best in the big leagues, I would think.”

mlive.com

Between fans of the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, even over the winter the sniping never really ends, it just becomes a little more muted than during the regular season.
This year in particular, the offseason seemed more bombastic than usual, what with members of both organizations getting involved and ratcheting up the noise. First, A-Rod stepped on Red Sox toes with the ill-timed World Series announcement that he was opting out of his contract. He says it was his agent’s idea and that he regrets the timing, but that was just the first volley anyway.
After that came Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon’s remark to a reporter that the Series-clinching ball, the one he supposedly had in his possession, had been eaten by his dog. The dog’s name? "Boss," of course, what else?
Move on to spring training, where Hank Steinbrenner railed against Boston’s "Red Sox Nation," much to the delight of Red Sox fans everywhere. Steinbrenner promised to restore order to the universe by beating the Sox, and everyone else, and earning a Yankee World Championship.
Finally, Boston management responded by enrolling Mr. Steinbrenner in Red Sox Nation and sending him a David Ortiz autographed hat as a peace offering. Needless to say, that peace offering went unaccepted.
From a Red Sox perspective, then, the Yankees are the hated enemy, the thorn in their side, the bane of their existence. As a kid born and raised outside Boston, I can testify to the truth of that statement, and undoubtedly the same thing is true of Yankee fans everywhere, who used to say, "You have to win once in a while for it to be a rivalry," in a not-so-subtle nod to the fact that while the Red Sox were going 86 years without a championship, the Yankees were racking them up with regularity. Well, now that the Sox have won a couple, it seems the rivalry has become invigorated and reached a renewed intensity.

msn.foxsports.com

EveryZing (formerly named Podzinger) is a Boston based company that has announced a suite of products for video search, EveryZing’s ezSearch product lets media companies offer their users a single integrated search box for audio, video, images, and text. Once ezSearch has blended results into a unified database, the company’s ezSEO service can then make all that content easier to find.
The promise that ezSEO could virtually automate video search optimization led me to interview EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde.
He told me that EveryZing uses voice recognition technology developed by BBN (the pioneering engineering company that was so involved with the birth of the Internet that they get credit for using the @ sign in email addresses) for the federal government to use in homeland security.
EveryZing already has clients using their hosted services, including Boston.com, Reuters, Dow Jones, and powerhouse Boston radio station WEEI. Since EveryZing can time stamp every word they extract from a video, a user who missed a WEEI interview with Patriot’s quarterback Tom Brady could skip directly to the parts of the interview they are most interested in.
Tom says “We make multimedia discoverable across the Web and them enhancing user engagement with the content with better search. If consumers can find what they want quickly they’ll consume more.”
EveryZing describes ezSEO as the first comprehensive SEO solution for connecting audio and video content to the major search engines. The solution is oriented towards sites with large amounts of archived or legacy content that is not currently indexed. ezSEO works behind the scenes of a website to unearth content in a way that search engines can find it. It automatically extracts keywords, topics, and other information and then uses BBN proprietary natural language processing to identify key terms, concepts, places, and people so as to create automatic tags for the content. The technology continuously “learns” what a site’s multimedia is about so when new content is added, the system automatically knows about it, analyzes it, and publishes new, highly “searchable” pages instantaneously.

searchengineland.com

Winter Haven, Fla. — The Indians and Winter Haven were a marriage of convenience from the start.
In 1993, after nearly 50 years in Arizona, the Indians were bound for a brand new spring-training site in Homestead, Fla., until Hurricane Andrew shattered the ballpark and their plans.
And after 27 springs, the Red Sox had just bolted Winter Haven for a snazzy new place in Fort Myers.
So this city had an empty ballpark and training grounds. And the Indians needed a home.
They took their vows and were quickly united.
But after 16 years, the union ends Thursday when the Indians play their final spring training game at Chain of Lakes Park against the Tampa Bay Rays.
The Indians haven’t officially killed their contract with Winter Haven yet, leaving a safety net in case Goodyear falls behind schedule. But if all goes as planned, by this time next year, the club will have traded palm trees and a wrinkled, old companion for a custom-built trophy wife in the desert. Goodyear, Ariz., awaits, arms — and purse — wide open.
That the relationship lasted this long is surprising, given the ballclub’s demands, the city’s indifference and the economic realities of spring training.
The Indians, whose 10-year lease with options to extend it expired in 2003, have publicly sought suitors to build them a new home for the past several years. Their finally leaving is more a slow end to a trial separation than a divorce notice suddenly arriving in the mail.
So tears are few — at both ends.
“I am not sorry to see them go,” said 62-year-old businessman Sam Killebrew, who was born and raised in Winter Haven and chairs the city’s chamber of commerce. “It was costing our government a half-a-million dollars. Economically, it was hurtin’ us.”
Gracious in goodbye, Indians General Manager Mark Shapiro said the club appreciated the convenience of Florida and Winter Haven’s support through the years. But what the team needs neither Winter Haven nor any other city in Florida was willing to provide: a state-of-the-art complex where players train, improve and mend year-round.

blog.cleveland.com