text: If you’ve ever sat through a boring First Aid class you know the instructor makes all the difference!
  5) Will they waste your precious time telling their own stories? - "When I was a volunteer firefighter..."
  SCOTT CITY, KS — The All-GWAC football and volleyball teams were announced on Thursday. Combined football & volleyball their were 19 athletes from Colby & Goodland that were honored, 13 from Colby & nine from Goodland.
  You are receiving this memo to remind you of the requirements for submitting reports, resolutions and petitions to be considered by annual conference.
  Please refer to the “Rules” Section X of the Conference Journal – Rules 27 & 28 address the submission requirements. You can view the rules in the Journal here: https://www.nyac.com/files/journal/nyac-2016-journal-section-10.pdf
  “All reports, resolutions and petitions to be considered by the annual conference shall be in the hands of the conference secretary six weeks before the beginning date of the annual conference in order to be included in the Conference Program Booklet.”
  “All resolutions or petitions for conference consideration shall be signed by at least five members of the conference, with the exception of petitions from local churches, which shall have been adopted by majority vote of the respective church’s Church Council (or equivalent structure) or Charge Conference.”
  For 2018 reports, petitions and resolutions are due no later than Thursday, April 26th! Please make every effort to meet this due date.
  Prepare your report as an editable Word document – yes WORD document (not more than 700 words), using this heading as a guide:
  Note that “Reports, resolutions and petitions failing to adhere to the five-day deadline shall not be considered by the annual conference.”
  A version of this archives appears in print on July 10, 1875, on Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: THE DEATH OF GEN. FRANK P. BLAIR. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
  THE FACTS -- It's an age-old rule about drinking, one that everyone knows and most people have broken: always fill up on food before filling up on alcohol.
  Common wisdom, of course, suggests a simple reason, that drinking on an empty stomach will lead to intoxication more quickly. But just how much of a difference does eating before imbibing really make?
  According to several studies and experts on alcohol, a lot. In 1994, one team of Swedish researchers set out to answer the question by having a group of 10 people consume a few drinks on two separate days.
  In one case they drank after an overnight fast, and in the other, they drank after they ate a modest breakfast.
  On the day the subjects ate, the rate of intoxication was slower, even though the amount of alcohol had not changed. But the subjects also reached significantly lower blood-alcohol levels over all -- on average about 70 percent of what they were on the day they skipped breakfast.
  In some cases, the study found, having a meal before drinking kept a person from climbing over the legal blood-alcohol limit for driving in most states.
  Dr. Harris B. Stratyner, an addiction specialist and associate professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center, said it all had to do with metabolism.
  As soon as alcohol is consumed, he said, the body starts to break it down, but some is always absorbed directly into the bloodstream.
  Having food in the stomach -- particularly proteins, fats and dense carbohydrates -- slows that absorption process.
  The things that speed it up are carbonated mixers, like soda, and higher temperatures. (Warm drinks are absorbed faster.) Once alcohol is in your blood, Dr. Stratyner said, neither coffee nor a cold shower will get it out any faster.
  A version of this article appears in print on December 6, 2005, on Page F00005 of the National edition with the headline: REALLY?. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
  SINGAPORE: — A legal backlash against the sale to Singapore of Thailand's leading telecommunications conglomerate by Thaksin Shinawatra and his family gathered steam Thursday when a top Thai court accepted a lawsuit aiming to revoke the company's key licenses.
  The $1.9 billion purchase in January of a controlling stake in Shin Corp. by a group of investors led by the Singapore government's investment arm, Temasek Holdings, triggered a wave of protests that culminated the military coup last month that removed Thaksin as prime minister. The deal gave Temasek control over Thailand's leading cellular operator, as well as a satellite company and a television broadcaster.
  On Thursday, Thailand's Supreme Administrative Court overturned a decision - made before the coup by a lower court - to reject the lawsuit. In the suit, a Thai academic charges the country's regulators with failing to prevent what he claims was the unlawful sale of national telecommunications services to a foreign investor. The suit demands that the licenses to operate those services be withdrawn.
  The plaintiff, Satra Toh-on, a law lecturer at Rangsit University, filed his original suit with the Central Administrative Court in March. The court rejected the suit on the ground that Satra was not a party to the transaction. But on Thursday, the Supreme Administrative Court ruled that Satra could claim aggrieved status as a user of Shin's telecommunications services.
  While analysts said the case appeared weak, they said it was still noteworthy that the court had agreed to hear it.
  The administrative courts were established after the adoption of Thailand's 1997 Constitution to enable citizens to file grievances against the government. Consumer groups successfully convinced the court in March to block the Thaksin government from privatizing the national power utility. The court has since agreed to hear petitions to reverse his privatization in 2001 of the national oil company.
  The Shin deal is already under scrutiny. On Monday, the Ministry of Commerce turned over to the police a report suggesting that the sale involved the illegal use of proxies to evade Thailand's foreign-shareholding limit on telecommunications companies. Temasek and its Thai partners in the deal have denied that it involved the use of proxies.
  Elizabeth Murray, a New York painter who reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself, died yesterday at her home in upstate New York.
  The cause was complications of lung cancer, said Douglas Baxter, president of PaceWildenstein, which has represented her work since 1995.
  An intense, unpretentious woman with vivid blue eyes and an unruly nest of prematurely white hair, Ms. Murray received a full-dress retrospective spanning her 40-year career at the Museum of Modern Art in 2006, one of handful of women to be so honored. In 1999 she was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.
  Ms. Murray belonged to a sprawling generation of Post-Minimal artists who spent the 1970s reversing the reductivist tendencies of Minimalism and reinvigorating art with a sense of narrative, process and personal identity. Her art never fit easily into the available Post-Minimal subcategories like Conceptual, Process or performance art. This may have been because her loyalty to painting, which was out of fashion, was unwavering. At the same time, her blithe indifference to the distinctions between abstraction and representation or high and low could put off serious painting buffs.
  Elizabeth Murray in 1998 with one of her New York subway murals, at the 59th Street and Lexington Avenue station in Manhattan. Credit G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times
  Born in Chicago in 1940, Ms. Murray had a hardscrabble childhood that included bouts of homelessness caused in part by the ill health of her father. Ms. Murray traced her interest in art to watching a nursery-school teacher cover a sheet of paper with thick red crayon, an experience that she said gave her an indelible sense of the physicality of color. She drew constantly from an early age, inspired mostly by newspaper comic strips, and once sent a sketchbook to Walt Disney asking for a job as his secretary. By the fifth grade she was selling erotic drawings to classmates for a quarter.
  In 1958, she entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her goal, to become a commercial artist, was derailed by a Cézanne still life she passed regularly on the way to classes. She later said that the painting was “the first in which I lost myself looking,” and added, “I just realized I could be a painter if I wanted to try.”
  She graduated from the school in 1962 and earned an M.F.A. from Mills College in Oakland, Calif., in 1964. There she met the painter Jennifer Bartlett, who remained a lifelong friend, and married Don Sunseri, a classmate from the Art Institute.
  The paintings she made in California and during her first teaching job, in Buffalo, teemed with ambition, confusion and a penchant for a jokey figuration that qualified as “regional,” a popular pejorative at the time. But these works rehearsed all the aspects of her later art: eccentric dimensionality, large scale, crusty paint surfaces and suggestive, emotionally charged, implicitly autobiographical narratives conveyed by extravagant distortions of form.
  In the fall of 1967, Ms. Murray moved to New York, where exposure to the work of Mr. Marden and Richard Serra, and to that of lesser-known artists like Ellen Phelan, roiled her ambition. She came to know other artists who, like her friend Ms. Bartlett, were combining abstraction and imagery. They included Robert Moskowitz, Susan Rothenberg and Joel Shapiro.
  The birth of her son, Dakota, in 1969, also firmed her ambitions. She proceeded to dismantle and rebuild her art, replacing acrylic paint with oil paint — which she called “another kind of life form” — and working on small, rectangular canvases. In the majority, shaky black lines forming grids, ladders and fan shapes are embedded in tactile monochrome fields. By 1973, the year she and Mr. Sunseri divorced, the lines had turned into wavy curves and then mobius bands. She began exhibiting at the Paula Cooper Gallery in SoHo in 1973 and had her first solo show there in 1976.
  By 1978, with “Children Meeting,” now in the collection of the Whitney, big biomorphic splats of color jazzed by zigzag lines jostled one another. With “Painter’s Progress” in 1981, she reintroduced legible imagery in the form of a large pink palette shape and three orange brushes inspired by a neon sign in the window of an art supply store. Thereafter, Ms. Murray proceeded with a momentum that rarely weakened. In addition to paintings, she made drawings in all sizes and many mediums, as well as prints and illustrated books. In the early 1980s, she watched in dismay as the revival of painting that she had helped foment was taken over by young male Neo-Expressionists like Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Anselm Kiefer. But she also acknowledged that she benefited from the expansiveness of their work, even if she didn’t always like it.
  In many ways the term Neo-Expressionist fit her well as an artist who long maintained that “the subconscious is what you paint about.” Moving between fractured and whole, flat and protruding canvases, and color schemes that could be murky or electric, her paintings asserted themselves as an aggressive mixture of shape, color and surface. Her progress coincided with her happy second marriage, to the poet Bob Holman, and the birth of two daughters in the early 1980s.
  In addition to Mr. Holman, who is the founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, Ms. Murray is survived by their daughters, Sophia Murray Holman and Daisy Murray Holman; her son, Dakota Sunseri of Los Angeles; a sister, Susan Murray Resnick of Taos, N.M.; a brother, Thomas Murray, of St. Marys, Ga.; and two grandchildren.
  In the late-1980 and 1990s, Ms. Murray produced several large gritty canvases that appeared to have interiors, their bulging forms suggesting flattened vessels descended from her signature images of cups and goblets. Also around this time she designed two large mosaic murals for the New York City subway system: one is at the 59th Street and Lexington Avenue station in Manhattan and the other at the 23rd Street-Ely Avenue Station in Queens.
  Yet around 2000 she embarked on an entirely new phase in works that marshaled together numerous small, irregular but flat-shaped canvases into lighter works that for the first time incorporated liberal amounts of white.
  Ms. Murray grew testy when her coffee cups were described as teacups, which she considered dainty. As she remarked to the critic Elizabeth Hess in 1988, “Cézanne painted cups and saucers and apples, and no one assumed he spent a lot of time in the kitchen.”
  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Elizabeth Murray, Artist Of Vivid Forms, Dies at 66. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
  WASHINGTON — Austin, Tex., drew the largest numbers of young Americans from 2007 through 2009, according to an analysis by a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, replacing Riverside, Calif., which was the most popular destination for young people in the middle of the decade.
  Migration slowed greatly during the recession, and rates have continued to remain low. But in an analysis of migration still occurring among some of the country’s most mobile citizens — people ages 25 to 34 — the cities at the top of the list were those that had remained economically vibrant, like Dallas, and those that were considered hip destinations, like Austin and Seattle, the demographer, William H. Frey, found.
  In the middle of the decade, before the recession, the top five destinations were Riverside, Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston and Charlotte, N.C., according to the analysis, which was based on Census Bureau data. Austin ranked ninth in that period, and Las Vegas was No. 10.
  Cities like Las Vegas and Riverside became popular destinations in the last decade, when overheated housing markets were churning growth and jobs. But since the recession began, they have fallen in the list of choices.
  From 2007 through 2009, the most recent data available, Dallas, Denver and Seattle moved into the top five. Riverside fell to 10th place, and Las Vegas to 24th.
  A version of this article appears in print on January 12, 2011, on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Young People Are Heeding Austin’s Call, Data Shows. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
  Built in 1900, this building consists of 5 floors, made up of 8 apartments, 1 of which are currently for sale, and none are available for rent. Located in New York's Chelsea neighborhood.
  Regional Facilities Auckland has proposed the stadium be developed into a world-class cricket ground, once it's phased out as a motorsport venue next summer.
  In its submission to the Auckland Council, New Zealand Cricket said Auckland is currently missing out on international cricket exposure, primarily due to the lack of a cost-effective, financially-viable venue.
  Concerns were also raised that the current economic benefits top-level cricket could bring to Auckland were considerably lower than what they should be.
  NZC said developing a fit-for-purpose and multi-use cricket venue was essential for bringing more tests, one-day internationals, and Twenty20 internationals to Auckland, as well as upcoming tournaments of significance such as the women's World Cup.
  "We'll certainly be seeing some cricket at Eden Park of course, but in terms of test match cricket, hosting is a challenge. [There's] No doubt about that from a financial perspective," White told Radio Sport.
  White said a new ground at Western Springs makes a lot of sense, as a proposed waterfront stadium would not suit cricket.
  "If that goes ahead, cricket wouldn't be involved because it's rectangular. Therefore we really support the Western Springs project. We like the concept. It's on a green belt with a natural amphitheatre 20,000-seat stadium and grass banking and a cricket-centric surrounding which our fans really enjoy."
  White said the ground might have a lower capacity than Eden Park, but the net costs of staging games there would be lower and that would make it more beneficial.
  "This facility has the potential to become the country's leading international cricket venue, as well as possibly accommodating NZC as a long-term tenant, and becoming a high-performance base for servicing professional men's and women's players.
  "With NZC headquarters already located in Auckland, and the North Island lacking a dedicated, elite cricket training venue, the value of the latter point cannot be underestimated."
  The submission supported flexibility at the venue, with the likes of a drop-in pitch, so it could also host non-cricketing events and activities.
  "Genuine cricket grounds, by dint of their grass fields and terraces, have long proved ideal spaces to complement other modes of entertainment, adding to the financial well-being of a venue," the submission surmised.
  The question over where to play cricket in Auckland has plagued the city's sporting landscape for years.
  NZC were committed to Eden Park last summer, because the ground was deemed the best option to host the country's inaugural day-night test - against England.
  On the other hand, Mt Maunganui's Bay Oval has shown it is capable of meeting the day-night brief. Eden Park also remains the best venue to cater for big crowds, such as the 35,000 fans attending the Australia-New Zealand T20 pool match in February.
  Debate has raged over the ground's small size, as referenced by White, with critics saying it detracts from the spectacle.
  Eden Park remains International Cricket Council-compliant because of a grandfather clause [it was an established ground before the latest regulations on minimum ground size].
  The NZC and RFA positions suggest a shift from what has been Auckland's cricket home since the New Zealand-England test in February 1930.
  However, funding the new stadium and finding speedway an alternative home after a legacy of 90 years will remain a sticking point.
  Auckland Cricket would also prefer to stick with the status quo. As an original owner of the Eden Park site, they are offered guarantees with their existing deal. Those include an annuity of approximately $330,000 under the Eden Park Trust Amendment Act 2009. That is further supplemented by cost savings on office space - as tenants at the ground - carparks, and the maintenance and use of the indoor facility.
  Auckland, via Eden Park, has been used as a test venue three times in the past 12 years for matches against England in 2013 and 2018, and India in 2014.
  Purpose-built cricket grounds such as Hamilton's Seddon Park, Wellington's Basin Reserve, Christchurch's Hagley Oval and Dunedin's University Oval have been preferred for the game's longest form.
  Rotorua's Max Bragg, 74, is going to compete in his age group at the Ironman 70.3 World Championships in South Africa. Photo/Stephen Parker
  This weekend the 74-year-old flies to South Africa to compete in his age group at the Ironman 70.3 World Championships.
  He qualified for the event, being held at Nelson Mandela Bay on September 2, by winning the 70-74 age group at Ironman 70.3 Taupō last year. He finished that race in 6h 18m 44s, almost an hour faster than second place.
  Bragg and his wife Doris have been regular fixtures in the Rotorua Marathon, and a wealth of other running events, for decades.
  "I've been a runner for years, with Lake City Athletic Club, and a few years ago I decided to have a go at triathlon. I had a hard job learning how to swim, because I wasn't a swimmer, but I persevered.
  "I did a quarter and some half Ironmans then started training for a full Ironman. The first one I tried, two years ago, the water was very rough and I never finished it. I came back again this year and finished it. It was the most sensational feeling, one of the greatest things you can do in your life.
  "There's so much commitment and training that goes into an Ironman that when you complete it, it's 10 times better than completing a marathon," Bragg said.
  More than 130,000 athletes participate in a season of qualifying races for the championship in South Africa, a series which comprises more than 85 events in locations such as New Zealand Australia, Germany, South Africa and Switzerland.
  More than 3000 people will participate in the Ironman 70.3 World Championships, ranging in age from 18 to 75-plus, from more than 70 countries.
  We are excited to introduce the 2018 Isuzu IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship South Africa bike course! Check it out ⬇️
  "I've qualified the last two years, actually, but decided not to go because my focus was on completing the full Ironman. That was in Chattanooga in Tennessee - I regret not doing that, I'd like to go there. But, when I won my age group again last December and heard it was in South Africa I said 'I'm not turning it down this time'.
  "I've got maps of the course and video of the bike course. Probably the biggest concern I have is the water temperature at Port Elizabeth, I've heard, is 13 degrees at the moment. That is cold. Hopefully it's warmed up by the time we get there.
  "To be honest it has been bloody hard, winter training is not a lot of fun. I swim at 5.30am outside at the aquatic centre. We've been doing up to three or four-hour bike rides at the weekends and sometimes the temperature is about zero when we start.
  "But, you do it, that's just what you have to do. I feel ready. I've always been a marathon runner and I just love the sport - where it takes you and all the people you meet.
  "We've been Lake City members since day one and we were members of the Ngongotahā club for 10 years before Lake City was formed."
  "We saw Cape Town on Travel Guides on TV and we've got a half-day safari booked, a harbour cruise, a cultural show, we've got plenty of things to do. It will be nice to have a holiday after competing."
  This is the first year an Ironman World Championship event has been held on an African continent. Located in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, Nelson Mandela Bay first hosted an Ironman event in 2004 and has been the site of the Ironman African Championship since 2015. The world championship is the pinnacle event in the global Ironman 70.3 calendar.
  Nicknamed "The Friendly City", Port Elizabeth was founded in 1820 and has steadily grown into an economic hub of more than 300,000 inhabitants. In 2010, Port Elizabeth played host to eight games of the Fifa World Cup held in South Africa.
  NZORD are very happy to announce the appointment of Letitia O’Dwyer to the role of Chief Executive. Letitia has over 20 years’ experience in the health sector - specifically around; introducing new health technologies, improving access to pharmaceuticals, initiating imaging and diagnostic trials, and establishing international healthcare networks. She holds a Bachelor of Science, a Post Graduate Diploma in Business and a Masters in Health Management from the University of Auckland. Letitia is dedicated to improving healthcare outcomes in New Zealand via research, and facilitating the connection of decision makers in the healthcare/patient pathway. She lives in central Wellington with her partner Scott, and their blended family of 5.
  We would like to thank Olivia Baddeley for stepping up to the role of Acting Chief Executive whilst the recruitment process was underway. Olivia’s contribution and knowledge is invaluable and appreciated by the entire NZORD team, we are extremely fortunate that Olivia will stay on with NZORD and would like to congratulate her on her appointment to the role of Senior Adviser.
  NZORD’s new website was launched at the end of May, hopefully many of you have had a chance to check out the website, which the team are very proud of. It is a work in progress with lots of ideas going forward on how to keep the site fresh and informative.
  The photographs on the site feature some families from our support groups, the photos bring a fresh look to the website and create lots of visual interest. The photography was carried out by Kelly McQuinlan and her husband who are based in Auckland.
  If anyone has any feedback on the site, please do not hesitate to get in touch with Lyndal Bremer on
  Recently, the NZORD team received a call from Angela Thomsen at John McGlashan College in Dunedin, which is a boy’s secondary school for year’s 7 to 13. Angela had phoned to tell the team that earlier this year the school ran a reading fundraiser to encourage reading in years 7 to 10 and that NZORD was the school's chosen charity. The students raised over $3,000 which is an outstanding effort. The NZORD team were blown away by the news and amazed at the amount the students raised for NZORD. Let’s hope that the boys are enjoying their reading and that they are reading more than ever!
  The NZORD team cannot thank the boys and the staff at John McGlashan College enough, to have chosen NZORD as their charity is very humbling and hugely appreciated.
  Since John left NZORD in June 2015, he has been kept busy working on the Folic Acid debate. John has attended meetings and reported back that the baking industry have just met targets of 25% of packaged bread being fortified – so certainly room for improvement.
  The target for December 2016 is to have 50% of packaged bread fortified. However, some factors are hampering these efforts, many folic acid factories in China have been closed by emission standard enforcement, and the price of folic acid has increased substantially.
  Despite these setbacks, efforts are continuing on bread fortification. It is hoped that solid data in the coming months from the NZ Birth Defects registry will provide firm figures to discuss rather than estimates.
  This year Rare Disease Day is happening on a leap year, which makes it an extra special day. Make sure you block out Monday 29 February in your diaries. The team at NZORD are beginning to think of how we will mark the day, the website has been updated so if you are super organised, feel free to register your event now. If you have any photos from events held last year, it would be great to add these to the website, please email these to lyndal.bremer@nzord.org.nz
  Many support groups will be hearing from NZORD over the next month or two. Daniel Webby who founded the PNH support group has been contracted to the role of Support Group Liaison. Daniel’s project is designed to better understand the challenges and opportunities facing rare disease communities here in New Zealand.