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"We're both entrepreneurial, and we liked the idea of bringing a good, healthy-food option to Dallas," Cohanim says. "We both have a passion for the hospitality industry, for restaurants, hotels, nightlife, and we saw that the poke trend hadn't yet hit Dallas."
There'll be a menu on the wall with signature poke bowls and a weekly special. Diners can also build their own, starting with bases such as bamboo rice, citrus kale salad, kelp noodle zucchini slaw, or cauliflower rice. From there, they can add proteins such as include tuna, salmon, albacore, or tofu, and accompaniments such as serrano peppers, avocado, and even macadamia nuts. A drizzle of sauce, and your poke is ready to roll.
The second component is a matcha bar, with drinks made with Japanese green tea, incorporating juices such as watermelon, and nut milks such as almond and macadamia.
"That's also a trend; there are these places making lattes, iced drinks, even alcoholic beverages with matcha," Cohanim says. "It's said to have all these health benefits, including detoxing and antioxidants."
Finally, there's the raw bar, which will serve sushi as well as novelties such as sashimi "tacos" and a crispy rice spicy tuna burger.
"Jimmy Park not only does some of the best sushi in Dallas, but he also has a great personality," Cohanim says. "People love him not only for his food but because he's fun to interact with."
They're enthused about their location, which has undergone a meaningful remodel. "West Village did a good thing by breaking up the top and bottom floor," Cohanim says. "They're looking at turning the lower level into an event space. We have the ground level space."
This is going to be more than a restaurant, he says. "There's nothing like this here," he says. "For us, it's about more than opening a poke restaurant. We're hoping to create an experience."
He spent so much time focused on winning over Democrats, he forgot what made his governorship significant in the first place.
It's easy to forget now, but New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was a hero to the Right during his first year in office. He became a fiscally conservative icon for pushing through a budget that focused on spending cuts, particularly to a bloated public sector. The governor tackled entitlements, reducing billions in scheduled pension payments. And he made his mark as an education reformer, aggressively challenging teachers' unions, calling for eliminating tenure, and proposing merit pay for top teachers.
It was this phase of the Christie governorship that put him on the national political map. His zest for political theater along with his commitment to conservative principles in a reliably Democratic state had some Republicans pining for him to run for president in 2012. Early national polls showed him as popular with the tea-party wing of the GOP as among moderates. Any discomfort over his more-moderate position on gun control and immigration was overshadowed by his charisma and zeal in attacking his liberal critics.
But at some point, he replaced his devotion to policy with a devotion to reelection. The cult of Christie went into overdrive after Hurricane Sandy hit, when he developed a politically beneficial alliance with President Obama: Praise the federal government's handling of the recovery and receive ample federal funding. Obama got a reelection boost while Christie used that episode to begin his relentless courtship of Democratic allies in preparation for 2013.
Almost simultaneously, he began attacking conservative elements of his own party, knowing they polled particularly poorly in New Jersey. He enjoyed taking shots at tea-party Republicans in Congress who were concerned about the level of federal spending appropriated for storm relief. He appointed an interim senator who didn't want to run to fill the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg's seat, allowing Democrat Cory Booker to win election without serious opposition. Before the storm, he irked Romney allies with a self-indulgent convention keynote address with sparse mentions of his party's presidential nominee.
There's nothing unusual about moving to the middle as reelection approaches — that's common for politicians in both parties. What's remarkable about Christie, though, is that the scandal now threatening his political future was borne of his obsession with winning Democratic support. Christie was already coasting to a second term when his staff pressured Democratic mayors for endorsements that were needed only to run up the score and build his bipartisan brand.
"He realizes he's popular because he's the Republican who hates the rest of the Republican Party and loves the media crack off of that," said Republican media strategist Rick Wilson, a Christie critic. "Christie could have acknowledged the president's help during Sandy without going out of his way to make it politically painful for Mitt Romney. There's something to be said for wearing the team jersey and sticking up for the team."
Bipartisanship is a welcome tonic for political gridlock, but Team Christie viewed it as a tool for his reelection, with his staff linking support for his candidacy to promises of economic development. In a state where machine politics still runs rampant, it's not particularly surprising. But for a candidate with presidential aspirations, the whole episode sounds more out of The Sopranos than effective state government.
These scandals are so damaging to Christie's presidential ambitions because they hit at the heart of what animates the tea-party movement: concern over government overreach. Tea-party-aligned Republicans have criticized the Obama administration and Republicans alike over earmarking, wasteful spending, and cronyism. Now Christie's administration has given an all-too-vivid illustration of the dangers of out-of-control government. Even if Christie had no direct connection to the George Washington Bridge scandal, it's becoming clear that his administration reveled in a play-to-pay culture where his government wielded outsized influence in picking winners and losers.
With Christie politically wounded, many now dismiss the idea that Christie was ever a top-tier candidate for the presidential nomination. But Republicans have regularly shown a willingness to nominate candidates who deviate from conservative orthodoxy, from Mitt Romney (2012) and John McCain (2008) to George H.W. Bush (1988). Even George W. Bush campaigned on a compassionate conservatism message as a subtle rebuke to the more-conservative forces in Congress at the time.
Christie's path to the presidency was running as a straight-talking outsider who accomplished a number of conservative reforms in a blue state. He still may have a shot. But in his zeal to raise his national profile, he lost what propelled him into the spotlight in the first place. It's becoming harder to imagine Republican voters will be eager to trade in Washington wheelers-and-dealers for the Trenton variety in 2016.
How trustworthy is NHS Digital?
It looks as though ministers are bullying supposedly the independent patient data agency to hand over private information to the Home Office despite an uncertain legal basis.
Between May 2013 and February 2016 a heated argument took place between Kingsley Manning, the chair of the Health and Social Care Information Centre (now called NHS Digital) on the one hand, and the Home Office and the Department of Health on the other. At stake was the HSCIC’s independence as an Executive Non-Departmental Body responsible to parliament, not to any minister, and its trustworthiness as the guardian of the personal details of every NHS patient in England.
After his appointment as chair in May 2013 Manning discovered that since at least 2005 the HSCIC and its predecessor, the NHS Information Centre, had been giving details of patients’ present and past addresses and GP registrations to the Home Office, to enable it to trace and deport people who were living in Britain without the right to do so. This appeared clearly to be in breach of the HSCIC’s ‘statutory duty to ensure that the information we hold in trust for the public is always kept safe, secure and private’. But the Home Office, supported by the Department of Health, insisted that tracing ‘illegal immigrants’ was a public interest that overrode any other. The outcome was a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between NHS Digital, the Department of Health and the Home Office, which specifies that NHS Digital will hand over the information requested by the Home Office for patients who have ‘breached s.24 of the Immigration Act 1971’, if all other ‘reasonable avenues’ (such as the Department of Work and Pensions and the DVLA) have been exhausted. The memorandum came into effect on 1 January this year.
Two questions need to be asked about the memorandum. First, what is the legal basis for the breach of confidentiality it normalises? The minutes of an NHS Digital Board meeting in August 2016 record that ‘NHS Digital had received internal advice that there is a high of risk of legal challenge but that there was a robust legal defence’. By the time of the Board’s November meeting this had become ‘we have established the legal basis for data flows to the HO [Home Office]’. Second, whom does the MoU’s codification of procedures protect? Evidently, at least NHS Digital. The Board insisted that the request form specified in the memorandum to be used by the Home Office should ‘note in the form that the form provides an explicit audit trail in the event of challenge or query’.
NHS Digital may still refuse to hand over information if it is not satisfied that there is a public interest in doing so. In practice, however, a public interest appears to be established if the Home Office says the details are those of someone who is in breach of the Immigration Act and can’t be traced in any other reasonable way.
The scale of these ‘data flows’ is not insignificant.
Source: NHS Digital data registers. In February 2017 the registers covered only the last nine months of 2013 and the first eleven months of 2016. To avoid understating the data for these years, data for the missing months have been added based on the averages for the reported months in the respective years.
The data release registers show that patient data are also routinely given to the police and the National Crime Agency (NCA), and to the courts in response to court orders (presumably relating to serious crime), without any MoU; and in 2016 the number of requests from the NCA (mainly) and the police increased by 40%, compared with 2015, accounting for a quarter of all the personal data that NHS Digital handed over last year – on what grounds, in these cases, and on the basis of what authority, we do not know. The effect of a memorandum of understanding seems simply to formalise an unaccountable practice with a debatable basis in law, but which the government wishes to continue. It will be interesting to see if this is compatible with the far-reaching new data protection regulations which will come into force in June.
NHS Digital is a critically important resource for high quality health care and its 2,700 staff have a well-earned reputation for competence and courtesy. But its independence, and public trust in its determination to protect patients’ privacy, have been seriously compromised, if not destroyed. The message sent by the MoU is, as a briefing by Doctors of the World points out, that ‘when it is politically expedient to do so, our personal information will be shared’. Trust can be restored only by ending the use of NHS Digital (along with landlords, schools and universities) as an agency of law enforcement. It would seem from his strongly-worded criticism that this was what Kingsley Manning wanted, and it is to his credit that we know as much about it as we do.
But why was it so relatively easy for the Home Office to have its way? Manning told the HSJ that he ‘came under immense pressure to leave matters as they were... The threat was that if we pursued this line of questioning we would be deemed to be an ‘insufficient partner within the system’. An ‘insufficient partner within the system’? What exactly was the threat in that? ‘If I didn’t agree to cooperate they would simply take the issue to Downing Street.’ How terrifying! The Board of NHS Digital have a statutory independence from government and, one would think, a moral duty to defend it. Manning announced his resignation in February last year, without giving any reasons. The memorandum was signed by his former colleagues in November.
This article was cross-posted from the Centre for Health and the Public Interest.
LOS ANGELES — The space shuttle Endeavour has landed for the final time, and its new owners can hardly believe that the historic vehicle is now in their hands.
Endeavour, flying piggyback atop its Boeing 747 carrier aircraft, touched down here at Los Angeles International Airport today (Sept. 21) to wrap up a nationwide farewell tour. The shuttle will stay at the airport for a few weeks, and then be ferried via surface streets to its museum retirement home, the California Science Center, in mid-October.
Museum officials have been looking forward to today since April 2011, when NASA announced that Endeavour was coming their way. So it feels a bit surreal that the shuttle is finally in LA, they said.
"It's pretty incredible, and it's incredibly emotional," Jeffrey Rudolph, president and CEO of the California Science Center, told SPACE.com a few hours before Endeavour touched down.
Space shuttle Endeavour, mounted atop a NASA 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) performs a low flyby at Los Angeles International Airport, Friday, Sept. 21, 2012. Endeavour, built as a replacement for space shuttle Challenger, completed 25 missions, spent 299 days in orbit, and orbited Earth 4,671 times while traveling 122,883,151 miles. Beginning Oct. 30, the shuttle will be on display in the California Science center's Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Endeavour Display Pavilion, embarking on its new mission to commemorate past achievements in space and educate and inspire future generations of explorers.
Endeavour's journey to the museum next month will be special as well. Over the course of two days — Oct. 12 and 13 — the shuttle will travel 12 miles (19 kilometers) through the heart of Los Angeles, providing a memorable and unprecedented sight.
"It's going to be an incredible spectacle — the only time ever that you'll see a space shuttle go through an urban corridor like that," Rudolph said. "People are already getting really excited about it."
NASA grounded its venerable space shuttle fleet in July 2011 after 30 years of service. The agency is encouraging the development of commercial American spacecraft to take over the shuttles' orbital taxi role while it works to send astronauts to deep-space destinations. In 2010, President Barack Obama directed NASA to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, then on to Mars by the mid-2030s.
NASA wants at least two private vehicles to be ready to carry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit by 2017. Commercial robotic cargo flights, on the other hand, should start in earnest next month, with SpaceX's Dragon capsule set to blast off toward the International Space Station on its first contracted supply run Oct. 7.
While Endeavour will never take to the skies again, it will continue to serve the nation as a museum showpiece, said NASA astronaut Mike Fincke.
"People are really going to get a taste of spaceflight, and it's a good reminder that we still have people flying in space, and that we're building a great space future," Fincke, who flew on Endeavour's final STS-134 mission last year, told SPACE.com here today.
The shuttle's long history as America's spaceship has left a strong impression on the public that should last for years to come, he added.
"You ask any kid from 1970 on to draw a picture of what a spaceship should look like, and they all look like space shuttles," Fincke said. "So it definitely resonates within human hearts."
PHOENIX — Jodi Arias, the woman convicted of killing her boyfriend, will spend life in prison, not because of a jury sentence, but because a jury could not reach an unanimous verdict on whether to sentence her to death.
PHOENIX — Jodi Arias, the woman convicted of killing her boyfriend, will spend life in prison, not because of a jury sentence, but because a jury could not reach an unanimous verdict on whether to sentence her to death for the murder of her lover, Travis Alexander.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sherry Stephens declared a mistrial Thursday, saying jurors repeatedly indicated they could not reach consensus.
Jurors later spoke to the media and said that 11 of the 12 were in favor of the death penalty. There was one holdout.
Jurors, who were not identified by name, alternately expressed remorse that they were not able to reach a verdict and anger at the woman who held out against the death penalty, saying they suspected she had an "agenda."
"We really feel like we made a huge effort," one juror said. "I could not say how sorry I am that it wasn't enough."
Alexander's sisters were seen sobbing in the courtroom during Thursday's proceedings. After leaving the courtroom, the family walked by the media. Tanisha Sorenson, one of Alexander's sisters, said, "The real justice will be in the afterlife, when Jodi burns in hell."
Arias has been on trial — a sentencing retrial, actually — since October.
The final 12 of the original jurors — five were dismissed over the five-month-long process and two were designated alternates a week ago when closing arguments ended — deliberated for three days, but reached an impasse late Tuesday morning. Stephens sent them back to the jury room to try again.
Jury confirms 11-1 split FOR death. Statement rips defense portrayal of Travis Alexander. They think holdout had an agenda.
Thursday morning, they called it quits and Stephens declared a mistrial. Under Arizona law, Arias automatically will be sentenced by Stephens to life in prison. Arias' formal sentencing hearing has been scheduled for April 13. Stephens will decide whether she's eligible for release after 25 years.
It was the second time a jury hung on life or death for Arias, 34. A 2014 jury in her first trial also reached impasse. Under state law, Arias cannot be tried again and must be sentenced to life in prison.
"The 11 of us strived for justice but to no avail," a juror said. "We absolutely feel the penalty should have been death."
In a statement to the media, the Alexander family said they were "saddened by the jury's inability to reach a decision on the death penalty.
"However, they understand the difficulty of the decision, and have nothing but respect for the jury's time. They appreciate Deputy Count Attorney's Juan Martinez and appreciate the outpouring of support they have received from the public."
It has taken 2½ years to reach this point.
Alexander, 30, was found dead in the bathroom of his Mesa, Ariz., home in June 2008. He had been shot in the head, stabbed nearly 30 times, and his throat was cut from ear to ear. His body sat there for five days before it was discovered by friends.
Those same friends immediately pointed to Alexander's former girlfriend, Arias, whom Alexander described as a stalker, even though he would travel with her on trips and invite her to his house for late-night trysts. Investigators found photographs from the last one — naked shots of both Alexander and Arias, as well as photos of Alexander in the shower minutes before he was killed. One photo even showed his inert body on the floor next to Arias' stockinged foot.
Even before the first trial began, TV crime maven Nancy Grace labeled Arias' case as the new Casey Anthony trial, referring to the high-profile, televised case of a young Florida mother acquitted of murdering her daughter.
The Arias trial began in January 2013 and was live-streamed around the world over the Internet. It quickly became a media circus. The prosecutor, Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Juan Martinez became a media hero. Defense attorneys Kirk Nurmi and Jennifer Willmott became media goats, as did nearly every witness they called to the stand.
When the time finally comes for Cairns Taipan Dusty Rychart to reluctantly hang up the hi-tops, the forward admits he isn't sure what he'll do with himself.
A one-time columnist and businessman with a Masters degree in finance, the naturalised Australian says approaching the autumn years of his basketball career hasn't led to any 'Eureka' moments but he likes having options.
"That's a question I've been striving to answer myself even going back five or six years ago," Rychart, 33, says pondering life away from the court.
"I knew I'd need a contingency plan. I trade currencies right now and I'd love to get to the point where I do that for a living.
"You know at our level you're not making millions and I didn't want to be one of those guys bagging groceries or filling shelves in some warehouse."
The NBL veteran says his natural inquisitiveness even led to him setting up a real estate company in Melbourne about four years ago with an acquaintance he knew from his playing days with the Victoria Giants.
"He brought an idea to the table and we formed a partnership and we just went from there," he says.
The journeyman's approach during more than a decade of basketball Down Under has been much the same.
When told he wouldn't last beyond the age of 30 if he played in Australia as an import, the Michigan-born player decided to become an Australian citizen and play out his career on his own terms.
The decision, he maintains, was one of the best he ever made.
"The thought process was I love the game and I want to play as long as possible," he says. "From when I was a kid at six, seven years old I when I first bounced a basketball, I wanted to play professionally."
"I got to thinking, I was 27 and I thought if I want to prolong my career I gotta get naturalised and I like it over here.
"I've enjoyed it and embraced it. I feel like it's my home, I've been here ten plus years now and I call Minnesota my second home now.
"Australia feels more home to me than where I grew up so it's definitely been good to me."
Which isn't to say there haven't been a few hiccups along the way. This season Rychart's spent mostly on the sidelines nursing an unusual injury sustained while scrimmaging.
A seemingly innocuous bump left him with three tears in the peroneous longus tendon in his right foot.
The injury caused inflammation to the point where he couldn't even raise his heel. Adding to his frustration, specialists were unable to diagnose the injury early on.
"This is the longest I've ever sat out in my career," he says. "We're making progress and hopefully we'll come around in the next couple of weeks."
"Every specialist that I've talked to, bar one, has never even seen the injury before.
"I just want to nurse it along until I get it to 100 per cent and hopefully that's not too far away."
One of the few benefits of the injury is it's given Rychart the opportunity to rule out one possible career choice.
Asked if he'll ever coach, his response is instant and he almost cringes.
"It's too frustrating," he says walking across the practice court. "I think that's why you don't see a lot of players get into it after you finish because you're so used to doing it on the court. Maybe in two or three years. We'll see, I guess."
Kenyan officials are angry over U.S. efforts to hold top lawmakers responsible for failing to adopt democratic reforms nearly two years after widespread election violence, but the public is supporting the United States because of President Obama’s roots in the East African nation.
Over the weekend, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki complained in a message to Mr. Obama about U.S. Ambassador Michael Ranneberger, who revealed last week that Washington sent warning letters to 15 top Kenyan officials. He added that the State Department is also considering banning them from traveling to the United States.
Foreign Minister Moses Wetengula on Monday asked Mr. Ranneberger to meet him on Wednesday. He accused the ambassador of violating “international protocols in the conduct of relations between friendly nations” and added that the letters set back reform efforts.
“These kinds of letters precipitate the fouling of the mood of reform in the country,” he said in a news conference in the capital, Nairobi.
Mr. Ranneberger refused to identify the recipients of the letters but said they include Cabinet ministers and members of parliament. He said the letters, signed by Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson, warned the targeted individuals that their “future relations” with the United States are at risk unless they make progress on reform measures that include overhauling the police and courts, creating a permanent electoral commission and fighting corruption.
Violence after the presidential election in December 2007 claimed about 1,000 lives and displaced about 200,000 people.
Despite the official protest, a poll by Kenyan television stations found that 83 percent of the public support the United States in the diplomatic dispute and distrust their own government.
Gitobu Imanyara, a human rights lawyer and member of parliament, said the poll results show that the government represents a “very tiny minority of opinion” in Kenya.
He told the Voice of America in an article Tuesday that Kenyans view the ambassador as the voice of Mr. Obama, whose father was born in Kenya.
“Kenyans look to the … future and identify with President Obama and the American ambassador here,” Mr. Imanyara said.
Taiwan diplomats in Washington expressed their government’s “deepest appreciation” to Congress, after the House last week adopted a resolution mourning the “terrible loss of life” caused by Typhoon Morakot, which struck the island in August.
The diplomats noted that Congress and the Obama administration responded quickly with aid to the victims of the storm, which killed at least 500 people.
This year, the United States and Taiwan are observing the 30th anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act, which established informal diplomatic ties after the United States officially recognized communist China.

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