We’ve dedicated an entire special issue,SLAM’s TOP 75 NBA Teams of All Time, to ranking the best 75 individual season teams ever.This week, we’re unveiling which squads made it on our top 10. To find out who else made it on the list, read here.
10. 2012-13 Miami Heat
Coach: Erik Spoelstra
Record: 66-16
Roster: Ray Allen, Chris Andersen, Joel Anthony, Shane Battier, Chris Bosh, Mario Chalmers, Norris Cole, Josh Harrellson, Terrel Harris, Udonis Haslem, Juwan Howard, LeBron James, James Jones, Rashard Lewis, Mike Miller, Dexter Pittman, Jarvis Varnado, Dwyane Wade
After LeBron James made his famous announcement that he had decided to play for Miami, he sat on a stage with Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade and talked about how many championships the trio would win with the Heat. “Not two. Not three…” And so on.
Well, after two years in South Beach, James had one title, not two. Nobody was restless, but there was clearly an expectation that after winning it all in 2012, Miami was about to start rolling.
The Big Three was on hand to try for a repeat, but the Heat had also added sharpshooter Ray Allen, who, though 37, provided some needed long-range production and finished the season making 41.9 percent of his three-point attempts. The formula worked. Miami rampaged to 66 wins, 12 better than any other Eastern Conference team.
James once again was the biggest star, leading the team in points, rebounds and assists. But Wade and Bosh were big every night, too. And while Allen was past the days when he could dominate with his long-range shooting, he was an undeniable weapon, as was do-everything forward Shane Battier, who actually shot a higher percentage from behind the arc than Allen did.
The regular season presented few hurdles for the Heat, and neither did the first two rounds of the playoffs. Miami swept Milwaukee in the first round and dusted away Chicago in five after that. But things got interesting in the Eastern Finals, when Indiana—led by Paul George and Roy Hibbert—extended the Heat to seven games in a series so heavy on defense that only one time did a team hit triple figures. In the finale, James scored 32, and Miami routed the Pacers, 99-76, to earn a Finals meeting with San Antonio.
The Eastern Finals series was great, but the Heat-Spurs showdown was even more dramatic. After five games, the Spurs held a 3-2 series lead, and it looked as if Pop’s bunch would close things out in the sixth contest. With 28.2 seconds left, the Spurs led, 94-89, but an Allen three-pointer with 5.2 left forced overtime, and the Heat ultimately prevailed. Game 7 was similarly dramatic. With San Antonio trailing by 2, Duncan missed a pair of shots close to the hoop, and the Heat held on to take the title. Though Miami wouldn’t win seven, as James had insinuated, the Heat had put up back-to-back banners, and that was still pretty darn good.
Conventions are back! Star Wars Celebration 2022 happened over the weekend, bringing together Star Wars fans from all over the world as they celebrated the movies and TV shows they adore while learning about everything on the horizon from the franchise. We saw sneak peeks for The Mandalorian Season 3 and the upcoming Ahsoka Tano show, among many other projects in the works, but that’s not all.
Celebration is also home to the best Star Wars cosplay you’re going to find. You’ll find practically everything there, including mashups, odes to iconic characters, and so many tributes to the Saturday Night Live sketch that featured Kylo Ren on Undercover Boss. There were even a few people who decided to go against the grain and represent other movies and TV shows they love.
Walking around Star Wars Celebration over the weekend, we saw plenty of cosplayers we loved and gathered our very favorite here for you to enjoy. You may not have been able to go to Celebration, but hopefully, this will make your missing it a little bit easier to handle.
Remember those debates with your friends over who would win in a fight between God of War‘s Kratos and Halo’s Master Chief? Well, now you can see the two video game titans duke it out thanks to a PC mod for God of War 2018.
The mod was originally created by Marcos RC, and the footage takes the first boss fight from the game, replacing The Stranger with Chief himself. You can check out a snippet of the brawl below, or watch the entire thing play out on Marcos RC’s YouTube page.
Due to the nature of the original boss fight, Chief doesn’t rely on any of his iconic weapons, instead opting for hand-to-hand combat. So, I guess the jury’s still out on who would win if both characters were fully equipped.
Ripple has announced a $100 million investment in the carbon trading segment, CEO Brad Garlinghouse told Cointelegraph’s Joseph Hall in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting, which concluded May 26.
Garlinghouse noted the rising profile of cryptocurrency at the international summit, comparing his experiences over the last several years. “As leaders across the world learn how these technologies can actually benefit their constituents, benefit their economies, they’re going to use them. […] I think we’re seeing that happen every day,” Garlinghouse said.
He went on to say that nonfungible tokens are “underhyped, in spite of the fact that there’s obviously a lot of hype in parts of the NFT market.” Specifically:
“The tokenization of various assets is underhyped.”
Garlinghouse cited carbon credit trading, which is often “challenged” by fraudulent activity, as a use case for tokenization due to its transparency and traceability. “It could really revolutionize carbon credit marketplaces, the efficacy of carbon credit marketplaces,” Garlinghouse said. Ripple is investing $100 million in the segment, he added.
Cryptocurrency will have some real use cases in 2022, Garlinghouse continued. Cross-border transactions are one such example that Ripple is working on. Currently, cross-border transactions are “usually quite slow, quite expensive and frankly very error-prone,” while the XRP chain has been “a very efficient, low-cost bridge,” he said.
“I don’t think we’re living in a single-chain world,” Garlinghouse said. “It’s a multi-chain world, there’re going to be a lot of different utility use cases.” Ripple will continue to focus on enterprise, but other cryptocurrency foundations are looking at consumers use cases as well, he explained.
The full conversation is on our YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe!
Ethereum founder and crypto enthusiast Vitalik Buterin recently shared his two cents on algorithmic stablecoins and their future adding that they should be scrutinised on the basis of how they fare under extreme market conditions, and whether they can safely wind down when hype falls away. Despite the recent collapse of UST and LUNA, which knocked UST from its $1 (roughly Rs. 77) peg and wiped billions from the market, Buterin argued in an essay that automated stablecoins can make sense while criticising exorbitant returns offered by those “doomed to collapse eventually.”
Buterin points out in his thought piece that although the UST debacle over the past month has led traders to form an opinion that algorithmic stablecoins are fundamentally flawed, some algorithmic stablecoin models are feasible and sets out his thinking as to why.
Citing an example, Buterin pointed to MakerDAO’s stable token DAI and Reflexer’s RAI, both of which have survived extreme market conditions as successful automated stablecoins.
Algorithmic stablecoins are inherently supported by another crypto and use baked-in formulas to regulate the price. This is different from, for example, USDC, which is a fiat-backed stablecoin supported by real dollars in the bank. The big challenge for all dollar-pegged stablecoins is finding ways to maintain their peg.
As per Buterin’s blog post, the first question for investors to ask about a stablecoin is “can the stablecoin safely wind down to zero users?” For Buterin, the event of market activity for a stablecoin dropping to zero should not be a fatal blow for investors. Instead, users should be able to get a fair value for their assets.
Buterin notes that this was not the case with Terra as the network relies on LUNA, which he calls a “volcoin” or volume coin to maintain the asset’s peg. Buterin painted Terra’s tragedy as caused by hyperinflation from printing lots of volcoins.
“First, the volcoin price drops,” writes Buterin. “Then, the stablecoin starts to shake. The system attempts to shore up stablecoin demand by issuing more volcoins. With confidence in the system low, there are a few buyers, so the volcoin price rapidly falls. Finally, once the volcoin price is near-zero, the stablecoin to collapses.”
Another issue highlighted by Buterin was that Terra’s Anchor protocol promised a 20 percent annual percentage yield (APY) on UST. Some investors converted their savings into UST to earn the high APY without fully understanding the risks involved. This is one reason Buterin welcomes the greater level of scrutiny on decentralised finance (DeFi).
The well-known developer says when stablecoins attempt to generate these types of returns, they can instead turn into ponzi schemes. “Obviously, there is no genuine investment that can get anywhere close to 20 percent returns per year,” he says. “In general, the crypto space needs to move away from the attitude that it’s okay to achieve safety by relying on endless growth.”
Buterin concludes the essay by stating that even if a stablecoin passes the said parameters test, there might still be underlying issues like bugs, and governance issues that threaten the survival of the project. However, “steady-state and extreme-case soundness should always be one of the things that we check for,” he concludes.
But more important, many might like to stay home, but can’t.
Too many people can’t afford to miss another day of work. Even if sick leave policies became more generous at the beginning of the pandemic, those days are over for most. Fewer people can work from home now. Even fewer can keep asking to miss work because they have some mild symptoms that may or may not be Covid.
The United States is the only wealthy country in the world that does not guarantee paid sick days or sick leave to workers. According to a 2020 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, some countries (Canada, France, Italy and Japan) have government insurance systems that provide benefits to workers even when they have short-term illnesses. Other countries, like Greece, Ireland and Spain, mandate employer protections in addition to government insurance. Still more (Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) have paid leave through collective bargaining arrangements.
Some countries are more generous than others. If a person gets Covid, or another illness, in Switzerland or Australia, then they are guaranteed to receive a full 10 days of paid sick leave. In the Netherlands, they’re guaranteed seven. In Japan, just under five; in France, between three and four; and in Britain, just over one.
Only in the United States are we not guaranteed any paid days off.
Of course, just because companies aren’t mandated to offer paid leave doesn’t mean that some don’t provide it. The reason I was able to stay home was because my employer is quite generous with its paid time off. Many Americans are not so lucky.
While most workers have some sick leave, it’s woefully insufficient. The median number of paid days off each year is seven. One in five workers has fewer than five days a year. Such workers have full-time jobs, though. Many Americans work part time, or hourly, and have no paid sick leave at all. Even states and cities that have regulations mandating some paid sick leave usually focus on companies of a certain size and workers with a certain number of hours at the job.
Community organizing is a lynchpin in the lives of environmental defenders in Peru, as in the case of Mirtha Villanueva, pictured here with other activists from the Cajamarca region also involved in the defense of rivers and Mother Earth. CREDIT: Courtesy of Mirtha Villanueva
by Mariela Jara (lima)
Inter Press Service
LIMA, May 30 (IPS) – “Water is part of our culture, it is intrinsic to the Amazon,” said José Manuyama, a member of a river defense committee in his native Requena, a town located in the department of Loreto, the largest in Peru, covering 28 percent of the national territory.
Despite the large size of this Amazon rainforest department or province located in the northeast of the country, data from 2020 indicated that it barely exceeded one million inhabitants, including some 220,000 indigenous people, in a country with a total population of 32.7 million.
A teacher by profession and a member of the Kukama indigenous people, one of the 51 officially recognized in Peru’s Amazon rainforest region, Manuyama reminisced about his childhood near a small river in a conversation with IPS during the Second Interregional Meeting of Defenders of Rivers and Territories, held in Lima on May 25.
“We would wait for the high water season and the floods, because that was our world. When the water comes, it’s used for bathing, for fishing, it’s a whole world adapted to water,” he said.
And he added: “We also waited for the floods to pass, which left us enormous areas of land where the forest would grow and where my mother would plant her cucumbers, her corn. Seeing the river, the transparent water, that beautiful, fertile world: that’s where I grew up.”
Today, approaching the age of 50, Manuyama is also an activist in defense of nature and rivers in the face of continuous aggressions from extractive economic activities that threaten the different forms of life in his home region.
Manuyama is a member of a collective in defense of the Nanay River that runs through the department of Loreto. It is one of the tributaries of the Amazon River that originates in the Andes highlands in southern Peru and which is considered the longest and the biggest in terms of volume in the world, running through eight South American countries.
“We started out as the Water Defense Committee in 2012 when the Nanay watershed was threatened by oil activity,” he said. “Together with other collectives and organizations we managed to block that initiative, but since 2018 there has been a second extractive industry wave, with mining that is damaging the basin and seems to be the latest brutal calamity in the Amazon.”
José Manuyama, a member of the Kukama indigenous people and a teacher committed to the protection of nature, stands in front of the Momón River, a tributary of the Nanay River, which environmental activists have been defending from extractive activities that threaten its very existence in the department of Loreto, in Peru’s Amazon jungle region. CREDIT: Courtesy of José Manuyama
Their struggle was weakened during the pandemic, when the “millionaire polluting illegal mining industry” – as he describes it – remained active. Their complaints have gone unheeded by the authorities despite the harmful impacts of the pollution, such as on people’s food, which depends to a large extent on the fish they catch.
However, he is hopeful about the new national network of defenders of rivers and territories, an effort that emerged in 2019 and that on May 25 organized its second national meeting in Lima, with the participation of 60 representatives from the Amazon, Andes and Pacific coast regions of the country.
“It is important because we strengthen ourselves in a common objective of defending territories and rights, confronting the various predatory extractive waves that exist in this dominant social economic system that uses different factors in a chain to achieve its purpose. The battle is not equal, but this is how resistance works,” Manuyama said.
Like the watersheds of a river
Ricardo Jiménez, director of the non-governmental Peru Solidarity Forum, an institution that works with the network of organizations for the protection and defense of rivers, said it emerged as a response to the demand of various sectors in the face of depredation and expanding illegal mining and logging activities detrimental to water sources.
The convergence process began in 2019, he recalled, with the participation, among others, of the Amazonian Wampis and Awajún indigenous peoples, “women defenders of life and the Pachamama” of the northeastern Andes highlands department of Cajamarca, and “rondas campesinas” (rural social organizations) in various regions of the country.
Mirtha Villanueva, defender of life and Pachamama in the Cajamarca region of northeastern Peru, is seen here participating in one of the sessions of the Second Interregional Meeting of Defenders of Rivers and Territories, which brought together 60 participants from different parts of the country. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
The first important milestone of the initiative occurred in 2021, when they held their first national meeting, in which a National Promotional Committee of Defenders of Rivers and Territories was formed.
They approved an agenda that they sent to the then minister of culture, Gisela Ortiz, who remained in office for only four months and was unable to meet the request to form the Multisectoral Roundtable for dialogue to address issues such as environmental remediation of legal and illegal extractive activities.
The proposed roundtable also mentioned the development of criteria for the protection of the headwaters of river basins, and the protection of river defenders from the criminalization of their protests and initiatives.
At this second national meeting, the Promotional Committee updated its agenda and created synergies with the National River Protection Network, made up of non-governmental organizations.
It also joined the river action initiative of the Pan-Amazonian Social Forum (Fospa), whose tenth edition will be held Jul. 28-31 in Belem do Pará, in Brazil’s Amazon region, and whose national chapter met on May 27.
Three days of activity were organized in the Peruvian capital by the defenders of the rivers and their riverside communities, who on May 26 participated in a march of indigenous peoples, organized by the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest.
“There is a coming together of the social collectives at the national level and also with their peers at the Pan-Amazonian level; we have a shared path with particularities but which coincides,” Jiménez told IPS.
A group of villagers participates in the monitoring and surveillance of the Chimín river in the Condebamba valley, in the Cajamarca region of northeastern Peru. The river is contaminated by illegal mining activity, which harms all the communities along its banks, as it irrigates 40 percent of the crops in the area. CREDIT: Courtesy of Mirtha Villanueva
Rivers have no borders
Mirtha Villanueva is an activist who defends life and Pachamama (Mother Earth, in the Quechua indigenous language) in Cajamarca, a northeastern department of Peru, where more than a decade ago the slogan “water yes, gold no!” was coined as part of the struggles of the local population in defense of their lakes and wetlands against the Conga mining project of the U.S.-owned Yanacocha gold mine.
The project was suspended, but only temporarily, after years of social protests against the open-pit gold mine, which in 2012 caused several deaths and led to the declaration of a state of emergency in the region for several months, in one of the most critical episodes in the communities’ struggle against the impact of extractivism on their environment and their lives.
A large part of Villanueva’s 66 years has been dedicated to the defense of nature’s assets, of rivers, to guarantee decent lives for people, in a struggle that she knows is extremely unequal in the face of the economic power of the mining companies.
“We, the defenders of the rivers, have to grow in strength and I hope that at the Fospa Peru meeting we will approve a plan of action agreed with our brothers and sisters in Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil, because our rivers are also connected, they have no borders,” she told IPS during an interview at the meeting in Lima.
“We need to strengthen ourselves from the local to the international level to have an impact with our actions. We receive 60 percent of our rainfall from the Amazon forest. How can we not take care of the Amazon?” she said.
José Manuyama stands to the right of the poster during one of his presentations at the Second Interregional Meeting of Defenders of Rivers and Territories, which brought together activists from different parts of Peru in Lima. His group analyzed power relations in the context of the risks surrounding the country’s rivers, especially those in the Amazon rainforest. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
The work she carries out with the environmental committees is titanic. She recalled the image of poor rural families protesting the change in the rivers and how it has caused rashes on their children’s skin.
And when they went to the mine to complain, they were told: “When I came, your river was already like this. Why do you want to blame me? Prove it.”
“In this situation, the farmer remains silent, which is why it is important to work in the communities to promote oversight and monitoring of ecosystems and resources. We work with macroinvertebrates, beings present in the rivers that are indicators of clean or polluted waters, gradually training the population,” she explained.
This is an urgent task. She gave as an example the case of the district of Bambamarca, in Loreto, which has the highest number of mining environmental liabilities in the country: 1118. “Only one river is still alive, the Yaucán River,” Villanueva lamented.
She also mentioned the Condebamba valley, “with the second highest level of diversity in Peru,” and 40 percent of whose farmland is being irrigated by water from the Chimín river polluted by the mines.
“In Cajamarca we have 11 committees monitoring the state of the rivers, we all suffer reprisals, but we cannot stop doing what we do because people’s health and lives are at stake,” both present and future, she said.
We independently selected these deals and products because we love them, and we think you might like them at these prices. E! has affiliate relationships, so we may get a commission if you purchase something through our links. Items are sold by the retailer, not E!. Prices are accurate as of publish time.
Lululemon is our go-to destination for all things activewear. Of course, Lululemon has the most comfortable leggings, great sneakers, pet-approved accessories, and amazing sports bras that cater to different body types. Who wouldn’t want an entire wardrobe full of Lululemon? Memorial Day Weekend is a great time to shop. There are so many amazing sales and deals during a long weekend.
If you’re in the mood for some new Lululemon, you need to check out the We Made Too Much section. You’ll find so many of the bestselling styles that you know and love at a reduced price, which is the perfect excuse to shop.
Treat yourself this holiday weekend a Lululemon shopping spree. You deserve it. Plus, prices are as low as $4. How can you pass that up?
Leading the call for countries to implement constitutional change and strong environmental laws to bring about positive change, UN-appointed independent rights expert David Boyd said that all such discussions should stem from the recognition of everyone’s right to a healthy environment.
Rights inspiration
Echoing that call, Marcos Orellana, UN Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights, also said that we should not forget how human rights inspired key elements of the original 1972 Stockholm Declaration.
“This is a key moment for international environmental law to change direction and embrace a human rights-based approach to environmental protection,” he added.
Multiple benefits
The experts insisted that “putting human rights at the centre of environmental action will have positive implications for air quality, clean water, healthy soil and sustainably produced food”.
A rights-based approach would also help “green energy, climate change, biodiversity and the elimination of toxic substances and (the) protection of indigenous people’s rights”, they added.
Standing in the way of progress on environmental action are multiple challenges, including climate shocks, biodiversity loss and pollution – all of which impact on the enjoyment of human rights, the experts maintained.
The resolution marked the culmination of decades of efforts by civil society organisations, including youth groups, national human rights institutions and indigenous peoples.
Kaye and Orellana, together with fellow Special Rapporteurs Francisco Calí Tzay and Ian Fry – encouraged States to encourage the UN General Assembly to consider recognizing the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment at its earliest convenience, just as the UN Human Rights Council had done.
General Assembly call
“A General Assembly resolution on the right to a healthy environment would reinforce the urgency of actions to implement the right,” they said in a statement, adding: “We are all extraordinarily fortunate to live on this miraculous planet, and we must use the right to a healthy environment to ensure governments, businesses and people do a better job of taking care of the home that we all share.”
Special Rapporteurs and independent experts are appointed by the Human Rights Council to examine and report back on a specific human rights theme or a country situation. They are independent from any government and are not paid for their work.
Todd Gurley seems to be totally comfortable with calling it a career on the football gridiron.
After having not played at all last NFL season, Todd Gurley seems to be okay with that being all she wrote for his brief, but brilliant, playing career.
Gurley first made a name for himself as a star running back for the Georgia Bulldogs from 2012 to 2014. After a 1,300-yard campaign as a true freshman in 2012, Gurley continued to marvel in a loaded Georgia backfield. However, a four-game suspension coupled with a devastating knee injury vs. Auburn in 2014 was ultimately what changed the course of his professional career.
Though the injury did not ruin his draft stock, as he went No. 10 overall to the then-St. Louis Rams, the knee remained a key concern throughout his early-to-mid-20s. Gurley was a three-time Pro Bowler and two-time All-Pro with Los Angeles. Unfortunately, he was also-ran after the 2018 season. He played one more year in with the Rams and then with the 2020 Atlanta Falcons.
All the while, the soon-to-be 28-year-old seems to be in good spirits about his career being over.
If this is really it for him, then congratulations on all he achieved collegiately and professionally!
Todd Gurley seems to be comfortable with his playing career coming to an end
He told NBCLX.com last week that while it is possible he could return to the field at some point down the line, “there was never not one time where I watched a game and was like, ‘I wish I was out there. I appreciated my time in the league and I’ve done things I could have never even dreamed about.” For now, he is an owner in the Fan Controlled Football league, living his best life.
At his pinnacle, Gurley was a top-tier player in the NFL. He won the AP Offensive Player of the Year in 2017, finishing second to former New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady in MVP voting. In his 2018 season with the Rams, Gurley played a huge role in getting Los Angeles back to the Super Bowl. Much of that Rams core won it all with Los Angeles four seasons later.
With over 6,000 rushing yards and 67 rushing touchdowns, Gurley should look back on his NFL career fondly. He did more than most players could ever hope to dream, albeit in such a short time. Gurley can rest easy, knowing he can be a goodwill ambassador forever at his alma mater and the NFL franchise he is best known playing for. However, we will all wonder what could have been…
The conversation about the knee will always follow whenever one talks about Gurley’s greatness.
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