2017 Current Events Study Guide

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Bamaman
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

Post by Bamaman »

econgator wrote: Fri Nov 24, 2017 10:59 pm Unlikely to ever be asked, but ... UCF becomes the first team in college football history to go from a winless regular season one year to an unbeaten one the next.
Their winless season was in 2015. They went 6-7 last year.

Still an impressive turnaround. The Gators could do much worse than hiring Frost.
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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econgator wrote: Fri Nov 24, 2017 10:59 pm Unlikely to ever be asked, but ... UCF becomes the first team in college football history to go from a winless regular season one year to an unbeaten one the next.
Asterisk: Due to Hurricane Irma, UCF was forced to cancel its game against Georgia Tech scheduled for that week, which would not have been an automatic win.
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MinnesotaMyron
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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Today George H.W. Bush becomes the oldest ex-president at 93 years, 166 days and counting. Previous record-holder Gerald Ford died at 93 years, 165 days. (He was delicious.)

Jimmy Carter is only 100 days younger than H.W., FYI.
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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MinnesotaMyron wrote: Sat Nov 25, 2017 1:28 pm Today George H.W. Bush becomes the oldest ex-president at 93 years, 166 days and counting. Previous record-holder Gerald Ford died at 93 years, 165 days. (He was delicious.)
It's a former president. Are you saying he's not delicious?

Clearly time to start putting bets on whether HW will be eaten by wolves.
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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MinnesotaMyron wrote: Sat Nov 25, 2017 1:28 pm Today George H.W. Bush becomes the oldest ex-president at 93 years, 166 days and counting. Previous record-holder Gerald Ford died at 93 years, 165 days. (He was delicious.)
That also means he's overtaken Ford's #3 position as longest-lived former Vice President. #2 is Levi P. Morton, who died on his 96th birthday, and #1 is John Nance Garner, who was fifteen days shy of 99 when he died.
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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acthomas wrote: Sat Nov 25, 2017 5:41 pm
MinnesotaMyron wrote: Sat Nov 25, 2017 1:28 pm Today George H.W. Bush becomes the oldest ex-president at 93 years, 166 days and counting. Previous record-holder Gerald Ford died at 93 years, 165 days. (He was delicious.)
It's a former president. Are you saying he's not delicious?

Clearly time to start putting bets on whether HW will be eaten by wolves.
Taft was.
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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Mount Agung, a volcano on Bali, Indonesia, is threatening eruption. It's already started belching ash. It last erupted in 1963-4
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42133502
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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MarkBarrett wrote: Sat May 20, 2017 10:21 am Prince Harry is dating Meghan Markle an American actress on the show Suits.
Prince Harry is now engaged to Meghan Markle and the wedding will be next spring.
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

Post by NoWhammies10 »

The Toronto Argonauts are your 2017 Grey Cup Champions, beating the Calgary Stampeders 27-24. Toronto scored a 100-yd TD, the longest in Grey Cup history.
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

Post by Cat Hammarskjold »

NoWhammies10 wrote: Mon Nov 27, 2017 12:54 pm The Toronto Argonauts are your 2017 Grey Cup Champions, beating the Calgary Stampeders 27-24. Toronto scored a 100-yd TD, the longest in Grey Cup history.
The receiver of that touchdown was former Buckeye (and Houston Texan) Devier Posey, who was also named the Grey Cup MVP.
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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Arby's ("Because you can always hate yourself more!") is buying Buffalo Wild Wings
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-buff ... SKBN1DS1GF

Okay, so it's not technically Arby's buying them, but their parent group, but riffs on a company called "Roark Capital" are just too easily architected (and so, so boring...)
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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U2 will release Songs of Experience, their 14th studio album, in December.
It's a followup to Songs of Innocence, a plague that spread across Apple devices in 2014.

Attempts to attach a generator to the spinning corpse of William Blake have thus far proved unsuccessful.
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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Jim Nabors of "Andy Griffith Show" and Gomer Pyle USMC" fame, passed away at age 87. Nabors was also part of sports lore: he sang "Back Home Again in Indiana" during the Indy 500 pre-race pageantry.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/jim-nabors-g ... 48269.html
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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The drugstore chain CVS has agreed to buy health insurer Aetna for $69 billion:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... 0a9fb93512

This is the largest corporate merger (so far) of 2017.

John Anderson, the Illinois congressman who ran for president as an indepedent in 1980, died at the age of 95. Anderson received 5.1 million votes (6.6 percent of the popular vote):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/ob ... cdada7e2fc
Last edited by Blue Lion on Tue Dec 05, 2017 9:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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Russia has been banned from the 2018 Pyeongchang (South Korea) Winter Olympics.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-olym ... SKBN1DZ2QZ
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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Song - "Candy Cane Lane" by Sia

Time Person of the Year - The Silence Breakers
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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I like to imagine Jeff Bezos laughing when he read this: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/06/wal-mar ... merce.html

In short in 2018:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will become Walmart Inc. losing the hyphen and "Stores" as trying to demonstrate its commitment to e-commerce.

[sarcastic]Amazon - Ooh, quiver quiver, shake shake.
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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Tiffany Haddish. Who?

She played Dina in 2017 comedy film, Girls Trip (Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, & Jada Pinkett Smith)
Last month she was the first black female stand-up comedian to host Saturday Night Live.
She is the author of December 2017 book, The Last Black Unicorn.
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

Post by zerobandwidth »

Officer Said He Fled Turkey, Carrying Evidence of Corruption

While not something that would generally be a Big Deal in American news, this could have political implications in Turkey, which is still (for now) one of the US's biggest Middle Eastern allies. The TL;DR here is that a police officer from Turkey, Huseyin Korkmaz, found links between a wealthy oligarch named Reza Zarrab and members of the Turkish government, as part of a gold smuggling and money laundering investigation, and now he's testifying in New York about it. The extent to which this could shake up Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's grip on power is, as yet, unknown, but is likely non-zero.

The most trivially fascinating part of this story from a linguistics-geek perspective is that the surname of the police officer ("korkmaz") translates to English as "won't be scared".
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Re: 2017 Current Events Study Guide

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Scientists dig up one of Opus's 60-million-year-old relatives in New Zealand
https://gizmodo.com/a-200-pound-penguin ... 1821183646
This long-extinct penguin was immense—standing nearly six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds—one of the largest semi-aquatic birds to ever shuffle across the Earth.

But this particular bird is unique. It’s extremely old, being not only the earliest known giant penguin, but also one of the first penguins, period. It also belongs to a totally different branch of the penguin family tree than basically every other giant penguin.
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